Feminism and Dialogics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Meridel Le Sueur, Mikhail M. Bakhtin [1 ed.] 9788437083537

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FEMINISM AND DIALOGICS: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, MERIDEL LE SUEUR, MIKHAIL M. BAKHTIN

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Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans Directora Carme Manuel

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FEMINISM AND DIALOGICS: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, MERIDEL LE SUEUR, MIKHAIL M. BAKHTIN

Carolina Núñez Puente

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans Universitat de València

© Carolina Núñez Puente, 2006 Feminism and Dialogics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Meridel Le Sueur, Mikhail M. Bakhtin

1ª edición de 2006 Reservados todos los derechos de autor Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial ISBN: 978-84-370-8353-7 Imagen de la portada: Gema Goig Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera Publicacions de la Universitat de València http://puv.uv.es [email protected]

for my family, especially for my Mother, my Father and my Sister, who believed in me even when I myself didn’t

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Table of Contents

Introduction

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PART ONE: THE SHORT STORY The Realist-Gothic: Dialogics and Subjectivity in “The Yellow(-)Wall Paper” The Dialogical ‘Feminine’: The Chronotope of Pregnancy in “Annunciation”

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PART TWO: THE NOVEL

Deconstructing Dialogics: Gender and Genre in Herland-Ourland

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Bakhtinian Becomings and the Female Subject(s): The Girl as Feminist Bildungsroman .......................................................

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PART THREE: GEN(D)ERIC PARTICULARS

Is Female to Male as Genre Is to Style? Gilman, Le Sueur, and Feminist Communities ......................................................................

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Inconclusion

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Works Cited

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Introduction

Now let us shake ourselves free, if only for a moment, from the androcentric habit of mind. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World

What is (so Interesting about) Feminist Dialogics? I would like to start by saying that, succinctly expressed, I see feminism as a form of thought that intends to do away with the subordination of women in multiple ways, one of them being the examination of women’s creative potential in literature. Feminism’s resourcefulness lies (partly) in its capacity to shelter different feminist perspectives or feminisms, one of which is ‘feminist dialogics.’ In 1994, Lynne Pearce defined feminist dialogics as a “new school of criticism” (102). Even though it was Pearce who identified the school, she named Dale M. Bauer as its founder.1 Quoting from D. M. Bauer’s and Jaret McKinstry’s introduction to Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic, Pearce summarizes feminist dialogics as a way of thinking that ‘challenges the assumption... of a monolithic or universal feminism’... a way of living that ‘overcomes the public-private split’... an epistemology which, like ‘standpoint theory,’ believes that context and positionality are all... a new model of pedagogy which shows ‘genders, classes and races in dialogue rather than in opposition’... and most importantly, it is the latest... form of feminist political resistance. (103, my italics)

Thus, feminist dialogics itself has multiple meanings, which feminist dialogicians have in fact deployed and expanded. This is coherent with a definition of dialogism that stems from the belief in the enriching potential of language/dialogue. I would argue that the literary branch of this new “school of criticism” is above all interested in the connections between ‘gender’ and ‘genre,’ which are also connected etymologically—from Latin genus, meaning “kind” or “class.” The representatives of feminist dialogics corroborate the links between gender and genre. Patricia Yaeger contends that women writers have (always) been able to find emancipatory ways through language, by “call[ing] upon verbal resources that are unavailable to their male contemporaries” (28). Jacqueline Howard brings back authorial intentions mainly because “it is difficult to examine how particular discourses have been appropriated... and transformed... without hypothesizing... about the author’s intention”—hypotheses that may 1 A curious coincidence, Mikhail M. Bakhtin also said that Dostoevsky invented the polyphonic novel, a term designed by Bakhtin himself.

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be useful when trying to reconstruct a feminist literary history (10). Anne Herrmann also claims that the ‘feminine’ must not remain undecidable when dealing with the gender of an author as a historical subject “if we retain an interest in the production and reception of texts” (19). According to Lynne Pearce, “what genders a text is... its potential readership— the way the readers are positioned as female or, indeed, feminist” (106). These studies have been very enlightening, encouraging the researcher’s desire to continue exploring the link ‘gender-genre,’ among other matters. I confess that I came to the feminist branch of dialogics before dealing in depth with Bakhtin himself, the nominally father of “dialogics.”2 Apart from reading the work of his followers, I re-read Bakhtin’s own essays in a modest attempt to articulate my own feminist dialogical perspective and method. The rich and complex career of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975), developed over approximately sixty years, has been divided into four periods (Morson & Emerson 66). The present work is based on his studies of genre or on period III-a. More specifically, I concentrate on the essays: “Discourse in the Novel” (DIN), “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (FTC), and “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” (BHR).3 I need to stress that the insights of feminist dialogicians are vital for my interpretations, given that gender can be considered Bakhtin’s blind spot (cf. Bauer 1988). In this way, I will try to assess how useful his thought is in a feminist evaluation of literature, through the notions of dialogics, genre, the chronotope, heteroglossia, the novel, the Bildungsroman, centripetal and centrifugal forces, ‘authoritative’ and ‘inner’ words, and so forth. Continuing with the gender-genre dichotomy, I will suggest new conceptualizations of the cited terminology, such as: the ‘dialogic’ man, the chronotope as a dialogical ‘pause,’ the ‘pregnancy chronotope,’ the other hetero(-)glossia of a woman’s voice(s), the patriarchal ‘authoritative’ word and the feminist ‘inner’ voice, and so on. In Part Three I defend the proposal that there should be a move from (the practice of) ‘feminist dialogics’ to (a) ‘dialogical feminism’—in fact, we might be witnessing this development today. I came to theorize on this move by chance since Herland-Ourland and The Girl, which correspond respectively to novels by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Meridel Le Sueur, fictionalize communities of women. This involved reassessing the concept of ‘sisterhood.’ Even if proposing explicit feminist alternatives, Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s fictionalized communities produce new binary oppositions—white women/other women, middle-class women/working-class women. Dialogics requires the ability to see (and celebrate) connections, such as the ability to reject the ‘either/or’ opposition in favour of a ‘both-and’ continuum, which I have called both-andism. I will provide an example of my usage of this compound before moving forward. Among other things, I contend that both Gilman and Le Sueur write hybrid genres. Depending on their usage of language, women writers have been classified within feminist criticism according to the tenets of either French or American feminism (Walker, Yaeger). In the present work, I lean most often on both feminist currents to account for the hybridity of the literary pieces, which can be both fantastic and ironic, both experimental and historical. In this same line, ‘dialogical 2 Although the theoretical germ of “dialogics” belongs to the German phenomenological tradition (cf. Brandist 2002), the concept has come into literary scholarship primarily through Bakhtin’s writings. 3 I will rely on other of his essays to a lesser extent. The three-character abbreviations of the titles correspond with the first letter of their main words—i.e. “Epic and the Novel” (E&N). Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s titles appear abbreviated with their first ‘key’ word—i.e. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (“Yellow”).

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feminism’ implies a self-consciousness and tolerance of the plural feminist communities/feminisms existing nowadays. Therefore, a dialogue amongst all the feminist perspectives might emerge with new, enriching, and surprising consequences. Why Study Genre, Gender, and Other Female(-related) Subjects in Gilman, Le Sueur, and Bakhtin? Many of the reasons for which we choose to do something are unknown to us. The reasons we know are sometimes hard to explain, especially in the condensed form of an introduction. Even so, I will start by saying that for Bakhtin genres are epistemologies, ways of seeing, and “form[s] of thought” (DIN 367, italics mine). A consciousness of linguistic usage as point of view does away with the equation “(patriarchal) word=world,” opening up possibilities for (re)describing and criticizing society. In other words, ‘the world’ has been told to us from a masculine perspective but there are also other voices to be listened to, such as (in) women’s literature. Therefore, employing new (literary) genres will lead us to see new aspects of Reality. Hence also my attempts to expand and exploit evaluative methods in order to interpret new genres. For Bakhtin the novel is the genre par excellence that “begins by presuming a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world” (DIN 367), hence being extremely useful for feminists. Unlike Bakhtin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and Meridel Le Sueur (1900-1996) are widely known as feminist thinkers. Like him, both authors were deeply concerned with the most social aspects of the world.4 I chose to deal mainly with “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” “Annunciation,” and the two novels mentioned above because they gave me the opportunity to explore different genres. Since each chapter counts with an ‘introduction’ and a ‘conclusion’ of the themes discussed in it, I will not repeat them here. In summary, I may say that Part Two shows how Gilman and Le Sueur have re-appropriated novelistic resources in order to invent feminist genres: for instance, a feminist Bildungsroman. Since Bakhtin’s privileged narrative form is the novel, Part One is intentionally dedicated to the short-story so as to deal with the question of how dialogism/novelization can enter and relate to other genres. I will also interrogate the boundary between style and genre—the realist-Gothic. Among other things, I will abandon the hierarchy high/low genres in favour of a proliferation of styles/genres: feminine écriture, a text that is both a novel and not a novel, and so forth. From the above, it may be deduced that I do not intend to clarify (the issues related to) gender(s) and genre(s)in a simplistic manner, but to complicate them.5 Paraphrasing Barbara Johnson, a law of Genre “is also, of course, a law of Gender” (1989, 33), which is another form of thought/way of seeing.6 In consequence, apart from relying on ‘gender’ as 4 There are really few studies on Gilman or Le Sueur that lean on Bakhtin. Laura E. Donaldson’s article on Gilman’s ‘dialogical utopia’ will be criticized in the first section of Part Two, “Deconstructing Dialogics: Gender and Genre in Herland-Ourland.” As for Le Sueur, Susan Sipple reads her stories through Bakhtin’s ‘carnival’— such a conceptualization (period IIIb) lies outside the main focus of my research. On the contrary, James M. Boehnlein’s piece on The Girl will be useful to an extent. 5 Related with this, my refusal to define/confine certain terms will be expressed occasionally by my use of the mark of interrogation (?), as I explain in the first chapter. 6 Like genre, gender is in fact a complicated issue, which can be simplified only with reservations. Gender has been defined as a “culturally shaped group of attributes and behaviours given to the female or to the male... [in

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an analytical tool, I also interpret it as perspective. Vision is chronotopic or dependent on time-space, which is to say vision is shaped by the viewer’s position, which is always gendered. Fortunately, the chronotopic quality of gender will appear as leading us to realize the very existence of genders (within gender). That is, the study of a woman must always be contextualized within the chronotope in which she lives. This results in portraying the differences amongst women: in race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical-mental (dis)abilities, religion, nationality, education, profession, political ideology, family status, and so on and so forth. Conceiving gender(s) in this way implies having an intersectional approach that takes into account all the variants influencing/shaping gender. The paradigm of intersectionality, required especially by (the nominally) feminists of colour—Lugones 1987 & 1998, Mani, Moraga & Anzaldúa, Morrison and Spivak to name a few—, is deployed by myself in this work. Furthermore, since genres are “form-shaping ideolog[ies]” (Morson & Emerson 282), changes to particular genres challenge the ideologies transmitted by them. One of my uses of gender attempts to determine the changes effected in genre conventions in Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s writings. I also try to listen to and interpret the voices of gender(s) represented in them. Since I am particularly interested in dialogue, the speech hierarchy man/woman will be dealt with. I will also evaluate other aspects of gender such as forms of creation, subordination, difference and resistance; sexual roles and stereotypes (the ‘reproduction of heterosexuality’); relational abilities (the ethics of care); internalized traits; and others. Along with many other feminist critics, I vindicate (the revision of) certain traditional concepts for women—namely ‘subject,’ ‘authorship,’ ‘identity.’ Employing these terms entails not few problems, as it could be argued that the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde “Master’s,” 99). It is true that the cited categories (“tools”) are charged with the others’ (patriarchal) intentions. It is also true that reusing them involves the risk of whether they can be used or not to ‘dismantle’ patriarchal society (the “house”). However, why should we believe that these ‘tools’ belong to the master (alone)? And why should we consider that this (society) is his ‘house’ only? Certainly, I do not wish to utilize the same (patriarchal) categories, in the same manner, and with the same aims. From a dialogical optic, my very usage of these categories will transform their meanings/ways/ends. From a dialogical optic too, genre, gender and the subject are historically inscribed. Therefore their definitions(?) are contextual, relational, and in process—which contradicts the idea that they could be “defined” at all, if only temporarily. Bakhtin points out that one becomes a subject through a process of assimilating and rejecting other people’s voices—the famous fight between the ‘(internally) persuasive voice’ and the ‘authoritative word.’ And from a feminist dialogical perspective, the female order] to distinguish between sex and gender” (Humm 1999, 106). When the feminist movement first came to examine gender, many of the supposed gender ‘differences’ revealed themselves as ‘inequalities,’ that is, as products of women’s subordination in patriarchy. Therefore studying ‘gender (questions)’ meant dealing with sexism in all its representations. Later on there emerged a new concept of ‘(gender) difference,’ which pointed out and celebrated women’s different way(s) of relating to life/literature/etc. My uses of the term gender involve these two perspectives together, seeking as well to enlarge them—for example, “genders.” Mary E. Hawkesworth has provided a comprehensive summary of the many deployments of ‘gender’ in feminist criticism so far: “to repudiate biological determinism... to analyze the social organization of relationships between men and women... to conceptualize the semiotics of the body... to illustrate the microtechniques of power... as triangulated psyche... as difference... as a process of creating interdependence... as embraced and inherently liberating...” (650-651).

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subject emerges by disidentifying herself with patriarchal discourse. The complexities of this ideological becoming will be studied—the suffering of the protagonist of “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper,” the wonder of the narrator-character of “Annunciation.” To comprehend this female subject, I will also rely on theories of relational identity, namely those developed by Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan and their followers. Thus, the theory of intersubjectivity of the 1990s will appear as having many points in common with dialogism (especially in section 3). My own compounds identity-alterity and both-andism address the question of the dialogic interdependence of individuals, areas of thought, and so on. In addition, the compound ‘female subject’ is also employed with the meaning of female subject matter, including the female body, sexuality, and maternity. Following Rita Felski, I wish to advance from a mere reading of (female) ‘form’ to questions of ‘subject matter’ that, apart from being crucial for (certain) genres, might be a fertile ground for feminist criticism. In this sense, also for the Bakhtin Circle, a poetics of genre should always be a sociological poetics. The previous sections trace implicitly the principal aims of my research, which can be sketched out as follows: I will try to reveal the active presence of feminist dialogics in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s and Meridel Le Sueur’s writings. Thus, Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s proposals will appear to expand upon and delimit Bakhtinian theory. At the same time, I will consider the extent to which the (feminist) dialogics practised by the three thinkers is indeed dialogic enough. Finally, I hope to show feminism and dialogics in dialogue, producing fruitful hybrid results.

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PART ONE

THE SHORT-STORY

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The Realist-Gothic. Dialogics and Subjectivity in “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper”

One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— One need not be a House— The Brain has Corridors—surpassing Material Place— Emily Dickinson, No. 670

In the prolific secondary literature on “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper,” most critics disagree on its stylistic-generic status (i.e. realist or gothic?) and the interpretations called forth by the possibly feminist ending (i.e. is the protagonist sane or mad?) Richard Feldstein has suggested “an ironic reading of the wall(-)paper,” in which he comes to question “the narrator’s madness” and “the question of madness itself” (311). His main reasons for arguing in favour of such a reading are two-fold: the multiple spellings of “wall(-)paper,” which shift arbitrarily in the original manuscript: “wallpaper, wall paper, wall-paper...” (308) and the doubt that “the protagonist and the narrator are one character” (314). Though enlightening, Feldstein’s is a short and condensed article, whose format does not allow him to give many examples. Perhaps, I could provide the following one: “I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me... But I find I get pretty tired when I try” (“Yellow” 29)—so we may wonder, is the protagonist writing at all?1 In this chapter, I will examine in depth the notion of a hybrid narrator-character, which is also susceptible of other (sub)divisions. Mikhail M. Bakhtin defined a hybrid construction as a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter... between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by... social differentiation or by some other factor... [A]n intentional... hybrid is... a mixture of two... individualized language consciousnesses... and two individual language-intentions as well: the individual, representing authorial consciousness and will, on the one hand, and the individualized linguistic consciousness and will of the character, on the other... (DIN 358-359)

Therefore, a different narrator(’s voice), which might coincide with Gilman, will also be identified. This hybridity is to be understood as an exploration of (the possibilities of dialogic) subjectivity. I will also explore the either realist or gothic interpretations of the 1 A few comments should be added here. Paula Treichler has also questioned the idea that the main character may be keeping a journal. Both Denise D. Knight (1997) and Robert Shulman (1995) decided on a hyphenated WallPaper in their editions. The short-story(?) in question, which its author calls “little book” (“Why” 53), was written in 1890. Finally, a very much reduced version of this chapter is in Núñez Puente 2002.

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text in order to suggest that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short-story(?) is both realist and gothic. In saying this, I pretend to demonstrate the dialogic novelistic features of other genres, such as the short-story. Therein I hope to add another perspective to Bakhtin’s almost exclusive focus on the novel. Among all the interesting problems already identified in “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper,” scholars disagree on its generic status: diary (Michaels), autobiography (Rogers), it might also belong to the “‘literature of hysteria’” that is as well a “genre” (Diamond 59), and so on. If we take into account all these views, “Yellow” shares the generic ‘cannibalism’ of the novel. Its classification as “diary” enhances even more its ‘prosaic’ and novelistic features, as one of the “units into which the novelistic whole usually breaks down... [such as] everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc)” (DIN 262). Moreover, this kind of ‘prosaic’ writing can be considered as the starting point of ‘women’s literature’ (Donovan 2000). My use of a bracketed question mark here—“short-story(?)”—, as well as in other places—e.g. Jane(?)—, is intended to emphasize the problematic of definition and the (sometimes preferred) ambiguity of certain situations/terms. Shortly, I will discuss the author’s alteration of realism in this story(?) First, I will clarify my position with respect to the way of identifying “Yellow”’s realism(?) As we will see, realism has been generally acknowledged as a style with (apparently) no political function. This is completely at odds with Gilman’s (and Bakhtin’s) sociological understanding of literature. Thereby, if I had to decide whether Gilman’s blend of realism(?) is a style or a genre, I would prefer to understand it as the latter. From the perspective of Bakhtin’s conception of genre as a way of thinking, Gilman’s genre is feminist in this (and other) text(s). Consequently, among other things, the author’s perspective of gender destabilizes canonical forms of thought already existent. The writer’s feminism will be thoroughly evaluated too.2 Beate Schöpp-Schilling and Loralee MacPike read “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” as psychological realism. For the former, the story is “a psychologically realistic account of the causes and the progressive stages of [the protagonist’s] mental illness” (141), that is: a prior “depression, then develops into increasing withdrawal from reality, a persecution complex, odor hallucinations, synaesthesia, and ends in the complete breakdown of her ego” (143). According to the latter: “If realism is to be defined, as... ‘the objective representation of contemporary social reality,’ Gilman’s story is indeed realism; but her realism, like Henry James, is a representation of what is real to the author...” (139). However, Gilman considered herself a sociologist and argued about the (feminist) social matters/purposes of all her writings. In the “Summary of Purpose” written at the closing of her own periodical, she stated that “[t]he subject matter [of The Forerunner]... is not to be regarded as ‘literature,’ but as an attempt to set forth certain views of life which seemed to the author of real importance to human welfare” (286). Bakhtin would expand the definition of literature, given his view on the socio-ideological impulse of certain genres, such as the novel.3

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Thus, throughout this study on Gilman, I will suggest that realism can be defined as a genre. In fact, realism could even be classified as a movement, since it was born as such for the French painters of the mid-nineteenth century. Coinciding with Gary Saul Morson (1991), I would just add that Bakhtin’s greatest generic hero was not the novel, as most critics agree, but the realist novel. 3 Above all, Gilman would criticize the fact that literature had been turned into a “‘business’” (“Apropos” 105) and that her “[s]ocial philosophy,” would sell little in such a market (Living 303-304).

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From a (feminist) dialogic perspective, the dichotomy between the “social” and the “psychological” is easy to deconstruct: “Feminists turn to Bakhtin’s notion of the word and dialogue in order to break down this separation of public rationality and private intersubjectivity” (Bauer 1991, 1). Besides, it seems that (most) realist writers saw themselves as reformers (Kaplan). Nevertheless Conrad Shumaker explains the problematic of the writer-reformer as follows: There is a tension between the feminist writer’s role as realist and her role as reformer. As a practitioner of realism as defined by [William Dean] Howells (that is, someone who proposes to show us ‘life as it is’ in order to show why it must be changed), the writer must respect the conventions that make up a large part of what the audience will accept as ‘reality.’ Yet if women’s role is what the writer wants to reform, then those very conventions must be attacked. (1991, 87)

I will try to prove that Gilman is both using established conventions (e.g. realism, the gothic) and parodying them. I consider this play with genres an intentional attack on patriarchal norms of gender. As she explains in her autobiography, it was precisely Howells who “tried the Atlantic Monthly print [“Yellow”], but Mr. Scudder, then the editor, sent it back with this brief card:... ‘I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!’” (Living 119) Later, she was asked by Howells to include her short-story(?) in his own collection: “I was more than willing, but assured him that it was no more ‘literature’ than my other stuff, being definitively written ‘with a purpose’” (65). In “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Gilman posits the connections between its plot and her own life and asserts that its purpose “was not... to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy” (53). Part of “Yellow”’s autobiographical data is that the woman writer herself had a postpartum depression and was prescribed a ‘rest cure,’ which turned out to be even more dangerous than the (supposed) illness—like her protagonist, she would even crawl around the room. With “Yellow” she intended that her doctor, the popular Silas Weir Mitchell, change his treatment. Published in The Forerunner, in 1913, Gilman’s review article was a response to a Boston reader who protested that “[s]uch a story ought not to be written... it was enough to drive mad anyone who read it” (52). In the words of Shumaker, if “Yellow” is to be considered ‘realistic’ in the Howellsian manner, one must read the protagonist as a “type,” which would imply “seeing creeping women everywhere” (1991, 91). It seems that both the editor of the Atlantic and the Bostonian reader interpret it ‘realistically,’ otherwise, why should they have been so bothered by it? Gilman wanted to make a social critique of her time—e.g. to expose the masculinism of the (medical) institution(s)—and she succeeded. Another of her purposes, that it appear “dreadful,” succeeded too (Living 119).4 That is probably why, in the introduction to his own edition, Howells stated that, “[“Yellow”] was too terribly good to be printed” (55). Thus, if Annette Kolodny thinks that “Yellow” contains certain feminist insights not possibly grasped by its contemporaries, Conrad Shumaker believes that they understood it too well (1992). In a patriarchal society, it is not surprising that many future printers and readers preferred to

4 Gilman recalled the first editor’s refusal with irony: “This was funny. The story was meant to be dreadful and succeeded. I suppose he would have sent back one of Poe’s on the same ground” (Living 119). Critics are divided as to whether the author’s purpose to make doctor Mitchell change his ‘cure’ was or not fruitful: Gilman herself affirmed “Yellow”’s success in this respect–“Why,” Living—and so did her contemporaries—e.g. Wellington. Nowadays, however, critics consider such an affirmation to be exaggerated (see Golden 1992).

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consider it as a “ghost/horror story” (King 24), since this kind of literature has been criticized as escapist.5 Nowadays, however, most writers and critics see Realism as conservative’ and find (more) ‘emancipatory’ possibilities in the Gothic: “Because it naturalizes the relation between character and [person], setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on, a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of that world” (Diamond 61). Leo Bersani has identified desire as “a threat to the form of realistic fiction” (66). Thus, as “desire becomes more radically disruptive of established [social and literary] orders, the novel tends to become less realistic and more allegorical” (67). Widely identified as a radical feminist, Gilman’s ‘desire’ to disrupt patriarchy (e.g. gender) would lead her to disrupt realistic conventions (e.g. genre). If realism is interested in maintaining the boundary between the real and the imagined (68), a neat division is complicated by an ill character, who tries to distinguish between the two. In “Yellow,” the arrangement of time coincides (in principle) with the expected temporal sequence of the classic realist story: beginning-middle-end (54-55). The story(time) covers three months (“Yellow” 33), from the beginning till the end of the summer. However, the text refers to a time beyond itself too: John and his wife hire “a hereditary estate” (24). This can be connected to the fact that the protagonist has a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (25), which was suffered by other women before her. “Yellow”’s allusion to ‘other times’ and its prevalence in time situate it in what Bakhtin called the Great Time (e.g. MHS 169). First, Gilman would write through the tradition of her great aunts—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine Beecher and Isabel Beecher (Shulman 1995, xxvii). Second, she would remind us that two Beecher women had also been in Silas Weir Mitchell’s hands (Living 95). Thus, hysteria recognizes a “‘woman with a [patriarchal] past’” (Diamond 59), which Gilman would attack as the main reason for women’s (psychological) problems. And, according to Elin Diamond, hysteria is precisely what Realism tries to suppress (76): a hysteria that is “meaningful” for (some) feminists “as a disruption of categories and systems of meaning” (61). These arguments seem reason enough for Gilman to attack certain genre conventions in order to portray her-story/the voice(s) of a gender. As she repeatedly complained, “[a]ll previous literature ha[d] been androcentric” (“Coming” 125). The hysteric is supposed to have more than one voice (Diamond 70-73), which goes against the “unity of personal voice characteristic of realistic fiction” (Bersani 86). This ‘doubleness’ will also destabilize the possibility of a “conclusive ending” (87). Bersani dismantles the flat dichotomy of ‘psychological-social’ (realism) mentioned above by stating that any proposition intended to change society includes questions about the self (57, 62). Further, Gilman’s use of the Gothic might convey a sense of the fragmented self (58), which goes against the “order, control and powers of a restrictive ideology” (Becker 4). [The Gothic] indicates a potential liberation from constraining—both cultural and narrative—structures. The idea of a secret plot from the past that structures a contemporary narrative... suggests an excess in narrative, a level of narration that doubles or contests... the conventions of a surface narrative pattern: for example, the pattern of the traditional ‘heroine’s text’—the text that ends in marriage or death. (Becker 11, italics mine) 5

Till today, “Yellow” has appeared in several collections of ‘supernatural’ stories, for instance, in Dowrick 1978.

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Through this “excess,” which implies an attack on classic Realism (2), we might be able to hear the voice(s) of a gender: “after all, gothic horror is domestic horror, family horror, and addresses precisely [the] gendered problems of everyday life” (11). But far from enhancing division itself, all scholars coincide that this genre serves to account for a self that has relationships (e.g. Kathryn Hume 196). The Gothic has been read as a dialogic genre that “only plays at being totalized... as... [it] encompasses several heterogeneous stylistic unities located on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls” (Howard 17). I read the gothic presence in “Yellow” as an attempt to ‘feminize’ a supposedly masculinist Realism, for instance, “to [dialogically] alter or erase its arrogance and exclusiveness and to open the once patriarchal discourses to relationality” (Little 160). Further, William E. Fleenor reads Gilman’s autobiography as containing gothic features and her gothic stories as containing autobiographical details. Despite Bakhtin’s relative lack of interest in Gothic fiction, he would call this opening (hybridity) of the genres ‘novelization.’ As Beverly A. Hume suggests, the most blatant gothic features of the protagonist’s environment, the “ancestral halls... a haunted house” (“Yellow” 24), do not explain her perception: “There was some legal trouble... and... the place has been empty for years... That spoils my ghostliness...” (25) Through this unlearning heroine, the author might be ‘reversing’ the (male) Bildungsroman characteristic of realist fiction (cf. BHR). She also parodies the adventure romance and the ‘castle chronotope’ typical of Gothic fiction (cf. FTC)6—i.e. “[to] reach the height of romantic felicity... would be asking too much of fate!” (“Yellow” 24). In this way has patriarchy constructed gender(s) through genre(s), such as in the Gothic: the brave (male) saviour of the scared (female) victim. So Jane(?) trusts the old characters she has probably “read about” (25). At first, she believes John is her ‘rescuing prince’—“I wish John would take me away from here!” (33). His failure to fulfil that role becomes apparent in the last scene when ‘prince charming’ “faint[s],” as if struck down by Medusa, displaying a so-called femininity (42). This parodic play with genre conventions problematizes any definition of the text. The author’s treatment of gender also destabilizes and complicates the well-known (gender) hierarchy. Besides, [the narrator envisions herself as] a prisoner inside the yellow wall[-]paper, an unsavory social text created and sustained not only by men like John, but by women like Jennie [her sister-in-law], and, most horribly, herself... [This complexity of oppressions enables] Gilman not only to transform her into a grotesque figure [through the author-narrator’s voice], but to make a pointed, darkly satiric comment against those conventional gender patterns that imprisoned her. (Beverly A. Hume 480)

In addition, there is an inner fight amongst the voices that inform the main character’s knowledge of the world. Bakhtin finds a mix of ideologies as the languages of different generations, professions, and classes merge or conflict, often within the speech of one character... [He] describes how a character may begin to borrow the phrasing and ideology of another (or of the narrator); the resulting juxtaposition of one speaker’s ideology may in effect evaluate or ridicule that of the other; or a dialogic struggle may indicate that one voice is trying to ‘liberate’ itself from the discourse of an imposed authority. (Little 10-11) 6

The chronotope, literally time-space, is one of Bakhtin’s theoretical approaches “for distinguishing generic types” (Morson & Emerson 250-251). The novel is the genre of the present and carries out a critique of its contemporary society. Bakhtin associates a particular novel with a specific set of chronotopes (e.g. the Gothic and the ‘castle chronotope’). In outline, the chronotope is going to define the relation between the work of art and (social) reality. Toward the end of this section, I will briefly suggest a chronotopic interpretation of “Yellow.” A thorough analysis of the Bakhtinian concept is undertaken in the next chapter.

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In what follows, I will examine the hybrid language(s) of the ‘extradiegetic homodiegetic’ narrator,7 one of the narrators of the text. I will pay special attention to the dialogic interplay between an “[i]nternally persuasive word” and an “authoritative word” (DIN 342). It is clear that John wants his temporarily depressed wife, a professional writer that has recently had a baby, to forget about her professional “duty” (“Yellow” 28). Both he and his brother-in-law, who are “physician[s] of high standing” (24, 25), impose on her the ‘rest cure,’ according to which she is “absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until [she is] well again” (25).8 For a modern mind, it seems a cruel paradox that, once she has ‘(re)produced,’ she is not allowed to ‘produce’ again. Victorian ideology is held responsible for establishing the separation of the (masculine) public/(feminine) private spheres. With the division into gendered domains, women (of the upper-classes) would be confined to the home and removed from “culture” and “work” (cf. Wolff). One cannot but see the threat that the new (‘wage-earning’) woman posed for patriarchal men, or, why is John’s wife taken to such an old place where, not only the furniture, but even the “flowers” seem to be “old-fashioned” (“Yellow” 29)? From this vantage we could explore the author’s endeavour to project a new gender (system) through her renovation of (‘old’) genres. It is necessary to remember that Gilman’s most ambitious project involved creating a world of economically independent women, or ending with women’s “sexuo-economic” dependence on men (Women, repeated throughout). In her desired world, motherhood and (artistic) ‘work’ would be compatible and women would not suffer the ordeals related in this and other turn-of-the-nineteenth-century texts—such as The Awakening. Nevertheless, “Yellow”’s character(-narrator) appears still as an ‘accomplice’ of patriarchy: she is at first pleasantly seduced by “[t]he most beautiful place!... It makes me think of English places you read about... There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden...” (25)—a paragraph that asserts both the antiquity of the house and the transmission of patriarchy through texts. Thus, the main character, who is never(?) named, is also patriarchal—as in the Lacanian universe, Jane(?)’s (linguistic) subject is subjected. And she also aspires to being a representative of patriarchal gender (and genre). William Veeder has suggested that her name is “Jane,” which is mentioned at the end and would not refer to her sister-in-law Jennie (or ‘Jenny’ in the 1892 edition)—even though it was a nickname for “Jane” for the Victorians. I will call her ‘Jane(?)’ since, as the feminine version of ‘John,’ it seems to suit perfectly her dialogic condition—the plurality of languages that struggle within her—thanks to which she can also be partly ‘Jenn/ie/y.’ Moreover, according to the Bible, ‘John’ is one of the first patriarchs and, historically, ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ one of Christianity’s (crazy?) martyrs. The biblical axiom “[i]n the beginning was the Word” is also in John 1:1, as if foreseeing the authoritarian attitude this fictionalized John adopts with his wife. According to Bakhtin, the authoritative voice “demands that we acknowledge it... [and] binds us quite independently of any power it might have to persuade us internally; [since] we encounter... its authority already fused to it” (DIN 342). Therefore, the voice of authority, of the Fathers, will correspond to the protagonist’s husband and the inner voice, which “is denied all privilege, backed up by no

7

I am borrowing this terminology from Gérard Genette. Dr. Mitchell had been much more radical with the author, for whom he prescribed: “‘never [to] touch pen, brush or pencil as long as [she] live[d]’” (Living 96). Gilman explains his tyrannical attitude as a consequence of his “prejudice against the Beechers” (95).

8

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authority at all” to herself.9 As can be inferred, Bakhtin found a deep connection between the hybridity of psychological life and that of the realist novel (e.g. DIN 338). It is then important to emphasize the psychological and artistic hybridity present in other genres, such as the short-stories written by women. Not surprisingly, the gender of these authors and their different novelized writings were completely ignored by Bakhtin. Readers soon notice a marked difference between John’s and Jane(?)’s ‘languages’ from the start: as patriarchal husbands do, he “laughs at” her and “scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures” (“Yellow” 24). Given her “imaginative power and habit of story-making” (29), he mistrusts all her opinions: when she told him that she felt “something strange about the house” (25), “he said what [she] felt was a draught, and shut the window” and he does not believe she is really sick (24). Playing with the words ‘norm’ and ‘male,’ Jacques Lacan liked to make a joke on defining “woman” as a ‘norm(e)mâl(e)’ being, that is: a normal “woman” is the one who adjusts to masculinist parameters. Hence, in John’s mind, his wife is indeed not ill but simply adjusts to the feminine pattern, designed to be defective. Though Jane(?) feels almost bereft of hope—“what can one do?” “[W]hat is one to do?” (repeated in 25)—she tries to hold on to her (own) beliefs: “Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about [the house]” (24). Her ‘inner personal voice’ lets itself be heard at times: like her brother, “John is a physician, and perhaps—... —perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (25), “[p]ersonally, I disagree with their ideas... Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.” Nevertheless, even her ‘inner’ language seems to be infected by his authoritarian voice “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says...” Perhaps the most salient feature of his language to be found in hers is her use of the (rationalizing) expression “of course” (i.e. 28, 31, 34). Even towards the middle of the story, when she starts to doubt John’s ‘voice,’ “[b]ut I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!” (32), we can still hear this voice of authority: “I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me” (35). Even in the last scene, when the protagonist crawls around after having torn off most of the wall(-)paper, she might be alluding to herself in the third person: “I’ve got out at last... in spite of you and Jane” (42). That is one of John’s habits that she probably acquires. When talking to her(?), he says: “Bless her little heart!... she shall be as sick as she pleases” (33). I will argue that Jane(?)’s ‘reading’ (‘acting’) of the wall(-)paper is informed by a (patriarchal) third-person perspective of gender. Fortunately, the author-narrator will not succumb to the gender pattern imprisoning the protagonist. Neither did Gilman herself accommodate herself to established (genre) forms. Just before the scene commented on previously, the reader is informed that the protagonist has come to mistrust not just John and Jennie but also the reader—“nobody should find [the pattern] out but myself!” (35), “I have found out another funny thing, but I shan’t tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much” (39). As the wall(-)paper becomes gradually more essential to her, she starts to feel more important than anyone else. She is finally able to ‘lie’ to her husband: “John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seem to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper... I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him that it was because of the wallpaper—he would have laughed at me” (35). I will argue that it is precisely John’s inability 9

Annie G. Rogers also distinguishes between the resisting “i” and the patriarchal “eye” (52).

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to maintain a true relationship with her that leads her to search for an other causing her subsequent (explicit) doubling.10 It seems that John is not only ‘bad’ at conversation but that he might be ‘bad’ at sex too. Therein, Veeder’s comparison to Gone with the Wind is appropriate and equally suggestive: “‘And dear John gathered me in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read by me till it tired my head,’ [though this] Scarlett O’Hara encounters Book Man” (56). The reading of a bedtime story is another indication of John’s paternal(ist) attitude towards her. Instead of the attic bedroom he had selected for her, “[which] was [only perhaps] a nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium” (“Yellow” 26), Jane(?) would prefer the one on the first floor that “had roses all over the window.” He refused because “there was... no room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another,” making explicit his desire not to sleep with her. Though he offered going to the cellar for her (29). That he wants her either ‘up’ or ‘down,’ but not ‘at an equal level,’ as a different subject, reminds us of (gender) discrimination working in two ways (mother/whore). Moreover, she has just given birth to a son (“him” 25), who ensures the male hereditary line, and explains one of the reasons why ‘the master’ does not require her sexual services immediately.11 When the protagonist-narrator asked John to let her visit “Cousin Henry and Julia” (32), she admits that even though “[she] tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him,” “[she] did not make out a very good case for [herself], for [she] was crying before [she] had finished.” One cannot but think about Edna Pontellier crying after an argument with Mr. Pontellier and he going to the club. John’s argument to convince his wife also follows the lordship/bondage pattern, by which the other (person) ceases to be an-other, or the pattern of assimilation through the ‘same.’ That is, “[h]e said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake,” thus manifesting John’s explicit reification of his wife (32). The first time these cousins were mentioned, he said that he “would as soon put fireworks in [her] pillow-case as to let [her] have those stimulating people around” (29). It seems that the protagonist is denied all kind of amusement, the sexual imagery being suggestive here. On another occasion, when “[Jane(?)] thought it was a good time to talk” of her condition (33), their conversation continues as follows: ‘The repairs are not done at home [John contends, ironically implying that his wife is also under some kind of ‘repair’], and I cannot possibly leave town now. Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you are really better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel much easier about you... Really dear you are better!’... ‘Better in body perhaps—’ [Jane(?)] began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at [her] with such a stern, reproachful look that [she] could not say another word... ‘My darling,’ said he, ‘I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never... let that idea enter you mind!’ (33-34 italics added)12

10 The protagonist confesses that she used to personify the objects of her schoolgirl’s room (29). Was she perhaps prone to succumb to ‘doubling’ already? 11 The importance of issues of heredity and inheritance is emphasized throughout—e.g. “There was some legal trouble [concerning the estate]... something about the heirs and coheirs...” (25). 12 “[T]hat idea,” which authoritarian John does not let us/readers ‘hear,’ might be related to her “excited fancies,” meaning sensuality?/madness? (29). Besides, in Deborah Tannen’s terms, we can assert that John really ‘interrupts’ his wife, whereas her following intervention can be considered as ‘overlapping’—she even repeats the word “‘[b]etter’”

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Obviously, this example cannot be considered as a real dialogue between two people, who are able to see each other as both ‘equal’ (e.g. having the same chances to be right) and ‘different’ (e.g. a female and a male) in the Todorovian sense (Todorov 1984, 76). The John/Jane(?) hierarchy stands for an (extreme) example of the asymmetry present in many relations. Dialogical feminists explain that, because language is ideologically charged, the conflict of voices reveals the power structures at work: The notion of ‘reciprocity’ means something different if we are talking about an exchange between a male/female speaker/addressee, or an exchange between two females. While a power dynamic will be operating in both sets of relationships, this will be attended by a complex (and perhaps contradictory) working out of sexual politics in the male-female exchange (Pearce 204).

However, I will challenge Pearce’s argument when I discuss Jane(?)’s relation with Jennie and other possible women. John “secure[s]” his wife in a house that is “alone,” surrounded by “hedges and walls and gates that lock,” and whose garden has “box-bordered paths” (“Yellow” 24-25). He puts her in what appears to be a nursery so that she might become a “little girl” again (33). John’s adjustment to patriarchal laws has a very harmful effect on Jane(?)’s subjectivity. Patriarchy confers the status of subject on neither girls nor mothers, that is, none of them has an “identity as a woman and as a lover” (Holmund 290). Their bedroom looks more like a madhouse—the “heavy bedstead” seems to be “nailed” (“Yellow” 28 & 31), the windows are “barred” (26) and there is a “gate at the head of the stairs” (28)—, probably the reason why the place “ha[d] stood so long untenanted” (24). The axiom “a woman’s place is the home” is satirized throughout Gilman’s work (e.g. “Extinct”) and “Yellow” is certainly the most sarcastic critique she wrote. The protagonist’s sense of isolation and her craving for relationships are evident in the excessive use of “and” (i.e. 26)—which might be a Gothic feature for some critics. This also shows that the feminist writer had to transform genres (especially realism) in order to fit the requirements of gender (e.g. relationships). The text’s line breaks indicate both the main character’s ‘problem’ with relationships and the wish to place (speaking) entities side by side (i.e. her voice-his voice). The use of a paratactic style has been read as a feminist dialogic device (Donovan, “Style” 87). Therefore, both “Yellow”’s form and content is consistent with Patricia Waugh’s argument on (contemporary) women writers. According to this scholar, women writers have decided to represent a relational model of subjectivity, which rejects both the notion of the autonomous ‘ego’ and the ‘fragmented self,’ since it is formulated upon a myth of wholeness that women have never been allowed to enjoy (1992, 10). Due to its emphasis on gender and relationships, it is not surprising that the Gothic has been considered a “‘women’s genre’” (Becker 2). I agree with Jacqueline Howard that this approach would be “ahistorical and homogenizing” and so essentialist (14). However, in this particular case, one cannot avoid pointing out that the protagonist had just been pregnant, which complicates even more the theme of ego-boundaries. A “strategic essentialism” could then be applied in order to approach her postpartum depression, which means that, this character’s state matches with the deployment of the Gothic genre.13 Keeping all this in mind, when generalizing on relational identity, I will be using the category “feminine” in a cultural, non-essentialist sense.

13

For more details on ‘strategic essentialism,’ refer to Spivak (1997). I will employ this term throughout this work.

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“Yellow”’s ‘excess’ might not only be a feature of the Gothic genre but also (an aspect) of gender, i.e., the Irigarayan feminine—suggested by Bauer & McKinstry, 6-7. In her most influential book, Gilman seems to be making a too clear-cut distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’: “The primary sex-distinctions [‘female,’ ‘male’]... consist merely in the essential organs and functions of reproduction. The secondary distinctions... our largest excess [gender]—consist in all those differences in... habit, manner,... occupation, behaviour, which distinguish men [as ‘masculine’] and women [as ‘feminine’]” (Women 40-41, my italics). Gilman uses the term (feminine) ‘excess’ only with a negative meaning, one could say in an anti-Bakhtinian manner. It seems she did not deal much with heteroglossia: the instability of meanings, the flexibility of language usage, and so forth. Nowadays, Gilman’s ideas might be considered as the (early twentieth century) ‘feminism of Equality.’ Thus, she would say that the human female is “oversexed” given that, through gender inequality, she was historically relegated to the home and to the development of her “sex-functions” exclusively—Women, repeated throughout. In this state of affairs, only “[m]an is the human creature. Woman has been checked, starved, aborted in human growth” (75). This view is related to the ‘third-person perspective’ on gender, for which woman should become the ‘same’ as man in order to “become humanly developed, civilized, socialized” (222). Such a conclusion indicates that feminists like Gilman believed the phallocentric discourse on women. On the contrary, Luce Irigaray’s writings could be characterized as ‘feminism of Difference.’ Fortunately, many of her uses of the feminine-and-its-‘excess(es)’ underline its positive side(s) and constitute an attack on (and an alternative to) phallocentric discourse. Some of these writings include jokes on Freud’s view of women as being castrated: The rejection, the exclusion of a female imaginary undoubtedly places woman in a position where she can experience herself only fragmentarily as waste or excess in the little structured margins of a dominant ideology, this mirror entrusted by the (masculine) ‘subject’ with the task of reflecting and redoubling himself. The role of ‘femininity’ is prescribed moreover by this masculine specula(riza)tion... (1997, 327, italics added)14

This excerpt can be connected with the passage from “Yellow” quoted above, in which the main character omits the first-person pronoun (and verb)—i.e. “[I am only b]etter in body.” Her inability to refer to herself as (an) ‘I’ could stem from the fact that she is not (seen as a) ‘you’ by John. Expressed in Irigarayan terms, she experiences herself as “waste.” This contrasts with the numerous times she mentions his name: four ‘Johns’ in half a page, “Yellow” 28. As I implied above, feminist philosophers have argued for a (non)ego whose first move toward the other does not entail the purpose of domination—as in the Foucaultian sphere—but that of establishing a relationship. In this ‘new’ realm, neither is dependence a shame nor does it imply assimilation. For instance, in the Chodorowian scene, differentiation does not imply separateness but connection. For Bakhtin, “I realize myself initially through others” (FNM 138). Lynne Pearce has connected both Bakhtin’s and Chodorow’s views, arguing for a subjectivity that is acquired through a relational self: “Chodorow’s argument that even our separateness from others should be seen as part of a larger relational identity... is fully consistent with Bakhtin’s view of a subject that is at all times dependent upon the ‘other’ for his or her self-definition. For him, as well as for her, 14

Irigaray’s concept of ‘excess’ can be said to go beyond gender, as she is certainly concerned with investigating the biological differences between the sexes. In this respect, as well as in highlighting the positive side of the maternal, Gilman would certainly agree with the French feminist, for instance in Herland-Ourland.

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the ‘me’-‘not me’ distinction is a false one: in any relationship, as in any utterance, who I am (and what I say) will be determined by the presence of my addressee” (91). Whether the female character is writing or not in her diary, her description of the wall(-)paper is a kind of (possibly feminine) ‘writing’ in itself.15 Firstly, writing accounts for the dialogic necessity of having a listener, even if that listener is herself (TPT 122). Secondly, the protagonist says the paper’s pattern “was not arranged on any laws... ever heard of” and notes “[its] defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind” (31 & 34). Her comments indicate that its (feminine) design upsets the patriarchal one. Playing on the Lacanian pun, writers of feminine écriture have widely proclaimed the need to fly away from the norm(e)mâl(e). “Yellow” has been defined as an “attempt to write a new kind of story, one true to women’s inner experience” (Weatherford 73), a new way of thinking (of genre parameters) in order to let the voice(s) of a gender be listened to. Furthermore, feminine writing has also been described as inner realism (Gelfant), feminist realism (Cohen & Prendergast), and so forth. In addition to all this, Jane(?) is a professional writer. Her need for a listener or even an audience is made evident when we read: “It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work...” (“Yellow” 29) The author and character’s gender, their profession and the genres of “Yellow” corroborate the assertion that (women’s) subjectivity is acquired through a relational self. The text also examines the difficulties (in the formation) of such a dialogical subject. This (particular) narrator’s text is constantly riddled with the pronoun ‘you’: i.e. “I assure you” (31), “you see” (32, 35), “I’ll tell you why— privately—” (38). As the story progresses she grows more and more egocentric and ends up alluding to her-self in an almost childish manner—“you don’t get me out... there!” (41). Her need to enter into a relationship is such that she becomes able to ‘see’ others in her room’s wall(-)paper: “two... eyes” and a “broken neck” (29)—are they fragmented ‘I’s?—, a “figure” (30, 33), “the same shape, only very numerous” (32)—an expression that seems ungrammatical—, a “woman” (33, 38), “heads” (37), “great many women” (38). This is the other (you?) that will stop her from being “all alone” (39). When she ‘finds out’ that this crawling, “stooping down” woman wants to be set free from the oppressive wall(-)paper (33)—“The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (38), she decides to “help her... I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (39). Hence, we face the problem of address once more: Jane(?) never calls her companion (a) ‘you’ but refers to her, like John does with herself, in the third person. As if by means of a speculum effect, she is led to identify her-self completely with her and also the “creeping women” she sees in the garden (40): “I wonder if they all come out of the wall-paper as I did?” Further, she is in possession of a rope so that “[i]f that woman does get out, and tries to get away, [she] can tie her!” (40)—and ends up tying herself (41). Far from approaching her as (a ‘you’) “an-other person” in the Irigarayan way (1995), she sees her(self) as an (inferior) “other” with whom she can merge. Unfortunately, she is not more relational than John, which contradicts the hypothesis that women are ‘naturally’ more relational than men. Apparently, Jane(?) seems to have complete faith in the patriarchal imaginary at the end. Actually, she seems also to believe in the patriarchal symbolic: i.e. she imitates the process of lordship/bondage logic. A very close reading of 15 I write feminine (in italics) here to denote subversion, for the feminine can be manifested in many different ways, some of them even anti-feminist.

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the title of the story(?) can give us a clue about this self/other relation. Through an intensive use of the hyphen we get: 1/ a “ye-l-low wall-paper,” where ‘low’ and ‘wall’ seem to mirror each other. This suggests that the protagonist gets trapped in the ‘mirror stage’—a proof of this is that she goes back to crawling (i.e. 40) and her companion/herself(?) never does talk. 2/ Thus, it is the ‘you paper,’ “y(ell)ow (wall)paper” that we cannot ‘listen’ to. 3/ Perhaps because the main character attempted to “yell-low,” a contradiction in terms, proving her inability to ‘speak.’ Like a genre, Howellsian realism/Gilmanian realism(?), (the feminine) gender can subdivide itself creating new hierarchies. Next, I will introduce the main character’s reading of the pattern so as to further integrate my assessment of genre and gender. Then, continuing with my argument on hybridity, I will discuss the hypothesis of the two narrators. The wall(-)paper is attributed anthropomorphic qualities: it has “expression” and seems to “kn[o]w” things (29). In fact, many of the nouns and adjectives used to describe its pattern remind us of those used by patriarchy to describe “woman”: it is “dull” (26) and has “lame uncertain curves,” it is “impertinen[t]” (29), “absurd,” “silly” (30) and provokes “confusion” (31), and its colour is “infuriating” (34). When she decides to “let [her condition] alone and talk about the house [and the garden]” (25), she uses similar adjectives: “beautiful,” “delicious.” The more the protagonist looks at/writes (about) it, the more sick or more “feminine” à la patriarchal she becomes: “[Jennie] thinks [and probably also Jane(?)] it is the writing which made me sick!,” “I’m getting dreadfully fretful and querulous” (30). She feels, somewhat paranoically, that she is being pursued by the smell of the wall(-)paper that “creeps all over the house... I find it... lying in wait for me on the stairs... Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell!” (37).16 Being so well trained by patriarchy, Jane(?) has a great ability to think in socalled Western terms. That is, she either thinks most rationally (à la realist) or abandons herself to dreams (à la gothic). Furthermore, she would like to see the woman “out of all the windows at once” (38). This reveals a further splitting of the I/eye as well as anxiety for a limitless (optical) perspective—could she ever see/define all women from where she stands? Along the development of Gender Studies, this kind of approach has been criticized for erasing the differences amongst women. The protagonist’s desire to ‘capture’ the woman under the wall(-)paper resembles that of First Wave Feminism, which implicitly defined ‘woman’ mainly as white, middle-class, educated and heterosexual. The other narrator is ironic with respect to Jane(?)’s non-dialogic ‘one-way perspective’ by introducing statements that seem comic to the reader whereas Jane(?) is unable to notice their hilarity. This form of narrative hybridity was explained by Bakhtin: The author manifests [her]self and h[er] point of view not only in h[er] effect on the narrator, on h[er] speech and h[er] language... but also in h[er] effect on the subject of the story—as a point of view that differs from the point of view of the narrator. Behind the narrator’s story, we read a second story, the author’s story; [s]he is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about the narrator h[er]self... (DIN 313-314)

16

She says: “I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell” (37). We cannot but think about Bertha Mason, another ‘woman in the attic,’ who appears in (another) Jane Eyre. In a different line of thought, Veeder has written that it is the smell of “the saturated diaper of childhood” (48).

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In “Yellow,” there are occasions when the narrator-character’s words appear “permeated with the ironic intonation of the author” (318). This new narrator-reader complicity destabilizes the narrator-character fusion and makes the protagonist’s narration appear unreliable (and even ridiculous). From a different angle, Jenny Weatherford has also defended the thesis of the two narrators. She contends that the diary entries evidence the protagonist’s writing (a journal) but at some point these references stop—section 3, 1899 edition. Then, the story must be (being) narrated by another voice. I cannot be in complete accord with such a straightforwardly non-dialogic argument. As I hope to demonstrate, the main character’s narration is infected by the author’s tone from the very beginning, which reads: “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer” (24, my italics). A couple who hire an estate, with an enormous mansion, a “private wharf” (28-29), “servants” (40), etc, do not seem to be merely working-class. Consequently, from the first section, we can glimpse the protagonist’s unreliability in narrating the story—i.e. it seems she has a disturbed perception of her (class) situation. Through her words, the satiric author could be saying: ‘it is very seldom that they would hire such a house. Only if Jane(?) needs to be put in a cage!’ The question of class appears once more when she mentions that the estate has “lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people” (25), which reveals her classism. She had also confessed her love for the “[rich] pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings!” (25-26). On the one hand, Gilman had an austere taste and was very critical with decoration—for instance, in her attempt to reform women’s clothing (Dress). Therefore, the protagonist-narrator’s upper-class language and attitude seem to be mocked by an author not fond of the “old-fashioned.” On the other, the author herself chose a wealthy woman as a main character. It is necessary to include here an extra note on class, and its effects on gender, given both its complexity and its presence in Gilman’s oeuvre. It is true that her female representations center upon white upper-/middle-class protagonists and how they can dismantle gender rules. On the contrary, a study of her usage of genre shows a much wider variety—i.e. poetry, essay, journal article, adventure novel, utopia, love story, and so forth. Discussing characters’ roles as ‘figure’ or ‘ground,’ Barbara Johnson has written, In... Gilman[’s “Yellow”], several figures are standing in the background—Mary, who cares for the [baby]; Jennie, the housekeeper... This background role is often played, in white Western literature, by non-white characters. (In pointing this out, I am of course, prolonging the colonizing gesture of equating race and class)... This is another way of denying a character the status of figure... (1998, 36)

As the main character’s sister-in-law, readers know a little about Jennie: she must be white. But we do not know any further particulars—is she single? Does she suffer economic hardship? Does John pay her for ‘watching over’ his wife? We are not informed of Mary’s race either, though she must be lower-class. Some critics have considered hysteria a ‘modern’ illness in which to find the roots of feminism (Price-Herndl). I wonder which feminism they are thinking of. Expressed in simple terms, hysteria is a rich women’s illness: poor women have no time or occasion to be(come) hysterical. It is pitiful and ironic that the main character uses her bedroom key to lock herself in (“Yellow” 40, 42). It is ironic and pitiful that she does not look for help or escape when “[she] go[es] to ride” (37). Apart from being a wealthy woman, Jane(?) is also trapped by the (old) rules of her social class.

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The protagonist’s narration is undercut in other ways (by the authorial narrator). As stated above, her brother is (also) a physician, which casts a humorous light on her following comment: “[the wallpaper] is torn off... and it sticketh closer than a brother— they [children] must have had perseverance as well as hatred” (29-30). Monika Fludernik has suggested that she knows about the paper’s stickiness only because she has tried to tear it off herself (83). Jane(?) also says that it “is stripped off... as far as [she] can reach” and admits later that “[she] peeled off all the paper [she] could reach standing on the floor” (“Yellow” 26 & 40). Is the protagonist mistaken? Is the narrative time reversed? Had she (“seldom”) been in that room before, peeling off the wallpaper, and does not remember it? Such leaps in time certainly upset the realist temporal sequence. In any case, her narration seems unreliable at this point.17 The author-narrator’s parody is more bitter-sweet when dealing with Jane(?)’s husband. This parody enables the female reader to occupy the position of the author or (at least) not to identify with Jane(?) That is, in the parody, gender patterns are ridiculed to the extreme. Let me examine some examples. “[John] is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction... [H]e takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it even more” (26). The verb “stir” reifies the wife’s condition and the modifiers “all,” “basely,” and “even” enhance the scathing critique of the author-narrator. “It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so” (33). The lack of modifier here may indicate that he loves her “so,” as much as “S. Weir Mitchell,” in whose “hands” she does “not want” to be, because “he is just like John and [her] brother” (30). Through a literal reading of her husband’s words, he is made to look a fool: “Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear... and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time” (26). Is this the prescription of a “high standing” medical doctor? Gilman is mocking the medical genre and its reification of patients at this point. It seems Jane(?) needs to believe that her husband really loves her and cares for her. However, no perspicuous reader could share her opinion, given the subtle irony displayed by the author(-narrator). She appears even more foolish by believing that “he is right about the beds and windows and things” (28, my italics)—like the “things in the walls” (26)? It has been suggested that Jane(?) considers hanging herself (40), this being the reason why she wants to move the bed (to reach one of those “things”). Irony becomes sarcasm when dealing specifically with “commit[ting] suicide” (37): “To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but... I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued” (40)—a reflection that seems a bitter parody of her husband’s language (“of course”). These examples could not be farther from Bakhtin’s laughing irony as a means to undergo an ordeal—I will assess this Bakhtinian proposal in Le Sueur’s work, especially in The Girl. Perhaps Gilman no longer desired to laugh at her ‘creature,’ who might not be perfect but is undoubtedly a victim of old conventions of gender and genre (such as the medical one). “Yellow”’s twists on death add a caustic touch to its satiric purpose, multiplying the readers’ worries, as corresponds to its didactic purpose—e.g. “to save people from being driven crazy” (“Why” 53). Throughout this work we will continue to see that, by means of the didacticism of her (still) literary genres, Gilman would intend to reform gender.

17 Fludernik notices the same narrative mode when describing the bed (83). First we get, “[t]his bedstead is fairly gnawed!” And shortly afterwards, “I bit off a little piece at the corner” (40).

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In what follows, I will develop further my reading of “Yellow” and ‘its’ pattern as language and as a mirror of Jane(?)’s sexuality. Both elements are constitutive of subjectivity and the arrangements of gender. I will also deal with the pattern as an object of design in itself, as it contains some linguistic clues to “Yellow”’s genres. Unfortunately, Jane(?) is unable to realize the dialogics inherent to (her) language. But no wonder, since she has been isolated from society and brought back into a ‘childhood’ stage where there is (almost) no sense of time. In Bakhtinian (non)theory, heteroglossia is the quality by which: “[a]t any given time, at any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical,... —that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a different meaning than it would have under any other conditions” (Holquist 2000, 428). Thus, heteroglossia accounts for the importance of ‘context’ over ‘text,’ making meaning(s) unstable and revisable, and so celebrating the enormous flexibility of linguistic (re)production. For the Bakhtinians, language is not a “‘prison house’” but an “‘ecosystem’” (quoted by Bauer, 1988, ix): that is, it allows the subject to “author” him-herself, to be subjected to his-her own re-presentation(s). In a dialogic feminist re-vision of the pattern (‘language’), it becomes (at least) double-voiced since, even if it appears oppressive, it also contains possibilities of liberation as well as of other possibilities. The imagery (used to describe the wallpaper) oozes with sexual connotations.18 Its colour is “lurid” (“Yellow” 26), “a smoldering unclean yellow,” which “makes [Jane(?)] think [only] of... old, foul, bad yellow things” (37). Its design has a “vicious influence” on Jane(?) suggestive of an orgasm (29): there is “a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls... and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down,” “[o]ne of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic [or even religious] sin” (37) as its lines “plunge off at outrageous angles,” it is “a kind of ‘debased Romanesque’ with delirium tremens” (31). Most critics have noticed its “smooch[es]” (35, 40)—“There is a very funny mark on this wall... that runs round the room... a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over... Round and round and round—round and round and round—it makes me dizzy!” (37). And some have suggested they refer to masturbation. A subject who masturbates (is a subject and) can be said to rebel against a society that imposes a heterosexual-reproductive regime. Unlike sexual intercourse, masturbation does not entail the risk of (an unwanted) pregnancy. Surprisingly, many medical authorities of the 1920s still thought that “[t]he habits of the problem homosexual or intersexual woman might take the form merely of masturbation” (Jeffreys 170). Furthermore, lesbianism and masturbation are “cited as cause and result of frigidity,” a frigidity that is understood as “dislike” or “failure to respond with enthusiasm to one particular sexual practice, sexual intercourse” (171-172, emphasis mine). Apart from the equation of the two former practices, homosexuality and masturbation, the word “queer” appears three times in this story(?). There is a moment when Jane(?) even admits that “[i]t is getting to be a great effort to think straight” (“Yellow” 32). Some readers have (rightly) appropriated these elements—as well as the story(?)’s silences, the (other) woman imagined by the protagonist, and so forth—so as to claim “Yellow” as a lesbian text (Allen, White).19 Whether the writer herself had or had not lesbian relationships is still a matter of discussion.20 18

The garden also has “riotous... flowers, and bushes, and gnarly trees” (28). For a possibly lesbian interpretation (of the ending), see the movie The Yellow Wallpaper by John Clive. 20 Apart from her two marriages, the author has been attributed other love relationships: one with Martha Luther, another with Adeline Knapp. 19

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As I argued above, John does not consider Jane(?) a subject with whom to establish a true relationship, for instance a sexual one. This might be one of the reasons why she needs to further explore her erotic possibilities by herself. William Veeder has stated that the couple has no sexual relations during the whole summer: “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious” (“Yellow” 28). The same critic asserts that he must have a lover—“[h]ow many cases so ‘serious’ that John would have to attend overnight can befall a village in summer?” (Veeder 59)—, and so Jane(?)’s confinement is very convenient for him. It is curious, even comic, that she hides her room key “under a plantain leaf!” (“Yellow” 42). Why a plantain? Is it a comic clue referring to her sexual nonsatisfaction? Therefore, during her virtual imprisonment in the ‘yellow room,’ the main character reveals (maybe even discovers) something else about her own sexuality, something beyond John, be it about masturbation, lesbianism, heterosexual non-satisfaction, etc. Once more, the author(-narrator)’s sense of humour undermines prejudices concerning both genre and gender—e.g. introducing comic remarks on (the literature of) hysteria and surreptitiously writing about a Victorian wife who masturbates. When Jane(?) starts to crawl around the room, acting like the kind of animal John suggested she is (i.e. a “blessed little goose” 28), he becomes so anxious that he wants to break down the door with “an axe” (41). In fact, men’s begging at the door for women to open is a constant in Gilman’s fiction (Fleenor)—as in Ourland. The door is also a clichéd symbol of female genitals in world literature. This is another instance of John’s inexperience in (female) sexuality, as well as of the inexperience of most (turn-of-the-lastcentury) men. Thus, her hysteric acting out at the end can be read as reclaiming the sexual body. Even if the protagonist does think of her baby (“Yellow” 28, 32) and of the possible children who inhabited(?) the room (26, 40), “Yellow” seems a parody of the ideal of ‘motherhood.’ Interestingly, the protagonist asks her husband to let her go and see her cousins, not her own mother (if she has one). He does not allow it and the couple are visited by “mother and Nellie and the children” (30). Since their visit is summed up in that line, we do not get to know whether they are her direct family or John’s. The readers may presume “Nellie” is the mother of the visiting “children.” Even so, we know nothing of her parental situation as if implying that she has no problems in that respect. Perhaps, one should consider other stories by Gilman in order to trace the lives of mothers like Nellie. Denise D. Knight has suggested that “Through This,” a story about an apparently ‘happy’ married mother, was written as a companion to “Yellow.” This happy(?) mother also has a “schedule prescription for each hour in the day” given the innumerable working tasks she performs for her family, which leaves no time for herself (Knight 1992, 292). The characters’ names are repeated: we have ‘Mary’ and ‘Jennie’ too, the husband is ‘John,’ and the protagonist, ‘Jane.’ Unlike in “Yellow,” this other protagonist insists on affirming the normalcy of her situation. However, if the text starts with “[t]he dawn colors creep up my bedroom wall, softly, slowly” (emphasis added), it ends with “darkness,” stressing the irony displayed throughout (cf. Knight 292). Therefore we might wonder if, like Jane and Jane(?), Nellie suffers from neurasthenia too.21 The (ideal) mother-figure is (also) absent from “Yellow.” This can be a means of attacking the gender representations inculcated by the genres addressed to a feminine public—like the kind of writings Jane(?)

21 Nellie, Jennie, even Mary, have the typical ending of diminutives (“ie”/“y”). This could evidence Gilman’s purpose of keeping them in the ‘background.’

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would have read. Besides, the maternal absence implies a further critique of gender practices, such as the mother/daughter relationships in upper-class families.22 Continuing with families and reproduction, the wall(-)paper’s pattern is so ‘excessive’ that the viewer feels repelled by its (her?) fertility. For example: “a florid arabesque... a fungus... a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions” (“Yellow” 34). Both with and without irony, “the bloated curves and flourishes... [that] go waddling up and down” bring to mind the peculiar way of walking of pregnant women in the last months of their pregnancies (31). These questions recall again the main character’s postpartum depression and the implied problems of fecund sexuality. Curiously, like the Mother-Virgin(?), “Mary” is also the name of the nanny’s baby (28). If, as Freud contends, women acquire the phallus (only) by delivering a son, it seems Jane(?), a professional writer, who already has a ‘pen,’ is ‘trying’ to acquire two. This entails a too daring breach of the phallocratic order that must be prevented. With Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Gilman would be denouncing patriarchy for forbidding women to enjoy both sexuality and maternity—this denunciation is central in another of her most famous stories, “The Giant Wistaria.”23 In another state of affairs, her little boy would certainly become that ideal listener, the Bakhtinian Third, Jane(?) craves for so much (e.g. TPT 126). If the ‘room’ can be very well a symbol of the ‘womb,’ her (supposed) breaking through the wall(-)paper could be read as a re-enactment of her?/her child’s? (re)birth. In this way, Gilman would be giving birth to the possibility of new genres and genders.24 Apart from allowing a ‘semiotic’ escape, the wall(-)paper’s pattern offers a way to freedom within the ‘symbolic’—thus, it contains and surpasses the supposed binary opposition. As I introduced above, the (description of the) wall(-)paper itself seems a kind of écriture feminine, another genre, posing a dialogical opening to phallocentric discourse as the pattern does not let itself be ‘mastered.’ Throughout the summer, the protagonist engages in many fights: with her husband, with Jennie, and, most importantly with herself—e.g. with her lesbianism? Gilman wrote in her diary that, a week after finishing the text’s draft—in just two days, also in summer and suffering a tremendous heat—, she had to take an “overdose of acid phosphate” (quoted by Weatherford, 61). Perhaps Jane(?)’s writing of the wall(-)paper and her struggle resemble those not only of Gilman-the ill woman but also of Gilman-the writer of the fictional wall(-)paper. Diane Price-Herndl sustains that the author recovered from the ‘rest cure’ through a ‘writing cure’ (1988). As with the ‘talking cure,’ Gilman wrote on her illness and found an audience for it: her/Jane(?)’s desired listeners. In a Derridean vein, Price-Herndl continues, “writing is a poison as well as a remedy, because to cure the woman, it must kill the hysteric. Writing takes the place of the hysteric. And leaves the subject” (68, emphasis mine). The hierarchy author(-narrator)/character(-narrator) might have to do with this ‘inner moulting.’ Besides, the main character’s tearing the (wall-)paper might very well enact the artist’s fury and how she suffers in order to find a voice of her own. Such an artistic ordeal can be explained in the words of Bakhtin: “[language is] populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of 22

Notice the sharp difference in (my commentaries on) Meridel Le Sueur’s account of the relationships of lowerclass mothers and their children in Part Two. 23 Like the pattern of the wallpaper, “‘th[e] wistaria’s trunk... looks like a writhing body—cringing—beseeching’ ” (42). 24 The term “genders” is also employed by Elsa Barkley Brown as “gender does not have a voice; women and men do” (277).

