Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism 0813546192, 9780813546193

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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FEMINISMS REDUX

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY























AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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an anthology of literary theory and criticism













FEMINISMS REDUX edited by

robyn warhol-down and

diane price herndl

rutgers university press • new brunswick, new jersey

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feminisms redux : an anthology of literary theory and criticism / Robyn WarholDown and Diane Price Herndl, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-4619-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-4620-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Feminist literary criticism. 2. Feminism and literature. 3. Women and literature. I. Warhol-Down, Robyn. II. Price Herndl, Diane, 1959PN98.W64F367 2009 801'.95082--dc22 2009006168 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2009 by Rutgers, The State University For copyrights to individual pieces please see pages 541–542. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

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About Feminisms Redux, by ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN and DIANE PRICE HERNDL ix Acknowledgments xix CANONS

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SANDRA M. GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR, “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination (1979) 9 ANNETTE KOLODNY, “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism” (1980) 21 BONNIE ZIMMERMAN, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism” (1981) 40 JOANNA RUSS, “Aesthetics” from How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) 61 70 PAUL LAUTER, “Caste, Class, and Canon” (1981/1987) ELAINE SHOWALTER, “A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory” (1989) 92 JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI, “Introduction” from Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, Difference (1997) 113 READINGS JUDITH FETTERLEY, “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature” from The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978) JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction” from The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982)

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CATHERINE BELSEY, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text” (1985) EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles” from Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) BARBARA JOHNSON, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” (1986) BIDDY MARTIN and CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” (1986) BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism” (1990) LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” (2002) HISTORIES PAULA GUNN ALLEN, “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale” from The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986) GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness” from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow” (1989) LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony, or an Infant Grifter Grows Up” (1992) SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature” (1993) GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999) SANGEETA RAY, “Introduction” from En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (2000) BODIES HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) LAURA MULVEY, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) JUDITH BUTLER, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions” from Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999) DIANE PRICE HERNDL, “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals” (2002)

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ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” (2002) 487 ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN, “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence” from Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (2003) 514 About the Authors Alternative Arrangements for Feminisms Redux Author/Title Index Permissions

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The introductions to the first and second editions of Feminisms, published in 1991 and 1997, began with the statement that “self-consciousness is one hallmark of contemporary literary scholarship, and feminist criticism is no exception. Indeed, being explicit about the referents of one’s pronouns, the origins of one’s projects, and the position from which one speaks has become very common among feminists; beginning a book with a personal anecdote is practically obligatory. There are good reasons for this: feminism holds that ‘the personal is political,’ and as feminists we believe that the traditional academic boundaries between professional and personal experience ought to be undermined.” In Who Stole Feminism, her 1994 diatribe against academic feminists, Christina Hoff Sommers quoted from the second paragraph of our introduction: “‘We’ are Robyn and Diane; we speak as white middle-class heterosexual American feminist academics in our early thirties (to cover a number of the categories feminist criticism has lately been emphasizing as significant to one’s reading and speaking position: race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, political positioning, education-level, and age). Colleagues at the University of Vermont since 1989, we two have found that we share passionate interests in fiction, feminism and quilt making.” Sommers quoted us in order to criticize the convention of self-disclosure in feminist criticism, but a telltale mistake shows that she never bothered to read past the first page of our introduction: she calls the book “Feminism” instead of Feminisms.1 The error is more than merely typographical; it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding behind many attacks since the early 1990s on feminist theory and criticism. Detractors like Sommers assume that “feminism” is a monolithic, prescriptive, conformist stance—that it is singular. The purpose of this anthology is, for the twenty-first century as it was in 1991, to dispel that error by demonstrating the multiplicity of perspectives and approaches called feminist literary theory and criticism. Feminisms Redux is a third edition of Feminisms, appreciably shorter than the first two and more retrospective in its conception. Almost two decades after its first appearance, Feminisms has become something of an institution in feminist criticism, having been adopted for many courses and consulted by many scholars over the years. As was the case when we edited the first edition, most collections of feminist theory are either interdisciplinary (leaving little room for a diversity

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of approaches to literature and cultural studies) or are short, containing twelve to fifteen essays that either represent a particular methodology or are focused on a specific subject. When such anthologies do attempt to represent a variety of methodological approaches, their limited space prevents attempts at real comprehensiveness. Generally, it has been true that if an anthology focuses on French feminist theories, it excludes Anglo-American approaches; if it brings together work on writings by women of color, it leaves out “mainstream” subjects; if it aspires to represent a broad spectrum of perspectives, it usually saves room for one or two voices to speak for “race” or “postcolonialism” and perhaps one or two to speak for “sexual orientation” and “class.” Given the constraints of expense and space in such books, these editorial decisions make perfect sense. Since its first appearance, Feminisms has remained the most comprehensive collection of complete essays and book chapters representing feminist literary criticism. In 2006, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar released Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, the logical extension of their classic Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.2 Theirs is the first book of feminist criticism to rival Feminisms in its scope, and it differs from our project in that it includes a substantial section of women writers’ commentaries on writing and case studies of specific women’s texts, as well as excerpts from many influential feminist critical and theoretical books and essays. Many of those essays and book chapters also appear in their entirety in Feminisms; this overlap confirms the impression we had in 1991 that we would be forming a canon of feminist literary criticism despite our skepticism about the validity of canons. By their nature and function, critical anthologies, like literary anthologies, create canons (as Jane Gallop has argued in Around 1981 [1992]3); when they become the basis for syllabi, collections come to define the fields they seek to introduce. Although the canonization effect is probably to some degree unavoidable, we tried our best to subvert it. We hoped the diversity of our selections and their organization into sections would emphasize our assertion that Feminisms did not propose a totalizing definition of feminist criticism, but rather presented various feminisms, a significant number of voices and approaches functioning alongside other feminisms in the academy. Feminisms Redux maintains the plural approach to feminist theory and criticism that inspired the original editions, but reduces the number of essays. This book is an offering to those colleagues who asked for a shorter, more manageable Feminisms that could serve as the basis for a course on feminist criticism or stand alongside primary texts in courses on literature or cultural studies. Reducing the number of entries by nearly two thirds, we have found the process of cutting painful. Many of our personal favorites—and many essays by dear friends—from Feminisms do not appear in Feminisms Redux. Our principle of selection this time was to choose those pieces that sparked dialogues that are still ongoing in academic feminist discourse. Having taught the book repeatedly, we included as many as we could of the pieces that still light a fire under students. As we looked over the previous tables of contents, we acknowledged that the debates sparking some of the essays in the original volume have ended. Methodological disputes over whether feminist criticism should have anything to do with critical theory more generally, over whether “French” feminism or “Anglo-American” feminism is the superior approach, and over whether feminists undermine their common goal by disagreeing with one another are, for the most part, over. They have gone the way

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of the preoccupation with methodology that dominated literary studies during the “theory revolution” of the late 1970s and 1980s. What students still find engaging in Feminisms are those pieces that speak to racial and sexual difference, to postcolonial concerns, to the history of women writers’ suppression, and to the study of the gendered body. Feminisms Redux collects a representative sample of entries on those topics, offering them in a form that instructors may find more convenient than the “doorstop” original version. We also added a few pieces that reflect directions feminism has taken in the previous two decades. We indulged our desire to have work of our own included in the collection, thus disclosing more of our own theoretical orientations than we had in previous editions. Also, the original editions did not include anything by Judith Butler because we had tried to choose pieces of theory that included close readings of texts, a practice that led us to exclude feminist philosophers. However, it is not possible to discuss gender theory in the twenty-first century without the foundations Butler laid with her theory of gender performativity, so we have included her in Feminisms Redux, offering a selection from her earliest work on that topic. In addition, we have added to the entries that provide postcolonial perspectives on literatures outside the United States and England, and we have introduced disability studies into the collection. The book is thus designed for use in courses on criticism and on women in literature, but it is addressed to many audiences outside the classroom as well. Because this collection seeks to answer such basic questions as “What is feminist literary theory?” and “What does it mean to do feminist criticism?” it is directed at curious nonfeminist academics as well as at feminists outside of academia looking for correspondences between their own political action and academically applied theory. We have assumed some knowledge of literary history on our readers’ part, but we have been careful in our introductions to each section to define terms that are specific to feminism or to literary theory. We hope this will still be the book an interdisciplinary reading group could use as an introduction to feminist literary studies or the book a feminist teacher could hand to the student, colleague, or friend who says, “I like what you’re saying about literature and about writing—what can I read to learn more about it?” We are both feminist teachers, committed to using feminist pedagogy in the classroom. Even after two decades of teaching experience, neither of us is politically reconciled to the position of authority that leading a class discussion—or editing an anthology—implies. Just as we encourage our students to question us and our assumptions, we invite our readers to question this book’s assumptions, its inclusions and exclusions, and its organization. Some of our friends teased us for adopting the quilt metaphor for the original Feminisms, calling it a feminist cliché. We don’t deny that criticism, but we find the metaphor useful nevertheless. This patchwork is not the only way these essays could have been pieced together; nor is this material the only selection we could have made.

SELECTING THE PIECES OF FEMINISMS REDUX The concept of Feminisms Redux, based as it is on multiplicity, depends, as we have said, on accepting heterogeneity within feminist literary studies. This does

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not mean that we, as editors, position ourselves as “pluralists” or as theorists who think that “anything goes.” As independent critics, each of us agrees with some of the pieces in this collection, and each disapproves of others. We do, however, believe that each essay here represents a viable—and important—voice in contemporary feminist literary studies, one that should be heard. Still we recognize that the diversity of views represented here sometimes leads to irreconcilable logical conflicts. There is no way to force these voices into a unison performance, or even—in some cases—to make them harmonize. For this reason, we have chosen not to evaluate individual positions in our introductions to each section of the book. We were very much amused by a reviewer who objected to our reticence about our own positions as a “boutique” approach to feminist criticism; she said we treated the various feminisms as “each its own little shop in the great American intellectual mall.”4 We recognize ourselves in the caricature because shopping is perhaps the only thing we have enjoyed doing together more than quilting. However, we stand by our decision not to evaluate individual entries. Rather than poking holes in each writer’s argument or declaring any winners in the debate, our section introductions try to take every entry on its own terms, summarizing briefly what each author has to say and showing the relation each piece holds to the others in its section. In taking this descriptive stance rather than a prescriptive or evaluative one, we are choosing to avoid what James Sosnoski in “A Mindless, Man-Driven Theory Machine” calls “intellectual machismo,” the kind of power-posturing that prompts endless arguments and inevitably leads either to hegemony or to a paralytic standoff.5 We are interested in promoting the forward movement of feminist activism, a movement we believe can occur only where difference commands attention, not dismissal or negativism. Although all the selections in Feminisms Redux appear in chronological order within sections, we resist any temptation to impose a “progress” model on the development of feminist criticism over the past thirty years. The order within sections is not intended to imply that the final essays have issued the final word on the question. We do not subscribe to what has come to be known as “literary Darwinism,” or the notion that the fittest approaches will survive by eliminating their weaker competitors. We have avoided editorial determinations of what used to be called “political correctness” (which was, we believe, a fabrication attributable to the New Right in its campaign to discredit progressive academics, including feminists); we do not want to be the arbiters of what feminism is supposed to be. Those pieces we have selected are—with only a few exceptions—uncut; most articles and book chapters appear here in their original forms. We felt it was important for readers to get as full an idea as possible of the rhetorical thrust of each piece, even though we then had space for fewer entries than we might have included had we used excerpts. Selections from books appearing in Feminisms Redux are not meant as substitutes for the whole works; we hope readers will follow through on the citations in our section introductions. In a few cases we did excerpt parts of book chapters to accommodate constraints of space and of resources available from our press. The financial constraints on Feminisms Redux have been real and reflect a serious issue facing feminist scholars at work today: How can feminist criticism reject marketplace ethics while still working within the marketplace of the competitive

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publishing industry? As more and more publishing houses are consolidated or bought by major multinational corporations, even the relatively autonomous university presses are forced to conform, to some extent, to the norms they establish. These norms are increasingly those of the corporate, rather than the academic, world (in the twenty-first century the distinction has become more and more blurry). We have been astonished at the range of fees university presses charge for permission to reprint scholarly work, from nothing more than a credit line to over a thousand dollars. Even more dismaying was our realization that some presses will agree to reduce the price for permission only if authors are willing to waive their part of the profits the fees represent. We remain grateful to the many scholars whose fame would warrant hefty fees but who generously donated their work to the first edition of Feminisms. To keep the size of the volume within economically feasible limits—and to give it a measure of coherence within diversity—we have narrowed the subject matter of the essays to include chiefly literature in English from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In making selections from each critic’s corpus, we favored theoretical over purely critical pieces. We looked for works by critics who were explicit about their premises and methods, and who illustrated their theories with specific reference to texts. Of course, the diversity of Feminisms Redux means that there are exceptions to these rules—in addition to Butler, Hélène Cixous, for example, writes theory without much recourse to practical criticism. But we have steered clear of essays that apply criticism to texts without some self-consciousness about the theories they are using because we want to highlight the process and thought behind the practice of feminist literary study.

THE PATTERN OF FEMINISMS REDUX Although feminisms are multiple, feminists do share certain beliefs, which we see as the common denominators among the essays reprinted here. Our understanding of feminism is that throughout history and in the present women as a group have been at a cultural, social, and political disadvantage; that this situation comes about through the institution of patriarchy, in which women and men have colluded equally; and that it is the responsibility of the feminist to take action toward rectifying the oppression of women and other marginalized groups. Feminist critics generally agree that the oppression of women is a fact of life, that gender leaves its traces in literary texts and on literary history, and that feminist literary criticism plays a worthwhile part in the struggle to end oppression in the world outside of texts. When they turn their attention to social history, most feminists agree that oppression of ethnic and racial minorities, gay men and lesbians, and working-class people is closely tied to the oppression of women. Of course, not all feminist critics have grounded their work in material history. But even when they focus on such comparatively abstract matters as discourse, aesthetics, or the constitution of subjectivity, feminists are always engaged in an explicitly political enterprise, always working to change existing power structures both inside and outside academia. Its overtly political nature is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of feminist scholarly work. As feminists have long insisted, all scholarly work is political, but not all scholars are as forthright about their politics as feminists are.

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Perhaps the most important development in the five years between the first and second editions of Feminisms was a widening acknowledgment that feminist studies had been too much the domain of white, middle-class, straight women who share much of the cultural privilege of their male counterparts. By 1997, the so-called third wave of feminism was beginning to criticize the previous generation of feminists for the exclusivity of its scope. However, when we searched in 1997 for examples of feminist criticism that looked beyond the straight, white, Western middle class, we found dozens of critics who had unfairly been relegated to a second wave even as they anticipated the third-wave critique. In Feminisms Redux, most of the authors in the Canons section, many in Readings, and many in Histories call for an inclusive feminism that the present generation of younger feminists would certainly recognize as the movement’s goal. In piecing together this volume, we have maintained a strong component of women of color, women from Asia and Africa, and lesbian and queer critics without “ghettoizing” them into sections of their own. We also have included essays by straight, middle-class, white feminists who interrogate their own identity positioning, rather than taking their perspective as universally representative of “women.” This edition includes many essays that work through the common assertion that race, sexual orientation, and class always inflect understandings of gender. Attention to gender is another rubric by which feminist criticism can usually be identified. But gender is a debatable term: some writers still use it to mean biological sex (male/female), whereas others insist on making a distinction between biology and culture. Still others have deconstructed that distinction, showing the ways in which cultural influences have marked biological sex and gender, and vice versa. “Cultural constructionist” feminists argue that masculinity and femininity are not predetermined by the body itself, but develop within cultures. To borrow a vivid illustration of this distinction from Susan Brownmiller: it is female (just as it is male) to grow hair on the legs and in the armpits, but in the United States it is deemed feminine (but not masculine) to shave that hair off.6 The “female,” then, is a matter of sex, the “feminine” a matter of culture. Some feminists depend on this distinction as a key to combating essentialism, or a deterministic view that biology is destiny. Others have embraced the biological facts of femaleness (for example, childbearing, lactation, and menstruation) as potentially liberatory for women, encouraging women to celebrate difference from the male “norm” rather than to discount or denigrate it. Still others (especially those whose work is grounded in the French language, which uses féminine to mean both female and feminine) resist the binary opposition of sex and gender, arguing that the cultural differences are, after all, instilled on the basis of biological givens. More recently, feminists have also begun to argue, conversely, that sex itself is historically constructed and that the male/female distinction is as dependent on cultural assumptions as the masculine/feminine divide. All these versions of what “gender” means are represented in Feminisms Redux, and all are brought to bear on literary studies. We have made a few references to “Anglo-American” and “French” feminisms, a distinction that will be clear to those who have read the essays in this volume but that bears some explanation here. In the most general terms, French feminism proceeds from the psychoanalytic premises of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and adopts or adapts the deconstructive methods of Jacques Derrida. It is

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poststructuralist in that it focuses on discourse and on the constructedness of subjectivity and of representation. By contrast, Anglo-American feminism is generally more interested in history, either literal history (accounts of the lived experience of people in the world) or literary history or both. Anglo-American feminism tends to focus more than does French feminism on the interaction of texts with the extratextual world they simultaneously address and represent. This simple differentiation between the two is, of course, much too schematic, especially for the twenty-first century. For one thing, “Anglo-American” appears to leave out black feminists, postcolonial feminists, and other feminists of color who share that approach’s allegiance to history, while “French” excludes the British and American queer theorists whose work is strongly psychoanalytic and poststructuralist. But so-called Anglo-American feminists often concerned themselves with discourse, French feminists with the world outside of texts. When applied to the essays in this volume, especially, the distinction between French and Anglo-American feminisms becomes blurred. The essays here reveal the many intersections between theories and show how feminist writers have used various theoretical approaches to understand the mechanisms through which gender operates within texts. We have tried to avoid privileging either approach. Making sense of the psychoanalytically informed feminist approaches requires an introduction to the work of Lacan, a late twentieth-century French psychoanalyst and re-reader of Freud. According to Lacan, each person encounters a deep split when s/he begins to use language; his own contention that we “enter language” suggests his sense of the exteriority of linguistic experience. He argued that language is a force that utterly changes the being who uses it and that creates and structures the unconscious. Because language is always metaphorical (it always stands for something else and can never be that thing), there is always a gap between expressing a wish and experiencing its fulfillment because language can never fully express exactly what we want. That gap is desire. For Lacan, our desire is always for jouissance, a term that refers both to orgasm and to a state of blissful, ecstatic union that would complete us, would heal the “split” that occurred when we entered language. This desire is unrealizable. Its impossibility does not, however, keep us from continually seeking its fulfillment. Desire becomes an issue for feminists because of the precarious relation women have to it in this system. “The Woman” is understood by Lacan to be desirable to man because of the (false) beliefs that she will be able to complete him, that she is his Other (all that he is not), and that union with her is a union with all he is not. Lacan’s famous assertion “Woman does not exist” does not refer to real women, but to this imaginary woman who could complete man. Desire is also important to women because of how their own desires are defined—and thereby limited—within psychoanalytic discourse; such restrictions within the realm of discourse may well limit the possibilities open to women in the world of lived experience. The symbol most central to desire, for Lacan, is the phallus. Although it bears a connection to the physical penis, Lacan argued (in the essay “The Signification of the Phallus” in Écrits) that it did not represent the physical organ itself, but came, metaphorically, to stand for all that was desirable.7 The origin of this signification is, for Lacan as it was for Freud, the castration complex; the male fears the loss of the penis, the female feels the anxiety of never having had one, and therefore

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the penis comes to represent that which is desirable. But Lacan insists that its symbolic force always exceeds its reference to the physical organ. Not surprisingly, though, this is one point that has troubled feminist writers deeply; the line separating phallus and penis is very fine. Lacan’s “phallocentric” (i.e., centered on the phallus) reliance on a male metaphor irrevocably marks his work as maledominated and male-privileging, and therefore raises serious questions for its applicability to feminist thought. Feminists have nonetheless used psychoanalysis in their critique of gender, despite misgivings about its phallocentrism. Psychoanalysis provides a framework for understanding how gender is defined, how it comes into being. Further, one of Freud’s chief contributions, as Dianne Hunter points out in “Hysteria, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.,” was listening to what hysterical women had to say;8 for literary critics, the model of listening to (or reading) previously uninterpretable texts is a powerful one. Finally, feminists have recognized that psychoanalysis was (with Marxism) a discourse that shaped the twentieth century. To ignore it, to refuse to participate in it and change it, would be to concede this important ground to other, and often hostile, forces. Two other Lacanian terms will be useful in reading the essays in Feminisms Redux: the symbolic and the imaginary. For Lacan, language exists in “the order of the symbolic” because language symbolizes things in the world. Based on the insights of structuralist linguistics and semiotics, “the symbolic” refers to the connection between signifier (a word) and signified (what it stands for), which is always arbitrarily established; we could just as easily call a dog un chien because there is no essential connection between the four-footed furry creature and the word dog. The system in which these symbols work is always outside the subject who uses it, and that subject is never in control of the system. Lacan calls this arbitrary system the Law of the Father because of its structural similarity to the establishment of paternity and its chronological connection to the Oedipal complex. “The imaginary,” however, is the realm of the image. Unlike symbols, whose connection to what they signify is arbitrary, images have a visual relation to the signified. The imaginary is typified, for Lacan, in the relation of the subject to his/her mirror image: that image both is and is not the subject. Whereas the symbolic is triadic—signifier, signified, and signifying system—the imaginary is dyadic—image and signified. As the readings in this volume show, desire for literary critics in the 1980s and 1990s moved beyond a strictly Lacanian formulation to encompass questions of social and political power: How is desire related to political power? How is sexual/political desire expressed in literary representations? Whether they are motivated primarily by questions stemming from psychoanalysis, Marxism, postcolonial theory, reader-response criticism, cultural studies, race-centered theory, deconstruction, narratology, disability studies, queer theory, or other approaches, the essays in this collection are not sorted by methodology. Traditionally, anthologies of criticism are arranged either chronologically or by type of criticism (and, in such collections, “feminist criticism” or “gender theory” is usually represented by just one section, although sometimes there will be a separate section for queer theory). We found that to try to describe any piece in this collection according to its method (to say, for instance, that something is “Marxist” or “deconstructionist” or “semiotic” criticism) would be greatly to oversimplify and misrepresent the complexity of what each of these feminist critics is

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doing. Most of these authors combine theoretical approaches in their work; some of them practice an eclecticism that defies categorization. We decided, therefore, to organize the book around a group of concepts that keep coming up in contemporary feminist critical debates. The second edition of Feminisms contained fourteen sections, while Feminisms Redux has only four. Each section focuses on what Raymond Williams would have called a “keyword,”9 or a topic of lively debate within feminist literary theory and criticism from the 1980s to the present. Although most of the section headings in the original version were singular (Desire, Gaze, Practice, Canon, Reading, Ethnicity, and so on), our four sections—Canons, Readings, Histories, and Bodies—are pluralized, like the title of the book, to reflect the diversity of conceptions of the topic within the section. The introduction to each section explains how we construe its central concept, shows what the relation of each essay to that concept is (from our point of view), and identifies the basic theoretical and methodological assumptions behind each essay’s argument. Most pieces could just as easily fit into other sections of the book; indeed, we have reorganized materials from many of the old sections into the four new ones. To facilitate discussion of how the issues intersect, we suggest different ways of organizing this material in the Alternative Arrangements section at the end of this book. The organization of Feminisms Redux is ultimately arbitrary—in that way, the volume most strikingly resembles a quilt. We have cut out and stitched together pieces of criticism, and we have laid them out in a pattern that imposes a sense of coherence the pieces themselves might not have fallen into of their own accord. Like the components of a quilt, however, those pieces all maintain their own integrity. Pulled together, the pieces acquire a new form and new function. We hope our readers will be critical, actively considering the value not just of individual pieces but of the governing design. We hope, too, that readers who become newly acquainted with these pieces will be moved to go back to the bolts from which they have been cut, to acquire a comfortable familiarity with all the material of feminist criticism and theory. —RW-D & DPH

NOTES 1. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). 2. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2007; 1st ed., 1985), and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader (New York: Norton, 2006). 3. Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992). 4. Marianne DeKoven, in American Literature 65.1 (1993): 182. 5. James J. Sosnoski, “A Mindless Man-Driven Theory Machine: Intellectuality, Sexuality, and the Institution of Criticism,” in Feminism and Institutions: Dialogues on Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 6. Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).

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7. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, Eloise Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006). 8. Dianne Hunter, “Hysteria, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.,” Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 465–488. 9. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS





















For help in preparing this new edition, Robyn would like to thank her able assistants, Eileen Hanerfeld and Lori Jean. Both of us thank the helpful and supportive staff at Rutgers University Press, including Rachel Friedman, Suzanne Kellam, and especially Leslie Mitchner. And each of us thanks our family members: Carl and Frances, Rich and Seth.

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FEMINISMS REDUX

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canons





















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ne of the axioms of traditional literary study was that “great literature” represents “universal” experiences. But as women and people of diverse ethnic, class, and national backgrounds began to study literature, that notion came into question. What had appeared universal to the once homogeneous group that studied literature and defined what was “great” as well—a group composed almost entirely of white upper- and upper-middle-class males until well into the 1970s—does not seem so to the heterogeneous group. What had once been taken for purely “aesthetic” choices of the literary texts that would be included on course syllabi, in anthologies, on graduate and undergraduate examinations began to be seen as political and social choices. The “canon” of literature—those literary works recognized as “great” or at least acknowledged as worthy to be read and studied in an academic setting—was never as codified as its religious namesake. As Lillian Robinson points out in her essay “Treason Our Text,” the canon’s lack of definition makes challenging it difficult.1 No official council has ever been set up to determine what books should and should not be read. Instead, many diverse, complex mechanisms exist for creating a canon of “authentic” literature (authenticity being one of the standard rubrics of canonicity): individual professors, faculty examination and editorial committees, publishing houses, and scholarly journals. The nebulousness of these mechanisms was for many years taken to be proof of the choices’ merit—surely, because so many readers had independently determined a work’s merit or lack of it, that judgment must be accurate, right? Feminist critics began exploring just how connected, in fact, those apparently independent groups were: the individual professor read the journals, received the catalogs of the publishing houses, and sat on those faculty committees; the faculty committees were the advisory boards to the journals and to the publishing houses; the publishing houses kept in print the books that the individual professors kept ordering for their courses. And most of those individuals making judgments were straight, white, upper- and upper-middle-class men in the United Kingdom and the United States. “Independent” judgments, indeed. Judgment, of course, is at the center of the question of canonicity. What makes literature “great”? What makes it worth studying in a university? What makes it worth reading at all? Early feminist critics found that their answers to these questions were not the same ones that they had been taught in graduate school. Is the purpose of literature to examine “universal” or individual, diverse experiences? Should we value “representative” or “aesthetic” language? What makes an experience “universal”? What guides our choice of what is aesthetically pleasing? As women readers found so-called minor women writers whose work was more moving, exciting, and representative of their experience than that of supposedly major writers, they began to question the standards of literary taste and to question the grounds on which those standards were based. As the canon develops within institutions (of higher education or of literary criticism), it becomes an institution in itself. The “institution” is an important category for feminist theory, in some ways more important than the more obvious categories of “the personal” or “the self.” In fact, recent work in feminism has shown how concepts like “self’ or “personal” are themselves constructed within institutions. Institutions establish orderliness, rules, sameness; feminism questions whether that orderliness and sameness has been gained at the expense of

O

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the differences represented by women or by women’s “otherness.” Otherness is itself almost always a matter of institutional definition: ensuring homogeneity is often one of the most important tasks of the institution. Difference is excluded, overlooked, forced back into conformity with an artificial norm, or suppressed. Feminist literary criticism has questioned the most basic institutions of literary studies: how we evaluate literature, how we constitute knowledge about it, how its study is determined by the structure of the academy, and how it is separated from other disciplines. From these questions have come serious critiques of how literature is taught, why it is taught, and who teaches it. Literary study has changed dramatically in the past three decades, largely as a result of the feminist critique of it as an institution. In that they have themselves become an institution within feminist criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar embody the difficult task facing the feminist critic: how to work against and from the outside of linguistic and critical institutions so that she will no longer be defined as mad, silent, Other, or invisible. Their monumental first book, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), challenges the institution of British and American literary history by focusing exclusively on the work of women writers to form a new canon. With other practitioners of gynocriticism (see Elaine Showalter’s essay in this section for a definition of this term, which she coined), they have been taken to task by so-called third-wave feminists for limiting their view to middle- and upper-class white women authors, but within those limits they treat a broad range of genres. The fragment of the second chapter of Madwoman reproduced here, from “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” can give only a faint indication of the entire work’s scale. Over seven hundred pages long, the collaboratively written study elaborates a model of a women’s literary tradition through scores of readings of texts by female authors who have been more or less accepted as “great” writers—texts ranging from works as obscure as Jane Austen’s juvenilia to such generally acknowledged masterpieces as George Eliot’s Middlemarch. As our sample indicates, the authors allude to points established in their previous chapters (here the mentions of Snow White refer back to a close reading performed in Chapter 1) to build their theory of the links among nineteenth-century women writers’ texts. Like Showalter, they analyze women writers’ relation to their literary foremothers in order to “reveal the extraordinary strength of women’s literary accomplishments” against daunting odds. To do so, they must defy the institution of male-centered literary criticism and work from a newly conceived canon. The first section of the chapter reprinted here outlines Gilbert and Gubar’s enormously influential revision of Harold Bloom’s Freudian theory of “the anxiety of influence” among authors. Gilbert and Gubar are quick to point out that Bloom’s examples—like Freud’s—are all male and that his theory can neither be adopted nor reversed to account for authors working in the female subculture (which is, for Gilbert and Gubar as for Showalter, a historical given). Women authors, they argue, experience “the anxiety of authorship,” doubly explicable as a feminine version of Bloom’s theory and as women authors’ individual and collective response to the pervasive Western metaphor of “literary paternity”—that is, the idea that the author stands in a fatherly relation to the text. “Based on the woman’s socially determined sense of her own biology,” the anxiety makes its way into women’s texts in recurring patterns of

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themes, forms, and motifs. The excerpt from the chapter places women’s anxiety about disease and about their bodies in historical context, links it to authorial anxiety, and begins sketching out strategies some nineteenth-century writers used to express and to overcome their sense of “infection in the sentence,” as Emily Dickinson called it. The balance of the chapter, with typical Gilbert-and-Gubar scope, brings the theory to bear on authors from Aphra Behn to H. D., from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, from George Eliot to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. As Gilbert and Gubar’s example established, a new concept of canon required a new feminist critical practice. Annette Kolodny, in “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism” (1980), sets out three “crucial propositions”—that literary history is itself a fiction, that we are taught to interpret texts by applying certain learned paradigms, and that we must examine the biases informing our critical methods and judgment. These ideas have remained central to American feminist critical practice. Kolodny goes on to explore what it means for a feminist critic to act on these assumptions; she sees these critical practices as having very definite results and dangers. Her metaphoric minefield—the academic ground laid with hazards that could destroy the feminist scholar if she treads too heavily—is her warrant for a methodology of pluralism, of choosing freely among the many reading strategies literary theory makes available. Kolodny’s argument suggests that the primary task of criticism is to do readings, or to find meanings for texts, and she contends that feminist criticism must embrace the possibility that multiple valid readings can be performed on any given work. Similarly open is Kolodny’s view of literary value, as she cautions feminist critics against unquestioningly accepting canonized notions of “good” and “bad” literature. Finally, she also explicitly links the practice of feminist criticism to the practices of feminist activism, suggesting that there cannot be a separation between them, that “ideas are important because they determine the ways we live, or want to live, in the world.” In “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism” (1981), Bonnie Zimmerman links sexuality to questions of taste and universality: “Lesbian literary criticism,” she argues, “simply restates what feminists already know, that one group cannot name itself ‘humanity’ or even ‘woman.’” She calls for an expansion of the feminist literary canon to include more works by lesbian writers and suggests that lesbian critics actively seek to discover more as yet unknown works by lesbian writers, reread the so-called great canon of literature from a lesbian perspective, and elaborate a lesbian perspective. This agenda presaged the broader feminist literary-critical projects of what was to be called the third wave of feminism in the 1980s and beyond. Zimmerman also examines what could be called the canon of feminist criticism to argue that the most influential feminist projects of the 1970s were themselves based on heterosexist assumptions and suppressed or overlooked lesbian writers and texts. Although Zimmerman would like to expand the feminist canon itself, of more importance to her is the development of a unique critical perspective or, “at the very least, determining whether or not such a perspective is possible.” The challenges for critics trying to make that determination parallel many of those that make expansion of the literary canon difficult: the longstanding silence of lesbian voices in literature and in the academy obscured the lesbian tradition, and the complexity of defining lesbian—is it strictly a sexual term, or does it mean more

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loosely “woman-identified”?—makes defining a “lesbian text”—one by a lesbian writer? one that depicts lesbian experience?—an important but perhaps limiting act. Zimmerman called for reforms of lesbian feminist criticism that signaled many of the changes that would come about in 1980s’ feminist criticism at large: greater attention to the specificity of a text’s relation to history and place, and a firmer acceptance of differences among women (not just the differences between women and men). Joanna Russ, in her 1983 book, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, explicitly connects exclusion from the literary canon with difference. As Russ sees it, people are profoundly threatened by difference and are likely to characterize it as inferiority; the threat offered by women’s writing, she shows, was effectively suppressed for decades. Russ delineates the variety of critical positions that seem to be arguments about quality but that are in fact arguments about difference. Such arguments are sometimes a matter of ignorance but are sometimes a matter of genuine bad faith; the “Glotologs” who make them often do not even recognize what they are doing (Glotologs, creatures Russ describes in a science-fiction-inspired prologue, revel in exclusion). In the chapter reprinted here, “Aesthetics,” she examines how the lack of literary context for women’s writing can be self-perpetuating because it can continue to make women’s writings seem too “different” to include in the canon of literature. In other chapters, she reveals how critical issues of quality have been used to question the validity of writings by women, from the authenticity of their authorship (“She didn’t write it” or “She had help”) to the validity of what they write about and what they produce (“She wrote it, but look at what she wrote about,” “She isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art”). Russ argues that we must stop using absolute values to judge literary value; as she puts it, “When we all live in the same culture, then it will be time for one literature.” In “Caste, Class, and Canon” (1987; a revised version of his 1981 essay of the same name), Paul Lauter examines the necessity for feminist critics to examine their own politics, lest they make the exclusionary mistakes they criticize in others. After questioning the use of New Critical technique in some feminist criticism, he asks, “Is the form of criticism value-free? . . . How is canon—that is, selection—related to, indeed a function of, critical technique?” To answer these questions, Lauter examines first a body of literature not often studied before 1981, working-class writing. He finds that it is unlikely to be studied because it does not conform to the criteria validated by New Critical technique—innovative or complex language and form, an individual creator—but must be explored on the basis of its function or use. Lauter moves from this analysis to question why some feminist critics still employ New Critical techniques when the political implications of New Criticism are so antithetical to a feminist undertaking. He argues that because, in the feminist revision of the canon, “the work of criticism and of political action most fully converge,” feminist critics cannot rely on solely “literary” criteria because such criteria are never value-free and can never be innocently used. Instead, feminist criticism calls for an evaluation of culture, the role literature plays in that culture, and the role that criticism plays in improving the world and our lives. In “A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory” (1989), Elaine Showalter chronicles the differences among feminist critical practices and among the theoretical movements

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they represent. After the publication of her influential “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” in 1981, Showalter became one of the primary historians of feminist criticism, proposing categories in which to place all the varieties of feminist projects and explaining the evolution of those categories within a chronological framework.2 “A Criticism of Our Own” outlines the dominant feminist methodologies of the 1980s. Showalter shows that African-American literary criticism and feminist criticism can be seen as having evolved through parallel stages “in our confrontations with the Western literary tradition.” Both began “in a separatist cultural aesthetics, born out of participation in a protest movement”; both then moved “to a middle stage of professionalized focus on a specific text-milieu in an alliance with academic literary theory”; and both more recently arrived at “an expanded and pluralistic critical field of expertise on sexual or racial difference.” In the case of feminist criticism, Showalter builds on her previous versions of its history to delineate six kinds of projects: (1) androgynist poetics, dedicated to effacing gender differences; (2) the feminist critique of male culture; (3) a Female Aesthetic celebrating women’s culture; (4) gynocritics, or the study of the tradition(s) of women’s writing; (5) gynesic, or poststructuralist, feminist criticism, focusing on “the feminine” as a category within culture; and (6) gender theory, which Showalter defines as “the comparative study of sexual difference.” Her essay enumerates influential books and essays in each of these approaches and attends to figures in such fields as philosophy, psychology, and anthropology whose work has had a significant impact on feminist literary theory and practice and, hence, on the canons it has produced. At the end of her essay, Showalter declares that “there is an urgent necessity to affirm the importance of black and female thinkers, speakers, readers, and writers. The Other Woman may be transparent or invisible to some; but she is still very vivid, important, and necessary to us.” Showalter’s “us” implicitly (although entirely unintentionally) excludes the Other Woman from the project of feminist criticism, laying feminist literary theory open to charges of exclusivity at the same time that she explicitly embraces the Other Woman. Speaking from that implicitly excluded position, Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi’s “Introduction” to Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, Difference (1997) outlines the relationship of national women’s literatures outside the United States and the United Kingdom to the feminist critical project. She begins by observing that African American women’s writing had reached more critical prominence by the late 1990s than had African women’s writing, which was often left out of histories and commentaries on African literature. The issue of women in African literature, she explains, was often expressed in the representation of women in writings by African men, who tended to portray women in either subordinate or idealized roles. Yet African women writers, as Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi demonstrates, have hesitated to self-identify as “feminist” because of the Western roots of feminist theory and practice. She mentions alternative terms preferred by some African women writers, such as womanist, acknowledging that African women must at least modify the term if feminism is to be useful in the context of their distinct experiences. In order to bring the canon of modern African women’s writing in English to light, she adapts a Western feminist perspective to develop a methodology suitable to her purposes.

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NOTES 1. Lillian S. Robinson, “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2 (1983): 83–98. 2. Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981).

SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR

INFECTION IN THE SENTENCE the woman writer and the anxiety of authorship (1979)



















The man who does not know sick women does not know women. —S. WEIR MITCHELL

I try to describe this long limitation, hoping that with such power as is now mine, and such use of language as is within that power, this will convince any one who cares about it that this “living” of mine had been done under a heavy handicap. . . . —CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

A Word dropped careless on a Page May stimulate an eye When folded in perpetual seam The Wrinkled Maker lie Infection in the sentence breeds We may inhale Despair At distances of Centuries From the Malaria— —EMILY DICKINSON

I stand in the ring in the dead city and tie on the red shoes .... They are not mine, they are my mother’s, her mother’s before, handed down like an heirloom but hidden like shameful letters. —ANNE SEXTON

What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal? If the vexed and vexing polarities of angel and monster, sweet dumb Snow White and fierce mad Queen, are major images literary tradition offers women,

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how does such imagery influence the ways in which women attempt the pen? If the Queen’s looking glass speaks with the King’s voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice? Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of view? Or does she “talk back” to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint? We believe these are basic questions feminist literary criticism—both theoretical and practical—must answer, and consequently they are questions to which we shall turn again and again, not only in this chapter but in all our readings of nineteenth-century literature by women. That writers assimilate and then consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of their predecessors is, of course, a central fact of literary history, a fact whose aesthetic and metaphysical implications have been discussed in detail by theorists as diverse as T. S. Eliot, M. H. Abrams, Erich Auerbach, and Frank Kermode.1 More recently, some literary theorists have begun to explore what we might call the psychology of literary history—the tensions and anxieties, hostilities and inadequacies writers feel when they confront not only the achievements of their predecessors but the traditions of genre, style, and metaphor that they inherit from such “forefathers.” Increasingly, these critics study the ways in which, as J. Hillis Miller has put it, a literary text “is inhabited . . . by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts.”2 As Miller himself also notes, the first and foremost student of such literary psychohistory has been Harold Bloom. Applying Freudian structures to literary genealogies, Bloom has postulated that the dynamics of literary history arise from the artist’s “anxiety of influence,” his fear that he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writings. In fact, as we pointed out in our discussion of the metaphor of literary paternity, Bloom’s paradigm of the sequential historical relationship between literary artists is the relationship of father to son, specifically that relationship as it was defined by Freud. Thus Bloom explains that a “strong poet” must engage in heroic warfare with his “precursor,” for, involved as he is in a literary Oedipal struggle, a man can only become a poet by somehow invalidating his poetic father. Bloom’s model of literary history is intensely (even exclusively) male, and necessarily patriarchal. For this reason it has seemed, and no doubt will continue to seem, offensively sexist to some feminist critics. Not only, after all, does Bloom describe literary history as the crucial warfare of fathers and sons, he sees Milton’s fiercely masculine fallen Satan as the type of the poet in our culture, and he metaphorically defines the poetic process as a sexual encounter between a male poet and his female muse. Where, then, does the female poet fit in? Does she want to annihilate a “forefather” or a “foremother”? What if she can find no models, no precursors? Does she have a muse, and what is its sex? Such questions are inevitable in any female consideration of Bloomian poetics.3 And yet, from a feminist perspective, their inevitability may be just the point; it may, that is, call our attention not to what is wrong about Bloom’s conceptualization of the dynamics of Western literary history, but to what is right (or at least suggestive) about his theory. For Western literary history is overwhelmingly male—or, more accurately, patri-

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archal—and Bloom analyzes and explains this fact, while other theorists have ignored it, precisely, one supposes, because they assumed literature had to be male. Like Freud, whose psychoanalytic postulates permeate Bloom’s literary psychoanalyses of the “anxiety of influence,” Bloom has defined processes of interaction that his predecessors did not bother to consider because, among other reasons, they were themselves so caught up in such processes. Like Freud, too, Bloom has insisted on bringing to consciousness assumptions readers and writers do not ordinarily examine. In doing so, he has clarified the implications of the psychosexual and sociosexual contexts by which every literary text is surrounded, and thus the meanings of the “guests” and “ghosts” which inhabit texts themselves. Speaking of Freud, the feminist theorist Juliet Mitchell has remarked that “psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one.”4 The same sort of statement could be made about Bloom’s model of literary history, which is not a recommendation for but an analysis of the patriarchal poetics (and attendant anxieties) which underlie our culture’s chief literary movements. For our purposes here, however, Bloom’s historical construction is useful not only because it helps identify and define the patriarchal psychosexual context in which so much Western literature was authored, but also because it can help us distinguish the anxieties and achievements of female writers from those of male writers. If we return to the question we asked earlier—where does a woman writer “fit in” to the overwhelmingly and essentially male literary history Bloom describes?—we find we have to answer that a woman writer does not “fit in.” At first glance, indeed, she seems to be anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider. Just as in Freud’s theories of male and female psychosexual development there is no symmetry between a boy’s growth and a girl’s (with, say, the male “Oedipus complex” balanced by a female “Electra complex”) so Bloom’s male-oriented theory of the “anxiety of influence” cannot be simply reversed or inverted in order to account for the situation of the woman writer. Certainly if we acquiesce in the patriarchal Bloomian model, we can be sure that the female poet does not experience the “anxiety of influence” in the same way that her male counterpart would, for the simple reason that she must confront precursors who are almost exclusively male, and therefore significantly different from her. Not only do these precursors incarnate patriarchal authority (as our discussion of the metaphor of literary paternity argued), they attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of her self—that is, of her subjectivity, her autonomy, her creativity. On the one hand, therefore, the woman writer’s male precursors symbolize authority; on the other hand, despite their authority, they fail to define the ways in which she experiences her own identity as a writer. More, the masculine authority with which they construct their literary personae, as well as the fierce power struggles in which they engage in their efforts of self-creating, seem to the woman writer directly to contradict the terms of her own gender definition. Thus the “anxiety of influence” that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary “anxiety of authorship”—a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a “precursor” the act of writing will isolate or destroy her. This anxiety is, of course, exacerbated by her fear that not only can she not

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fight a male precursor on “his” terms and win, she cannot “beget” art upon the (female) body of the muse. As Juliet Mitchell notes, in a concise summary of the implications Freud’s theory of psychosexual development has for women, both a boy and a girl, “as they learn to speak and live within society, want to take the father’s [in Bloom’s terminology the precursor’s] place, and only the boy will one day be allowed to do so. Furthermore both sexes are born into the desire of the mother, and as, through cultural heritage, what the mother desires is the phallus-turnedbaby, both children desire to be the phallus for the mother. Again, only the boy can fully recognize himself in his mother’s desire. Thus both sexes repudiate the implications of femininity,” but the girl learns (in relation to her father) “that her subjugation to the law of the father entails her becoming the representative of ‘nature’ and ‘sexuality,’ a chaos of spontaneous, intuitive creativity.”5 Unlike her male counterpart, then, the female artist must first struggle against the effects of socialization which makes conflict with the will of her (male) precursors seem inexpressibly absurd, futile, or even—as in the case of the Queen in “Little Snow White”—self-annihilating. And just as the male artist’s struggle against his precursor takes the form of what Bloom calls revisionary swerves, flights, misreadings, so the female writer’s battle for self-creation involves her in a revisionary process. Her battle, however, is not against her (male) precursor’s reading of the world but against his reading of her. In order to define herself as an author she must redefine the terms of her socialization. Her revisionary struggle, therefore, often becomes a struggle for what Adrienne Rich has called “Revision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction . . . an act of survival.”6 Frequently, moreover, she can begin such a struggle only by actively seeking a female precursor who, far from representing a threatening force to be denied or killed, proves by example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible. For this reason, as well as for the sound psychoanalytic reasons Mitchell and others give, it would be foolish to lock the woman artist into an Electra pattern matching the Oedipal structure Bloom proposes for male writers. The woman writer—and we shall see women doing this over and over again—searches for a female model not because she wants dutifully to comply with male definitions of her “femininity” but because she must legitimize her own rebellious endeavors. At the same time, like most women in patriarchal society, the woman writer does experience her gender as a painful obstacle, or even a debilitating inadequacy; like most patriarchally conditioned women, in other words, she is victimized by what Mitchell calls “the inferiorized and ‘alternative’ (second sex) psychology of women under patriarchy.”7 Thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female audience together with her fear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention—all these phenomena of “inferiorization” mark the woman writer’s struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creating from those of her male counterpart. As we shall see, such sociosexual differentiation means that, as Elaine Showalter has suggested, women writers participate in a quite different literary subculture from that inhabited by male writers, a subculture which has its own

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distinctive literary traditions, even—though it defines itself in relation to the “main,” male-dominated, literary culture—a distinctive history.8 At best, the separateness of this female subculture has been exhilarating for women. In recent years, for instance, while male writers seem increasingly to have felt exhausted by the need for revisionism which Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” accurately describes, women writers have seen themselves as pioneers in a creativity so intense that their male counterparts have probably not experienced its analog since the Renaissance, or at least since the Romantic era. The son of many fathers, today’s male writer feels hopelessly belated; the daughter of too few mothers, today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively emerging. There is a darker side of this female literary subculture, however, especially when women’s struggles for literary self-creation are seen in the psychosexual context described by Bloom’s Freudian theories of patrilineal literary inheritance. As we noted above, for an “anxiety of influence” the woman writer substitutes what we have called an “anxiety of authorship,” an anxiety built from complex and often only barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappropriate to her sex. Because it is based on the woman’s socially determined sense of her own biology, this anxiety of authorship is quite distinct from the anxiety about creativity that could be traced in such male writers as Hawthorne or Dostoevsky. Indeed, to the extent that it forms one of the unique bonds that link women in what we might call the secret sisterhood of their literary subculture, such anxiety in itself constitutes a crucial mark of that subculture. In comparison to the “male” tradition of strong, father-son combat, however, this female anxiety of authorship is profoundly debilitating. Handed down not from one woman to another but from the stern literary “fathers” of patriarchy to all their “inferiorized” female descendants, it is in many ways the germ of a disease or, at any rate, a disaffection, a disturbance, a distrust, that spreads like a stain throughout the style and structure of much literature by women, especially—as we shall see in this study—throughout literature by women before the twentieth century. For if contemporary women do now attempt the pen with energy and authority, they are able to do so only because their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foremothers struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt like paralysis to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subculture. Thus, while the recent feminist emphasis on positive role models has undoubtedly helped many women, it should not keep us from realizing the terrible odds against which a creative female subculture was established. Far from reinforcing socially oppressive sexual stereotyping, only a full consideration of such problems can reveal the extraordinary strength of women’s literary accomplishments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Emily Dickinson’s acute observations about “infection in the sentence,” quoted in our epigraphs, resonate in a number of different ways, then, for women writers, given the literary woman’s special concept of her place in literary psychohistory. To begin with, the words seem to indicate Dickinson’s keen consciousness that, in the purest Bloomian or Millerian sense, pernicious “guests” and “ghosts” inhabit all literary texts. For any reader, but especially for a reader

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who is also a writer, every text can become a “sentence” or weapon in a kind of metaphorical germ warfare. Beyond this, however, the fact that “infection in the sentence breeds” suggests Dickinson’s recognition that literary texts are coercive, imprisoning, fever-inducing; that, since literature usurps a reader’s interiority, it is an invasion of privacy. Moreover, given Dickinson’s own gender definition, the sexual ambiguity of her poem’s “Wrinkled Maker” is significant. For while, on the one hand, “we” (meaning especially women writers) “may inhale Despair” from all those patriarchal texts which seek to deny female autonomy and authority, on the other hand “we” (meaning especially women writers) “may inhale Despair” from all those “foremothers” who have both overtly and covertly conveyed their traditional authorship anxiety to their bewildered female descendants. Finally, such traditional, metaphorically matrilineal anxiety ensures that even the maker of a text, when she is a woman, may feel imprisoned within texts—folded and “wrinkled” by their pages and thus trapped in their “perpetual seam[s]” which perpetually tell her how she seems. Although contemporary women writers are relatively free of the infection of this “Despair” Dickinson defines (at least in comparison to their nineteenthcentury precursors), an anecdote recently related by the American poet and essayist Annie Gottlieb summarizes our point about the ways in which, for all women, “Infection in the sentence breeds”: When I began to enjoy my powers as a writer, I dreamt that my mother had me sterilized! (Even in dreams we still blame our mothers for the punitive choices our culture forces on us.) I went after the mother-figure in my dream, brandishing a large knife; on its blade was writing. I cried, “Do you know what you are doing? You are destroying my femaleness, my female power, which is important to me because of you!”9

Seeking motherly precursors, says Gottlieb, as if echoing Dickinson, the woman writer may find only infection, debilitation. Yet still she must seek, not seek to subvert, her “female power, which is important” to her because of her lost literary matrilineage. In this connection, Dickinson’s own words about mothers are revealing, for she alternately claimed that “I never had a mother,” that “I always ran Home to Awe as a child. . . . He was an awful Mother but I liked him better than none,” and that “a mother [was] a miracle.”10 Yet, as we shall see, her own anxiety of authorship was a “Despair” inhaled not only from the infections suffered by her own ailing physical mother, and her many tormented literary mothers, but from the literary fathers who spoke to her—even “lied” to her— sometimes near at hand, sometimes “at distances of Centuries,” from the censorious looking glasses of literary texts. It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters. Recently, in fact, social scientists and social historians like Jessie Bernard, Phyllis Chesler, Naomi Weisstein, and Pauline Bart have begun to study the ways in which patriarchal socialization literally makes women sick, both physically and mentally.11 Hysteria, the disease with which Freud so famously began his investigations into the dynamic connections between psyche and soma, is by definition a “female disease,” not so

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much because it takes its name from the Greek word for womb, hyster (the organ which was in the nineteenth century supposed to “cause” this emotional disturbance), but because hysteria did occur mainly among women in turn-of-the-century Vienna, and because throughout the nineteenth century this mental illness, like many other nervous disorders, was thought to be caused by the female reproductive system, as if to elaborate upon Aristotle’s notion that femaleness was in and of itself a deformity.12 And, indeed, such diseases of maladjustment to the physical and social environment as anorexia and agoraphobia did and do strike a disproportionate number of women. Sufferers from anorexia—loss of appetite, self-starvation—are primarily adolescent girls. Sufferers from agoraphobia—fear of open or “public” places—are usually female, most frequently middle-aged housewives, as are sufferers from crippling rheumatoid arthritis.13 Such diseases are caused by patriarchal socialization in several ways. Most obviously, of course, any young girl, but especially a lively or imaginative one, is likely to experience her education in docility, submissiveness, self-lessness as in some sense sickening. To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health, since the human animal’s first and strongest urge is to his/her own survival, pleasure, assertion. In addition, each of the “subjects” in which a young girl is educated may be sickening in a specific way. Learning to become a beautiful object, the girl learns anxiety about—perhaps even loathing of—her own flesh. Peering obsessively into the real as well as metaphoric looking glasses that surround her, she desires literally to “reduce” her own body. In the nineteenth century, as we noted earlier, this desire to be beautiful and “frail” led to tight-lacing and vinegar-drinking. In our own era it has spawned innumerable diets and “controlled” fasts, as well as the extraordinary phenomenon of teenage anorexia.14 Similarly, it seems inevitable that women reared for, and conditioned to, lives of privacy, reticence, domesticity, might develop pathological fears of public places and unconfined spaces. Like the comb, stay-laces, and apple which the Queen in “Little Snow White” uses as weapons against her hated stepdaughter, such afflictions as anorexia and agoraphobia simply carry patriarchal definitions of “femininity” to absurd extremes, and thus function as essential or at least inescapable parodies of social prescriptions. In the nineteenth century, however, the complex of social prescriptions these diseases parody did not merely urge women to act in ways which would cause them to become ill; nineteenth-century culture seems to have actually admonished women to be ill. In other words, the “female diseases” from which Victorian women suffered were not always byproducts of their training in femininity; they were the goals of such training. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have shown, throughout much of the nineteenth century “Upper- and upper-middleclass women were [defined as] ‘sick’ [frail, ill]; working-class women were [defined as] ‘sickening’ [infectious, diseased].” Speaking of the “lady,” they go on to point out that “Society agreed that she was frail and sickly,” and consequently a “cult of female invalidism” developed in England and America. For the products of such a cult, it was, as Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi wrote in 1895, “considered natural and almost laudable to break down under all conceivable varieties of strain—a winter dissipation, a houseful of servants, a quarrel with a female friend, not to speak of more legitimate reasons. . . . Constantly considering their nerves, urged

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to consider them by well-intentioned but short-sighted advisors, [women] pretty soon become nothing but a bundle of nerves.”15 Given this socially conditioned epidemic of female illness, it is not surprising to find that the angel in the house of literature frequently suffered not just from fear and trembling but from literal and figurative sicknesses unto death. Although her hyperactive stepmother dances herself into the grave, after all, beautiful Snow White has just barely recovered from a catatonic trance in her glass coffin. And if we return to Goethe’s Makarie, the “good” woman of Wilhelm Meister’s Travels whom Hans Eichner has described as incarnating her author’s ideal of “contemplative purity,” we find that this “model of selflessness and of purity of heart . . . this embodiment of das Ewig-Weibliche, suffers from migraine headaches.”16 Implying ruthless self-suppression, does the “eternal feminine” necessarily imply illness? If so, we have found yet another meaning for Dickinson’s assertion that “Infection in the sentence breeds.” The despair we “inhale” even “at distances of centuries” may be the despair of a life like Makarie’s, a life that “has no story.” At the same time, however, the despair of the monster-woman is also real, undeniable, and infectious. The Queen’s mad tarantella is plainly unhealthy and metaphorically the result of too much storytelling. As the Romantic poets feared, too much imagination may be dangerous to anyone, male or female, but for women in particular patriarchal culture has always assumed mental exercises would have dire consequences. In 1645 John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, noted in his journal that Anne Hopkins “has fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books,” adding that “if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women . . . she had kept her wits.”17 And as Wendy Martin has noted: in the nineteenth century this fear of the intellectual woman became so intense that the phenomenon . . . was recorded in medical annals. A thinking woman was considered such a breach of nature that a Harvard doctor reported during his autopsy on a Radcliffe graduate he discovered that her uterus had shrivelled to the size of a pea.18

If, then, as Anne Sexton suggests (in a poem parts of which we have also used here as an epigraph), the red shoes passed furtively down from woman to woman are the shoes of art, the Queen’s dancing shoes, it is as sickening to be a Queen who wears them as it is to be an angelic Makarie who repudiates them. Several passages in Sexton’s verse express what we have defined as “anxiety of authorship” in the form of a feverish dread of the suicidal tarantella of female creativity: All those girls who wore red shoes, each boarded a train that would not stop. .....

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They tore off their ears like safety pins. Their arms fell off them and became hats. Their heads rolled off and sang down the street. And their feet—oh God, their feet in the market place— . . . the feet went on. The feet could not stop. ..... They could not listen. They could not stop. What they did was the death dance. What they did would do them in.

Certainly infection breeds in these sentences, and despair: female art, Sexton suggests, has a “hidden” but crucial tradition of uncontrollable madness. Perhaps it was her semi-conscious perception of this tradition that gave Sexton herself “a secret fear” of being “a reincarnation” of Edna Millay, whose reputation seemed based on romance. In a letter to DeWitt Snodgrass she confessed that she had “a fear of writing as a woman writes,” adding, “I wish I were a man—I would rather write the way a man writes.”19 After all, dancing the death dance, “all those girls/ who wore the red shoes” dismantle their own bodies, like anorexics renouncing the guilty weight of their female flesh. But if their arms, ears, and heads fall off, perhaps their wombs, too, will “shrivel” to “the size of a pea”? In this connection, a passage from Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle acts almost as a gloss on the conflict between creativity and “femininity” which Sexton’s violent imagery embodies (or dis-embodies). Significantly, the protagonist of Atwood’s novel is a writer of the sort of fiction that has recently been called “female gothic,” and even more significantly she too projects her anxieties of authorship into the fairy-tale metaphor of the red shoes. Stepping in glass, she sees blood on her feet, and suddenly feels that she has discovered: The real red shoes, the feet punished for dancing. You could dance, or you could have the love of a good man. But you were afraid to dance, because you had this unnatural fear that if you danced they’d cut your feet off so you wouldn’t be able to dance. . . . Finally you overcame your fear and danced, and they cut your feet off. The good man went away too, because you wanted to dance.20

Whether she is a passive angel or an active monster, in other words, the woman writer feels herself to be literally or figuratively crippled by the debilitating alternatives her culture offers her, and the crippling effects of her conditioning sometimes seem to “breed” like sentences of death in the bloody shoes she inherits from her literary foremothers. Surrounded as she is by images of disease, traditions of disease, and invitations both to disease and to dis-ease, it is no wonder that the woman writer has held many mirrors up to the discomforts of her own nature. As we shall see, the notion that “Infection in the sentence breeds” has been so central a truth for literary women that the great artistic achievements of nineteenth-century novelists and poets from Austen and Shelley to Dickinson and Barrett Browning are

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often both literally and figuratively concerned with disease, as if to emphasize the effort with which health and wholeness were won from the infectious “vapors” of despair and fragmentation. Rejecting the poisoned apples her culture offers her, the woman writer often becomes in some sense anorexic, resolutely closing her mouth on silence (since—in the words of Jane Austen’s Henry Tilney—“a woman’s only power is the power of refusal”21), even while she complains of starvation. Thus both Charlotte and Emily Brontë depict the travails of starved or starving anorexic heroines, while Emily Dickinson declares in one breath that she “had been hungry, all the Years,” and in another opts for “Sumptuous Destitution.” Similarly, Christina Rossetti represents her own anxiety of authorship in the split between one heroine who longs to “suck and suck” on goblin fruit and another who locks her lips fiercely together in a gesture of silent and passionate renunciation. In addition, many of these literary women become in one way or another agoraphobic. Trained to reticence, they fear the vertiginous openness of the literary marketplace and rationalize with Emily Dickinson that “Publication—is the Auction/ Of the Mind of Man” or, worse, punningly confess that “Creation seemed a mighty Crack—/ To make me visible.”22 As we shall also see, other diseases and dis-eases accompany the two classic symptoms of anorexia and agoraphobia. Claustrophobia, for instance, agoraphobia’s parallel and complementary opposite, is a disturbance we shall encounter again and again in women’s writing throughout the nineteenth century. Eye “troubles,” moreover, seem to abound in the lives and works of literary women, with Dickinson matter-of-factly noting that her eye got “put out,” George Eliot describing patriarchal Rome as “a disease of the retina,” Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh marrying blind men, Charlotte Brontë deliberately writing with her eyes closed, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge writing about “Blindness” that came because “Absolute and bright,/ The Sun’s rays smote me till they masked the Sun.”23 Finally, aphasia and amnesia—two illnesses which symbolically represent (and parody) the sort of intellectual incapacity patriarchal culture has traditionally required of women—appear and reappear in women’s writings in frankly stated or disguised forms. “Foolish” women characters in Jane Austen’s novels (Miss Bates in Emma, for instance) express Malapropish confusion about language, while Mary Shelley’s monster has to learn language from scratch and Emily Dickinson herself childishly questions the meanings of the most basic English words: “Will there really be a ‘Morning’?/ Is there such a thing as ‘Day’?”24 At the same time, many women writers manage to imply that the reason for such ignorance of language—as well as the reason for their deep sense of alienation and inescapable feeling of anomie—is that they have forgotten something. Deprived of the power that even their pens don’t seem to confer, these women resemble Doris Lessing’s heroines, who have to fight their internalization of patriarchal strictures for even a faint trace memory of what they might have become. “Where are the songs I used to know,/ Where are the notes I used to sing?” writes Christina Rossetti in “The Key-Note,” a poem whose title indicates its significance for her. “I have forgotten everything/ I used to know so long ago.”25 As if to make the same point, Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe conveniently “forgets” her own history and even, so it seems, the Christian name of one of the central characters in her story, while Brontë’s orphaned Jane Eyre seems to have lost

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(or symbolically “forgotten”) her family heritage. Similarly, too, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff “forgets” or is made to forget who and what he was; Mary Shelley’s monster is “born” without either a memory or a family history; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh is early separated from—and thus induced to “forget”—her “mother land” of Italy. As this last example suggests, however, what all these characters and their authors really fear they have forgotten is precisely that aspect of their lives which has been kept from them by patriarchal poetics: their matrilineal heritage of literary strength, their “female power” which, as Annie Gottlieb wrote, is important to them because of (not in spite of) their mothers. In order, then, not only to understand the ways in which “Infection in the sentence breeds” for women but also to learn how women have won through disease to artistic health we must begin by redefining Bloom’s seminal definitions of the revisionary “anxiety of influence.” In doing so, we will have to trace the difficult paths by which nineteenth-century women overcame their “anxiety of authorship,” repudiated debilitating patriarchal prescriptions, and recovered or remembered the lost foremothers who could help them find their distinctive female power. . . .

NOTES Epigraphs: Doctor on Patient (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), quoted in Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 219–20; The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Harper and Row, 1975; first published 1935), p. 104; J. 1261 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955: all subsequent references are to this edition); “The Red Shoes,” The Book of Folly (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), pp. 28–29. 1. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot of course considers these matters; in Mimesis Auerbach traces the ways in which the realist includes what has been previously excluded from art; and in The Sense of an Ending Frank Kermode shows how poets and novelists lay bare the literariness of their predecessors’ forms in order to explore the dissonance between fiction and reality. 2. J. Hillis Miller, “The Limits of Pluralism, III: The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry (Spring 1977): 446. 3. For a discussion of the woman writer and her place in Bloomian literary history, see Joanne Feit Diehl, “‘Come Slowly—Eden’: An Exploration of Women Poets and their Muse,” Signs 3, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 572–87. See also the responses to Diehl in Signs 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 188–96. 4. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. xiii. 5. Ibid., pp. 404–05. 6. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 90. 7. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, p. 402. 8. See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 9. Annie Gottlieb, “Feminists Look at Motherhood,” Mother Jones (November 1976): 53. 10. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958). 2: 475; 2: 518.

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11. See Jessie Bernard, “The Paradox of the Happy Marriage,” Pauline B. Bart, “Depression in Middle-Aged Women,” and Naomi Weisstein, “Psychology Constructs the Female,” all in Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, ed., Woman in Sexist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1971). See also Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Doubleday, 1972), and—for a summary of all these matters—Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1973). 12. In Hints on Insanity (1861) John Millar wrote that “Mental derangement frequently occurs in young females from Amenorrhoea, especially in those who have any strong hereditary predisposition to insanity,” adding that “an occasional warm hipbath or leeches to the pubis will . . . be followed by complete mental recovery.” In 1873, Henry Mauldsey wrote in Body and Mind that “the monthly activity of the ovaries . . . has a notable effect upon the mind and body; wherefore it may become an important cause of mental and physical derangement.” See especially the medical opinions of John Millar, Henry Maudsley, and Andrew Wynter in Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Vieda Skultans (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 230–35. 13. See Marlene Boskind-Lodahl, “Cinderella’s Stepsisters: A Feminist Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia,” Signs 2, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 342–56; Walter Blum, “The Thirteenth Guest,” (on agoraphobia), in California Living, The San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle (17 April 1977): 8–12; Joan Archart-Treichel, “Can Your Personality Kill You?” (on female rheumatoid arthritis, among other diseases), New York 10, no. 48 (28 November 1977): 45: “According to studies conducted in recent years, four out of five rheumatoid victims are women, and for good reason: The disease appears to arise in those unhappy with the traditional female-sex role.” 14. More recent discussions of the etiology and treatment of anorexia are offered in Hilde Bruch, M.D., The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), and in Salvador Minuchin, Bernice L. Rosman, and Lester Baker, Psychosomatic Families: Anorexia Nervosa in Context (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 15. Quoted by Ehrenreich and English, Complaints and Disorders, p. 19. 16. Eichner, “The Eternal Feminine,” Norton Critical Edition of Faust, p. 620. 17. John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. James Savage (Boston, 1826), 2: 216. 18. Wendy Martin, “Anne Bradstreet’s Poetry: A Study of Subversive Piety,” Shakespeare’s Sisters, ed. Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 19–31. 19. “The Uncensored Poet: Letters of Anne Sexton,” Ms. 6, no. 5 (November 1977): 53. 20. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), p. 335. 21. See Northanger Abbey, chapter 10: “You will allow, that in both [matrimony and dancing], man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal.” 22. See Dickinson, Poems, J. 579 (“I had been hungry, all the Years”), J. 709 (“Publication—is the Auction”), and J. 891 (“To my quick ear the Leaves—conferred”); see also Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market.” 23. See Dickinson, Poems, J. 327 (“Before I got my eye put out”), George Eliot, Middlemarch, book 2, chapter 20, and M. E. Coleridge, “Doubt,” in Poems by Mary E. Coleridge, p. 40. 24. See Dickinson, Poems, J. 101. 25. The Poetical works of Christina C. Rossetti, 2 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1909), 2: 11.

ANNETTE KOLODNY

DANCING THROUGH THE MINEFIELD some observations on the theory, practice, and politics of a feminist literary criticism (1980)



















Had anyone the prescience, ten years ago, to pose the question of defining a “feminist” literary criticism, she might have been told, in the wake of Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women,1 that it involved exposing the sexual stereotyping of women in both our literature and our literary criticism and, as well, demonstrating the inadequacy of established critical schools and methods to deal fairly or sensitively with works written by women. In broad outline, such a prediction would have stood well the test of time, and, in fact, Ellmann’s book continues to be widely read and to point us in useful directions. What could not have been anticipated in 1969, however, was the catalyzing force of an ideology that, for many of us, helped to bridge the gap between the world as we found it and the world as we wanted it to be. For those of us who studied literature, a previously unspoken sense of exclusion from authorship, and a painfully personal distress at discovering whores, bitches, muses, and heroines dead in childbirth where we had once hoped to discover ourselves, could—for the first time—begin to be understood as more than “a set of disconnected, unrealized private emotions.”2 With a renewed courage to make public our otherwise private discontents, what had once been “felt individually as personal insecurity” came at last to be “viewed collectively as structural inconsistency”3 within the very disciplines we studied. Following unflinchingly the full implications of Ellmann’s percipient observations, and emboldened by the liberating energy of feminist ideology—in all its various forms and guises—feminist criticism very quickly moved beyond merely “expos[ing] sexism in one work of literature after another,”4 and promised, instead, that we might at last “begin to record new choices in a new literary history.”5 So powerful was that impulse that we experienced it, along with Adrienne Rich, as much “more than a chapter in cultural history”: it became, rather, “an act of survival.”6 What was at stake was not so much literature or criticism as such, but the historical, social, and ethical consequences of women’s participation in, or exclusion from, either enterprise. The pace of inquiry these last ten years has been fast and furious—especially after Kate Millett’s 1970 analysis of the sexual politics of literature7 added a note of urgency to what had earlier been Ellmann’s sardonic anger—while the diversity of that inquiry easily outstripped all efforts to define feminist literary criticism

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as either a coherent system or a unified set of methodologies. Under its wide umbrella, everything has been thrown into question: our established canons, our aesthetic criteria, our interpretive strategies, our reading habits, and, most of all, ourselves as critics and as teachers. To delineate its full scope would require nothing less than a book—a book that would be outdated even as it was being composed. For the sake of brevity, therefore, let me attempt only a summary outline. Perhaps the most obvious success of this new scholarship has been the return to circulation of previously lost or otherwise ignored works by women writers. Following fast upon the initial success of the Feminist Press in reissuing gems such as Rebecca Harding Davis’s 1861 novella, Life in the Iron Mills, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1972 and 1973, respectively,8 commercial trade and reprint houses vied with one another in the reprinting of anthologies of lost texts and, in some cases, in the reprinting of whole series. For those of us in American literature especially, the phenomenon promised a radical reshaping of our concepts of literary history and, at the very least, a new chapter in understanding the development of women’s literary traditions. So commercially successful were these reprintings, and so attuned were the reprint houses to the political attitudes of the audiences for which they were offered, that many of us found ourselves wooed to compose critical introductions, which would find in the pages of nineteenth-century domestic and sentimental fictions, some signs of either muted rebellions or overt radicalism, in anticipation of the current wave of “new feminism.” In rereading with our students these previously lost works, we inevitably raised perplexing questions as to the reasons for their disappearance from the canons of “major works,” and we worried over the aesthetic and critical criteria by which they had been accorded diminished status. This increased availability of works by women writers led, of course, to an increased interest in what elements, if any, might comprise some sort of unity or connection among them. The possibility that women had developed either a unique, or at least a related tradition of their own, especially intrigued those of us who specialized in one national literature or another, or in historical periods. Nina Baym’s recent Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 9 demonstrates the Americanists’ penchant for examining what were once the “best-sellers” of their day, the ranks of the popular fiction writers, among which women took a dominant place throughout the nineteenth century, while the feminist studies of British literature emphasized instead the wealth of women writers who have been regarded as worthy of canonization. Not so much building upon one another’s work as clarifying, successively, the parameters of the questions to be posed, Sydney Janet Kaplan, Ellen Moers, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and Elaine Showalter, among many others, concentrated their energies on delineating an internally consistent “body of work” by women that might stand as a female countertradition. For Kaplan, in 1975, this entailed examining women writers’ various attempts to portray feminine consciousness and selfconsciousness, not as a psychological category, but as a stylistic or rhetorical device.10 That same year, arguing essentially that literature publicizes the private, Spacks placed her consideration of a “female imagination” within social and historical frames, to conclude that, “for readily discernible historical reasons women have characteristically concerned themselves with matters more or less peripheral

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to male concerns,” and she attributed to this fact an inevitable difference in the literary emphases and subject matters of female and male writers.11 The next year, Moers’s Literary Women: The Great Writers focused on the pathways of literary influence that linked the English novel in the hands of women.12 And, finally, in 1977, Showalter took up the matter of a “female literary tradition in the English novel from the generation of the Brontës to the present day” by arguing that, because women in general constitute a kind of “subculture within the framework of a larger society,” the work of women writers, in particular, would thereby demonstrate a unity of “values, conventions, experiences, and behaviors impinging on each individual” as she found her sources of “self-expression relative to a dominant [and, by implication, male] society.”13 At the same time that women writers were being reconsidered and reread, male writers were similarly subjected to a new feminist scrutiny. The continuing result—to put ten years of difficult analysis into a single sentence—has been nothing less than an acute attentiveness to the ways in which certain power relations—usually those in which males wield various forms of influence over females—are inscribed in the texts (both literary and critical), that we have inherited, not merely as subject matter, but as the unquestioned, often unacknowledged given of the culture. Even more important than the new interpretations of individual texts are the probings into the consequences (for women) of the conventions that inform those texts. For example, in surveying selected nineteenthand early twentieth-century British novels which employ what she calls “the two suitors convention,” Jean E. Kennard sought to understand why and how the structural demands of the convention, even in the hands of women writers, inevitably work to imply “the inferiority and necessary subordination of women.” Her 1978 study, Victims of Convention, points out that the symbolic nature of the marriage which conventionally concludes such novels “indicates the adjustment of the protagonist to society’s value, a condition which is equated with her maturity.” Kennard’s concern, however, is with the fact that the structural demands of the form too often sacrifice precisely those “virtues of independence and individuality,” or, in other words, the very “qualities we have been invited to admire in” the heroines.14 Kennard appropriately cautions us against drawing from her work any simplistically reductive thesis about the mimetic relations between art and life. Yet her approach nonetheless suggests that what is important about a fiction is not whether it ends in a death or a marriage, but what the symbolic demands of that particular conventional ending imply about the values and beliefs of the world that engendered it. Her work thus participates in a growing emphasis in feminist literary study on the fact of literature as a social institution, embedded not only within its own literary traditions, but also within the particular physical and mental artifacts of the society from which it comes. Adumbrating Millett’s 1970 decision to anchor her “literary reflections” to a preceding analysis of the historical, social, and economic contexts of sexual politics,15 more recent work—most notably Lillian Robinson’s—begins with the premise that the process of artistic creation “consists not of ghostly happenings in the head but of a matching of the states and processes of symbolic models against the states and processes of the wider world.”16 The power relations inscribed in the form of conventions within our literary inheritance, these critics argue, reify the encodings of those same power

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relations in the culture at large. And the critical examination of rhetorical codes becomes, in their hands, the pursuit of ideological codes, because both embody either value systems or the dialectic of competition between value systems. More often than not, these critics also insist upon examining not only the mirroring of life in art, but also the normative impact of art on life. Addressing herself to the popular art available to working women, for example, Robinson is interested in understanding not only “the forms it uses,” but, more importantly, “the myths it creates, the influence it exerts.” “The way art helps people to order, interpret, mythologize, or dispose of their own experience,” she declares, may be “complex and often ambiguous, but it is not impossible to define.”17 Whether its focus be upon the material or the imaginative contexts of literary invention; single texts or entire canons; the relations between authors, genres, or historical circumstances; lost authors or well-known names, the variety and diversity of all feminist literary criticism finally coheres in its stance of almost defensive rereading. What Adrienne Rich had earlier called “re-vision,” that is, “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction,”18 took on a more actively self-protective coloration in 1978, when Judith Fetterley called upon the woman reader to learn to “resist” the sexist designs a text might make upon her—asking her to identify against herself, so to speak, by manipulating her sympathies on behalf of male heroes, but against female shrew or bitch characters.19 Underpinning a great deal of this critical rereading has been the not-unexpected alliance between feminist literary study and feminist studies in linguistics and language-acquisition. Tillie Olsen’s commonsense observation of the danger of “perpetuating—by continued usage—entrenched, centuries-old oppressive power realities, early-on incorporated into language,”20 has been given substantive analysis in the writings of feminists who study “language as a symbolic system closely tied to a patriarchal social structure.” Taken together, their work demonstrates “the importance of language in establishing, reflecting, and maintaining an asymmetrical relationship between women and men.”21 To consider what this implies for the fate of women who essay the craft of language is to ascertain, perhaps for the first time, the real dilemma of the poet who finds her most cherished private experience “hedged by taboos, mined with false-namings.”22 It also explains the dilemma of the male reader who, in opening the pages of a woman’s book, finds himself entering a strange and unfamiliar world of symbolic significance. For if, as Nelly Furman insists, neither language use nor language acquisition are “gender-neutral,” but are, instead, “imbued with our sex-inflected cultural values”;23 and if, additionally, reading is a process of “sorting out the structures of signification,”24 in any text, then male readers who find themselves outside of and unfamiliar with the symbolic systems that constitute female experience in women’s writings, will necessarily dismiss those systems as undecipherable, meaningless, or trivial. And male professors will find no reason to include such works in the canons of “major authors.” At the same time, women writers, coming into a tradition of literary language and conventional forms already appropriated, for centuries, to the purposes of male expression, will be forced virtually to “wrestle” with that language in an effort “to remake it as a language adequate to our conceptual processes.”25 To all of this, feminists concerned with the politics of language and style have been acutely attentive. “Lan-

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guage conceals an invincible adversary,” observes French critic Hélène Cixous, “because it’s the language of men and their grammar.”26 But equally insistent, as in the work of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, has been the understanding of the need for all readers—male and female alike—to learn to penetrate the otherwise unfamiliar universes of symbolic action that comprise women’s writings, past and present.27 To have attempted so many difficult questions and to have accomplished so much—even acknowledging the inevitable false starts, overlapping, and repetition—in so short a time, should certainly have secured feminist literary criticism an honored berth on that ongoing intellectual journey which we loosely term, in academia, “critical analysis.” Instead of being welcomed onto the train, however, we’ve been forced to negotiate a minefield. The very energy and diversity of our enterprise have rendered us vulnerable to attack on the grounds that we lack both definition and coherence; while our particular attentiveness to the ways in which literature encodes and disseminates cultural value systems calls down upon us imprecations echoing those heaped upon the Marxist critics of an earlier generation. If we are scholars dedicated to rediscovering a lost body of writings by women, then our finds are questioned on aesthetic grounds. And if we are critics, determined to practice revisionist readings, it is claimed that our focus is too narrow, and our results are only distortions or, worse still, polemical misreadings. The very vehemence of the outcry, coupled with our total dismissal in some quarters,28 suggests not our deficiencies, however, but the potential magnitude of our challenge. For what we are asking be scrutinized are nothing less than shared cultural assumptions so deeply rooted and so long ingrained that, for the most part, our critical colleagues have ceased to recognize them as such. In other words, what is really being bewailed in the claims that we distort texts or threaten the disappearance of the great Western literary tradition itself29 is not so much the disappearance of either text or tradition but, instead, the eclipse of that particular form of the text, and that particular shape of the canon, which previously reified male readers’ sense of power and significance in the world. Analogously, by asking whether, as readers, we ought to be “really satisfied by the marriage of Dorothea Brooke to Will Ladislaw? of Shirley Keeldar to Louis Moore?” or whether, as Kennard suggests, we must reckon with the ways in which “the qualities we have been invited to admire in these heroines [have] been sacrificed to structural neatness,”30 is to raise difficult and profoundly perplexing questions about the ethical implications of our otherwise unquestioned aesthetic pleasures. It is, after all, an imposition of high order to ask the viewer to attend to Ophelia’s sufferings in a scene where, before, he had always so comfortably kept his eye fixed firmly on Hamlet. To understand all this, then, as the real nature of the challenge we have offered and, in consequence, as the motivation for the often overt hostility we’ve aroused, should help us learn to negotiate the minefield, if not with grace, then with at least a clearer comprehension of its underlying patterns. The ways in which objections to our work are usually posed, of course, serve to obscure their deeper motivations. But this may, in part, be due to our own reticence at taking full responsibility for the truly radicalizing premises that lie at the theoretical core of all we have so far accomplished. It may be time, therefore,

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to redirect discussion, forcing our adversaries to deal with the substantive issues and pushing ourselves into a clearer articulation of what, in fact, we are about. Up until now, I fear, we have only piecemeal dealt with the difficulties inherent in challenging the authority of established canons and then justifying the excellence of women’s traditions, sometimes in accord with standards to which they have no intrinsic relation. At the very point at which we must perforce enter the discourse—that is, claiming excellence or importance for our “finds”—all discussion has already, we discover, long ago been closed. “If Kate Chopin were really worth reading,” an Oxford-trained colleague once assured me, “she’d have lasted—like Shakespeare”; and he then proceeded to vote against the English department’s crediting a women’s studies seminar I was offering in American women writers. The canon, for him, conferred excellence; Chopin’s exclusion demonstrated only her lesser worth. As far as he was concerned, I could no more justify giving English department credit for the study of Chopin than I could dare publicly to question Shakespeare’s genius. Through hindsight, I’ve now come to view that discussion as not only having posed fruitless oppositions, but also as having entirely evaded the much more profound problem lurking just beneath the surface of our disagreement. That is, that the fact of canonization puts any work beyond questions of establishing its merit and, instead, invites students to offer only increasingly more ingenious readings and interpretations, the purpose of which is to validate the greatness already imputed by canonization. Had I only understood it for what it was then, into this circular and selfserving set of assumptions I might have interjected some statement of my right to question why any text is revered and my need to know what it tells us about “how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, [and] how our language has trapped as well as liberated us.”31 The very fact of our critical training within the strictures imposed by an established canon of major works and authors, however, repeatedly deflects us from such questions. Instead, we find ourselves endlessly responding to the riposte that the overwhelmingly male presence among canonical authors was only an accident of history—and never intentionally sexist—coupled with claims to the “obvious” aesthetic merit of those canonized texts. It is, as I say, a fruitless exchange, serving more to obscure than to expose the territory being protected and dragging us, again and again, through the minefield. It is my contention that current hostilities might be transformed into a true dialogue with our critics if we at last made explicit what appear, to this observer, to constitute the three crucial propositions to which our special interests inevitably give rise. They are, moreover, propositions which, if handled with care and intelligence, could breathe new life into now moribund areas of our profession: (1) Literary history (and with that, the historicity of literature) is a fiction; (2) insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms; and, finally, (3) that since the grounds upon which we assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable, or universal, we must reexamine not only our aesthetics but, as well, the inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical methods which (in part) shape our aesthetic responses. For the sake of brevity, I won’t attempt to offer the full arguments for each but, rather, only sufficient

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elaboration to demonstrate what I see as their intrinsic relation to the potential scope of and present challenge implied by feminist literary study. 1. Literary history (and, with that, the historicity of literature) is a fiction. To begin with, an established canon functions as a model by which to chart the continuities and discontinuities, as well as the influences upon and the interconnections between works, genres, and authors. That model we tend to forget, however, is of our own making. It will take a very different shape, and explain its inclusions and exclusions in very different ways, if the reigning critical ideology believes that new literary forms result from some kind of ongoing internal dialectic within preexisting styles and traditions or if, by contrast, the ideology declares that literary change is dependent upon societal development and thereby determined by upheavals in the social and economic organization of the culture at large.32 Indeed, whenever in the previous century of English and American literary scholarship one alternative replaced the other, we saw dramatic alterations in canonical “wisdom.” This suggests, then, that our sense of a “literary history” and, by extension, our confidence in a “historical” canon, is rooted not so much in any definitive understanding of the past, as it is in our need to call up and utilize the past on behalf of a better understanding of the present. Thus, to paraphrase David Couzens Hoy, it becomes “necessary to point out that the understanding of art and literature is such an essential aspect of the present’s self-understanding that this self-understanding conditions what even gets taken” as comprising that artistic and literary past. To quote Hoy fully, “this continual reinterpretation of the past goes hand in hand with the continual reinterpretation by the present of itself.”33 In our own time, uncertain as to which, if any, model truly accounts for our canonical choices or accurately explains literary history, and pressured further by the feminists’ call for some justification of the criteria by which women’s writings were largely excluded from both that canon and history, we suffer what Harold Bloom has called “a remarkable dimming” of “our mutual sense of canonical standards.”34 Into this apparent impasse, feminist literary theorists implicitly introduce the observation that our choices and evaluations of current literature have the effect either of solidifying or of reshaping our sense of the past. The authority of any established canon, after all, is reified by our perception that current work seems to grow, almost inevitably, out of it (even in opposition or rebellion) and is called into question when what we read appears to have little or no relation to what we recognize as coming before. So, were the larger critical community to begin to seriously attend to the recent outpouring of fine literature by women, this would surely be accompanied by a concomitant researching of the past, by literary historians, in order to account for the present phenomenon. In that process, literary history would itself be altered: works by seventeenth-, eighteenth-, or nineteenth-century women, to which we had not previously attended, might be given new importance as “precursors” or as prior influences upon present-day authors; while selected male writers might also be granted new prominence as figures whom the women today, or even yesterday, needed to reject. I am arguing, in other words, that the choices we make in the present inevitably alter our sense of the past that led to them. Related to this is the feminist challenge to that patently mendacious critical fallacy that we read the “classics” in order to reconstruct the past “the way it

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really was,” and that we read Shakespeare and Milton in order to apprehend the meanings that they intended. Short of time machines or miraculous resurrections, there is simply no way to know, precisely or surely, what “really was,” what Homer intended when he sang, or Milton when he dictated. Critics more acute than I have already pointed up the impossibility of grounding a reading in the imputation of authorial intention because the further removed the author is from us, so too must be her or his systems of knowledge and belief, points of view, and structures of vision (artistic and otherwise).35 (I omit here the difficulty of finally either proving or disproving the imputation of intentionality because, inescapably, the only appropriate authority is unavailable: deceased.) What we have really come to mean when we speak of competence in reading historical texts, therefore, is the ability to recognize literary conventions which have survived through time—so as to remain operational in the mind of the reader—and, where these are lacking, the ability to translate (or perhaps transform?) the text’s ciphers into more current and recognizable shapes. But we never really reconstruct the past in its own terms. What we gain when we read the “classics,” then, is neither Homer’s Greece nor George Eliot’s England as they knew it but, rather, an approximation of an already fictively imputed past made available, through our interpretive strategies, for present concerns. Only by understanding this can we put to rest that recurrent delusion that the “continuing relevance” of the classics serves as “testimony to perennial features of human experience.”36 The only “perennial feature” to which our ability to read and reread texts written in previous centuries testifies is our inventiveness—in the sense that all of literary history is a fiction which we daily re-create as we reread it. What distinguishes feminists in this regard is their desire to alter and extend what we take as historically relevant from out of that vast storehouse of our literary inheritance and, further, feminists’ recognition of the storehouse for what it really is: a resource for remodeling our literary history, past, present, and future. 2. Insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms. To pursue the logical consequences of the first proposition leads, however uncomfortably, to the conclusion that we appropriate meaning from a text according to what we need (or desire) or, in other words, according to the critical assumptions or predispositions (conscious or not) that we bring to it. And we appropriate different meanings, or report different gleanings, at different times—even from the same text—according to our changed assumptions, circumstances, and requirements. This, in essence, constitutes the heart of the second proposition. For insofar as literature is itself a social institution, so, too, reading is a highly socialized—or learned—activity. What makes it so exciting, of course, is that it can be constantly relearned and refined, so as to provide either an individual or an entire reading community, over time, with infinite variations of the same text. It can provide that, but, I must add, too often it does not. Frequently our reading habits become fixed, so that each successive reading experience functions, in effect, normatively, with one particular kind of novel stylizing our expectations of those to follow, the stylistic devices of any favorite author (or group of authors) alerting us to the presence or absence of those devices in the works of others, and so on. “Once one has read his first poem,” Murray Krieger has observed, “he turns to his second and to the others that will follow thereafter with an increasing series of preconceptions about the sort of activity in which he is indulging. In matters of

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literary experience, as in other experiences,” Krieger concludes, “one is a virgin but once.”37 For most readers, this is a fairly unconscious process, and not unnaturally, what we are taught to read well and with pleasure, when we are young, predisposes us to certain specific kinds of adult reading tastes. For the professional literary critic, the process may be no different, but it is at least more conscious. Graduate schools, at their best, are training grounds for competing interpretive paradigms or reading techniques: affective stylistics, structuralism, and semiotic analysis, to name only a few of the more recent entries. The delight we learn to take in the mastery of these interpretive strategies is then often mistakenly construed as our delight in reading specific texts, especially in the case of works that would otherwise be unavailable or even offensive to us. In my own graduate career, for example, with superb teachers to guide me, I learned to take great pleasure in Paradise Lost, even though as both a Jew and a feminist, I can subscribe neither to its theology nor to its hierarchy of sexual valuation. If, within its own terms (as I have been taught to understand them), the text manipulates my sensibilities and moves me to pleasure—as I will affirm it does—then, at least in part, that must be because, in spite of my real-world alienation from many of its basic tenets, I have been able to enter that text through interpretive strategies which allow me to displace less comfortable observations with others to which I have been taught pleasurably to attend. Though some of my teachers may have called this process “learning to read the text properly,” I have now come to see it as learning to effectively manipulate the critical strategies which they taught me so well. Knowing, for example, the poem’s debt to epic conventions, I am able to discover in it echoes and reworkings of both lines and situations from Virgil and Homer; placing it within the ongoing Christian debate between Good and Evil, I comprehend both the philosophic and the stylistic significance of Satan’s ornate rhetoric as compared to God’s majestic simplicity in Book III. But, in each case, an interpretive model, already assumed, had guided my discovery of the evidence for it.38 When we consider the implications of these observations for the processes of canon formation and for the assignment of aesthetic value, we find ourselves locked in a chicken-and-egg dilemma, unable easily to distinguish as primary the importance of what we read as opposed to how we have learned to read it. For, simply put, we read well, and with pleasure, what we already know how to read; and what we know how to read is to a large extent dependent upon what we have already read (works from which we’ve developed our expectations and learned our interpretive strategies). What we then choose to read—and, by extension, teach and thereby “canonize”—usually follows upon our previous reading. Radical breaks are tiring, demanding, uncomfortable, and sometimes wholly beyond our comprehension. Though the argument is not usually couched in precisely these terms, a considerable segment of the most recent feminist rereadings of women writers allows the conclusion that, where those authors have dropped out of sight, the reason may be due not to any lack of merit in the work but, instead, to an incapacity of predominantly male readers to properly interpret and appreciate women’s texts—due, in large part, to a lack of prior acquaintance. The fictions which women compose about the worlds they inhabit may owe a debt to prior,

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influential works by other women or, simply enough, to the daily experience of the writer herself or, more usually, to some combination of the two. The reader coming upon such fiction, with knowledge of neither its informing literary traditions nor its real-world contexts, will thereby find himself hard-pressed, though he may recognize the words on the page, to competently decipher its intended meanings. And this is what makes the recent studies by Spacks, Moers, Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, and others so crucial. For, by attempting to delineate the connections and interrelations that make for a female literary tradition, they provide us invaluable aids for recognizing and understanding the unique literary traditions and sex-related contexts out of which women write. The (usually male) reader who, both by experience and by reading, has never made acquaintance with those contexts—historically, the lying-in room, the parlor, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundry, and so on—will necessarily lack the capacity to fully interpret the dialogue or action embedded therein; for, as every good novelist knows, the meaning of any character’s action or statement is inescapably a function of the specific situation in which it is embedded.39 Virginia Woolf therefore quite properly anticipated the male reader’s disposition to write off what he could not understand, abandoning women’s writings as offering “not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental because it differs from his own.” In her 1929 essay on “Women and Fiction,” Woolf grappled most obviously with the ways in which male writers and male subject matter had already preempted the language of literature. Yet she was also tacitly commenting on the problem of (male) audience and conventional reading expectations when she speculated that the woman writer might well “find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values [in literature]—to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important.”40 “The ‘competence’ necessary for understanding [a] literary message . . . depends upon a great number of codices,” after all; as Cesare Segre has pointed out, to be competent, a reader must either share or at least be familiar with, “in addition to the code language . . . the codes of custom, of society, and of conceptions of the world”41 (what Woolf meant by “values”). Males ignorant of women’s “values” or conceptions of the world will necessarily, thereby, be poor readers of works that in any sense recapitulate their codes. The problem is further exacerbated when the language of the literary text is largely dependent upon figuration. For it can be argued, as Ted Cohen has shown, that while “in general, and with some obvious qualifications . . . all literal use of language is accessible to all whose language it is . . . figurative use can be inaccessible to all but those who share information about one another’s knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and attitudes.”42 There was nothing fortuitous, for example, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s decision to situate the progressive mental breakdown and increasing incapacity of the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in an upstairs room that had once served as a nursery (with barred windows, no less). But the reader unacquainted with the ways in which women traditionally inhabited a household might not have taken the initial description of the setting as semantically relevant; and the progressive infantilization of the adult protagonist would thereby lose some of its symbolic implications. Analogously, the contemporary poet who declares, along with Adrienne Rich, the need for “a whole new poetry beginning here” is acknowledging that the materials available for symbolization

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and figuration from women’s contexts will necessarily differ from those that men have traditionally utilized: Vision begins to happen in such a life as if a woman quietly walked away from the argument and jargon in a room and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps, pulling the tenets of a life together with no mere will to mastery, only care for the many-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself.43

What, then, is the fate of the woman writer whose competent reading community is composed only of members of her own sex? And what, then, the response of the male critic who, on first looking into Virginia Woolf or Doris Lessing, finds all of the interpretive strategies at his command inadequate to a full and pleasurable deciphering of their pages? Historically, the result has been the diminished status of women’s products and their consequent absence from major canons. Nowadays, however, by pointing out that the act of “interpreting language is no more sexually neutral than language use or the language system itself,” feminist students of language, like Nelly Furman, help us better understand the crucial linkage between our gender and our interpretive, or reading, strategies. Insisting upon “the contribution of the . . . reader [in] the active attribution of significance to formal signifiers,”44 Furman and others promise to shake us all—female and male alike—out of our canonized and conventional aesthetic assumptions. 3. Since the grounds upon which we assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable, or universal, we must reexamine not only our aesthetics but, as well, the inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical methods which (in part) shape our aesthetic responses. I am, on the one hand, arguing that men will be better readers, or appreciators, of women’s books when they have read more of them (as women have always been taught to become astute readers of men’s texts). On the other hand, it will be noted, the emphasis of my remarks shifts the act of critical judgment from assigning aesthetic valuations to texts and directs it, instead, to ascertaining the adequacy of any interpretive paradigm to a full reading of both female and male writing. My third proposition—and, I admit, perhaps the most controversial—thus calls into question that recurrent tendency in criticism to establish norms for the evaluation of literary works when we might better serve the cause of literature by developing standards for evaluating the adequacy of our critical methods.45 This does not mean that I wish to discard aesthetic valuation. The choice, as I see it, is not between retaining or discarding aesthetic values; rather, the choice is between having some awareness of what constitutes (at least in part) the bases of our aesthetic responses and going without such an awareness. For it is my view that insofar as aesthetic responsiveness continues to be an integral aspect of our human response system—in part spontaneous, in part learned and educated—we will inevitably develop theories to help explain, formalize, or even initiate those responses. In challenging the adequacy of received critical opinion or the imputed excellence

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of established canons, feminist literary critics are essentially seeking to discover how aesthetic value is assigned in the first place, where it resides (in the text or in the reader), and, most importantly, what validity may really be claimed by our aesthetic “judgments.” What ends do those judgments serve, the feminist asks; and what conceptions of the world or ideological stances do they (even if unwittingly) help to perpetuate? In so doing, she points out, among other things, that any response labeled “aesthetic” may as easily designate some immediately experienced moment or event as it may designate a species of nostalgia, a yearning for the components of a simpler past, when the world seemed known or at least understandable. Thus the value accorded an opera or a Shakespeare play may well reside in the viewer’s immediate viewing pleasure, or it may reside in the play’s nostalgic evocation of a once-comprehensible and ordered world. At the same time, the feminist confronts, for example, the reader who simply cannot entertain the possibility that women’s worlds are symbolically rich, the reader who, like the male characters in Susan Glaspell’s 1917 short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” has already assumed the innate “insignificance of kitchen things.”46 Such a reader, she knows, will prove himself unable to assign significance to fictions that attend to “kitchen things” and will, instead, judge such fictions as trivial and as aesthetically wanting. For her to take useful issue with such a reader, she must make clear that what appears to be a dispute about aesthetic merit is, in reality, a dispute about the contexts of judgment; and what is at issue, then, is the adequacy of the prior assumptions and reading habits brought to bear on the text. To put it bluntly: we have had enough pronouncements of aesthetic valuation for a time; it is now our task to evaluate the imputed norms and normative reading patterns that, in part, led to those pronouncements. By and large, I think I’ve made my point. Only to clarify it do I add this coda: when feminists turn their attention to the works of male authors which have traditionally been accorded high aesthetic value and, where warranted, follow Olsen’s advice that we assert our “right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades,”47 such statements do not necessarily mean that we will end up with a diminished canon. To question the source of the aesthetic pleasures we’ve gained from reading Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and so on, does not imply that we must deny those pleasures. It means only that aesthetic response is once more invested with epistemological, ethical, and moral concerns. It means, in other words, that readings of Paradise Lost which analyze its complex hierarchal structures but fail to note the implications of gender within that hierarchy; or which insist upon the inherent (or even inspired) perfection of Milton’s figurative language but fail to note the consequences, for Eve, of her specifically gendermarked weakness, which, like the flowers to which she attends, requires “propping up”; or which concentrate on the poem’s thematic reworking of classical notions of martial and epic prowess into Christian (moral) heroism but fail to note that Eve is stylistically edited out of that process—all such readings, however useful, will no longer be deemed wholly adequate. The pleasures we had earlier learned to take in the poem will not be diminished thereby, but they will become part of an altered reading attentiveness. These three propositions I believe to be at the theoretical core of most current feminist literary criticism, whether acknowledged as such or not. If I am correct

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in this, then that criticism represents more than a profoundly skeptical stance toward all other preexisting and contemporaneous schools and methods, and more than an impassioned demand that the variety and variability of women’s literary expression be taken into full account, rather than written off as caprice and exception, the irregularity in an otherwise regular design. It represents that locus in literary study where, in unceasing effort, female self-consciousness turns in upon itself, attempting to grasp the deepest conditions of its own unique and multiplicitous realities, in the hope, eventually, of altering the very forms through which the culture perceives, expresses, and knows itself. For, if what the larger women’s movement looks for in the future is a transformation of the structures of primarily male power which now order our society, then the feminist literary critic demands that we understand the ways in which those structures have been—and continue to be—reified by our literature and by our literary criticism. Thus, along with other “radical” critics and critical schools, though our focus remains the power of the word to both structure and mirror human experience, our overriding commitment is to a radical alteration—an improvement, we hope—in the nature of that experience. What distinguishes our work from those similarly oriented “social consciousness” critiques, it is said, is its lack of systematic coherence. Pitted against, for example, psychoanalytic or Marxist readings, which owe a decisive share of their persuasiveness to their apparent internal consistency as a system, the aggregate of feminist literary criticism appears woefully deficient in system, and painfully lacking in program. It is, in fact, from all quarters, the most telling defect alleged against us, the most explosive threat in the minefield. And my own earlier observation that, as of 1976, feminist literary criticism appeared “more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation,” has been taken by some as an indictment, by others as a statement of impatience. Neither was intended. I felt then, as I do now, that this would “prove both its strength and its weakness,”48 in the sense that the apparent disarray would leave us vulnerable to the kind of objection I’ve just alluded to; while the fact of our diversity would finally place us securely where, all along, we should have been: camped out, on the far side of the minefield, with the other pluralists and pluralisms. In our heart of hearts, of course, most critics are really structuralists (whether or not they accept the label) because what we are seeking are patterns (or structures) that can order and explain the otherwise inchoate; thus, we invent, or believe we discover, relational patternings in the texts we read which promise transcendence from difficulty and perplexity to clarity and coherence. But, as I’ve tried to argue in these pages, to the imputed “truth” or “accuracy” of these findings, the feminist must oppose the painfully obvious truism that what is attended to in a literary work, and hence what is reported about it, is often determined not so much by the work itself as by the critical technique or aesthetic criteria through which it is filtered or, rather, read and decoded. All the feminist is asserting, then, is her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significances from these same texts; and, at the same time, her right to choose which features of a text she takes as relevant because she is, after all, asking new and different questions of it. In the process, she claims neither definitiveness nor structural completeness for her different readings and reading systems, but only

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their usefulness in recognizing the particular achievements of woman-as-author and their applicability in conscientiously decoding woman-as-sign. That these alternate foci of critical attentiveness will render alternate readings or interpretations of the same text—even among feminists—should be no cause for alarm. Such developments illustrate only the pluralist contention that, “in approaching a text of any complexity . . . the reader must choose to emphasize certain aspects which seem to him crucial” and that, “in fact, the variety of readings which we have for many works is a function of the selection of crucial aspects made by the variety of readers.” Robert Scholes, from whom I’ve been quoting, goes so far as to assert that “there is no single ‘right’ reading for any complex literary work,” and, following the Russian formalist school, he observes that “we do not speak of readings that are simply true or false, but of readings that are more or less rich, strategies that are more or less appropriate.”49 Because those who share the term “feminist” nonetheless practice a diversity of critical strategies, leading, in some cases, to quite different readings, we must acknowledge among ourselves that sister critics, “having chosen to tell a different story, may in their interpretation identify different aspects of the meanings conveyed by the same passage.”50 Adopting a “pluralist” label does not mean, however, that we cease to disagree; it means only that we entertain the possibility that different readings, even of the same text, may be differently useful, even illuminating, within different contexts of inquiry. It means, in effect, that we enter a dialectical process of examining, testing, even trying out the contexts—be they prior critical assumptions or explicitly stated ideological stances (or some combination of the two)—that led to the disparate readings. Not all will be equally acceptable to every one of us, of course, and even those prior assumptions or ideologies that are acceptable may call for further refinement and/or clarification. But, at the very least, because we will have grappled with the assumptions that led to it, we will be better able to articulate why we find a particular reading or interpretation adequate or inadequate. This kind of dialectical process, moreover, not only makes us more fully aware of what criticism is, and how it functions; it also gives us access to its future possibilities, making us conscious, as R. P. Blackmur put it, “of what we have done,” “of what can be done next, or done again,”51 or, I would add, of what can be done differently. To put it still another way: just because we will no longer tolerate the specifically sexist omissions and oversights of earlier critical schools and methods does not mean that, in their stead, we must establish our own “party line.” In my view, our purpose is not and should not be the formulation of any single reading method or potentially procrustean set of critical procedures nor, even less, the generation of prescriptive categories for some dreamed-of nonsexist literary canon.52 Instead, as I see it, our task is to initiate nothing less than a playful pluralism responsive to the possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods, but captive of none, recognizing that the many tools needed for our analysis will necessarily be largely inherited and only partly of our own making. Only by employing a plurality of methods will we protect ourselves from the temptation of so oversimplifying any text—and especially those particularly offensive to us—that we render ourselves unresponsive to what Scholes has called “its various systems of meaning and their interaction.”53 Any text we deem worthy of our critical attention is usually, after all, a locus of many and varied kinds of (personal, thematic, stylistic, structural, rhetorical, etc.) relationships. So, whether we tend to treat

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a text as a mimesis, in which words are taken to be re-creating or representing viable worlds; or whether we prefer to treat a text as a kind of equation of communication, in which decipherable messages are passed from writers to readers; and whether we locate meaning as inherent in the text, the act of reading, or in some collaboration between reader and text—whatever our predilection, let us not generate from it a straitjacket that limits the scope of possible analysis. Rather, let us generate an ongoing dialogue of competing potential possibilities—among feminists and, as well, between feminist and nonfeminist critics. The difficulty of what I describe does not escape me. The very idea of pluralism seems to threaten a kind of chaos for the future of literary inquiry while, at the same time, it seems to deny the hope of establishing some basic conceptual model which can organize all data—the hope which always begins any analytical exercise. My effort here, however, has been to demonstrate the essential delusions that inform such objections: If literary inquiry has historically escaped chaos by establishing canons, then it has only substituted one mode of arbitrary action for another—and, in this case, at the expense of half the population. And if feminists openly acknowledge ourselves as pluralists, then we do not give up the search for patterns of opposition and connection—probably the basis of thinking itself; what we give up is simply the arrogance of claiming that our work is either exhaustive or definitive. (It is, after all, the identical arrogance we are asking our nonfeminist colleagues to abandon.) If this kind of pluralism appears to threaten both the present coherence of and the inherited aesthetic criteria for a canon of “greats,” then, as I have earlier argued, it is precisely that threat which, alone, can free us from the prejudices, the strictures, and the blind spots of the past. In feminist hands, I would add, it is less a threat than a promise. What unites and repeatedly invigorates feminist literary criticism, then, is neither dogma nor method but, as I have indicated earlier, an acute and impassioned attentiveness to the ways in which primarily male structures of power are inscribed (or encoded) within our literary inheritance; the consequences of that encoding for women—as characters, as readers, and as writers; and, with that, a shared analytic concern for the implications of that encoding not only for a better understanding of the past, but also for an improved reordering of the present and future as well. If that concern identifies feminist literary criticism as one of the many academic arms of the larger women’s movement, then that attentiveness, within the halls of academe, poses no less a challenge for change, generating, as it does, the three propositions explored here. The critical pluralism that inevitably follows upon those three propositions, however, bears little resemblance to what Robinson has called “the greatest bourgeois theme of all, the myth of pluralism, with its consequent rejection of ideological commitment as ‘too simple’ to embrace the (necessarily complex) truth.”54 Only ideological commitment could have gotten us to enter the minefield, putting in jeopardy our careers and our livelihood. Only the power of ideology to transform our conceptual worlds, and the inspiration of that ideology to liberate long-suppressed energies and emotions, can account for our willingness to take on critical tasks that, in an earlier decade, would have been “abandoned in despair or apathy.”55 The fact of differences among us proves only that, despite our shared commitments, we have nonetheless refused to shy away from complexity, preferring rather to openly disagree than to give up either intellectual honesty or hard-won insights.

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Finally, I would argue, pluralism informs feminist literary inquiry not simply as a description of what already exists but, more importantly, as the only critical stance consistent with the current status of the larger women’s movement. Segmented and variously focused, the different women’s organizations neither espouse any single system of analysis nor, as a result, express any wholly shared, consistently articulated ideology. The ensuing loss in effective organization and political clout is a serious one, but it has not been paralyzing; in spite of our differences, we have united to act in areas of clear mutual concern (the push for the Equal Rights Amendment is probably the most obvious example). The trade-off, as I see it, has made possible an ongoing and educative dialectic of analysis and proferred solutions, protecting us thereby from the inviting traps of reductionism and dogma. And so long as this dialogue remains active, both our politics and our criticism will be free of dogma—but never, I hope, of feminist ideology, in all its variety. For, “whatever else ideologies may be—projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior motives, phatic expressions of group solidarity” (and the women’s movement, to date, has certainly been all of these, and more)— whatever ideologies express, they are, as Geertz astutely observes, “most distinctively, maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience.” And despite the fact that “ideological advocates . . . tend as much to obscure as to clarify the true nature of the problems involved,” as Geertz notes, “they at least call attention to their existence and, by polarizing issues, make continued neglect more difficult. Without Marxist attack, there would have been no labor reform; without Black Nationalists, no deliberate speed.”56 Without Seneca Falls, I would add, no enfranchisement of women, and without “consciousness raising,” no feminist literary criticism nor, even less, women’s studies. Ideology, however, only truly manifests its power by ordering the sum of our actions.57 If feminist criticism calls anything into question, it must be that dogeared myth of intellectual neutrality. For, what I take to be the underlying spirit, or message, of any consciously ideologically premised criticism—that is, that ideas are important because they determine the ways we live, or want to live, in the world—is vitiated by confining those ideas to the study, the classroom, or the pages of our books. To write chapters decrying the sexual stereotyping of women in our literature, while closing our eyes to the sexual harassment of our women students and colleagues; to display Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell in our courses on “The Image of the Independent Career Woman in Film,” while managing not to notice the paucity of female administrators on our own campus; to study the women who helped make universal enfranchisement a political reality, while keeping silent about our activist colleagues who are denied promotion or tenure; to include segments on “Women in the Labor Movement” in our American studies or women’s studies courses, while remaining willfully ignorant of the department secretary fired for her efforts to organize a clerical workers’ union; to glory in the delusions of “merit,” “privilege,” and “status” which accompany campus life in order to insulate ourselves from the millions of women who labor in poverty—all this is not merely hypocritical; it destroys both the spirit and the meaning of what we are about. It puts us, however unwittingly, in the service of those who laid the minefield in the first place. In my view, it is a fine thing for many of us, individually, to have traversed the minefield; but that happy circumstance will only prove of lasting importance if, together, we expose it for what it is

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(the male fear of sharing power and significance with women) and deactivate its components, so that others, after us, may literally dance through the minefield.

NOTES “Dancing Through the Minefield” was the winner of the 1979 Florence Howe Essay Contest, which is sponsored by the Women’s Caucus of the Modern Language Association. Some sections of this essay were composed during the time made available to me by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, for which I am most grateful. 1. Mary Ellman, Thinking About Women (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Harvest, 1968). 2. See Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 232. 3. Ibid., p. 204. 4. Lillian S. Robinson, “Cultural Criticism and the Horror Vacui,” College English 33, no. 1 (1972); reprinted as “The Critical Task” in her Sex, Class, and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 51. 5. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 36. 6. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34, no. 1 (October 1972); reprinted in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1975), p. 90. 7. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1970). 8. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1861; reprinted with “A Biographical Interpretation” by Tillie Olsen (New York: Feminist Press, 1972). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” originally published in The New England Magazine, May 1892; reprinted with an Afterword by Elaine R. Hedges (New York: Feminist Press, 1973). 9. Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 10. In her Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 3, Sydney Janet Kaplan explains that she is using the term “feminine consciousness” “not simply as some general attitude of women toward their own femininity, and not as something synonymous with a particular sensibility among female writers. I am concerned with it as a literary device: a method of characterization of females in fiction.” 11. Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon Books, 1975), p. 6. 12. Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1976). 13. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 11. 14. Jean E. Kennard, Victims of Convention (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978), pp. 164, 18, 14. 15. See Millett, Sexual Politics, pt. 3, “The Literary Reflection,” pp. 235–361. 16. The phrase is Geertz’s, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” p. 214. 17. Lillian Robinson, “Criticism—and Self-Criticism,” College English 36, no. 4 (1974) and “Criticism: Who Needs It?” in The Uses of Criticism, ed. A. P. Foulkes (Bern and Frankfurt: Lang, 1976); both reprinted in Sex, Class, and Culture, pp. 67, 80. 18. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” p. 90. 19. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 20. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), pp. 239–40.

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21. See Cheris Kramarae, Barrie Thorne, and Nancy Henley, “Perspectives on Language and Communication,” Review Essay in Signs 3, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 646. 22. See Adrienne Rich’s discussion of the difficulty in finding authentic language for her experience as a mother in her Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1976), p. 15. 23. Nelly Furman, “The Study of Women and Language: Comment on Vol. 3, no. 3” in Signs 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 184. 24. Again, my phrasing comes from Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” in his Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p. 9. 25. Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan W. Robbins, “Toward a Feminist Aesthetic,” Chrysalis, no. 6 (1977): 63. 26. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 87. 27. In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest that women’s writings are in some sense “palimpsestic” in that their “surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning” (p. 73). It is, in their view, an art designed “both to express and to camouflage” (p. 81). 28. Consider, for example, Paul Boyers’s reductive and inaccurate generalization that “what distinguishes ordinary books and articles about women from feminist writing is the feminist insistence on asking the same questions of every work and demanding ideologically satisfactory answers to those questions as a means of evaluating it,” in his “A Case Against Feminist Criticism,” Partisan Review 43, no. 4 (1976): 602. It is partly as a result of such misconceptions that we have the paucity of feminist critics who are granted a place in English departments which otherwise pride themselves on the variety of their critical orientations. 29. Ambivalent though he is about the literary continuity that begins with Homer, Harold Bloom nonetheless somewhat ominously prophesies “that the first true break . . . will be brought about in generations to come, if the burgeoning religion of Liberated Woman spreads from its clusters of enthusiasts to dominate the West,” in his A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 33. On p. 36, he acknowledges that while something “as violent [as] a quarrel would ensue if I expressed my judgment” on Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer, “it would lead to something more intense than quarrels if I expressed my judgment upon . . . the ‘literature of Women’s Liberation.’” 30. Kennard, Victims of Convention, p. 14. 31. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” p. 90. 32. The first is a proposition currently expressed by some structuralists and formalist critics; the best statement of the second probably appears in Georg Lukacs, Writer and Critic (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1970), p. 119. 33. David Couzens Hoy, “Hermeneutic Circularity, Indeterminacy, and Incommensurability,” New Literary History 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 166–67. 34. Bloom, Map of Misreading, p. 36. 35. John Dewey offered precisely this argument in 1934 when he insisted that a work of art “is recreated every time it is esthetically experienced. . . . It is absurd to ask what an artist ‘really’ meant by his product: he himself would find different meanings in it at different days and hours and in different stages of his own development.” Further, he explained, “It is simply an impossibility that any one today should experience the Parthenon as the devout Athenian contemporary citizen experienced it, any more than the religious statuary of the twelfth century can mean, esthetically, even to a good Catholic today just what it meant to the worshipers of the old period,” in Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), pp. 108–109.

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36. Charles Altieri, “The Hermeneutics of Literary Indeterminacy: A Dissent from the New Orthodoxy,” New Literary History 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 90. 37. Murray Krieger, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 6. 38. See Stanley E. Fish, “Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 627–28. 39. Ibid., p. 643. 40. Virginia Woolf, “Women and Fiction,” Granite and Rainbow: Essays (London: Hogarth, 1958), p. 81. 41. Cesare Segre, “Narrative Structures and Literary History,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 272–73. 42. Ted Cohen, “Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 9. 43. From Adrienne Rich’s “Transcendental Etude” in her The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), pp. 76–77. 44. Furman, “The Study of Women and Language,” p. 184. 45. “A recurrent tendency in criticism is the establishment of false norms for the evaluation of literary works,” notes Robert Scholes in his Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 131. 46. For a full discussion of the Glaspell short story which takes this problem into account, please see my “A Map for Re-Reading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts,” New Literary History 11 (1980): 451–67. 47. Olsen, Silences, p. 45. 48. Annette Kolodny, “Literary Criticism,” Review Essay in Signs 2, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 420. 49. Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, pp. 144–45. These comments appear within his explication of Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of reading. 50. I borrow this concise phrasing of pluralistic modesty from M. H. Abrams’s “The Deconstructive Angel,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 427. Indications of the pluralism that was to mark feminist inquiry were to be found in the diversity of essays collected by Susan Koppelman Cornillon for her early and ground-breaking anthology, Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972). 51. R. P. Blackmur, “A Burden for Critics,” The Hudson Review 1 (1948): 171. Blackmur, of course, was referring to the way in which criticism makes us conscious of how art functions; I use his wording here because I am arguing that that same awareness must also be focused on the critical act itself. “Consciousness,” he avers, “is the way we feel the critic’s burden.” 52. I have earlier elaborated my objection to prescriptive categories for literature in “The Feminist as Literary Critic,” Critical Response in Critical Inquiry 2, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 827–28. 53. Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, pp. 151–52. 54. Lillian Robinson, “Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective,” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971); reprinted in Sex, Class, and Culture, p. 11. 55. “Ideology bridges the emotional gap between things as they are and as one would have them be, thus insuring the performance of roles that might otherwise be abandoned in despair or apathy,” comments Geertz in “Ideology as a Cultural System,” p. 205. 56. Ibid., pp. 220, 205. 57. I here follow Fredric Jameson’s view in The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 107, that: “Ideology would seem to be that grillwork of form, convention, and belief which orders our actions.”

BONNIE ZIMMERMAN

WHAT HAS NEVER BEEN an overview of lesbian feminist literary criticism (1981)



















In the 1970s, a generation of lesbian feminist literary critics came of age. Some, like the lesbian professor in Lynn Strongin’s poem, “Sayre,”1 had been closeted in the profession; many had “come out” as lesbians in the women’s liberation movement. As academics and as lesbians, we cautiously began to plait together the strands of our existence: teaching lesbian literature, establishing networks and support groups, and exploring assumptions about a lesbian-focused literary criticism. Beginning with nothing, as we thought, this generation quickly began to expand the limitations of literary scholarship by pointing to what had been for decades “unspeakable”—lesbian existence—thus phrasing, in novelist June Arnold’s words, “what has never been.”2 Our process has paralleled the development of feminist literary criticism—and, indeed, pioneering feminist critics and lesbian critics are often one and the same. As women in a male-dominated academy, we explored the way we write and read from a different or “other” perspective. As lesbians in a heterosexist academy, we have continued to explore the impact of “otherness,” suggesting dimensions previously ignored and yet necessary to understand fully the female condition and the creative work born from it. Lesbian critics, in the 1980s, may have more questions than answers, but the questions are important not only to lesbians, but to all feminists teaching and criticizing literature. Does a woman’s sexual and affectional preference influence the way she writes, reads, and thinks? Does lesbianism belong in the classroom and in scholarship? Is there a lesbian aesthetic distinct from a feminist aesthetic? What should be the role of the lesbian critic? Can we establish a lesbian “canon” in the way in which feminist critics have established a female canon? Can lesbian feminists develop insights into female creativity that might enrich all literary criticism? Different women, of course, answer these questions in different ways, but one set of assumptions underlies virtually all lesbian criticism: that a woman’s identity is not defined only by her relation to a male world and male literary tradition (as feminist critics have demonstrated), that powerful bonds between women are a crucial factor in women’s lives, and that the sexual and emotional orientation of a woman profoundly affects her consciousness and thus her creativity. Those critics who have consciously chosen to read as lesbians argue that this perspective can be uniquely liberating and can provide new

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insights into life and literature because it assigns the lesbian a specific vantage point from which to criticize and analyze the politics, language, and culture of patriarchy: We have the whole range of women’s experience and the other dimension too, which is the unique viewpoint of the dyke. This extra dimension puts us a step outside of so-called normal life and lets us see how gruesomely abnormal it is. . . . [This perspective] can issue in a world-view that is distinct in history and uniquely liberating.3

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the current state of lesbian scholarship, to suggest how lesbians are exercising this unique world view, and to investigate some of the problems, strengths, and future needs of a developing lesbian feminist literary criticism.4 One way in which this unique world view takes shape is as a “critical consciousness about heterosexist assumptions.”5 Heterosexism is the set of values and structures that assumes heterosexuality to be the only natural form of sexual and emotional expression, “the perceptual screen provided by our [patriarchal] cultural conditioning.”6 Heterosexist assumptions abound in literary texts, such as feminist literary anthologies, that purport to be open-minded about lesbianism. When authors’ biographies make special note of husbands, male mentors, and male companions, even when that author was primarily female-identified, but fail to mention the female companions of prominent lesbian writers—that is heterosexism. When anthologists ignore historically significant lesbian writers such as Renée Vivien and Radclyffe Hall—that is heterosexism. When anthologies include only the heterosexual or nonsexual works of a writer like Katherine Philips or Adrienne Rich who is celebrated for her lesbian or homoemotional poetry—that is heterosexism. When a topically organized anthology includes sections on wives, mothers, sex objects, young girls, aging women, and liberated women, but not lesbians—that is heterosexism. Heterosexism in feminist anthologies—like the sexism of androcentric collections— serves to obliterate lesbian existence and maintain the lie that women have searched for emotional and sexual fulfillment only through men—or not at all. Lesbians have also expressed concern that the absence of lesbian material in women’s studies journals such as Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies, and Women and Literature indicates heterosexism either by omission or by design. Only in 1979 did lesbian-focused articles appear in Signs and Frontiers. Most lesbian criticism first appeared in alternative, non-establishment lesbian journals, particularly Sinister Wisdom and Conditions, which are unfamiliar to many feminist scholars. For example, Signs’s first review article on literary criticism by Elaine Showalter (1975) makes no mention of lesbianism as a theme or potential critical perspective, not even to point out its absence. Annette Kolodny, in the second review article in Signs (1976), does call Jane Rule’s Lesbian Images “a novelist’s challenge to the academy and its accompanying critical community,” and further criticizes the homophobia in then-current biographies, calling for “candor and sensitivity” in future work.7 However, neither this nor subsequent review articles familiarize the reader with “underground” sources of lesbian criticism, some of which had appeared by this time, nor do they explicate lesbianism as a literary theme or

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critical perspective. Ironically, more articles on lesbian literature have appeared in traditional literary journals than in the women’s studies press, just as for years only male critics felt free to mention lesbianism. Possibly, feminist critics continue to feel that they will be identified as “dykes,” thus invalidating their work. The perceptual screen of heterosexism is also evident in most of the acclaimed works of feminist literary criticism. None of the current collections of essays—such as The Authority of Experience or Shakespeare’s Sisters—includes even a token article from a lesbian perspective. Ellen Moers’s Literary Women, germinal work as it is, is homophobic as well as heterosexist. Lesbians, she points out, appear as monsters, grotesques, and freaks in works by Carson McCullers, Djuna Barnes (her reading of Nightwood is at the very least questionable), and Diane Arbus, but she seems to concur in this identification rather than call it into question or explain its historical context. Although her so-called defense of unmarried women writers against the “charge” of lesbianism does criticize the way in which this word has been used as a slur, she neither condemns such antilesbianism nor entertains the possibility that some women writers were, in fact, lesbians. Her chapter on “Loving Heroinism” is virtually textbook heterosexism, assuming as it does that women writers only articulate love for men.8 Perceptual blinders also mar The Female Imagination by Patricia Meyers Spacks which never uses the word “lesbian” (except in the index) or “lover” to describe either the “sexual ambiguity” of the bond between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre, nor Margaret Anderson’s relationship with a “beloved older woman.” Furthermore, Spacks claims that Gertrude Stein, “whose life lack[ed] real attachments” (a surprise to Alice B. Toklas), also “denied whatever is special to women” (which lesbianism is not?).9 This latter judgment is particularly ominous because heterosexuals often have difficulty accepting that a lesbian, especially a role-playing “butch,” is in fact a woman. More care is demonstrated by Elaine Showalter who, in A Literature of Their Own, uncovers the attitudes toward lesbianism held by nineteenth-century writers Eliza Lynn Linton and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. However, she does not integrate lesbian issues into her discussion of the crucial generation of early twentieth-century writers (Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Dorothy Richardson, and Rosamond Lehmann among others; Radclyffe Hall is mentioned, but not The Well of Loneliness), all of whom wrote about sexual love between women. Her well-taken point that modern British novelists avoid lesbianism might have been balanced, however, by a mention of Maureen Duffy, Sybille Bedford, or Fay Weldon.10 Finally, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic does not even index lesbianism; the lone reference made in the text is to the possibility that “Goblin Market” describes “a covertly (if ambiguously) lesbian world.” The authors’ tendency to interpret all pairs of female characters as aspects of the self sometimes serves to mask a relationship that a lesbian reader might interpret as bonding or love between women.11 Lesbian critics, who as feminists owe much to these critical texts, have had to turn to other resources, first to develop a lesbian canon, and then to establish a lesbian critical perspective. Barbara Grier, who, as Gene Damon, reviewed books for the pioneering lesbian journal The Ladder, laid the groundwork for this canon with her incomparable, but largely unknown The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography.12 Equally obscure was Jeanette Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature, self-published in 1956 after having been rejected by a university press because of

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its subject matter. An exhaustive chronological account of every reference to love between women from Sappho and Ruth to the fiction of the fifties, Sex Variant Women has proven to be an invaluable starting point for lesbian readers and scholars. Out of print almost immediately after its publication and lost to all but a few intrepid souls, it was finally reprinted by Diana Press in 1975.13 A further resource and gathering point for lesbian critics was the special issue on lesbian writing and publishing in Margins, a review of small press publications, which appeared in 1975, the first issue of a literary journal devoted entirely to lesbian writing. In 1976, its editor, Beth Hodges, produced a second special issue, this time in Sinister Wisdom.14 Along with the growing visibility and solidarity of lesbians within the academic profession, and the increased availability of lesbian literature from feminist and mass-market presses, these two journal issues propelled lesbian feminist literary criticism to the surface.15 The literary resources available to lesbian critics form only part of the story, for lesbian criticism is equally rooted in political ideology. Although not all lesbian critics are activists, most have been strongly influenced by the politics of lesbian feminism. These politics travel the continuum from civil rights advocacy to separatism; however, most, if not all, lesbian feminists assume that lesbianism is a healthy lifestyle chosen by women in virtually all eras and all cultures, and thus strive to eliminate the stigma historically attached to lesbianism. One way to remove this stigma is to associate lesbianism with positive and desirable attributes, to divert women’s attention away from male values and toward an exclusively female communitas. Thus, the influential Radicalesbians’ essay, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” argues that lesbian feminism assumes “the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other. . . . We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves.”16 Many lesbian writers and critics have also been influenced profoundly by the politics of separatism which provides a critique of heterosexuality as a political institution rather than a personal choice, “because relationships between men and women are essentially political, they involve power and dominance.”17 As we shall see, the notion of “woman-identification,” that is, the primacy of women bonding with women emotionally and politically, as well as the premises of separatism, that lesbians have a unique and critical place at the margins of patriarchal society, are central to much current lesbian literary criticism. Unmasking heterosexist assumptions in feminist literary criticism has been an important but hardly primary task for lesbian critics. We are more concerned with the development of a unique lesbian feminist perspective or, at the very least, determining whether or not such a perspective is possible. In order to do so, lesbian critics have had to begin with a special question: “When is a text a ‘lesbian text’ or its writer a ‘lesbian writer’”?18 Lesbians are faced with this special problem of definition: presumably we know when a writer is a “Victorian writer” or a “Canadian writer.” To answer this question, we have to determine how inclusively or exclusively we define “lesbian.” Should we limit this appellation to those women for whom sexual experience with other women can be proven? This is an almost impossible historical task, as many have noted, for what constitutes proof? Women have not left obvious markers in their private writings. Furthermore, such a narrow definition “names” lesbianism as an exclusively sexual phenomenon

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which, many argue, may be an inadequate construction of lesbian experience, both today and in less sexually explicit eras. This sexual definition of lesbianism also leads to the identification of literature with life, and thus can be an overly defensive and suspect strategy. Nevertheless, lesbian criticism continues to be plagued with the problem of definition. One perspective insists that desire must be there and at least somewhat embodied. . . . That carnality distinguishes it from gestures of political sympathy for homosexuals and from affectionate friendships in which women enjoy each other, support each other, and commingle their sense of identity and well-being.19

A second perspective, which might be called a school, claims, on the contrary, that “the very meaning of lesbianism is being expanded in literature, just as it is being redefined through politics.”20 An articulate spokeswoman for this “expanded meaning” school of criticism is Adrienne Rich, who offers a compelling inclusive definition of lesbianism: I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital experience with another woman. If we expand it 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 practical and political support . . . we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology which have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of “lesbianism.”21

This definition has the virtue of deemphasizing lesbianism as a static entity and of suggesting interconnections among the various ways in which women bond together. However, all inclusive definitions of lesbianism risk blurring the distinctions between lesbian relationships and non-lesbian female friendships, or between lesbian identity and female-centered identity. Some lesbian writers would deny that there are such distinctions, but this position is reductive and of mixed value to those who are developing lesbian criticism and theory and who may need limited and precise definitions. In fact, reductionism is a serious problem in lesbian ideology. Too often, we identify lesbian and woman, or feminist; we equate lesbianism with any close bonds between women or with political commitment to women. These identifications can be fuzzy and historically questionable, as, for example, in the claim that lesbians have a unique relationship with nature or (as Rich also has claimed) that all female creativity is lesbian. By so reducing the meaning of lesbian, we have in effect eliminated lesbianism as a meaningful category. A similar problem arises when lesbian theorists redefine lesbianism politically, equating it with strength, independence, and resistance to patriarchy. This new political definition then influences the interpretation of literature: “If in a woman writer’s work a sentence refuses to do what it is supposed to do, if there are strong images of women and if there is a refusal to be linear, the result is innately lesbian literature.”22 The concept of an “innately” lesbian perspective or aesthetic

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allows the critic to separate lesbianism from biographical content which is an essential development in lesbian critical theory. Literary interpretation will, of course, be supported by historical and biographical evidence, but perhaps lesbian critics should borrow a few insights from new criticism. If a text lends itself to a lesbian reading, then no amount of biographic “proof” ought to be necessary to establish it as a lesbian text.23 Barbara Smith, for example, interprets Toni Morrison’s Sula as a lesbian novel, regardless of the author’s affectional preference. But we need to be cautious about what we call “innately” lesbian. Why is circularity or strength limited to lesbians, or, similarly, why is love of nature or creativity? It is certainly not evident that women, let alone lesbians, are “innately” anything. And, although it might require a lesbian perspective to stress the dominant relationship between Nel and Sula (“All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude”), it is difficult to imagine a novel so imbued with heterosexuality as lesbian. Almost midway between the inclusive and exclusive approaches to a definition of lesbianism lies that of Lillian Faderman in her extraordinary overview, Surpassing the Love of Man: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present. Faderman’s precise definition of lesbianism provides a conceptual framework for the four hundred years of literary history explored by the text: “Lesbian” describes a relationship in which two women’s strongest emotions and affections are directed toward each other. Sexual contact may be a part of the relationship to a greater or lesser degree, or it may be entirely absent. By preference the two women spend most of their time together and share most aspects of their lives with each other.24

Broader than the exclusive definition of lesbianism—for Faderman argues that not all lesbian relationships may be fully embodied—but narrower than Rich’s “lesbian continuum,” this definition is both specific and discriminating. The book is slightly marred by a defensive, overexplanatory tone, caused, no doubt, by her attempt to neutralize the “intense charge of the word lesbian”; note, for example, that this charged word is omitted from the title.25 Furthermore, certain problems remain with her framework, as with any that a lesbian critic or historian might establish. The historical relationship between genital sexuality and lesbianism remains unclear, and we cannot identify easily lesbianism outside a monogamous relationship. Nevertheless, despite problems in definition that may be inherent in lesbian studies, the strength of Surpassing the Love of Men is partially the precision with which Faderman defines her topic and chooses her texts and subjects. This problem of definition is exacerbated by the problem of silence. One of the most pervasive themes in lesbian criticism is that woman-identified writers, silenced by a homophobic and misogynistic society, have been forced to adopt coded and obscure language and internal censorship. Emily Dickinson counseled us to “tell all the truth / but tell it slant,” and critics are now calculating what price we have paid for slanted truth. The silences of heterosexual women writers may become lies for lesbian writers, as Rich warns: “a life ‘in the closet’ . . . [may] spread into private life, so that lying (described as discretion) becomes an easy way to avoid conflict or complication.”26 Gloria T. Hull recounts

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the moving story of just such a victim of society, the black lesbian poet Angelina Weld Grimké, whose “convoluted life and thwarted sexuality” marked her slim output of poetry with images of self-abnegation, diminution, sadness, and the wish for death. The lesbian writer who is working class or a woman of color may be particularly isolated, shackled by conventions, and, ultimately, silenced “with [her] real gifts stifled within.”27 What does a lesbian writer do when the words cannot be silenced? Critics are pointing to the codes and strategies for literary survival adopted by many women. For example, Willa Cather may have adopted her characteristic male persona in order to express safely her emotional and erotic feelings for other women.28 Thus, a writer some critics call antifeminist or at least disappointing may be better appreciated when her lesbianism is taken into account. Similarly, many ask whether Gertrude Stein cultivated obscurity, encoding her lesbianism in order to express hidden feelings and evade potential enemies. Or, on the other hand, Stein may have been always a declared lesbian, but a victim of readers’ (and scholars’) unwillingness or inability to pay her the close and sympathetic attention she requires.29 The silence of “Shakespeare’s [lesbian] sister” has meant that modern writers have had little or no tradition with which to nurture themselves: Feminist critics such as Moers, Showalter, and Gilbert and Gubar have demonstrated the extent and significance of a female literary tradition, but the lesbian writer developed her craft alone (and perhaps this is the significance of the title of the lesbian novel about novel writing, The Well of Loneliness). Elly Bulkin’s much-reprinted article on lesbian poetry points out that lesbian poets “have their work shaped by the simple fact of their having begun to write without knowledge of such history and with little or no hope of support from a woman’s and/or lesbian writing community.”30 If white women can at least imagine a lesbian literature, the black lesbian writer, as Barbara Smith demonstrates, is even more hampered by the lack of tradition: “Black women are still in the position of having to ‘imagine,’ discover and verify Black lesbian literature because so little has been written from an avowedly lesbian perspective.”31 Blanche Wiesen Cook points out further that all lesbians are affected by this absence of tradition and role models, or the limiting of role models to Hall’s Stephen Gordon. She also reminds us that our lesbian foremothers and networks were not simply lost and forgotten; rather, our past has been “erased,” obliterated by the actions of a hostile society.32 It would appear then that lesbian critics are faced with a set of problems that make our work particularly delicate and problematic, requiring caution, sensitivity, and flexibility as well as imagination and risk. Lesbian criticism begins with the establishment of the lesbian text: the creation of language out of silence. The critic must first define the term “lesbian” and then determine its applicability to both writer and text, sorting out the relation of literature to life. Her definition of lesbianism will influence the texts she identifies as lesbian, and, except for the growing body of literature written from an explicit lesbian perspective since the development of a lesbian political movement, it is likely that many will disagree with various identifications of lesbian texts. It is not only Sula that may provoke controversy, but even the “coded” works of lesbian writers like Gertrude Stein. The critic will need to consider whether a lesbian text is one written by a lesbian (and if so, how do we determine who is a lesbian?), one written about lesbians (which might be by a heterosexual woman or a man), or one that expresses a les-

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bian “vision” (which has yet to be satisfactorily outlined). But despite the problems raised by definition, silence and coding, and absence of tradition, lesbian critics have begun to develop a critical stance. Often this stance involves peering into shadows, into the spaces between words, into what has been unspoken and barely imagined. It is a perilous critical adventure with results that may violate accepted norms of traditional criticism, but which may also transform our notions of literary possibility. One of the first tasks of this emerging lesbian criticism has been to provide lesbians with a tradition, even if a retrospective one. Jane Rule, whose Lesbian Images appeared about the same time as Literary Women, first attempted to establish this tradition.33 Although her text is problematic, relying overly much on biographical evidence and derivative interpretations and including some questionable writers (such as Dorothy Baker) while omitting others, Lesbian Images was a milestone in lesbian criticism. Its importance is partially suggested by the fact that it took five years for another complete book—Faderman’s—to appear on lesbian literature. In a review of Lesbian Images, I questioned the existence of a lesbian “great tradition” in literature, but now I think I was wrong.34 Along with Rule, Dolores Klaich in Woman Plus Woman and Louise Bernikow in the introduction to The World Split Open have explored the possibility of a lesbian tradition,35 and recent critics such as Faderman and Cook in particular have begun to define that tradition, who belongs to it, and what links the writers who can be identified as lesbians. Cook’s review of lesbian literature and culture in the early twentieth century proposes “to analyze the literature and attitudes out of which the present lesbian feminist works have emerged, and to examine the continued denials and invalidation of the lesbian experience.”36 Focusing on the recognized lesbian networks in France and England that included Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Ethel Smythe, Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, Natalie Barney, and Romaine Brooks, Cook provides an important outline of a lesbian cultural tradition and an insightful analysis of the distortions and denials of homophobic scholars, critics, and biographers. Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men, like her earlier critical articles, ranges more widely through a literary tradition of romantic love between women (whether or not one calls that “lesbian”) from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Her thesis is that passionate love between women was labeled neither abnormal nor undesirable—probably because women were perceived to be asexual—until the sexologists led by Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis “morbidified” female friendship around 1900. Although she does not always clarify the dialectic between idealization and condemnation that is suggested in her text, Faderman’s basic theory is quite convincing. Most readers, like myself, will be amazed at the wealth of information about women’s same-sex love that Faderman has uncovered. She rescues from heterosexual obscurity Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wortley Montagu, Anna Seward, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Somerville, “Michael Field,” and many others, including the Scottish schoolmistresses whose lesbian libel suit inspired Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. Faderman has also written on the theme of same-sex love and romantic friendship in poems and letters of Emily Dickinson; in novels by Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and in popular magazine fiction of the early twentieth century.37

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Faderman is preeminent among those critics who are attempting to establish a lesbian tradition by rereading writers of the past previously assumed to be heterosexual or “spinsters.” As songwriter Holly Near expresses it: “Lady poet of great acclaim/ I have been misreading you/ I never knew your poems were meant for me.”38 It is in this area of lesbian scholarship that the most controversy—and some of the most exciting work—occurs. Was Mary Wollstonecraft’s passionate love for Fanny Blood, recorded in Mary, A Fiction, lesbian? Does Henry James dissect a lesbian relationship in The Bostonians? Did Emily Dickinson address many of her love poems to a woman, not a man? How did Virginia Woolf’s relationships with Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smythe affect her literary vision? Not only are some lesbian critics increasingly naming such women and relationships “lesbian,” they are also suggesting that criticism cannot fail to take into account the influence of sexual and emotional orientation on literary expression. In the establishment of a self-conscious literary tradition, certain writers have become focal points both for critics and for lesbians in general, who affirm and celebrate their identity by “naming names,” establishing a sense of historical continuity and community through the knowledge that incontrovertibly great women were also lesbians. Foremost among these heroes (or “heras”) are the women who created the first self-identified lesbian feminist community in Paris during the early years of the twentieth century. With Natalie Barney at its hub, this circle included such notable writers as Colette, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, Renée Vivien, and, peripherally, Gertrude Stein. Contemporary lesbians—literary critics, historians, and lay readers—have been drawn to their mythic and mythmaking presence, seeing in them a vision of lesbian society and culture that may have existed only once before—on the original island of Lesbos.39 More interest, however, has been paid to their lives so far than to their art. Barnes’s portraits of decadent, tormented lesbians and homosexuals in Nightwood and silly, salacious ones in The Ladies Almanack often prove troublesome to lesbian readers and critics.40 However, Elaine Marks’s perceptive study of French lesbian writers traces a tradition and how it has changed, modified by circumstance and by feminism, from the Sappho of Renée Vivien to the amazons of Monique Wittig.41 The problem inherent in reading lesbian literature primarily for role modeling is most evident with Hall—the most notorious of literary lesbians—whose archetypal “butch,” Stephen Gordon, has bothered readers since the publication of The Well of Loneliness. Although one critic praises it as “the standard by which all subsequent similar works are measured,” most contemporary lesbian feminists would, I believe, agree with Faderman’s harsh condemnation that it “helped to wreak confusion in young women.”42 Such an extraliterary debate is not limited to lesbian novels and lesbian characters; I am reminded of the intense disappointment expressed by many feminists over George Eliot’s disposal of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. In both cases, the cry is the same: why haven’t these writers provided us with appropriate role models? Cook may be justified in criticizing Hall for creating a narrow and debilitating image for lesbians who follow, but my reading of the novel (and that of Catharine Stimpson in an excellent study of the lesbian novel) convinces me that both Hall’s hero and message are highly complex.43 In looking to writers for a tradition, we need to recognize that the tradition may not always be a happy one. Women like Stephen Gordon exist alongside characters like Molly Bolt, in Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, but lesbians may

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also question whether or not the incarnation of a “politically correct” but elusive and utopian mythology provides our only appropriate role model. As with Hall, many readers and critics are strongly antipathetic to Stein, citing her reactionary and antifeminist politics and her role-playing relationship with Alice B. Toklas. However, other critics, by carefully analyzing Stein’s actual words, establish, convincingly to my reading, that she did have a lesbian and feminist perspective, calling into question assumptions about coding and masculine role playing. Cynthia Secor, who is developing an exciting lesbian feminist interpretation of Stein, argues that her novel Ida attempts to discover what it means to be a female person, and that the author profited from her position on the boundaries of patriarchal society: “Stein’s own experience as a lesbian gives her a critical distance that shapes her understanding of the struggle to be one’s self. Her own identity is not shaped as she moves into relation with a man.” Similarly, Elizabeth Fifer points out that Stein’s situation encouraged her to experiment with parody, theatricality, role playing, and “the diversity of ways possible to look at homosexual love and at her love object.” Dierdre Vanderlinde finds in Three Lives “one of the earliest attempts to find a new language in which to say, ‘I, woman-loving woman, exist.’” Catharine Stimpson places more critical emphasis on Stein’s use of masculine pronouns and conventional language, but despite what may have been her compromise, Stimpson feels that female bonding in Stein provides her with a private solution to woman’s mind–body split.44 Along with Stein, Dickinson’s woman-identification has drawn the most attention from recent critics, and has generated considerable controversy between lesbian and other feminist critics. Faderman insists that Dickinson’s love for women must be considered homosexual, and that critics must take into account her sexuality (or affectionality). Like most critics who accept this lesbian identification of Dickinson, she points to Susan Gilbert Dickinson as Emily’s primary romantic and sexual passion. Both Faderman and Bernikow thus argue that Dickinson’s “muse” was sometimes a female figure as well as a male.45 Some of this work can be justifiably criticized for too closely identifying literature with life; however, by altering our awareness of what is possible—namely, that Dickinson’s poetry was inspired by her love for a woman—we also can transform our response to the poetry. Paula Bennett daringly suggests that Dickinson’s use of crumbs, jewels, pebbles, and similar objects was an attempt to create “clitoral imagery.” In a controversial paper on the subject, Nadean Bishop argues forcefully that the poet’s marriage poems must be reread in light of what she considers to have been Dickinson’s consummated sexual relationship with her sister-in-law.46 The establishment of a lesbian literary tradition, a “canon,” as my lengthy discussion suggests, has been the primary task of critics writing from a lesbian feminist perspective. But it is not the only focus to emerge. For example, lesbian critics, like feminist critics in the early seventies, have begun to analyze the images, stereotypes, and mythic presence of lesbians in fiction by or about lesbians. Bertha Harris, a major novelist as well as a provocative and trailblazing critic, considers the lesbian to be the prototype of the monster and “the quintessence of all that is female; and female enraged . . . a lesbian is . . . that which has been unspeakable about women.”47 Harris offers this monstrous lesbian as a female archetype who subverts traditional notions of female submissiveness, passivity, and virtue.

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Her “tooth-and-claw” image of the lesbian is ironically similar to that of Ellen Moers, although from a lesbian rather than heterosexual point of view. But the very fact that Moers presents the lesbian-as-monster in a derogatory context and Harris in a celebratory one suggests that there is an important dialectic between how the lesbian articulates herself and how she is articulated and objectified by others. Popular culture, in particular, exposes the objectifying purpose of the lesbian-as-monster image, such as the lesbian vampire first created by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1871 ghost story “Carmilla,” and revived in early 1970s “B” films as a symbolic attack on women’s struggle for self-identity.48 Other critics also have analyzed the negative symbolic appearance of the lesbian in literature. Ann Allen Shockley, reviewing black lesbian characters in American fiction, notes that “within these works exists an undercurrent of hostility, trepidation, subtlety, shadiness, and in some instances, ignorance culling forth homophobic stereotypes.”49 Homophobic stereotypes are also what Judith McDaniel and Maureen Brady find in abundance in recent commercial fiction (such as Kinflicks, A Sea Change, Some Do, and How to Save Your Own Life) by avowedly feminist novelists. Although individuals might disagree with McDaniel and Brady’s severe criticism of specific novels, their overall argument is unimpeachable. Contemporary feminist fiction, by perpetuating stereotyped characters and themes (such as the punishment theme so dear to pre-feminist lesbian literature), serves to “disempower the lesbian.”50 Lesbian, as well as heterosexual, writers present the lesbian as Other, as Julia Penelope Stanley discovered in prefeminist fiction: “The lesbian character creates for herself a mythology of darkness, a world in which she moves through dreams and shadows.”51 Lesbian critics may wish to avoid this analysis of the lesbian as Other because we no longer wish to dwell upon the cultural violence done against us. Yet this area must be explored until we strip these stereotypes of their inhibiting and dehumanizing presence in our popular culture and social mythology. Lesbian critics have also delved into the area of stylistics and literary theory. If we have been silenced for centuries and speak an oppressor’s tongue, then liberation for the lesbian must begin with language. Some writers may have reconciled their internal censor with their speech by writing in code, but many critics maintain that modern lesbian writers, because they are uniquely alienated from the patriarchy, experiment with its literary style and form. Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan Wolfe, considering such diverse writers as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Kate Millett, and Elana Dykewoman, claim that “a feminist aesthetic, as it emerges out of women’s evolution, grounds itself in female consciousness and in the unrelenting language of process and change.”52 In this article, the authors do not call their feminist aesthetic a lesbian feminist aesthetic, although all the writers they discuss are, in fact, lesbians. Susan Wolfe later confronted this fact: “Few women who continue to identify with men can risk the male censure of ‘women’s style,’ and few escape the male perspective long enough to attempt it.”53 Through examples from Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, and Monique Wittig, she illustrates her contention that lesbian literature is characterized by the use of the continuous present, unconventional grammar, and neologism; and that it breaks boundaries between art and the world, between events and our perceptions of them, and between past, present, and the dream world. It is, as even the proponents of this theory admit, highly debatable that all lesbian writers are mod-

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ernists, or that all modernists are lesbians. If Virginia Woolf wrote in non-linear, stream-of-consciousness style because she was a lesbian (or “woman-identified”) how does one explain Dorothy Richardson whose Pilgrimage, despite one lesbian relationship, is primarily heterosexual? If both Woolf and Richardson can be called “feminist” stylists, then how does one explain the nonlinear experimentation of James Joyce or Alain Robbe-Grillet, for example? The holes that presently exist in this theory should not, however, detract from the highly suggestive overlap between experimental and lesbian writers. Nor should we ignore the clear evidence that many contemporary, self-conscious lesbian writers (such as Wittig, Johnston, Bertha Harris, and June Arnold) are choosing an experimental style as well as content. This development of a self-conscious lesbian literature and literary theory in recent years has led a number of critics to investigate the unifying themes and values of current literature. Such an attempt has been made by Elly Bulkin, who traces the various sources of contemporary lesbian poetry, analyzes “the range of lesbian voices,” and advises feminist teachers how to teach lesbian poetry. Mary Carruthers, in asking why so much contemporary feminist poetry is also lesbian, observes that the “lesbian love celebrated in contemporary women’s poetry requires an affirmation of the value of femaleness, women’s bodies, women’s sexuality—in women’s language.”54 Jane Gurko and Sally Gearhart compare contemporary lesbian and gay male literature, attempting to discern to what extent one or the other transforms heterosexual ideology. They claim that, unlike gay male literature, lesbian literature “does express a revolutionary model of sexuality which in its structure, its content, and its practice defies the fundamental violent assumptions of patriarchal culture.”55 There is a danger in this attempt to establish a characteristic lesbian vision or literary value system, one that is well illustrated by this article. In an attempt to say this is what defines a lesbian literature, we are easily tempted to read selectively, omitting what is foreign to our theories. Most contemporary lesbian literature does embrace a rhetoric of nonviolence, but this is not universally true; for example, M. F. Beal’s Angel Dance is a lesbian hard-boiled detective novel and Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien is infused with a violent eroticism that is, nonetheless, intensely non-patriarchal. Violence, role playing, disaffection, unhappiness, suicide, and self-hatred, to name a few “taboo” subjects, all exist within the lesbian culture, and a useful criticism will have to effectively analyze these as lesbian themes and issues, regardless of ideological purity. Lesbian feminist criticism faces a number of concerns that must be addressed as it grows in force and clarity. Among these concerns is the fact that this criticism is dominated by the politics of lesbian separatism. This is exemplified by the following statement from Sinister Wisdom, a journal that has developed a consistent and articulate separatist politics, that ‘lesbian consciousness’ is really a point of view, a view from the boundary. And in a sense every time a woman draws a circle around her psyche, saying ‘this is a room of my own,’ and then writes from within that ‘room,’ she’s inhabiting lesbian consciousness.56

The value of separatism which, I believe, has always provided the most exciting

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theoretical developments in lesbian ideology, is precisely this marginality: lesbian existence “on the periphery of patriarchy.”57 Separatism provides criticism, as it did for lesbian politics, a cutting edge and radical energy that keeps us moving forward rather than backward either from fear or complacency. Those critics who maintain a consciously chosen position on the boundaries (and not one imposed by a hostile society) help to keep lesbian and feminist criticism radical and provocative, preventing both from becoming another arm of the established truth. At the same time, however, it is essential that separatist criticism does not itself become an orthodoxy, and thus repetitive, empty, and resistant to change. Lesbian criticism, as Kolodny has argued about feminist criticism, has more to gain from resisting dogma than from monotheism.58 Understandably, those critics and scholars willing to identify themselves publicly as lesbians also have tended to hold radical politics of marginality. Exposing one’s self to public scrutiny as a lesbian may in fact entail marginality through denial of tenure or loss of job, and those lesbians willing to risk these consequences usually have a political position that justifies their risk. However, to me it seems imperative that lesbian criticism develop diversity in theory and approach. Much as lesbians, even more than heterosexual feminists, may mistrust systems of thought developed by and associated with men and male values, we may, in fact, enrich our work through the insights of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic, or even psychoanalytic criticism. Perhaps “male” systems of thought are incompatible with a lesbian literary vision, but we will not know until we attempt to integrate these ideas into our work.59 Similarly, lesbian criticism and cultural theory in general can only gain by developing a greater specificity, historically and culturally. We have tended to write and act as if lesbian experience—which is perceived as that of a contemporary, white, middle-class feminist—is universal and unchanging. Although most lesbians know that this is not the case, we too often forget to apply rigorous historical and cross-cultural tools to our scholarship. Much of this ahistoricity occurs around the shifting definitions of lesbianism from one era and one culture to another. To state simply that Wollstonecraft “was” a lesbian because she passionately loved Fanny Blood, or Susan B. Anthony was a lesbian because she wrote amorous letters to Anna Dickinson, without accounting for historical circumstances, may serve to distort or dislocate the actual meaning of these women’s lives (just as it is distorting to deny their love for women). There are also notable differences among the institution of the berdache (the adoption by one sex of the opposite gender role) in Native American tribes; faute de mieux lesbian activity tolerated in France (as in Colette’s Claudine novels); idyllic romantic friendships (such as that of the famous Ladies of Llangollen); and contemporary self-conscious lesbianism. I do believe that there is a common structure—a lesbian “essence”—that may be located in all these specific historical existences, just as we may speak of a widespread, perhaps universal, structure of marriage or the family. However, in each of these cases—lesbianism, marriage, the family—careful attention to history teaches us that differences are as significant as similarities, and vital information about female survival may be found in the different ways in which women have responded to their historical situation. This tendency toward simplistic universalism is accompanied by what I see as a dangerous development of biological determinism and a curious revival of the nineteenth-century feminist notion of female (now lesbian) moral superiority—that women are uniquely caring and su-

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perior to inherently violent males. Although only an undertone in some criticism and literature, any such sociobiological impulse should be questioned at every appearance. The denial of meaningful differences among women is being challenged, particularly around the issue of racism. Bulkin has raised criticisms about the racism of white lesbian feminist theory. She has written that if I can put together—or think someone else can put together—a viable piece of feminist criticism or theory whose base is the thought and writing of white women/lesbians and expect that an analysis of racism can be tacked on or dealt with later as a useful addition, it is a measure of the extent to which I partake of that white privilege.60

Implicit in the criticism of Bulkin and other antiracist writers is the belief that lesbians, because of our experience of stigma and exclusion from the feminist mainstream, ought to be particularly sensitive to the dynamic between oppression and oppressing. White lesbians who are concerned about eradicating racism in criticism and theory have been greatly influenced as well by the work of several black lesbian feminist literary critics, such as Gloria T. Hull, Barbara Smith, and Lorraine Bethel.61 Such concern is not yet present over the issue of class, although the historical association of lesbianism with upper-class values has often been used by left-wing political groups and governments to deny legitimacy to homosexual rights and needs. Lesbian critics studying the Barney circle, for example, might analyze the historical connections between lesbianism and class status. Lesbian critics might also develop comparisons among the literatures of various nationalities because the lesbian canon is of necessity cross-national. We have barely explored the differences between American, English, French, and German lesbian literature (although Surpassing the Love of Men draws some distinctions), let alone non-Western literature. The paucity of lesbian scholars trained in these literatures has so far prevented the development of a truly international lesbian literary canon. As lesbian criticism matures, we may anticipate the development of ongoing and compelling political and practical concerns. At this time, for example, lesbians are still defining and discovering texts. We are certainly not as badly off as we were in the early seventies when the only lesbian novels in print were The Well of Loneliness, Rubyfruit Jungle, and Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah. However, texts published prior to 1970 are still difficult to find, and even The Well of Loneliness is intermittently available at the whim of publishers. Furthermore, the demise of Diana Press and the apparent slowdown of Daughters (two of the most active lesbian publishing houses) leaves many major works unavailable, possibly forever. As the boom in gay literature subsides, teachers of literature will find it very difficult to unearth teachable texts. Scholars have the excellent Arno Press series, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History, and Literature, but, as Faderman’s monumental scholarship reveals, far more lesbian literature exists than anyone has suspected. This literature needs to be unearthed, analyzed, explicated, perhaps translated, and made available to readers. As lesbian critics, we also need to address the exclusion of lesbian literature

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from not merely the traditional, but also the feminist canon. Little lesbian literature has been integrated into the mainstream of feminist texts, as evidenced by what is criticized, collected, and taught. It is a matter of serious concern that lesbian literature is omitted from anthologies or included in mere token amounts, or that critical works and Modern Language Association panels still exclude lesbianism. It may as yet be possible for heterosexual feminists to claim ignorance about lesbian literature; however, lesbian critics should make it impossible for that claim to stand much longer. Lesbianism is still perceived as a minor and somewhat discomforting variation within the female life cycle, when it is mentioned at all. Just as we need to integrate lesbian material and perspectives into the traditional and feminist canons, we might also apply lesbian theory to traditional literature. Feminists have not only pointed out the sexism in many canonical works, but have also provided creative and influential rereadings of these works; similarly lesbians might contribute to the rereading of the classics. For example, The Bostonians, an obvious text, has been reread often from a lesbian perspective, and we could reinterpret D. H. Lawrence’s antifeminism or Doris Lessing’s compromised feminism (particularly in The Golden Notebook) by relating these attitudes to their fear of or discomfort with lesbianism. Other texts or selections of texts—such as Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” or the relationship between Lucy Snowe and Ginevra Fanshawe in Villette—might reveal a subtext that could be called lesbian. Just as few texts escape a feminist re-vision, few might evade a lesbian transformation. This last point—that there is a way in which we might “review” literature as lesbians—brings me to my conclusion. In a brief period of a few years, critics have begun to demonstrate the existence of a distinct lesbian aesthetic, just as feminists have outlined elements of a female aesthetic. Certain components of this aesthetic or critical perspective are clear: Perhaps lesbian feminist criticism [or literature, I would add] is a political or thematic perspective, a kind of imagination that can see beyond the barriers of heterosexuality, role stereotypes, patterns of language and culture that may be repressive to female sexuality and expression.62

A lesbian artist very likely would express herself differently about sexuality, the body, and relationships. But are there other—less obvious—unifying themes, ideas, and imagery that might define a lesbian text or subtext? How, for example, does the lesbian’s sense of outlaw status affect her literary vision? Might lesbian writing, because of the lesbian’s position on the boundaries, be characterized by a particular sense of freedom and flexibility or, rather, by images of violently imposed barriers, the closet? Or, in fact, is there a dialectic between freedom and imprisonment unique to lesbian writing? Do lesbians have a special perception of suffering and stigma, as so much prefeminist literature seems to suggest? What about the “muse,” the female symbol of literary creativity: do women writers create a lesbian relationship with their muse as May Sarton asserts? If so, do those writers who choose a female muse experience a freedom from inhibition because of that fact, or might there be a lack of creative tension in such a figurative same-sex relationship? I feel on solid ground in asserting that there are certain topics and themes that define lesbian culture, and that we are beginning

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to define a lesbian symbolism. Lesbian literature may present a unified tradition of thematic concerns such as that of unrequited longing, a longing of almost cosmic totality because the love object is denied not by circumstance or chance, but by necessity. The tension between romantic love and genital sexuality takes a particular form in woman-to-woman relationships, often articulated through musings on the difference between purity and impurity (culminating in Colette’s study of variant sexuality, The Pure and the Impure). Lesbian literature approaches the theme of development or the quest in a manner different from that of men or heterosexual women. Lesbian literature, as lesbian culture in general, is particularly flexible on issues of gender and role identification; even The Well of Loneliness hints at the tragedy of rigid gender roles. Because of this flexibility, lesbian artists and writers have always been fascinated with costuming, because dress is an external manifestation of gender roles lesbians often reject.63 As we read and reread literature from a lesbian perspective, I am confident we will continue to expand our understanding of the lesbian literary tradition and a lesbian aesthetic. This essay has suggested the vigor of lesbian criticism and its value to all feminists in raising awareness of entrenched heterosexism in existing texts, clarifying the lesbian traditions in literature through scholarship and reinterpretation, pointing out barriers that have stood in the way of free lesbian expression, explicating the recurring themes and values of lesbian literature, and exposing the dehumanizing stereotypes of lesbians in our culture. Many of the issues that face lesbian critics—resisting dogma, expanding the canon, creating a non-racist and non-classist critical vision, transforming our readings of traditional texts, and exploring new methodologies—are the interests of all feminist critics. Because feminism concerns itself with the removal of limitations and impediments in the way of female imagination, and lesbian criticism helps to expand our notions of what is possible for women, then all women would grow by adopting for themselves a lesbian vision. Disenfranchised groups have had to adopt a double-vision for survival; one of the political transformations of recent decades has been the realization that enfranchised groups—men, whites, heterosexuals, the middle class—would do well to adopt that double-vision for the survival of us all. Lesbian literary criticism simply restates what feminists already know, that one group cannot name itself “humanity” or even “woman”: “We’re not trying to become part of the old order misnamed ‘universal’ which has tabooed us; we are transforming the meaning of ‘universality.’”64 Whether lesbian criticism will survive depends as much upon the external social climate as it does upon the creativity and skill of its practitioners. If political attacks on gay rights and freedom grow; if the so-called Moral Majority wins its fight to eliminate gay teachers and texts from the schools (it would be foolhardy to believe they will exempt universities); and if the academy, including feminist teachers and scholars, fails to support lesbian scholars, eradicate heterosexist values and assumptions, and incorporate the insights of lesbian scholarship into the mainstream; then current lesbian criticism will probably suffer the same fate as did Jeanette Foster’s Sex Variant Women in the fifties. Lesbian or heterosexual, we will all suffer from that loss.

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NOTES An earlier version of this paper was presented at the first annual convention of the National Women’s Studies Association, Lawrence, Kansas, May 1979. 1. Lynn Strongin, “Sayre,” in Rising Tides: Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, ed. Laura Chester and Sharon Barba (New York: Washington Square Press, 1973), p. 317. 2. June Arnold, “Lesbian Fiction,” Special Issue on Lesbian Writing and Publishing, Sinister Wisdom 2 (Fall 1976): 28. 3. Sandy Boucher, “Lesbian Artists,” Special Issue on Lesbian Art and Artists, Heresies 3 (Fall 1977): 48. 4. This survey is limited to published and unpublished essays in literary criticism that present a perspective either sympathetic to lesbianism or those explicitly lesbian in orientation. It is limited to literature and to theoretical articles (not book reviews). The sexual preference of the authors is, for the most part, irrelevant; this is an analysis of lesbian feminist ideas, not authors. Although the network of lesbian critics is well developed, some major unpublished papers may have escaped my attention. 5. Elly Bulkin, “‘Kissing Against the Light’: A Look at Lesbian Poetry,” Radical Teacher 10 (December 1978): 8. This article was reprinted in College English and Women’s Studies Newsletter; an expanded version is available from the Lesbian-Feminist Study Clearinghouse, Women’s Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260. 6. Julia Penelope [Stanley], “The Articulation of Bias: Hoof in Mouth Disease,” paper presented at the 1979 convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, San Francisco, November 1979, pp. 4–5. On the same panel, I presented a paper on “Heterosexism in Literary Anthologies,” which develops some of the points of this paragraph. 7. Annette Kolodny, “Literary Criticism: Review Essay,” Signs 2, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 416, 419. 8. Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1976), pp. 108–9, 145. 9. Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon Books, 1975), pp. 89, 214, 363. 10. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 178, 229, 316. 11. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 567. Regarding another issue—their analysis of Emily Dickinson’s poem no. 1722—Nadean Bishop says, “It is hard to fathom how Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar could take this erotic representation of lesbian love-making to be an ‘image of the chaste moon goddess Diana,’ who does not have hand or tender tongue or inspire incredulity.” See Nadean Bishop, “Renunciation in the Bridal Poems of Emily Dickinson,” paper presented at the National Women’s Studies Association, Bloomington, Indiana, 16–20 May 1980. One other major critical study, Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), is uniquely sensitive to lesbianism in its interpretation of The Bostonians. 12. Gene Damon, Jan Watson, and Robin Jordan, The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography (1967; reprinted., Reno, Nev.: Naiad Press, 1975). 13. Jeannette Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956; reprinted, Baltimore: Diana Press, 1975). See also, Karla Jay, “The X-Rated Bibliographer: A Spy in the House of Sex,” in Lavender Culture, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 257–61. 14. Beth Hodges, ed., Special Issue on Lesbian Writing and Publishing, Margins 23

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(August 1975). Beth Hodges, ed., Special Issue on Lesbian Literature and Publishing, Sinister Wisdom 2 (Fall 1976). 15. In addition, networks of lesbian critics, teachers, and scholars were established through panels at the Modern Language Association’s annual conventions and at the Lesbian Writers’ Conference in Chicago, which began in 1974 and continued for several years. Currently, networking continues through conferences, journals, and other institutionalized outlets. The Lesbian-Feminist Study Clearinghouse reprints articles, bibliographies, and syllabi pertinent to lesbian studies. See note 5 for the address. The Lesbian Herstory Archives collects all material documenting lesbian lives past or present; their address is P.O. Box 1258, New York, New York 10001. Matrices, “A Lesbian-Feminist Research Newsletter,” is a network of information about research projects, reference materials, calls for papers, bibliographies, and so forth. There are several regional editors; the managing editor is Bobby Lacy, 4000 Randolph, Lincoln, Nebraska 68510. 16. Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York; Quadrangle, 1973). This article is extensively reprinted in women’s studies anthologies. 17. Charlotte Bunch, “Lesbians in Revolt,” in Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, ed. Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch (Baltimore: Diana Press, 1975), p. 30. 18. Susan Sniader Lanser, “Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Language of Celebration,” Frontiers 4, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 39. 19. Catharine R. Stimpson, “Zero Degree Deviancy: A Study of the Lesbian Novel,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (1981): 363–79. 20. Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Conditions: Two 1, no. 2 (October 1977): 39. It is sometimes overlooked that Smith’s pathbreaking article on black feminist criticism is also a lesbian feminist analysis. 21. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 648–49. 22. Bertha Harris, quoted by Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” p. 33. 23. Supportive historical and biographical information about women writers can be found in a number of recent articles, in addition to those cited elsewhere in this paper. See, for example, Judith Schwarz, “Yellow Clover: Katherine Lee Bates and Katherine Coman,” pp. 59–67; Josephine Donovan, “The Unpublished Love Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett,” pp. 26–31; and Margaret Cruikshank, “Geraldine Jewsbury and Jane Carlyle,” pp. 60–64, all in Special Issue on Lesbian History, Frontiers 4, no. 3 (Fall 1979). 24. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981), pp. 17–18. 25. Adrienne Rich, “‘It Is the Lesbian in Us . . . ,’” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), p. 202. 26. Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1975),” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, p. 190. 27. Gloria T. Hull, “ ‘Under the Days’: The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké,” The Black Women’s Issue, Conditions: Five 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 23, 20. 28. Joanna Russ, “To Write ‘Like a Woman’: Transformations of Identity in Willa Cather,” paper presented at the MLA convention, in San Francisco, December 1979. On coding in other writers, see also Ann Cothran and Diane Griffin Crowder, “An Optical Thirst for Invisible Water: Image Structure, Codes and Recoding in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure,” paper presented at the MLA convention, New York, December 1978; and Annette Kolodny, “The Lady’s Not For Spurning: Kate Millett and the Critics,” Contemporary Literature 17, no. 4: 541–62. 29. Two male critics—Edmund Wilson and Robert Bridgman—first suggested the connection between Stein’s obscurity and her lesbianism. Jane Rule in Lesbian Images and

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Dolores Klaich in Woman Plus Woman (see note 35) both follow their analysis. Cynthia Secor has argued that Stein did declare her lesbianism in her writing (“Can We Call Gertrude Stein a Non-Declared Lesbian Writer?”) in a paper presented at the MLA convention, San Francisco, December 1979. For more on Stein, see note 44. 30. Bulkin, “‘Kissing Against the Light,’” p. 8. 31. Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” p. 39. 32. Blanche Wiesen Cook, “‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination’: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition,” Signs 4, no. 4 (Summer 1979): 718–39. A curious example of contemporary denial of lesbianism—the obliteration of the lesbian tradition such as it is—is found in Judith Hallett, “Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality,” Signs 4, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 447–64. Sappho, of course, personifies “lesbian existence,” indeed lesbian possibility, as well as female poetic creativity. Hallett, however, essentially denies Sappho’s love for women with her conclusion that “she did not represent herself in her verses as having expressed homosexual feelings physically.” One might certainly argue that no other possible interpretation can exist for Sappho’s “He is more than a hero” (Mary Barnard’s translation). Eva Stigers, in “Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho” (same issue, pp. 464–71), contends that Sappho “chose female homosexual love as the vehicle because lesbian love offered the most receptive setting for romantic eros.” This interpretation may more accurately reflect the perspective of the nineteenth-century romantic poets who rediscovered Sappho. However, Stiger’s argument that Sappho used lesbian love to create an alternate world in which male values are not dominant and in which to explore the female experience provides a starting point for a feminist analysis of Sappho’s influence on her modern lesbian followers. A fine exposition of this “Sappho model” in French lesbian literature is provided by Elaine Marks in her essay “Lesbian Intertextuality” (see note 41). 33. Jane Rule, Lesbian Images (Garden City, N.Y.; Doubleday & Co., 1975). 34. Bonnie Zimmerman, “The New Tradition,” Sinister Wisdom 2 (Fall 1976): 34–41. 35. Dolores Klaich, Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1974); Louise Bernikow, The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950 (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). 36. Cook, “‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination,’ ” p. 720. 37. See Lillian Faderman’s articles: “The Morbidification of Love Between Women by Nineteenth-Century Sexologists,” Journal of Homosexuality 4, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 73–90; “Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Sue Gilbert,” Massachusetts Review 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 197–225; “Emily Dickinson’s Homoerotic Poetry,” Higginson Journal 18 (1978): 19–27; “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James,” New England Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September 1978): 309–32; and “Lesbian Magazine Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Popular Culture 11, no. 4 (Spring 1978): 800–17. 38. Holly Near, “Imagine My Surprise,” on Imagine My Surprise! (Redwood Records, 1978). 39. See Klaich, chap. 6. Also, see Bertha Harris, “The More Profound Nationality of their Lesbianism: Lesbian Society in Paris in the 1920’s,” Amazon Expedition (New York: Times Change Press, 1973), pp. 77–88; and Gayle Rubin’s Introduction to Renée Vivien’s A Woman Appeared to Me, trans. Jeanette Foster (Reno, Nev.: Naiad Press, 1976). 40. For example, see Lanser, “Speaking in Tongues.” 41. Marks, “Lesbian Intertexuality,” in Homosexualities and French Literature, ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 353–77. 42. Lillian Faderman and Ann Williams, “Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Image,” Conditions: One 1, no. 1 (April 1977): 40; and Sybil Korff Vincent, “Nothing Fails Like Success: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness,” unpublished paper. 43. Stimpson, “Zero Degree Deviancy.” 44. Cynthia Secor, “Ida, A Great American Novel,” Twentieth-Century Literature 24, no. 1

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(Spring 1978): 99; Elizabeth Fifer, “Is Flesh Advisable: The Interior Theater of Gertrude Stein,” Signs 4, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 478; Dierdre Vanderlinde, “Gertrude Stein: Three Lives,” paper presented at MLA convention, San Francisco, December 1979, p. 10; and Catharine Stimpson, “The Mind, and Body and Gertrude Stein,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 489–506. Like Stimpson on Stein, Lanser, in “Speaking in Tongues,” suggests that Djuna Barnes in Ladies Almanack “writes through the lesbian body, celebrating not the abstraction of a sexual preference, but female sexuality and its lesbian expression.” 45. Lillian Faderman and Louise Bernikow, “Comment on Joanne Feit Diehl’s ‘Come Slowly—Eden,’” Signs 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 188–95. For another perspective on woman as muse, see my paper, “ ‘The Dark Eye Beaming’: George Eliot, Sara Hennell and the Female Muse” (presented at MLA convention, “George Eliot and the Female Tradition,” 1980); and Arlene Raven and Ruth Iskin, “Through the Peephole: Toward a Lesbian Sensibility in Art,” Chrysalis no. 4, pp. 19–31. Contemporary lesbian interpretations of Dickinson were anticipated by Rebecca Patterson in The Riddle of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951). 46. Paula Bennett, “The Language of Love: Emily Dickinson’s Homoerotic Poetry,” Gai Saber 1, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 13–17; Bennett, “Emily Dickinson and the Value of Isolation,” Dickinson Studies 36 (1979): 13–17; Bennett’s paper presented at the MLA, 1979; and Bishop, “Renunciation in the Bridal Poems.” 47. Bertha Harris, “What we mean to say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,” Heresies 3 (Fall 1977): 7–8. Also, Harris, “The Purification of Monstrosity: The Lesbian as Literature,” paper presented at the MLA convention, New York, December 1974. 48. Bonnie Zimmerman, “‘Daughters of Darkness’: Lesbian Vampires,” Jump Cut no. 24–25 (March 1981): 23–24. See also, Jane Caputi, “‘Jaws’: Fish Stories and Patriarchal Myth,” Sinister Wisdom 7 (Fall 1978): 66–81. 49. Ann Allen Shockley, “The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview,” Conditions: Five 2: no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 136. 50. Maureen Brady and Judith McDaniel, “Lesbians in the Mainstream: Images of Lesbians in Recent Commercial Fiction,” Conditions: Six 2, no. 3 (Summer 1980): 83. 51. Julia Penelope Stanley, “Uninhabited Angels: Metaphors for Love,” Margins 23 (August 1975): 8. 52. Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan J. Wolfe, “Toward a Feminist Aesthetic,” Chrysalis, no. 6, p. 66. 53. Susan J. Wolfe, “Stylistic Experimentation in Millett, Johnston, and Wittig,” paper presented at the MLA convention, New York, December 1978, p. 3. On lesbian stylistics, see Lanser, “Speaking in Tongues”; and Martha Rosenfield, “Linguistic Experimentation in Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien,” paper presented at the MLA convention, 1978. 54. Mary Carruthers, “Imagining Women: Notes Toward a Feminist Poetic,” Massachusetts Review 20, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 301. 55. Jane Gurko and Sally Gearhart, “The Sword and the Vessel Versus the Lake on the Lake: A Lesbian Model of Nonviolent Rhetoric,” paper presented at the MLA convention, 1979, p. 3. 56. Harriet Desmoines, “Notes for a Magazine 11,” Sinister Wisdom 1, no. 1 (July 1976): 29. 57. Wolfe, “Stylistic Experimentation,” p. 16. 58. Annette Kolodny, “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” Feminist Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 1–25; in Feminisms Redux. 59. For example, a panel at the 1980 MLA convention (Houston), “Literary History and the New Histories of Sexuality,” presented gay and lesbian perspectives on contemporary French philosophies.

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60. Elly Bulkin, “Racism and Writing: Some Implications for White Lesbian Critics,” Sinister Wisdom 13 (Spring 1980): 16. 61. See Lorraine Bethel, “‘This Infinity of Conscious Pain’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition” and Gloria T. Hull, “Researching Alice Dunbar Nelson: A Personal and Literary Perspective,” both in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982); and Cheryl Clarke et al., “Conversations and Questions: Black Women on Black Women Writers,” Conditions: Nine 3, no. 3 (1983): 88–137. 62. Judith McDaniel, “Lesbians and Literature,” Sinister Wisdom 2 (Fall 1976): 2. 63. Susan Gubar, “Blessings in Disguise: Cross-Dressing as Re-Dressing for Female Modernists,” Massachusetts Review 22, no. 3 (1981): 477–508. 64. Elly Bulkin, “An Interview with Adrienne Rich: Part II,” Conditions: Two (1977): 58.

JOANNA RUSS

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The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, which will thereby be more complete, but fundamentally unchanged. Sometimes it’s also stressed that the erasing of previous injustice will encourage new artists of the hitherto “wrong” groups and thus provide art with more artists who will provide new (or different) material—and that all of this activity will enrich, but not change, the canon of art itself. But in the case of women, what has been left out? “Merely,” says Carolyn Kizer, “the private lives of one half of humanity.”1 These lives are not lived in isolation from the private and public lives of the other half. Here is Jean Baker Miller describing what happens when the lives of half a community are omitted from the consciousness of the other half: Some of the areas of life denied by the dominant group are . . . projected onto all subordinate groups. . . . But other parts of experience are so necessary that they cannot be projected very far away. One must have them nearby, even if one can still deny owning them. These are the special areas delegated to women.

She adds: . . . when . . . women move out of their restricted place, they threaten men in a very profound sense with the need to reintegrate many of the essentials of human development. . . . These things have been warded off and become doubly fearful because they look as if they will entrap men in “emotions,” weakness, sexuality, vulnerability, helplessness, the need for care, and other unsolved areas.

And: Inevitably the dominant group is the model for “normal human relationships.” It then becomes normal to treat others destructively and to derogate

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them, to obscure the truth of what you are doing by creating false explanations . . . to keep on doing these things, one need only behave “normally.”2

A mode of understanding life which wilfully ignores so much can do so only at the peril of thoroughly distorting the rest. A mode of understanding literature which can ignore the private lives of half the human race is not “incomplete”; it is distorted through and through. Feminist criticism of the early 1970s began by pointing out the simplest of these distortions, that is, that the female characters of even our greatest realistic “classics” by male writers are often not individualized portraits of possible women, but creations of fear and desire. At best, according to Lillian Robinson: . . . the problem is . . . [whether] the author, in showing what goes on in a heroine’s mind, is showing us anything like the mind of an actual human female. . . . I am amazed at how many writers have chosen to evade it by externalizing the psychological situation, using “objective” images that convey the pattern or content of a woman’s thought without actually entering into it. . . . Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, to name two eminently successful literary creations, are realized for us in this way.3

Some literary creations are not so successful or so innocuous, from Dickens’ incapacity to portray women alone or in solely female society to Hemingway’s misogynistic daydreams. I am thinking especially of Dickens’ Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend, vain and pretty, who flirts (quite reasonably) with her father, then applies the same manner to her younger sister (which is not reasonable) and then—alone—flirts (impossibly) with her mirror. Women speaking of mirrors and prettiness make it all too clear that even for pretty women, mirrors are the foci of anxious, not gratified, narcissism. The woman who knows beyond a doubt that she is beautiful exists aplenty in male novelists’ imaginations; I have yet to find her in women’s books or women’s memoirs or in life. Women spend a lot of time looking in mirrors, but the “compulsion to visualize the self” is a phrase Moers uses of women in her chapter on Gothic freaks and horrors; the compulsion is a constant check on one’s (possible) beauty, not an enjoyment of it. Dickens’ error is simple; how could he have observed the Bellas of his world alone or heard their thoughts? So he simply extends public behavior into a private situation. Here is Annis Pratt, on that incarnation of the eternal feminine, Molly Bloom: It is difficult not to feel about Molly Bloom on her chamberpot what Eldridge Cleaver must feel about Jack Benny’s Rochester, but a good critic will not withdraw her attention from a work which is resonant and craftsmanlike even if it is chauvinistic.4

Robinson, answering Pratt in the same issue of the same journal, refuses to take so mild a position: sexual stereotypes serve somebody’s interest. . . . I believe only a feminist knows what Molly Bloom is really about and can ask the questions that will demonstrate the real functioning of sexual myth in Joyce’s novel.5

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In the same issue, Dolores Barracano Schmidt performs this investigation in an essay on “The Great American Bitch,” calling this twentieth-century character who appears in men’s novels: more myth than reality, a fabrication used to maintain the status quo. She is a figure about whom a whole cluster of values and taboos clings: women’s fight for equality was a mistake . . . women are not equipped for civilization. . . . by being so thoroughly hateful the Great American Bitch of fiction reinforces the sexist view.6

Another feminist critic, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, generalizes: The definition [in literature] of women’s most serious problems and the proposed solutions . . . are . . . covertly tailored to meet the needs of fundamentally masculine problems. . . . women appear in literature . . . as conveniences to the resolution of masculine dilemmas.

One of Wolff’s examples is the opposition of “virtuous” to “sensuous” woman, a projection of a male split in feeling and value which “relieves . . . [the man] from the difficulties of trying to unite two forces of love.” (The “sensuous” woman, as Wolff points out, is not one who desires men but one who is desired by them.) She goes on: men may appear stereotypically . . . but the stereotype [e.g., the Warrior] is usually a fantasied solution to an essentially masculine problem. . . . Moreover, there is a . . . significant body of literature which recognizes the limitations of some of these masculine stereotypes [e.g., The Red Badge of Courage]. There is no comparable body of anti-stereotype literature about women. . . . Even women writers . . . seem to adopt them.7

Judith Fetterley offers even more telling examples: . . . when I look at a poem like “The Solitary Reaper” . . . I do not find my experience in it at all. Rather I find that the drama of the poem depends upon a contrast between the male subject as conscious, creative knower and the unknowing female object of his contemplation; it is my wordless, artless, natural and utterly unself-conscious song which has provided the male speaker/poet with the opportunity to define himself as knower. . . . [in “To His Coy Mistress”] the complexity of the speaker’s situation, which is the subject of the poem, is modest compared to the complexity of the mistress’s position . . . [which is] the essence of my relation to the poem.

Elsewhere she states one of the central problems of feminist criticism: What happens to one’s definition of aesthetic criteria . . . when one is confronted by a literature which does not support the self but assaults it[?]8

Vonda McIntyre answers: Right now a lot of literary and film “classics” are unbearable . . . because of

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the underlying [sexist] assumptions. In a few generations I think they will be either incomprehensible or so ridiculous as to be funny.9

And Ellen Cantarow, looking into her college textbook, finds that next to Pope’s line, “Most women have no Characters at all,” she once wrote: “SPEAKER TONE DEFINE.” She asks: Where in my notes was that other girl, the girl who once raged at being taken for “a typical Wellesley girl?” . . . [there was] intense self-hatred. . . . education at Wellesley . . . didn’t just belie our life experience as girls . . . it nullified that experience, rendered it invisible. . . . we lived in a state of schizophrenia that we took to be normal.10

A more explicit, systematic rejection of the canon and the standards that support it can be found in the field of art—a rejection I believe parallel to that going on in a more piecemeal fashion in literature. For example, Mary Garrard asks: Why is our art history . . . full of virtuous reversals in which a virile, heroic, or austere style suddenly and dramatically replaces a feminine, lyrical, or luxurious one—David over Fragonard, Caravaggio over Salviati, clean international Modern Gropius over wickedly ornamental Sullivan or Tiffany?11

Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff answer: The prejudice against the decorative has a long art history and is based on hierarchies: fine art above decorative art, Western art above non-Western art, men’s art above women’s art . . . “high art” [means] man, mankind, the individual man, individuality, humans, humanity, the human figure, humanism, civilization, culture, the Greeks, the Romans, the English, Christianity, spiritual transcendence, religion, nature, true form, science, logic, creativity, action, war, virility, violence, brutality, dynamism, power, and greatness. In the same texts other words are used repeatedly in connection with . . . “low art”: Africans, Orientals, Persians, Slovaks, peasants, the lower classes, women, children, savages, pagans, sensuality, pleasure, decadence, chaos, anarchy, impotence, exotica, eroticism, artifice, tattoos, cosmetics, ornaments, decoration, carpets, weaving, patterns, domesticity, wallpaper, fabrics, and furniture.

The rest of Jaudon and Kozloff’s essay consists of quotations from artists and art historians arranged under such headings as “War and Virility,” “Purity in Art as a Holy Cause,” and a particularly damning section expressing “the desire for unlimited personal power,” which the authors call “Autocracy.”12 Such associations of art with virility, quality with size, and authenticity with self-aggrandizement appear in literature, too. (One of the strangest conversations I ever had was with a male colleague who stated that Chekhov could not be a “great” artist because he never wrote anything “full-length.” In some confusion—apparently short stories and novellas didn’t count—I mentioned the plays. These, it seemed, didn’t count either; “They’re much shorter than novels,” said my colleague.) Here is Adrienne Rich, pointing out that the “masterpieces” we have been taught to admire are not merely flawed, but that they may not

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even mean what we have been taught they mean. In “The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message” Rich begins with “A man in terror of impotence,” goes on to describe the music as: music of the entirely isolated soul yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego music without the ghost of another person in it. . . .

What is the man trying to say? Something he would keep back if he could, “bound and flogged” with “chords of Joy.” The real situation behind all this pounding? . . . everything is silence and the beating of a bloody fist upon a splintered table.13

If the canon is an attempt to shore up the status quo, if the masterpieces don’t mean what they pretend to mean, then artists must throw away the rules altogether in favor of something else. “Their musty rules of unity, and God knows what besides, if they meant anything,” says Aphra Behn, but she goes no further.14 Rich does, stating: in pretending to stand for “the human,” masculine subjectivity tries to force us to name our truths in an alien language, to dilute them; we are constantly told that the “real” problems . . . are those men have defined, that the problems we need to examine are trivial, unscholarly, nonexistent. . . . Any woman who has moved from the playing-fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world, knows the extraordinary sense of shedding . . . someone else’s baggage, of ceasing to translate. It is not that thinking becomes easy, but that the difficulties are intrinsic to the work itself, rather than to the environment. . . . 15

In “ceasing to translate,” the “wrong” people begin to make not only good, but genuinely experimental art. Several contemporary women’s theater groups have thrown away not only the unities but the lights, the proscenium, the elaborate impressiveness, the “primitivism,” and the assault-on-the-audience that marked the theatrical “experiments” of the 1960s. Contemporaneously with the reappearance of feminism, these women’s groups have instead created a version of Epic Theater (though nobody’s noticed): much narrative, constantly changing characters, many incidents (personal and historical), direct (and sympathetic) commentary to the audience, and the reenactment, sometimes in mime, rather than the here-and-now “hot” acting, of important scenes. These performances are, to my mind, more genuinely experimental than what passed for experimental theater in the 1960s, just as Baldwin’s non-fiction is not only beautiful but genuinely experimental in comparison (for example) with much Joyce- or Nabokov-derived modern work. We have been trained to regard certain kinds of art (especially the violent, the arcane, and the assaultive) as “experimental.” But there’s all the

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difference in the world between studying oxidation and producing loud noises with gunpowder. The former leads somewhere; the latter (analogous to rock groups’ raising the ante with decibelage, luridness, and violence) does not. There are genuine experiments happening in women’s writing. According to Suzanne Juhasz, “In the late sixties and early seventies an explosion of poetry by women occurred. . . . ” She goes on, concluding that women are being forced to create new poetic forms, since: If the woman poet wants . . . to link her particular experiences with larger universals . . . she can call upon only a percentage of her own experiences. Much of what she knows does not link up to universals because the universals presently in existence are based upon masculine experience, masculine norms.

One way of dealing with the norms of what is or is not universal is to ignore them and relate particulars to particulars. This leads to writing (as Juhasz puts it) in the vernacular and not in Latin. It also leads to rejection slips as she finds out: Recently I received a rejection slip from a well-meaning editor who, while admitting the “necessary” nature of my poems, took issue with the fact that my poems “said it all.” “Try more denotation, synecdoche, metonymy, suggestion,” he said. Yet I and many feminist poets do not want to treat poetry as a metalanguage that needs to be decoded.16

Julia Penelope, also, notes the critics’ annoyance when “works . . . make the function of the critic obsolete. The . . . work . . . (is) immediately available to the reader, and there is no need for the . . . intervention of the critic as guide or explicator.”17 Noting that the epigram is, by tradition, inferior to the epic, Juhasz quotes with delight some of Alta’s short poems, for example: if you won’t make love to me, at least get out of my dreams!

Here’s another, by black poet Pat Parker, to white women: SISTER! your foot’s smaller but it’s still on my neck.

Juhasz finally abandons the idea of the canon altogether: a poem works if it lives up to itself. Such a definition contains no built-in ranking system.18

And here is Woolf’s opinion of the canon: They [the children] knew what he liked best—to be forever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay, and saying who had won this, who had won that, who was a “first-rate man” . . . who was “brilliant but . . . fundamentally unsound,” who was “undoubtedly the ablest fellow in Bailliol.” . . . That was what they talked about.19

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But if we throw out the linear hierarchy, are we to do without standards altogether? Here is Juhasz again: Yet a poem can work and not be good. It can be dull or ordinary, or superficial. A good poem works powerfully and accurately to communicate between poet and reader or listener.20 [Italics mine]

But which reader? Which listener? The techniques for mystifying women’s lives and belittling women’s writing that I have described work by suppressing context: writing is separated from experience, women writers are separated from their tradition and each other, public is separated from private, political from personal—all to enforce a supposed set of absolute standards. What is frightening about black art or women’s art or Chicago art—and so on—is that it calls into question the very idea of objectivity and absolute standards: This is a good novel. Good for what? Good for whom? One side of the nightmare is that the privileged group will not recognize that “other” art, will not be able to judge it, that the superiority of taste and training possessed by the privileged critic and the privileged artist will suddenly vanish. The other side of the nightmare is not that what is found in the “other” art will be incomprehensible, but that it will be all too familiar. That is: Women’s lives are the buried truth about men’s lives. The lives of people of color are the buried truth about white lives. The buried truth about the rich is who they take their money from and how. The buried truth about “normal” sexuality is how one kind of sexual expression has been made privileged, and what kinds of unearned virtue and terrors about identity this distinction serves. There are other questions: why is “greatness” in art so often aggressive? Why does “great” literature have to be long? Is “regionalism” only another instance of down-grading the vernacular? Why is “great” architecture supposed to knock your eye out at first view, unlike “indigenous” architecture, which must be appreciated slowly and with knowledge of the climate in which it exists? Why is the design of clothing—those grotesque and sometimes perilously fantastic anatomical-social-role-characterological ideas of the person—a “minor” art? Because it has a use? In admiring “pure” (i.e., useless) art, are we not merely admiring Veblenian conspicuous consumption, like the Mandarin fingernail? In Eve Merriam’s recent play The Club it became clear that masculine and feminine body-language are very different; gestures socially recognizable as “male” lay claim to as much space as possible, while comparable “female” gestures are selfprotective, self-referential, and take up as little space as possible. Male reviewers, astonished at a play in which the members of a nineteenthcentury men’s club and the club’s black waiter and its boy in buttons and its piano player were all played by women, praised the actresses for their success in imitating men without making any attempt to hide their own female anatomy. In her autobiography Judy Chicago comments: when the women “acted out” walking down the street and being accosted by men, everyone seemed able to “take on” the characteristics of the tough swagger, of men “coming on.” It was as if they knew the words so well.21

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Male reviewers understood the point of hearing sexist jokes and songs of the period performed by women, but it took a female reviewer (in Harper’s Bazaar, I think) to see that the final effect of seeing women in the habiliments of power was utter confusion as to what roles belonged to whom. She called this disappearance of the link between gender and sexual physiology the labels washing off the bottles; I came out of the theater saying, “But what is ‘women’?” Perhaps this isn’t the effect the play had on men, or perhaps male reviewers were not being honest. I think it would be unlikely if a play like this had an identical effect on women and on men. In art, are we (in fact) trained to admire body language? An obviously aggressive or forceful technique? Loudness? These questions are being asked and dealt with. But they cannot be (and are not being) dealt with by assuming one absolute center of value. In everybody’s present historical situation, there can be, I believe, no single center of value and hence no absolute standards. That does not mean that assignment of values must be arbitrary or self-serving (like my students, whose defense of their poetry is “I felt it”). It does mean that for the linear hierarchy of good and bad it becomes necessary to substitute a multitude of centers of value, each with its own periphery, some closer to each other, some farther apart. The centers have been constructed by the historical facts of what it is to be female or black or working class or what-have-you; when we all live in the same culture, then it will be time for one literature. But that is not the case now. Nor is there one proper “style.” There are many kinds of English (including Anglo-Indian) and before determining whether (for example) Virginia Woolf “writes better than” Zora Neale Hurston, it might be a good idea to decide who is addressing the mind’s ear and who the mind’s eye, in short, what English we’re talking about. One is a kind of Latin, sculptured, solid, and distinct, into which comes the vernacular from time to time; the other is literary-as-vernacular: fluid, tone-shifting, visually fleeting, with the (impossible) cadences of the mind’s ear constantly overriding the memory of the physical ear. (Woolf often writes sentences too long for any but the most experienced actor to speak as a single breath-unit.) If the one kind of English is too slow and too eternally set, is not the other kind too facile, too quick, always a little too thin? There used to be an odd, popular, and erroneous idea that the sun revolved around the earth. This has been replaced by an even odder, equally popular, and equally erroneous idea that the earth goes around the sun. In fact, the moon and the earth revolve around a common center, and this commonly-centered pair revolves with the sun around another common center, except that you must figure in all the solar planets here, so things get complicated. Then there is the motion of the solar system with regard to a great many other objects, e.g., the galaxy, and if at this point you ask what does the motion of the earth really look like from the center of the entire universe, say (and where are the Glotolog?), the only answer is: that it doesn’t. Because there isn’t.