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others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” even though a possible one (DIN 294). Thus, the pattern’s “interminable grotesques seem to form around a common center and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction” (“Yellow” 31). Read from a Bakhtinian optic, if ‘centripetal forces’ “form around a common center” in order to sustain the (linguistic) system, ‘centrifugal forces,’ which “rush off” from the center, make it susceptible to change. Bakhtin’s application of these ‘forces’ to genres, where the epic is ‘centripetal’ and the novel ‘centrifugal,’ accentuates even more “Yellow”’s novelistic form. Therefore, the pattern is hybrid: it contains a feminine excess, in the Irigarayan manner, which can dismantle patriarchal meanings and which “changes as the light changes,” impossible to be fixed (34). So does Gilman’s ‘excessive’ realism and feminist Gothic attempt to portray the gendered problems still untold. The problem is that her main character finally decides to read the wall(-)paper’s pattern in a (Western) realistic way: “I will follow the pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion” (31), “I... lay there... trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately” (34), “I am determined... [to] find it out” (35), “I have spent hours trying to analyze it” (37). And a purely realistic approach is not enough: every day she finds “new shoots of fungus, new shades of yellow... I cannot keep count of them” (37). Contemporary feminists, such as practitioners of feminine writing, have argued for a dialogue between the symbolic and semiotic realms. Here, the (Bakhtinian) narrator proposes that the reader play with the ‘lines’ as an attempt to reinvent (patriarchal) language, thus corroborating the play with gender/genres of the feminist dialogical author. On the one hand, it has been suggested that the wall(-)paper’s design itself contains an implicit critique of Art Nouveau—remember the authorial joke on the “chintz hangings” (25-26). On the other, the colour yellow was associated with the Decadent movement (Heilmann, “Overwriting”). However this was not the writer’s only ‘purpose’ or else the pattern’s description got out of hand, as it becomes not only entrapping but also embracing: an ecosystem. Gilman certainly believed in the (dialogic) possibilities of subverting the patriarchal (gender) system through language (genre). That might be why she left a written legacy of almost thirty volumes! Furthermore, she wrote: “The change in education is in large part a cause of [women’s advances], and progressively a consequence. Day by day, [unlike the bars of Jane(?)’s windows,] the bars [of patriarchy] go down” (Women 149, italics added). Therefore, the narrator-character split mentioned above works as a reading lesson for us not to identify with Jane(?). More precisely, for Emmanuel Levinas, language creates religion (or ‘community’), a link between the self and the other that does not constitute totality (cf. Descombes 64). As “Yellow” seems to tell us, language is like a (yel)low wall(-paper), which allows communication and impedes merging, and for which it is necessary to have (at least) two speaking subjects: that is, not only the eye-I-i-‘text’ but also the y(ell)o[u] (wall-)paper. As I said above Jane(?) does not talk to the woman-women of the wall(-)paper. Nor is she able to trust Jennie, who appears as her guard: hiding her writing before she comes (“Yellow” 30), thinking she is “sly” (39), etc. The author is complicating the issue of women’s sisterhood—that is: women do not ‘naturally’ get on well with each other, some women oppress other women, and so on. In 1989, Susan S. Lanser wrote a ground-breaking article inviting us to imagine that Jane(?)’s female companion does not represent her own reflection but another person, for example, an Asian woman. Victorian America was a time of massive immigration, in which 36

many people seemed to have feared the so-called ‘yellow peril.’ Lanser points out that the colour yellow was associated with the immigrants and so the woman behind the yellow wall(-)paper might be one of them. I would like to provide my own contribution to this “other” woman from a close reading of “Yellow” and an article on immigration written by Gilman. Hence my reading of “the sprawling outlines [that] run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase” (31, italics mine). This description can be associated with the “sprawling” areas, where the (ultramarine) immigrants reproduce, and whose women might have “slanting” eyes. Furthermore, in 1923, writing on the immigrants’ “social evolution,” Gilman used the following metaphor: “The sea-weeds and mosses have not all become oaks and roses” (“America” 291). Wondering about “[w]hat is an American?” she complained that the “American people [we]re giving up their country to other [foreign] people” (288-289). Besides, she assured the reader that “[t]he American blend is from a few closely connected races” (299). Two paragraphs before the marine metaphor, she subscribes to her contemporaries’ general consideration of the “Eurasian mixture... [as] unfortunate” (291). Two paragraphs further on, she refers to humans comparatively through images of the animal kingdom, her favourite realm for allegories, so as to examine more reproductive factors: Genus canis, like genus homo, can interbreed practically without limit. But if you want a watch-dog you don’t mate an Italian greyhound with a hairless pup from Mexico... If dogs are left to themselves, in some canine ‘asylum’ or ‘melting pot,’ they are cheerfully promiscuous, but do not produce a super-dog. On the contrary, they tend to revert to the ‘yaller dog,’ the jackal type so far behind them. (291)

One could say that, in this particular case, Gilman was sadly ahead of her time. The previous excerpt has clear quasi-Nazi overtones, at least from my point-of-view: the author ‘speaks’ from a position of superiority, (doubly) evoking those who wrote/would write on the “super-man.” Whether Gilman was or not racist has recently become a subject of debate. According to Mary Jo Deegan, she was so only at times. Denise D. Knight recriminates her precisely for having such an ambiguous attitude (1999), more racist in private, for instance in letters, and less in public. Even so, the cited article contains (more) xenophobic and classist messages. It seems the author’s main preoccupation was centred on how immigrants were impeding America’s progress and on maintaining the purity of the race(s). For instance, dwelling on “[t]he poor and oppressed,” she comments that “[a] nation composed of underdogs is not likely to remain on top” (“America” 289). Furthermore, Gail Bederman has noted that Gilman’s “feminism was inextricably rooted in the white supremacism of ‘civilization’ [discourse]” (quoted by Newman, 134). In spite of everything, her “Yellow,” and probably her thought too, is hybrid/impure. In it, she ‘invented’ the realist-gothic. And it shelters more than one gender, given its combination with factors of class, race, sexual preference, ethnicity, and so on. The “other” imprisoned woman(/women) of “Yellow” might be “plain” (“Yellow” 34), a “thing” (39), a “formless sort of figure” (30), who has a repulsive “yellow smell” (37). Her posture, “stooping down” and “creeping” (33 & 40), indicates the submissive attitude of servants. The image becomes horrifying because Jane(?) wants to tie her up, “perhaps the narrator is both resisting and embracing the woman of color who is self and non-self, a woman who might need to be rescued from the text of patriarchy but cannot yet be allowed to go free” (Lanser 429). If patriarchal attitudes try to suppress difference(s), Lanser’s reading is a warning to avoid a merging of (white) feminist consciousnesses that would imply committing the same (hierarchical) mistake—subject/object, Jane(?)/woman, and so 37

forth. A historical example of this merging can be how First World feminists have ‘looked down upon’ feminists of the Third World. Given the hybridity of “Yellow” (e.g. realistgothic), it seems difficult for a critic to sustain one single reading of it. Thus, through the authorial narrator-reader relationship, we learn that there are actually “many women” in the wall(-)paper (“Yellow” 38), whose colour is not just yellow but also “orange... [and] sulphur” (26). This is another instance that avoids its (or woman’s) definition/‘tying down,’ which would inevitably be essentialist/reductionist. That is, all these colours point to women’s different genders, races, ethnicities, national/clan origins, political/religious beliefs, and so forth. Why could this female image not stand for a Native American woman, stooping down while nursing/working?25 In the opening lines of “Yellow,” the protagonistnarrator says they had hired a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate,” as if both adjectives were synonymous (24). By her tendency to assimilate differences, she forgets that there were other women before her who might have suffered not only sexism but also racism and other multiple oppressions, such as the experience of being colonized. One can easily find an analogy between “Yellow” and the history of the feminist movement. Like the feminists of the First and Second Waves, the main character ‘tears down’ the signs that try to prove her ‘madness’ as natural. Turning the system up side down implies trampling on men, i.e. “I had to creep over [John] every time!” (42). Further, also like them (past feminists, men), she remains oblivious to considering the existence of others—women who are non-white, lower-class, and so forth—something (most) feminists have started to work on quite recently. Thus, Gayatri C. Spivak has repeatedly denounced the “inbuilt colonialism of First World feminism toward the Third” (quoted by Watson, 147). My insistence upon the many colours of “Yellow”’s women sympathizes with contemporary feminists’ critique of “the production of the ‘third world woman’ as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (Western) feminist texts” (Mohanty 231). Thereby, through the textual/critical persistence in Great Time that avoids (‘tying down’) a meaning, “Yellow” is also a dialogical text in a (perpetual) state of becoming—open to future readings on genre and gender. It is important to enlarge upon the concept of ‘time’ given the numerous amount of temporal references that appear in “Yellow”: “night(s)” appears fourteen times (25), “time(s)” thirteen, “hour(s)” and “week(s)” six times each, “daytime” four times, “month(s)” is repeated twice, “years,” “the Fourth of July” (30), and so forth. The story(?) starts with “[i]t is very seldom” and ends with “time!,” which is connected with the concept of chronotope. Given the agreement that Bakhtin never really ‘defined’ the chronotope, I will make use of Michael Holquist’s explanation (for now): “[a] unity of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented... The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the cultural system from which they spring” (2000, 425-426). As I pointed out above, in Victorian times women’s space was intended to be almost only the home. I also stressed that “Yellow” refers to other times, for instance, other women (such as the Beechers) who had also agonized in Dr. Mitchell’s hands. Being a critique of a patriarchal chrono-tope, the text hankers for a feminist chrono-tope, a time-space when-where women would actually 25

Le Sueur would protest about the “stoop labor” performed by immigrants and lower-class people in order to defend their rights (Dread 32). One of the protagonists of The Dread Road is a female stoop laborer of Mexican origin.

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live. Gilman might be telling us, it is ‘time’ to advance in the ‘woman question’ in order to create a more democratic ‘space’ for both women and men. It is time to change genres (imaginary classifications, social parameters) in order to change genders. But this might be only one of its hybrid messages. I would like to return to the first quote of this chapter, which elaborates on another of “Yellow”’s messages. Richard Feldstein has stated that Gilman’s text could belong to the (purely) fantastic genre, which “induces us to suspend judgement” or interpretation (317). He follows Todorov’s study of the fantastic genres (1993) to suggest that “Yellow”’s fantastic resistance toward interpretation struggles between the “supernatural (the women in the wall-paper are ghosts) or the uncanny (the protagonist projects self-aspects to form her double[s]).” I am reading it as both realist and gothic. In order to provide some final examples that clarify my point, I would like to extend the hybrid perspective to its ending(?). The protagonist’s madness is questionable, that is, she could be acting it out: “I want to astonish [John]” (“Yellow” 40). Besides, as Elin Diamond has pointed out, “hysterical women... became semiotically indistinguishable from actresses playing the hysterical fallen women in melodrama” (63). Even so, feminist critics have read her excentricity either as a ‘semiotic’ victory or as a surrender to patriarchy (cf. Hedges 1992). Perhaps Jane(?) ends up being both crazy in (psychological) realist terms and sane in a(n illuminated) gothic sense. Therefore, she both adjusts herself to the “woman” designed in the patriarchal ‘pattern,’ and also exceeds what the ‘pattern’ can symbolize—e.g. female sexuality—hence her Lacanian abnormality. Since undecidability might be close to a gothic interpretation, in order to be (more) dialogic, I have decided to focus my interpretation upon the narrator-protagonist hybridity. It seems coherent that, since we have a written text, there must be someone that is not really mad. Therefore, it is vital not to forget that, in real life, the (narrator-)author recovered from her breakdown and published the work. The (patriarchal linguistic) pattern does not “strangl[e] so” much as the (narrator-)character believes (“Yellow” 38). Inventing a feminist genre, i.e. the realist-gothic, the writer/the woman “climb[ed] through the pattern [of gender].” In order to continue with a succinct though dialogic conclusion, I will elaborate on the possible languages-subjects of Gilman’s short-story(?). “Yellow” is a dialogic text that both follows and challenges both realist and gothic conventions, so that it cannot be ‘mastered’ by any reader. The author proposes a concept of a non-ego that gains her-his subjectivity through relationships with (an)other sel(f)ves. The hybridity of the (author)narrator and the (narrator-)character allows the former to act as a Bakhtinian ‘Third’ or that which makes communication possible. This might function in such a way so that the reader does not identify with the ‘victim’s discourse.’ From a Third World perspective, the yellow woman appears literally more trapped than the ‘white woman’ by the ‘patriarchal (wall-)paper.’ Doubly (an) “other,” she is not given the title of ‘subject’ and appears confined under a (simpler) Gothic pattern. As I suggested before, dialogics implies a plurality of voices fighting for control. In this piece, we can ‘hear’ at least two genres, realism and the Gothic, ‘speaking’ with equal strength. Unfortunately among the gendered voices, there are no real fights but hierarchical situations, such as: author/character, John/Jane(?), Jennie/Jane(?), wife/servant, upper-class/lower-class, heterosexual/lesbian,

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white woman/woman of colour, native/immigrant, and so forth.26 This recognition deconstructs Gilman’s own sociological (literary) impulse and asserts that the celebrated (turn-of-the-nineteenth-century) ‘feminist sisterhood’ is not an easy given, but a conflict of voices that strive to be listened to. Perhaps, “Yellow”’s possible languages-subjects were written only by its author’s approaching the modernist form (DeKoven, Mizejewski). Hence the still unsolved complexity of the style/genre/movement adequate to define/confine “Yellow.” I consider it is our (feminist dialogical) responsibility to read Gilman’s novelization of the short-story as leading toward the hybridity and proliferation of genders.

26 As I explained before, some of these hierarchies are turned up-side-down throughout as follows: Jane(?)/John, Jane(?)/Jennie. A complete reversal of the terms brings about a new binary opposition. Such a result is far from the ideal community of individuals, who are capable of maintaining dialogic-ethical relationships.

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The Dialogical ‘Feminine’: The Chronotope of Pregnancy in “Annunciation”

‘But I will put you in chains.’ Man, what are you talking about? Me in chains? You may fetter my leg, but [not] my will... ‘I will throw you into prison.’ My poor body, you mean. ‘I will cut your head off.’ When, then, have I told you that my head alone cannot be cut off? Epictetus, The Discourses

“Annunciation” is the story of a woman who is going to have a child and who writes joyfully about the experience of motherhood. At the same time, Meridel Le Sueur’s text contains a profound feminist critique of patriarchally informed practices in the realms of capitalism, religion, literature, philosophy, parenthood, ethics, ecology, and others. Defined as a “small American masterpiece” (quoted by Hedges, 1982, 8), “Annunciation”’s contemporaries overlooked the story’s subversive character perhaps due to its lyricism. Though Le Sueur was identified as a writer of “class-conscious literature” (Pratt 1984, 229), she was not always respected by her own colleagues: “[s]ometimes I was almost blacklisted by the Left, [which] often commented on my lyrical style. They wanted... socialist realism... I considered it a struggle” (quoted by Coiner, 1995, 108). That “Annunciation” was written by a woman, who was also a member of the Communist Party, might have something to do with the text’s absence in future canons.1 As in the preceding reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in this chapter I will evaluate this short-story’s departure from and re-creation of realism. A comparative reading of “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” and “Annunciation” will be considered too. Most importantly, I will try to interpret the feminist proposals of the latter under the light of both Bakhtinian dialogics and the theory of feminine écriture, a mode of writing that can be considered a genre. Recently, Le Sueur’s preferred genre of writing has been labelled ‘inner realism’ (Gelfant) and Hélène Cixous’s, ‘feminist realism’ (Cohen). Here I must stress that my future references to feminine writing consider it a variant of realism. Thus, I will try to stage a dialogue between the dialogical and the feminine critical perspectives, read often at odds with each other. For example, fusing both approaches, it can be argued that Le Sueur invents a gendered “chronotope of pregnancy.” It must be stressed that, in his vast study on 1 Le Sueur affiliated herself to the Communist Party at twenty-four and remained in it all her life. In the interview recorded with Joe Cuomo, Le Sueur recalls with irony being blacklisted by the McCarthy administration: “Ah, that was an honour.” Unfortunately, her books together with those by socialist writers—and others such as Whitman, Emerson or Melville—were removed from embassy libraries around the world in order to be burnt.

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the chronotope, Bakhtin does not include examples of short-stories but of (proto-)novels.2 Furthermore, Lynne Pearce has expressed suspicion of the notion of the chronotope, an analytical tool that appears “gender neutral,” urging its revision (119). Broadly speaking, Le Sueur’s piece rereads Bakhtin’s chronotope in two ways: (1) revealing the novelistic character of the short-story, (2) gendering certain aspects of art (and life). Through the observation of this gendered chronotope (of pregnancy), we are invited to discover a dialogic, even hybrid, conception of the self: i.e. the relational nature of our identity-alterities, the simultaneous corporeality and spirituality of our body-selves, the sexual-maternal qualities of motherhood. We might receive vital lessons from Buddhism and Hinduism too. Since the female character herself narrates the story, her voice accentuates even more her subjectivity. In fact, a pregnant woman talking to her unborn child represents the kind of story-teller performed by most mothers, an example of Bakhtinian prosaics. Above all, the image of a pregnant woman is profoundly dialogic, as the harboring of (new) meanings that will be (re)born: such as a new philosophy, a socialist revolution, and others. Therein, I will make use of socialist feminists’ criticism when necessary. It should be added that the chapter is divided into two (unmarked) parts: a first part dedicated to gender and the feminine and a second part dealing more concretely with the implications of a gendered chronotope. Starting from the Bakhtinian premise that genres are ways of thinking, one could hold that so-called “feminine writing” is also a genre. The theorist who promoted this label, Hélène Cixous, clearly states that this way of thinking/writing cannot be defined (1997, 340). Even so, one could venture to say that writing in the ‘feminine’ gives voice to women’s need to “write [t]he[i]r sel[ves]” (341). This need stems from the fact that women have internalized their “supposed” alterities, as we have “believed” what patriarchy “want[ed]... us [to] believe.” Consequently, patriarchal women think of themselves from a third-person perspective—as Jane(?) did in “Yellow.” This led First Wave feminists, like Gilman, to think that the only way toward liberation was to be(come) like a man, an attitude that came from their search for “equality.” As a response to this derogation of the “feminine,” Second (and Third) Wave feminists, like Le Sueur, have decided to affirm “difference,” by means of expressing themselves in the first person, what came first accompanied with celebrating the (new) feminine.3 In theory, (sexual) differences are turned into inequalities, where the “other” appears as inferior. Writing difference is an alternative to an unjust patriarchal theorization (Cixous & Clément 36-37).4 Hélène Cixous reflects:

2 Together with (1) ‘dialogism,’ which I reviewed in the previous chapter, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson distinguish two more approaches to the novel in Bakhtin’s writings: (2) the ‘chronotope’ and (3) ‘carnival.’ 3 The Second Feminist Wave is supposed to have started in the 1960s. It seems that Le Sueur was ahead of her time, as her feminism could be included in this current of thought. As for the Third Wave, see the following chapters. 4 The dialogics within the term difference entails multiple uses and users. For instance, if we deal with questions of the sexed subject, then, “[g]ender is not the issue; sexual difference is” (Gatens 9). Especially for Third World feminists, a study of difference must cover not just the (sexual) difference female-male, but also the differences amongst women, according to race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and so forth (Trinh). Following this line, I will use the term “genders:” i.e. to point out the differences of privilege not only between women and men but also among women. Beyond “gender,” in this chapter I will examine the peculiarities of the protagonist’s sex (female) and class (‘the poor’).

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Thought has always worked through opposition... Through dual, hierarchical oppositions. Superior/Inferior... Theory of... society, symbolic systems in general—art, religion, family, language—, it is all developed while bringing the same schemes to light. And [in] the movement whereby each opposition is set up to make sense... a war is set loose. Death is always at work... Father/son... The Word/writing... Master/slave... (63-64)

The Bakhtinian idea of the person’s becoming(s) rebels against such a definition of otherness (e.g. DIN 294). For the theorists(?) of feminine writing, the other is as well infinite in his-her possibilities, and hence ‘non theorizable’—Cixous & Clément, 71; Irigaray 1993, 111-112 & 1996, 133. But in order to think about the other differently, Cixous asks for a change in “human relationships” or the “intersubjective relation[s]” (1997, 340 & 343), which means asking for a new ethics. Luce Irigaray has also asserted that “intersubjective relations between the genders are lacking in maturity,” where a relationship between two people turns both partners into one (1996, 136). The former’s new ethic also includes a (new) way of thinking about the body, also an “other” in our patriarchal schemas. It can be understood that all these proposals include a rewriting of the imaginary, such as in Le Sueur’s (non-)religious Annunciation.5 In fact, Le Sueur’s story contains a dialogue among many genres (forms of thinking): working-class literature,6 biblical discourse, realism, feminine writing, etc. The present analysis sets out to study the dialogic and feminine qualities of “Annunciation,” with the end of suggesting that the dialogical ‘feminine’ could also be a genre. Through (re)writing, “woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her” (Cixous 1997, 337). Above I pointed out Le Sueur’s socialist affiliations. Socialist feminists have always insisted that, (1) the overthrowing of patriarchy starts by changing the relations between women and men, and that (2) it is necessary to include women’s material questions, such as the body, in all our feminist critiques (Hartsock, Young Throwing). Cixous once stated that “[w]riting in the feminine is passing on what is cut out by the Symbolic, the voice of the mother,” who has been catalogued as an “other” too (1981, 54). At this stage I want to make clear that neither her nor my reading of maternity pursues a critique of abortion or other similar ends. As for these, she declares: “Either you want a kid or you don’t—that’s your own business” and “[t]here are thousands of ways of living one’s pregnancy” (Cixous 1997, 346). Such manifestations contradict the negativism of the (purely) essentialist interpretations of her text. Above all, I think “The Laugh of the Medusa” is a beautiful and powerful exhortation that invites multiple (nonessentialist) readings.7

5

Lacan distinguished among the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The Imaginary (Kristeva’s Semiotic) corresponds to the pre-oedipal fusion of mother and child and gives way to the Symbolic with the formation of language and the subject, whereas the Real seems to be what cannot be symbolized. The imaginary (usually not capitalized) is also a set of cultural images that are lodged in our body-minds from the beginning of our existence, and which might change throughout our lives. I want to underline both these meanings here. 6 Paul Lauter has defined proletarian literature as “texts by and about the working class that coincide with other literary categories such as literature by women and people of color” (Coiner 1990, 163). Though from middleclass origins, Le Sueur’s living among the working class (Hedges 1982, 9)—as well as her affiliations and sympathies with it—can be said to provide her with the ‘working-class writer’s position.’ 7 Against (a first level of) gender essentialism, Cixous has also asserted: “It’s rare, but you can sometimes find femininity in writings signed by men: it does happen” (1981, 52). Another non-essentialist approach in this line, Kristeva’s most famous study on Semiotics (1981) deals with works by male poets. For the first level-second level distinction between gender analyses see below.

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For Le Sueur, “[w]riting is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life” (“Formal” 208). An amateur writer, “Annunciation”’s protagonist-narrator has a typically poetic sensitivity that is shown in the way she contemplates Nature and listens to Its sounds, “as I am going down the steps... one [tree leaf] falls heavily on the walk” (125), and also to “the clang of the city” (126). I will later recreate how she listens to a very special pear tree. The pattern of this tree is described as follows: “The leaves twirl and twirl all over the tree, the delicately curving tinkling leaves. They twirl and twirl on the tree and the tree moves far inward upon its stem... gently swaying” (131). It seems Le Sueur thought that women’s lives and symbolic acts (e.g. writing) bore similarities with this tree’s pattern: “The space of woman is different. The inner, enduring, turning in, healing space of earth and woman. The spasm of the ultimate dark womb space—Druid opening. Enfolding, enfolded, inner space, not threatened. You keep going inward, fold upon fold” (quoted by Schleuning, 1983, 45). The often-discussed different way of writing of women has been seen as a product of gender: “[s]hut out from [the] rationalistic, progressive world, women have turned to exploring new modes of expression which are more circular, and expressive of their own inner world” (Schleuning 47). As in the chapter before, I want to recall the need of maintaining, of scrutinizing the category “gender” and of being more precise when necessary. With regard to women’s writing, Le Sueur and Schleuning must have in mind a first level approach to gender, that is, the hierarchy men/women. On a first level, gender (like genre) is a way from which to think about/see the world. A second level of analysis is necessary in order to affirm that not all women think about/see the world in the same way, and that there are genders. This would mean considering gender not as fixed category, but as a category having a chronotopic character: e.g. the gender variants that change according to time-space. For instance, a white middle-class heterosexual woman worker in the United States—with particular habits, hobbies, and so on—may certainly experience the world from a different perspective than a low-caste Indian woman, who is offered up by her family to prostitute herself for the high castes of their local temple and government. Certainly also, both women are situated by patriarchy in an inferior position to the (respective) ruling men: the male workers and bosses in one case and the abusing high posts in the other. The latter explanation corresponds to a second level of examining gender and the former, to a first level. As I held before too, a person’s gender is one of the constitutive elements of her-his writing (of a genre). Hence many women writers’ insistence upon a first level of difference, one of the voice(s) of gender, so as to negate the notion that a monologic masculine voice/point-of-view/experience is the only one in (the artistic forms of) the world—e.g. Irigaray 1996, 36; Mayoral.8 Thus also my favorite Le Sueurian anecdote about an editor at Scribner’s, who suggested to her that she write more like Hemingway: but “fishin,’ fightin,’ and fuckin,’” she retorted, “are not the sum of my experience” (quoted by Coiner, 1990, 170). The other (‘feminine’) language of heteroglossia, that of Le Sueur, had to be different from the linear logical code, whose meaning needs to be mastered, which she associated with masculinity, as well as with the Protestant ethic (Cuomo). I would like to interpret this other language as the (other) hetero(-)glossia, that is, a woman’s language. Although Bakhtin did not speak about it explicitly, he wrote: “[t]he word removed from life: the word of the idiot, the holy fool, the insane, the child, and dying person, and sometimes women” (FNM 148). In “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” (PND), Bakhtin suggests a 8

Virginia Woolf had advised women to seek a woman’s sentence with similar purposes (“Women”).

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distinction between heteroglossia and polyglossia—even though they are sometimes used synonymously. Whereas polyglossia refers to the “many [national] languages and many cultures” interacting at one time (64), “heteroglossia [occurs] within a language, [or] is... the problem of internal differentiation, the stratification characteristic of any national language” (67)—e.g. official/unofficial. Concretely in this chapter, and only in this one, I would like to give it another turn of the screw, and suggest the term polyglossia for the most general use (the many voices) and heteroglossia for the most particular use (the voice(s) of a woman). Faithful to my proposal of the existence of genders (within the feminine), being the “other-other,” this particular protagonist has a hetero-heteroglossic voice. As in the case of the genders that hide within “Yellow,” there are many ways of seeing, of living, the “feminine.” My purpose is not to essentialize this category but to contextualize it. As stated previously, the dialogics within the word “feminine” oblige us to specify the meaning we want to express. Then, I will particularize my usage—by means of a substantive, a modifier, and so on—or I will write it in single quotes (‘feminine’) when I am referring to one of its variants, and I will use the italics (feminine) to underline a subversive aspect. In “Annunciation,” the (concrete) feminine woman chosen by the author is lower-class, fertile and pro-pregnancy, literate, presumably and heterosexual. Besides, though by omission, it seems she is white. It is clear that these features are not shared by all the women of the world. It can be argued that Le Sueur is opting for a ‘strategic essentialism,’ in Spivak’s terms (1997), in order to claim concrete rights: such as the right of a lower-class woman to have a child and not to be sterilized. Le Sueur’s option does not imply manifest ignorance about the problems of proletarian women with children. She is aware that some women would prefer abortion to childbearing in poverty. In a piece of reportage, the writer echoes this case of polyglossia when Anna’s mother retorts: “There are four pregnant women in this attic... If they knew... if they knew... they would cut their children out with a butcher’s knife....” (“Hungry” 147, ellipsis hers) Therefore, the female protagonist of “Annunciation” may pursue multiple strategies. For instance, challenging patriarchal definitions, the text points out the different meanings and dialogics within the category “feminine” (beyond being middle-class). Also, defying the literary tradition, it gives artistic (and thus human) status to a representative of the “other (side of) woman,” and so forth. It can be criticized that Cixous calls attention to only one of the possible forms of ‘feminine’ writing, since there might be others. I have already considered that (like Le Sueur) Cixous does so on a first level of gender analysis. I will next outline feminists’ discussion of the (supposed) incompatibilities between feminine écriture and dialogics. The large amount of criticism by feminist dialogicians concerned with feminine writing is surprising. Their critiques might be summarized as follows: whereas Bakhtin underlines the author’s position, Irigaray’s text has been said to be spoken by “‘no one,’” a nonposition that reinforces the established gender hierarchy (Herndl 11-16). By trying to escape from the mythical reign of the Fathers, Cixous suggests a return to the mythical world of the Mothers by means of an equally dogmatic method, which also prefers poetry to prose. Such a presupposition of the woman’s text implies a narcissistic emphasis on the “self,” at the cost of erasing (the) other(s), which dissolves the tension characteristic of dialogics (cf. Gasbarrone 5-10). Kristeva’s writing is only interested in destruction and so prevents any possibility of dialogue (cf. purvis-smith 45). In spite of everything, a possible alliance between the two hermeneutics could lie in the concern with the listeners, the non-

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conclusive and interrogative form, the critique of hierarchies, the rejection of monologic truth (cf. Schwab 59-63), and so forth. In fact, this liaison takes place in “Annunciation,” which might stand for a hybrid genre, given both its dialogic and ‘feminine’ character. In this same line, Le Sueur’s piece questions the essentialist non-dialogic readings of the French feminist theory outlined before.9 It also re-reads Bakhtin’s and Cixous’s proposals from a feminine point-of-view, both criticizing and expanding upon them. Above all, feminine écriture has been defined in terms of style, as a (sort of) stream of consciousness conventionally associated with the body and with experimental literature. Though in an apparently unexperimental form, “Anunciation”’s narration can be considered a (different) manifestation of the feminine: sensual and imaginative but also direct and clear. The fact that Le Sueur does not experiment more with style has to do with her democratic ideology, her reaction against “Modernism,” her wish to communicate, and her love for colloquial language. Le Sueur was very early conscious of the rhythmic qualities of Midwestern talk and of the need to write about it and its users. She recalls sitting close to the farmers and jotting down what they were saying and so, in her late seventies, she would be keeping “180 files” of such “oral history” (cf. Cuomo, sound recording). Interestingly, the Bakhtin Circle’s work has been read as a reaction against Formalism and its general denigration of the prosaic, being unable to see neither the artistic qualities of speech nor the ethical practices of the everyday (Morson & Emerson 22-23).10 Le Sueur and Bakhtin shared more opinions about art, ethics, and the connection between the two, e.g.: in the chronotope essay, Bakhtin shows that a novel’s plot is as important as its language. When asked about the importance of literary content, Le Sueur replied: The subject-matter has a lot to do with women’s literature... with all oppressed literature, like Indian literature or Black literature. I mean, what you write about is quite different from the white protestant literature. I think that subject-matter is very indicative of the whole attitude towards writing... (Cuomo, ellipsis mine)

In this recorded interview, she also protests that the whole society cannot be represented through a fragment that is “white, male and upper-class.” Both her interviewer, Joe Cuomo, and herself agree that a certain “ethic” is connected with writing/not writing about certain things (like childbirth). Le Sueur blames writers for their “elitism,” for not going amongst the people and for not listening to them (Cuomo). She is conscious of the existence of two languages—one “aristocratic,” another of the “people”—and that both poetry and linguistic change come “from below.” Bakhtin’s description of the high and the low, the centripetal and the centrifugal pursued a similar critical perspective. In the interview, Cuomo goes on to attack the New Critics for dissociating “writing and the rest of the world” and for placing artistic value in a form completely isolated from its “referents,” a form that would have to be analyzed as “a prepared slide for the microscope.”11 Le Sueur believes that such a 9 Probably the most famous piece against feminine écriture is Toril Moi’s, “Womanspeak: A Tale Told by an Idiot,” in which she also attacks its (apparent) eurocentrism. But Cixous also adds the note: “I am speaking here only of the place ‘reserved’ for women by the Western world” (1997, 349). 10 “In his meditations on the everyday and the ordinary, Bakhtin follows the tradition of Russian anti-ideological thinkers that includes Alexander Herzen, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov” (Morson & Emerson 23). The subtitle of Morson’s and Emerson’s book, Creation of a Prosaics (and not a Poetics), exemplifies Bakhtin’s ways of thinking. 11 Cuomo satirizes the aseptic formal analyses encouraged by some university professors: considering the amount of vowels in a poem by Yeats or counting the prepositions in a Dickens’s novel.

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concentration on form and technique, with no (interest in) content, can lead to an “incredibly frivolous literature” that is “dangerous politically”‘: making “people indifferent” and letting “technocracy” use writers for its own benefit (Cuomo). According to her, “it’s no good if you have the form and the skill and you’re just using it as a shroud for the stinking corpse.” Bakhtin would also agree on the importance of connecting literature and the other activities of culture. Cixous can also be criticized for her elitism: i.e. for not considering other stylistic alternatives to her ‘feminine’ proposal. Rita Felski has questioned the idea that formal experimentation per se can be subversive, underlining that this idea has much in common with the position of many theorists of Modernism (4). She has also questioned the proposition that experimental writing be inherently feminine or feminist or anything: “if one examines the texts of l’écriture féminine, for example, the only gender-specific elements exist on the level of content, as in metaphors of the female body” (5). Cixous has never claimed to have invented a language, but she has revindicated the inclusion of the semiotic within the symbolic, enhancing questions of feminine subject-matter as well. On the one hand, the protagonist of “Annunciation” is pregnant, which functions as a (symbolic) materialization of the semiotic. On the other, Le Sueur’s literature was not only of working class women but also for them (and all workers). The fact that it is written in a colloquial language stresses the connections between form and (a) gender, which is a nonfixed/chronotopic category. Hence Felski’s point-of-view: [The assertion that] experimental writing constitutes the only truly ‘subversive’ or ‘feminist’ textual practice, and that the conventional forms such as realism are complicit with patriarchal systems of representation... maps onto gender what are in fact class questions and thus avoids any examination of the potentially elitist implications of its own position. (7, my italics)12

In sum, for this feminist critic, “a link between literature and feminism can be established if a text addresses themes in some ways relevant to feminist concerns” (7, italics added). With Felski, Bakhtin and his followers (e.g. Howard), I am in agreement with studying contextual questions, such as the production and reception of texts, in order to evaluate their subversive character (Felski 7, 38). As in the case of “Yellow,” the editorial rejection of “Annunciation,” which took its author eight years to publish, might have to do with its capacity to going against the literary-critical current. One tends to assess questions of feminine subject-matter, apart from form, in order to formulate a feminist critique of women’s problems in the socio-political sphere. In order that feminine writing can be a variant of realism, it must contemplate the possibilities of colloquial language and deal with the critical portrayal of women’s realities. In this respect, Le Sueur’s ‘pregnancy chronotope’ covers not merely a stylistic function but also an ideological one. Contrary to the detractors’ readings of feminine écriture, “Annunciation”’s protagonistnarrator is socially and economically situated. She is a very poor woman, who lives with her husband Karl, the presumed father of their unborn child. They have worked performing some kind of “show” (126, 128)13 and selling “old fruit” (124). Karl has sold beans and 12

On the one hand, some kinds of realism can be (very) oppositional: e.g. the realist-gothic, feminist realism. On the other, both Gilman and Le Sueur were most interested in altering people’s consciousnesses by means of addressing particular themes. 13 The narrator says they would “pla[y] in a tent” (128), so it seems possible that they were actors. Le Sueur herself “studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and worked on the New York stage” (Hedges 1982, 3). She also worked as an “extr[a] in the... silent film industry” in Hollywood, though for a very short period.

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washed dishes as well (127 & 128). They have travelled “from Tia Juana to S.F.” and then to a smaller town in the “fall” (128). Further, she is also pregnant with a bursting literary creativity: “Ever since I have known I was going to have a child I have kept writing things down on these little scraps of paper” (124). For this heroine, the main reason for writing is that “[t]here is something [she] want[s] to make clear for [her]self and for others” (124), which ensures her (dialogical) concern for the listeners. Le Sueur wrote that worker writers like herself were “not concerned with ‘style.’ We want to communicate, speak to others,... because we want to share a rich, communal experience,” which expresses her understanding of writing-reading as a dialogic act (Worker 4). Though unstated, she is obviously referring to proletarian writers’ reaction against a particular kind of ‘high’ style. This is the gist of her criticism of those non-dialogic writers “who do not write to communicate but only for themselves...” (3).14 Her protagonist wants to tell her experience as she has “never heard anything about how a woman feels who is going to have a child... [and she] would like to read [about it]” (130). So far, the language and theme of her narration can be considered both dialogic and ‘feminine.’ The previous quote makes explicit another criticism: literary history has omitted/distorted maternal experience. “Annunciation” was rejected by New Masses, Scribner’s and Atlantic Monthly since “pregnancy was considered unacceptable as a literary subject” (Coiner 1995, 128). As Constance Coiner suggests, the editors of Le Sueur—“who were overwhelmingly male—did not question their ability to read; instead, they criticized women’s ability to write” (130). Such rejection can be explained since the editors could not understand Le Sueur’s proposals, among others, of a (gendered) ‘chronotope of gestation.’ Bakhtin celebrates the “continual renew[al] of the work [of art] through the creative perception of... readers” (FTC 254). Therefore, future readers will be able to see (gendered) chronotopes that were unavailable to the text’s contemporaries. It is the need to approach/represent female experience that impels Cixous to encourage women to “Write!” (1997, 335). In her manual on writing, Le Sueur expands upon this call and rouses all workers to write about their “history” (Worker 1-2). In her own words: “[writers] not only want to describe the world, we want to change it” (10). For Cixous, writing “can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (1997, 337). Her hope for change is mainly located in the (poetic) unconscious, “where the repressed manage to survive.” Cixous’s appeal in favour of women’s writing emphasizes the freedom of the imagination, not description or even prescription, so that woman can dream about herself again. Curiously enough, the title of Le Sueur’s short-story is also very Cixousian. According to the online version of the OED, to enunciate/make an enunciation is to state a proposition/theory in words, to declare/assert facts, a doctrine, etc, whereas to annunciate/make an annunciation does not necessarily include words, but an appeal to the senses. Further, to annunciate is both to make something public and to intimate. In this same line, feminine écriture might

14 She adds that those writers are just “like Gertrude Stein with her ‘Pigeons on the grass, alas,’ and others who write only for a select few” (Worker 3). These quotations appear in her thirty-pages manual on writing, whose format appears ridiculous compared to Gertrude Stein’s weighty volume on How to Write. Nevertheless, Worker Writers’ encouragement, optimism, and support clear the path for nouvelle proletarian writers.

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add another page to both Bakhtinian and feminist dialogics: going from the alterity between women and men, to the alterity among women, and then to the alterity within woman.15 Furthermore, the story’s title is also suggestive of a further Alterity. It makes reference to the biblical Annunciation, as even God the Father had to depend on Mary’s female body to conceive his Son (Luke 1: 26-38). As I will suggest, Le Sueur’s text might be read as a rewriting of the biblical narrative and even of feminine écriture. In Bakhtinian terms, the dialogics inherent in these rewritings is called novelization. Following the study on genres carried out by Bakhtin, the Bible would be close to epic and the short-story to the novel. Rewriting a narrative by means of a change of genre might serve to displace Truth from its site of honour, for instance, to see it under a new light by listening to another(’s) voice. A “truth” that can be told in many genres and by different speakers becomes “truths.” A change in genre might also displace our reading/interest from one social class to another. Certainly, the polyglossia of (a multitude of) people’s voices is close to the Bakhtinian concept of truth. Instead of being something previous to the speakers, e.g. written in some place like the Bible, Bakhtin’s is also a truth to be achieved through people’s dialogues. As is well-known, his critical study of popular art forms, his critique of capitalism, and his despisal of any kind of hierarchy includes a praise of the subaltern classes. In a Bakhtinian manner, Le Sueur encourages workers to write, criticizing certain elite forms of culture, such as certain genres, that have imposed themselves in an imperialistic manner: “The universities have put a kind of halo around the written word as if it were sacred and not for common use. Literature... has been the expression of... a privileged class... [to be] read [only] by such a class” (Worker 3). Contrary to this, she assures us that anybody can learn to construct a story since its “rules of construction... [are] no mysterious magic, only known by a few old men” (2). That is, Le Sueur encourages poor people to write about their suffering, in their own terms, “so [that] it [can] be known” (5). Contemporary feminists and theorists also share this wish for the prosaic. Gloria Anzaldúa has expressed her rejection of ‘High’ theory as it cannot be communicated “to masses of people made up of different audiences” (1990, xxvi). Anzaldúa’s, Le Sueur’s, and (to some extent) Cixous’s concern for connecting the “others” to the sphere of writing shows their dialogic attitude and knowledge of polyglossia, as well as a Bakhtinian refusal to use theory just for the theory’s/theorists’ sake. All this involves the rewriting of genres, the literary and the theoretical. Moreover, Cixous likes using the French verb voler, which means both “to fly” and “to steal.” My interpretation of it is that women must ‘fly away’ from the patriarchal symbolic (e.g. genders and genres) through ‘stealing’ its forms and contents.16 Cixous believes that “[t]hings are starting to be written... that will constitute a feminine Imaginary” (1981, 52). Anzaldúa can be a representative of this (re)writing (of a new Symbolic) of/for all the oppressed: “I seek new images of identity, new beliefs about ourselves, our humanity and worth no longer in question” (1987, 87). As part of the genres dialogized in this piece, I will discuss both the biblical Annunciation and that of Le Sueur’s.

15 Cixous’s critique of the philosophical and literary idea of the subject reads: “[s]o long as we... ignore... that the ‘subject’ is an effect of the unconscious[,]... which is unanalyzable, uncharacterizable, we will remain prisoners of the monotonous machination that turns every ‘character’ into a marionette” (1974, 387). 16 In a Cixousian vein, Alicia Ostriker calls the female artist-revisionist a ‘thief of language.’

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If painters have chosen the white lily as one of the most significant symbols of the Annunciation, in this feminist version, the white lily is replaced by “a terribly red flower,” a geranium (“Annunciation” 125). On the one hand, the author’s choice of the colour red instead of white seems to indicate the non-virginal nature of the expectant mother. Referring to the biblical scene, Julia Kristeva shows the virginity attributed to Mary to be the effect of a bad translation, since the scribe chose “the Greek [word] parthenos” to translate “the Semitic word denoting the social-legal status of an unmarried girl” (1986, 101). It was indeed a very unfortunate choice, as it has been affecting Western women’s lives ever since. On the other hand, since this new Mary “water[s]” the geraniums regularly, she has contributed to the red flower’s birth (125). This calls attention to the amount of care needed to create life. It also implies that living beings do not just come out of anywhere, as if they did not depend on anyone. A return to the study of origins (of things, of people) has been a feminist initiative for a long time. Luce Irigaray has denounced the fact that Western culture and society are founded on the erasure/the murder of the mother/the primary place of origin (cf. Stanton 160). By paying attention to the importance of the body in human processes, Le Sueur takes part in this rewriting of the Western tradition—for instance, its literary genres. Following our ‘binary-philic’ tradition, we could affirm that pregnancy is both a corporeal and a spiritual event that must not be reduced to one of its aspects alone. In this (possibly) feminist rewriting of the Annunciation, instead of the archangel Gabriel’s predictions and instructions, there is the “murmuring” of a pear tree (“Annunciation” 128). Irigaray has suggested a rereading of the biblical Annunciation itself. Instead of the Lord possessing and appropriating Mary’s will and body, she interprets the archangel’s presence as questions addressed to her [Mary] in the form of speech, a question asking if she agrees to become the lover of the Lord and the mother of his son... [In this way,] the Lord [would] actually renounc[e] having the object, power, in order to accede to being-man and to the realization of intersubjectivity with the being of woman... And that alliance... could... lead the way to another era. (1996, 141)17

Le Sueur’s story also aspires to inaugurate another era (time-space) for women and the rest of the downtrodden. Making a Bakhtinian use of folklore, I will say that there is a popular Christmas carol that repeatedly mentions (a partridge in) “a pear tree.” That a pear tree is also present in “Annunciation” connects Le Sueur’s protagonist once more to Jesus’s mother. And instead of facing (her) silence—would the biblical Mary write about how she felt during pregnancy?—in this new “Annunciation,” there is (her) writing. If, as Bakhtin contends, the rogue, the clown, and the fool can create their own chronotopes (FTC 159), so can a pregnant woman. Even so, in his very long study on the chronotope, Bakhtin does not consider a single one by or about women. Ironically, he would note that women’s symbolic acts are not included as part of Culture (FNM 148). I will call “Annunciation”’s chronotope the ‘chronotope of pregnancy,’ a (gendered) chronotope that escaped Bakhtin’s attention, unable to conceive such jouissance. Sometimes translated as “bliss,” the term jouissance has been interpreted as “the pregnant woman[’s] recollect[ions of] a primordial sexual continuity with the maternal body” (Young Throwing, 166). In another of Le Sueur’s stories, the feeling of pregnancy is also described as “Bliss” (“Wind” 100).

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Irigaray affirms that her interpretation “is supported by the tradition of the physical and spiritual centers of the body, the chakras” as well as by religious “iconography” (140).

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Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson have written extensively on the concept ‘chronotope’ to conclude that the discursive and the chronotopic are two aspects of the same theory. While discourse deals mainly with the novel’s “language,” the chronotope focuses on its “people, actions, events, history, and society” (372). Besides, they go on to affirm that, for Bakhtin, genres do not just put into artistic form discoveries made somewhere else, they make discoveries by themselves. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope” explores “the richest discoveries made about the relation of people and events to time and space” (366). Thus, if ethics does not consist in a set of abstract rules, as Bakhtin believes, but is always dependent on (chronotopic) temporal and spatial coordinates, novels appear to be “the richest form of ethical thought” (366). This must be the reason why he considers novels as the greatest products of Western thinking. As in the case of “Yellow,” “Annunciation” seeks a feminist chrono-tope that could occur in a nonpatriarchal society where relations between women and men would be really ethical. It also goes beyond that, re-presenting a gendered chronotope in itself. Through the image of the pregnant woman, Le Sueur is proposing a new conception and practice of a self-inrelations. The conception and representation of time-space changes throughout history, from genre to genre and even within genres. Therein, the subtitle of Bakhtin’s chapter is “Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” As I said above, the Russian thinker does not examine in depth the short-story genre in FTC. Nevertheless, I argue in favour of the existence of a gendered chronotope in a short-story of the first half of the twentieth century. This means that the short-story may contain the characteristics Bakhtin conferred upon the novel (parody, criticism, and so on). If we approach the multiplicity of chronotopes of the (proto)novels studied by him from Ancient Greece, we would realize that they differ greatly from “Annunciation.” Following Bakhtin’s own analyses, I will provide an introduction to the general characteristics of time and space in this piece. Contrary to the “extratemporal categories” of (epic) discourses such as the Bible (FTC 206), pregnancy develops irreversibly throughout (approximately) nine months in a particular woman’s space. In “Annunciation,” the main character is conscious that pregnancy happens through a (spaced) time with a beginning and an end (129, 130). There are many non-specific references to the time of the day: especially “afternoon[s],” which appears nine times, “night[s]” six times and “noon,” “morning[s]” and “evening[s]” twice each. In Le Sueur’s novel The Girl, the main character’s baby is born around 1:00 p.m. It could be argued that, in both texts, the writer ‘announces’ a new way of (re)starting time(space), and in consequence everything else. The time sequence of the short-story is not linear: the narrator initially specifies the time as the “fourth month” of her pregnancy (124), then describes the first months (127), and ends with her present moment. In addition, she also remembers past moments, what she had written before,18 and anticipates others, her hope for revolution. The very first line starts with “Ever” (124), and the last one ends with “the pear tree... falling... into the earth” (132). This might give us a feeling of eternity, the continuity of life through (children’s) birth, or even through reincarnation within Nature’s cycle. On the one hand, for a woman with such difficulties, writing is a precious exercise to “preserve” (a moment of) life (124, 127, 129, 130). On the other, her capacity for resilience, to extract beauty and enthusiasm out of shabbiness and decay, is symptomatic of the 18

The protagonist-narrator does actually go back to reread her own writings. She tells us about it on three occasions, by means of framed texts that appear between inverted commas (127, 128, 130).

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triumph of life over death. The “rickety porch” (125), where she sits and watches the pear tree, “seems to be actually tied to the wall of the house with bits of wire and rope” (125). Even so she thinks, “I am in luck to have this porch to sit on and this tree swaying before me through the long afternoons and the long nights” (126). If Nietzsche found evidence of man’s intelligence in the latter’s ability to get depressed, one can point to this woman’s supra intelligence in her ability to overcome her depression (as well as the economic one). Opposed to the atomic individuality and non-ubiquity of mythical heroes, “Annunciation”’s protagonist acknowledges “the slow time of the making [of a human being]” (131), who is actually born of a woman, bringing to light that the mother’s body is the (tangible) place of origin of us all. Furthermore, Le Sueur’s dialogical feminine realism is interested in the real (non allegorical) concreteness of space and time. This story expresses hope for a radical turn in the history of the subaltern classes. The gendered ‘chronotope of gestation,’ which I hold she invented, really approaches only one of the chronotopes discussed by Bakhtin: the Rabelaisian chronotope. From Bakhtin’s point-of-view, Rabelais invented a chronotope for a “whole and harmonious [hu]man, and for new forms of human communication” (FTC 168). Morson and Emerson stress that the Rabelais of Bakhtin’s Chronotope is very different from the one of Rabelais and his World (R&W). Whereas FTC praises Rabelais’s portrayal of the humanist body of the Renaissance, I agree with Morson and Emerson that R&W is merely interested in the French writer’s representations of the grotesque medieval body (439). I have found evidence of Bakhtin’s account of the Rabelaisian harmonious body in FTC (e.g. 176, 186, 192, etc). Even so, I would like to highlight that these allusions are still related only to the “healthy, whole and virile [body]” (FTC 193). In FTC, Rabelais’s references to the female body still contain a note of mockery—a baby being born through the ear (FTC 171-172)—, derogation—“the... analogy between the female organ and an open wound” (FTC 190)—, and so forth. We need a gendered chronotope dealing with the female body from a less patriarchal perspective. Bakhtin continues that Rabelais managed “to link real life (history) to the real earth” (FTC 206). In the section dedicated to examining “The Folkloric Bases of the Rabelaisian Chronotope,” he states that the folkloric chronotope corresponds to a “pre-class, agricultural stage” that speaks about “the temporal contiguity of phenomena” and a “collective life... [in which] the interior time of an individual life does not yet exist” (FTC 207). Capitalism provoked the stratification of society into classes with the separation of people’s lives into “individual life-sequences” (FTC 215). All these questions are also very dear to Le Sueur, who was concerned with socialist politics, and who liked to resort to ancient mythology so as to portray women’s lives. The influence of agriculture in the Rabelaisian chronotope situates it close to the chronotope of idyll, with its pastoral qualities (FTC 103), and that of agricultural labour, since they all portray “a real link... between... nature and... human life” (FTC 227). The character-narrator of “Annunciation” recalls what she had written on her feelings of pregnancy in a sort of Whitmanian (perhaps also Rabelaisian) fit: ‘Lie in the sun with the child in your flesh shining like a jewel. Dream and sing, pagan, wise in your vitals. Stand still like a fat budding tree, like a stalk of corn athrob and aglisten in the heat. Like a mare panting with the dancing feet of colts against her sides. Sleep at night as the spring earth. Walk heavily as a wheat stalk as its full time bending toward the earth waiting for the reaper. Let your life swell downward so you become like a vase, a vessel. Let the unknown child knock and knock against you like a dolphin within.’ (130)

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It is clear that, for Le Sueur, the earth has “flesh” too (128). Neala Schleuning divides (what I will later call) Le Sueur’s sexual-maternal symbolism into two periods: one that rewrites the myth of Demeter and Persephone, another that incorporates the traditions of the Native Americans (1980). Nevertheless, the two periods seem to be combined in this story. Like Demeter, this pregnant woman “feel[s] like a pear” (129), “like a tree” (131), looks like a “pomegranate” (130), wants to “[w]alk... as a wheat stalk,” and so on. Among other moments, she writes also about her “fourth month” (124). For the Native Americans “four” is a sacred number (Gelfant 76) and “Changing Woman,” such as a pregnant woman, a sacred figure (Rites).19 Therefore, rewriting patriarchal discourse (such as myth) from a gendered perspective brings about unknown feminist possibilities. Myth, either biblical or prosaic, can also work as another of the genres in the structural dialogue of “Annunciation.” Bakhtin laments as well that, with capitalism, everyday rituals such as “[f]ood, drink, copulation and so forth los[t]... their link with the laboring life of the social whole... [and] bec[a]me a petty private matter.” Love was “sublimated” as if it were not human. Then, historical discourse emerged as an outside force “serving as the channel for the life of the nation, the state, mankind... [whose] time-sequence is not fused with individual lifesequences... [and is] measured by different standards of value... [with] no interior aspects” (FTC 219). As I implied above, “Annunciation” does not only sublimate the maternal but also observes its most prosaic facets—the widening of the female body, the feelings of sickness of the first months. Thus, the (gendered) ‘chronotope of pregnancy’ invites us to think of the reproductive process as part of the natural cycle, showing that human and other living beings live together in the same community (e.g. her unborn child and the pear tree). Throughout I will try to explain that (much of) Le Sueur’s oeuvre reconciles the individual and the social, the private and the public. The feminist writer also encouraged workers to write their own history in the genre of literature—“Who is to write it if not you?” (Worker 2)—, attempting a transformation of (the genre of) History that involves form and content, discourse and chronotope. I have already pointed out that her writing can be considered ‘realism with an adjective’ (inner, feminist, and so on). Bakhtin also calls Rabelais’s genre(s), “fantastic realism” (FTC 169). Almost in a Le Sueurian manner, Bakhtin asserts that folkloric time was a time of “ripening,” “a pregnant time, a fruit-bearing time, a birthing time and a time that conceives again” (FTC 207)—why did he not call it directly ‘pregnancy time’ or even ‘maternal time’? Contrary to the other chronotopes he examines in the rest of FTC, in the Rabelaisian chronotope, “time is profoundly spatial and concrete... Human life and nature are perceived in the same categories [something that is also vital for Le Sueur]... Time in its course binds together the earth and the laboring hand of [wo]man... Such time is fleshed-out, irreversible[,]... realistic” (208). For the purposes of dialogical feminism, such concrete realism is especially important to describe the peculiarities and differences of each woman. This can be interpreted as the performance of an analysis of gender in the ‘level 2’ outlined before. In her proposal of considering the “concrete other” besides the “generalized other,” Seyla Benhabib has argued for the politics of recognizing that the “other” has concrete 19

Nora Ruth Roberts explains that Le Sueur’s recovery of agricultural myths has more to do with the mythical tradition of the Midwest than with Socialism (1997). Le Sueur’s book of poetry Rites of Ancient Ripening recreates the traditions of the Native Americans. Far from being an appropriation of another culture, the poet shows an absolute respect and profound knowledge of it. Moreover, one of Le Sueur’s grandmothers was a full-blooded Iroquois. The author herself had Native American friends throughout her life and spent long periods of it on a reserve.

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qualities and needs that differ from person to person (1990). Such differences would focus our attention on questions of race, sexual behaviour, ethnicity, and class, to name a few. This would imply considering gender an unfixed category whose chronotopic qualities depend on time-space. In this same line, forms of ‘strategic essentialism’ (such as Le Sueur’s) encourage the dialogue between feminist theory (e.g. feminine écriture) and women’s social reality/ies. According to Bakhtin, every “chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh” (FTC 250). This dialogic protagonist “feel[s] thick with th[e] child” and is aware that “in [her]... are the buds of [her] child” (“Annunciation” 126 & 131). Bakhtin continues that the chronotope “causes blood to flow in [the] veins” (FTC 250). Also here, “[the] skin shines like crystal with the veins showing beneath blue and distended” (“Annunciation” 130). The Bakhtinian chronotope “materializ[es] time in space” (FTC 130), and this female character “hadn’t any time except the nine months [she] was counting off” (“Annunciation” 127). It appears that the pregnant body is an actual performance of a gendered chronotope, showing the fusion of time and space in the growing of the woman’s belly/the fetus. Obviously, in Le Sueur’s text, the female body is the chosen site of human experience. Recent studies have examined Bakhtin’s attempt to break with Kant’s dualism of mind/body. According to David McNally, in the chronotope essay, time and space are shown not as transcendental units but as forms of embodiment (124). But, it is above all in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” where the Russian thinker placed special emphasis on the corporeal. But in this essay, Bakhtin not only claims that we are all linguistic beings, who need the other’s response, which has been pointed out by most dialogicians. McNally stresses Bakhtin’s insistence that “we are body-selves whose sense of self coheres through embodied relations with other body selves” (125). He highlights the fact that Bakhtinian “[c]onsciousness, language, and culture are thus attributes of particular kinds of bodies, not extra-natural and extra-bodily events,” and that, contrary to Nietzsche and Lacan, “the mother for Bakhtin represents a social relationship, an entry to culture and language” (126). Despite this, McNally criticizes the fact that the Russian philosopher does not recognize the mother’s subjectivity: 20 she is an “object... in the world of the child.” However, Bakhtin himself affirmed that, since the chronotope points out the relation between the work of art and history, it “always contains... an evaluating aspect” (FTC 243). Therefore, considering a gendered ‘chronotope of gestation’ should lead us to criticize the devaluation of female experience by patriarchal discourses, including even Bakhtin’s. Given its importance for reading Bakhtinian dialogics, I will assess the (concept of the) pregnant body from the perspectives of socialist feminists and the theorists of feminine écriture. Luce Irigaray has resorted to the Far-Eastern traditions, such as Yoga, to conclude that in the West “man has not begun to think. He lives in a... state of somnambulism” (1996, 40). One of the problems lies in the fact that “man thinks... by estranging himself from his body.” Iris M. Young acknowledges the contribution of Erwin Straus and Maurice MerlauPonty, who (like Bakhtin) locate consciousness and subjectivity in the body itself, a move 20

The images of pregnancy, the womb, and so forth appear continually throughout R&W. However, women and the concreteness of their bodies are absent from the text. With McNally I suspect that Bakhtin’s method obeys “a tendency to appropriate female procreative power to the male body” (146). Many are the feminists who have pointed out that gender, as well as the female, is Bakhtin’s blind spot. For further information on these critiques, see Shepherd, Thompson.

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that “jeopardizes dualistic metaphysics altogether” (Throwing 161). Even so, she rejects these philosophers’ tendency “to [still] operate with a dualistic language” (162), and proposes the pregnant body as a new model for the self as revealing “a body subjectivity that is decentered, myself in the mode of not being myself.” From Young’s point-of-view: Pregnancy challenges the integration of my body experience by rendering fluid the boundary between what is within, myself, and what is outside, separate. I experience my insides as the space of another, yet my own body... The integrity of my body is undermined in pregnancy not only by this externality of the inside, but also by the fact that the boundaries of my body are themselves in flux. (163)

Le Sueur’s pregnant character thinks of the changes her body is going through: “My legs and head hardly make a difference... My hips are full and tight in back as if bracing themselves. I look like a pale and shining pomegranate, hard and tight...” (“Annunciation” 130) She also considers the being inside her as a close yet separate entity, “‘let the unknown child knock and knock against you like a dolphin within’” (130). But the pregnant body is not the only one capable of metamorphosis. That is, through observing the gendered ‘chronotope of pregnancy,’ we realize that not only the female body but that the human body (in general) undergoes metamorphosis. A body-self whose boundaries are in flux no longer has “unchangeable” qualities or an “identity.” I suggest the term identity-alterity as an alternative to the concept of “identity” as essential, unchangeable, etc. I write this term in italics to try to destabilize “identity,” making it (look) more dynamic, as it moves into other time-spaces. An identity contains identities—age, physical appearance, nationality, profession, hobbies, ‘sentimental status,’ and others—that are susceptible to being altered. The hybridity of the compound enhances the relational possibilities of the self, as well as its openness to change into/being altered by another self, a self-other. This idea seeks to free the “self” from the chain of unalterable “identities,” the fixed hierarchies defined by patriarchy. Hopefully, identity-alterities, selfothers are able to practice truly ethical relations of difference that confront all dualisms— man/woman, conscious/unconscious, reason/body, and so forth.21 Bakhtin praised Dostoevsky for creating characters who, like free people, “liv[e] by the fact that [they are] not finalized, that [they] ha[ve] not yet uttered [their] ultimate word[s]” (PDP 59). The Bakhtinian concept of person is someone who “never coincides with h[er]self. One cannot apply to h[er] the formula of identity.” Then, perhaps one should apply her the formula of identity-alterity. I would like to come back to Young’s account of pregnancy. Apart from the moving boundaries, she also focuses on the “split subjectivity” of the pregnant self (Throwing 162). The first movements of the fetus produce this sense of splitting subject; the fetus’s movements are wholly mine, completely within me, conditioning my experience and space. Only I have access to these movements from their origin, as it were. For months, only I can witness this life within me, and it is only under my direction of where to put their hands that others can feel [it]. I have a privileged relation to this other life, not unlike that which I have to my dreams, thoughts, which I can tell someone but which cannot be an object for both of us in the same way... (163)

In “Annunciation,” we also read: “I put my hand where you [child] lie so silently” (128), “I walk looking for work, stopping secretly in doorways to feel beneath my coat.” Surprisingly against its patriarchal archetype, pregnancy is a privileged locus of 21

The identity-alterity compound was introduced in Núñez Puente 2003.

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relationality and discovery. Hence the importance of feminist rewritings of patriarchal genres/narratives dealing with women (medicine, dialogics), which may suffer from gender-bias. The pregnant character has access to other important revelations: that pregnancy is part of a revolutionary time, that she is connected with other human and natural beings, and that the pear tree has an important message to communicate. Once again, in contrast with its passive stereotype,22 pregnancy is an unclassifiable time of revolutionary actions: How can it be explained? Suddenly many movements are going on within me, many things are happening, there is an almost unbearable sense of sprouting, of bursting encasements, of moving kernels, expanding flesh. Perhaps it is such an activity that makes a field come alive with millions of sprouting shoots of corn or wheat. Perhaps it is something like that that makes a new world. (129)

Like any kind of creation, pregnancy implies movement. Thus, it is the perfect (explanation and) model for revolutions, for they have to be conceived first and harbored too. It is not only, as Young affirms, that the pregnant woman has a privileged position/relation to the fetus. Thanks to the ‘pregnancy chronotope,’ Le Sueur’s female character is in a privileged position to “see” all the others around her (repeated in “Annunciation” 129). She notices the movement going on in the surrounding houses—“shaking and trembling, moving outward with shouting” (129)—, in the garage and even inside the pear tree (131), as well as the presence and activity of other people: “Old men and tramps lie on the grass” (124), a dying woman (125), “[a] woman in an old wrapper comes out” (125-126), “a young girl making a bed” (129), “a young man sleeping,” “a child looking,” “an old woman sits rocking,” “[c]hildren are playing and girls are walking” (130), and so forth. Most importantly, perhaps, she becomes aware of the others of Nature: the sun, rain, and wind (124), the “tiny animals” and “vegetation” (127), and the pear tree. On the one hand, the recognition of these others contradict the (empty) egocentrism attributed to feminine écriture by its detractors. On the other, such references are evidence that “Annunciation” has at least a hybrid genre: both dialogical and ‘feminine.’ Due to the gendered ‘chronotope of gestation,’ she can sometimes feel “a flying and circling within [her]” (124) “as if [she were] mesmerized” (124) and “in a trance of wonder” (128). Ultimately, she can reach some sort of epiphany, in which everything has meaning (124, 128), and the pear tree also “stands for something” (124). This time has come without warning. How can it be explained? Everything is dead and closed, the world a stone, and then suddenly everything comes alive as it has for me, like an anemone on a rock, opening itself, disclosing itself, and the very stones themselves break open like bread... It has come about some way as I have sat here with this child so many afternoons, with the pear tree murmuring in the air. (128)

The narrator-character protests that “the world remains a stone [for most people] and a closed door” (129), something that ends when experiencing the ‘pregnancy chronotope.’ Such a gendered chronotope leads to the epiphany where “closed places are opening, still things are moving” (130). Similar to religious epiphanies, the ones by Le Sueur are also miraculous, with stones that become bread. They could also be read as reactions against the Modernist epiphanies employed by Eliot, Joyce and others. First of all, the body is the main 22

Contradicting existential phenomenologists’ conception of the body, Young writes: “attending to my pregnant body... I do not feel alienated from it, as in illness. I merely notice its borders and rumblings with interest, sometimes with pleasure, and this aesthetic interest does not divert me from my business” (Throwing 165).