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NOTES 1. Carolyn Kizer, “Pro Femina,” in No More Masks, ed. Ellen Bass and Florence Howe (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973), p. 175. 2. Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 47, 120, 8. 3. Lillian S. Robinson, “Who’s Afraid of a Room of One’s Own?” in The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English, ed. Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 376–77. 4. Annis Pratt, “The New Feminist Criticism,” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 877. 5. Lillian S. Robinson, “Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective,” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 884–87. 6. Dolores Barracano Schmidt, “The Great American Bitch,” College English 32, no. 8 (May 1971): 904. 7. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “A Mirror for Men: Stereotypes of Women in Literature,” in Woman: An Issue, ed. Edwards et al., pp. 207–8, 217. 8. Judith Fetterley, MLA convention, December 1975, pp. 8–9. 9. McIntyre, Khatru, p. 119. 10. Ellen Cantarow, “Why Teach Literature?” in The Politics of Literature, ed. Kampf and Lauter, pp. 57–61. 11. Mary D. Garrard, “Feminism: Has It Changed Art History?” Heresies 4 (1978): 60. 12. Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff, “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture,” Heresies 4 (1978): 38–42. 13. Adrienne Rich, Poems Selected and New: 1950–1974 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 205–6. 14. In By a Woman Writt, ed. Goulianos, p. 99. 15. Adrienne Rich, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” Heresies 3 (1977): 53–54. 16. Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms, pp. 139, 178–79. 17. Julia Penelope (Stanley), “Fear of Flying?”, Sinister Wisdom 2 (1976): 59. 18. Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms, pp. 185, 201. 19. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927), p. 15. 20. Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms, p. 201. 21. Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Life as a Woman Artist (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), p. 127.

PAUL LAUTER

CASTE, CLASS, AND CANON (1981/1987)























I I want to consider two problems in this essay, problems which—as I shall try to show—are closely related, although they may not at first glimpse appear to be. One problem, as my title suggests, involves the “canon” of literature—that is, the works from the past that we continue to read, teach, and write about. I am less concerned here with describing the history or features of a canon, or proposing alternatives to the canons we have inherited, than in exploring some of the factors that have continued to shape it. In particular, I want to consider how “class” and “caste,” especially as they emerge in the work of literary analysis, shape canon. Examining the relationships of class, caste, and canon will, I believe, aid in understanding what we might mean by “feminist criticism,” the second problem I wish to address. To frame that problem somewhat differently, how does—does?— the project of feminist criticism differ from other forms of literary analysis, and especially the formalisms rooted in the work of the New Critics? Can the question of the canon serve as a lens to help focus the project of feminist criticism? I want to begin with an experience I had at the 1980 National Women’s Studies Association convention during a session on the practice of feminist literary criticism. A group of young critics, all women, described to the audience how they met regularly at a library centrally located in their city, how they prepared and discussed various texts, and how they aided each other in developing their critical skills and range. They then handed out a poem and read it aloud, each one taking one section, and began discussing it by having each member of the group present a short statement about it. Then the audience was invited to join in the discussion. It seems like a reasonable process, and I am sure that—especially for those living in relatively isolated areas—it felt like the rushing of falls in the desert. But as the session wore on I found myself getting more and more restive, indeed rather irritated. I tried to trace my growing anger. It seemed to derive from the dynamic of the panel itself; it had, I thought, to do with the form of criticism, almost all close analysis of text. I found myself, reluctantly, painfully, being drawn back into the tortured style of graduate-school competition: “can you top this?” As much ma-

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cho as mind filled the room. Was this feminist criticism? I began to wonder: is the form of criticism value-free? Is critical technique simply a tool, like trigonometry? Well, is trigonometry value-free? There was a second problem, the poem under consideration. As might be guessed, the poem was one from Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language. I want to be very clear about my comment here: I respect Adrienne Rich’s poetry very much, and I particularly like that book. I think the poem that was under discussion quite a good poem indeed. But I remembered Deborah Hilty’s questioning such a focus in a paper she prepared for a Midwest Modern Language Association conference. Why was it, she asked, that such panels always seem to take up poems by Adrienne Rich? Why not Judy Grahn or Susan Griffin? Or Vera Hall? or Malvina Reynolds? Or Gwendolyn Brooks? Adrienne Rich, by the way, was among the first to ask precisely that question. Those two questions—about the technique of criticism and the subject for analysis—led, in turn, to a third question: what connection existed between the selection of the poem and the kind of criticism, really the kind of response, being undertaken? Or, to put it another way, how is canon—that is, selection—related to, indeed a function of, critical technique? That is the fundamental question I want to consider here—the relationship of style in criticism to the canon of literature. But before I address that question specifically, I want simply to outline the nest of questions implicit in the central one: —Can the canon significantly change if we retain essentially the same critical techniques and priorities? —Where do the techniques of criticism come from? Do they fall from the sky? Or do they arise out of social practice? And if the latter, from what social practice? —Out of what social practice, from what values, did close analysis of complex texts arise? —Do we perpetuate those values in pursuing the critical practice derived from them? —Does such critical practice effectively screen from our appreciation, even our scrutiny, other worlds of creativity, of art? —Are there other worlds of art out there whose nature, dynamics, values we fail to appreciate because we ask the wrong questions, or don’t know what questions to ask? Or maybe shouldn’t simply be asking questions? Such questions clearly enough reveal the drift of my argument. But to summarize it: I think the literary canon as we have known it is a product in significant measure of our training in a male, white, bourgeois cultural tradition, including in particular the formal techniques of literary analysis. And further, that other cultural traditions provide alternate views about the nature and function of art, and of approaches to it. Indeed, if our concern is to change the canon “radically”—that is, at its roots—as distinct from grafting on to it a few odd branches, we must look at the full range of these alternate traditions. This argument holds, I believe, whether one is concerned with working-class art, the art of minority groups, or much of the art of women. For in significant ways, all “marginalized”

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groups have experiences and traditions distinct from those of the dominant majority. In this paper I focus initially on working-class and black traditions, both for their inherent interest and also because they provide us with revealing perspectives on women’s art as well as on feminist criticism.

II Raymond Williams’ distinction between “working-class” and “bourgeois” culture provides a useful starting point: . . . a culture is not only a body of intellectual and imaginative work; it is also and essentially a whole way of life. The basis of a distinction between bourgeois and working-class culture is only secondarily in the field of intellectual and imaginative work. . . . The crucial distinguishing element in English life since the Industrial Revolution is not language, not dress, not leisure—for these indeed will tend to uniformity. The crucial distinction is between alternative ideas of the nature of social relationship. “Bourgeois” is a significant term because it marks that version of social relationship which we usually call individualism: that is to say, an idea of society as a neutral area within which each individual is free to pursue his own development and his own advantage as a natural right. . . . [Both] this idea [of service] and the individualistic idea can be sharply contrasted with the idea that we properly associate with the working class: an idea which, whether it is called communism, socialism, or cooperation regards society neither as neutral nor as protective, but as the positive means for all kinds of development, including individual development.1

Writing from a British perspective, Williams perhaps underestimates the significance of works of imagination in defining “working-class culture”: “It is not proletarian art, or council houses, or a particular use of languages; it is, rather, the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits of thought and intentions which proceed from this.”2 But his fundamental point is critical to understand: while broad areas of the culture are common to the working class and the bourgeoisie, there remains a “crucial distinction . . . between alternative ideas of the nature of social relationship.” This distinction significantly explains differing “institutions, manners, habits of thought and intentions.” Distinct cultures also help shape ideas about the nature of art, its functions, the processes of its creation, the nature of the artist and of the artist’s social role. There is nothing very mysterious about this: people whose experiences of the world significantly differ, whose material conditions of life, whose formal and informal training, whose traditions, sometimes even whose language, differ—and especially people whose understanding of their own life-chances and opportunities, their “place”—differ will think about things differently, will talk about things differently, will value at least some things differently, will express themselves to different people in different ways and about different experiences, at least in some measure. But that is all very abstract. We need to be somewhat more specific about differences between working-class and bourgeois art and literature. Unfortunate-

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ly, there are relatively few cultural, and particularly literary, analyses of workingclass materials (at least in Western practice). Martha Vicinus’ The Industrial Muse3 is a unique full-length study, but confined to Great Britain; Dan Tannacito examines the poetry of Colorado miners around the turn of this century;4 an article of mine provides bibliographical and some theoretical approaches to working-class women’s literature;5 Lawrence Levine brilliantly explores the historical relationships between black culture and consciousness.6 Even from this limited number of analyses certain features of working-class or “popular”7 art emerge clearly. First, working-class art often is produced in group situations, rather than in the privacy of a study—or garret—and it is similarly experienced in the hall, the church, the work-site, the quilting bee, the picket line. It thus emerges from the experiences of a particular group of people facing particular problems in a particular time. Much of it is therefore not conceived as timeless and transcendent; rather, it might be called “instrumental.” As Tannacito puts it, “the value of the Colorado miners’ poetry derived exclusively from the use made of the poems by their audience. The audience was an immediate one. The objective [in writing] was inseparable from those goals” toward which the workers’ lives directed them. Vicinus points out that working-class artists, themselves persuaded of the power of literature to “influence people’s behavior,” aimed to “persuade readers to adopt particular beliefs.” Some recommended the bourgeois values embodied in the culture of what they thought of as their “betters.” Others, despairing of social and political change, devoted their work to reassuring readers that their lives, debased as they might have become, still had value, and to providing at least some entertainment and consolation in an oppressive world. Many wrote to help change the status quo. Their work, Vicinus says, aimed “to arouse and focus social tension in order to channel it toward specific political actions.” By “clarifying” or making vivid economic, social, and political relationships between working people and those who held power, they helped to “shape individual and class consciousness” and to “imbue a sense of class solidarity that encouraged working people to fight for social and political equality.” Tannacito provides a number of instances of the ways in which the miner poets tried to accomplish such goals. Poems of “praise,” for example, explicitly tried to link heroic deeds of the past with the contemporary workers’ community. Other poems sought to inspire specific forms of struggle, job actions, voting, boycotts. Miner poets, like working-class artists generally, wrote about the world they and their readers shared: the job, oppression by bosses, the militia and the scabs, a heritage of common struggle. They saw art not as a means for removing people from the world in which they lived—however desirable that might seem—nor as a device for producing “catharsis” or “stasis.” Rather, art aimed to inspire consciousness about and actions within the world, to make living in that world more bearable, to extend experiences of that world, indeed to enlarge the world working people could experience. Thus, even as sophisticated an example of working-class fiction as Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle” centrally concerns the problem of inspiring a new generation with the values, hopes, and images that directed the actions and aspirations of an earlier generation and that lie buried under the grit produced by forty years of daily life. Or consider how Morris Rosenfeld renders the experience of time-discipline in his work as a pants presser:

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The Clock in the workshop,—it rests not a moment; It points on, and ticks on: eternity—time; Once someone told me the clock had a meaning,— In pointing and ticking had reason and rhyme. . . . At times, when I listen, I hear the clock plainly;— The reason of old—the old meaning—is gone! The maddening pendulum urges me forward To labor and still labor on. The tick of the clock is the boss in his anger. The face of the clock has the eyes of the foe. The clock—I shudder—Dost hear how it draws me? It calls me “Machine” and it cries [to] me “Sew”!8

Rosenfeld is concerned to capture, and to mourn, the passing in a particular historical moment of an older, less time-disciplined order of work, as well as the degradation of the worker to the status of machine. The poem gives names and pictures to the experiences that Rosenfeld and his fellow-workers encountered in moving from the shtetl to the sweatshops of the new world. Working-class art thus functions to focus consciousness and to develop ideology, but it can also play a variety of other roles. Songs were used, especially by black slaves and nominally free laborers, to set the pace of work in a group and, at the same time, to relieve the tension and pent-up feelings born of oppressive labor. Leaders lined out a rhythm for hoeing, chopping, lifting bales, for rowing boats. At the same time, the songs spoke realistically about the shared labor, and more covertly, perhaps, about those exacting it.9 Similarly, sorrow songs or spirituals served not only to express grief and to sustain hope in slavery, but they were also used as signals to prepare for escapes from it (see Levine, pp. 30–31). Similarly, during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, what were originally church hymns underwent conversion to marching songs and sometimes means for triumphing over one’s jailers. Clearly, the conception of the functions of art are here very different from those propounded, say, by Aristotle, or Milton, or Coleridge—or formalist criticism, as I shall indicate in a moment. It is not, however, only conception or function which differ, but also form and technique, and even the manner of creation of much working-class art. In characterizing the distinctive qualities of the song styles of black slaves, Levine emphasizes “its overriding antiphony, its group nature, its pervasive functionality, its improvisational character, its strong relationship in performance to dance and bodily movements and expression. . . . ” (p. 6). Some of these qualities are peculiar to styles derived from West African roots, but some are characteristic of other working-class cultures. New songs are often based upon old ones, and there is less concern with the unique qualities of art than with building variations upon tunes, themes, and texts well known in the community. For example, songs like “Hold the Fort” and “We Are Building a Strong Union,” which began as gospel hymns, went through a series of metamorphoses in order to serve the needs of a diverse sequence of worker’s organizations—in the case of the former, including the British transport workers, the Knights of Labor, and the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobbly poet Joe Hill constructed some of his best-known songs as take-offs on Salvation Army hymns. The spiritual “Oh, Freedom” became one of the most popular songs of the Civil Rights movement;

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as the movement’s militance increased, many singers changed the song’s refrain from “Before I be a slave/ I be buried in my grave/ and go home to my Lord/ And be free” to “Before . . . grave/ And I’ll fight for my right/ To be free.” In many ways, working-class art, like other elements in working-class life, is highly traditional; certainly innovative form is not a primary consideration and “make it new” a slogan which would be viewed with some suspicion. Similarly, working-class poetry and song, especially, but also tales and stories are often built around repeated elements—refrains, formulae, commonly-accepted assumptions about characters. Language, too, is often simpler, sometimes commonplace, certainly less “heightened” than that of “high-culture” verse. Many of these characteristics are common to literary forms rooted in oral art—made necessary by the exigencies of memory and improvisation. Some may arise from the artist’s desire to avoid a fancy vocabulary unfamiliar to the audience, or esoteric images and allusions. Thus a poem like Rosenfeld’s carefully works with materials as familiar to his readers as gabardine was to him. In some respects, as well, these characteristics are derived from the communal character of the creation of certain working-class art forms. One old former slave describes the creation of a “spiritual” in a pre-Civil War religious meeting in these words: I’d jump up dar and den and hollar and shout and sing and pat, and dey would all cotch de words and I’d sing it to some old shout song I’d heard ’em sing from Africa, and dey’d all take it up and keep at it, and keep a-addin’ to it, and den it would be a spiritual.10

In such situations, the individual creator is generally less significant than the group; or, rather, to the extent that individuals are creators, they shape a common stock to new group purposes without diminishing or expropriating that common stock. The song leader in church is not asked to provide new hymns (much less copyright old ones) and would be looked at with suspicion if she did so. She is asked to reinvigorate a hymn that is known, perhaps to add something especially appropriate for the occasion.11 The jazz musician may be admired for a new melody, but probably more important—at least until recently—is the ability to ring variations on melodies the listeners know and follow. I am emphasizing here the “folk,” communal elements of working-class art, in some degree at the expense of art produced by self-conscious individual working-class artists. I do so because an approach through people’s culture helps to focus certain distinctive qualities of working-class art, certain “centers of gravity,” not so easily seen if one concentrates on the productions of separate artists. Yet, obviously, a continuum exists between songs, poems, and tales which are, so to speak, common property and works created primarily by individual imaginations. But what is critical here is precisely the relationship between individual and community. Levine, for example, directly connects the form of the spiritual with the underlying social reality of black slave life: Just as the process by which the spirituals were created allowed for simultaneous individual and communal creativity, so their very structure provided simultaneous outlets for individual and communal expression. The overriding

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antiphonal structure of the spirituals—the call and response pattern which Negroes brought with them from Africa and which was reinforced in America by the practice of lining out hymns—placed the individual in continual dialogue with his community, allowing him at one and the same time to preserve his voice as a distinct entity and to blend it with those of his fellows.12

I would carry the argument in a slightly different direction by suggesting that one center of gravity of working-class art is its high level of integration of creator and audience. Works often have their origin, as well as their being, in situations which do not absolutely distinguish active performer/artist from passive audience. Or when the distinction is relatively clearer, the artist’s “product” is offered not primarily for its exchange value (money for that song or painting), but for its use in the lives of the people to whom it is directed. A moving example is provided by the Kentucky mountain songs sung at the funeral of “Jock” Yablonski and recorded with great majesty in the film Harlan County, U.S.A. In a larger sense, all working-class art (perhaps all art13) must be explored precisely in terms of its use. Partly that is a function of marginality itself: the struggle for existence and dignity necessarily involves all available resources, including art. But partly, I think, this phenomenon is explained by the fundamental character of working-class culture, what Williams called “solidarity.” It is not simply a slogan or an abstraction that happens to appeal to many people who work. It is, rather, a way of describing the culture of people who have been pushed together into workplaces and communities where survival and growth enforce interdependence. In this context, the work of the artist—while it may in some respects be expressive and private—remains overwhelmingly functional in his or her community. And an approach to it cannot strip it of this context without ripping away its substance. My argument began from the premise that the conditions of life of workingclass people have produced ideas about social relationships crucially distinct from those of the bourgeoisie. This distinction shaped differing institutions, manners, and ideas about culture and art. In order to approach working-class culture, then, we must begin not with presuppositions about what literature is and is not, or what is valuable in it or not, but rather by asking in what forms, on what themes, in what circumstances, and to what ends do working people speak and sing and write and signify to each other. We must, in other words, discover the distinctive rules and measures of working-class art and thus the critical strategies and tools appropriate to them. “Are you saying,” someone might object, “that the rules and measures—the critical tools—we now possess are invalid, somehow biased or irrelevant?” Here, indeed, is the nub of the matter. For we do approach culture with certain presuppositions, frameworks, touchstones which we learn and which we learn to valorize. I have tried here to state as neutrally as I can certain of the qualities and origins of working-class art. I have not tried to lay a spiritual like “Roll, Jordan” or a poem like Rosenfeld’s alongside, say, Donne’s “A Valediction: forbidding mourning” in order to evaluate one in relation to another, or all against some “universal” standard of measurement. For the central issue is not which is “better,” but what we mean by “better.” And I am sure it is clear by now that

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I believe such standards of judgment, which shape the canon, to be rooted in assumptions derived from class and caste about the techniques, qualities, and especially the functions of art. I do not want to be misleading here: I do not believe that somewhere out there is a working-class poet, ignored through bourgeois prejudice, who actually wrote better metaphysical poems than Donne or more singular odes than Shelley. No more do I think that a factory organized along truly socialist lines will be more “efficient” and “productive” than a capitalist factory; capitalists often find means to do rather well what it is they want to do—in this case to squeeze as much profit from workers as they can. But that does not necessarily make for a humane, safe, creative, or socially responsible workplace. The goals are different; the values and thus the priorities different. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that there are forgotten black and white women writers who wrote fiction as good in traditional terms as that of many of the white men with whom we are familiar. As Williams pointed out, there are vast shared areas of culture. My main point, however, is that if there probably are no working-class metaphysical poets, neither did Donne write verses for “Roll, Jordan.” And if “Roll, Jordan” does not demonstrate the fine elaboration of complex language to be found in “A Valediction,” it is also the fact that none of Donne’s poems—not all of them together I daresay—has served to sustain and inspire so many thousands of oppressed people. What, finally, is art about?

III Mr. Allen Tate had an answer for us. “Good poetry,” he writes in “Tension in Poetry,” “is a unity of all the meanings from the furthest extremes of intension and extension. . . . the meaning of poetry is its ‘tension,’ the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it.”14 In the same essay he attacks Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” a poem written in gloomy reaction to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Let us abandon then our gardens and go home And sit in the sitting-room. Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud? Sour to the fruitful seed Is the cold earth under this cloud, Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer; We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them. Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room. Not in our day Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before, Beneficent upon us Out of the glittering bay, And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea Moving the blades of cord With a peaceful sound.

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“These lines,” Tate claims, “are mass language: they arouse an affective state in one set of terms, and suddenly an object quite unrelated to those terms gets the benefit of it.” The Millay poem, he continues, is no doubt still admired, by persons to whom it communicates certain feelings about social justice, by persons for whom the lines are the occasion of feelings shared by them and the poet. But if you do not share those feelings, as I happen not to share them in the images of desiccated nature, the lines and even the entire poem are impenetrably obscure.15

It once occurred to me that Tate might be using “obscure” in a Pickwickian sense, for whatever one might think of the Millay poem it seems rather less obscure than Tate’s critique. But then, from his point of view, “communication in poetry” is a fallacy. The poet is “not responsible to society for a version of what it thinks it is or what it wants.” The poet is responsible to his conscience. And he (the pronoun remains Tate’s) is responsible “for the virtue proper to him as poet, for his special arête for the mastery of a disciplined language which will not shun the full report of reality conveyed to him by his awareness: he must hold, in Yeats’ great phrase, ‘reality and justice in a single thought.’”16 Elsewhere Tate approvingly quotes I. A. Richards to the effect that poetry is “complete knowledge”: “The order of completeness that it achieves in the great works of the imagination is not the order of experimental completeness aimed at by the positivist sciences. . . . For the completeness of Hamlet is not of the experimental order, but of the experienced order; it is, in short, of the mythical order.”17 Given this self-contained idea of poetry, it is not surprising that formalist critics like Tate should develop techniques emphasizing intense analysis of a poem’s language and its “tensions.” Or that they should conceive the primary task of the “man of letters” as preserving “the integrity, the purity, and the reality of language wherever and for whatever purpose it may be used.” “He must,” Tate goes on to explain, approach this task “through the letter—the letter of the poem, the letter of the politician’s speech, the letter of the law; for the use of the letter is in the long run our one indispensible test of the actuality of our experience.”18 How different this conservative, monitory role from that staked out for the American Scholar by Emerson. Besides, is it really necessary to talk about the taste of rotting fruit to test its actuality? However that might be, Tate’s ultimate vision of the “man of letters” asserts an even weightier function: . . . the duty of the man of letters is to supervise the culture of language, to which the rest of culture is subordinate, and to warn us when our language is ceasing to forward the ends proper to man. The end of social man is communion in time through love, which is beyond time.19

The man of letters thus stands a priest of language, linking society and culture with the transcendent. But why devote such attention to these ideas, or once again pillory an often abused guru of the New Criticism? Has not criticism passed beyond the exegetical stage? In theory, it has. In practice, however, and especially in the common practice of the classroom, the dominant mode of procedure remains exploring

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the “furthest extremes of intension and extension” we may find in a text. And the texts we prefer are, on the whole, those which invite such explication. One or another version of formalism remains, in short, the meat and potatoes of what men—and women—of letters stir up for our students and readers. And while Tate’s ecclesiastical trappings may have been doffed as rather too quaint and burdensome, something of the incense lingers in the justification for what we do. Thus it seems to me important to ask what social and political values generate the forms of criticism and its justifications we find in Tate and his fellows. There is a second, perhaps more fundamental reason for examining Tate’s ideas. He and his New Critical peers were the first generation to pose what became, and still is, the dominant paradigm of academic criticism. I want to suggest that, regardless of form, academic criticism in the past half century has retained a common set of social and political roots and a consistent function. An image may help flesh this assertion. In Invisible Man Ellison pictures a statue of the “Founder,” his hands holding the edges of a veil, which covers the face of the black youth kneeling before him. The speaker of the book comments that it is never clear whether the Founder is lifting the veil from the boy’s face, or holding it ever more firmly in its place. That ambiguous image may stand for the academic critic; is he (I want to retain the overwhelmingly appropriate pronoun) offering enlightenment by lifting the veil or holding the student in a kind of darkness? In feminist pedagogy a distinction has developed between two forms of teaching: one, which often involves the display of a specialized vocabulary, has the tendency to overwhelm students, paralyzing them before the erudition of the teacher; another, seen as developing from the equalitarian ideals of feminism, tries to legitimize the student’s own responses to a text, to history, to experience as the starting points for analysis and thus understanding. To be sure, it has often been easy to overstate this distinction between—in crude shorthand—lecturer as authority and discussion leader as participant, to convert pedagogical tendencies into behavioral absolutes; indeed, to elevate difference in style into fiercely-held educational principles. For all that rhetoric has burdened us with inflation of difference, the differences remain, more perhaps as foci or what I have called “centers of gravity” than as differences in kind. Analogous “centers of gravity” can, I think, be charted in criticism. Is the objective result of criticism to help readers formulate, understand, and develop their own responses? To open a text to a common reader? Or is it to make the reader feel excluded from the critical enterprise, sense his or her own responses to a work as essentially irrelevant to the process of its exploration? The latter result has, it seems to me, the concomitant effect—or, perhaps I should say, underlying motive—of confirming the position, the cultural power, of the critic himself—even while, as was historically the case in the 1920s and 1930s, the real social authority of the class from which “men of letters” were drawn was being eroded. In fact, I want to argue, the major project of criticism as it developed from patriarchs like Tate was the confirmation of the authoritative position, at least with respect to culture, of the Man of Letters and his caste. And while the forms of criticism have changed—from New Criticism to structuralism to poststructuralism—the functions of academic criticism seem to me to have remained constant, related primarily to the status, power, and careers of critics.20

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There is, furthermore, an awful logic to the changes in form that derives precisely from the persistence of function. At the beginning, formal analysis did—as it still can—help illuminate texts. And as differing kinds of analyses developed, these too added to the illumination, albeit with increasing marginality. But a law of diminishing returns necessarily begins to operate with the thirtieth explication of “A Valediction,” or the eighteenth lick of ice-cream, and the eye of the beholder starts to shift from the qualities of the text to the qualities of the comment, from the poet to the critic; with the exhaustion of the ways of looking at a pigeon, we begin to observe the antics of the pigeon-watchers. And thus emerges a speculative criticism claiming equality with the literary texts, once the objects to be illuminated, and framed in a language increasingly impenetrable to the common reader. The project of such criticism is its politics. This is not to say that academic critics are by character and inclination conscious elitists; my point is not, in any case, characterological. The very momentum, not to say corpulence, of academic criticism hides its political origins. But in sad fact, cultural institutions move in the directions established by their initial political impetus unless or until they are redirected by the intervention of a new political force—like the social and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, to understand contemporary academic criticism we must examine its roots and its values as these appear in their rudimentary form. These values emerge into severe profile from Tate’s account of the limitations of Southern literature: But the abolition of slavery did not make for a distinctively Southern literature. We must seek the cause of our limitations elsewhere. It is worth remarking, for the sake of argument, that chattel slavery is not demonstrably a worse form of slavery than any other upon which an aristocracy may base its power and wealth. That African chattel slavery was the worst groundwork conceivable for the growth of a great culture of European pattern, is scarcely at this day arguable. . . . The distance between white master and black slave was unalterably greater than that between white master and white serf after the destruction of feudalism. The peasant is the soil. The Negro slave was a barrier between the ruling class and the soil. If we look at aristocracies in Europe, say in eighteenth-century England, we find at least genuine social classes, each carrying on a different level of the common culture. But in the Old South, and under the worse form of slavery that afflicts both races today, genuine social classes do not exist. The enormous “difference” of the Negro doomed him from the beginning to an economic status purely: he has had much the same thinning influence upon the class above him as the anonymous city proletariat has had upon the culture of industrial capitalism. . . . The white man got nothing from the Negro, no profound image of himself in terms of the soil. . . . But the Negro, who has long been described as a responsibility, got everything from the white man. The history of French culture, I suppose, has been quite different. The high arts have been grafted upon the peasant stock. We could graft no new life upon the Negro; he was too different, too alien.21

It is not my intent to comment upon the less than genteel racism, the abysmal cultural chauvinism, or even the simple historical ignorance of this passage. But it does make amply clear the elitist soil in which Tate’s formalist ideas of poetry and

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the “man of letters” are rooted. The New Criticism is the fruit—strange fruit—of such plants. But that metaphor is rather too easy. In plain fact, criticism which makes all-important the special languages that specially-trained critics share with specially-cultivated poets is finally a means for defending special privilege. It is a version of what Raymond Williams calls the “dominative” use of language. Meridel LeSueur, who studied with Tate and others at the University of Minnesota, has a different way of drawing the connection between the politics and the critical style of these men of letters: It was just like being bitten every morning by a black spider—paralysis set in. They taught the structure of the short story this way: you run around Robin Hood’s barn, have two or three conclusions, and then come to a kind of paralysis. Ambiguity is a very seductive idea.22

The paralysis of ambiguity in a world crying for change fits well with “Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas.” I am not suggesting that formalist critics are necessarily racists or political reactionaries in their personal outlooks. Or that every formalist move necessarily builds higher the bulwarks of bourgeois culture. But it seems to me natural to suspect a project with such roots. And thus (returning at last to the nest of questions I raised many pages back) to propose that, indeed, critical tactics carry with them rather more ideological baggage than we might at first have suspected. In the opening section of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (1986), Alicia Ostriker has analyzed how that ideology operated to marginalize women poets. She cites, among other documents, John Crowe Ransom’s essay on Millay,23 which nicely illustrates how the formalist aesthetic principles Ransom shared with Tate worked in practice. Ransom writes: Man distinguishes himself from woman by intellect, but he should keep it feminized. He knows he should not abandon sensibility and tenderness, though perhaps he has generally done so. . . . But the problem does not arise for a woman. Less pliant, safer as a biological organism, she remains fixed in her famous attitudes, and is indifferent to intellectuality. I mean, of course, comparatively indifferent; more so than a man. (p. 78)

Thus, from Ransom’s point of view, Millay’s is a lesser “vein of poetry,” “spontaneous, straightforward in diction,” with “transparently simple” structures and “immediate” effects (pp. 103–5). Indeed, a good deal of Ransom’s essay is devoted to showing how, in effect, Millay’s “excitingly womanlike” poems display little analyzable “intention” or “extension,” and thus are not intellectually challenging. It seems to me clear how in these works patriarchy and racism emerge into critical categories and a methodology that helped place the work of most white women and black writers behind the veil. Perhaps the final step in the elevation of this critical tradition into orthodoxy was that taken by Lionel Trilling. Tate and Ransom were in some sense defensive, protecting what remained of the privilege of the “man of letters” and his class against the incursions of the crowd, and often cloaking their political sentiments with the mantle of cultural appraisal. Trilling, by contrast, mounts an offensive by situating matters of critical opinion precisely at “the dark and

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bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” By so doing, he converts the question of canon into a question of political judgment and moral values. He is thus able to train on that already “bloody crossroads” the devastating weapons of Cold-War rhetoric. His method is perhaps best illustrated in his two-part essay “Reality in America.”24 Between the writing of the first section of the essay (Partisan Review, January–February, 1940) and the second (The Nation, April 20, 1946) intruded, among other things, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the first A-bombs, and—perhaps most important to its point—the emergence of the Cold War and the beginnings of anticommunist hysteria in the United States. Part I is primarily an attack on the literary taste and cultural values of V. L. Parrington. Nina Baym has complained that in his search for the “essence” of American culture Trilling offers no aesthetic basis for his literary preferences; nor does he present any “notion of culture more valid than Parrington’s.”25 While it is true that in this part of the essay Trilling does not develop his aesthetic standards, he displays a clear preference for artists who, in his view, “contain a large part of the dialectic [of cultural struggle or debate] within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions. . . . ” Indeed, Trilling goes on, in the freighted, redundant language of thirties’ political debate, “they contain within themselves . . . the very essence of the culture, and the sign of this is that they do not submit to serve the ends of any one ideological group or tendency” (p. 20). The nonpartisanship of artists, their refusal to “submit” to any “group,” to “serve” any ideology, here becomes the flag of their cultural significance, an idea which certainly held sway for much of the quarter century following Trilling’s presentation of it in, can we say “ironically,” Partisan. How artists differ from the rest of us in embodying the contradictions of our culture, Trilling does not say; in any case, as later becomes clear, his point is to mark out, like Tate, the difference between how “true” artists and critics think and how “the modern crowd thinks when it decides to think” (p. 28). To be sure, as Baym points out, Trilling’s rhetoric masks the real partisanship of a writer like Hawthorne, even while it provides one basis for devaluing the work, say, of Harriet Beecher Stowe. To detach ourselves from Trilling’s judgments, his canon, it has not proved sufficient to demonstrate that Hawthorne and Stowe were both, in their differing ways, partisan; rather, I think, we have had to bring into question his idea that detachment from ideology or “tendency” is a necessary artistic virtue, much less a philosophically credible notion. But non-partisanship is finally rather a negative criterion of value in art. In part II of the essay, as Bruce Spear has shown, Trilling does indeed present a crucial line of aesthetic defense for his canon, symbolized by Henry James, whom he poses against Theodore Dreiser and his defenders.26 James, he claims, “was devoted to an extraordinary moral perceptiveness,” powerfully aware of “tragedy, irony, and multitudinous distinctions”; but above all, James’ work shows “electric qualities of mind, through a complex and rapid imagination and with a kind of authoritative immediacy” (pp. 22, 25). By contrast, Trilling tells us, even Dreiser’s defenders acknowledge that his ideas are often unformed, his moral perceptions crude, and his style, above all his style, clumsy. It is in style, finally, that Trilling locates quality: “The great novelists have usually written very good prose, and what comes through even a bad translation is exactly the power of mind that

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made the well-hung sentence of the original text. In literature style is so little the mere clothing of thought—need it be insisted on at this late date?—that we may say that from the earth of the novelist’s prose spring his characters, his ideas, and even his story itself” (p. 27). The failure of Dreiser’s liberal defenders—Charles Beard, Granville Hicks, Edward Berry Burgum, and above all F. O. Matthiessen—at least according to Trilling, derives precisely from that form of “progressive” politics which places a concern for “realism” and usefulness above “electric qualities of mind.” Or, rather, The liberal judgment of Dreiser and James goes back of politics, goes back to the cultural assumptions that make politics. We are still haunted by a kind of political fear of the intellect which Tocqueville observed in us more than a century ago. American intellectuals, when they are being consciously American or political, are remarkably quick to suggest that an art which is marked by perception and knowledge, although all very well in its way, can never get us through gross dangers and difficulties. And their misgivings become the more intense when intellect works in art as it ideally should, when its processes are vivacious and interesting and brilliant. (p. 23)

With his sliding “we”s and “us”s, his use of “political” and “American” as disparagements, his erection of James upon a mound of melioratives, Trilling is attempting to obliterate the fundamental distinction between, on the one hand, suspicion of art that is predominantly artful, precious, self-enclosed, and, on the other, gross anti-intellectualism. But for us, what his argument comes to is this: intellect displayed in brilliance of style displaces whatever other criteria might be posed for the evaluation of art. With this argument we have returned to our central issue: the relationship of canon and critical practice, the “crossroads” of literature and politics. What Trilling is about in this essay is hanging round the necks of Dreiser’s defenders (and James’ doubters) not only his crudities of style, but his presumably consequent anti-Semitism, his late religiosity, his later conversion to communism. In short, as Spear convincingly documents, Trilling is deeply engaged in a struggle over cultural politics, in particular with Matthiessen. The stake was not merely one’s preference for the style, the subjects, or even the values of James or Dreiser—even if that constituted the universe of choice. At stake was whether there would be room in the canon, in legitimate critical discourse, in the American university or, indeed, polity for the kinds of political commitments Matthiessen and other progressives tried to maintain, and which they recognized, along with his many failings, in Dreiser. Trilling’s victory, and it was that, at least then, placed at the center of literary value, and thus of literary study, those figures like James who best exemplified his ideas of complexity of imagination and brilliance of surface, who displayed in their prose the cultural “tensions” Trilling took to exemplify American intellectual history. What he accomplished, or rather what his accomplishment represents, was at once the legitimation of textual analysis by critics sensitive to the electric qualities of the Jameses as the correct form of literary study and the exiling of those forms of cultural analysis used by “progressives” from Parrington to Matthiessen to the outskirts of literary, indeed political, respectability. To think like them, to write like Dreiser, to acknowledge one’s ideology, to be partisan was not merely vulgar; it had become by 1946 a

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sign that you were a cultural risk, unsafe to be determining the texts from which tomorrow’s intellectual leaders would draw their images of the world.

IV By this long and perhaps burdensome route we return to that room in Lawrence, Kansas, that panel on feminist criticism, and maybe even my growing anger. For I came to that panel with more or less the ideas I’ve outlined. It seemed to me that while there are broad shared areas, the social experiences and the cultures of women and men diverge at significant points. I do not have ready terms like “individualism” and “solidarity,” to characterize the distinct organizing principles, but it seemed quite plain that significantly diverse experiences will produce significantly diverse cultural forms, among men and women, just as among blacks and whites, working people and bourgeoisie. And that, therefore, the application to women’s art of principles and standards derived almost exclusively from the study of men’s art will tend to obscure, even hide, and certainly undervalue what women have created. Indeed, the application of critical standards and tactics derived from white, male—not to say racist and elitist—culture not only obscures female accomplishment, on the one side, but reinforces the validity of those critical standards and what they represent, on the other. Thus I thought that panel’s project was grafting Adrienne Rich’s poem onto Allen Tate’s stock—to borrow a Tate metaphor—rather than joining the dialogue in which The Dream of a Common Language and The Common Woman poems both participate. It is not that the panelists shared Tate’s and Ransom’s values; rather, in pursuing their techniques, the panel seemed to me to reinforce the structures of academic elitism. I hope this will not be misconstrued into an odd shorthand report like “Lauter says there’s a peculiar female sensibility and that criticism is male, so feminists should be doing something else, as yet unspecified.” I do not know if there is such a thing as a female sensibility. “Sensibility” is a psychological category and is approachable, I think, only through individuals. I am talking not of sensibility but of culture, which is a social category. It cannot be used to predict individual behavior, but it is critical to understanding how we perceive, indeed what we look at, as well as how we conceive the structures of language we call works of art. Formalist critics, I am suggesting, are trapped within their culture, restricted in what they look at and by who looks. Why? First, because they have derived much of their cultural data from a narrow base, largely art composed by white Western men (as Tate’s comment on southern culture reveals). They have not adequately considered art from outside that tradition, except, as it were, after the fact, after they had donned their theoretical spectacles. Also these spectacles have been ground by the social and economic pressures which characteristically mold the residents of academe. For criticism is not solely a pure activity of mind, an expression of altruism directed toward revealing truth, or even the play of intellect upon the surfaces of language. It may upon occasion be these. It will also in some measure be an ideology constructed in order to insure and enhance the social and economic position of the critic and his class—even occasionally, now, “her” class. To put it another way, the connection we have seen of New Critical methodology with reactionary politics is no accident, nor is the obscurity of, say, Diacritics. An

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adequate theory of criticism can only be developed by fully considering the art produced by women, by working people, and by national minorities; further, such art needs to be understood in light of its own principles, not simply in terms and categories derived from so-called “high culture,” or on the basis of the imperatives imposed by careerism or reigning institutional priorities. Thus the first task in the project of feminist criticism seems to me the recovery of lost works by women, and the restoration of the value of disdained genres. In part a restorative literary history is required simply for the sake of intellectual honesty. But more important, as I have suggested, is the imperative for broadening the “text milieu” from which we derive critical and historical propositions. Now this task has considerably been advanced in the last decade, as witness, on the one hand, the publications of feminist and university presses and, on the other, the recent issuance of Gilbert and Gubar’s Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and the new Heath Anthology of American Literature (two volumes). But the work is by no means complete nor, for a number of reasons, is it likely soon to be. For example, women writers of early and mid-nineteenth-century America are known to most readers, even most academics, mainly secondhand, through such useful studies as Nina Baym’s.27 In fact, writers of substance like Caroline Kirkland, Lydia Maria Child, and Alice Cary are seldom read, in part because their books have not until recently been reissued for over a hundred years,28 in part because they have not been given the legitimation of academic study even to the degree that someone as marginal as William Gilmore Simms has been. Most important, the modern outlook, and particularly modern criticism, has been out of sympathy with the sensibilities displayed in the work of such authors. I shall have more to say about that in a moment. Suffice it here to say it is unlikely that the deep obscurity in which women writers from Sherwood Bonner to Zitkala-Sa are hidden is peculiarly an American phenomenon, thus I doubt whether we are close to the end of the process of rediscovery. More certainly, even, we are far from establishing the distinctive qualities of the art of these and many better known women writers. This seems to me the second major task of feminist criticism. Studies like those by Baym, Barbara Christian, Elaine Showalter, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar29 are only among some of the better-known works devoted to establishing thematic and formal connections among women writers. A parallel task is defining the distinctive thematic and formal characteristics of particular women writers. Elizabeth Ammons’s examination of the structure of Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs30 provides an especially useful example because it implicitly questions received norms about the structure of short fictions and suggests that Jewett used a distinct, and perhaps gender-linked form. There is, of course, a certain dialectic between the rediscovery of works and an adequate account of characteristics that link them to other texts. In reevaluating the work of Caroline Kirkland, Judith Fetterley has suggested that A New Home, Who’ll Follow is in essence a series of elaborated letters and that the letter form represented for women a halfway house between the privacy of correspondence and the public act of authorship, an act seen by many in the early nineteenth century as unseemly for women. That suggestion took on for me powerful implications as I reread Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Lydia Maria Child’s Letters from New-York, thought about the letter form adopted

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by Margaret Fuller in the last years of her life, and finally focused (thanks particularly to two of my students, Ellen Louise Hart and Katie King) on the implications of such precedents on the major form of Emily Dickinson’s (self-) “publication”—letters: This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me . . .

It would at this point claim too much to propose correspondence as constituting a fundamental model for many American nineteenth-century women of letters, but as we come to know more about these writers that may, indeed, be one conclusion. I mention this hypothesis as one illustration of how the dialectic between rediscovery of texts and definition of characteristic themes and forms operates. It also leads us toward two additional objectives in the project of feminist criticism. These I would describe as decentering male texts, on the one hand, and moving female texts from the margins of culture to the core. Decentering male texts (including phallocentric criticism) was in many respects the initial concern of the earliest feminist critics. It took two forms: first, studies of the images of women, often absurd or vile, projected in widely-respected work by male writers. Second, and in these days of theoretical sophistication too often condescended to, were works like Kate Millett’s pioneering and courageous Sexual Politics (1970). It need hardly be said that the work of decentering male-centered culture as it is expressed in language, syntax, form, and institutional configuration remains a major concern of current feminist criticism. Indeed, the major contribution of contemporary French feminist writing may be in this area. What is surprising, perhaps, is how persistent phallocentric historical models have remained despite the accumulated weight of contrary evidence. A vivid illustration of how male-centered literary history continues to obscure the work of women writers was provided by Leslie Fiedler in an essay called “Literature and Lucre,” featured in the New York Times Book Review (May 31, 1981), and reprinted in one of Fiedler’s recent books. Fiedler pictures the history of the novel in America as a struggle between “high Art and low,” between “those writers among us who aspire to critical acclaim and an eternal place in libraries” and “the authors of ‘best sellers.’” The former, “sophisticated novelists,” include Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, all male, as Fiedler points out. The latter tradition, “a series of deeply moving though stylistically undistinguished fictions . . . begins with Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, reaches a nineteenth-century high point with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a twentieth-century climax with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.” This spurious battle of the sexes, and the image of the failed artist which supposedly emerges from it, can be sustained only by ignoring huge parts of American literary history. For example, Fiedler proclaims that “only in the last decade of this century did it become possible, first in fact, then in fiction, for a novelist highly regarded by critics (Norman Mailer is an example) to become wealthy long before his death. . . . ” This is patrifocal history with a vengeance, since it altogether ignores Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow, not to speak of Stowe, E. D. E. N. Southworth (who was much praised by contemporary crit-

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ics), Jewett, Mary Austin, and even William Dean Howells. Most of these women novelists, among others, were and still are “highly regarded by critics,” and did very well from their writing. But more to the point, bringing them up altogether explodes the theory, or perhaps myth, Fiedler wishes to float, that in America writers have either been (until our generation) successful or artistic: . . . both primary and secondary literature in the United Stares, the novels and poems of which we are most proud and the critical autobiographical [sic] works written on them, reflect the myth of the “serious” writer as an alienated male, condemned to neglect and poverty by a culture simultaneously commercialized and feminized.

Since the women novelists don’t fit this nice theory, “we” need to ignore them. And also ignore the fact that writers like Melville and Hawthorne indeed aspired to popularity and were enraged by what they took to be the failure of their audience to appreciate them. Nor is it at all clear as Fiedler makes out that Stowe, for example, was not artistic as well as successful. On the contrary, recent studies have documented her artistry. In linking her to Rowson and Mitchell, Fiedler is trying to stigmatize her with the unstated labels, familiar from critics like Tate, of “sentimental” and “mass market.” “Sentimental” and “mass” are terms, like “regional,” “popular,” “minor,” which have been undergoing reexamination31 since it became clear they were used to bury much of value on specious assumptions, like the proposition that the suppression of feelings, even tears, is a more legitimate basis for fiction than their display.32 In short, the problem with Fiedler’s theory is that it begins with a truncated set of data, examines them from a dazzlingly parochial angle of vision, and, not surprisingly, concludes by reenforcing the artistic centrality of the traditional male texts which have constituted the canon. Moreover, the myth of the unappreciated artist itself requires a differing analysis. Myths constitute metaphorical ideologies. Here, the problem for American male writers is construed as the frailty of his audience. It might equally well be posed as the obstinate refusal of many male novelists to take that dominantly female audience seriously. In concluding her second series of stories entitled Clovernook (1853), Alice Cary deftly questions the motives of those who, as Fiedler puts it, aspire to “an eternal place in libraries”: In our country, though all men are not “created equal,” such is the influence of the sentiment of liberty and political equality, that: “All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame,” may with as much probability be supposed to affect conduct and expectation in the log cabin as in the marble mansion; and to illustrate this truth, to dispel that erroneous belief of the necessary baseness of the “common people” which the great masters in literature have in all ages labored to create, is a purpose and an object in our nationality to which the finest and highest genius may wisely be devoted; but which may be effected in a degree by writings as unpretending as these reminiscences of what occurred in and

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about the little village where I from childhood watched the pulsations of surrounding hearts.33

Cary’s comment not only raises questions about the values of the literary “masters,” but suggests the importance of an alternative standard embodied in the “unpretending . . . reminiscences” of her village which she—and, indeed, many American women writers—presents. And that comment brings me to the last part of the project of feminist criticism upon which I wish to touch: the effort to move the work of women from the margins toward the center of culture. Here, the work of criticism and of political action most fully converge. For in the first instance, it was not the work of critics that refocused attention on the distinctive concerns of women writers, any more than black aestheticians initially established the conditions for recognizing the traditions of African-American composition. On the contrary, it was the movements for social, economic, and political change of the 1960s and 1970s that challenged long-held assumptions about what was significant as subject matter for literary art by challenging the assumptions about what was significant for people. Meridel LeSueur once described how her story “Annunciation,” which deals with pregnancy, was turned down by editors demanding fighting and fornicating. That may stand as a symbol of my point here: it will not be on the basis solely of “literary” criteria that the days and works of women—any more than of other marginalized groups—will be established at the center of cultural concern. In California, the school system in cooperation with certain universities has launched an ambitious “Literature Project” designed to reinvigorate the teaching of English at the secondary level. Part of that effort has involved the creation of model curricula, including what are called “core” and “extended” readings. One model thematic unit is titled “Journey to Personal Fulfillment.” The “core” readings are these: Dickens, Great Expectations; Twain, Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi; Shaw, Pygmalion; Cather, “Paul’s Case”; Kafka, “The Hunger Artist”; Auden, “The Unknown Citizen”; Eliot, “The Hollow Men”; and Whitman, “The Ox-Tamer.” These selections suggest that an old canard still lives: “Choose works that interest the boys; the girls will read anything.” That reflection is reenforced by considering that among the “extended readings” are Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, E. B. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, the autobiographies of Mme. Curie and Helen Keller, and Alice Walker’s “African Images.” Further, one might wonder, in a state in which Latinos, Asian-Americans, American Indians, and Blacks will shortly constitute a majority, whether all of these works together constitute any adequate portrait of journeys to “personal fulfillment.” I do not cite this instance to mock the very concerned people working in this important project. On the contrary, I think we need to admire and support their efforts, even as we criticize them. But it will not be critical practice alone that will shift what is perceived and treated as “core.” To be sure, as literary people we need to reexamine hierarchies of taste as expressed in subject matter, genre, language and imagery, as well as in conceptions of literary function and audience.34 Still, there is little more than can be done to establish the literary equality of the work of the Brontës and Twain. It will be our work as political people, rather, as citizens of real communities, that will be critical to achieving

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the axial transformation to which we aspire. Revolution is not, finally, in and of the word alone. Nor should this come as a surprise. It is a commonplace of scholarship informed by a working-class perspective—often honored, I must admit, in the breach—that the point is not to describe the world, but to change it. So it must be, I think, with feminist criticism: it cannot be neutral, simply analytic, formal. It needs always to be asking how its project is changing the world, reconstructing history as well as consciousness, so that the accomplishments of women can be fully valued and, more important, so that the lives of women and men can more fully be lived.

NOTES This essay originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 57–82. I want to express my appreciation for the creativity and support of the editors. Portions of the essay also appear as “The Two Criticisms: Structure, Lingo and Power in the Discourse of Academic Humanists,” in my own Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 1. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 325–326. 2. Ibid., p. 327. 3. Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974); see, especially, pp. 1–3. 4. Dan Tannacito, “Poetry of the Colorado Miners: 1903–1906,” Radical Teacher, #15 (March 1980), pp. 1–8. Appended to Tannacito’s article is a small anthology of miners’ poetry. 5. Paul Lauter, “Working-Class Women’s Literature—An Introduction to Study,” Women in Print, I, ed. Ellen Messer-Davidow and Joan Hartman (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982), pp. 109–34. 6. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). See also Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound and Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). 7. I am distinguishing between “working-class,” “folk,” or “popular” (peoples’) culture and what Dwight MacDonald characterized as “mass culture.” Popular culture, what people who share class (or ethnicity and race) produce in communicating with one another, can be separated from what is produced as a commodity, generally at the lowest common denominator, for consumption by masses of people. To be sure, the distinction is not always clear-cut, but it is worth seeking. 8. Quoted by Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976), pp. 23–24, from Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in the United States (New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1950), pp. 290–291. 9. See John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 49–59. 10. Jeanette R. Murphy, “The Survival of African Music in America,” Popular Science Monthly, LV (Sept. 1899), 662; quoted by Blassingame, op. cit., pp. 27–28. 11. See “The Burning Struggle: The Civil Rights Movement,” an interview with Bernice Johnson Reagon, Radical America, 12 (11–12/78), 18–20. 12. Black Culture and Black Consciousness, p. 33; cf. p. 207. 13. The usual distinctions between “poetry” and “propaganda,” or between “fine arts”

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and “crafts” hinge on the issue of function. Modern critics have, in one form or another, generally assumed that “poetry is its own excuse for being” and that a poem should “not mean, but be.” This is not the place to argue such claims. I don’t find them particularly convincing, though it is obvious enough that art can have differing functions in different cultures. Let it suffice here to assert that viewing working-class culture from the standpoint of such assumptions will fatally mislead the critic. 14. Allen Tate, “Tension in Poetry,” Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1968), p. 64. 15. Ibid., p. 58. 16. “To Whom is the Poet Responsible?” Essays of Four Decades, p. 27. 17. “Literature as Knowledge,” Essays of Four Decades, p. 104. 18. “The Man of Letters in the Modern World,” Essays of Four Decades, p. 14. 19. Ibid., p. 16. 20. In rereading this, it seems to me that I have made it sound like all academic critics are centers of independent power. Clearly, people in academe respond to institutional priorities, corporate definitions of appropriate career tracks. Indeed, most teachers and literary scholars are the victims of established modes of performance rather than their creators. It is not my intention to blame the victims but rather to make clear the source of that victimization. Cf. “The Two Criticisms,” in Canons and Contents. 21. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (Freeport, NY: Books for libraries, 1968), pp. 154–157. 22. The comment was quoted in a press release connected with the publication of her collection Ripening (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1982). 23. “The Poet as Woman,” The World’s Body (New York: Scribner’s, 1938). 24. The essay was printed as a single unit in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking Press, 1950). I shall be quoting from the Anchor Books edition (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954), pp. 15–32. 25. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 68. 26. In the following paragraphs I am deeply indebted to two fine essays by Bruce Spear of the University of California, Santa Cruz. They are “Cold War Aesthetics: Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and F. O. Matthiessen” and “The Late Work of F. O. Matthiessen: Criticism, Politics, and Spirit.” 27. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 28. Steps toward changing the absolute unavailability of texts were taken when Indiana University Press issued Judith Fetterley’s collection of early- and mid-nineteenth-century American women writers, Rutgers University Press began to issue its excellent series of reprints of the work of writers like Child, Rose Terry Cooke, and Cary, and Oxford University Press began to issue the Schomburg series of works by black women writers. Still, little of Child, Fanny Fern, or Sarah Josepha Hale is accessible. Only one work by Rebecca Harding Davis is available, “Life in the Iron Mills,” first restored in an edition from The Feminist Press and now enshrined in some anthologies of American literature. Only within the last few years have works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps become available; and even some of H. B. Stowe’s texts are unavailable in paperback. Nor is there any edition of the work of the most widely published black woman writer of the nineteenth century, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, though Frances Foster is attempting to remedy that. Still, other minority works, by men as well as by women, remain to be reprinted—or, as in the case of nineteenth-century autobiographies in Spanish, printed for the first time. 29. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: Brit-

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ish Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 30. “Going in Circles: The Female Geography of Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 16 (Fall 1983), esp. 85–89. 31. See, for example, Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 32. See, for example, Baym, Woman’s Fiction, pp. 25, 144. 33. Alice Cary, Clovernook, or Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West, Second Series (New York: Redfield, 1853), pp. 363–364. 34. My own effort in this direction is represented by “The Literatures of America—A Comparative Discipline,” prepared for a Soviet-American conference on minority literatures in the United States, University of Pennsylvania, July, 1985, and printed in Canons and Contexts (1991).

ELAINE SHOWALTER

A CRITICISM OF OUR OWN autonomy and assimilation in afroamerican and feminist literary theory (1989)





















THE OTHER WOMAN In the summer of 1985, I was one of the speakers at the annual conference on literary theory at Georgetown University. On the first morning, a distinguished Marxist theorist was introduced, and as he began to read his paper, there appeared from the other side of the stage a slender young woman in a leotard and long skirt who looked like a ballet dancer. Positioning herself a few feet from the speaker, she whirled into motion, waving her fingers and hands, wordlessly moving her lips, alternating smiles and frowns. There were murmurs in the audience; what could this mean? Was it a protest against academic conferences? A Feifferesque prayer to the muse of criticism? A celebratory performance of the Althusserian two-step? Of course, as we soon realized, it was nothing so dramatic or strange. Georgetown had hired this young woman from an organization called Deaf Pride to translate all the papers into sign language for the hearing-impaired. Yet from the perspective of the audience, this performance soon began to look like a guerrilla theatre of sexual difference which had been staged especially for our benefit. After the first ten minutes, it became impossible simply to listen to the famous man, immobilized behind the podium. Our eyes were drawn instead to the nameless woman, and to the eloquent body language into which she mutely translated his words. In this context, her signs seemed uncannily feminine and Other, as if we were watching a Kristevan ambassador from the semiotic, or the ghost of a Freudian hysteric back from the beyond. Anna O. is alive and well in Georgetown! The feminist implications of this arrangement were increasingly emphasized, moreover, throughout the first day of the conference, because, although the young woman reached ever more dazzling heights of ingenuity, mobility, and grace, not one of the three white male theorists who addressed us took any notice of her presence. No one introduced her; no one alluded to her. It was as if they could not see her. She had become transparent, like the female medium of the symbolists who, according to Mary Ann Caws, “served up the sign, conveying it

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with fidelity, patience, and absolute personal silence. She herself was patiently ruled out.”1 Sitting in the audience that first morning, I wondered what would happen when I was introduced as the fourth speaker. I had wild fantasies that Georgetown would provide a bearded male interpreter who would translate my paper into the rhetoric of deconstruction. (It turned out that there were two young women who alternated the task of interpretation. This does not seem to be a man’s job.) I wondered too how I should speak from the position of power as the “theorist” when I also identified with the silent, transparent woman? The presence of the other woman was a return of the repressed paradox of female authority, the paradox Jane Gallop describes as fraudulence: “A woman theoretician is already an exile; expatriated from her langue maternelle, she speaks a paternal language; she presumes to a fraudulent power.”2 The translator seemed to represent not only the langue maternelle, the feminine other side of discourse, but also the Other Woman of feminist discourse, the woman outside of academia in the “real world,” or the Third World, to whom a Feminist critic is responsible, just as she is responsible to the standards and conventions of criticism.3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has reminded us that she must always be acknowledged in our work: “Who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me?”4 At the Georgetown conference, my awareness of the Other Woman was shared by the other women on the program; all of us, in our presentations, introduced the interpreter, and changed our lectures in order to work with her presence. Yet the only male speaker who took notice of the interpreter was Houston Baker. By the time he spoke on the second day, Baker had learned enough sign language to produce a virtuoso translation of the beginning of his own talk, and to work with the translator in a playful duet. The Georgetown conference was not the first time that Afro-American and feminist critics have found ourselves on the same side of otherness, but it was certainly one of the most dramatic. For those of us who work within “oppositional” or cultural criticisms—black, socialist, feminist, or gay—questions of the critic’s double consciousness, double audience, and double role come with the territory and arise every day. They are not just the sort of global questions Terry Eagleton poses in Literary Theory, as to whether an analysis of the Lacanian imaginary can help welfare mothers, but more mundane problems of ethnicity and ethics: how we will answer the mail, how we will conduct ourselves in the classroom or on the podium, and how we will act not only in symbolic relationships but also in real encounters with constituencies inside and outside of academia. In this essay, I briefly sketch out the parallel histories of Afro-American and feminist literary criticism and theory over the past twenty-five years, in order to learn from our mutual experience in relation to the dominant culture. This may seem like a strange moment for such a project. In both feminist and AfroAmerican criticism, the Other Woman, the silenced partner, has been the black woman, and the role played by black feminist critics in bridging the two schools is controversial. While black and white feminists have objected to the sexism of black literary history, black women have also challenged the racism of feminist literary history. Black male writers have protested against the representation of black men in the fiction of Afro-American women novelists, and Ishmael Reed’s

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latest novel, Reckless Eyeballing (1986), imagines a violent vengeance on feminists in general and black feminist writers in particular. Yet this record of misunderstanding obscures what I think are the strong and important connections between the two kinds of cultural criticism; we have much to gain by a dialogue.5 Both feminist and Afro-American criticism have brought together personal, intellectual, and political issues in our confrontations with the Western literary tradition. We have both followed traditional patterns in the institutionalization of critical movements, from our beginnings in a separatist cultural aesthetics, born out of participation in a protest movement; to a middle stage of professionalized focus on a specific text-milieu in an alliance with academic literary theory; to an expanded and pluralistic critical field of expertise on sexual or racial difference. Along with gay and post-Colonial critics, we share many critical metaphors, theories, and dilemmas, such as the notion of a double-voiced discourse, the imagery of the veil, the mask, or the closet; and the problem of autonomy versus mimicry and civil disobedience. In abandoning marginal territories of our own for places in the poststructuralist critical wilderness, do black and feminist critics also risk exchanging authenticity for imitation, and self-generated critical models for what Lisa Jardine calls Designer Theory? If we oppose the idea that women should have the exclusive franchise on “gender” or blacks the franchise on “race,” what can be the distinguishing idiom or role of the black or feminist critic, and how do we identify the place from which we speak? Can we make the compromises necessary for acceptance by the mainstream, and still work for a criticism of our own? Or is the dream of an alternative criticism which is “simultaneously subversive and selfauthenticating” the most utopian of all sub-cultural fantasies?6

THE BLACK CRITICAL REVOLUTION In a splendidly argued essay called “Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature,” Houston Baker has drawn on the work of Thomas Kuhn and Lewis Feuer to account for the transformations within Afro-American criticism from the 1950s to the early 1980s. He suggests that intergenerational conflict and the pressures of ascendant class interests can explain the movement towards alliance with the mainstream.7 While Baker’s essay is the most important and coherent account we have of the black critical revolution, his concept of the “generational shift” still raises a number of problems. First of all, critics cannot be assigned to generations with any precision, since, as David Riesman reminds us, people “are not born in batches, as are pancakes, but are born continuously.”8 The shifts within the critical fields, moreover, cannot be seen simply in generational terms, since in the humanities, intelligent people often transform and revise their theoretical positions in the light of new ideas, rather than stubbornly clinging to their original paradigms unto death. Within feminist criticism, indeed, the tendency of such writers as Toril Moi to construct rigid binary oppositions of feminist thought without regard for the complex permutations and exchanges within feminist discourse today, ignores the historical contexts in which ideas began, and the process of self-criticism and revision which has kept them sharp.9

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A second problem with Baker’s essay, and with Afro-American critical history in general, is that it does not take sufficient account of gender, and of the role of black women in shaping both literary and critical discourse. In using a number of his categories, then, I have tried to rethink them as well in the light of black feminist writing. Before the Civil Rights Movement, criticism of Afro-American literature was dominated by “integrationist poetics”—skepticism about a unified black consciousness, and the ambition to have black writers merge with the mainstream of the American literary tradition. This view was articulated in the 1940s and 1950s by such male writers and scholars as Richard Wright, Arthur P. David, and Sterling Brown, who denied any specificity to “Negro writing” and insisted that black literature should measure up to and be judged by the standards of the dominant critical community. As Davis wrote in an introduction to The Negro Caravan in 1941, “the Negro writes in the forms evolved in English and American literature. . . . The editors considered Negro writing to be American writing, and literature by American Negroes to be a segment of American literature.”10 Since black Americans were promised equal rights under such legislation as the 1954 Supreme Court decision, so too, integrationist critics hoped, “Negro writing” would win an equal place in American literary culture. Meanwhile, they argued, black writers “must demand a single standard of criticism,” and reject any special consideration on the basis of race. The occasional success of a writer like Ralph Ellison was taken to prove that a serious black artist would be recognized. Yet integrationist poetics rested on the optimistic and deluded belief that a “single standard of criticism” could respond equitably and intelligently to AfroAmerican writing, that the “single” standard could be universal, rather than a cultural straitjacket based on the limited and exclusive literary values of an elite.11 In practice, black writing was often viewed by white critics using the excuse of integrationist poetics as inferior or flawed. Moreover, even when black male writers won recognition, novels by black women such as Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953) were marginalized by the black and white male literary communities. As Mary Helen Washington has argued, the “real ‘invisible man’ of the 1950s was the black woman.”12 Integrationist poetics, however, was challenged in the 1960s by the new political ideology which Stokely Carmichael christened “Black Power.” Calling for racial leadership and identity, and for a rejection of the racist standards masked as equality offered by white society, Black Power generated the cultural forms of the Black Arts movement, led by Afro-American writers, artists, and intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, Addison Gayle, Jr., and Stephen Henderson. These leaders of the black male intelligentsia insisted on the uniqueness and authenticity of black expression, especially in folk forms and music, and rejected the idea that a uniform standard of criticism derived from white culture could be adequate to the interpretation and evaluation of Black Art. Indeed, Black Art proposed “a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic . . . a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.”13 The term “negritude,” originating in Paris, the Caribbean, and Francophone Africa, celebrated the existence of a unique black artistic consciousness transcending nationality.

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Via the concept of negritude, as Melvin Dixon has explained, a “generation of blacks dispersed through the world reclaimed a part of their identity as members of the African diaspora.”14 In the United States, the Black Aesthetic attempted to produce “a distinctive code for the creation and evaluation of black art.”15 “Blackness” itself became an ontological and critical category for assessing Afro-American literature. Stephen Henderson, one of the major theorists of the Black Aesthetic, argued that the black poem must not be considered in isolation, as the New Critics had maintained, but as a verbal performance in the fullest contexts of the “Black Experience,” the “complex galaxy of personal, social, institutional, historical, religious, and mythical meanings that affect everything we say or do as Black people sharing a common heritage.”16 Its value could be determined only by the black interpretive community which shared the “Soul Field” of Afro-American culture. Thus the Black Aesthetic offered the possibility of an autonomous and coherent black literary-critical discourse, not merely imitative of or parasitic on the white tradition, but in possession of its own roots, themes, structures, terms, and symbols from Afro-American culture. Moreover, the theoretical privileging of the black interpretive community gave the individual black critic a kind of cultural authority that enabled him or her to rise within the profession. As Baker notes, the predication of blackness as a “distinct and positive category of existence . . . was not only a radical political act designed to effect the liberation struggles of Afro-America, but also a bold critical act designed to break the interpretive monopoly on Afro-American expressive culture that had been held from time immemorial by a white liberal-critical establishment that set ‘a single standard of criticism.’”17 The importance of the Black Aesthetic in the establishment of Afro-American literature cannot be overestimated. But to many black intellectuals, the Black Aesthetic also appeared narrow, chauvinistic, mystical, and theoretically weak. If only black critics were qualified by virtue of their racial experience to interpret black literature, they feared, it would remain ghettoized forever. In practice, too, the theoretical privileging of the revolutionary black artist and the black critical imagination was open to charges of sexism; the major texts of the Black Aesthetic ignored or patronized women’s imaginative and critical writing, just as the Black Power movement, in Stokely Carmichael’s other notorious phrase, defined the position of women as “prone.”18 By 1970, beginning with the publication of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, black feminist writers and critics began to make their voices heard within the literary community. Alice Walker was teaching courses on black women writers at Wellesley and the University of Massachusetts in the early 1970s, and leading others such as Toni Cade Bambara in “looking for Zora”—carrying out the quest for Zora Neale Hurston, who had been ignored by male critics of the Black Aesthetic, as the literary and critical foremother of the black female literary tradition. Black feminist critics such as Barbara Smith, Mary Helen Washington, Gloria Hull, and Barbara Christian raised important questions about the place of women within the Afro-American literary canon, and within the decade, some male theorists of the Black Aesthetic, including Stephen Henderson and Amiri Baraka, reconsidered their earlier positions. “When Black women discovered a political context that involved both race and gender,” Henderson wrote in the introduction to Mari Evans’s Black Women

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Writers (1983), “Our history in this country took a special turn, and our literature made a quantum leap toward maturity and honesty.” Yet even when the question of sexism was addressed, there were blatant theoretical weaknesses in the Black Aesthetic. Their concept of “race” was romantic and ideological; they ignored new developments within literary criticism. As Houston Baker concludes: The defensive inwardness of the Black Aesthetic—its manifest appeal to a racially-conditioned, revolutionary, and intuitive standard of critical judgment—made the new paradigm an ideal instrument of vision for those who wished to usher into the world new and sui generis Afro-American objects of investigation. Ultimately, though, such introspection could not answer the kinds of theoretical questions occasioned by the entry of these objects into the world. In a sense, the Afro-American literary-critical investigator had been given—through a bold act of the critical imagination—a unique literary tradition but no distinctive theoretical vocabulary with which to discuss this tradition.19

The political collapse of the Black Power movement, the advent of women’s liberation, and the impact of European literary theory in the United States, all led to the demise of the Black Aesthetic. It was succeeded in the late 1970s by a new wave of young black intellectuals, benefitting from the academic prestige the Black Aesthetic had won for black writing, yet skeptical of the cultural claims of the Black Arts movement, and opposed to its separatist policies and poetics. Trained in such deconstructionist centers as Cornell and Yale, these critics sought to establish a “sound theoretical framework for the study of Afro-American literature,” by situating it within the discourse of poststructuralist literary theory. Instead of seeing themselves primarily as spokesmen for art in the black community, with the mission of helping to create a revolutionary black literary consciousness in American society, they defined themselves as Afro-American specialists in the theoretical community, with the goal of rendering “major contributions to contemporary theory’s quest to ‘save the text.’”20 Among the central critical texts of the generation Houston Baker calls the “reconstructionists” are two major anthologies, Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1979), edited by Robert B. Stepto and Dexter Fisher; and Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Stepto’s “Introduction” to Afro-American Literature argues for a mixture of formal and cultural approaches to the black literary text, which is still seen as the object of a black critical practice, and as the primary subject of a sophisticated and formalized Afro-American pedagogy. Afro-American Literature, published by the Modern Language Association, represented the intersection of Afro-American studies and the English department. It suggested ways that black or white teachers of American literature could learn to be competent readers of Afro-American writing. Gates’s anthology goes considerably further, and could easily be subtitled “the reconstruction of deconstruction.” Dedicated to the memories of Charles Davis and Paul de Man, Black Literature and Literary Theory presents itself in its structure, themes, and rhetoric, as a “two-toned” critical discourse, poised between black studies and the Yale School. Gates defines his textual territory as African,

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Caribbean, and Afro-American literatures, and his purpose as the application of contemporary literary theory to black literature. The anthology begins with Gates’s own dazzling manifesto of black deconstruction, “Criticism in the Jungle.” Like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a central novel in Gates’s canon of black literature, which provides the epigraph to the essay, the title itself is double-voiced. Gates parodies or signifies upon Geoffrey Hartman’s manifesto of rhetorical criticism, Criticism in the Wilderness, published in 1980; he alludes ironically to a stereotyped image of primitive and exotic African origins (cf. Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo”) and thus literalizes the “sacred jungle” of Hartman’s text; and he slyly suggests that black theory must make its way not only in the indeterminate heart of darkness and in the pan-African cultural jungle (the home of the “signifying monkey” and the Tar Baby), but also in the far more dangerous blackboard jungle of professional critical debate. Gates sees his mission as one of saving the black text from the political and ideological contexts which have repressed its signifying systems, in treating it more as sociology, anthropology, or a document of the black experience, than as art. If the black tradition is to move “into the mainstream of critical debate in the profession,” it must free itself from polemic and apply the lessons of formalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism. Gates is a bold and confident spokesman for this new program: The black literary tradition now demands, for sustenance and for growth, the sorts of reading which it is the especial province of the literary critic to render; and these sorts of reading will all share a fundamental concern with the nature and functions of figurative language as manifested in specific texts. No matter to what ends we put our readings, we can never lose sight of the fact that a text is not a fixed “thing” but a rhetorical structure which functions in response to a complex set of rules. It can never be related satisfactorily to a reality outside itself merely in a one-to-one relation.21

Two major problems came to the fore, however, in the reconstructionist project. First, who is qualified to be a critic of black literature? Second, can black criticism appropriate white or Western literary theory without sacrificing its hard-won independence and individuality? In the earlier phases of black criticism, black critics were first the reluctant or de facto partisans of “Negro writing” and then the passionate advocates of “black literature.” During the phase of the Black Aesthetic, black artists and intellectuals who had become frustrated by the condescension or indifference of the white literary establishment toward Afro-American writing staked their own claim to a privileged critical authority within the black cultural tradition. With the early reconstructionist phase, however, the emphasis on the blackness of the ideal critic was abandoned in the interests of establishing black literature in the canon, and replaced by a focus on professional expertise. For Stepto and Fisher in 1979, the teacher of Afro-American literature need no longer be black, and blackness is no guarantee of authority in deciphering the text. Rather, the teacher must be trained to read the “ingrained cultural metaphors,” “coded structures,” and “poetic rhetoric” of the Afro-American text.22 By 1984, as Gates asserts, the “critic of black literature” no longer needs to have a special relationship to Afro-American culture, or a commitment to social

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change, obligations which saddle the critical project of reading black literature well with an impossible sociological burden. Instead the critic of black literature is an intellectual specialist who writes “primarily for other critics of literature.”23 Moreover, the critic of black literature can no longer be a mere amateur, either an ordinary reader, a practicing artist, or an untheoretical teacher, but must come from the professional community of poststructuralist literary critics, trained in the difficult new methodologies and theories of reading, and fluent in their terms. The retreat from the populism of the Black Aesthetic could scarcely be more emphatic. Houston Baker, himself a critic who has tried to mediate between the cultural anthropology of the Black Aesthetic and poststructuralism, and whose essay on Ralph Ellison is included in Black Literature and Literary Theory, links the rise of black poststructuralism to the rise of black professionals in academia “whose class status . . . and privileges are . . . contingent upon their adherence to accepted (i.e., white) standards. . . . ” With the decline of a mass black audience for critical or political discourse in the aftermath of the 1960s, Baker argues, a “class-oriented professionalism among Afro-American literary critics” has led to a “sometimes uncritical imposition upon Afro-American culture of literary theories borrowed from prominent white scholars.”24 While Baker maintains that reconstructionist critics impose such theories without a rigorous analysis of their ethnocentrism, Gates, as we have seen, believes that the black literary tradition itself “demands” to be read in these sophisticated theoretical ways, for “sustenance and growth”—that is, in order to maintain a critical growth curve within academia that gives it parity with the dominant tradition of Dante, Milton, Holderlin, and Rousseau. In a more telling critique than these sociological objections, however, Baker further protests that Gates simplifies and distorts the theories of the Black Aestheticians, and that he creates a semiotic circle around literature that cuts literary language off from the verbal behavior of Afro-American culture and that isolates the black text from the complex cultural systems that give meaning to its words. Gates’s response is to challenge the idea of a unified black subject in terms taken from poststructuralism. Both in his introduction and in his own essay on Ellison and Reed, Gates emphasizes this critique of the “transcendent black subject, integral and whole, self-sufficient and plentiful, the ‘always already’ black signified, available for literary representation in received Western forms as would be the water dippered from a deep and dark well.”25 Yet despite his critical rhetoric, Gates is not completely prepared to abandon either the politics of black presence or a vividly particularized sense of AfroAmerican culture and the black vernacular; and there are a number of contradictions and tensions in his essay pointing towards a different, if repressed, desire. He refers frequently to a “signifying black difference” produced by the process of applying literary theory to the black text, as if the black text were so powerful a catalyst that its combination with deconstruction explosively “changes both the received theory and received ideas about the text.”26 Moreover, his anonymous expert, the “critic of black literature,” sometimes merges with a more personal and specific black critic struggling to represent a “black self” in ethnocentric Western languages that make blackness a figure of absence and negation. This black critic speaks in the Afro-American idiom “which makes the black tradition our very own,” as well as in the professional idiom of Ithaca or New Haven.27

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These conflicts between academic centrality and a black tradition and “criticism of our own” became even more pronounced with the newest critical wave. Most recently, the black critic and the critic of black literature have been joined by the Third-World critic and the critic of Third-World literature, whose subject is “the curious dialectic between formal language use and the inscription of metaphorical racial differences.”28 Metaphorical? Yes, according to the leading figure and theorist in this group, once again Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who edited a special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry called “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference” in autumn 1985: “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction. When we speak of ‘the white race’ or ‘the black race,’ ‘the Jewish race’ or ‘the Aryan race,’ we speak in biological misnomers, and more generally, in metaphors.”29 As Anthony Appiah points out, “apart from the visible morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone, by which we are inclined to assign people to the broadest racial categories— black, white, yellow—,” current genetic research proves that there are few biological characteristics of “race.”30 Apart from these unimportant “gross differences,” the kind of positive black racial identity advocated by W. E. B. DuBois, involving a common language, history, and tradition, is thus wholly unscientific, and “must go” (p. 27). At the mitochondrial or cellular level, according to Appiah, race has little to do with biological differences between people. What we are talking about, then, is a linguistic construct. While some black critics, like Houston Baker, might observe that “the shift to the common ground of subtle academic discourse is . . . ultimately unhelpful in a world where New York taxi drivers scarcely ever think of mitochondria before refusing to pick me up,”31 the move to “race” as a fundamental rhetorical category in the study of writing and the shaping of critical theory would seem to be the manifest destiny of black criticism, giving it an unlimited access to Third World, colonial, and Western literature, and granting it a primary term like “class” in Marxist criticism. One of the major advantages of the category of “race” is that it problematizes the dominant as well as the Other, and provides a way of talking about “Western” or “white” genres and forms. Moreover, the emphasis on “race” is a brilliant solution to the problem of establishment indifference to the black literary tradition. If black criticism requires expertise in the black text, there will be a lot of important “other critics of literature” who will never qualify. There is no way to compel Jacques Derrida to read Toni Morrison or Ishmael Reed. But when the subject is the rhetorical inscription of “race,” Derrida can legitimately be brought inside the hermeneutic circle of Third-World criticism, with a political essay on South Africa, while it would be very hard to include him in the reconstructionist project except as a mentor. From another perspective, however, the shift to “race” also marks an obvious swerve away from Afro-American criticism. The quotation marks around “race” signal not only the questioning of racial essentialism, but also the effacement of black identity and an Afro-American literary canon. The very small number of Afro-American literary critics in the volume itself is striking. In a follow-up issue, which became part of the book version published by the University of Chicago Press, there were additional pieces by Jane Tompkins, Christopher Miller, and Tzvetan Todorov, and a debate between two South African critical activists and Derrida. Most of these essays are extremely good, and several are even brilliant;

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what is disturbing about the issue is not the quality of the criticism, but the implications of the fact that the first issue of Critical Inquiry edited by a black critic and devoted to the question of race and writing has a list of contributors virtually indistinguishable from any other issue of Critical Inquiry. The most unusual part of the issue is the ad section at the back, where books by Trudier Harris, Sunday Anozie, and Hortense Spillers, among others, are featured. The reader of the volume must wonder whether the installation of “race” will displace the study of black literature, and reinstitute a familiar canon, now seen from the perspective of the racial trope. It’s troubling, too, that while gender is given some rhetorical attention as a fundamental category of critical analysis in Gates’s introduction, and has been a central concern of both his and Houston Baker’s recent work, in this volume the responsibility for dealing with gender is almost entirely delegated to the female contributors.32 And finally, it’s revealing that after a vigorous critique and rebuttal of Tzvetan Todorov’s contribution to the debate, Gates still believes that the counter-cultural critic must use the language of the dominant since it is the only one Todorov will even pay mild attention to: “Todorov can’t even hear us, Houston, when we talk his academic talk; how he gonna hear us if we ‘talk that talk,’ the talk of the black idiom?”33 In the female vernacular of my own past, or as my mother used to say, why talk to the wall? Why does it still matter so much to be heard by the tone-deaf masters of European theory when other and larger audiences want to listen? These aspects of the volume are particularly disturbing since in his introductory essay, Gates announces a significant shift in his own thinking, away from his defiant reconstructionist stance to a recognition of the dangers of assimilation, and a renewed emphasis on the cultural grounding of black literature: “I once thought it our most important gesture to master the canon of criticism, to imitate and apply it, but I now believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures.” Gates now warns of the dangers in black poststructuralism and the need for Third-World critics to “analyze the language of contemporary criticism itself, recognizing especially that hermeneutic systems are not universal, color-blind, apolitical, or neutral. . . . To attempt to appropriate our own discourses by using Western theory uncritically is to substitute one mode of neocolonialism for another.”34

THE FEMINIST CRITICAL REVOLUTION The debates within Afro-American criticism and theory have many parallels within the feminist critical community, and indeed the genealogies of black and feminist criticism are strikingly similar in many respects. For the sake of emphasizing these parallels, and for convenience of reference, I have given names to the various phases and modes which make up the complex totality of feminist literary criticism; but it should be understood that none of these approaches has the exact historical and political specificity that may be claimed by some of the stages of Afro-American criticism. None of these overlapping phases has been superseded or discredited, and in general each has undergone considerable change through a vigorous internal debate. Before the Women’s Liberation Movement, criticism of women’s writing took

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the form of an androgynist poetics, denying the uniqueness of a female literary consciousness, and advocating a single or universal standard of critical judgment which women writers had to meet. The women’s movement of the late 1960s initiated both a feminist critique of male culture and a Female Aesthetic celebrating women’s culture. By the mid-1970s, academic feminist criticism, in league with interdisciplinary work in women’s studies, entered a new phase of gynocritics, or the study of women’s writing. With the impact of European literary and feminist theory in the late 1970s, gynesic or poststructuralist feminist criticism, dealing with “the feminine” in philosophy, language, and psychoanalysis, became an important influence on the field as a whole. And in the late 1980s, we are seeing the rise of gender theory, the comparative study of sexual difference. In contrast to black criticism, where integrationist poetics is at least currently unacceptable, androgynist poetics continues to have many partisans among women writers, creating an apparent conflict between writers and critics that the media have relished. It disturbed many feminist critics, including myself, when Gail Godwin and Cynthia Ozick attacked the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women on the grounds that the creative imagination is sexless and that the concept of a female literary tradition was insulting to women who (like Godwin) regard themselves as disciples of Joseph Conrad. I think it unlikely that black writers will raise similar objections to the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Black Literature, edited by the indefatigable and phenomenal Skip Gates. Nevertheless, androgynist poetics, which can be an unexamined misogyny that demands a spurious “universality” from women’s writing, as integrationist poetics did from black writers, as well as a form of feminine self-hatred, also speaks for genuinely serious and permanent concerns within feminist criticism. The androgynist position was articulated early on by Mary Ellmann in Thinking About Women (1969), which wittily deconstructed the pernicious effects of thinking by sexual analogy; and by Carolyn Heilbrun in Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973), which argued that “our future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender.”35 Among contemporary American writers, Joyce Carol Oates is probably the most persuasive representative of this position. In an essay entitled “(Woman) Writer: Theory and Practice” (1986), Oates protests the category of “woman” or “gender” in art: “Subject-matter is culture-determined, not gender-determined. And the imagination, in itself genderless, allows us all things.” Since the 1970s, however, while acknowledging the writer’s need to feel free of labels, most feminist critics have rejected the concept of the genderless “imagination,” and have argued from a variety of perspectives that the imagination cannot escape from the unconscious structures and strictures of gender identity. These arguments may emphasize the impossibility of separating the imagination from a socially, sexually, and historically positioned self, as in Sandra Gilbert’s sensible insistence that “what is finally written is, whether consciously or not, written by the whole person. . . . If the writer is a woman who has been raised as a woman—and I daresay only a very few biologically anomalous human females have not been raised as women—how can her sexual identity be split off from her literary energy? Even a denial of her femininity . . . would surely be significant to an understanding of the dynamics of her aesthetic creativity.”36 A more systematic feminist critique of the woman writer’s unified and sexless “imagination”

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comes from Lacanian psychoanalysis, which describes the split in the female subject within language. In a psycholinguistic world structured by father/son resemblance and by the primacy of male logic, woman is a gap or a silence, the invisible and unheard sex. In contrast to the “writer only” problems of androgynist poetics, therefore, most feminist critics insist that the way to contend with patriarchal bias against women is not to deny sexual difference but to dismantle gender hierarchies. Not sexual difference itself, but rather its meaning within patriarchal ideology—“division, oppression, inequality, interiorized inferiority for women”—must be attacked.37 The first break with androgynist poetics was the affirmation of womanhood as a positive factor in literary experience. As in the development of a Black Aesthetic, the Female Aesthetic evolved during the early years of the women’s liberation movement as a radical response to a past in which the assumed goal for women’s literature had been a smooth passage into a neuter and “universal” aesthetic realm. Instead the Female Aesthetic maintained that women’s writing expressed a distinct female consciousness, that it constituted a unique and coherent literary tradition, and that the woman writer who denied her female identity restricted or even crippled her art. At the same time, a feminist critique of androcentric literature and criticism examined the “misogyny of literary practice: the stereotyped images of women in literature as angels or monsters, the . . . textual harassment of women in classic and popular male literature, and the exclusion of women from literary history.”38 Virtually all of the romantic and invigorating images of independence that characterized the Black Aesthetic have their counterpart in the Female Aesthetic as well. In contrast to the hegemony of what it characterized as the arid and elitist “methodolatry” of patriarchal criticism, the Female Aesthetic proposed the empowerment of the common woman reader (indeed we could also see here a conjunction of Women’s Liberation with what Terry Eagleton has called the Reader’s Liberation Movement), and the celebration of an intuitive female critical consciousness in the interpretation of women’s texts. In striking parallels to the Black Aesthetic, the Female Aesthetic also spoke of a vanished nation, a lost motherland; of the female vernacular or Mother Tongue; and of a powerful but neglected women’s culture. In her introduction to an anthology of international women’s poetry, for example, Adrienne Rich put forth the compelling hypothesis of a female diaspora: The idea of a common female culture—splintered and diasporized among the male cultures under and within which women have survived—has been a haunting though tentative theme of feminist thought over the past few years. Divided from each other through our dependencies on men—domestically, tribally, and in the world of patronage and institutions—our first need has been to recognize and reject these divisions, the second to begin exploring all that we share in common as women on this planet.39

This phase of intellectual rebellion, gynocentrism, and critical separatism was a crucial period in the experience of women who had always played subordinate roles as dutiful academic daughters, research assistants, second readers, and faculty wives. Through the Female Aesthetic, women experimented with efforts to

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inscribe a female idiom in critical discourse and to define a feminist critical stylistics based on women’s experience. In “Toward a Feminist Aesthetic” (1978), Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan J. Wolfe (Robbins) proposed that “the unique perceptions and interpretations of women require a literary style that reflects, captures, and embodies the quality of our thought,” a “discursive, conjunctive style instead of the complex, subordinating, linear style of classification and distinction.”40 French feminist writing of the same period, although it came out of radically different intellectual sources, also produced the concept of écriture féminine, analyzing women’s style as a writing-effect of rupture and subversion in avant-garde literature, available to both men and women, but connected or analogous to female sexual morphology. The French feminist project of “writing the body” is a particularly strong and revolutionary effort to provide women’s writing with an authority based in women’s genital and libidinal difference from men. While the French critique of phallocentrism takes very different paths in the work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, all explore the possibility of a concentric feminine discourse. Whether clitoral, vulval, vaginal, or uterine; whether centered on semiotic pulsions, childbearing, or jouissance, the feminist theorization of female sexuality/textuality, and its funky audacity in violating patriarchal taboos by unveiling the Medusa, is an exhilarating challenge to phallic discourse. Yet the Female Aesthetic also had serious weaknesses. As many feminist critics sharply noted, its emphasis on the importance of female biological experience came dangerously close to sexist essentialism. Its efforts to establish a specificity of female writing through the hypothesis of a women’s language, a lost motherland, or a cultural enclave, could not be supported by scholarship. The initial identification with the Amazon as a figure of female autonomy and creativity (in the work of Monique Wittig and Ti-Grace Atkinson, among others), and with lesbian separatism as the correct political form for feminist commitment, was both too radical and too narrow for a broadly based critical movement. The concepts of female style or écriture féminine described only one avant-garde mode of women’s writing, and many feminists felt excluded by a prescriptive stylistics that seemed to privilege the non-linear, experimental, and surreal. Insofar as the Female Aesthetic suggested that only women were qualified to read women’s texts, feminist criticism ran the risk of ghettoization. Finally, the essentialism of the universal female subject and the female imagination was open to charges of racism, especially since black women’s texts were rarely cited as examples. As black women and others within the women’s movement protested against the inattention to racial and class differences between women, the idea of a common women’s culture had to be re-examined. Gynocritics, which developed alongside the Female Aesthetic in the 1970s, has been an effort to resolve some of these problems. It identified women’s writing as a central subject of feminist criticism, but rejected the concept of an essential female identity and style. In an essay called “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” (1981), a response to Geoffrey Hartman whose title now seems feeble compared to the brilliant riposte of Skip Gates, I argued against feminist fantasies of a wild zone of female consciousness or culture outside of patriarchy, declaring instead that “there can be no writing or criticism outside of the dominant culture.” Thus

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both women’s writing and feminist criticism were of necessity “a double-voiced discourse embodying both the muted and the dominant, speaking inside of both feminism and criticism.”41 Instead gynocriticism has focused on the multiple signifying systems of female literary traditions and intertextualities. In studying women’s writing, feminist critics have challenged and revised the prevailing styles of critical discourse, and asked whether theories of female creativity could be developed instead from within the female literary tradition itself. Influenced by the interdisciplinary field of women’s studies, they have brought to their reading of women’s texts theories and terms generated by the work of such feminist scholars as the historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, the psychologist Carol Gilligan, and the sociologist Nancy Chodorow, whose enormously influential study, The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), revised Freudian psychoanalysis and British object-relations psychology to emphasize the pre-Oedipal phase as the key factor in the construction of gender identity. The work of Smith-Rosenberg, Chodorow, and Gilligan has led to a wide range of studies in philosophy, social history, and religion endorsing what are called “matriarchal values” of nurturance, caring, non-violence, and connectedness, and urging their adoption by society as a whole. Feminist critics have used metaphors of this idealized maternity both in the quest for a strong literary matrilineage, and in the rejection of the adversary method in critical discourse. In a famous and moving essay, Alice Walker has described black women writers’ “search for our mother’s gardens,” tracing the suppressed creativity of black women under slavery and poverty to non-verbal art forms.42 In sharp contrast to the Oedipal poetics of aggression, competition, and defense put forth by Harold Bloom, some American feminist critics have postulated a pre-Oedipal “female poetics of affiliation,” dependent on the daughter’s bond with the mother, in which intergenerational conflict is replaced by female literary intimacy, generosity, and continuity. Joan Lidoff, Judith Kegan Gardiner, and Elizabeth Abel are among the feminist critics who see women’s fluid ego boundaries affecting plot and genre conventions, blurring the lines between lyric and narrative, between realism and romance. Here the Female Aesthetic and postmodernism join in a celebration of heterogeneity, dissolving boundaries, and différence. Although I can hardly claim to be an innocent bystander on the subject of gynocriticism, I would argue that over the past decade it has been sufficiently large, undogmatic, and flexible to have accommodated many theoretical revisions and criticisms, and it has been enormously productive. In a relatively short period of time, gynocritics has generated a vast critical literature on individual women writers, persuasive studies of the female literary tradition from the Middle Ages to the present in virtually every national literature, and important books on what is called “gender and genre”: the significance of gender in shaping generic conventions in forms ranging from the hymn to the Bildungsroman. Nevertheless, many of the original gynocritical theories of women’s writing were based primarily on nineteenth-century English women’s texts, so that a black feminist critic such as Hortense Spillers sees “the gynocritical themes of recent feminist inquiry” as separate from a “black women’s writing community.”43 Only in recent years has attention to black women’s writing begun to address and redress this issue. A pivotal text of gynocritics is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s monumental

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study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Gilbert and Gubar offer a detailed revisionist reading of Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, transforming his Freudian paradigm of Oedipal struggle between literary fathers and sons into a feminist theory of influence which describes the nineteenth-century woman writer’s anxieties within a patriarchal literary culture. Strongly influenced by the work of Gilbert and Gubar, the theoretical program of gynocritics by the 1980s has been marked by increasing attention to “the analysis of female talent grappling with a male tradition,” both in literature and criticism, a project that defined both the female literary text and the feminist critical text as the sum of its “acts of revision, appropriation, and subversion,” and its differences of “genre, structure, voice, and plot.”44 Gynocritics had derived much of its strength from its self-reflexive properties as a double-voiced mode of women’s writing; the anxieties of the nineteenth-century woman writer were much like those of the modern Feminist critic attempting to penetrate literary theory, the most defended bastion of patriarchal prose. Now, as Feminist critics began to profit from their labors and to enjoy some prestige and authority within the profession of literary studies, questions of the complicity between the feminist critical talent and the male critical tradition became acute, and the acts of theoretical revision, appropriation, and subversion in gynocritics itself became the source of a troubling, sometimes obsessive and guilty, self-consciousness. About this time, too, as reports on the French feminists began to appear in women’s studies journals, and as their work became available to American readers through translation, a new group of feminist critics entered the field, primarily through departments of French and Comparative Literature. They saw post-Saussurean linguistics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and deconstruction as the most powerful means to understanding the production of sexual difference in language, reading, and writing, and they wrote in a language accessible chiefly to other literary critics, rather than to a wider audience. Following the work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, Franco-American feminist critics focused on what Alice Jardine calls “gynesis”: the exploration of the textual consequences and representations of “the feminine” in Western thought. Deconstruction has paid little attention to women writers individually or as a group; “for Derrida and his disciples,” Jardine notes, “the question of how women might accede to subjecthood, write texts or acquire their own signatures, are phallogocentric questions.”45 Some poststructuralist feminist critics thus maintain that “feminist criticism should avoid ‘the women’s literature ghetto’ . . . and return to confrontation with ‘the’ canon.”46 While gynocritics looks at the patrilineage and matrilineage of the female literary work, poststructuralist feminist criticism views the literary text as fatherless and motherless; its feminist subjectivity is a product of the reading process. From a gynesic perspective, moreover, disruptions in discourse constitute disruptions of the patriarchal system. Gynesic criticism has been a major intellectual force within feminist discourse, but the gynesic project has also raised a number of problems. First of all, as black poststructuralism has questioned the transcendent black self, however, so poststructuralist feminist criticism has had to wrestle with the paradox of fundamental theoretical affiliations that undermine the very notion of female subjectivity. Other modes of feminist criticism have had the empowerment of the female

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subject as a specific goal. Within the Female Aesthetic, female consciousness was celebrated as an interpretive guide; within gynocritics, the woman critic could use her own confrontation with the male critical tradition and her own experience of writing as a guide to understanding the situation of the woman writer. But if women are the silenced and repressed Other of Western discourse, how can a Feminist theorist speak as a woman about women or anything else? As Shoshana Felman asks, “If ‘the woman’ is precisely the Other of any conceivable Western theoretical focus of speech, how can the woman as such be speaking in this book? Who is speaking here, and who is asserting the otherness of the woman?”47 Kaja Silverman also admits that “the relationship of the female subject to semiotic theory is . . . necessarily an ambivalent one. The theory offers her a sophisticated understanding of her present cultural condition, but it also seems to confine her forever to the status of one who is to be seen, spoken, and analyzed.”48 The rhetorical problems of expressing a black male self to which Gates briefly alludes in “Criticism in the Jungle” are much less disabling than the burden, inherent in a gynesic feminist criticism heavily and necessarily dependent on psychoanalytic theory, of speaking from the feminine position of absence, silence, and lack. Furthermore, while poststructuralist feminists have played a significant role within poststructuralism as translators and advocates, as well as critics, of the European male theorists, the male feminists who have participated in gynesis, with some outstanding exceptions (such as Neil Hertz, Stephen Heath, and Andrew Ross) have tended to present themselves as metacritical masters of the feminine rather than as students of women’s writing, or critics of masculinity. When the Australian critic Ken Ruthven (sometimes called the Crocodile Dundee of male feminism) observes in his book Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction, that “the female ‘problematic’ is too important to be left in the hands of anti-intellectual feminists,” and could be subjected to much more rigorous metacritical inspection by impartial men like himself, it’s difficult not to be suspicious. Since, when you come right down to it, Ruthven argues, feminist criticism is “just another way of talking about books,” and he is a guy who “makes a living talking about books,” it would be churlish (or girlish) to try to keep him out of the conversation.49 In other cases, as I have learned from sad experience, “male feminists” do not even bother to read the feminist critical texts they are allegedly responding to, since they always already know what women think. Poststructuralism and feminism are a familiar and almost obligatory critical couple in the 1980s, but they are still having to work at their relationship. Finally, some recent discussions of what they call “Anglo-American” feminist criticism by poststructuralist feminists have been startlingly ad feminam and harsh, introducing a tone of acrimony into what we had hoped was a mutual, if pluralistic, enterprise, and eliciting equally intemperate attacks on “theory” in defensive response. Certainly there are real issues at stake in the theoretical debates, as well as struggles for what Evelyn Fox Keller has called epistemic power in the feminist critical arena. But the polarization of feminist discourse along dualistic lines seems particularly unfortunate at a moment when there is such a lively exchange of ideas. While The Madwoman in the Attic has yet to be translated into French, gynesic criticism has been widely read by American feminist critics; it has modified American work in gynocritics, and vice-versa. It is not exceptional that Sandra Gilbert, for example, should have edited the first English translation of Cixous’s work and

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Catherine Clément’s La Jeune Née, or on the other hand, that Barbara Johnson is currently working on black women writers. The complex heterogeneities of contemporary feminist discourse cannot be reduced to hierarchal oppositions. The latest and most rapidly growing mode of feminist criticism is gender theory, corresponding to the Third-World critic’s focus on “race.” Within American feminist scholarship, the term “gender” is used to mean the social, cultural, and psychological constructs imposed upon biological sexual difference. Like “race” or “class,” “gender” is a fundamental or organic social variable in all human experience. Within gender theory, the object of feminist criticism undergoes another transformation; unlike the emphasis on women’s writing that informs gynocritics, or on the signification of “the feminine” within gynesis, gender theory explores ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender system: “that set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human social intervention.”50 The interest in gender theory is not confined to feminist criticism, but has also appeared in feminist thought in the fields of history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and science. In “Anthropology and the Study of Gender,” Judith Shapiro argues that the goal of feminist research is not to focus on “women,” and thus to reify female marginalization, but rather “to integrate the study of gender differences into the central pursuits of the social sciences.”51 In the natural sciences, the path-breaking work of Evelyn Fox Keller, Ruth Bleier, and Donna Haraway has analyzed “the critical role of gender ideology in mediating between science and social forms.”52 The most searching analysis of gender as a historical concept has been carried out by Joan W. Scott; in an essay called “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Scott outlines three goals of gender theory: to substitute the analysis of social constructs for biological determinism in the discussion of sexual difference; to introduce comparative studies of women and men into the specific disciplinary field; and to transform disciplinary paradigms by adding gender as an analytic category.53 What are the advantages of gender theory for feminist criticism? Most significantly, gender theory insists that all writing, not just writing by women, is gendered. To define the objective of feminist criticism as an analysis of gender in literary discourse completely opens the textual field. It also provides a way of uncovering the implicit assumptions about gender in literary theory that pretends to be neutral or gender-free. Secondly, the term “gender,” like race, problematizes the dominant. Gender theory promises to introduce the subject of masculinity into feminist criticism, and to bring men into the field as students, scholars, theorists, and critics. It has already opened feminist criticism to include the consideration of male homosexuality, both through the pioneering work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and through writing by gay men. Third, the addition of gender as a fundamental analytic category within literary criticism moves feminist criticism from the margin to the center, and has revolutionary transformative potential for the ways that we read, think, and write. Thinking in terms of gender is a constant reminder of the other categories of difference that structure our lives and texts, just as theorizing gender emphasizes the connections between feminist criticism and other minority critical revolutions. As with Third-World criticism, however, it is too soon to be certain how these possibilities will work out. One danger is that men will continue to read “gender”

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as a synonym for “femininity,” and pontificate about the representation of women without accepting the risks and opportunities of investigating masculinity, or analyzing the gender subtexts of their own critical practice. Another danger, seemingly paradoxical but actually related, is that gender will become a postfeminist term that declares the study of women, and women’s writing, obsolete, or what Ruthven denounces as “separatist.” The most troubling risk is that gender studies will depoliticize feminist criticism, that men will declare an interest in what one of my colleagues recently called “gender and power,” while refusing to call themselves feminists. Even Ronald Reagan and Sylvester Stallone, after all, are interested in gender and power; in some respects, as Joan Scott acknowledges, the term “gender” seems to transcend the politics of feminism, and to promise a “more neutral and objective” scholarly perspective, certainly one more acceptable to men, than the focus on “women.”54 Despite the risks, however, none of these outcomes is inevitable. Gender can be an important expansion of our work, rather than a displacement or depoliticization, if it is defined within a feminist framework that remains committed to the continuing struggle against sexism, racism, and homophobia.