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channel for experiencing the epiphany, it is the body of a woman and furthermore the pregnancy epiphany is very close to the political one. That is, in both chronotopes, the critical action/revelation brings with it an understanding of her connection with the rest of the world. The author experienced a political epiphany herself when she participated in a Minneapolis truckers’ strike in 1934. The following quote summarizes its description in one of her most famous pieces of reportage: I have never been in a strike before... com[ing] from the middle class... I am putting down exactly how I felt, because I believe others of my class feel the same as I did... for the first time in my life I do not feel myself as separate. I realize then that all my previous feelings have been based on feeling myself as separate and distinct from others and now I sense sharply faces, bodies, closeness, and my own fear is not my own alone, nor my hope... We were moving spontaneously in a movement, natural, hardy, and miraculous... As if an electric charge had passed through me, my hair stood on end. I was marching. (“Marching” 158-165)

In this piece, the mixture of past and present tenses is typical of Le Sueur’s style. The dominance of the present accentuates the (novelistic) character of modern chronotopes. “Marching” documents the fact that, in its beginnings, “Socialism was not only a rebellion of the intellect but of the heart, spirit, and body” (Rowbotham 133). Sheila Rowbotham thinks that this was consequent upon an awareness that “middle-class men’s upbringing made them incapable of being open to feeling” (134). Both Rowbotham and Le Sueur express the possibility of dialogue amongst classes. As Elaine Hedges constantly repeats, Le Sueur was deeply interested in reaching a “communal sensibility” (1982). In order to be dialogic enough, we must listen to the other texts surrounding the ‘pregnancy chronotope.’ One of them tells us that the protagonist’s state is a victory against sterilization, a common practice in United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Historians document that the U.S. of the 1920s confuses birth control and population control: “[m]iddle-class women are encouraged to use methods, such as the diaphragm and the pill, that allow individual control. Poor women are encouraged to use methods, such as the intrauterine device and sterilization, that are controlled by physicians” (Shapiro 9-10). Le Sueur reminds us that one of the reasons lower-class women starved and never went on the breadlines was the fear of being sterilized: “[t]hey’d be picked up and taken to women’s prison and [be] sterilized within twenty-four hours” (quoted by Hoy, 56). One of the criteria for sterilization was a test of the individual’s intelligence. Le Sueur recalls, “I took the intelligence test: you couldn’t pass the intelligence test, it was a class test. You might not know who was the president, yet be of superior intelligence: that wouldn’t show you couldn’t birth a baby, or cook meals” (quoted by Hoy, 56). There is a moment in “Annunciation” when the main character travels by boat. The description of this trip itself can be read as a metaphor of her own life: I am going on a boat between dark shores, and... I can hear the scurryings of tiny animals on the shores and their little breathings seem to be all around. I think of them, wild, carrying their young now, crouching in the dark... Silent, alive, they sit in the dark shadow of the greedy world. There is something wild about us too, something tender and wild about my having you as a child, about your crouching secretly here. There is something very tender and wild about it. We, too, are at the mercy of many hunters. On this boat I act like the other human beings, for I do not show that I have you, but really I know we are as helpless, as wild, as at bay as some tender wild animals who might be on the ship. (127128, italics mine)

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The Depression was certainly a ‘dark time’ and, like the tiny animals, the poorest people were in the worst situation. But it is especially mothers that have the most to fear (“I do not show that I have you” 128). The parallelism between the lives of the weakest, the animals and ‘the poor,’ especially the female poor, has a double purpose: (1) it serves to highlight the hierarchies rich/poor, human/animal. (2) It undermines the dualisms since people are not more important than animals and both groups appear humanized. Therefore, the new Mary rebelliously hopes that the future being “will come glistening with life power... I hope that you will be a warrior and fierce for change, so all can live” (128), like a new Messiah. However she also seems to realize that she-he might be taken away from her: “Perhaps after this child is born, then everything will harden and... I would even have a hard time remembering this time” (129), possibly evocative of the biblical scene when Jesus was born and the political powers ordered small children to be sacrificed. This is a new instance of the feminist-patriarchal dialogue among genres present in “Annunciation.” Being a socialist, the author was interested in criticizing other socio-economic problems. This woman is poor, her husband “is out of work. [And p]eople are hungry just as [she is] hungry” (124). In fact, she has been feeling “hungry” since the first months of her pregnancy (126). The couple have gone through times with “no money at all,” in which Karl even had to beg (126). His desperation has lead him to get drunk regularly. There are many occasions when his wife has “no supper” (132). During the Depression, Le Sueur recalls, “[t]here was also a drought” and “there was no place for women, there was no way to feed them” (quoted by Hoy, 56). Another reason why proletarian women could not go on the breadlines was that, since “they were all men [there,]... it would be a very exposed place for jokes and hoots and propositions and sexual approaches” (quoted by Hoy, 56). The protagonist of “Annunciation” is in her “fourth month” (124), when the woman’s belly starts to grow and pregnancy can be noticed by others. So she stays at home to avoid being discovered and sterilized eventually. This woman is poor and pregnant and she is not helped by anyone in order to survive. And so she dreams. In another piece of reportage, the author recounts that young proletarian women would not reject “the suffering of birth, death, love... but the suffering of endless labor without dream...” (“Breadlines” 143) In the words of Hélène Cixous: “Everyone knows that a place exists which is not... obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds” (Cixous & Clément 72). And so she writes. There is a continual allusion to writing and its process: “I sit on this porch writing these notes” (“Annunciation” 124), “writing on pieces of paper,” “[m]y sweater pocket is full of scraps of paper on which I have already written,” “carrying slips of paper with me and writing on them” (127), “I [w]ould look up from writing,” “[i]t is hard to write” (130) “on a piece of wrapping paper” (132).23 In an effort to both question and enrich Freud’s list of the human drives, Cixous includes a “gestation drive—just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood. We are not going to refuse... the unsurpassed pleasures of pregnancy which have actually been always exaggerated or conjured away—or cursed—in classic texts. For if there’s one thing that’s been repressed, here’s just the place to find it: in the taboo of the pregnant woman. This 23 Her method, writing on paper pieces and putting them in her pockets, is the same as that used by Joyce when he wrote Ulysses. Le Sueur herself employed partly the same method when she wrote The Girl.

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says a lot about the power she seems invested with at the time... when pregnant, the woman... takes on intrinsic value as a woman in her own eyes and, undeniably, acquires body and sex” (1997, 346). Before I noted that the main character feels like writing “[e]ver since [she has] known [she] was going to have a child” (“Annunciation” 124). Once again, Cixous’s fragment helps me to emphasize the many kinds of pregnancies that can be enjoyed/suffered by women. I can only agree with the French philosopher if I read her as speaking of the ‘feminine’ (a variant). As I implied above with reference to sterilization, society has established certain differentiations between a pregnant woman who is white, or educated, or from the upper class, and another one who does not meet these requirements— such as the female nomad of our story. The inner power experienced by the pregnant woman would also depend on whether hers is a wanted pregnancy. Above all, Cixous demands a rewriting of the discourse of pregnancy. Kristeva protests that the mother’s subjectivity is never taken into account by religious, scientific, and even some artistic discourses on maternity (1980). For Le Sueur, it is clear that the “mystery” of reproduction is “unknown to scientists” (“Origins” 256), perhaps because it is “directly correlated with the maternal and the sexual imaginary” (Irigaray 1993, 123). For feminists, it is very obvious that the patriarchal imaginary needs to be changed. And it is also vital that woman be identified as both a maternal and a sexual subject—Cixous suggests, as “body and sex” (1997, 346). Iris M. Young (Throwing) has insistently denounced that much of patriarchy is based upon this separation of maternal and sexual qualities—e.g. the mother/whore dichotomy. When dealing with Le Sueur’s mother-characters, with their sensual and nurturing qualities, in this as well as in other writings, one cannot but conclude that she invented the (literary) sexual-maternal. The pregnant woman of “Annunciation” compares her state and her desire to write with the time when she “was first in love” (124). Being pregnant has made her feel “some kind of loveliness” (127). She daydreams sensually of “a young girl making a bed from which she had just risen having dreamt of a young man who became her lover...” (129, ellipsis in the original) and of “a woman lying on a bed after her husband has left her.” She repeatedly mentions how excited she feels about her pregnancy (three times on page 129). It seems strange that, instead of watching the typically feminine “large magnolia tree with its blossoms yellow” (125), she chooses to fix her attention on a pear tree that has no pears, but which she imagines It bears (126, 129, 131). The pear tree has anthropomorphic (even masculine) qualities: the “body of the upshooting tree” seems “shot upward like a rocket” (131), the pear tree has a “ripe,” “curving,” “radiating,” “gentle” body (131-132), It “knows” about life (131), It has “lips” and “tongues” that speak (131132) and Its “vertical stem” has phallic connotations (131). “[T]he tree of life” is treated as being male, “himself” (129). The female character either identifies with a tree or, at least, she “feel[s] like a tree [herself]... muscular sap alive... flaring outward rocket-like... rich strong power in me to break through into a new life” (131). This seems to suggest the hybrid sexuality of Nature, perhaps even a hybrid gender, which is unknown to us due to the hierarchical divisions that come with culture. “Annunciation” also searches for a true dialogue between (different) ways of thinking, hence its genre hybridity—both dialogic and ‘feminine.’ In Le Sueur’s fiction, Nature is a force that seduces women and even gets them pregnant. For instance in “Wind,” the female protagonist only suspects she is pregnant when “the wind blew straight upon her... that fertile spring wind” (105). In “Spring Story,”

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evoking the girl’s sexual awakening, “the air blew in upon her... with a strange fertile promise in it” (85). In her portrayals of the sensual female subjectivity of mothers and nonmothers, Le Sueur seems a pioneer amongst the women writers of her time at least in the U.S.—see especially The Girl. In “Annunciation,” the protagonist confesses what “seems a shameful thing” for her: the pear tree “has become more familiar to [her] than [her husband]” (132). She listens to It continually, finding it hard to translate Its saying to the readers: “Karl did not speak to me so. No one spoke to me in any good speech.” Unfortunately, the dialogue between the genres of the dialogical ‘feminine’ does not reflect a dialogue among the story’s characters.24 When reading “Annunciation,” one recalls in comparison the famous mother-writer of “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper.” Both unnamed protagonists live in a kind of mansion with an exuberant garden during the story-time. Even so, Gilman’s fictional family are upper-class and Le Sueur’s characters “have only paid a week’s rent” (125). “Annunciation”’s boarding house “was owned by the rich once and now the dispossessed live in it with the rats” (125). A word such as “dispossessed” alludes to the critique of an unequal class system, which is completely ignored by Gilman’s text. Whereas her mother-protagonist feels sick and spends most of the time inside her bedroom, Le Sueur’s mother-to-be feels wonderful and is usually outside. Though she wants to write, we doubt that John’s wife is writing at all. On the contrary, we are repeatedly informed that Karl’s wife does write.25 At some point, Le Sueur’s character is writing on a “yellow paper” (124), the sight of a yellow magnolia overwhelms her (125), and the pears she imagines to be on the tree would also be yellow. In the other story, the yellow colour of the wallpaper repels its viewer and makes her think only about “old foul, bad yellow things” (“Yellow” 37). Interestingly, in the first months of her pregnancy, the proletarian character had also been in a “foul-smelling place” (“Annunciation” 126), a “foul room” with “foul walls,” which made her feel “sick” though she was also “happy... because of [her] child.” Both texts show the hierarchy between ‘men/women’ and also the hierarchy between ‘other female characters/heroines.’ “Yellow”’s protagonist is situated in an inferior position to Jennie (her ‘guard’) and Mary (the ‘ideal mother’). In “Annunciation,” Mrs. Mason,26 the landlady—“I hate to go out and have to pass the landlady’s door” (125)—and the nosy woman— “‘I hear you are going to have a child,’ she said. ‘It’s too bad’” (132)—are or pretend to be in a superior position to the heroine. Both pieces criticize patriarchy’s medical (non-)treatment of the mother: one while pregnant, the other after delivering. The two of them are, in part, autobiographical.27 In spite of the different tone, both have ambiguous endings. They also have a similar starting point: given their solitude and lack of understanding with their partners, the female characters feel desperately obliged to search 24 A Chilean writer, María Luisa Bombal, published “El árbol” in 1935, the same year as “Annunciation.” “El árbol” is about a gomero, a rubber tree, which shelters the female protagonist from a cold and non-dialogic husband. 25 It is not, as S. Weir Mitchell prescribed, that maternity goes against writing. On the contrary, maternity encourages artistic creation. 26 As is usual with Le Sueur’s characters, the landlady has an appropriate name for someone who is connected with a building. 27 Like “Yellow,” “Annunciation” was published separately as a single book. Since the format is also constitutive of genre status, both texts could be considered novellas or even autobiographies. It is a curious coincidence that Gilman and Le Sueur started to write these pieces when they were about the same age: the former was in her early thirties and the latter, in her late twenties. Among other biographical coincidences, both writers lived separate from their biological fathers and suffered periods of economic hardship.

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for an other (communicator). In both texts we hear (one of the) the voice(s) of gender through the alteration of genre/classic realism: the Gothic in one, a type of feminine writing in the other. Both symbolic others encountered, the yellow wall(-)paper and the pear tree, have an intricate or even feminine pattern. Perhaps the most important difference here is that, whereas for the rich heroine its pattern is only imprisoning, the pear tree “has opened a door for [the poor woman]” (126). If the pattern were language, Jane(?) feels her relation to it à la Lacan, as entrapment, whereas this new Mary feels it à la Bakhtin, as an ecosystem. Unlike in Gilman’s work, there is no doubt about Le Sueur’s extradiegetic homodiegetic narrator, whose voice is free from the male character’s influence. The woman of this story has been at Mrs. Mason’s boarding house for a short time and she knows nobody there (126). Besides, her lack of money prevents her from socializing. Moreover, “[t]here wasn’t a person I could have told it to, that I was going to have a child. I didn’t want to be pitied” (128). This is one reason why she turns to her own writing. Far from being non-dialogic, she maintains a dialogue with herself in the kind of lyrical confession in which “[b]y objectifying myself... I gain the opportunity to have an authentic dialogic relationship with myself,” as even the inner word is addressed toward a(n) addressee/response (TPT 122). She “unfold[s]” herself into a speaker and a listener “I say to myself” (“Annunciation” 130)—, a viewer and a viewed—“I look at myself in the mirror”—, a writer and reader—“reading what I have already written” (124). Above all, she keeps “speaking” to her unborn child that could even be considered a character in the story (127), which appears as one of the first times a foetus plays such a role in literary history. As if to an entitled subject, she always refers to her/him as “child” (not “baby”), without specifying the gender, and she even addresses her/him as “you” (127-128). Luce Irigaray maintains that we need a new(?) language that allows us to communicate with each other differently since, for instance, “I love you does not respect the intersubjective” (1996, 138). In order to put it differently, she decides to introduce the preposition “to” and prefers the clause: “I love to you.” The preposition “to” serves to denote an indirection that avoids the reduction, appropriation, or objectification of the “other” by the “same” (109-111). Therefore, the new Mary’s way of talking to her (non-)baby is a manifestation of her ethical attitude. Le Sueur’s short-story itself is also dedicated to (another ‘you’) “Rachel,” the author’s eldest daughter. A further problem is that this expectant mother cannot talk with Karl, her partner: “I stopped talking to him much. Everything I said only made him angry. So writing was a kind of conversation I carried on with myself and with the child” (“Annunciation” 127, my emphasis). He treats her in a bullying way: “He took me out and made me walk along the deck although it was hardly light yet... and he kept talking to me in a low voice, trying to persuade me. It was hard for me to listen... My teeth were chattering with cold...” (127)28 Fortunately, she clearly realizes that he is trying to manipulate her. Consequently, it is not that she is not willing to talk with others, such as the nosy woman, but that she refuses to be positioned at the bottom of the speech hierarchy. By choosing not to be influenced by Karl’s voice, she has matured in her ideological becoming. In Bakhtin’s words, “[c]onsciousness finds its way inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language” (DIN 295). Curiously feminist, one of Bakhtin’s allusions to pregnancy also 28

Karl seems a difficult person indeed: “Just to look at him makes him angry now... I gave him the ‘willies’ he said, looking at him like that” (128). This is another example of the patriarchal fear of the “feminine,” a reason why it has been turned into an “other.”

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confirms that “[j]ust as the body is formed initially in the mother’s womb (body), a person’s consciousness awakens wrapped in another’s consciousness” (FNM 138). The new Mary’s writing (and thinking by herself) is a (Symbolic) victory through which she becomes a female subject. Following the feminists of the Second Wave, this gesture indicates that she decides to think/write about herself in the first person. The etymology of “Karl,” the male character’s name, tells us he is the patriarchal prototype: a “strong manly man.” Obviously, Karl Marx comes to mind too and it seems probable that this is the starting point of the author’s critique of the masculinism still inherent in Marxist ideology. In a revealing incident from her own biography, “[s]ome party members... questioned Le Sueur’s choice to have children. They feared that motherhood might distract her from her political work” (Kennedy 148).29 The fictionalized Karl repeatedly tells his wife to “[g]et rid of [the baby]” (126 & 127), insisting that “[t]hat’s what everybody does nowadays. This isn’t the time to have a child. Everything is rotten. We must change it” (126-127, my emphasis). It is extremely ironic that this Karl is in favour of abortion, because it is the common practice, even though he wants to change things! In such a state of affairs, she comes to think that “a child should be made by machinery now... then there would be no fuss” (128). In this account of (female) reproduction, such an allusion to (industrial) production constitutes another attack on Marxist discourse. Given this criticism and Le Sueur’s political affiliations, it is necessary to comment on recent feminist readings of Socialism. Socialist feminists have criticized Marx’s conceptualization of ‘production’ for leaving out many female activities, such as domestic work, sexual services, or childcare. Feminists have argued about the need to reassess the general conception of ‘production’ and its relation to ‘reproduction.’ Linda Nicholson praises Marx’s ability as a philosopher who perceived the link among the family, the state and the economy, which had been denied by Liberal thought since the seventeenth century. However, while Marx was aware of these interconnections, “his theory did not consistently abide by this awareness” (131). That is why she finds a surprising similarity between the Marxist and the liberal positions, “denying the influence over the market of such factors as gender, religion, politics, etc” (141). Lidia Falcón protests that the child “is the worthiest of goods... And nevertheless, gestation, labour of birth, breastfeeding and the following care of the progeny has never been considered as productive work” (47, italics hers, translation mine). On her part, Nancy C. M. Hartsock has written: One does not (cannot) produce another human being in anything like the way one produces an object such as a chair. Much more is involved... Helping another to develop, the gradual relinquishing of control, the experience of the human limits of one’s action—all these are important features in women’s activity as mothers... The female experience in reproduction represents a unity with nature which goes beyond the proletarian experience of interchange with nature... Finally the female experience in bearing and rearing children involves a unity of mind and body more profound than is possible in the worker’s instrumental activity. (224-225)

Hartsock concludes that not only women’s mothering, but also the preparation for it they receive in socialization, constitute women’s particular relational standpoint. This feminist 29

Meridel Le Sueur took her last name from her stepfather, Arthur Le Sueur. Continuing with etymology, in French, “sueur” means “sweat,” which enhances her condition as a member of the proletariat and not a mere sympathizer with its cause.

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approach has been labelled “standpoint theory.”30 It seems Le Sueur would agree with Hartsock, and with most of these socialist feminist critiques of Marxism, in “the belief that women’s experiences as mothers g[i]ve them a unique vision of the world” (Kennedy 142, my italics). This quote helps me to bring back the two analytical levels of gender outlined above. From a multicultural perspective, the ‘standpoint (of women)’ could be defended but it could be attacked as well: i.e. not all women are mothers or suffer an identical training (in motherhood) in all societies of the world. Hartsock’s theory bears the characteristics of a 1st level of gender analysis: i.e. women can be mothers and they can also be trained for it, hence a common feature of women. A 2nd level of gender analysis would lead us to concretize the differences between non-mothers and mothers, and also among the latter (e.g. age, class). Perhaps only implicitly, Le Sueur herself does account for the differences in the maternal experiences undergone by women of different profession or marital status— cf. “Annunciation,” The Girl. Part of Hartsock’s “standpoint theory” is based upon the work of Nancy Chodorow. Among other things, Chodorow has produced a rereading of the pre-Oedipal stage described by Freud, in which girls continue the relation with their mothers longer than boys. Thus, she criticizes Freud’s conclusive dichotomy of women’s weaker ego boundaries that would lead them (and not men) to be prone to psychosis. On the contrary, for Chodorow, “[g]irls emerge from this period with a basis for ‘empathy’ built into their primary definition of self in a way that boys do not” (167). In other words, she affirms that women end up having a richer ability than men for relationships. Another pioneer on the relational theory of identity is Carol Gilligan. Gilligan’s work began as a rereading of a masculinist account of women, in this case, of their moral (in)ability. Lawrence Kohlberg decided to measure moral development in adolescence by means of interviews. That the interviewed male gave the more logical answers and the female the more interactive led Kohlberg to conclude that female adolescents were morally immature. Nevertheless, Gilligan questioned whether he had understood female responses. Thus, she argued that girls’ “understanding of morality as arising from the recognition of relationship, [and their] belief in communication as the mode of conflict resolution... contain the insights central to an ethic of care” (39). It appears that patriarchy has devalued both relational abilities and the ethics of care. This might be because women’s biological capacity and different roles as nurturers have turned them into the main practitioners of these abilities/ethics. In spite of the criticism both Gilligan and Chodorow have received,31 I consider theirs is groundbreaking work documenting the dialogics of the many points of view on women’s questions. Leaving aside the corroboration of the notion that women are the most relational, I would like to suggest the maternal as a model for (all of) us to practice an ethic of care and to perform our relational abilities, in order to move beyond hierarchical relations. The hope is that both women and men can become self-others, in the sense that we can develop an ability to have relations of difference, e.g. to treat the other as both ‘equal’ and ‘different,’ in the Todorovian sense (see chapter “The Realist-Gothic”). “Annunciation”’s gendered ‘chronotope of gestation’ certifies that hope and, at the same time, subverts patriarchal 30 Feminist dialogicians have already pointed out a link between standpoint theory and Bakhtin (cf. Bauer & McKinstry 2-3). 31 For criticism of Gilligan, refer to Heyes, Koehn, Tronto. As for Chodorow, check the debate among herself and others (Lorber et al). For the problematic of a Chodorowian analysis of an African context, see Oyewumi.

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narratives on the “feminine.” It should be stressed that gender is not only a place of oppression but also a place of resistance and creative work (hooks 2000). I will now focus on the relational abilities that can be observed in pregnancy and other forms of Nature, and on their consequences in the creation of and care for a more ethical world. I will start with the detailed description of the pear tree’s pattern: The leaves twirl and twirl all over the tree... Far below... runs the trunk; and invisible, spiraling downward and outward... lie the roots. I can see it spiraling upward... its stem straight, and from it, spiraling the branches... and from the spiraling branches... the forked stems, and from the stems twirling... the tinier stems holding... the half-curled pear leaves. (131)

As I have tried to imitate in this chapter, the narrator introduces us to the pear tree in a slow, extremely respectful way. In this sense, her attitude toward It is close to Buddha’s while he was contemplating a flower (Irigaray 1993, 24-25). A paragraph later, the female narrator says: “the pear tree from above looks as if it had been shot instantaneously from the ground... My child when grown can be looked at in this way as if it suddenly existed... but I know the slow time of the making. The pear tree knows” (“Annunciation” 131, italics mine). Theorists of feminine écriture have also expressed their rejection of the patriarchal myth of the motherless hero, the uprooted ego of Western theory. It seems that, in order to approach others ethically, we have to start by changing our ways of seeing. By a close observation of the tree, we can see how it comes “from” the roots, the branches “from” the stem, the leaves “from” the branches, and so forth. Besides the pregnant woman, it seems Nature also provides us with the ideal for ethical relations, showing a dependence that, instead of being a shame, is simply what sustains life. Besides the gender-genre connection detailed above, the circling pattern is as well an alternative to the status quo. Le Sueur herself proposed that a self-consciousness of life as circle would even lead us toward ecology (cf. Schleuning 1983). Both in maternity and in the pear tree, we may find nurturing, (close) relation and difference. We depend on others from the moment we are born, start to speak, and keep on forming ourselves as persons. Cixous reminds us that “we have been caught up in citation ever since we said the first words mama or papa” (1996, 343). Bakhtin also rejects the mere individuality of human beings, therefore questioning the boundaries of a (non-sufficient) self that is always dependent on the other(s): “To be means to be for another, and through the other for oneself. A person has no sovereign internal territory, [s]he is always on the boundary; looking inside h[er]self, [s]he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another” (PDP 287). This way of thinking of “identity” supports my previous suggestion of a new label, identity-alterity. As I have stressed, through the gendered ‘chronotope of pregnancy,’ the protagonist becomes conscious of the important presence of the others, such as Nature. When she looks at the mountains, she realizes that their “bony skeleton... [is] like the skeleton of the world... [and of her] child too” (“Annunciation” 128). That is, human beings are not more important than (the rest of) Nature. That is why she listens to the tree’s voice and, by doing so, turns It into a speaking subject: its “leaves are the lips of the tree... or they move like many tongues. The fruit of the tree... has been a round speech, speaking in full tongue” (131). The heroine is a speaking subject that also listens. Therein, she is a really dialogic subject, who must not only talk but listen too: “[a]nd I listen through the slow hours. I listen to the whispering of the pear tree, speaking to me, speaking to me” (132). The tree tells her about “how to round a fruit,” and more:

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If the pears were still hanging on it each would be alone and separate with a kind of bloom upon it. Such a bloom is upon me at this moment. Is it possible that everyone, Mrs. Mason... the woman next door, the girls downstairs, all in this dead house have hung at one time, each separate in a mist and bloom upon some invisible tree? (126)

Even if the passage could be read as essentializing this chronotopic experience as female, she later asserts: “[i]t seems possible to me that perhaps all people at some time feel this, round and full” (129). This corroborates the idea that Nature and maternity are models to be followed by women and men in the search for a new ethics of care. Both feminist dialogics and feminine writing struggle to enter into a dialogue with the “others,” those erased from (any) historical discourse. And one of these “others” is certainly the mother. The dying old woman of “Annunciation,” used to be a “housemaid” that spent “all her life tending other people’s children” (125) and now “nobody comes to see” her. The protagonist herself reckons that it is hard to speak with this woman—because she is so sick or is isolated/has isolated herself? Again, to criticize Chodorow and Gilligan, we might question the idea that women qua women have unlimited dialogic/relational powers.32 Fortunately, we get to know about another (future) mother even though she cannot talk with her child’s father. It is true that her husband is angry and even ashamed about her pregnancy, for instance, her vomiting in the street (126). But it is also true that she imagines that her “child... [comes] from a far seed blowing from last year’s rich and revolutionary dead” (131). Perhaps only a metaphor, this thought makes us suspect whether her child’s father is another lover unspoken of in the story.33 In any case, her wild thought evidences another triumph of life over death. We just know that Karl is her husband and the man that has been with her for the longest time (or, at least, the story time). Unfortunately, her sad circumstances lead her to forget completely the (supposed) biological father of the child— just biological because he never helps her emotionally and advises her to have an abortion. Of course, in an ideal dialogical situation, both mother and father should be enjoying the ‘pregnancy chronotope,’ which is impossible in this case given Karl’s dislike of pregnancy and childbirth. With both partners enjoying a chrono-tope of gestation, one would approach the ideal dialogue described by Bakhtin: “To be means to communicate dialogically... A single voice ends nothing and resolves nothing. Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence” (PDP 252). As previously advanced, such a dialogue only takes place in the genre structure of the text, which is both dialogical and feminine. For the philosophers of feminine writing, “we do not come from one: we are engendered by two” (Irigaray 1996, 40). Following the Irigarayan line, “Annunciation” seems to search for a future chrono-tope of shared parenthood but it fails to show reproduction, love, desire as being “intersubjective” (28). But also ideally, dialogical (and intersubjective) situations are those shared by (speaking) subjects, a title some women have not been awarded yet. Therefore, due to the heroine’s self unfolding through writing, listening, and the other imagined(?) relations, she is able to become a subject for herself. In this way, she incarnates the hope for a dialogical and ethical future.34 32 It could be argued that the whole literary space of Winter Prairie Woman was dedicated to the dying housemaid of “Annunciation.” The protagonist of this novella(?) is a dying woman farmer, who used to act as midwife, and spends the whole story-time remembering her past. 33 Le Sueur herself never revealed the name(s) of her two daughters’ father(s) (Kennedy 142). 34 On the impossibility of ethics without feminism, see Amorós (1985).

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Le Sueur’s reliance on the manifestations of Nature and women’s nature obeys also other purposes, such as offering a positive confident outlook, given the “negativism of the ‘lost generation’” (Roberts 1996, 53), and making other (strictly) political statements. The narrative agent had already told us, “[m]any people besides Karl are out of work... People are ready to flower and they cannot” (124), encapsulating her economic critique in Nature imagery. But we do not find here the pessimistic sense of fragmentation and loneliness of many Modernist male(-authored) texts. If William Carlos William’s dislike for “The Waste Land” is well-known, Le Sueur confessed: “I consider the darkest time of my life in ’23 when T.S. Eliot published ‘The Wasteland’; ‘The Wasteland’ is about death... straw men, going out with a whimper... a terrible influence” (quoted by Gelfant, 78). In a recorded interview, she declared that “that poem set a very terrible deadly thing in American literature because generations of writers tried to follow that despair” (Cuomo). Furthermore, Le Sueur thought that despair was “a political plan” in itself. Throughout her interview with Joe Cuomo, she gives several examples of such a plan: only some writers were given places in colleges and some of them were also being used as “mask[s] for Imperialism” such as Pound. In general, she insists that the plan was to “prepar[e] American people for Fascism” (Cuomo). She explains that “it’s very important to make people feel hopeless, no use,” to make them think that their enemy is too “big,” something feminists know very well. She adds amid laughter: “what better could prepare you for the neutron bomb... to be joyfully exterminated... and leave your property behind?” (Cuomo, ellipsis in the original) She continues with the comment that, in the 1930s, socialist writers were made fun of “because they were hopeful.” In Le Sueur’s opinion, it was a matter of whether you wrote about “the corpse” or about “the new birth.” Eliot was trying to “convert you to the whimper” and, in the “Proletarian Conversion School,” despair was converted into hope. In her “Origins of Corn,” we read: I speak to you from the shuck... Snipers, atomic bomb droppers divide the seed of love. It is they announce a crisis of energy. The crisis is their robbery... Hear the councils of the corn around the atomic blast. Hear the hosannas of the communal green... Guard the democratic corn... My hungered people come home to the cob, to the stalk, home root to great council of cyclonic love, defying Strontium winds, purifying poisons in the ovarian grace and the joyful benediction of sperm. (258-259)

In Hindu philosophy, Kali and Shiva represent creation and destruction respectively. As Le Sueur predicted, the actual world seems to be going toward destruction. Are we as conscious of this as she was? And yet hope may lie in the cyclic pattern of Nature, as “Spring always c[o]me[s]” (Winter 16), which can restore ecological equilibrium—even though we might not be here then. Recent interpretations of Bakhtin consider his thought deeply ecological—cf. Murphy. As mentioned above, his account of the Rabelaisian chronotope is also critical of the loss of the link between humans and Nature. Throughout her fiction, Le Sueur’s recurrence to the agricultural myths of the “feminine” fulfil a strategic function in a hopeful quest for people’s rebirth in communion with Nature. In “Annunciation,” the woman experiencing the gendered ‘chronotope of gestation’ realizes her links not only with Nature but with other people in a very profound and revolutionary way: I have been sitting here and it seems as if the wooden houses around me had become like husks that suddenly... began to swarm with [the] livening seed [of revolution]. The house across becomes a fermenting seed alive with its own movements. Everything seems to be moving along a curve of creation... The people coming and going seem to hang on the tree of life, each blossoming from himself...

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The many houses have become like an orchard blooming soundlessly. The many people have become like fruits to me, the young girl... the young man... the mother, all are shaking with their inward blossoming... moving along a future curve. (129-130, my italics)

This movement toward a “future curve” brings to mind the periodical of social(ist) ideology Left Curve. In any case, the excerpt testifies to the writer’s hope in a leftist revolution, a change that would transform the obscure lives of the dominated (“blossoming” appears twice). She suggests human beings are able to follow Nature’s ethical example and celebrates it. During the protagonist’s chronotopic state, she comprehends that her pregnancy symbolizes “the kind of spring there should be in the world,” and demands “a deep rebellion” (130 & 131). It appears that pregnancy constitutes a crucial gendered chronotope to write upon, or to be observed in some detailed way, as one can learn from it—for example, how to construct a more dialogic relational world. While gendering a moment in the natural process, (this new) Mary imagines a “time when the doors will close again, the sprouting will be gone... and the wondrous opening out of everything will be gone. I will be only myself” (130). The story’s ending, with the image of the pear tree “falling... into the earth” (132), has traditionally been read to represent something tragic—e.g. Coiner 1995. However, defeat and Le Sueur do not go hand in hand, “for the only dead are those who do not have the future in them” (“Dead” 130). The partly melancholic tone is characteristic of her fiction. The question is that the author is talking about the problems of a very poor woman and is also trying to move the reader to certain actions—social, political and ecological, on the whole. After all, “Annunciation” contains the bit of didactic advice required of class-conscious texts. Therefore, I would like to suggest a different interpretation of the ending. The many elements falling (leaves, haze) are also related to the story’s season, fall, a time of harvest and recollection. Previously, the heroine had compared herself with a tree and with “a wheat stalk... waiting for the reaper” (130). After (approximately) five more months, the protagonist will have her baby, with the consequent ending of the ‘pregnancy chronotope.’ A time ends, another one begins, and her child is the hope. In his study on the chronotope, Bakhtin wrote: “In the present work we will not consider the complex problem of the listener-reader, h[er] chronotopic situation and h[er] role in renewing the work of art (h[er] role in the process of the work’s life); we will point out merely that every literary work faces outward away from itself, toward the listener-reader, and to a certain extent thus anticipates possible reactions to itself” (FTC 257). Firstly, being historical, chronotopes “change over time in response to the current needs” (Morson & Emerson 369). This could explain that I (and not Bakhtin) can write on the gendered ‘chronotope of pregnancy,’ given my existence in another (feminist) chronotope. Furthermore, for Bakhtin, the greatness of a work of art does not depend on its inclusion in/exclusion from the canon but on its life in Great Time. That is, different readers in different chrono-topes will reaccentuate the text, enriching it with new meanings, which facilitates the dialogue among periods and also among cultures (FTC 254). Secondly, it seems to me that the ideal chronotopic reader of Le Sueur’s text is one that really listens to her proposals, incarnating in some way her and her protagonist’s hope. As in the case of Gilman commented in the previous section, we are expected to learn something from the text and also to be responsive toward it. Therefore, I am inclined to suggest the ‘annunciation’ of the (future) collective revolution the author would have wanted. As in Bakhtin’s novel, “there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found” (E&N 37). “Annunciation” functions as an example of a short-story with 67

novelistic qualities (critical, prosaic, among others). Such qualities emphasize the need for a future chronotope of emancipation. Before dealing with the conclusions of this chapter, I would like to propose the Bakhtinian chronotope as a metaphorical ‘pause’ within dialogics. Far from being an aside, this idea is present in my close reading of Le Sueur’s text: e.g. ‘pausing’ to rethink women’s problems, to rethink the Western conception of the self and the body, and so on. It seems that Bakhtin’s chapter on the chronotope has been considered a ‘pause’ in itself, given its contrasts, illustrations and digressions (Morson & Emerson 376). Le Sueur’s story is also a sketch/reflection/pause that ponders over gestation, creating its own chronotope. In academic circles, dialogics is colloquially defined as “dialectics without teleology.” That is, dialogics is a never-ending process that must be striven for constantly. Though I agree with this, I would suggest that there can be a teleology in a light sense (or a pause) in Bakhtin’s writings, such as with the emancipation of the subaltern classes. For a feminist critic, the ‘pause’ in question would bring about the end of women’s subordination. Furthermore, from a feminist dialogical perspective, gendered chronotopes can provide writer and reader with a metaphorical ‘pause’ in which to criticize and reflect—e.g. how are women’s lives different from men’s? And from other women’s? How have women been represented in literature? Above I claimed the importance of observing/writing on the ‘pregnancy chronotope.’ Concentrating on her pregnancy helps “Annunciation”’s protagonist-narrator to overcome her difficult situation and to move beyond the Depression of her time. Nowadays, many middle- and working-class women professionals have no time to stop/pause and reflect upon their pregnancies. How does contemporary Western society treat pregnancy and childbirth? Usually as an ordeal women are supposed to endure with the sole help of a patriarchally informed medicine, for which the model of the human body is male! It is necessary to rethink pregnancy and motherhood, for instance, in order to consider pregnant women’s rights and needs: healthy diet and way of life, leaves from work whenever necessary (to release stress), free personal medical and therapeutic assistance (e.g. prenatal exercises), free access to professionals that provide alternatives (such as childbirth in water), etc. Le Sueur’s new Mary has hope for bringing her child into a better world—who would like to bring children into a masculinist society where females may suffer as much as the protagonist of “Yellow” or even more? ‘Pausing’ to reflect on these female questions is part of the feminist chrono-tope this short-story aspires to. Hence its didactic qualities, which the reader is expected to respond to. In this chapter, I have discussed (pregnancy as) a gendered chronotope that provides a short-story, “Annunciation,” with feminine dialogical characteristics. Le Sueur’s dialogical ‘feminine’ proposal includes a particularly democratic feminine style, which tries to approach all readers, a rewriting of the patriarchal symbolic (e.g. of gender and genre), and a feminine content that goes beyond the female experience of pregnancy to discuss the social realities affecting women (such as poverty). As I have underlined above, dialogics is also interested in approaching the “others” (the body, the working class) and in criticizing the social conditions of their lives, which constitutes the social-critical role of the novel and the short-story. The new concept of the self-other observable through the ‘pregnancy chronotope’ has connections with Buddhist philosophy, Socialist and French feminism, and Bakhtinian conceptions of (non-)identity among other questions. These other ways of seeing form part of the polyglossia that masculinism, capitalism and other forms of cultural 68

imperialism have tried to eliminate. “Annunciation” also promotes the hope of banishing hierarchical systems (class, gender), oppressive beliefs (rationalism), and of changing patterns (industrialism by ecology) in order to make a more inhabitable world. A world of relational identities may lead us to the practice of an ethics of care, for ourselves and for Nature. The story’s theme poses a challenge to both dialogical and socialist theories as well (Marx). Bakhtin himself has been accused by feminists of using the images of pregnancy and the womb in a typically patriarchal and derogatory manner (e.g. O’Connor). If he recreated the centrifugal force of Rabelais’s “unofficial side of male speech” (FTC 238), he did not say a word about the centrifugal side of female speech, such as gossip. Finding parallelisms between “a good story [teller]” and “a good gossip,” though seemingly Bakhtinian, is a Le Sueurian initiative (Worker 2). Bakhtin’s dialogism is not as thoroughgoing as it might seem. Class-conscious, pro-dialogics and feminist, Le Sueur would never experiment with a form just for (the) form’s sake itself. In this story, her strategic use of feminine writing evidences its dialogical and feminist possibilities. With Bakhtin, she would agree that “[i]t is necessary to destroy and rebuild the entire false picture of the world” (FTC 169). Finally, though as a starting point, “Annunciation” helps us to (re)create the much needed and longed for feminine imaginary.

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PART TWO

THE NOVEL

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Deconstructing Dialogics: Gender and Genre in Herland-Ourland

Look at me!... I could have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?... I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?”

In its 1979 edition, Herland was subtitled “A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel.” This cataloguing of the genre, as a ‘novel plus adjective(s),’ fits in with my decision to consider the hybridity of certain feminist experiments on genre (both a utopia and a novel). The labelling also differs from some critics’ preference for naming the text simply ‘utopia’ (e.g. Smith) and provokes questions regarding its genre status. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland appeared for the first time in 1915, serialized in her periodical The Forerunner. The following year, and in the same format, Gilman published With Her in Ourland or the Sequel to Herland, indicating that both texts are part of a saga. That critics have usually read/written on Herland alone is part of the reason why they have not fully realized its novelistic features (e.g. Showalter 1988). In this chapter, I will try to demonstrate that, from a Bakhtinian perspective, the Herland-Ourland saga is both a novel and not a novel (in two parts). This deconstructive argument of the novel as anti-genre is, in fact, Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s own conceptualization of it in “Epic and the Novel.”1 I will read Herland-Ourland through the lenses of Bakhtinian dialogics in order to prove that it belongs to the (non-)genre novel. By simultaneously applying chronotopic and discourse-oriented readings, I will show that the saga can be both a novel and not a novel. The title of the chapter refers to the fact that a dual chronotope-discourse reading shows that the novel is a genre that erases itself or that deconstructs the notion of literary genre. Perhaps even before writing on the chronotope and on (novelistic) discourse, Bakhtin already had in mind the novel as a (self-)deconstructive genre.2 I have come to this conclusion only after putting the two analyses into practice together. I hope, then, that my 1

“Epic and the Novel” (E&N) corresponds to Bakhtin’s period IIIb (Morson & Emerson 66). As stated elsewhere, my work deals mainly with period IIIa. Nevertheless, in this chapter, I will include E&N in order to explain Bakhtin’s and my own deconstructive proposal of the novel as a genre(?) that erases itself. 2 It is unclear whether Bakhtin wrote “Epic and the Novel” before or after “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope” (FTC) and “Discourse in the Novel” (DIN). Even so, Michael Holquist (editor) situates E&N as the first chapter of his Dialogic Imagination.

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contribution serves as practical evidence of the Bakhtinian deconstructive concept of the novel. At the same time, I will be deconstructing his conceptualization, by showing the probable steps through which he arrived at that conclusion. Also as indicated by the title, I will ponder the connections between gender and genre, two terms that have a common linguistic origin—the Latin genus that means “kind/class.” This section is subdivided into three subsections. First of all, given the chapter’s focus on the ‘novel.’ I will discuss Bakhtin’s and Gilman’s conceptions of the novel from a dialogic and feminist perspective. Apart from Gilman’s, some feminists’ theory and practice of art as a form of didacticism have posited problems for contemporary readings. Therefore, I will comment in depth on the links between dialogics, feminism, authorial intention and having an influence on readers and on the future. The opening section is followed by two analytical studies, one on the ‘chronotope(s)’ and another on the ‘discourse(s)’ of Herland-Ourland. According to the dialogical perspective, the text will be shown to work in a particular context, with concrete spatial-temporal conditions, in which it appropriately tries to exert its influence (Medvedev & Bakhtin 132). Dialogics also maintains that genres are ‘socio-ideological’ constructs, carriers of systems of ideas and meanings. Thus, I will evaluate the author’s feminist transformation of certain literary conventions, such as genre, subject-matter, story, and others, as an attempt to challenge the very ideological conventions from which they stem. It is necessary to point out that, in his vast oeuvre, Bakhtin does not include any novel written by a woman writer, a fact that has been denounced repeatedly not only by women critics (cf. Booth). Consequently, he does not examine any literary device that might concern women either (e.g. female characters). As I will show, Gilman’s feminist intentions and vision of the world led her to invent new genres (such as “‘visionary realism,’” Kessler 1995, 81), new and gendered chronotopes (the “chronotope of rape”), new characters (the ‘dialogic man’), to name just a few. Finally, as if it were a dialogue between the two thinkers, not only will Bakhtin’s ideas be employed to illuminate Gilman’s but also her contributions to the novel will be shown to criticize and extend Bakhtin’s. Bakhtin, Gilman, Feminism and the Novel In “Epic and the Novel,” Bakhtin explains the emergence of the novel in contrast with epic, thus setting up a binary opposition.3 These are some of the distinctive peculiarities he finds in the novel’s appearance in opposition to epic: irony (7), polyglossia (12), “the common people’s creative culture of laughter” and profanation (20), the “new attitude toward the world” (21), “contemporary reality” as “subject[-matter]” (22), the (new) author-hero relation (27-28), the (new) importance of the plot and of the hero (32-33), etc. Bakhtin’s writings do not only offer a deconstructive conception of the novel but the features he ascribes to it also contradict one another: “the novel is a prose genre (although there are excellent novels in verse)” (9). Another strategy he uses to avoid a (traditional) label is the provision of a list of negative qualities: the novel should not be poetic, the hero 3 Due to his preference for the (realist) novel, Bakhtin has been accused of creating a binary opposition between the novel and other genres (Ping-hui, Wise). Recent publications argue for the dialogic qualities of (other) genres beyond the novel: poetry (Arnold, Gibson), drama (Wise), performance art (Sabatini), cybergenres (Breure), and so forth.

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should not be heroic and “should not be portrayed as... [a] completed and unchanging person” (10). Somewhat contradictorily, in spite of the set of traits cited above, the Russian philologist insists that there can be no genre definition of the novel since its characteristics cannot be fixed and change over time (6). Antiquity’s taxonomical division of genres into static entities had already been questioned during the Romantic period (Breure). Bakhtin would certainly agree with the Romantics in ascribing to a dynamic historical conception of genres. “Epic and the Novel” starts with the novel’s lack of definition, as it has not entered the organic whole called Literature and is still a “developing genre” (4). Nevertheless, the novel fights for its own hegemony in literature and, when it becomes dominant, “all the remaining genres are to a lesser or greater extent novelized” (5). Being a fluid genre(?), the novel’s influence upon other genres “inserts into [them] an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with the unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (7). This phenomenon could be used to argue that Herland is a novelized utopia, with Ourland being a novelized “anti-utopi[a]” (Kessler 1995, 76), as we will see. “Epic and the Novel” ends with the assertion that “[t]he novel... has no canon... It is... not canonic” (39), and that the novelization of other genres does not imply their subjection but “their liberation from all that serves as a brake in their unique development.” That might be the reason why, till the appearance of the novel, there was nothing to add to Aristotle’s Poetics (8). It seems that, in the Bakhtinian universe, ascriptions to “genre” have a hierarchical character. Another link between gender and genre beyond their etymology is that “[h]ierarchies, classifications, and categories are fundamental characteristics of both” (Gygax 1). Unamenable to categorization, the Bakhtinian novel has a special relation to genre and works as a centrifugal force that unmasks the taxonomical character of genre (formation). Besides, the novel works as a decentralizing force in the process of linguistic/literary stratification, whereas (the other) genres are centripetal, centralizing forces. Let me now examine other novelistic aspects such as ‘presentness,’ influence on the future and authorial intention. Probably the most vital element in the emergence of the novel is the change in the word/change in the world. Bakhtin explains these changes as follows: The temporal model of the world changes radically: it becomes a world where there is no first word (no ideal word), and the final word has not yet been spoken. For the first time in artistic-historical consciousness, time and the world become historical: they unfold... as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all embracing and uncompleted process... Through contact with the present, an object is attracted to the incomplete process of a world in-the-making, and is stamped with the seal of [the] inconclusiveness... [of the] future. And in this inconclusive context all the semantic stability of the object is lost; its sense and significance are renewed and grow as the text continues to unfold. (30, italics mine)

At this stage, one can affirm that the novel owes its cannibalistic and evolutionary vitality to heteroglossia, the condition that propitiates dialogism or the struggle of meanings against one another. Therefore, I read the previous excerpt as providing an opening for all oppressed people’s narratives/definitions to flourish, for instance, as Literature. Bakhtin even makes a call for justice insisting, as before, on the importance of the present and the future: “Prophecy is characteristic for the epic, prediction for the novel. Epic prophecy is realized wholly within the limits of the absolute past... it does not touch the reader and his real time. The novel might wish to... predict facts... and influence... the future of the author

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and [her] readers. But the novel has a new... problematicalness:... an eternal re-thinking and re-evaluating... The ‘modernity’ of the novel... verges on an unjust evaluation of times...” (31, emphasis added). As stated in “The Realist-Gothic: Dialogics and Subjectivity in ‘The Yellow(-)Wall Paper,” the novel is the genre(?) of the present time and is able to put forward a critique of its contemporary society. For instance, in another of his writings, we read: “one of the most basic tasks for the novel [is] the laying-bare of any sort of conventionality... of all that is... falsely stereotyped in human relationships” (FTC 162). All things considered, one can understand why women writers were so keen on writing novels—e.g. to redefine themselves/their environment. Josephine Donovan has underlined women writers’ and Bakhtin’s penchant for the irony of the novel as a critical weapon 1991, 2000). As we will see, Gilman makes use of the novel’s heavy artillery to attack the patriarchal conventions of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America—e.g. the distinction between supposedly “feminine” and “masculine” modes of behaviour. But Bakhtin also insists on the novel’s intimate relation with the future, upon which it seeks to have an “influence.” Perhaps the (non-genre) novel is closer to utopia than the Russian thinker explicitly points out—e.g. one of the novel’s antecedents, the Menippean satire, had “an intense [utopian] spirit of inquiry” (E&N 26).4 As the modern qualities he sees in novel(ized genre)s, the purpose and function within a particular time(-space) are characteristics of utopia too. Furthermore, for utopia the world is not finished yet and it is possible to alter the readers in order to attain a historical change. Moreover, great writers must be utopian, since they “have two sorts of intention, the expression of specific meanings and the creation of potentials” (Morson 186). In this same line, Seyla Benhabib has suggested that the feminist contribution to theory is two-sided, in that it develops critiques that are both ‘explanatory-diagnostic’ and ‘anticipatory utopian’ (1990, 126). Possibly a ‘feminist utopian novel,’ the Herland-Ourland saga also contains a dialogue with the past (literary genres),5 a critique of the present (gender subordination), and a proposal for the future. If Bakhtin had studied utopia(n novel)s, he would probably have come up with a ‘chronotope of estrangement,’ which is crucial for this genre, and how it can alter other chronotopes through dialogic relations. Furthermore, if he had considered the analytical tool of ‘gender,’ he might have discovered the ‘gendered chronotopes.’ Following “Epic and the Novel,” one would say that, with canonization, certain genres, together with authors and movements, underwent a process of ‘epicization’ in literary history and certain ‘times’ were considered to be more heroic than others. This epicoriented process should have ended with the advent of Post-Colonial and Feminist criticism. For Bakhtin, the novel is the daughter of the spirit of carnival and thus it belongs to the ‘low genres’ (E&N 24, 36-37).6 In his distinction between the ‘high’ and the ‘low,’ Bakhtin was undoubtedly able to detect the existing hierarchies. The Russian philologist would certainly agree with many feminist critics’ antagonism to a canon that has always ignored popular literature (Felski, Tompkins). Jane Tompkins has lamented the fact that

4

Apparently, Bakhtin was not a keen reader of utopias. Gary Saul Morson has commented on his dislike for this genre given “[t]he Russian radical tradition... [and] its willingness to sacrifice the people of the present in the name of a great utopian future” (182). 5 In Morson’s opinion, an inconsistency in Bakhtin’s theorization is that “the novel... turned out to be the genre best able to represent the past” (183). 6 The culture of carnival is presided by laughter—a central element that facilitated the development of the novel (e.g. PND 50-51, R&W 59-144)—, for instance, by laughing at the principles imposed by an external Authority.

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twentieth-century critics have taught us to equate popularity with “womanly inferiority” (123), and has described the ‘binary-philia’ of so-called intellectual circles: A long tradition of academic parochialism has enforced this sort of discourse through a series of cultural contrasts [or binary oppositions]: light ‘feminine’ novels vs. toughminded intellectual treatises; domestic ‘chattiness’ vs. serious thinking; and summarily, the ‘damned mob of scribbling women’ vs. a few giant [male] intellects, unappreciated and misunderstood in their time, struggling manfully against a flood of [feminine] rubbish. (125)

The previous paragraph shares the anti-hierarchical attitude of dialogical feminism (Bauer & McKinstry 3). After its rescue from oblivion during the revival of the Second Feminist Wave, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” was identified as one of the first texts of American Modernism (DeKoven), and included in the canon of Literature. One might wonder why Herland-Ourland has not been distinguished with such honour. Is it because its markedly social spirit is closer to the texts typically labelled antimodernist? Perhaps some answers to these questions lie in Tompkins’s study, which seems to be written within a Bakhtinian vein of heteroglossia. First, Tompkins argues that in order to understand the value of a literary work, it is necessary to know its context (xiv): the cultural conditions that generated it, and how it affected its readers. Therefore, her research appears as an attempt to redefine literature and its theory/criticism, “for it sees literary texts not as works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms, but as attempts to redefine social order” (xi). Second, she proves that “literature” and “literary value” are categories whose meanings change over time, as evidenced by the contents of literary anthologies: “works of art are not selected according to any unalterable standard, but that their very essence is always changing in accordance with the systems of description and evaluation that are in force” (147).7 This argument on the “cultural work” of texts that attempt to change the(ir) social order has also been employed differently by several (feminist) critics— Beer, Felski, Howard, Kessler. Perhaps, as Tompkins maintains, our literary taste is so infected by the canonical version of Modernism that we can no longer really comprehend former/non-modernist literature. In Tompkins’s words, the main problem is that [i]n modernist thinking, literature... has no designs on the world. It does not attempt to change things, but merely to represent them, and it does so in a specifically literary language whose claim to value lies in its uniqueness. Consequently, works whose stated purpose is to influence the course of history, and which therefore employ a language that is not only not unique but accessible to everyone, do not qualify as works of art. (125)

One might affirm that those “designs on the world,” or the attempts to redefine the symbolic order with all its socio-political consequences, have been the causes of the feminist movement from the start. As we will see, although written in the Modernist period, Herland-Ourland does not have the New Critically defined modernist qualities. No doubt Charlotte Perkins Gilman employed other “designs” to alter her readers’ consciousnesses. Furthermore, in order to reach a larger reading audience, she expressed herself in plain accessible terms. 7 If “Yellow” was included in the canon fairly recently, Meridel Le Sueur’s “Annunciation” has just been anthologized by Heath. I would like to say that, if Le Sueur’s story has received such honour, it is because its artistic value is extraordinary. Nevertheless, some details must be added to that argument, such as, that the General Editor (Paul Lauter) is one of the most outstanding specialists in class-conscious literature in the United States.

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Like nominally realist authors, Gilman believed that art should represent reality. She was especially interested in representing women and considered that “[f]iction, under our androcentric culture, ha[d] not given any true picture of woman’s life, very little of human life, and a disproportioned section of man’s life” (“Masculine” 122). It is necessary to add here that, in the fin-de-siècle, women writers were “not us[ing] the conventions of realism... [or] of domestic realism” (Ardis 116)—I will evaluate her transformations of realism below. Furthermore, Gilman criticized the erasure of women’s existence, given that literature “[did] not [portray] the way women lived” (“Masculine” 117), an aspect of artistic historical discourse Bakhtin does not point out (e.g. E&N 30-31). Until Post-Modernism, literature and history have been catalogued as two different genres. It seems that, ahead of their times, Bakhtin and Gilman saw a clear connection between them. For Bakhtin, “literary scholarship should establish closer links with the history of culture” (RTQ 2). For Gilman, “[t]hrough [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future” (“Masculine” 117). In “Epic and the Novel,” among the novel’s elements are the genre’s “intention” and wish to “influence” the audience or attain a historical change (3031). Consciousness-raising has been a characteristic feminist initiative, which accounts for (feminist) women writers’ attraction to the novel. After Foucault and Barthes proclaimed the ‘death of the author,’ feminist dialogicians have reclaimed an interest in authorial intention for reasons such as examining how (women) writers transform discourses “in a potentially subversive way” and constructing a “feminist literary history” (Howard 2 & 10). The concern with having an intention and exerting an influence upon the readers brings back the didactic aim beloved by much of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century literature and detested by later currents. In this respect, according to Janet Beer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton had a “clear and cogent sense of artistic purpose... All three writers stretched and manipulated generic conventions and boundaries... to accommodate their particular [feminist] thematic” (5-6). In November 1898, the then divorced Charlotte Perkins (formerly Stetson) wrote a letter to her fiancée, Houghton Gilman, in which she expressed her wish to write with a purpose. She told him that she wanted to write “a book of stories to carry on [her] work from its plane of mere argument into the popular imagination” (quoted by Beer, 18). Beer understands this comment as Gilman’s wish to alter “her readers’ perception of their everyday world” (19). The British scholar has further attacked the “critical truism” that the only true work of art Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote was “The Yellow Wallpaper”‘: I would argue that Gilman’s moral tales[,]... including “The Yellow Wallpaper,”... are all the more interesting for being written with a purpose and it is this that should be at the forefront of any critical investigation of her work, not her failure to conceal her purpose... The didactic intent, inscribed as it is in the structure, language and theme... actually show[s] Gilman to be an expert manipulator of generic convention and form. (19, italics mine)

It is precisely Gilman’s inscription of feminist intentions with respect to gender, genre and other socio-literary conventions that I am most interested in studying in this chapter. As I have commented in “The Realist-Gothic: Dialogics and Subjectivity in ‘The Yellow(-)Wall Paper,” Gilman repeatedly stated that she always wrote ‘with a purpose,’ mainly understood as changing people’s minds with respect to women (Living, Man-Made, Moving). For instance, she declared that she had written “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” with the intention of abolishing the rest cure (“Why”). As a new manifestation of her wish to 78

alter her readers’ minds, in the last article Gilman published in her Forerunner, she compared her work with that of preachers (“Summary”)—as if continuing with the Beecher tradition. In fact, for the New Women writers, as Mary Hartley remarked, “[t]he Function of the Novel [was then] recognized as fully equal to those of the Pulpit and the Professional Chair” (quoted by Heilmann, New, 5). First, it seems that having a goal in mind was reason enough for Gilman not to apply the label “literature” to her own writings (“Apropos”). By doing so, she breaks with the prejudices with which readers may approach her, as genre expectations undoubtedly condition the meanings we assign texts. Second, it is vital to bear in mind that Gilman was a sociologist (see below), so a large part of her fiction can be read as fictionalized sociology and not “literature” in the strictest sense. A third reason why she denied the literary status of her works might be because “[a]ll previous literature ha[d] been androcentric; written by men for men” (“Coming” 125), and she wanted to change the way of writing/reading it. Furthermore, as for Bakhtin, for Gilman (literary) genres are ways of ‘seeing,’—meaning ‘conceptualizing/interpreting’—reality. She criticized the fact that, in the past, women’s “point of view” had been considered “limited” (“Masculine” 116), and that readers could just access to those events “worth recording, from a masculine point of view” (118, emphasis added). Thus, she wrote, “[n]ow we are beginning to look at [the world] as also a woman’s world” and “if art keeps pace with events, we are on the brink of a new literature” (“Coming” 125, italics mine). She believed that, in the fin-de-siècle, literature “[wa]s changing[,]” that “new fields [we]re opening” (“Masculine” 122). She defended a (new) literature that dealt with those woman-centred subjects previously garbled or ignored since, for example, “[o]f real motherhood... literature has said nothing” (“Coming” 126). The importance Gilman gave to the subject-matter led her to distinguish five woman-centred themes or “fields of fiction” still to be explored by literature (“Masculine” 123).8 We must remember that, in the Bakhtinian schema, “contemporary reality” as subject-matter is a prerequisite for the novel (E&N 22). And the issue of a female thematic for a feminist literature has recently been prioritized (Felski). Gilman advocated that women write this (new) kind of literature—for example, “that woman, as an artist, stud[ied] and wr[o]t[e] about children[,] using her special sympathy and knowledge to voice for the world” (“Coming” 127). The essentialist touch of her words would take one to think that only women writers can write about women. Certain critics have also argued for a woman’s ontology that directs (women) to a different epistemology or way of seeing the world. As Liz Stanley argues, “[t]he different ontology of male realists is most clearly reflected in their heroines’ subjectivity, which is either inaccessible or constructed through the male gaze” (quoted by Heilmann, New, 55). But Gilman goes further when she contends that “[w]e need wiser, more far-seeing treatment [of the female thematic]. We need to see... it is a far harder [question]” (“Coming” 129, my emphasis). It seems fair to say that she called women writers to exert that change in literature. Not a long time ago, Hélène Cixous encouraged women to “Write!” with similar ends (1997, 335). Gilman also wanted the new literature to be addressed to women readers: “the young woman reader... forms a large proportion of the reading public... Why does not the writer 8

Thus, she classified these fields of fiction, according to their subject-matter, as follows: (1) a young woman who chooses work instead of marriage, (2) a middle-aged woman who discovers she does not need more love but business, (3) “the inter-relation of women with women... that we never had... before” (“Masculine” 123), (4) “mothers and children... the... drama of the personal relationship,” and (5) “the full-grown woman, who faces... love with the high standards of conscious motherhood.”

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give her a true picture of what is going on[?]” (128-129). Lately the concept of Women’s Literature has also been (re)defined as literature for women (Pearce). In short, the American author advocated a “literature for the new woman” (“Coming” 131).9 Certainly, Herland-Ourland shares many characteristics of New Women’s writing—e.g. talkative heroines that defend their views in interminable verbal exchanges (Miller 19). Jane Elridge Miller has explained that New Women authors wrote “first and foremost purpose novels” and considered themselves more a social movement than a literary one (18). Although without academic training, in her time Gilman was considered and considered herself a sociologist (cf. Deegan), whose mentors had been the well-known sociologists Edward E. Ross and Lester F. Ward, the so-called father of Sociology (cf. Focking). Before being known as a fiction writer, Gilman acquired world-fame as an essayist with Women and Economics, which was translated into seven languages. Since she used literature as a channel to fictionalize (her) social critiques, Herland has been read as the comic version of her treatise on women’s economic situation (Peyser 1992)—a novelized treatise in the Bakhtinian sense. Furthermore, the ‘new realism’ or ‘new fiction’ were novels that dealt with women, relations between the sexes and that “offered a critical analysis of contemporary society” (Miller 14). Once again, I would like to stress that using literature as a device to put forward a critique of present society is one of the premises of the Bakhtinian novel. Furthermore, for the Bakhtin Circle, a poetics of literature should always be a ‘sociological poetics.’ Miller continues to give an account of the impact that the translations of the works of Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Tolstoy and Zola had upon English-speaking writers in the 1880s. In particular, the innovations of “naturalism—or realism, as it came to be called in England” (12)—were mainly “in terms of subject matter, social criticism, psychological insight and sexual frankness” (10). Since the requirements of realism—objectivity, lack of sentiment, etc—were all considered impossible for women writers, (male) writers—George Moore, George Gissing and others—started a campaign to achieve real “realism [or] to masculinize the British novel” (11), in order to distinguish between serious literature and the other/most popular fiction (16). According to Miller, the irony was that the novel became more and more ‘feminized’ while male “critics were dismayed by the sheer number of women realists[,]... refused to consider them as professionals... [and]... complained [of their] large sale figures” (17).10 A main characteristic of New Women’s writing was its emphasis on theme and their apparent lack of concern with style. For example, speaking through her autobiographical heroine, Sarah Grand declared: “[m]anner has always been less to me than matter... I pray [to have] books of good intention—never mind the style!” (quoted by Miller, 18). On a more general level, Josephine Donovan has characterized women writers’ use of a plain style in prose as reflecting “a political resistance to hierarchical subordination” (“Style” 87). Indeed, Gilman tried to be accessible to a large audience, not just to an elite, in order to reach (and teach) all of them. Her strategic choice of plain style, as well as her interest in

9 Unfortunately, it seems Gilman had a classist perception of the new women (readers): “Our newsstands are smothered with publications for women—so called—which are not truly for women at all, but only for dressmakers, cooks, nurses, houseservants, and those who need books on etiquette” (131). 10 Ann Heilmann coincides with Jane Elridge Miller that male writers envied their female counterparts for selling more than them (New 50).

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subject-matter, suits her purposes as a reformer. Describing the literary milieu in the United States, Christopher P. Wilson has another opinion on Gilman’s interests and choices: American popular tastes in the progressive era were dominated by ‘masculine’ naturalists like Jack London, Frank Norris and David Graham Phillips. In their own rebellion from the ‘feminized’... midVictorianism, these writers moved... by emphasizing a prose style that was ‘vigorous’ and topics that... appealed to ‘real men’... Although the era’s ‘naturalism’ posed as scientific realism, to Gilman it was brutal and misogynist. (279)

From a different perspective, Marsha A. Smith believes that Gilman may have purposefully changed her style of writing from “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” to Herland-Ourland given “the negative... responses to her short story” (123).11 It seems plausible that Gilman both included herself in the tradition of the New Women writers of the 1890s and resisted a phallocratic control of literature that supported elitism as well as derogatory representations of women. That she is writing from a New Woman’s ideology still in 1915-16 shows that her older peers’ petitions had not been really heard yet. As Miller has underlined, it appears that the real crisis of the 1890s was that “a literary breakdown seemed emblematic of a larger social breakdown: if literary divisions were destroyed [serious literature/popular literature], then gender and class divisions could also be leveled” (Miller 36). Referring to New Women’s writing, she comments that “there was indeed an intimate link between feminist challenges to the social order and artistic challenges to the literary tradition” (38)—other critics have also expressed a similar view, cf. Heilmann, New 66. It seems to me that women writers have been rewriting/interrogating Western tradition, beyond its literary genres, not only at the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century but for a long time. The Bakhtinian scholar Annie Cranny-Francis has concisely explained the importance of examining the imaginary-symbolic practice of genres for feminist criticism: [A] particular text is constructed in terms of one dominant genre... [T]hose genres are themselves constructed as a dialogue of literary conventions, which developed in a particular time and place, in a particular social formation; these conventions encode discourses constitutive of this social formation; changes to the conventions (and to their encoded discourses) are indicative of changes to the social formation (as is evident in the historical study of a particular genre), since the social formation is itself a construct or negotiation of many discourses (about gender, race, class, etc). (Cranny-Francis 206-207)

Thus, from a Bakhtinian perspective, genres are “socio-ideological” constructs (DIN repeated throughout). With Cranny-Francis, many critics have shared the view that feminist authors’ revision of literary conventions is also a revision of the ideology from which they stem (Cobley, Gygax, Harrison). I am using the word re-vision on purpose since, if Gilman’s realism is not like her male contemporaries,’ it is partly due to her feminist perspective. A particular way of seeing leads to a particular choice of literary genre/s, which suggests further connections between gender and genre. In the Herland-Ourland saga, Gilman incorporated several genres, in order to question their conventions/ideologies, in the fashion of the Bakhtinian novel, which “parodies other genres[;]... exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language;... squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accenting them” (E&N 5). In Herland-Ourland Gilman contributed to remake the utopian genre and the 11

For a comprehensive recollection of the reviews contemporary with “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper,” refer to Dock (102-115).

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special realism she had been practising since “Yellow.” Most critics agree that classical realism’s main goal is the conservation of the status quo. In contrast, Carol Farley Kessler has argued that Gilman “uses realism subversively... for effecting the ‘cultural work’ [i.e. redefining the social sphere] of her utopian fiction” (1994, 128-129). A style/genre like “realism,” susceptible of producing a naturalization of the state of affairs, cannot please a “‘Social inventor’” like Gilman (“Summary” 287). Therefore she would need to challenge its norms.12 In the words of Cranny-Francis: Socially committed writers have always used [fantastic] fiction to write about their own society in a way precluded by realist fiction, to construct a textual representation of a world in which the causal relationships of their own society (bourgeois, patriarchal, white supremacist) operate but in which that operation is not mystified or concealed by the ‘naturalization’ of particular power relations, subject positions or events (for example—men are naturally more powerful than women, women are naturally passive, women naturally want to be dominated by men). Instead these texts show patriarchal, bourgeois, white supremacist social practices in practice, denying a voice to those who are marginalized by those discourses... (194)13

Gilman had already resorted to a manifestation of the fantastic genre, the Gothic, in “Yellow.” Cranny-Francis has added that utopia, another form of the fantastic, is concerned with “the production of an activist reading position” (119). If utopia is interested in establishing a relationship with the audience, perhaps it could be considered a dialogicallyoriented genre. For feminist reformers, the question is to show the readers another feminist perspective of the world. Carol Farley Kessler has written on Gilman’s ‘progress toward utopia’ (1995), through nine short-stories and five utopian novels: What Diantha Did, Moving the Mountain, the fragmentary “A Woman’s Utopia” and, finally, HerlandOurland. In Gilman’s “Preface” to Moving, she placed her own work within the utopian tradition of Plato, More and Wells (37). Nevertheless she marks a difference between her proposal and theirs by calling her book “a short distance Utopia, a baby Utopia.” Perhaps this suggests the text is (just) a rewriting of utopia(?)/a novelized utopia, whose ‘short distance’ implies a double (Benhabibian) intention: both ‘explanatory-diagnostic’ and ‘anticipatory utopian.’ Herland-Ourland might be considered a very special utopia(?). First, unlike classical utopia it cannot be accused of being escapist with respect to the (male) world (Davis 23). Even if the country of Herland is peopled exclusively by women and receives men only after two thousand years (Herland 45), Herland suggests that women and men can coexist happily in a new world where women would no longer be disempowered, such as in a ‘Herland’ reformed with the inclusion of men.14 This ‘good place’ should perhaps be named “eutopia” (Kessler 1995, 7). Therefore, I have at least two reasons to disagree with Elaine Showalter, who considers Herland a separatist “Amazon utopia” (1989, 263): (1) it 12

Bakhtin did not see such naturalization in the realism of writers as Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais or Tolstoi. In fact, he argued that Dostoevsky invented the polyphonic novel (PDP). This suggests that not every realist’s writing is the same and that there are subversive forms of realism. 13 Bearing this in mind, in the section dedicated to discourse, I will assess whether Gilman was willing to give voice to all those who were officially marginalized in 1915-1916 such as Blacks, Jews, immigrants, and others. 14 A brief summary of the plot may throw some light here. This is the “Synopsis of Herland” written by Gilman and placed at the beginning of the sequel: “Three American young men discover a country inhabited solely by women, who were Parthenogenetic, and had borne only girl children for two thousand years; they marry three of the women. Two of the men and one woman leave the country of Herland to return to America; Jeff Margrave remaining with his wife, Celis, a willing citizen; Terry O. Nicholson being expelled for bad conduct; and Ellador electing to go with her husband, Vandyck Jennings” (Ourland 61).

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ends with one of the male characters (Jeff) staying in Herland and with the protagonists’ plans of communication between the utopian country and the rest of the world. (2) The text is the first part of a saga, followed by With Her in Ourland. Sequel to Herland, which must be read together to understand its projection beyond utopia. For instance, after travelling around Ourland (‘our’ patriarchal world), the protagonists (Ellador and Van) return to Herland in order to prepare its inhabitants for an intercultural exchange. Thus, if the first part of the novel ends with the word “Herland” (Herland 146), the second part ends with “us” (Ourland 193). Second, the saga does not coincide with the majority of utopias in lacking a theory of change (Davis 371; Showalter 1988, 192). Kessler has pointed out that “Gilman subscribes to a literature that can... enact social changes,... can convey alternative versions of human action” (1995, 6), in this sense she calls her utopian writings “pragmatopias,” a label coined by Riane Eisler (7). Again, one must read With Her in Ourland in order to obtain the keys of how to go from this (our) world to the desired one. Here we read that “Ellador was never satisfied merely to criticize; she must… plan some way out, some improvement” (Ourland 177). Therein, the heroine advances several recipes to improve Ourlandian society. Here is one of them: “Definite training in democratic thought, feeling and action, from infancy. An economic administration of common resources under which the home would cease to be a burden and become an unconscious source of happiness and comfort. And, of course, the socializing of home and industry” (135). Peter Fitting has underlined that 1970’s utopias also “addre[ss] the issue of how we got from here to there” (161). Certainly, Herland-Ourland foresees this change. Thus, third, Herland itself could only be placed next to modern utopias which, according to Elizabeth Handsot, are activist, try to incorporate a theory of change and have been designed to be performed (cf. Davis 370). Then, we should perhaps call it a “heterotopia,” borrowing the term from Tobin Siebers. The fourth aspect I want to point out is that utopia has been labelled a totalitarian genre, where the pluralism of values, participation and freedom do not exist, which implies the end of uncertainty, change of ideas, and so on (cf. Davis 367-373). It is precisely the conversations between the male and female characters that occur in this utopia(?) that softens its totalitarianism, or the search for a unique truth imposed by force on its participants. Also for Bakhtin, the dialogue on Truth turns it into “a truth that is an event,” encountered by at least two interlocutors (Sánchez-Mesa 45, my translation). In this utopia(?), there is an opening/novelization of the genre as characters and readers are invited to play with former discourses in what constitutes a carnivalesque destabilization of “truth”—especially of the institutionalized truth concerning “women.” In fact, from my point of view, the only feature shared by Herland-Ourland and traditional utopias is their marked didacticism, an important characteristic (here the fifth) of the genre (Russ 92). As we will see at great length, this feature mars the dialogical character of Gilman’s work. So far, the Herland-Ourland saga appears as a rewriting of both utopia and classical realism. The text is informed by a great variety of genres—utopia, New Women novel, love story, adventure novel, and sociological essay, to name a few—that are sometimes used in a parodic way and on other occasions to account for (social) heteroglossia. In fact, “one of the most basic and fundamental forms of incorporating... heteroglossia in the novel... [is through the] ‘incorporated genres’” (DIN 320). When commenting on the “development of European literature,” Bakhtin affirms that “carnivalization constantly assisted in the destruction of all barriers between genres” (PDP 134). In an appropriate simile, Bridget

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Bennet has suggested that just as Gilman’s interest in pockets articulates “the challenge to the boundaries of dress codes[,]... her appropriation of many forms of writing,... the romance, the quest narrative, the myth... [also] suggests her resistance to the constraints of writing boundaries” (40).15 Certainly, Gilman showed an opposition to sticking to a sole genre—“[fiction has] no limits but those of the author” (“Masculine” 118)—as well as to limiting the possibilities of gender. For Bakhtin, the novel’s dialogic status makes its (genre) definition a utopia, as it touches the limits of many genres—like the ‘utopian novel’ and the ‘realist Gothic.’ Hence his reflections on the ‘limits’ among classified kinds/genres: “the most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in the places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity” (RTQ 2). His preference for the novel took him to associate it with unofficial language/thought and to situate it in the boundary/‘zone of contact’ between literature and life (e.g. E&N 39), incorporating non-literary genres. Since everyone’s words bear the traces of another’s words, Bakhtin’s conceptualizations of genre were influenced by many Russian scholars preceding him (cf. Tihanov) and especially by two members of the Bakhtin Circle: Pavel N. Medveved and Valentin N. Voloshinov. Actually, Medvedev was the first of them to study the notion of literary genre, inspiring Bakhtin to continue (cf. Morson & Emerson).16 In The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (FML), Medvedev and Bakhtin entered into a polemic with the Formalists for whom, succinctly expressed, there was an impenetrable barrier between literature and the external(?) social world. As already signalled in the subtitle of the book, Medvedev and Bakhtin thought that “[t]he conceptualization of reality develops and generates in the process of ideological social intercourse. Therefore, a genuine poetics of genre can only be a sociology of genre” (135). This idea reappears throughout Bakhtin’s oeuvre (e.g. FTC 254, POC 289-290) and, in part, has lead Morson and Emerson to speak of Bakhtinian ‘prosaics’ instead of poetics. It is also in FML when the Bakhtin Circle gestates the idea of genres as forms of thought: “human consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality. A given consciousness is richer or poorer in genres, depending on its ideological environment” (134). In this same line, Herland-Ourland is richer in genres than “these monotonous players of one tune [i.e. (patriarchal forms of) genre] would have us believe” (“Masculine” 123). It appears that, every genre has its own methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, which are accessible to it alone... [Since n]ew means of representation force us to see new aspects of visible reality,... [t]he artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of genre. A particular aspect of reality can only be understood in connection with the particular means of representing it. (FML 133-134, my italics)

A perception of genre as a means of conceptualizing reality can explain why Gilman resorts to a renewal of the utopian genre in 1915-16, e.g.: to show women’s frustrations and 15

Bennet exemplifies her argument with Gilman’s short-story “If I Were a Man,” in which Molly, the female protagonist, is temporarily transformed into her husband. Molly is pleasantly surprised with her discovery of pockets, which were (almost) non-existent in women’s dresses, as they let her have all her things at hand. To this I would add that Gilman’s strategic use of pockets may very well symbolize her desire for a world of economically independent women, who can carry money/own property. 16 I accept Gary Saul Morson’s and Caryl Emerson’s opinion that the famous “disputable texts” were written by the different members of the Bakhtin Circle and not by Bakhtin himself under their names. In their view, to affirm the opposite, as Holquist does, implies a denial of the dialogics inherent to the Circle.

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aspirations in order to make readers see new aspects of reality, precluded by other genres. Apart from stressing the social, subject-matter and readership are of crucial importance for the Bakhtin Circle. This explains the two-fold orientation of genre in reality: “In the first place, the work is oriented toward the listener and perceiver... In the second place, the work is oriented in life... by its thematic content” (131). In principle, Gilman’s persuasive intentions and her interest in developing a female thematic share the view of genre presented in FML. Questions such as, “the themes... of the work... [are] separate and finished utterances” and “genre forms essentially determine the theme” (132), may have been the reason why Bakhtin later wrote on the “Forms of... the Chronotope” so as to identify the plots and themes specific to each type of novel. Many of the literary devices used by Gilman—mainly plain style, current social subjectmatter, authorial intention, didacticism—cause a lot of trouble for today’s criticism. Thus, I have wanted to make clear that they are inextricably related with the system of ideas she developed and those of her literary period, as well as with (a) feminist and Bakhtinian ideology. It should be specified that, some of Gilman’s overt didactic aims are not exactly Bakhtinian. This happens as her didacticism is infected by her ethnocentrism, which causes trouble for post-colonial evaluations. Her use of irony and criticism have much in common with the two above-mentioned critical currents. On the whole, Herland-Ourland might be closer to the novel than to utopia than some critics have thought. In what follows, I will propose a close reading of the chronotopes of this saga and their implications for feminist literary criticism. I would like to anticipate that a completely neat division between chronotope and discourse is not possible—“There is no formless content and there is no contentless form” (FML 140). Besides, I will reflect on the chronotope as a dialogical ‘pause,’ and on the question of feminist aims. On the Chronotope In Bakhtin’s essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” the latter is defined as an “organizing cente[r] for the fundamental narrative events[,]... where the knots of the narrative are tied and untied... [T]o [it] belongs the meaning that shapes the narrative” (FTC 250). Roughly speaking, we could say chronotopes are kinds of genre patterns, which recur throughout literary history, so that readers can articulate their meanings. One can affirm that Bakhtin’s chronotopic approach is more fundamentally thematic than his discursive approach. Thereby, my reading of the chronotopes of Herland-Ourland is soci(ologic)al as well as it is literary, as corresponds to Gilman’s sociological-novelistic careers/interests. Since chronotopes change over time, they are potentially historical—the subtitle of Bakhtin’s essay being “Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” As an example, one can cite the change in the representation of adventure time from Apuleius’s novels to Petronius’s (FTC 128-129). On the one hand, chronotopes are “the basis for distinguishing generic types” (250-251). Bakhtin associates a specific genre with a specific chronotope—the Gothic with the ‘castle chronotope,’ realism with the ‘parlor-salon chronotope.’ On the other, “every chronotope can include within it an unlimited number of minor chronotopes” (253), for example, the ‘chronotope of the road’ might contain the ‘encounter chronotope’ (243). There seems to be a difference between the (structural) chronotopes that characterize whole

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genres and the (minor) chronotopic motifs.17 For instance, in Meridel Le Sueur’s “Anunciation,” the ‘chronotope of pregnancy’ might be used as a basis to describe its genre: feminist realism, manifested through the dialogical feminine. In Herland-Ourland, we can distinguish between structural chronotopes—adventure, idyll—, which are distinctive of a feminist utopian novel, and minor chronotopes—encounter, castle—, which account for the author’s wish not to restrict herself to using one genre. If for Bakhtin, “genres are neither sets of rules nor accumulations of forms and themes” (Morson 185) but forms of thinking that allow the reader to view the world in a specific way, then they are form-shaping ideologies. Therefore, certain masculinist chronotopes that are reproduced throughout literary history contribute to the perpetuation of patriarchy. This explains why Gilman, a feminist thinker, had to parody some chronotopes as well as to invent new ones (unimagined by her predecessors) so that she could express some of the problematic of gender: ‘gender violence,’ the need for a ‘social(ized) motherhood,’ among others. I have already introduced the idea of the Bakhtinian chronotope as a metaphorical pause within dialogics: i.e. ‘pausing’ to reflect upon women’s problems. In Herland-Ourland, there are dialogical ‘pauses’ or chronotopes, which constitute integral parts of the text’s structure, and which posit themes for discussion. Gendered chronotopes provide writer and reader with the means to (re)think about women’s lives in a way that complies with the author’s didactic aim. I would like to link this feminist view of the chronotope with Bakhtinian and Socialist theory. In the last article of her Forerunner, Gilman defined herself as a “Socialist” (“Summary” 287), although she was critical of Marx (e.g. “Suffering,” “Socialist”). That is why many critics have identified her as a non-Marxist socialist—Doskow, Gabnocsik-Williams, Levitas, MacKinnon—, a label that could also be applied to Le Sueur. After contrasting socialist and non-socialist feminist critiques, Iris M. Young has suggested that feminist theoreticians must combine both (Throwing). That is, apart from a material evaluation of women’s situations, feminists need to assess the symbolic systems in which we live. Reading Young’s argument, one perceives the Marxist division between the ‘infrastructure’ and the ‘superstructure,’ understood respectively as the two main forms of assessment she describes. It seems that, as a Socialist feminist, Young is influenced by Marx’s differentiation. One may wonder whether Bakhtin was also influenced by it when, at a point in his career, he divided his study on dialogics between (the infrastructure of the) ‘chronotope’ and (the superstructure of) ‘discourse.’ In order to clarify my chronotopic reading, I will begin with an overview of the characters, who may create their own chronotopes too (FTC 159). First of all, following the nineteenth-century realist tradition, the characters’ names are indicative of their personalities (Herland 15-16). Christopher P. Wilson has recorded Gilman’s love for Ancient Greece (258). I would add that, as for the women-characters’ names, “Celis” might come from Latin caelum (“heaven”), as she has the sweetest personality and dresses in blue (Herland 16); “Alima” might be a variant from “Alma,” which explains the misspelling on page 91, and comes also from Latin anima (“soul”), probably due to her strong personality; and “Ellador,” from the Latin pronoun illa (“she”), as if she enacted what any Ourlandian

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Morson and Emerson have clarified the notion of chronotopic motif in a way that is consistent with the Bakhtinian philosophy of language. Since every word “‘remembers’ its past,” an event/a place also “acquires a certain chronotopic aura, which is in fact the ‘echo of the generic whole’... When these events or locales are used in other genres, they may ‘remember’ their past and carry the aura of the earlier genre into the new one” (374).

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woman could do in the appropriate conditions—‘Ella-dor’ could be read as ‘she-doer.’18 In the early twentieth century, Gilman had already protested: “No wonder [woman] has no place in art—she has had no existence before. Women as persons, human beings, treated in their social relations solely, are quite new to us” (“Coming” 124). In the late twentieth century, Joanna Russ asserted that fantastic texts allow authors to write stories that are not “about men qua Man and women qua Woman” (91). For instance, the fantastic (e.g. utopia) is the only genre where one may represent “Woman as Intellectual” (83), or just as a subject. In Gilman’s saga, the three young Herlanders are “foresters” (Herland 124), a profession usually associated with physical strength, whose intellectual abilities are praised throughout: “[their] genius... subtle understanding” (28), “marvellously keen on inference their minds were!” (64), “[t]he freshness of mind of these Herland women concealed their intellectual power” (Ourland 62). As we will continue to see, these three female personalities are part of the process of deconstructing the idea of “woman.” Furthermore, being “independent, outspoken and creative,” each Herlander may stand for a chronotope of the New Woman, who is “antithetical to the Victorian stereotype of the proper lady and the angel in the house” (Miller 14). Again, the writer seems to be countering what patriarchal powers wanted to do to Jane(?) in “Yellow.” The main problem is that all Herlanders represent the same (New) woman or a woman that is white, middle-class, heterosexual, educated, and so on. This reveals that the idea of the New Woman was biased and that, as we saw in Part One, Gilman would give no protagonism to the women that were not represented by such idea—a fact that diminishes her dialogical project. Vandyck’s divisible name and his almost feminine surname, Jennings—“Jennies” was a colloquial synonym for ‘women’ (34)—, seem to indicate his capacity for dialogical thinking. According to Elaine Showalter (1988), the male characters of the novelists of the “Feminine Period” follow the masculinist tradition of binary oppositions employed by male writers for their female characters. In the literature written by such women writers, we can find examples of ‘meek’ and ‘brute’ men, such as the clergyman- and Rochester-types (1988, 143). Gilman creates a third intermediate character, Van, whom I have decided to call the ‘dialogic man,’ and who may represent a new chronotope. Her break with the previous hierarchy indicates clearly her ability to go beyond existing (literary) norms. Jeff Mar(-)grave is certainly a serious man (Herland 15). And Terry O. Nicholson, whom his friends call “the Old Nick, with good reason” (1), is the most ‘terrestrial’ of the three. Before arriving in Herland, Jeff thinks that “it will be like a nunnery—a peaceful harmonious sisterhood” (Herland 8), whereas Terry imagines it to be a “sort of national harem” (13), and Van cautiously speculates on a possible “matriarchal principle” (7). Jeff and Terry stand for two common patriarchal ideologies that discriminate women, that is, discrimination from above—women must be either virgins or mothers—and from below— all women are whores. Since Jeff is easily assimilated to Herland, Van and Terry are more interesting characters for the reader. Van is the only really dialogical character, not only because of his ability to talk and to listen, but also due to his openness to change. According to Bakhtin, a novelistic hero “should not be portrayed as... [a] completed unchanging person” (E&N 10), which means that, unlike the case of epic, the hero “doing 18 “Ellador” could also come from “Delle” and “Dora,” the nicknames of Adeline Knapp (Bauer 1998, 32). In September 1891, “Gilman moves to Oakland and shares boarding-house rooms with Adeline Knapp, Katharine [Gilman’s daughter], and her ailing mother. She initiates divorce proceedings against Walter Stetson” (33). “Ellador” is also evocative of Freud’s “Dora,” suggesting how a woman/Gilman/elle would talk/write on her(self).

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the depicting” cannot “coincid[e] with the one being depicted” (34). Though open-minded, at the beginning of the saga Van had deep-rooted patriarchal ideas: “this is a civilized country!... There must be men” (Herland 11). After his stay in Herland and through his relationship with Ellador, he will change his mind. Therefore, Van could be the starting point of what Marleen S. Barr has called the “death of the macho hero[,]... the emergence of the feminine male hero” (211). Despised by scholars (Keyser, Lant), Terry is also a very important character. If it were not for his “biplane” (Herland 6), the three friends would never arrive in Herland. He is the one who will name the new country: “Feminisia” (7), “Ma-Land” (146), “Herland” (12). His language is interesting from a Bakhtinian perspective. He makes offensive comments with respect to the Herlanders’ ignorance concerning (hetero)sexual matters. He also refers to the older women as the “Colonels” (e.g. 27) and invents offensive nicknames for the men’s three tutors (e.g. 75). Mr. Nicholson is described by the narrator as reacting “like a war horse” that wants to fight with “sticks and stones” or with his “fists” (40 & 33). He frequently uses bellicose terms, e.g.: “council of war,” “scrimmage” (25). His insults, colloquialisms, and even proverbs— “Rather hard on Thomas” (51), “‘Love will find out a way’” (34)—provide the text with a different linguistic register that forms part of the surrounding heteroglossia. A dialogic novel is “constructed not as a whole single consciousness” but reflects a “plurality... of unmerged consciousnesses” (PDP 17). Consequently, if it were not for Terry, Herland’s discourses would be more monologic. It should not be at all surprising that Gilman, who has been identified as a radical feminist (Humm 1999, 111), would write a ‘utopian novel.’ In Herland, there is no need to travel very far in space (e.g. to another planet) or in time (e.g. to the future). Herland is situated in some hidden place of the Earth, some have suggested in South America—Annas, Peyser 1998—, and in a time contemporaneous with that of its first readers,’ 1915-16. According to Annie Cranny-Francis, one of the conventions of utopian fiction is “estrangement,” or setting the story in another time and place (110), so that the reader “is posited to see her/his own society from a different perspective” (emphasis mine). She continues by commenting that “estrangement” has been used by feminists, “[s]o readers and writers are freed from the restrictions of a realist reading, which tends to restrict representation to an imitation” (193). This liberatory impulse is again consistent with Gilman’s wish to alter realist norms. Following Cranny-Francis and bringing together the chronotopic origin of utopia and its intrinsic characteristic of estrangement, I would suggest that a feminist novelized utopia(?) such as Herland-Ourland creates a gendered ‘chronotope of estrangement’ in order “to construct a feminist reading position as a strategy in the production of a feminist subject” (125). Bakhtin also speaks of the “creative chronotope” that occurs between author and reader (FTC 254). In Gilman’s work, the reader is expected to produce a feminist critique of his/her (present) world. In order to promote a critique of the establishment, Gilman starts by refusing to “follo[w] masculine canons” avant la lettre (“Masculine” 122), which she summarizes in “two main branches[:]... the Story of Adventure, and the Love Story” (119). Since both ‘adventure’ and ‘romance’ can be considered conventions of the utopian genre (CrannyFrancis 200, Donaldson 376, Ferns 24), she will rewrite these two fictional forms in Herland. Aleta Cane has read the first part of the saga as a feminist response to male quest romance. More concretely, Susan Gubar has pointed out it is a rewriting of H. Rider 88

Haggard’s She. The text starts with three men (Van, Jeff and Terry), who decide to explore a mythical “Woman Land” (Herland 2), which has “a strictly Amazonian nature” (5). More specifically, these three characters correspond to three different kinds of men imagined by Gilman: Jeff (botanist and poet) is ‘meek,’ Terry (technician and airman) is a ‘brute,’ and Van (sociologist and linguist) stands for an ‘intermediate kind of man,’ who is also the narrator. Contrary to their dreams of colonization, ‘explorers’ will be ‘explored,’ ‘masters’ will be ‘taught,’ and ‘conquerors’ will be ‘conquered’ romantically but with no duels (except the verbal ones) and no killing. Through the undoing of the conventions of imperialist narratives, Gilman reveals that male authors have always been “monopolizing this form of art [literature] with special favor... [so] they have given the world a masculinized literature” (“Masculine” 116), that is, written by men and for men. This time, the narrator will emphasize that the story is not about the men’s “expedition” (2) and insists in chapter V, titled “A Unique History”‘: “It is no use for me to try to piece out this account with adventures. If the people who read it are not interested in these amazing women and their history, they will not be interested at all” (49). That is, the author forces readers to ‘pause’ and question their prejudice before continuing their reading. If they continue, readers will learn to see women differently, as corresponds to this kind of feminist novel. Given the saga’s gendering of the masculinist “Story of Adventure,” the greatest adventure here is meeting the women themselves—Ellador and Van continue getting to know each other in Ourland. In fact, the whole saga can be read through the ‘chronotope of adventure’ in this light. In his “Concluding Remarks” to FTC, Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest that if the text deals with an alien world it does not belong to the genre “novel,” since a(n authentic) novel is able to show the alien qualities of one’s own world (245). In Herland, by situating the action in a very advanced society run exclusively by women, Gilman is playing with the notion of the alien, as if she were saying: “this is what women could do in a world that was not alien to them.” This fact newly complicates a facile classification of her book. I should add that Bakhtin’s ‘conclusion’ to FTC was written in 1973. When rewriting his essays, Bakhtin usually includes elements that might contradict previous assertions. In the original version of the essay, written probably between 1937 and 1938, he had talked about a “realistic fantastic” that “relies on the real-life possibilities of human development... [that] sooner or later... will force their way to a full realization” (150-151). I believe Gilman’s (not so) “utopian” novel is close to the previous theorization. As Bakhtin contends, the “major chronotope” of adventure-time is “the road” (120). In fact, he stresses “the important role of the road in the history of the novel” (244).19 The action of Ourland occurs while Ellador and Van travel around the world. Above I suggested that Gilman uses the alien as a strategy to criticize ‘our’ existing world. If the road(s) of Ourland “pass[es] through familiar territory, and not through some exotic alien world” it is with the (same) feminist aim of showing “the sociohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own country” (245). Bakhtin continues that, when the ‘road’ and the ‘encounter chronotope’ appear together, the combination is carnivalesque as “[p]eople who are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance can accidentally meet” (243). The first Herlanders 19

He could have made a gender distinction as follows: when it is not a metaphor, the ‘road’ plays a crucial role in the novels written by men, since they are the ones who usually enjoy (social) mobility—hence the vitality of the ‘road’ in the Beat generation. Unsurprisingly, all the examples he gives are from male writers’ novels. Other fictional forms (the ‘domestic novel,’ the diary form) were highly favoured by female writers.

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met by the men are three young women in a treetop: “There among the boughs overhead was something—more than one something... three swift-moving figures” (Herland 14-15, italics mine). The men’s climbing the tree with great difficulty to speak with them becomes a feminist reformulation of the ‘encounter chronotope.’ This chronotope is gendered in order to reverse the lower position that women occupy in patriarchy. That the women are placed in a superior position, at the top of the tree, implies an explicit critique of the hierarchy ‘(hu)man/gender.’ This scene is the first of a series of role-reversals, which occur throughout. Above all, the series places woman in the subject position, starting with the fact that Herland is placed at the top of “a basalt column” (38). Moreover, that the women refuse to climb down the tree (16), reminds us of Bertrand Russell’s insistence on considering woman as “equal” to man ‘from above’ and not ‘from below’ (cf. Amorós 1997). The visitors’ courteous greeting—“doff[ing their] hats” (15)—is ridiculed by the Herlanders’ laughter in response. Gilman seems to play the role of the ‘fool’ (writer), who has the right to mock (gender) norms of behaviour. As Bakhtin says, “one of the most basic tasks for the novel [is] the laying-bare of any sort of conventionality,... of all that is... falsely stereotyped in human relationships” (FTC 162). A more symbolic reading of the scene reminds us of the Biblical tree of temptation. Terry takes “a necklace” out of a “box” and stands “swinging his bright temptation” before the women (16). Bridget Bennet has compared the naked arm of Terry, who is “devilishly handsome,” to the serpent of Eden (45). I would like to add that the arm-plus-necklace compound can represent his desire of the phallus or his pre-maturity, both sexual and cognitive, as he had gone there “armed with a theory” (Herland 20). As we will realize, the desire of the phallus—the identity between signifier and signified—will be continuously unsatisfied by Gilman’s playing around with all classifications. The men’s situation, “in the fork of a great limb” (15), is indicative of how they should ‘bifurcate’ their minds in order to understand the Herlanders, whom the narrator does not call “women” till page 19. Men’s and women’s position is, then, frankly unstable: Van “nearly lost [his] balance” (15), Terry “made his snatch [of Alima’s arm], quite vainly, almost losing his position” and “with inconceivable rapidity, the three bright creatures were gone” (17). It seems these women do not let themselves be easily trapped by phallocentric conceptions. The men’s second encounter occurs with the middle-aged women, who appear to them “as cool as cucumbers” (21). The phallic overtones of the comparison indicates that the men were powerfully impressed by them. That might be why the narrator can only describe the older women in negative terms: “They were not young. They were not old. They were not... beautiful. They were not... ferocious...” (19). Terry, the “playboy” (Keyser 160), tries to confront them with his usual tricks, first by offering them “a broad soft scarf” and then “a circlet of rhinestones” (20). That Terry offers the women complements to surround their necks and heads for the second time appears symbolic: suggesting choking or an attempt to impede their reasoning. Furthermore, both encounters function as rewritings of imperial narratives, as the motif of giving supposedly precious objects to the natives is a typical element in such texts. As before, due to the women’s lack of interest Terry excuses himself saying, “[w]hat on earth is a fellow to say to a regiment of old Colonels like this?,” thus

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exposing his masculinist bias. The homodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator, who re-tells the story quietly, revises his previous, misguided ideas of women as follows:20 [W]e had assumed that the women... would be young... ‘[w]oman’ in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming... It makes me laugh, knowing all I do now, to think of us... Jeff, with his gentle romantic old-fashioned notions of women as clinging vines. Terry, with his clear decided practical theories that there were two kinds of women—those that he wanted and those he didn’t... (20-21)

This excerpt evidences how encountering the other might put an end to our previous expectations of her/him. Prejudice with respect to “women,” the patriarchal weapon whose institutionalization has been one of the strongest bastions for their oppression, will be fought against through the verbal exchanges. Today one recognizes the existence of several types of discrimination because of sex, gender, marital status, colour, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, class, nationality, physical appearance, physical/mental disability, and so forth. This list could be enlarged, e.g.: by noting discrimination because of age (cf. Lorde 1984). Gilman believed middle age provided women with a wonderful opportunity to develop their potential, an idea she also represented in her short-stories—see “A Surplus Woman,” “Three Thanksgivings,” “Mrs. Hines’s Money,” “The Widow’s Might.”21 Once we have learned more about the personalities of Herland-Ourland’s heroes(?), we will pay attention to other chronotopes. I have mentioned that Gilman despised masculinist genres based on the Story of Adventure and the Love Story. In fact, she believed that both of these narrative forms were structurally the same (“Masculine” 119). Bakhtin might have agreed with her with respect to the Greek romance, whose “essence of... adventure-time” is love too (FTC 89). According to Gilman, the love story as usually realized in literature “is the story of the premarital struggle. It is the Adventures of Him in Pursuit of Her... The ‘love’ of our stories is man’s love of woman... [and] the stories stop at marriage” (“Masculine” 120). Through his diachronic evaluation of the (proto-)novel, Bakhtin proves that the representation of adventure time changed throughout literary history. In his assessment of the (history of the) ‘chronotope of idyll,’ he appreciates that “the dominant theme” in novels such as the Bildungsroman, the family novel or the novel of generations “is the destruction of the idyll, and of the idyllic-type family or patriarchal relations” (FTC 233, emphasis mine). Perhaps unconsciously, he corroborates the American writer’s critique that the ‘love story’ idealized in literature promotes patriarchal ideology. The love stories of the three Herlanders with the three men become a rewriting of the ‘idyll chronotope’: the three couples marry and two of them end up having children, although Jeff and Celis’s relationship develops much more quickly than Van and Ellador’s. Although there is no radical alteration of the convention of heterosexual love, I agree with Val Gough that “[i]n its redefinition of love, Herland looks forward to the feminist utopias of the 1970s, which depict alternatives to the patriarchal concepts of love” (1995, 204). Moreover, maternal love is another kind of love, enriching a couple’s/the family’s relationship, which the (original) ‘idyll chronotope’ had not considered. 20

I will deal with the narrator’s re-telling of the story in the section dedicated to discourse. Since I am referring to the narrator, I am using his in italics to distinguish him from Van(dyck) the character. These graphic differentiations will continue throughout. 21 Meridel Le Sueur coincided in giving a fair place to mature women. Thus, she encouraged the example of the Native Americans, among whom old women are respected as some of the wisest members of the community (Cole & Wrinkler 95-97).

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If for Bakhtin all types of idylls have in common a ‘unity of time’ and a ‘unity of place’ (FTC 225), Ellador and Van’s travels around the world in the second part of the saga work literally to destroy this chronotope. In general, idylls take place in a “narrow and reduced idyllic little world” that suggests the pastoral (232), birds chirping and a total abandonment to inanity. In Herland-Ourland, Gilman ‘pauses’ to reflect on the irony of this world through Van and Ellador, whose love “grew like a tree” (Herland 90). We could say that Herland-Ourland destroys the myth of idyll, or of constant unchanging love, by turning to a new chronotope we could name the ‘chronotope of real(istic) love.’ Nevertheless, what this renewed chronotope and ‘idyll’ have in common is a sublimation of sexuality (FTC 225). After the three Americans fall in love with three of the women, the author problematizes a courtship full of “pitfalls” (Herland 91) as “[t]here was no sex-feeling to appeal to, or practically none. Two thousand years’ disuse had left very little of the instinct” (92), and “[t]here was no accepted standard of what was ‘manly’ and what was ‘womanly.’” Moreover, the narrator acknowledges the role played by education in the erotic: [A] young and inexperienced [Ourlandian girl]... educated with a background of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest worthy of the name—why, it is a comparatively easy matter to sweep her off her feet with a dashing attack. (93)

Through a gendering of the ‘chronotope of idyll,’ readers are forced to see it from the woman’s point-of-view. For instance, the novelist criticizes the patriarchal education of women that turns them into just dependants of men (emotionally, economically). She also points out that, for patriarchy, the language of “love” and that of “combat” are the same (“Masculine” 119): e.g., “with a dashing attack” (Herland 93). In Women and Economics, Gilman had already denounced that women’s lack of educational training to work outside the home obliged them to get married in order to survive (e.g. 89).22 In her opinion, if women were independent, “[t]here w[ould] be needed neither bribe nor punishment to force women to true marriage” (91). She even asserted that “the higher development of social life following the economic independence of women makes possible a higher sex-life than has ever yet been known” (143). One would think she might be talking of a ‘human’ sex-life (or sexuality), developed by dialogic, sexual subjects.23 The truth is that her saga has been read as trying to recover the “sexual innocence” so typical of classical utopian texts (Ferns 34). I partly agree with this reading though there is a space for further interpretation. For the feminists of today, it seems regressive that Ellador can only accept the practice of (hetero)sexual intercourse with the purpose of reproduction. The heroine says that “[n]one of the creatures we know do [it for other purposes]” (Herland 138), to which Van replies, “[w]e are not animals!” I would say that his strong remark here might indicate that perhaps the author guessed she was going too far. According to Elaine Showalter, the feminist literature of the first phase “represented a reaction to a male sexual force that struck [them]... as alien” (1988, 189) since, in that

22 Her most quoted affirmation in this respect is: “W[om]e[n] are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sexual relation is also an economic relation” (5). 23 In “A Partnership,” the married couple recovers harmony by working together. Only then can they really understand one another.

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period, the only sexual force considered was the male. Gilman promoted the sexes’ (prior) self- and mutual knowledge in order to achieve a true heterosexual life. The sociologist-novelist constantly denounced that women were kept ignorant of all the world’s matters, especially sex (“Unnatural”). Therefore, Terry’s offensive comment about the Herlanders, “[s]exless, epicene, undeveloped neuters!” (Herland 142), actually “sounded like” their contemporaries’ comments on Ourlandian women. This makes Herland appear not as the ‘alien’ country some had thought, since Gilman is always criticizing ‘our’ (patriarchal) traditions. Van desperately tries to convince Ellador through rational though unconventional arguments that sex is what “stimulates all high creative work” (127). She begs him, “[b]e patient with me, dear” (139), and adds shrewdly, “[y]ou would not have a mere submission, would you? That is not the kind of high romantic love you spoke of, surely?” (129)—ignoring that many of the canonized Romantics were extremely misogynist. Earlier in time, Gilman herself had stated that “woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body” (Women 237, my emphasis). The author seems to be positing that, before becoming lovers, men and women must be friends, even colleagues. As has been mentioned above, Herland-Ourland has much in common with New Women novels. Ann Ardis has pointed out the influence of Socialism on new women writers’ depiction of love affairs. Ellador’s resistance to giving herself completely to Van evidences “the New Woman’s unwillingness to let her sexuality absorb her ‘character,’ and thereby her life” (Ardis 137). Ellador becomes pregnant at the end of Ourland, which evidences the development of (hetero)sexuality. This change is facilitated by the fact that Van “learned to see things very differently since living with [her]” (Herland 135). Furthermore, the myth of male sexual desire (and orgasm) is turned up-side-down: “I [had]... a... pleasant rested calm feeling... [and] I found that... very much, of what I had honestly supposed to be a physiological necessity was a psychological necessity” (128). It is Ellador, the “witch” (130), who soothes his (imagined) sexual ardour by using her intelligence for dialogue, like Scheherazade herself. Through a gendered ‘idyll chronotope,’ once more, Gilman wants to stress the fact that woman is a human being, not just a sexual one, and that bedroom problems can be approached through dialogue. I would like to argue that her aims in describing this kind of “supersexual” relationship might also have more to do with presenting woman as an intellectual being (Ourland 141), for whom man can develop respect and even an intellectual passion, than with the tradition of utopia. Thus, “[t]hese were women one had to love ‘up’... instead of down. They were not pets. They were not servants” (Herland 141). Gilman’s goals in criticizing women’s situation in patriarchy and in suggesting alternatives form a crucial part of her novelistic project. Returning to a question expressed above, although I think that the argument of ‘sexual innocence’ is not completely wrong, one can still discern the author’s intention to achieve an improved human sexuality/dialogue.24 In 1904, she wrote: “Before society grew... we were... maintaining and reproducing ourselves... but with no connection, no common life... All social evolution is the story of development and improvement of the collective...” (Human 112). This paragraph corroborates that she was (also) an evolutionary feminist—Gabnocsik-Williams, Hausman, 24 In order to support this argument, here is a fragment of one of Gilman’s letters to her friend and colleague Edward E. Ross: “See what a nice thing I’ve got on Freud... Sex is not the ‘Life Force.’ Life existed for ages, the reproduction went on, billion-fold, before sex was developed. It is not essential to life, nor to reproduction, but to the improvement of the species” (quoted by Gale, xxxiv).

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Magner, Peyser 1998. This further explains her preference for a belated (hetero)sexuality instead of a non-existent one, contrary to what critics have traditionally interpreted. That the saga lacks references to the characters’ erotic encounters can be due to the puritanical condition of American literature (in that period). Women’s expression of heterosexual desire is missing from the text, although we know that Ellador starts to develop erotic feelings toward Vandyck once in Ourland (Ourland 75, 112, 189). All in all, the representation of female heterosexual desire is still pending in women’s literature—with a few exceptions, such as Meridel Le Sueur. The question is that, in the First Wave of feminism, most women writers “did not equate women’s liberation with women’s sexual liberation... [And] sought to improve... marriage, for... it afforded essential legal and economic protection for women and children” (Miller 15). I would say Gilman lays the grounds for the literary expression of women’s heterosexual eroticism—through learning, dialogue—and shows optimism toward the future.25 Since quarrels and abuse might infect love stories too, the author would have to create new chronotopes such as the ‘chronotope of rape.’ In a lecture delivered at the University of Santiago de Compostela in 1998, Maud Ellmann wondered whether Modernist writing is a means of overlooking (modern) pain, whether metaphor is a way of avoiding the evidence of rape. Particularly in Modernist poetry, it seems rape has been forever read metaphorically as something else—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” This might be one of the reasons why there is not a historical study of the ‘chronotope of rape,’ a chronotope present in the first part of this saga. Of course, another reason is that literary scholars have traditionally ignored gender as a tool of critical analysis. Contrary to what happened with Ellador and Van’s relationship, Terry and Alima “quarreled and parted, re-met and re-parted” (Herland 90), for she “never gave an inch” (87), and he “was not used to real refusal” (93). As I commented above, Herlandian women had not had (hetero)sexual relationships. After their weddings, the three couples keep on sleeping in separate bedrooms (132). Alima resists yielding to Terry’s authority and, given his patriarchal training, he tries to rape her or to commit what has recently been labelled ‘marital rape.’ There is no metaphorical frustrated rape here: Alima does not symbolize a country or a mythical struggler, she stands for herself—and perhaps (metonymically) for any woman (or female character) who may have suffered sexual abuse. Throughout her life, Gilman was concerned with representing gender violence in literary form. In 1997, Catherine J. Golden and Denise D. Knight edited her detective novel Unpunished, written in 1929 but never published before. Golden and Knight argue that this text not only addresses sexual abuse but “domestic violence and battered women’s syndrome long before the phrases were introduced in our vocabulary” (222).26 Gilman’s treatment of private affairs in the public realm (e.g. literature) advances 25

Kessler affirms that, in her letters to William Dean Howels, Gilman “pushes herself... to attempt the expression of ‘her own love,’ and thereby contradicts Irigaray’s claim that ‘the heterosexual female lover does not yet exist’ ” (1995, 294). As can be guessed so far, Gilman’s letters show a facet of her personality she managed to hide in public. 26 Wade Vaughn, who is a marital rapist among other things, abuses her wife till she opts for suicide. Some time afterwards, the widower appears dead in strange circumstances. The person that might have caused Mr. Vaughn’s death remains unpunished, by which Gilman seems to justify his (apparent) homicide. In this sense, the tone and denounce of Unpunished are evocative of Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1920). Herland (1915) partly anticipates of both these works.

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the slogan that became (almost) definitional of the Second Feminist Wave, “the personal is the political.”27 In this feminist rewriting of rape, Terry is not able to rape Alima because, being “exceptionally strong” (Herland 87), she is not the conventional feminine figure repeatedly portrayed in literature. Gilman employs a meta-literary reference to point this out: “Othello could not have extinguished Alima with a pillow, as if she were a mouse” (132). Although rapes usually occur in an enclosed ‘space’ and in a short ‘time,’ their sequelae can last for the victims’ (and their families’) lifetimes. A study that is still pending would have to assess the portrayal/concealment of the chronotope of rape in the history of literature. The author adds a comic element that amuses a female reader as it saves the victim: “[s]he kicked [him there,]... a man’s helpless when you hit him like that” (143). This allusion suggests that, contrary to literary tradition, Herland and its adventures are not for male readers only. Besides, it tells us of Gilman’s irony and humour, even when dealing with a serious subject, elements which are basic in Bakhtin’s assessment of the genre(?) novel. Immediately, the Herlanders went to Alima’s aid and “it was only the work of a few moments to have him tied...” (132). And once readers can see the literalness of the attempt of marital rape, the scene ends with a carnivalesque call for women’s solidarity. Verging on the discursive analysis, I would add that here the master is the one who tries to rape the woman. In Terry’s own speech: “These women have never been mastered’” (94) and “[t]here never was a woman yet that did not enjoy being mastered” (131). The novel provides a redefinition of what being a ‘master’ means, deconstucting the patriarchal (and Freudian) axiom by which all women are masochists, who like being abused/mastered. As Vandyck would later reflect, “[Terry’s] idea was some quarry he was pursuing, something to catch and conquer” (138). The ideology of this potential rapist corroborates the author’s belief that, in patriarchal thought, love and war share the same semantic/conceptual field. Thus, master/conqueror/rapist should appear as synonyms in a patriarchal dictionary. Above I pointed out that Herland has been read as a rewriting of male (con)quest romances. Georgia Johnston has written that, the first time the male characters enter Herland, the country is described as a female nude (58)—“its broad glistening bosom” (Herland 9). On her part, Aleta Cane has made the following comparison: “Just as Marlow seeks to penetrate the ‘heart of darkness’ so Terry believes he must penetrate Alima in order to make her his own” (36). Once again, Johnston’s and Cane’s insightful comments support Gilman’s assertion that the ‘Story of Adventure’ and the ‘Love Story’ are structural siblings (“Masculine” 119). Nevertheless, in this case, it is the women who “master” the attacker and teach him an unforgettable lesson (Herland 142). Therefore, the creation and gendering of this chronotope manages both to save the victim and to constitute a community of (feminist) women readers. Kathleen M. Lant has written that Gilman “violates th[e feminist project] by the very shape of her novel... —that is by centering the narrative on the issue of Terry and Alima’s uncertain union and by generating suspense through exploiting the potential of that union” (292, italics mine). It is true that the author creates such suspense and, when reading the text, readers, like myself, might wonder what would happen to him if he tried to beat her (and not the other way round). I disagree with Lant’s interpretation except for the fact that 27

Due to her vision that ‘the personal is the political,’ Gilman has been compared to thinkers of the mentioned Second Wave such as Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, Sheila Rowbotham and Maria della Costa (Hill 516).

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the very telling of the frustrated rape forms part of the novelistic character of Herland, as the “specific ‘impulse to continue’ (what will happen next?) and the ‘impulse to end’ (how will it end?) are characteristic only for the novel” (E&N 32). Let us observe how the event is approached throughout the text: Terry was moody... and he harped on Alima, and how near he’d come to catching her [on the tree] ‘If I had—’ he would say, rather savagely [30]... and he was irritable [58]... ‘Just wait till I get out!’ [he would shout during their training period, 59]... He was madly in love with [her]. He wanted to take her by storm [93]... ‘These women think of nothing but children... We’ll teach ‘em!’ [119]... Alima was patient... until he—but I haven’t got to that yet [124]... [After the wedding s]he didn’t wish to be alone with Terry [131]... I daresay he thought he had a right to do as he did... Anyhow, he did himself in her bedroom one night... [132]

The (frustrated) rape event constitutes an important motif in the structure of the first novel of the saga, which confirms my decision to consider it a (new) chronotope of its own. To criticize Lant’s argument I would say that, first, Terry’s attempt of rape is not “at the heart of Herland” (Lant 299), not even at the heart of the saga, which is occupied by the main protagonists’ transition to the old world. Second, Elaine Showalter has proposed that “women’s fiction can be read as a double-voiced discourse, containing a ‘dominant’ and a ‘muted’ story,... [like] a ‘palimpsest’... [in which t]he orthodox plot recedes, and another plot, hitherto submerged... stands out” (1989, 266). That is, like so many feminist writers, Gilman had to balance the tensions between feminist content and traditional narrative forms (Miller 21). And in order to alter novelistic conventions and the ideology inherent in them, she had to use them differently. Thus, she partly adjusted herself to certain conventions— the Story of Adventure-Romance—in order to be understood by the majority of readers and thus fulfil her feminist (didactic) project. It goes without saying that, being a feminist novel, Terry is judged for his crime. As the narrator recalls, “[i]n a court in our country he would have been held quite ‘within his rights,’ of course” (Herland 132) due to “the custom of marital indulgence” (138), according to which Ourlandian women have to submit to their husband’s deeds/ill-treatment. But in Herland, an eutopian land for women, the potential rapist is condemned to leave the country (133). Therefore, the rape event despised by Lant constitutes a means to put into practice several feminist (genre) strategies, among them, the creation of a feminist uncanny. Tzvetan Todorov has read the Freudian uncanny as “realiz[ing]... one of the conditions of the fantastic [genre]: the description of certain reactions, especially fear... [that is linked to] scenes of cruelty, delight in evil and murder” (1993, 47-48). In most fantastic works, the scared character (the object) is almost always female and the one causing fear or dissipating it (the subject) is male. The fantastic uncanny is another of the multigenre elements in Gilman’s work. I think the author’s added touch of feminist realism would make her (female) readers react against its original masculinism. Marleen S. Barr has provided the following feminist (re)reading of the patriarchal uncanny: “Shocked after encountering the victimized female protagonist (the patriarchal uncanny), feminist readers identify with her, hesitate, and wonder how she (and they themselves) will survive. The protagonist also hesitates (awakens), questions the patriarchal uncanny’s control over her life story. She pauses to create a space in which to rewrite herself. In turn, ‘the actual reader identifies... [herself] with the character’ (Todorov, 33) and reads patriarchy negatively. This hesitation and negative reading open a new narrative space... so that it can encroach upon the territory of the patriarchal real” (200-201, my italics). This ‘new narrative space’ forms part of the 96

(here gendered) ‘chronotope of estrangement’ characteristic of the utopian genre. This space directly relates to the dialogical ‘pause’ offered by the chronotope—Barr even uses the verb ‘to pause,’ a curious coincidence—so that readers question the naturalization of uncanny scenes. Therefore, readers might question (marital) rape itself: “that supreme conquest which seems so natural a thing to that type of man [like Terry]” (Herland 142, my emphasis). Having persuasive aims as well as interest in the readers’ responses is evidence of the dialogical projection of a writer. If literature is as important in the creation of the cultural imaginary as Gilman thought (“Masculine” 117), both male and female readers should react negatively against sexist stereotypes. Thus, the uncanny can be positively related to other questions affecting women, such as the gendered ‘chronotope of motherhood.’ In order to provide a not so literary definition of the uncanny, I would like to go back briefly to Freud’s essay on this matter. He begins by studying the etymological origin of the German word: unheimlich (“uncanny”) comes from heimlich (“canny”), which has several semantic entries, mainly: familiar, friendly, concealed, hidden from public sight, uncanny, strange, malicious (220-226). According to this last negative meaning, unheimlich would have a positive side too, meaning ‘not strange’ (224-226). The Austrian psychoanalyst comes to the conclusion that the uncanny is not something new or ‘other’ but something that was familiar to our lives a long time ago, and was later alienated from us through a process of repression (241). Then, Freud returns to Schelling’s definition by which the uncanny is something that, destined to be kept out of sight, has come to light. Going back to the ‘chronotope of rape,’ apart from provoking a feminist uncanny reading, there are other uncanny elements in its writing. When the community of Herlanders defend the victim from being raped, as well as when they judge the attacker, a private affair—that is, sexual assault—is made public. The exposure of this (uncanny) event disconcerts the narrator, who says: “I do not recall a similar case in all history or fiction” (Herland 142). It seems that the politicization of the personal, following the 1970’s slogan, helps women not only in their feminist goals but, primarily, in the maintenance of their psycho-physical integrity. Among the examples of the uncanny provided by Freud are female genitals (244) and the fantasy of living in the maternal womb (243, 248). Once more, for good or bad, woman and the mother are favourite figures of his theory. The subject of motherhood preoccupied Gilman greatly throughout her life. In “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper,” she portrayed a tortured woman who, among other problems, was torn between her role as a mother and her career as a writer. Motherhood is a central theme in Herland to the point that it is parthenogenesis that has propitiated the existence of a women’s country. When Van, Jeff and Terry fly over it, they are amazed by its “civilized” appearance (Herland 10): “parklike meadows and open places,” “cities” like in “any other country” and “well-built-roads” (11). Incidentally, the writer’s concern with ecology has been read in accordance with present feminist currents on the subject.28 When the only people the Americans can see are female, their dialogue is as follows: “‘Only women there—and 28

Amanda Graham distinguishes two main feminist lines on ecology: “Whilst cultural ecofeminists see the solution to ecological and feminist problems as being ‘the creation of an alternative women’s culture’ ‘based on revaluing, celebrating and defending what patriarchy has devaluated, including the feminine, non-human nature, the body and the emotions,’ the social ecofeminist perspective is one of ‘nature as a political rather than a natural category,’ the proposed solution being ‘the construction of a less oppositional culture’ ” (116, emphasis mine). Graham concludes situating Herland between the two perspectives (118).

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children,’ Jeff urged excitedly... ‘But they look—why, this is a civilized country!’ I protested. ‘There must be men’... ‘Of course there are men,’ said Terry. ‘Come on, let’s find ‘em.’” Such a reaction shows their conformity with a patriarchal system that associates men with Culture and women with Nature (cf. Ortner). In Herland, Gilman invented a world in which (civilized, male) ‘production’ and (female) ‘reproduction’ are neither incompatible nor opposite but, on the contrary, can coexist and help one another.29 As in “Yellow,” the novelist was, once more, trying to teach her audience that pretending to be something else besides a wife and a mother is not equivalent to having “‘monstrous’ ambitions” (Ardis 134). If motherhood opens Herland, both motherhood and fatherhood act as a connecting thread throughout the saga and lead to the parenthood that closes Ourland. Given the centrality of the subject and its (re)definition in a concrete time and space, especially in the first part of the saga, we can talk of a ‘chronotope of motherhood.’ Needless to say that no such chronotope was ever studied by Bakhtin and we would need to peer into the history of literature to know how the ‘chronotope of motherhood’ has (or has not) been represented. Concerned as she was with gendered issues (and chronotopes), Gilman would wonder: “what has fiction to offer concerning mother-love, or even concerning father-love, as compared to this vast volume of excitement about lover-love?” (“Masculine” 120). The truth is that the mother has not been treated as a subject, a person or an individual by culture, for whom “motherhood... [has been] a subordinate process” (Ourland 132). As in the case of the previous (gendered) chronotopes, the ‘chronotope of motherhood’ will provide us with a dialogical pause to (re)think about mothers’ activities. I would like to argue that showing all these mothers in open, public spaces— “r[u]n[ning] out of the houses” and “gather[ing] in from the fields” (Herland 11)—is a manifestation of the Freudian uncanny. That is, in patriarchy, the mother, who was familiar to us, has been kept out of sight (in the private sphere). And, in Herland, the mother comes back to light. This implies a dialogical usage of the notion ‘uncanny,’ which indicates that something has been repressed not only psychologically but also socially. One of the problems is that women, and by extension mothers, have been neglected by culture. For instance, romantic philosophers constantly denied the human status of women—cf. Amorós 1997, Valcárcel. The rationalists, on their part, were not more dialogical, and so the rationality theory makes the educational activities of mothers, and by implication mothers themselves, appear non-rational, if not downright irrational... Perhaps the most important concern is that, when the educational realm makes women invisible, philosophers of education cannot provide an adequate answer to the question of what constitutes an educated person... [whose] adequate ideal... must [dialogically] join thought to action and reason to feeling and emotion. (Martin 115-117, emphasis mine)

In principle, Gilman would also agree to educating children in “thought” as well as in “feeling” (Ourland 135). In Herland, the feminist uncanny of the ‘motherhood chronotope’ lets readers see mothers differently—they work as educators of their children and perform several functions outside the home. Thus, the Herlanders can affirm: “We are Mothers, and we are People...” (Herland 126). In the words of Rosemary Jackson the uncanny “uncovers what is hidden and, by doing so, effects a disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar” (65). Dialogical feminists have also argued that, by defamiliarizing a concept (here ‘mother’) that forms part of the “existing literary and social norms[,]... in addition occurs the formation of a new ideology, a plan of resistance against the conventions” 29

This alliance between ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ appears also in Meridel Le Sueur.

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(Bauer 1988, 161). Like Le Sueur’s dialogical version of the feminine, Gilman’s Herlanders work to socialize the mother, to make her a participant in the symbolic world. For example, in Herland, women are the (only) educators of their children. This constitutes a ‘plan of resistance’ against “androcracy” (“Woman’s” 288), as the socialization of the maternal could bring about a maternalization of society. Herlanders and Americans will maternal questions thoroughly. Such (uncanny) discussions imply making public/bringing to light the mother herself. As in the case of rape, ‘the personal is the political’ appears fictionalized through motherhood. Furthermore, we learn that not only the space of discussion, but the ‘space’ of motherhood itself is also public. In order to deal with its ‘time,’ I need to highlight the Herlandian distinction between “motherhood” and “maternity”‘: whereas the latter term means “to bear a child,” the former is related with the “highest art” of “education” (Herland 82). Thus, in Herland: Each mother had her year of [the] glory [of maternity]; the time to love and learn, living closely with her child, nursing it proudly, often for two years or more... But after[wards]... the mother was not so constantly in attendance... She was never far-off, however, and her attitude toward the co-mothers [the child’s educators], whose proud child-service was direct and continuous, was lovely to see. (103)

On the one hand, I agree with Ruth Levitas that Gilman did not have much faith in (the qualities added to) maternal instinct, i.e. that a woman can give birth to a child does not mean that she will be able to educate her/him (all by herself). On the other, with the introduction of the co-mothers, the visionary writer was anticipating kindergartens or the existence of other caretakers that help mothers in children’s upbringing. Above all, she was enhancing the role of education, which is basic in her feminist project. Probably due to her socialist beliefs, Gilman was more interested in the wellness of the community than in the wellness of a single individual (“Unnatural”). That is the reason why her Herlanders “thought in terms of the community. As such, their time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an individual life. Therefore, they habitually considered and carried out plans for improvement which might cover centuries” (Herland 79). For example, “the deliberate replanting of an entire forest area with different kinds of trees”—again, the novelist’s ecological vein comes to light. Herlandian self-consciousness of future generations responds to Gilman’s objective of making the mother(’s work) visible. Another question is that her women characters always find a way to solve their problems by themselves. In several of her works, women organize themselves to look after children among themselves or through the kindergartens they themselves run (Diantha). Therein, Gilman has been accused of not advocating men’s participation in childcare (Gough 1995, Kessler, Levitas). On the contrary, Gilman advocates both sexes’ co-operation in the care of children in her short-stories (“Garden,” “Housekeeper”) and does so too in HerlandOurland. It is then important to test the reasons why the author decided to fictionalize a world of parthenogenetic women. Susan Gubar has suggested a feminist psychoanalytic interpretation: “Parthenogenesis... releases women from the female Oedipus complex... Gilman valorizes the creativity of the womb which is[,]... after all, the tangible place of reproduction... The female, far from seeming castrated or mutilated or wounded or envious of the penis, derives her energy and her assurance from the fact that, having no penis, she cannot be castrated” (144-145). Gubar continues by arguing that Gilman rejected the

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Freudian identification of ‘penis’ with ‘power,’30 a rejection that is made evident “in her emphasis on the erotics of motherhood” (144). She goes on to quote the following extract from the novel: “before a child comes to one of [the Herlanders] there is a period of utter exaltation—the whole being is uplifted and filled with a concentrated desire for that child ([Herland] 70).” This statement can be seen as an anticipation of the 1970s’ discourse on jouissance. As it appears only once, I do not think its message is highlighted sufficiently in the text. In fact, the saga’s prose cannot be characterized as being erotic at all—at least in comparison with Le Sueur’s, which rejoices in the semiotic.31 Nonetheless I agree with Gubar that Gilman wanted to underline the ‘creativity of the womb,’ something she strove to communicate in “Yellow.” For Gilman, woman is the origin of life and parthenogenesis itself can be seen as a rewriting of genesis (Gubar). This theory of parthenogenesis was inspired by a work of Lester Ward on the “Gynaecocentric Theory of Life” (Man-Made 3). According to it, she repeatedly stated that the female is (originally) the ‘race type’ and the male, a ‘variant’ (Man-Made, Religion, Women). From her point of view, in the beginning, it was the female who helped the male to become “more human” (Women 132). Gilman blamed the institution of patriarchy which, mainly through marriage, turns women (the primary producers) into mere consumers, whose “maternal energy” is appropriated by men (125126). As in the view of liberal feminism, she contended that the patriarchal ‘system’ diminishes women’s human potential by means of increasing their sexual function (Human 313-314). Therefore, she questioned the androcentric view of the male/masculine being the norm: “We must learn to study the normal human life as the outcome of the feminine, and to see that many features we have assumed to be natural to humanity are merely natural to masculinity, which is quite another thing” (Religion 83). In this fragment, she reversed the opposites (e.g. human/gender), to provoke her readers to hopefully change their ways of thinking. This tendency to reverse the opposites is the first step in the emancipation of the oppressed (cf. Anzaldúa 1987). Gilman described the process of gender-role internalization (in both sexes) as early as 1911: “The girl-child, peering out, sees this forbidden [public] field as belonging wholly to menkind; and her relation to it is to secure one [man] for herself... He will feed, clothe and adorn her—she will serve him...” (Man-Made 41). In a surprisingly visionary way, Gilman was advancing the recent work of feminists such as Nancy Chodorow. In Herland, the solution she suggested to do away with the ‘male (work)/female (domesticity)’ hierarchy is a parthenogenetic society, where daughters would derive their identities exclusively from their mothers. Together with Gilman’s, Chodorow’s theory constitutes a(nother) challenge to Freud. It seems to me both feminists would agree that “girls continue to derive their sense of [maternal] identity from the mother... rather than primarily through a desire to give the father a baby as a substitute for the missing penis” (Waugh 1989, 45-46). Furthermore, Herlanders do not have last names because they come from a “common source” (Herland 75). Celia Amorós has interpreted the custom of taking fathers’ last names, explained by Lacan, as a preference of metaphor (the symbolic order) over metonymy (the natural order): 30

Le Sueur would also reject the equivalence ‘penis’=‘power.’ Among the ideas shared by both thinkers are also their socialist beliefs and their ecological concerns. Unfortunately, the lines quoted by Gubar are followed by an explanation of the Herlanders’ ability to practice negative eugenics or to “voluntarily defer [maternity]” (Herland 70). In the section dedicated to discourse, I will come back to this and other issues of Gilman’s controversial thought. 31

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“Metaphor is to Metonymy... what Culture is to Nature and what Man is to Woman” (1985, 31-32, my translation). Through parthenogenesis, the question of relationship, contiguity and, by extension, metonymy is emphasized. Thus, Herlandian parthenogenesis becomes a profound critique of patriarchy and its systems, e.g. capitalism: Herlanders do not need to “sign” their children “[b]ecause the finished product is not a private one” (Herland 76). It seems that, traditionally, only women have been considered part of Nature. However, we are all links in the natural chain. Inventing a ‘chronotope of motherhood,’ specifying its gendered particulars, helps the introduction of women into literature/culture. In Women and Economics, Gilman powerfully stated: “Maternal energy is the force through which have come into the world both love and industry” (126). Here is how she rephrased this idea in Herland: As I learned more and more to appreciate what these women had accomplished, the less proud I was of what we, with all our manhood, had done... They were sisters, they grew together—not by competition, but by united action... We tried to put in a good word for competition... but there was no such arrogance about them... We rather... t[old them]... that without it there would be ‘no stimulus to industry.’ Terry was very strong on that point... ‘No one... man or woman would work without incentive. Competition is the... motor power[’]... ‘It is not so with us,’ they explained gently. ‘Do you mean, for instance, that with you no mother would work for her children without the stimulus of competition?’... No, he admitted that he did not mean that. (60)

First of all, Herland is a co-operative community, not a capitalist one. Once more, the novelist turns the binary opposition ‘male/female’ up-side-down in order to associate women with all the positive values of culture. Questioning traditional beliefs—e.g. competition as what drives the economy—, dismantling hierarchies and blurring boundaries—between culture and nature, production and reproduction, public and private— form part of Gilman’s feminist dialogical project of showing the limits of definitions. Needless to say that, from a modern (feminist) optic, there is no way to justify the author’s assumption that competition is masculine and co-operation feminine—a hierarchy that undermines any dialogical project. What is justifiable is her need to demonstrate women’s capacity to work and work together, something ‘our’ culture has insisted on denying (Herland 67). At the same time the author attacks sexist stereotypes, she teaches her audience the (new) skills women can develop. No wonder the narrator says he “learned” to see them differently and to value them positively. Contrary to its traditional stereotype, ‘motherhood(’s chronotope’) is prolific also beyond (re)producing human beings. Practising the alliance between ‘production’ and ‘reproduction,’ the Herlanders “developed all this close inter-service in the interests of their children. To do the best work they had to specialize, of course; the children needed spinners and weavers, farmers and gardeners, carpenters and masons, as well as mothers” (68). The implications of creating these working-mothers are multiple. First, it is important not to forget that these “children” are all daughters. Herland stands for a society in which females (girls and women) count as subjects, who both demand improvement and work for it. Second, Gubar states that Herland’s “airy gazebos, ceilingless temples, [and] open-air theaters” manifest a concern with ecology by confounding the frontier between “art and nature” (144). Third, Bridget Bennet argues for a new blurring of boundaries since “the[se] women ha[d] manufactured a nation which resembles a huge domestic space in a transformation which anticipates the blurring between the public and the private” (47). One the one hand, such blurring of boundaries is also reflected in the heteroglossia of the saga’s

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genres: adventure novel, romance, fantastic literature, among others. On the other hand, Bennet’s and Gubar’s arguments could be used to support my interpretation that the novel’s ‘chronotope of motherhood’ contains an uncanny element, where the mother (a figure of the private sphere) has come out into the public realm. Fourth, in her work of re-writing Western tradition, Gilman is also revising history in order to include women’s deeds, of which we have almost no records. Nowadays, feminists are continuing her work by reevaluating women’s historical importance in the development of agriculture, medicine, the textile industry, architecture, among other fields (Reed 111-128). Once we have learned to see the mother as a subject, Gilman’s final proposal will consist of turning both mother and father into caretakers. In spite of everything, one of the reasons why the Herlanders are happy with the men’s visit is to move on from parthenogenesis to heterosexual reproduction, in what they consider an improvement, “a bi-sexual race” (Herland 89, 119, 135,... & Ourland 63-64, 88,...). Playing on Chodorow’s famous title, I will call such a move ‘the reproduction of heterosexuality,’ as Gilman did not finally envision a society where women could choose to have children without the need of consenting to heterosexual relationships—as it is partly in Le Sueur’s work. In the end, Gilman was more interested in criticizing her male contemporaries’ lack of involvement in childcare. Creating a “dual parentage” or a “‘New Motherhood’” implies fathers’ full participation in child-rearing (Herland 119 & 140). As stated above, for the Herlanders maternity’s time-space is limited and belongs to the biological mother. But motherhood’s time-space can be occupied by other caretakers, so why not the father? Once again, the novelist foresaw current discourse on shared parenthood, initiated by Chodorow and continued by other scholars—see Balbus, Markus. That future place can be achieved, as Ellador contends, “[i]f we, in Herland, can begin a new kind of men!” (Ourland 189). Thus, the future chronotope (of motherhood) occupied by Celis, Jeff, Vandyck, Ellador, and their descendants will be really both-Herland-andHisland: a ‘chronotope of parenthood.’ Gilman’s faith in this new pragma-topia is evident in her assertion: “We are slowly forming a nobler type of family; the union or two, based on love and... combined with the friendliness and comradeship of equals... It will be good for... man, woman and child” (Man-Made 43).32 Considering these proposals one cannot but appreciate Gilman’s desire that future families do not repeat old mistakes, such as the lack of communication, love and equity between John and Jane in “Yellow.” According to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar: “[i]nterestingly, when we juxtapose “The Yellow Wallpaper” [1892] and His Religion & Hers [1923]... it becomes plain that much of [the author]’s maternal theology is compensatory” (211). Gilbert and Gubar imply that the ambiguities present in Gilman’s oeuvre predict those found in recent discourses: for instance, Julia Kristeva has written on maternal ‘abjection’ and maternal ‘jouissance’ in different texts/periods (215). Nowadays, some feminists’ discourse on motherhood is truly hybrid, trying to escape from either idealization or repudiation—cf. Abbey & O’Reilly, Chandler. From my point-of-view, the ambiguities and contradictions in Gilman’s work make it all the more interesting. What is more important is that, throughout her literary career, she showed both the ‘glories’ and the ‘burdens’ of being a mother. I consider more worrying that, in her later years, her thought became more monologic by focusing on the

32

The drawing appearing on the cover of Gilman’s periodical The Forerunner represented a triad of mother, father and child.

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inherent virtues of the ‘mother sex,’33 something that is not so patent in this saga (Ourland 185). In post-Victorian America, Gilman still needed to prove it was possible for women to perform several activities successfully (marriage, motherhood, a professional career) and even to be happy with them. Ironically, in the twenty-first century, women who combine all those activities are still fighting for their happiness. Nowadays, a woman who has children, is (or not) married and works in and out of the home without receiving any help suffers from innumerable problems. Gilman’s proposals to improve women’s lives would include providing them with men’s help (HerlandOurland), salaries for housewives (Women), fairly cheap kindergartens (Diantha), food delivered to the homes (Moving), specialized house-workers, public dining-rooms and laundries (Moving, Women), communal apartments (with the cited facilities) and leisure centres accessible to all social classes (“Best”), apart from others. Unfortunately the socioeconomic structure, together with the force of a masculinist tradition, is still crippling women from enjoying their ‘human’ potential. Gilman’s visionary power was limited and I guess she would not like today’s world. As I pointed out when dealing with Le Sueur’s ‘pregnancy chronotope,’ it seems urgent that we ‘pause’ to (re)think about motherhood, among other reasons, to construct the necessary bridges toward the ‘chronotope of parenthood.’ But first, I agree with Gilman that we have to posit questions concerning fatherhood—men’s co-operation in childcare, as well as in housework, is still much discussed today. Giving a(nother) twist to some interpretations of her work, I will insist on the writer’s preoccupation with men(-readers), at least in this saga, and on her efforts to change them (toward feminism). In effect, that the narrator-character is male is a way of making readers identify with him so as to convince them of her proposals. In the introductory paragraphs of this chapter, I referred to fin-de-siècle debates on the New Women. The period also saw debates on the crisis of masculinity (Heilmann, New 46). On the contrary, with Gilman I believe the new men would be the results of an improved masculinity and not of a masculinity going through a ‘bad time.’ In Herland, male travellers will be educated before they are allowed to deal with young women. The author believed in the power of education and training for the improvement of society (cf. Lane). Since the Herlanders might be representatives of the new women—who, for instance, can be both mothers and have a career—one would think the three Americans are educated to become new men. This educational process takes place in a comic feminist recreation of the Bakhtinian ‘castle chronotope.’ Bakhtin identified the original version of the ‘castle chronotope’ in the Gothic genre, which traditionally has not been very kind toward women (characters). In the Gothic, “the castle is saturated through and through with... the time of the historical past... [and] where... particular human relationships involv[e] dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights” (FTC 245-246). Gilman liked the Gothic, which she practised in short-stories such as “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper,” “The Giant Wisteria,” and “The Rocking Chair” among others. The Gothic presence in Herland participates in the novel’s heteroglossic usage of genres, as well as of its gendered alterations. Moreover, the especially ironic character of 33

Some examples: “Motherhood... [is] the farthest and fullest purpose of feminism” (“Feminism” 186), “[t]he term ‘woman’ should connote wifehood and motherhood” (“Brains” 258), the “real woman” is “the Giver and Sewer and Caretaker” (“Woman’s” 290). Toward the end of her life, Meridel Le Sueur also tended to highlight the onesidedness of the maternal (without the erotic) in her portrayals of women—see Winter.