REPETITION AND DIFFERENCE Where do we go from here? The parallels between Afro-American and feminist criticism show how problematic the idea of a unified “black” or “female” self has become. Whether it is the linguistic skepticism of poststructuralism, or our acknowledgment of the differences between women that stops us, Feminist critics today can no longer speak as and about women with the unself-conscious authority of the past. The female subject, we are told, is dead, a position instead of a person. Our dilemma has even reached the pages of the New Yorker; in Tama Janowitz’s short story “Engagements,” a graduate student in feminist criticism at Yale takes notes as her distraught professor tells of being severely attacked for trying to talk about “women” and “female identity” at a Poetics of Gender conference.55 Without a claim to subjectivity or group identity, how can we have a feminist criticism of our own? Black and Third-World critics haunted by the messages of poststructuralism are now facing the same dilemma. Is there a critic-position as well as a subject-position? Gates asks whether “the critic of black literature acquires his or her identity parodically, as it were, in the manner of the parrot,” but hopefully concludes that “we are able to achieve difference through repetition” by looking at a different critical object.56 Homi Bhabha addresses the issue in the contexts of colonialist discourse, citing “mimicry” as a form of “civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance.”57 In Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un, Luce Irigaray too locates the subversive force of Feminist discourse in a playful mimesis, a mimicry both of phallocentric discourse which exceeds its logic, and of the feminine position within that system. Yet playing with mimesis cannot offer us authority except in individual star turns, especially if the dominant culture wants to play with your mesis too. And in mimicking the language of the dominant, how can we guarantee that mimicry is understood as ironic—as civil disobedience, camp, or feminist difference rather than as merely derivative?

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Feminist criticism can’t afford to settle for mimicry, or to give up the idea of female subjectivity, even if we accept it as a constructed or metaphysical one. To paraphrase Baker, men’s clubs hardly ever think of metaphysics before they keep women out; we need what Gayatri Spivak calls a “strategic essentialism” to combat patriarchy.58 Neither can we abandon our investigation of women’s literary history, or give up the belief that through careful reading of women’s texts we will develop a criticism of our own that is both theoretical and feminist. This is a task worth pursuing for its intellectual challenge and for its contribution to a truly inclusive theory of literature, rather than for its “defense” of women’s creative gifts. The goal Virginia Woolf envisioned for feminist writers and critics in 1928, to labor in poverty and obscurity for the coming of Shakespeare’s sister, no longer seems meaningful or necessary. Our enterprise does not stand or fall by proving some kind of parity with male literary or critical “genius”; even assuming that a female Shakespeare or a female Derrida would be recognized, to question the very idea of “genius” is part of Woolf’s legacy to us. Despite our awareness of diversity and deconstruction, feminist critics cannot depend on gynesic ruptures in discourse to bring about social change. During a period when many of the meager gains of the civil rights and women’s movements are being threatened or undone by Reaganism and the New Right, when, indeed, there is a backlash against what the Bennetts and Blooms see as too much black and female power in the university, there is an urgent necessity to affirm the importance of black and female thinkers, speakers, readers, and writers. The Other Woman may be transparent or invisible to some; but she is still very vivid, important, and necessary to us.

NOTES Thanks for helpful suggestions on drafts of this paper to members of the School for Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College, and also to Skip Gates, Houston Baker, Brenda Silver, Marianne Hirsch, Evelyn Fox Keller, Valerie Smith, Daryl Dance, and English Showalter. 1. Mary Ann Caws, “The Conception of Engendering, the Erotics of Editing,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia U. P., 1986), pp. 42–63. This episode is all the more ironic in the light of the successful protest in spring 1988 by deaf students of Gallaudet College in Washington. 2. Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1982), pp. 126–27. 3. In this paper I need to make distinctions between a generic feminist criticism, practiced by a feminist critic of either sex; “Feminist” criticism practiced by women; and male feminist criticism, practiced by men. 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 184. See also Jane Gallop, “Annie Leclerc Writing a Letter, with Vermeer,” The Poetics of Gender, p. 154. 5. For a stimulating example of how such critical cross-fertilization might take place, see Craig Werner, “New Democratic Vistas: Toward a Pluralistic Genealogy “ in Studies in Black American Literature, II, ed. Joe Weixlmann and Chester Fontenot (Greenwood, Florida: Penkevill Press, 1986), pp. 47–83. 6. See Jonathan Dollimore, “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism,” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1985), p. 15.

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7. Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature,” Black American Literature Forum 15 (Spring 1981): 3–21. My discussion of Afro-American literary theory is profoundly indebted to Baker’s essay, and to my discussions with him about parallels to feminist criticism. 8. Quoted in Werner Sollers, Beyond Ethnicity (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1986), p. 209. 9. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London and New York: Methuen, 1985). 10. Arthur P. Davis, Ulysses Lee, and Sterling Brown, eds., The Negro Caravan (New York: Dryden Press, 1941). Through the 1950s, Davis and other Afro-American critics envisioned the eventual disappearance of the social conditions that produced identifiably “Negro” literature. 11. See Baker, “Generational Shifts,” pp. 3–4. The term “integrationist poetics” comes from his essay. 12. Mary Helen Washington, “Rage and Silence in Maud Martha,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York and London: Methuen, 1984), p. 258. 13. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1971), p. 272. 14. Melvin Dixon, “Rivers Remembering Their Source,” in The Reconstruction of Instruction, ed. Robert Stepto and Dexter Fisher (New York: MLA, 1979), pp. 25–26. 15. Baker, “Generational Shifts,” p. 6. 16. Stephen Henderson, “The Forms of Things Unknown,” in his book Understanding the New Black Poetry (New York: Morrow, 1973), p. 41. 17. Baker, “Generational Shifts,” p. 9. 18. See Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 168–87; Deborah McDowell, “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,” in The New Feminist Criticism, pp. 186–99; and Mary Helen Washington, “New Lives and New Letters: Black Women Writers at the End of the Seventies,” College English 43 (Jan. 1981): 1–11. 19. Baker, “Generational Shifts,” p. 10. 20. Baker, “Generational Shifts,” p. 12; and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Criticism in the Jungle,” Black Literature and Literary Theory, p. 9. 21. Gates, “Jungle,” pp. 5, 8. 22. Robert B. Stepto, quoted in Baker, “Generational Shifts,” p. 12. 23. Gates, “Jungle” p. 8. By 1987, Gates had drastically changed this formulation: “No matter what theories we seem to embrace, we have more in common with each other than we do with any other critic of any other literature. We write for each other and for our own contemporary writers” (Figures in Black, New York: Oxford U. P., 1987, p. xxii). 24. Baker, “Generational Shifts,” p. 11. 25. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” Black Literature and Literary Theory, p. 297. 26. Gates, “Jungle,” p. 9. 27. Gates, “Jungle,” p. 8. 28. Gates, “Introduction,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 6. 29. Gates, “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference It Makes,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 5, 6. 30. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 21–22. 31. Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Caliban’s Triple Play,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 186. 32. The exception is Sander L. Gilman, who contributed a controversial essay on race and female sexuality.

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33. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Talkin’ That Talk,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 210. 34. Gates, “Introduction,” pp. 13, 15. 35. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1973), p. ix. 36. Sandra Gilbert, “Feminist Criticism in the University,” in Criticism in the University, ed. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons (Evanston: Northwestern U. P., 1985), p. 117. 37. Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London: Villiers, 1980), pp. 112–13. 38. Elaine Showalter, “The Feminist Critical Revolution,” in The New Feminist Criticism, p. 5. 39. The Other Voice (New York: Morrow, 1975), p. xvii. 40. Adrienne Rich, “Toward a Feminist Aesthetic,” Chrysalis 6 (1978): 59, 67. 41. Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” in The New Feminist Criticism, p. 266. 42. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983). 43. Hortense Spillers, Conjuring, ed. Spillers and Marjorie Pryse (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1985), p. 261. 44. Elizabeth Abel, “Introduction,” Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 2. 45. Alice Jardine, “Pre-Texts for the Transatlantic Feminist,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 225; and Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1985), pp. 61–63. 46. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, “Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman,” in Green and Kahn, eds., Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 24–27. 47. Shoshana Felman, “Woman and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Diacritics 5 (1975): 10; see also this volume, pp. 7–20. 48. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford U. P., 1983), p. viii. 49. Ken Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1985), p. 6. 50. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” in Rayna Rapp Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 165. 51. Judith Shapiro, “Anthropology and the Study of Gender,” in A Feminist Perspective in the Academy, ed. Elizabeth Langland and Walter Gove (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 112. 52. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1985), p. 3. 53. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 5 (November 1986). 54. Scott, “Gender,” p. 1065. 55. Reprinted in Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York (New York: Crown, 1986). 56. Gates, “Jungle,” p. 10. 57. Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Words,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 162. 58. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1987).

JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI

INTRODUCTION FROM GENDER IN AFRICAN WOMEN’S WRITING (1997)





















In October of 1985, Michigan State University sponsored a conference, “The Black Woman Writer and the Diaspora.” A selection of the presentations made at this conference were published in a special issue of The Black Scholar.1 In her editorial introducing this issue, Gloria T. Hull writes: One of the most dramatic changes in the literary world over the last decade has been the blossoming of a large corps of female writers, poets, critics. It is not that black women writers did not exist prior to this period, but the black literary scene had historically been predominantly a male preserve. On the one hand, a white, male-dominated publishing industry hadn’t seen fit to publish the works of black women writers; on the other hand, even among the black intelligentsia, only the male articulation of the black experience had been viewed as worthy of literary expression. In conjunction with the growth of a movement for women’s liberation, however, this situation has dramatically been reversed in recent years. . . . In the process black women are currently making a valuable contribution to the U.S. literary landscape, bringing their own experiences as women to life in the form of exciting female characters who confront not only a racist world but a sexist one.

The changes alluded to by Hull did not occur on their own. Black women/feminists in America who had embraced the women’s movement were soon to raise their voices in protest against what they considered to be the politics of exclusion, bigotry, and homophobia of a predominantly white, middle-class feminist movement.2 These black women/feminists sought to speak out and bring their own (her)stories to the forefront, to express their points of view on (black) women’s culture, on (black) women’s silence. They rejected the hegemonic and totalizing conceptualizations of “Woman” by Anglo-American feminists, as well as those presented by African American men, who always claimed to speak for all Negroes and in so doing subsumed or erased the black woman’s voice.3 Black feminists defined and redefined the marginal position of black women as one characterized by double jeopardy,4 multiple jeopardy, and multiple consciousnesses.5 They called for the uplift of black people by rejecting and combating the existent

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stereotypes of black women, as well as the privileges enjoyed by black male authors within an androcentric African American literary tradition. They also suggested that black women bring to their work a critical self-consciousness about their position as defined by race, class, and ideology.6 They rightly noted the exclusion of black women writers by white feminist critics both in publications and in the classroom, insisting that not only should black women writers be read and taught, but that they must be studied from a feminist perspective. By so doing, these women articulated the need for critics to value black women’s writing as an identifiable literary tradition.7 African American women’s writing has thus gained a lot of ground in academia and within (feminist) literary studies.

THE NEGLECT OF AFRICAN WOMEN’S WRITING African women writers have had to endure these same kinds of exclusions and contempt from a male-oriented African literary scene. The study of African literature has long been the preserve of male writers, and despite the enviable position women have occupied as oral artists African women writers were not given the attention they deserved; even after the advent of the feminist movement, the male voice continued to be the dominant one.8 Lloyd Brown best expresses this dilemma in his Women Writers in Black Africa, published in 1981: [I]nterest in African literature continues to grow, and there is every reason to believe that the African writer will be heard and studied for a long time to come, as artist, social analyst, and literary critic. But in all of this, African literature has to be understood as a literature by African men, for interest in African literature has, with very rare exceptions, excluded women writers. The women writers of Africa are the other voices, the unheard voices, rarely discussed and seldom accorded space in the repetitive anthologies and the predictably male-oriented studies in the field. Relatively few literary magazines and scholarly journals, in the West and in Africa itself, have found significant space or time for African women writers. The ignoring of African women writers on the continent has become a tradition, implicit, rather than formally stated, but a tradition nonetheless—and a rather unfortunate one at that. (3)

A number of reasons have been offered to justify why African women writers have generally been ignored, excluded, and/or forgotten. It has been suggested that African women’s late arrival on the African (written) literary scene is one of the major reasons. Other reasons include African family systems, marriage customs, and the system of formal education that for a long time was the preserve of men.9 Men were the first to be educated and the first to write, while fewer women were sent to school or obtained the university educations that have “traditionally been prerequisites for the writing of African literature in European languages” (Brown 4). Nonetheless, although marriage, family organization, and the paucity of women’s education significantly hampered women’s written literary expression, these reasons cannot explain why those who did write were simply ignored. After all, Ama Ata Aidoo’s play The Dilemma of a Ghost was published in 1965; Flora Nwapa’s first novel, Efuru, in 1966; Thérèse Kuoh Moukouri’s

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Rencontres essentielles, in 1969. A good number of women have been published since. What happened more often than not was that men—male writers, male critics—promoted their work and the ideas of other men such that even those images of women that were fostered systematically excluded images of women by women.10 Ama Ata Aidoo cogently described the problems that the African woman writer has faced, and still continues to deal with, at the Second African Writers’ Conference held in Stockholm in 1986. Here she presented a paper, “To Be an African Woman Writer—An Overview and a Detai1,”11 in which she acknowledged gender discrimination and the traditional roles assigned to women within patriarchal society as some of the drawbacks to African women’s writing: It is definite that anything that had to do with African women was, of all vital pieces of information, the most unknown (or rather unsought), the most ignored of all concerns, the most unseen of all the visibles, and we might as well face it, of everything to do with humanity, the most despised. This had nothing to do with anything that African women did or failed to do. It had to do with the politics of sex and the politics of the wealthy of this earth who grabbed it and who held it (156–57).

Aidoo also criticized the attitudes of publishers and other elements of the book industry. She especially decried the blatant exclusionary practices and lack of attention from the world of (predominantly male) critics, both African and non-African: In March of 1985, Professor Dieter Riemenschneider came to Harare to give a lecture on some regional approach to African literature. The lecture lasted at least two hours. In all that time, Professor Riemenschneider did not find it possible to mention a single African woman writer. When this was pointed out to him later, he said he was sorry, but it had been “so natural.” I could have died. It had been natural to forget that quite a bit of modern African literature was produced by women? Why should it be “natural” to forget that some African women had been writing and publishing for as long as some African men writers? (159)

Aidoo noted that though critical material on women writers has appeared sporadically—either in a few special-topic books or in so-called “special issues” of a few critical journals12—even then the criticism undermines women’s writing, as it is “often absent-minded at the best, and at the worst, full of ridicule and resentment. When commentary on African women in literature is none of the above, it is certain to be disorganized (or rather unorganized) and choked full of condescension” (165). Aidoo maintains that as writers, African women have the right to be treated as equals, to expect that “critics try harder to give [their] work some of their best in time and attention, as well as the full weight of their intelligence, just like they do for the work of their male counterparts” (168). Given what these women writers have had to endure, one can understand Aidoo’s bitterness. Nevertheless, the plight of the African woman writer has begun to change drastically, partly because of growing interest toward African women and their writing, coupled with the explosion in the mid-1980s of scholarly inquiries

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on, by, and about women.13 Although the space that is allocated to the writings of African women in university curricula is still minimal, some progress has been made. Scholars of African literature in Europe and North America are increasingly feeling the need to include at least one African woman writer in their course material. The spirit is also catching on in African universities, given that the curricula of these institutions have traditionally been Eurocentric and/or maleoriented.14 What this means is that more work is being done on African women writers. Africans and critics are slowly coming to grips with a distinctive and diverse literary tradition that demands to be given as much attention as and/or treated differently from the dominant male literary tradition. One facet of this male tradition that has come increasingly under attack has been the subservient image that the African male writer has given of African women.15 They are portrayed as passive, as always prepared to do the bidding of their husbands and family, as having no status of their own and therefore completely dependent on their husbands. Such representation has promoted what Deidre LaPin has suggested is the “classic and inescapable image of wife-mother at the core of the feminine literary persona.”16 These men have been criticized for providing few images of African women as heroic characters, or as self-determined subjects with agency.17 The central themes about women that were broached by the poets of the Negritude movement or those who wrote in the Negritude tradition were the first to be severely censured.18 Foremost was the idealization of pre-colonial Africa and the concomitant romanticization of the African woman, who is described by Senghor (for example) in his poetry as the symbol of the Earth, of the Nation, as Mother Africa.19 Senghor went as far as to state that “the African woman does not need to be liberated. She has been free for many thousands of years.”20 This idealization of the African woman that posits her status as transcendental symbol found itself duplicated in African literature with a parallel stress on the supremacy of motherhood, of the fertile mother, of fecundity. This emphasis had the adverse effect of reaffirming women’s subordinate roles, given that in the writing and thinking of these male authors, African women were virtually silent observers who simply fulfilled their destiny without questioning it or the structures that sanctioned the roles they were made to assume. Furthermore, the Mother Africa trope was sometimes converted into the prostitute metaphor, which, as Florence Stratton has argued, is not only ubiquitous to the African male written tradition, its embodiments “are one of its defining features.”21 Stratton contends that even though the conflated symbol of mother and whore was sometimes revised by employing woman as the symbol of change within post-independence African nations, the trope ultimately worked against the interests of women. Whether she is elevated to the status of a goddess or reduced to the level of a prostitute, the designation is degrading, for he does the naming, whereas her experience as a woman is trivialized and distorted. Metaphorically, she is of the highest importance; practically she is nothing. She has no autonomy, no status as a character, for her person and her story are shaped to meet the requirements of his vision. One of these requirements is that she provide attractive packaging. She is thus constructed as beauty, eroticism, fecundity—the qualities the male Self values most in the female Other. (123)

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The African woman was thus spoken for; she herself was no speaking subject. She was, as Christopher Miller has pointed out, “a woman who exists on paper.” Miller makes these illuminating points in his reading of Senghor’s classic poem “Femme noire” [Black Woman]: Her mouth is not for speaking directly; it is a condition of his lyricism. Her voice, which says nothing, is only the organ of a love-object, the Loved one. The concluding gesture places the poet in a godlike position of promoting the woman to eternal status while at the same time reducing her to fertilizer for future generations of poets. While the status of ‘woman’ here is full of ambiguity (she is elevated and debased at the same time), there is no doubt about the fundamental inequality of the sexes. . . . In the days of colonialism and anti-colonialism, it was thought that certain forms of liberation had to precede others: first racial liberation, then, eventually, perhaps, gender liberation. Rarely stated explicitly, but highly influential, this thesis is often at work within the history of African literature.22

The African woman was not only silent as depicted in print, but was ignored when she herself spoke, when she broke that silence. Brown has rightly stated that “the neglect of the woman as writer in Africa has been an unfortunate omission because she offers self-images, patterns of self-analysis, and general insights into the woman’s situation which are ignored by, or are inaccessible to, the male writer” (“African Woman” 495). He goes on to stress the fact (as have other critics)23 that “these self-descriptions provide us with useful contexts within which to assess the frequently uniform generalizations about African womanhood.” Women in their writing have therefore posited the African woman as speaking subject, making their “self-descriptions” the nucleus to challenging “uniform generalizations” by many male authors.

AFRICAN WOMEN (WRITERS) AND THE ISSUE OF FEMINISM African critics now generally agree that African women writers offer more dynamic representations of women than the images of subordination often presented by their male counterparts. Although some of the women in these works are still inscribed in traditional or secondary roles centered around motherhood and the family, these same roles have also been sharply problematized by some of the women writers. They have sought to “subvert and demythologise indigenous male writings and traditions which seek to label [them]”24 and by so doing have claimed the right not only to name themselves but also to “define themselves from the point of view of what they have and do with their lives, rather than the point of view of what they lack or must not do.”25 They have therefore inscribed in literary discourse an invaluable “generational and cultural continuity” of and for African women.26 Such dynamism is attributable to the fact that women are now writing about women and bringing not only their points of view but lived experiences as women to their writing. The works of these women have been hailed as feminist or stemming from a feminist consciousness. But it is worth noting that some male critics have condemned these women writers for the same reasons.27 According to Femi Ojo-Ade,

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for instance, feminism breeds the hate and bitterness that underlies women writers’ complaints about male chauvinism; as such, “extremism” becomes the “hallmark” of their feminism. It is “the veneer of the progressive striving to become a man” (84). Nancy Bazin articulates a different point of view (and a more acceptable one, I might add). She notes that, “[t]he works of [Emecheta, Nwapa, Head, and Bâ] belie the myth that feminist issues are not important to African women, that African women already have sufficient power, that women choose to support polygamy because they like it, and whatever misery African women suffer can be blamed on the introduction of Western cultures into Africa.”28 However, some African women/writers are themselves not terribly pleased with being defined as feminist for very personal and political reasons. Consider the following questions and answers: Q: You have been identified as a feminist writer. How do you feel about this label? A: I am a feminist with a small “f.” I love men and good men are the salt of the earth. But to tell me that we should abolish marriage like the capital “F” (Feminist) woman who says women should live together and all that, I say NO! Personally I’d like to see the ideal, happy marriage. But if it doesn’t work, for goodness sake, call it off. (Buchi Emecheta in a 1980 interview) I write about the little happenings of everyday life. Being a woman, and African born, I see things through an African woman’s eyes. I chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know. I did not know that by doing so I was going to be called a feminist. But if I am now a feminist then I am an African feminist with a small f. (Buchi Emecheta, at the 1986 Stockholm Second African Writers’ Conference) Q: Why do you refuse to be called a feminist? A: I will not be called a feminist here, because it is European. It is as simple as that. I just resent that. . . . I don’t like being defined by them. . . . It is just that it comes from outside and I don’t like people dictating to me. I do believe in the African type of feminism. They call it womanism, because, you see, you Europeans don’t worry about water, you don’t worry about schooling, you are so well off. Now, I buy land, and I say, ‘Okay, I can’t build on it, I have no money, so I give it to some women to start planting.’ That is my brand of feminism. (Buchi Emecheta in a 1989 interview) Q: What impact has the women’s movement had on you as an African woman writer? A: The women’s movement has definitely reinforced one’s conviction about the need for us to push in whatever way we can for the development of women. But I don’t think that one woke up one morning and found that they were talking about the development of women, and one should also join the bandwagon—no. What it has done is that it has actually confirmed one’s belief and one’s conviction. Our people say that if you take up a drum

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to beat and nobody joins then you just became a fool. The women’s movement has helped in that it is like other people taking up the drum and beating along with you. (Ama Ata Aidoo in a 1986 interview) Q: In this period of “isms” and deconstructed canons, what label would you like for yourself? A: I identify myself as a black woman writer. In South Africa we live under a pyramid of power, so I regard myself as the voice of the African woman who is oppressed politically, socially and culturally. There is not enough emphasis given to the plight of the South African woman. I insist on this in my collection of short stories called Soweto Stories. . . . In that book, I show the terrible predicament of the South African woman. She is oppressed by her man, by the white woman and of course by the system. . . . African women have no voice, no platform and nobody cares. Winnie Mandela has made a difference on the political agenda, but she usually does not speak on women’s issues, these issues are not emphasized, they are not considered important. Therefore, I feel that I must address them in my writing. (Miriam Tlali in a 1990 interview) Q: Are you pleased to learn that publishers are now falling over themselves to secure translation rights [of Une si longue lettre] . . . ? A: Naturally, because this book that has so often been described as a ‘cry from the heart’: this cry is coming from the heart of all women everywhere. It is first a cry from the heart of the Senegalese women, because it talks about the problems of Senegalese women, of Muslim women, of the woman with the constraints of religion which weigh on her as well as other social constraints. But it is also a cry which can symbolize the cry of the woman everywhere. . . . [T]here is everywhere a cry, everywhere in the world, a woman’s cry is being uttered. The cry might be different, but there is still a certain unity. There is the social fact of physiology. The fact that she is the bearer of the children. And from the fact of this responsibility, is also the fact of a partner, a man. A man who has not always been loyal to her. I am happy, however, that if this book is translated, there will be many countries who will be able to hear our cry, our own cry. The cry that they utter, the women from these other countries, their cry will not be exactly the same as ours—we have not all got the same problems—but there is a fundamental unity in all of our sufferings and in our desire for liberation and in our desire to cut off the chains which date from antiquity. (Mariama Bâ in a 1980 interview) I have quoted these women at length so as to let their thoughts and voices speak to this issue of feminism, and also because what they say directly puts into perspective the objectives of this study. What these women writers say underlines the complex nature of feminism for all women and for themselves as African

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women. They raise a number of issues. They disapprove of, or simply eschew, the word “feminist” (Emecheta, Tlali), because of the implications that they suspect are inherent in such identification. Tsitsi Dangarembga has also stated in an interview that “the white Western feminism does not meet my experiences at a certain point, the issues of me as a black woman. The black American female writers touch more of me than the white ones.”29 Emecheta questions the very context from which the word “feminist” originates—one that is European, Western, literate, developed and affluent. By refusing to be dictated to and/or defined by Western women, Emecheta is alluding to the fact that some African women tend to see feminism as a form of imperialism with a woman’s face, an imperialism that has come to impose or dictate its views and visions on African or “Third World” women. It is therefore the neo-colonial tendencies that these women see as intrinsic to feminism that they are actively rejecting. Such neo-colonialism is aptly discussed by Madhu Kishwar in her essay “Why I Do Not Call Myself a Feminist.” She examines the situation of women’s struggles in India and is alarmed by the fact that the general flow of ideas and of labels is one way—from west to east, in the overall context of a highly imbalanced power relation, feminism, as appropriated and defined by the west, has too often become a tool of cultural imperialism. The definitions, the terminology, the assumptions, even the issues, the forms of struggle and institutions are exported from west to east, and too often we are expected to be the echo of what are assumed to be more advanced women’s movements in the west.30

An example of this, says Kishwar, is the fact that countless Western feminists in the last decade have asked Indian women whether they have “battered women’s homes” in India? Underlying this question is the assumption that “not to have such homes is to be at a lower stage of development in the struggle against violence on women, and that such homes will be one inevitable outcome of the movement’s development” (5). Aihwa Ong elucidates this point further when she argues that Western standards and goals—rationality and individualism—are . . . used to evaluate the cultures of non-Western societies. . . . [W]hen Western feminists look overseas, they frequently seek to establish their authority on the backs of non-Western women, determining for them the meanings and goals of their lives. If, from the feminist perspective there can be no shared experience with persons who stand for the Other, the claim to a common kinship with non-Western women is at best, tenuous, at worst, non-existent.31

These women are also suspicious of a feminism that lays claim to radical separatist tendencies. They claim men as part of their struggle, affirming their heterosexuality without necessarily idealizing this sexual preference or the men with/by whom they define and experience their sexuality (Bâ, Emecheta). They posit the anteriority of an “African feminism” (Aidoo), an unlabeled feminism, and endorse the feminist movement as that which confirms their actions, providing both political and theoretical grounding for the issues that African women have

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been concerned with for millennia. At the Stockholm Writers’ Conference, Aidoo rightly rejected Taban lo Liyong’s accusation that African women writers were not keeping the “African house-hold intact” by “going off and joining in dances in lapland which concern only the people of Lapland.” As Aidoo responds: African women struggling both on behalf of themselves and on behalf of the wider community is very much a part of our heritage. It is not new and I really refuse to be told I am learning feminism from abroad, from Lapland. Africa has produced a much more concrete tradition of strong women fighters than most other societies. So when we say that we are refusing to be overlooked we are only acting today as daughters and grand-daughters of women who always refused to keep quiet. We haven’t learnt this from anybody abroad. (183, emphasis added)

What this means is that before feminism became a movement with a global political agenda, African women both “theorized” and practiced what for them was crucial to the development of women, although no terminology was used to describe what these women were actively doing, and are still practicing, on a day-to-day basis. (It is this fact—that African women were “theorizing” in an empirical, ad hoc way through daily lived experience long before the advent of feminism—that grounds my contention, further discussed in the next chapter, that African theory is embedded in the texts we will consider.) In this way the women translate their “cry” or “drumbeat” into a universal war-cry, while at the same time stressing the particularities and/or complex and multiple levels of their own oppression. They believe this oppression cannot be identified by a separatist Western feminism that needs to move beyond an essentialist “physiology” by simultaneously problematizing both the universal and particular nature(s) of women’s oppression. As Emecheta convincingly points out, (most) Western women do not have to bother about water or education, this is a given for the latter; meanwhile, for African women, water and education are basic needs. They are a point from which to begin, those very essential needs that are uppermost on their list of requirements for daily survival, those that ground their own feminism, unlike the rejection of marriage and motherhood, the separatism and economic independence, that Katherine Frank claims is intrinsic to an emerging African feminism.32 The women’s movement has provided one of the spaces where many different drums can be beaten to many different tunes at the same time. Consequently, women in Africa and the diaspora can use this space as a place where they can beat their own drums as well, where they can send out and receive their own messages.33 Owing to the diverse nature of these voices, it becomes problematic for African women to adopt the word “feminist” that does not adequately speak their experiences but those of a particular Western/privileged group of women, a word that, when used in their African socio-cultural contexts, is often loaded with pejorative connotations. Often, when an African woman is associated with feminism or directly labeled as a “feminist,” such labeling incongruously defines her as Western, meaning that she is either condemned or not credited for what she is or does because she is said to be deviant or simply imitating Western women (a negative statement). Carole Boyce Davies has maintained that

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the obvious connection between African and Western feminism is that both identify gender-specific issues and recognize women’s position internationally as one of second class status and “otherness” and seek to correct that. An International Feminism to which various regional perspectives are contributed seems acceptable to African women while the European/American model is not. The failure of Western feminists to deal with issues that directly affect Black women and their tendencies to sensationalize others creates antagonisms as does the fact that white women are often partners in the oppression of both African women and men (South Africa as the most overt example). The term “feminism” often has to be qualified when used by most African or other Third World women.34

The insufficiency of the word “feminism” (and the controversy surrounding its appropriation) has been asserted by many critics.35 Some African and “Third World” women have proposed other terms in lieu of “feminist” and/or “feminism.” Alice Walker is known to have proposed the word “‘womanism,” an allinclusive term that should speak to all women and especially to black women.36 But Chikwenye Ogunyemi contends that she also “arrived at the term ‘womanism’ independently and was pleasantly surprised to discover that [her] notion of its meaning overlaps with Alice Walker’s.”37 Werewere Liking coined the word “misovire,”38 and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, who calls herself a Stiwanist, has advocated the term “Stiwanism” instead of feminism.39 When these women refuse the label of feminist, it is not because they do not want to side with other feminists; as Trinh Minh-ha points out in an interview with Pratibha Parmar, “Third World” women sometimes have to refuse labels “because it is crucial to keep open the space of naming in feminism” (66). African women therefore have to modify this term to better describe their experiences and the nature of their oppressions. One can judge from these assessments that Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Bâ combine their struggle for women with the struggles of men. For them, women’s subject-hood and sexuality is intrinsically linked with that of men. Experience of this subjectivity, of agency, is an ongoing process wherein women should make choices for themselves. Ama Ata Aidoo is convinced of the importance of the “development of women”—not only African, but all women—and this development (in whatever form) becomes an issue to reckon with in her writing. Miriam Tlali identifies herself as a black woman who wants to speak specifically to the black South African woman and the multifaceted nature of her struggles against the political, social, historical, and cultural oppression that plunges black women into a struggle not only with their men, but with white wo/men, and the racial, political power structures that erase the black South African woman’s voice. As a writer addressing specifically “women’s issues,” she distinguishes and distances herself from the powerful political figure that Winnie Mandela was. In an interview with Schipper, Tlali laments the fact that she is still the only black South African woman who has ventured to write about feminism. “There is no equality,” she says. “If you do something out of the ordinary men are more inclined to see you as a ‘fellow man’ than to acknowledge that you have accomplished something important as a woman. That would present too much of a threat” (66). This “threat” that men see in (the act of) women’s writing is not specific to the South African context. Mariama Bâ sounds the same alarm:

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Dans toutes les cultures, la femme qui revendique ou proteste est dévalorisée. Si la parole qui s’envole marginalise la femme, comment jugera-t-on celle qui ose fixer pour l’éternité sa pensée? C’est dire la réticence des femmes à devenir écrivain. Leur répresentation dans la littérature Africaine est presque nulle. Et pourtant, comme elles ont à dire et à écrire! Plus qu’ailleurs, le contexte social africain étant caractérisé par l’inégalité criante entre l’homme et la femme, par l’exploitation et l’oppression séculaires et barbares du sexe dit faible, la femme-écrivain a une mission particulière. Elle doit, plus que ses pairs masculins, dresser un tableau de la condition de la femme africaine.40 [In all cultures, the woman who makes demands or protests is devalued. If the fleeting word marginalizes the woman, how will she who dares to set her thoughts down for eternity be judged? That explains women’s reluctance to become writers. Their representation in African literature is almost nonexistent. And yet, how much they have to say and write! More than anywhere else, the African social context being characterized by the glaring inequality between man and woman, by the exploitation and the centuries-old, savage oppression of the so-called weaker sex, the woman writer has a special task. She must, more than her male counterparts, paint a picture of the African woman’s condition].41

No wonder, in the interview with Harrell-Bond, Bâ maintained that “books are a weapon, a peaceful weapon perhaps, but they are a weapon” (214)—one that women must seize and use for themselves. Tlali subverts and uses what others perceive as a threat by addressing in her writing those thorny issues that South African women persistently have to deal with. By emphasizing this multifaceted plight of the South African, she gives voice and a platform where there was voicelessness. That is why Bâ insists that African women owe it to themselves, they have a specific mandate to write, to draw up and review the African woman question. One can therefore infer that African women writers do not categorize their problems in linear/hierarchical, either/or dichotomies, as would some Western feminists who would privilege a specific agenda: sexism over racism, or sexuality/ the erotic over material experiences and the sexual division of labor. These women do not separate one form of oppression from another; neither do they advocate such a separation as might only sensationalize certain issues and sweep equally important issues under the carpet, reinforcing the general ignorance and neglect of the problems of African women. The experience of identity, be it constituted or constituting; and the experience of difference, be it racial or sexual; and the process of reconstructing subjectivity—these are all experienced and lived out simultaneously in the realm of specific sexual politics. I will take a critical feminist look at the ways in which the women writers whose works are the object of this study subvert (gender) and redefine the contradictions inherent in gender relations by appropriating feminist theories of gender in the African literary context. But I will also examine these post-colonial women’s texts through a complementary interrogation of (Western) feminist theories of gender and African (feminist) literary criticism. My intention is to discuss women’s subjectivity through the critical use of gender as a category of analysis in

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feminist research grounded in African women’s writing, bringing my lived experiences as African woman/subject to bear on my discussion. Teresa de Lauretis has stated that gender, both as representation and as selfrepresentation, is constructed through multiple techniques and discursive practices that she has described as “technologies of gender.”42 It is this multiplicity inherent in the use of gender, the complexity of gender relations, and the ways in which they are subverted by sub-Saharan women writers that will foreground my discussions on identity, sexuality, and difference. This study will demonstrate that the subversion of difference and the simultaneous construction of identity, subjectivity, and sexuality are all interlocking issues. In their portrayals of women, these writers actively seek to (re)construct the subject/object dichotomy that has often been used to define the female subject. For millennia, African women have learned to juggle many things at once, and these multiple ways of simultaneously experiencing identity, sexuality, and difference in the construction of subjectivity have come to ground their strengths, not weaknesses. Chapter 1 will take a critical look at the use of gender by feminist theorists and advance ways in which their theories, as well as those of post-colonial theorists, can be modified and/or appropriated by an African/feminist literary critic for the purposes of feminist research, thereby setting the theoretical parameters that will govern my literary analysis. Chapter 2 will explore the construction of identity in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Ama Ata Aidoo’s recent novel Changes—A Love Story, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s first and only novel to date, Nervous Conditions. Chapter 3 will examine sexuality in Delphine Zanga Tsogo’s Vies de femmes, Calixthe Beyala’s C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée and Tu t’appelleras Tanga (two novels that explore very similar themes and are almost an extension of one another), and Werewere Liking’s Elle sera de jaspe et de corail [journal d’une misovire . . . ]. Chapter 4 will deal with difference in Mariama Bâ’s Un chant écarlate (translated as Scarlet Song), Miriam Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan, and Bessie Head’s Maru. After reading these texts, both as “fictionalized theory” and as “theorized fiction,” finding and naming African indigenous theory that is autonomous and self-determining, I will conclude that these women writers have used their writing as a weapon to delve into the African woman question, concurrently offering reconstructive insights into feminist and post-colonial theories and the reading of non-Western literatures.

NOTES 1. 17. 2 (1986). 2. For instance, Toni Cade, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: Signet, 1970); Joyce Lardner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972); Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); doris davenport, “The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 85–90; Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 110–13.

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3. Valerie Smith, “Gender and Afro-Americanist Literary Theory and Criticism,” Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Routledge, 1989), 56–70; Henry Louis Gates, ed., introduction to Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (New York: Meridian, 1990), 1–17. 4. Frances Beal, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Random House, 1970), 340–53. 5. Deborah King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” in Feminist Theory in Practice and Process, ed. Micheline Malson et al. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989), 75–105. 6. Cheryl A. Wall, ed., Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989). 7. Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984); Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon, 1985); Barbara Smith, “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1986), 168–85; Deborah McDowell, “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,” in Showalter, 186–99. 8. See Roseann Bell, “The Absence of the African Woman Writer,” College Language Association Journal 21. 4 (1978): 491–98; Arlette Chemain-Degrange, Emancipation féminine et roman africain (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1980). 9. Oladele Taiwo, Female Novelists of Modern Africa (London: Macmillan, 1984); Mineke Schipper, “Women and Literature in Africa,” in Unheard Words: Women and Literature in Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, ed. Mineke Schipper (London: Allison and Busby, 1985), 22–68; Kembe Milolo, L’Image de la femme chez les romanciers de l’afrique noire francophone (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1986); Jean-Marie Volet, La parole aux africaines ou l’idée du pouvoir chez les romancières d’expression française de l’Afrique sub-Saharienne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993); Beverley Ormerod and Jean-Marie Volet, Romancières africaines d’expression française: Le sud du Sahara (Paris: Editions l’Harmattan, 1994). 10. See Femi Ojo-Ade, “Female Writers, Male Critics,” African Literature Today 13 (1983): 158–79; Jean-Marie Volet, “Romancières francophones d’Afrique noire: vingt ans d’activité littéraire à découvrir,” French Review 65.5 (April 1992): 765–73. 11. In Criticism and Ideology, ed. Kirsten H. Petersen (Uppsala: Nordiska afrikainstitutet, 1988), 155–72. 12. For example, the fifteenth volume of African Literature Today on women in African literature, published in 1987. 13. It is interesting to note that the African Literature Association dedicated (for the first time) an annual conference, their seventeenth, in 1991, exclusively to African women writers, titled “‘Nwayibu’: Woman being . . . ” 14. For some of the reasons why the teaching of African literature in Africa has not gained as much ground as would be expected since 1963, see Chidi Ikonne, “African Literature in Africa Twenty-Five Years after the Dakar and Freetown Conferences,” in African Literature (1988) New Masks, ed. Hal Wylie et al. (Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1990), 97–105. 15. Esther Smith, “Images of Women in African Literature: Some Examples of Inequality in the Colonial Period,” in Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1986), 27–44. 16. “Women in African Literature,” in African Women South of the Sahara, ed. Margaret Hay and Sharon Stichter (London: Longman, 1984), 102. 17. Marie Linton-Umeh, “The African Heroine,” in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann P. Bell et al. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979), 39–51.

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18. Carroll Yoder, White Shadows: A Dialectical View of the French African Novel (Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1991). 19. Mineke Schipper, “Mother Africa on a Pedestal: The Male Heritage in African Literature and Criticism,” Women in African Literature Today, ed. Eldred Jones et al. (London: James Currey, 1987), 35–54. 20. Quoted in Lloyd Brown, “The African Woman as Writer,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 9.3 (1975): 493. 21. “‘Periodic Embodiments’: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Men’s Writing,” Research in African Literatures 20.1 (1990): 120. 22. “Senegalese Women Writers, Silence, and Letters: Before the Canon’s Roar,” Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990) 259. 23. Filomina Steady, “The Black Woman Cross-Culturally: An Overview,” in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Steady (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1981), 7–41; Carole B. Davies, “Introduction: Feminist Criticism and African Literary Criticism,” in Davies and Graves, 1–23. 24. Susheila Nasta, introduction to Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992), xv. 25. Abena P. B. Busia, “Words Whispered over Voids: A Context for Black Women’s Rebellious Voices in the Novel of the African Diaspora,” in Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1988), 5. 26. Gay Wilentz, Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), xiv. 27. See Femi Ojo-Ade, “Still a Victim? Mariama Bâ’s Une si Longue Lettre,” African Literature Today 12 (1982):71–87. 28. “Weight of Custom, Signs of Change: Feminism in the Literature of African Women,” World Literature Written in English 25.2 (1985):183. 29. Interview with Flora Veit-Wild in Black Women’s Writing: Crossing the Boundaries, ed. Carole Boyce Davies (Frankfurt a.M.: Ehling, 1989), 106. 30. Manushi 61 (Nov.-Dec. 1990): 3. See also Maivan Clech Lâm, “Feeling Foreign in Feminism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19.4 (Summer 1994): 865–93; Sara Suleri, “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 756–69. 31. “Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies,” Inscriptions 3/4 (1988): 80. 32. “Women without Men: The Feminist Novel in Africa,” in Jones et al., 24–34. 33. I have discussed this issue elsewhere: “African Women and Feminism: The Context of an-Other Black Woman’s Voice,” at the conference on “African and African American Women: The Ties That Bind” (Baton Rouge: Southern University, 1992). 34. In Davies and Graves, 10. See also Kirsten Petersen, “First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature,” Kunapipi 6.3 (1984): 35–47, and Amy Kaminsky, “Issues for an International Feminist Literary Criticism,” Signs 19.1 (Autumn 1993): 213–27. 35. For example, Katherine Frank, “Feminist Criticism and the African Novel,” African Literature Today 14 (1984):34–48; Filomina Steady, “African Feminism: A Worldwide Perspective,” in Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn et al. (Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1987), 3–24; Rotimi Johnson, “Womanism and Feminism in African Letters,” Literary Criterion 25.2 (1990): 25–35; Cecily Lockett, “Feminism(s) and Writing in English in South Africa,” Current Writing 2 (1990): 1–21; Cheryl Johnson-Odim, “Common Themes, Different Contexts: Third World Women and Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Mohanty et al. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 314–27; Irene d’Almeida, “Femme? Féministe? Misovire? Les romancières africaines face au féminisme,” Notre Librairie 117 (Avril-Juin 1994): 48–51; and Francophone

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African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994) 1–31. 36. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi-xii. 37. “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English,” Signs 11.1 (1985): 72. 38. “Misovire” literally means “man hater,” analogous to misogynist, a word that she coined out of Latin, Greek, and her African experience. See chapter 3. 39. “Stiwa” is an acronym for Social Transformation Including Women in Africa, in ReCreating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994), 229. 40. “La fonction politique des littératures africaines écrites,” Ecriture française dans le monde 5.3 (1981): 6–7, my emphasis. 41. Unless otherwise indicated, this and all other translations within the text are mine. 42. “The Technology of Gender,” in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987) 1–30.

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n literary terms, “reading” can mean two distinct things: the first meaning centers on texts, the second on receivers of texts. First, “a reading” is an interpretation, one critic’s version of what a piece of writing has to say. “A feminist reading,” in this usage, would be an interpretation of a text that assumes that gender is central to what the text means. In a feminist reading of a text, gender can come into play as something represented in the text (as in “images-of-woman” criticism); as something shaping the experience and, therefore, the writing of the author (as in gynocriticism); or as a significant influence in the life—and, therefore, the interior experience—of the particular reader who is trying to understand what the text says. “Reading,” in its second literary sense, refers directly to that interior experience of readers, understood as an activity or a process. Rarely do theorists or critics make empirical studies of what actual readers do when they peruse books (Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance [1984] was a notable feminist exception1), although a few have applied psychoanalytic or ethnographic principles to their observations of real readers reading. More often, reader-response theorists have hypothesized a universalized abstraction called “the reader,” and they have described what “he” feels, thinks, or does when confronted with a given text. For such critics, reading is conceptual, based—one assumes—on their personal experiences with texts. In the theoretical work of such reader-centered theorists as Peter Brooks, Norman Holland, David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser, gender seldom surfaces as a potential influence on the reader’s experience. Indeed, reader-centered theorists are not unusual in this regard; the (usually) male originators of poststructuralist theory seldom attend to gender in their formulations of such concepts as text, voice, genre, or discourse. The readings their methodologies produce are gender-blind. Feminist reading, then, would be the reception and processing of texts by a reader who is conceived of not only as possibly female but also as conscious of the tradition of women’s oppression in patriarchal culture. The feminist reader—whether in fact male or female—is committed to breaking the pattern of that oppression by calling attention to the ways some texts can perpetuate it. The essays in this section focus on reading in this second, active (and activist) sense. Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1977) is one of the first attempts to conceptualize feminist reading, a process that Fetterley says occurs when a female reader confronts an androcentric (male-centered) or even a misogynist (antiwoman) text. Explaining that “great” American literature treats male experience as universal, Fetterley argues in her “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature” that reading the traditional American canon requires one to “identify as male,” to sympathize with masculine heroes whose troubles are overtly or covertly associated with the women in their stories. This practice has led, Fetterley says, to the “immasculation” of the woman reader, who must identify “against herself” as she reads, thus becoming a “divided self.” The “resisting reader” would work to “exorcise” the male-imposed part of that self, to be conscious of the way American classics exclude and alienate her. Fetterley’s book fills out the readings of novels she sketches in the introductory chapter reprinted here. In Jane Gallop’s “The Father’s Seduction” (1982) we see two versions of another kind of resisting reader, the feminist psychoanalytic critic. Part explanation, part analysis, and part interrogation, Gallop’s essay uses French feminist Luce Irigaray’s psychoanalytic technique to read Irigaray’s “Blind Spot of an Old Dream

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of Symmetry.” Gallop points to contradictions in Irigaray’s essay and pursues issues of the writer’s own desires as apparent in her text. In particular, Gallop examines Irigaray’s position as an analyst. If Freud is the “father” of psychoanalysis, is Irigaray the (hysterical?) daughter? And if she is, how does her desire (as daughter) for the father mark her text? Questions of sameness and difference, of symmetry and asymmetry, are at issue here: Irigaray uses Freud’s technique to read Freud; Gallop uses Irigaray’s technique to read Irigaray; and, throughout, the question of the analyst/reader’s desire remains problematic. If, as Irigaray argues elsewhere in Speculum of the Other Woman, any theory is always masculine, where does that leave Irigaray’s own theorizing? Gallop explores the difficulties Irigaray faces in trying to represent female desire without recourse to a patriarchal system of representation—that is, without recourse to the “Law of the Father.” Irigaray’s project is to raise the possibility of a sexuality—and a system of representation—not governed by the phallus, not guided by the principle of sameness, “univocity,” and one-ness. But, Gallop asks, how can Irigaray offer a different version of femininity without being seduced by the same? If she solves the problem and offers an answer, she risks coming to completion and closure—the mark of phallic “unicity.” To avoid this problematic closure, Irigaray offers only questions—but how does one offer new options with only questions? Gallop marks these attempts to avoid authority, to avoid the artificial precision of phallocentrism, but points to the occasion when even Irigaray insists on precision—her statement that she doesn’t advocate a daughter’s having sex with her father—as evidence of the difficulty of escaping the Law of the Father and of Irigaray’s own desire for/seduction by the father. Catherine Belsey’s “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text” (1985) may be one of the more difficult selections in Feminisms Redux for readers uninitiated into literary theory, but such readers might consider tackling it first and last, as an introduction to and a summary of the interplay of feminisms and literary theory. Belsey focuses on reading “literary discourse,” and her project is to survey the major assumptions that have dominated critical thinking about what to do with literature in a poststructuralist era. Belsey carefully weaves together the primary concern of feminism—to change the world by eliminating the subjugation of women—with the positions of critical and cultural theorists whose approaches seem, on the face of it, either to be apolitical or else to make class struggle, rather than gender inequities, their highest priority. Establishing definitions for such crucial concepts as subject, identity, discourse, and ideology, Belsey shows how those terms cross boundaries between the linguistically based theories of Emile Benveniste and Ferdinand de Saussure, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the Marxism of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey, and the semiotic cultural critique of Roland Barthes. For Belsey, the method of analyzing literary discourse that draws on the most fruitful accumulation of these concepts is deconstruction, an approach she finds particularly helpful to the feminist who wishes to challenge the subject position constructed for readers within “classic realism.” Belsey asserts that critics who follow deconstruction’s invitation to find “the multiplicity and diversity of . . . possible meanings” rather than the unity of a text will find it “implicitly criticizes its own ideology; it contains within itself the critique of its own values.” Placing an overlay of gender on that deconstructive tenet, Belsey looks at some

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Sherlock Holmes stories to demonstrate that the shadowy, silent, mysterious, and magical presence of sexualized women in those stories undercuts the narratives’ overt endorsements of logic, positivism, and science. Deconstruction, then, is one way to uncover the operations of gender in literary discourse, one productive route toward feminist reading. Lacanian psychoanalysis, like deconstruction, has inspired feminist readings of familiar texts, particularly those that focus on desire. Desire has become an issue for literary critics because it exists within the field of language; as Lacan understood it, desire was the motivation for all language. As one of the most intense involvements with language, literature can be understood as a playing out of desire. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work marks a move toward combining psychoanalytic and socialist theories in the discussion of desire, as she explores the connection between desire and the political. In the “Introduction” and first chapter (“Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles”) of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Sedgwick traces the links between male homosocial desire (which she carefully delineates as not homosexual but homophobic) and patriarchal culture. Here she sets out the theoretical groundwork on which the rest of her book is built, questioning how closely the connections between radical feminism, which sees gender as the fundamental issue, and Marxist theory, which sees power relations and economics as fundamental, can be drawn in feminist readings. Sedgwick concludes that one can trace the relations of sexual desire and political power through an examination of the “exchange of women”—a theory that women are used to cement relations between men, an idea that has been developed and refined both by Freud and by anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin, and applied to women’s psychic lives by Irigaray in her famous essay “This Sex Which Is Not One.”2 Warning that sexual desire and political power cannot simply be equated, Sedgwick seeks to examine the historical relation between the two through representations, questioning “what counts as sexual” and questioning as well the effect that the sexual has on political power. In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” (1986), Barbara Johnson raises the stakes of feminist reading by asking, “Is there any inherent connection between figurative language and questions of life and death?” The question of life and death here is about abortion; the literary form under scrutiny is the poetic figure of apostrophe, or the address to an absent entity that paradoxically both animates and silences the addressee. To bring abortion and apostrophe together is to raise the issue of “discursive positions,” or the place from which you speak (for example, as the no-longer-pregnant woman? as the aborted fetus?) in a poem. Johnson looks at poems about abortion, pregnancy, childbirth, and the death of children written in various periods by men and by women, and observes that a difficulty for poets seems to be “the attempt to achieve a full elaboration of any discursive position other than that of child.” Johnson’s deconstruction of apostrophe in those poems points to the “undecidability” of matters of life and death in poetic discourse, and, in bringing this difficulty up, she alludes to the controversy over poststructuralism’s reputation for uselessness in the face of politics. As Johnson argues though, and Belsey, for one, would probably agree, undecidability is not an apolitical condition but rather is what brings politics into being, what gives them birth. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty propose a different kind of

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feminist reading in “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” (1986), inspired by postcolonial feminism. Martin and Mohanty enter the debate about “identity politics,” the issue of whether one’s experience and “positionality” (i.e., class, race, sexual orientation, nation, religion)—or one’s home, so to speak—must limit one to writing from a specific perspective defined by those identity markers. Can a white woman write about women of color? Can a heterosexual woman write about lesbians? When a woman of color writes about her own experience, can she speak for other women of color as well? If mainstream feminism has marginalized the perspectives and experiences of Third World women, is there anything in Western feminism that can be of use from those perspectives? (In this respect the authors are asking questions very similar to those raised by Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi in her essay reprinted in Canons.) Martin and Mohanty use the principles of deconstruction to show that maintaining such oppositions as white/ color, West/East, heterosexual/lesbian operates only to perpetuate the power of the dominant term in each pair. Doing a close reading of an autobiographical essay by Minnie Bruce Pratt (“white, middle-class, Christian-raised, southern, and lesbian”), Martin and Mohanty argue that Pratt’s text questions “the all-too-common conflation of experience, identity, and political perspective.” By maintaining “complex positionalities” that avoid settling into a fixed identity, Pratt writes “an enactment of careful and constant differentiations which refuses the all-too-easy polemic that opposes victims to perpetrators.” Martin and Mohanty see Pratt’s writing as leading to “a conception of power that refuses totalizations, and can therefore account for the possibility of resistance.” Implicitly disputing the charge that deconstruction is not a political practice, Martin and Mohanty view the prospect of reclaiming “home” from the neoconservative Right as a concept newly useful to building feminist community. Speaking from a black feminist position, Barbara Christian in “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism” (1990) reads academic rather than literary texts, meditating on the relationship between female literary critics and the language(s) they use to establish their places within the academy. Christian speaks of her personal history as a woman whose “formal schooling” took her “from kindergarten in the black Virgin Islands through a Ph.D. at white Columbia” and muses on the way education trains us to categorize cultural experience as “high” (Greek and Latin, Western philosophy, teacherly authority) or “low” (“sweat, calypso, long talk and plenty voices”). Although Christian credits the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s with altering the institution of literary criticism (“We have asked why some forms are not considered literature—for example, the diary, the journal, the letter. . . . We have developed women’s studies programs.”), she criticizes feminist studies for their tendency, as she sees it, to “homogenize the world of our Sisters, to fix ourselves in boxes and categories through jargon, theory, abstraction.” Christian offers a model for thinking about the black feminist critic’s relationship to her work not as either high or low but as “both-and”; she also offers an alternative literary critical prose style, incorporating black English and personal details in a formal piece of writing. She alludes, in her list of experiences in “the middle world,” to her influential 1989 essay, “The Race for Theory,” in which she had questioned the applicability of literary theory to African American literary studies.3 In the present essay, she focuses more exclusively on the relationship of the woman critic to theoretical writing.

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The section turns, with Lauren Berlant’s “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” (2002), from attention to reading and writing theory in general to a queer-theory-inspired reading of a particular feminist theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (whose Between Men is also featured in this section). Berlant begins with a look at the optimism implicit in Sedgwick’s long-term project of “reparative reading.” She navigates points of contact and difference between Sedgwick and herself, along the way critiquing queer theory’s tendency to focus on individual interiority. It brings out her own queerness, she says, “to think of living less as self-extension than as a process that interferes with the drama of the self.” For Berlant, the impersonal is “not . . . the opposite of the personal” but is “one of its conditions.” From this position she embarks on a reading of Mary Gaitskill’s 1991 novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, an account of two women’s youthful sexual trauma and its impact on their experience of their own embodiment. In an unprecedented tour de force, Berlant catalogs all the girls’ snacks in a full-page list of food items detailed enough to make a reader feel full just from perusing it. “Food” is one of the three pleasures (or “zones of absorption”) Berlant argues the girls adopt to “interfere with the subordinations that feel inevitable”; the two other pleasures are “Smarts” (in the sense of intelligence and also in the sense of pain) and “Sex.” Berlant reads the two girls’ reading practices, remarking that they learn from their reading of romances “to savor the story of bodily submission.” She suggests that the final scene of the novel can be read “as the foundation for an actually feminist queer theory,” complementary to the reading practice modeled by Sedgwick.

NOTES 1. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 2. Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 23–33. 3. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues in Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 225–237.

JUDITH FETTERLEY

INTRODUCTION on the politics of literature (1978)























I Literature is political. It is painful to have to insist on this fact, but the necessity of such insistence indicates the dimensions of the problem. John Keats once objected to poetry “that has a palpable design upon us.” The major works of American fiction constitute a series of designs on the female reader, all the more potent in their effect because they are “impalpable.” One of the main things that keep the design of our literature unavailable to the consciousness of the woman reader, and hence impalpable, is the very posture of the apolitical, the pretense that literature speaks universal truths through forms from which all the merely personal, the purely subjective, has been burned away or at least transformed through the medium of art into the representative. When only one reality is encouraged, legitimized, and transmitted and when that limited vision endlessly insists on its comprehensiveness, then we have the conditions necessary for that confusion of consciousness in which impalpability flourishes. It is the purpose of this book to give voice to a different reality and different vision, to bring a different subjectivity to bear on the old “universality.” To examine American fictions in light of how attitudes toward women shape their form and content is to make available to consciousness that which has been largely left unconscious and thus to change our understanding of these fictions, our relation to them, and their effect on us. It is to make palpable their designs. American literature is male. To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male. Though exceptions to this generalization can be found here and there—a Dickinson poem, a Wharton novel—these exceptions usually function to obscure the argument and confuse the issue: American literature is male. Our literature neither leaves women alone nor allows them to participate. It insists on its universality at the same time that it defines that universality in specifically male terms. “Rip Van Winkle” is paradigmatic of this phenomenon. While the desire to avoid work, escape authority, and sleep through the major decisions of one’s life is obviously applicable to both men and women, in Irving’s story this “universal” desire is made specifically male. Work, authority, and decision making are symbolized by Dame Van Winkle,

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and the longing for flight is defined against her. She is what one must escape from, and the “one” is necessarily male. In Mailer’s An American Dream, the fantasy of eliminating all one’s ills through the ritual of scapegoating is equally male: the sacrificial scapegoat is the woman/wife and the cleansed survivor is the husband/male. In such fictions the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself. The woman reader’s relation to American literature is made even more problematic by the fact that our literature is frequently dedicated to defining what is peculiarly American about experience and identity. Given the pervasive male bias of this literature, it is not surprising that in it the experience of being American is equated with the experience of being male. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the background for the experience of disillusionment and betrayal revealed in the novel is the discovery of America, and Daisy’s failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations in the imagination of the men who “discovered” it. America is female; to be American is male; and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by woman. Henry James certainly defined our literature, if not our culture, when he picked the situation of women as the subject of The Bostonians, his very American tale. Power is the issue in the politics of literature, as it is in the politics of anything else. To be excluded from a literature that claims to define one’s identity is to experience a peculiar form of powerlessness—not simply the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one’s experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocation to identify as male while being reminded that to be male—to be universal, to be American—is to be not female. Not only does powerlessness characterize woman’s experience of reading, it also describes the content of what is read. Each of the works chosen for this study presents a version and an enactment of the drama of men’s power over women. The final irony, and indignity of the woman reader’s relation to American literature, then, is that she is required to dissociate herself from the very experience the literature engenders. Powerlessness is the subject and powerlessness the experience, and the design insists that Rip Van Winkle/Frederic Henry/Nick Carraway/Stephen Rojack speak for us all. The drama of power in our literature is often disguised. In “Rip Van Winkle,” Rip poses as powerless, the henpecked husband cowering before his termagant Dame. Yet, when Rip returns from the mountains, armed by the drama of female deposition witnessed there, to discover that his wife is dead and he is free to enjoy what he has always wanted, the “Shucks, Ma’am, I don’t mean no harm” posture dissolves. In Sherwood Anderson’s “I Want to Know Why,” the issue of power is refracted through the trauma of a young boy’s discovery of what it means to be male in a culture that gives white men power over women, horses, and niggers. More sympathetic and honest than “Rip,” Anderson’s story nevertheless exposes both the imaginative limits of our literature and the reasons for those limits. Storytelling and art can do no more than lament the inevitable—boys must grow up to be men; it can provide no alternative vision of being male. Bathed in nostalgia, “I Want to Know Why” is infused with the perspective it

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abhors, because finally to disavow that perspective would be to relinquish power. The lament is self-indulgent; it offers the luxury of feeling bad without the responsibility of change. And it is completely male-centered, registering the tragedy of sexism through its cost to men. At the end we cry for the boy and not for the whores he will eventually make use of. In Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” the subject of power is more explicit. The fact of men’s power over women and the full implications of that fact are the crux of the story. Aylmer is free to experiment on Georgiana, to the point of death, because she is both woman and wife. Hawthorne indicates the attractiveness of the power that marriage puts in the hands of men through his description of Aylmer’s reluctance to leave his laboratory and through his portrayal of Aylmer’s inherent discomfort with women and sex. And why does Aylmer want this power badly enough to overcome his initial reluctance and resistance? Hitherto Aylmer has failed in all his efforts to achieve a power equal to that of “Mother” nature. Georgiana provides an opportunity for him to outdo nature by remaking her creation. And if he fails, he still will have won because he will have destroyed the earthly embodiment and representative of his adversary. Hawthorne intends his character to be seen as duplicitous, and he maneuvers Aylmer through the poses of lover, husband, and scientist to show us how Aylmer attempts to gain power and to use that power to salve his sense of inadequacy. But even so, Hawthorne, like Anderson, is unwilling to do more with the sickness than call it sick. He obscures the issue of sexual politics behind a haze of “universals” and clothes the murder of wife by husband in the language of idealism. Though the grotesque may serve Faulkner as a disguise in the same way that the ideal serves Hawthorne, “A Rose for Emily” goes farther than “The Birthmark” in making the power of men over women an overt subject. Emily’s life is shaped by her father’s absolute control over her; her murder of Homer Barron is reaction, not action. Though Emily exercises the power the myths of sexism make available to her, that power is minimal; her retaliation is no alternative to the patriarchy which oppresses her. Yet Faulkner, like Anderson and Hawthorne, ultimately protects himself and short-circuits the implications of his analysis, not simply through the use of the grotesque, which makes Emily eccentric rather than central, but also through his choice of her victim. In having Emily murder Homer Barron, a northern day-laborer, rather than Judge Stevens, the southern patriarch, Faulkner indicates how far he is willing to go in imagining even the minimal reversal of power involved in retaliation. The elimination of Homer Barron is no real threat to the system Judge Stevens represents. Indeed, a few daylaborers may have to be sacrificed here and there to keep that system going. In A Farewell to Arms, the issue of power is thoroughly obscured by the mythology, language, and structure of romantic love and by the invocation of an abstract, though spiteful, “they” whose goal it is to break the good, the beautiful, and the brave. Yet the brave who is broken is Catherine; at the end of the novel Catherine is dead, Frederic is alive, and the resemblance to “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Birthmark” is unmistakable. Though the scene in the hospital is reminiscent of Aylmer’s last visit to Georgiana in her chambers, Hemingway, unlike Hawthorne, separates his protagonist from the source of his heroine’s death, locating the agency of Catherine’s demise not simply in “them” but in her biology. Frederic survives several years of war, massive injuries, the dangers of a desperate retreat,

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and the threat of execution by his own army; Catherine dies in her first pregnancy. Clearly, biology is destiny. Yet, Catherine is as much a scapegoat as Dame Van Winkle, Georgiana, Daisy Fay, and Deborah Rojack. For Frederic to survive, free of the intolerable burdens of marriage, family, and fatherhood, yet with his vision of himself as the heroic victim of cosmic antagonism intact, Catherine must die. Frederic’s necessities determine Catherine’s fate. He is, indeed, the agent of her death. In its passionate attraction to the phenomenon of wealth, The Great Gatsby reveals its author’s consuming interest in the issue of power. In the quintessentially male drama of poor boy’s becoming rich boy, ownership of women is invoked as the index of power: he who possesses Daisy Fay is the most powerful boy. But when the rich boy, fearing finally for his territory, repossesses the girl and, by asking “Who is he,” strips the poor boy of his presumed power, the resultant animus is directed not against the rich boy but against the girl, whose rejection of him exposes the poor boy’s powerlessness. The struggle for power between men is deflected into safer and more certain channels, and the consequence is the familiar demonstration of male power over women. This demonstration, however, is not simply the result of a greater safety in directing anger at women than at men. It derives as well from the fact that even the poorest male gains something from a system in which all women are at some level his subjects. Rather than attack the men who represent and manifest that system, he identifies with them and acquires his sense of power through superiority to women. It is not surprising, therefore, that the drama of The Great Gatsby involves an attack on Daisy, whose systematic reduction from the glamorous object of Gatsby’s romantic longings to the casual killer of Myrtle Wilson provides an accurate measure of the power available to the most “powerless” male. By his choice of scene, context, and situation, Henry James in The Bostonians directly confronts the hostile nature of the relations between men and women and sees in that war the defining characteristics of American culture. His honesty provides the opportunity for a clarification rather than a confusion of consciousness and offers a welcome relief from the deceptions of other writers. Yet the drama, while correctly labeled, is still the same. The Bostonians is an unrelenting demonstration of the extent, and an incisive analysis of the sources, of the power of men as a class over women as a class. Yet, though James laments women’s oppression, and laments it because of its effects on women, he nevertheless sees it as inevitable. The Bostonians represents a kind of end point in the literary exploration of sex/class power; it would be impossible to see more clearly and feel more deeply and still remain convinced that patriarchy is inevitable. Indeed, there is revolution latent in James’s novel, and, while he would be the last to endorse it, being far more interested in articulating and romanticizing the tragic elements in women’s powerlessness, The Bostonians provides the material for that analysis of American social reality which is the beginning of change. Norman Mailer’s An American Dream represents another kind of end point. Mailer is thoroughly enthralled by the possibility of power that sexism makes available to men, absolutely convinced that he is in danger of losing it, and completely dedicated to maintaining it, at whatever cost. It is impossible to imagine a more frenzied commitment to the maintenance of male power than Mailer’s. In An American Dream all content has been reduced to the enactment of men’s power

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over women, and to the development and legitimization of that act Mailer brings every strategy he can muster, not the least of which is an extended elaboration of the mythology of female power. In Mailer’s work the effort to obscure the issue, disguise reality, and confuse consciousness is so frantic that the antitheses he provides to protect his thesis become in fact his message and his confusions shed a lurid illumination. If The Bostonians induces one to rearrange James’s conceptual framework and so to make evitable his inevitable, An American Dream induces a desire to eliminate Mailer’s conceptual framework altogether and start over. Beyond his frenzy is only utter nausea and weariness of spirit and a profound willingness to give up an exhausted, sick, and sickening struggle. In Mailer, the drama of power comes full circle; at once the most sexist writer, he is also the most freeing, and out of him it may be possible to create anew.

II But what have I to say of Sexual Politics itself? Millett has undertaken a task which I find particularly worthwhile: the consideration of certain events or works of literature from an unexpected, even startling point of view. Millett never suggests that hers is a sufficient analysis of any of the works she discusses. Her aim is to wrench the reader from the vantage point he has long occupied, and force him to look at life and letters from a new coign. Hers is not meant to be the last word on any writer, but a wholly new word, little heard before and strange. For the first time we have been asked to look at literature as women; we, men, women and Ph.D.s, have always read it as men. Who cannot point to a certain overemphasis in the way Millett reads Lawrence or Stalin or Euripides? What matter? We are rooted in our vantage points and require transplanting which, always dangerous, involves violence and the possibility of death. —Carolyn Heilbrun1 The method that is required is not one of correlation but of liberation. Even the term “method” must be reinterpreted and in fact wrenched out of its usual semantic field, for the emerging creativity in women is by no means a merely cerebral process. In order to understand the implications of this process it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God. The old naming was not the product of dialogue—a fact inadvertently admitted in the Genesis story of Adam’s naming the animals and the woman. Women are now realizing that the universal imposing of names by men has been false because partial. That is, inadequate words have been taken as adequate. —Mary Daly2 Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all

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as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see—and therefore live—afresh. —Adrienne Rich3 A culture which does not allow itself to look clearly at the obvious through the universal accessibility of art is a culture of tragic delusion, hardly viable. —Cynthia Ozick4 When a system of power is thoroughly in command, it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned, it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change. —Kate Millett5

Consciousness is power. To create a new understanding of our literature is to make possible a new effect of that literature on us. And to make possible a new effect is in turn to provide the conditions for changing the culture that the literature reflects. To expose and question that complex of ideas and mythologies about women and men which exist in our society and are confirmed in our literature is to make the system of power embodied in the literature open not only to discussion but even to change. Such questioning and exposure can, of course, be carried on only by a consciousness radically different from the one that informs the literature. Such a closed system cannot be opened up from within but only from without. It must be entered into from a point of view which questions its values and assumptions and which has its investment in making available to consciousness precisely that which the literature wishes to keep hidden. Feminist criticism provides that point of view and embodies that consciousness. In “A Woman’s Map of Lyric Poetry,” Elizabeth Hampsten, after quoting in full Thomas Campion’s “My Sweetest Lesbia,” asks, “And Lesbia, what’s in it for her?”6 The answer to this question is the subject of Hampsten’s essay and the answer is, of course, nothing. But implicit in her question is another answer—a great deal, for someone. As Lillian Robinson reminds us, “and, always, cui bono—who profits?”7 The questions of who profits, and how, are crucial because the attempt to answer them leads directly to an understanding of the function of literary sexual politics. Function is often best known by effect. Though one of the most persistent of literary stereotypes is the castrating bitch, the cultural reality is not the emasculation of men by women but the immasculation of women by men. As readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny. One of the earliest statements of the phenomenon of immasculation, serving indeed as a position paper, is Elaine Showalter’s “Women and the Literary Curriculum.” In the opening part of her article, Showalter imaginatively re-creates the literary curriculum the average young woman entering college confronts: In her freshman year she would probably study literature and composition, and the texts in her course would be selected for their timeliness, or their relevance, or their power to involve the reader, rather than for their absolute standing in the literary canon. Thus she might be assigned any one of the

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texts which have recently been advertised for Freshman English: an anthology of essays, perhaps such as The Responsible Man, “for the student who wants literature relevant to the world in which he lives,” or Conditions of Men, or Man in Crisis: Perspectives on The Individual and His World, or again, Representative Men: Cult Heroes of Our Time, in which thirty-three men represent such categories of heroism as the writer, the poet, the dramatist, the artist, and the guru, and the only two women included are the Actress Elizabeth Taylor and The Existential Heroine Jacqueline Onassis. . . . By the end of her freshman year, a woman student would have learned something about intellectual neutrality; she would be learning, in fact, how to think like a man.8

Showalter’s analysis of the process of immasculation raises a central question: “What are the effects of this long apprenticeship in negative capability on the self-image and the self-confidence of women students?” And the answer is selfhatred and self-doubt: “Women are estranged from their own experience and unable to perceive its shape and authenticity. . . . they are expected to identify as readers with a masculine experience and perspective, which is presented as the human one. . . . Since they have no faith in the validity of their own perceptions and experiences, rarely seeing them confirmed in literature, or accepted in criticism, can we wonder that women students are so often timid, cautious, and insecure when we exhort them to ‘think for themselves.’?”9 The experience of immasculation is also the focus of Lee Edwards’s article, “Women, Energy, and Middlemarch.” Summarizing her experience, Edwards concludes: Thus, like most women, I have gone through my entire education—as both student and teacher—as a schizophrenic, and I do not use this term lightly, for madness is the bizarre but logical conclusion of our education. Imagining myself male, I attempted to create myself male. Although I knew the case was otherwise, it seemed I could do nothing to make this other critically real.

Edwards extends her analysis by linking this condition to the effects of the stereotypical presentation of women in literature: I said simply, and for the most part silently that, since neither those women nor any women whose acquaintances I had made in fiction had much to do with the life I led or wanted to lead, I was not female. Alien from the women I saw most frequently imagined, I mentally arranged them in rows labelled respectively insipid heroines, sexy survivors, and demonic destroyers. As organizer I stood somewhere else, alone perhaps, but hopefully above them.10

Intellectually male, sexually female, one is in effect no one, nowhere, immasculated. Clearly, then, the first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us. The consequence of this exorcism is the capacity for what Adrienne Rich describes as re-vision—“the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” And the consequence, in turn, of this re-vision is that books

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will no longer be read as they have been read and thus will lose their power to bind us unknowingly to their designs. While women obviously cannot rewrite literary works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality, we can accurately name the reality they do reflect and so change literary criticism from a closed conversation to an active dialogue. In making available to women this power of naming reality, feminist criticism is revolutionary. The significance of such power is evident if one considers the strength of the taboos against it: I permit no woman to teach . . . she is to keep silent. —St. Paul By Talmudic law a man could divorce a wife whose voice could be heard next door. From there to Shakespeare: “Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low—an excellent thing in woman.” And to Yeats: “The women that I picked spoke sweet and low / And yet gave tongue.” And to Samuel Beckett, guessing at the last torture, The Worst: “a woman’s voice perhaps, I hadn’t thought of that, they might engage a soprano.” —Mary Ellmann11 The experience of the class in which I voiced my discontent still haunts my nightmares. Until my face froze and my brain congealed, I was called prude and, worse yet, insensitive, since I willfully misread the play in the interest of proving a point false both to the work and in itself. —Lee Edwards12

The experience Edwards describes of attempting to communicate her reading of the character of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is a common memory for most of us who have become feminist critics. Many of us never spoke; those of us who did speak were usually quickly silenced. The need to keep certain things from being thought and said reveals to us their importance. Feminist criticism represents the discovery/recovery of a voice, a unique and uniquely powerful voice capable of canceling out those other voices, so movingly described in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which spoke about us and to us and at us but never for us.

III The eight works analyzed in this book were chosen for their individual significance, their representative value, and their collective potential. They are interconnected in the ways that they comment on and illuminate each other, and they form a dramatic whole whose meaning transcends the mere sum of the parts. These eight are meant to stand for a much larger body of literature; their individual and collective designs can be found elsewhere repeatedly. The four short stories form a unit, as do the four novels. These units are subdivided into pairs. “Rip Van Winkle” and “I Want to Know Why” are companion pieces whose focus is the fear of and resistance to growing up. The value of Anderson’s story lies mainly in the light it sheds on Irving’s, making explicit the fear of sexuality only implied in “Rip” and focusing attention on the strategy of

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deflecting hostility away from men and onto women. “The Birthmark” and “A Rose for Emily” are richly related studies of the consequences of growing up and, by implication, of the reasons for the resistance to it. In both stories sexual desire leads to death. More significantly, they are brilliant companion analyses of that sex/class hostility that is the essence of patriarchal culture and that underlies the adult identity Anderson’s boy recoils from assuming. “The Birthmark” is the story of how to murder your wife and get away with it; “A Rose for Emily” is the story of how the system which allows you to murder your wife makes it possible for your wife to murder you. Both A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby are love stories; together they demonstrate the multiple uses of the mythology of romantic love in the maintenance of male power. In addition they elaborate on the function of scapegoating evident in “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Birthmark.” In its more obvious connection of the themes of love and power The Great Gatsby brings closer to consciousness the hostility which A Farewell to Arms seeks to disguise and bury. The Bostonians and An American Dream form the most unlikely and perhaps the most fascinating of the pairs. In both, the obfuscation of romantic love has been cleared away and the issue of power directly joined. James’s novel describes a social reality—male power, female powerlessness—which Mailer’s denies by creating a social mythology—female power, male powerlessness—that inverts that reality. Yet finally, the intention of Mailer’s mythology is to maintain the reality it denies. The Bostonians forces the strategies of An American Dream into the open by its massive documentation of women’s oppression, and An American Dream provides the political answer to The Bostonians’s inevitability by its massive, though unintended, demonstration of the fact that women’s oppression grows not out of biology but out of men’s need to oppress. The sequence of both the stories and the novels is generated by a scale of increasing complexity, increasing consciousness, and increasing “feminist” sympathy and insight. Thus, the movement of the stories is from the black and white of “Rip Van Winkle,” with its postulation of good guy and villain and its formulation in terms of innocent fable, to the complexity of “A Rose for Emily,” whose action forces sexual violence into consciousness and demands understanding for the erstwhile villain. The movement of the novels is similar. A Farewell to Arms is as simplistic and disguised and hostile as “Rip Van Winkle”; indeed, the two have many affinities, not the least of which is the similarity of their sleep-centered protagonists who believe that women are a bad dream that will go away if you just stay in bed long enough. The sympathy and complexity of consciousness in The Bostonians is even larger than that in “A Rose for Emily,” and is exceeded only by the imagination of An American Dream, which is “feminist” not by design but by default. Yet the decision to end with An American Dream comes not simply from its position on the incremental scale. An American Dream is “Rip Van Winkle” one hundred and fifty years later, intensified to be sure, but exactly the same story. Thus, the complete trajectory of the immasculating imagination of American literature is described by the movement from “Rip Van Winkle” to An American Dream, and that movement is finally circular. This juxtaposition of beginning and end provides the sharpest possible exposure of that circular quality in the design of our literature, apparent in the movements within and between works, which defines its imaginative limits. Like the race horse so loved by Anderson’s boy, the

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imagination which informs our “classic” American literature runs endlessly round a single track, unable because unwilling to get out of the race.

NOTES 1. Carolyn Heilbrun, “Millett’s Sexual Politics: A Year Later,” Aphra 2 (Summer 1971), 39. 2. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973), p. 8. 3. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34 (1972), 18. 4. Cynthia Ozick, “Women and Creativity: The Demise of the Dancing Dog,” Motive 29 (1969); reprinted in Woman in Sexist Society, eds. Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran (New York: Signet–New American Library, 1972), p. 450. 5. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), p. 58. 6. College English 34 (1973), 1075. 7. “Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective,” College English 32 (1971), 887; reprinted in Sex, Class, and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 16. 8. College English 32 (1971), 855. 9. Ibid., 856–57. 10. Massachusetts Review 13 (1972), 226, 227. 11. Thinking About Women (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), pp. 149–50. 12. Edwards, p. 230.

JANE GALLOP

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The first third of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum de l’autre femme is called ‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry.’ It is a close reading of ‘Femininity,’ one of Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933). This encounter between Irigaray’s feminist critique and Freud’s final text on woman is an important training ground for a new kind of battle, a feminine seduction/disarming/unsettling of the positions of phallocratic ideology. Irigaray’s tactic is a kind of reading: close reading, which separates the text into fragments of varying size, quotes it and then comments with various questions and associations. She never sums up the meaning of Freud’s text, nor binds all her commentaries, questions, associations into a unified representation, a coherent interpretation. Her commentaries are full of loose ends and unanswered questions. As a result, the reader does not so easily lose sight of the incoherency and inconsistency of the text. That could be seen as a victory for feminism. The Man’s order is disturbed by the woman with the impertinent questions and the incisive comments. But as with all seductions, the question of complicity poses itself. The dichotomy active/passive is always equivocal in seduction, that is what distinguishes it from rape. So Freud might have been encouraging Irigaray all along, ‘asking for it.’ ‘By exhibiting this “symptom,” this crisis-point in metaphysics where the sexual “indifference” which assured metaphysics its coherence and “closure” finally exposes itself, Freud proposes it to analysis: his text asking to be heard, to be read’ (Speculum, p. 29). Freud might have seduced Irigaray. It might be psychoanalysis that has won over feminism. The very strategy of reading with which Irigaray works Freud over is presented by Freud himself earlier in these New Introductory Lectures where he writes, ‘we ask the dreamer, too, to free himself from the impression of the manifest dream, to divert his attention from the dream as a whole on to the separate portions of its content and to report to us in succession everything that occurs to him in relation to each of these portions—what associations present themselves to him if he focuses on each of them separately.’1 Freud’s text asks for analysis. Not just any analysis, but the peculiar technique developed in psychoanalysis for dealing with dreams and other ‘symptoms.’ Freud proposed the model of the rebus for understanding dreams. According

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to the dictionary, a rebus is ‘a riddle composed of words or syllables depicted by symbols or pictures that suggest the sound of the words or syllables they represent.’ As a total picture, a unified representation, the rebus makes no sense. It is only by separating the picture into its elements, dealing with them one at a time, making all possible associations, that one can get anywhere. So psychoanalysis in its technique if not its theory offers an alternative to coherent, unified representation. The rebus-text shatters the manifest unity so as to produce a wealth of associations which must necessarily be reduced if the goal of interpretation is to reach a final, definitive meaning, the ‘latent dream-thoughts.’ The unconscious is reappropriated to the model of consciousness—a circumscription analogous to the reappropriation of otherness, femininity to sameness, masculinity. Whereas Freud proposes the rebus as merely a path to the ‘latent thoughts,’ Irigaray radicalizes Freud’s rebus. Irigaray’s dream-analysis (‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’) does not offer a final latent thought, but merely presents the abundance of associations, not editing those that ‘lead nowhere.’ Yet Irigaray’s encounter with Freud is not a psychoanalysis. Freud is not there to associate. Irigaray both asks questions (the analyst’s role) and supplies associations (the dreamer’s role). And since many questions go unanswered they appear directed to the reader, who thus becomes the dreamer. She does not aim to decipher Freud’s peculiar psyche, but rather to unravel ‘an old dream,’ everyone’s dream, even Irigaray’s dream. The dream is everyone’s inasmuch as everyone is within ‘the metaphysical closure,’ inasmuch as any reader is a ‘subject,’ which is to say has been philosophically reduced to a unified, stable, sexually indifferent subject, trapped in the old dream of symmetry. (‘Symmetry’ from the Greek summetros—‘of like measure’; from sun—‘like, same,’ and metron—‘measure.’ Symmetry is appropriating two things to like measure, measure by the same standard: for example the feminine judged by masculine standards. Judged by masculine measures, woman is inadequate, castrated.) On the first page of Speculum, Irigaray interrupts Freud’s text with the attributive indicator: ‘he says, they [masculine plural] say.’ She repeatedly does that, attributing Freud’s words to both a masculine singular and a masculine plural subject pronoun. The old dream belongs to any subject, to anyone speaking and therefore in the position of subject. ‘Every theory of the “subject” [Every theory about the subject as well as every theory produced by a subject] will always have been appropriate(d) to the “masculine”’ (Speculum, p. 165). The neutral ‘subject’ is actually a desexualized, sublimated guise for the masculine sexed being. Woman can be subject by fitting male standards which are not appropriate to, cannot measure any specificity of femininity, any difference. Sexual indifference is not lack of sexuality, but lack of any different sexuality, the old dream of symmetry, the other, woman, circumscribed into woman as man’s complementary other, his appropriate opposite sex. But what of ‘the blind spot of an old dream of symmetry’? What is the blind spot? What cannot be seen, what is excluded from the light? According to Freud, the sight of woman’s genitalia horrifies the young boy because he sees an absence. Mark that he does not see what is there, he sees the absence of a phallus. Nothing to see, nothing that looks like a phallus, nothing of like measure (summetros), no coherent visual representation in a familiar form. Nothing to see becomes

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nothing of worth. The privilege of sight over other senses, oculocentrism, supports and unifies phallocentric, sexual theory (theory—from the Greek theoria, from theoros, ‘spectator,’ from thea, ‘a viewing’). Speculum (from specere, ‘to look at’) makes repeated reference to the oculocentrism of theory. ‘Every theory of the “subject” will always have been appropriate(d) to the “masculine.”’ Every theoria, every viewing of the subject will have always been according to phallomorphic standards. Hence there is no valid representation of woman; but only a lack. The female sex organs are the blind spot. Freud’s theory must occult female sexuality, in order to manifest symmetry. But a blind spot can also be thought as the locus of greatest resistance in a dream, the least easily interpretable point and thus the most tantalizing. To call a text a dream in a Freudian context is not like calling it an illusion. To point to the blind spot of a dream is not a moral condemnation. For it to be a moral condemnation, it would be grounded in an ethic of absolute lucidity and enlightenment. The etymology of such words implies the morality of oculocentrism. Dreams are the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ and ask for reading destructive of unified ‘phallomorphic’ representation, the very reading Irigaray gives. The locus of greatest resistance, ‘the blind spot’ is the heart of the dream, the crisis-point crying, begging for analysis. Blind also like Oedipus is blinded. Freud is assimilated by Irigaray to Oedipus. Freud, man, is never really out of the Oedipus complex, never resolves his Oedipal phase. According to Freud, the end of the Oedipus complex marks the end of the boy’s phallic phase. The phallic phase is characterized by the opposition phallic/castrated. In that phase there is no representation of an other sex—the vagina, for example, is ‘unknown.’ Supposedly, the difference between the phallic phase and adult sexuality is that the dichotomy phallic/castrated gives way to the opposition masculine/feminine. But if, as Irigaray finds in her reading of Freud, the boy, the man, never resolves his Oedipal complex, then he never leaves the phallic phase, and the opposition masculine/feminine merely masks the opposition phallic/castrated. ‘A boy’s mother is the first object of his love, and she remains so too during the formation of his Oedipus complex and, in essence, all through his life’ (NIL, p. 118, my italics). Woman’s destiny is to become her husband’s mother: ‘A marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well and in acting as a mother to him’ (NIL, pp. 133–4). The blind spot is the price of man’s inability to escape his Oedipal destiny. Theory cannot see woman, but can only represent, represent, make present again endlessly, ‘all through his life,’ Mother, the masculine subject’s own original complementary other. Oedipus/Freud is an old riddle-solver. Oedipus solved the riddle of the sphinx; Freud learned to read the rebus of dreams. In the Freud text that Irigaray analyzes there is another riddle at stake: ‘Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity.’ Yet Irigaray never quotes or comments on this sentence. It occurs on the second page of ‘Femininity’ and is followed by four lines of poetry—the only poetry in this text. Irigaray only begins her reading of ‘Femininity’ after the poetry, in fact immediately after the poetry, thus ignoring the first two pages of text. Reading Speculum, one would never notice she does not begin at the beginning, for the paragraph she does start with ‘makes sense’ as an opening for Freud’s lecture.