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this chronotope reinforces the text’s novelistic condition. As she had done previously, Gilman’s allusions to a past time form part of the parody, since she is more interested in the future (results). Thus, once in Herland, the Americans spend a total of “nine months” (Herland 58) amongst the older women, “six” of which they are confined in “a sort of castle” (53, 29). On the one hand, the (male) explorers appear suddenly in an all-women society, which had not had contact with the outside world for two thousand years, which explains why the Herlanders take precautions. In fact, as Jeff says: “[the confinement]’s better than [they]’d have been likely to get in a man-country” (28). On the other, it could be argued that the training process or even the fortress is a metaphor for the womb since it is expected that, when the three adventurers leave it, they will be re-born as new men. The Herlanders’ project of beginning “a new kind of men” (Ourland 189)—e.g. interested in practising fatherhood—starts with the ‘castle chronotope’ of Herland and is culminated by the birth of Van and Ellador’s “son” at the end of Ourland (193). Again, the birth of a ‘son,’ neither a daughter nor twins of different sexes, is another manifestation of the author’s interest in a new masculinity.34 Given the important significance of the ‘castle chronotope’ in the whole saga, I consider it is a vital motif that deserves studying. In order to explain why Van, Terry and Jeff end up in such “[a] [p]eculiar [i]mprisonment” (Herland 24), I need to go back to their encounter with the middle-aged women. One can recall that Terry had tried to approach them by offering them imitation jewellery. Like the girls, the older Herlanders do not pay much attention to the offer and “indicat[e to the newcomers]... to go with them” (21). The visitors refuse and, after hesitating for a while, violently approach the women. During that encounter, the Herlanders’ radical solutions was to use “anesthesia” (not) to fight with the travellers (23). Supporting my argument about the birth of the new men, the narrator describes his awakening as a rebirth: “as refreshing as that of a healthy child... It was like rising up... through a deep warm ocean... [o]r like... coming back to life...” (24). Curiously, Gilman was specially keen to portray men who faint and (re)awaken at some point, as if she wanted to awaken her male readers too (Smith 129). Minna Doskow has argued that the John of Moving the Mountain, Gilman’s first utopian novel, is the antecedent of the Van of Herland. John, who had lost his memory for twenty-five years, recovers it only after awakening from a fainting spell (Moving 38). After twenty-five years, he finds himself in a new society somewhat similar to Herland, especially in its feminist advances. Given all these changes, he will also have to undergo a process of “re-education” thereafter (38). At the end of “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper,” there is another John, the male protagonist, who faints. Since readers are deprived of his awakening, numerous questions have been raised on a most disturbing open ending. In the present case, and as Vandyck will turn into a (very) dialogic man progressively throughout the two novels, one would like to think ‘he’ is the John of “Yellow” being reborn. So that the Ourlanders can be thoroughly re-educated, they first undergo some kind of infantilization. Terry wakes up complaining: “They have taken away all our clothes... We have been stripped and washed and put to bed like babies—by these highly civilized women” (Herland 24). His complaint suggests a new role reversal—civilized women/babylike men—, which situates women in the subject position. Other signs of their masculinity are further erased: they are dressed in tunics that make them look “like a lot of neuters” (26) 34 The crisis of masculinity and the need for more feminine men are still topics of debate in our times—Anzaldúa (1987), Camps (1997).

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and their hats are “like those... o[f] the prince in the fairy tale, lacking the plume”—the phallus? Thus, through a gendered ‘castle chronotope,’ women will not lose their entities as subjects but will duplicate them at the cost of disempowering the men. If, as Bakhtin contends, the ‘castle chronotope’ of the Gothic relates to a distant historical past, Gilman’s humorist appropriation relates to the fairy tales of the men’s recent past (childhood). New infantilizations and feminizations occur when the three friends try to escape through the window, by throwing out “rugs, robes, [and] towels,” as if they were a group of Rapunzels (34). The parody is completed when they are found and brought back by the Herlanders, which once again situates them in an inferior position. It is only after this episode when they decide to co-operate with the women. Thereafter, they are treated like real guests: being invited to eat delicious food (27) and “free to study as [they] wis[h], and... not left merely to wander in the garden for recreation but introduced to a great gymnasium” (30)— a quote reminiscent of “Yellow.” The protagonist in “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” is taken to a sort of castle: “a hereditary estate,” “a haunted house” (“Yellow” 24). She is also kept in a room, which might have been a “gymnasium” (26), and has a “garden” (24, 25, 40). Very probably, one of the reasons why she is confined in that Gothic place is to re-conduct her to/re-educate her in her exclusive role as a mother and not as a writer. In fact, “Yellow” could be read through the ‘castle chronotope,’ where Gothic features are both parodied and positively used. Consequently, the ‘castle chronotope’ of Herland can also be a rewriting of that in “Yellow,” where roles are once again reversed so that (new) women confine/educate (old) men. Nevertheless, whereas Jane(?) is kept totally isolated, the men’s training in the castle is carried out by means of dialogue and relationships. In this way “[the Ourlanders] were indeed to learn the [Herlanders’] language, and... to teach [their] own” (Herland 28). As I have commented upon, given their first violent reaction, the visitors are not allowed to wander freely till they are properly educated. Each man is assigned a mature woman—Zava to Jeff, Moadine to Terry, and Somel to Van—, who will be his tutor. Throughout literary history, “the image of older women as threatening rival rather than as mentor is familiar to us from ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to ‘Snow White’” (Attebery 99). As expected, this old myth is satirized through the wisdom and infinite patience of Gilman’s middle-aged female characters. During a period of nine months and through their conversations, both parties learn a lot about each other—their respective histories, customs, laws—till the men are allowed out, meet the rest of the women and get married. Of the three men, only Terry does not enjoy either the educating/intercultural process or Herland itself (Herland 98). Therefore, Gilman’s feminist version of the ‘castle chronotope’ might also be parodying the “period of ordeals and instructions” that, traditionally, all literary heroes must go through (Attebery 90). During their enforced stay, the men were “always under a certain degree of watchfulness” (Herland 98), as they were “studied” (27) and “analyzed” (88) by the Herlanders, who “never relax[ed] their close attention” (22). Obviously, they studied the women too (22, 46, 103), although they were not “‘a vigilance committee’” (22) of “a couple of million people” (104). As incredible as it seems, in Herland, Van never felt “homesick” (136), although he was being retained against his will. Once in Ourland, he remembers his visit/imprisonment as the “mothering care of that group of enlightened women” (Ourland 72) and even comes to feel “homesickness for Herland” (177). On the one hand, Gilman is playing with the notion “home” and Van’s latter statement could be read as if he had some kind of Stockholm syndrome. On the other, the question of

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educating a person is extremely complicated. Patriarchy has always tried to compulsorily ‘educate’ women in its own image, one example being the story of “Yellow.” In HerlandOurland, Gilman could be accused of trying to transform the male characters into new men without giving them (either literal or metaphorical) freedom. As we will discover later, the feminist activist had more radical ideas on how to ‘educate’ immigrants, Blacks, and other people. Before closing the section on the chronotope, it should be noted that, from a Bakhtinian optic, the chronotopes studied here make Herland-Ourland a novel. I want to stress, once more, that the gendering of chronotopes contributes to their feminist critiques. There are more chronotopes in Herland—‘estrangement,’ ‘adventure,’ ‘road,’ ‘encounter,’ ‘idyll,’ ‘rape,’ ‘motherhood,’ ‘castle’—than in Ourland, although some of them continue in this second novel in a less detailed way—‘adventure,’ ‘idyll,’ ‘motherhood.’ In Ourland, readers experience a new ‘chronotope of estrangement’ through the eyes of Ellador, who visits Ourland (‘our land’ or the known world) for the first time. In addition, readers are to consider the world from a woman’s viewpoint, which genders the ‘estrangement chronotope,’ contributing enormously to Gilman’s feminist project. As I have been insisting, Bakhtinian genres are ways of seeing, and feminist genres seek to exploit these ways. As Bakhtin wrote (and Gilman would agree with): “[i]n the realm of culture, outsidedness is a most powerful fact in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly” (RTQ 7). In this case, Mrs. Jennings is the foreigner, who makes a comparative analysis, and readers are expected to ‘estrange’ ourselves through her eyes in order to see culture more profoundly. Readers are supposed to be as altered as Van, who “beg[i]n[s] to get a new perspective” (Ourland 87) as he is “[g]oing about with Ellador, among familiar conditions, and seeing things [he] never dreamed were there” (159). It seems as if, besides Ellador, all feminists were ‘foreigners’ in patriarchy, since we certainly need to disidentify ourselves from it so as to produce a feminist critique. And if genres are forms of thought, feminism must be a genre. Gilman’s feminist designs in Herland-Ourland intend that readers become feminist too, that is, we are to interrogate Ourland: its laws, traditions, ways of living, institutions, and so forth. The production of a “feminist reading position” is one of the results of the strategy of ‘estrangement’ introduced above (Cranny-Francis 125). It must be accounted that Ellador’s perspective is neither neutral nor the best, although Van comes to believe in it blindly (Ourland 87). Actually, Mrs. Jennings’s opinions are infected by xenophobia and other phobias—as any genre (of feminism) might be. On Discourse Griselda Pollock has observed: “Feminism’s struggle... is a struggle about meanings, a fight against dominant and established systems of meanings and the positions and identities they try to secure” (365).35 As we have seen in the previous section, in this feminist saga Americans and Herlanders debate the patriarchal meanings that affect (certain) women: “virgin” (Herland 45-46), “wife” (52, 61, 97, 118), to cite just a few. In Herland these 35 In the light of this and of what we are seeing in this study, who could deny that the feminists of the past laid the first stone for deconstruction?

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concepts appear between inverted commas and in italics. No doubt, Gilman wanted to incite discussion about these terms, since calling attention to their written form is a technique widely used by the theorists who debate about language (cf. Burton). The first signs of the Herlanders noticed by the explorers are their giggling voices: “something... like a suppressed whisper of laughter—a little happy sound” (Herland 14). Recognizing the other (woman) aurally may be a way of breaking with masculinist voyeurism and promoting relationships through speech and dialogue. Moreover, laughter has a vital importance in Bakhtinian (non-)theory: it demolishes hierarchies, puts an end to fear, unmasks ideologies, makes possible (artistic) creativity, etc. Several scholars have appreciated the comic touches of Herland (Adams, Bernikow, Lane). Hence a new sign that the first part of the saga is more dialogical than Ourland. Laura E. Donaldson had classified Herland as a ‘dialogical feminist utopia,’ “which recreates truth among people collectively searching, [while] its monological masculinist counterpart relies upon... a priori principles” (374). On the contrary, I would support the view that Herland has a “question-and-answer style... [close to] many utopian romances” (Wilson 283-284). The Herlanders ask questions like: “[w]hat is ‘the home’?” (Herland 61), “what is the work of the world, that men do...?” (60), “[w]hat is [a wife’s] work?” (97). I also agree that the question-and-answer exchange denaturalizes patriarchal definitions, constituting a power-reversal that contributes to the creation of a female speaking subject (cf. Jauss), who will finally have all the answers.36 In spite of its invaluable feminist impulse, I doubt that Herland (or even the whole saga) contains real dialogues, at least in the Bakhtinian sense. Still, of the two parts, Herland seems to have a dialogical novel-like structure, given its many gendered transformations of novelistic chronotopes. Ourland has fewer chronotopes and is mostly centred on the more serious discussions between Ellador and Vandyck. From a Bakhtinian optic, the second part needs to be studied from the vantage point of discourse and, unfortunately, this makes it (even) less dialogic. As before, there will be no strict division between chronotope and discourse except when necessary. In fact, many questions raised in the discursive part will help us to understand better those dealt with in the chronotopic section. Among the terms discussed between the Jennings are: ‘woman,’ ‘Native American,’ ‘Jew,’ ‘Black,’ ‘education,’ ‘immigrant,’ ‘poor,’ and ‘democracy.’ Far from dialogical, the Herlanders’ “lines of interrogation” are compared to those of “Napoleon” (Herland 50, 65). Quite naively, the narrator praises Ellador’s way of “extracting information,” by “‘placing’” and “‘handling’” her interlocutors in a Socratic fashion (Ourland 104, 106, 66). Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson interpret three senses in Bakhtin’s deployment of the term ‘dialogue’: (1) “every utterance is by definition dialogic,” (2) “some utterances [are] dialogic and some nondialogic or monologic,” (3) “as a global concept, as a view of truth and the world” (130-131). According to meaning 2, which is the basis for the novel and relates to concepts such as hybridization and heteroglossia, the Herlanders’ utterances cannot be (highly) dialogic. They seem to have all the answers and are really keen on giving speeches, without listening much in return. A true 36

An interesting example of this reversal occurs while the men “address general audiences and classes of girls” (Herland 84). The Americans take a long time in dressing up to meet the younger women, whose questions are finally answered by the older Herlanders. We could say the men’s lecture is turned into one of Bakhtin’s carnivals, whose “primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king[s]” (PDP 124).

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representative of the New Women, Ellador talks uninterruptedly while Van just listens patiently (Ourland 128-129, 134, 190). In fact, not only his language but the narrator’s appears to lack sufficient authority. The saga opens with a narrator who confesses he “writ[es] from memory,” having lost the “notes... and... pictures” he had taken, and who adds that he has “never [been] good at descriptions” (Herland 1). He will say more about his narrative problems throughout: e.g. “I wish I could represent [how Herland actually was]” (50), “Oh, I don’t know how to say it” (69), “I’m afraid I’m leaving out some [data]” (Ourland 128). Scholars agree that the narrator’s insistence on his inability to tell the story is a strategy deployed by Gilman (Cane, Johnston). Given the many allusions to his telling, some critics argue he is a self-conscious narrator (Johnston). Moreover, he may be disoriented “so that the reader c[an] be both comfortable and disoriented—safe enough to listen and compelled to reflect” (Smith 133). This argument supports the premises of dialogical novels that disorder the readers’ consciousnesses so as to provoke responses in their readers. In other words, genres are ways of seeing, and Gilman wanted her audience (especially the male side of it) to change their ways. Apart from calling attention to the lack of authority of all (patriarchal) texts, given the inefficiency of the narrators, Gilman might have wanted to give more authority to Ellador precisely because she is not the narrator. As I said above, as a character (and also as a narrator), Van is capable of dialogic growth, which means, capable of selecting between the authoritative voice (of the fathers) and an “internally persuasive word that is... backed up by no authority at all” (DIN 342). This is the second time the narrator tells the story, not only because he lost the first account he produced, but also because he lost something else: “I will not try to repeat the carefully detailed account [of the authoritative voice] I lost” (Herland 53, my italics). In other words, Vandyck loses (much) contact with the patriarchal voice ‘living within him’ as he changes it for his wife’s. “In order to assess and divine the real meaning of others’ words,” Bakhtin advises us, among other questions, to wonder about the “concrete circumstances” within which the speaker speaks (DIN 340). I will argue that, because Vandyck is in love, the character-narrator’s point of view is influenced by Ellador, who is the true focalizer of Ourland.37 Therefore, once in Ourland, the narrator says: “[he] grew to see life as she saw it... to adopt [Ellador’s] point of view” (Ourland 81), while he came to “see things” (76) from a new perspective (96, 167). Van’s conversion fulfils the feminist dream of transforming patriarchy: for instance, he is convinced that the patriarchal family is the “‘root’” of “America’s political shortcomings” (129). The problem is that, the more he sees the world “through her eyes” (109, 181), the “less and less inclined, indeed less able” he becomes “to discuss it with her” (109). From a radical perspective, we could argue that, as in Foucault’s panopticum, the male protagonist-narrator ends up internalizing the viewer’s word.38 As suggested by her feminist gendering and alterating of genre forms, Gilman believed in the force of language to (dis)continue women’s oppression. That is, using patriarchal genre/linguistic forms contributes to perpetuate patriarchal power. For instance, the usage of the universal masculine to refer to both sexes can certainly lead people to mistakenly 37

I am using the concept of focalization as introduced by Genette. John S. Bak has interpreted “The Yellow Wallpaper” through the panopticon. Once more, the reader is overwhelmed by references to “eyes” in Herland—“keen appraising eye” (88), “her [“brown”] eyes rested in mine” (91), “[h]er eyes grew large” (110), etc—and specially in Ourland—“clear eyes” (63), “kind eyes” (66), “wise far-seeing eyes” (116), “[h]er eyes were grave” (154), “shining” “luminous eyes” (167, 161), “a steady eye” (174), “the fixed determination in her eyes” (188), etc. 38

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think that the only human beings who inhabit (and work in) the world are male. That is why the narrator-protagonist reckons: It took me a long time to realize—Terry never did realize—... [that w]hen we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and its activities. To grow up and ‘be a man,’ to ‘act like a man’—the meaning and connotation is wide indeed. The vast background is full of marching columns of men,... of men steering their ships into new seas[,]... ploughing and sowing and reaping,... building roads and bridges and high cathedrals, managing great businesses[;]... of men everywhere, doing everything—‘the world’... And when we say women, we think female—the sex... But... in Herland women were ‘the world.’ (Herland 137)

This excerpt evidences Van’s (dialogic) growth. In it, Gilman is once more attacking binary oppositions—hu(man)/woman, male intellect/female sex(uality), work/domesticity—in order to deconstruct the categories “women” and “men.” Since “in Herland women were ‘the world,’” men do not have any other alternative than to deal/talk with them. Celia Amorós has also expressed the hope that, by means of dialogue, women will emancipate themselves from the site of violence, of ‘heterodesignation,’ they have been condemned to (1992). Reversals of hierarchies and gender-roles occur throughout Herland-Ourland. The first time the Americans face the older Herlanders, the narrator confesses: “we found ourselves much in the position of the suffragette trying to get to the Parliament buildings through a triple cordon of London police” (Herland 23). Before arriving in Ourland with Ellador, Van “[feels] like a housekeeper... longing to... set the house in order before inspection” (Ourland 97). Reversing the hierarchy (‘empowered/disempowered’) is the first step toward the liberation of the tyrannized. It seems Gilman might not have advanced from this first step—was it because she was a First Wave feminist? Therefore, she created the characters of Ellador and Van and situated them respectively at the top and at the bottom of the speech hierarchy. Most of the time, the couple’s conversations are too asymmetrical in the sense that she talks much more than him, his (short) replies and contradictions seeming too ineffective—for instance, when he shows disgust at her criticism of Ourlandian women (114). And, sometimes, his intermissions and quizzical questions just help to strengthen her arguments, for instance when talking about poor immigrants (118). In fact, the two characters’ voices could stand for the two (main) voices fighting within the author herself, given her ideological contradictions, although Ellador wins the battle. By saying this I am suggesting that, in Herland-Ourland, Gilman’s design of/relationship with her characters was not very dialogical.39 Ellador definitively becomes the “teacher” (64), the surgeon (137, 143, 144, 149), “the sociologist” (125), “the investigator” (110, 125), the leader of the two. The expression ‘tame and train’ appears throughout Herland. In that country, women had spent nine months training their male guests. And in Ourland, Van’s wife keeps on teaching him effectively and at a certain point she will tell him, “I’m very proud of you. That’s splendid!” (80), confirming his Herlandization. At the same time, Mrs. Jennings spends most of her stay in Ourland doing research on the different problems and pointing out solutions, her research method being to “pitch in,” diagnose and prescribe (112). Thus, she reads an impressive amount of history and 39

Bakhtin developed the concept ‘polyphony’ in period II of his career. In Dostoevsky, the relation between author and hero/es is defined as polyphony, a “plurality of consciousness, with equal rights and each with its own world” (PDP 6).

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literature—Winwood Reade (78), Ina Coolbrith (104), John Muir (109), to name a few— and shares her ideas with Vandyck and other Ourlanders. The couple visits several places in Europe and Asia. Like Mr. Jennings, Mrs. Jennings is highly gifted at learning languages (99). So they can talk with “many other persons, of all kinds and classes” (138) such as the “most interesting and valuable people, missionaries, teachers, diplomats, merchants” (92), “experts” (90), “a Japanese authority” (100), “a woman doctor” (101), “business men” (156), apart from with each other. Obviously, their interlocutors represent an elite within the social sphere, which implies that the narrator is ingenious or wilfully mistaken when he assures us that they actually were “of all kinds and classes” (138). Lower-class and uneducated people’s voices, to say the least, are absent fro the text. When dealing with the novel’s discourse, Bakhtin describes it as “variform in speech and voice” (DIN 261), “a diversity of social speech types... and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262), a “diversity of voices and heteroglossia” (300), etc. Following these definitions strictly, Ourland is not dialogical, Ourland is not a novel. Furthermore, a text whose languages reflect only those of the author approaches Bakhtin’s conception of “poetic genres” (264). Before Simone de Beauvoir pronounced her over-quoted statement, one is not born, but becomes a woman, Gilman explained patriarchy’s classification of women that “[a]s females they were born and not made” (Man-Made 146). After meeting the female Ourlanders, Ellador assures Van that the kind of (patriarchal) woman characterized as “woman” is only “the [one] man made” and “manufactur[ed]” (Ourland 175, 188). These statements make of Gilman a nominalist and are crucial in a society so obsessed with biological differences. I have already pointed out the kind of modern women her female characters represent. Apart from that, it must be noted that the Herlanders are all descendants of an “Aryan stock” (Herland 54). Herlandian women live in a place “cut off from the rest of the world, surrounded by the darker-skinned natives of South America” (Peyser 1998, 78), and speak “no savage sing-song, but clear musical fluent speech” (Herland 15). Thomas Galt Peyser has observed that Gilman’s preoccupation with ecology and cleanness seem to conceal racism. Her Herlanders also seem to harbour other prejudices such as heterosexism or classism. That is, the majority of the Herlanders are mothers, who happily convert from parthenogenesis to (the reproduction of) heterosexuality. Besides, they are educated women, who also cultivate the body—they practise gymnastics (Herland 31) and do not eat meat (46). Mrs. Jennings herself has the manners of an “aristocrat” (Ourland 65) and can (under)stand only the educated female Ourlanders (98). Therefore, the women Gilman gives birth to are not representative of all the world’s women either. It appears that when she “defin[es] woman, sex trumps race” (Peyser 1998, 74) besides class, sexual preference, maternal and intellectual interests, etc. Louise Michele Newman has recorded that, in the beginning of the twentieth century, “feminism and assimilationism were historical siblings” (136). Newman affirms that “Gilman would come to see the Anglo-Protestant women as central to [her] civilizing mission” (140). As treated above, so-called Third-World feminists have protested that FirstWorld feminists have constantly approached them as missionaries among them (cf. Mohanty, Spivak). That is, instead of trying to establish a dialogue with the other, Western feminism has denounced women’s suffering in poor countries in an objectifying antidialogical way. All these questions are exemplified in this saga. On her arrival in Ourland, the narrator describes Mrs. Jennings’ attitude as that of “Columbus” (Ourland 63). During 110

the trip to Asia, Ellador criticizes Oriental women for foot binding (92-93) and Vandyck refers to the way of life of “women in the East” as if they were all the same (101). Contemporary feminists have protested against the homogenization of so-called ThirdWorld women (cf. Mohanty). In general, the author pays no attention to the chronotopicity of gender.40 As I have been insisting throughout, gender is a relative concept depending on the chrono-tope (time-space) it inhabits. Although in patriarchy the female sex is repressed by gender discrimination (1st level of gender analysis), not all women experience it in the same way (2nd level). In the First Feminist Wave, Gilman would (apparently) refer to women as a sex, providing a gender analysis of the 1st level. In my opinion, the focus of critical perspective should begin with ‘gender’ and then move to ‘genders’ since, usually, gender subordination is complicated by other factors—racism, classism. Sadly, Gilman did not worry about/realize the problems of women who were Native American, Jewish, or African. Being a socialist, the feminist author would be more understanding with the case of poor women. While, traditionally, scholars have focused on middle-class women to talk about the New Woman phenomenon (and movement), recent studies demystify such a notion as class-biased. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis maintain that “the dramatic increase of women workers who were joining [such as trade unionists, the Women’s Cooperative Guild, the Women’s Industrial Council, The National Union of Women Workers, etc]... tells [a] story” different from the New Woman myth (27). In fact, Gilman concluded The Man-Made World with the following paragraph: “The great woman’s movement and the labor movement of to-day are parts of the same... An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy” (260). In her article “The Best for the Poorest,” she demanded for them the creation of apartments exactly equal to the collective living she had always promoted. Among Gilman’s values as a social analyst is the denunciation of (wild) capitalism as ‘robbery’ (Ourland 133-139, 148, 155). She/Ellador attacks corporations, such as the railway companies, calling them “blood-suckers... oil-suckers and coal-suckers, water-suckers and wood-suckers and farm-suckers...” (133-134). And she blames “employees” for earning much more money than the “workers” (139). Mrs. Jennings demands “[r]oom for all, wealth for all” (128) although it is not necessary to become strictly socialist but “to think in terms of the community” (134).41 When discussing all these questions with Van, she “suggest[s] that [they] change politics for tennis” (124). Such a way of abandoning the theme of discussion is not dialogic at all, as the internal dialogism of discourse cannot be exhausted in (dramatized) dialogues (DIN 330). When Ellador is in Ourland, she cannot get used to the idea that nobody cares about feeding all the population (Ourland 296) and contemplates with disgust the living conditions of the poor (97).42 In Herland, the men assure the women that economic laws are 40 In other instances, Gilman would show understanding of the ‘chronotopic word.’ Talking about the Bible, Ellador wonders how “‘The Word of God,’” which “was written by many people... at different times,” could be “the same Word” (Ourland 67). 41 Gilman’s political vision is complex. In Ourland, we read: “democracy must be economic... [but] not exactly... Socialism” (123). The writer’s main objection to Marxist Socialism was its basis in class-hatred, something she often denounced (also in Ourland 154). Gabnocsik-Williams argues she believed in “socialized capitalism as a benevolently unifying force” (41). Other scholars identify her as a Fabian socialist (Deegan, Levitas). 42 There is a social(ist) feeling in both Gilman and Le Sueur. Though not her biological daughter, Le Sueur’s “Biography of My Daughter” is about Rhoda. The author denounces the fact that Rhoda died of starvation due to

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simply laws of nature, an argument that naturalizes stratification into classes as well as the justification of poverty (Herland 63). Gilman’s feminist socialism would lead her to protest (through Ellador) that those may be the laws of “male human nature... [as they] have no such ‘law[s]’ in Herland,” implying that women are naturally socialists (Ourland 132). But the author’s concern with class can stem from other factors as well. As a child, after her father abandoned the family, she experienced what some consider “extreme poverty” (quoted by Gabnocsik-Williams, 31). Then, her mother, her brother and herself had to live off their relatives, moving around constantly. As an adult, Gilman would suffer more economic problems, such as after the failure of the Impress, and would have friends who would help her, as Jane Addams did (Bauer 1998, 33). Since ‘class’ is indeed a shifting category (as any other), she herself saw her class-status fluctuate depending on her relative economic prosperity. According to Carol Farley Kessler, after marrying for the second time in 1900, Gilman became bourgeois, I assume, with all the ideological implications of the word (1994, 133). Nonetheless, in this saga we learn that, in our patriarchal world, it is the poorest women that work most and have the most children (Herland 63, 97; Ourland 97), it is white middle-class women who become educated and heterosexual married women that can enjoy motherhood and respectability. This means that, like a(ny) category, gender must resist (its) classification. Earlier I analyzed the existence of a ‘chronotope of motherhood’ in Herland. I would like to add some points of comparison with Ourland. Ellador thinks that “such limited women [as most Ourlanders] cannot produce a nobler race” (97).43 This comment seems a satirical trigger with which to instigate female Ourlanders to develop their inner potential. Then, Ellador asserts, women would become (truer) “Women!” able to educate their children well, which is to say, in the Herlandian way (175, italics hers). Herlanders are interested in making “the best kind of people” (Herland 59). Though they are repelled by the idea of abortion (70), they practise eugenics. Being parthenogenetic, they had managed to “breed out... the lowest types” (82). As Somel (a tutor) explains, whenever there was a girl showing “bad qualities... we appealed to her... to renounce motherhood” (82). Thus, in Herland, “everywhere there was the same level of intelligence” (64), as they had “develop[ed] two kinds of mind—the critic and inventor” (76), and they understood the “need of improvement as well as of repetition” (82, my italics). If these statements can be considered totalitarian, or even an anticipation of the discourse in favour of cloning, they can also be related to the context of the fin-de-siècle. In Herland, child-rearing “is entrusted only to the most fit” (Herland 83). The well-known feminist Margaret Sanger also said: “more children from the fit, less from the unfit” (quoted by Kline, 2). Wendy Kline connects Gilman’s insistence on women’s responsibility as makers of men with Theodore Roosevelt’s and Edward E. Ross’s preoccupation with (the white) “race suicide” and the fact that Roosevelt blamed the New Woman for not wanting to have children (10-11).44 It is true that Gilman encouraged some women—heterosexual, educated, middle-class—to have the unfair distribution of resources: “Round pumpkins in the field, corn fattening, melons like the crescent moons of the season, hogs fattening on the hoof, this is the wheat corn belt, that is the rich rich country” (108). 43 The text employs the term “noble” and its derivatives to excess—(Herland 57, 68, 82, 90, 99; Ourland 64, 68, 72, 97, 102)—, something which is obviously connected with Gilman’s elitist preferences. 44 “[F]or eugenicists marriage was overshadowed by mating and sexual selection replaced sexual passion” (Richardson 190). This helps us to further understand the lack of eroticism (of the ‘idyll chronotope’) in HerlandOurland.

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children. The most negative side of her view of motherhood is that her wish to control human processes, especially the biological ones, would lead her to reject the people that were not assimilable to her project. From this follows that Gilman would disapprove of the pregnancies in Meridel Le Sueur’s “Annunciation” and The Girl. And yet, in Gilman’s vision of motherhood, we can still find a positive side, which is her (unfortunately narrow) appreciation of what Carol Gilligan later called the ‘ethics of care.’ Thus, Ellador/Gilman criticizes the “unmotherliness” of Ourland as well as the lack of “interrelation” amongst people (Ourland 110, 144-145). It is true that Gilman attacked women’s subordination in patriarchy but, unfortunately, it is also true that she subordinated other people in her writings. Recently, critics have denounced the racial, ethnic and class-related prejudices of her “mixed legacy” (Knight 1999, 168)—Ceplair, Ganobcsik-Williams, Gilbert & Gubar, Lane, Lanser, Newman, Peyser 1998, and Stimpson, among others. Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams suggests that Ann J. Lane postponed the publication of Herland’s sequel (With Her in Ourland) because its Anti-Semitic, classist and racist content would “mar [Gilman’s] contribution as a social analyst and theorist” (23). In Herland-Ourland, there is an explicit binary opposition between America and ‘the rest’ (of the world)—Herland 62, Ourland 105-110. Thus, in comparison with “war-torn Europe, and the slow dark reaches of the Oriental civilization” (Ourland 75), Americans are “good-natured and friendly” and they are “not at war” (78). Vandyck convinces Ellador that Americans have progressive views with respect to women (91) and that he is “saving the best [country] to the last” (98). Like his wife, Van also has a colonial attitude. For instance, he refers to “our American Aborigines” (84). There are explicit comparisons between Herland and “Holland” (Herland 77, Ourland 191), whose inhabitants are the so-called (co)founders of the U.S. Curiously enough, the word “Van” is also common in Dutch last names. All this shows that, again, the author favours certain peoples. Here are some examples of how the novel’s (non)dialogues treat some so-called ethnic minorities. When dealing with the subject of how the first colonists “arranged” affairs with the Native Americans, Mr. Jennings has to admit that “[they] are not perfect in America” (Ourland 99). “We killed them,” he explains to Ellador, “[w]e left some... in... ‘reservations.’ [Others]... have become fully civilized—as good citizens as any... But speaking generally this is one of our national shames. Helen Hunt wrote a book about it called, ‘A Century of Dishonor’. ” Instead of commenting on such a ‘shame,’ Ellador changes the subject to “the pressure of population,” as if that justified the killing of the Native Americans! Then, they move on to deal with the “dispossessed” Hawaiians (102). Once more, contemplating Van’s discomfort with that question, Ellador encourages him to “drop it” too (103), thus allowing him to feel “glad to put aside a sense of national guilt.” Whereas in Dostoevsky (dialogic) dialogues seem to go on and on for the characters’ lifetimes—as in “Bobok”—, the debate taking place here is once more concluded in a nondialogical way. Nonetheless, in the first case, the mention of Helen Hunt’s book accounts for the dialogics concerning the term ‘Native American.’ That is, depending on the context in which a word is being used, it acquires different meanings, which does not negate but confirms the existence of other voices/ideas/points of view within the same (historical) chronotope. Therefore, fortunately, in the fin-de-siècle, there was more than one point of view (or heteroglossia) on the concept ‘Native American.’ Later in time, Meridel Le Sueur would “wor[k] for Indian land rights” (Hedges 1994, 1806), and would write books that

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exemplify her dialogical attitude toward the Native Americans. Le Sueur’s North Star Country (1945) deals with the first immigrants’ expansion to the West. The negotiation of a treaty between the new settlers and the Sioux, which ended in the latter’s massacre, is described in chapter III. In it, Le Sueur lets us hear the others’ voice as follows: “[t]he lament of the Indian Chiefs... ‘We have sold our hunting ground. / We have no place to bury our dead, yet you do not pay us. /... Day and night my shadow falls against the graves of my people. / Woe, woe be to my people’” (103). At the end of her life, she would remember another massacre at Wounded Knee as part of the history of the oppressed peoples of America (Word). This comparison provides a new example of the differences between Le Sueur and Gilman. With Her in Ourland contains several instances of prejudice against the Jewish minority too. Ellador despises them for not “hav[ing] passed the tribal stage” (163), and their “religion” is considered sexist, as it “blamed women for the sins of the world” (173). As tragic as it sounds, Ellador/Gilman naturalizes xenophobia, by arguing that anti-Semitism may stem from how the Jews “boast of the purity of their race” (162) as well as from their fanaticism (164). In spite of Herland’s homogeneity, intermarriage for the Jews is advised (166). Gilman’s comments are radical and (especially) contradictory, as usual. Further, they reveal her ignorance of the precarious lives of many Jews in the United States, especially in New York—although she might have worked in the tenements for a short period (Gabnocsik-Williams).45 In 1890, Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, a book on the immigrants living in New York. “It is said,” we read, “that nowhere in the world are so many people crowded together on a square mile as [in ‘Jewtown’]” (Riis, chapter x, paragraph two). Riis goes on to describe the ignominious working conditions of the Jewish sweat shops (chapter xi). This is an instance of the dialogics concerning the concept “Jew,” or of the chronotopic form of any word. Gilman was at times (self-)conscious of the alliance between perspective and dialogics. A proof of this self-consciousness is her invention of gendered chronotopes. Therefore, she would also write, “[Ellador’s] been reading the history as written by the North European races. Perhaps when [she and Vandyck] get to Persia, India, China, and Japan, it w[ould] be different... [And i]t was different” (Ourland 86). Feminist dialogicians have highlighted the importance of perspective in order to divine a text’s meaning (cf. Bauer & McKinstry). As I pointed out earlier, Ellador/Gilman’s focalization was often intolerant, not only ambiguous. Mrs. Jennings refers to America as a “Splendid Child” (repeated throughout). It is a land full of possibilities, “the top of the tree” (Ourland 111), something which, Ellador laments, Americans seem unable to realize. If ‘America’ is a ‘child,’ one presumes it needs instruction, and Ellador is ready to provide it. We have witnessed that education was a fundamental element in Gilman’s project. As part of the emphasis on culture, education has been a central issue for nominalist feminists, especially in the nineteenth century—cf. Concepción Arenal. Some scholars have attributed Gilman’s emphasis on education to her interest in Lamarckianism, according to which we not only inherit biological features but also cultural ones (Herland 78, Ourland 91). The feminist sociologist favoured the education of the emotions and the teaching of psychology and ethics from an early age 45 Some critics have suggested that, in her old age, Gilman moved to California because she could not stand the dirt and the immigrants of N.Y. City. Such a move has been creatively called ‘the West cure’ (Tuttle).

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(Herland 105-106, Religion 138). I agree with Ellador/Gilman that all these initiatives seem quite right, in an appropriate measure, so as to train Ourlandian children to think (Ourland 80, 171). As for African Americans, Ellador’s attitude is not that ethical as she proposes their submission to “[c]ompulsory and efficient education, [and] suitable employment at fair wages” (161). Gilman had already developed the idea of compulsory education for Blacks in her article “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” (1908). First, she holds her own compatriots responsible for the ‘problem,’ as Americans “gave [Blacks] a compulsory introduction into [their] economic group”—a far too euphemistic way of referring to slavery (“Suggestion” 78).46 The ‘problem,’ she presumes, is that not all but many Blacks are a “backward race,” who have not reached the stage of “civilization” (79, 80). Therefore, she proposes the following solution: [T]he whole body of negroes who do not progress... should be taken hold of by the state... This proposed organization is not enslavement, but enlistment. The new army should have its uniforms, its decorations, its titles, its careful system of grading, its music and banners and impressive ceremonies. Men, women, and children should belong to it... For the children... a system of education... should guarantee the fullest development possible to each... This at once stops the lowering process—it leaves the state only the existing crop of low efficients to handle, and insures the higher efficiency of the next generation... (81)

Tzvetan Todorov has described the colonizer’s attitude toward the colonized as moving in two directions, [1] ‘assimilation’ and [2] ‘segregation’ (1984, 42). Gilman adopts the first attitude with respect to the Africans living in America, which defines her colonial attitude. While she promoted more humane educational methods for white children (Herland 102) and attacked the army for its irrational authoritarian methods (Ourland 85), she wanted the opposite for Blacks! She justifies her ‘suggestion’ as the latter “ha[d] proved unequal” to “the strain of personal initiative and responsibility” and so they would work for “the service of the community” (82). And she specifies that the “institution should be compulsory at the bottom, perfectly free at the top.” According to Gabnocsik-Williams, “[the author]’s unfeeling, unrealistic, and patronizing perceptions of American Blacks as a race which needed to become ‘civilized’ can... be attributed to the social climate of the progressive[?] era” (22)—a more than inappropriate label to classify the era, from my point-of-view. Not surprisingly, given the ideological confusion of the text, there are moments where xenophobic attitudes are considered “unnatural” (Ourland 97) and the myth of the northern races as more progressive is denied (85-86). Ellador bravely uncovers American hypocrisy toward Blacks (119-120) and produces the subversive fragment: “If negroes can not or will not work, why was one worth a thousand dollars?... If they could not learn anything, why was it necessary to make laws forbidding their education...?” (160). The presence of these paradoxical views cannot be considered “dialogized heteroglossia,” as Bakhtin contends, “for the dialogic nature of language... [i]s a struggle among socio-linguistic points-of-view, not an intra-struggle between individual wills or logical contradictions” (DIN 273). In order to find some contemporary dialogics on the word “Black,” one only has to read W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). This book consists of a heteroglossia of genres: essay, history, lyric, music, confession, apart from others. In the “Forethought,” the reader is enjoined to “stud[y] [the author’s] words with [him]” (Du Bois xxxi), an invitation to dialogics. On one occasion Du Bois defines the ‘Negro problem’ as “that dead-weight of 46 Ourland makes an offensive use of euphemisms to refer to other races: the “sunny-faced people” of Japan, the “‘golden lilies’ of China” (97), “the golden-colored people” of Hawaii (102).

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social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem” and blames “sociologists,” like Gilman, for misunderstanding the question (6 & 7). The truth is that African Americans have their own problems, one of them being ‘double consciousness’: “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (3). With a subtle irony, Du Bois assures us that the Black person would not “Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world... He would not bleach his Negro soul... [either,] for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world... He simply wishes... to be both a Negro and an American” (my emphasis). Instead of being either assimilated to or segregated from the American people, the author asks for the ethical recognition of (Black) difference, which implies being treated as a(nother) human being: both similar to other human beings—white Americans—and different—with another origin, skin colour, culture—(cf. Todorov 1984, 76). This petition is more complicated than Gilman’s, perhaps still utopian, in a world like ours. But that does not mean that we should not strive toward its achievement. Above all, Souls is written with a spirit of beauty and optimism. As evidence of the dialogical encounter among cultures, “there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; [and] the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African” (Du Bois 8). In Herland-Ourland, there is an obsessively recurrent binary opposition between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’—Herland 26, 29, 52, 87, 135; Ourland 75, 95-96, 99, 103, 178. Mr. and Mrs. Jennings have a discussion to ambiguously conclude that ‘civilized’ is not a synonym of ‘white,’ as “race or color do not count in civilization” (Ourland 96), although “[p]eople [including Gilman?] dislike and despise one another on exactly that ground” (97). Nevertheless, the writer’s wish to civilize African Americans is repeated in stronger terms with respect to immigrants. In her usual line, Ellador/Gilman blames Van’s American ancestors for not understanding “sociology” in connection with immigration (119). And she pronounces an illustrative speech: You [Americans] have stuffed yourselves with the most ill-assorted and unassimilable mass of human material that ever was held together by artificial means... You go to England, and the people are English... And in France the people are French—bless them!... But... Here you were, a little [l]and of really promising people, of different nations, yet of the same general stock, and like-minded—that was the main thing. The real union is the union of the idea; without that, no nation. You made settlements,... you set up a new flag, and then... It never occurred to you that the poor and the oppressed [immigrants] were not necessarily good stuff for democracy... Why, Van, it is the poor and the oppressed who make monarchy and despotism—don’t you see that? (118, italics hers)

This excerpt, and all of chapter VI, serves to exemplify Gilmanian ideology on immigration.47 It also certifies that, with respect to certain areas beyond white/upperclass/heterosexual feminism, the author’s ways of seeing were highly confused. That immigrants have to be ‘assimilated’ to the settlers seems xenophobic and anti-dialogical, as it goes against respecting the other’s ‘difference.’ It is even improductive, since differences are always enriching. That all of them have to share the same “idea,” is (again) antidialogical and even anti-life itself. Further, her thoughts on “the poor and the oppressed” are unjust and also pedantic—although on other occasions, (some) immigrants are considered “victims” (119). 47

For more references on this matter, see my response to Gilman’s article “Is America Too Hospitable?” in “The Realist-Gothic: Dialogics and Subjectivity in ‘The Yellow(-)Wall Paper.”

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Van ‘protests’ that “there’s room for everybody [in America]—this is the ‘melting-pot’” (120). She asks him, “[a]nd do you think that you can put a little of everything into a melting-pot and produce a good metal?”48 Van responds affirmatively, asserting that the melting-pot involves “fusion” or the assimilation of differences. Ellador justifies her presumed ethnocentrism, among other things, by arguing that she “like[s]... all [immigrants].” The problem is that, “the human race is in different stages of development, and only some of the races—or some individuals in a given race—have reached the democratic stage” (121). That is why, from her point-of-view, “democracy must pick and choose a little” (120). Apparently, Gilman believed that not all races had achieved the democratic stage but that all of them could. Some critics have attributed this to her evolutionary (and) Lamarckian ideas (Gabnocsik-Williams, Hausman). Thus, Ellador’s proposal is to add “Immigration Bureaus on either coast... to definitively Americanize the newcomers” (121, italics mine). Just as Terry, Van and Jeff had been treated when arriving in Herland, immigrants “should be met like children,” implying they should be ‘tamed and trained’ too. Finally, Americans are portrayed as the inventors of democracy, a system born in Ancient Greece, which needs to be taught to immigrants especially to the poor ones. This implies that Americanization, civilization and ‘whitening’ have one and the same meaning. Hopefully, foreigners’ assimilation to another culture is usually not so radical, otherwise there would be no space for dialogics. For instance, “[w]ould America have been America without [the] Negro people [and the immigrants]?” (Du Bois 187).49 As Bakhtin would recommend, it is necessary to understand Gilman’s thought in her socio-historical context. Susan S. Lanser has rightly described the context of “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” as “a culture obsessively preoccupied with race[,]... a culture desperate to maintain Aryan superiority in the face of massive immigrants[,]... a culture openly antiSemitic, anti-Asian, anti-Catholic, and Jim Crow” (425). This situation would become only more complicated with the advent of the First World War and in 1915-1916 Gilman’s fears did not diminish. Thereby Thomas Galt Peyser has written that “[her] aim throughout her career was to prevent the incursion of the global upon the local” (1998, 65). In fact, a defence of the small scale (of the agricultural model) vs. the large scale (of wild capitalism) can be found in Herland-Ourland. That is probably why these “little sisters” live in a “little nation,” a “little country,” a “little land” (Herland 56, 57, 60). It seems that, in the progressive era, Gilman was nostalgic of certain ways of life of the past—a ‘weaker’ capitalism, a ‘whiter’ population. Recently, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of Pointed the Firs (1896) has been read also in this line. In contrast, though with the same radical vein, their contemporary Frank Norris would write The Octopus (1901) to condemn the utopianism of the followers of agriculture and socialism. Norris justifies and celebrates the unstoppable power of the railway, which ‘the Octopus’ of the title refers to, as a symbol of capitalism. In order to be dialogical enough, it is important to study Herland-Ourland as an utterance within the heteroglossia of the literature of its period. Furthermore, “[e]very utterance,” Bakhtin says, “participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical stratifying forces” (DIN 48

On other occasions, Van/Gilman is not so happy about the melting-pot and blames people of European origins for America’s problems (Ourland 111, 140). 49 And while Gilman was so preoccupied with Americanizing newcomers on their very arrival, Jacob Riis would demand “to house [them] decently” (chapter xxv, fragment two). For a more dialogical view on the “immigrant,” see Le Sueur’s piece of reportage “They Wanted Little” (1934), which studies the immigrants settling in the U.S. at the very beginning of the twentieth century.

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272). This saga makes use of several genres, ‘old’ (utopia, love story) and ‘new’ (New Woman novel, sociology). It also rebels against some forms of social injustice but it also misunderstands others. Herland-Ourland’s failure to see the suffering of so many downtrodden, and to allow them to participate in the dialogue, weakens the saga’s dialogical strength. In spite of her feminism, Gilman would not be aware of the problems of women of so-called ethnic origins: Native American, Jewish, African, to name a few. We could say she was “deaf” to the heteroglossia surrounding her and to the numerous voices clamouring to be heard (DIN 327).50 Even if, from a favourable perspective, the narrator could be considered (almost) hybrid, the author clumsily manages to represent novelistic heteroglossia, the potential creativity of myriad social languages in dialogue with each other. Michael Holquist considers heteroglossia “as close a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal [mainstream] and centrifugal [rebel] forces collide” (2000, 428). It appears that Gilman believed in the necessity of having a group of homogeneous people, who are white and civilized—as they seem to be synonyms (Ourland 99)—, and who would dictate a ‘pattern’ to be followed by heterogeneous groups. The first product from Herland found by the Americans is a piece of fabric “with a pattern” and “[n]o savage tribe... made such fabrics” (4). Terry also offers the older women a scarf that has a “rich... pattern” (21). On the contrary, Gilman’s Jane(?) appears to be very disappointed by a yellow wall(-)paper that obeys no pattern, and whose “interminable grotesques... form around a common center and rush off [centrifugally]” (“Yellow” 31). These latter ‘lines’ are traced by those women and men who escape from (highly) civilized systems, resembling “so many creeping savages” (Herland 39). Even if this “unnovelistic nove[l]” has a pattern (DIN 327), the Herlanders are praised for having the “arboreal” qualities of “‘savages’” (Herland 17, Ourland 178). Once again, adding to her habitual contradictions, the saga’s author also relied on the liberating possibilities of centrifugal forces. In a dialogic novel, every character defends her/his meaning, as a true ideologeme (DIN 333), whose voice fights for hegemony in the polyglossic arena. In consequence, a dialogue can be compared to a “bloodless carnival war” (PDP 125), in which one pulls down hierarchies, deconstructs definitions, and gains terrain through reason-able negotiations. Gilman/Ellador/Van tries to solve the ‘problems’ of many people (Blacks, women, immigrants, Jews, Native Americans) without actually talking to them. And, when Ellador talks to Van, their dialogues are resolved by forthright conclusions. In the first edition of Ourland, the last four chapters were untitled. It is not surprising then that Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill, who edited Ourland in a book-format, decided to entitle the last chapter “Conclusion.” This is another indication that, from the Bakhtinian perspective of discourse, Herland-Ourland is not a novel. Perhaps the text is a new genre, a blend between a novel and sociological treatise or dialogized/novelized sociology, but it is certainly not a dialogical novel. Apart from ‘deaf,’ Gilman seems to be ‘blind’ to the idea of consensus and assumes that, in order to have democracy, people/voices need to be assimilated. Thus, Ellador states that democracy certainly “requires common knowledge of the common 50

I need to highlight that, throughout her life and work, Le Sueur constantly and openly denounced anti-human actions: fascism (“Song for my Time,” “Women Know a Lot of Things”), anti-Semitism (“American Bus,” “Summer Idyl, 1949,” The Girl), racism (“American Bus,” “Song for my Time”). In Le Sueur’s collection Harvest Song, most of the pieces are protagonized by immigrants: English, French, Russian, Swedish, among others. This takes one to reflect that, except for the Native Americans, did not the rest of the “Americans” come from somewhere else just like the immigrants?

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need...” (Ourland 124), such an interest in the general/common implies ignoring the particulars/differences. Even so, this relation between the “common interest” and democracy is repeated throughout (e.g. 132).51 In contrast, bell hooks has attacked the liberal model of democracy, which is based on assimilation and consensus (Ziarek 206207). According to hooks, Ziarek continues, consensus creates more separatism and the non-appreciation of (true) differences (209). Among other proposals, she asks for “the cultivation of ethical concern for the oppression of others” (211), something Gilman does not cultivate in Herland-Ourland. The Herlanders cultivate not only the mind—controlling education, grammar (e.g. Herland 102)—but also the body—through gymnastics (31) and vegetarianism (46). Mens sana in corpore sano is a slogan, which refers to a (healthy) way of life, and which can easily acquire totalitarian overtones. I think that, to put it succinctly, in Herland-Ourland, Gilman was only rational (and controlling) in a monological way: e.g. “Emotion does not help us any” (Ourland 175). The author’s unemotional, or even unironic,52 attitude, especially in the second part of the saga, is an important quality to distinguish it from “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” as well as from Le Sueur’s writings. As Gilman confessed in her autobiography, she went through an ordeal when writing “Yellow.” Judging by the shortstory’s discourse, she also ‘let herself go’ (irrationally) and, above all, opened her heart. Perhaps that is why “Yellow” is still her most gripping piece. In it, “the intentions of the prose writer are refracted” as she does not have absolute control of the “intentions of others [in] the heteroglot language of [her] wor[k]” (DIN 299-300). In contrast, her saga has a meticulous pattern: each part has twelve chapters to cover the twenty-four numbers in the last two years of the monthly Forerunner.53 Herland (65, 80, 90, 95, 140) includes several foreshadowings of itself and of Ourland. The two novels have mirror structures: the ‘end’ of Ourland is parallel to its beginning, which is the ‘end’ of Herland, and ends with the couple going to the tree where the Herlanders had first appeared (Ourland 193). Such a rationalistic controlling attitude weakens if it does not kill dialogics. One of the problems of soci(ologic)ally engaged writers is producing artistic works while being politically committed. Though I have tried to prove that Gilman’s writings do have literary value, it seems fair that she did not apply the label “literature” to some of them, given their explicit treatment of the socio-political. Meridel Le Sueur was more apt to combine art and politics in a Bakhtinian way, which is perhaps the most important difference between her and Gilman. On the one hand, the didactic goals of some works of art might go unnoticed as in “Yellow.” On the other, Herland-Ourland’s didacticism is not dialogical—both soci(ologic)al and artistic—because, in my reading, apart from being extremely blatant, it is authoritarian, prescriptive and in consequence unjust. For Bakhtin, the novel is the most valuable product of Western thinking, as it allows for the study of ethical relationships (Morson & Emerson 366). As I have tried to show, Gilman’s treatment of many of the so-called minorities is not dialogical/ethical. Furthermore, when she gives the Herlanders the title of speaking subjects, she does it unethically at the cost of erasing 51

As expected, Mrs. Jennings also thinks that, “[f]ortunately we do not have to wait for universal conviction before moving onward” (Ourland 179)—a new paradox? 52 It must be remembered that, for Bakhtin, irony was a vital (probably the most vital) characteristic of the novel. 53 This means that the last number of The Forerunner contained the last chapter of Ourland. Gilman could not make her periodical financially profitable and it never had a circulation larger than a thousand copies. If she closed it, it was because her readership had been declining more and more. Hopefully this time her didactic project did not reach many people.

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the men’s and other people’s speaking importance. As I said above, this gesture has been described as a first necessary step in the emancipation of the “others.” Apparently, Van needs to become an other so that Ellador may become a self. Perhaps we lack more ethical relationships precisely because we, like Gilman, are usually unable to move beyond this first step. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer with an agenda in mind and a didactic mission. In “The Open Text,” Umberto Eco defines such a text in contrast with the ‘closed text,’ which corresponds to the writer’s agenda and does not leave much room for the reader’s (dialogical) response. One of Eco’s conclusions is that, paradoxically, the ‘close text’ makes the reader react, which implies more dialogics. As in a true democracy (Ziarek 212), spaces for dissensus are needed in dialogics too. Gilman’s didactic mission turns her into a sort of (feminist) missionary seeking radical conversion at all costs—hence, Vandyck’s conversion to Gilmanian feminism in this saga. In spite of everything, the reader is still expected to ‘pause’/produce a creative chronotope (FTC 254) that involves a (feminist) critique of his/her own society. Ourland contains several gaps represented graphically by means of asterisks. I would like to interpret them as a space in which to respond.54 Utopia, and one presumes dystopia too, is “a textual strategy... to engage readers... in a critical analysis of the customs and institutions, the dominant ideological practices, of their own time” (Cranny-Francis 110). As readers, I believe we have an ethical responsibility toward texts. My responsibility as a feminist reader has lead me to react against Gilman’s most anti-dialogical aspects. A dialogical appreciation of the woman and her work would lead us to see that she was an extraordinary feminist theorist and activist, who fought for women’s suffrage, and espoused socialist views. But she was also an eugenicist, who proved authoritarian, and believed in WASP supremacy. In the end, her ambiguous personality makes research more fascinating, as one learns doubly from its positive and negative aspects. Gilman’s visionary power allowed her to see in anticipation proposals of the feminist philosophers of today. These days, feminist strategies such as Victoria Camps’ have proposed “the feminization of men” and the conversion of the badly named ‘women’s problem’ into “a problem of common interest” (1997, 19 & 22, my translation). Both strategies were used by Gilman in her proposal of shared parenthood and in her insistence that woman’s advance was an advance “for the common good” and not just for herself (Man-Made 254). Herland-Ourland forms part of the literary debates taking place in her age. The author worked very hard to build a space for herself in which to have a dialogue with patriarchy. The continuation of this dialogue in the future is the next chronotope for feminist dialogicians. From Gilman’s (misdirected) proposals, we can learn several lessons: (1) ours and our children’s (re)education in ethics, as in shared parenting, seems an appropriate way of practising our human potential.55 (2) The purpose of dialogics/ethics 54

If we are to appreciate Gilman’s intentions, I would hazard the following interpretation. On the one hand, the (three) consecutive gaps of eight asterisks might be used to show a delay in the story-time (192, 192, 193). On the other, the six eight-starred gaps might enjoin the reader to ‘pause’ and think about what is being told, producing a delay in the reading-time. The asterisks might also represent the (belief in the) possibility of change as well as the time necessary to achieve it. 55 I have already mentioned that the education project has been traditionally important for nominalist reformers. Moira Gatens has given a twist to this proposal. Pretending that gender practices can be re-educated without problems is a rationalistic fallacy, as if our bodies were passive towards education. As Freud said, many of our

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must be the very dialogue and not converting the other person into one’s opinion. (3) Instead of scrutinizing the “others” as “parasites” (Ourland 118), we must try to listen to them. Following Todorov, “it is only by speaking [and listening] to the other (not giving orders but engaging in a dialogue) that I can acknowledge him [or her] as subject, comparable to what I am myself” (1984, 132). We should also realize that it is necessary to enter into a dialogue with ‘more’ women and dominated peoples—to move from gender to genders and beyond. For instance, instead of having First-World women behaving as missionaries, talking and lecturing about the problems of Third World women, why should not both parties meet and discuss common and particular problems? Above all, this novelized utopia(?) represents its author’s confidence that change is possible and utopian hope in the future must always guide a Bakhtinian feminist. Expressed in a simple form, which shelters a promising difficult content, we need to multiply our ways of seeing. Finally, in order to remind the reader of this chapter’s primary argument, I should conclude that: Herland-Ourland is a novel, according to the chronotope, while HerlandOurland is not a novel, according to discourse. Like gender, the novel is a text impossible to be fixed. Curiously enough, that is the very non-definition of the novel Bakhtin came to in “Epic and the Novel” (E&N). Perhaps Morson and Emerson’s periodization of Bakhtin’s thought can be revised (Morson & Emerson 66). And perhaps E&N of period IIIb should be read together with his chapter on the Chronotope (FTC) and with the one on Discourse (DIN) of period IIIa. It is expected that, in this way, readers would be able to perceive how Bakhtin came to the idea of the novel as a genre(?) that erases itself.

perceptions are impregnated within ourselves without passing through consciousness. Gatens criticizes Chodorow and her followers for not taking into account the imaginary body: the relationship between the subject and his/her body. In any case, at least the project of reorienting (all) unethical practices to more ethical ones seems perfectly viable and a hope for change.

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Bakhtinian Becomings and the Female Subject(s): The Girl as Feminist Bildungsroman

Along the roads, you are courted by men, And your father wants you not to talk to them. A night of fire and black trees, Your father could no longer Your father could no longer Kill his jealousy. Hilario Camacho, “Cuerpo de ola” (my translation)

At the midpoint of his career, Mikhail M. Bakhtin wrote a book entitled The Novel of Education and Its Significance in the History of Realism. In one of its sections, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” he discussed five types of “[novels] of human emergence” (BHR 21).1 For the fifth sort of novel, he provided a preliminary sketch as follows: In it, man’s individual emergence is inseparably linked to historical emergence. Man’s emergence is accomplished in real historical time, with all its necessity, its fullness, its future, and its chronotopic nature... In such novels... human emergence... is no longer man’s own private affair. He emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs... What is happening here is precisely the emergence of a new man... It is as though the very foundations of the world are changing, and man must change along with them. Understandably,... problems of reality and man’s potential, problems of freedom and necessity, and the problem of creative initiative rise to their full height... (23-24) 2

Very unfortunately indeed, Bakhtin did not leave us the chapter about the fifth type of Bildungsroman, which constituted “the special theme of [his] book” (24). We are only left with one essay containing three sections: two that study the main features (10-19) and kinds of apprenticeship novels (19-25), and a third one on Goethe’s work (25-59) or the Bildungsroman “in the narrow sense” (24). As a clarifying note, I will say that the five novelistic types might be designated like this: (1st) idyllic-cyclical time novel of emergence, (2nd) non-idyllic, cyclical time or “classical novel of education,” (3rd) “biographical (and 1 Bakhtin’s flexible terminology encourages me to use interchangeably “novel of education” (BHR 19), novel of formation/apprenticeship/becoming and Bildungsroman. The plural of the last term is Bildungsromane. 2 Michael Holquist’s explanation of this event belongs to the unfortunate history of Bakhtin’s publications. The final copy of The Novel of Education and Its Significance in the History of Realism had been sent to the editorial house, which was blown up during the German invasion. “Bakhtin retained only certain preparatory materials... [and] due to the paper shortage, he had torn them up page by page... to make wrappers for his endless chain of cigarettes. He began smoking pages from the conclusion of the manuscript, so what we have is a small portion of its opening section, primarily about Goethe” (1999, xiii).

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autobiographical) [time and] type,” (4th) “didactic-pedagogical novel,” (5th) realistichistorical novel of emergence (22-24). This section, once again, constitutes an empirical exercise in Bakhtinian and feminist theories. My purpose is to claim that Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl is a representative of Bakhtin’s 5th novel of education sketched out above. I can anticipate that the protagonist’s full becoming, as described above, will not take place till the end of the novel. The excerpt cited previously contains notions such as “history,” “transition,” the “new” (person), and the “potential, problems of freedom and necessity, and... of creative initiative” (23-24). These terms have been revised by Post-structuralist theory and will be rethought here. Besides, all terms are inextricably related to the question of subjectivity. From a feminist dialogical perspective, I will deliberately replace “man” by “woman” in order to study the emergence of the female subject, expanding the theoretical scope of Bakhtin’s lost essay. Therein, my analysis will consider the ‘feminist Bildungsroman’ as a variation of the preceding genre/s. Through an intersectional approach, I will evaluate how “gender” and “class” become intertwined in order to effectively problematize the category “woman” and her becoming a subject of “experience,” “sexuality,” “discourse” (history, literature), and so on. Obviously, apart from “woman” and its derivatives, the rest of the notions just mentioned have been the object of feminist rewritings, which will be reconsidered. Apart from the (female) subject, contemporary feminists such as Rita Felski have called for the analysis of the subject-matter treated by feminist novels. In the title of this chapter, the reference to “the Female Subject(s)” is a play-on-words that tries to enhance the need to assess both, i.e. subjects and objects(?). It must be pointed out that, except for Felski, all the scholars consulted speak of women novelists’ female and not feminist Bildungsromane. The reasons for labelling The Girl a “feminist Bildungsroman” will be made explicit throughout. If, as Bakhtin affirms, genres are ways of seeing, a novel whose main character is a woman and that presents us with the gender problems that intervene in her Bildung (or “formation”), appears clearly to contain feminist elements. In order to complete this introduction, I will focus on some questions directly concerning Le Sueur’s feminist working-class novel. As noted elsewhere in this work, bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman?, Monique Wittig’s argument that a lesbian is not a “woman,” and other writings function as criticisms of the feminist studies of Gender. The charge they make is that Gender studies have reified the category “woman” as white, heterosexual, middle-class, etc. Throughout the present work, I have employed the analytical tool ‘gender’ on two different levels, namely: a 1st level that considers that, in patriarchy, (all) women are subordinated by gender and a 2nd level that goes further to assert the differences amongst women (beyond gender), attending to class, sexual preference, (dis)abilities, race, religion, ethnicity, age, and so forth.3 Le Sueur’s (favourite) female characters belong to the working class or ‘the poor.’ Like the male characters, they are heterosexual and can be considered ‘white’ with reservations given their ethnic origins. For these reasons, I disagree with Marilyn Jones Crawford, who thinks that “Annunciation” “is a story about the authentic experience of being a woman, not about being a member of the proletariat” (102). As was the case in “Annunciation,” The Girl is also ‘about’ the complexity of being both a woman and “poor” in a patriarchal society. 3 For a more extensive description of the two levels of ‘gender,’ see section “The Dialogical ‘Feminine’: The Chronotope of Pregnancy in ‘Anunciation.’”

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Though not the primary aim of this reading, through the study of the women characters I hope to deal in a modest fashion with the presumed homogeneity both of ‘white women’ and of ‘Western society.’ Besides, I will compare two subtypes of feminist Bildungsromane that, in broad terms, might correspond to the middle-class and the working-class. With other specialists in working-class literature, Ann Pancake agrees that 1930’s authors satirized the conventions of the Bildungsroman for serving a particular bourgeois ideology that “valorize[s] individual change” (292). According to Pancake, most scholars have concentrated basically on the “individual” and little on the “change” being portrayed in these novels. Instead, she decides to focus on the “change” due to political causes, given that the myth of an ever-ascendant class trajectory for those who strive hard enough has at least two consequences in justifying American class inequities. It assures that any present disparities in the economic system are only temporary—if not for the collective, at least for the individual—and insists that if individuals do fail to rise, they have no one to blame but themselves. (293)

In Pancake’s view, both Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl and Tillie Lerner Olsen’s Yonnondio defy “change” and the assumptions of “teleology, linearity, vertical narrative movement, and temporal order” (292). Later, I will explore the question of “individual” Bildung (or “change”), and how it interacts with the community, which Pancake does not treat. For the moment, I am more interested in discussing the hypothesis of a ‘bourgeois Bakhtin.’ From Hegel to Felski, critics have pointed out the alliance of the bourgeoisie and the Bildungsroman. Bakhtin sets the birth of this sub-genre of the novel in the midst of the Enlightenment: “in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century” (BHR 19). As we have seen, Bakhtin emphasizes the individuality of the hero without questioning the ostensibly classist ideology of his words. He even refers to the novel of “‘education of the human race’” (24), which poses problems for twenty-first century readers. Not surprisingly, he provides a list of Bildungsromane all written by male authors (19-20). Pancake’s basic idea of the genre of the novel—“Novels in general are associated with the construction of the middle class” (294)—can be contextualized within the English critical tradition. However, if we study Bakhtin, we need to turn to a Russian (thinker’s) context. Perhaps, as Pin-chia Feng sustains, it was the nineteenth-century English Bildungsroman that added “an overt class ideology to the androcentric bias in the German tradition” (4). In any case, Bakhtin’s surviving essay deserves further attention. He insists that, in the novels of emergence, the world and life are an experience, a school (BHR 22-23). Nevertheless, there is a change in the depiction of this “world” in the five novelistic kinds of his classification. Thus, in the first, second, third, and fourth sorts of Bildungsromane: man’s emergence proceeded against the immobile background of the world... The world, existing and stable in its existence, required man to... submit to the existing laws of life. Man emerged, but the world itself did not... Man’s emergence was his private affair, as it were, the results of this emergence were also private and biographical in nature... In and of itself the conception of the world as an experience, a school, was very productive in the Bildungsroman: it... led to a radical reinterpretation of the elements of the novel’s plot and opened up for the novels new and realistically productive points for viewing the world. But the world, as an experience and as a school, remained the same... In [the fifth type of Bildungsroman,]... however, human emergence is of a different nature. It is no longer man’s own private affair. He emerges along with the world... (BHR 23, my italics)

This quotation is enclosed within the one cited at the beginning. Many interesting points can be raised from a close reading of it. If (hu)man’s emergence is ‘private’ in the first four 125

novelistic types, the reader presumes that his emergence is, somehow, ‘public’ in the 5th kind. This ‘public state’ has profound implications for women: the meeting/creation of communities, which eventually turn into coalitions. For now, I will concentrate on what this might imply for Bakhtin. First, it appears he believes in the existence of certain “laws of life” that would change (by themselves?) in Bildungsromane of type five. Second, that these laws, or the world, emerging along with (wo)man makes his(her) emergence nonprivate, or public. Third, the term “world” can also work is a synecdoche of the people who live in it, since they are the ones who form the “school” to both aid and obstruct the hero’s Bildung. Therefore, fourth, it is not the protagonist’s life and perspective, but all these “productive points for viewing,” which shape the novel’s plot. Fifth, this means that the hero/heroine will no longer consider his/her point of view alone, since s/he “emerges along with the world.” All these conclusions are consistent with Bakhtin’s ideas, mentioned in previous chapters: that language, which is mainly perspective, is collective; that we all speak the languages of others; and so forth. Furthermore, his allusion to the ‘private’ leads me to think that the 5th Bildungsroman should be the novel of the ‘public’ emergence of the working class. As if it were (the product of) a centrifugal force, this kind of novel would provide the necessary space for the lower classes to be listened to—since “every meaning will have its homecoming festival” (MHS 170). In my opinion, the ‘lower classes’ are closer to the Bakhtinian ‘folk’ than ‘women’ as a separate group. In Part One, I introduced the idea of the chronotope as a ‘pause’ within dialogics. In “Deconstructing Dialogics: Gender and Genre in Herland-Ourland,” we saw that a utopian novel(?) forces the reader to ‘pause’ and question her/his social environment. I have also expressed my partial disagreement with the idea that dialogics be defined as ‘dialectics without teleology,’ since the teleology(?) in a weak sense could very well be the emancipation of the downtrodden.4 Consequently, Bakhtin’s Bildungsroman of type five could serve as a novelized manifesto for those who belong to the subaltern (classes). So we are left to wonder whether The Girl might be a Bildungsroman in a ‘broader sense’—though specifically for/about workingclass women? That is a major reason why I will explore the fifth novel of formation sketched out by Bakhtin as exemplified by Le Sueur’s feminist proletarian text. Given its feminist projection, I will turn to more recent analyses of the novel of education. I hope to show not only the differences between male and female Bildung novels, but the differences amongst the latter too. Special attention will be paid to sexuality and the sexual becoming of the female heterosexual subject(s) treated by Le Sueur in this and other texts. This will lead me to consider the question of (love) relationships and their complications—namely gender roles, mistreatment, marital violence and (wife) rape. Since Le Sueur’s female characters will end up forming a community, I will refer to Gilman’s Herlanders whenever necessary—as well as to other comparisons between the two writers. Other issues such as the narrative voice and its others, the novel’s style, the respons(-)ible role of artists and readers, and the questions of memory and time will also be explored. Like Bakhtin, contemporary critics of the female Bildungsroman have pointed out that a particular plot, the protagonist’s life and even her quest, is a key feature of the genre 4 Certainly, dialogics is a process and not a fixed state. In this sense, it could be compared to democracy, whose end lies in the process itself. Nevertheless, in order to enjoy democracy, first we need to establish a democratic system. From it follows that a (higher) dialogical life will truly develop when all human beings are emancipated, for instance, after both a feminist and post-colonial era.

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(Eysturoy, Kester, Labovitz, Pin-chia). My reading will mostly follow The Girl’s “story” or sequence of events too.5 Nevertheless, there is a (first) difference among the characters’ quests: “Through the quest motif, the heroine undergoes experiences which she both seeks and demands, either through goals set by herself or by an ideal she follows” (Labovitz 245246). It seems obvious that this kind of quest corresponds to a middle-class heroine. On the contrary, the protagonist of The Girl does not pursue any such goal but survival, as she leaves her home out of pure economic necessity: “I left because papa was driven to a fury sitting down with all the mouths to feed. We had to eat in relays” (Girl 30). Most critics agree that the main character’s growth occurs after moving from a provincial to an urban environment (Bakhtin, Eysturoy, Pin-chia). This happens also in The Girl: “I left [home] to come to St. Paul” (30), “[m]y folks lived up the river in a village” (34). A second difference strikes us from Esther Kleinbord Labovitz’s study of the female protagonists of Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Dorothy Richardson and Christa Wolf: “As each heroine waits to gain entry into real life, a characteristic in common is her dependence upon reading... in all four works... [I]n two of the four cases [showing]... [a] voracious appetite for [it]” (253). As a working-class woman on the verge of poverty, Le Sueur’s female protagonist has no occasion to read. It is worth quoting the very opening lines of the text, as it sets the tone of her life: “Saturday was the big day at the German Village where I was lucky to get a job in those bad times, and Clara and I were the only waitresses and had to be going up and down from the bar to the bootleg rooms upstairs” (Girl 1).6 Interestingly, though the main character’s second intervention has to do with a text, “[c]an I have one,... reaching for the leaflet [of the Workers Alliance]. The big letters say, Don’t Starve—Organize” (3), the protagonist will keep uninterested in reading till the end, “[I] read a leaflet... but kept thinking [about other things]” (134). Labovitz’s heroines can even afford to get rid of “excess baggage as they proceed in their life journey” (253). On the contrary, deprived or destitute heroines have nothing to jettison—“I got this coat at the Salvation Army” (Girl 62). Labovitz continues to emphasize that all ‘her’ characters’ journeys are “related to a philosophical or spiritual quest” (246). Below, I will argue that Le Sueur’s protagonist is (also) on a quest for knowledge, on a quest for (or about) her-self. A third differentiation between middle-class and working-class novels of apprenticeship appears to lie in the relationship between the hero and his family or other educators. As in the novels of male Bildung, the family might appear hostile to the middle-class (fe)male (Bakhtin, Eysturoy, Labovitz). Moreover, “the role of patriarchy and its rejection in the heroines’ quest of self is decisive” (Labovitz 249). Below I will try to evaluate this protagonist’s attitude toward her family, an attitude that is ambiguous, yet also not positive. Novels of male and female becoming usually portray a protagonist that develops from innocence to maturity, from childhood/adolescence to adulthood (Bakhtin, Eysturoy, Labovitz). Although the age of the female protagonists of Beauvoir, Lessing, Richardson and Wolf is extended “well beyond early adulthood into middle age” (Labovitz 247), some of the female characters of The Girl will never live that long (e.g. Clara). The Girl covers approximately one year, from one summer to the next: [Clara asks:] “How can we live till

5

I am borrowing the category “story” from Seymour Chatman. Obviously, this accounts for the criticism of the slave-like conditions of their work. Tillie Olsen, another classconscious writer, would write: “catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption / works for three dollars a week / from dawn to midnight” (1994, 1396).

6

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Summer?” [and Amelia answers:] “O,... ho, We’ll live till next Summer!” (Girl 55).7 When the novel starts, ‘the main girl’ is not a child. I assume she is probably older than eighteen—as she is allowed to leave home by her poor but protective family—and she is younger than her brother Joe, who is twenty-two (34). Her personal/psychological development, coinciding with the passage from her teens into her twenties, fits the Bildungsroman’s idea of growth. That this Girl is never given a first name, but is always called ‘girl,’ opens a whole range of possibilities for the readers. From a very optimistic perspective, as she has no identifying label, she can become a new person free(er) from the constraints of patriarchy. The lack of a name can also imply a criticism of a masculinist society that overlooks the possibility of growth for females and considers them perpetual children. It can also mean that her story is representative of any proletarian girl in the United States of the 1930s. Besides, the name’s absence accounts for the lack of poor women’s stories in public discourses such as newspapers, history, etc. Bakhtin would consider these discourses centripetal forces, as they act to reinforce mainstream ideology. Thus, “[w]ho cares if she had a name even” (Girl 136). As suggested above, the female (and the feminist) Bildungsromane are centrifugal forces, aiming to subvert the status quo. In The Girl, we learn that newspapers do not get the facts right (108) and lie (135). And the women of the novel use the pages of these newspapers to get rid of their abortions (54) or afterbirths (148). Current scholars of the female Bildungsroman have argued for another (fourth) difference from the male novel of education. In the former, the narrator is no longer an omniscient voice, distanced from the text, but an “I” or the so-called first person narrator. Thereby the female “gains authority over her own life and her own story, an act which in and of itself subverts patriarchal confinement of the female self” (Eysturoy 86). The Girl conveys its story through an extradiegetic homodiegetic narrator, by which it remains plausible that she does not mention her own name.8 However, lines such as “[Butch] even called my name” (52) or “[Clara] cried my name” (53) can function to underline her modesty. Specialists on proletarian literature enhance the importance of the community in Tillie Olsen’s and Meridel Le Sueur’s novels so as “to rewrite the individual quest as a collective one” (Pancake 292). I have already commented upon Le Sueur’s love of listening to the common people, whose stories she would ‘file’ and fictionalize whenever possible. In consequence, she defined herself as “not a writer, just a recorder” (quoted by Coiner, 1995, 72-73), giving priority to the others’ voices. In her “Preface” to Winter Prairie Woman, Le Sueur writes: “This is a collective book. This means it is not a performance by one author in a room alone... Like a tree it was made by communal movement...” (5). Afterwards, she lists the “editors,” the “illustrator,” “[p]rinter, proof reader, binder... it became a creation of us all.” Communist not only by name, this exceptional novelist minimizes the importance of her work to highlight and praise that of others. Another revealing text, the “Author’s Note” to The Dread Road contends: “This is not a book written by one person. This is a communal creation of an image, using the collective experience of a number of people” 7 The tone of the text celebrates this resilience. Clara’s question here can be contrasted with the preoccupation of ‘how to survive through winter’ characteristic of Frontier Literature (another patriarchal genre). 8 I am using the forms ‘she/her’ and ‘she/her’ (in italics) to distinguish respectively between the main character’s and the narrator’s voices.

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(61). In a Bakhtinian spirit, Le Sueur underlines the fact that her literature is impregnated by the voices and social realities of the people with whom she shared some experience, such as people she met or interviewed and people she was friends with. Throughout, I have been insisting that Gilman and Le Sueur transformed realism in ways that suited gender prerogatives—i.e. the realist-gothic, the dialogical feminine, the pragmatopian novel(?). As a fiction writer, Le Sueur has been widely classified as a Midwestern regionalist and a socialist realist. She has been labelled “a modern antimodernist” (Dawahare 410), “an avant-garde Marxist” that wrote a “lyric novel [The Girl]” (Shulman 2000, 51 & 74), and so on. Le Sueur thought of herself as “a people’s writer” (quoted by Kirkpatrick, 9) and wrote at great length on the significance of having a “Proletarian Literature.” As such, she can be considered a proletarian writer along with others such as Josephine Herbst, Richard Wright, Tess Schlesinger, Sherwood Anderson and Tillie Olsen, apart from others. Marilyn Jones Crawford places her with the antimodernists Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, D.H. Lawrence, and John Dos Passos, who “were in full revolt against all static intellectual and moral systems and were committed to a vitalist cult of energy and process... [Besides, they] explored the ideas of the modern world: secularization, and the loss of relationships, within a God-abandoned universe. Yet, they examined these ideas through traditional forms” (5354). I will comment upon The Girl’s stylistic mode below. What matters now is that these features and interests were shared by Midwestern regionalists, socialist realists, and antimodernists alike. In general terms, proletarian literature is born as a new genre, which breaks with ‘high’ or ‘bourgeois’ modernism, and places hope in a better future and a socialist revolution. Which explains the fact that most of these authors tend to favour an idealization of the subaltern classes as a source of salvation. During her life, Le Sueur came to be known for her reportage, a (sub)genre of journalism that emerged in the 1930s. “The Fetish of Being Outside” is one of her quintessential pieces, where she rejects the myth of “objective writing” (“Fetish” 201), or ‘being outside’ of the event the journalist writes upon. Succinctly expressed, for Le Sueur, the writing called ‘objective’ stems from middle-class mentality and capitalist alienation. Thus, she declares: I want to be integrated in a new and different way as an individual and this I feel can come only from a communal participation which reverses the feeling of a bourgeois writer. What will happen... will be the communal happening... I can no longer live without communal sensibility. I can no longer breathe in this maggoty individualism of a merchant society... I hope to ‘belong’ to a communal society, to be a cellular part of that and able to grow and function with others in a living whole. (200)

Ideologically socialist, this excerpt contains profoundly Bakhtinian ideas—e.g. to be means to communicate—, which will be put to the test in The Girl (and) below. Furthermore, sympathizing and commun-icating with the subject of study prevents its alienation and objectification on the researcher’s side (“Fetish,” Cuomo).9 Apart from being a Bildungsroman of type five, The Girl has several features of fictionalized reportage. In the “Afterword” to the novel, Le Sueur made explicit the question of the communal narrator as follows: 9 The kind of analyst despised by Le Sueur in “Fetish” is further satirized in her short-story “A Hungry Intellectual.” In spite of his physical hunger, this ‘intellectual’ is unable to join the Hunger March. The ideas of these texts have reminiscences of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual,’ who must go well beyond impersonal rationalist analysis. Other connections between Gramsci and Bakhtin have also been found (cf. Brandist 1996).

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This memorial to the great and heroic women of the depression was really written by them... [W]e pooled our memories,... told each other our stories or wrote them down. We had a writers’ group... and we met... to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of sagas, poetry, cry-outs... So the publishing of this book is wonderful—to be made visible by now a new generation,... a shout of joy and strength back to those wonderful women... who keep us all alive. (149)

It appears that, here, she intended a hidden ‘we’-narrator instead of the lonely ‘I’ favoured by middle-class (women’s) Bildungsromane (Eysturoy 86). In this piece, Le Sueur reveals the names of Gladys and Natalie, who narrated part of Girl’s story in the novel.10 She adds that she ‘rewrote’ the events of Belle’s, Butch’s and Hoink’s lives—and those were their real names. Actually, The Girl ‘participates’ in many genres: (auto)biography, reportage, and so on. In particular, the women-characters met by Girl are allowed a space to tell their stories, which will function as a tool to denounce the social situation. Amelia, an active veteran member of the Workers Alliance, tells her “stories [she] had never heard before” (Girl 136): of how they “smacked tar feathers on [her son] and set fire to him” and of the hanging of “Wesley Everett,” the murder of “Sacco and Vanzetti” and so forth.11 Belle, the owner of the joint called the German Village, tells of her thirteen abortions (12), her abusive husband giving her “black eye” (20) and “beat[ing]” her (75). Clara—waitress, prostitute, and Girl’s best friend—teaches her “how to wander on the street and not to be picked up by... police matrons... [who would] sterilize [her]” (1). Clara adds that she “worked in a sweatshop when she was 12” (9), and talks about her mother, who “used to leave her locked in a room and go out to feed her.” Butch, Girl’s lover, talks about his entire life for three sections during his agony (XXVIII-XXX). But it is Amelia, Belle and Clara—Girl’s ‘ABC’—, who have a special influence on her (process of) becoming. The others’ voices reveal their importance from the first paragraph of chapter I: “My mama had told me that the cities were Sodom and Gomorrah...” (1). Throughout the chapter, the “German Village” bar appears as a perfect location for the struggle amongst voices (heteroglossia), which are both individualized—especially what Clara said, what Belle yelled—and fused together—“the whole bar roared and sneezed through their noses and yelled” (2), “[t]here was a kind of roar in the place, a hum” (4). Bakhtin thought that the ideal genre for representing this striving among voices was the (dialogic) novel. Elsewhere I evaluated that a person’s dialogic maturity is achieved through a struggle between the ‘authoritative voice’ and the ‘inner personal voice.’ As I will go on to discuss, Girl’s consciousness is formed by leaving aside some voices (e.g. Butch’s) and choosing among others (e.g. Alice’s), while experiencing heteroglossia. At the beginning, the other characters say she is “a virgin from the country” (2), an “infant,” “green,” “too young”(19), “little,” a “kid” (28), and so forth. They (and she) repeatedly agree that she needs to learn (1, 9, 17, 77), as corresponds to a novel of education. The experiences of her journey to 10 The Girl was dedicated “To Robert Aaron Brown and that dark city of St Paul... And for Natalie, Anna, Bernice, Gladys, Doris, Sara, all living, all real, all in need.” The female names may correspond to the women who helped Le Sueur to write the book. The male name cited first must refer to “her male companion for 25 years [till his death], [the] painter Bob Brown” (Shcleuning 1983, 24). 11 “Farewell my Wife and Child and All my Friends” were Nicola Sacco’s last words, which also form the title of a short-story by Le Sueur (1940), telling of his and Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s execution. “It was Monday, August 22, 1927” the first clause reads (31). The editors include a footnote explaining that the two Italian immigrants “[were] labor organizers executed on framed charges of murder.” Le Sueur went to “jail for having participated in a protests against [the two anarchists’] executions” (Hedges 1982, 4).

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maturity might be sketched out like this: she will waitress for the bootleggers; take a lover, get pregnant and have a daughter; participate in a bank robbery; be battered by men; suffer attempts of rape; lose three special people (her father, her lover, and her best friend); go on social relief; be ill-treated by social workers; become aware that she is a worker (and a woman); enjoy her participation in a female community; and so on. It has been argued that Girl’s becoming is mainly heterosexual (Pancake, Rabinowitz). Nevertheless, the talks with her girlfriends will help her assemble her life-puzzle. Thus, Belle and Clara tell her about their intimate relationships with men: Belle, to warn her, and Clara, to help her dream. Most importantly, Girl will grow as a speaking subject, from being speechless (7) to even talking back and doing so smartly (61). Above all, Girl is a wonderful listener. Contemporary critics, such as Martha Nussbaum, Jessica Benjamin and Carol Gilligan, have argued that women are better prepared than men to pay attention and to care (cf. Frie). In Girl’s case, she had been forced to do so throughout her short life: at home, the father would “shout at” the whole family (Girl 34). When she is facing his corpse, she thinks, “I was glad he couldn’t see me to roar at me” (35). We read three times that “[n]obody said anything” then (36). Emily, the mother, is ashamed that they did not have enough money to call the doctor. At the beginning of the chapter, the mother’s shame is reflected very explicitly by her covering of her head, and she stands “looking at [her daughter] with one eye, over her apron” (34). She starts to talk about the children, and Girl remains “listening to everything” (36). The children talk about how their father used to beat them all. Then, readers learn what caused the father’s death. Among giggles, the children tell her sister that, in one of his fits of anger, he decided to sleep “out under the apple tree” (37-38). “Sleeping in the damp brought on his dock trouble” and he died (38). Suddenly, the conversation becomes hilarious with a multitude of ‘Os’ and cries of laughter: “‘Children!’ mama cried... ‘Remember papa was going to trade Henry once for a tire’... ‘O, my!,’ mama cried, her [two] eyes [finally] startled. ‘O, my!’” (38) Interestingly enough, Emily gains her speech identity à la Bakhtin by casting off her dead husband’s voice. As the narrator says: “Everybody was laughing and we were happy. There was a way to laugh because papa was dead.” As in Bakhtin’s world, laughter is one of the best strategies against the tyrant. The scene turns out to be bitterly comic, though, as the family is making a (Bakhtinian) carnival out of someone’s (real) death. More generally, laughter is a vital element in Bakhtin’s view of the novel/life. Laughter can also be connected to the semiotic and the (mother’s) body. Thus, as Girl enters the house, she thinks, “I could never touch mama” (34). Afterwards, she “put[s her] arm around her laughing” (38). The following day, Girl wants to “ask her [mother] a million questions” mainly concerned with “having to decide something” (probably sexual) about Butch, her future boyfriend (40). Emily becomes very talkative and wants to remember the family’s past events. Since her daughter encourages her repeatedly to “go on,” she personifies the role of the Bakhtinian third, which facilitates communication. The mother tells her about the day she traded some rags for “a whole sheep” and all the family was delighted (41). Then, she reveals how her husband “patted [her] on the back,” and how she “stroked his head” (4243), and “little smiles came all over [her] flesh” (43). This story is crucial, not only because our protagonist will learn to identify many women with her ‘mama’—Amelia, she herself, and even her own daughter—, but because it accounts for the possibility of ethical relationships of love and tenderness in working-class marriages. Le Sueur’s portrayal of

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such relationships is especially important to contravene the old association “between working-class status (and language) with lack of refinement, a taste for ‘coarser’ pleasures and a lack of sensitivity” (Ingham 104). The mother-daughter dialogue serves to question other myths such as the belief that emotions are pure, relationships are monological and that people are either good or evil—that is, “[her husband] was a gentle man, but he was worried and bitter” (Girl 42). Nevertheless, the widow keeps a much too sweetened memory of her husband, who used to beat the whole family: “he was a good man” (35), “[h]e was good to me” (42). Unfortunately, this is an instance of how mothers can become accomplices of patriarchy, by teaching their daughters to tolerate men’s abuse without protesting. Nonetheless, as we will see, Girl will not misunderstand male violence as she grows up. After losing her father (and recovering a new mother), Girl thinks of herself “as a different person” (45). For Bakhtin, the vast majority of non-Bildung novels portray a “ready-made hero,” a hero that remains unchanged (BHR 20). As François Jost contends, up to the eighteenth century, Bildung was a synonym of “Bild, or imago or portrait. Bildung... in the pedagogical sense of the word, is the process by which a human being becomes a replica of his mentor and is identified with him as the exemplary model” (quoted by Pin-chia, 3). In this feminist novel of formation, Girl will not become the replica of her mother. The importance of the Bildungsroman in the history of realism, Bakhtin seems to conclude, lies basically in its creation of a hero(ine) that does not coincide with him(her)self. As I stated previously, from my point of view, a concept such as “identity”— i.e. denoting unchangeability—is insufficient (apart from obsolete) to describe a person’s development throughout life. Perhaps a compound term, such as identity-alterity, as the protagonist(s) become(s) altered, would be better-suited to refer to the self-other.12 Back in the German Village, Butch keeps going “after [her] night and day” till they have a row (34). Their use of language is quite different: he swears, “Lordgodchrist and the seven angels” (48), and she pleads with him to keep quiet frequently. He had insulted her before— “stupid” (11), “dope” (23), “harlot” (27)—and will insult her in the future—“dumb” (61), “[y]ou goddam chiseler, you lying whore” (83). Most often, Girl feels bewildered and unable to counteract his remarks (6, 7, 11). This is a representative scene of what some scholars consider the speech hierarchy present in (most) male-female conversational exchanges (Pearce). At first, Butch might coincide with the stereotype of the proletarian macho made implicit above (Ingham 104). In fact, the reader reminds one of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Terry in Herland-Ourland, who was upper-class, and apparently more refined, although not less dangerous. Toward the end of the novel, however, Butch’s language as well as his personality will take on greater scope and signification (Girl, chapters XXVIII-XXX). During the argument between Girl and Butch, his aggressive language is completely at odds with hers—“Can’t you shoot straight girl?”—but she replies—“I’m not shooting or hitting or striking” (49). At some point, Girl feels desperate and reads “all the sandwich signs” as if looking for a better way to communicate between each other: “american cheese, chickenamporkcoffemilkbuttermilklettucetomatohotbeef. They looked like signs like lovehatejealousymarriage” (49). I would like to comment the author’s choice of 12

These compound terms have been coined by myself. Refer to section “The Dialogical ‘Feminine’: The Chronotope of Pregnancy in ‘Annunciation’” for their definitions.

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typography. Apart from being a formal experiment, trying to show Girl’s reading speed, these signs stand for something else. It is the Depression period and people (like these characters) cannot afford to buy much of anything, let alone food. Very subtly, Le Sueur is attacking capitalist devices, such as advertisements that ignore as well as hide people’s misery. But in this case, the main object of their discussion is that Butch just wants to have sex with her on the spot. She wants something beyond that: “I want everything. Sure. I got hungers. I want the earth. I feel rich. I feel heavy. I want meat, bread, children. I am starving...” (50). Rewriting patriarchal myths (Freud, Lacan), it appears that Girl has no difficulty in articulating her desires: to say what she/a woman wants. Ironically, during their row, someone was playing “‘I can’t give you anything but love, baby’ on the player.” Again the song, the signs, and voice shouting that the WPA (Works Progress Administration) were building “[f]ive dams” reflect the surrounding heteroglossia. That is, the different voices that make ideas meet, bringing about new ones. On the one hand, it is ‘only’ love(-hate) that Butch can ‘give’ Girl (and not the ‘sandwiches’), thus highlighting their difficult economic situation. On the other, the good news about the WPA promises a social renewal. Le Sueur’s heteroglossic text subversively represents the voices of those that are in need and how they can help each other. This particular fragment might foreshadow Girl’s (socialist) conversion/becoming at the end of the novel. Eventually, Girl has sex with Butch. And it is “short” but not “sweet” as Clara had said (50). According to the “male prerogatives [that] defined the [novel of apprenticeship],” the hero enjoys several love affairs and/or sexual encounters (Eysturoy 11). On the contrary, for the protagonists of female Bildungsromane, sex “is more often debasing and handicapping” (Pin-chia 7). After it, Girl “didn’t feel good. [She] cried. Butch got mad and slapped [her]... ‘I hurt,’ [she] said. ‘I didn’t know it... Nobody tells you the truth’” (Girl 51). Once more, though still surprisingly, he reacts violently towards her and she seems to withstand it stoically. Butch is nervous getting dressed and feeling unsure of himself: “Didn’t you like it? Wasn’t I good to you?... I never had no complaints before” (51). Apart from satirizing the myth of the macho-lover, there is complete ignorance and lack of communication about each other’s problems: she thinks, “[h]ad it hurt him too?,” and the sight of her “blood” horrifies him (52). These questions are related to the different kinds of experiences undergone by Le Sueur’s male and female characters. Most characters’ names are symbolic of their personalities: ‘Butch’ is butchy enough and able to act like a ‘butcher’—Girl is bleeding till the end of the next chapter (XV); ‘Belle’ was probably “a beauty once” (2); if ‘Clara’ seems ironic for a prostitute, it becomes “Clear Light” (a symbol of renewal) at the end (143); evocative of a pig’s sound, ‘Hoink’ seems the perfect name for a batterer; and ‘Ganz’ is certainly the biggest gangster. Symbolically too, the couple makes love for the first time in chapter XIV, which coincides with the day of ovulation, as if foreseeing her pregnancy. Related to how the first sexual experience might affect women, Moira Gatens has theorized against Freud’s neglect of the effect of the menses on the pubertal girl’s psyche... That the flow of blood would have profound psychological signification for her is clear and that this signification would center around ideas of castration, sexual attack, and socially reinforced shame is highly probable. The female’s first act of coitus would probably also bear on this. (10)

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Consequently, a woman’s first sexual experience has deep psychic effects on her formation. And, if the experience is like the one in this novel, the effects will be negative. Nevertheless, Girl will definitively recover. Her thoughts after being with him, “I felt I would never be the same... I felt I became mama” (51-52), fit in with the emergence she is going through. Current feminists agree that, by contrast with the male hero, the female heroine “must first ‘assail her womanhood’ before she can define herself and her true role in society” (Labovitz 252). Among other reasons, this is due to the existence of a repressive heterosexual structure for women. I want to argue that Le Sueur’s protagonist becomes a subject not only as a heterosexual lover and mother, but also as a daughter, a friend, a(n improvised) leader of the bank-robbers, a driver, a worker, a “comrade” (Girl 131), a re-teller of her experiences, a subject of (her own) desire, and so forth. Here is a first example of her turning into a speaking subject, who both listens and talks: the first time Girl leaves home, she cannot “turn to wave [to] her [mother], or open [her] mouth or howl or say a word” (30); the second time, she tells her “Goodbye, mama, goodbye” (44). What matters more now is that, the moment after having sex with Butch, Girl thinks about other women’s voices: “I thought of Clara... and how she said it don’t mean a thing if you don’t feel it,” “[a]nd Belle saying that about Hoink, how good... it was for them” (52). She remembers her mama and thinks Butch is like “her father always in anger, putting on his pants and leaving” (51). Even though she is heterosexual, she returns to the German Village to be healed and nurtured by her female community: “I wanted to find Belle and Amelia and Clara and my mama” (53). There, the women care for and talk to her—(Amelia:) “I’m glad you came here if you don’t feel good,” (Belle:) “the first time is the hardest,” (Clara:) “[h]ave a straight shot.” From what we have seen so far, there is a marked divide between the male and female words/worlds. Le Sueur has been accused of emphasizing women’s maternal qualities at the cost of erasing others (Marilyn J. Crawford). Although rethinking the maternal is a vital concern of (Second Wave) feminism, Le Sueur can also be accused of having a quite simple view of the masculine. Actually, she had a multiple vision of the feminine, as when she declared: “I think the gestating part of the female consciousness is to give birth to many things—a child is just one” (quoted by Kirkpatrick, 12). Even so, sometimes her characters appear to have fixed “feminine” and “masculine” roles that may contribute to reinforcing the hierarchy—e.g. “Harvest,” “I Was Marching,” “What Happens in a Strike.” This is especially dangerous in the America of the Depression: Section 213 of the 1932 Federal Economy Act made it illegal for a married couple to work for the federal government... [A]nd, thanks to patriarchal cultural consensus, married women lost their jobs... The culture of the 1930s reinforced the separation between the public and the private spheres and the idea that a woman’s place is the home, which... helped to justify the government’s and the industries’ political economic discrimination against women. (Dawahare 417)

Fortunately, Le Sueur’s depiction of gender roles as partially coincident with the structure of the status quo is exceptional (as in the three examples listed above). In The Girl, we are presented with a very stereotypical, if not negative, “masculinity”: if men have no jobs, they crumble (Girl 118); “[w]hat tools is to a man,” Belle says (137); and so forth. The reductiveness of this attribution of gender features is indubitable. As stated elsewhere in this work, the complete reversal of opposites is nothing but a repetition of patriarchal parameters. Even so, such reversal is still the necessary first step toward 134

emancipation. Nonetheless, the hierarchy’s reversal strengthens the value of working-class women’s union/sisterhood, which functions mainly to protect each other against men’s abuse and to defeat patriarchy, economic depression, segregation or illness. The depiction of the gender (man/woman) hierarchy can be read as a criticism of patriarchy or even of capitalism. Clara warns Girl: “you’re in trouble if you love a guy... It seems they love you at first but... they only want to put it in you... They’ll do you in hell, beat you up,... mow you down...” (56). And Belle says: “[w]hen men look like that [Ack “thinking in his sleep”]... [women m]ight as well not say anything, just pray” (73). But Amelia, the communist sympathizer, affirms: “A man is a mighty fine thing... It’s the way we have to live that makes us sink to the bottom and rot” (112). Identified mainly as a communist writer, for Le Sueur, capitalism, and not men (or even patriarchy), must be blamed. Feminists, particularly the socialist feminists, have demonstrated the happy alliance between patriarchy and capitalism—see Chodorow, Reed, Rubin. Even so, as I pointed out earlier, traditional socialism cannot be classified as ‘feminist’: if women are given the right to work outside the home, they must still work inside it (cf. Weitz). The truth is that women usually lose, since they have the same ‘double burden of work’ with capitalism (in the twenty-first century). Consequently, should the patriarchal order be blamed for the problematic relationships between men and women? If Rebecca Harding Davis was a pioneer in portraying the difficult working lives of the lower classes—“their incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking—God and the distillers only know” (45)—, Le Sueur continued to show their psychological destitution. Above all, capitalism impoverishes if not suppresses the dialogics, not only between men and women but more especially, amongst ‘the poor.’ Transposing a term by Celia Amorós from gender to class (1997, 194-204), living in poverty makes people ‘identical’ (with each other) but neither ‘different’ from each other nor ‘equal’ before the law. For instance, when it was Christmas and ‘the poor’ were waiting together to be given some food, “[t]he wind... tore around them, and each alone not seeing that they made a sea of men all alike, that you could hardly tell one man’s strength from another’s, or one man’s weakness” (Girl 64). At the relief house, there will be much less talking among the women: “Butch’s mother got under [Girl’s] skin. [She] couldn’t stand to hear her. Belle was drunk most of the time and Clara out of her head” (117). Mrs. Rose describes the degree of non-dialogism their lives can reach: After a while, you don’t quarrel anymore, that’s a fact, and... you don’t even read detective stories anymore... You eat and sleep... Sometimes you sweep the floor,... and you hate sleeping with your husband because you’re scared of having a baby anyway... Ach,... what the poor suffer for bread and butter, we can’t tell even to each other. There are things the poor suffer they can’t bear even to mouth to each other. (124)

Deprived of conversation, reading and sexual relationships, the subaltern are not even entitled to speak up. In this way the gender hierarchy is definitively reinforced for them. Probably, the most anti-dialogical character in the text is Ganz, who will try to rape Girl, and who voices opinions such as the following: “What we need in this country is somebody like Hitler... God I hate Jews... [And] I don’t want anybody to argue with me, see?” (72). Women do not believe in what men say (6). And men do not listen to women (73, 82). Butch does not talk with Girl, he gives her orders (38) and batters her: “Instead of answering he struck me full in the face with the flat of his hand” (83). But then she adds, 135

“he came toward me and I put out my hand and pushed against his chest and when I touched him I loved him then” and “I tried to look like nothing had happened” (85). Belle, another battered woman, confesses: “I couldn’t stand a man wasn’t strong and bitter with a scare and a whip to him” (113). As in the lordship/bondage relationship, some of the women become so tragically used to their victimization that it gives them (part of) their identities. Then, they are sometimes unable to question their situation any further than asking “[w]here will I be [if you leave me]?” (49 & 65). Interestingly, Girl’s mother also wonders what she would have “become” if she had not married Mr. Schaffer (40), who used to “beat her” too (35). Possibly, if Mrs. Schaffer had not married that ‘Creator,’13 she might have become another kind of woman, a self-other, whose identity-alterity would not have been subordinated to her husband. For instance, Belle wonders: “Why did I marry? I could have been my own boss” (75). Le Sueur’s fiction contains more examples of what is now called the battered women syndrome (“Harvest,” “Holiday”). Nevertheless, “Le Sueur’s sympathies [toward the male sex] become divided. On the one hand, she deplores the treatment women suffer at the hands of oppression or males, yet, almost simultaneously, she goes so far at times to romanticize them as dark Byronic figures ravaged by capitalism” (Marilyn J. Crawford 120). I agree with Marilyn J. Crawford that issues such as gender violence ought not to be romanticized. Assuming men had a violent identity(?), Gilman wanted to change them in order to convert them to feminism. Apparently, Le Sueur believes in a male identity(?) too, but she either accepts it (as it is) or rejects it. What appears most important to me is that the feminist antimodernist wrote on, and so denounced, the mistreatment suffered by women. The absence of a moral(izing) voice telling the readers that such mistreatment is “bad” or “wrong” only makes her texts more modern, more like a Bakhtinian novel. To interrogate and to judge those practices is our responsibility as readers. That is, like the novels of the “Second Stylistic Line” (DIN 375), The Girl incorporates heteroglossia, “resisting altogether any unmediated and pure authorial discourse” and “transforming th[e]... everyday and literary language into essential material for its own orchestration” (383).14 Confirming the stereotype, we find out that this kind of violence is frequent amongst proletarian families: once Butch “took [Girl’s] arm and marched [her] out of the tavern” while the people inside shouted, “that’s the way to treat her. A woman’s got to be struck regular like a gong. Pull her eyebrows down. Knock it into her” (Girl 81). This quote corroborates that battering women has traditionally formed part of patriarchal discourses/practices, being widely accepted as norm-al. In other words, patriarchy promulgates the belief that “[a] woman’s got to be struck” as if it were good for her. And “[i]n a court in our country,” as Gilman wrote, “[a batterer] would... b[e] held quite ‘within his rights,’ of course” (Herland 132). Quite probably, like Gilman, Le Sueur would hold that “male violence against women should not be acceptable under any circumstances” (Moynihan 6). Unlike Gilman, though, she did not “envisio[n] cultural institutions that 13

Ironically, “schaffen” is a German verb meaning to make/manage/succeed/create. During Girl’s final months of gestation, she receives an encouraging letter from Amelia, who celebrates her pregnancy: “U are a maker now” (131, my italics). 14 In DIN, Bakhtin makes a differentiation between a First and a Second Stylistic Line of novels. A novel of the First Stylistic Line “leaves heteroglossia outside itself... But... even its perception presumes heteroglossia as a background” as in Gilman’s Herland-Ourland (375). A a further characteristic, this (first) line of novels “aspire[s] to organize and stylistically order the heteroglossia of conversational language, as well as of written everyday and semiliterary genres” (383).

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enforce customs and laws against [sexual violence].” In spite of that, she implicitly denounces what in the 21st century has been named “wife rape,” e.g., Girl recalls, “I remember... when [my father] often beat mama, and it didn’t sound very different from love-making” (Girl 51).15 As poverty mars love, it casts a sadomasochistic light on people’s relations. Apparently, men mistreat women and children out of jealousy: Butch (65, 78, 79, 81, 90), Hoink (75), Mr. Schaffer (36). Surprisingly, as Girl ‘grows up,’ she finds out a(nother) way to comprehend such ill-treatment. This is part of her Bildung as a rewriter of her experience—“[her mama] loved [her papa] in a terrible way” (51). Her father had a “stormy love for his children” (30), and he would not let anyone be “‘better than him’” (36). Actually, men do not (seem to) know what women want—[Butch to Girl:] “[w]hat the hell do you want?” (50), [Hoink to Belle:] “[w]hat do you want?” (82). They also ignore what it is they should give women, or how to give it: Hoink tells Belle, “I’m giving you all I can.” Unable to give, they beat them: Butch states, “That’s why I always want to beat a woman down” (48) and Girl confesses, “[m]y father planted a longing in me” (50), “[h]e only had to look at me to want to hit me good and plenty. I thought it was because he saw that wanting in me... just like he wanted it,” and he could not fulfil it (30). Girl’s reflection, holding capitalism and incomprehension responsible for violence, is more specific than the psychoanalytic accounts attributing the ill-treatment of women to male fantasies about the phallic mother (see Dinnerstein). Whichever is the case, a society that treats woman as a piece of meat on which to vent its rage is unquestionably psychologically unbalanced. Furthermore, if men seem to be more alone than women (65), working-class women can form a solid union: “We are women. Nothing can hold us apart” (140). As I will comment later, the values of the women’s community are different from men’s values. For Rita Felski, the “interactions and antagonisms between the values of female community and the structures and norms of a larger, male-defined society emerge as a defining feature of the feminist Bildungsroman as a genre” (141). However, the binary opposition between the female/male communities is rather simplistic. Actually, this binary is not proposed by Le Sueur, probably in keeping with her communist ideals. Amelia, who constantly encourages people not to feel alone, contends: “[t]here is no use saying... it is men, it is women... We got to be men and women again and want everything and dream everything and fight for it” (Girl 125). As for Girl, from the beginning we know that she wants to be with others à la Bakhtin, “for what is one voice alone?” (144). Correcting Freud, Carol Gilligan reframed “women’s psychological development as... a struggle for connection rather than... as having a problem in achieving separation” (xv). A difference between Gilman’s stoic Herlanders and Le Sueur’s female group is the latter’s ability for imagination, tenderness, mutual comfort, consolation, play, and more. Above I underlined the importance of the others’ voices in the formation of the (social female) subject. Moreover, the extra-linguistic has a special importance in the constitution of identity-alterity. Contrary to other theories of identity, Bakhtin emphasized that neither does the construction of identity end at a specific point, nor is childhood its determining factor—hence his allusions to rebirths. Traditionally, bodily contact, play, creativity and laughter have been placed in the semiotic or imaginary domain, as if they were not part of the real (Morson & Emerson 187). Alternatively, Bakhtin would include this domain within the daily ‘prosaic’ world, enjoyable and 15

In any case, Le Sueur’s work anticipate the words of feminist theorists like Elizabeth Stanko, when she says “women are more at risk from physical and sexual violence at the hands of men they know, than they are from strangers” (quoted by Moynihan, 6).

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accessible to anyone (not only women) anytime (also during adulthood). Bakhtin’s own study of the grotesque male body of Rabelais’s works is well known. In it, he focussed on the carnal figures of the clown, the rogue and the fool as the main representatives of the carnivalesque spirit—that is, laughing at authority. It is vital to highlight that the female body, laughter, creativity, and so forth have a special importance in The Girl. Working-class women’s relationships are rich in explicit manifestations of love—for example, Clara and Girl kiss each other every time they part. Their relationships can be considered a manifestation of the “lesbian continuum,” that is, an expansion “of woman-identified experience... to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of... support; [among other forms]” (Rich 1980, 648-649).16 In this same line, Amelia tells Girl: You are going to have a child now? [and] she smiled... Yes, I said... Why, she said, you will have a child and then you will belong to the whole earth... She was the first person who seemed to be glad of it... I feel lonely, I said... why you aren’t alone now, she laughed, he will dog your heels now all right, day in and day out. Try and be alone now Ho! she cried laughing, she’ll be kicking around like a sack full of kittens in no time... You had to laugh. She was so comical peering into my face, stroking my arms... I know how it is, she said... But lubchick, look! we [Belle, Clara and herself] are all here. (112, emphasis mine)

Related to this, Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering provides a psychoanalytical explanation of women’s (supposedly) exceptional relational abilities and desire for mothering. As part of the dialogue amongst feminists, she has been accused of centering her study on Western (middle-class) females—see Oyewumi. Curiously, if we were to apply Chodorow’s ‘object relations theory’ to the women of Gilman’s fiction, who are white and higher-class, the results would be surprisingly negative. For instance, in “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the relationship between the protagonist and “mother” seems nonexistent (“Yellow” 30). In Herland-Ourland, the Herlanders might not be so cold, but they do not really demonstrate it. Le Sueur’s middle-class mothers and daughters do not have warm relationships either, such as the relationship between Mercedes and her mother, Mrs. Willis, in The Horse. This biased portrayal needs to be criticized because, although it might be realistic, it only reverses and repeats the hierarchy, depicting the lower class as ethical and the middle class as unethical. It is not, as Chodorow has been interpreted, that all women’s erotic lives are “richer than men’s” (Chodorow 200). But emotional demonstrations among women are indeed crucial in the particular working-class female community of Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl. That is, expressing signs of affection, through terms of endearment (e.g. “lubchick”), caresses, strengthens female bonding and provides a means of spiritual survival. Therefore, sharing her life with these women enriches Girl’s process of becoming a woman with self-assurance, self-esteem and a sense of altruism apart from other positive characteristics. Theorists of ‘relational identity’ encourage “the rediscovery of connection” (Gilligan 127), which leads one to realize that “self and other are interdependent and that life... can only be sustained by care in relationships.” Coming back to the excerpt quoted above, one can illustrate Gilligan’s theory with other examples: in the opening chapters, Amelia acted as midwife for Susybelly, the female cat, and she will act as midwife for Girl too. Furthermore, she guides her in her union activism, having presumable effects on her and her future daughter. 16

Rich records in passing that The Girl “reveal[s] the lesbian continuum” (1980, 656).

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Apparently, Butch is the biological father of Girl’s baby. The only person happy for Girl is Amelia, who proves this happiness in a nurturing and sensual way. Thus, Amelia might be seen as a symbolic grandmother, if not a father, before her and the reader’s eyes. Dialogical feminists have insisted that Bakhtin did not write a word on the positive, human value of the female body (e.g. Ginsburg). In contrast, The Girl’s allusions to it are an integral part of its feminist critique. There are repetitive, even obsessive, references to women’s breasts that increase almost mimetically toward the end of the Bildungsroman, with the progress of Girl’s pregnancy: Belle has a “beery breast” (Girl 54); when Girl returns from running away after the bank robbery, Belle comforts her with her warm breast (110). The female breast is a metonymy of women(’s desire and feelings): “I felt the knobs of my breasts” (65), “the breasts of our mothers are deep with this sorrow” for Clara’s illness (135), “[r]emember, Amelia says, the breasts of your mothers” (142), “[w]hat shall we do, our little sister [Clara] has no breasts” (143). All these repetitions lead us to the last sentence of the novel, after the new (baby) Clara is born: “O girl, I said down to her, giving her my full breast of milk” (148). Girl’s breast-feeding represents the milk the community could not afford to buy (126), the milk denied to Clara, Girl’s best friend, who finally fell ill and died. Le Sueur’s descriptions of female breasts are feminist for various reasons. First of all, it seems obvious that the breasts of this female community challenge beauty standards. Besides, the references to breasts take us back to the mother, erased from patriarchal histories and values, but ultimately the most concrete place of origin. They value the mother as a source of food/milk, materializing maternal care as an irreplaceable means of human survival. Therefore, maternal metonymies lead the readers to face our dependence on others from the moment we are born, notice the passive form in English, underscoring once more the dubious validity of certain beliefs, such as individualism. Laughter is another well-known semiotic/somatic element. Though differently, both Le Sueur and Gilman use humour as the best weapon against patriarchy. Though hybrid in both cases, the tone of their writings is different: protesting and comic in Gilman, melancholic and humorous in Le Sueur. Apart from being comic, The Girl is a deeply sad novel too and the reader can be easily moved from laughter to tears and vice versa. Moving the reader was very important for class-conscious writers, who practiced the famous ‘suspension of disbelief,’ among other strategies, as an attempt convert the audience. Furthermore, while Gilman’s irony can turn into sarcasm, since the Herlanders’ witty remarks leave male interlocutors speechless, Le Sueur’s subtle irony and laughter are a means to overcome a difficult situation. I have previously commented upon the importance of laughter for Bakhtinian dialogics. Bakhtin expands upon this thus: Laughter has the remarkable power of... drawing [an object] into a zone of crude contact where one can... turn it up side down,... doubt it,... lay it bare and expose it,... and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. (E&N 23)

In extreme circumstances, when they had not much to eat, some of Le Sueur’s characters “laughed and remembered Charlie Chaplin boiling an old shoe. They always made it” (Winter 16). In The Girl, there are several instances when the characters rise above the superficial appearance of the situation. 139

Before, I pointed out that Girl’s family finds a way to laugh after the (domineering) father is dead. After her husband’s death, Belle assesses the practical use of her mourning veil: “I got this veil at the five and ten... It’s O.K. but it gets in the beer. It makes you laugh to wear a veil like that for Hoinck” (Girl 113). At the relief office, Girl is advised to follow a healthy diet during pregnancy. But the reality is that only wealthy pregnant women can follow it, “well, oranges don’t grow in the fine tropical climate of Minnesota” (117). The social worker advised a “change of environment” after the baby is born, thus, Belle suggests Girl, “Miami or Pasadena...or the Bahamas” (139, ellipsis in source text). As the latter is about to deliver, the former tells her, “I’ll bring you a Doctor Pepper... I’ll need a doctor, I said and she hooted with laughter” (144). When the protagonist is already pregnant, she and Clara wander around the streets in fear, cold and hunger. Entering a café once to have a soda, they “both laughed about the oranges and one quart of milk a day... [Girl recalls] I never laughed so much” (120). All these examples evidence what is most impressive about this poor female community: their amusing, self-ironic and resistant creativity. Thus, the daily performance of resilience, laughter being a means to cure the pain, helps them to endure the abominable material conditions of their lives. Proletarian women’s resistance reminds us of Josefina Ludmer’s account of “[the trick of the weak, which] consists of the fact that, from the... assigned place, she changes not only the sense of that place but also the sense... of what it includes” (53, my translation). In other words, being marginalized by gender, and by class, implies oblivion and segregation. Nonetheless, the margin can be a space for resistance and creation. I will now turn to observe the importance this novel gives to being together, to official voices and, above all, the folk voices, which eventually lead them to fierce protest. At the end of the novel, there is a harmonious fusion of female voices that empathize with Girl’s labour of birth: “[w]as it my cry, the cry of the women, the cry of a child?” (Girl 147). Certainly, Le Sueur believed in the concord amongst these women’s voices. However, if this approaches the utopian ideal proposed by gender feminism, it is only proletarian women that share features such as care, collaboration, and so on. Fortunately, we learn that working-class women are conscious about being doubly underprivileged, not only by gender, but also by class. Belle affirms: “[t]his is a rotten stinking world and for women it is worse” (10), and “[i]f women are to get anything you have to be a guerilla, a thief, a tricker, a clown. O Lord, to be a woman!” (55). This indicates that, hopefully, poor women can become feminist, without having to be given lessons by other (white middleclass) women. The working-class novel of female apprenticeship portrays the hierarchical conflict between middle-class and lower-class women. As we will see, Girl ‘grows’ to realize the hierarchy while she experiences it: “I knew we were enemies” (128). The presentation of a binary opposition between women’s classes has been criticized as not being “subtle” enough (Clausen 3). Even so, nobody has denied it manages to realistically show the inequalities of real life. It also fulfils the critical purposes of Second and Third Wave feminists:17 i.e. First Wave and Gender feminists were racist and classist as they did not pay attention to the so-called “other” women—and one example of such First Wave feminist is Gilman.

17

The current feminist moment has been labeled by some scholars as the “Third Feminist Wave.” In spite of the lack of agreement—some consider it a branch of the Second Wave—, the term has been defended, counting with more than one manifesta (cf. Baumgardner & Richards).

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At present, feminists (of the Second and Third Waves) have argued that much of patriarchy is based on the separation between motherhood and sexuality. However, patriarchal oppression works in multiple ways, as cultural and governmental institutions condemn only working-class women’s sexual relationships as immoral. Patricia Ingham has demonstrated how, since the nineteenth century, “the attempts to reaccent the signs of both the womanly woman and the fallen woman succeeded in rewriting... class and gender” (20). Thereby “materialism [appears] as [a sign of] virtue” (23), in a tacit “assumption that middle-class women never ‘fall.’” I will argue that this binary opposition, within the ‘man/woman’ duality, has to do with the complexities of the “(splitting) other.” That is, patriarchy assigns “woman” the condition of “other” (man=self/woman=other). So that a group of women—the higher-class woman—may be ‘happy’ with this assignation and work for patriarchy, it is necessary to create another group, the “other-other”—the lower-class woman—, from whom the first group differentiate themselves in a position of privilege. Ingham’s conclusion is that “[t]he fallen woman is thus a linguistic coding as important as the Angel/House trope in the interlocking of class and gender” (25). Moral discourse on sexuality has no mercy with the women characters of The Girl. The second time Girl left home to go to work at the German Village, her mother continued warning her that “[she] would come to a bad end... because of those who preyed on young girls and [she] had to watch out and not let any man get [her]... [she] should get up in the world, meet some nice men...” (Girl 44). As part of patriarchal paradoxes, men can both rob and restore women’s virtue. Girl’s “mama always said you should never kill a child, having a child was the only way to make up for lust” (77). Clara, the prostitute, suffers constant pangs of conscience that “[she] will fry in hell” due to her kind of job (56). Moreover, she is conscious of a new surprising hierarchy between her and her best friend, “the virgin” (2). Thus, Girl says: “O... I am ready to live, to know someone, to touch someone. Clara hugged me—It don’t seem right to me, an angel like you kid it ain’t right” (45). As a more practical example of governmental action, in the Depression years, lowerclass women were pursued by people working as ‘spies’ for the institutions. In this novel, the protagonist is assigned to Anna Bradley, to make sure she does not commit “any immorality,” meaning that she “wasn’t a bad girl” (127, 128). Sarcastically enough, Miss Bradley “was a well known whore, [who] ran a... regular house on the north side” (128). When Miss Rice, the social worker, knows about Girl’s current life, she tells her: “I think I will have to give you only four-eighty this month for food. Jesus Christ [the narrator thinks] who can keep their skin alive on four-eighty a month for food” (127).18 In spite of her state of pregnancy, her caseworker asks her: “Have you slept with a man? I thought maybe she believed in the Virgin Mary. When I told her yes, she said You’ve been immoral” (129). Then she tells her that she “was going to face the greatest ordeal a woman could face... sacred motherhood.” If motherhood is sacred, then, it must be only conferred on those moral women-angels of the upper classes. Women like the protagonist must not be prized with such honour. Or, if Nature is wiser than Culture, they must be indoctrinated with the sanctification of motherhood. This very discourse is produced at the relief maternity house:

18

This social worker has an ironic name. The same is the case of ‘Rice Park,’ a meeting place for the less favoured (e.g. 73). Anecdotally, Le Sueur was married to a Russian immigrant, Yasha Rabanov, who changed his name to Harry Rice.

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The bell rang and the Major came in to lead us in prayer. She read from the bible. Some of the girls could talk together on their fingers, clasped behind their backs. The Major talked about the great divine joy of Easter and of the motherhood and prayed, asking the deity to forgive us for the great sin we had committed... Somebody must have made a mistake about the song because it was Hark the Herald Angels Sing, which is a Christmas song, but everybody sang... because it’s a pleasure to sing... and Julia began to giggle so that the Major said, You may go, Julia, and she turned at the door and thumbed her nose at the major and I felt an awful tickle of laughter like I was going to hoot and howl. Alice pinched me and I smiled and pretended she was singing. (132, emphasis mine)

The relief maternity house functions in a centripetal or systematic way, marked here by the bell. This highlights even more the hierarchy patrons/residents, which is to say, white middle-class educated women versus “the rest.” The contradictory religious messages used by the Major reveal the indoctrination they inflict on poor women. The Christmas song is, of course, a subliminal message to influence them to restore their life habits, probably like the “funny readings” they are given to read. Once more, the proletarian female community keeps together, communicates, enjoys it and uses jokes and laughter as a centrifugal means of defence against authority. Consequently, in this house, the policewoman, the matron and the Major are not in any sense responsive to the needs of the women living there, as they never move beyond a position of authority. From a Bakhtinian perspective, I will argue that The Girl’s middleclass women have no ‘respons-ibility’ toward the proletarians, as they do not care about the latter’s “self-actualization[s] and self realization[s]” (Morson & Emerson 75-76). The women occupying official positions neither fulfil their duties nor engage in any kind of ethical relationship with the poorer women. Cruelly, it is women like Le Sueur’s female characters that would be denied maternity in Gilman’s imagined world. Unfortunately, they would be pursued for sterilization in the real America long after the turn-of-the-nineteenthcentury. This practice was constantly denounced by Le Sueur: They won’t let me out of here if I don’t get sterilized. I been cryin for about three weeks... I can’t be sleepin hardly ever any night yet I’d stay right here than have that sin done to me because then I won’t be in any pleasure with a man and that’s all the pleasure I ever had. Workers ain’t supposed to have any pleasure... Miss Smith that comes here to talk to me into havin an operation says I like men too much... They keep sayin I like men but... why shouldn’t a girl like a man? But for us girls who work for our livin we ain’t got no right to it... They don’t want us to have nothin... (“Sequel” 3-5)

In order to take precautions, the pertinent authorities argued hypocritically that sterilization depended on the woman’s proficiency in intelligence “tests” (5). I have pointed out Le Sueur’s opinion of those tests, which could only be passed by (formally) educated people. As she said, they were certainly “class tests” (quoted by Hoy, 56), not only in the academic sense but also in the social one. The cited excerpt belongs to the piece of reportage “Sequel to Love.” This is an appropriately doubly ironic title for a story narrated by a working-class female character, who has just had a child, and who is now suffering the consequences. As can be inferred from the language used, the narrator is not academically educated. However, she is very far from being stupid: i.e. she realizes that enforced sterilization is wrong and that she is being discriminated by class. Besides, the discourse of sexuality intertwines with that of motherhood and class. These things considered, theorizing on gender alone, or class alone, is not sufficient in the search for emancipation, “as if women’s bodies and the representation and control of women’s bodies were not a crucial stake in [feminist] struggles” (Gatens 17). From here, once more, one can claim the need for an intersectional approach. 142

In The Girl, social workers keep on working against the socially needy.19 As an illustration, Miss Rice writes a report suggesting that Girl “should be tested for sterilization after the baby is born” (Girl 129). In one of her visits to the relief office, Girl steals a letter. Its content is elaborated upon for the second time as she reads it to her girlfriends: I started to read out loud... where it said, the girl is maladjusted, emotionally unstable and a difficult problem to get to talk... Continuous casework should follow up the birth of the child. Educational interests should be encouraged to get her away from her friend Clara, a prostitute she lives with... In our opinion there should be a referral to a psychiatrist,... [s]he should be tested for sterilization at the birth of her baby. In our opinion sterilization would be advisable... Amelia [said]... It’s because they don’t need any more children from workers. They don’t need us to reproduce our kind. (139, italics mine)

This piece constitutes a horrifying piece of historical evidence of the policing of the poor. Once more, those affected (e.g. Amelia) are aware of the class-discrimination they are being subjected to. Theorists have demonstrated that the practice of sterilization “must be seen both as an attempt by the state to regulate the terms of family life and as a repressive weapon against the poor” (Shapiro 27).20 As was the case in “Annunciation,” where the pregnant protagonist hides so as not to be besieged by social workers, among proletarian women pregnancy is considered a “Treasure” (Girl 134). After Girl escapes the abortionist, she thinks: “I had to smile. I had robbed the bank. I had stolen the seed. I had it on deposit. It was cached. It was safe... I had the key” (85). From here we could argue, as part of her formation, that her consciousness is starting to awaken to new values like class, maternity, care, and so on. Obviously, she must be proud of having been able to resist the hegemonic powers. Further on, I will assess the novel’s portrayal of female desire and motherhood. In the community of women depicted by Le Sueur, even the deaf like Alice can “‘talk’” (133). In the hotel, Girl had listened to the voices coming from above and from the hall (87), from upstairs (89), and from the other room (91). Throughout the novel, she becomes a witness of and a listener to the complaints of the downtrodden (63, 116-117). Even so, they are not used to protesting: “There are maybe two thousand people, I said, [“Belle said more”] living right out there, hungry” (114) but “people are always very quiet about hunger.” Perhaps because, in the “[s]coundrel [t]ime” (Hellman) of McCarthy as in the one of “Capone... everybody is afraid to think” (Le Sueur, “American” 136). Under such living conditions—“[w]e can’t tell what happens to us even in secret” (Girl 135)—, one may wonder how ‘the world’ is going to publicly emerge as Bakhtin described in the 5th sort of Bildungsroman, though The Girl will finally offer a way out. When Clara dies as a result of electroshock treatment, “her mouth formed a round O but nothing came out” (140). This ‘O’ brings to mind the Freudian case-story of Anna O, another “silent screaming mouth” (145). Clara becomes a symbolic figure for those whose humanity is denied and destroyed without allowing them to pronounce a word. What Clara might have said becomes a part of the novel’s text. At the end Girl gives birth to her (text and) daughter, who is named after Clara—she calls her “girl,” like the novel’s title (148). As Clara’s best friend, the character19

Case workers have been caustically represented in working-class literature: “It took us eight months to get [my daughter] released home, and only the fact that she gained back so little of her seven lost pounds convinced the social worker” (Olsen 1997, 7). 20 Le Sueur’s delightful story “Beer Town” starts like this: “I should have had a bad life. Any reformer would say so. I was bred, born and raised in... [a] brewery” (172). And although “[w]e had beer for supper. The babies were given it... [our village] produced no gangster or holdup men I know of” (174), perhaps because the personal/social formation does not correspond with the academic one.

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narrator is concerned about what to do so that she will “be spoken for” (145). Using a term from Gunilla Theander Kester, throughout her Bildung process Girl becomes a “selfproducing narrating subjec[t]” (5). Thanks to Le Sueur’s characterizations we finally know about the voices/opinions of the “other” women, who are marginalized in Gilman’s feminist literature. Though all from a lower-class status, the women of this female community have various professions (waitresses, prostitutes), various interests (whether to become mothers or not),21 different (dis)abilities (Alice is deaf). Hence, this group is more open to heteroglossia, to listen to the voices not only of the “others” but also of the “other-others.” In contrast with Gilman’s characters, Le Sueur’s have so-called peripheral origins: Girl’s last name (Schaffer) sounds German, Butch says their future baby is “Irish” (Girl 78), Belle comes from Wales (54), and so on. The Girl makes reference to “other” not mainstream “white” ethnicities and nationalities: we are informed of the racism against the Jews (108) or that Greeks and Italians live nearby (53, 114). The Bildungsroman points out the segregation of the different groups existing in St. Paul: while the German Village is on Third St., women on relief are on Seventh St., Irwing Park is for the Italians, and so on. Thus, we become aware of the intersectionality required to approach identity, as national and ethnic origins play a part in its negotiation. Contrary to Gilman’s point-of-view on the “‘melting-pot’” (Ourland 120), at seventy-five years of age, Le Sueur declared: “This I think is a beginning of a cultural root that we might experience a renaissance in America. Because the people are becoming conscious of their own fate and their own history and their own imagination. It’s going to be multi-nationally fed by the ethnic groups and their culture. The Indians and [B]lacks are contributing a new rich kind of language” (quoted by Prokop, 4). This same heteroglossic spirit resonates in The Girl. As in Bakhtin’s marketplace, this novel attempts to contain all the other (everyday) languages: slang—Jiggers, dicks, Black Maria, stool, didies; speech representations— “pardner” (Girl 66), “many’s the time” (113); proverbs—“more of the hair [of the dog]” (56); idioms—“[s]he gave me the willys” (128); colloquialisms such as ‘kind of,’ which infects the narrative voice impregnating the whole text; among others. These are the voices that, denied artistic privilege, demand their inclusion in the symbolic. In the “Preface” of Women on the Breadlines, Le Sueur explains: “I did not write these stories... I recorded them. They are the words of women who are now dead, lost,... who have forgotten their names from shock treatments and lobotomies,... These are not stories, but epitaphs marking the lives of women who... leave no statistics,... obituary or remembrance... I believe it is the privilege and function of the proletarian writer to... respon[d]... [to] the oppressed, showing not only their suffering but their endurance... (unpaginated).”With Bakhtin—“Art and life... must become united in... the unity of my answerability” (A&A 2)—, Le Sueur believed that the artist and the reader have an ethical ‘respons-ibility’ (‘answer’+‘duty’ or ‘responsibility’) with respect to others, especially with the less favoured.22 The cited preface could apply to The Girl too, given that these voices are the ones which influence the protagonist’s maturation process. At times, voices can overlap, with the consequent fusion 21

Of course, that Belle had thirteen abortions cannot be said to be her own choice. This is part of the criticism of a socio-economic structure, which does not inform/help its members in sexual matters, which refuses certain women the privilege of motherhood, to cite only a few problems. 22 The Russian word “otvetsvennost” contains both meanings of ‘answer’ and ‘response.’ According to the critics’ reception of Bakhtin, it has been translated both as “answerability” (Holquist) and “responsibility.” Morson and Emerson alternate both terms according to their significance in each Bakhtinian period.