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What are we to make of this exclusion of a large section of the text? Although here and there a few words or even a short sentence are omitted from Irigaray’s reinscription of Freud, this is the only exclusion of such major proportion. Perhaps we must read this as another blind spot of an old dream of symmetry. The section omitted is introductory and diverse, speaking of many things and not just on the topic of femininity. So one of the effects of Irigaray’s omission is to give a more consistent, more unified representation of the text. In the same way, omitting the poetry homogenizes the discourse. The heterogeneous must be ignored by phallocentrism. Irigaray’s forgetting renders Freud’s text more phallocentric. Perhaps, then, the ‘forgetting’ is a tactical decision. Does she choose to ignore the materiality of the text in order to delineate and condemn the ‘phallocentric theory’? She does not consistently use this tactic. At other moments in Speculum she emphasizes the crisis-points of confusion and contradiction, signalling the workings of the unconscious and the ‘feminine’ in Freud’s text. Is it the inconsistency of her strategy, the lack of unity to her reading, that makes it most effective as an unsettling of phallocentric discourse? Whatever the foundation for it, her omission, like Freud’s ‘blind spot,’ has the effect of begging for analysis, implicating her reader in the kind of reading she is doing. In this addendum to Irigaray’s dream-work, this investigation of her ‘blind spot,’ I would like to spend some time on the lines of poetry, as the least homogenized part of Freud’s discourse, most resistant to an economy of the same. In this I am following the lead of another feminist, Lacanian reader, Shoshana Felman, who has written: ‘Literature . . . is the unconscious of psychoanalysis; . . . the unthought out shadow in psychoanalytic theory is precisely its own involvement with literature; . . . literature in psychoanalysis functions precisely as its “unthought”: as the condition of possibility and the self-subversive blind spot of psychoanalytic thought.’2 Felman’s terms are resonant with those at play in Irigaray. The ‘shadow in theory’ calls to the oculocentric etymology of theory, and the appearance of the ‘blind spot,’ also in that visual register, implicates this quotation in our present investigation. ‘Literature’ in Felman’s discussion plays the same role (support and blind spot) in relation to psychoanalytic theory as ‘the feminine’ in Irigaray’s reading. It might be appropriate to look at the effect of this poetry on Freud’s ‘Femininity.’ Freud has just said: ‘Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity’ and then he quotes: ‘Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets/ Heads in turbans and black birettas/ Heads in wigs and thousand other/ Wretched, sweating heads of humans.’ A puzzling inclusion, in many ways. Why quote poetry about heads instead of about woman? The poem has the effect of emphasizing the marginal word ‘heads,’ which is used in Freud’s sentence in a figurative sense and ought to efface itself. Yet the poetry, repeating the word four times, makes ‘heads’ the dominant word in the sentence. The ‘riddle of femininity’ is eclipsed by an obsession with heads. Irigaray suggests (Speculum, p. 39) that in Freud’s theory the materiality of sex is obliterated by ‘the Idea of sex’ (she capitalizes to recall Plato and metaphysics). In other words, the riddle of sex, of sexual difference, the puzzling otherness there in its unresolved materiality is occulted, leaving in its place metaphysics, the Idea, in other words, ‘heads . . . heads . . . heads.’ The enigmatic ‘hieroglyphic bonnet’ suggests Egypt and in this riddle context

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reminds us of the riddle of the Sphinx. We think of Oedipus and the way solving riddles leads to blindness. A ‘solved’ riddle is the reduction of heterogeneous material to logic, to the homogeneity of logical thought, which produces a blind spot, the inability to see the otherness that gets lost in the reduction. Only the unsolved riddle, the process of riddle-work before its final completion, is a confrontation with otherness. Hieroglyphs themselves are a sort of riddle. Indeed, like a rebus, they present pictures which as a whole are not unified, and can only be read if one distinguishes the elements. ‘Hieroglyphic’ has the figurative sense of ‘having a hidden meaning’ and also ‘hard to read, undecipherable.’ As if the mysterious ‘hieroglyphic bonnet’ were itself a hieroglyph, this reader cannot determine if it is undecipherable or has a hidden meaning she cannot uncover. Such is also the puzzle of this entire poetic interruption. Why did Freud put it here? Why did Irigaray forget it? The four lines are from Heinrich Heine’s Nordsee (North Sea), from a section of the poem entitled ‘Fragen’ (Questions). As an intrusion into Freud’s lecture the poem indeed poses many questions: Why a poem about heads? Why a poem here and nowhere else? What is a hieroglyphic bonnet? Perhaps this hieroglyphic intrusion is not unlike Irigaray’s interruptions. She often inserts a parenthetic question mark into Freud’s or her own text, not altering the statement, but merely calling it into question. Much of her commentary consists in merely asking questions. And the largest section of her next book Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un is, like Heine’s poem, entitled ‘Questions.’3 Of course, unlike Irigaray’s questions, Heine’s are well buried. Freud’s text only attributes the lines to Nordsee, not mentioning the title ‘Fragen.’ (Although it appears in a footnote to the English translation, the title ‘Fragen’ is in neither the German nor the French versions.) And there are no questions in the four lines of poetry quoted. Simply the reader’s question: Why are these lines here? None the less, might not Irigaray’s impertinent questions already be implicit in the disruption to Freud’s lecture, the interruption of his discourse, the distraction from his main point, wrought by Heine’s poetry, Heine’s ‘Fragen’? After all, it can be construed to make her point about the sublimation of sex into ‘heads.’ Does she forget the poem so as to forget her already inscribed place in Freud’s text? her own complicity in the dream symmetry she decries? Is she not reducing Freud to a single discourse, thus making his text more phallic, more centred? Perhaps any text can be read as either body (site of contradictory drives and heterogeneous matter) or Law? The exclusion of the Heine poem serves to place Freud more firmly on the side of the Law, which enables Irigaray to be more firm, more certain of her position against him. To be against the Law is to be outside the Law. But to be against a body is a more ambiguous, unsettling position. In Heine’s ‘Questions’ a youth asks the sea to answer ‘life’s hidden riddle, the riddle primeval and painful.’ He asks specifically: ‘Tell me, what signifies man? From whence doth he come? And where doth he go?’ There is no answer, only the murmuring of the sea. The poem then ends with the line: ‘And a fool is awaiting the answer.’4 At the beginning of the section called ‘Questions’ in Ce Sexe, Irigaray writes: ‘Since the writing and publication of Speculum, many questions have been asked. And this book is, in a way, a collection of questions. It does not “really” answer

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them. It pursues their questioning. It continues to interrogate’ (p. 119). The fool waits for an answer. Irigaray is not interested in the answer. She pursues a ceaseless questioning which has not time and is not foolish enough to wait for an answer. The first part of Irigaray’s ‘Questions’ takes place in a philosophy seminar, where, in response to Speculum, she has been invited as ‘authority on women,’ for the students to ask her questions. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of ‘Femininity,’ in which Freud is lecturing on women, professing about women, allowing the audience to learn from his expertise. Tied up in this dialectic of questions and answers is the problematic of ‘authority on women.’ To have a theory of woman is already to reduce the plurality of woman to the coherent and thus phallocentric representations of theory. Irigaray, as professor of woman, is in the role of ‘subject of theory,’ subject theorizing, a role appropriate to the masculine. She is in Freud’s role, dreaming his dream. How can she avoid it without simply giving up speaking, leaving authority to men and phallocentrism? She begins the transcribed seminar with this introduction: ‘There are questions that I don’t really see how I could answer. In any case “simply”’ (Ce Sexe, p. 120). She can respond to a question, give associations, keep talking, hopefully continue to interrogate. But she ‘doesn’t see,’ has a blind spot which she exposes: her inability to give a ‘simple’ answer, a unified, definitive answer, the kind valorized by an ideology of well-framed representation. She is inadequate to a phallomorphic answer. The phallus is singular (‘simple’), represents a unified self, as opposed to the indefinite plurality of female genitalia (clitoris, vagina, lips—how many?, cervix, breasts—Irigaray is fond of making the list, which never has quite the same elements, never is ‘simply’ finished). ‘In other words,’ she continues, ‘I don’t know how to conduct here some renversement [overthrow/reversal] of the pedagogic relation in which, holding a truth about woman, a theory of woman, I could answer your questions: answer for woman in front of you.’ The pedagogic relation expects her as ‘authority’ to have a ‘truth,’ a ‘theory’ which would allow her to ‘simply’ answer. She would then ‘answer for woman,’ speak for her not as her. Woman would be the subject-matter, the material of her discourse. She would trade woman, just as women have always been ‘merchandise’ in a commerce between men. Woman is passed from the hands of the father to the husband, from the pimp to the john, from the professor to the student who asks questions about the riddle of femininity. There is a certain pederasty implicit in pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge. The homosexuality means that both are measurable by the same standards, by which measure one is greater than the other. Irigaray uncovers a sublimated male homosexuality structuring all our institutions: pedagogy, marriage, commerce, even Freud’s theory of so-called heterosexuality. Those structures necessarily exclude women, but are unquestioned because sublimated—raised from suspect homosexuality to secure homology, to the sexually indifferent logos, science, logic. But what of Irigaray’s phrase: ‘I don’t know how to conduct here some renversement of the pedagogic relation’? Again she is admitting, from the position of supposed knowledge, her inadequacy—‘I don’t know.’ That already is a reversal of the pedagogic relation. The teacher ‘knows,’ the student does not. But what

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Irigaray does not know is how to reverse the relation, how to get out of the position of authority. Her lack of knowledge is specifically her inability to speak her lack of knowledge, her inability to make a non-phallic representation. Of course there is also the sense that a woman in the role of authority is already a reversal. But she cannot carry off that reversal, cannot profess about women, cannot ‘simply’ theorize. ‘Renversement’ means both ‘reversal’ and ‘overthrow.’ The pedagogic relation ought to be overthrown, but this subversion tends to be a reversal, which would bring us back to the same. If men and women, teachers and students switched places, there would still be an economy of symmetry, in which the knowledge of the one, the theory of the one, was the gauge for measuring the worth of the other, still no dialogue between two different sexes, knowledges, only a homologue with one side lacking what the other has. ‘I will thus not bring definitions into a questioned discourse.’ She does not know what to do to bring about an upset of the pedagogic, pederastic relation, but she can decide what not to do. She refuses definitions, definiteness which fixes plurality into unified representations. She will not bring definitions from outside into a ‘questioned discourse.’ The process of questioning is a specific dialectic shattering stable assumptions and producing contextual associations. To bring in ready-made definitions as answer to questions is not really to allow one’s discourse or authority to be called into question. Such prepared answers are not part of a specific dialogue, but simply immutable truth that is unaffected by dialogue. That sort of relation—the mocked-up, artificial, Socratic dialogue of pedagogy with the ‘answer’ prior to and independent of the question and the questioning—denies any possibility of an unsettling contact with the questioner’s otherness, one that might affect definition. Good pedagogic definition remains aloof from the situation, free from the desires of student and teacher, free from desire, sexually indifferent. Irigaray’s uncertain, indeterminate attempt to respond to questions without giving definitive answers thus attempts really to engage the questions, to dialogue with something hetero (other) rather than being trapped in the homo (same). Compare Irigaray’s seminar to Freud’s situation in the ‘lecture’ on femininity. First, there is the difference between lecture and seminar, the seminar supposedly implying a plurality of contribution, whereas the lecture divides into speaker presumed to have knowledge and listeners presumed to learn—to be lacking in knowledge.5 But as Irigaray reminds us in the first footnote of Speculum, ‘Femininity’ is a fictive lecture. In the preface to the New Introductory Lectures, Freud writes: ‘These new lectures . . . have never been delivered. . . . If, therefore, I once more take my place in the lecture room, it is only by an artifice of the imagination; it may help me not to forget to bear the reader in mind as I enter more deeply into my subject.’ As he ‘enters more deeply into his subject,’ in this case as he ‘enters more deeply’ into woman, he needs an ‘artifice of the imagination,’ a fantasy that he is really communicating not just trapped in his own sameness. Freud fantasizes the lecture hall so as to conjure up the comforting pederastic relation as he penetrates into femininity. Whereas Irigaray will not give answers, and publishes the questions posed by others, Freud, with the exception of the Heine fragment and its hidden questions, writes from an imaginary dialogue in which otherness is simply a fantasy, an artificial projection. Such is, according to Irigaray, the so-called het-

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erosexual encounter: man’s relation is only to his imaginary other; femininity is no more encountered as otherness and difference than in Freud’s audience. Irigaray takes Freud’s fictive lecture and forces it into a dialogic context. She becomes the reader, not Freud’s imagined reader, but an impertinent questioner. Although Freud begins his lecture ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ a few pages later (right after the Heine poem and its shift of emphasis from woman to man), he says: ‘Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem, because you are men; as for the women among you this will not apply, they are themselves this riddle’ (my italics). When he explicitly addresses the audience as sexed beings, he reserves the second person pronoun for men, and refers to women with the third person pronoun. Freud talks to men about women. I have provided my own translation because Strachey’s translation (NIL, p. 113) covers over this telling inequity in Freud’s text, using the second person pronoun for both sexes. Irigaray’s ‘impertinence’ is her assumption of the place of Freud’s interlocutor, an exclusively male position. As a woman, this lecture does not speak to her, only about her. But she speaks up, responds, breaking the homosexual symmetry. Irigaray impertinently asks a few questions, as if the student, the women, the reader were not merely a lack waiting to be filled with Freud’s knowledge, but a real interlocutor, a second viewpoint. And in her questions a certain desire comes through, not a desire for a ‘simple answer,’ but for an encounter, a hetero-sexual dialogue. Not in the customary way we think heterosexual—the dream of symmetry, two opposite sexes complementing each other. In that dream the woman/ student/reader ends up functioning as mirror, giving back a coherent, framed representation to the appropriately masculine subject. There is no real sexuality of the heteros. ‘Will there ever be any relation between the sexes?’—asks Irigaray (Speculum, p. 33). Irigaray’s reading of Freud seeks that ‘relation between the sexes.’ Her aggression is not merely some man-hating, penis-envying urge to destroy the phallocentric oppressor. She lays fiery siege to the Phallus, out of a yearning to get beyond its prohibitiveness and touch some masculine body. It is the rule of the Phallus as standard for any sexuality which denigrates women, and makes any relation between the sexes impossible, any relation between two modalities of desire, between two desires unthinkable. The rule of the Phallus is the reign of the One, of Unicity. In the ‘phallic phase,’ according to Freud, ‘only one kind of genital organ comes into account—the male.’6 Freud, man, is arrested in the phallic phase, caught in the reign of the One, obsessively trying to tame otherness in a mirror-image of sameness. In the transcribed seminar, Irigaray says: ‘What I desire and what I am waiting for, is what men will do and say if their sexuality gets loose from the empire of phallocratism’ (Ce Sexe, pp. 133–4). The masculine exists no more than does the feminine. The specificity of both is suppressed by the reign of the Idea, the Phallus. Freud is not without a certain awareness of this. Something like the trace of a non-phallic masculinity can be read in a footnote that appears a few sentences after his statement about ‘one kind of genital organ’: ‘It is remarkable, by the way, what a small degree of interest the other part of the male genitals, the little sac with its contents, arouses in the child. From all one hears in analyses one could not guess that the male genitals consist of anything more than the penis.’ ‘By the way,’ in a remark marginal to the central thrust of his argument can be found that

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which must be left aside by phallocentrism. Yet it is precisely because of the anatomical discrepancies in ‘all one hears in analysis’ that analysis can be the place where the untenable reductions that constitute the reign of the phallus are most noticeable. The difference, of course, between the phallic suppression of masculinity and the phallic suppression of femininity is that the phallic represents (even if inaccurately) the masculine and not the feminine. By giving up their bodies, men gain power—the power to theorize, to represent themselves, to exchange women, to reproduce themselves and mark their offspring with their name. All these activities ignore bodily pleasure in pursuit of representation, reproduction, production. ‘In this “phallocratic” power, man is not without loss: notably in regard to the enjoyment of his body’ (Ce Sexe, p. 140). Irigaray’s reading of Freud’s theory continually discovers an ignoring of pleasure. The theory of sexuality is a theory of the sexual function (ultimately the reproductive function) and questions of pleasure are excluded, because they have no place in an economy of production. Commenting on Freud’s discussion of breast-feeding, Irigaray remarks: ‘Every consideration of pleasure in nursing appears here to be excluded, unrecognized, prohibited. That, certainly, would introduce some nuances in such statements’ (Speculum, p. 13). A consideration of pleasure would introduce a few nuances into the theory (‘nuance,’ from nue, cloud). A consideration of pleasure might cloud the theory, cloud the view, reduce its ability to penetrate with clarity, to appropriate. The distinction of active and passive roles becomes more ambiguous when it is a question of pleasure. And it is the distinction active/passive which is in question in Freud’s discussion of nursing. Freud writes: ‘A mother is active in every sense towards the child; the act of nursing itself may equally be described as the mother suckling the baby or as her being sucked by it’ (NIL, p. 115). The sentence seems contradictory. If a mother is so clearly ‘active in every sense,’ why is the only example chosen so easily interpretable as either active or passive? The difficulty is symptomatic of one of the most insistent problems for Freud—the relation of the dichotomies active/passive and masculine/feminine. According to Freud, the opposition active/passive characterizes the anal phase, whereas masculine/feminine is the logic of adult sexuality. In this discussion of the mother Freud is trying to show how improper it is to identify feminine with passive, masculine with active, since a mother is clearly feminine and clearly active. Again and again in different books and articles over a span of twenty years,7 Freud will try to differentiate and articulate the anal dichotomy and the adult sexual opposition. Without much success. In ‘Femininity’ Freud refers to the confusion of these two oppositions as ‘the error of superimposition.’ The footnote to the English translation indicates that such an error consists in ‘mistaking two different things for a single one’ (NIL, p. 115). Thus ‘the error of superimposition’ is emblematic of what Irigaray finds as the general ‘error’ of Freud’s sexual theory—mistaking two different sexes for a single one. In the French translation of the text,8 ‘Überdeckungsfehler’ (‘the error of superimposition’) becomes ‘l’erreur de raisonnement analogique,’ ‘the error of analogical reasoning.’ The specific superimposition in this text is both analogical and anal-logical. Anal logic organizes everything according to the opposition

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active/passive. The phrase ‘analogical reasoning’ ties the whole problematic of defining sexual difference in a non-anal logic to another persistent embarrassment. For Freud, analogy is dangerously seductive. In 1905 he writes: ‘Shall we not yield to the temptation to construct [the formation of a joke] on the analogy of the formation of a dream?’ In 1937: ‘I have not been able to resist the seduction of an analogy.’9 Is not the guilty compulsion to analogy symptomatic of Freud’s inability to escape anal logic? Irigaray suggests that Freud’s model of sexuality has a strong anal erotic bias. The faeces become other products (a baby, a penis, a representation, a theory)10 but the emphasis is on the product. Why else would the ambiguous nursing (describable in either active or passive terms) be so clearly an ‘activity’? Indeed breast-feeding constitutes the model of the Freudian oral phase, which is defined as prior to the opposition active/passive. Freud’s anal logic thus even intrudes into the very stage defined as pre-anal. In this case, the inconsistency cannot be explained as a legacy in a later stage from the earlier anal period. We are faced with the anal fixation of the theory itself. An accusation of contradiction could be levelled at this point. Earlier in the present text Freud has been deemed ‘arrested in the phallic phase.’ Now he is judged ‘arrested’ in the anal phase. It is not a question of resolving this contradiction, of fixing the diagnosis of Freud’s personal pathology. Freud himself acknowleged that the stages of development are not clearly separate and distinct. The attempt to isolate each stage could be considered an effect to reduce sexuality to only one modality at any given moment, symptomatic of the rule of the One. The investment in unicity, in one sexuality, shows itself in Freud’s description of the little girl ‘in the phallic phase.’ (Of course, the very assimilation of the girl into a phallic phase is already a sign of ‘an error of superimposition,’ analogical reasoning.) Freud insists that, in the phallic phase, little girls only get pleasure from their clitoris and are unfamiliar with the rest of their genitalia. (Remember the phallic phase is characterized as recognizing only one kind of sexual organ.) Yet others have found girls at this stage aware of vaginal sensations, and Freud dismisses this peremptorily as well as somewhat contradictorily: ‘It is true that there are a few isolated reports of early vaginal sensations as well, but it could not be easy to distinguish these from sensations in the anus or vestibulum; in any case they cannot play a great part. We are entitled to keep our view that in the phallic phase of girls the clitoris is the leading erotogenic zone’ (NIL, p. 118, italics mine). Why ‘can they not play a great part’? Because then ‘we’ would not be ‘entitled to keep our view,’ keep our theoria. Entitled by what or whom? The blind spot is obvious; what must be protected is ‘our view,’ appropriate to the masculine. Freud insists on reducing the little girl’s genitalia to her clitoris because that organ fits ‘our view,’ is phallomorphic, can be measured by the same standard (summetros). ‘We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man’ (NIL, p. 118), declares Freud, making the phallocentric pederastic economy clear. The girl is assimilated to a male model, male history and, ‘naturally,’ found lacking. The condition of that assimilation is the reduction of any possible complexity, plural sexuality, to the one, the simple, in this case to the phallomorphic clitoris. Once reduced to phallomorphic measures, woman is defined as ‘really castrated,’ by Freud/man. As such she is the guarantee against man’s castration anxiety. She has no desires that don’t complement his, so she can mirror him, provide him

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with a representation of himself which calms his fears and phobias about (his own potential) otherness and difference, about some ‘other view’ which might not support his narcissistic overinvestment in his penis. ‘As for woman, on peut se demander [one could wonder, ask oneself] why she submits so easily . . . to the counter-phobic projects, projections, productions of man relative to his desire’ (Speculum, p. 61). The expression for wondering, for speculation, which Irigaray uses above, is the reflexive verb ‘se demander,’ literally ‘to ask oneself.’ Most of the ‘impertinent questions’ in Speculum seem to be addressed to Freud, or men, or the reader. But this question of woman’s easy submission she must ask herself. And the answer is not so obvious. A little later, she attempts to continue this line of questioning: ‘And why does she lend herself to it so easily? Because she’s suggestible? Hysterical? But one can catch sight of the vicious circle’ (Speculum, p. 69). This question of the complicity, the suggestibility of the hysteric who ‘finally says in analysis [what is not] foreign to what she is expected to say there’ (Speculum, p. 64) leads us to the contemplation of another vicious circle—the (hysterical) daughter’s relationship to the father (of psychoanalysis). The daughter’s desire for her father is desperate: ‘the only redemption of her value as a girl would be to seduce the father, to draw from him the mark if not the admission of some interest’ (Speculum, p. 106). If the phallus is the standard of value, then the Father, possessor of the phallus, must desire the daughter in order to give her value. But the Father is a man (a little boy in the anal, the phallic phase) and cannot afford to desire otherness, an other sex, because that opens up his castration anxiety. The father’s refusal to seduce the daughter, to be seduced by her (seduction wreaking havoc with anal logic and its active/passive distribution), gains him another kind of seduction (this one more one-sided, more like violation), a veiled seduction in the form of the law. The daughter submits to the father’s rule, which prohibits the father’s desire, the father’s penis, out of the desire to seduce the father by doing his bidding and thus pleasing him. That is the vicious circle. The daughter desires a heterosexual encounter with the father, and is rebuffed by the rule of the homo-logical, raising the homo over the hetero, the logical over the sexual, decreeing neither the hetero nor the sexual worthy of the father. Irigaray would like really to respond to Freud, provoke him into a real dialogue. But the only way to seduce the father, to avoid scaring him away, is to please him, and to please him one must submit to his law which proscribes any sexual relation. Patriarchal law, the law of the father, decrees that the ‘product’ of sexual union, the child, shall belong exclusively to the father, be marked with his name. Also that the womb which bears that child should be a passive receptacle with no claims on the product, the womb ‘itself possessed as a means of (re)production’ (Speculum, p. 16). Irigaray understands woman’s exclusion from production via a reading of Marx and Engels which she brings in as a long association near the end of her reading of Freud’s dream. That exclusion of the woman is inscribed in her relation to the father. Any feminist upheaval, which would change woman’s definition, identity, name as well as the foundations of her economic status, must undo the vicious circle by which the desire for the father’s desire (for his penis) causes her to submit to the father’s law, which denies his desire/penis, but

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operates in its place, and according to Irigaray, even procures for him a surplus of pleasure. The question of why woman complies must be asked. To ask that question is to ask what woman must not do anymore, what feminist strategy ought to be. Only a fool would wait for an answer, deferring the struggle against phallocentrism until a definitive explanation were found. In lieu of that ‘answer,’ I would like slowly to trace a reading of a section of Speculum which concerns the father and the daughter, in this case specifically the father of psychoanalysis and his hysterics, but also the father of psychoanalytic theory and his daughter Irigaray. Irigaray reads in Freud an account of an episode from the beginnings of psychoanalysis which ‘caused [him] many distressing hours’ (Irigaray’s italics)” ‘In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my woman patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end, that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences’ (NIL, p. 120; Speculum, p. 40). Irigaray suggests that the reader ‘imagine that x, of the masculine gender, of a ripe age, uses the following language, how would you interpret it: “it caused me many distressing hours,” “almost all my woman patients told me that they had been seduced by their father.”’ Irigaray invites her reader to interpret Freud. She does not offer a definitive reading, closing the text, making it her property, but only notes those phrases which seem interpretable, drawing the rebus but not giving the solution, so as to induce her reader to play analyst. ‘And let us leave the interpretation to the discretion of each analyst, be she/he improvised for the occasion. It would even be desirable if she/he were, otherwise he/she would risk having already been seduced, whatever her/his sex, or her/his gender, by the father of psychoanalysis’ (pp. 40–1, Irigaray’s italics). The reader is considered an analyst and capable of his/her own interpretation. But Irigaray recognizes that ‘the analyst’ in question may not ‘really’ be a psychoanalyst, but rather be the recipient of a sort of battlefield promotion, prepared only by the experience of reading Freud with Irigaray. Speculum becomes a ‘training analysis,’ the reading of it preparing the reader to make her/his own interpretations. And the analyst trained by Speculum is likely to be a better analyst of Freud than a proper psychoanalyst, for any analyst—male or female, masculine or feminine, Irigaray herself—is likely to have been seduced by Freud, seduced by his theory. There is a contrast here between two different kinds of analyst. The one privileged by Irigaray is an amateur, a ‘wild analyst,’11 not ‘entitled’ to analyze, but simply a reader, who can catch symptoms and make her/his own interpretations. The other sort of analyst is a professional, which is to say has investments in analysis as an identity and an economically productive system, and a transference onto Freud, that is, a belief in Freud’s knowledge. The analyst is likely to ‘see’ according to Freud’s theory, having been seduced into sharing ‘our view,’ giving a predictable ‘Freudian’ interpretation, one that always hears according to the same standards, returning every text to pre-existent Freudian models, ‘bringing definitions into a discourse from outside.’ Irigaray as an analyst is perhaps not as likely to give an attentive, specific interpretation as is her reader. So that, once again, as in the Ce Sexe seminar, she proceeds to some sort of overthrow of a certain hierarchy

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between theoretical writer as distributor of knowledge and reader as passive, lacking consumer. But certain questions pose themselves to this reader at this point. Can Irigaray really overthrow the pedagogic relation, or is this merely a ruse to flatter the reader into less resistance, a ploy to seduce her reader? For she does go on to interpret, simply having deferred it for a few sentences. As in an artificial, Socratic (pederastic) dialogue, if she asks the reader to think for him/her self, that reader will produce an answer which the teacher expected all along, the right answer. Like Freud in the New Introductory Lectures, Irigaray is fantasizing a reader, one who would make the same associations as she does, one created in her own image. It is thus interesting that at this point Irigaray is reasoning by analogy—Freud : hysteric :: father : daughter :: Freud : any other psychoanalyst. Analogy, as Irigaray has said, is one of the ‘eternal operations which support the defining of difference in function of the a priori of the same’ (Speculum, p. 28). The analogy of analyst to father is the analytic analogy par excellence, the fact of transference. Transference is the repetition of infantile prototype relations, of unconscious desires in the analytic relation. Without transference, psychoanalysis is simply literary criticism, by an unimplicated, discriminating reader, lacking either affect or effect. The example of the analytic analogy suggests a way of overturning the phallocentric effects of analogy. Analogy cannot simply be avoided, it is radically tempting. Transference occurs everywhere, not just in psychoanalysis but in any relation where the other is ‘presumed to know,’ relations to teachers, loved ones, doctors. But psychoanalysis provides the opportunity to analyze the transference, take cognizance of it as such and work it through. Likewise Irigaray’s use of analogy in a context where analogy has been analyzed provides a way of making the economic function of analogy evident. The phallocentric effect of analogy would be explicit, and thus less powerful. Her use of analogy as well as her projection of a reader in her own image, a narcissistic mirror, means she has acceded to a certain economy of the homo . . . and the auto . . . , the economy which men have and women are excluded from. Of course, the ‘answer’ is not to set up another homosexual economy, but that may be necessary as one step to some hetero-sexuality. ‘Of course, it is not a question, in the final analysis, of demanding the same attributions. Still it is necessary that women arrive at the same so that consideration be made, be imposed of the differences that they would elicit there’ (Speculum, pp. 148–9). Women need to reach the ‘same’: that is, be ‘like men,’ able to represent themselves. But they also need to reach ‘the same,’ ‘the homo’: their own homosexual economy, a female homosexuality that ratifies and glorifies female standards. The two ‘sames’ are inextricably linked. Female homosexuality, when raised to an ideology, tends to be either masculine (women that are ‘like men’) or essentialistic (based on some ascertainable female identity). The latter is as phallic as the former for it reduces heterogeneity to a unified, rigid representation. But without a female homosexual economy, a female narcissistic ego, a way to represent herself, a woman in a heterosexual encounter will always be engulfed by the male homosexual economy, will not be able to represent her difference. Woman must demand ‘the same,’ ‘the homo’ and then not settle for it, not fall into the trap of thinking a female ‘homo’ is necessarily any closer to a representation of otherness, an opening for the other.

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Yet having posed these questions of Irigaray’s own imaginary economy, I might also say she was right about her reader. Her fantasized reader would be the impertinent questioner she is. I am asking Irigaray Irigarayan questions, reopening the interrogation when Luce becomes too tight, when she seems to settle on an answer. I have been seduced into a transference onto her, into following her suggestion, into saying ‘what is not foreign to what I am expected to say,’ into playing ‘wild analysis.’ ‘This seduction,’ she continues, ‘is covered of course, in practice or theory, by a normative statement, by a law, which denies it.’ A new element is introduced by Irigaray and emphasized: the law. This term, foreign to the Freud passage she is reading, not suggested by him, is Irigaray’s own association, her remaining in excess of the Freudian seduction. ‘Law’ is a political term, refers to patriarchy, the law of the father, and here will refer to Freud’s legislative control of his theory, his normative prescriptions. Her text continues with another sentence from Freud: ‘It was only later that I was able to recognize in the phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women’ (NIL, p. 120; Speculum, p. 41, Irigaray’s italics). The seduction by the father is not only a mere fantasy, but is the manifestation of a typical complex, one that is supposed to be universal, and therefore a law of Freudian theory. Given Irigaray’s introduction to this passage, we read that the Oedipus complex, the incest taboo, the law forbidding intercourse between father and daughter, covers over a seduction, masks it so it goes unrecognized. Also covered over is a seduction in the theory, whereby psychoanalysts through their transference onto Freud (their unfulfillable desire for his love and approval) accept his immutable theoretical laws. ‘It would be too risky, it seems, to admit that the father could be a seducer, and even eventually that he desires to have a daughter in order to seduce her. That he wishes to become an analyst in order to exercise by hypnosis, suggestion, transference, interpretation bearing on the sexual economy, on the proscribed, prohibited sexual representations, a lasting seduction upon the hysteric’ (Irigaray’s italics) (p. 41). Freud as a father must deny the possibility of being seductive. Patriarchy is grounded in the uprightness of the father. If he were devious and unreliable, he could not have the power to legislate. The law is supposed to be just—that is, impartial, indifferent, free from desire. ‘It is necessary to endure the law which exculpates the operation. But, of course, if under cover of the law the seduction can now be practised at leisure, it appears just as urgent to interrogate the seductive function of the law itself’ (Irigaray’s italics) (p. 41). For example, the law which prohibits sexual intercourse between analyst and patient actually makes the seduction last forever. The sexually actualized seduction would be complicitous, nuanced, impossible to delineate into active and passive roles, into the anal logic so necessary for a traditional distribution of wealth and power. But the ‘lasting seduction’ of the law is never consummated and as such maintains the power of the prohibited analyst. The seduction which the daughter desires would give her contact with the father as masculine sexed body. The seduction which the father of psychoanalysis exercises refuses her his body, his penis, and asks her to embrace his law, his indifference, his phallic uprightness. Psychoanalysis works because of the tranference, which is to say because the

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hysteric transfers her desire to seduce her father, to be seduced by him, onto her analyst. But since the fantasy of seducing the father is produced in analysis, it is produced for the analyst. In order to please him, in order to seduce him, in order to give him what he wants. The installation of the law in psychoanalysis, the prohibition of the analyst’s penis by the Doctor in a position to validate the hysteric, to announce her as healthy, sets up the desperate situation outlined by Irigaray: ‘the only redemption of her value as a girl would be to seduce the father’ (Speculum, p. 106). ‘Thus is it not simply true, nor on the other hand completely false, to claim that the little girl fantasizes being seduced by her father, because it is just as pertinent to admit that the father seduces his daughter but that, refusing to recognize and realize his desire—not always it is true—‘he legislates to defend himself from it’ (Speculum, p. 41, Irigaray’s italics). The father’s law is a counterphobic mechanism. He must protect himself from his desire for the daughter. His desire for the feminine threatens his narcissistic overvaluation of his penis. It is so necessary to deny his attraction for the little girl that Freud denies her existence: ‘We must admit that the little girl is a little man.’ If the father were to desire his daughter he could no longer exchange her, no longer possess her in the economy by which true, masterful possession is the right to exchange. If you cannot give something up for something of like value, if you consider it nonsubstitutable, then you do not possess it any more than it possesses you. So the father must not desire the daughter for that threatens to remove him from the homosexual commerce in which women are exchanged between men, in the service of power relations and community for the men. Also: if the father desires his daughter as daughter he will be outside his Oedipal desire for his mother, which is to say also beyond ‘the phallic phase.’ So the law of the father protects him and patriarchy from the potential havoc of the daughter’s desirability. Were she recognized as desirable in her specificity as daughter, not as son (‘little man’) nor as mother, there would be a second sexual economy besides the one between ‘phallic little boy’ and ‘phallic mother.’ An economy in which the stake might not be a reflection of the phallus, the phallus’s desire for itself. ‘In place of the desire for the sexed body of the father there thus comes to be proposed, to be imposed, his law, that is to say an institutionalizing and institutionalized discourse. In part, defensive (Think of those “distressing hours.” . . . )’ (pp. 41–2, Irigaray’s italics). The father gives his daughter his law and protects himself from her desire for his body, protects himself from his body. For it is only the law—and not the body—which constitutes him as patriarch. Paternity is corporeally uncertain, without evidence. But patriarchy compensates for that with the law which marks each child with the father’s name as his exclusive property. ‘That is not to say that the father should make love with his daughter— from time to time it is better to state things precisely—but that it would be good to call into question this mantle of the law with which he drapes his desire, and his sex (organ)’ (p. 42, Irigaray’s italics). The strategic difference between a prescriptive ‘should’ and a suggestive ‘it would be good’ is emphasized by this sentence. But suggestion may have always been a more devious, more powerful mode of prescription. ‘It would be good’ to question the law’s appearance of indifference, as Irigaray

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questions it, and find the phallic stake behind it. ‘It would be good’ to lift ‘the mantle of the law’ so that the father’s desire and his penis are exposed. But that does not mean the ‘answer’ is for the father to make love to his daughter. Irigaray, above all, avoids giving an answer, a prescription such as ‘the father should make love with his daughter.’ Not that he might not, not that it might not be a way to lift the law and expose the sexed body. The ‘should’ is underlined, because that is what Irigaray will not say. She will not lay down a law about how to lift the law. If she did lay down such a law—‘the father should make love with his daughter’—it would, like all laws, mask and support a desire. The negated appearance of this law suggests the mechanism Freud called Verneinung—‘Procedure whereby the subject, while formulating one of his wishes, thoughts or feelings which has been repressed hitherto, contrives, by disowning it, to continue to defend himself against it.’12 What surfaces that Irigaray needs to disown is her desire to impose the law upon the father, her desire for a simple reversal rather than an overthrow of patriarchy. This sentence is marked as symptomatic, asking for analysis, by the parenthetical remark, ‘from time to time it is better to state things precisely.’ ‘From time to time’ pretends this is a random moment; it just happens to fall at this moment that she will be precise. But this is the only such remark in all of her reading of Freud; this is the point where she is most afraid of a misunderstanding. Her desire to be precise is in direct contradiction to something she says later in Speculum about feminist strategies of language: ‘No clear nor univocal statement can, in fact, dissolve this mortgage, this obstacle, all of them being caught, trapped, in the same reign of credit. It is as yet better to speak only through equivocations, allusions, innuendos, parables. . . . Even if you are asked for some précisions [precise details]’ (Speculum, p. 178). All clear statements are trapped in the same economy of values, in which clarity (oculocentrism) and univocity (the One) reign. Precision must be avoided, if the economy of the One is to be unsettled. Equivocations, allusions, etc. are all flirtatious; they induce the interlocutor to listen, to encounter, to interpret, but defer the moment of assimilation back into a familiar model. Even if someone asks for précisions, even if that someone is oneself, it is better for women to avoid stating things precisely. Yet on one point Luce Irigaray tightens up, prefers to be precise, to return to an economy of clarity and univocity. The locus of her conservatism, her caution, her need to defend herself, is the question of making love with the father. It is terrifying to lift the mantle of the law and encounter the father’s desire. What if in making love the father still remained the law, and the daughter were just passive, denied? The father’s law has so restructured the daughter and her desires that it is hard, well nigh impossible, to differentiate the Father (that is to say, the Law) from the male sexed body. What if making love with the father were merely a ruse to get the impertinent daughter to give up her resistance to the law? Irigaray clutches for something stable, something precise, because she too is a ‘subject,’ with a stake in identity. And the law of the father gives her an identity, even if it is not her own, even if it blots out her feminine specificity. To give it up is not a ‘simple’ matter. It must be done over and over. Later she will say of her method in Speculum, ‘what was left for me to do was to have an orgy with the philosophers’ (Ce Sexe, p. 147, Irigaray’s italics). Intercourse with the philosophers, the father of psychoanalysis included, is her method of

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insinuation into their system, of inducing them to reveal the phallocentrism, the desire cloaked in their sexual indifference. Perhaps these are merely two different moments in her inconsistency: a brave, new, loose moment—‘have an orgy with the philosophers’—and a defensive, cautious moment—refusal to make love with the father. But perhaps these are not merely two moments. The two situations are analogous, but not the same. Some terms may be more frightening, more sensitive than others. ‘Father’ may be more threatening than ‘philosophers.’ She writes in Ce Sexe: ‘As far as the family is concerned, my answer will be simple and clear: the family has always been the privileged locus of the exploitation of women. Thus, as far as familialism is concerned, there is no ambiguity!’ (pp. 139–40, my italics). Yet earlier in the same text she says she cannot give a ‘simple answer.’ Also: ‘faire l’amour’ (make love) may be more threatening than ‘faire la noce’ (have an orgy). Maybe what frightens her is not seduction of the father or by the father but ‘making love.’ ‘Love’ has always been sublimated, idealized desire, away from the bodily specificity and towards dreams of complementarity, and the union of opposites, difference resolved into the One. ‘Love’ is entangled with the question of woman’s complicity; it may be the bribe which has persuaded her to agree to her own exclusion. It may be historically necessary to be momentarily blind to father-love; it may be politically effective to defend—tightly, unlucidly—against its inducements, in order for a ‘relation between the sexes,’ in order to rediscover some feminine desire, some desire for a masculine body that does not respect the Father’s law.

NOTES 1. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Standard Edition, vol. XXII, pp. 10–11. Hereafter referred to as NIL. 2. Shoshana Felman. ‘To Open the Question,’ Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Yale French Studies, 55–6 (1977) p. 10. All italics Felman’s except ‘blind spot.’ 3. Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Éditions de Minuit, 1477). In this context of questions it is interesting to notice Felman’s titles: ‘The Question of Reading,’ ‘To Open the Question.’ 4. The Poems of Heine, Complete, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (G. Bell and Sons, 1916) p. 260. 5. Is then the ironic lesson of Jacques Lacan’s ‘Seminars,’ which are enormous lectures, in which he functions as the only and ultimate ‘subject presumed to know,’ that a seminar is always merely a disguised lecture, that one does not know how to overthrow the pedagogic relation? 6. Freud, ‘The Infantile Genital Organization,’ Standard Edition, vol. XIX, p. 142. 7. The most glaring of these symptomatic attempts to disengage the anal definitions from the genital can be found in a 1915 footnote to the third of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; a footnote to Chapter 4 of Civilization and its Discontents (1930); and here in ‘Femininity’ (1933). 8. Nouvelles Conférences sur la psychanalyse (Gallimard, Collection Idées). This is the edition Irigaray uses. 9. The first quotation is from Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, the second from ‘Constructions in Analysis.’ The italics in both are mine.

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10. Freud provides the model for metaphorization of faeces in ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’ (1917), Standard Edition, vol. XVII. 11. The term is Freud’s from his article on ‘“Wild” Psychoanalysis,’ Standard Edition, vol. XI. 12. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, p. 201.

WORKS CITED Felman, Shoshana, ‘To Open the Question,’ Yale French Studies 55–6 (1978/79). Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (Hogarth Press, 1953–74) vol. XXI. ———, ‘Constructions in Analysis,’ Standard Edition, vol. XXIII. ———, ‘Female Sexuality,’ Standard Edition, vol. XXI. ———, ‘The Infantile Genital Organization,’ Standard Edition, vol. XIX. ———, ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,’ Standard Edition, vol. VIII. ———, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Standard Edition, vol. XXII. ———, ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism,’ Standard Edition, vol. XVII. ———, “‘Wild” Psychoanalysis,’ Standard Edition, vol. XI. Heine, Heinrich, The Poems, Complete, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (G. Bell and Sons, 1916). Irigaray, Luce, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Éditions de Minuit, 1977). ———, Speculum de l’autre femme (Éditions de Minuit, 1974). Lacan, Jacques, ‘A la mémoire d’Ernest Jones: Sur sa théorie du symbolisme,’ Écrits (Éditions du Seuil, 1966). ———, ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,’ Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (Tavistock and Norton, 1977). ———, ‘La Chose freudienne,’ Écrits. ———, ‘The Freudian Thing,’ Écrits: A Selection. ———, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Hogarth and Norton, 1976). ———, ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,’ trans. Jan Miel, Structuralism (Anchor Books, 1970). ———, ‘L’ Instance de la lettre dans l’ inconscient,’ Écrits. ———, ‘Intervention sur le transfert,’ Écrits. ———, ‘Kant avec Sade,’ Écrits. ———, ‘The Mirror Stage,’ Écrits: A Selection. ———, ‘Position de l’inconscient,’ Écrits. ———, ‘Propos directifs pour un congrès sur la sexualité féminine,’ Écrits.

CATHERINE BELSEY

CONSTRUCTING THE SUBJECT deconstructing the text (1985)























THE SUBJECT IN IDEOLOGY One of the central issues for feminism is the cultural construction of subjectivity. It seems imperative to many feminists to find ways of explaining why women have not simply united to overthrow patriarchy. Why, since all women experience the effects of patriarchal practices, are not all women feminists? And why do those of us who think of ourselves as feminists find ourselves inadvertently colluding, at least from time to time, with the patriarchal values and assumptions prevalent in our society? Since the late seventeenth century feminists have seen subjectivity as itself subject to convention, education, and culture in its broadest sense. Now feminist criticism has allowed that fiction too plays a part in the process of constructing subjectivity. But how? In his influential essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ Louis Althusser includes literature among the ideological apparatuses which contribute to the process of reproducing the relations of production, the social relationships which are the necessary condition for the existence and perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production. He does not here develop the argument concerning literature, but in the context both of his concept of ideology and also of the work of Roland Barthes on literature and Jacques Lacan on psychoanalysis it is possible to construct an account of some of the implications for feminist theory and practice of Althusser’s position. The argument is not only that literature represents the myths and imaginary versions of real social relationships which constitute ideology, but also that classic realist fiction, the dominant literary form of the nineteenth century and arguably of the twentieth, ‘interpellates’ the reader, addresses itself to him or her directly, offering the reader as the position from which the text is most ‘obviously’ intelligible, the position of the subject in (and of) ideology. According to Althusser’s reading (re-reading) of Marx, ideology is not simply a set of illusions, as The German Ideology seems to argue, but a system of representations (discourses, images, myths) concerning the real relations in which people live. But what is represented in ideology is ‘not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those

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individuals to the real relations in which they live’ (Althusser 1971, p. 155). In other words, ideology is both a real and an imaginary relation to the world—real in that it is the way in which people really live their relationship to the social relations which govern their conditions of existence, but imaginary in that it discourages a full understanding of these conditions of existence and the ways in which people are socially constituted within them. It is not, therefore, to be thought of as a system of ideas in people’s heads, nor as the expression at a higher level of real material relationships, but as the necessary condition of action within the social formation. Althusser talks of ideology as a ‘material practice’ in this sense: it exists in the behaviour of people acting according to their beliefs (ibid., pp. 155–9). As the necessary condition of action, ideology exists in commonplaces and truisms as well as in philosophical and religious systems. It is apparent in all that is ‘obvious’ to us, in ‘obviousnesses which we cannot fail to recognise and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the “still, small voice of conscience”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!’” (ibid., p. 161). If it is true, however, it is not the whole truth. It is a set of omissions, gaps rather than lies, smoothing over contradictions, appearing to provide answers to questions which in reality it evades, and masquerading as coherence in the interests of the social relations generated by and necessary to the reproduction of the existing mode of production. It is important to stress, of course, that ideology is in no sense a set of deliberate distortions foisted upon a helpless working class by a corrupt and cynical bourgeoisie (or upon victimized women by violent and power hungry men). If there are groups of sinister men in shirt-sleeves purveying illusions to the public these are not the real makers of ideology. Ideology has no creators in that sense, since it exists necessarily. But according to Althusser ideological practices are supported and reproduced in the institutions of our society which he calls Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The phrase distinguishes from the Repressive State Apparatus which works by force (the police, the penal system, the army) those institutions whose existence helps to guarantee consent to the existing mode of production. The central ISA in contemporary capitalism is the educational system, which prepares children to act consistently with the values of society by inculcating in them the dominant versions of appropriate behaviour as well as history, social studies and, of course, literature. Among the allies of the educational ISA are the family, the law, the media and the arts, all helping to represent and reproduce the myths and beliefs necessary to enable people to work within the existing social formation. The destination of all ideology is the subject (the individual in society) and it is the role of ideology to construct people as subjects: I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology in so far as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects. (ibid., p. 160)

Within the existing ideology it appears ‘obvious’ that people are autonomous individuals, possessed of subjectivity or consciousness which is the source of their

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beliefs and actions. That people are unique, distinguishable, irreplaceable identities is ‘the elementary ideological effect’ (ibid., p. 161). The obviousness of subjectivity has been challenged by the linguistic theory which has developed on the basis of the work of Saussure. As Emile Benveniste argues, it is language which provides the possibility of subjectivity because it is language which enables the speaker to posit himself or herself as ‘I,’ as the subject of a sentence. It is in language that people constitute themselves as subjects. Consciousness of self is possible only through contrast, differentiation: ‘I’ cannot be conceived without the conception ‘non-I,’ ‘you,’ and dialogue, the fundamental condition of language, implies a reversible polarity between ‘I’ and ‘you.’ ‘Language is possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as I in his discourse’ (Benveniste 1971, p. 225). But if language is a system of differences with no positive terms, ‘I’ designates only the subject of a specific utterance. ‘And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language. If one really thinks about it, one will see that there is no other objective testimony to the identity of the subject except that which he himself thus gives about himself’ (ibid., p. 226). Within ideology, of course, it seems ‘obvious’ that the individual speaker is the origin of the meaning of his or her utterance. Post-Saussurean linguistics, however, implies a more complex relationship between the individual and meaning, since it is language itself which, by differentiating between concepts, offers the possibility of meaning. In reality, it is only by adopting the position of the subject within language that the individual is able to produce meaning. As Derrida puts it, What was it that Saussure in particular reminded us of? That ‘language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject.’ This implies that the subject (self-identical or even conscious of self-identity, self-conscious) is inscribed in the language, that he is a ‘function’ of the language. He becomes a speaking subject only by conforming his speech . . . to the system of linguistic prescriptions taken as the system of differences. (Derrida 1973, pp. 145–6)

Derrida goes on to raise the question whether, even if we accept that it is only the signifying system which makes possible the speaking subject, the signifying subject, we cannot none the less conceive of a non-speaking, non-signifying subjectivity, ‘a silent and intuitive consciousness’ (ibid., p. 146). The problem here, he concludes, is to define consciousness-in-itself as distinct from consciousness of something, and ultimately as distinct from consciousness of self. If consciousness is finally consciousness of self, this in turn implies that consciousness depends on differentiation, and specifically on Benveniste’s differentiation between ‘I’ and ‘you,’ a process made possible by language. The implications of this concept of the primacy of language over subjectivity have been developed by Jacques Lacan’s reading of Freud. Lacan’s theory of the subject as constructed in language confirms the decentering of the individual consciousness so that it can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action. Instead, Lacan proposes that the infant is initially an ‘hommelette’—‘a little man and also like a broken egg spreading without hindrance in all directions’ (Coward and Ellis 1977, p. 101). The child has no sense of identity, no way of conceiving of itself as a unity, distinct from what is ‘other,’ exterior to

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it. During the ‘mirror-phase’ of its development, however, it ‘recognizes’ itself in the mirror as a unit distinct from the outside world. This ‘recognition’ is an identifcation with an ‘imaginary’ (because imaged) unitary and autonomous self. But it is only with its entry into language that the child becomes a full subject. If it is to participate in the society into which it is born, to be able to act deliberately within the social formation, the child must enter into the symbolic order, the set of signifying systems of culture of which the supreme example is language. The child who refuses to learn the language is ‘sick,’ unable to become a full member of the family and of society. In order to speak the child is compelled to differentiate; to speak of itself it has to distinguish ‘I’ from ‘you.’ In order to formulate its needs the child learns to identify with the first person singular pronoun, and this identification constitutes the basis of subjectivity. Subsequently it learns to recognize itself in a series of subject-positions (‘he’ or ‘she,’ ‘boy’ or ‘girl,’ and so on) which are the positions from which discourse is intelligible to itself and others. ‘Identity,’ subjectivity, is thus a matrix of subject-positions, which may be inconsistent or even in contradiction with one another. Subjectivity, then, is linguistically and discursively constructed and displaced across the range of discourses in which the concrete individual participates. It follows from Saussure’s theory of language as a system of differences that the world is intelligible only in discourse: there is no unmediated experience, no access to the raw reality of self and others. Thus: As well as being a system of signs related among themselves, language incarnates meaning in the form of the series of positions it offers for the subject from which to grasp itself and its relations with the real. (Nowell-Smith 1976, p. 26)

The subject is constructed in language and in discourse and, since the symbolic order in its discursive use is closely related to ideology, in ideology. It is in this sense that ideology has the effect, as Althusser argues, of constituting individuals as subjects, and it is also in this sense that their subjectivity appears ‘obvious.’ Ideology suppresses the role of language in the construction of the subject. As a result, people ‘recognize’ (misrecognize) themselves in the ways in which ideology ‘interpellates’ them, or in other words, addresses them as subjects, calls them by their names and in turn ‘recognizes’ their autonomy. As a result, they ‘work by themselves’ (Althusser 1971, p. 169), they ‘willingly’ adopt the subject-positions necessary to their participation in the social formation. In capitalism they ‘freely’ exchange their labour-power for wages, and they ‘voluntarily’ purchase the commodities produced. In patriarchal society women ‘choose’ to do the housework, to make sacrifices for their children, not to become engineers. And it is here that we see the full force of Althusser’s use of the term ‘subject,’ originally borrowed, as he says, from law. The subject is not only a grammatical subject, ‘a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions,’ but also a subjected being who submits to the authority of the social formation represented in ideology as the Absolute Subject (God, the king, the boss, Man, conscience): ‘the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection’ (ibid., p. 169).

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Ideology interpellates concrete individuals as subjects, and bourgeois ideology in particular emphasizes the fixed identity of the individual. ‘I’m just like that’—cowardly, perhaps, or aggressive, generous or impulsive. Astrology is only an extreme form of the determinism which attributes to us given essences which cannot change. Popular psychology and popular sociology make individual behaviour a product of these essences. And underlying them all, ultimately unalterable, is ‘human nature.’ In these circumstances, how is it possible to suppose that, even if we could break in theoretical terms with the concepts of the ruling ideology, we are ourselves capable of change, and therefore capable both of acting to change the social formation and of transforming ourselves to constitute a new kind of society? A possible answer can be found in Lacan’s theory of the precariousness of conscious subjectivity, which in turn depends on the Lacanian conception of the unconscious. In Lacan’s theory the individual is not in reality the harmonious and coherent totality of ideological misrecognition. The mirror-phase, in which the infant perceives itself as other, an image, exterior to is own perceiving self, necessitates a splitting between the I which is perceived and the I which does the perceiving. The entry into language necessitates a secondary division which reinforces the first, a split between the I of discourse, the subject of the utterance, and the I who speaks, the subject of the enunciation. There is thus a contradiction between the conscious self, the self which appears in its own discourse, and the self which is only partly represented there, the self which speaks. The unconscious comes into being in the gap which is formed by this division. The unconscious is constructed in the moment of entry into the symbolic order, simultaneously with the construction of the subject. The repository of repressed and pre-linguistic signifiers, the unconscious is a constant source of potential disruption of the symbolic order. To summarize very briefly what in Lacan is a complex and elusive theory, entry into the symbolic order liberates the child into the possibility of social relationship; it also reduces its helplessness to the extent that it is now able to articulate its needs in the form of demands. But at the same time a division within the self is constructed. In offering the child the possibility of formulating its desires the symbolic order also betrays them, since it cannot by definition formulate those elements of desire which remain unconscious. Demand is always only a metonymy of desire (Lemaire 1977, p. 64). The subject is thus the site of contradiction, and is consequently perpetually in the process of construction, thrown into crisis by alterations in language and in the social formation, capable of change. And in the fact that the subject is a process lies the possibility of transformation. In addition, the displacement of subjectivity across a range of discourses implies a range of positions from which the subject grasps itself and its relations with the real, and these positions may be incompatible or contradictory. It is these incompatibilities and contradictions within what is taken for granted that exert a pressure on concrete individuals to seek new, non-contradictory subject-positions. Women as a group in our society are both produced and inhibited by contradictory discourses. Very broadly, we participate both in the liberal—humanist discourse of freedom, self-determination and rationality and at the same time in the specifically feminine discourse offered by society of submission, relative inadequacy and irrational intuition. The attempt to locate a single and coherent subject-position within these contradictory discourses, and in consequence to find

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a non-contradictory pattern of behaviour, can create intolerable pressures. One way of responding to this situation is to retreat from the contradictions and from discourse itself, to become ‘sick’—more women than men are treated for mental illness. Another is to seek a resolution of the contradictions in the discourses of feminism. That the position of women in society has changed so slowly, in spite of such a radical instability in it, may be partly explained in terms of the relative exclusion of women from the discourse of liberal humanism. This relative exclusion, supported in the predominantly masculine institutions of our society, is implicit, for example, in the use of masculine terms as generic (‘rational man,’ etc.). Women are not an isolated case. The class structure also produces contradictory subject-positions which precipitate changes in social relations not only between whole classes but between concrete individuals within those classes. Even at the conscious level, although this fact may itself be unconscious, the individual subject is not a unity, and in this lies the possibility of deliberate change. This does not imply the reinstatement of individual subjects as the agents of change and changing knowledge. On the contrary, it insists on the concept of a dialectical relationship between concrete individuals and the language in which their subjectivity is constructed. In consequence, it also supports the concept of subjectivity as in process. It is because subjectivity is perpetually in process that literary texts can have an important function. No one, I think, would suggest that literature alone could precipitate a crisis in the social formation. None the less, if we accept Lacan’s analysis of the importance of language in the construction of the subject it becomes apparent that literature as one of the most persuasive uses of language may have an important influence on the ways in which people grasp themselves and their relation to the real relations in which they live. The interpellation of the reader in the literary text could be argued to have a role in reinforcing the concepts of the world and of subjectivity which ensure that people ‘work by themselves’ in the social formation. On the other hand, certain critical modes could be seen to challenge these concepts, and to call in question the particular complex of imaginary relations between individuals and the real conditions of their existence which helps to reproduce the present relations of class, race and gender.

THE SUBJECT AND THE TEXT Althusser analyzes the interpellation of the subject in the context of ideology in general; Benveniste in discussing the relationship between language and subjectivity is concerned with language in general. None the less, it readily becomes apparent that capitalism in particular needs subjects who work by themselves, who freely exchange their labour-power for wages. It is in the epoch of capitalism that ideology emphasizes the value of individual freedom, freedom of conscience and, of course, consumer choice in all the multiplicity of its forms. The ideology of liberal humanism assumes a world of non-contradictory (and therefore fundamentally unalterable) individuals whose unfettered consciousness is the origin of meaning, knowledge and action. It is in the interest of this ideology above all to suppress the role of language in the construction of the subject, and its own role in the interpellation of the subject, and to present the individual as a free, unified,

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autonomous subjectivity. Classic realism, still the dominant popular mode in literature, film and television drama, roughly coincides chronologically with the epoch of industrial capitalism. It performs, I wish to suggest, the work of ideology, not only in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as the position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding. It is readily apparent that Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, from Wordsworth through the Victorian period at least to Eliot and Yeats, takes subjectivity as its central theme. The developing self of the poet, his consciousness of himself as poet, his struggle against the constraints of an outer reality, constitute the preoccupations of The Prelude, In Memoriam or Meditations in Time of Civil War. The ‘I’ of these poems is a kind of super-subject, experiencing life at a higher level of intensity than ordinary people and absorbed in a world of selfhood which the phenomenal world, perceived as external and antithetical, either nourishes or constrains. This transcendence of the subject in poetry is not presented as unproblematic, but it is entirely overt in the poetry of this period. The ‘I’ of the poem directly addresses an individual reader who is invited to respond equally directly to this interpellation. Fiction, however, in this same period, frequently appears to deal rather in social relationships, the interaction between the individual and society, to the increasing exclusion of the subjectivity of the author. Direct intrusion by the author comes to seem an impropriety; impersonal narration, ‘showing’ (the truth) rather than ‘telling’ it, is a requirement of prose fiction by the end of the nineteenth century. In drama too the author is apparently absent from the self-contained fictional world on the stage. Even the text effaces its own existence as text: unlike poetry, which clearly announces itself as formal, if only in terms of the shape of the text on the page, the novel seems merely to transcribe a series of events, to report on a palpable world, however fictional. Classic realist drama displays transparently and from the outside how people speak and behave. Nevertheless, as we know while we read or watch, the author is present as a shadowy authority and as source of the fiction, and the author’s presence is substantiated by the name on the cover or the programme: ‘a novel by Thomas Hardy,’ ‘a new play by Ibsen.’ And at the same time, as I shall suggest in this section, the form of the classic realist text acts in conjunction with the expressive theory and with ideology by interpellating the reader as subject. The reader is invited to perceive and judge the ‘truth’ of the text, the coherent, non-contradictory interpretation of the world as it is perceived by an author whose autonomy is the source and evidence of the truth of the interpretation. This model of intersubjective communication, of shared understanding of a text which re-presents the world, is the guarantee not only of the truth of the text but of the reader’s existence as an autonomous and knowing subject in a world of knowing subjects. In this way classic realism constitutes an ideological practice in addressing itself to readers as subjects, interpellating them in order that they freely accept their subjectivity and their subjection. It is important to reiterate, of course, that this process is not inevitable, in the sense that texts do not determine like fate the ways in which they must be read. I am concerned at this stage primarily with ways in which they are conventionally

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read: conventionally, since language is conventional, and since modes of writing as well as ways of reading are conventional, but conventionally also in that new conventions of reading are available. In this sense meaning is never a fixed essence inherent in the text but is always constructed by the reader, the result of a ‘circulation’ between social formation, reader and text (Heath 1977–8, p. 74). In the same way, ‘inscribed subject positions are never hermetically sealed into a text, but are always positions in ideologies’ (Willemen 1978, p. 63). To argue that classic realism interpellates subjects in certain ways is not to propose that this process is ineluctable; on the contrary it is a matter of choice. But the choice is ideological: certain ranges of meaning (there is always room for debate) are ‘obvious’ within the currently dominant ideology, and certain subject-positions are equally ‘obviously’ the positions from which these meanings are apparent. Classic realism is characterized by ‘illusionism,’ narrative which leads to ‘closure,’ and a ‘hierarchy of discourses’ which establishes the ‘truth’ of the story. ‘Illusionism’ is, I hope, self-explanatory. The other two defining characteristics of classic realism need some discussion. Narrative tends to follow certain recurrent patterns. Classic realist narrative, as Barthes demonstrates in S/Z, turns on the creation of enigma through the precipitation of disorder which throws into disarray the conventional cultural and signifying systems. Among the commonest sources of disorder at the level of plot in classic realism are murder, war, a journey or love. But the story moves inevitably towards closure which is also disclosure, the dissolution of enigma through the re-establishment of order, recognizable as a reinstatement or a development of the order which is understood to have preceded the events of the story itself. The moment of closure is the point at which the events of the story become fully intelligible to the reader. The most obvious instance is the detective story where, in the final pages, the murderer is revealed and the motive made plain. But a high degree of intelligibility is sustained throughout the narrative as a result of the hierarchy of discourses in the text. The hierarchy works above all by means of a privileged discourse which places as subordinate all the discourses that are literally or figuratively between inverted commas. By these means classic realism offers the reader a position of knowingness which is also a position of identification with the narrative voice. To the extent that the story first constructs, and then depends for its intelligibility, on a set of assumptions shared between narrator and reader, it confirms both the transcendent knowingness of the reader-as-subject and the ‘obviousness’ of the shared truths in question.

DECONSTRUCTING THE TEXT Ideology, masquerading as coherence and plenitude, is in reality inconsistent, limited, contradictory, and the realist text as a crystallization of ideology participates in this incompleteness even while it diverts attention from the fact in the apparent plenitude of narrative closure. The object of deconstructing the text is to examine the process of its production—not the private experience of the individual author, but the mode of production, the materials and their arrangement in the work. The aim is to locate the point of contradiction within the text, the point at

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which it transgresses the limits within which it is constructed, breaks free of the constraints imposed by its own realist form. Composed of contradictions, the text is no longer restricted to a single, harmonious and authoritative reading. Instead it becomes plural, open to rereading, no longer an object for passive consumption but an object of work by the reader to produce meaning. It is the work of Derrida which has been most influential in promoting deconstruction as a critical strategy. Refusing to identify meaning with authorial intention or with the theme of the work, deconstruction tends to locate meaning in areas which traditional criticism has seen as marginal—in the metaphors, the set of oppositions or the hierarchies of terms which provide the framework of the text. The procedure, very broadly, is to identify in the text the contrary meanings which are the inevitable condition of its existence as a signifying practice, locating the trace of otherness which undermines the overt project. Derrida, however, says little specifically about literary criticism or about the question of meaning in fiction. Nor is his work directly political. In order to produce a politics of reading we need to draw in addition on the work of Roland Barthes and Pierre Macherey. In S/Z, first published in 1970 (English translation 1975), Barthes deconstructs (without using the word) a short story by Balzac. Sarrasine is a classic realist text concerning a castrato singer and a fortune. The narrative turns on a series of enigmas (What is the source of the fortune? Who is the little old man? Who is La Zambinella? What is the connection between all three?). Even in summarizing the story in this way it is necessary to ‘lie’: there are not ‘three’ but two, since the little old ‘man’ is ‘La’ Zambinella. Barthes breaks the text into fragments of varying lengths for analysis, and adds a number of ‘divagations,’ pieces of more generalized commentary and exploration, to show Sarrasine as a ‘limit-text,’ a text which uses the modes of classic realism in ways which constitute a series of ‘transgressions’ of classic realism itself. The sense of plenitude, of a full understanding of a coherent text which is the normal result of reading the realist narrative, cannot here be achieved. It is not only that castration cannot be named in a text of this period. The text is compelled to transgress the conventional antithesis between the genders whenever it uses a pronoun to speak of the castrato. The story concerns the scandal of castration and the death of desire which follows its revelation; it concerns the scandalous origin of wealth; and it demonstrates the collapse of language, of antithesis (difference) as a source of meaning, which is involved in the discourse of these scandals. Each of these elements of the text provides a point of entry into it, none privileged, and these approaches constitute the degree of polyphony, the ‘parsimonious plural’ of the readable (lisible) text. The classic realist text moves inevitably and irreversibly to an end, to the conclusion of an ordered series of events, to the disclosure of what has been concealed. But even in the realist text certain modes of signification within the discourse—the symbolic, the codes of reference and the semes—evade the constraints of the narrative sequence. To the extent that these are ‘reversible,’ free-floating and of indeterminate authority, the text is plural. In the writable (scriptible), wholly plural text all statements are of indeterminate origin, no single discourse is privileged, and no consistent and coherent plot constrains the free play of the discourses. The totally writable, plural text does not exist. At the opposite extreme, the readable text is barely plural. The readable text is merchandize to be consumed, while the plural text requires the

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production of meanings through the identification of its polyphony. Deconstruction in order to reconstruct the text as a newly intelligible, plural object is the work of criticism. Barthes’s own mode of writing demonstrates his contempt for the readable: S/Z is itself a polyphonic critical text. It is impossible to summarize adequately, to reduce to systematic accessibility, and it is noticeable that the book contains no summarizing conclusion. Like Sarrasine, S/Z offers a number of points of entry, critical discourses which generate trains of thought in the reader, but it would be contrary to Barthes’s own (anarchist) argument to order all these into a single, coherent methodology, to constitute a new unitary way of reading, however comprehensive, and so to become the (authoritative) author of a new critical orthodoxy. As a result, the experience of reading S/Z is at once frustrating and exhilarating. Though it offers a model in one sense—it implies a new kind of critical practice—it would almost certainly not be possible (or useful) to attempt a wholesale imitation of its critical method(s). It seems clear that one of the most influential precursors of S/Z, though Barthes does not allude to it, was Pierre Macherey’s (Marxist) A Theory of Literary Production, first published in 1966 (English translation 1978). Despite real and important differences between them, there are similarities worth noting. For instance, Macherey anticipates Barthes in demonstrating that contradiction is a condition of narrative. The classic realist text is constructed on the basis of enigma. Information is initially withheld on condition of a ‘promise’ to the reader that it will finally be revealed. The discourse of this ‘truth’ brings the story to an end. The movement of narrative is thus both towards discourse—the end of the story—and towards concealment—prolonging itself by delaying the end of the story through a series of ‘reticences,’ as Barthes calls them, snares for the reader, partial answers to the questions raised, equivocations (Macherey 1978, pp. 28–9; Barthes 1975, pp. 75–6). Further, narrative involves the reader in an experience of the inevitable in the form of the unforeseen (Macherey 1978, p. 43). The hero encounters an obstacle: will he attempt to overcome it or abandon the quest? The answer is already determined, though the reader, who has only to turn the page to discover it, experiences the moment as one of choice for the hero. In fact, of course, if the narrative is to continue the hero must go on (Barthes 1975, p. 135). Thus the author’s autonomy is to some degree illusory. In one sense the author determines the nature of the story: he or she decides what happens. In another sense, however, this decision is itself determined by the constraints of the narrative (Macherey 1978, p. 48), or by what Barthes calls the ‘interest’ (in both the psychological and the economic senses) of the story (Barthes 1975, p. 135). The formal constraints imposed by literary form on the project of the work in the process of literary production constitute the structural principle of Macherey’s analysis. It is a mistake to reduce the text to the product of a single cause, authorial determination or the mechanics of the narrative. On the contrary, the literary work ‘is composed from a real diversity of elements which give it substance’ (Macherey 1978, p. 49). There may be a direct contradiction between the project and the formal constraints, and in the transgression thus created it is possible to locate an important object of the critical quest. Fiction for Macherey (he deals mainly with classic realist narrative) is intimately related to ideology, but the two are not identical. Literature is a specific and

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irreducible form of discourse, but the language which constitutes the raw material of the text is the language of ideology. It is thus an inadequate language, incomplete, partial, incapable of concealing the real contradictions it is its purpose to efface. This language, normally in flux, is arrested, ‘congealed’ by the literary text. The realist text is a determinate representation, an intelligible structure which claims to convey intelligible relationships between its elements. In its attempt to create a coherent and internally consistent fictive world the text, in spite of itself, exposes incoherences, omissions, absences and transgressions which in turn reveal the inability of the language of ideology to create coherence. This becomes apparent because the contradiction between the diverse elements drawn from different discourses, the ideological project and the literary form, creates an absence at the centre of the work. The text is divided, split as the Lacanian subject is split, and Macherey compares the ‘lack’ in the consciousness of the work, its silence, what it cannot say, with the unconscious which Freud explored (ibid., p. 85). The unconscious of the work (not, it must be insisted, of the author) is constructed in the moment of its entry into literary form, in the gap between the ideological project and the specifically literary form. Thus the text is no more a transcendent unity than the human subject. The texts of Jules Verne, for instance, whose work Macherey analyses in some detail, indicate that ‘if Jules Verne chose to be the spokesman of a certain ideological condition, he could not choose to be what he in fact became’ (ibid., p. 94). What Macherey reveals in Verne’s The Secret of the Island is an unpredicted and contradictory element, disrupting the colonialist ideology which informs the conscious project of the work. Within the narrative, which concerns the willing surrender of nature to improvement by a team of civilized and civilizing colonizers, there insists an older and contrary myth which the consciousness of the text rejects. Unexplained events imply another mysterious presence on what is apparently a desert island. Captain Nemo’s secret presence, and his influence on the fate of the castaways from a subterranean cave, is the source of the series of enigmas and the final disclosure which constitute the narrative. But his existence in the text has no part in the overt ideological project. On the contrary, it represents the return of the repressed in the form of a re-enacting of the myth of Robinson Crusoe. This myth evokes both a literary ancestor—Defoe’s story—on which all subsequent castaway stories are to some degree conditional, and an ancestral relationship to nature—the creation of an economy by Crusoe’s solitary struggle to appropriate and transform the island—on which subsequent bourgeois society is also conditional. The Robinson Crusoe story, the antithesis of the conscious project of the narrative, is also the condition of its existence. It returns, as the repressed experience returns to the consciousness of the patient in dreams and slips of the tongue and in doing so it unconsciously draws attention to an origin and a history from which both desert island stories and triumphant bourgeois ideology are unable to cut themselves off, and with which they must settle their account. The Secret of the Island thus reveals, through the discord within it between the conscious project and the insistence of the disruptive unconscious, the limits of the coherence of nineteenth-century ideology. The object of the critic, then, is to seek not the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions. In its absences, and in the collisions between its divergent meanings, the text implicitly

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criticizes its own ideology; it contains within itself the critique of its own values, in the sense that it is available for a new process of production of meaning by the reader, and in this process it can provide a knowledge of the limits of ideological representation. Macherey’s way of reading is precisely contrary to traditional Anglo-American critical practice, where the quest is for the unity of the work, its coherence, a way of repairing any deficiencies in consistency by reference to the author’s philosophy or the contemporary world picture. In thus smoothing out contradiction, closing the text, criticism becomes the accomplice of ideology. Having created a canon of acceptable texts, criticism then provides them with acceptable interpretations, thus effectively censoring any elements in them which come into collision with the dominant ideology. To deconstruct the text, on the other hand, is to open it, to release the possible positions of its intelligibility, including those which reveal the partiality (in both senses) of the ideology inscribed in the text.

THE CASE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES In locating the transitions and uncertainties of the text it is important to remember, Macherey insists, sustaining the parallel with psychoanalysis, that the problem of the work is not the same as its consciousness of a problem (Macherey 1978, p. 93). In ‘Charles Augustus Milverton,’ one of the short stories from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle presents the reader with an ethical problem. Milverton is a blackmailer; blackmail is a crime not easily brought to justice since the victims are inevitably unwilling to make the matter public; the text therefore proposes for the reader’s consideration that in such a case illegal action may be ethical. Holmes plans to burgle Milverton’s house to recover the letters which are at stake, and both Watson and the text appear to conclude, after due consideration, that the action is morally justifiable. The structure of the narrative is symmetrical: one victim initiates the plot, another concludes it. While Holmes and Watson hide in Milverton’s study a woman shoots him, protesting that he has ruined her life. Inspector Lestrade asks Holmes to help catch the murderer. Holmes replies that certain crimes justify private revenge, that his sympathies are with the criminal and that he will not handle the case. The reader is left to ponder the ethical implications of his position. Meanwhile, on the fringes of the text, another narrative is sketched. It too contains problems but these are not foregrounded. Holmes’s client is the Lady Eva Blackwell, a beautiful debutante who is to be married to the Earl of Dovercourt. Milverton has secured letters she has written ‘to an impecunious young squire in the country.’ Lady Eva does not appear in the narrative in person. The content of the letters is not specified, but they are ‘imprudent, Watson, nothing worse.’ Milverton describes them as ‘sprightly.’ Holmes’s sympathies, and ours, are with the Lady Eva. None the less we, and Holmes, accept without question on the one hand that the marriage with the Earl of Dovercourt is a desirable one and on the other that were he to see the letters he would certainly break off the match. The text’s elusiveness on the content of the letters, and the absence of the Lady Eva herself, deflects the reader’s attention from the potentially contradictory ideology of marriage which the narrative takes for granted.

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This second narrative is also symmetrical. The murderer too is a woman with a past. She is not identified. Milverton has sent her letters to her husband who in consequence ‘broke his gallant heart and died.’ Again the text is unable to be precise about the content of the letters since to do so would be to risk losing the sympathy of the reader for either the woman or her husband. In the mean time Holmes has become engaged. By offering to marry Milverton’s housemaid he has secured information about the layout of the house he is to burgle. Watson remonstrates about the subsequent fate of the girl, but Holmes replies: ‘You can’t help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table. However, I rejoice to say that I have a hated rival who will certainly cut me out the instant that my back is turned. What a splendid night it is.’

The housemaid is not further discussed in the story. The sexuality of these three shadowy women motivates the narrative and yet is barely present in it. The disclosure which ends the story is thus scarcely a disclosure at all. Symbolically Holmes has burnt the letters, records of women’s sexuality. Watson’s opening paragraph constitutes an apology for the ‘reticence’ of the narrative; ‘with due suppression the story may be told’; ‘The reader will excuse me if I conceal the date or any other fact’ (my italics). The project of the Sherlock Holmes stories is to dispel magic and mystery, to make everything explicit, accountable, subject to scientific analysis. The phrase most familiar to all readers—‘Elementary, my dear Watson’—is in fact a misquotation, but its familiarity is no accident since it precisely captures the central concern of the stories. Holmes and Watson are both men of science. Holmes, the ‘genius,’ is a scientific conjuror who insists on disclosing how the trick is done. The stories begin in enigma, mystery, the impossible, and conclude with an explanation which makes it clear that logical deduction and scientific method render all mysteries accountable to reason: I am afraid that my explanation may disillusionize you, but it has always been my habit to hide none of my methods, either from my friend Watson or from anyone who might take an intelligent interest in them. (‘The Reigate Squires,’ The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes)

The stories are a plea for science not only in the spheres conventionally associated with detection (footprints, traces of hair or cloth, cigarette ends), where they have been deservedly influential on forensic practice, but in all areas. They reflect the widespread optimism characteristic of their period concerning the comprehensive power of positivist science. Holmes’s ability to deduce Watson’s train of thought, for instance, is repeatedly displayed, and it owes nothing to the supernatural. Once explained, the reasoning process always appears ‘absurdly simple,’ open to the commonest of common sense. The project of the stories themselves, enigma followed by disclosure, echoes precisely the structure of the classic realist text. The narrator himself draws attention to the parallel between them:

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‘Excellent!’ I cried. ‘Elementary,’ said he. ‘It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader. Now, at present I am in the position of these same readers, for I hold in this hand several threads of one of the strangest cases which ever perplexed a man’s brain, and yet I lack the one or two which are needful to complete my theory. But I’ll have them, Watson, I’ll have them!’ (‘The Crooked Man,’ Memoirs)

(The passage is quoted by Macherey [1978, p. 35] in his discussion of the characteristic structure of narrative.) The project also requires the maximum degree of ‘realism’—verisimilitude, plausibility. In the interest of science no hint of the fantastic or the implausible is permitted to remain once the disclosure is complete. This is why even their own existence as writing is so frequently discussed within the texts. The stories are alluded to as Watson’s ‘little sketches,’ his ‘memoirs.’ They resemble fictions because of Watson’s unscientific weakness for story-telling: ‘I must admit, Watson, that you have some power of selection which atones for much which I deplore in your narratives. Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations.’ (‘The Abbey Grange,’ The Return of Sherlock Holmes)

In other words, the fiction itself accounts even for its own fictionality, and the text thus appears wholly transparent. The success with which the Sherlock Holmes stories achieve an illusion of reality is repeatedly demonstrated. In their Foreword to The Sherlock Holmes Companion (1962) Michael and Mollie Hardwick comment on their own recurrent illusion ‘that we were dealing with a figure of real life rather than of fiction. How vital Holmes appears, compared with many people of one’s own acquaintance.’ De Waal’s bibliography of Sherlock Holmes lists twenty-five ‘Sherlockian’ periodicals apparently largely devoted to conjectures, based on the ‘evidence’ of the stories, concerning matters only hinted at in the texts—Holmes’s education, his income and his romantic and sexual adventures. According to The Times in December 1967, letters to Sherlock Holmes were then still commonly addressed to 221B Baker Street, many of them asking for the detective’s help. None the less these stories, whose overt project is total explicitness, total verisimilitude in the interests of a plea for scientificity, are haunted by shadowy, mysterious and often silent women. Their silence repeatedly conceals their sexuality, investing it with a dark and magical quality which is beyond the reach of scientific knowledge. In ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (Memoirs) Sophie Kratides has run away with a man. Though she is the pivot of the plot she appears only briefly: ‘I could not see her clearly enough to know more than that she was tall and graceful, with black hair, and clad in some sort of loose white gown.’ Connotatively

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the white gown marks her as still virginal and her flight as the result of romance rather than desire. At the same time the dim light surrounds her with shadow, the unknown. ‘The Crooked Man’ concerns Mrs. Barclay, whose husband is found dead on the day of her meeting with her lover of many years before. Mrs. Barclay is now insensible, ‘temporarily insane’ since the night of the murder and therefore unable to speak. In ‘The Dancing Men’ (Return) Mrs. Elsie Cubitt, once engaged to a criminal, longs to speak but cannot bring herself to break her silence. By the time Holmes arrives she is unconscious, and she remains so for the rest of the story. Ironically the narrative concerns the breaking of the code which enables her former lover to communicate with her. Elsie’s only contribution to the correspondence is the word, ‘never.’ The precise nature of their relationship is left mysterious, constructed of contrary suggestions. Holmes says she feared and hated him; the lover claims, ‘She had been engaged to me, and she would have married me, I believe, if I had taken over another profession.’ When her husband moves to shoot the man whose coded messages are the source of a ‘terror’ which is ‘wearing her away,’ Elsie restrains him with compulsive strength. On the question of her motives the text is characteristically elusive. Her husband recounts the story: ‘I was angry with my wife that night for having held me back when I might have caught the skulking rascal. She said that she feared that I might come to harm. For an instant it had crossed my mind that what she really feared was that he might come to harm, for I could not doubt that she knew who this man was and what he meant by those strange signals. But there is a tone in my wife’s voice, Mr. Holmes, and a look in her eyes which forbid doubt, and I am sure that it was indeed my own safety that was in her mind.’

After her husband’s death Elsie remains a widow, faithful to his memory and devoting her life to the care of the poor, apparently expiating something unspecified, perhaps an act or a state of feeling, remote or recent. ‘The Dancing Men’ is ‘about’ Holmes’s method of breaking the cipher. Its project is to dispel any magic from the deciphering process. Elsie’s silence is in the interest of the story since she knows the code. But she also ‘knows’ her feelings towards her former lover. Contained in the completed and fully disclosed story of the decipherment is another uncompleted and undisclosed narrative which is more than merely peripheral to the text as a whole. Elsie’s past is central and causal. As a result, the text with its project of dispelling mystery is haunted by the mysterious state of mind of a woman who is unable to speak. The classic realist text had not yet developed a way of signifying women’s sexuality except in a metaphoric or symbolic mode whose presence disrupts the realist surface. Joyce and Lawrence were beginning to experiment at this time with modes of sexual signification but in order to do so they largely abandoned the codes of realism. So much is readily apparent. What is more significant, however, is that the presentation of so many women in the Sherlock Holmes stories as shadowy, mysterious and magical figures precisely contradicts the project of explicitness, transgresses the values of the texts, and in doing so throws into relief the poverty of the contemporary concept of science. These stories, pleas for a total explicitness about the world, are unable to explain an area which none the less

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they cannot ignore. The version of science which the texts present would constitute a clear challenge to ideology: the interpretation of all areas of life, physical, social and psychological, is to be subject to rational scrutiny and the requirements of coherent theorization. Confronted, however, by an area in which ideology itself is uncertain, the Sherlock Holmes stories display the limits of their own project and are compelled to manifest the inadequacy of a bourgeois scientificity which, working within the constraints of ideology, is thus unable to challenge it. Perhaps the most interesting case, since it introduces an additional area of shadow, is ‘The Second Stain’ (Return), which concerns two letters. Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope does speak. She has written before her marriage ‘an indiscreet letter . . . a foolish letter, a letter of an impulsive, loving girl.’ Had her husband read the letter his confidence in her would have been for ever destroyed. Her husband is none the less presented as entirely sympathetic, and here again we encounter the familiar contradiction between a husband’s supposed reaction, accepted as just, and the reaction offered to the reader by the text. In return for her original letter Lady Hilda gives her blackmailer a letter from ‘a certain foreign potentate’ stolen from the dispatch box of her husband, the European Secretary of State. This political letter is symbolically parallel to the first sexual one. Its contents are equally elusive but it too is ‘indiscreet,’ ‘hot-headed’; certain phrases in it are ‘provocative.’ Its publication would produce ‘a most dangerous state of feeling’ in the nation. Lady Hilda’s innocent folly is the cause of the theft: she knows nothing of politics and was not in a position to understand the consequences of her action. Holmes ensures the restoration of the political letter and both secrets are preserved. Here the text is symmetrically elusive concerning both sexuality and politics. Watson, as is so often the case where these areas are concerned, begins the story by apologizing for his own reticence and vagueness. In the political instance what becomes clear as a result of the uncertainty of the text is the contradictory nature of the requirements of verisimilitude in fiction. The potentate’s identity and the nature of his indiscretion cannot be named without involving on the part of the reader either disbelief (the introduction of a patently fictional country would be dangerous to the project of verisimilitude) or belief (dangerous to the text’s status as fiction, entertainment; also quite possibly politically dangerous). The scientific project of the texts require that they deal in ‘facts,’ but their nature as fiction forbids the introduction of facts. The classic realist text instills itself in the space between fact and illusion through the presentation of a simulated reality which is plausible but not real. In this lies its power as myth. It is because fiction does not normally deal with ‘politics’ directly, except in the form of history or satire, that it is ostensibly innocent and therefore ideologically effective. But in its evasion of the real also lies its weakness as ‘realism.’ Through their transgression of their own values of explicitness and verisimilitude, the Sherlock Holmes stories contain within themselves an implicit critique of their limited nature as characteristic examples of classic realism. They thus offer the reader through the process of deconstruction a form of knowledge, not about ‘life’ or ‘the world,’ but about the nature of fiction itself. Thus, in adopting the form of classic realism, the only appropriate literary mode, positivism is compelled to display its own limitations. Offered as science, it reveals itself to a deconstructive reading as ideology at the very moment that

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classic realism, offered as verisimilitude, reveals itself as fiction. In claiming to make explicit and understandable what appears mysterious, these texts offer evidence of the tendency of positivism to push to the margins of experience whatever it cannot explain or understand. In the Sherlock Holmes stories classic realism ironically tells a truth, though not the truth about the world which is the project of classic realism. The truth the stories tell is the truth about ideology, the truth which ideology represses, its own existence as ideology itself.

WORKS CITED Althusser, Louis (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books). Barthes, Roland (1975) S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (London: Cape). Benveniste, Emile (1971) Problems in General Linguistics (Miami: University of Miami Press). Conan Doyle, Arthur (1950) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Conan Doyle, Arthur (1976) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (London: Pan). Coward, Rosalind and John Ellis (1977) Language and Materialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Derrida, Jacques (1973) Speech and Phenomena, tr. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press). De Waal, Ronald (1972) The World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society). Hardwick, Michael and Mollie (1972) The Sherlock Holmes Companion (London: John Murray). Heath, Stephen (1977–8) “Notes of Suture,” Screen 18:4, pp. 48–76. Lemaire, Anika (1977) Jacques Lacan, tr. David Macey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Macherey, Pierre (1978) A Theory of Literary Production, tr. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (1976) ‘A Note on History Discourse,’ Edinburgh 76 Magazine 1, pp. 26–32. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1974) Course in General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin (London: Fontana). Willemen, Paul (1978) ‘Notes on Subjectivity—On Reading “Subjectivity Under Siege,”’ Screen 19:1, pp. 41–69.

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INTRODUCTION FROM BETWEEN MEN (1985)























I. HOMOSOCIAL DESIRE The subject of this book is a relatively short, recent, and accessible passage of English culture, chiefly as embodied in the mid-eighteenth- to mid-nineteenthcentury novel. The attraction of the period to theorists of many disciplines is obvious: condensed, self-reflective, and widely influential change in economic, ideological, and gender arrangements. I will be arguing that concomitant changes in the structure of the continuum of male “homosocial desire” were tightly, often causally bound up with the other more visible changes; that the emerging pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality was in an intimate and shifting relation to class; and that no element of that pattern can be understood outside of its relation to women and the gender system as a whole. “Male homosocial desire”: the phrase in the title of this study is intended to mark both discriminations and paradoxes. “Homosocial desire,” to begin with, is a kind of oxymoron. “Homosocial” is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with “homosexual,” and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from “homosexual.” In fact, it is applied to such activities as “male bonding,” which may, as in our society, be characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality.1 To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,” of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted. It will become clear, in the course of my argument, that my hypothesis of the unbrokenness of this continuum is not a genetic one—I do not mean to discuss genital homosexual desire as “at the root of” other forms of male homosociality—but rather a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men’s relations with other men. “Male homosocial desire” is the name this book will give to the entire continuum. I have chosen the word “desire” rather than “love” to mark the erotic emphasis because, in literary critical and related discourse, “love” is more easily used

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to name a particular emotion, and “desire” to name a structure; in this study, a series of arguments about the structural permutations of social impulses fuels the critical dialectic. For the most part, I will be using “desire” in a way analogous to the psychoanalytic use of “libido”—not for a particular affective state or emotion, but for the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship. How far this force is properly sexual (what, historically, it means for something to be “sexual”) will be an active question. The title is specific about male homosocial desire partly in order to acknowledge from the beginning (and stress the seriousness of) a limitation of my subject; but there is a more positive and substantial reason, as well. It is one of the main projects of this study to explore the ways in which the shapes of sexuality, and what counts as sexuality, both depend on and affect historical power relationships.2 A corollary is that in a society where men and women differ in their access to power, there will be important gender differences, as well, in the structure and constitution of sexuality. For instance, the diacritical opposition between the “homosocial” and the “homosexual” seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men. At this particular historical moment, an intelligible continuum of aims, emotions, and valuations links lesbianism with the other forms of women’s attention to women: the bond of mother and daughter, for instance, the bond of sister and sister, women’s friendship, “networking,” and the active struggles of feminism.3 The continuum is crisscrossed with deep discontinuities—with much homophobia, with conflicts of race and class—but its intelligibility seems now a matter of simple common sense. However agonistic the politics, however conflicted the feelings, it seems at this moment to make an obvious kind of sense to say that women in our society who love women, women who teach, study, nurture, suckle, write about, march for, vote for, give jobs to, or otherwise promote the interests of other women, are pursuing congruent and closely related activities. Thus the adjective “homosocial” as applied to women’s bonds (by, for example, historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg)4 need not be pointedly dichotomized as against “homosexual”; it can intelligibly denominate the entire continuum. The apparent simplicity—the unity—of the continuum between “women loving women” and “women promoting the interests of women,” extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic, and political realms, would not be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males. When Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms get down to serious logrolling on “family policy,” they are men promoting men’s interests. (In fact, they embody Heidi Hartmann’s definition of patriarchy: “relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women.”)5 Is their bond in any way congruent with the bond of a loving gay male couple? Reagan and Helms would say no—disgustedly. Most gay couples would say no—disgustedly. But why not? Doesn’t the continuum between “men-loving-men” and “men-promoting-theinterests-of-men” have the same intuitive force that it has for women? Quite the contrary: much of the most useful recent writing about patriarchal structures suggests that “obligatory heterosexuality” is built into male-dominated

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kinship systems, or that homophobia is a necessary consequence of such patriarchal institutions as heterosexual marriage.6 Clearly, however convenient it might be to group together all the bonds that link males to males, and by which males enhance the status of males—usefully symmetrical as it would be, that grouping meets with a prohibitive structural obstacle. From the vantage point of our own society, at any rate, it has apparently been impossible to imagine a form of patriarchy that was not homophobic. Gayle Rubin writes, for instance, “The suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppression of homosexuals, is . . . a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women.”7 The historical manifestations of this patriarchal oppression of homosexuals have been savage and nearly endless. Louis Crompton makes a detailed case for describing the history as genocidal.8 Our own society is brutally homophobic; and the homophobia directed against both males and females is not arbitrary or gratuitous, but tightly knit into the texture of family, gender, age, class, and race relations. Our society could not cease to be homophobic and have its economic and political structures remain unchanged. Nevertheless, it has yet to be demonstrated that, because most patriarchies structurally include homophobia, therefore patriarchy structurally requires homophobia. K. J. Dover’s recent study, Greek Homosexuality, seems to give a strong counter-example in classical Greece. Male homosexuality, according to Dover’s evidence, was a widespread, licit, and very influential part of the culture. Highly structured along lines of class, and within the citizen class along lines of age, the pursuit of the adolescent boy by the older man was described by stereotypes that we associate with romantic heterosexual love (conquest, surrender, the “cruel fair,” the absence of desire in the love object), with the passive part going to the boy. At the same time, however, because the boy was destined in turn to grow into manhood, the assignment of roles was not permanent.9 Thus the love relationship, while temporarily oppressive to the object, had a strongly educational function; Dover quotes Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium as saying “that it would be right for him [the boy] to perform any service for one who improves him in mind and character.”10 Along with its erotic component, then, this was a bond of mentorship; the boys were apprentices in the ways and virtues of Athenian citizenship, whose privileges they inherited. These privileges included the power to command the labor of slaves of both sexes, and of women of any class including their own. “Women and slaves belonged and lived together,” Hannah Arendt writes. The system of sharp class and gender subordination was a necessary part of what the male culture valued most in itself: “Contempt for laboring originally [arose] out of a passionate striving for freedom from necessity and a no less passionate impatience with every effort that left no trace, no monument, no great work worthy to remembrance”;11 so the contemptible labor was left to women and slaves. The example of the Greeks demonstrates, I think, that while heterosexuality is necessary for the maintenance of any patriarchy, homophobia, against males at any rate, is not. In fact, for the Greeks, the continuum between “men loving men” and “men promoting the interests of men” appears to have been quite seamless. It is as if, in our terms, there were no perceived discontinuity between the male bonds at the Continental Baths and the male bonds at the Bohemian Grove12 or in the boardroom or Senate cloakroom.

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It is clear, then, that there is an asymmetry in our present society between, on the one hand, the relatively continuous relation of female homosocial and homosexual bonds, and, on the other hand, the radically discontinuous relation of male homosocial and homosexual bonds. The example of the Greeks (and of other, tribal cultures, such as the New Guinea “Sambia” studies by G. H. Herdt) shows, in addition, that the structure of homosocial continuums is culturally contingent, not an innate feature of either “maleness” or “femaleness.” Indeed, closely tied though it obviously is to questions of male vs. female power, the explanation will require a more exact mode of historical categorization than “patriarchy,” as well, since patriarchal power structures (in Hartmann’s sense) characterize both Athenian and American societies. Nevertheless, we may take as an explicit axiom that the historically differential shapes of male and female homosociality—much as they themselves may vary over time—will always be articulations and mechanisms of the enduring inequality of power between women and men. Why should the different shapes of the homosocial continuum be an interesting question? Why should it be a literary question? Its importance for the practical politics of the gay movement as a minority rights movement is already obvious from the recent history of strategic and philosophical differences between lesbians and gay men. In addition, it is theoretically interesting partly as a way of approaching a larger question of “sexual politics”: What does it mean—what difference does it make—when a social or political relationship is sexualized? If the relation of homosocial to homosexual bonds is so shifty, then what theoretical framework do we have for drawing any links between sexual and power relationships?