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of identities, for instance between Butch and Girl (Girl 81). If she participates in the bank holdup it is because she expects to have a better life with him afterwards. As anticipated, I will deal with Girl’s becoming and her roles as a subject of a robbery, a driver, a further speaking subject (also of desire), a (self-conscious) worker, and so on. But first of all, it must be made clear that Girl and her friends feel driven to robbery by their deplorable circumstances—as Butch screams during his agony: “We didn’t mean any of this we didn’t mean any of this” (107). Clara contends that “Belle and Ack and Hoink... don’t pay the rent and might be put out. That’s why they are looking forward to the hold-up” (76). Throughout the text, we are insistently told that the characters suffer intensely from hunger and cold: “If it was summer... [Butch says, m]aybe we wouldn’t have had to do this” (65). It is also true that he participates in the hold-up “with Ganz” in order to get a lease (80): “A hundred dollars more and I can get a lease from the Standard Oil—I can have a station of my own... then we will be sitting pretty.” In the capitalist system, Le Sueur seems to be saying, only those who have money get more money; the rich get richer and the poor... Obviously, Girl takes part in the hold-up because Butch is in it. As in her mother’s conversion into an “I,” Girl’s eyes play a crucial role the morning of the raid. Then, she had “extra ways of seeing” (93). The car was in front... I could see in the back, all the guns... Everything looked so... clear... like in a show,... so clear... I never saw everything before so clear... I could feel Butch at my back. I could see him there. I could see him plain... The police squad car was coming behind us. I saw it... Be still, I said. There’s Ack. I could see him a block ahead... I drove fast. I drove very well... I could see my foot [“on the clutch”]... I could see the bank so clear like it was made of ice... I raced the engine... I could see the air... I could see very well. Everything looked very clear... (92-97)

There is a reversal in the power hierarchy of their temporary group. Ganz, the supposed leader is extremely nervous and Girl has to calm him down. She tells him: “You’re not so brave,... you’re a rat” (94). Moreover, she seems to communicate telepathically with Butch (95). Given this situation, Girl becomes a necessary agent in the ‘supervision’ of the event. As a grown-up person, Girl has a particular way of facing what happens to her, by being self-conscious of her changes and explaining her experiences to herself: “It is funny how you can stand more than you thought, and feel yourself inside get stronger, and taste the salt of your own wounds, and the weight of the things that have happened to you” (79). Therefore, her ‘education’ is not only directed toward being a lover and a mother. She can also be an active agent of her own becomings. For instance, she is able to become a mother only because she disobeys Clara’s advice as well as Butch’s insistence that she have an abortion (76-77), and runs away from the old river abortionist (81). Therefore, she acts through the many other beings forming her identity-alterity, her changing self. When Butch is shot, she heals his wound. When he dies, she takes his corpse out of the hut and leaves it on the grass (chapters XXVIII-XXX). And she manages to go on without him, increasingly more worried about the unborn baby (191). Moreover, her story will not end in marriage, unlike in the Bildungsromane of middle-class female protagonists (Labovitz 4). In fact, these novels have been considered “‘truncated female Bildungsromane’” (6). Perhaps Girl’s pregnancy turns her into a fighter (Girl 114). In any case, she becomes a “young woman” and explicitly announces: “I felt like a girl again” (119) and “I am different too” (125). In the Bakhtinian schema, the hero(ine)’s “resignation” by the end of his(her) apprenticeship is an inescapable feature of the “classical novel of education” (BHR 22). If Girl becomes more resigned—“Let everyone have his own grief anyway” (Girl 108)—, her character 145

becomes more violently outspoken too, for instance, she shouts and swears (129). She protests against the unfortunate circumstances that might cloud her growth: “I don’t want to become hard and bitter” (80), “[a]re we supposed to sit here [in the relief home] and grow thin and bitter?” (114). Once more, unlike male and middle-class female novels of apprenticeship, this protagonist is never passive. In this, she is closer to the heroines of ethnic Bildungsromane (cf. Pin-chia 39). As I have been suggesting, both novelists and critics of this (sub)genre emphasize experience and how it affects subjectivity. Before dealing with them, I would like to consider the category of “experience” itself, which has become a key issue in contemporary debates. In a brief summary, I will argue there are at least two perspectives toward it. Those critics who consider language as a prerogative for experience (e.g. Joan Scott), those who consider that location comes first (e.g. Paula Moya), and those who might sustain a middle perspective (e.g. Cherríe Moraga). There are many problems when trying to relate experience: since language is not equal to facts—which one is the experience?—different interpretations might constitute different experiences. An analysis of experience, Scott warns us, can “reproduce and naturalize categories,” while “it cannot guarantee the historian’s neutrality” (1992, 37). Moraga’s perspective of the relation between language and experience might be more complicated than Scott’s. When she explains her coming to consciousness as a painful process—e.g. an inner struggle with her own racism—she is far from naturalizing the category “Chicana.” Furthermore, she could be said to follow Scott’s method and criticize the “processes by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced” (“Güera” 33). To some extent, Moraga would agree with the postmodern dictum that ‘statement makes the experience,’ as it was not until she uses the words “‘class’” and “‘color’” that she is able to realize experience (31). However, it is Moraga’s particular location, by coming closer to the women of colour (“Preface” xvii), which produces a particular experience/expression. With the introduction of location, Moraga complicates Scott’s purely linguistic argument: expression is influenced by location, which influences experience/expression. The most conspicuous example of this apparent tautology is the volume This Bridge Called my Back itself, as Gender (white/middle-class/heterosexual) feminists had not published anything like it before! There is a connection between women of colour’s and proletarian women’s accounts of experience. Girl needs to learn a new language/undergo a new experience: “Sometimes I didn’t even know the words Clara spoke. You have a lot to learn, Clara said” (Girl 1), “[i]t’s crowning, Amelia cried, I never had heard that. The crown of its head” (147). Further, as a Bildungsroman, The Girl is very different from the novels of education about middle-class women. Something these three scholars and Le Sueur herself would agree with is the importance of showing the differences (and the different kinds of oppression), not only between men and women, but also amongst women. And that is why location becomes an issue, for instance, given the economic hierarchy, middle-class/working-class. Also for Le Sueur, ‘expression is experience’: “Last winter a hundred and fifty women from factory and farm wrote down their great proletarian experience... Writing is nearer experience than a trade...” (“Proletarian” 137). Many postmodernist theorists challenge the reliance upon a located subject of knowledge that has access to (a particular) experience. Nevertheless, both Moraga and Scott have some points in common. I do not think that Scott’s statement that “it is not individuals that have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience”

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(1992, 26), is inconsistent with Moraga’s affirmation that “Third World women derive a feminist political theory specifically from [their] racial/cultural background and experience” (“Preface” xxiv). Moreover, when Moraga asserts that “we have the power to actually transform our experience, change our lives, save our lives,” she seems to be suggesting that a change of experience would bring about a change of subject (xviii). Girl’s journey is a progression toward knowledge. After Ganz had hit her in the hotel in trying to rape her, she thinks: “I always wanted to know what they did in there... Now I knew it” (Girl 72). This can partially answer her initial questions, “[w]hat happens to women? What awful things do they know?” (34). In this sense, it could be argued that she is a privileged subject, as she appears to learn from experience. When the policeman is trying to touch/rape her: “[she] remembered something Butch had told [her] once, and [she] kicked him... in the groin, and he yelled...” (130). Amelia always knows what Girl is going through, e.g. pregnancy (111-112, 128). After Amelia tells Girl about the activist workers’ unhappy histories, the latter realizes that “[she] was one of them” (136). Furthermore, throughout the novel, she is repeatedly told about the importance of having experienced something in order to know something about it (43, 72-73, 114). Towards the end, she thinks: I know I have some feelings... The strong young woman’s feelings these I know. What can comfort you on these streets? From when I was a green girl and didn’t know what it was... I didn’t know what everything was then. Now I know the whole city and the way it is and the way those in it can be together. This you can’t know, or be at home with, until you have lived it. No one can tell you. Now I am at home with my own body and the bodies of others and I will do whatever there is to do. (114)

Her thoughts seem to conform to the warnings she has received. Most interestingly, the recognition that disempowered women “suffer together” makes them join together in the struggle (140). Therefore, another point of coincidence between postmodern feminists and Bildungsroman scholars is their reliance on Teresa de Lauretis’s definition of the subject(s) of experience. For Teresa de Lauretis, subjectivity is that effect of interaction, which she calls “experience,” produced “by one’s personal, subjective, engagement in the practices, discourses, and institutions that lend significance... to the events of the world” (159). In fact, not only concepts such as subjectivity and/or experience but also others like identity, history, etc, have been denied to women in patriarchal discourses. Carol Lazzaro-Weis has proposed the Bildungsroman as the perfect model of the dispute between Cultural Feminism and Post-structuralism, since the genre “always represents conflicts between individual agency and social forces” (quoted by Pin-chia, 29).23 Agency is another concept, forever denied to women, which they have appropriated in order to rewrite themselves. If some (male) critics had asserted that, as a genre(?), the novel of emergence was dead, it has been undergoing a revival in women’s and nominally minority literature, for obvious reasons (Eysturoy, Pin-chia). Like Bakhtin, I also believe there is a centrifugal escape through language and that feminist re-inscriptions of these conceptualizations might lead them away from theoretical-practical subjugation. What feminism criticizes, in part, is the masculinism inherent in the categories of the 23

Put in very simple terms, whereas Post-Structuralism interrogates or denies all definitions, such as the features culturally attributed to women and other groups, Cultural Feminism celebrates and promulgates certain supposedly “feminine” qualities such as nurture, sensitivity or pacifism.

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Enlightenment: a particular definition of the subject (i.e. universal, rational), a particular identity (i.e. self-sufficient, non-relational), etc. Borrowing Gunilla T. Kester’s words, we need to rescue the self from the self, history from history. Le Sueur confessed she “rebelled against... the philosophy and language of the oppressor, the splitting of the subjective and the objective, which... makes us blind to the slaughter” (“Afterword” 1984, 238). Before “experience” became a notion under suspicion, Bildungsroman only dealt with male experience (Eysturoy, Labovitz). This might seem sufficient grounds for a feminist rejection of it. After the voices of millions of people (labelled “minorities”) have been silenced, it is our duty to listen to their narrations (of their experiences). Furthermore, they share an experience of repression—e.g. in the symbolic—that has been erased from official discourses. Therefore, even if we need to deconstruct the category experience, it is still important to reclaim (a new) one. This whole problematic is related mainly to two questions posed in The Girl, which are memory and the collective narrator. By Clara’s deathbed, Girl tells her: “remember me, remember how you took me on your wanderings, how you showed me everything... I remember every insult those rich johns give you that night, Clara, and you shining like a light...” (Girl 142-143). As usual, it is Amelia who, now, makes the use of memory specific in a paragraph that intertwines her voice and Girl’s: We got to remember to be able to fight. Got to write down the names... They know if we don’t remember we can’t point them out. They got their guilt wiped out. The last thing they take is memory. Remember, Amelia said, the breasts of our mothers. O mama help us now [Girl said]... Clara you got to remember your mama, I’ll help you... you remember [my] baby, see they can’t wipe it out. Nothing can wipe it out... (142-143)

Accusation is the first step toward liberation. Virginia Woolf had already recommended that women think through our mothers and foremothers in order to understand ourselves (Room 79). In this novel, the text usually appears in italics when the characters remember the past: Girl’s memories of her childhood (chapter IX) and of Butch treating her badly (XXIII), Butch’s reminiscences while delirious (XXVIII-XXX), Amelia’s memory of her dead husband (XXXIV). Here, the change in the typographic form is indicative of how important memory is. But the usage of memory is even more complex, as there are ways to remember and to disremember. Belle says, “[y]ou can’t keep on remembering forever” (113) and Girl thinks, “[f]or two nights I dreamed every night about the bank. Then I stopped dreaming” (108). As she arrives in St. Paul, she decides to buy herself a pair of used shoes. She comes upon a page from a newspaper that reads “Body Found in Iowa,” which refers to Butch’s corpse (108). As if stepping onto that memory, she puts “the notice in [her] shoe” (109). When she retells the holdup to herself, the text is not in italics. She “had to wear Butch’s coat” since she “had let [hers] sink in the river” (my italics). Hence, she “let[s]” herself forget what she first had to remember. Then, she eats in “a good restaurant” and goes to look for her girlfriends (110). And she goes on with her life and becomes a subject/re-teller who makes sense of experience. According to Kester, the new Bildungsromane by “African American authors explore a different kind of subjectivity which is contingent, collective, and historical” (16). She adds Ellison’s “[i]nvisible man’s major contributio[n] to the... postmodernist narrative of Bildung must be found... in the collective subject whose (hi)story is both personal and representational” (39). In principle, a collective subject might run the risk of essentialism— that is, ‘all (women or all) working-class women are/suffer the same (sort of 148

subordination).’ But perhaps writers must run that risk in order to point out, for instance, that such a subjectivization has other advantages. The Girl portrays the stories of many working-class characters, whose voices influence the perspective of the protagonistnarrator. This serves to account for a collectivity that has deep relations of love, hate, friendship, etc. For Amelia, Belle, Clara and Girl, the feeling of connection is a survival strategy: to “[p]rotect each other” (140). The connection and importance of others is also stylistically marked. For instance, there are occasions when the narrative voice does not describe the events but we know them through the words of others: “Amelia said, Don’t cry girl, don’t cry now” (111). Consequently, critics of Bildungsromane have highlighted the vital and different dimension of the female union for the woman-protagonist’s formation (Cardoni, Felski, Kester, Pin-chia). Apart from the subject(-matter), the style of the Bildungsromane may be as well discussed. As Drucilla Cornell observes, metonymy “is frequently employed in ‘realistic’ narratives... narratives of women’s difference, and of their shared ‘experience’ as potential or actual reproducers” (1999, 62). In contrast with metaphor, which implies the substitution of one word for another, the contiguity involved in metonymy enables the representation of characters’ ethical (subject to subject) relationships. We have already seen the link between metonymy and maternity, in Gilman’s Herland. What stands out in The Girl is a remarkable, if not excessive, use of simile. It could be argued that this figure is closer to metonymy than to metaphor, as it maintains both the original word and the word of the linked comparison, the tenor and vehicle. Not surprisingly, the similes of this novel are usually animalizations and reifications of the male sex. Butch is “like a cat” (Girl 4), “like a fox” (5), “like a whipped dog” (61), his neck is “like snakes” (24); Mr. Schaffer is “like an animal” (37), his eyebrows are “like mice” (35); among the poor, the men are “like broken sticks” (63); and Ack is “like... fried cod fish” (111). If these explicit comparisons reflect the consciousness of an uneducated female narrator, they could as well function as warnings especially addressed to an uneducated female reader. At the same time, the feminist author might be interested in informing us about how close (these) men are to being non-human when behaving in certain ways. Nevertheless, they ‘are not’ animals/things yet. Optimistically, the openness of the simile allows for the possibility of change, and so de-essentializes any conception of a “male identity.” We have witnessed that, in Girl’s environment, relationships between men and women can be “worse than a war” (73). Again, showing women as great friends and men as being animalized/reified is extremely reductive. Further, if a political strategy, it can be seen to repeat the patriarchal subject/object paradigm. In Le Sueur’s feminist Bildungsroman, it appears that, for women to become subjects, men have to be made to vanish. In the case of Gilman’s HerlandOurland, in order to have women-subjects, men have to dwindle (especially in moral and intellectual stature). As I indicated above, I must stress that the reversal of the subject/object hierarchy should be only the first step to end up with oppression but never a permanent strategy. While dealing with other stylistic features of this feminist proletarian Bildungsroman, in what follows, I will pay special attention to its original portrayal of the development of a female heterosexual erotic subject: Girl. This novel has a rich use of imagery and highly sensual descriptions. This became a problem for proletarian writers, who reacted against an embellished “style,” and, as in the novel of formation, underscored the importance of “themes” (Coiner 1990 & 1995, Hedges 1982). On the one hand, the theme of a girl’s turning into a (hetero)sexual subject matches 149

the deployment of such a style. On the other, even if delicate, erotic descriptions are very direct. This supposes a radical change from most novels of (male and female) education. From my point of view, the most important consequence is that, in the female character’s process of sexual becoming, she will be the subject of (her own) desire. It is vital to note that, in her treatment of the female (hetero-)erotic subject, Le Sueur is a pioneer amongst women writers. Hers is an important feminist innovation, not only for her time and culture, but even for today’s chronotope/time-space. There can be several reasons for this: (1) sexual desire (as subjectiv/ity) has always been considered abnormal in women, perhaps to minimize other desires (e.g. for power), (2) heterosexual women have internalized their role as ‘objects of male desire,’ (3) women came to believe that, like their other concerns of theirs, female sexuality was not a literary subject. Antoinette Lucy, one of Le Sueur’s grandmothers, was a very puritanical woman. Her granddaughter immortalized her attitude toward her own body as follows: She had that acrid, bitter thing about her body, a kind of sourness as if she had abandoned it. It was like an abandoned thing, perhaps it had not been occupied. The Puritans used the body like a commodity, and the land and the body resent it. She never took a bath except under her shift. Hearing her move about her room alone I always wondered what she was doing, so bodyless, with that acrid odor as if she had buried her body, murdered and buried it, and it gave off this secret odor revealing the place where it lay. (“Corn” 20)

Mainly, it is the puritan, if not capitalist, way of treating things/people/bodies as commodities that Le Sueur rejects. Again, it is religious discourse that kills the (natural) dialogics between body and soul. No wonder that, in her youth, the socialist writer loved prostitutes as they “were the only ones at that time who could wear bright colors [cheering up their bodies-souls]” (14). As Bakhtin also did (R&W), Le Sueur would urge us to enjoy the body. Particularly, she would mock both the female (“The Girl”) and the male characters (“Psyche”) who repress their own search for pleasure.24 Mrs. Lucy would only confess that she loved Jesus. As her granddaughter amusingly comments: “She would sing ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul, Let Me To Thy Bosom Fly’—I thought that was pretty radical, to fly to someone’s bosom... [Jesus being] the only loving male they ever knew” (quoted by Pratt, 1984, 226). Apparently, this song had a strong effect on Le Sueur. Two other Jesus-lovers would sing it in her novels: Sara (Girl 138) and Penelope (Hear 20). Le Sueur started to read D. H. Lawrence at twenty-three and recognized that “Lawrence saved my life. I’d never have gotten out of that Puritanism without [him]” (quoted by Pratt, 1984, 227). Due to her (usual) reliance on personal experience, she adds: but “Lawrence never fully understood a woman’s experience” (228). Le Sueur’s own biography and the fact that she was not convinced by the literary representations of female sexuality surely motivated her decision to describe it herself. In The Girl, at first the protagonist identifies her sexual awareness by referring to her mother’s words: “I felt all my body open in little smiles like mama said” (Girl 46)—the allusion to the vaginal lips being evident. Later in the novel, this feeling is transformed into “I felt like bells were ringing in all my flesh” (78), with no allusion to the mother. As 24 I would like to add two notes here. (1) The plot of the short-story “The Girl” is absolutely not related with the novel of the same title. (2) Even today, women novelists are still trying to exorcize the phantoms of (sexual) repression: “I regret... the delicious dishes rejected for the sake of vanity, as well as I am sorry for the occasions to make love I have missed for dealing with some unfinished business or for puritanical virtue” (Allende 10, my translation).

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underlined elsewhere in this work, western thought has implied that heterosexual women cannot experience desire in the first person. Contrarily, Le Sueur’s pioneer female heterosexual protagonists can be subjects of desire: “I could feel my whole front of my body rise like mama’s dough, for her good bread” (51). Recently, feminists have started to write about woman’s experience of eroticism as subjects, and some of them allude to the Cixousian “rising,” coinciding with the previous description (Gilbert xvii). Though not much attended to (sexually) by her lover, Girl learns to enjoy desire and sex with him: “[i]t was lovely, the great lovely life he gave me” (Girl 68). It appears that she is able to separate his role as a mistreater from his bodily appeal: “his whole body said something [to me]... his good body” (51), “[h]is body had been good to me” (106). Although just initiated, she becomes sexually adventurous: “I let [Butch] in [the hotel room] naked with soap all over me” (68). The sad consequence is that, given Butch’s sadistic behaviour, she can never tell him about her sensual feelings. The situation of the couple in “Annunciation” is repeated here and, like the other facets of their relationship, sexuality is non-dialogical for both of them. Even so, and like the protagonist of “Annunciation,” Girl is highly dialogical with herself and her sexuality. After making love with Butch, she looks at his naked body and thinks about “the way his chest went sharp into his thighs, his legs like a strong scissors and it hanging so small like a bird” (69). Therefore, for her ‘a penis is just a penis’ or, in the best of cases, an object of pleasure. In other words, Butch does not have the “phallus” with which to subjugate Girl, at least in the bedroom. Although she looks for him right after his death (134), afterwards she starts to project desire onto others, e.g. a married couple (117). And she goes on alone, thinking about her future sexual enjoyment (114). Le Sueur’s (main) narrative agent likes to compare desire with fruits, for instance with “an apple” (52), with its implicit Biblical allusion. Furthermore, she even thinks that her girlfriends and she are “like fruits” (54), perhaps like the pears of “Annunciation.” On the one hand, in the Black vernacular tradition, peaches are favourite symbols to represent female sensuality—cf. Hurston. On the other, this fruit symbolism brings to mind the figure of Persephone, often depicted while eating a pomegranate, whose myth Le Sueur rewrote several times. Rewriting these symbols contributes to the creation of a feminine imaginary, using both so-called popular and other sources The existence of such an imaginary can explain Girl’s minimization of Butch’s erotic role: it is women, she seems to be saying, not men, who possess the (strongest) sexual force. Although probably exaggerated, this approach is intended to break with one the oldest myths of human history.25 A favorite description is one that is (re)elaborated twice. The first time, Girl mentions her mother to identify her desire with her: “As if my bark was breaking in spring or mama rising in me...” (60). The second time, the mother is carelessly mentioned in passing only to be expelled: I got desires now, wild, like the dark sweet fruit of the night that breaks on your tongue. How can you sit down in any room, and mend your stockings, and polish your nails and maybe think about your mother, with your flesh like the wild breaking of spring, like a tree after a storm, weighted to the ground and rainwater in your throat and your hair springing wild out of your skull and the strong root terrible in the earth with bitter strength? (79)

25

Gilman also enjoyed playing with the myth of an almighty male sexuality (see “Deconstructing Dialogics: Gender and Genre in Herland-Ourland”).

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After all the references to Emily Schaffer we have come upon, this quote is evidence of Girl’s progression from an ‘identification-fusion with’ to an ‘identification-difference from’ her mother. It must be added that, here like before, Le Sueur’s representation of the motherdaughter “double voice” (Hirsch 258) foresees the intersubjectivity described by contemporary feminist studies on maternity. Further, the simultaneously simple and gripping, subtle and daring tone of the text provides her with an erotic imagination/subjectivity that, for the first time, is not male and that destroys the stereotype of the working-class ‘fallen’ woman—such as Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby.26 Therefore, the myth of Demeter and Persephone is newly invoked. Like Persephone, Girl “want[s] the earth” (50), and her “mama [Demeter] would hide [her]” from her father and Butch too (46). After her first sexual experience, there is an explicit comparison with Persephone that also rewrites the Greek narration: “I came out of that foul hotel as out of the hole of hell but also the meadows of heaven... Butch’s mother stopped and wiped her eyes and Amelia cried, O girl[,]... as if I returned from a kidnapping” (53). Given her circumstances, Girl consents to prostitute herself for Ganz: “Twenty-five [dollars], I thought. That’s enough for the service station, with what Butch can get [for taking part in the raid]” (67).27 The Greek myth is soured, however, with Ganz acting like the wickedest Hades, who cheats—by bringing a guest, Hone, and offering her only ten dollars (69)—and hits Girl—“driving me into the earth” (70), “I fell down... into the dark earth.” Although unnarrated, it is hard not to imagine that Ganz and Hone might manage to rape or sexually attack Girl while she is unconscious. However, I still think that her baby is also Butch’s. There are references to her (feelings of) pregnancy before her encounter with the two gangsters: “I couldn’t take canned meat” (64), “[i]f a had a baby I would look like a bag of bones carrying a pumpkin” (65). Le Sueur rewrote the ancient mother-daughter story because she considered that “the non-return to the mother in Christian myth is very hurting... We trash the mother for the father, the matriarchy for the patriarchy” (“... circle” 14). Hers is a search for a new imaginary for women and so she encourages women artists à la Cixous to search for new images [on] what is the relationship of rape to sex and how can we rename it... and understand it—men most of all... men have to learn to turn entrance / invasion / possession / rape into husbanding / nourishing / shepherding / protecting (...) there is a mystery here of the virgin (...) and the rape, the opening, the gestation, the conception. We have to have new concepts of this... it is contained I think in the (...) Mayan concept of the marriage of equals (...) These symbols must be extended (...) The New Women [Second Wave Feminists] have illumined [sic] much of this... (“... circle” 15, bracketed ellipses mine)

The lyrical author’s call to men foresees and sympathizes with today’s feminism. For instance, Gloria Anzaldúa is convinced that “[m]en... are fettered by gender roles... Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them... We need a new masculinity” (1987, 84). Furthermore, when Le Sueur (and Gilman) portrays rape or rape attempts, she can be considered a pioneer in fictionalizing them without turning them into a metaphor, such as in I Hear Men Talking and The Horse. In The Girl, if female initiation into sexuality is painful, it is mysteriously transformed into at least an ambiguous experience, which is not definable in ‘either/or’ terms. And she conceives desire as 26

It is sad, although expected, that the proletarian linguistic economy also labels women as either “sisters” or “harlots” (Girl 27), “angel[s]” or demons (45). 27 As part of her capitalist dreams, she had already started to save money for it much earlier (11).

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something ambiguous—“the awful wonderful need to enter each other” (Girl 52)—, the same as love—“O it was strange and hidden, terrible and wonderful” (italics mine). Besides Girl’s sensual daydreaming, her dreams while sleeping are an important part of the novel’s plot. In general, the characters dream and daydream a lot—Butch dreams about his dead brother Bill (27). Not only women’s dreams but also their intuitions predict future events: “my hunch about papa[’s death] was right” (34), Belle has an intuition that her male partners will die in the holdup (chapters XXI, XXIV), Girl dreams about the shooting before it actually happens (87). This takes me back to Ann Pancake’s argument that the novel breaks with the teleological idea of thinking about time. Furthermore, the intrusion of memory commented on above interrupts the chronological flow of events. Le Sueur herself declared that she struggled against “purely logical [“thought”]” (“Afterword” 1984, 239). If, as Bakhtin said, genres are forms of thought, Le Sueur was certainly looking for new ways of thinking, which would lead us to a new (experience of the) world. In Pancake’s view, the socialist’s rejection of chronological time implies more than a struggle against capitalism. Le Sueur was much influenced by her perception of women’s time and the traditions of the Native Americans (Pancake 301). As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Pancake associates the classical Bildungsroman’s belief in time with “the American belief in unfettered upward mobility” (295). In The Girl, capitalist ideology is mocked as hypocritical through the erosion of the characters’ dreams of success. Clara was perpetually hankering, “always looking to a bright future” (Girl 9), like marrying a rich prince charming, who would take her to Florida or to Norway (2, 118).28 Unlike what the fortunetellers told her (118), she is killed by a set cure used to save her. Butch and Bill, the “natural winners” (5), end up being killed too. With them, Girl believes in good luck (1). Her and her lover’s dream of having a service station is satirized when a man who owns one tells them: “I put everything me and my wife had into this place... and now the Standard Oil is going to take it away from me... They hold the cards, you can’t win” (99). Girl’s economic trajectory, from the (lower) working class to poverty—from waitressing in a bootleg to going on relief—goes against the capitalist model as well. As many ethnic writers, Anzia Yezierska had already parodied the belief of America as “the Promised Land” (Yezierska 1865), remembering her beginnings as an immigrant, who “earned hardly enough to pay for bread and rent... [And] was always hungry” (1868). As a result, she comes to the conclusion that “There is no America!... [It is just] a big idea—a deathless hope—a world still in the making” (1872). Contrary to these (temporal) frustrations, Pancake emphasizes “the role of cyclic woman’s time” in this Bildungsroman (Pancake 302). Finished in 1939, The Girl was rejected for publication, probably due to its feminine/feminist and socialist content. Parts of the book were reprinted as short stories in 1935, ’39, ’40, ’42, ’45, and ’47. Given the historical moments—McCarthyism, the feminist backlash, the Cold War, and so on—the whole novel was only published in 1978, during the second feminist revival. Curiously, The Girl’s writing and publishing history “duplicates the novel’s theme of deferred promise and disputed progress” (Pancake 300). The novel lasts from summer to summer, when Girl delivers her baby, with the implicit allusion to Demeter and Persephone. Once again, female biological rhythms subvert 28

Although she would not mail them, Clara would also write ‘fantastic’ letters on how ‘wonderful’ her life was (122-123). The letters are further evidence of the space she is given in the novel so that her “low” voice can be heard effectively (145).

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temporal expectations. What Pancake does not say is that the three references to noontime (12.00 pm), the time of the demonstration (Girl 141-145), make up the number of weeks of a regular pregnancy, thirty-six. In the end, the female body is not so chaotic, which again deconstructs another masculinist and temporal myth. Elsewhere I considered the pregnant woman’s body as the developmental site of the ‘chronotope of pregnancy.’ I will carefully study the labour of birth represented in the Bildungsroman, which directly affects the main character’s becoming (a mother). Living with Amelia, Belle and Clara contributes to Girl’s realization that she is becoming a woman and a worker. After sleeping with Butch for the first time, she comes back to the German Village: “The whiskey made me feel better with the smell of the Booya [Belle’s stew] and being with the women who knew what I knew” (54). Their sincere demonstrations of love form part of the ‘ethics of care’ supposed to be practiced by (many) women: “[Amelia] stroked my hair... And Clara took my hand and kissed it... Amelia pressed my head to her breasts... she said, the breasts of our women are deep with the great life of the people... Now I knew what she meant by the people” (italics mine). Girl is starting not to “feel alone” amongst the members of her own class and gender. Her encounter with Alice in the relief maternity home will be crucial for her maturation process. ‘Alice’ is the name chosen by Teresa de Lauretis for her Alice Doesn’t. Lauretis chooses that name in order to counteract Carroll’s ‘Alice,’ who was told that the masters of society are also the masters of meaning (1-14). Her gesture signifies both the feminist rejection of the already established definitions/cultural values and the search for new ones. Certainly, like the new ‘Alice,’ Le Sueur’s female character(s) seek(s) to engage in conversations in order to rewrite the meanings of the social order. The Girl’s Alice, who is deaf, communicates with Girl through writing: “[s]he wrote, Don’t cry. We, the common people, suffer together... How did she know I felt sad?... Nothing can hold us apart... even deafness... or loneliness... or fear” (133, italics hers). Alice adds: “I am with the Workers Alliance... They demand food, jobs... I looked at the word demand. It was a strong word.” Identity is partly linguistic, so Girl keeps on growing and learning new concepts. Then, she starts to become conscious of her identity as a worker and writes, “I worked all my life... I took the pad. I was excited. I read We are both workers!” This awareness is vital to introduce the idea of ‘woman’ as a ‘working subject’ in our (patriarchal) vocabulary. Emily, Girl’s mother, was a worker too but she probably did not see herself as such and she talked of her husband as the “provider” (35). The recognition of woman as a worker/working subject (should) lead(s) to her inclusion in the public sphere, from which she had been excluded. It should as well lead to her full enjoyment—e.g. of her rights—and participation in the symbolic as a possible agent of change. Moreover, the Bildungsroman’s didactic aim pursues this agency outside the text (Kester, Pin-chia). As part of the criticism of (non-communal) capitalist systems, The Girl continues to parody how little social institutions work for society: “my case worker... said some paper was lost [the letter?] and I had to sign something and they couldn’t do anything until they found the paper” (135). After looking desperately for a nickel, “[Belle] called the ambulance but they seemed like they never heard of [Girl], didn’t get the requisition or whatever it is” (145). Even though the authorities cannot see it, the reality is that, “when you are going to have a baby you got to have it. You can’t wait till the Depression is over” (124). In contrast with governmental apathy, both the workers’ labour and the labour of

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birth constitute and produce “work.” Lidia Falcón has defined giving birth as the performance of ‘work’ given the investment of energy, stimulus, friction, pain, movement, effort, heat, emotion, and much more. Besides, a labour of birth appears as real labour, work without the (possible) obstacles of economic exchange and alienation. Eventually, the close alliance between ‘production’ and ‘reproduction,’ which classic Marxists appear unable to see, manifests itself again. Girl’s labour of birth will be different from the one narrated in Le Sueur’s I Hear Men Talking, whose characters come from the middle class. Continuing with the reversal of the hierarchy (i.e. lower class/upper class), births among wealthy families are cold and seemingly unnatural. The leading role in the scene is given to Dr. Starry and his instruments (Hear 94), and to his spontaneous assistant Penelope, whom he repeatedly calls ‘soldier.’ So as to make her more passive, Mrs. Fearing, the woman about to give birth, is given ether (95)—as usual, Le Sueur’s choice of names is apt. The doctor prepares the “steel forceps”29 while Penelope holds the future mother “under her armpits” (96, 97). As expected, the father’s baby appears drunk in the middle of the scene and fights to be let into the bedroom. When finally “a little boy” is born (98), it is Penelope, and not his mother, who cries and is praised for behaving like a (future) “nurse” (99). At the end of The Girl, the female community grows enormously with all the poor women seeking refuge in an abandoned “big old warehouse” (Girl 137).30 Displaying the generosity that characterizes these dispossessed women characters (22, 76), they all care for each other and provide emotional support for Girl during her labour. Fortunately, the (future) mother is an active protagonist of her labour and, having no male interventions, it is an all-female event that brings to mind again the ‘lesbian continuum.’ Maternity is such a luxury among the poor that Girl feels pleasure even during the contractions: “I began to count the seconds... I felt good... Now it was six minutes apart. It was exciting... I could feel my blood like a river inside me, and... thigh and womb ready for a new child, and strong labor for it and I liked it” (Girl 143-144). The experience of giving birth, she contends, is the realest dream. I saw Amelia leaning between my legs looking at me saying breathe—push—wait— breathe. It was like being run over by a truck when the pains came. But the women were pressing around now, I could look into their faces. They seem to breathe with me, like a great wind through their bodies like wind in a woods [sic]... I felt like all the river broke in me and poured and gave and opened. Was it my cry, the cry of the women, the cry of a child?... Covered with a kind of slime and dark [Amelia] lay the child on me. A girl, she cried... [and the baby] turned golden as Clara. (147)

Firstly, the baby girl is born right after Clara’s death, as if a continuation of her life, and will be named after her (148). Secondly, as I anticipated, the new mother gives birth to the text: “I heard the mimeograph start. A kind of beat... It’s crowning, Amelia cried...” (147). Thirdly, one should not read this fragment as universalizing female experience. That is, she has both a good pregnancy and a good labour of birth.31 However, this description challenges masculinist and even some feminist conceptualizations of the maternal (for example, Simone de Beauvoir’s). It might be ironic that while Joyce’s female characters 29

For details on the variety of medical devices historically employed with women in labour, see Falcón, Rich 1976. 30 A similar experience was undergone by Le Sueur (Hedges 1982, Schleuning 1983). 31 In a contrasting manner, María Auxiliadora Álvarez chooses to give artistic form to the clinical picture of maternity, portraying the woman in labour as a self-destroying animal, doctors as specialized butchers, among other images.

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undergo menstruation (e.g. Molly Bloom) and Faulkner filled his fiction with pregnant women, their female peers did not write (much) on women’s sexual/reproductive issues. This is not altogether surprising, as I have already specified, given women’s repression of such issues, which started to be valued positively in the Second Feminist Wave. Therefore, the scene can be read as a document of the feminism of difference, which celebrates female bodily powers. At this point, the hierarchy men/women is newly and totally reversed: “[Girl’s baby]’s a woman, Belle was shouting, a sister a daughter. No dingle dangle, no rod of satan, no sword, no third arm, a girl a woman a mother” (148). As I previously highlighted, turning the patriarchal man/woman hierarchy upside-down is a way of repeating the established parameters and should not be “a [feminist] way of life” (Anzaldúa 1987, 78). I should add that, in the first version of the book, Girl had a son (John F. Crawford). Le Sueur revised the text for publication in the 1970s, coinciding with the peak of the above mentioned Second Wave. In this context, the change of the baby’s sex (from boy to girl) seems a reasonable choice given the historical impulse—so as to make women(’s voices) stronger. On the contrary, perhaps because it was still the First Feminist Wave, Gilman decided that Vandyck and Ellador would have a son (Ourland 193). I will not interpret the couple of Gilman’s boy plus Le Sueur’s girl as happily ‘reproducing heterosexuality.’ Instead, I will say that, for both feminists, childbirth is the starting-point for revolution, in which to bring up the sexes to really live together. Only then would we experience the Bakhtinian emergence of a new world. The scene of Girl’s labour is a hybrid spectacle: both realist and fantastic or perhaps only grotesquely realistic—Butch’s unnamed mother wants to eat the afterbirth: “she said, it has more protein in it than any living thing” (Girl 148). As in the Native American myth, the mother appears again as a source of food, of protection and of continuity.32 I need to add an explanation here in order to suggest both a metaphorical and literal reading of this event. Patriarchy’s myths about women can be lethal for them, as symbolic constructions have consequences in the so-called real world apart from in women’s psyches—such as sexual harassment. Given our past history, our imaginary-symbolic structures and so on, one cannot get rid of myths right away since, as Bakhtin would say, our language is infected with the intentions of others (DIN 294). It is, then, a vital feminist task to invent myths that do justice to women (cf. Cornell 1999). Thus, a both-andism of the mind is required to discuss these new myths, through both a metaphorical and a literal interpretation.33 Le Sueur has been repeatedly accused of glorifying maternity as if conforming to the patriarchal script (Marilyn J. Crawford). However, hers is not the same idealization as the patriarchal one: it is an ‘idealization plus.’ I mean that the feminist novelist ‘idealizes’ maternity—for instance, making use of Greek and Native American myths—but she also ‘materializes’ the maternal, describing its bodily side (e.g. labour), through concrete references to the female body and others like: “I saw mama [in the women surrounding her]... the same... sagging belly” (146), “the hanging belly” or “bellies” (146 & 148), and so forth. Insisting on the argument developed in 1.2., Le Sueur wants us to approach a new 32 After giving birth, a Native American woman recalls, “I brought the afterbirth for my grandmother... [She] said the umbilical cord is your line of life and you can always come back to your grandma and she’ll show you the way if you’re lost” (Dread 37). 33 “Both-andism” is my own term to describe dialogical thinking/living. It implies abandoning the ‘either/or’ hierarchy in the pursuing of a ‘both/and’ way of seeing/living in the world.

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definition, the sexual-maternal, in order to avoid the hierarchies caused by the separation of the two concepts (virgin/whore). Drucilla Cornell has recently underlined the feminist advantages of putting two words together, as in date rape (1999). Consternated by Clara’s poor health, the female community organize a demonstration demanding “Milk and Iron Pills for Clara” (145). Girl thinks: “I couldn’t get over it, that they all should care, as Amelia says a breast for all—the men kind of hung back but the women gathered... I felt I would stand there and just drop my child into their hands, the great Mothers...” (146, italics mine). Le Sueur attributes maternal qualities of love and care to all proletarian women but not to men. As expected, fathers are not pleasant figures in this novel. Mr. Schaffer’s letter to her daughter is the testimony of a bitter resentful man: “may my grandchildren punish my children the same as they have punished me” (33). Butch feels particularly angry with his father: “Fathers should be lost at sea” (30). He screams while drunk: “I will talk to you [father] when you are dead” (90). However, when it is his turn to become a father he shouts at Girl: “Don’t slap your brats onto me” (78). In contrast with Gilman’s modern proposal of shared parenthood (Herland-Ourland), Le Sueur’s exclusion of fathers and of men in general seems regressive. Furthermore, it multiplies mothers’ and other women’s burden of work, as they must look after the children just by themselves apart from doing other tasks. In The Girl, the mother becomes a symbol of salvation for ‘the poor.’ So we go from the concrete descriptions of the maternal body to the symbolic mother as social body. The inclusion of the traditionally called feminine/maternal/private values within the social sphere has been widely demanded by (cultural) feminists for some time from Gilman (1915) to Camps (1997). What feminists primarily demand is a change in values. The question is that patriarchy has turned into ‘values’ the achievements of the public realm, such as professional success, obviously meaning ‘having money.’ At the same time, these values have been identified as ‘masculine,’ since men were the only ones allowed to participate in the mentioned realm until fairly recently. For instance, during her socialist conversion, Girl changes her mind with respect to what “Butch want[ed]... He was playing the wrong game. They were all trying to win—what? It was the wrong holdup... I had just outfoxed the cops... with the loot under my belly. I am the Treasure” (134). When she is about to give birth, she stops believing in the values of competition promoted by capitalism: “I thought of Butch, and how he thought it was all a ball game. It ain’t a ball game honey, I was laughing” (147). That Le Sueur (and Gilman) despises certain public values, which she would call ‘masculine,’ leads us to deal with some crucial questions. First, feminists like Le Sueur might be attacked for appearing to conform to the traditional hierarchy, by accepting their assigned place, i.e., domesticity and the care of children. The truth is that tasks such as working in the home without earning a salary and having personal success (meaning ‘having friends’) have never been considered (positive) “values.” Second, reclaiming private values as real ‘values’ is an important step toward the renewal of society. Further, reclaiming them as feminine does not have to be essentializing: since women have been historically constrained to the domestic sphere, it seems plausible that they have developed certain relational skills such as taking care, helping people, and so on. And rethinking these qualities, so that they can be extended to the public space seems indeed positive. Third, the care reclaimed by Le Sueur is not the same care conceptualized by patriarchy. As Girl contemplates the women’s demonstration, while feeling the contractions of labour, she thinks: “I saw mama there, the same... look of sorrow and of

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something else, something fierce, and the reason you have a child maybe” (146, emphasis added). After her daughter is born, she looks at the women about her and “s[ees] mama in them all, the bearing the suffering... and the ferocity of their guarding” (148, my italics). Therefore, taking care implies the “courage and emotional stamina” required by (dialogic) relations (Gilligan xix). These values have never been truly valued by patriarchy. When Girl tells Butch of her wish to have the child and not an abortion, he calls her “crummy” (Girl 77). On the contrary, and ironically too, the woman abortionist calls Butch “bucko” (81), apparently for having left other women pregnant and for having taken them to her cabin. But Girl escapes the abortionist, as her caring makes her rebel and fight. It is this same care that incites (Le Sueur’s) women to form coalitions and protest. Fourth, the author goes further to attack the institutions that supposedly care for society. Speaking with Amelia, the veteran socialist, makes Girl see their situation “clearer, yes clearer” (127). At one stage they converse in the following terms: Who is doing all that, I said after awhile. Why, they just force a girl on the streets, and Clara having... electric shock treatments that they say will make you forget... Who cares if [Clara] had a name even, who cares about her blood and bones[?]... I care, Amelia said... Who else?... All that knew what she knew. All that feel the same, they are together, all with hands like that from working their enduring life... I knew then I was one of them... Yes, [Amelia] said,... a new heart is growing. (136, emphasis added)

As Girl turns to socialism, we feel forced to wonder: what sort of world would it be if institutions that really cared existed? Right before their talk, even more infuriated by institutional inefficiency, Amelia contends: “What are we? Just goods to be brought and sold? Yes, she answered herself cursing, that’s what they think, buy and sell you and then use your body after you’re dead!” (135). Nora Ruth Roberts has read the literature of Le Sueur, Olsen and Herbst as celebrating use-value against exchange-value production. For all the three writers: The triumph of the feminine... of the personal presupposes the time in the future when all production will be use-value production, the reproduction of the species will be the prime responsibility of the species, and what is now undervalued as women’s nurturing and concern for humane values will be extended to the society as a whole without subsuming one sex or the other into imposed roles. (1996, 24)

Continuing with this argument, Josephine Donovan locates a feminine standpoint in the world of use-value production, born “as an ethical response to the alienation inherent in commodity exchange” (“Women” 446). It is her opinion that “women novelists envisage... an oppositional ethic that does not entail the commodification of women, one that is rooted in spiritual love, in a thou-experience of relationship” (451). I do not know whether all women novelists envisage such an ethics but, from what we have witnessed throughout, Le Sueur certainly does. In any case, I believe that her proposal of ‘revaluing’ the personal, the so-called feminine, and extending its qualities to the political is a very productive initiative. Before concluding this chapter, I need to insist that Le Sueur’s emphasis on workingclass women’s ability to care for their children and for each other fulfils certain feminist strategies—a necessary affirmation since the Communist Party was not considered feminist enough (Pratt 1988, Sipple). Given her interest in consciousness raising, Le Sueur can be said to urge marginalized female groups to form coalitions of feminist action. After Clara died, “Sara [the religious fanatic] said, We must have a mass for Clara... Amelia said— Yes... a mass meeting... a judgement against the city fathers...” (Girl 146). “Sara said 158

Amen,” and so they decided to write the critical petition at “the Labor Temple,” a place where both to work and to give birth. First Clara’s illness and later her death function as the triggers that move all the women at the warehouse into a community of action. At last, a Bakhtinian world has started to emerge. When? Tomorrow?... Everyone seemed to agree in everything. Yes. Take it down, Sara... Take all suggestions down, Amelia said, everything. All accusations. People called out... Who didn’t care if she died? Who doesn’t care that we are hungry?... Clara never got any wealth... She never got rich on the labor of others... Who killed Clara? Who will kill us?... O it was something to hear and see their anger. And their power... (146)

The author’s intention to effect consciousness-raising is unquestionable. As in Bakhtin’s “speech genres,” The Girl is a word with a goal: an utterance directed toward an addressee with a persuasive intention. In this way “the ‘answer-word’ of the reader intersects with the imaginary and the symbolic” (Boehnlein 1997, 75). I have already argued that Gilman searched for “an activist reading position” too (Cranny-Francis 119). Le Sueur’s excerpt cited above has reminiscences of Gilman’s “Council of War,” where, during an “informal meeting of women” (221), characters and readers are called to action. Nevertheless, Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s fictionalizations of didacticism are very different, seeming more creative and imaginative in the latter. Moreover, Le Sueur’s dialogical “collective” books seek not to impose her ideas on the reader but to have a dialogue with him/her, “who... becomes a part of the collective” (“Preface” 1991, 6). The values of the personal and the political merge in Gilman, the home being a site of social activity. In Le Sueur’s fiction, proletarian women are the “other-other-other...” that raise their voices in order to fight segregation, forming what Bakhtin called a Bildungsroman of sort five. However, this event creates new problems for communitybuilding. In Gilman’s union, acceptance for membership requires an initiation ritual of Gilmanian feminism both for men and women. In Le Sueur’s union, the conversion is to (feminist) socialism for women only. On the one hand, there is the exclusion of men from Le Sueur’s ‘feminist world,’ with which I cannot agree. On the other, there are more nondialogical problems in both proposals. Unfortunately, complete agreement among Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s respective fictional communities proves a weakening of dialogics (DIN 360). With Gilman, Le Sueur believed in the need for a feminist alliance in the face of patriarchy. Unlike them, Third Wave feminists believe in the positive results of discussion—disagreement, accusations—also among themselves. In his theorization on the Bildungsroman, Bakhtin foregrounds ‘time’ as the key element: “the assimilation of real historical time... of [the] historical man that takes place in that time” and “[that] emerges along with the world and... is... on the border between two epochs” (BHR 19 & 23). Nowadays, critics have brought back the Bakhtinian appraisal of Goethe’s synchronism, “the ‘necessary connection’ of the past, present, and future in ‘the unbroken line of historical development’” (Pin-chia 22). At the end of the novel, the (birth of) Girl’s female baby represents the future. This new girl is also “on the border” between at least two epochs, one of sexist and classist exploitation, and one emerging anew toward a promising future. The Girl mixes the present and the past tenses or uses the past tense followed by “now.” This narrative strategy can be intended to make the reader place him/herself in the text, to realize the social reality/ies it depicts and criticizes throughout. The inseparability between literature and (social) reality is at the core of Bakhtin’s thought about art. This unity is formally represented by the chronotope (FTC 243). Current scholars 159

also read the chronotope as “the subject that represents history” (Kester 138), which can refer to the human being herself. Certainly, the chronotope has anthropomorphic qualities, as “[t]ime... thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (FTC 84). Elsewhere I have presented the pregnant woman as a living chronotope, gestating the future children. In The Girl, the sought-after ‘chrono-tope’ is that of a (future) socialist feminist world. In order to rewrite the patriarchal script, Le Sueur purposely changed the male subject for a female one—i.e. a baby girl—, to whom the title might also refer. As if to resurrect her, she is named after Clara, meaning “light,” like the light that helped Girl to see differently. I have maintained that Girl gives birth to her daughter and to the text. When Clara breathed her last, Girl held a mirror “up to her mouth which was now in an awful O... The mirror was empty” (144). The Girl contains (part of) the text Clara and other women like her could never narrate. The mirror is also a symbolic image of a woman’s first identification with her mother. Thus, the newly born girl “had the tiny face of [Girl’s] mother. Like in a mirror” (148). Memory is essential for feminism, and remembering our female ancestors is a way of returning to the mother. But the mirror gives back a distorted image, which saves us from mere repetition. Memory is essential for Le Sueur so that we are conscious of the ordeals suffered by so many women and disempowered peoples. Observing the demonstration, Girl reflects: “Remembering always and appearing in everything, great mirrors, like we held the picture of all, the suffering of all” (146). In this light, remembering could be compared with taking a picture, filming a movie, writing/reading a novel so as to have a record of the past that forms part of what we are. The mirror of language brings us back to Carroll’s ‘Alice,’ who was not allowed to participate in a true dialogue. But the Le Sueurian mirror is fully dialogic, inviting us to see ourselves and also the others. Born around 1.00 p.m., the baby girl incarnates the new chronotopic female subject that starts the world from scratch. As in the Cixousian figure, The Girl’s girl’s girl is the ‘newly born woman’ emerging in a new world, which ensures the survival and continuity of its women—as in the Native American myth of the “‘continuous woman’” (Hedges 1982, 19). Moreover, Butch’s mother contends that the umbilical cord is “the road” that will help her to return to her grandmother (Girl 148). Thus, in the new journey of female Bildung, the heroines will be (self-)consciously looking for their mothers and foremothers as part of their quest for a self. Born right after a workers’ demonstration, Le Sueur seems to be telling us, this future heroine will be (self-)conscious that the “foundations of the world are changing” (BHR 24). And her “creative initiative” will build a class-consciousness for herself and also for others, as her emergence is no longer “h[er] private affair” (23). No doubt, she is the perfect protagonist for a Bildungsroman of kind five. But the mother also fits the bill since she ‘becomes’ anew as a mother only after the baby is born. For all these reasons, I propose that The Girl can be read as a model of the Bakhtinian novel of becoming, which he described in his missing chapter. Given the outline of Bakhtin’s description, the fifth novel-type could very well correspond to a feminist working-class Bildungsroman. With all its promises of becoming and newness, it appears that the (novel of) type-five was designed for not only a female but also a feminist protagonist. On the one hand, Girl’s ability to create—e.g. stories that help her overcome suffering—accounts for her richness as a subject. On the other, Le Sueur’s proposals coincide with Second Wave (and subsequent) feminists,’ who accuse not only patriarchy—

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the works by male authors—but also other feminists—conventions used by women writers—, which still exclude ‘other’ women. The working-class woman is not only oppressed by patriarchy as a woman, but also as a lower-class woman by the upper classes, as a female worker within her working group, and so on. This net of multiple oppressions brings her closer to women of colour, non-heterosexual women, and other multiply oppressed groups. The artist’s intention to help us see(/have) a new perception of reality is only achieved through a new genre, a new form of thought. I agree that Le Sueur’s legacy for current feminist theory contains a “developing epistemology as the basis for an alternative feminist discourse” (Boehnlein 1994, 135), which includes the telling of women’s experiences as subject matter. Hopefully, new feminist (and why not leftist?) reading subjects will be emerging in the future.

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PART THREE

GEN(D)ERIC PARTICULARS

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Is Female to Male as Genre is to Style? Gilman, Le Sueur, and Feminist Communities1

How can we touch each other, my sisters? How can we hear each other over the criminal space? Meridel Le Sueur, “Doàn Kêt”

This chapter is an open reflection on the communities of gender(s), of genre(s), which can be read in Gilman, Le Sueur, and Bakhtin. I should stress the fact that I have been led inescapably to such a reflection by the course of my research, which treats the relationships between feminism and Bakhtin, gender and genre, women and women, women and men, and so forth. Throughout this work, I have assessed how Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s feminist reformulations of genres establish a dialogue with patriarchy. Part Three deals again with some aspects of their fictionalized (female) communities, since they play a central role in the creation of a genre. I will explore not only the co-operation and eroticism amongst women, but also the enmity and betrayal amongst themselves. I must insist that my research focuses on Bakhtin’s period III-a. Bakhtin devoted several essays to ethics in periods I and II of his career (cf. Morson & Emerson). Nonetheless, when discussing relationships, community and so forth, one must not skip ethical issues, which will be explored here too. If ethics is mainly concerned with the tensions between the ‘individual’ and the ‘community,’ I will also occupy myself with those between the ‘particular’ and the ‘generic.’ Consequently I will deal with some ‘old’ dichotomies—male/female, style/genre—as well as with more recent ones—feminism/feminisms. After the notion of ‘feminism’ as a unitary group has been challenged (e.g. Martin & Mohanty), with the simultaneous explosion of feminisms, one may wonder whether a union among all these feminist perspectives is possible or even desirable? Can we universalize about ‘woman’ without literally essentializing? Could we establish an analogy between today’s feminisms and (Bakhtinian) genres? Should we prefer style or genre? To try to answer all this, a dialogue among present-day feminist theories will be sought. I will return to some discussion-themes of previous sections, such as the chronotope as a ‘pause’ within dialogics, the intersectionality among critical categories—e.g. the racialization of gender—, the chronotopicity of gender, standpoint theory/ies, the need for human respons-ibility, and so on. “Is Female to Male as Genre Is to Style? Gilman, Le Sueur, and Feminist Communities” starts by con-fusing the notions of style, genre, the self, the other, Le 1 Sherry B. Ortner was the first to put forward the question “Is Female to Male... ?” Barbara Johnson asked it again under a new phrasing (1998). As the title indicates, this chapter seeks partly to continue with this inquiry.

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Sueur’s and Gilman’s communities and Bakhtin’s oeuvre. Then, I will briefly revise more features of the communities proposed by Gilman and Le Sueur as well as both women’s conceptions of feminism. Finally, in order to enlarge scope of my (chapter on) community, I will move on to a contemporary framework, within which to re-evaluate their perspectives, and which includes feminist and Bakhtinian viewpoints. Style, Genre, Self and Community Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s novels—together with Bakhtin’s criticism on the novel— became accessible to the great public in the 1970s, with the advent of feminist criticism. In 1988, Sandra A. Zagarell identified a new genre she named the ‘narrative of community.’ She explains that she was able to notice it “only because feminist scholarship has rewritten social and cultural history and attended to... women’s writing” (507). The blindness to the heteroglossia of generic forms is not surprinsingly connected with patriarchal tradition: “the preeminence of ‘the’ canon perpetuated a hierarchy of status among genres and worked against the notion that there remain genres yet to be identified” (504). I have already noticed the process of ‘epicization’ amongst literary genres and periods. The Bakhtin of “Discourse in the Novel” had already made the following complaint: the separation of style and language from the question of genre has been largely responsible for a situation in which only individual and period-bound overtones of a style are the privileged subjects of study, while its basic social tone is ignored. The great historical destinies of genres are overshadowed by the petty vicissitudes of artistic modifications... More often than not, stylistics defines itself as a stylistics of ‘private craftsmanship’ and ignores the social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourses in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages, of social groups, generations and epochs... (259, my italics)

Bakhtin seems to be redefining binary oppositions: genre/style, social/individual. These hierarchies betray the most important principles of dialogics, since the speech of an individual is also and always social. Nevertheless, its momentary positing as individual speech might be necessary, as this points out an argument that most preoccupied the Russian philosopher, i.e., the idiocy of individualism. Even the “artist’s study” is infected with the social accents of the public square. On the contrary, for the long-established Western tradition, it is more important that the individual ‘rises.’ In other words, as I observed earlier, “the [Wattian] rise of the novel keeps pace with the rise of the individual” (Zagarell 504). Simply put, it seems that a (Bakhtinian) genre is ‘bigger than’ a style/language/discourse, in the same way that a community is ‘bigger than’ an individual. Furthermore, the cited excerpt implies some ideas I have assessed throughout this study. Genres are ways of viewing the world, which change according to the forms of thought of different epochs—the epic of Ancient Greece, the (proto-)novel of Medieval carnival. Hence the “social tone” and “the great historical destinies of genres,” which attempt to describe and influence the world. This is one of the motives why the Bakhtin Circle talks about ‘sociological poetics.’ For Bakhtin and the Bakhtinians, to value style per se would imply forgetting that we depend on others, that we speak and exist thanks to them. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson coincide that, for dialogical thought, “[t]he style of the novel is... the sum of styles in the novel. But the genre of the novel... cannot be understood except as a style of styles, an orchestration of the diverse languages of everyday into a 166

heterogeneous sort of whole” (17). In his late essays, the boundary style-genre will be still less clear-cut: “Where there is style, there is genre. The transfer of style from one genre to another not only alters the way a style sounds... but it also violates or renews the given genre” (PSG 66). The (Bakhtinian) novel is a hybrid genre that “demands a broadening and deepening of the language horizon, a sharpening in our perception of socio-linguistic differentiations” (DIN 366). This hybridity comprehends the encounter of at least two genres, two languages, two points of view, “two epochs, that come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance... In an intentional novelistic hybrid... the important activity is... the collision between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms...” (360, my italics). It seems that Bakhtin’s own (non-)theory welcomes the intervention of gender(s). Both Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s works represent ‘intentional novelistic hybrids,’ which diversify genres (cf. DIN 358). That is, Gilman experiments with utopia, the Gothic, the adventure novel, the love story, autobiography, and among other (genre) forms; Le Sueur combines the Bildungsroman, feminine writing, reportage, ‘inner realism,’ (auto)biography, to name just a few. This genre hybridity is intended to put into dialogue at least two consciousnesses: the patriarchal and the feminist, the ‘authoritative word’ and the ‘inner word.’ From this dialogue/encounter between two languages, a new language/consciousness is born: the intellectual heroines and the dialogic man (Vandyck Jennings) in Herland-Ourland, the erotic-maternal ‘extradiegetic homodiegetic’ narrator of “Annunciation,” the socialist feminist protagonist (and perhaps also the reader) of The Girl, etc. In a (new) feminist universe, if someone were to wonder, “Is Female to Male as Genre is to Style?,” the answers would be very different from the way patriarchy has dealt with men and women writers’ performances (of style and genre). If we took into account the patriarchal view, the most probable answer could be something like: —“Well, yes, of course, whereas Style is Male, Genre is Female. Women [writers] just talk about women’s stuff—usually domestic-related matters—and always in the same way—a detailed realism without further risks—while [male] writers are the great experimenters of aesthetic resources [period].” The paragraph before the last one contains sufficient evidence to reply to that androcentric standpoint. As for the concrete inquiry, for a feminist reader, it would be important to point out that: —“Women writers, due to historical, ideological and other reasons, have found themselves very often restricted to certain genres (such as the novel). Nevertheless, they have known how to exploit and parody these genres in a feminist/subversive way. This includes the nexus genre-gender, which reveals the nonliterary origin of the binary opposition: that is, in ‘our’ patriarchal world, Female is considered a gender-Genre whereas Male is a human-Style that aspires to transcend the former equivalence and be universal [open to criticism].” As in the excerpts just quoted, throughout we have been witness to the fact that the question of genre is usually interconnected with that of discourse/style and also that the (feminist) changes in the word/world are often suggested. In the previous chapters, we saw how important style is for both Gilman and Le Sueur: through it, we hear the voice(s) of a gender. The realist-gothic uncovers the muffled voice of the hysterical subject, feminine écriture retells the (so-called) feminine and “gives us the hope... that we may one day be beyond it. But it also allows us to affirm the feminine” (Cornell 1999, 186). Certainly, Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s experiments with style/genre are 167

intended to unsettle the social order, as a feminist style/genre implies a feminist way of seeing the world. Bakhtin believes that we inherit a language charged with alien intentions and ideologies. But he also believes in the symbolic freedom of the so-called “others” to author themselves (cf. DIN 294). The colonizer’s imposition of his own view on the other (other-woman, other-Indian) has distorted his/her own view of him/herself. In order to liberate themselves from the imposed designations, and achieve true dialogue, the (hetero)designated—e.g. women—have to undergo the painful process of making up a new(?) language (and imaginary) with which to negotiate their identities—such as the ‘invention’ of ‘feminine écriture(s).’ The re-interpretation of one’s identities from one’s own (first-person) position is what Drucilla Cornell calls the right to the imaginary domain (1998, 14-15). Therefore, I would argue that many women authors and critics are looking for their ‘own’ theoretical voices/styles so that they might enter into a dialogic relationship with patriarchy. The truth is that “[r]elation requires connection. It depends not only on the capacity for empathy or the ability to listen to others and learn their language or take their point of view, but also on having a voice and having a language” (Gilligan xix-xx). As I have explained above, Le Sueur’s protagonists learn new languages in The Girl, and how to speak to/by/for themselves in “Annunciation.” If the protagonist of “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper” cannot name herself from a first-person perspective, the narrator fully employs and exploits the centrifugal/rushing-off lines of the (wall-)paper. In Herland, Gilman utilizes the highlighting via inverted commas—“virgin,” “wife”—to discuss the relationships between language and reality/ies. Furthermore, both the Herlanders and the Ourlanders learn each other’s languages, and that is a first step toward achieving a (womenmen) dialogue and bringing about a change in the word/world. In The Girl, women of different backgrounds and abilities—Alice is deaf, Butch’s mother suffers with her nerves—manage to communicate affectively/effectively beyond mere speech. In Bakhtin’s excerpt on the ‘style-genre muddle’ cited above, the author is probably also attacking the fact that genres had been defined exclusively through their use of (a) language—e.g. by Russian Formalism—, given the importance of thematic elements especially for certain genres—such as the Bildungsroman. This results from Bakhtin’s connection between language and thought (ideologeme), and his assertion that the novel is in the “zone of contact” between life and art—repeated throughout E&N. Several feminist critics have shown their discontent with a feminist criticism that focuses on style rather than subject-matter since taking the latter into account would lead us to evaluate the texts’ (feminist) socio-political criticism—Beer, Felski, Tompkins. In Part One and Part Two, I have tried to approach the socio-political and historical horizons of Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s oeuvres. Their ultimate goal may involve the creation of a feminist, truly democratic society, though with reservations in Gilman’s case. In order to achieve such a goal, I have suggested that the chronotope can function as a momentary ‘pause’ within dialogics, as one needs to be entitled to act as a speaking subject so that one can be listened to. As its name indicates, the chronotope (‘time-space’) is a way of (re)negotiating a future space, such as the male public/female private split. For example, after reading both parts of the saga, the country of Herland certainly appears as a pragmatopian chronotope: an-other space to be produced in a future time. I have argued that Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s uses of the chronotope, which are in principle thematically oriented, are (re)formulated in a feminist way in order to make readers reflect and take a stand before what they are being

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told. This is related to the Bakhtinian concept of responsibility. Before discussing it, I will provide a few examples from the two women writers. Gilman rewrites the ‘idyll chronotope’ by adding a temporal factor to it, i.e., how love changes through time. By doing so, she historicizes the chronotope or uses it as a ‘device’ instead of as a ‘motif’ (Holquist 1990, 110-111). She includes the maternal (love), which may enrich a couple’s relationship, something the classic ‘idyll chronotope’ had not counted with. Writing about maternity is a way of socializing such a theme, of putting it in the public realm with the aim of claiming certain rights such as shared parenting. All these rewritings contribute to situate the development of (a) female subjectivity in the public realm. Le Sueur invents the ‘chronotope of pregnancy’ with similar, but not identical, intentions (“Annunciation”). In her feminist working-class Bildungsroman she makes it even clearer that a poor pregnant woman has less (social) value than a middle-class pregnant one. Consequently, gender becomes ‘genders,’ given the different situations of subordination undergone by women. In the best reading-situation possible, these kinds of chronotopes would lead the dialogical reader to a ‘chronotope of estrangement,’ in which to reflect on issues such as: the notion that gender must be studied intersectionally, taking into account issues of class, sexual preference, ethnicity, psycho-physical ability, etc. Therefore, feminist chronotopes not only seek to disorder the consciousnesses of the most patriarchal readers. They also provoke a different response within and amongst the feminist community/ies. Ken Hirschkop argues that, unlike the post-modern work, “the dialogical work does not simply throw the subject into disarray but enforces a new relation between itself and the reader,” hence, “forc[ing] the reader to ‘take up a position’...” (775). This implies assuming a responsibility toward what one reads, for instance, not remaining blind or deaf before a feminist critique. In contrast with more traditional approaches to genre, Bakhtin is interested “in the ways in which the text is transmitted and used... suggesting that the text should be appreciated as an event or performance rather than as a closed system of form and content” (Cobley 326). In other words, genre is an utterance whose meaning is generated between the author and the reading community. Like genre, consciousness is a public collective process. Ken Hirschkop has asserted that “Bakhtin’s concept of genre holds out the possibility of constructing a notion of dialogism that breaks with the theoretical primacy of the subject” (774). Coinciding with Bakhtin, present-day feminist theories of the subject are deconstructing the Freudian attributed vision of an androcentric individualistic ego, dialogically admitting that we have not only been given life but also language by others. As Patricia Waugh contends: “the first significant ‘other’ through whom both sexes define their sense of self [is the mother]” (1989, 45), so “the human infant is seen as fundamentally object seeking rather than pleasure seeking, that our basic desire is for human relationship...” (50). Like the subject, genres live in ‘communities,’ on the boundary between different genres (cf. PDP 134).2 In this same line, Sandra A. Zagarell reminds us that, for the (patriarchal) canon, Great Literature is the “literature that is ‘about’ the self” (504). Curiously enough, whereas “The Yellow(-)Wallpaper” and “Annunciation” have entered the canon, Gilman’s saga and Le Sueur’s feminist Bildungsroman-of-type-five, which deal extensively with (women) communities, have not. Instead of questioning their literary status one may wonder whether 2 Following Jacques Derrida, I need to underline that Herland-Ourland and The Girl ‘participate’ in but do not ‘belong to’ the narrative of community described by Zagarell.

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the(ir) female communities seem dangerous for patriarchy? Is the idea of a feminist coalition inherent in these texts? Would some readers perhaps try to follow their proposals? A similar case, the narrative of community, so dear to fin-de-siècle white middle-class women writers (Zagarell 500), was only identifiable for a feminist critic. Nevertheless, Zagarell emphasizes the point that “all members of marginal groups perform [this genre]” (512). Men such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, the earlier D. H. Lawrence, and Sherwood Anderson “also wrote narratives of community. In fact the position of these particular men can be said to have been analogous... to many women... for their origins were... rural, working-class ways of life that were not emphatically individualistic” (Zagarell 512, italics added). As for a dialogical thinker, the boundary between “man” and “woman” is not so clear-cut. And as in Bakhtinian dialogics, the position one takes and the one from which we see/experience the world is one of the key(s) to genre. This perspective de-essentializes the idea of female genres and subjects as unmediated biological products. So genre, the subject and, by analogy, gender, is a process whose meaning is relational or is elaborated within a community of relationships. Accepting men in originally female communities seemed unacceptable to Le Sueur. Gilman would welcome only those men who shared her same feminist views. On the contrary, I would argue for constructing more intersexual communities, considering the possible fluidity among the (female-male) positions, in order to engage in dialogue. The acknowledged ‘mother’ of feminist dialogics, Dale M. Bauer has read novels by Chopin, Hawthorne, James, and Wharton in order to conclude that the linguistic community that “restrains men, constrains women” (1988, x). Edna Pontellier’s suicide “is a sign of her failure to continue the subversive dialogue she would engage with the Creole ideologies and, at the same time, a failure of the community” (xvii). As we saw in parts One and Two, Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s protagonists refuse to be positioned at the bottom of the speech hierarchy. Moreover, contrary to the texts interpreted by Bauer, these American writers’ communities contain members that are willing to listen to the women characters. Ideally, this situation should lead to true relationships of difference. On Gilman Gilman’s refusal to stick to just one genre might correspond to her rejection of patriarchal confinement in “(feminine) gender.” In spite of that, the community of Herland is not really heteroglossic. Even if we hear the voice(s) of (a) gender, it is a very particular vision of the “feminine” that is portrayed. In the second chapter, I pointed to the necessity of carrying out a ‘second move’ in gender analysis. That is, apart from using ‘gender’ as an interpretative tool in order to lay bare the hierarchy ‘men/women’ (level one), we must never isolate gender from a ‘context.’ Then, we will be able to show that not all women suffer from the same oppression (level two). In reality, on a world-scale, white women are usually in a position of privilege.3 Gilman was conscious of the differences and inequalities existing amongst women but she did not fully engage this problem. “Circumstances [a]lter [c]ases” not only between women and men, as Gilman contended, but also amongst 3

And yet, I agree with using the category gender on a theoretical basis. As Nancy K. Miller wonders: “What if anything belongs to feminism?... Doesn’t it all become cultural studies, if we don’t ‘privilege gender’?” (Quoted by Friedman, 33).

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women. The Herlanders appear to be all white educated middle-class heterosexual women, who think in terms of Gilman’s feminist perspective—a perspective which is exclusive (rather than inclusive) and which corresponds to the First Wave of feminism. The Herlanders are concerned with “breed[ing] out, when possible, the lowest types [of women]” (Herland 82). They welcome white educated middle-class heterosexual men, who have converted themselves to Herlandian/Gilmanian feminism. Paraphrasing Bauer’s title, instead of a ‘failed community,’ Gilman creates an ‘ideal community’ of female and male listeners for her female characters. However, the community is definitively not polyphonic, as some voices lead the others, such as the “Over Mothers” (69) and the “Temple Mothers” (114). In With Her in Ourland, Ellador’s non-dialogic dialogues are reminiscent of the Socratic ones. In general, the Herlanders can be accused of the ‘deafness’ that Bakhtin found in certain writers (cf. DIN 327). For a contemporary feminist, the saga’s association of masculinity with “struggle” (Herland 99) and femininity with harmonious understanding and “solidity” (23) can be accused of being gender-based, as it just contributes to perpetuate hierarchical thinking. In spite of this obvious criticism, it is necessary to value the concept of ‘sisterhood’ in the (post-)Victorian context, as it helped to deny patriarchal axioms of enmity among women probably intended to impede their co-operation. According to Carol Gilligan, “a disconnection from women... is essential to the perpetuation of patriarchy” (xxiii). The concept of ‘sisterhood’ has changed on the threshold of the twenty-first century—women’s agency has been detected in betrayals too. “Sisterhood” is one of the effects Lynne Pearce associates with feminist dialogics (100). According to some scholars, homoerotic relationships were common amongst nineteenth-century ‘heterosexual’ women (cf. SmithRosenberg). Therefore, before the American men enter Herland’s Amazonian community, one feels tempted to look for some kind of sensual love among its inhabitants. However, the cold stiff prose of Herland-Ourland works against this. Some of Gilman’s stories have been read as concealing lesbian traces within its lines (refer to “The Realist-Gothic: Dialogics and Subjectivity in ‘The Yellow(-)Wall Paper”). In order to appreciate this contrast, “Turned” is an interesting example to examine. In this story, a young ‘servant’ and her middle-aged ‘lady’ become friends after the latter’s husband has left the youngest pregnant. The two women abandon the man, who finds them together with a baby at the story’s end. The last word of the text, “us” (“Turned” 181), enhances the union between the women, suggesting the possibility of something more than friendship. Interpreted as a possibly lesbian text, a cross-class alliance is unfortunately absent from “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper.”4 From a post-colonial perspective, the wealthy protagonist cannot finally communicate with the yellow/immigrant woman living in the wallpaper/another context. Currently, the hierarchy ‘upper-class/lower-class women’ in the field of domestic work has been taken up again by feminism (Brace & Davidson, Brown, Lorde “Master’s”). Gilman has been widely accused of assigning domestic-related affairs to (some) women and not to men—Gough 1995, Kessler, Levitas. Although this is true in the main, these scholars have not recorded the exception of Herland-Ourland. Furthermore, small cross-class alliances are not completely exceptional in Gilman’s work. Thus, her career women assist those that need advice on legal, medical, and other professional affairs. 4

In the movie The Yellow Wallpaper (1992), the hierarchy guard/prisoner is subtly disrupted at a certain point. Jennie, the protagonist’s guard and sister-in-law, rebels against her brother John for the kind of treatment he is (not) giving to his wife.

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In spite of the author’s (usual) missionary attitude with respect to the uneducated and the poor, the female professionals of “Deserted” or “Dr. Clair’s Place” cannot be accused of being patronizing. Dealing with women’s relationships leads one to reassess maternal issues. I have earlier commented upon how vital the subject of motherhood is for Gilman and her saga. Another exploration of it will re-stress its deep connection with feminism. I have also criticized the Herlanders’ difficult but viable transition from parthenogenesis to heterosexuality. Herland’s population is enthusiastic about the idea of having a “dual parenthood” or a “New Motherhood” that involves women and men (Herland 119 & 140). A co-parental family would avoid the hierarchy ‘father(-figure)/mother(-figure).’ In it, all members—let us call them fathers, mothers, boys and girls—would benefit from the advantages of the pre-Oedipal. Hopefully, this would mean that, not only girls, but also boys would acquire the strong basis for empathy described by Chodorow. The birth of Ellador’s and Van’s son, mentioned at the saga’s closing, can be read as a hopeful projection of this event. Furthermore, with the introduction of the co-mothers (Herland 71), Gilman coincided with later feminists in the belief that children must not be looked after by their mothers alone. In several works, the feminist sociologist expressed her wish that maternal care be extended to the rest of society so as to create a community of “interhuman love” (Women 142). If some of the principles of Herland can be appropriated to make a (more) maternal society, other aspects appear quite problematic: Mother-love with them [Herlanders] was not... a mere ‘instinct,’ a wholly personal feeling; it was—a religion... It included the limitless feelings of sisterhood, that wide unity in service which was so difficult for us to grasp. And it was National, Racial, Human—oh, I don’t know how to say it... But these women were working all together at the grandest of tasks—they were making People... (Herland 68-69, italics mine)

This is a controversial fragment. First of all, it needs to be emphasized that the narrator has no words to express the reality he is witnessing (hence my italics). This is a proof of the erasure of the mother’s presence and activities in ‘our’ civilization. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Gilman had to highlight the fact that mothers were responsible beings able to educate their children—and that she had no faith in maternal instincts. So her narrator calls them “Conscious Makers of People,” who perform “Human Motherhood” (68 & 66). Second, Gilman’s maternal religion is made accessible “only to the most fit” (83). The Herlanders practice “negative eugenics” as parthenogenetic women can “voluntarily defer [maternity]” (68-70). Thereby the “National, Racial, Human” work of these “makers of People” has proto-fascist overtones. As I said above, the Herlandian community constitutes an elite group of women. Here, the use of the term “religion” does not conform to its etymological promises—from religare, or ‘to create community.’ In sum, such a ‘sisterhood’ is more like a ‘sorority,’ which implies having a hierarchy.5 As stated elsewhere, Gilman’s thought is complex and ambiguous: very enlightening and useful sometimes, monological and unacceptable at other times. Once in the United States, Ellador/Gilman confesses: “[t]he very first thing that strikes me in this... land of yours is its unmotherliness. We are of course used to seeing everything taken care of” (Ourland 110)—something Vandyck blames on their “feminine culture... [being] more 5 Dana Seitler has highlighted the “nativist rhetoric” infecting Gilman’s work (68). This could be identified as another of the genres used in Herland-Ourland.

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sensitive.” Back in his home country he is “sharply struck with the lack of thinking among people in general” (171, italics mine). In principle, these lines invite a comparison with Gilligan’s words: “[a] consciousness of the dynamics of human relationships... becomes central to moral understanding,... in an ethic that ties the activity of thought to the activity of care” (149).6 Hybrid/dialogical thinking acts as a leading principle of dialogic feminism’s theory of change—a theory of both-andism—of the possibility of putting two genres, two genders, two different concepts together. “Both-andism” is my own concept to approach dialogical thinking, which implies a rejection of the ‘either/or’ hierarchy in the pursuit of a ‘both-and’ way of seeing. Even so, the American novelist’s fictionalization of the ethics of care, of nurturing and maintaining ethical relationships, is very narrow. Although the Herlanders have created a very special and caring society in the interests of their children, Herland-Ourland does not have a single paragraph exemplifying their ethics. Further, in sharp contrast with The Girl, there is no evidence of the practice of the ‘lesbian continuum’ amongst the Herlanders. Consequently, I cannot agree with Val Gough—“Herland functions as a lesbian narrative space... of women’s bonding” (1995, 205)—since only an elitist group of women are allowed to participate in this “bonding.” Jean Pfaelzer claims to “have found the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ in American women’s earliest critiques of utopia,” such as in Davis’s, Alcott’s, and Gilman’s writings (100). I would like to mention that intersubjectivity has a lot to do with the ethics of care, as the “ethics of rights also denies difference” (Young Justice, 229). Providing some women and not others—and some men only—with (speaking) subjectivity does not guarantee the existence of a whole dialogic community. Furthermore, to recall an issue discussed previously, how could an advocate of the ethics of care suggest the creation of compulsory work-camps for Blacks as Gilman did in 1908? In sum, from an optimistic point-of-view, Herland-Ourland contains only a dialogical germ. Its dialogue-format serves to give some women(-speakers) both ‘subjectivity’—“the person... is the subject of an address” (PDP 251)—and ‘autonomy’—“dialocality is a special form of interaction among autonomous and equally signifying consciousness” (284)—just like men(-speakers). This is the dialogical germ that hatches revolutions, leading to a new conception of identity-alterity or vice versa.7 But, nowadays, feminists need to go further, as a dialogue between (higher-class) women and men is certainly not enough. Ellador/Gilman’s thought on the state of “the woman’s movement” in 1916 is posited in chapter XI of Ourland. At first, she appears discouraged with respect to feminists’ “strange missing of purpose... They seem like flies behind a window, they bump and buzz... and never seem really to plan a way out” (176). I understand that some kind of temporary agreements(?) among the feminist perspectives (forming feminism) is needed in concrete situations, but I doubt such a proposal is envisaged in this paragraph. The derogatory simile reveals Gilman’s intolerance toward dialogics, the coexistence of many points of view and actions instead of a single “plan.” After studying the argument more carefully, Ellador continues: “th[e women’s] movement... now seems to me a sunburst of blazing 6

I am conscious of the criticism Gilligan has received. I disagree with those who think her project entails a repetition of the ‘male/female’ hierarchy, in the form of ‘ethics of justice/ethics of care.’ When African-Americans reclaim their own culture, does anyone think they are asking to be returned to slavery? 7 An identity-alterity is susceptible to being altered, for instance in conversations. For further explanation of this made-up compound refer to section “The Dialogical ‘Feminine’: The Chronotope of Pregnancy in ‘Annunciation.’”

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improvement. Of course, they ‘bump and buzz’ in every direction,... haven’t they been kept down in every direction? They’ll get over that as they grow accustomed to real liberty” (178). This paragraph is even more obscure. The repetition of the animalizing comparison points out her/Gilman’s intolerance toward those that did not believe and follow what she proposed. Her wish that feminists “get over” their various centrifugal tendencies is antidialogical. Of course one wishes that feminism disappears, once patriarchy is overcome. Is that what she is suggesting with the phrase “real freedom”? But till then, women living in different chrono-topes cannot/must not but move in different directions. Actually, from a dialogical standpoint, the community of feminisms can be very enriching. Nowadays, Gilman’s assertion that “the poor and the oppressed” are the least likely to protest has been challenged by Third World Feminism (118)—a few examples are the writings of Anzaldúa, Mani, Mohanty, Moraga and Spivak. If “Jessica Benjamin suggests that intersubjectivity is a concept that assumes the human need for recognition” (Pfaelzer 100), I am of the opinion that it is still First World feminists’ respons-ibility to recognize Third World women as having the autonomy of speaking subjects. On Le Sueur Since I read Le Sueur’s The Girl as a Bakhtinian Bildungsroman, I have already said a lot about ‘her’ community of women (speakers) and their influence on the protagonist’s (linguistic) formation. I do not wish to repeat myself and I will only recover some main details to compare them with Gilman’s saga. Then, I will assess the author’s feminist standpoint, in this and other texts, in the light of today’s critical milieu. In her short-stories, novels, pieces of reportage, and other writings, Le Sueur’s (favourite) characters are not Aryan descendants like Gilman’s but have nominally ethnic origins. In this novel, they are partly Welsh, Irish, Jewish, Greek, Italian, and so on—The Girl 54, 78, 108, 53, 114. Provided that colours have imaginary dimensions, one cannot affirm they are exactly “white,” as they do not wholly fit WASPist ideology. The fictional community is formed by the very women that are marginalized in Gilman’s feminism/literature. At the beginning, the community has only four active members: Amelia, Belle, Clara and Girl, usually accompanied by Butch’s ill mother. Towards the end of the Bildungsroman, many other poor women join them and shelter each other in an abandoned warehouse. Although all the women of this community are lower-class, its members are clearly different: there is a joint-owner, a waitress, a deaf woman, a communist organizer, a prostitute, a religious fanatic, an apparently insane woman, and so forth. There are no real hierarchies among them, not even between Belle (boss) and Girl (her employee)—when Girl was feeling bad after her first sexual experience, Belle asked her not to work that day and “to go home and rest” (Girl 57). In principle, this community is open to heteroglossia, to listen to the voices of the “other-others-others...” A large group of different people/women is a source of dialogical strength although this same community excludes men, even the poor(est) ones. Nevertheless, their all-female group is built out of necessity in order to escape from male violence, above all from batterers and (potential) rapists. Following Marilyn Friedman’s terminology, it is a “community of choice” whereas the female population of Herland are a “community of place” (quoted by Lugones, 1998, 469). The erasure of the classical gender

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hierarchy man/woman, creates new ones, and the dichotomy upper-class women/lowerclass women is thus present in The Girl. In spite of that, history shows that understanding and collaboration across classes is feasible. Moral suasions can provoke a phenomenon anthropologist Victor Turner calls “‘communitas’” (quoted by Kessler-Harris, 114). In “Deconstructing Dialogics: Gender and Genre in Herland-Ourland,” I observed the alliances that were born amongst wage-earning and middle-class women in the fight for women’s rights during the First Wave. Alice Kessler-Harris confirms that, in the 1920s, “women drew together out of a need for companionship... to attain a larger goal... [And their] shared sense of violation of accepted norms provided the warmth behind cross-class alliances and sustained them” (114-115). Le Sueur realized that, in extreme situations, people are “welded together from separateness to communal warmth and mutual aid” (“Summer” 131). Commemorating the Second Wave, Drucilla Cornell recalls her feminist activist group, “Las Greñudas,” which joined together women that were “femmed differently because [of] race and class” and that “did not share the same experiences of oppression” (1034-1035). The Girl’s community can reflect other women’s ways of coming together in similar circumstances, which suggests a future coalition of women of different social classes. A new difference from Gilman’s stoic elitist group is that Le Sueur’s collective can develop along the lines of a ‘lesbian continuum.’ The writer shows but does not focus morbidly or sensationally on her characters’ conditions of extreme poverty. Rather, she enhances their spiritual richness and proletarian women practice ethical relationships. For a feminist reader, perhaps the most striking and amusing similarity between both novelists’ texts is that, in the attempts of rape represented, the victims escape after hitting their attackers in the groin. I consider that both feminists’ portrayals of gender violence is admirable pioneering work. Whereas Herland portrays one case of (attempted) wife-rape in an upper-class context, The Girl shows several scenes in which proletarian women are abused sexually. A comparison between both works should lead us to comprehend not only the similarities and differences but also the inequalities existing between the white/wealthy women and the non-white/poor ones. In the United States, Audre Lorde reveals, women of colour have “three times as many chances of being raped, murdered, or assaulted as exist for white women” (“Letter” 97).8 Other similarities between Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s works are that most men appear to be dangerous for women (Golden 2000), their personalities being reduced in a derogatory manner, leading to the hierarchy ‘(some) women=co-operation/men=competition.’ Using a binary opposition is at times necessary but not ultimately desirable, given its repetition of old patriarchal schemes. The artificial identifications are obviously essentializing and impoverishing, as they reduce the groups to the minimum and suppress the dialogic discussions among their members. There is a permanent total agreement among their women characters, who think/talk/work in the same way. Such univocal groups show a complete lack of dialogics, as the necessary “collision between differing points of view” does not exist (DIN 360). Acceptance in Gilman’s society requires an initiation ritual of Gilmanian feminism. In Le Sueur’s, the conversion is to (feminist) socialism. The second author was of middleclass origins and changed her way of life, as she joined the communist party, in order to 8

Catherine MacKinnon “holds to a radical version of standpoint theory” according to which women’s “similarities are grounded in our bodies” and, consequently, we are all equally vulnerable in the face of rape (Moore 16-17). My Gilman-Le Sueur comparison can be read as a critique of MacKinnon’s and others’ universalizing assertions.

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support the proletariat’s cause. Her gesture represents a solidarity across classes that does not really appear reflected in her literature. Above I said that Le Sueur had many prejudices against the middle class, which she considered individualistic, insensitive, inhuman. For Le Sueur, lack of feeling meant lack of involvement, be it with relationships, work, or life. In line with this, she demystified the axiom of the objective (journalistic) writer that “cannot write in the heat of conflict. I don’t think anyone demands this but what we do demand is heat. You can’t hatch anything without heat” (“Fetish” 201). Third World feminists have declared they are “painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to... combat their racism, which requires... that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and black history and culture” (Combahee 69). Hence their demand for feeling/heat amongst all feminists: “Yes, fusion is possible / but only if things get hot enough— / all else is temporary adhesion, / patching up” (Moraga, “Welder” 219). For Cherríe Moraga and her ‘comadres,’ disagreement is positive since they envision the pursuit of solidarity in a dialogical way: as a process and not as “a given” (“Preface” xiv). Furthermore, the need to ‘heat up’ people/themes involves the need for the conflicts that must arise, thanks to real emotional investment, in any sincere discussion of differences. To tolerate each other without real understanding would produce a mere “patching up,” by either ignoring or assimilating the differences. Though Le Sueur does not elaborate on the conflictive discussions amongst the feminist communities, she would undoubtedly agree that “[c]hange requires a lot of heat” (Anzaldúa, Untitled 196). Thus, the conversation between one of her fictional mothers and an intellectual: “‘Change must come from the intellect with understanding and non-violence, non-resistance’ [he said]... ‘I don’t think it’s that way,’ [she] said. ‘From having a baby I think it’s different. It comes out violently’” (“Hungry” 55). In contrast with Gilman, Le Sueur’s pre-occupation for the less favoured is not missionary-like but seems to be put into practice sincerely: “Belief is an action for the writer” (“Fetish” 203). Therefore, Le Sueur wrote she agreed with the words of “Lorca [who] said... the writer... should take the collective image of the people, give it form and return it to the people” (“Author’s” 62). Moreover, she would demand that dialogical respons-ibility from her readers: “I demand that you listen. Be with me on the dread journey... We must all take this journey into each other,... into the human power of... our memory, the loving memory that is our transformation” (Dread 2, emphasis mine). The invocation of collective memory does not imply having had the same experiences, but that these be re-experienced while remembering. Spiritual encounter in memory is believed to provide the power to join together and “transfor[m]” the world. Another example is the motto cited at the beginning of this chapter—“How can we touch each other[?]... / How can we hear each other[?]...”9 It is from the poem “Doàn Kêt,” which was sent to the North Vietnamese Women’s Union. Its editor, Elaine Hedges, adds the footnote: “Doàn Kêt means ‘solidarity’ in Vietnamese. This poem was sent to... [Vietnam,] translated into Vietnamese and warmly received. The poet received a letter of thanks from the women” (1982, 266). In line with this, the epigraph preceding The Girl is an adaptation of the biblical “A Lament for Judah and Jerusalem” (Jeremiah 8: 18-22). From my point-of-view, the most important addition was the change of the singular “daughter” by its plural form: “I 9

Another class-conscious writer, Muriel Rukeyser pleaded similarly for human contact: “If we could touch one another / if these our separate entities could come to grips, /... Everyone silent, moving,.... Take my hand. Speak to me” (1753, second ellipsis hers).

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might weep day and night for the slain of the daughters of my people... For the hurt of the daughters of my people, I am hurt” (unpaginated). Therefore, the American socialist’s concern is with all the suffering women of the world. Described as Le Sueur’s “‘feminist manifesto’” (Boehnlein 1994, 129), “Women Know a Lot of Things” is a call to her “international sisters” in the “international struggle against war and fascism” (172, 173). The author compares the situations of proletarian women “in South America” (172), “Spain, Russia, China” (173) to conclude that “[h]unger and terror are a Braille that hands used to labor... can read in any language.” She continues to celebrate the fact that, when Spanish women were given the vote, the supposed “illiterate peasant women” surprised everyone and “voted for the People’s Front of Spain, voted for... democracy” (173, 174). On the one hand, as a socialist, it is undeniable that she would have sympathies for them—would she have been so dialogical if they had voted differently? On the other, she believed in poor people’s ability to be politically conscious/active, hence the subtitle of the article: “Women Know a Lot of Things... That they don’t read in the papers, and they’re acting on what they know” (171). This strikes us as a profound difference with respect to Gilman, for whom the subaltern must be taught and guided inescapably. Contrarily, in her old age, Le Sueur predicted: The youth... [a]re so disgusted with the criminality of the establishment that now you have a counter culture all over the world,... an exposure of imperialism,... a whole Third World culture. You have to look at the raising of consciousnesses... [T]he Third World isn’t going to go back in the bottle. Now we have a global world and nothing is going to stop it. (Quoted by Kirkpatrick, 12)

More than once, the author expressed her happiness to have lived long enough to be able to know a revival of the feminist movement (e.g. “... circle”). Her confidence in “International women” is an indispensable dialogical tool in the creation of global feminism (“Know” 174). Interestingly, both Gilman and Le Sueur spent time living in communes: the former with Emma Goldman (and others) in New York City and the latter in Hull House, founded by Jane Addams. Both feminists understood that women cannot be classified under the essentializing category “woman.” Both longed for a maternalization of society, and studied the importance of women in women’s lives. That is, we become ‘women’ not only through an opposition(?) with men, but also through our relationships with other women. Though in principle very dialogical, both Herland-Ourland and The Girl practice repressive measures with some women and men. Furthermore, these texts contribute to reify the notion of heterosexuality. As for other aspects shared between them and Bakhtin, the three of them deconstruct binary oppositions like art/life, ideology/action, by letting us see the connection between theory and practice. Consequently, the three dialogicians—Gilman, Le Sueur and Bakhtin—are deeply interested in the reader(’s response), as we become individuals/authors only in a community. Feminist Communities Today After examining Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s female groups one may wonder: do we want to build the same kind(s) of communities? Where is the link between them and style/genre? The works of Gilman, Le Sueur and Bakhtin will be used in order to throw some light on these concerns. Both Gilman’s and Le Sueur’s all-female communities are situated at the 177

margins of patriarchy. However, Foucault taught us that in order to negotiate (social reforms) with the system, one has to be within it. Even if the protagonist of “Annunciation” proves to herself that she is a subject, an agent of her own writing and idiosyncratic philosophy, her private acts might go nowhere else. Thus, a solitary woman might only go mad as a form of rebellion, like Gilman’s most Gothic mother. Expressed differently: “what is one voice alone, or what good is it to cry in a room with the door shut [like in “The Yellow Wall(-)Paper]?” (The Girl 144). Gilman also thought: “Well did the Greeks call an ‘idiot’ the man who behaved as a separate individual and considered his personal advantage first” (Human 54). It is clear that forming a community is the first move to act as a public force and engage in a dialogue with the other (‘patriarchs’). The feminist communities examined allow entrance only to a ‘special’ kind of women and a ‘special’ kind of men. This segregation results in the hierarchies that come (inevitably?) with any ranking, such as: style/genre, “high” and “low” genres, “the human” and gender. The phenomenon of ‘epicization’ that took place with respect to genres, seems to have repeated itself with feminisms. That is, the current of Gender acted as a centripetal force, creating a hierarchy between it and other feminist perspectives. This results in the opposition ‘gender/other women.’ In order not to repeat old mistakes, we must become aware of the ‘chronotopicity of gender,’ as real women must never be extrapolated from the contexts in which they exist. The Girl shows the inequalities within the “feminine,” making us comprehend the existence of ‘genders’ instead of “gender,” which differ mainly according to class. A pragmatic interpretation of Susan Moller Okin’s ‘essentialisms’ helps to refer to women’s different experiences (of oppression). In Okin’s view, we can only compare the situations of women—e.g. the wealthy with the poor—using specific expressions like “similar but worse,... similar but much worse” (11). With Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s attempts, Okin’s might function as an initial means to study the inequalities affecting women.10 But we must also recognize (and celebrate) our differences before making connections, creating a community. Many feminists have joined Chandra T. Mohanty’s enraged claim, “[b]eyond sisterhood there are still racism, colonialism, and imperialism!” (245), to demand a reconceptualization of both ‘sisterhood’ and ‘community.’ Revision of these concepts involves evaluating the problematic of relationships and of power relations. From a feminist dialogical perspective, genre has meaning only in relations: with other genres, between author and reader, etc. In consequence, we could argue that the recently identified ‘feminisms’ work like genres or forms of thought, ways of seeing. The truth is that each of these perspectives sees a part of the gender problem, or sees it differently, forming a dialogical whole. Furthermore, the co-existence of feminisms (instead of a feminism) implies a challenge to Western ideology and tradition, so obsessed with the number ‘one’: univocity, the phallus, being a winner, being the best. All in all, the panorama appears to be complicated. Whereas some scholars justify the necessity of returning to the term “feminism” (Friedman), others have stressed the importance of the (separate) “feminisms” (Young Justice), which in reality emerged out of necessity. These different feminist perspectives function as centrifugal forces that decenter so-called patriarchal ideology, including feminism itself: feminists criticize other feminists, enlarging and re-accentuating each other’s projects in a chronotopic way. One of the theorizations suggested by some 10

Unfortunately, in the last pages of her article, Okin’s attitude falls into a Gilmanian vein of educating the subaltern instead of listening to them (18-21).

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feminists and revised by others is “standpoint theory.” Standpoint theory is a feminist genre that can be used to approach gender analysis on ‘level one.’ Such an approach is suitable to a certain extent, for instance: we must affirm gender difference (and not strict equality) with men concerning procreation so that medicine stops considering pregnancy as something abnormal, that is, an illness, due to the impossibility of men getting pregnant. On a ‘second level’ of analysis, as with feminisms, standpoint theory becomes ‘theories’—like the different pregnancies undergone by different (or even the same) women. The truth is that knowledge is always partial and women’s different positioning/locations might lead to different kinds of knowledge. Alison M. Jaggar remarks: Only when women are free from domination will they have access to the resources necessary to construct a systematic and fully comprehensive view of the world, from the standpoint of women. In the meantime, within a class-divided and racist society, different groups of women will inevitably have unequal opportunities to speak and to be heard... (387)

Jaggar concludes the paragraph encouraging all women and men to “theorize together.” Therein the need to know about our (group) differences first.11 Iris M. Young reaffirms that “the assertion of group [and subgroup] difference provides a standpoint from which to criticize prevailing institutions and norms” (Justice 167). Her arguments against the ‘ideal community,’ which promotes segregation, and inclusion theories, since they always rest on exclusion, appear represented in literary form especially in Gilman’s Herland. Young’s comments can be applied to the discussion about feminism(s): the ideal of just society [or feminism] as eliminating group differences [or feminisms] is both unrealistic and undesirable. Instead justice in a group-differentiated society demands social equality of groups, and mutual recognition and affirmation of group differences. Attending to group specific needs and providing for group representation both promotes that social equality and provides for the recognition that undermines cultural imperialism. (Justice 191)

Like Jaggar, Young is in favour of affirming our differences in order to dialogically discuss issues of equality. Both Jaggar and Young also prefer the plural ‘feminisms’ to its singular form. I agree with both authors, since I am of the opinion that we need to multiply our ways of seeing. As in Dostoevsky’s world, “[a] single person... cannot make ends meet... [S]he cannot manage without another consciousness” (PDP 177). But in order to produce a dialogue among women, we must deal also with the hierarchies dividing them (and their feminisms). The subject of power relations among people has been a theme of debate for a long time, gaining new accents and insights with feminism(s). Throughout, I have analyzed genders/genres in relations: (of hierarchy) male/female, (of difference) proletarian womenproletarian women. Some women contribute to perpetuate the oppression of other women and even their own: Jane(?)/yellow woman and Jennie/Jane(?) in “Yellow,” Emily (mother)/Girl (daughter) and Miss Rice (caseworker)/Girl in The Girl. In my research, I have paid especial attention to “class” and its influence on the inequalities and differences of women’s lives. From my point-of-view, the importance of this category has not been 11 I have already referred to those men who are positioned close to women due to their living conditions (Zagarell 512). As for the rest of men, if they so desired, men could certainly approach the world from the strategically considered standpoint of women (gender level 1). Unfortunately, it usually seems as if they find it really difficult or avoid it.

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sufficiently valued in critical theory—perhaps given that Marx, who studied it in depth, is now considered demodé and even superseded.12 Third World feminists are protesting at the First World’s tendency to consider the ‘Third World woman’ as a monolithic entity (cf. Mohanty). To this I would add that the ‘First World woman,’ and the ‘white woman,’ must not be approached monolithically either. I am aware that the differences of ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, and so forth, play a part in power relations. Taking this into account, I would dare to assert that, in certain contexts, class might work as a supracategory that affects and changes all the others. Or is a rich Black person socially valued as equal(ly prestigious) to a poor Black one? In ‘our’ capitalistic world, money has magic qualities that can even dye people’s skin. Therein Gloria Anzaldúa’s call to Third World feminism “to work with... the colored, the queer, the poor, the female, the physically challenged” (Untitled 196). As well as with the racialization of class, we must remember that not all women living in the First World are ‘white.’ Inequalities mainly of class and also of race, national origins, etc, led Elsa Barkley Brown to suggest the term “genders” (instead of gender): It is important to recognize that middle-class women live the lives they do precisely because workingclass women live the lives they do... The increased labor force participation of white middle-class women has been... made possible... by the increased availability outside the home of services formerly provided inside the home—cleaning, food, health, and personal services. These jobs are disproportionately filled by women of color—African American, Latina, Asian American... We have still to recognize that all women do not have the same gender. (275-276)

Unfortunately, in most of Gilman’s oeuvre, domestic work is done by “other” women different from those that perform ‘intellectual’ tasks. With Brown, Third Wave feminists are concerned with uncovering the extent to which feminist advances actually help to raise the status of women in all classes.13 These research initiatives are crucial in order to construct a more dialogical community. According to María Lugones, rethinking community starts with an “understanding of the self in relations” (1998, 468). I have been repeating that for Bakhtin the self is dialogical or is a self that has relationships. I have as well insisted that feminist psychologists are presently interested in the idea of relational identities (cf. Frie). They propose that the subject is both separate and connected to others, and so, self-consciousness and intersubjectivity can simultaneously exist; and dependence is not a shame: it is a fact that does not do away with individuation. In this light, Bakhtinian thought has been read as a correction of the objectifying trends of the philosophical cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among which [Bakhtin] would include Freud, which result in an unbridgeable gap between subjects, who are for each other merely objects in the world. In its place, [Bakhtin] suggests the model of the aesthetic relationship between the author and his hero... of a relationship of subjects to each other... [that is] grounded in the intersubjective need for mutuality. (Pirog 409-412)

12

For Chris Weedon, the reasons why class-based analysis is out of fashion are “the proclaimed ‘failure of socialism[;]’... the demise of working class identification with particular kinds of politics; and the development of postmodern theory which casts Marxist theory as a totalizing metanarrative” (chapter six, paragraph one). 13 A Third Wave feminist contends: “In Manhattan, I see playgrounds filled with black and Latino women caring for white children. The white women who employ these nannies are busy working on their careers—‘thinking like winners’ as Naomi Wolf prescribes” (Senna 20).

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Even within the community, some voices(/subjects) might oppress others, turning them into objects. For instance, in Gilman’s Herland there are women who convince other women not to become mothers. It seems that the heteroglossic voice of the “other” is what patriarchy, and some feminists, want to suppress. As I have already mentioned, the colonizer’s attitude toward the colonized has been identified as moving in two directions: [1] ‘assimilation’ and [2] ‘segregation’ (Todorov 1984, 42). Sadly enough, we find Gilman and Le Sueur lean respectively towards both: [1] it seems Vandyck has to become an “other” so that Ellador may become a “self.” [2] Men are expelled from the proletarian female community. Furthermore, the deaths of Butch and Hoinck, Girl’s and Belle’s partners, is a perfect literary device to get rid of the male protagonists. Before I argued that different voices could represent a novel’s different styles that, like genres, are ways of seeing the world. It is then crucial that feminists do not repeat patriarchy’s objectifying tendencies so that we can truly engage in intersubjective relationships. Even if voices/styles might convert within communities/genres, there are still differences among them.14 As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese points out, often the personal is not “political enough” (quoted by Dill, 148). I believe it is still women’s commitment to find points of dialogue amongst the communities in order to achieve effective political action. My suggestion would be that we see and practice the feminist community as a dialogical novel, containing many different styles/genres, in the form of consciously organized heteroglossia (cf. DIN 273). At a certain point, Bakhtin approaches the dialogical novel “as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even a diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). He also refers to the heteroglossia of incorporated genres as defining the novel (320). Read from a post-colonial optic, Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s female characters suffer from not showing the differences among women but the inequalities (class, education). Further, in both communities, agreement is privileged over disagreement. Unfortunately, as Victoria Camps says, agreement does not play a critical role in discursive ethics, i.e.: “more than celebrating the agreements, which will always raise the suspicion of latent forms of control, criticism should accept... more fully positions in disagreement... [Since] they and they alone are the motive for ethical discourse” (1995, 33, translation mine). It is clear that we need to recognize “the internal stratification of any single national [or feminist] language [or community]” among the voices, which have legitimate rights as subjects to compete in the social arena (DIN 262). To some extent, Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s communities might be estimated totalitarian or monologic. Especially in Ourland, Ellador’s voice is absolutely predominant as if she were fighting alone. Even if both authors practice ‘feminist dialogics,’ they cannot be considered models of ‘dialogic/al feminism.’ That is, I would suggest there could be a subsequent move from (one’s own way of) practicing ‘feminist dialogics’ to sharing a ‘dialogic feminist’ community of communities/feminisms. Dialogics implies a negotiation, a challenge to the stability of a monologic truth, in favour of a truth taking place in between the speaking subjects. In Bakhtin’s world, meaning or truth does not reside in a single consciousness but emerges out of collective endeavour. The same could be said about the common interest(s) of the individuals/groups forming a dialogic community. Feminist dialogics implies a struggle that may be extended 14

And so styles/genres always proliferate. The ‘literature of misery’ has recently been identified as a (sub)genre of ‘sentimental literature,’ practiced (especially) by women poets between 1830 and 1880, e.g. Dickinson.

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from the feminist struggle with patriarchy, to the struggle within and among the feminist communities, as some of them come close to being monological. Michael Holquist reminds us that “every word/discourse betrays the ideology of its speaker” (2000, 429). It seems this ‘betrayal,’ inherent in the production of discourse, is (partly) what makes dialogue possible, including the dialogue among feminists. If patriarchal ideology ‘betrayed’ itself creating discourses that could be reused by feminisms—the Enlightenment, philosophical thinking on the subject, psychoanalysis—some feminists have suggested the need to betray each other in order not to be oppressed among/by them (Visweswaran). Comparable to the concept of “disidentification” (Muñoz), betrayal reminds us of Bakhtinian ideological becoming: the fight between the “authoritarian word” and the “inner/persuasive voice.” As we have seen, a feminist language can be close to being another language of authority. Therefore, feminists of colour are proposing that we discuss and feel our differences openly and sincerely in order to produce truly democratic feminist proposals and communities. This appeal to feeling reminds one of the call to integrate the semiotic within the symbolic characteristic of French Feminism. Such an appeal is an attempt to articulate other relationships/discourses different from the ones we have articulated so far. And feelings are, of course, not only sweet and nurturing but also bitter and conflictive. In this light, bell hooks challenges us with her theory of hostility that, when used as a catalyst, can push us “on to greater clarity and understanding” (2000, 66). As for the practice of hostility, she confesses: Time and time again, I have had the experience of making statements at talks that anger a listener and lead to assertive and sometimes hostile verbal confrontation. The situation feels uncomfortable... and yet I may find later that the experience has led to greater clarity and growth on my part and on the part of the listener... If women always seek to avoid confrontation, to always be ‘safe,’ we may never experience any revolutionary change, any transformation, individually or collectively... When women actively struggle in a truly supportive way to understand our differences, to change misguided, distorted perspectives, we lay the foundation for the experience of political solidarity. (66-67)

hooks’s thought with respect to transformative acts reminds us of Le Sueur’s position that change “comes out violently” (“Hungry” 55). As more recent examples, Audre Lorde’s “[o]pen [l]etter to Mary Daly,” accusing her of ignoring women of colour’s own voices, is one of the most moving pieces of the volume Bridge. Cherríe Moraga’s reading of it is still more moving: it is “an act of love [she says]... to expect the most out of a woman [Daly] that calls herself a feminist—to challenge her as you yourself wish to be challenged” (Untitled 62). María Lugones believes that in “the relation between women of color in the U.S. and White/Anglo women: there is a failure of love” (1987, 6). She encourages each ‘world’ to ‘travel’ into each other since “[k]nowing other women’s ‘worlds’ is part of knowing them and knowing them is part of loving them” (12). Lorde had also defended the erotic as a source of power “that can provide energy for change” (1984, 53), encouraging women to practice eroticism “in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society” (59). What all these initiatives emphasize are the importance of feeling in human processes and that we must work hard to achieve sisterhood. Succinctly expressed, this work involves both-andism, a combination of both mind and emotion.15 15

As sketched above, both-andism is an attempt to move beyond binary oppositions. I am conscious of the simplification implied by dividing human beings into both mind and emotion. However, the division may be posited sometimes, for instance, to allude to Gilman’s wish to avoid emotions in Herland-Ourland. Bakhtin’s

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A dialogic feminist community requires the possibility of a neither assimilating nor segregating both-andism, or thinking in ‘both/and’ terms. Dialogical texts contain various styles/genres: they might require us to read both the realist and the Gothic, both the dialogic and the feminine, both literally and metaphorically. A dialogic feminist community is made of identities-alterities, of subjects that are open to being altered by the others/feminist communities. Perhaps the suggestion to use ‘feminism’ instead of ‘feminisms’ is a valid one, taking into account the strong social effects the former word might provoke. Rewriting Julia Kristeva, perhaps “[w]e must use ‘[feminism]’ as a... slogan for our demands” (quoted by Okin, 7). And, if we think about feminism à la Bakhtin, a dialogical feminist community is that of ‘feminisms.’ In Michael Holquist’s opinion, Bakhtin’s self is a self “that can change places with another—that must, in fact, change places to see where it is... I can see things you cannot, and you can see things I cannot... We must share each other’s excess in order to overcome our lack” (1990, xxvi). In the light of this, the inter-location should lead to the interrogation, not only of the current status quo, but also of the oppressive practices within a/the feminist community. Like the (dialogic) novel, feminism has tended to the demystification of absolute/canonical languages. It must still lead to further demystifications, showing the limits of each particular feminist discourse/genre. Strategic essentialism, standpoint theory, ‘essentialisms’ and ‘genders’ function as ‘local narratives’ so as to decentralize ‘grand narratives’ about women/feminism. Post-colonial thought has contributed enormously to describing (experience) in local terms rather than universally. This has had an effect on U.S. feminists: “if we begin by understanding who we are,... we can then move to build coalitions with women in other locations by working to the nature and significance of their own lives” (Rudy 1053). In a Bakhtinian manner, Alison Jaggar advises white/Anglo women, when trying to enter into dialogue with women of colour, to “become familiar with an alternative way of viewing the world” (386, italics added). This piece of advice would be profitable for women of different social classes, educational backgrounds, etc. Iris M. Young has suggested that one “listen to the voice of those my privilege otherwise tends to silence” in order to test group claims and avoid practices of domination (Justice 186). It seems to me that, if Ellador ‘inter-located’ herself with the uneducated women, she would know how to start a dialogue with them (Ourland). If the female Major of the relief maternity home were able to change places with the residents of the relief maternity home, she would have to recognize their capacity for mothering (The Girl). In a dialogical feminist community (genre) a woman’s voice must reveal her discontent, in a different style, so as to be listened to and responded to by her feminist co-members. One wishes Gilman could have found a community in which to allow voice to her lesbian identity, if she had one. Unfortunately, still in 1995, in a conference on Gilman at Liverpool University, suggesting that she might have been lesbian or bisexual “was sacrilege” (Bennett 50). This event should be seen as an instance of how not to listen, or of the amount of learning still to be done by feminists in order to become dialogic enough. A dialogical feminist community would be one based on ‘identification’ and not on ‘identity’ (Brah), which means all its members are feminists but not identical, and that their differences are kept, respected, and promoted. In this sense, making a case for egalitarian values, dialogue presupposes and creates difference (Pearce), and so constitutes an ethical proposal. In order writings, on the contrary, reveal a rare passion for art and life that is mostly absent from both structuralist and post-structuralist theory.

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to achieve such co-operation, we have to change our ways of thinking and being in the world. Thus, our attitude toward the others should change in a radical way. We should make use of other means of approaching the other, such as Donald Davidson’s charity principle, by which the majority of the other person’s beliefs are true in spite of the problems of communicative understanding (cf. Norris 148). In Bakhtinian philosophy, we would have to become a third, “the person who understands” (POT 126).16 In this state of affairs, “the alien” no longer appears as someone/something we have to scrutinize but “is what we must respond to” (Waldenfels 43). Bakhtin would certainly agree that, since all utterances are oriented toward a response, we have an ethical respons-ibility toward the other. All these theories are very illuminating but given the unethical behaviour, acts of cruelty, wars, and so forth, abounding in the world, one may cast in doubt our ability for (practicing) ethics. Being truly ethical, the dialogical proposal is one of dialogue, not only among theories/genres but also among all the members of society (apart from women). The belief in true dialogue, which supposes the disappearance of hierarchical binary oppositions, stems from refusing to privilege the ‘one.’ I would argue that it is this pervasive ‘mystique of the number one’—one theory (rationalism), one god (the Christian), one sex (the male), one feminism (white, heterosexual, upper-class)—that has prevented patriarchal cultures from being more dialogical. On the contrary, Bakhtin affirmed that “[a] single voice ends nothing and resolves nothing. Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence” (PDP 252). With Holquist, I believe that “what is essential for Bakhtin is not only the categories as such that get paired in author/hero, space/time, self/other,... but in addition the architectonics governing relations between them” (1990, xxiii). In this sense, dialogics can be seen as adding a third step to deconstruction. In the words of Joan Scott, “[t]he method [of deconstruction] consists in two related steps: [1/] the reversal of the categories and [2/ the] displacement of [the] binary oppositions” (1988, 37). Bakhtin is further interested in [3]: the relationships among the differences. Contemporary feminists have realized that showing (the) difference(s) is not enough, a more profound epistemological transition is needed—Friedman, Young Justice. Gloria Anzaldúa’s (Bakhtinian) new mestiza, for example, is interested in “mak[ing] the connections” (1987, 49).17 It is time to (re)think relationships, and the first other with whom we have a relationship is the mother. It is not surprising that Le Sueur and Gilman make use of the mother-and-child relationship to describe an ethical practice that has been labelled the ‘ethics of care.’ Such a model counts with detractors that argue that it “reinscribes patriarchy” (Heyes 114), and universalizes women and maternity, privileging the figures of white middle-class females (Heyes, Koehn, Tronto). Contrary to its criticism, in the novels examined in my research, care ethics worked much better in working-class environments than in middle-class ones. Nevertheless, I agree with the above mentioned scholars that “interpersonal trust and care are not intrinsically good” (Koehn 122). For instance, some totalitarian groups organize

16 In the past chapters, I have made use of the ‘Bakhtinian third’ mainly with this meaning. The third has also been interpreted as language, dialogue, what comes out of dialogue, the theme of conversation, a referent point, the context, a witness, and even God. 17 Those further interested in “Anzaldúa’s Third Step,” go to Núñez Puente 2003.

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themselves around care relationships: in Gilman’s saga, care is certainly ‘for whites only.’18 Care alone is not enough, and should not be seen as an alternative to the ethics of justice (cf. Tronto 162), or even as a complement to it, like Female to Male. On the one hand, I am sure that its advocators do not pursue such ends. Being realistic, women in (a) general (1st gender level) have historically performed several functions, above all of care: mainly of their children, their husbands, their direct family and the in-laws. However, his-story has traditionally denied a space of recognition to maternal practices. Valuing the ethics of care is a dialogical way of repairing “an unjust evaluation of times” (E&N 37). In other words, would it not be absurd and even stupid not to value (positively) the work of our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, and the rest of the women preceding them? In a sense, feminist literary research on the women writers of the past is a way of going back to revalue our theoretical mothers. On the other hand, I doubt that the defenders of ‘care’ promote the notion of getting rid of ‘justice’ since, in reality, they are advocates for both (Young Justice). It is probably the lack of care, of love, in the current world that has led theorists to re-examine these matters at this precise moment. In the best of cases, the mother-and-infant relationship seems a perfectly fair ideal to aspire to as it can be a site of subject relations theory—see Cornell 1999. In the words of Jessica Benjamin: “[t]he creation of a symbolic space within the infant-mother relationship fosters the dimension of intersubjectivity, a concomitant of mutual understanding” (paragraph twenty-one). Furthermore, intersubjective theory “amplifies separation-individuation theory... by focusing on the affective exchange between parent and child and by stressing the simultaneity of connection and separation” (paragraph ten, my italics). Throughout, I have insisted on the importance of being connected to others in order to achieve individuality. Chapter Two presents the pregnant woman as a site for a different conception of the self(-other dichotomy). Moreover, on a 2nd gender level, each mother is a ‘concrete other,’ who has concrete features and needs that have to be addressed concretely (Benhabib 1990). For instance, after being nine months pregnant, Girl has to have her baby and she has to have it, whether the paper of the relief office is found or not (Girl 135). Borrowing a term from Spivak, James M. Boehnlein comments that: Th[e] construction of an ‘oppositional consciousness’ necessitates a form of ‘strategic essentialism’—a discourse ethic which privileges the historical, ‘stratified’ struggles of oppositional social groups... [A] discourse ethic of this kind consists in an ongoing dialogue among ‘alien’ words for the purpose of interpreting needs, defining situations, and pressing claims. (1997, 79)

Like ‘genders,’ ‘strategic essentialism’ can recognize what feminists have in common— opposition to a patriarchal/monological regime—while, at the same time, it can still bear in mind the differences among women—different contexts, experiences. Read in depth, both strategic essentialism(s) and the ‘concrete other(s)’ are attempts not to define/kill women, whose (anti-)essences are changeable, non-identical. Therefore, (a) woman’s definition is chronotopic, as it varies according to time-space, and will have to be negotiated amongst the feminist groups.

18 Daryl Koehn contends that “the Mafia” is one of these peculiar totalitarian groups (122). One could add to this that the Mafia calls itself (and behaves as) a ‘family’ and the family is a hierarchical (non-dialogic) unit. As expected, Koehn’s reading is indeed partial, as all readings are. My own reading emphasizes partiality, historical experience, and, above all, hope.

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“[A]n oppositional” strategy has traditionally been distinguished from “a care based” strategy, and both have been classified as women’s principal forms of exerting (moral) agency (Meyers 375). Instead of confining both positions within completely separate realms, Diana Tietjens Meyers has identified “a [possible] continuity” between them (381). Josephine Donovan’s research (“Women”) and my own could be examples of such continuity. That is, Gilman and Le Sueur make use both of care and opposition in the practice of their feminisms. Therefore, they question women’s subordination in patriarchy, their erasure from ‘canonic’ genres, and so on, at the same time that they champion maternal abilities, the care for the environment, and other related matters. Of course, Le Sueur’s and Gilman’s fictionalized mothers are not the same ones promoted by patriarchy, in what Gilman called “matriolatry” (Women 174), while Le Sueur’s maternal-sexual subjects situate themselves in a different realm. Further, the two authors’ claims are expressed in subversive forms, like the hybridization of (and experimentation with) genres. From here we could highlight the validity of transforming the forms/genres with which to approach the social sphere, which Bakhtin would phrase as transforming our ways of seeing, in order to carry out the desired change. That is partly why categories affecting women have been put into question, from “essence” to “feminine.” Feminist dialogicians are asking for an extension of the scope of the feminine to the realm of all the “others.” This has constituted an attack on feminine écriture: To what extent do others speak within this space [feminine écriture]? We are thinking of Hispanics, lesbians and gay men, African and Native Americans, and other marginalized peoples whose voices have been and... continue to be devalued and silenced. Feminine language is usually defined as ‘marked by a process of change, by absence and shifting, by multivoicedness.’ Perhaps these attributes are... the mark of any oppressed group of people who... are determined... to... allow different voices to be heard. (Hohne & Wussow xi-xii)

There is at least a problematic side and a useful side to this conceptualization of the “feminine,” which requires a detailed appreciation. On the one hand, I consider that Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow espouse a ‘light,’ plainly metaphorical, conception of the “feminine”—the “other,” the distorted/ignored/oppressed by those in power. The ‘light’ definition can be a good version of the “feminine,” for it guarantees that men can actually have so-called “feminine” qualities—as in nurturing. A ‘strong’ consideration of it would lead us to see the people that are effectively labelled as “feminine,” that is, women, with all the consequences of such labelling. Thus, the ‘strong’ definition is necessary to understand these consequences, a few examples being: having a double (or triple) working day, earning less money for the same (professional) work, not having access to professional promotion or education, being physically abused, wearing a veil, undergoing an unwanted cliteridectomy or hysterectomy, and so on and so forth. Furthermore, “feminine” men and “feminine” women do not share similar experiences of femininity: ‘young’ men cannot menstruate as most ‘young’ women do, a (masculine-looking) gay man will most probably not be the object of verbal harassment in the street as so many women are, etc. Obviously, in an even ‘stronger’ conceptualization of the term, we would have to look into the way each particular woman lives her “feminine” condition. Curiously, Hohne and Wussow have not wanted to recognize that the theory and practice of feminine writing involves a subversive version of the “feminine.” As I have shown throughout, the feminine is not simply a site of

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marginalization, it is a space of resistance and of creation too. There are more meanings of the word ‘feminine’ than the negative ones. On the other hand, the initiative quoted above can be part of the development, suggested by myself, from practicing ‘feminist dialogics’ to sharing a ‘dialogical feminist’ community, which is self-conscious of (and open to) other communities. Coinciding with these proposals, Victoria Camps has declared: Only the exchange of roles, the mix and mutual recognition of the realms that till now have been separated, like the public and the private, will achieve the revitalization of politics. The ‘ethic of care,’... [That is, t]he different voice of woman and of the discriminated other[,] can ENRICH a communicative interaction that often seems more like a monologue than like an authentic dialogue. (1997, 103, translation and capitals mine)

Camps’s allusion to the ‘ethic of care’ seems appropriate given its social projection of the self. Such an ethics does not have to be practiced in the private realm only, it needs to be extended to the public too, in what Gilman and Le Sueur saw as a maternalization of society. In my reading of Nancy Fraser’s evaluation of the repercussion of ‘care’ theory, “[i]f [Benhabib’s past] elaboration of the standpoint of the individual concrete other eventuates in [Gilligan’s] ethic of care and responsibility, then perhaps the elaboration of the standpoint of the collective other leads to an ethic of solidarity” (428). In more recent essays, Seyla Benhabib has argued in favour of moving to “a community of conversation and [then] to a community of interdependence” (1995, 252). First of all, these initiatives prove the productive re-accentuations of care ethics in the Bakhtinian Great Time. Second, they evidence that, nowadays, feminists are demanding the recognition and dialogic interaction among feminisms. I do not wish to lose sight of the fact that, over seventy years ago, Bakhtin had already written on the socio-dialogic nature of the self and our responsibility with each other. That is why, in the Third Feminist Wave, I would appeal for the solidarity among all the (feminist) communities. Before reaching that state, one first requires the protagonism of Third World (feminist-)speakers, whose voices have not been listened to enough. I agree with Camps that taking into account all these other speaking subjects—women, the poor, Latinos/as, Blacks, transsexuals, bisexuals, and so on—would surely lead to a radical restructuring of the (political) world. As shown throughout this study, dialogical thought—as it appears in Bakhtin, Le Sueur, and Gilman—has a lot to do with current feminisms. For intersubjective theory, as for dialogical theory, “the ideal ‘resolution’ of the paradox of recognition is that it continue as a constant tension between recognizing the other and asserting the self” (Benjamin, paragraph twelve). A dialogical-ethical practice must be open to disagreements and ideological collisions. In this way, nominally ‘common interest’ is not something established a priori but reached and constructed democratically through dialogue. Current feminism is fortunate to count with more and more projects that emulate or are inspired by dialogics. Firstly, in a beautiful definition, “Ojeda Penn has called jazz an expression of true democracy, for each person is allowed, in fact required, to be an individual, to go her or his own way, and yet to do so in concert with the group...” (Brown 274). Having jazz as a model, Elsa Barkley Brown celebrates women and men raising their “voices simultaneously in concert, in dialogue with each other. Sometimes the effect may seem chaotic[,]... sometimes it may seem harmonic. But always it is polyrhythmic; never is it a solo or single composition” (277). The comparison evokes Bakhtin’s description of 187

polyglossia and of the novelistic orchestration of languages. Secondly, in contrast with the anti-urbanism of the ‘ideal community’ (such as in Herland), Iris M. Young puts forward city-life as a model of ethical living together. Therefore, she foregrounds the following possibilities of the city, as opposed to other communities: “(1) [s]ocial differentiation without exclusion... (2) [v]ariety... (3) [e]roticism... [and] (4) [p]ublicity” (Justice 238-241). As for the last characteristic: “Cities provide important public spaces—streets, parks, and plazas—where people stand and sit together, interact and mingle, or simply witness one another, without becoming unified in a community of ‘shared final ends’... In public life the differences remain unassimilated, but each participating group acknowledges and is open to listening to the others...” (240-241). Bakhtin would embrace her suggestion of the city as an ethical site to become aware of, to re-connect to, and within which to enjoy our sociality. In the excerpt cited at the beginning of this chapter, he himself refers to the “discourses in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages, [and] of social groups” (DIN 259). In a necessarily inconclusive summary of all this, I need to emphasize that, in a dialogical fashion, feminists of today want a self-conscious “understanding of the communitarian self that allows for the recognition of oppression within and across boundaries” (Lugones 1998, 468). Therefore, they ask for the distinction of oppression(s) among categories such as race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, to list just some. This results in the intersectionality required to study (social) reality using gender as a tool of analysis among others. Once we comprehend that differences “ENRICH our political and social action rather than divide it, we will have gone beyond the personal and will, in fact, be ‘political enough’” (Dill 148, capitals hers). A self-consciousness of the (feminist) boundaries and communication through them will lead us to achieve “the most intense and productive life of culture,” or of the feminist community, as it actually “takes place on the boundaries of its... [communities]” (RTQ 2, my italics). Feminist dialogics is about the capacity of hybrid living, of both-andism, which translates into the connection of theory and practice, the private and the public, the semiotic and the symbolic, the individual and the community, women and men, women and women, etc. This results in the possibility of listening responsibly to others, defending our views through the emotions, welcoming diverse members (e.g. men) into our feminist communities, and other promising innovations. Historically, “community [has been] more a product of material conditions and constraints than of ideological dictates” (Hewitt 11). By saying this I am implying that women and even men do not need to share the same experiences or ideologies to join in a dialogical search for (feminist) shared interests so as to exert an influence in the presentday world—as in Le Sueur’s efforts to establish collective narrators. A different ethics, jazz, city-life, and my own proposal of feminism(s) as a dialogic novel have been suggested as models of a democratic living together that we should imitate. Contemporary feminist criticisms can benefit from the concept of dialogization. A nondialogized world is a world of tyranny and ignorance, as it avoids listening to the other’s voice, be it style/genre/definition/feminism. Bakhtin sees in the (dialogic) novel the capacity to represent ethical relationships of true difference. Unfortunately, given the lack of ethical attitudes existing in the world—sexism, racism, and so forth—it seems as if difference could only be represented artistically. To follow the novel’s ethical proposals, we/readers have to start by exercising the ‘chronotope of estrangement,’ for instance by taking a stand before a masculinist society. Making such a chronotopic ‘pause’ for 188

reflection involves our responsibility in striving for “a new kind of interrelationships between individuals” (PDP 123)—from subject/object to subjects—, through which feminist genres attempt to influence the world. Reading Le Sueur, Gilman and Bakhtin we can start to realize that the dialogues among feminisms must be improved. That is why I have argued that, in this Third Feminist Wave, the First World must take the responsibility of becoming a third in the dialogue with the Third World. Reading the above thinkers we can continue to understand that, in general, dialogues are not dialogic enough, genuine dialogue keeps on moving, we still have (to learn) to listen and respond to the others, and much more. It is my hope that, practicing this knowledge, we will construct a ‘dialogic feminist’ community—sharing words/sharing worlds.

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Inconclusion1

Everything that is truly great must include an element of laughter. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “From Notes Made in 1970-71”

One must begin to conclude by mentioning how monological, contrary to the aims of research, the word “conclusion” is. As a dialogical feminist, my conclusion needs to be and is inconclusive, that is, open to further re-accentuation and enrichment. Having said this, I will rethink the chrono-topic inconclusions of this work. When I started this project, I set myself the objectives stated in the introduction, mainly to show the (non-)presence of both feminism and dialogics in the literature of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Meridel Le Sueur and Mikhail M. Bakhtin. At first, feminism and dialogics appeared as two critical attitudes between which a fertile dialogical life promised to emerge. For Bakhtin, genres are forms of thought and the novel is the best dialogical way of thinking about the social world. Succinctly expressed, the novel’s dialogicity stems from its capacity to enter into dialogue with other genres and test the ethical potential of society. Novelized genres function as centrifugal forces that intend to disorder the relationships between the word-world. Put differently, they attempt to redefine the social order through altering the readers’ consciousnesses. For all these reasons, the novel is indeed an optimal communicative means for feminists, who attempt to criticize and rebuild the contemporary world. Also in the Bakhtinian universe we inherit the others’ language, which is charged with their intentions and accents. But with (that) language we are also given the gift to reinvent ourselves, to change the existing meanings, to challenge the state of affairs, to start a dialogue. Le Sueur, Gilman, and Bakhtin were especially interested in rewriting realism in order to (re)tell reality from a different and more social perspective. For feminist authors, transforming realist genres implies destabilizing patriarchal “truth” concerning women. Thus, authoring themselves, feminist writers side-step the patriarchal symbolic in an attempt to rewrite the feminine imaginary/ies—an example being “Annunciation.” Since genres are ways of seeing, in order to test the living conditions of (a) gender, it is necessary to invent new genres—or to gender the genres. I have shown that the three mentioned thinkers have a preference for (novelistic) hybrid genres: the realist-Gothic, the dialogical ‘feminine,’ the both-a-novel-and-not-a-novel, the feminist Bildungsroman, to name the most outstanding ones. New genres let us see new problems, and so do new characters: the non-maternal Victorian wife, the intellectual heroine(s), the dialogic man, the sexual-maternal subject, the growing-feminist heroine, etc. Defined as what can identify 1

The original of this term is the Spanish “Inconclusión” coined by Carmen Elejabeitia.

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“the forces at work in [a] culture system” (Holquist 2000, 425-426), the chronotopes used by Gilman, by Le Sueur, and not by Bakhtin, are revealed as being gendered. Therein, there are gendered chronotopes of adventure, rape, encounter, idyll, castle, motherhood, estrangement, pregnancy, and the road, to list a few. As literature exceeds theory, my research deploys these three authors in question so that they ‘read’/‘rewrite’ each other and other patriarchal sources from Hegel to Freud. As with hybrid genres (narrator-characters, collective narrators), dialogics is interested in ethical relationships. The dialogical proposal is one of dialogue, which argues for considering the other as a (speaking) subject, to whom we are obliged to listen/respond. Bakhtinian thinking foresees recent feminist theories of intersubjectivity, which no longer give credit to the uprooted self-centred ego of the past.2 Considering this, I have wanted to describe the dialogic person as a self-other, open to communication with the other, as an identityalterity, prone to being altered, and so on. A self-in-relations can be very well represented by the pregnant woman, a model unaccounted for by Bakhtin. Dealing with maternity, sexuality, feelings, and desire involved rethinking the body, one of the forgotten “others” of Western theory. Our bodies are our primary locations and what first determines the attribution of our ‘genders.’ Intimately related with the body as well as with the novel, laughter (and irony) rejects considering the one-sidedness of an event, showing it in its totality. Questions like the ambiguity of events have led dialogical and other feminists to assert that not all “feminine(-attributed)” qualities are negative. Some of them are recoverable in order to construct a more ethical world—such as the ethics of care. In consequence, it seems urgent to distinguish among various “feminine/s” as well as among “genders.” Continuing with double-voiced categories, I have been complicating gender and genre throughout. As for gender as an analytical tool, I have distinguished between two levels of gender analysis: a ‘superficial’ one that deals with those individuals gendered (as) women and a ‘deeper’ one that examines the differences (and inequalities) amongst women, according to race, class, ethnicity, nationality, profession, and so forth—which is also called the intersectional approach. In the end, woman’s definition is chronotopic or dependent on time-space co-ordinates. It is important to retrieve experience and local (hi)stories—instead of the universal “woman”—so as to adapt new genres that demand new rights/rules for the newly discovered needs. Furthermore, I have interpreted gender as a form of thought that does not only correspond with a marginalized space, with all this implies. Also, gender is a space of resistance and self-affirmation, where life/art continues to exist. This results in the creation of feminist genres, like Feminist Literature and Criticism, or ways of seeing. Like any utterance or speech genre, a feminist genre is concerned with provoking a (chronotope of) estrangement by means of which readers ‘pause’ to reflect and take a stand before contemporary reality, consciousness raising being one of the major perlocutionary effects pursued. That is partly why subject-matter is basic in Gilman’s, Le Sueur’s and Bakhtin’s oeuvres, for instance, in order to describe, criticize and restructure the conditions of the status quo. In this study, I have looked at the so-called 2

Above I agreed that a well-channelled way of being hostile with the other can lead to fruitful results. Nevertheless, I have to disagree with the Hegelian way of primary recognition through hostility toward the “other.” The very first other with whom (most of us) all relate is the mother. The relationship established between our mothers and ourselves is (most often) not one of aggression but of care, otherwise most of us would surely not be here—which seems reason enough to argue against Hegel.

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thematics of feminist novels and short-stories in an effort to deal with women’s social, economic, and political problems explicitly. Moreover, I have referred to the fact that men are fettered by gender attributions too. It must be emphasized that dialogical feminism is in favour of promoting fatherhood as well as motherhood and of including more women and men in the feminist communities. Dialogics involves a plurality of voices fighting to be heard. Thus, it highlights the importance of relating to a “you” beyond the individualistic “I” theorized by other currents, as in the lordship/bondage relationship. Consequently, we have to move beyond the fear or contempt for the (unknown) ‘other,’ such as the way Jane(?) sees the woman in the wallpaper (“Yellow”). In sum, we have to multiply our ways of seeing and behaving by opening ourselves to alteration by other genres. Furthermore, dialogics reveals that, amongst the voices/genres demanding recognition and attention, there are hierarchical attitudes and patterns of domination. Throughout the past chapters, I came to the conviction that dealing with the hierarchy ‘men/women’ is not enough, as some women oppress others—wealthy women/poor women (The Girl), professional women/non-professional women (HerlandOurland). Third World Women have protested against their classification as a unique kind of “woman,” or a unique form of living/thinking, by the First World. I will not tire of insisting that First World Feminists should become Bakhtinian thirds in their way(s) of approaching Third World Feminists. Beyond adopting the colonizer’s attitude, privileged women should relate to the less privileged by dialogically sharing their views and problems with them in order to listen to what the others have to say and vice versa. Perhaps we have more things to learn from the subaltern than we think. Sharing words/worlds comprehends the necessary both-andism of the mind in the communication among genres. Therefore, I concluded by suggesting a move from ‘feminist dialogics’ to a ‘dialogic (practice of) feminism,’ in which all perspectives appear as the genres of a dialogic novel or as a multitude of voices in dialogue. I confess that, at the beginning of this project, I had hoped to demonstrate that the writings of Le Sueur, Gilman and Bakhtin were highly dialogic and that they should be taken as ethical models for us to follow. It is true that their oeuvres illuminate for us the question of dialogics implying, for instance, that we cannot have ethics without feminism and post-colonialism. But, unfortunately, it is also true that some of these authors’ proposals might be qualified as anti-dialogical, turning out to be repressive for some people: women (in the case of Bakhtin), men (in that of Le Sueur), and the downtrodden (in Gilman). Most importantly, reading these three thinkers teaches us both what to do and what not to do in ethical relationships. It is hoped that new readers of past texts can reach new insights in, what Bakhtin called, the Great Time. Though with reservations, I have positioned Gilman in the First Wave of feminism and Le Sueur in the Second Wave. Both writers have been read here by myself, who could be positioned among the feminists of the Third Wave. Throughout my research, I have always worked with the hope that feminist genres—of literary writers (Le Sueur, Gilman) and literary critics (feminist dialogicians)— be respected and ethically/dialogically treated by the scholarly community. Above all, I hope that my work encourages dialogue among acknowledged and unacknowledged feminists. Paraphrasing Bakhtin, the final word has not yet been spoken, and so many things lie still in the future...

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Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans

1. Carme Manuel, Guía bibliográfica para el estudio de la literatura norteamericana 2. Carme Manuel, ed., Teaching American Literature in Spanish Universities 3. Russell DiNapoli, The Elusive Prominence of Maxwell Anderson’s Works in the American Theater 4. José Beltrán, Celebrar el mundo: introducción al pensar nómada de George Santayana 5. Nieves Alberola, Texto y deconstrucción en la literatura norteamericana postmoderna 6. María Ruth Noriega, Challenging Realities: Magic Realism in Contemporary American Women’s Fiction 7. Belén Vidal, Textures of the Image: Rewriting the American Novel in the Contemporary Film Adaptation 8. Santiago Juan Navarro, Postmodernismo y metaficción historiográfica: una perspectiva interamericana 9. Antonio Lastra, La Constitución americana y el arte de escribir 10. Yvonne Shafer, The Changing American Theater: Mainstream and Marginal, Past and Present 11. Vicente Cervera y Antonio Lastra, eds., Los reinos de Santayana 12. David Hamilton, Textualities: Essays on Poetry in the United States 13. Carme Manuel and Paul S. Derrick, eds., Nor Shall Diamond Die: American Studies in Honour of Javier Coy 14. Maurice A. Lee, The Aesthetics of Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka: The Rebel Poet 15. Xavier García Raffi, Alfred North Whitehead: un metafísico atípico 16. Carmen Rueda Ramos, Voice in the South: Female Identity and Language in Lee Smith’s Fiction 17. Maurice A. Lee, The Image of Women in Literature of the Harlem Renaissance 18. Paul Scott Derrick, “We Stand Before the Secret of the World”: Traces Along the Pathway of American Romanticism 19. Javier Alcoriza, El poder de la escritura. La ética literaria de Henry Adams 20. J. Hillis Miller, Zero Plus One 21. Francisco Collado, El orden del caos: literatura, política y posthumanidad en la narrativa de Thomas Pynchon 22. Ana María Fraile Marcos, Planteamientos estéticos y políticos en la obra de Zora Neale Hurston 23. Suzanne Greenslade, Under the Magnolias: Growing Up White in the South 24. Miriam López and Mª Dolores Narbona, eds., Women’s Contribution to Nineteenth-Century American Theatre 25. Susana Mª Jiménez Placer, Katherine Anne Porter y la Revolución Mexicana: de la fascinación al desencanto 26. Fabio L. Vericat, From Physics to Metaphysics: Philosophy and Allegory in the Critical Writings of T. S. Eliot 27. Juan J. Coy, Entre el espejo y el mundo. Texto literario y contexto histórico en la literatura norteamericana (I) 28. Juan J. Coy, Entre el espejo y el mundo. Texto literario y contexto histórico en la literatura norteamericana (II) 29. Antonio Lastra, Emerson transcendens. La trascendencia de Emerson 30. Juan I. Guijarro y Ramón Espejo, eds., Arthur Miller: visiones desde el nuevo milenio

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31. Manuel Vela Rodríguez, La lucha contra el nihilismo: la recuperación platónica de Stanley Rosen 32. Jesús Ángel González López, La narrativa popular de Dashiell Hammett: ‘pulps’, cine y cómics 33. Mercedes Peñalba, Sinclair Lewis: la ironía como conciencia crítica 34. Gabriel Torres Chalk, Robert Lowell: la mirada de Aquiles 35. Antonio Lastra, Herencias straussianas 36. Mª Rosario Ferrer Gimeno, El viaje de Helen Hanff a 84, Charing Cross Road 37. Fernando Beltrán Llavador, La encendida memoria: aproximación a Thomas Merton 38. Carme Manuel, La reconstrucción del Sur en la narrativa de George W. Cable y Thomas N. Page 39. Paul S. Derrick, Norma González y Anna M. Brígido, La poesía temprana de Emily Dickinson: el primer cuadernillo 40. Douglas Edward LaPrade, Censura y recepción de Hemingway en España 41. Elvira del Pozo Aviñó, ed., Integralism, Altruism and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin 42. Carolina Núñez Puente, Feminism and Dialogics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Meridel Le Sueur, Mikhail M. Bakhtin 43. Rosa María Díez Cobo, Nueva sátira en la ficción postmodernista de las Américas 44. María Frías, José Liste and Begoña Simal, eds., Ethics and Ethnicity in the Literature of the United States 45. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, The Rhetoric of Race: Towards a Revolutionary Construction of Black Identity

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