II. SEXUAL POLITICS AND SEXUAL MEANING This question, in a variety of forms, is being posed importantly by and for the different gender-politics movements right now. Feminist along with gay male theorists, for instance, are disagreeing actively about how direct the relation is between power domination and sexual sadomasochism. Start with two arresting images: the naked, beefy motorcyclist on the front cover, or the shockingly battered nude male corpse on the back cover, of the recent so-called “Polysexuality” issue of Semiotext(e) (4, no. 1 [1981])—which, for all the women in it, ought to have been called the semisexuality issue of Polytext. It seemed to be a purpose of that issue to insist, and possibly not only for reasons of radical-chic titillation, that the violence imaged in sadomasochism is not mainly theatrical, but is fully continuous with violence in the real world. Women Against Pornography and the framers of the 1980 NOW Resolution on Lesbian and Gay Rights share the same view, but without the celebratory glamor: to them too it seems intuitively clear that to sexualize violence or an image of violence is simply to extend, unchanged, its reach and force.13 But, as other feminist writers have reminded us another view is possible. For example: is a woman’s masochistic sexual fantasy really only an internalization and endorsement, if not a cause, of her more general powerlessness and sense of worthlessness? Or may not the sexual drama stand in some more oblique, or even oppositional, relation to her political experience of oppression?14

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The debate in the gay male community and elsewhere over “man-boy love” asks a cognate question: can an adult’s sexual relationship with a child be simply a continuous part of a more general relationship of education and nurturance? Or must the inclusion of sex qualitatively alter the relationship, for instance in the direction of exploitiveness? In this case, the same NOW communiqué that had assumed an unbroken continuity between sexualized violence and real, social violence, came to the opposite conclusion on pedophilia: that the injection of the sexual charge would alter (would corrupt) the very substance of the relationship. Thus, in moving from the question of sadomasochism to the question of pedophilia, the “permissive” argument and the “puritanical” argument have essentially exchanged their assumptions about how the sexual relates to the social. So the answer to the question “what difference does the inclusion of sex make” to a social or political relationship, is—it varies: just as, for different groups in different political circumstances, homosexual activity can be either supportive of or oppositional to homosocial bonding. From this and the other examples I have mentioned, it is clear that there is not some ahistorical Stoff of sexuality, some sexual charge that can be simply added to a social relationship to “sexualize” it in a constant and predictable direction, or that splits off from it unchanged. Nor does it make sense to assume that the sexualized form epitomizes or simply condenses a broader relationship. (As, for instance, Kathleen Barry, in Female Sexual Slavery, places the Marquis de Sade at the very center of all forms of female oppression, including traditional genital mutilation, incest, and the economic as well as the sexual exploitation of prostitutes.) Instead, an examination of the relation of sexual desire to political power must move along two axes. First, of course, it needs to make use of whatever forms of analysis are most potent for describing historically variable power asymmetries, such as those of class and race, as well as gender. But in conjunction with that, an analysis of representation itself is necessary. Only the model of representation will let us do justice to the (broad but not infinite or random) range of ways in which sexuality functions as a signifier for power relations. The importance of the rhetorical model in this case is not to make the problems of sexuality or of violence or oppression sound less immediate and urgent; it is to help us analyze and use the really very disparate intuitions of political immediacy that come to us from the sexual realm. For instance, a dazzling recent article by Catharine MacKinnon, attempting to go carefully over and clear out the grounds of disagreement between different streams of feminist thought, arrives at the following summary of the centrality of sexuality per se for every issue of gender: Each element of the female gender stereotype is revealed as, in fact, sexual. Vulnerability means the appearance/reality of easy sexual access; passivity means receptivity and disabled resistance . . . ; softness means pregnability by something hard. . . . Woman’s infantilization evokes pedophilia; fixation on dismembered body parts . . . evokes fetishism; idolization of vapidity, necrophilia. Narcissism insures that woman identifies with that image of herself that man holds up. . . . Masochism means that pleasure in violation becomes her sensuality.

And MacKinnon sums up this part of her argument: “Socially, femaleness

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means femininity, which means attractiveness to men, which means sexual attractiveness, which means sexual availability on male terms.”15 There’s a whole lot of “mean”-ing going on. MacKinnon manages to make every manifestation of sexuality mean the same thing, by making every instance of “meaning” mean something different. A trait can “mean” as an element in a semiotic system such as fashion (“softness means pregnability”); or anaclitically, it can “mean” its complementary opposite (“Woman’s infantilization evokes pedophilia”); or across time, it can “mean” the consequence that it enforces (“Narcissism insures that woman identifies. . . . Masochism means that pleasure in violation becomes her sensuality”). MacKinnon concludes, “What defines woman as such is what turns men on.” But what defines “defines”? That every node of sexual experience is in some signifying relation to the whole fabric of gender oppression, and vice versa, is true and important, but insufficiently exact to be of analytic use on specific political issues. The danger lies, of course, in the illusion that we do know from such a totalistic analysis where to look for our sexuality and how to protect it from expropriation when we find it. On the other hand, one value of MacKinnon’s piece was as a contribution to the increasing deftness with which, over the last twenty years, the question has been posed, “Who or what is the subject of the sexuality we (as women) enact?” It has been posed in terms more or less antic or frontal, phallic or gyno-, angry or frantic—in short, perhaps, Anglic or Franco-. But in different terms it is this same question that has animated the complaint of the American “sex object” of the 1960s, the claim since the 70s for “women’s control of our own bodies,” and the recently imported “critique of the subject” as it was used by French feminists. Let me take an example from the great ideological blockbuster of white bourgeois feminism, its apotheosis, the fictional work that has most resonantly thematized for successive generations of American women the constraints of the “feminine” role, the obstacles to and the ravenous urgency of female ambition, the importance of the economic motive, the compulsiveness and destructiveness of romantic love, and (what MacKinnon would underline) the centrality and the total alienation of female sexuality. Of course, I am referring to Gone With the Wind. As MacKinnon’s paradigm would predict, in the life of Scarlett O’Hara, it is expressly clear that to be born female is to be defined entirely in relation to the role of “lady,” a role that does take its shape and meaning from a sexuality of which she is not the subject but the object. For Scarlett, to survive as a woman does mean learning to see sexuality, male power domination, and her traditional gender role as all meaning the same dangerous thing. To absent herself silently from each of them alike, and learn to manipulate them from behind this screen as objects or pure signifiers, as men do, is the numbing but effective lesson of her life. However, it is only a white bourgeois feminism that this view apotheosizes. As in one of those trick rooms where water appears to run uphill and little children look taller than their parents, it is only when viewed from one fixed vantage in any society that sexuality, gender roles, and power domination can seem to line up in this perfect chain of echoic meaning. From an even slightly more ec-centric or disempowered perspective, the displacements and discontinuities of the signifying chain come to seem increasingly definitive. For instance, if it is true in this novel that all the women characters exist in some meaning-ful relation to the role

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of “lady,” the signifying relation grows more tortuous—though at the same time, in the novel’s white bourgeois view, more totally determining—as the women’s social and racial distance from that role grows. Melanie is a woman as she is a lady; Scarlett is a woman as she is required to be and pretends to be a lady; but Belle Watling, the Atlanta prostitute, is a woman not in relation to her own role of “lady,” which is exiguous, but only negatively, in a compensatory and at the same time parodic relation to Melanie’s and Scarlett’s. And as for Mammy, her mind and life, in this view, are totally in thrall to the ideal of the “lady,” but in a relation that excludes herself entirely: she is the template, the support, the enforcement, of Scarlett’s “lady” role, to the degree that her personal femaleness loses any meaning whatever that is not in relation to Scarlett’s role. Whose mother is Mammy? At the precise intersection of domination and sexuality is the issue of rape. Gone With the Wind—both book and movie—leaves in the memory a most graphic image of rape: As the negro came running to the buggy, his black face twisted in a leering grin, she fired point-blank at him. . . . The negro was beside her, so close that she could smell the rank odor of him as he tried to drag her over the buggy side. With her own free hand she fought madly, clawing at his face, and then she felt his big hand at her throat and, with a ripping noise, her basque was torn open from breast to waist. Then the black hand fumbled between her breasts, and terror and revulsion such as she had never known came over her and she screamed like an insane woman.16

In the wake of this attack, the entire machinery by which “rape” is signified in this culture rolls into action. Scarlett’s menfolk and their friends in the Ku Klux Klan set out after dark to kill the assailants and “wipe out that whole Shantytown settlement,” with the predictable carnage on both sides. The question of how much Scarlett is to blame for the deaths of the white men is widely mooted, with Belle Watling speaking for the “lady” role—“She caused it all, prancin’ bout Atlanta by herself, enticin’ niggers and trash”—and Rhett Butler, as so often, speaking from the central vision of the novel’s bourgeois feminism, assuring her that her desperate sense of guilt is purely superstitious (chs. 46, 47). In preparation for this central incident, the novel had even raised the issue of the legal treatment of rape victims (ch. 42). And the effect of that earlier case, the classic effect of rape, had already been to abridge Scarlett’s own mobility and, hence, personal and economic power: it was to expedite her business that she had needed to ride by Shantytown in the first place. The attack on Scarlett, in short, fully means rape, both to her and to all the forces in her culture that produce and circulate powerful meanings. It makes no difference at all that one constituent element of rape is missing; but the missing constituent is simply sex. The attack on Scarlett had been for money; the black hands had fumbled between the white breasts because the man had been told that was where she kept her money; Scarlett knew that; there is no mention of any other motive; but it does not matter in the least, the absent sexuality leaves no gap in the character’s, the novel’s, or the society’s discourse of rape. Nevertheless, Gone With the Wind is not a novel that omits enforced sexuality.

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We are shown one actual rape in fairly graphic detail; but when it is white hands that scrabble on white skin, its ideological name is “blissful marriage.” “[Rhett] had humbled her, used her brutally through a wild mad night and she had gloried in it” (ch. 54). The sexual predations of white men on Black women are also a presence in the novel, but the issue of force vs. content is never raised there; the white male alienation of a Black woman’s sexuality is shaped differently from the alienation of the white woman’s, to the degree that rape ceases to be a meaningful term at all. And if forcible sex ever did occur between a Black male and female character in this world, the sexual event itself would have no signifying power, since Black sexuality “means” here only as a grammatic transformation of a sentence whose true implicit subject and object are white. We have in this protofeminist novel, then, in this ideological microcosm, a symbolic economy in which both the meaning of rape and rape itself are insistently circulated. Because of the racial fracture of the society, however, rape and its meaning circulate in precisely opposite directions. It is an extreme case; the racial fracture is, in America, more sharply dichotomized than others except perhaps for gender. Still, other symbolic fractures such as class (and by fractures I mean the lines along which the quantitative differentials of power may in a given society be read as qualitative differentials with some other name) are abundant and actively disruptive in every social constitution. The signifying relation of sex to power, of sexual alienation to political oppression, is not the most stable, but precisely the most volatile of social nodes, under this pressure. Thus, it is of serious political importance that our tools for examining the signifying relation be subtle and discriminate ones, and that our literary knowledge of the most crabbed or oblique paths of meaning not be oversimplified in the face of panic-inducing images of real violence, especially the violence of, around, and to sexuality. To assume that sex signifies power in a flat, unvarying relation of metaphor or synecdoche will always entail a blindness, not to the rhetorical and pyrotechnic, but to such historical categories as class and race. Before we can fully achieve and use our intuitive grasp of the leverage that sexual relations seem to offer on the relations of oppression, we need more—more different, more complicated, more diachronically apt, more off-centered—more daring and prehensile applications of our present understanding of what it may mean for one thing to signify another.

III. SEX OR HISTORY? It will be clear by this point that the centrality of sexual questions in this study is important to its methodological ambitions, as well. I am going to be recurring to the subject of sex as an especially charged leverage-point, or point for the exchange of meanings, between gender and class (and in many societies, race), the sets of categories by which we ordinarily try to describe the divisions of human labor. And methodologically, I want to situate these readings as a contribution to a dialectic within femininst theory between more and less historicizing views of the oppression of women. In a rough way, we can label the extremes on this theoretical spectrum “Marxist feminism” for the most historicizing analysis, “radical feminism” for the least.

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Of course, “radical feminism” is so called not because it occupies the farthest “left” space on a conventional political map, but because it takes gender itself, gender alone, to be the most radical division of human experience, and a relatively unchanging one. For the purposes of the present argument, in addition, and for reasons that I will explain more fully later, I am going to be assimilating “French” feminism— deconstructive and/or Lacanian-oriented feminism—to the radical-feminist end of this spectrum. “French” and “radical” feminism differ on very many very important issues, such as how much respect they give to the brute fact that everyone gets categorized as either female or male; but they are alike in seeing all human culture, language, and life as structured in the first place—structured radically, transhistorically, and essentially similarly, however coarsely or finely—by a drama of gender difference. (Chapter 1 discusses more fully the particular terms by which this structuralist motive will be represented in the present study.) French-feminist and radical-feminist prose tend to share the same vatic, and perhaps imperialistic, uses of the present tense. In a sense, the polemical energy behind my arguments will be a desire, through the rhetorically volatile subject of sex, to recruit the representational finesse of deconstructive feminism in the service of a more historically discriminate mode of analysis. The choice of sexuality as a thematic emphasis of this study makes salient and problematical a division of thematic emphasis between Marxist-feminist and radical-feminist theory as they are now practiced. Specifically, Marxist feminism, the study of the deep interconnections between on the one hand historical and economic change, and on the other hand the vicissitudes of gender division, has typically proceeded in the absence of a theory of sexuality and without much interest in the meaning or experience of sexuality. Or more accurately, it has held implicitly to a view of female sexuality as something that is essentially of a piece with reproduction, and hence appropriately studied with the tools of demography; or else essentially of a piece with a simple, prescriptive hegemonic ideology, and hence appropriately studied through intellectual or legal history. Where important advances have been made by Marxist-feminist-oriented research into sexuality, it has been in areas that were already explicitly distinguished as deviant by the society’s legal discourse: signally, homosexuality for men and prostitution for women. Marxist feminism has been of little help in unpacking the historical meanings of women’s experience of heterosexuality, or even, until it becomes legally and medically visible in this century, of lesbianism.17 Radical feminism, on the other hand, in the many different forms I am classing under that head, has been relatively successful in placing sexuality in a prominent and interrogative position, one that often allows scope for the decentered and the contradictory. Kathleen Barry’s Female Sexual Slavery, Susan Griffin’s Pornography and Silence, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Jane Gallop’s The Daughter’s Seduction, and Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women make up an exceedingly heterogeneous group of texts in many respects—in style, in urgency, in explicit feminist identification, in French or American affiliation, in “brow”-elevation level. They have in common, however, a view that sexuality is centrally problematical in the formation of women’s experience. And in more or less sophisticated formulations, the subject as well as the ultimate object of female heterosexuality within what is called patriarchal culture are seen as male.

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Whether in literal interpersonal terms or in internalized psychological and linguistic terms, this approach privileges sexuality and often sees it within the context of the structure that Lévi-Strauss analyzes as “the male traffic in women.” This family of approaches has, however, shared with other forms of structuralism a difficulty in dealing with the diachronic. It is the essence of structures viewed as such to reproduce themselves; and historical change from this point of view appears as something outside of structure and threatening—or worse, not threatening—to it, rather than in a formative and dialectical relation with it. History tends thus to be either invisible or viewed in an impoverishingly glaring and contrastive light.18 Implicitly or explicitly, radical feminism tends to deny that the meaning of gender or sexuality has ever significantly changed; and more damagingly, it can make future change appear impossible, or necessarily apocalyptic, even though desirable. Alternatively, it can radically oversimplify the prerequisites for significant change. In addition, history even in the residual, synchronic form of class or racial difference and conflict becomes invisible or excessively coarsened and dichotomized in the universalizing structuralist view. As feminist readers, then, we seem poised for the moment between reading sex and reading history, at a choice that appears (though, it must be, wrongly) to be between the synchronic and the diachronic. We know that it must be wrongly viewed in this way, not only because in the abstract the synchronic and the diachronic must ultimately be considered in relation to one another, but because specifically in the disciplines we are considering they are so mutually inscribed: the narrative of Marxist history is so graphic, and the schematics of structuralist sexuality so narrative. I will be trying in this study to activate and use some of the potential congruences of the two approaches. Part of the underpinning of this attempt will be a continuing meditation of ways in which the category ideology can be used as part of an analysis of sexuality. The two categories seem comparable in several important ways: each mediates between the material and the representational, for instance; ideology, like sexuality as we have discussed it, both epitomizes and itself influences broader social relations of power; and each, I shall be arguing, mediates similarly between diachronic, narrative structures of social experience and synchronic, graphic ones. If common sense suggests that we can roughly group historicizing, “Marxist” feminism with the diachronic and the narrative, and “radical,” structuralist, deconstructive, and “French” feminisms with the synchronic and the graphic, then the methodological promise of these two mediating categories will be understandable. In The German Ideology, Marx suggests that the function of ideology is to conceal contradictions in the status quo by, for instance, recasting them into a diachronic narrative of origins. Corresponding to that function, one important structure of ideology is an idealizing appeal to the outdated values of an earlier system, in defense of a later system that in practice undermines the material basis of those values.19 For instance, Juliet Mitchell analyzes the importance of the family in ideologically justifying the shift to capitalism, in these terms: The peasant masses of feudal society had individual private property; their ideal was simply more of it. Capitalist society seemed to offer more because

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it stressed the idea of individual private property in a new context (or in a context of new ideas). Thus it offered individualism (an old value) plus the apparently new means for its greater realization—freedom and equality (values that are conspicuously absent from feudalism). However, the only place where this ideal could be given an apparently concrete base was in the maintenance of an old institution: the family. Thus the family changed from being the economic basis of individual private property under feudalism to being the focal point of the idea of individual private property under a system that banished such an economic form from its central mode of production—capitalism. . . . The working class work socially in production for the private property of a few capitalists in the hope of individual private property for themselves and their families.20

The phrase “A man’s home is his castle” offers a nicely condensed example of ideological construction in this sense. It reaches back to an emptied-out image of mastery and integration under feudalism in order to propel the male wageworker forward to further feats of alienated labor, in the service of a now atomized and embattled, but all the more intensively idealized home. The man who has this home is a different person from the lord who has a castle; and the forms of property implied in the two possessives (his [mortgaged] home/his [inherited] castle) are not only different but, as Mitchell points out, mutually contradictory. The contradiction is assuaged and filled in by transferring the lord’s political and economic control over the environs of his castle to an image of the father’s personal control over the inmates of his house. The ideological formulation thus permits a criss-crossing of agency, temporality, and space. It is important that ideology in this sense, even when its form is flatly declarative (“A man’s home is his castle”), is always at least implicitly narrative, and that, in order for the reweaving of ideology to be truly invisible, the narrative is necessarily chiasmic in structure: that is, that the subject of the beginning of the narrative is different from the subject at the end, and that the two subjects cross each other in a rhetorical figure that conceals their discontinuity. It is also important that the sutures of contradiction in these ideological narratives become most visible under the disassembling eye of an alternative narrative, ideological as that narrative may itself be. In addition, the diachronic opening-out of contradictions within the status quo, even when the project of that diachronic recasting is to conceal those very contradictions, can have just the opposite effect of making them newly visible, offering a new leverage for critique. For these reasons, distinguishing between the construction and the critique of ideological narrative is not always even a theoretical possibility, even with relatively flat texts; with the fat rich texts that we are taking for examples in this project, no such attempt will be made. Sexuality, like ideology, depends on the mutual redefinition and occlusion of synchronic and diachronic formulations. The developmental fact that, as Freud among others has shown, even the naming of sexuality as such is always retroactive in relation to most of the sensations and emotions that constitute it,21 is historically important. What counts as the sexual is, as we shall see, variable and itself political. The exact, contingent space of indeterminacy—the place of shifting over time—of the mutual boundaries between the political and the sexual is, in fact, the most fertile space of ideological formation. This is true because

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ideological formation, like sexuality, depends on retroactive change in the naming or labelling of the subject.22 The two sides, the political and the erotic, necessarily obscure and misrepresent each other—but in ways that offer important and shifting affordances to all parties in historical gender and class struggle.

IV. WHAT THIS BOOK DOES The difficult but potentially productive tension between historical and structuralist forms of feminism, in the theoretical grounding of this book, is echoed by a tension in the book between historical and more properly literary organization, methodologies, and emphases. Necessarily because of my particular aptitudes and training, if for no better reason, the historical argument almost throughout is embodied in and guided by the readings of the literary texts. For better and for worse, the large historical narrative has an off-centering effect on the discrete readings, as the introversive techniques of literary analysis have in turn on the historical argument. The resulting structure represents a continuing negotiation between the book’s historicizing and dehistoricizing motives. The two ways in which I have described to myself the purpose of this book express a similar tension: first, to make it easier for readers to focus intelligently on male homosocial bonds throughout the heterosexual European erotic ethos; but secondly, to use the subject of sexuality to show the usefulness of certain Marxist-feminist historical categories for literary criticism, where they have so far had relatively little impact. Chapter 1 of the book, “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles,” locates the book’s focus on male homosocial desire within the structural context of triangular, heterosexual desire. René Girard, Freud, and Lévi-Strauss, especially as he is interpreted by Gayle Rubin, offer the basic paradigm of “male traffic in women” that will underlie the entire book. In the next three chapters a historically deracinated reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a partially historical reading of Wycherley’s The Country Wife, and a reading of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey in relation to the inextricable gender, class, and national anxieties of mid-eighteenth-century English men both establish some persistent paradigms for discussion, and begin to locate them specifically in the terms of modern England. Chapters 5 and 6, on homophobia and the Romantic Gothic, discuss the paranoid Gothic tradition in the novel as an exploration of the changing meaning and importance of homophobia in England during and after the eighteenth century. A reading of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner treats homophobia not most immediately as an oppression of homosexual men, but as a tool for manipulating the entire spectrum of male bonds, and hence the gender system as a whole. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on more “mainstream,” public Victorian ideological fictions, and on the fate of the women who are caught up in male homosocial exchange. This section treats three Victorian texts, historical or mock-historical, that claim to offer accounts of changes in women’s relation to male bonds: Tennyson’s The Princess, Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and Eliot’s Adam Bede; it approaches most explicitly the different explanatory claims of structuralist and historical approaches to sex and gender.

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Chapters 9 and 10, on Dickens’ Victorian Gothic, show how Dickens’s last two novels delineate the interactions of homophobia with nineteenth-century class and racial as well as gender division. Finally, a Coda, “Toward the Twentieth Century: English Readers of Whitman,” uses an account of some influential English (mis-)understandings of Whitman’s poetry, to sketch in the links between mid-Victorian English sexual politics and the familiar modern Anglo-American landscape of male homosexuality, heterosexuality, and homophobia as (we think) we know them. The choices I have made of texts through which to embody the argument of the book are specifically not meant to begin to delineate a separate male-homosocial literary canon. In fact, it will be essential to my argument to claim that the European canon as it exists is already such a canon, and most so when it is most heterosexual. In this sense, it would perhaps be easiest to describe this book (as will be done more explicitly in chapter 1) as a recasting of, and a refocusing on, René Girard’s triangular schematization of the existing European canon in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In fact, I have simply chosen texts at pleasure from within or alongside the English canon that represented particularly interesting interpretive problems, or particularly symptomatic historical and ideological nodes, for understanding the politics of male homosociality. I hope it is obvious by this point that I mean to situate this book in a dialectically usable, rather than an authoritative, relation to the rapidly developing discourse of feminist theory. Of course, the readings and interpretations are as careful in their own terms as I have known how to make them; but at the same time I am aware of having privileged certain arresting (and hence achronic) or potentially generalizable formulations, in the hope of making interpretations like these dialectically available to readers of other texts, as well. The formal models I have had in mind for this book are two very different books, Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur: not in this instance because of an agreement with the substance of their arguments, but because each in a relatively short study with an apparently idiosyncratic focus nevertheless conveys a complex of ideas forcefully enough—even, repetitiously enough—to make it a usable part of any reader’s repertoire of approaches to her or his personal experience and future reading. From that position in the repertoire each can be—must be—criticized and changed. To take such a position has been my ambition for this book. Among the directions of critique and alteration that seem to me most called for, but which I have been unable so far to incorporate properly in the argument itself, are the following: First, the violence done by my historicizing narrative to the literary readings proper shows perhaps most glaringly in the overriding of distinctions and structural considerations of genre. And in general, the number and the differentness of the many different mechanisms of mediation between history and text— mechanisms with names like, for instance, “literary convention,” “literary history”—need to be reasserted in newly applicable formulations. At the same time, the violences done to a historical argument by embodying it in a series of readings of works of literature are probably even more numerous and damaging. Aside from issues of ideological condensation and displacement that will be discussed in chapters 7 and 8, the form of violence most obvious to me is simply the limitation of my argument to the “book-writing classes”—a group that

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is distinctive in more than merely socioeconomic terms, but importantly in those terms as well. Next, the isolation, not to mention the absolute subordination, of women, in the structural paradigm on which this study is based (see chapter 1 for more on this) is a distortion that necessarily fails to do justice to women’s own powers, bonds, and struggles.23 The absence of lesbianism from the book was an early and, I think, necessary decision, since my argument is structured around the distinctive relation of the male homosocial spectrum to the transmission of unequally distributed power. Nevertheless, the exclusively heterosexual perspective of the book’s attention to women is seriously impoverishing in itself, and also an index of the larger distortion. The reading of Henry Esmond is the only one that explicitly considers the bond of woman with woman in the context of male homosocial exchange, but much better analyses are needed of the relations between female-homosocial and male-homosocial structures. The book’s almost exclusive focus on male authors is, I think, similarly justified for this early stage of this particular inquiry; but it has a similar effect of impoverishing our sense of women’s own cultural resources of resistance, adaptation, revision, and survival. My reluctance to distinguish between “ideologizing” and “de-ideologizing” narratives may have had, paradoxically, a similar effect of presenting the “canonical” cultural discourse in an excessively protean and inescapable (because internally contradictory) form. In addition, the relation between the traffic-in-women paradigm used here and hypotheses, such as Dinnerstein’s, Chodorow’s, and Kristeva’s in Powers of Horror, of a primary fear in men and women of the maternal power of women, is yet to be analyzed. Again, the lack of entirely usable paradigms, at this early moment in feminist theory, for the complicated relations among violence, sexual violence, and the sadomasochistic sexualization of violence,24 has led me in this book to a perhaps inappropriately gentle emphasis on modes of gender oppression that could be (more or less metaphorically) described in economic terms. At the same time, the erotic and individualistic bias of literature itself, and the relative ease—not to mention the genuine pleasure—of using feminist theoretical paradigms to write about eros and sex, have led to a relative deemphasis of the many, crucially important male homosocial bonds that are less glamorous to talk about—such as the institutional, bureaucratic, and military. Finally, and I think most importantly, the focus of this study on specifically English social structures, combined with the hegemonic claim for “universality” that has historically been implicit in the entire discourse of European social and psychological analysis, leave the relation of my discussion to non-European cultures and people entirely unspecified, and at present, perhaps, to some extent unspecifiable. A running subtext of comparisons between English sexual ideology and some ideologies of American racism is not a token attempt to conceal that gap in the book’s coverage, but an attempt to make clear to other American readers some of the points of reference in white America that I have used in thinking about English ideology. Perhaps what one can most appropriately ask of readers who find this book’s formulations useful is simply to remember that, important as it is that they be criticized at every step of even European applications, any attempt to treat them as cross-cultural or (far more) as universal ought to involve the most searching and particular analysis.

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As a woman and a feminist writing (in part) about male homosexuality, I feel I must be especially explicit about the political groundings, assumptions, and ambitions of this study in that regard, as well. My intention throughout has been to conduct an antihomophobic as well as feminist inquiry. However, most of the (little) published analysis up to now of the relation between women and male homosexuality has been at a lower level of sophistication and care than either feminist or gay male analysis separately. In the absence of workable formulations about the male homosocial spectrum, this literature has, with only a few recent exceptions,25 subscribed to one of two assumptions: either that gay men and all women share a “natural,” transhistorical alliance and an essential identity of interests (e.g., in breaking down gender stereotypes);26 or else that male homosexuality is an epitome, a personification, an effect, or perhaps a primary cause of woman-hating.27 I do not believe either of these assumptions to be true. Especially because this study discusses a continuum, a potential structural congruence, and a (shifting) relation of meaning between male homosexual relationships and the male patriarchal relations by which women are oppressed, it is important to emphasize that I am not assuming or arguing either that patriarchal power is primarily or necessarily homosexual (as distinct from homosocial), or that male homosexual desire has a primary or necessary relationship to misogyny. Either of those arguments would be homophobic and, I believe, inaccurate. I will, however, be arguing that homophobia directed by men against men is misogynistic, and perhaps transhistorically so. (By “misogynistic” I mean not only that it is oppressive of the so-called feminine in men, but that it is oppressive of women.) The greatest potential for misinterpretation lies here. Because “homosexuality” and “homophobia” are, in any of their avatars, historical constructions, because they are likely to concern themselves intensely with each other and to assume interlocking or mirroring shapes, because the theater of their struggle is likely to be intrapsychic or intra-institutional as well as public, it is not always easy (sometimes barely possible) to distinguish them from each other. Thus, for instance, Freud’s study of Dr. Schreber shows clearly that the repression of homosexual desire in a man who by any commonsense standard was heterosexual, occasioned paranoid psychosis; the psychoanalytic use that has been made of this perception, however, has been, not against homophobia and its schizogenic force, but against homosexuality—against homosexuals—on account of an association between “homosexuality” and mental illness.28 Similar confusions have marked discussions of the relation between “homosexuality” and fascism. As the historically constructed nature of “homosexuality” as an institution becomes more fully understood, it should become possible to understand these distinctions in a more exact and less prejudicious theoretical context. Thus, profound and intuitable as the bonds between feminism and antihomophobia often are in our society, the two forces are not the same. As the alliance between them is not automatic or transhistorical, it will be most fruitful if it is analytic and unpresuming. To shed light on the grounds and implications of that alliance, as well as, through these issues, on formative literary texts, is an aim of the readings that follow.

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NOTES 1. The notion of “homophobia” is itself fraught with difficulties. To begin with, the word is etymologically nonsensical. A more serious problem is that the linking of fear and hatred in the “-phobia” suffix, and in the word’s usage, does tend to prejudge the question of the cause of homosexual oppression: it is attributed to fear, as opposed to (for example) a desire for power, privilege, or material goods. An alternative term that is more suggestive of collective, structurally inscribed, perhaps materially based oppression is “heterosexism.” This study will, however, continue to use “homophobia,” for three reasons. First, it will be an important concern here to question, rather than to reinforce, the presumptively symmetrical opposition between homo- and heterosexuality, which seems to be implicit in the term “heterosexism.” Second, the etiology of individual people’s attitudes toward male homosexuality will not be a focus of discussion. And third, the ideological and thematic treatments of male homosexuality to be discussed from the late eighteenth century onward do combine fear and hatred in a way that is appropriately called phobic. For a good summary of social science research on the concept of homophobia, see Morin and Garfinkle, “Male Homophobia.” 2. For a good survey of the background to this assertion, see Weeks, Sex, pp. 1–18. 3. Adrienne Rich describes these bonds as forming a “lesbian continuum,” in her essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Stimpson and Person, Women, pp. 62–91, especially pp. 79–82. 4. “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” in Cott and Pleck, Heritage, pp. 311–42; usage appears on, e.g., pp. 316, 317. 5. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Sargent, Women and Revolution, pp. 1–41; quotation is from p. 14. 6. See, for example, Rubin, “Traffic,” pp. 182–83. 7. Rubin, “Traffic,” p. 180. 8. Crompton, “Gay Genocide”; but see chapter 5 for a discussion of the limitations of “genocide” as an understanding of the fate of homosexual men. 9. On this, see Miller, New Psychology, ch. 1. 10. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, p. 91. 11. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 83, quoted in Rich, On Lies, p. 206. 12. On the Bohemian Grove, an all-male summer camp for American ruling-class men, see Domhoff, Bohemian Grove; and a more vivid, although homophobic, account, van der Zee, Men’s Party. 13. The NOW resolution, for instance, explicitly defines sadomasochism, pornography, and “pederasty” (meaning pedophilia) as issues of “exploitation and violence,” as opposed to “affectional/sexual preference/orientation.” Quoted in Heresies 12, vol. 3, no 4 (1981), p. 92. 14. For explorations of these viewpoints, see Heresies, ibid.; Snitow et al., Powers; and Samois, Coming. 15. MacKinnon, “Feminism,” pp. 530–31. 16. Mitchell, Gone, p. 780. Further citations will be incorporated within the text and designated by chapter number. 17. For a discussion of these limitations, see Vicinus, “Sexuality.” The variety of useful work that is possible within these boundaries is exemplified by the essays in Newton et al., Sex and Class. 18. On this, see McKeon, “Marxism.” 19. Juliet Mitchell discusses this aspect of The German Ideology in Woman’s Estate, pp. 152–58. 20. Mitchell, Woman’s Estate, p. 154.

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21. The best and clearest discussion of this aspect of Freud is Laplanche, Life and Death, especially pp. 25–47. 22. On this, see ch. 8 of Between Men. 23. For an especially useful discussion of the absence of women from the work of Girard, see Moi, “Missing Mother.” 24. On this see (in addition to Snitow et al., Powers) Breines and Gordon, “Family Violence.” 25. The following books are, to a greater or lesser extent, among the exceptions: Fernbach, Spiral Path; Mieli, Homosexuality; Rowbotham and Weeks, Socialism; Dworkin, Pornography. 26. The most influential recent statement of this position is Heilbrun, Androgyny. 27. See Irigaray, “Goods”; and Frye, Politics, pp. 128–51. Jane Marcus’s work on Virginia Woolf makes use of Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi’s homophobic formulation, “the Nazi community is made by homosexual brothers who exclude the woman and valorize the mother.” Marcus says, “The Cambridge Apostles’ notions of fraternity surely appeared to Woolf analogous to certain fascist notions of fraternity.” Macciocchi’s formulation is quoted in Jane Caplan, “Introduction to Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology,” Feminist Review 1 (1979), p. 62. Marcus’s essay is “Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny,” in Heilbrun and Higonnet, Representation, pp. 60–97; quotation is from p. 67. 28. On this see Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, pp. 42–67.

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GENDER ASYMMETRY AND EROTIC TRIANGLES (1985)





















The graphic schema on which I am going to be drawing most heavily in the readings that follow is the triangle. The triangle is useful as a figure by which the “commonsense” of our intellectual tradition schematizes erotic relations, and because it allows us to condense into a juxtaposition with that folk-perception several somewhat different streams of recent thought. René Girard’s early book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, was itself something of a schematization of the folk-wisdom of erotic triangles. Through readings of major European fictions, Girard traced a calculus of power that was structured by the relation of rivalry between the two active members of an erotic triangle. What is most interesting for our purposes in his study is its insistence that, in any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of “rivalry” and “love,” differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent. For instance, Girard finds many examples in which the choice of the beloved is determined in the first place, not by the qualities of the beloved, but by the beloved’s already being the choice of the person who has been chosen as a rival. In fact, Girard seems to see the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle as being even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved. And within the male-centered novelistic tradition of European high culture, the triangles Girard traces are most often those in which two males are rivals for a female; it is the bond between males that he most assiduously uncovers. The index to Girard’s book gives only two citations for “homosexuality” per se, and it is one of the strengths of his formulation not to depend on how homosexuality as an entity was perceived or experienced—indeed, on what was or was not considered sexual—at any given historical moment. As a matter of fact, the symmetry of his formulation always depends on suppressing the subjective, historically determined account of which feelings are or are not part of the body of “sexuality.” The transhistorical clarity gained by this organizing move naturally has a cost, however. Psychoanalysis, the recent work of Foucault, and feminist historical scholarship all suggest that the place of drawing the boundary between the sexual and the not-sexual, like the place of drawing the boundary between the

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realms of the two genders, is variable, but is not arbitrary. That is (as the example of Gone With the Wind suggests), the placement of the boundaries in a particular society affects not merely the definitions of those terms themselves—sexual/nonsexual, masculine/feminine—but also the apportionment of forms of power that are not obviously sexual. These include control over the means of production and reproduction of goods, persons, and meanings. So that Girard’s account, which thinks it is describing a dialectic of power abstracted from either the male/female or the sexual/nonsexual dichotomies, is leaving out of consideration categories that in fact preside over the distribution of power in every known society. And because the distribution of power according to these dichotomies is not and possibly cannot be symmetrical, the hidden symmetries that Girard’s triangle helps us discover will always in turn discover hidden obliquities. At the same time, even to bear in mind the lurking possibility of the Girardian symmetry is to be possessed of a graphic tool for historical measure. It will make it easier for us to perceive and discuss the mutual inscription in these texts of male homosocial and heterosocial desire, and the resistances to them. Girard’s argument is of course heavily dependent, not only on a brilliant intuition for taking seriously the received wisdom of sexual folklore, but also on a schematization from Freud: the Oedipal triangle, the situation of the young child that is attempting to situate itself with respect to a powerful father and a beloved mother. Freud’s discussions of the etiology of “homosexuality” (which current research seems to be rendering questionable as a set of generalizations about personal histories of “homosexuals”)1 suggest homo- and heterosexual outcomes in adults to be the result of a complicated play of desire for and identification with the parent of each gender: the child routes its desire/identification through the mother to arrive at a role like the father’s, or vice versa. Richard Klein summarizes this argument as follows: In the normal development of the little boy’s progress towards heterosexuality, he must pass, as Freud says with increasing insistence in late essays like “Terminable and Interminable Analysis,” through the stage of the “positive” Oedipus, a homoerotic identification with his father, a position of effeminized subordination to the father, as a condition of finding a model for his own heterosexual role. Conversely, in this theory, the development of the male homosexual requires the postulation of the father’s absence or distance and an abnormally strong identification by the child with the mother, in which the child takes the place of the father. There results from this scheme a surprising neutralization of polarities: heterosexuality in the male . . . presupposes a homosexual neutralization phase as the condition of its normal possibility: homosexuality, obversely, requires that the child experience a powerful heterosexual identification.2

I have mentioned that Girard’s reading presents itself as one whose symmetry is undisturbed by such differences as gender; although the triangles that most shape his view tend, in the European tradition, to involve bonds of “rivalry” between males “over” a woman, in his view any relation of rivalry is structured by the same play of emulation and identification, whether the entities occupying the corners of the triangle be heroes, heroines, gods, books, or whatever. In describing the Oedipal drama, Freud notoriously tended to place a male in the generic

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position of “child” and treat the case of the female as being more or less the same, “mutatis mutandis”; at any rate, as Freud is interpreted by conventional American psychoanalysis, the enormous difference in the degree and kind of female and male power enters psychoanalytic view, when at all, as a result rather than as an active determinant of familial and intrapsychic structures of development. Thus, both Girard and Freud (or at least the Freud of this interpretive tradition) treat the erotic triangle as symmetrical—in the sense that its structure would be relatively unaffected by the power difference that would be introduced by a change in the gender of one of the participants. In addition, the asymmetry I spoke of in section 1 of the Introduction—the radically disrupted continuum, in our society, between sexual and nonsexual male bonds, as against the relatively smooth and palpable continuum of female homosocial desire—might be expected to alter the structure of erotic triangles in ways that depended on gender, and for which neither Freud nor Girard would offer an account. Both Freud and Girard, in other words, treat erotic triangles under the Platonic light that perceives no discontinuity in the homosocial continuum— none, at any rate, that makes much difference—even in modern Western society. There is a kind of bravery about the proceeding of each in this respect, but a historical blindness, as well. Recent readings and reinterpretations of Freud have gone much farther in taking into account the asymmetries of gender. In France, recent psychoanalytic discourse impelled by Jacques Lacan identifies power, language, and the Law itself with the phallus and the “name of the father.” It goes without saying that such a discourse has the potential for setting in motion both feminist and virulently misogynistic analyses; it does, at any rate, offer tools, though not (so far) historically sensitive ones, for describing the mechanisms of patriarchal power in terms that are at once intrapsychic (Oedipal conflict) and public (language and the Law). Moreover, by distinguishing (however incompletely) the phallus, the locus of power, from the actual anatomical penis,3 Lacan’s account creates a space in which anatomic sex and cultural gender may be distinguished from one another and in which the different paths of men’s relations to male power might be explored (e.g. in terms of class). In addition, it suggests ways of talking about the relation between the individual male and the cultural institutions of masculine domination that fall usefully under the rubric of representation. A further contribution of Lacanian psychoanalysis that will be important for our investigation is the subtlety with which it articulates the slippery relation— already adumbrated in Freud—between desire and identification. The schematic elegance with which Richard Klein, in the passage I have quoted, is able to summarize the feminizing potential of desire for a woman and the masculine potential of subordination to a man, owes at least something to a Lacanian grinding of the lenses through which Freud is being viewed. In Lacan and those who have learned from him, an elaborate meditation on introjection and incorporation forms the link between the apparently dissimilar processes of desire and identification. Recent American feminist work by Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow also revises Freud in the direction of greater attention to gender/power difference. Coppélia Kahn summarizes the common theme of their argument (which she applies to Shakespeare) as follows:

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Most children, male or female, in Shakespeare’s time, Freud’s, or ours, are not only borne but raised by women. And thus arises a crucial difference between the girl’s developing sense of identity and the boy’s. For though she follows the same sequence of symbiotic union, separation and individuation, identification, and object love as the boy, her femininity arises in relation to a person of the same sex, while his masculinity arises in relation to a person of the opposite sex. Her femininity is reinforced by her original symbiotic union with her mother and by the identification with her that must precede identity, while his masculinity is threatened by the same union and the same identification. While the boy’s sense of self begins in union with the feminine, his sense of masculinity arises against it.4

It should be clear, then, from what has gone before, on the one hand that there are many and thorough asymmetries between the sexual continuums of women and men, between female and male sexuality and homosociality, and most pointedly between homosocial and heterosocial object choices for males; and on the other hand that the status of women and the whole question of arrangements between genders, is deeply and inescapably inscribed in the structure even of relationships that seem to exclude women—even in male homosocial/homosexual relationships. Heidi Hartmann’s definition of patriarchy in terms of “relationships between men” (see introduction 1), in making the power relationships between men and women appear to be dependent on the power relationships between men and men, suggests that large-scale social structures are congruent with the male–male–female erotic triangles described most forcefully by Girard and articulated most thoughtfully by others. We can go further than that, to say that in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence. For historical reasons, this special relationship may take the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the two. (Lesbianism also must always be in a special relation to patriarchy, but on different [sometimes opposite] grounds and working through different mechanisms.) Perhaps the most powerful recent argument through (and against) a traditional discipline that bears on these issues has occurred within anthropology. Based on readings and critiques of Lévi-Strauss and Engels, in addition to Freud and Lacan, Gayle Rubin has argued in an influential essay that patriarchal heterosexuality can best be discussed in terms of one or another form of the traffic in women: it is the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men. For example, Lévi-Strauss writes, “The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners.”5 Thus, like Freud’s “heterosexual” in Richard Klein’s account, Lévi-Strauss’s normative man uses a woman as a “conduit of a relationship” in which the true partner is a man.6 Rejecting Lévi-Strauss’s celebratory treatment of this relegation of women, Rubin offers, instead, an array of tools for specifying and analyzing it.

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Luce Irigaray has used the Lévi-Straussian description of the traffic in women to make a resounding though expensive leap of register in her discussion of the relation of heterosexual to male homosocial bonds. In the reflections translated into English as “When the Goods Get Together,” she concludes: “[Male] homosexuality is the law that regulates the sociocultural order. Heterosexuality amounts to the assignment of roles in the economy.”7 To begin to describe this relation as having the asymmetry of (to put it roughly) parole to langue is wonderfully pregnant; if her use of it here is not a historically responsive one, still it has potential for increasing our ability to register historical difference. The expensiveness of Irigaray’s vision of male homosexuality is, oddly, in a sacrifice of sex itself: the male “homosexuality” discussed here turns out to represent anything but actual sex between men, which—although it is also, importantly, called “homosexuality”—has something like the same invariable, tabooed status for her larger, “real” “homosexuality” that incest has in principle for Lévi-Straussian kinship in general. Even Irigaray’s supple machinery of meaning has the effect of transfixing, then sublimating, the quicksilver of sex itself. The loss of the diachronic in a formulation like Irigaray’s is, again, most significant, as well. Recent anthropology, as well as historical work by Foucault, Sheila Rowbotham, Jeffrey Weeks, Alan Bray, K. J. Dover, John Boswell, David Fernbach, and others, suggests that among the things that have changed radically in Western culture over the centuries, and vary across cultures, about men’s genital activity with men are its frequency, its exclusivity, its class associations, its relation to the dominant culture, its ethical status, the degree to which it is seen as defining nongenital aspects of the lives of those who practice it, and, perhaps most radically, its association with femininity or masculinity in societies where gender is a profound determinant of power. The virility of the homosexual orientation of male desire seemed as self-evident to the ancient Spartans, and perhaps to Whitman, as its effeminacy seems in contemporary popular culture. The importance of women (not merely of “the feminine,” but of actual women as well) in the etiology and the continuing experience of male homosexuality seems to be historically volatile (across time, across class) to a similar degree. Its changes are inextricable from the changing shapes of the institutions by which gender and class inequality are structured. Thus, Lacan, Chodorow and Dinnerstein, Rubin, Irigaray, and others, making critiques from within their multiple traditions, offer analytical tools for treating the erotic triangle not as an ahistorical, Platonic form, a deadly symmetry from which the historical accidents of gender, language, class, and power detract, but as a sensitive register precisely for delineating relationships of power and meaning, and for making graphically intelligible the play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment.

NOTES 1. On this, see Bell et al., Sexual Preferences. 2. Review of Homosexualities, p. 1077. 3. On this see Gallop, Daughter’s Seduction, pp. 15–32. 4. Kahn, Man’s Estate, pp. 9–10.

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5. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 115; quoted in Rubin, “Traffic,” p. 174. 6. Rubin, ibid. 7. Irigaray, “Goods,” pp. 107–10.

WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Barry, Kathleen. Female Sexual Slavery. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1979. Bell, Alan P., Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith. Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982. Breines, Wini, and Linda Gordon. “The New Scholarship on Family Violence.” Signs 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983), pp. 490–531. Chodorow, Nancy. “Mothering, Male Dominance, and Capitalism.” In Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. Ed. Zillah Eisenstein. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979, pp. 83–106. ———. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Cott, Nancy F., and Elizabeth H. Pleck, eds. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. Crompton, Louis. “Gay Genocide: From Leviticus to Hitler.” In The Gay Academic. Ed. Louie Crew. Palm Springs, Calif.: ETC Publications, 1978, pp. 67–91. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Ed. Trevor Blount. Harmondsworth, Sussex: Penguin, 1966. ———. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Ed. Margaret Cardwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. ———. Our Mutual Friend. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper & Row–Colophon, 1976. Domhoff, G. William. The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Dover, K. J. Greek Homosexuality. New York: Random House–Vintage, 1980. Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons–Perigee Books, 1981. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Illustrated Cabinet Edition. 2 vols. Boston: Dana Estes, n.d. Fernbach, David. The Spiral Path: A Gay Contribution to Human Survival. Alyson Press, 1981. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction. Tr. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Frye, Marilyn. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1983. Gallop, Jane. The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Tr. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence: Cultures Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

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Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Harper & Row–Colophon, 1973. Heilbrun, Carolyn G., and Margaret Higonnet, eds. The Representation of Women in Fiction: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1981. New series, no. 7. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Herdt, G. H. Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity: A Study of Ritualized Homosexual Behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Tr. Daniella Dangoor. London: Allison & Busby, 1978. Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. New York: Norton, 1970. Irigaray, Luce. “When the Goods Get Together.” In New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1981, pp. 107–11. Kahn, Coppélia. Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Klein, Richard. Review of Homosexualities in French Literature. MLN 95, no. 4 (May 1980), pp. 1070–80. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Tr. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Tr. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. MacKinnon, Catharine A. “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982), pp. 515–44. McKeon, Michael. “The ‘Marxism’ of Claude Lévi-Strauss.” Dialectical Anthropology 6 (1981), pp. 123–50. Mieli, Mario. Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1977. Miller, Jean Baker. Psychology of Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976. Mitchell, Juliet. Woman’s Estate. New York: Random House–Vintage, 1973. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind. New York: Avon, 1973. Moi, Toril. “The Missing Mother: The Oedipal Rivalries of René Girard.” Diacritics 12, no. 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 21–31. Morin, Stephen M., and Ellen M. Garfinkle. “Male Homophobia.” In Gayspeak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication. Ed. James W. Chesebro. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981, pp. 117–29. Rowbotham, Sheila, and Jeffrey Weeks. Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. London: Pluto Press, 1977. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157–210. Samois, ed. Coming to Power: Writing and Graphics on Lesbian S/M. Boston: Alyson, 1982. Sargent, Lydia, ed. Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. Snitow, Ann, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review Press–New Feminist Library, 1983. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Ed. Graham Petrie. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Stimpson, Catharine R., and Ethel Spector Person, eds. Women: Sex and Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. The Princess: A Medley. In The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longmans, 1969, pp. 743–844.

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Thackeray, William Makepeace. The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. Written By Himself. Biographical Edition. New York: Harper, 1903. van der Zee, John. The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth: Inside the Bohemian Grove. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Vicinus, Martha. “Sexuality and Power: A Review of Current Work in the History of Sexuality.” Feminist Studies 8, no. I (Spring 1982), pp. 133–56. Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quartet Books, 1977. ———. Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. London: Longman, 1981. Wycherley, William. The Country Wife. Ed. Thomas H. Fujimura. Regents Restoration Drama Series. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.

BARBARA JOHNSON

APOSTROPHE, ANIMATION, AND ABORTION (1986)





















The abortion issue is as alive and controversial in the body politic as it is in the academy and the courtroom. JAY L. GARFIELD, ABORTION: MORAL AND LEGAL PERSPECTIVES

Although rhetoric can be defined as something politicians often accuse each other of using, the political dimensions of the scholarly study of rhetoric have gone largely unexplored by literary critics. What, indeed, could seem more dry and apolitical than a rhetorical treatise? What could seem farther away from budgets and guerrilla warfare than a discussion of anaphora, antithesis, prolepsis, and preterition? Yet the notorious CIA manual1 on psychological operations in guerrilla warfare ends with just such a rhetorical treatise: an appendix on techniques of oratory which lists definitions and examples for these and many other rhetorical figures. The manual is designed to set up a Machiavellian campaign of propaganda, indoctrination, and infiltration in Nicaragua, underwritten by the visible display and selective use of weapons. Shoot softly, it implies, and carry a big schtick. If rhetoric is defined as language that says one thing and means another, then the manual is in effect attempting to maximize the collusion between deviousness in language and accuracy in violence, again and again implying that targets are most effectively hit when most indirectly aimed at. Rhetoric, clearly, has everything to do with covert operations. But are the politics of violence already encoded in rhetorical figures as such? In other words, can the very essence of a political issue—an issue like, say, abortion—hinge on the structure of a figure? Is there any inherent connection between figurative language and questions of life and death, of who will wield and who will receive violence in a given human society? As a way of approaching this question, I will begin in a more traditional way by discussing a rhetorical device that has come to seem almost synonymous with the lyric voice: the figure of apostrophe. In an essay in The Pursuit of Signs, Jonathan Culler indeed sees apostrophe as an embarrassingly explicit emblem of procedures inherent, but usually better hidden, in lyric poetry as such.2 Apostrophe in the sense in which I will be using it involves the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate being by a first-person speaker: “O wild West Wind,

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thou breath of Autumn’s being. . . . ” Apostrophe is thus both direct and indirect: based etymologically on the notion of turning aside, of digressing from straight speech, it manipulates the I/Thou structure of direct address in an indirect, fictionalized way. The absent, dead, or inanimate entity addressed is thereby made present, animate, and anthropomorphic. Apostrophe is a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness. Baudelaire’s poem “Moesta et Errabunda,”3 whose Latin title means “sad and vagabond,” raises questions of rhetorical animation through several different grades of apostrophe. Inanimate objects like trains and ships or abstract entities like perfumed paradises find themselves called upon to attend to the needs of a plaintive and restless lyric speaker. Even the poem’s title poses questions of life and death in linguistic terms: the fact that Baudelaire here temporarily resuscitates a dead language prefigures the poem’s attempts to function as a finder of lost loves. But in the opening lines of the poem, the direct-address structure seems straightforwardly unfigurative: “Tell me, Agatha.” This could be called a minimally fictionalized apostrophe, although that is of course its fiction. Nothing at first indicates that Agatha is any more dead, absent, or inanimate than the poet himself. The poem’s opening makes explicit the relation between direct address and the desire for the other’s voice: “Tell me—you talk.” But something strange soon happens to the face-to-face humanness of this conversation. What Agatha is supposed to talk about starts a process of dismemberment that might have something to do with a kind of reverse anthropomorphism: “Does your heart sometimes take flight?” Instead of conferring a human shape, this question starts to undo one. Then, too, why the name Agatha? Baudelaire scholars have searched in vain for a biographical referent, never identifying one, but always presuming that one exists. In the Pléiade edition of Baudelaire’s complete works, a footnote sends the reader to the only other place in Baudelaire’s oeuvre where the name Agathe appears—a page in his Carnets where he is listing debts and appointments. This would seem to indicate that Agathe was indeed a real person. What do we know about her? A footnote to the Carnets tells us she was probably a prostitute. Why? See the poem “Moesta et Errabunda.” This is a particularly stark example of the inevitable circularity of biographical criticism. If Agathe is finally only a proper name written on two different pages in Baudelaire, then the name itself must have a function as a name. The name is a homonym for the word “agate,” a semiprecious stone. Is Agathe really a stone? Does the poem express the Orphic hope of getting a stone to talk? In a poem about wandering, taking flight, getting away from “here,” it is surprising to find that, structurally, each stanza acts out not a departure but a return to its starting point, a repetition of its first line. The poem’s structure is at odds with its apparent theme. But we soon see that the object of the voyage is precisely to return—to return to a prior state, planted in the first stanza as virginity, in the second as motherhood (through the image of the nurse and the pun on mer/mère) and finally as childhood love and furtive pleasure. The voyage outward in space is a figure for the voyage backward in time. The poem’s structure of address backs up, too, most explicitly in the third stanza. The cry apostrophizing train and ship to carry the speaker off leads to a seeming reprise of the opening line, but by this

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point the inanimate has entirely taken over: instead of addressing Agatha directly, the poem asks whether Agatha’s heart ever speaks the line the poet himself has spoken four lines earlier. Agatha herself now drops out of the poem, and direct address is temporarily lost, too, in the grammar of the sentence (“Est-il vrai que . . . ”). The poem seems to empty itself of all its human characters and voices, acting out a loss of animation—which is in fact its subject: the loss of childhood aliveness brought about by the passage of time. The poem thus enacts in its own temporality the loss of animation it situates in the temporality of the speaker’s life. At this point it launches into a new apostrophe, a new direct address to an abstract, lost state: “How far away you are, sweet paradise.” The poem reanimates, addresses an image of fullness and wholeness and perfect correspondence (“what we love is worthy of our loves”). This height of liveliness, however, culminates strangely in an image of death. The heart that formerly kept trying to fly away now drowns in the moment of reaching its destination [“Où dans la volupté pure le coeur se noie!”]. There may be something to gain, therefore, by deferring arrival, as the poem next seems to do by interrupting itself before grammatically completing the fifth stanza. The poem again ceases to employ direct address and ends by asking two drawn-out, self-interrupting questions. Is that paradise now farther away than India or China? Can one call it back and animate it with a silvery voice? This last question—“Peut-on le rappeler avec des cris plaintifs/ Et l’animer encore d’une voix argentine?”—is a perfect description of apostrophe itself: a trope which, by means of the silvery voice of rhetoric, calls up and animates the absent, the lost, and the dead. Apostrophe itself, then, has become not just the poem’s mode but also the poem’s theme. In other words, what the poem ends up wanting to know is not how far away childhood is, but whether its own rhetorical strategies can be effective. The final question becomes: can this gap be bridged; can this loss be healed, through language alone? Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which is perhaps the ultimate apostrophic poem, makes even more explicit the relation between apostrophe and animation. Shelley spends the first three stanzas demonstrating that the west wind is a figure for the power to animate: it is described as the breath of being, moving everywhere, blowing movement and energy through the world, waking it from its summer dream, parting the waters of the Atlantic, uncontrollable. Yet the wind animates by bringing death, winter, destruction. How do the rhetorical strategies of the poem carry out this program of animation through the giving of death? The apostrophe structure is immediately foregrounded by the interjections, four times spelled “O” and four times spelled “oh.” One of the bridges this poem attempts to build is the bridge between the “O” of the pure vocative, Jakobson’s conative function, or the pure presencing of the second person, and the “oh” of pure subjectivity, Jakobson’s emotive function, or the pure presencing of the first person. The first three stanzas are grammatical amplifications of the sentence “O thou, hear, oh, hear!” All the vivid imagery, all the picture painting, come in clauses subordinate to this obsessive direct address. But the poet addresses, gives animation, gives the capacity of responsiveness, to the wind, not in order to make it speak but in order to make it listen to him—in order to make it listen to him doing nothing but address it. It takes him three long stanzas to break out of this

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intense near-tautology. As the fourth stanza begins, the “I” starts to inscribe itself grammatically (but not thematically) where the “thou” has been. A power struggle starts up for control over the poem’s grammar, a struggle which mirrors the rivalry named in such lines as: “If I were now what I was then, I would ne’er have striven as thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.” This rivalry is expressed as a comparison: “less free than thou,” but then: “One too like thee.” What does it mean to be “too like”? Time has created a loss of similarity, a loss of animation that has made the sense of similarity even more hyperbolic. In other words, the poet, in becoming less than—less like the wind—somehow becomes more like the wind in his rebellion against the loss of likeness. In the final stanza the speaker both inscribes and reverses the structure of apostrophe. In saying “be thou me,” he is attempting to restore metaphorical exchange and equality. If apostrophe is the giving of voice, the throwing of voice, the giving of animation, then a poet using it is always in a sense saying to the addressee, “Be thou me.” But this implies that a poet has animation to give. And that is what this poem is saying is not, or is no longer, the case. Shelley’s speaker’s own sense of animation is precisely what is in doubt, so that he is in effect saying to the wind, “I will animate you so that you will animate, or reanimate, me.” “Make me thy lyre. . . . ” Yet the wind, which is to give animation, is also a giver of death. The opposition between life and death has to undergo another reversal, another transvaluation. If death could somehow become a positive force for animation, then the poet would thereby create hope for his own “dead thoughts.” The animator that will blow his words around the world will also instate the power of their deadness, their deadness as power, the place of maximum potential for renewal. This is the burden of the final rhetorical question. Does death necessarily entail rebirth? If winter comes, can spring be far behind? The poem is attempting to appropriate the authority of natural logic—in which spring always does follow winter—in order to clinch the authority of cyclic reversibility for its own prophetic powers. Yet because this clincher is expressed in the form of a rhetorical question, it expresses natural certainty by means of a linguistic device that mimics no natural structure and has no stable one-to-one correspondence with a meaning. The rhetorical question, in a sense, leaves the poem in a state of suspended animation. But that, according to the poem, is the state of maximum potential. Both the Baudelaire and the Shelley, then, end with a rhetorical question that both raises and begs the question of rhetoric. It is as though the apostrophe is ultimately directed toward the reader, to whom the poem is addressing Mayor Koch’s question: “How’m I doing?” What is at stake in both poems is, as we have seen, the fate of a lost child—the speaker’s own former self—and the possibility of a new birth or a reanimation. In the poems that I will discuss next, these structures of apostrophe, animation, and lost life will take on a very different cast through the foregrounding of the question of motherhood and the premise that the life that is lost may be someone else’s. In Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Mother,” the structures of address are shifting and complex. In the first line (“Abortions will not let you forget”), there is a “you” but there is no “I.” Instead, the subject of the sentence is the word “abortions,” which thus assumes a position of grammatical control over the poem. As entities that disallow forgetting, the abortions are not only controlling but

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animate and anthropomorphic, capable of treating persons as objects. While Baudelaire and Shelley addressed the anthropomorphized other in order to repossess their lost selves, Brooks is representing the self as eternally addressed and possessed by the lost, anthropomorphized other. Yet the self that is possessed here is itself already a “you,” not an “I.” The “you” in the opening lines can be seen as an “I” that has become alienated, distanced from itself, and combined with a generalized other, which includes and feminizes the reader of the poem. The grammatical I/Thou starting point of traditional apostrophe has been replaced by a structure in which the speaker is simultaneously eclipsed, alienated, and confused with the addressee. It is already clear that something has happened to the possibility of establishing a clear-cut distinction in this poem between subject and object, agent and victim. The second section of the poem opens with a change in the structure of address. “I” takes up the positional place of “abortions,” and there is temporarily no second person. The first sentence narrates: “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.” What is interesting about this line is that the speaker situates the children’s voices firmly in a traditional romantic locus of lyric apostrophe—the voices of the wind, Shelley’s “West Wind,” say, or Wordsworth’s “gentle breeze.”4 Gwendolyn Brooks, in other words, is here explicitly rewriting the male lyric tradition, textually placing aborted children in the spot formerly occupied by all the dead, inanimate, or absent entities previously addressed by the lyric. And the question of animation and anthropomorphism is thereby given a new and disturbing twist. For if apostrophe is said to involve language’s capacity to give life and human form to something dead or inanimate, what happens when those questions are literalized? What happens when the lyric speaker assumes responsibility for producing the death in the first place, but without being sure of the precise degree of human animation that existed in the entity killed? What is the debate over abortion about, indeed, if not the question of when, precisely, a being assumes a human form? It is not until line 14 that Brooks’s speaker actually addresses the dim killed children. And she does so not directly, but in the form of a self-quotation: “I have said.” This embedding of the apostrophe appears to serve two functions here, just as it did in Baudelaire: a self-distancing function, and a foregrounding of the question of the adequacy of language. But whereas in Baudelaire the distance between the speaker and the lost childhood is what is being lamented, and a restoration of vividness and contact is what is desired, in Brooks the vividness of the contact is precisely the source of the pain. While Baudelaire suffers from the dimming of memory, Brooks suffers from an inability to forget. And while Baudelaire’s speaker actively seeks a fusion between present self and lost child, Brooks’s speaker is attempting to fight her way out of a state of confusion between self and other. This confusion is indicated by the shifts in the poem’s structures of address. It is never clear whether the speaker sees herself as an “I” or a “you,” an addressor or an addressee. The voices in the wind are not created by the lyric apostrophe; they rather initiate the need for one. The initiative of speech seems always to lie in the other. The poem continues to struggle to clarify the relation between “I” and “you,” but in the end it only succeeds in expressing the inability of its language to do so. By not closing the quotation in its final line, the poem, which began by confusing the reader with the aborter, ends by

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implicitly including the reader among those aborted—and loved. The poem can no more distinguish between “I” and “you” than it can come up with a proper definition of life. For all the Yeatsian tripartite aphorisms about life as what is past or passing or to come, Brooks substitutes the impossible middle ground between “You were born, you had body, you died” and “It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.” In line 28, the poem explicitly asks, “Oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?” Surrounding this question are attempts to make impossible distinctions: got/did not get, deliberate/not deliberate, dead/never made. The uncertainty of the speaker’s control as a subject mirrors the uncertainty of the children’s status as an object. It is interesting that the status of the human subject here hinges on the word “deliberate.” The association of deliberateness with human agency has a long (and very American) history. It is deliberateness, for instance, that underlies that epic of separation and self-reliant autonomy, Thoreau’s Walden. “I went to the woods,” writes Thoreau, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” [66]. Clearly, for Thoreau, pregnancy was not an essential fact of life. Yet for him as well as for every human being that has yet existed, someone else’s pregnancy is the very first fact of life. How might the plot of human subjectivity be reconceived (so to speak) if pregnancy rather than autonomy is what raises the question of deliberateness? Much recent feminist work has been devoted to the task of rethinking the relations between subjectivity, autonomy, interconnectedness, responsibility, and gender. Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice (and this focus on “voice” is not irrelevant here) studies gender differences in patterns of ethical thinking. The central ethical question analyzed by Gilligan is precisely the decision whether to have, or not to have, an abortion. The first time I read the book, this struck me as strange. Why, I wondered, would an investigation of gender differences focus on one of the questions about which an even-handed comparison of the male and the female points of view is impossible? Yet this, clearly, turns out to be the point: there is difference because it is not always possible to make symmetrical oppositions. As long as there is symmetry, one is not dealing with difference but rather with versions of the same. Gilligan’s difference arises out of the impossibility of maintaining a rigorously logical binary model for ethical choices. Female logic, as she defines it, is a way of rethinking the logic of choice in a situation in which none of the choices are good. “Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate”: believe that the agent is not entirely autonomous, believe that I can be subject and object of violence at the same time, believe that I have not chosen the conditions under which I must choose. As Gilligan writes of the abortion decision, “the occurrence of the dilemma itself precludes nonviolent resolution” [94]. The choice is not between violence and nonviolence, but between simple violence to a fetus and complex, less determinate violence to an involuntary mother and/or an unwanted child. Readers of Brooks’s poem have often read it as an argument against abortion. And it is certainly clear that the poem is not saying that abortion is a good thing. But to see it as making a simple case for the embryo’s right to life is to assume that a woman who has chosen abortion does not have the right to mourn. It is to assume that no case for abortion can take the woman’s feelings of guilt and loss into consideration, that to take those feelings into account is to deny the

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right to choose the act that produced them. Yet the poem makes no such claim: it attempts the impossible task of humanizing both the mother and the aborted children while presenting the inadequacy of language to resolve the dilemma without violence. What I would like to emphasize is the way in which the poem suggests that the arguments for and against abortion are structured through and through by the rhetorical limits and possibilities of something akin to apostrophe. The fact that apostrophe allows one to animate the inanimate, the dead, or the absent implies that whenever a being is apostrophized, it is thereby automatically animated, anthropomorphized, “person-ified.” (By the same token, the rhetoric of calling makes it difficult to tell the difference between the animate and the inanimate, as anyone with a telephone answering machine can attest.) Because of the ineradicable tendency of language to animate whatever it addresses, rhetoric itself can always have already answered “yes” to the question of whether a fetus is a human being. It is no accident that the anti-abortion film most often shown in the United States should be entitled The Silent Scream. By activating the imagination to believe in the anthropomorphized embryo’s mute responsiveness in exactly the same way that apostrophe does, the film (which is of course itself a highly rhetorical entity) is playing on rhetorical possibilities that are inherent in all linguistically based modes of representation. Yet the function of apostrophe in the Brooks poem is far from simple. If the fact that the speaker addresses the children at all makes them human, then she must pronounce herself guilty of murder—but only if she discontinues her apostrophe. As long as she addresses the children, she can keep them alive, can keep from finishing with the act of killing them. The speaker’s attempt to absolve herself of guilt depends on never forgetting, never breaking the ventriloquism of an apostrophe through which she cannot define her identity otherwise than as the mother eaten alive by the children she has never fed. Who, in the final analysis, exists by addressing whom? The children are a rhetorical extension of the mother, but she, as the poem’s title indicates, has no existence apart from her relation to them. It begins to be clear that the speaker has written herself into a poem she cannot get out of without violence. The violence she commits in the end is to her own language: as the poem ends, the vocabulary shrinks away, words are repeated, nothing but “all” rhymes with “all.” The speaker has written herself into silence. Yet hers is not the only silence in the poem: earlier she had said, “You will never . . . silence or buy with a sweet.” If sweets are for silencing, then by beginning her apostrophe, “Sweets, if I sinned . . . ” the speaker is already saying that the poem, which exists to memorialize those whose lack of life makes them eternally alive, is also attempting to silence once and for all the voices of the children in the wind. It becomes impossible to tell whether language is what gives life or what kills. Women have said again and again “This body is my body!” and they have reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has been like shouting into the wind. —Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion”

It is interesting to note the ways in which legal and moral discussions of abortion tend to employ the same terms as those we have been using to describe

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the figure of apostrophe. “These disciplines [philosophy, theology, and civil and canon law] variously approached the question in terms of the point at which the embryo or fetus became ‘formed’ or recognizably human, or in terms of when a ‘person’ came into being, that is, infused with a ‘soul’ or ‘animated’” [Blackmun, Roe vs. Wade, Abortion: Moral and Legal Perspectives, Garfield and Hennessey, Eds. 15]. The issue of “fetal personhood” [Garfield and Hennessey 55] is of course a way of bringing to a state of explicit uncertainty the fundamental difficulty of defining personhood in general [cf. Luker 6]. Even if the question of defining the nature of “persons” is restricted to the question of understanding what is meant by the word “person” in the United States Constitution (since the Bill of Rights guarantees the rights only of “persons”), there is not at present, and probably will never be, a stable legal definition. Existing discussions of the legality and morality of abortion almost invariably confront, leave unresolved, and detour around the question of the nature and boundaries of human life. As Justice Blackmun puts it in Roe vs. Wade: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer” [27]. In the case of Roe vs. Wade, the legality of abortion is derived from the pregnant couple’s right to privacy—an argument which, as Catharine MacKinnon argues in Roe vs. Wade: A Study in Male Ideology” [Garfield and Hennessey 45– 54], is itself problematic for women, since by protecting “privacy” the courts also protect the injustices of patriarchal sexual arrangements. When the issue is an unwanted pregnancy, some sort of privacy has already, in a sense, been invaded. In order for the personal to avoid being reduced once again to the non-political, privacy, like deliberateness, needs to be rethought in terms of sexual politics. Yet even the attempt to re-gender the issues surrounding abortion is not simple. As Kristin Luker convincingly demonstrates, the debate turns around the claims not only of woman vs. fetus or of woman vs. patriarchal state, but also of woman vs. woman: Pro-choice and pro-life activists live in different worlds, and the scope of their lives, as both adults and children, fortifies them in their belief that their views on abortion are the more correct, more moral, and more reasonable. When added to this is the fact that should “the other side” win, one group of women will see the very real devaluation of their lives and life resources, it is not surprising that the abortion debate has generated so much heat and so little light. [Luker 215] .... Are pro-life activists, as they claim, actually reaching their cherished goal of “educating the public to the humanity of the unborn child?” As we begin to seek an answer, we should recall that motherhood is a topic about which people have very complicated feelings, and because abortion has become the battleground for different definitions of motherhood, neither the pro-life nor the pro-choice movement has ever been “representative” of how most Americans feel about abortion. More to the point, all our data suggest that neither of these groups will ever be able to be representative. [224, emphasis in original]

It is often said, in literary-theoretical circles, that to focus on undecidability is to be apolitical. Everything I have read about the abortion controversy in its present

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form in the United States leads me to suspect that, on the contrary, the undecidable is the political. There is politics precisely because there is undecidability. And there is also poetry. There are striking and suggestive parallels between the “different voices” involved in the abortion debate and the shifting addressstructures of poems like Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Mother.” A glance at several other poems suggests that there tends indeed to be an overdetermined relation between the theme of abortion and the problematization of structures of address. In Anne Sexton’s “The Abortion,” six 3-line stanzas narrate, in the first person, a trip to Pennsylvania where the “I” has obtained an abortion. Three times the poem is interrupted by the italicized lines: Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Like a voice-over narrator taking superegoistic control of the moral bottom line, this refrain (or “burden,” to use the archaic term for both “refrain” and “child in the womb”) puts the first-person narrator’s authority in question without necessarily constituting the voice of a separate entity. Then, in the seventh and final stanza, the poem extends and intensifies this split: Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.

Self-accusing, self-interrupting, the narrating “I” turns on herself (or is it someone else?) as “you,” as “woman.” The poem’s speaker becomes as split as the two senses of the word “bleed.” Once again, “saying what one means” can only be done by ellipsis, violence, illogic, transgression, silence. The question of who is addressing whom is once again unresolved. As we have seen, the question of “when life begins” is complicated partly because of the way in which language blurs the boundary between life and death. In “Menstruation at Forty,” Sexton sees menstruation itself as the loss of a child (“two days gone in blood”)—a child that exists because it can be called: I was thinking of a son. . . . You! . . . Will you be the David or the Susan? ... David! Susan! David! David! ... my carrot, my cabbage, I would have possessed you before all women, calling your name, calling you mine.

The political consequences and complexities of addressing—of “calling”—are made even more explicit in a poem by Lucille Clifton entitled “The Lost Baby Poem.” By choosing the word “dropped” (“i dropped your almost body down”), Clifton renders it unclear whether the child has been lost through abortion or

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through miscarriage. What is clear, however, is that that loss is both mourned and rationalized. The rationalization occurs through the description of a life of hardship, flight, and loss: the image of a child born into winter, slipping like ice into the hands of strangers in Canada, conflates the scene of Eliza’s escape in Uncle Tom’s Cabin with the exile of draft resisters during the Vietnam War. The guilt and mourning occur in the form of an imperative in which the notion of “stranger” returns in the following lines: if i am ever less than a mountain for your definite brothers and sisters. . . . . . . let black men call me stranger always for your never named sake.

The act of “calling” here correlates a lack of name with a loss of membership. For the sake of the one that cannot be called, the speaker invites an apostrophe that would expel her into otherness. The consequences of the death of a child ramify beyond the mother-child dyad to encompass the fate of an entire community. The world that has created conditions under which the loss of a baby becomes desirable must be resisted, not joined. For a black woman, the loss of a baby can always be perceived as a complicity with genocide. The black mother sees her own choice as one of being either a stranger or a rock. The humanization of the lost baby addressed by the poem is thus carried out at the cost of dehumanizing, even of rendering inanimate, the calling mother. Yet each of these poems exists, finally, because a child does not.5 In Adrienne Rich’s poem “To a Poet,” the rivalry between poems and children is made quite explicit. The “you” in the poem is again aborted, but here it is the mother herself who could be called “dim and killed” by the fact not of abortion but of the institution of motherhood. And again, the structures of address are complex and unstable. The deadness of the “you” cannot be named: not suicide, not murder. The question of the life or death of the addressee is raised in an interesting way through Rich’s rewriting of Keats’s sonnet on his mortality. While Keats writes, “When I have fears that I will cease to be” [“When I Have Fears”], Rich writes “and I have fears that you will cease to be.” If poetry is at stake in both intimations of mortality, what is the significance of this shift from “I” to “you”? On the one hand, the very existence of the Keats poem indicates that the pen has succeeded in gleaning something before the brain has ceased to be. No such grammatical guarantee exists for the “you.” Death in the Keats poem is as much a source as it is a threat to writing. Hence, death, for Keats, could be called the mother of poetry while motherhood, for Rich, is precisely the death of poetry. The Western myth of the conjunction of word and flesh implied by the word “incarnate” is undone by images of language floating and vanishing in the toilet bowl of real-flesh needs. The word is not made flesh; rather, flesh unmakes the mother-poet’s word. The difficulty of retrieving the “you” as poet is enacted by the structures of address in the following lines: I write this who fight to write your own words fighting up the falls but for another woman

not for you

dumb

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In saying “I write this not for you,” it is almost as though Rich is excluding as addressee anyone who could conceivably be reading this poem. The poem is setting aside both the “I” and the “you”—the pronouns Benveniste associates with personhood—and reaches instead toward a “she,” which belongs in the category of “non-person.” The poem is thus attempting the impossible task of directly addressing not a second person but a third person—a person who, if she is reading the poem, cannot be the reader the poem has in mind. The poem is trying to include what is by its own grammar excluded from it—to animate through language the non-person, the “other woman.” Therefore, this poem, too, is bursting the limits of its own language, inscribing a logic that it itself reveals to be impossible—but necessary. Even the divorce between writing and childbearing is less absolute than it appears: in comparing the writing of words to the spawning of fish, Rich’s poem reveals itself to be trapped between the inability to combine and the inability to separate the woman’s various roles. In each of these poems, then, a kind of competition is implicitly instated between the bearing of children and the writing of poems. Something unsettling has happened to the analogy often drawn by male poets between artistic creation and procreation. For it is not true that literature contains no examples of male pregnancy. Sir Philip Sidney, in the first sonnet from “Astrophel and Stella,” describes himself as “great with child to speak,” but the poem is ultimately produced at the expense of no literalized child. Sidney’s labor pains are smoothed away by a midwifely apostrophe (“‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write!’”) [The Norton Anthology of Poetry 1:12–14], and by a sort of poetic Caesarian section, out springs the poem we have, in fact, already finished reading. Mallarmé, in “Don du poème,” describes himself as an enemy father seeking nourishment for his monstrous poetic child from the woman within apostrophe-shot who is busy nursing a literalized daughter. But since the woman presumably has two breasts, there seems to be enough to go around. As Shakespeare assures the fair young man, “But were some child of yours alive that time,/ You should live twice in it and in my rhyme” [Sonnets 17:13–14]. Apollinaire, in his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, depicts woman as a de-maternalized neo-Malthusian leaving the task of childbearing to a surrealistically fertile husband. But again, nothing more disturbing than Tiresian cross-dressing seems to occur. Children are alive and well, and far more numerous than ever. Indeed, in one of the dedicatory poems, Apollinaire indicates that his drama represents a return to health from the literary reign of the poète maudit: La féconde raison a jailli de ma fable, Plus de femme stérile et non plus d’avortons . . . [Fertile reason springs out of my fable, No more sterile women, no aborted children]

This dig at Baudelaire, among others, reminds us that in the opening poem to Les Fleurs du mal (“Bénédiction”), Baudelaire represents the poet himself as an abortion manqué, cursed by the poisonous words of a rejecting mother. The question of the unnatural seems more closely allied with the bad mother than with the pregnant father.

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Even in the seemingly more obvious parallel provided by poems written to dead children by male poets, it is not really surprising to find that the substitution of poem for child lacks the sinister undertones and disturbed address exhibited by the abortion poems we have been discussing. Ben Jonson, in “On My First Son,” calls his dead child “his best piece of poetry,” while Mallarmé, in an only semi-guilty Aufhebung, transfuses the dead Anatole to the level of an idea. More recently, Jon Silkin has written movingly of the death of a handicapped child (“something like a person”) as a change of silence, not a splitting of voice. And Michael Harper, in “Nightmare Begins Responsibility,” stresses the powerlessness and distrust of a black father leaving his dying son to the care of a “white-doctor-who-breathed-for-him-all-night.” But again, whatever the complexity of the voices in that poem, the speaker does not split self-accusingly or infra-symbiotically in the ways we have noted in the abortion/motherhood poems. While one could undoubtedly find counter-examples on both sides, it is not surprising that the substitution of art for children should not be inherently transgressive for the male poet. Men have in a sense always had no choice but to substitute something for the literal process of birth. That, at least, is the belief that has long been encoded into male poetic conventions. It is as though male writing were by nature procreative, while female writing is somehow by nature infanticidal. It is, of course, as problematic as it is tempting to draw general conclusions about differences between male and female writing on the basis of these somewhat random examples. Yet it is clear that a great many poetic effects may be colored according to expectations articulated through the gender of the poetic speaker. Whether or not men and women would “naturally” write differently about dead children, there is something about the connection between motherhood and death that refuses to remain comfortably and conventionally figurative. When a woman speaks about the death of children in any sense other than that of pure loss, a powerful taboo is being violated. The indistinguishability of miscarriage and abortion in the Clifton poem indeed points to the notion that any death of a child is perceived as a crime committed by the mother, something a mother ought by definition to be able to prevent. That these questions should be so inextricably connected to the figure of apostrophe, however, deserves further comment. For there may be a deeper link between motherhood and apostrophe than we have hitherto suspected. The verbal development of the infant, according to Lacan, begins as a demand addressed to the mother, out of which the entire verbal universe is spun. Yet the mother addressed is somehow a personification, not a person—a personification of presence or absence, of Otherness itself. Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for. It is demand of a presence or of an absence—which is what is manifested in the primordial relation to the mother, pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Insofar as [man’s] needs are subjected to demand, they return to him alienated. This is not the effect of his real dependence . . . , but rather the turning into signifying form as such, from the fact that it is from the locus of the Other that its message is emitted. [Ecrits 286]

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If demand is the originary vocative, which assures life even as it inaugurates alienation, then it is not surprising that questions of animation inhere in the rhetorical figure of apostrophe. The reversal of apostrophe we noted in the Shelley poem (“animate me”) would be no reversal at all, but a reinstatement of the primal apostrophe in which, despite Lacan’s disclaimer, there is precisely a link between demand and animation, between apostrophe and life-and-death dependency.6 If apostrophe is structured like demand, and if demand articulates the primal relation to the mother as a relation to the Other, then lyric poetry itself—summed up in the figure of apostrophe—comes to look like the fantastically intricate history of endless elaborations and displacements of the single cry, “Mama!” The question these poems are asking, then, is what happens when the poet is speaking as a mother—a mother whose cry arises out of—and is addressed to—a dead child? It is no wonder that the distinction between addressor and addressee should become so problematic in poems about abortion. It is also no wonder that the debate about abortion should refuse to settle into a single voice. Whether or not one has ever been a mother, everyone participating in the debate has once been a child. Rhetorical, psychoanalytical, and political structures are profoundly implicated in one another. The difficulty in all three would seem to reside in the attempt to achieve a full elaboration of any discursive position other than that of child.

NOTES 1. I would like to thank Tom Keenan of Yale University for bringing this text to my attention. The present essay has in fact benefited greatly from the suggestions of others, among whom I would like particularly to thank Marge Garber, Rachel Jacoff, Carolyn Williams, Helen Vendler, Steven Melville, Ted Morris, Stamos Metzidakis, Steven Ungar, and Richard Yarborough. 2. Cf. also Paul de Man, in “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory”: “Now it is certainly beyond question that the figure of address is recurrent in lyric poetry, to the point of constituting the generic definition of, at the very least, the ode (which can, in turn, be seen as paradigmatic for poetry in general)” [61]. 3. For complete texts of the poems under discussion, see the appendix to this article in its original form, in Diacritics vol. 5, No. 4 (1975):29–47. 4. It is interesting to note that the “gentle breeze,” apostrophized as “Messenger” and “Friend” in the 1805–6 Prelude (Book 1, line 5), is, significantly, not directly addressed in the 1850 version. One might ask whether this change stands as a sign of the much-discussed waning of Wordsworth’s poetic inspiration, or whether it is, rather, one of a number of strictly rhetorical shifts that give the impression of a wane, just as the shift in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry from her early impersonal poetic narratives to her more recent direct-address poems gives the impression of a politicization. 5. For additional poems dealing with the loss of babies, see the anthology The Limits of Miracles collected by Marion Deutsche Cohen. Sharon Dunn, editor of the Agni Review, told me recently that she has in fact noticed that such poems have begun to form almost a new genre. 6. An interesting example of a poem in which an apostrophe confers upon the total Other the authority to animate the self is Randall Jarrell’s “A Sick Child,” which ends: “All that I’ve never thought of—think of me!”

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WORKS CITED Allison et al., Eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Apollinaire, Guillaume. Les Mamelles de Tirésias. L’Enchanteur pourrissant. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Pléiade, 1976. Brooks, Gwendolyn. “The Mother.” Selected Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Clifton, Lucille. “The Lost Baby Poem.” Good News About the Earth. New York: Random House, 1972. Cohen, Marion Deutsche, Ed. The Limits of Miracles. South Hadley, Eng.: Bergin & Garvey, 1985. Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. de Man, Paul. “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Hosek and Parker. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. Harper, Michael. Nightmare Begins Responsibility. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1975. Jarrell, Randall. “A Sick Child.” The Voice that is Great within Us. Ed. Hayden Caruth. New York: Bantam, 1970. Jonson, Ben. “On My First Son.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Allison et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Keats, John. “When I Have Fears.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Allison et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Pléiade, 1961. ———. Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole. Ed. Richard. Paris: Seuil, 1961. Rich, Adrienne. “To a Poet.” The Dream of a Common Language. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Sexton, Anne. “The Abortion.” The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Shakespeare, William. Sonnets. Ed. Booth. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ode to the West Wind.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Allison et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Sidney, Sir Philip. “Astrophel and Stella.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Allison et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “A Defense of Abortion.” Rights, Restitution, Risk. Ed. William Parent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York: Signet, 1960. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Ed. de Selincourt. London: Oxford UP, 1959.

BIDDY MARTIN AND CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY

FEMINIST POLITICS

What’s Home Got to Do with It? (1986)





















We began working on this project after visiting our respective “homes” in Lynchburg, Virginia and Bombay, India in the fall of 1984—visits fraught with conflict, loss, memories, and desires we both considered to be of central importance in thinking about our relationship to feminist politics. In spite of significant differences in our personal histories and academic backgrounds, and the displacements we both experience, the political and intellectual positions we share made it possible for us to work on, indeed to write, this essay together. Our separate readings of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s autobiographical narrative entitled “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” became the occasion for thinking through and developing more precisely some of the ideas about feminist theory and politics that have occupied us. We are interested in the configuration of home, identity, and community; more specifically, in the power and appeal of “home” as a concept and a desire, its occurrence as metaphor in feminist writings, and its challenging presence in the rhetoric of the New Right. Both leftists and feminists have realized the importance of not handing over notions of home and community to the Right. Far too often, however, both male leftists and feminists have responded to the appeal of a rhetoric of home and family by merely reproducing the most conventional articulations of those terms in their own writings. In her recent work, Zillah Eisenstein identifies instances of what she labels revisionism within liberal, radical, and socialist feminist writings: texts by women such as Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, in which the pursuit of safe places and ever-narrower conceptions of community relies on unexamined notions of home, family, and nation, and severely limits the scope of the feminist inquiry and struggle.1 The challenge, then, is to find ways of conceptualizing community differently without dismissing its appeal and importance. It is significant that the notion of “home” has been taken up in a range of writings by women of color, who cannot easily assume “home” within feminist communities as they have been constituted.2 Bernice Johnson Reagon’s critique of white feminists’ incorporation of “others” into their “homes” is a warning to all feminists that “we are going to have to break out of little barred rooms”

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and cease holding tenaciously to the invisible and only apparently self-evident boundaries around that which we define as our own, “if we are going to have anything to do with what makes it into the next century.” Reagon does not deny the appeal and the importance of “home” but challenges us to stop confusing it with political coalition and suggests that it takes what she calls an old-age perspective to know when to engage and when to withdraw, when to break out and when to consolidate.3 For our discussion of the problematics of “home,” we chose a text that demonstrates the importance of both narrative and historical specificity in the attempt to reconceptualize the relations between “home,” “identity,” and political change. The volume in which Pratt’s essay appears, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Long Haul Press, 1984), is written by Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, each of whom ostensibly represents a different experience and identity and consequently a different (even if feminist) perspective on racism and anti-Semitism. What makes this text unusual, in spite of what its title may suggest, is its questioning of the all-too-common conflation of experience, identity, and political perspective. What we have tried to draw out of this text is the way in which it unsettles not only any notion of feminism as an all-encompassing home but also the assumption that there are discrete, coherent, and absolutely separate identities—homes within feminism, so to speak—based on absolute divisions between various sexual, racial, or ethnic identities. What accounts for the unsettling of boundaries and identities, and the questioning of conventional notions of experience, is the task that the contributors have set for themselves: to address certain specific questions and so to situate themselves in relation to the tensions between feminism, racism, and anti-Semitism. The “unity” of the individual subject, as well as the unity of feminism, is situated and specified as the product of the interpretation of personal histories; personal histories that are themselves situated in relation to the development within feminism of particular questions and critiques. Pratt’s autobiographical narrative is the narrative of a woman who identifies herself as white, middle-class, Christian-raised, southern, and lesbian. She makes it very clear that unity through incorporation has too often been the white middle-class feminist’s mode of adding on difference without leaving the comfort of home. What Pratt sets out to explore are the exclusions and repressions which support the seeming homogeneity, stability, and self-evidence of “white identity,” which is derived from and dependent on the marginalization of differences within as well as “without.” Our decision to concentrate on Pratt’s narrative has to do with our shared concern that critiques of what is increasingly identified as “white” or “Western” feminism unwittingly leave the terms of West/East, white/nonwhite polarities intact; they do so, paradoxically, by starting from the premise that Western feminist discourse is inadequate or irrelevant to women of color or Third World women. The implicit assumption here, which we wish to challenge, is that the terms of a totalizing feminist discourse are adequate to the task of articulating the situation of white women in the West. We would contest that assumption and argue that the reproduction of such polarities only serves to concede “feminism” to the “West” all over again. The potential consequence is the repeated failure to contest the

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feigned homogeneity of the West and what seems to be a discursive and political stability of the hierarchical West/East divide. Pratt’s essay enacts as much as it treats the contradictory relations between skin, blood, heart, and identity and between experience, identity, and community in ways that we would like to analyze and discuss in more detail. Like the essays that follow it, it is a form of writing that not only anticipates and integrates diverse audiences or readers but also positions the narrator as reader. The perspective is multiple and shifting, and the shifts in perspective are enabled by the attempts to define self, home, and community that are at the heart of Pratt’s enterprise. The historical grounding of shifts and changes allows for an emphasis on the pleasures and terrors of interminable boundary confusions, but insists, at the same time, on our responsibility for remapping boundaries and renegotiating connections. These are partial in at least two senses of the word: politically partial, and without claim to wholeness or finality. It is this insistence that distinguishes the work of a Reagon or a Pratt from the more abstract critiques of “feminism” and the charges of totalization that come from the ranks of antihumanist intellectuals. For without denying the importance of their vigilante attacks on humanist beliefs in “man” and Absolute Knowledge wherever they appear, it is equally important to point out the political limitations of an insistence on “indeterminacy” which implicitly, when not explicitly, denies the critic’s own situatedness in the social, and in effect refuses to acknowledge the critic’s own institutional home. Pratt, on the contrary, succeeds in carefully taking apart the bases of her own privilege by resituating herself again and again in the social, by constantly referring to the materiality of the situation in which she finds herself. The form of the personal historical narrative forces her to re-anchor herself repeatedly in each of the positions from which she speaks, even as she works to expose the illusory coherence of those positions. For the subject of such a narrative, it is not possible to speak from, or on behalf of, an abstract indeterminacy. Certainly, Pratt’s essay would be considered a “conventional” (and therefore suspect) narrative from the point of view of contemporary deconstructive methodologies, because of its collapsing of author and text, its unreflected authorial intentionality, and its claims to personal and political authenticity. Basic to the (at least implicit) disavowal of conventionally realist and autobiographical narrative by deconstructionist critics is the assumption that difference can emerge only through self-referential language, i.e., through certain relatively specific formal operations present in the text or performed upon it. Our reading of Pratt’s narrative contends that a so-called conventional narrative such as Pratt’s is not only useful but essential in addressing the politically and theoretically urgent questions surrounding identity politics. Just as Pratt refuses the methodological imperative to distinguish between herself as actual biographical referent and her narrator, we have at points allowed ourselves to let our reading of the text speak for us. It is noteworthy that some of the American feminist texts and arguments that have been set up as targets to be taken apart by deconstructive moves are texts and arguments that have been critiqued from within “American” feminist communities for their homogenizing, even colonialist gestures; they have been critiqued, in fact, by those most directly affected by the exclusions that have

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made possible certain radical and cultural feminist generalizations. Antihumanist attacks on “feminism” usually set up “American feminism” as a “straw man” and so contribute to the production—or, at the very least, the reproduction—of an image of “Western feminism” as conceptually and politically unified in its monolithically imperialist moves. We do not wish to deny that too much of the conceptual and political work of “Western” feminists is encumbered by analytic strategies that do indeed homogenize the experiences and conditions of women across time and culture; nor do we wish to deny that “Western” feminists have often taken their own positions as referent, thereby participating in the colonialist moves characteristic of traditional humanist scholarship. However, such critiques run the risk of falling into culturalist arguments, and these tend to have the undesired effect of solidifying the identification of feminism with the West rather than challenging the hegemony of specific analytic and political positions. The refusal to engage in the kind of feminist analysis that is more differentiated, more finely articulated, and more attentive to the problems raised in poststructuralist theory makes “bad feminism” a foil supporting the privilege of the critics’ “indeterminacy.” Wary of the limitations of an antihumanism which refuses to rejoin the political, we purposely chose a text that speaks from within “Western feminist discourse” and attempts to expose the bases and supports of privilege even as it renegotiates political and personal alliances.4 One of the most striking aspects of “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” is the text’s movement away from the purely personal, visceral experience of identity suggested by the title to a complicated working out of the relationship between home, identity, and community that calls into question the notion of a coherent, historically continuous, stable identity and works to expose the political stakes concealed in such equations. An effective way of analyzing Pratt’s conceptualization of these relationships is to focus on the manner in which the narrative works by grounding itself in the geography, demography, and architecture of the communities that are her “homes”; these factors function as an organizing mode in the text, providing a specific concreteness and movement for the narrative. Correspondingly, the narrative politicizes the geography, demography, and architecture of these communities—Pratt’s homes at various times of her history—by discovering local histories of exploitation and struggle. These are histories quite unlike the ones she is familiar with, the ones with which she grew up. Pratt problematizes her ideas about herself by juxtaposing the assumed histories of her family and childhood, predicated on the invisibility of the histories of people unlike her, to the layers of exploitation and struggles of different groups of people for whom these geographical sites were also home. Each of the three primary geographical locations—Alabama (the home of her childhood and college days), North Carolina (the place of her marriage and coming out as a lesbian), and Washington, D.C. (characterized by her acute awareness of racism, anti-Semitism, class, and global politics)—is constructed on the tension between two specific modalities: being home and not being home. “Being home” refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and

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resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself. Because these locations acquire meaning and function as sites of personal and historical struggles, they work against the notion of an unproblematic geographic location of home in Pratt’s narrative. Similarly, demographic information functions to ground and concretize race, class, and gender conflicts. Illusions of home are always undercut by the discovery of the hidden demographics of particular places, as demography also carries the weight of histories of struggle. Pratt speaks of being “shaped” in relation to the buildings and streets in the town in which she lived. Architecture and the layouts of particular towns provide concrete, physical anchoring points in relation to which she both sees and does not see certain people and things in the buildings and on the streets. However, the very stability, familiarity, and security of these physical structures are undermined by the discovery that these buildings and streets witnessed and obscured particular race, class, and gender struggles. The realization that these “growing up places” are hometowns where Pratt’s eye “has only let in what I have been taught to see” politicizes and undercuts any physical anchors she might use to construct a coherent notion of home or her identity in relation to it. Each of us carries around those growing up places, the institutions, a sort of backdrop, a stage set. So often we act out the present against the backdrop of the past, within a frame of perception that is so familiar, so safe that it is terrifying to risk changing it even when we know our perceptions are distorted, limited, constricted by that old view.

The traces of her past remain with her but must be challenged and reinterpreted. Pratt’s own histories are in constant flux. There is no linear progression based on “that old view,” no developmental notion of her own identity or self. There is instead a constant expansion of her “constricted eye,” a necessary reevaluation and return to the past in order to move forward to the present. Geography, demography, and architecture, as well as the configuration of her relationships to particular people (her father, her lover, her workmate), serve to indicate the fundamentally relational nature of identity and the negations on which the assumption of a singular, fixed, and essential self is based. For the narrator, such negativity is represented by a rigid identity such as that of her father, which sustains its appearance of stability by defining itself in terms of what it is not: not black, not female, not Jewish, not Catholic, not poor, etc. The “self” in this narrative is not an essence or truth concealed by patriarchal layers of deceit and lying in wait of discovery, revelation, or birth.5 It is this very conception of self that Pratt likens to entrapment, constriction, a bounded fortress that must be transgressed, shattered, opened onto that world which has been made invisible and threatening by the security of home. While Pratt is aware that stable notions of self and identity are based on exclusion and secured by terror, she is also aware of the risk and terror inherent in breaking through the walls of home. The consciousness of these contradictions characterizes the narrative. In order to indicate the fundamentally constructive, interpretive nature of Pratt’s narrative, we have chosen to analyze the text following its own narrative organization in three different scenarios: scenarios that are characterized not by

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chronological development but by discontinuous moments of consciousness. The scenarios are constructed around moments in Pratt’s own history which propel her in new directions through their fundamental instability and built-in contradictions. Scenario 1 I live in a part of Washington, D.C. that white suburbanites called “the jungle” during the uprising of the ’60s—perhaps still do, for all I know. When I walk the two-and-a-half blocks to H St. NE, to stop in at the bank, to leave my boots off at the shoe-repair-and-lock shop, I am most usually the only white person in sight. I’ve seen two other whites, women, in the year I’ve lived here. [This does not count white folks in cars, passing through. In official language, H St. NE, is known as “The H Street Corridor,” as in something to be passed through quickly, going from your place, on the way to elsewhere.]

This paragraph of the text locates Minnie Bruce Pratt in a place that does not exist as a legitimate possibility for home on a white people’s map of Washington, D.C. That place is H Street N.E., where Pratt lives, a section of town referred to as “the jungle” by white suburbanites in the sixties, also known as “the H Street Corridor as in something to be passed through quickly, going from your place to elsewhere” (p. 11). That, then, is potentially Pratt’s home, the community in which she lives. But this “jungle,” this corridor, is located at the edge of homes of white folk. It is a place outside the experience of white people, where Pratt must be the outsider because she is white. This “being on the edge” is what characterizes her “being in the world as it is,” as opposed to remaining within safe bounded places with their illusion of acceptance. “I will try to be at the edge between my fear and outside, on the edge at my skin, listening, asking what new thing will I hear, will I see, will I let myself feel, beyond the fear,” she writes. It is her situation on the edge that expresses the desire and the possibility of breaking through the narrow circle called home without pretense that she can or should “jump out of her skin” or deny her past. The salience of demography, a white woman in a black neighborhood, afraid to be too familiar and neighborly with black people, is acutely felt. Pratt is comforted by the sounds of the voices of black people, for they make her “feel at home” and remind her of her father’s southern voice, until she runs into Mr. Boone, the janitor with the downcast head and the “yes ma’ams,” and Pratt responds in “the horrid cheerful accents of a white lady.” The pain is not just the pain of rejection by this black man; it is the pain of acknowledging the history of the oppression and separation of different groups of people which shatters the protective boundaries of her self and renders her desire to speak with others problematic. The context of this personal interaction is set immediately in terms of geographical and political history. Mr. Boone’s place of origin (hometown) is evoked through the narration of the history of local resistance struggles in the region from which he comes. He’s a dark, red-brown man from the Yemessee in South Carolina—that swampy land of Indian resistance and armed communities of fugitive slaves, that marshy land at the headwaters of the Combahee, once site of enormous

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rice plantations and location of Harriet Tubman’s successful military action that freed many slaves.

This history of resistance has the effect of disrupting forever all memories of a safe, familiar southern home. As a result of this interaction, Pratt now remembers that home was repressive space built on the surrendering of all responsibility. Pratt’s self-reflection, brought on by a consciousness of difference, is nourished and expanded by thinking contextually of other histories and of her own responsibility and implication in them. What we find extraordinary about Pratt as narrator (and person) is her refusal to allow guilt to trap her within the boundaries of a coherent “white” identity. It is this very refusal that makes it possible for her to make the effort to educate herself about the histories of her own and other peoples—an education that indicates to her her own implication in those histories. Pratt’s approach achieves significance in the context of other white feminists’ responses to the charge of racism in the women’s movement. An all-too-common response has been self-paralyzing guilt and/or defensiveness; another has been the desire to be educated by women of color. The problem is exacerbated by the tendency on the part of some women of color to assume the position of ultimate critic or judge on the basis of the authenticity of their personal experience of oppression. An interesting example of the assignment of fixed positions—the educator/critic (woman of color) and the guilty and silent listener (white woman)—is a recent essay written collaboratively by Elizabeth Spelman and Maria Lugones. The dynamics set up would seem to exempt both parties from the responsibilities of working through the complex historical relations between and among structures of domination and oppression. In this scenario, the street scene is particularly effective, both spatially and metaphorically. The street evokes a sense of constant movement, change, and temporality. For instance, Pratt can ask herself why the young black woman did not speak to her, why she herself could not speak to the professional white woman in the morning but does at night, why the woman does not respond—all in the space of one evening’s walk down three blocks. The meetings on the street also allow for a focus on the racial and ethnic demography of the community as a way of localizing racial, sexual, and class tensions. Since her present location is nowhere (the space does not exist for white people), she constantly has to problematize and define herself anew in relation to people she meets in the street. There is an acute consciousness of being white, woman, lesbian, and Christian-raised, and of which of these aspects is salient in different “speakings.” Instead, when I walk out in my neighborhood, each speaking to another person has become fraught for me, with the history of race and sex and class; as I walk I have a constant interior discussion with myself questioning how I acknowledge the presence of another, what I know or don’t know about them, and what it means how they acknowledge me.

Thus, walking down the street and speaking to various people—a young white man, young black woman, young professional white woman, young black man, older white woman are all rendered acutely complex and contradictory in terms of actual speakings, imagined speakings, and actual and imagined motivations,

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responses, and implications—there is no possibility of a coherent self with a continuity of responses across these different “speaking-to’s.” History intervenes. For instance, a respectful answer from a young black man might well be “the response violently extorted by history.” The voices, sounds, hearing, and sight in particular interactions or within “speaking to’s” carry with them their own particular histories; this narrative mode breaks the boundaries of Pratt’s experience of being protected, of being a majority. Scenario 2 Yet I was shaped by my relation to those buildings and to the people in the buildings, by ideas of who should be in the Board of Education, of who should be in the bank handling money, of who should have the guns and the keys to the jail, of who should be in the jail; and I was shaped by what I didn’t see, or didn’t notice, on those streets.

The second scenario is constructed in relation to her childhood home in Alabama and deals very centrally with her relation to her father. Again, she explores that relationship to her father in terms of the geography, demography, and architecture of the hometown; again she reconstructs it by uncovering knowledges, not only the knowledge of those Others who were made invisible to her as a child but also the suppressed knowledge of her own family background. The importance of her elaborating the relation to her father through spatial relations and historical knowledges lies in the contextualization of that relation, and the consequent avoidance of any purely psychological explanation. What is effected, then, is the unsettling of any self-evident relation between blood, skin, heart. And yet, here as elsewhere, the essential relation between blood, skin, heart, home, and identity is challenged without dismissing the power and appeal of those connections. Pratt introduces her childhood home and her father in order to explain the source of her need to change “what she was born into,” to explain what she, or any person who benefits from privileges of class and race, has to gain from change. This kind of self-reflexivity characterizes the entire narrative and takes the form of an attempt to avoid the roles and points of enunciation that she identifies as the legacy of her culture: the roles of judge, martyr, preacher, and peacemaker, and the typically white, Christian, middle-class, and liberal pretense of a concern for Others, an abstract moral or ethical concern for what is right. Her effort to explain her own need to change is elaborated through the memory of childhood scenes, full of strong and suggestive architectural/spatial metaphors which are juxtaposed with images suggesting alternative possibilities. The effort to explain her motivation for change reminds her of her father. “When I try to think of this, I think of my father. . . . ” Pratt recounts a scene from her childhood in which her father took her up the marble steps of the courthouse in the center of the town, the courthouse in which her grandfather had judged for forty years, to the clock tower in order to show her the town from the top and the center. But the father’s desire to have her see as he saw, to position her in relation to her town and the world as he was positioned, failed. She was unable, as a small child, to make it to the top of the clock tower and could not see what she would have seen had she been her father or taken his place. From her vantage point as an adult, she is now able to reconstruct and analyze what she would have seen and would not have seen from the center and the top

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of the town. She would have seen the Methodist church, the Health Department, for example, and she would not have seen the sawmill of Four Points where the white mill folks lived, or the houses of blacks in Veneer Mill quarters. She had not been able to take that height because she was not her father and could not become like him: she was a white girl, not a boy. This assertion of her difference from the father is undercut, however, in a reversal characteristic of the moves enacted throughout the essay, when she begins a new paragraph by acknowledging: “Yet I was shaped by my relation to those buildings and to the people in the buildings.” What she has gained by rejecting the father’s position and vision, by acknowledging her difference from him, is represented as a way of looking, a capacity for seeing the world in overlapping circles, “like movement on the millpond after a fish has jumped, instead of the courthouse square with me at the middle, even if I am on the ground.” The contrast between the vision that her father would have her learn and her own vision, her difference and “need,” emerges as the contrast between images of constriction, of entrapment, or ever-narrowing circles with a bounded self at the center—the narrow steps to the roof of the courthouse, the clock tower with a walled ledge—and, on the other hand, the image of the millpond with its ever shifting centers. The apparently stable, centered position of the father is revealed to be profoundly unstable, based on exclusions, and characterized by terror. Change, however, is not a simple escape from constraint to liberation. There is no shedding the literal fear and figurative law of the father, and no reaching a final realm of freedom. There is no new place, no new home. Since neither her view of history nor her construction of herself through it is linear, the past, home, and the father leave traces that are constantly reabsorbed into a shifting vision. She lives, after all, on the edge. Indeed, that early experience of separation and difference from the father is remembered not only in terms of the possibility of change but also in relation to the pain of loss, the loneliness of change, the undiminished desire for home, for familiarity, for some coexistence of familiarity and difference. The day she couldn’t make it to the top of the tower “marks the last time I can remember us doing something together, just the two of us; thereafter, I knew on some level that my place was with women, not with him, not with men.” This statement would seem to make the divisions simple, would seem to provide an overriding explanation of her desire for change, for dealing with racism and anti-Semitism, would seem to make her one of a monolithic group of Others in relation to the white father. However, this division, too, is not allowed to remain stable and so to be seen as a simple determinant of identity. Near the end of her narrative, Pratt recounts a dream in which her father entered her room carrying something like a heavy box, which he put down on her desk. After he left, she noticed that the floor of her room had become a field of dirt with rows of tiny green seed just sprouting. We quote from her narration of the dream, her ambivalence about her father’s presence, and her interpretation of it: He was so tired; I flung my hands out angrily, told him to go, back to my mother; but crying, because my heart ached; he was my father and so tired. . . . The box was still there, with what I feared: my responsibility for

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what the men of my culture have done. . . . I was angry: why should I be left with this: I didn’t want it: I’d done my best for years to reject it: I wanted no part of what was in it: the benefits of my privilege, the restrictions, the injustice, the pain, the broken urgings of the heart, the unknown horrors. And yet it is mine: I am my father’s daughter in the present, living in a world he and my folks helped create. A month after I dreamed this he died; I honor the grief of his life by striving to change much of what he believed in: and my own grief by acknowledging that I saw him caught in the grip of racial, sexual, cultural fears that I still am trying to understand in myself.

Only one aspect of experience is given a unifying and originating function in the text: that is, her lesbianism and love for other women, which has motivated and continues to motivate her efforts to reconceptualize and re-create both her self and home. A careful reading of the narrative demonstrates the complexity of lesbianism, which is constructed as an effect, as well as a source, of her political and familial positions. Its significance, that is, is demonstrated in relation to other experiences rather than assumed as essential determinant. What lesbianism becomes as the narrative unfolds is that which makes “home” impossible, which makes her self nonidentical, which makes her vulnerable, removing her from the protection afforded those women within privileged races and classes who do not transgress a limited sphere of movement. Quite literally, it is her involvement with another woman that separates the narrator not only from her husband but from her children, as well. It is that which threatens to separate her from her mother, and that which remains a silence between herself and her father. That silence is significant, since, as she points out—and this is a crucial point—her lesbianism is precisely what she can deny, and indeed must deny, in order to benefit fully from the privilege of being white and middle-class and Christian. She can deny it, but only at great expense to herself. Her lesbianism is what she experiences most immediately as the limitation imposed on her by the family, culture, race, and class that afforded her both privilege and comfort, at a price. Learning at what price privilege, comfort, home, and secure notions of self are purchased, the price to herself and ultimately to others is what makes lesbianism a political motivation as well as a personal experience. It is significant that lesbianism is neither marginalized nor essentialized, but constructed at various levels of experience and abstraction. There are at least two ways in which lesbianism has been isolated in feminist discourse: the homophobic oversight and relegation of it to the margins, and the lesbian-feminist centering of it, which has had at times the paradoxical effect of removing lesbianism and sexuality from their embeddedness in social relations. In Pratt’s narrative, lesbianism is that which exposes the extreme limits of what passes itself off as simply human, as universal, as unconstrained by identity, namely, the position of the white middle class. It is also a positive source of solidarity, community, and change. Change has to do with the transgression of boundaries, those boundaries so carefully, so tenaciously, so invisibly drawn around white identity.6 Change has to do with the transgression of those boundaries. The insight that white, Christian, middle-class identity, as well as comfort and home, is purchased at a high price is articulated very compellingly in relation to her father. It is significant that there is so much attention to her relation to her father, from whom she describes herself as having been estranged—significant

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and exemplary of what we think is so important about this narrative.7 What gets articulated are the contradictions in that relation, her difference from the father, her rejection of his positions, and at the same time her connections to him, her love for him, the ways in which she is his daughter. The complexity of the father-daughter relationship and Pratt’s acknowledgment of the differences within it—rather than simply between her self and her father—make it impossible to be satisfied with a notion of difference from the father, literal or figurative, which would (and in much feminist literature does) exempt the daughter from her implication in the structures of privilege/oppression, structures that operate in ways much more complex than the male/female split itself. The narrator expresses the pain, the confusion attendant upon this complexity. The narrative recounts the use of threat and of protections to consolidate home, identity, community, and privilege, and in the process exposes the underside of the father’s protection. Pratt recalls a memory of a night, during the height of the civil rights demonstrations in Alabama, when her father called her in to read her an article in which Martin Luther King, Jr. was accused of sexually abusing young teenaged girls. “I can only guess that he wanted me to feel that my danger, my physical, sexual danger, would be the result of the release of others from containment. I felt frightened and profoundly endangered, by King, by my father: I could not answer him. It was the first, the only time, I could not answer him. It was the first, the only time, he spoke of sex, in any way, to me.” What emerges is the consolidation of the white home in response to a threatening outside. The rhetoric of sexual victimization or vulnerability of white women is used to establish and enforce unity among whites and to create the myth of the black rapist.8 Once again, her experience within the family is reinterpreted in relation to the history of race relations in an “outside” in which the family is implicated. What Pratt integrates in the text at such points is a wealth of historical information and analysis of the ideological and social/political operations beyond her “home.” In addition to the historical information she unearths both about the atrocities committed in the name of protection, by the Ku Klux Klan and white society in general, and about the resistance to those forms of oppression, she points to the underside of the rhetoric of home, protection, and threatening Others that is currently promoted by Reagan and the New Right. “It is this threatening ‘protection’ that white Christian men in the U.S. are now offering.” When one conceives of power differently, in terms of its local, institutional, discursive formations, of its positivity, and in terms of the production rather than suppression of forces, then unity is exposed to be a potentially repressive fiction.9 It is at the moment at which groups and individuals are conceived as agents, as social actors, as desiring subjects that unity, in the sense of coherent group identity, commonality, and shared experience, becomes difficult. Individuals do not fit neatly into unidimensional, self-identical categories. Hence the need for a new sense of political community which gives up the desire for the kind of home where the suppression of positive differences underwrites familial identity. Pratt’s narrative makes it clear that connections have to be made at levels other than abstract political interests. And the ways in which intimacy and emotional solidarity figure in notions of political community avoid an all-too-common trivialization of the emotional, on the one hand, and romanticization of the political, on the other.

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Scenario 3 Every day I drove around the market house, carrying my two boys between home and grammar school and day care. To me it was an impediment to the flow of traffic, awkward, anachronistic. Sometimes in early spring light it seemed quaint. I had no knowledge and no feeling of the sweat and blood of people’s lives that had been mortared into its bricks: nor of their independent joy apart from that place.

The third scenario involves her life in an eastern rural North Carolina town, to which she came in 1974 with her husband and two children. Once again Pratt characterizes her relation to the town, as well as to her husband and children, by means of demographic and architectural markers and metaphors that situate her at the periphery of this “place which is so much like home”: a place in which everything would seem to revolve around a stable center, in this case the market house. I drove around the market house four times a day, traveling on the surface of my own life: circular, repetitive, like one of the games at the county fair. . . .

Once again she is invited to view her home town from the top and center, specifically from the point of view of the white “well-to-do folks,” for whom the history of the market house consisted of the fruits, the vegetables, and the tobacco exchanged there. “But not slaves, they said.” However, the black waiter serving the well-to-do in the private club overlooking the center of town contests this account, providing facts and dates of the slave trade in that town. This contradiction leaves a trace but does not become significant to her view of her life in that town, a town so much like the landscape of her childhood. It does not become significant, that is, until her own resistance to the limitations of home and family converges with her increasing knowledge of the resistance of other people; converges but is not conflated with those other struggles. What Pratt uncovers of the town histories is multilayered and complex. She speaks of the relation of different groups of people to the town and their particular histories of resistance—the breaking up of Klan rallies by Lumbee Indians, the long tradition of black culture and resistance, Jewish traditions of resistance, anti-Vietnam protest, and lesbians’ defiance of military codes—with no attempt to unify or equate the various struggles under a grand polemics of oppression. The coexistence of these histories gives the narrative its complex, rich texture. Both the town and her relation to it change as these histories of struggle are narrated. Indeed, there is an explicit structural connection between moments of fear and loss of former homes with the recognition of the importance of interpretation and struggle. From our perspectives, the integrity of the narrative and the sense of self have to do with the refusal to make easy divisions and with the unrelenting exploration of the ways in which the desire for home, for security, for protection—and not only the desire for them, but the expectation of a right to these things—operates in Pratt’s own conception of political work. She describes her involvement in political work as having begun when feminism swept through the North Carolina town in which she was living with her husband and her two sons in the 1970s, a period in her life when she felt threatened as a woman and was forced to see herself as

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part of a class of people; that she describes as anathema to the self-concept of middle-class white people, who would just like to “be,” unconstrained by labels, by identities, by consignment to a group, and would prefer to ignore the fact that their existence and social place are anything other than self-evident, natural, human. What differentiates her narration of her development from other feminist narratives of political awakening is its tentativeness, its consisting of fits and starts, and the absence of linear progress toward a visible end.10 This narrator pursues the extent and the ways in which she carried her white, middle-class conceptions of home around with her, and the ways in which they informed her relation to politics. There is an irreconcilable tension between the search for a secure place from which to speak, within which to act, and the awareness of the price at which secure places are bought, the awareness of the exclusions, the denials, the blindnesses on which they are predicated. The search for a secure place is articulated in its ambivalence and complexity through the ambiguous use of the words place and space in precisely the ways they have become commonplace within feminist discourse. The moments of terror when she is brought face to face with the fact that she is “homesick with nowhere to go,” that she has no place, the “kind of vertigo” she feels upon learning of her own family’s history of racism and slaveholding, the sensation of her body having no fixed place to be, are remembered concurrently with moments of hope, when “she thought she had the beginning of a place for myself.” What she tried to re-create as a feminist, a woman aware of her position vis-à-vis men as a group, is critiqued as a childish place: Raised to believe that I could be where I wanted and have what I wanted, as a grown woman I thought I could simply claim what I wanted, even the making of a new place to live with other women. I had no understanding of the limits that I lived within, nor of how much my memory and my experience of a safe space to be was based on places secured by omission, exclusions or violence, and on my submitting to the limits of that place.

The self-reflexiveness that characterizes the narrative becomes especially clear in her discussion of white feminists’ efforts at outreach in her North Carolina community. She and her NOW fellow workers had gone forward “to a new place”: “Now we were throwing back safety lines to other women, to pull them in as if they were drowning, to save them. . . . What I felt, deep down, was hope that they would join me in my place, which would be the way I wanted it. I didn’t want to have to limit myself.” However, it is not only her increasing knowledge of her exclusion of Others from that place that initiates her rethinking. What is most compelling is her account of her realization that her work in NOW was also based on the exclusion of parts of herself, specifically her lesbianism.11 Those moments when she would make it the basis of a sameness with other women, a sameness that would make a new place possible, are less convincing than the moments when that possibility too is undercut by her seeing the denials, the exclusions, and the violence that are the conditions of privilege and indeed of love in its Christian formulation. The relationship between love and the occlusion or appropriation of the Other finds expression in her description of her attempts to express her love for her Jewish

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lover in a poem filled with images from the Jewish tradition, a way of assuming, indeed insisting upon, their similarity by appropriating the other’s culture. The ways in which appropriation or stealth, in the colonial gesture, reproduces itself in the political positions of white feminists is formulated convincingly in a passage about what Pratt calls “cultural impersonation,” a term that refers to the tendency among white women to respond with guilt and self-denial to the knowledge of racism and anti-Semitism, and to borrow or take on the identity of the Other in order to avoid not only guilt but pain and self-hatred.12 It is Pratt’s discussion of the negative effects, political and personal, of cultural impersonation that raises the crucial issue of what destructive forms a monolithic (and overly theoretical) critique of identity can take. The claim to a lack of identity or positionality is itself based on privilege, on a refusal to accept responsibility for one’s implication in actual historical or social relations, on a denial that positionalities exist or that they matter, the denial of one’s own personal history and the claim to a total separation from it. What Minnie Bruce Pratt refuses over and over is the facile equation of her own situation with that of other people. When, after Greensboro, I groped toward an understanding of injustice done to others, injustice done outside my narrow circle of being, and to folks not like me, I began to grasp, through my own experience, something of what that injustice might be. . . . But I did not feel that my new understanding simply moved me into a place where I joined others to struggle with them against common injustices. Because I was implicated in the doing of some of these injustices, and I held myself, and my people responsible.

The tension between the desire for home, for synchrony, for sameness, and the realization of the repressions and violence that make home, harmony, sameness imaginable, and that enforce it, is made clear in the movement of the narrative by very careful and effective reversals which do not erase the positive desire for unity, for Oneness, but destabilize and undercut it. The relation between what Teresa de Lauretis has called the negativity of theory and the positivity of politics is a tension enacted over and over again by this text.13 The possibility of re-creating herself and of creating new forms of community not based on “home” depends for Minnie Bruce Pratt upon work and upon knowledge, not only of the traditions and culture of Others but also of the positive forms of struggle within her own. It depends on acknowledging not only her ignorance and her predjudices but also her fears, above all the fear of loss that accompanies change. The risk of rejection by one’s own kind, by one’s family, when one exceeds the limits laid out or the self-definition of the group, is not made easy; again, the emphasis on her profoundly ambivalent relationship to her father is crucial. When the alternatives would seem to be either the enclosing, encircling, constraining circle of home, or nowhere to go, the risk is enormous. The assumption of, or desire for, another safe place like “home” is challenged by the realization that “unity”—interpersonal as well as political—is itself necessarily fragmentary, itself that which is struggled for, chosen, and hence unstable by definition; it is not based on “sameness,” and there is no perfect fit. But there is agency as opposed to passivity.

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The fear of rejection by one’s own kind refers not only to the family of origin but also to the potential loss of a second family, the women’s community, with its implicit and often unconscious replication of the conditions of home.14 When we justify the homogeneity of the women’s community in which we move on the basis of the need for community, the need for home, what, Pratt asks, distinguishes our community from the justifications advanced by women who have joined the Klan for “family, community, and protection”? The relationship between the loss of community and the loss of self is crucial. To the extent that identity is collapsed with home and community and based on homogeneity and comfort, on skin, blood, and heart, the giving up of home will necessarily mean the giving up of self and vice versa. Then comes the fear of nowhere to go; no old home with family: no new one with women like ourselves: and no place to be expected with folks who have been systematically excluded by ours. And with our fear comes the doubt: Can I maintain my principles against my need for the love and presence of others like me? It is lonely to be separated from others because of injustice, but it is also lonely to break with our own in opposition to that injustice.

The essay ends with a tension between despair and optimism over political conditions and the possibilities for change. Pratt walks down Maryland Avenue in Washington, D.C.—the town that is now her “hometown”—protesting against U.S. invasions, Grenada, the marines in Lebanon, the war in Central America, the acquittals of the North Carolina Klan and Nazi perpetrators. The narrative has come full circle, and her consciousness of her “place” in this town—the Capital—encompasses both local and global politics, and her own implication in them. The essay ends with the following statement: “I continue the struggle with myself and the world I was born in.” Pratt’s essay on feminism, racism, and anti-Semitism is not a litany of oppression but an elaboration, indeed an enactment, of careful and constant differentiations which refuses the all-too-easy polemic that opposes victims to perpetrators. The exposure of the arbitrariness and the instability of positions within systems of oppression evidences a conception of power that refuses totalizations, and can therefore account for the possibility of resistance. “The system” is revealed to be not one but multiple, overlapping, intersecting systems or relations that are historically constructed and re-created through everyday practices and interactions, and that implicate the individual in contradictory ways. All of that without denying the operations of actual power differences, overdetermined though they may be. Reconceptualizing power without giving up the possibility of conceiving power. Community, then, is the product of work, of struggle; it is inherently unstable, contextual; it has to be constantly reevaluated in relation to critical political priorities; and it is the product of interpretation, interpretation based on an attention to history, to the concrete, to what Foucault has called subjugated knowledges.15 There is also, however, a strong suggestion that community is related to experience, to history. For if identity and community are not the product of essential connections, neither are they merely the product of political urgency or necessity. For Pratt, they are a constant recontextualizing of the relationship between personal/group history and political priorities.

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It is crucial, then, to avoid two traps, the purely experiential and the theoretical oversight of personal and collective histories. In Pratt’s narrative, personal history acquires a materiality in the constant rewriting of herself in relation to shifting interpersonal and political contexts. This rewriting is an interpretive act which is itself embedded in social and political practice. In this city where I am no longer of the majority by color or culture, I tell myself every day: In this world you aren’t the superior race or culture, and never were, whatever you were raised to think: and are you getting ready to be in this world? And I answer myself back: I’m trying to learn how to live, to have the speaking-to extend beyond the moment’s word, to act so as to change the unjust circumstances that keep us from being able to speak to each other; I’m trying to get a little closer to the longed-for but unrealized world, where we each are able to live, but not by trying to make someone less than us, not by someone else’s blood or pain: yes, that’s what I’m trying to do with my living now.

We have used our reading of this text to open up the question of how political community might be reconceptualized within feminist practice. We do not intend to suggest that Pratt’s essay, or any single autobiographical narrative, offers “an answer.” Indeed, what this text has offered is a pretext for posing questions. The conflation of Pratt the person with the narrator and subject of this text has led us and our students to want to ask, for example, how such individual self-reflection and critical practice might translate into the building of political collectivity. And to consider more specifically, the possible political implications and effects of a white middle-class woman’s “choice” to move to H St. NE. Certainly, we might usefully keep in mind that the approach to identity, to unity, and to political alliances in Pratt’s text is itself grounded in and specific to her complex positionalities in a society divided very centrally by race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexualities.

NOTES 1. Zillah Eisenstein, Feminism and Sexual Equality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). 2. See, for example, Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” and Barbara Smith’s introduction in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1984), and Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End Press, 1984). 3. Of course, feminist intellectuals have read various antihumanist strategies as having made similar arguments about the turn of the last century and the future of this one. In her contribution to a Yale French Studies special issue on French feminism, Alice Jardine argues against an “American” feminist tendency to establish and maintain an illusory unity based on incorporation, a unity and centrism that relegate differences to the margins or out of sight. “Feminism,” she writes, “must not open the door to modernity then close it behind itself.” In her Foucauldian critique of American feminist/humanist empiricism, Peggy Kamuf warns against the assumption that she sees guiding much feminist thought, “an unshaken faith in the ultimate arrival at essential truth through the empirical method of

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accumulation of knowledge, knowledge about women” (“Replacing Feminist Criticism,” Diacritics, Summer 1982, p. 45). She goes on to spell out the problem of humanism in a new guise: There is an implicit assumption in such programs that this knowledge about women can be produced in and of itself without seeking any support within those very structures of power which—or so it is implied—have prevented knowledge of the feminine in the past. Yet what is it about those structures which could have succeeded until now in excluding such knowledge if it is not a similar appeal to a “we” that has had a similar faith in its own eventual constitution as a delimited and totalizable object? 4. For incisive and insistent analyses of the uses and limitations of deconstructive and poststructuralist analytic strategies for feminist intellectual and political projects, see in particular the work of Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), and Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 5. This notion of a female “true self” underlying a male-imposed “false consciousness” is evident in the work of cultural feminists such as Mary Daly, Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975); and Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York: Harper and Row, 1978) and Pornography and Silence (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). 6. For analyses and critiques of tendencies to romanticize lesbianism, see essays by Carole Vance, Alice Echols, and Gayle Rubin in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), on the “cultural feminism” of such writers as Griffin, Rich, Daly, and Gearheart. 7. Feminist theorists such as Nancy Chodorow (The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978]), Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice [Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983]), and Adrienne Rich (Of Woman Born [New York: W. W. Norton, 1976]) have focused exclusively on the psychosocial configuration of mother/daughter relationships. Jessica Benjamin, in “A Desire of One’s Own” (Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986]), points to the problem of not theorizing “the father” in feminist psychoanalytic work, emphasizing the significance of the father in the construction of sexuality within the family. 8. See critiques of Brownmiller (1975) by Angela Davis (Women, Race, and Class [Boston: Doubleday, 1983]), bell hooks (Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism [Boston: South End Press, 1981]), and Jacqueline Dowd Hall (“The Mind That Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983], pp. 328–49). 9. For a discussion of the relevance of Foucault’s reconceptualization of power to feminist theorizing, see Biddy Martin, “Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault,” New German Critique, no. 27 (1982), pp. 3–30. 10. One good example of the numerous narratives of political awakening in feminist work is the transformation of the stripper in the film Not A Love Story (directed by Bonnie Klein, 1982) from exploited sex worker to enlightened feminist. Where this individual’s linear and unproblematic development is taken to be emblematic of problems in and feminist solutions to pornography, the complexities of the issues involved are circumvented and class differences are erased. 11. For a historical account of the situation of lesbians and attitudes toward lesbianism in NOW, see Sidney Abbot and Barbara Love, Sappho Was A Right On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (New York: Stein and Day, 1972). 12. For writings that address the construction of colonial discourse, see Homi Bhabha,

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“The Other Question—the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24 (November–December 1983): 18–36; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (London: Paladin, 1970); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” forthcoming in boundary 2 (1985); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” Yale French Studies, no. 62 (1981), pp. 154–84. 13. See especially the introduction in de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, and Teresa de Lauretis, “Comparative Literature among the Disciplines: Politics” (unpublished manuscript). 14. For an excellent discussion of the effects of conscious and unconscious pursuits of safety, see Carole Vance’s introduction to Pleasure and Danger in which she elaborates upon the obstacles to theorizing embedded in such pursuits. 15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980).

BARBARA CHRISTIAN

THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM (1990)





















In her essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker asked the questions, “What is my literary tradition? Who are the black women artists who preceded me? Do I have a ground to stand on?” Confronted by centuries of Afro-American women who, but for an exceptional few, lived under conditions antithetical to the creation of Art as it was then defined, how could she claim a creative legacy of foremothers, women who after all had no access to the pen, to paints, or to clay? If American cultural history was accurate, singing was the only art form in which black women participated. But Walker turned the idea of Art on its head. Instead of looking high, she suggested, we should look low. On that low ground she found a multitude of artistmothers—the women who’d transformed the material to which they’d had access into their conception of Beauty: cooking, gardening, quilting, storytelling. In retrieving that low ground, Walker not only reclaimed her foremothers, she pointed to a critical approach. For she reminded us that Art, and the thought and sense of beauty on which it is based, is the province not only of those with a room of their own, or of those in libraries, universities and literary Renaissances—that creating is necessary to those who work in kitchens and factories, nurture children and adorn homes, sweep streets or harvest crops, type in offices and manage them. In the early seventies when anyone asked me, “What do you think you’re doing anyway? What is this Black Feminist Literary Critic thing you’re trying to become?” I would immediately think of Alice’s essay. Like any other critic, my personal history has much to do with what I hear when I read. Perhaps because I am from the Caribbean, Alice’s high and low struck chords in me. I’d grown up with a sharp division between the “high” thought, language, behavior expected in school and in church, and the “low” language that persisted at home and in the yards and the streets. In school: Proper English, Romanesque sentences, Western philosophy, jargon and exegesis; boys always before girls, lines and lines; “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” the authority of the teacher. In church: Unintelligible Latin and Greek, the canon, the text; the Virgin Mary and the nuclear family; priests always before nuns; Gregorian chant and tiptoeing.

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At home: Bad English, raunchy sayings and stories, the intoning of toasts; women in the kitchen, the parlor and the market; kallaloo, loud supper talk, cousins, father, aunts, godmothers. In the yards: Sashaying and bodies, sweat, calypso, long talk and plenty voices; women and men bantering, bad words, politics and bambooshaying. What is real? The high, though endured, was valued. The low, though enjoyed, was denigrated even by the lowest of the low. As I read Jane Eyre, I wondered what women dreamt as they gazed at men and at the sea. I knew that women as well as men gazed. My mother and aunts constantly assessed men’s bodies, the sea’s rhythm. But Charlotte Brontë was in print. She had a language across time and space. I could not find my mother’s language, far less her attitude, in any books, despite the fact that her phrasing was as complex and as subtle as Charlotte’s. Because of the 1950s (which for me was not the Eisenhower years but rather the Civil Rights movement, rhythm ’n’ blues, and the works of James Baldwin), because of the 1960s (which for me was not the Free Speech Movement and the Weathermen, but rather SNCC, SEEK, the Black Muslims, Aretha and the Black Arts Movement), the low began to be valued by some of us. Yet there remained the high and the low for many black women. Camouflaged by the rhetoric of the period, we were, on high ground, a monolithic Harriet Tubman or a silent Queen of Africa; on low ground, we were creaming sapphires or bourgeois bitches. But what were we saying, writing? By the early seventies, I knew some black women had written, I’d read Phillis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry. I’d heard poets like Nikki Giovanni and June Jordan read. I’d known women in my childhood and adolescence who’d written stories. Yet I had never, in my years of formal schooling from kindergarten in the black Virgin Islands through a Ph.D. at white Columbia, heard even the name of one black woman writer. That women writers were studied, I knew. I’d had courses in which Jane Austen, George Elliot, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf appeared like fleeting phantoms. I knew the university knew that black writers existed. My professors bristled at the names of Richard Wright and James Baldwin and barely acknowledged Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. But what of black women writers? No phantoms, no bristlings—not even a mention. Few of us knew they wrote; fewer of us cared. In fact, who even perceived of us, as late as the early 1970s, as writers, artists, thinkers? Why should anyone want to know what we thought or imagined? What could we tell others, far less show them, that they did not already know? After all, weren’t we, as Mister taunts Celie, “black,” “pore,” woman, and therefore “nothing at all”? Of course we were telling stories, playing with language, speculating and specifying, reaching for wisdom, transforming the universe in our image. Who but us would end a harrowing tale with these words to her tormentors? Frado has passed from their memories as Joseph from the butler’s but she will never cease to track them till beyond mortal vision. (Harriet Wilson, Our Nig) Who but us could use the image of a Plum Bun for the intersection of racism and sexism in this country? (Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun)

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Who but us could begin her story with this comment? Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God) Who but us could lovingly present women poets in the kitchen? (Paule Marshall, Poets in the Kitchen) Who but us could tell how it was possible to clean the blood off [our] beaten men and yet receive abuse from the victim? (Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye) Who but us could chant: momma/momma/mammy/nanny/granny/ woman/mistress/sista luv (June Jordan, “Trying to Get Over”)

But who knew that we knew? Even those of us who were telling stories or writing did not always see ourselves as artists of the word. And those of us who did know our genius were so rejected, unheard that we sometimes became crazy women crying in the wind or silenced scarecrows. Who could answer us but us? For us did need us if only to validate that which we knew, we knew. The publications of first novels, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland, June Jordan’s His Own Where, heralded the decade of the seventies. While their novels were barely acknowledged in 1970, the movement of women all over the world was highlighted by American women who had some access to the Big Capital Media. Inspired though sometimes disappointed, by movements of people of color, of blacks in the United States, of liberation struggles of “underdeveloped” nations, some American women began to seek themselves as women and to protest the truncated definition of woman in this society. In this context the literature of women, the critical responses of women were published as never before during a decade when many others were asserting that The Movement was dead. For those of us who came out of the sixties, the vision of women moving all over the world was not solely a claiming of our rights but also the rights of all those who had been denied their humanity. In the space created for us by our foremothers, by our sisters in the streets, the houses, the factories, the schools, we were now able to speak and to listen to each other, to hear our own language, to refine and critique it across time and space, through the written word. For me that dialogue is the kernel of what a black feminist literary critic tries to do. We listen to those of us who speak, write, read, to those who have written, to those who may write. We write to those who write, read, speak, may write, and we try to hear the voiceless. We are participants in a many-voiced palaver of thought/ feeling, image/language that moves us to move—toward a world where, like Alice Walker’s revolutionary petunias, all of us can bloom. We found that in order to move beyond prescribed categories we had to “rememory”—reconstruct our past. But in the literary church of the sixties, such an appeal to history was anathema. Presiding at the altar were the new critic priests, for whom the text was God, unstained by history, politics, experience, the world. Art for them was artifact. So, for example, the literature of blacks could not be literature, tainted as it was by what they called sociology. To the side of the altar

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were the pretenders, the political revolutionaries and new philosophers for whom creative works were primarily a pretext to expound their own ideas, their world programs. For both groups, women were neither the word nor the world, though sometimes we could be dots on some i’s, muses or furies in the service of the text or the idea. We found that we could not talk to either group unless we talked their talk, which was specialized, abstract—on high ground. So we learned their language only to find that its character had a profound effect on the questions we thought, the images we evoked, and that such thinking recalled a tradition beyond which we had to move if we were to be included in any authentic dialogue. Because language is one (though not the only) way to express what one knows/ feels even when one doesn’t know one knows it, because storytelling is a dynamic form of remembering/re-creating, we found that it was often in the relationship between literatures and the world that re-visioning occurred. It is often in the poem, the story, the play, rather than in Western philosophical theorizing, that feminist thought/feeling evolves, challenges and renews itself. So our Sisterbonding was presented and celebrated in novels like Sula, our body/spirit/erotic in works like The Color Purple, our revision of biography in works like Zami. It has often been through our literatures that women have renamed critical areas of human life: mothering, sexuality, bodies, friendship, spirituality, economics, the process of literature itself. And it was to these expressions that many of us turned in order to turn to ourselves as situated in a dynamic rather than a fixed world. For many of us such a turning led us to universities where words, ideas, are, were supposed to be nurtured and valued. And—ah, here’s the rub. As a result of that gravitation, we have moved to excavate the past and restore to ourselves the words of many of our foremothers who were buried in the rumble of distorted history. We have questioned the idea of great works of literature, preferences clearly determined by a powerful elite. We have asked why some forms are not considered literature—for example, the diary, the journal, the letter. We have built journals and presses through which the works of women might be published. We have developed women’s studies programs. Using our stories and images, we have taught our daughters and sons about ourselves, our sisters, brothers, and lovers about our desires. And some of us have shared a palaver with our writers/readers that prompts us all to re-vision ourselves. Yet even as we moved, the high, the low persisted, in fact moved further and further apart. For we now confronted the revelations we always knew, that there is both a She and there are many she’s. And that sometimes, in our work we seemed to reduce the both-and to either-or. That revelation made itself strongly felt in the exclusion that women of color protested when Woman was defined, in the rejection that many working-class women experienced when Woman was described. The awareness that we too seek to homogenize the world of our Sisters, to fix ourselves in boxes and categories through jargon, theory, abstraction, is upon us. Why so? Has our training led us back to the high ground that has rejected us, our education to the very language that masked our existence? So often feminist literary discussion seems riveted on defining Woman in much the same way that Western medieval scholars tried to define God. Why is it that rather than

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acknowledge that we are both-and, we persist in seeking the either-or. Might that be because the either-or construction, the either-or deconstruction, is so embedded in our education? Might it be because that language, whether it moves us anywhere or not, is recognized, rewarded as brilliant, intellectual, high, in contrast to the low, vulgar, ordinary language of most creative writers and readers? Is it that we too are drawn to the power that resides on the high ground? Even as we turned to our literatures, in which language is not merely an object but is always situated in a context, in which the pleasure and emotion of language are as important as its meaning, we have gravitated toward a critical language that is riddled with abstraction and is as distanced as possible from the creative work, and from pleasure. I sometimes wonder if we critics read stories and poems, or, if as our language indicates, our reading fare is primarily that of other critics and philosophers? Do we know our own literatures? Why, for example, does it appear that white feminist critics have abandoned their contemporary novelists? Where is the palaver among them? Or are Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida inevitably more appealing? Why are we so riveted on male thinkers, preferably dead and European? Why is it that in refuting essence, we become so fixed on essence? To whom are we writing when we write? Have we turned so far round that we have completed our circle? Is it that we no longer see any connections between the emotion/knowing language of women’s literature, the many-voiced sounds of our own language and the re-visioning we seek? Now when I think of Alice’s high and low, I feel a new meaning. Because I am a black literary/feminist critic, I live in a sharp distinction between the high world of lit crit books, journals, and conferences, the middle world of classrooms and graduate students, and the low world of bookstores, kitchens, communities, and creative writers. In the high world: Discourse, theory, the canon, the body, the boys (preferably Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault) before the girls; linguistics, the authority of the critic, the exclusion of creative writings. In the middle world: Reading the texts, sometimes of creative writers; negotiating between advancement and appreciation; tropes, research, discourse; now I understand my mother; narrative strategies. What does it mean? The race for theory. In the low world: Stories, poems, plays. The language of the folk. Many bodies—the feeling as one with June, Alice, Toni. I sure know what she’s talking about. I don’t want to hear that. Her words move me. That poem changed my life. I dream like that. That’s really disturbing. God—that’s beautiful. Perhaps I’m not so crazy after all. I want to write too. Say what?

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Much, of course, can be learned by all of us from all of us who speak, read, write, including those of us who look high. But as we look high, we might also look low, lest we devalue women in the world even as we define Woman. In ignoring their voices, we may not only truncate our movement but we may also limit our own process until our voices no longer sound like women’s voices to anyone.

LAUREN BERLANT

TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN (2002)























WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR History hurts, but not only. It also engenders optimism and disappointment, aggressions that respond to the oppressive presence of what dominates or is takenfor-granted. Both emotions are responses to prospects for change. It is not usual to think of critical theory as an optimistic genre, since it creates so much exhausting anxiety about the value of the pleasure of thinking even the “thinkiest” thought.1 But the compulsion to repeat optimism, which is another definition of desire, is a condition of possibility that also justifies the risk of having to survive, once again, disappointment and depression, the protracted sense that no-one, especially oneself, is teachable after all. All that work for what? Love isn’t the half of it. To be teachable is to be open for change. It is a tendency. It is to turn toward the story of what we have said in terms of phrases we hadn’t yet noticed.2 Eve Sedgwick’s work has changed sexuality’s history and destiny: She is a referent, and there is a professional field with a jargon and things, and articles and books that summarize it. For me, though, the luck of encountering her grandiosity, her belief that it is a good to disseminate the intelligent force of an attachment to a thing, a thought, a sensation, is of unsurpassable consequence. In the pleasure/ knowledge economy of her work, the force of attachment has more righteousness than anything intelligibly or objectively “true”: She enables the refusal of cramped necessity by way of a poetics of misrecognition. This is the process described by the concept of misrecognition. Misrecognition (méconnaissance) describes the psychic process by which fantasy recalibrates what we encounter so that we can imagine that something or someone can fulfill our desire. To misrecognize is not to err, but to project qualities onto something so that we can love, hate, and manipulate it for having those qualities—which it might or might not have.3 A poetics of misrecognition may seem to risk collapsing the critical analysis of fantasy into fantasy. Maybe so, but such a risk is unavoidable. Fantasy is that which manages the ambivalence and itinerancy of attachment: It provides representations to make the subject appear intelligible to herself and to others throughout the career of desire’s unruly attentiveness to new objects. That is, fantasy parses ambivalence in such a way that the subject is

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not defeated by it. To track fantasy across the scene of the subject in history, in this view, is to take seriously the magical thinking, or formalism, involved in seeing selves and worlds as continuous and whole.4 This is a theory of being, and it is also a theory of reading. As any reader of her work on Henry James would attest, Sedgwick’s mode of reading is to deshame fantasmatic attachment so as to encounter its operations as knowledge.5 For example, we may feel the violence of history as something “it” does to “us”: But Sedgwick argues that the stories we tell about how subjectivity takes shape must also represent our involvement with the pain and error, the bad memory and mental lag, that also shape our desire’s perverse, twisted, or, if you prefer, indirect routes toward pleasure and survival. To admit your surprising attachments, to trace your transformation over the course of a long (life) sentence, is sentience. That’s what I’ve learned. The pain of paying attention pays me back in the form of eloquence: A sound pleasure. Yet for a long time now, Sedgwick argues, skepticism has been deemed the only ethical position for the intellectual to take with respect to the subject’s ordinary attachments. Even Adorno, the great belittler of the popular pleasures, can be aghast at the ease with which intellectuals shit on people who hold to a dream.6 Dreams are seen as easy optimism, while failures seem complex. Sedgwick writes against the hermeneutics of suspicion on the grounds that it always finds the mirages and failures for which it looks: She finds critics overdedicated to a self-confirming scene of disappointment.7 In this view the disappointed critic mistakes his act of negation for a performance of his seriousness; perhaps he also elevates his thought by disdaining anything that emanates a scent of therapy, reparation, or utopianism. How does one go about defetishizing negation, while remaining critical? Begin with Freud’s dictum that there is no negative in the unconscious. Sedgwick seeks to read every word the subject writes (she believes in the author) to establish the avowed and disavowed patterns of his/her desire, and then understands those repetitions in terms of a story about sexuality that does not exist yet as a convention or an identity. That aim is what makes her writing so optimistic. In it the persistence of sexually anomalous attachment figures the social potential of queerness, in which what counts is not one’s “object choice” as such but rather one’s sustaining attachments, which are only sometimes also one’s social relations. In this way repetition, heavily marked as a process of reading and rereading, has a reparative effect on the subject of an impossible sexuality. The queer tendency of this method is to put one’s attachments back into play, into pleasure, into knowledge, into worlds. It is to admit that they matter. In Sedgwick’s work, desire’s self-elaboration enables an aesthetic that is organized neither by the sublime nor the beautiful, the dramatic nor the banal, but by something vibratingly quiet. This would also be the erotic tonality struck by what she calls “reparative criticism,” her antidote to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Set against the practice of deconstructing truth forms that she locates in literary theory of the 1970s, the aim of reparative criticism is to sustain the unfinished and perhaps unthought thoughts about desire that are otherwise defeated by the roar of conventionality or heteroculture.8 Any writer’s task, in this view, would be to track desire’s itinerary, not on behalf of confirming its hidden or suppressed Truths but to elaborate

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its variety of attachments as sexuality, as lived life, and as an unfinished history that confounds the hurts and the pleasures. I love the idea of reparative reading insofar as it is a practice of meticulous curiosity. But I also resist idealizing, even implicitly, any program of better thought or reading. Those of us who think for a living are all too well-positioned to characterize acts of thought as dramatically powerful, whether effective or futile; we are set up to overestimate the clarity and destiny of an idea’s effects. This can produce strange distortions in the ways we stage agency as a mode of heroic authorship, and vice versa. Thus the distinction I’m making here is about an attitude toward what thinking (as écriture) can do. I’m suggesting that the overvaluation of thought is both an occupational hazard and part of a larger overvaluation of a certain mode of self-reflective personhood. Elaine Hadley tells the long history of the liberal elevation of cultivated selfreflection starting from its congealing image in Mill’s Autobiography. Mill, she argues, posits an identity between thought and interiority, such that his version of the ethical subject takes on the shape of the intellectual who cultivates his selfawareness—that is, his awareness of himself as a self.9 More recently, there was a seemingly antithetical moment—call it ’68—when a program of history from and of the subject opposed the proprietary clarities of institutional and bodily truth claims even, or even especially, in liberal capitalist/democratic contexts that elevate mental abstraction over bodily labor. In this Anti-Oedipal moment the subject’s amalgam of knowledges—thoughts and practices—became a generative ground for refiguring the normatively social, especially in the domains of socialist and sexual politics. Bodies were elevated as, in a sense, smarter and more knowing than minds, although ultimately the distinction heads toward exhaustion. We are still in that epoch and need still to be, and yet there can be an uncanny confluence between the ideal of liberal abstraction or inner-directedness and the antiliberal orientation toward the subject. I often experience the radical project as having attenuated somewhat, as it is thematized in stories about exemplary individualities and individuals seen swimming or drowning amidst unjust forces. Like Eve, my desire is to angle knowledge toward and from the places where it is (and we are) impossible. But individuality, that monument of liberal fantasy, that site of commodity fetishism, that project of certain psychoanalytic desires, that sign of cultural and national modernity, is to me a contrary form, a form that needs interruption by a contrary. There is an orientation toward interiority in much queer theory that brings me up short, makes me wonder: Must the project of queerness start “inside” of the subject and spread out from there? This distinction is not an opposition. Here is a biographical way of showing it, though in writing this way I am working against my own inclination. Eve’s public stories about becoming possible—in Fat Art/Thin Art, Tendencies, and A Dialogue on Love—recount a crowded world of loving family and friends in which she thrives partly by living in the fold of her internal counter-narrative.10 My story, if I wrote it, would locate its optimism in a crowded scene too, but mine was dominated by a general environment not of thriving but of disappointment, contempt, and threat. I salvaged my capacity to attach to persons by reconceiving of both their violence and their love as impersonal. This isn’t about me. This has had some unpleasant effects, as you might imagine. But it was also a way to protect my optimism. Selves seemed like ruthless personalizers. In contrast, to think of the

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world as organized around the impersonality of the structures and practices that conventionalize desire, intimacy, and even one’s own personhood was to realize how uninevitable the experience of being personal, of having personality, is. Out of this happy thought came an orientation toward passions of all sorts, including those intellectual and political. Attachments are made not by will, after all, but by an intelligence after which we are always running. (It’s not just “Hey, you!” but “Wait up!”11) This lagging and sagging relation to attachment threatens to make us feel vertiginously formless, except that normative conventions and our own creative repetitions are there along the way to quell the panic we might feel at the prospect of becoming exhausted or dead before we can make sense of ourselves.12 In other words, the anxiety of formlessness makes us awfully teachable, for a minute. To the degree that the conventional forms of the social direct us to recognize only some of our attachments as the core of who we are and what we belong to, one’s relation to attachment is impersonal. To belong to the normal world is to misrecognize only these modes of intelligibility as expressing one’s true self. It brings out my queerness to think of living less as self-extension than as a process that interferes with the drama of the self. You will note that I am talking about impersonality not as the opposite of the personal—say, as “structure” or “power”—but as one of its conditions. In this sense, my world operates according to a proximate, but different, fantasy of disappointment, optimism, and attachment than the one I attribute to Eve. I think of how I met the girl. We are both shy—who isn’t? She gave a paper, and we talked about it. Years later, I gave one, and she listened to it. She wrote another book and I read it. There were meetings in airports and hotel dining rooms. We took walks, talked. Once, by accident, we took a small plane together. Reading is one place where the impersonality of intimacy can be transacted without harm to anyone: so are writing and paper-giving. There is no romance of the impersonal, no love plot for it. But there is optimism, a space across which to move. Stupid optimism is the most disappointing thing of all. By “stupid” I mean the faith that adjustment to certain forms or practices of living and thinking will secure one’s happiness: for example, the prospect of class mobility, romantic narrative, normalcy, nationality, or better sexual identity. Here is a stupidity of mine: “History is what hurts,” that motto of The Political Unconscious, is a phrase that I love.13 It resonates as truth; it performs a truth-effect in me. But because it is in the genre of the maxim I have never tried, I realize, to understand it. That is one project of this essay.

DID SOMEBODY SAY WISH? Bodies and sexualities were in the wings of the previous section. Eve and I both write about fat because we identify as it, rightly or wrongly. She: “I used to have a superstition that / there was this use to being fat: no one I loved could come to harm / enfolded in my touch.”14 Me, writing about someone else, of course: “for him, it is a narrative in which the very compulsion to desire specific things . . . forces him to risk insatiability, a constant inadequacy to one’s own desire.”15 My claim is that our relations to these modes of embodiment register our

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proximate approaches to the incorporative and impersonal strategies of queer/ utopian thought. Mary Gaitskill’s novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, tells a story that comes close to encapsulating these dialectical impulses. All of her books try to make sense of the relation between painful history and the painful optimism of traumatized subjects trying to survive within that history, since they cannot put it behind them.16 Trauma can never be let go of: it holds you. It locates you at the juncture of the personal and the impersonal, specifying you at the moment of least control over your own destiny and meaning. You become like a small pet that, when picked up, never stops moving its legs. In Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Dorothy Never and Justine Shade—shades of The Wizard of Oz, Pale Fire, and Justine—come in contact because of their common interest in Anna Granite, an Ayn Rand-like figure. Like Rand, Granite intoxicates her audience with the promise that identification with one’s sexual and intellectual power can produce happiness and fulfillment, achieving a victory over the deadening normal world.17 Justine Shade has decided to write an article on Anna Granite and the people who follow her for Urban Vision, a hip paper like The Village Voice. She has learned of Granite at her day job in a doctor’s office, where the promise they make to cure bodies in pain appears to her a false but necessary form of forestalling despair. When a young patient with heart disease tells her about Granite, the philosophy strikes Justine as both stupid and powerful. Dorothy Never had once been a Granite acolyte, liberated by the thought of living and promoting the beauty of destructive passion. The two girls meet when Dorothy responds to a three by five card Justine posts on a Laundromat wall that asks for information about Granite. At the time of their meeting, neither Justine nor Dorothy has had a good conversation with anyone in many years: Each has long ago drawn a “cloak” around herself (Gaitskill 1991, 112, 158, 173) that acts as an “invisible shield” or “square of definition” (128, 129). Yet from the moment of their initial phone call they resonate with each other, a resonance that they take personally but which has, in a sense, nothing to do with the other except insofar as the other functions formally as an enigmatic opportunity for something transformative. “I invented possible scenarios daily,” Dorothy thinks, “growing more and more excited by the impending intellectual adventure” (17). They convert into disembodied, vocal actors in each other’s fantasy world: Dorothy is “lulled by the expressionless, melancholy quality” of Justine’s voice (16), while Dorothy’s “voice . . . stroked Justine on the inside of her skull in a way that both repelled and attracted her” (23). There is an attachment: yet the interlocutor factors in it not as a human, but as an opportunity for the possible emergence of something human. This paradox of the impersonality of attachment, that it circumvents the personal—the historical—on the way to enumerating their relation, organizes the women’s mutual attraction/aversion throughout the novel. They feel taken over by it at the same time as they are taken up in it. Likewise, during the studied formalism of the interview, they find themselves overwhelmed by a compulsion to historicize, to narrate their lives to each other. In part, this is a banal effect of the event, in which journalism takes on contemporary modes of therapeutic confessional storytelling. Any number of times in the novel the girls tell their life stories to a stranger who exchanges his/her own for it: such is the strange sociability of contemporary trauma talk. But the girls’ mutual

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attachment goes well beyond the content of the phrase. Each woman becomes a “strange world” into which the other “unwittingly pitched” herself (11, 17). They register ambivalence and embarrassment toward the enormity of this impulse, which is not at all their usual practice. When Dorothy meets Justine and intensity grows between them this dissonance arises first clothed in Dorothy’s fierce desire to tell Justine about her childhood and then as an aversion to Justine for animating this wish to tell. Meeting Justine makes Dorothy want to burst open a long life of self-containment, a life in which she has hoarded her knowledge and made her body into a grotesque shield (39). Obesity and ugliness create a force field around her, seeming to neutralize what, in those “gatherings of the normally proportioned,” might come from others—curiosity or attachment (169). In this way she is protected from saying what she knows, just as she is protected from the world’s demand to know what she knows. “I preferred the elegance of distance,” she notes (226). One might say that she shows, rather than tells. Yet she is also like a sadistic Sleeping Beauty, aggressively waiting for an opportunity to trust someone. On meeting Justine Dorothy begins to detach from her own defenses, but not from her own pleasures. Her mode of enfleshment stays the same, but she follows the trail of the voice, and she’s not sure why. Justine’s response to Dorothy is at first like Dorothy’s to her—a desire to tell a hard story to a stranger to whom she feels averse, and then confusion about that impulse lived as ambivalence toward the person who animates it. Far more impersonal than Dorothy, Justine has a slower emotional metabolism (yet Dorothy is the fat one, Justine the thin), but eventually she returns to Dorothy, sensing that Dorothy knows something that Justine cannot bear to know on her own. This meeting and return frame the book. Meanwhile, the body of the novel narrates the whole life stories of Justine and Dorothy, which they never fully tell to each other. We witness them growing up paralyzed by fear and at the same time launching into madnesses of thinking, reading, eating, masturbating, attaching, and fucking. A traumatic frenzy of interiority and impersonality constitutes a scene of being and embodiment that they both control and control not a whit. If she wants a good life, what’s a girl, or two girls, to do? When does doing matter? This question takes shape generically through the novel’s proximity to the case study. Each girl knows she’s a case, in many senses—it’s no accident that Justine works for a doctor and Dorothy for a law firm. This proximity to the case is repeated aesthetically as well. Until the very end of the novel, each chapter has its own narrative voice, which is to say that it assigns each case its own norm of expertise. Dorothy tells her own story in the first person, while a narrator talks about Justine as “she.” Each girl’s mode of representation performs her relation to impersonality and self-cultivation, but not in a mimetic way: That is, Dorothy details how protecting her vigilant subjectivity requires strategies of social impersonality, while Justine’s narrator tenderly registers the formation of Justine’s dissociated intimacies. Yet their distinct lives mesh thematically in a hundred ways too, as though there were a certain generic rhythm to the traumatic tableau: peripatetic nuclear families, miserable fathers and mothers, childhood sexual abuse, never the right tone of voice or body. When the two girls are in their childhood families, they don’t notice it that much. Their mothers give them enemas, their

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fathers overvalue them, whatever: They love whatever they can misrecognize as love. Distortion is the shape love takes. Here is some of the case study content: A doctor friend of her doctor-father repeatedly and painfully masturbates Justine at the age of five. The awful “clawing” feeling of this event confirms something overwhelming she already knows without knowing it about the too intense emotional enclosure of her family: it involves them-against-the-world with an intensity of hermeticism that holds her close, but impersonally so. Justine participates in the economy of familial love by being “good”: pretty and smart and submissive to the scene of parental aggression. At the same time she cultivates school as an alternative public for her badness. At seven years old, she gets a neighbor friend to tie her up and whip her; at eleven, she and her friends torture a fat and ugly girl with the nickname “Emotional”; at twelve she rapes a playmate with a toothbrush, masturbating to the memory later (99, 109–11). Later, the playmate asks for more, and Justine refuses her. During high school she develops a secret trashy wardrobe in which she can fit in with the popular girls who are marked by being knowing. They produce hierarchies of social value by trafficking in stereotype and mockery; they compete among themselves sexually to have the most “adult” experience. In short, school is a world in which intimacies are always betrayed. But to Justine its viciousness offers a kind of confirming relief, for the explicit rule of cruelty feels truer to her than the familial amalgam of aggressive intimacy. She enters into adolescent heterosexuality by enacting the ambivalence of this scene repeatedly, but with herself as top and bottom, men being merely the instruments of violent relief from her “goodness.” Perhaps her most telling act is to design a plot to lose her virginity violently at home. The scene to which she lures an indifferent boy is the rough floor of the family’s “rec room,” and its purpose is both to enact a fantasy of sexual surrender and to remain interesting to her closest female friend, Watley. The unpleasant hardness of the unfeeling fuck confirms something ruthless in Justine, and yet it marks her vulnerability too: After pretending that the experience was good high drama, she confides in her friend that it wasn’t. Watley drops her and uses the story as capital to diminish Justine socially. Vulnerability makes you worthless: Survival depends on producing forms of hardened identity and closeting the soft remainders. On realizing that she has been outed as a sexual failure, Justine “walked with her arms around her middle feeling loneliness and humiliation coupled with the sensation that she was, at this moment, absolutely herself” (156). At the moment of that holding thought she is having, perhaps, the best sex of her life. Dorothy also grows up with an angry father and a passive-aggressive mother, both of whom comment constantly on their daughter, whose value shifts according to the tempestuous parental mood. As a child she loves being at the center of this shifty scene, and yet like Justine she is hypervigilant—she can tell that something is off. “One of my first clear memories is having to deny the concrete truths of my life, of denying the clear pattern of them” (32). In particular, Dorothy shares with Justine a family that is weirdly self-enclosed, and she is likewise split from herself as a result. But Dorothy produces a different kind of split. Usually a “vision of my embattled father with my mother and me standing behind him” animates her. Like superhero partners she and her father “aimed for higher

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things; we had relinquished beauty and pleasure and turned our faces towards the harsh reality of the fight against cruelty and falsehood” (123). At the same time, Dorothy begins to cultivate “beautiful and elaborate fantasies” about many things, including men and women whom she finds “unbearably beautiful” (117). She associates her drive for beauty with her mother’s drive toward fictionalizing and femininity. Dorothy and her mother spend her youth drawing fantasy pictures together on construction paper in crayon. They tell each other “airy” stories about their visions, and then eat lavish desserts. At first, Dorothy draws countless Heavens “full of grinning winged children, candy bars, cake, ice cream, and toys” (81); then, on hearing her mother read aloud Peter Pan, Dorothy turns toward an addiction to Never-Never Land. Its very name made me feel a sadness like a big beautiful blanket I could wrap around myself. I tried to believe that Peter Pan might really come one night and fly me away; I was too old to believe this and I knew it, but I forced the bright polka-dotted canopy of this belief over my unhappy knowledge. (81; emphasis added)

At ten, Dorothy—nicknamed “Dottie,” then—is already practiced at disavowing disquieting knowledge she barely senses with an optimistic absorption in beauty. But the anomalous style of her attachment both to her unthought thought and its compensations resonates unpleasantly throughout her life. She lets slip to an already sexualized friend that Never-Never Land is her favorite fantasy world, and the friend immediately betrays the immature fantasy, making Dorothy the “queer” pariah at school. When strangers speak to her she becomes “struck dumb by trying too hard to discover the correct response” (115). This result is, in part, a relief, however: It confirms something inchoate about Dorothy’s hyperorientation toward her family, and the family’s toward itself. The alien eyes of her peers force Dorothy to disfigure her family romance and family romance in general. This is played out as her physical withdrawal from the machinery of familial narcissism. During Dorothy’s early adolescence she gets quiet, fat, and disgusting, without knowing why. When I say “disgusting” I am not interpreting: Dorothy characterizes herself as “gross and unhealthy.” When she is fifteen, her father abjectly enters her room to tell her that his frustration with the unjust world causes him to act out on her, and in the jumble of love and apology he utters he begins to molest and to rape her. This is no surprise to Dorothy, really, for underneath the fear and shame, underneath the excitement, it seemed that what was happening now between my father and me was only the physical expression of what always happened between us, even when he verbally reviled me. Tears came to my eyes; it seemed that his cruel words had clothed these loving caresses all along. (126)

This relation lasts for many years. At night, he grunts while she fragments in silence. During the day, he denounces her furiously—because she no longer obeys her mother. Dorothy looks down at her plate and eats. Subsequently, whenever she experiences anxiety, it is as though her organs explode through her body, in

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ways recognizable from the literature on incest but also, here, resonant as the bodily ground of what Justine calls Dorothy’s soft and graceful corpulence. [M]ost of the time I felt as if my body had been turned inside out, that I was a walking deformity hung with visible blood-purple organs, lungs, heart, bladder, kidneys, spleen, the full ugliness of a human stripped of its skin. (161)

She comments that “these bodily memories are so unevenly submerged and revealed, so distorted . . . that they may as well be completely invented” (44): this is not to say that the post-traumatic subject is doomed to false- or pseudo-memory but that memory is mediated by fantasies and misrecognitions so powerful and gratifying in their intensity that one must read them, and oneself, with distrust even when the affect that binds one to memory feels true. To create forms for managing the post-traumatic drives requires an acute visceral and intellectual sensorium that monitors at all times. Monitoring is more important than knowing. All of the girls’ creativity is sucked up by the optimism of that patrolling activity, which enables self-deferral as well. But monitoring in itself assures no authenticity: It just keeps the subject close to the enigmatic representation. In the language of case study rationality, both girls can be said to know negation as something productive, at once an expression of attachment and a cutting gesture that enables someone, usually the tormenter, to stop feeling overwhelmed. The older men teach the girls the value of the cut, and they spend their teens and twenties reproducing its cruelty where and whenever they feel the need to rise above the engulfing world of normal intimacy.18 Yet the cruel cut is not merely dissociative, anti-intimate: It also binds the girls to optimistic projects of embodiment and attachment.19 This is to say that the relation between impersonal formalism and the project of unique self-cultivation are all tied up in the novel. Self-protection and risk are indistinguishable here. From a distance, the girls’ nexus of self-abuse and pleasure produces formally antithetical sexualities. Justine loses and finds herself in S/M while Dorothy practices a kind of distance learning, a mode of monitoring characterized by psychological sadism and sexual idealization.20 Yet to the extent that these sexualities control the flow of risk and desire, they are formally identical. The girls share other pleasure styles as well, featuring the consumption of food and the production of intense intellection. Each, like sex, is a process of absorption and a way of being in the world, a way of bringing it in, entering it, and averting it. While optimistic, these habituated modes of being are also techniques of self-annihilation and negation, ways of using the episodic relief of particular exchanges in order not, for a minute, to be that ordinary failed person with that history. Even if one risks self-negation through such tendencies, not to be that person is an amazing thing. Strongly ambivalent, then, these three powerful modes of repetition, negation, and optimism are associated with the cultivation of the senses as well: Food, thought, and sex are comforting as well as risky and raw-making modes of engagement and exchange. So in one view, these repetitions can be read as establishing a regime of selfcontinuity that amounts to the constellation called “who I am.” At the same time the girls’ capacity not to inhabit the case study version of their story (“Hey you!”) that marks everything as a continuous symptom of the cultivated self, suggests

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something else: a project of interference with “personality.” Their negativity can be read as a departure from rather than an assumption of a way of being “who they are.” For the greater part of this essay I will turn toward this set of pleasures which, I am arguing, interfere with negating rhythms of self-continuity. Responding to trauma’s haunting plenitude not with ascesis but with a formalist abundance, the girls’ tactic of counter-absorption marks their will to live otherwise (“Wait up!”). Pleasure #1: Food (for Thought) Separately and together the girls “snack” constantly and “savagely” (15, 37, 81, 93, 241). Their mouths and their eyes consume potatoes, “a brown-bagged carton of milk”; “rum-flavored marzipan candies, each wrapped in bright red tinfoil bearing a picture of a mysterious brown-haired lady in decolletage, bottled spring water” (12); sweet and sour pork (30); egg roll (36); cheese curls, diet soda, chocolate cake, cookies, sandwiches, coffee, Gruyere brioche, Mystic Mint cookies (15); dainty fried snacks (25); “tea . . . lumps of sugar and cream,” “boiled dumpling” (28); “white bags of candy” (44); “cream and eggs” (45); chili, potatoes, beer, dry roasted peanuts (47); chili over spaghetti noodles, chocolate ice cream, ungnawable jawbreakers (48); cinnamon toast and hot chocolate (52); tuna sandwich (55); mucusy eggs (56); gum (62); “old tea bags and carrot peels” (66); blazing Popsicles (66); Cream of Wheat (74); “apple cores, old potato chip bags” (75); “ice cream and . . . chicken pot pie. . . . Almond Joys, Mallomars, Mellomints, and licorice ropes” (76); “cookies . . . gum” (78); eggs (80); “crackers and peanut butter . . . candy bars, cake, ice cream . . . cake and ice cream” (81); “orange and pink candy . . . Sloppy Joes . . . hot chocolate” (84); “cookies and tea” (86); cocoa (87); gum (91); ice cream (93); candy necklaces (94); eggs (98); “alcohol mixed with Coca-Cola” (105); “ice cream and vanilla wafers” (107); “Choco Chunk bars and French fries” (114); “meat . . . potatoes . . . iced tea” (118); sugar (119); “salad. . . . scalloped potatoes. . . . orange corn curls” (120); “potato chips and beer . . . bite-sized Heath Bars” (123); “pork chops and green beans . . . boxed lemon chiffon pie” (124); “carrots . . . potatoes” (128); “lime sherbet” (130); muffins (137); “gristle, . . . milkshake” (141); “coffee with three spoons of sugar” (146); “a box of chocolates, some of which had ladies’ faces painted on them” (154); “a chocolate . . . another chocolate” (155); ice cream sandwiches (160); “a box of donuts and bag of potato chips” (161); “a bag of burgers, fries, and orange drink . . . French toast” (168); “two chocolate donuts wrapped in cellophane” (174); “mushroom fried rice with green peas and lurid red spare ribs” (175); “lumpy potatoes” (177); “cookies and coffee” (179); “salads . . . . water” (185); “coffee. . . . pizza. . . . diet root beer” (193); “take-out salad” (195, 233); “cheese sandwich, potato chips, and candy . . . milkshake and double fries” (205); “lemon meringue pie” (206); “malteds and potato chips, jelly beans and roast beef sandwiches dripping gravy” (211); French toast (214); “can of soup . . . bread” (215); “wonderfully gooey apple pie” (221); “champagne with our omelettes” (225); “hot coffee and a bag of sugars, stirrers, and petroleum milk substitutes” (229); “muffins . . . bag of cookies” (232); “a bag of cashews, a bag of marzipan, and an apple” (234); cookies (238); grilled cheese sandwich (241); misshapen bran muffin (242); “a bag of potato chips and a bag of candy” (244); “a plate of jewel-like sushi and shiny purple seaweed. . . . sake” (248); cookies (258);

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“pastries and puddings” (260); cakes (261); chocolate cake (264); “bags of potato chips and cookies” (272); martinis (281); “little mints and chewy candies” (290); chamomile tea (309). Forget the fat and calories: To live for one’s snack is to live by the rhythm of one’s own impulse for pleasure, as in creating “a paradise of trips to the grocery and take-out dinners” (76). “In this time of anorexic cuties” being a foodie is a way of both being and not being in the world, giving the girls leverage to engage in exchange and to withdraw from sharing anything with just anyone (95). Eating is their time. It’s their time. When either woman travels, she marks time by eating. When she waits, she eats. When she thinks, she eats. She eats before and after sex. In response to the overwhelming feeling of “sickening boundlessness” or endless absorbing interiority, food shapes a space of time for her, an episode of alterity to herself that is nonetheless self-confirming (160). It provides and defeats structure. It makes consciousness (pleasure memory) and its opposite (inarticulateness) too.21 That is to say the girls’ relation to eating is a scene, not a symptom: among other things, the practice of eating provides a way to negotiate one’s incoherence while nonetheless refusing to organize a personality to compensate for it. Dorothy never feels full when she’s on her own. Then, she can eat any spread infinitely. Only when she is absorbed in unoriginal acts—proofreading the law’s text on Wall Street each night or transcribing the debates that take place in Granite’s inner circle—does she feel something like satiety. To be unoriginal is thereby to gain a reprieve from desire’s self-articulating pressure: Accordingly, the more intense the desire, the emptier the body feels. To empty out one’s emptiness through work is something like negating the negation, at least for a minute, because work is absorbing, like eating. But Dorothy also shows that one cannot help but be original or to desire. It was in Ohio that I developed what my mother came to call my “unattractive habits.” First, I stopped brushing my teeth, except on rare occasions. All at once, I hated putting the paste-laden brush into my nice warm mouth and scraping the intriguing texture of food from my teeth, annihilating the rich stew of flavors, the culinary history of my day, and replacing it with the vacuous mint-flavored aftertaste, the empty cavern of impersonal ivory. . . . In addition, I began giving in to gross and unhealthy cravings: candy bars, ice cream, cookies, sugar in wet spoonfuls from the bowl, Hershey’s syrup drunk in gulps from the can, Reddi-Wip shot down my throat, icing in huge fingerfuls from other people’s pieces of cake. (64)

Dorothy shifts between the name brand particularity of her attachment and the formless inner world of taste that she also creates. Her body is a kitchen in which the things of exchange become thingness, sensory knowledge, and material for a counter-temporality (“the culinary history of my day”) that enables her to “chop up and organize [her] life to lessen the impact of the outside world” (112). The violence of the chopping is accompanied by the pleasures of the result, which she appreciates with all the pride of an author. “It was never enough,” she notes (64). Frequently, she reads when she eats. In the factory of Dorothy’s abundant counter-sensorium, then, the personal is produced as a formally continuous but constantly mutating scene of gratifying repetition. The subtlety of her incremen-

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tal attachment to tastes is strictly her property, her inalienable hoard. At the same time, auto-pollution is not just a victory over something: In school and in her family Dorothy is a stray, a “deject,” an outsider. It is not enough to say she embraces her negativity, because she doesn’t.22 The pain of inassimilability is unbearable while also remediated through the modes of self-care I have been describing. Eating cuts a swath in the anhedonia she experiences in the normal world by liberating her from the time and space of her sociability, where she is only inadequate. Devouring, and its plangent after-affects, engender an endless present. Collaborating with her body makes it a gift that keeps giving, but it only gives to her, meanwhile confirming its social negation with bodily grossness. That two negatives do not make a positive here means that the rhythm of this process sets up an alternative way of relating to the formalism of negation. Dorothy’s misery is central to the system, and her social abjection seals her off from the shame of wanting to be normal after all. Yet her will-to-absorption is a drive toward self-annihilation that seeks, at the same time, to be topped by its optimism for pleasure. She associates the annihilated self with the subjected, abjected, and therefore impersonal one, whereas her grandiosity is a creative force that thrives as long as her enfleshment becomes separated into flavors, tastes, and smells. Justine lives according to a similar scale of culinary plenitude, but its place in her sexual economy takes on quite a different shape, one involving cultivated objectification, rather than the subjective spreading we see in Dorothy’s case. In one moment the world of Justine, “alone under the covers with her own smells, her fingers at her wet crotch, was now the world of the mall filled with fat, ugly people walking around eating and staring” (93). To have sexuality even in private is to be exposed to her own hypercritical gaze. An object of her own disgust exposed as having had desire, Justine’s desire is further degraded because of its banality; after all, in the mall as in masturbation she seeks to stimulate desire while minimizing surprise. Yet when Justine actually eats rather than fantasizes about it, the world seems manageable and pleasant: “When Justine left work she bought a bag of cookies and rode home on the subway eating them with queenly elation” (22). Justine’s pleasure at public eating envelops her in a protective bubble: eating in public is better even than masturbating, because the outside is an anonymous space that enables episodic abandonment of the hurt self. While Dorothy’s saturation by the taste of her uniqueness constitutes a kind of homeopathic aggression at her stereotypically enfleshed identity, Justine’s mode of survival involves generating a pleasure in the repeated gesture rather than in any sensual or visual specificity. When it works, each woman is relieved of herself in the act of taking in what she can bear to have of what she wants. The processual nature of Dorothy’s sensual ingestion paradoxically enables her to shape the external body as a blockage while the sensual intellectual zone allows infinitely hoarded internal self-elaboration. In contrast, for Justine eating is a formalist strategy of impersonality, of time- and space-making, whether or not it appears “really” to be creativity oriented toward the self. They share a formalism of the invented gesture, organized for survival: What differs between them are the ways their compulsion to eat negotiates the economy of the personal and the impersonal. It would be too grand to call any of these moments of food exchange “agency” in any transformative sense. In Two Girls, Fat and Thin any individual’s sustained emancipation from the hurt of history is unimaginable. History is what hurts

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because that which repeats in consciousness, that which gives the pleasure at least of self-continuity, is what the subject deems her history. She is what she continues to have been. Traumatically-identified people in this sense take a technical pleasure in their histories, insofar as their histories are what they have, their personal property. But this is not to say that the history that hurts is destiny, a gothic repetition. Optimistic compulsion in Two Girls, Fat and Thin produces a counter-temporality that provides not narrative continuity but something more like the deep red areas on an infrared image. It involves attempts to experience moments of negative density.23 Inhabiting such dense moments of sensuality stops time, makes time, saturates the lived, imagined, and not-yet-imagined world. The impossible act the girls seek to repeat, for which food and eating serve to substitute, merges will and repetition to produce something not uncomplicated or amnesiac, but something that as yet has no content, just inclination. What they achieve is not nothing; nor is it readable. Paying attention to what’s absorbing marks a direction for the will to take. At one point Justine thinks, “The hell of it was, the fat woman was obviously very tough in some way” (195): then, “a man in an Armani suit . . . wildly waved a broken bottle and yelled ‘I love you! I love you! I want to eat your shit and drink your piss!’” (196).

Pleasure #2: (History Is What) Smarts I have suggested that, for the girls, eating is a technique for pulling the world in and pushing it away according to their own terms and sense of pacing. It is neither an act of conscious intentional Agency nor a manifestation of unconscious symptoms in any objective sense, although the narrative center of the novel, which tells the girls’ stories one episode at a time, does use eating to establish the girls’ way of participating in ordinary life. Yet along with making sense of their lives in the usual way, the novel shows another mode of organizing knowledge about persons. Technically it provides a sense that pleasure—a reiteration that makes a form, not necessarily something that feels good—also captures a way of being a something unbound to an identity that circulates, or that can be tracked to personality. Christopher Bollas calls this the “unthought known,” and argues that knowledge forms before it is experienced idiomatically, in terms of the subject’s own patterning.24 This suggests another way that traumatic repetition might generate knowledge beyond itself despite the manifestation of repetition as a kind of paralysis. The pedagogy of repetition involves a shift of the relation of content (the scene to which one returns) to form (the pacing and placement of one’s attachment). In Caravaggio’s Secrets, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit describe the intricate relation between desire and form as the enigma of sexuality itself.25 The enigmatic quality that allures derives from the sense that one’s attachments are at best only symbolized in their objects, and that the objects are so charged by our regard for them that they remain enigmatic to us at the same time as they are never fully known. Bersani and Dutoit focus on the ways that sexual attachment is constituted by the risk of becoming open to the scene of unpredictable change that the misrecognition involved in erotic attachment brings. In their view, jouissance is a counter-traumatic shapelessness that shatters the ego, pleasing the subject’s desire to be overwhelmed while marking a limit to what it can know. Nonetheless,

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attachment taps into a desire not-to-know as well, an aversion that has many simultaneous functions: preserving the object’s enigmatic quality protects one from becoming bored with, alienated from, or overwhelmed by the object. At the same time the seriality of repetition protects the subject from experiencing the unbearable pull of her own ambivalence toward what she has attached to. In the world of Two Girls, Fat and Thin, this is why it is safer to open oneself up to reiterated forms rather than to persons or fetishes. The reliable rhythm of the girls’ impulse to eat neutralizes the pressure of the pleasure motives it serves: eating is a way of admitting desire without having to “know” that its sensual enactment stands for anything but itself. It is an attachment to a process, not an object, with diverging implications for each of the girls. In both cases, though, having a masticating habit does not amount to an attempt to become null, numb, or stupid. These girls are sharp cookies. Here as everywhere in this novel, the visceral quality of attachment to a practice inevitably involves a kind of acute awareness as well. The intellectual referent of the word “smart” derives from its root in physical pain. Smartness is what hurts, or to say that something smarts is to say that it hurts—it’s sharp, it stings, and it’s ruthless. It is as though to be smart is to pose a threat of impending acuteness (L. acutus—sharp). In this sense smartness is the opposite of eating, which foregrounds the pleasure of self-absorption, not its sting. In Two Girls, Fat and Thin, the fear of and attachment to that sting has multiple functions. As defense: hypervigilance enables pleasure in judging and explaining, including explaining away one’s own contradictions; and it aims to ward off traumatic surprise. As libidinal drive: its constant activity works as well to find scenes for controlled acting out. For like eating, monitoring appears to control the shape and pacing of exchange. Hyperactively speaking, therefore, the counter-traumatic functions of smartness are almost indistinguishable from its traumatic effects. Mediated to people as a zone of personal perception and will, smartness can just as easily be seen as the site for grandiosity and dissimulation. Both girls’ hypervigilant minds munch the storied scenery of memory by reoccupying it optimistically with ideas. In itself, a new idea does not reeducate the mind, erasing or sublimating its knowledge. Rather, it organizes the opportunity to identify with pursuit, with the raw energy of desire. As children they read with the voracious need to inhabit parallel worlds that operate, as Justine says, according to better rules. In this sense even the aesthetic is an instrument for providing a better idea than the one that governs actual living: All novels are utopian, by definition. Definitism too appears to be an intellectual source for emancipatory optimism, but likewise, in the end, its content is irrelevant. For the girls, the pursuit of the ideal form is the pursuit of alterity. Risk, transformation, denegation, and beyond: a yet unenumerated possible destiny. Perhaps this is why Justine can only bear to get “ideas at the rate of about one a year” (18): It is still more risky to interfere with the reproduction of the life you know than to follow an instinct toward something. Intellection thus appears in the novel as content—philosophy and plot—on the one hand and as a hunger for a kind or form of freedom on the other. That is, the emancipatory form does not require a particular content but instead the capacity to be both surprised and confirmed by an attachment of which one knows little. For both girls the word for this unthought form is “beauty,” in its spectacularly alien

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capacity to absorb a person, to take her out of her old way of being whether or not she finds a place elsewhere. The most thematic but not least dramatic instance of this double movement is in Dorothy’s encounter with Anna Granite. Dorothy: She showed me that human beings can live in strength and honor. And that sex is actually part of that strength and honor, not oppositional to it. And she was the first writer to do that, ever. To show that sex is not only loving but empowering and enlarging. Not only for men but for women. As you can imagine, this was a big revelation to me. And then the rest was just . . . the sheer beauty of her ideas. (27)

In this domain of Definitist thought, thinking and sex are modes of power that women and men wield with equal force. The couplet “thinking and sex” constitutes a utopianism whose violence and rage is embraced right up front as central to attachment and intimacy: Granite elicits a “muted snarl of urgency and need” from her followers (12). Dorothy and Justine both see that Granite’s followers are as likely to be nerds and strays as they are to be authoritarian masters. The rhetoric of greatness Granite speaks, for example, seems to be experienced by many of her followers as a kind of soft Nietzscheanism that rejects the emasculating proprieties of normative middle-class order. Dorothy’s embrace of Definitism strikes a similar, but not identical chord. She attaches to a vision of sexual emancipation that is far more iconoclastic and risky, embodying a will of intelligence beyond intention and rationality, a will afraid of nothing, neither death, nor what’s scarier, living. What she calls the “beauty” of this possibility makes her weep with anger and gratitude. For Definitism is the first philosophy of living that accommodates the range of Dorothy’s responses to the world—her softness (desire for intimacy) and her hardness (rage and intelligence). Only in this domain are they continuous attitudes and positive values rather than evidence of monstrous vulnerability that requires hiding. For Dorothy, to develop a self that can exist powerfully, not in compensation for abject objective powerlessness but in affirmation of her power, is to denegate the aspersions of her family, her father, and the taxonomizing cruelty of the normal world. Then again, Dorothy is not actually transformed by Definitism. The beautiful idea turns out not to rehardwire the girl’s capacity to navigate worldliness: When we meet her she has regressed to her adolescent bubble of sadistic thought and culinary self-consolation. What, then, is the value of the ideational event? That’s the beauty of it. On an impulse, Dorothy decides to leave college to join the Definitist Movement. “I could allow [Granite] to penetrate the tiny but vibrant internal Never-Never Land I’d lived in when there was no other place for me,” she thinks, understanding that “the intimacy and understanding that I fantasized was such that it would rip my skin off” (167). To do that, though, she has to imagine that Granite will make that space beautiful, as she makes all others. “Beauty is part of what makes life livable” (133), Dorothy says, especially “strong, contemptuous beauty indifferent to anything but itself and its own growth” (132). Granite legitimates Dorothy’s ruthlessness as a form not of monstrosity but beauty—in the abstract. Alas, when they meet, the girl struggles, feeling “disappointment, a dark wave under my need to worship”(169), for here

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was Granite “looking like a middle-aged housewife in a Chanel dress. No, no, she didn’t look like that. I don’t want that recorded. . . . She had beautiful lids and eyes,” a “beautiful black cape,” a “beautiful tan” (28–29). “Then the light caught the necklace she wore, the deep blue hunks of precious stone that encircled her, and in a flash, I saw her haloed by the brilliant wattage of blue, the air about her ululating with an iridescent current of energy. . . . My fantasy mightily puffed out its sails” (170). As was the case in her fantasy of Peter Pan, Dorothy here cannot bear to be disappointed (again): her desire for the beautiful idea to saturate both the abstract and concrete zones of survival compels her to project beauty onto the smallest screen. The novel makes clear that Definitism requires such a commitment to misrecognizing impossibility as the beautiful: Evaluating Bernard, another follower, Justine notes that “he arranged his perception into fantasies of beauty and strength, glory and striving, fantasies he nursed deep within himself. . . . Through this armor his deformed sensitivity strained to find the thundering abstracts of beauty and heroism that consoled it” (177). This is the compulsion to repeat optimism. Later, encountering Justine, Dorothy repeats this pattern. Paragraph by paragraph she judges her friend’s physical, psychological, and intellectual adequacy to the beautiful idea and its transformative promise. At the same time that she meets Granite, Dorothy renames herself. “Dotty Footie” becomes “Dorothy Never,” a fantasy pseudonym borrowed from Peter Pan, a renaming that negates her family, marks her historical anonymity and stakes out her attachment to a transformational harmony of desire and will through the idea. Granite asks Dorothy to tell the story of her life and then hires her to be a secretary and a scribe for the conversations held in the circle of philosophers that Granite convenes. Dorothy’s job is not to comprehend the beautiful ideas that whirl around her, but to take them down as dictation—as sound, not as meaning. The experience was so charged, so heady that I lived those days in my head, my breath high and quivering on the pinnacle of my deserted body. . . . After the first hours had passed, my frayed perception forked into two—one navigating the landscape of words, phrases, and ideas, the other absorbing the sounds, inflections, and tonal habits of the voices. This secondary perception transmuted words and phrases into sounds that took on shapes of gentleness, aggression, hardness, softness, pride and happiness, shapes that moved through the room, changing and reacting to one another, swelling and shrinking, nosing against the furniture, filling the apartment with their mobile, invisible, contradicting vibrancy, then fading away. (203, 209)

“Fortunately I went emotionally blank,” Dorothy thinks (207), appreciating her post-traumatic capacity to dissociate in order not to interfere with the soundtrack she absorbs uncomprehendingly. This absorption marks another entry into the archive of beautiful forms she has amassed, and not surprisingly this time, as the sound fills her body no longer needs its protective cover of fat, and she loses piles of weight. It is as though the sound substitutes for food, and as though the rhythmic pleasure of talk sublimates the solitary pleasure of eating. “All loneliness is a pinnacle,” Granite pronounces (163). It is not loneliness as abandonment but as the impersonality of intellectual intimacy that frees Dorothy from the compensatory body she had developed as ballast against annihilation. Fat, the congealed

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form of history that hurts: As though it were indeed true that “the body remembers everything” the loss of fat reveals a new Dorothy. She begins to shop, to cultivate her now striking looks, and to fall in love with a musculature she hasn’t seen since she was struggling and fifteen. She also begins to have sexual feeling. Characteristically, smartness for Justine provides a scene of optimism and absorption much like Dorothy’s, but for Justine smartness is far less personalized and embodied, less oriented toward savior-heroes in their magnificent iconicity. Instead, to identify with intellectual absorption is to develop an internal aesthetic that serves as an index for the feeling she can imagine having in a better life. That is, smartness is not utopian in the productive sense, but marks a yet unembodied affective relation toward which she directs herself. Arguing for “the beauty of loneliness” and “the intrinsic value of beauty in writing,” she does not make the connection explicit: and yet the isolation of writing constitutes for her a space of grandiosity without violence, a space of possibility (175, 235). “Stark” beauty is her chosen mode of public impersonality: Through writing she passes as normal by withholding her perversity. No one can see and therefore touch her plenitude: The hell of abandonment to herself is thereby safeguarded from further trauma. Face to face, Dorothy experiences Justine as retiring and dutiful, marked by “methodical reserve,” and otherwise “insubstantial” and tentatively alive (27–29, 12). But in her head, Justine is otherwise: gloriously judgmental like Dorothy, just less dramatic and vocal about it. She believes in her judgments, her pity, her contempt, her aversion, her ambivalence, and on the rare occasions when she has it, her approval. But it is difficult to inhabit this grandiosity in public: and in this sense she and Dorothy are grotesque inversions, each producing an impersonal body for the deterrence of others through strategies of hyperbole and litotes, hyper- and hyporepresentation. But the impersonality of the socialized flesh does not suggest that anyone’s true personhood lies beneath. Their bodies are the condition of possibility for the truth-function: They provide a space for navigating the risk of knowing. They provide for the girls the time and space to judge freely, angrily and bemusedly; to seek the experience of big feeling and the protection from exposure. Impersonalizing bodies facilitate escape from the very monitoring intelligence that the girls also cherish. In this regard, their overvaluation of the idea is akin to the pleasure of critical negation. The idea enables the girls to hold themselves, to embrace their own bodies at the pinnacle of their greatest humiliations. Their embodied cloaks of loneliness protect a cherished sense of bitter superiority and abjection. But, more cherished than the relation between contemptuous defensive knowledge and the libidinal stimulation of intellectual comfort are these forms of distance—of interference with the rhythm of the post-traumatic shuttle—that they have developed with an instinct toward surviving. The differences between them matter here, but as content more than form: Dorothy cultivates the idea as though it were an actual world for her, while Justine experiences in the alterity of thought a relief from the too intimate alterity of the world she lives in. For both girls, though, being mental provides almost a rhythmic relief from being reactive that protects what they know (without knowing it) about the possibility of a better or less bad relation to enfleshment, epistemology, fantasy, and intimacy. It is with such strategies in mind, no doubt, that Adam Phillips titles his essay

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on intellectual subjectivity, “On Composure.”26 Phillips wants to understand why some people come to identify with their minds: not the mind as the true self but as an appendage that does things, that can be trained and cultivated for the self’s benefit. The image of a judge watching him/herself judge, for example, and taking pleasure as though the judging organ were elsewhere. Phillips argues that children with unstable caretaking environments will sometimes turn to the mind as the better mother. It holds you, it maps the world for you, and perhaps most important, it produces a space of composure between you and the world, so that you amount to more than a reactive impulse (“Hey, you!”). The space of time that composure produces enables you to set the scene of your entrance and makes the world come to you when you want it (“My close-up, Mr. De Mille!”) to some degree or another. A number of consequences can be distilled from this structure. Phillips argues that the precociously mind-oriented child (read “intellectual”) enters the world with “diffuse resentment,” a certain self-confirming and sadistic thrill at the scene of optimism and disappointment.27 Why is this, though? In part, disappointment can be channeled as though it were a judgment rather than a feeling, supporting the mytheme that the solitary and independent life of the brain precedes and is superior to the simple attachments of intimate proximity. On the other hand, no one experiences abandonment as a pleasure that simply feels good. Dorothy: “I clawed backward into the past and found no comfort in anything there unless ‘comfort’ could be had in the excruciating site of brute, ignorant love, cowed and trapped, exposed by the wildly panning camera of my memory” (162). My argument so far has been that this recognition precisely brings the comfort or pleasure of recognition itself: but that this cannot be confused, say, with happiness. The mind enables alternative means of self-production without ever necessarily cultivating them. It is a camera that pans where it must, but also where you will it— not that the will is smarter or more creative than the unconscious (far from it!), but that one identifies oneself with its action. Usually, as Dorothy notes, there is “an awful thematic sameness under the deceptive novelty of the experience” (160). As composure approaches the posture of impersonality, it protects the subject’s sensorial capacity to impoverish threatening objects while animating new ones and, more importantly, animates animation itself, spurring new processes of paying attention.28 At least this is the counter-traumatic structure of mindfulness in Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Psychoanalysis always raises anxieties for critics about its tendency to universalize individuality and normalize conventions of, say, individuation and autonomy as ideals of health that should be cultivated and always intelligible. Working between Winnicott and Lacan, Phillips articulates a different view, disidentifying health with the appearance of successful anything. Thinking about the form of the subject as related to his/her capacity to be composed, Phillips rethinks Freudian disease categories, pointing out that the pervert plays with his composure, the hysteric with its absence, and so on. In other words the idea of composure tells us that the symptom lies. When the pervert gives form to perversion, this is his/ her performance of composure, a private way of keeping the world at bay until she/he is ready. What looks like an absence of composure might well constitute its presence at the level of form, not representation. The subject who identifies with thought might be able to disavow her/his dependency and disappointment

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through the appearance of composure, and s/he can act as an autonomous author of the salient terms of accountability, judgment, and value with which s/he and the world shall be measured. Or, disappointed in the world’s unhomeliness, the subject might experience the contingency of autonomy in a way that either impoverishes or overvalues the boundaries made by intellectual will. Composure then might feel desperate, like the drag of melancholy or the push of mania. Or, perhaps the subject absorbs unhomeliness as a just dessert for being unlovable. Composure then might be experienced not as a condition of action but of dark affectlessness or simple neutrality. From this perspective, one cannot predict how and when—with intellection as the guardian of the bruised and disappointed self—someone will move toward any number of possible identifications. Composure is the formalist protector of fantasy, the subject’s medium for misrecognizing what it takes to make some sense.

Pleasure #3: Sex Sex negates composure, except when it doesn’t. We have seen that, throughout the novel, all forms—all patterns that can be misrecognized as objects are managerial habits that orchestrate the subject’s cadence of optimism and disappointment while minimizing her/his risk of unwanted exposure or discomposure. A complex relation of fantasy to self-understanding ensues: Even though I wish to remain myself, I want to experience discomposure, yet only the discomposure I can imagine, and how can I bear the risk of experiencing anything but it? And so on. What counts as composure might be a conventional style of instability rather than an instability that actually threatens the subject’s core patterning. These questions of the seeming and being of exposure and instability are central to the scene of sex in practice. Both confirming and interfering with intelligibility, sex’s threat is objectively indistinguishable from its capacity to confirm. How do you know whether a change is a change or the confirmation of a (conscious or unconscious) expectation? A sex event technically interferes with the ordinary self, the self who mostly is not having sex, who spends time mostly not risking the pleasure of a momentarily different body/mind relation that predictably overwhelms. Tellingly, when the girls imbue ordinary acts of eating and thinking with qualities like “queenly elation,” they are valuing the sense of mental uniqueness that they are able to project into the acts, which remain ordinary even as they open up into the extraordinary. It may look ordinary to eat a cookie or to be fat, but mentally, an infinite domain of optimism opens up directed toward an enigmatic somewhere. In contrast, what the girls value most about sex is its unoriginality. The more mental work involved, the more dangerous it is. For instance, the orgasm seems to make you shatteringly different than your ego was a minute ago, but in another minute you are likely to be doing something utterly intelligible, like pissing, shmoozing, looking away, or walking into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator door. Is it not possible that the very unoriginality of the sexual experience, its banality, also makes it worth cherishing? This is not a rhetorical question, but one that argues methodologically against the transparency of bodily response. Shattering is not always shattering, just as shame is only one way of coding sexual aversion; sentimentality, say, might be a much

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bigger threat to someone’s defenses than any sexual event is, pace normative ideology.29 When people consent to inhabiting the potential for change that sexual events require they are mainly consenting to enter a space whose potentially surprising consequences are kept to a minimum. The only requirement is that sexual subjects be able to manage any anxiety emerging from their failure—always possible—to be the something that they need or want to be. Such instability can have its comforts, nonetheless, if the subject can successfully control the degree of unwanted uniqueness engendered in the event. Bound optimistically to the impersonality of sex, s/he does not have to take personally its failure or her failure to do everything it is meant to do, in whatever context. So when Justine makes “what she hoped were attractive moaning noises” as a lover undresses her (149), and Dorothy describes “the mystery of masculine tenderness that enveloped me like the wings of a swan” (222), the girls perform rhetorically the comforting conventionality of sexual mimesis and the freeing impersonality of sexual sociability in general. There are phrases about sex that one can say; there are sounds that one can make; there are things one does and one doesn’t do; there is what one can imagine. When one occupies the domain of those desires one is using fantasy norms to shape what feeling sexual is, in advance. Sex events might be expressive of one’s true feelings or not, and they might be exciting, overwhelming, painful, and/or boring. One can never be sure, though, whether one will be confirmed or threatened by the negativity or positivity that one attaches to the event. The struggle to master the implications of the impersonality of sex is central to the novel, at least, if not to living: For the girls in particular, I have suggested, this is a fundamentally aesthetic question, a question of training the senses for building possible and beautiful worlds out of impossible ones. Sex is the culminating counter-traumatic pleasure of Two Girls, Fat and Thin, then, because its challenge to the girls’ composure is the greatest, even greater than the adrenaline rush that comes from a good thought or piece of cake. Adrenaline is the addictive booty in this novel: its experience always involves tapping into one’s creativity, even if the scene of stimulation repeats the most unpleasant or disappointing urges of need and desire. An idea, a possibility, takes over the girls. Suddenly as though they are all nerve endings, they turn and return toward mania, compelled to be compelled to repeat. “Justine was morbidly attracted to obsessions” (21); Dorothy attaches to scenarios with “wildest invention . . . growing more and more excited” (17). Romance narrative and violent sex are twins here the ways the girls, fat and thin, are also nominally twins. These genres of the viscera use heightened adrenaline (from longing and fear) to play out a threat to the subject’s attachment to formalism itself. All genres produce drama from their moments of potential failure. (What, the romance might not pan out, or its failure might not affirm the beauty of the elusive ideal? The hero might not survive, or the rule of law that his survival affirms might not be affirmed by his death?) Just as thinking and eating turn out to be ways of managing the risk of sociability formally, sex works dialectically in this novel. It wears its ordinary dress as the site in which the subject’s structuring drama is repeated, and it functions as well as a site of metacommentary about traumatic repetition and what it takes not to negate it, but to break its stride.

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I have described the girls’ attachment to reading as a space for detaching from the normative world while cultivating a parallel sensorium from it. By the time they become readers, both girls are hot for the dual historical functions of romance: as the site of grandiose alternative worlds and of recognizable intimate intensities. We cannot underestimate the gendered divisions that subject the girls to the thought that love plots, intellectual and sexual, will emancipate them from the deadening space of their own worlds. They read about suffering in Victorian literature, absorbed by its dramas of subordination. Further, like many middleclass American girls during the 1960s, they read Anne Frank’s Diary and other Nazi and survivor tales from World War II, savoring and expanding these images of adolescent girl heroism. This pedagogy of feminine suffering teaches many things. The girls learn to savor the story of bodily submission. They cultivate all sorts of scenes that repeat this submission and interfere with it too, by living the full range of their sensuality more fully as intellectuals than they do as social persons. As adolescents and adults, they read everything as romance, amalgamating the big passion of utopianism to the big passion of heterosexual lust. Even though one girl looks normal and the other grotesque from the perspective of white, middle class suburban femininity, these forms of survival render the public body more impersonal to them than the mental body is. They end up in New York City, where the relief and pain of that impersonality is a fact of life. Thereby the power of the idea merges into sexuality. One would think that Anna Granite’s ideology of conscienceless power might not appeal to girls so femininely trained and so post-traumatic. But, and crucially, Anna Granite disseminates her ideology through romance novels. In effect, she turns all readers into adolescent girls. A utopia of the ruthless drives uses the genre of the ruthless drives: how to tell them apart? Which is the tenor and which, the vehicle? Granite’s novels, The Bulwark, The Last Woman Alive, and The Gods Disdained, are repeatedly characterized as trashy and preachy pornography. They are all about “the struggle of a few isolated, superior people to ward off the attacks of the mean-spirited majority as they created all the beautiful important things in the world while having incredible sex with each other” (163). This clearly ironic sentence is not ironic to Dorothy. Reading that the beautiful (fictional) Solitaire D’Anconti experiences trauma that forces “the hot anger of her pain into the icy steel of her intellect” makes Dorothy feel “possible,” like a beautiful person whose social banishment is not fitting but the effect of a vicious and mendacious world (163–64). That Granite’s plots feature women who submit and men who benefit from that submission is not supposed to be interesting: Dorothy scorns Justine for suggesting as much, arguing that the power to submit without fear of loss is the pinnacle of anyone’s individuality—if they can bear the beauty of it. We have seen that Dorothy cannot bear the ugliness of it when Granite turns out to be, after all, a bad practitioner of her theory. When turned down sexually by a younger man, Granite banishes that man publicly from the cadre, wrecking the ideals for which Dorothy needs her idol to stand. Granite’s belief in the ruthlessness of desire turns out to mean mainly her desire and not everyone’s. To Dorothy, this threatens to make Granite’s philosophy merely an individual’s sexual alibi, not a way to retool the world for emancipated sexual personhood. What would emancipated sexual personhood look like if she did encounter it?

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A cultivated individuality that merges inner ruthlessness with the beautiful form of desire in practice feels liberating to Dorothy in her intellectually organized affects. When she experiences it, however, the rhetorical archive for this fantasy is a romance novel, a vehicle central to the reproduction of feminine ideology in the first place. In Two Girls, Fat and Thin, the one relation involving sex that Dorothy seeks is with Knight Ludlow, “a wealthy New York financier” and colleague of Granite’s. Engaged to someone else, Ludlow looks at Dorothy in a way so thrilling that her life changes overnight. She moves from her shabby apartment to a nice one, from shapeless clothes to shaped ones, and from exorbitant fat-eating to moderation. As they move toward becoming lovers, the language of her chapters takes up the song of romance: sparks fly and “streams of colored light” sway between them (218). “The ricocheting chatter in my mind became inaudible, the zipping comets of quasi thought slowed to melting putty. Rivulets of liquid gold, swollen with nodules of heat, spanned my limbs. A glimmering flower of blood and fire bloomed between my legs, its petals spanned my thighs” (222). This ratcheted up, rhetorical blast crashes the moment Ludlow moves toward Dorothy’s vagina. She turns to ice and then dissolves in tears. As she does, her traumatic story leaks out, but this enhances their romance. Knight holds her, tells her his hard stories, and they sleep together for days until they make love happily. At this point the language of the soft and warm flowering vagina reblossoms. Afterwards they eat a big champagne breakfast, and he leaves to rejoin his fiancée. Dorothy is happy: she has been idealized. That’s the end of sex for her. The memory stays perfect, before it fades. Justine’s history of painful sex takes on much the same trajectory as Dorothy’s romantic one. “This memory [of sexual violence], with its ugly eroticism, was not in the least arousing; however she recognized something compelling in it, a compulsion akin to that of a starving lab animal which will keep pressing the button that once supplied it with food, even though the button now jolts its poor small body with increasing doses of electric shock” (235–36). The story of the starving lab animal suggests the bare relevance of content to what drives a being toward what negates him: the unlivable experience of infinite need. The “poor small body” wants food, gets shocked, and is compelled to return to the place of pain by the possibility that shock will again turn to food. Or, the rat is compelled to return because returning is what the rat now knows how to do. All the rat might know is reduced to that one habit of living. The smarting rat is not using his smarts: it has no smarts. It is compelled to create a form of living through repetitions that do not gratify him. But they do gratify him too, in the sense that this is a scene he recognizes. Recognizing oneself when one has survived shock provides a foundation for a mode of survival that is more than just a failure to die. Heterosexual conventionality is, exactly, a painful maze for Justine—given her history, a perverse desire. Like loneliness, S/M performs the unnaturalness of normal intimacy for her by eroticizing form and boundary. It takes up the aspects of grandiose suffering she already associates with love and rescue plots. Her femininity is all tied up with training in the excellence of survival against the odds, the uninevitability of happiness, the pain of bodily pleasure. In this sense sexual trauma only slightly exacerbates ordinary sexuality. Thus on the one hand, it is not surprising that she turns toward a formalist mode of sex that foregrounds and replays the unfailing merger of violence and pleasure. On the other, and like

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Dorothy, when Justine meets Bryan, an artist and an ad man who accosts her in a bar, the defensive impersonal version of Justine’s social self develops a softer, more feminine persona than we or she has seen. Bryan immediately gets Justine’s persona as the gamine/terrorizer she has been. She responds to his percipience by recounting to him a sexually violent experience with a lover who “penetrated” and “opened” her up in a way that she could neither control nor wanted to control.30 He takes her up on the promise of that story, frightening her with an image of “people being tied up and beaten, women getting fucked by dozens of guys” (201); they proceed to a whirl of soft romance and hard sex. Their relation feels normal, reciprocal—confusing. Bryan’s surprising penetration discomposes the intellectual in Justine, shredding the “cloak” of loneliness that has protected her as well as emotionally repeating the surprise of intense childhood sexualization. It gives her pleasure to return to this complex tableau, although her narrator makes it clear that she still must shift positions constantly to get the responses from him she wants. But that Bryan knows how to be human in the context of heterosexual and S/M formalism opens Justine up to new and destabilizing practices. What’s stunning is that each woman gets exactly what she wants out of consensual sex. She gets to be other than her default self. She gets to be impersonal by virtue of the imitative quality of the sex, its conventionality or formalism. At the same time, she can identify with that impersonality and see it as an opening up of something that may or may not lead to something else. Finally, each girl gets to experience a simple feeling with another person. For Dorothy, this is a scene in which she can socially experience ownership of unimpeded “beautiful” femininity, while for Justine this is a scene in which vulnerability and defense recombine into a personality that can be recognized and desired. These enacted desires for simplicity, flow, and normalcy, in short, are gratifying to the girls. Formally these brief relationships repeat the girls’ impulse to become other than who they are historically, but they repeat this desire with a change, in that a certain conventional feminine rhetoric and sensorium is let in the door. Is this irony, or is it destiny? The end of the novel asks as much. Meeting Justine reclaims for Dorothy the desire for belonging that she once associated with Definitism. The energy released by these memories now attaches to Justine, not to the memories. This is why Dorothy sees their relation as “mind-boggling” (17): Justine becomes her newest object, her next opportunity to idealize and to become idealized by another human. Sex seems to interfere with idealization: but sex is only one route to love. As the novel closes, Bryan has just whipped Justine. At first, this is at her direction, but then it escalates beyond her consent (310). Meanwhile, Dorothy is acting violent and crazy in public, sputtering curses and wild accusations aloud on the New York City subway while reading Justine’s article on Anna Granite in Urban Vision. Dorothy feels both accurately depicted and “raped” by the article. She marches up to Justine’s apartment furiously, and enters the room enraged. But seeing the scrawny, naked Justine tied to her bed all bloody, scarred, and fatigued, Dorothy takes up like a super hero, beating Bryan up and ejecting him from the room naked. Justine and Dorothy talk a little, but, exhausted by this show of violence and release, Justine falls asleep in Dorothy’s arms. This is not a lesbian ending, exactly, since exhaustion is not sexuality. On the other hand, this mutual fall into bed is not nothing. It’s something else.

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CODA: MELOTRAUMA This is what we come to: the exhaustion of a repetition. What does it mean to turn an exhausted something into something other than itself—a lesson learned? It may be that any commentary violates the spirit of the novel’s ending, to the degree that the image of the two women hovers there as what it is. They need no longer to monitor. In contrast to us, they no longer shuttle between the traumatic and the critical. It is our task to catch up to them, to find out what happened: wait up! Were we to take on the tactic that sustained them throughout their struggles we would return to their desire for beauty, for absorption in the emancipating image or sound. We would have no choice but to be gratified that, finally, these two hypervigilant minds have come to rest in their bodies without being dead or crazy. It may be that the beauty of writing of love in the post-post-traumatic scene requires the risk of acknowledging, even coveting, the possibility of such simplicity. This beauty is born of simple violence, too. Literally iconoclastic, it has beaten up on the heteroimago that has for so long provided the content for girlish fantasy. Now the girls are literally beyond biography. Not only that, but the door has been closed on boys. A newly sensible scene prevails to attach to that desire for an attachment to repeat. At least it amounts to a less bad world for anomalous women and sexuality, if not for sex. Perhaps it also sets forth a new lexicon for memory, and those lesbians and gay men Justine and Dorothy encounter suddenly become characters to whom they have paid too little attention (72, 116). We can extrapolate from this a practice of intimacy that does not refer to the birth or childhood family, property, or inheritance. Nor does it require the bodily and sensual cultivation of alternative worlds inside individuals who exchange stories about them without changing their actual lives. If, that is, we want to read Dorothy as beneficent, as something other than a monitoring top who now both rescues and fondles the adult, but diminutive, Justine Shade. Her father eerily haunts that structure. So does another subject: the young Dorothy. Earlier in the novel Dorothy reads The Little Match Girl the way she will later read of other suffering protagonists. She imagines rescuing the poor little girl, feeding her Cream of Wheat, and then sleeping with her, “her bony back pressed against my front, my arm wrapped around her waist” (74). At the end of the novel Justine faces Dorothy and falls asleep in her arms (312). Now Dorothy experiences “white flowers” blooming in her heart, and the erotic luminaries of Definitist romance who have “for so long” absorbed her libidinal energy suddenly dissolve. We know nothing about how Justine is feeling—the poor girl sleeps, impersonal as ever, but more relaxed. In other words, the novel can be read as Dorothy’s voice-over, a sound loop, and the story of a mind-boggling tenderness that she loonily projects. As with so many voice-over narratives in which things happen outside of the writer’s experience, the decision as to whether this is true testimony or a troubled scene is a matter of trust or transference (desire). In this case, the ordinary narrative questions are compounded by Dorothy’s particular habit of idealization for emancipation from herself. No matter, the novel’s closing scene enables a something to be constructed in the present, from where the people are. We can even read this scene as the foundation

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for an actually feminist queer theory, if we can imagine Justine waking up rested and content. This would involve following sexuality along all of the perverse paths it will travel—the traumatic, the conventionally romantic, the experimental, the meaningless, the hysterical—paying less moral attention to visceral content and paying more respect to the simple imperative to fight for women where the urgencies are. Because it can seem so trivial, private, self-referential, and minor in the “big picture” of things, feminists have paid a big cost for attending to sex, the elaborate economies built around it, and their impact on women. Some have left feminism behind as white, heterosexual; a bourgeois tic. Two Girls, Fat and Thin provides a good case for both arguments. The problem is most acutely staged in the terms of that other emancipating promise suggested in the sleepy ending: that of a post-psychological world, a world where people are defined in their actions and where the monitoring subject is not deemed closer to the truth about living. Two Girls, Fat and Thin associates psychological interiority with the traumatic incapacity to disavow: Trauma confounds the subject’s censor, substituting its own wild aesthetic of distortion and repetition, and at the same time provides a counter-traumatic grandiosity for the now impossible subject. This novel provides for us an easy way to recognize trauma: it happens through sex. But the girls know it is more than this. Their families are traumatized and traumatic. I do not mean that all families are traumatic and traumaticized, but these particular families in their historical milieu were incited to attach to a good life that was not very good for anyone in it. The structuring “unthought known” of their lives is that the sexuality of the family, its amalgamated intimate and financial economy, is already a terrible context for the cultivation of anything. Sexual trauma shapes knowledge the girls already have, rather than being the event that merely structures subsequent consciousness.31 I have told a psychological story here about the two girls’ will to attach, suggesting the convolutions of repetition in the traumas of femininity. I tell it this way because this is how the novel explains the mental involution and bodily expression of the two girls, and I wanted to spin out for you a concept of impersonality that both marks any ordinary subject and presents strategies for interfering with particular toxic intimacies. But, as Carolyn Steedman reminds us, typically only some people—the middle classes—get to have (complex) psychology, while others—on the economic bottom—are deemed as mere (simple) effects of social and material crises of survival.32 Justine and Dorothy are saturated by the mass cultural signs of the United States from the late ’60s through the ’80s. Like virtually every recent film about the ’60s Two Girls, Fat and Thin locates the girls historically by depicting them listening to pop music, buying pop style, eating pop food, and watching pop TV. On television they witness the civil rights actions of 1963, Martin Luther King, and metropolitan rioting. Their parents pronounce lots of historically predictable softly liberal opinions from their perch at a safe distance. In short, the two girls are not exemplary traumatic subjects, or children, or women, or any kind of exemplary Subject of History, whether of nations, capitalism, or sexuality. They are two middle class white American girls, enclosed in nuclear families that live in communities so white that “the Jew” and “the Spic” are easy to spot from a distance. Economically more than comfortable, the girls nonetheless have virtually no resources but themselves and books with which to escape the given world.

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It is entirely predictable that they would end up addressing the problem of living by diving inside their bodies and feelings. Partly, this is training, as during adolescence, their parents send them to uncomprehending therapists. But even if this were not the case, the girls’ isolation and involution are to be expected of children of the professional classes. Their interiority is the product, the cost, and the benefit of seeing themselves, in the terms of bourgeois universalism, as autonomous individuals who demand some attention and independence, parental affirmation and private space. What if the girls had inhabited worlds in which the burden to make happiness was not indexed according to power at work and harmony at home and by the achievement of a family so complete it needs nothing else but itself? They would not be who they are. In this sense too, what is personal about them is also impersonal. Not strategically, but analytically and historically speaking. In short, even if we could agree on the meaning of the girls’ final binding moment, their particular story can be only a part-object, involving the exhaustion or discomposure of heterocultural trauma stories as the destiny for certain sectors of the professional and metropolitan elite. When I say this I may sound accusatory: aha! But I mean not to sound that way, just to name the particular location out of which their drama comes. I also realize that there is nothing “beautiful” in this explanation of the repetitive modalities of optimism and disappointment, will and transformation that I have been tracking. Such a poetic seems so connected to the cultivation of selves, will, and desire that it feels like clunkification to say anything but “as sexualization is the problem so too will its better cultivation make the solution.” But this has not been my argument. Further, we are trained to read the end of a novel as though it provides a solution to a problem or a diagnosis of a case study subject. All the details meld into a shape, and finally a moment comes when it all makes sense. But Justine and Dorothy are not finding sexual truth when they finally get some rest from working the relations of trauma and absorption, history and fantasy, will and misrecognition, flesh and abstraction, form and content. The concept of the two-as-one as a solution to individual isolation is conventionally recognized as a requirement for happiness, but as such it nonetheless produces the kinds of hermeticism that marked the girls out in the first place as likely to misrecognize their story as personal trauma. Dorothy’s movement toward Definitism demonstrates this paradoxically, as it requires a new style of risky collective identification and deprivatization in order to promote the legitimacy of all individual will. The “Two Girls’“ twinning in the novel’s title therefore suggests to me a different thought. The novel’s epigraph from Nabokov reads, “All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and chimeras, something real ahead.” The closing image of Dorothy and Justine’s attachment might testify to something real. We can also read the conclusion as the new present from which we cannot predict, but only intuit, futures. History is what has hurt and it continues to make shadowlines, and we are always in the haze of the present, sensing new repetitions-to-be, some of which can be willed, others of which remain enigmatic. We are still unlearning the transparency of repetitive representation, and still therefore improvising how else we might know to pay attention. We are also given a little help toward this reading. When Dorothy provides that image of their final bodily intimacy, she produces it as a soundtrack. “Her body

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against me was like a phrase of music” (313). The soundtrack is not accompanied by dialogue: It is as though we have returned to the melodramatic stage where the smallest bodily gesture communicates so much about the ineloquence of the language we have. A musical phrase is powerful because it repeats: As we become attached to it, it helps us find a place before the plot tells what it means and where that place is. Melodrama is trauma’s perfect vehicle in that regard, the unspeakable meeting the unsaid, all the while music bypassing the order of composure to make contact with the audience’s affective intelligence. Melodrama is associated historically with the breakdown of political regimes (of class, of government, of family). These dissolutions release energies for social organization into the public that had been siphoned off into institutions. The transparency of melodramatic emotion responds directly to the enigma of a present no longer capable of being understood in terms of inheritance and its institutions—law, property, religion, family—whose oppressive histories have hurt but have also organized life consequentially. We can make a claim that the emphasis of melodrama shifts slightly in contemporary melotrauma. The former consoles its audience with an aesthetic of transparent embodiment and affect that produces continuity with the very past that is dissolving, while the latter humbles the viewer with the enigmatic quality of institutions, affects, and bodies in the present. Melotrauma is a fundamentally temporal form, focusing on the urgency to wrest the present both from the forms we know—the burden of inheritance, of personality, of normativity—and from the ones we can only imagine in the futures to which the claims of the present are always oppressively deferred. So, the urgency to not take the present for granted as a rest stop between the enduring past and the momentous future provides another reason to conclude this essay with neither ringing optimism nor disappointment. To interfere with the work of trauma means to refuse its temporality. Singly, the girls countertemporalize constantly through fantasy and habit in the ways I have described. Together, they break the time-stunting frame of girlhood by finally relaxing in each other’s presence. No longer living within the mania of intellectual and erotic attachment, they drink a soothing cup of tea and unclench into consoling positions, much like the one I am in now toward you. To lean into the body of an intimate is a most personal thing. But what’s personal about it is like the deep anonymity of sleepers finally disburdened of the weight of bearing themselves. Our Professor Sedgwick, whose beautiful and acute thought teaches me how to read the meaningful stammering of repetition, has elsewhere instructed us not to think that feelings are constructed, and I have no doubt that she is right that the body responds to stimulus as it will.33 My angle on the question is slightly different. To me the evidence suggests a distinction between the moment of affect and what we call that affect. I may feel overwhelmed, I may feel composure: my panic might look like a stony silence, and my composure like a manic will to control. In one decade, what looks like a shamed response may look like an angry one in another. Subalterns seem always to have tone of voice problems. All babies smile, but it might be gas. One decides these things according to one’s education in tracking repetition, form and norm. In contrast, an aesthetic that values the beauty of fantasy because it produces pleasures we can feel and not feel too overwhelmed by can believe too much in the thingness or idea of the representation, and can believe paradoxically that the viscera are hardwired as to motive and

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aim. This is a paradox because the motive and aim of the aesthetic education is to train the viscera. The aspect I love most about a poetics of misrecognition is that it teaches us that our viscera are teachable, if anything is. This view is also central to why I find impersonality such an optimistic concept for interfering with the march of individualities toward liberal freedoms. I have tried to suggest, then, something quite different here. First, no model of subordination can rely on the view that emotions are transparent if the critic wants to interfere with the reproduction of normative claims about that which should organize optimism and disappointment. On this basis I have argued that pleasure does not always feel good, and that understanding the binding of subjects both to their negation and incoherence is key to rewiring the ways we think about what binds people to harmful conventions of personhood. Second, emotions have content and form (the repetitions—of word, lyric, music, or sound). They are not species of pre-ideological clarity, but quite the opposite: they are taught (“Hey, you!”) and barely known (“Wait up!”). Two Girls, Fat and Thin articulates this haze of clarity and incoherence around emotions, as do the three zones of absorption the girls invent to interfere with the subordinations that feel inevitable. Third, the novel’s conclusion tells us nothing conclusive about how not to be a case study subject, since all it represents is a fantasy that someday the self-consuming negotiation of ambivalence will stop and we can rest. I think of the relation of composition and composure. I am hoping it has something to do with a political claim on the present, but that might be just me. The novel presents eating as creativity and self-annihilation; language as meaning and sound; the intellect as weapon and cushion. These clusters of image and pulsions of attachment might mean anything or be meaningless. The test is a broadly historical one, which wonderfully unsettles what’s personal and impersonal about being and having a history.

NOTES 1. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Fat Art, Thin Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 160. 2. By “phrase” I refer both to The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte [in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 594–617] and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), where the concept of the phrase resonates musically—a form generated through repetition that comes to seem like the origin and limit of meaning, rather than a scene of it. The differend is what goes beyond the phrase; it is what, in Marx, the bourgeoisie cannot afford to avow and which, therefore, is everywhere enacted in the tawdry pleasure and violence of ordinary discipline and taboo. 3. See the keyword “Phantasy,” in The Language of Psychoanalysis, eds. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, and trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 314–19. 4. On this question, see generally the work of Leo Bersani, Teresa DeLauretis, Laplanche and Pontalis, Jacqueline Rose, and Slavoj Zizek. 5. See “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” GLQ 1.1(1993): 1–16.

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6. See Adorno, Theodor, “On Television,” in Critical Theory. 7. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37. 8. Christopher Bollas puts forth the phrase “unthought known” for those knowledges one has inarticulately or unarticulated, and which one expresses in practices of being rather than in language. See The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 9. I learned to recognize the overvaluation of this mode of self-reflective, self-elaborating personhood as a major effect of the liberal project, dating from John Stuart Mill, from Elaine Hadley. See also David Lloyd and Paul Taylor, Culture and the State (New York: Routledge, 1998). 10. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), A Dialogue on Love (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), and Fat Art, Thin Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 11. In the end, of course, it’s a dialectic between the Althusserian “Hey, you!” and “Wait up!” but these locutions are not antitheses either, because they each mark the subject’s lag (Nachträglichkeit) with respect to the meanings and desires that organize her. 12. On repetition and convention as antidotes to the formlessness of subjects, see Bollas, Christopher, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), and Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. See also Bersani, Leo, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 13. Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 14. Sedgwick, “The Use of Being Fat,” Fat Art, Thin Art, 15. 15. Berlant, Lauren, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 92. 16. Gaitskill, Mary, Because They Wanted To (New York: Scribner, 1997); Two Girls, Fat and Thin (New York: Vintage, 1991). All subsequent references to Gaitskill’s novel will be cited in the body of the essay; Bad Behavior (New York: Vintage, 1988). Uncollected stories include “Suntan,” in Word (12 July 1999): http://new.word.com./habit/suntan/story.html; with Peter Trachtenberg, “Walt and Beth: A Love Story,” in Word (7 July 1999): http://www. word.com.features99/walt_and_beth/; “Veronica” in POZ (August 1998): http://www.thebody.com/poz/culture/8_98/fiction_gaitskill. html; “Folksong,” in Nerve (1999): http://www. nerve.com/Gaitskill/folkSong/. 17. Thanks to Howard Helsinger for the Pale Fire reminder. The literary history whose repetition pulsates in this novel requires a story of its own. 18. On “normal intimacy,” see Berlant, Lauren, “Introduction,” in Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On case study normative intimacy see, in the same volume, Candace Vogler, “Sex and Talk.” Vogler’s procedure for tracking the contradictions between the ideology of more intimacy and the seemingly actual need for less of it is central to this essay’s conceptualization of impersonality. 19. Freud’s essay on “Femininity” argues that female masochism emerges from the lack of sanction for women’s justified anger in and at the world. Much contemporary feminist theory follows through this line, although not Gilles Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” [Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1989)], which mainly forgets to remember women. 20. I refer to Freud’s description of the child’s desire to master the relation of control to loss of control in the fort/da game. The child’s “loss” and “recovery” of the top is read generally as the bargaining any subject does to retain a notion that her/his intelligibility or continuity in the world is a function of her/his will. However, the capacity of the ego to

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respond to contingency via a principle of form should not imply that the subject “really” is contingent and only masterful in a compensatory way. Each position, repeated countless times, is its own pleasure. 21. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari comment that cultural minoritization—a relation of displacement within a hegemonic frame, a non-position of internal exteriority to ideal collective norms—is reenacted in the displacement of speech and writing by eating. Eating performs a displacement that is already a social fact: it stuffs the mouth that cannot be heard anyway, except as a distortion. 22. In Kristeva’s version of abjection the abjected subject becomes a thing astray, a deject. One cannot, in my reading of this text, embrace one’s abjection, because that would imply a capacity to disavow one’s expulsion from normal personhood. That’s the difference between a notion of subordination as subjectifying (I am an “x” kind of person) and desubjectifying (I am not a person, I have no form, I am a negative). I have suggested throughout this essay that these positions are inassimilable but proximate, articulated in the relation between a psychologically-oriented subjectivity and an impersonal one, at least in Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and perhaps beyond. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 23. See Stewart, Kathleen, A Space on the Side of the Road (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 24. See The Shadow of the Object, 4. 25. Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit, eds., Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). 26. Phillips, Adam, “On Composure,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Essays on the Uncommitted Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993),42–46. 27. Ibid., 44. 28. Ibid., “First Hates,” 24. 29. Here I allude to a longer argument I make elsewhere against the presumption of shame as the primary sexual affect (recognizable by queers). While I agree with Sedgwick that subjects’ responses may well be hardwired as such, I maintain the importance of reading the gap between an affect and its coding. That gap is an historical and political one, one which is part of what’s at stake in sexual politics. See Frank, Adam, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), and Warner, Michael, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). 30. This story, of the lover who introduces a female protagonist to emancipating sexual violence (to which she becomes classically ambivalent), is a staple of Gaitskill’s oeuvre since her first book, Bad Behavior. 31. Traditionally the Freudian après coup is structured by a primary trauma that finds form in a later repetition (such as a childhood molestation that generates symptoms later on in life, after what looks like an irrational phobic symptom appears). Often in this novel, I am suggesting, the inverse relation applies. 32. Steedman, Carolyn, Landscape for a Good Woman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). Sometimes this distribution happens because critics make it so, but it is also the case that the explanations of therapy culture are very class articulated. 33. See Frank, Adam, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds., Shame and Her Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), and Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “A Poem Is Being Written,” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 177–214.

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reat deeds of great men; chronological accounts of battles and borders, treaties and territories: this is what history connoted through much of the twentieth century, but as the century waned, the term came to embrace much more. Historiography departed from the diachronic narratives of political and military “events,” moving into more synchronic accounts of such matters as courtship conventions, attitudes toward smell and personal hygiene, and even patterns of weather in the past. The “new history” tries, among other things, to scrutinize the experiences of those who have inhabited the margins of culture and society, those whose voices had previously been silenced because their race, class, gender, or nationality denied them access to power and self-expression in the world of events. In literary studies, what was called at first “new historicism” (epitomized by such journals as Representations and American Literary History) holds texts up against nonliterary documents from their own historical period, looking at how a culture’s discourse on a topic—be it power, sexuality, knowledge, madness, punishment (the subjects associated with Michel Foucault, an important influence on this movement)—affects our interpretation of literature addressing that same topic. New historicism has been influential in putting literary texts firmly back into the historical context from which New Criticism, structuralism, and their theoretical descendants had tended to alienate them—so influential, in fact, that by the early twenty-first century, such critical methods tend not even to be associated with a school of theory; they just seem to be the norm of literary criticism. Arguably, though, history was already playing a significant role in feminist criticism before the rise of new historicism. Such feminist commentators as Judith Lowder Newton (in “History as Usual? Feminism and the ‘New Historicism’”) and Linda Boose (in “The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or—The Politics of Politics”) assert that feminists have been bringing history to bear on literary criticism long enough to shake the “new” from “historicism.”1 To be sure, not all feminist criticism treats “history” in a way that “historicists” would approve, and one of the things this section does is to challenge ideas of how history is usually defined. But as Newton points out, early feminist criticism (especially the “images of women” or archetypal forms) tended to locate certain female figures in texts outside of history, pointing to the recurrence of types and psychological patterns without reference to their specific moments in time. Feminist critics who do locate texts in a specific historical moment are often influenced by a Marxist explanation of historical change and stasis, but not without a healthy skepticism. Marx taught us to look at class and economics as engines of change in history; he also showed us the importance of examining dominant ideology, the force of capitalism, and the significance of struggle. Marxism has often provided a vocabulary for feminist analysis of women’s social and political status. Perhaps one reason for the seeming compatibility of the two modes is Marxism’s insistence that “the material conditions, the real conditions” (as Newton calls them) are operating in the world. Feminists agree that the oppression of women is a reality that ought to be eradicated, and Marxism’s grounding in economic evidence provides both reinforcement for that view and an operative model for its analysis. Still, feminists question the invisibility of women in most classical Marxism and are therefore suspicious of its methods, often invoking other modes of analysis—psychoanalysis, Foucaultian cultural studies, postcolonial criticism—to

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temper Marxism’s role in their discussions. Furthermore, feminists are dubious about the way that “material conditions” have sometimes been defined, and they often turn very different lenses on those conditions, suggesting that previously ignored texts—conduct books, housekeeping manuals, testimony about sexual harassment, for example—may constitute a different version of the “real relations” than has previously been acknowledged. Feminist historicism, then, is marked not just by an affinity with Marxism but also by a questioning of certain fundamental issues in the previous writing of history: the importance of the individual, the functioning of power, the separation between the public and the private, the constitution of gender difference itself, and even the existence and importance of a linear chronology. In calling this chapter “Histories,” we point to the work feminist criticism has done to call attention to the multiple versions of the past that literature delineates, including the problems articulated by national (and nationalist) histories, racial and ethnic histories, and personal histories. These essays also point to the ways that traditional (academic, patriarchal) histories have symptomatically ignored women in history, not just their active participation in history but also their roles as emblems of history. “The woman” sometimes plays a role in history by her absence or by being made a symbol of something she is not. Furthermore, many of these essays examine the consequence of an assumption that the “public” sphere is really separate from a “private” sphere, and that those two spheres are gendered. If we assume that the world of commerce and the home are in fact two worlds, then we miss important connections between them in the way we understand our histories. Such a mistake is structurally similar to the mistake of assuming that “First World” and “Third World” histories can be read either separately or with the influence going only in one direction. The essays in this section therefore call attention to the multiple ways that gender, history, ethnicity, nation, home, and economics shape and are shaped by literary representation. In “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale” (1986), Paula Gunn Allen demonstrates how Western narrative history can distort the representation of native American thought. Allen reproduces an English-language version of an oral tale about a female character, translated in the early twentieth century by a white man. Allen subjects this Keres tale to three readings, showing how profoundly one’s expectations and information affect one’s reading of a text from outside the mainstream culture. First, subtly applying the tools of structuralist narrative theory, Allen shows how the translator’s unselfconscious allegiance to Western patriarchal story lines has caused him to distort the content and form of the tale. From a tribal perspective, she explains, the English rendition is nonsense, as it dismantles the ritual nature of the original to force it into a linear tale of conflict and resolution. Next, Allen considers what an Anglo-American feminist might say about the translated tale, observing that such a reader would have good reason to jump to false conclusions about the oppression of women in the culture supposedly represented by the story. Finally, Allen proposes a “feminist-tribal” interpretation, bringing together her knowledge of Keres “perception, aesthetics, and social systems” with her awareness of what gender signifies in Keres culture. The feminist-tribal perspective allows Allen to reveal “how the interpolations of patriarchal thinking distort all the relationships in the story and, by extension,

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how such impositions of patriarchy upon gynocracy work to disorder harmonious social and spiritual relationships.” As this last remark indicates, Allen is interested in the effect stories have on the world of lived experience; she asserts that the Westernization of American Indian tales is partly responsible for the problematic relations between the sexes in tribes today. Euro-American culture has robbed the Keres of their history by interpreting stories in ways that render them nonsensical. Allen’s literary criticism is a form of activism, a way of bringing structuralist-inspired abstractions to life. “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads,” asserts Gloria Anzaldúa in “La consciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness” (1987). Anzaldúa sketches out the consciousness of the mestiza, the Chicana living in the borderlands that link the southwestern United States with Mexico, the product of “racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollination.” For Anzaldúa, the space that exists between and within opposing worlds is a creative space, where la mestiza can revel in the strength and ambiguities that result from the “struggle of flesh, [the] struggle of borders,” the “cultural collision” she embodies. This enormously influential essay is one of the few in this volume that is not, strictly speaking, a piece of literary theory or criticism, but Anzaldúa’s project of remaking North American culture by transforming those “images in our heads” closely parallels that of the literary critics represented in this section. Anzaldúa’s argument invokes principles of deconstruction, as she advocates “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity,” as well as “the breaking down of paradigms” that perpetuate oppression. She emphasizes the multiple possibilities that arise from being both inside and outside of cultures simultaneously. For example, “as a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.” Anzaldúa explores the relations between Anglo culture and the culture of the borderlands, arguing that the struggle for recovery in Chicano and Chicana culture must be specifically feminist in that it must end the destructive patterns set by Anglo-influenced gender roles. Her essay ends with some beautiful autobiographical writing describing the relationship between her own family and the borderland itself. True to her argument for living on the border, Anzaldúa’s essay blurs the boundaries between academic and personal writing, between scholarship and experience, and between theory and activism. In doing so, it illustrates some of the postcolonial historymaking that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak might advocate: creating an impossibility from a history that in some ways cannot be said to really exist. The next two essays in this section take up explicitly the problem of writing a history of oneself. Like “history,” autobiography was once the province of the great man, the extraordinary life. But what stories—what histories—are lost when only the great get to write their own lives? Such questions are complicated, though, by other questions about history that feminist criticism makes clear: Can we trust a speaking subject to accurately tell her own story? How does an individual’s story connect to or intersect with a larger history of a group, a gender, an ethnicity, a nation, or a region? And, within a history where women’s voices were silenced by being limited to the domestic, private sphere, must a woman tell her own story from the vantage point of a commercial, public realm in order to have a say in history?

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In “Me and My Shadow” (1989), Jane Tompkins represents her writing self as split between two voices, that of an academic critic who knows how to use all the critical terminology, all the moves, and that of “a person who wants to write about her feelings.” Oscillating fearlessly between the public side of her working life (as in her direct scholarly response to the Ellen Messer-Davidow essay that inspired this piece) and the private side (as in allusions to her stockinged feet, her childhood conflicts, her anger at men, her present need to go to the bathroom), Tompkins goes as far as any academic feminist has dared to go in pushing out the boundaries of academically appropriate writing. As she explains, the public/ private split is a fiction anyway, perpetuated by a system that assigns the private realm of emotions to women in order simultaneously to devalue both females and feelings. In her call for “love,” not “anger,” as a dominant academic mode (and her recognition that such a call is embarrassing because it is “mushy” and “sentimental”), in her evocation of the voices of poststructuralist theorists alongside her “own” voice’s questioning, musing, even humming, Tompkins is redefining the way autobiography might inform the feminist theory and criticism of the future: the way it might have its effect—like some of its sources—in the world of experience outside texts. In so doing, she challenges our usual notions of what history is and does. Linda Kauffman’s “The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony, or an Infant Grifter Grows Up” (1992) is a tour de force that places the “confessional” aspects of feminist criticism (and the truth-claims of autobiography itself) in an ironic light. The irony is that the “infant grifter” is Kauffman herself, as she reveals in the catchy narrative passage that opens the piece. Although Kauffman’s autobiographical details figure prominently in her essay, she provides them to demonstrate her point “against personal testimony,” primarily that it is open to interpretation, that it tends to feed into oppressive master narratives, and that it allies feminist criticism—however unconsciously—with individualism. Excessive focus on the self, she argues, carries “the implicit message . . . that you cannot change society, only yourself. Such interpretations,” she maintains, “perpetuate narcissism and personal passivity instead of inspiring political action and social change.” Kauffman rejects the arguments of Jane Tompkins and Barbara Christian (in Readings) against using “male” theoretical discourse in academic feminist writing. Kauffman’s spirited defense of “theory” points out that to reject theory is to “discourage investigation of any complicating factors that may weaken the stance of victimization or moral superiority. It avoids the complicated question of collusion and complicity either in one’s own oppression, or with institutions.” Kauffman is acutely aware of feminism’s interdependence with institutions, particularly academia, and of the relative privilege of academic feminists in the larger social world. “While we are being exhorted to focus on our feelings,” she remarks, “a lot of people are falling through the cracks in our society.” She advocates keeping the lines of “self-critique” open within feminism and, like Spivak, challenges the idea that feminism’s goal is individual self-fulfillment. “I never thought feminism was about happiness. I thought it was about justice.” The reader of Kauffman’s essay learns a lot about Kauffman’s “self”: the personal voice behind the “I” of her essay is as vivid as that in Tompkins’s work. But Kauffman exemplifies how a feminist scholar can write in the first person without making herself the ultimate

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subject of her writing, for—as she puts it—“writing about yourself does not liberate you, it just shows how ingrained the ideology of freedom through self-expression is in our thinking.” In “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature” (1993), Shirley Geok-lin Lim problematizes the concepts of experience and identity, on both pragmatic and theoretical grounds, and raises the question of how history is connected to—or creates—both. To speak of “Asian American” experience is pragmatically difficult because of the diversity of cultures and histories represented within the phrase (Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-, Filipino-, Southeast-Asian-, and Indian-American, to put the categories most broadly). Lim’s theoretical survey of the then-emerging field of Asian American literature foregrounds the inevitable struggles between ethnicity, history, and feminism for women writers whose Asian Americanness allies them (ambivalently) with traditions that Western feminists would perceive as patriarchal. Lim’s essay traces out the friction between women’s studies and ethnic studies, both in white feminists’ neglect of women of color and in Asian American men’s having overlooked women writers as they constructed their own canon through the 1970s. Her critique of white feminists remains for the most part implicit, while her reprimands of the male editors of Asian American literary anthologies are spirited and detailed. Lim turns to anthologies of Asian American women’s writing for definitions of Asian American identity that can accommodate feminine and feminist values. Lim’s close readings of two full-length texts by Asian American women, however, “provide a caution against too easily assuming the merger of ethnic and feminist identities,” as the texts tend to move from a critique of gender roles within Asian American communities to a critique of racism in American culture, without harmonizing the two. Even Asian American women poets who assert more obviously feminist identities by “writing the body” in a form Lim identifies as l’écriture féminine do not bridge the gap because they ground their writing in a Western form of discourse. Still, Lim points to their work as a positive reminder “of how ethnic and gender identities are continuously negotiated in tension against each other, the very act . . . of writing composed of strategies of identity that challenge each other in a dialogical mode within the texts themselves.” By shifting the focus from the private experience of heroines in novels to the wider arena of empire and by looking at “First World” texts from an explicitly marginal perspective, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has had a tremendous influence on our thinking about history in connection with feminist criticism. In what we are calling “Four Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (the 1985 version was called “Three Women’s Texts . . .”; this essay is reproduced here in its revised 1999 version, entitled simply “Literature”), Spivak adopts a contentious stance at once: whereas received wisdom would assume that feminism (opposed as it is to the oppression of women) would be “naturally” antithetical to imperialism (the oppression of conquered peoples), Spivak observes that “the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism.” She substantiates the charge with reference to feminist readings of Jane Eyre, which, Spivak explains, participate in the ideology of individualism that is central to colonizing impulses. To assign a “self” to the “other,” to assign “world” to a region or culture (for example, to designate a group of places as “the Third World”) by enumerating it in a series where the “first” is “ours,” is to participate in imperialism. Spivak

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shows how Jane Eyre supports the ideology of individual uniqueness and “soul making,” and reads Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a “reinscription” of Brontë’s text. Her counterexample is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which—with its complex playing out of issues of sexual reproduction and self-construction—deconstructs the ideology that shapes Jane Eyre. She concludes with a reading of a story by Mahasweta Devi from Imaginary Maps that uses a colonial history to represent a new postcolonial subjectivity that is neither individualistic nor colonized but is constructed from and against the impossible history of an “India” that was, in fact, never really a nation. Spivak asserts that feminist criticism that wants to go beyond the limits established by individualist assumptions must “turn to the archives of imperialist governance”; she concedes that her essay does not do so, although the next chapter in her book does. Given the absence of those nonliterary documents from this piece, we can see that Spivak’s way of bringing “history” to literary studies does not trace a chronology of women’s writing—Frankenstein was published twenty-nine years before the text that it “deconstructs,” and Devi’s pterodactyl is a monster, but not one that alludes to Frankenstein’s creature—nor does she compare a novel’s discourse about imperialism with official or nonliterary statements on empire from the period. Instead, Spivak reads the texts with an eye to the history of the long term, as we can see it from a postcolonial perspective. She is not interested in charting biographies of (or progress through) individual authors; like the Marxist critics from whom she explicitly separates herself, Spivak is more concerned with analyzing the social constitution of the self. “The most I can say,” she explains, “is that it is possible to read these texts, within the frame of imperialism and the Kantian ethical moment, in a politically useful way.” One of her most politically suggestive conclusions is that “the radically other cannot be selfed,” another warning against indulging a Western individualist feminism that would try to name the “Third World Woman” as a signifier. In the “Introduction” to En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (2000), Sangeeta Ray directly interrogates the ways that the discourses of imperialism, nationalism, and gender are intertwined in our understandings of history. In her readings of narratives that tell and retell the historical events that shaped contemporary India and Pakistan (the 1857 Indian uprising against the East India Company, which was horrifically put down and led to the British government’s incorporation of India into the empire, and the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, into Pakistan and India), Ray examines how gender is crucial but often overlooked. She reminds us that “every aspect of our sociopolitical reality is gendered, and the presumption of a gender-neutral methodology perpetuates the fiction of a transgendered universality that is nothing but a euphemism for a universal masculinity.” In particular, Ray examines the construction of “the Indian woman” as a political act that constructs simultaneously the nation of India and a particular gendered and classed version of female identity. Ray reads the history of the Indian novel as hybrid form, constructed both from indigenous forms of storytelling and from British Victorian novels. The novels therefore manifest both indigenous and British ideologies, but also reveal an investment in nation-making that describes the nation specifically in Western terms that are patriarchal in their insistence on a separation between the public

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and private spheres. Such a construction leaves women as the representatives of a traditional India while leaving space for men to be Westernized.

NOTE 1. Judith Lowder Newton, “History as Usual? Feminism and the ‘New Historicism.’” Cultural Critique 9 (1998); Linda Boose, “The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or—The Politics of Politics,” Renaissance Quarterly 40.4 (1987).

PAULA GUNN ALLEN

KOCHINNENAKO IN ACADEME three approaches to interpreting a keres indian tale (1986)



















I became engaged in studying feminist thought and theory at the same time I was first studying and teaching American Indian literature in the early seventies. Over the ensuing fifteen years, my own particular stance toward both feminist and American Indian life and thought have unfolded along intertwining lines. I have always included feminist content and perspectives in my teaching of American Indian subjects, though at first the mating was uneasy at best. My determination that both areas were mutually interdependent and mutually significant to a balanced pedagogy of American Indian studies led me to grow into an approach to both that is best described as tribal-feminism or feminist-tribalism. Both terms are applicable: if I am dealing with feminism, I approach it from a strong tribal posture, and when I am dealing with American Indian literature, history, culture, or philosophy I approach them from a strongly feminist one. A feminist approach to the study and teaching of American Indian life and thought is essential because the area has been dominated by paternalistic, maledominant modes of consciousness since the first writings about American Indians in the fifteenth century. This male bias has seriously skewed our understanding of tribal life and philosophy, distorting it in ways that are sometimes obvious but are most often invisible. Often what appears to be a misinterpretation caused by racial differences is a distortion based on sexual politics. When the patriarchal paradigm that characterizes Western thinking is applied to gynecentric tribal modes, it transforms the ideas, significances, and raw data into something not only unrecognizable to the tribes, but also entirely incongruent with the significance of their philosophies and theories. We know that materials and interpretations amassed by the white intellectual establishment are in error, but we have not pinpointed the source of that error. It has been my belief that its major source has been male bias, and that feminist theory, when judiciously applied to the field, makes the error correctable, freeing the data for re-interpretation that is at least congruent with a tribal preceptual mode even while it is not identical to it. To demonstrate the interconnections between tribal and feminist approaches as I use them in my work, I have developed an analysis of a traditional “Yellow

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Woman” story of the Laguna-Acoma Keres, as re-cast by my mother’s great uncle, John M. Gunn, in his book Schat Chen.1 My analysis utilizes three possible approaches and demonstrates the relationship of context to meaning, illuminating three consciousness styles, and providing students with a traditionally tribal and non-racist, feminist understanding of traditional and contemporary American Indian life.

SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS Analyzing tribal cultural systems from a mainstream feminist point of view allows a certain otherwise overlooked insight into the complex interplay of factors that have led to the systematic loosening of tribal ties, the disruption of tribal cohesion and complexity, and the growing disequilibrium of cultures that were anciently based on a belief in balance and relationship and the centrality of women, particularly elder women, as basic to harmonious, evenhanded ordering of human society. A feminist approach reveals not only the exploitation and oppression of the tribes by whites and white government, but it also reveals areas of oppression within the tribes, and the sources and nature of that oppression. To a large extent, such an analysis can provide strategies for ameliorating the effects of patriarchal colonialism, enabling many of the tribes to reclaim their ancient gynarchical, egalitarian, and sacred traditions. (In a system where all persons in power are called mother chief and where the supreme deity is female, and where social organization is matrilocal, matrifocal, and matrilineal, gynarchy is happening. However, it does not imply domination of men by women as patriarchy implies domination by males of all aspects of a society.) At the present time, American Indians in general are not comfortable with feminist analysis or action within the reservation or urban Indian enclaves. Many Indian women are uncomfortable with feminism because they perceive it (correctly) as white-dominated. They (not so correctly) believe it is concerned with issues that have little bearing on their own lives. They are also uncomfortable with it because they have been reared in an anglophobic world, one that views white society with fear and hostility; but because the fear of and bitterness toward whites and their consequent unwillingness to examine the dynamics of white socialization, American Indian women often overlook the central areas of damage done to tribal tradition by white Christian and secular patriarchal dominance. Militant and “progressive” American Indian men are even more likely to quarrel with feminism; they have benefited in certain ways from white male-centeredness, and while those benefits are of real danger to the tribes, the rewards are compelling. It is within the context of growing violence against women, and the concomitant lowering of our status among Native Americans that I teach and write. Certainly I could not locate the mechanisms of colonization that have led to the virulent rise of woman-hating among American Indian men (and, to a certain extent, among many of the women)2 without a secure and determined feminism. Just as certainly, feminist theory applied to my literary studies clarifies a number

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of issues for me, including the patriarchal bias that has been systematically imposed on traditional literary materials and the mechanism by which that bias has affected contemporary American Indian life, thought, and culture. The oral tradition is more than the repository of a people’s culture. It is the source of their identity as a people and as individuals within their tradition. When that wellspring of identity is tampered with, the sense of self is also tampered with; and when that tampering includes the sexist and classist assumptions of the white world within the body of the tradition, serious consequences necessarily ensue. The oral tradition is a living body. It is in continuous flux, which enables it to accommodate itself to the real circumstances of the people’s lives. That is its strength, but it is also its weakness, for when a people finds itself living within a racist, classist, and sexist reality, the oral tradition will reflect those values and will thus shape the people’s consciousness to include racism, classism, and sexism, and they will incorporate that change, hardly noticing the shift. If the oral tradition is altered in certain subtle, fundamental ways, if elements alien to it are introduced so that its internal coherence is disturbed, it becomes the major instrument of colonization and oppression. Such alterations have occurred in the past and are still occurring. Those who translate or “render” narratives make certain crucial changes, many of which are unconscious. The cultural bias of the translator will inevitably shape his or her perception of the materials being translated, often in ways that are not particularly noticeable to those so formed. In short, it’s hard to see the forest when you’re a tree. To a great extent, these changes are a result of the vast difference in languages; certain ideas and concepts that are implicit in the structure of an Indian language are not possible in English. Language embodies the unspoken assumptions and orientations of the culture it belongs to. So while the problem is one of translation, it is not simply one of word equivalences. The differences are perceptual and contextual as much as verbal or verbalizable. Sometimes the shifts are contextual; indeed what usually goes on is that both the context and content are shifted, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. The net effect is that the whole axis of the culture is shifted. When shifts of language and context are coupled with the almost infinite changes occasioned by christianization, secularization, economic dislocation from subsistence to industrial modes, destruction of the wilderness, and associated damage to the biota, much that is changed goes unnoticed or unremarked by the people being changed. This is not to suggest that Native Americans are unaware of the enormity of the change they have been forced to undergo by the several centuries of white presence in their midst, but it is to say that much of that change is at deep and subtle levels that are not easily noted or resisted. John Gunn got the story I am using here from a Keres-speaking informant and did the translating himself. The story, which he titles “Sh-ah-cock and Miochin or the Battle of the Seasons,” is in reality a ritual, here cast in a narrative form. The ritual brings about the change of season and of moiety among the Keres. Gunn doesn’t mention this, perhaps because he was interested in stories and not in religion, or perhaps because his informant didn’t mention the connection to him. What is interesting about his rendering is the interpolation of European, clas-

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sist, conflict-centered patriarchal assumptions which are used as plotting devices. These interpolations have the effect of dislocating the significance of the tale, and of subtly altering the ideational context of woman-centered, largely pacifistic people whose ritual story this is. I have developed three critiques of the tale as it appears in his book, using feminist and tribal understandings to discuss the various meanings of the story when it is read from three different perspectives. In the first reading, I apply tribal understanding to the story. In the second, I apply the sort of feminist perspective I applied to traditional stories, historical events, traditional culture, and contemporary literature when I began developing a feminist perspective. The third reading applies what I am calling a “feministtribal perspective.” Each of these analyses is somewhat less detailed than it might be; but as I am interested in detailing modes of perception, and their impact on our understanding of cultural artifacts (and by extension our understanding people who come from different cultural contexts than our own), rather than critiquing a story, they are adequate.

YELLOW WOMAN STORIES The Keres of Laguna and Acoma Pueblos in New Mexico have stories that are called “Yellow Woman” stories. The themes and to a large extent the motifs of these stories are always female-centered, and they are always told from Yellow Woman’s point of view. Virtually any story that has a female protagonist can be a Yellow Woman story as long as its purpose is to clarify aspects of women’s lives in general. Some older recorded versions of Yellow Woman tales (as in Gunn) make her the daughter of the hocheni. Gunn translates this to “ruler.” But Keres notions of the hocheni’s function and position as cacique or “mother chief” differ greatly from Anglo-European ideas of rulership. However, for Gunn to render hocheni as “ruler” is congruent with the European folk tale tradition, and his use of the term may have been one used by Gunn’s informants, who were often Carlisle or Menaul Indian school educated, in an attempt to find an equivalent term signifying the deep respect and reverence the hocheni tyi’a’muni is granted and a term that Gunn could comprehend. Or he might have selected the term because he was writing a book for an anonymous Keres audience, one which included himself. As he spoke Laguna Keres, I think he was doing the translations himself, and his renderings of words (and contexts) were likely influenced by the way Lagunas themselves rendered local terms into English, but I doubt that he was conscious of the extent to which his renderings reflected European traditions and simultaneously distorted Laguna-Acoma ones. Gunn was deeply aware of the importance and intelligence of the Keresan tradition, but he was also unable to grant it independent existence. His major impulse was to link the Western Keres with the Sumerians, in some strange way, in order to demonstrate the justice of his assessment of their intelligence.3 However it may be, Kochinnenako, Yellow Woman, is in some sense a name that means Woman-Woman because among the Keres, yellow is the color for women (as pink and red are among Anglo-European Americans), and it is the color ascribed to the northwest. Keres women paint their faces yellow on certain ceremonial occasions, and are so painted at death so that the guardian at the gate

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of the spirit world, Naiya Iyatiku (Mother Corn Woman), will recognize that the newly arrived person is a woman. It is also the name of a particular Irriaku, corn mother (sacred corn-ear bundle), and Yellow Woman stories, in their original form, detail rituals in which the Irriaku figures prominently. Yellow Woman stories are about all sorts of things—abduction, meeting with happy powerful spirits, birth of twins, getting power from the spirit worlds and returning it to the people, refusing to marry, weaving, grinding corn, getting water, outsmarting witches, eluding or escaping malintentioned spirits, and more. Yellow Woman’s sisters are often in the stories (Blue, White, and Red Corn), as is Grandmother Spider and her helper Spider Boy, the Sun God or one of his aspects, Yellow Woman’s twin sons, witches, magicians, gamblers, and mothers-in-law. Many Yellow Woman tales highlight her alienation from the people—she lives with her grandmother at the edge of the village, for example, or she is in some way atypical, maybe a woman who refuses to marry, one who is known for some particular special talent, or one who is very quick-witted and resourceful. In many ways Kochinnenako is a role-model, though she models some behaviors that are not likely to occur in the lives of many who hear the stories about her. She is, one might say, the Spirit of Woman. The stories do not necessarily imply that difference is punishable; on the contrary, it is often her very difference that makes her special adventures possible, and these adventures often have happy outcomes for Kochinnenako and for her people. This is of significance among a people who value conformity and propriety above almost anything. It suggests that the behavior of women, at least at certain times or under certain circumstances, must be improper or non-conformist for the greater good of the whole. Not that all the stories are graced with a happy ending. Some come to a tragic conclusion, and sometimes this conclusion is the result of someone’s inability to follow the rules or perform a ritual in the proper way. Other Kochinnenako stories are about her centrality to the harmony, balance, and prosperity of the group. “Sh-ah-cock and Miochin” is one of these. John Gunn prefaces the narrative with the comment that while this story is about a battle, war stories are rarely told by the Keres as they are not “a warlike people” and “very rarely refer to their exploits in war.”

SH-AH-COCK AND MIOCHIN OR THE BATTLE OF THE SEASONS In the Kush-kut-ret-u-nah-tit (white village of the north) was once a ruler by the name of Hut-cha-mun Ki-uk (the broken prayer stick), one of whose daughters, Ko-chin-ne-nako, became the bride of Sh-ah-cock (the spirit of winter), a person of very violent temper. He always manifested his presence by blizzards of snow or sleet or by freezing cold, and on account of his alliance with the ruler’s daughter, he was most of the time in the vicinity of Kush-kutret, and as their manifestations continued from month to month and year to year, the people of Kush-kutret found that their crops would not mature, and finally they were compelled to subsist on leaves of the cactus. On one occasion Ko-chin-ne-nako had wandered a long way from home in search of the cactus and had gathered quite a bundle and was preparing to carry home by singeing of the thorns, when on looking up she

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found herself confronted by a very bold but handsome young man. His attire attracted her gaze at once. He wore a shirt of yellow woven from silks of the corn, a belt made from the broad green blades of the same plant, a tall pointed hat made from the same kind of material and from the top of which waved a yellow corn tassel. He wore green leggings woven from kow-e-nuh, the green stringy moss that forms in springs and ponds. His moccasins were beautifully embroidered with flowers and butterflies. In his hand he carried a ear of green corn. His whole appearance proclaimed him a stranger and as Ko-chin-nenako gazed in wonder, he spoke to her in a very pleasing voice asking her what she was doing. She told him that on account of the cold and drought, the people of Kush-kutret were forced to eat the leaves of the cactus to keep from starving. “Here,” said the young man, handing her the ear of green corn. “Eat this and I will go and bring more that you may take home with you.” He left her and soon disappeared going towards the south. In a short time he returned bringing with him a big load of green corn. Ko-chin-ne-nako asked him where he had gathered the corn and if it grew near by. “No,” he replied, “it is from my home far away in the south, where the corn grows and the flowers bloom all the year round. Would you not like to accompany me back to my country?” Ko-chin-ne-nako replied that his home just be very beautiful, but that she could not go with him because she was the wife of Shah-cock. And then she told him of her alliance with the Spirit of Winter, and admitted that her husband was very cold and disagreeable and that she did not love him. The strange young man urged her to go with him to the warm land of the south, saying that he did not fear Sh-ah-cock. But Ko-chin-nenako would not consent. So the stranger directed her to return to her home with the corn he had brought and cautioned her not to throw any of the husks out of the door. Upon leaving he said to her, “You must meet me at this place tomorrow. I will bring more corn for you.” Ko-chin-ne-nako had not proceeded far on her homeward way ere she met her sisters who, having become uneasy because of her long absence, had come in search of her. They were greatly surprised at seeing her with an armful of corn instead of cactus. Ko-chin-ne-nako told them the whole story of how she had obtained it, and thereby only added wonderment to their surprise. They helped her to carry the corn home; and there she had again to tell her story to her father and mother. When she had described the stranger even from his peaked hat to his butterfly moccasins, and had told them that she was to meet him again the day following, Hut-cha-mum Ki-uk, the father, exclaimed: “It is Mi-o-chin!” “It is Mi-o-chin! It is Mi-o-chin!” echoed the mother. “Tomorrow you must bring him home with you.” The next day Ko-chin-ne-nako went again to the spot where she had met Mi-o-chin, for it was indeed Mi-o-chin, the Spirit of Summer. He was already there, awaiting her coming. With him he had brought a huge bundle of corn. Ko-chin-ne-nako pressed upon him the invitation of her parents to accompany her home, so together they carried the corn to Kush-kut-ret. When it had been distributed there was sufficient to feed all the people of the city. Amid great rejoicing and thanksgiving, Mi-o-chin was welcomed at the Hotchin’s (ruler’s) house.

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In the evening, as was his custom, Sh-ah-cock, the Spirit of Winter, returned to his home. He came in a blinding storm of snow and hail and sleet, for he was in a boisterous mood. On approaching the city, he felt within his very bones that Mi-o-chin was there, so he called in a loud and blustering voice: “Ha! Mi-o-chin, are you here?” For answer, Mi-o-chin advanced to meet him. Then Sh-ah-cock, beholding him, called again, “Ha! Mi-o-chin, I will destroy you.” “Ha! Sh-ah-cock, I will destroy you,” replied Mi-o-chin, still advancing. Sh-ah-cock paused, irresolute. He was covered from head to foot with frost (skah). Icycles [sic] (ya-pet-tu-ne) draped him round. The fierce, cold wind proceeded from his nostrils. As Mi-o-chin drew near, the wintry wind changed to a warm summer breeze. The frost and icycles melted and displayed beneath them, the dry, bleached bulrushes (ska-ra-ru-ka) in which Sh-ah-cock was clad. Seeing that he was doomed to defeat, Sh-ah-cock cried out: “I will not fight you now, for we cannot try our powers. We will make ready, and in four days from this time, we will meet here and fight for supremacy. The victor shall claim Ko-chin-ne-nako for his wife.” With this, Sh-ah-cock withdrew in a rage. The wind again roared and shook the very houses; but the people were warm within them, for Mi-o-chin was with them. The next day Mi-o-chin left Kush-kut-ret for his home in the south. Arriving there, he began to make his preparations to meet Sh-ah-cock in battle. First he sent an eagle as a messenger to his friend, Ya-chun-ne-nemoot (kind of shaley rock that becomes very hot in the fire), who lived in the west, requesting him to come and help to battle Sh-ah-cock. Then he called together the birds and the four legged animals—all those that live in sunny climes. For his advance guard and shield he selected the bat (pickikke), as its tough skin would best resist the sleet and hail that Sh-ah-cock would hurl at him. Meantime Sh-ah-cock had gone to his home in the north to make his preparations for battle. To his aid he called all the winter birds and all of the four legged animals of the wintry climates. For his advance guard and shield he selected the Shro-ak-ah (a magpie). When these formidable forces had been mustered by the rivals, they advanced, Mi-o-chin from the south and Sh-ah-cock from the north, in battle array. Ya-chun-ne-ne-moot kindled his fires and piled great heaps of resinous fuel upon them until volumes of steam and smoke ascended, forming enormous clouds that hurried forth toward Kush-kut-ret and the battle ground. Upon these clouds rode Mi-o-chin, the Spirit of Summer, and his vast army. All the animals of the army, encountering the smoke from Ya-chun-ne-nemoot’s fires, were colored by the smoke so that, from that day, the animals from the south have been black or brown in color. Sh-ah-cock and his army came out of the north in a howling blizzard and borne forward on black storm clouds driven by a freezing wintry wind. As he came on, the lakes and rivers over which he passed were frozen and the air was filled with blinding sleet.

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When the combatants drew near to Kush-kut-ret, they advanced with fearful rapidity. Their arrival upon the field was marked by fierce and terrific strife. Flashes of lightning darted from Mi-o-chin’s clouds. Striking the animals of Sh-ah-cock, they singed the hair upon them, and turned it white, so that, from that day, the animals from the north have worn a covering of white or have white markings upon them. From the south, the black clouds still rolled upward, the thunder spoke again and again. Clouds of smoke and vapor rushed onward, melting the snow and ice weapons of Sh-ah-cock and compelling him, at length, to retire from the field. Mi-o-chin, assured of victory, pursued him. To save himself from total defeat and destruction, Sh-ah-cock called for an armistice. This being granted on the part of Mi-o-chin, the rivals met at Kushkut-ret to arrange the terms of the treaty. Sh-ah-cock acknowledged himself defeated. He consented to give up Ko-chin-ne-nako to Mi-o-chin. This concession was received with rejoicing by Ko-chin-ne-nako and all the people of Kush-kut-ret. It was then agreed between the late combatants that, for all time thereafter, Mi-o-chin was to rule at Kush Kut-ret during one-half of the year, and Shah-cock was to rule during the remaining half, and that neither should molest the other.4

Or so John Gunn tells the tale, which I have quoted in its entirety because the way it is told lends itself to three kinds of analysis, that of an Indian literary commentator, that of a feminist, and that of an Indian feminist (or a feminist Indian). John Gunn’s version has a formal plot structure that makes the account seem to be a narrative. But had he translated it directly from the Keres, even in “narrative” form, as in a story-telling session, its ritual nature would have been more clearly in evidence. How the account might go, if it were done that way, I can only surmise, based on renderings of Keres rituals in narrative forms I am acquainted with. But it would have sounded more like the following than like Gunn’s rendition of it: Long ago. Eh. There in the North. Yellow Woman. Up northward she went. Then she picked burrs and cactus. Then here went Summer. From the south he came. Above there he arrived. Thus spoke Summer. “Are you here? How is it going?” said Summer. “Did you come here?” Thus said Yellow Woman. Then answered Yellow Woman. “I pick these poor things because I am hungry.” “Why do you not eat corn and melons?” asked Summer. Then he gave her some corn and melons. “Take it!” Then thus spoke Yellow Woman, “It is good. Let us go. To my house I take you.” “Is not your husband there?” “No. He went hunting deer. Today at night he will come back.” Then in the north they arrived. In the west they went down. Arrived then they in the east. “Are you here?” Remembering Prayer Sticks said. “Yes,” Summer said. “How is it going?” Summer said. Then he said, “Your daughter Yellow Woman, she brought me here.” “Eh. That is good.” Thus spoke Remembering Prayer Sticks. . . .

The story would continue, with many of the elements contained in Gunn’s version, but organized along the axis of directions, movements of the participants,

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their maternal relationships to each other (daughter, mother, mother chief, etc.), and events sketched in only as they pertained to directions and the division of the year into its ritual/ceremonial segments, one of which belongs to the Kurena (summer supernaturals or powers who are connected to the Summer people or clans and the other which belongs to the Kashare, perhaps in conjunction with the Kopishtaya, the Spirits). Summer, Mi-o-chin, is the Shiwana who lives on the south mountain, and Sh-ah-cock is the Shiwana who lives on the north mountain.5 It is interesting to note that the Kurena wear three eagle feathers and ctc’otika’ feathers (white striped) on their heads, bells, and woman’s dress, and carry a reed flute, which, perhaps, is connected with Iyatiku’s sister, Istoakoa, Reed Woman.

A KERES INTERPRETATION When a traditional Keres reads this tale, she listens with certain information about her people in mind: she knows, for example, that Hutchamun Kiuk (properly it means “Remembering Prayer Sticks” through Gunn translates this as “Broken Prayer Sticks”),6 refers to the ritual (sacred) identity of the cacique and that the story is a narrative version of a ceremony related to the planting of corn. She knows that Lagunas and Acomas don’t have rulers in the Anglo-European sense of monarchs, lords, and such (though they do, in recent times have elected governors, but that’s another matter), and that a person’s social status is determined by her mother’s clan and position in it, rather by her relationship to the cacique as his daughter. (Actually, in various accounts, the cacique refers to Yellow Woman as his mother, so the designation of her as his daughter is troublesome unless one is aware that relationships in the context of their ritual significance are being delineated here.) In any case, our hypothetical Keresan reader also knows that the story is about a ritual that take place every year, and that the battle imagery refers to events that take place during the ritual; she is also aware that Kochinnenako’s will, as expressed in her attraction to Miochin, is a central element of the ritual. She knows further that the ritual is partly about the coming of summer and partly about the ritual relationship and exchange of primacy between the two divisions of the tribe, and that the ritual described in the narrative is enacted by men, dressed as Miochin and Sh-ah-cock, and that Yellow Woman in her Corn Mother aspect is the center of this and other sacred rites of the Kurena, though in this ritual she may also be danced by a Kurena mask dancer. (Gunn include a drawing of this figure, made by a Laguna, and titled “Ko-chin-ne-nako—In the Mask Dances”). The various birds and animals along the forces such as warm air, fire, heat, sleet, and ice will be represented in the ritual; Hutchamun Kiuk is the timekeeper or officer who keeps track of the ritual calendar (which is intrinsically related to the equinoxes), and as such has a central role in the ritual. The presence of Kochinnenako and Hutchamun Kiuk, and the Shiwana Miochin and Sh-ah-cock means something sacred is going on for the Keres. The ritual transfers focus of power or ritual axis, so to speak, held in turn by two moieties whose constitution reflects the earth’s bilateral division between summer and winter, from the winter to the summer people. Each moiety’s right

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to power is confirmed by and reflective of the seasons, as it is reflected and support by the equinoxes. It is accomplished through the Iyani, ritual empowerment, of female Power, embodied in Kochinnenako as mask dancer or Irriaku. Without her empowering mediatorship among the south and north Shiwana, the cacique, and the village, the season and the moiety cannot change, and balance cannot be maintained. It is understood that unchanging supremacy of one moiety/season over the other is unnatural and therefore undesirable because unilateral dominance of one aspect of existence and of society over another is not reflected or supported by reality at meteorological or spiritual levels. Whilst Sh-ah-cock, who after all is the Winter Spirit (Winter Cloud), Shiwana (one of several categories of supernaturals) is cold and connected to sleet, snow, ice, and hunger, not because he is a source of unmitigated evil (or of evil at all, for that matter). Half of the people (not numerically but mystically, so to speak) are Winter, and in that sense are Sh-ah-cock; and while this portion of the gestalt that is the people may seem unlovely when their time is up, that same half is lovely indeed in the proper season. Similarly, Miochin will also age—that is, pass his time, and will then give way for his “rival”—which is also his complement—in turn. Thus harmony is preserved for the village, and thus each portion of the community takes responsibility for the prosperity and well-being of the people. A Keres is of course aware that balance and harmony are two primary assumptions held by Keres society, and will not approach the narrative wondering whether the handsome Miochin will win the hand of the unhappy wife and triumph over the enemy, thereby heroically saving the people from disaster. The triumph of handsome youth over ugly age, or of virile liberality over withered tyranny doesn’t make sense in a Keresan context because such a view contradicts central Keres values. A traditional Keres, at least, is satisfied by the story because it reaffirms a Keres sense of rightness, of propriety. It is a tale that describes ritual events, and the Keres reader can visualize the ritual itself when reading Gunn’s story. Such a reader is likely to be puzzled by the references to rulers and by the tone of heroic romance, but will be reasonably satisfied by the account because in spite of its Westernized changes, it still ends happily with the orderly transfer of focality between the moieties and seasons that has been accomplished in all its seasonal splendor as winter in New Mexico blusters and sleets its way north, and summer sings and warms its way home. In the end, the primary Keresan values of harmony, balance, and the centrality of woman in their maintenance have been validated, and the fundamental Keres principal of proper order is celebrated and affirmed once again.

A MODERN FEMINIST INTERPRETATION A non-Keres feminist, reading this tale, is likely to suppose that this narrative is about the importance of men and the use of a passive female figure as a pawn in their bid for power.7 And, given the way Gunn renders the story, she would have good reason to make such an inference. As Gunn recounts it, the story opens in classic patriarchal style and implies certain patriarchal complications: that

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Kochinnenako has married a man who is violent and destructive. She is the ruler’s daughter, which might suggest that the traditional Keres are concerned with the abuses of power of the wealthy. This in turn suggests that the traditional Keres social system, like the traditional Anglo-Europeans ones, suffered from oppressive class structures in which the rich and powerful bring misery to the people, who, in the tale, are reduced to bare subsistence seemingly as a result of her unfortunate alliance. A reader making the usual assumptions Western readers make when enjoying folk tales will think she is reading a sort of Robin Hood story, replete with a lovely maid Marian, an evil Sheriff, and a green-clad agent of social justice with the Indian name Miochin. Given the usual assumptions that underlie European folk tales, given the Western romantic view of the Indian that is generally America’s only view, and given the usual anti-patriarchal bias that characterizes feminist analysis, a feminist reader might assume that Kochinnenako has been compelled to make an unhappy match by her father the ruler who must be gaining some power from the alliance. Besides, his name is given as “Broken Prayer Stick,” which might be taken to mean that he is an unholy man, remiss in his religious duties and weak in spiritual accomplishment. Nor does Gunn’s tale clarify these issues. Instead it proceeds in a way best calculated to confirm a feminist’s interpretation of the tale as only another example of the low status women in tribal cultures hold. (Certainly an inordinate amount of effort on the part of students and recorders of traditional American Indian life has gone into creating the impression that the white woman’s lot was glorious when and if compared to that of the savage squaw!) In accordance with his most sacred of American myths, Gunn makes it clear that Kochinnenako is not happy in her marriage; she thinks Sh-ah-cock is “cold and disagreeable, and she cannot love him.” Certainly, contemporary American women will read that to mean that Sh-ah-cock is an emotionally uncaring, perhaps cruel husband, and that Kochinnenako is forced by her position in life to accept a life bereft of warmth and love. Our feminist reader might imagine that Kochinnenako, like many women, has been socialized into submission. So obedient is she, it seems, so lacking in spirit and independence, that she doesn’t seize her chance to escape a bad situation, preferring instead to remain obedient to the patriarchal institution of marriage. As it turns out (in Gunn’s tale), Yellow Woman is delivered from the clutches of her violent and unwanted mate by a timely intervention of a much more pleasant man, our hero. A radical feminist is likely to read the story for its content vis-à-vis racism and resistance to oppression. From a radical perspective, it is politically significant that Sh-ah-cock is white. That is, winter is white. Snow is white. Blizzards are white. Clearly, while the story does not give much support to concepts of a people’s struggles, it could be construed to mean that the oppressor is designated white in the story because the Keres are engaged in serious combat with white colonial power, and given the significance of storytelling in tribal culture, are chronicling that struggle in this tale. Read this way, it would seem to acknowledge the right and duty of the people in overthrowing the hated white dictator who, by this account, possesses the power of life and death over them. Briefly, in this context, the story can be read as a tale about the nature of white oppression of Indian people, and Kochinnenako then becomes something of a

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revolutionary fighter through her collusion with the rebel Miochin in the overthrow of the tyrant Sh-ah-cock. In this reading, the tale becomes a cry for liberation and a direct command to women to aid in the people’s struggle to overthrow the colonial powers that drain them of life and strength, deprive them of their rightful prosperity, and threaten them with extinction. An activist teacher could use this tale to instruct women in their obligation to the revolutionary struggle; the daughter, her sisters, and the mother are, after all, implicated in the attempt to bring peace and prosperity to the people; indeed, they are central to it, and such a teacher could, by so using the story, appear to be incorporating culturally diverse materials in the classroom while at the same time exploiting the romantic and moral appeal Native Americans often have for other Americans. When read as a battle narrative, the story as Gunn renders it makes clear that the superiority of Miochin rests as much in his commitment to the welfare of the people as in his military prowess, and that because his attempt to free the people is backed up by their active invitation to him to come and liberate them, he is successful. Because of his success he is entitled to the hand of the ruler’s daughter, Kochinnenako, one of the traditional Old World spoils of victory. Similarly, Sh-ah-cock is defeated not only because he is violent and oppressive, but also because the people, like Kochinnenako, find that they cannot love him. A radical lesbian separatist might find herself uncomfortable with the story even though it is so clearly correct in identifying the enemy as white and violent, though, because the overthrow of the tyrant is placed squarely in the hands of another male figure, Miochin. This rescue is likely to be viewed with a jaundiced eye by many feminists (though more romantic women might be satisfied with it, since it’s a story about an Indian woman of long ago), as Kochinnenako has to await the coming of a handsome stranger for her salvation, and her fate is decided by her father and the more salutory suitor Miochin. No one asks Kochinnenako what she wants to do; the reader is informed that her marriage is not to her liking when she admits to Miochin that she is unhappy in her marriage. Nevertheless, Kochinnenako acts like any passive, dependent woman who is exploited by the males in her life, who get what they want, regardless of her own needs or desires. Some readers (like me) might find themselves hoping that Miochin is really female, disguised by males as one of them in order to buttress their position of relative power. After all, this figure is dressed in yellow and green, colors associated with corn, a plant always associated with Woman. Kochinnenako and her sisters are all Corn Women; her mother is, presumably, the head of the Corn Clan; and the Earth Mother of the Keres, Iyatiku, is Corn Woman herself. Alas, I haven’t yet found evidence to support such a wishful notion, except to note that the mask dancer who impersonates Kochinnenako is male, dressed female, which is sort of the obverse side of the wish.

AN INDIAN-FEMINIST INTERPRETATION The feminist interpretation I have sketched—which is a fair representation of an early reading of my own from what I took to be a feminist perspective— proceeds from two unspoken assumptions. These assumptions are that women

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are essentially powerless and that conflict is basic to human experience. The first is a fundamental feminist position, while the second is basic to Anglo-European thought; neither, however, is characteristic of Keres thought. To a modern feminist, marriage is an institution developed to establish and maintain male supremacy, and as the “ruler’s” daughter, whom Kochinnenako marries determines which male will hold power over the people and who will inherit the throne.8 When Western assumptions are applied to tribal narratives, they become mildly confusing and moderately annoying from any perspective.9 Western assumptions about the nature of human society (and thus of literature) when contextualizing a tribal story or ritual must necessarily leave certain elements unclear. For if the battle between Summer Spirit and Winter Spirit is about the triumph of warmth, generosity, and kindness over coldness, miserliness, and cruelty, supremacy of the good over the bad, why does the hero grant his protagonist rights over the village and Kochinnenako for half of each year? The contexts of Anglo-European and Keres Indian life differ so greatly in virtually every assumption about the nature of reality, society, ethics, female roles, and the sacred importance of seasonal change, that simply telling a Keres tale with a Euro-American narrative context creates a dizzying series of false impressions and unanswerable (perhaps even unposable) questions. For instance, marriage among traditional Keres is not particularly related to marriage among Anglo-European Americans. Paternity is not an issue among traditional Keres people; a child belongs to its mother’s clan—not in the sense that she or he is owned by the clan, but in the sense of belonging within it. This is one example of the great difference between patriarchal and traditional (that is, before Anglo colonization of family systems) Keres cultures. Another equally basic difference is the attitude toward conflict; the Keres can best be described as conflict-phobic, while Anglo and Euro-American culture is conflictcentered. These attitudes inform every aspect of both cultures and make them different in fundamental ways. So while the orderly and proper annual transference of power from Winter to Summer people through the agency of the Keres’ central female figure is the major theme of the narrative from a Keres perspective, the triumph of good over evil becomes its major theme when it is retold by a white man. Essentially what is happening is that Summer (a mask dancer dressed as Miochin) asks Kochinnenako permission, in a ritual manner, to enter the village. She (a mask dancer dressed as Yellow Woman or Iriaku—Yellow Corn) follows a specified ritual order of responses and events that enable Summer to enter. Some of these are acts she must perform and words she must say, and others are prohibitions. One of the latter is that she must not “throw any of the husks out of the door,” a command that establishes both the identity of Miochin and constitutes his declaration of his ritual intention and his ritual relationship to her. It is also a directive to the people on the proper way to handle the corn. Agency is Kochinnenako’s ritual role here, and it is through her ritual agency that the orderly, harmonious transfer of primacy between the Summer and Winter people is accomplished. This transfer of course takes place at the time of the year that winter goes north and summer comes to the pueblo from the south, the time when the sun moves north, along the line the sun makes along the edge of the sun’s house as ascertained by the Hotchin who is the calendar keeper and

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the official who determines the proper solar and astronomical times for various ceremonies. Thus, in the proper time, Kochinnenako empowers Summer to enter the village. Kochinnenako’s careful observance of the ritual requirements of the situation, joined with the proper conduct of her sisters, her mother, the priests (symbolized by the title Hutchamun Kiuk, whom Gunn identifies as the ruler and Yellow Woman’s father though he could as properly—more properly, actually—be called her mother), the animals and birds, the weather and the people at last bring summer to the village, ending the winter and the famine that accompanies winter’s end. A feminist who is conscious of tribal thought and practice will know that the real story of Sh-ah-cock and Miochin underscores the central role that woman plays in the orderly life of the people. Reading Gunn’s version, she will be aware of the vast gulf between the Lagunas and John Gunn in their understanding of the role of women in a traditional gynecentric society such as that of the Western Keres. Knowing that the central role of woman is harmonizing spiritual relationships between the people and the rest of the universe, and empowering ritual activities, she will be able to read the story for its Western colonial content, aware that Gunn’s version reveals more about American consciousness when it meets with tribal thought than it does about the tribe. When the story is analyzed from within the context to which it rightly belongs, its feminist content becomes clear, as do the various purposes to which a tribal story can be put by industrialized patriarchal people. If she is familiar with the ritual color-code of this particular group of Native Americans, she will know that white is the color of Shipapu, the place where the four rivers of life come together and where our Mother Iyatiku lives. Thus she will know that it is appropriate that the Spirit of Woman’s Power/Being (Yellow Woman) be “married” (that is, ritually connected in energy-transferring gestalts) first with Winter who is the power signified by the color white that informs clouds, the Mountain Tse-pina, Shipapu, originating Power, Koshare, and that half of the year; then with Summer whose color powers are yellow and green that inform Kurena, sunrise, growing and ripening time of Mother Earth, and whose direction is south and southeast and that portion of the year. She will know that the story is about how the Mother Corn who is Iyatiku’s “daughter”—that is, her essence in one of its aspects—comes to live as Remembering Prayer Stick’s daughter first with the Winter people and then with the Summer people, and so on. The net effect of Gunn’s rendition of the story is the unhappy wedding of the woman-centered tradition of the western Keres to patriarchal Anglo-European tradition, and thus the dislocation of the central position of Keres women by their assumption under the rules of men. When one understands that the Hotchin is the person who tells the time and prays for all the people, even the white people, and that the Hutchamun Kiuk is the ruler only in the sense that the Constitution of the United States is the ruler of the citizens and government of the United States, the Keres organization of men, women, spirit folk, equinoxes, seasons, and clouds into a balanced and integral dynamic will be seen reflected in the narrative. Knowing this, she will also be able to see how the interpolations of patriarchal thinking distort all the relationships in the story, and, by extension, how such

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impositions of patriarchy upon gynocracy work to disorder harmonious social and spiritual relationships. A careful tribal-feminist analysis of Gunn’s rendition of a story that would be better titled “The Transfer of Iyani (ritual power, sacred power) from Winter to Summer” will provide a tribally conscious feminist with an interesting example of how colonization works (and it does so, I am sure, innocent of its effect) to misinform both the colonized and the colonizer about the victim of colonization. She will be able to note the process by which the victim of the translation process, the Keres woman who reads the tale, is misinformed because she reads Gunn’s book, and even though she knows that something odd is happening in this tale, she is not likely to apply sophisticated feminist analysis to the rendition; in the absence of real knowledge of the process of story-changing, she is all too likely to find bits of the Gunn tale sticking in her mind and subtly altering her perception of herself, her role in her society, and her relationship to the larger world. The hazard to male Keres readers is, of course, equally great. They are likely to imagine that the proper relationship of women to men is that of subservience. And it is in the service of this shockingly unconventional modern interpretation, brought on as much by reading Gunn as by other, perhaps more obvious mechanisms, that the relationships between men and women are so severely disordered at Laguna that wife-abuse, rape, and battery of women there has reached frightening levels in recent years.

POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF NARRATIVE STRUCTURE The changes Gunn has made in the narrative are not only changes in content. They are structural as well. One of the more useful social functions of traditional tribal literature is its tendency to distribute value evenly among the various elements in the piece, providing a model or pattern for egalitarian structuring of things other than literary documents. However, egalitarian structures in both literature and society are not easily “read” by hierarchically included Westerners. Still, the tendency to equal distribution of value among all elements in a field, whether the field is social, spiritual, or aesthetic (and the distinction is moot when tribal materials are under discussion) is an integral part of tribal consciousness, and is reflected in tribal social and aesthetic systems all over the Americas. In this structural framework, no single element is foregrounded leaving the others to supply “background.” Thus, properly speaking, there are no heroes, no villains, no chorus, no “setting” (as inert ground against which dramas are played out). There are no minor characters, really, and what happens is that foreground slips along from one focal point to another until all the pertinent elements in the ritual conversation have had their say. Because of this tribal habit of mind toward equilibrium of all factors in a situation, “chiefs” for example, were largely created by whites, as was/is the supposedly lower status of women (derogatorily called squaws by whites, although the word was used to designate women of high status among Algonkians who lived on the Northern Atlantic coast and could be translated to something like queen10). In tribal literatures, the timing of the foregrounding of various elements is

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dependent on the purpose the narrative is intended to serve. Tribal art functions something like a forest in which all elements coexist and where each is integral to the being of the others. Depending on the season, the interplay of various life-forms, the state of the overall biosphere and psychosphere, and the entity’s reason for being there, certain plants will leap into focus on certain occasions. For example, when tribal women on the eastern seaboard were gathering sassafras, what they noticed, what stood out sharply in their attention, were the sassafras plants. But when they were out to get maple sugar, maples became foregrounded. But the foregrounding of sassafras or maple in no way lessens the value of the other plants or other features of the forest. When a woman goes after maple syrup, she is aware of the other plant forms that are also present. In the same way, a story that is intended to convey the importance of the grandmother spirits will focus on grandmothers in their interaction with grandchildren and will convey little information about uncles. In traditional tales, a number of points will be made, and a number of elements will be present, all of which will bear some relationship to the subject of the story; within the time the storyteller has allotted to the story, and depending on the interests and needs of her audience at the time of the storytelling, each of these elements will receive its proper due. Traditional American Indian stories work like a dynamic among clusters of loosely interconnected circles. The focus of the action shifts from one character to another as the story unfolds. There is no “point of view” as the term is generally understood unless the action itself, the story’s purpose, can be termed “point of view.” But as the old tales get translated and “rendered” in English, the Western notion of proper fictional form takes over the tribal narrative. Soon there appear to be heroes, point of view, conflict, crisis and resolution, and as Western tastes in story-crafting are imposed over the narrative structure of the ritual story, a Western story with Indian characters is produced. Mournfully, the new form often becomes confused with archaic form by the very people whose tradition has been re-formed. The “battle” between Summer and Winter is an accurate description of seasonal change in central New Mexico during the spring. This comes through in the Gunn rendition, but because the story is focused on conflict rather than on balance, the meteorological facts and their intrinsic relationship to human ritual are obscured. Only a non-Indian mind, accustomed to interpreting events in terms of battle, struggle, and opposition, would assume the process of transfer had to occur through a battle replete with protagonist, antagonist, a cast of thousands, and a pretty girl as the prize. For who but an industrialized patriarch would think that winter can be vanquished? As though the right brain could overcome the left? Winter and summer enjoy a relationship based on complementariness, mutuality, and this is the moral significance of the tale.

TRIBAL NARRATIVES AND WOMEN’S LIVES Reading American Indian traditional songs and stories is not an easy task. Adequate comprehension requires that the reader be aware that Indians never think like whites and that any typeset version of traditional materials is distortive.

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In many ways, literary conventions, as well as the conventions of literacy, militate against an understanding of traditional tribal materials. Western technological-industrialized minds cannot adequately interpret tribal materials because they are generally trained to perceive their entire world in ways which are alien to tribal understandings. This problem is not exclusive to tribal literature. It is one that all ethnic writers who write out of a tribal or folk tradition must face, and one which is also shared by women writers who, after all, inhabit a separate folk tradition. Women’s culture bears marked resemblance to tribal culture. The perceptual modes that women, even those of us who are literate, industrialized, and reared within masculinist academic traditions habitually engage in, are more resemblant of open-field perception than of foreground-background perceptions. Women’s traditional occupations, their arts and crafts, and their literature and philosophies are more often circular than linear, more synchronistic than chronological, and more dependent upon harmonious relationships of all elements within a field of perception than Western culture in general is thought to be. Indeed, the patchwork quilt is the best material example I can think of to describe the plot and process of a traditional tribal narrative, and quilting is a non-Indian woman’s art, one that Indian women have taken to avidly and which they display in their ceremonies, rituals, and social gatherings, as well as in their homes. It is the nature of woman’s existence to be and to create background. This fact, viewed with unhappiness by many feminists, can be seen in a tribal way as being of ultimate importance. Certainly no art object is bereft of background. Certainly the quality of one’s background will largely determine the quality of one’s life and, therefore, the quality of one’s performance in any given sphere of activity. Westerners have for a long time discounted the importance of background. The earth herself, which is our most inclusive background, is dealt with summarily as a source of food, metals, water, and investment yield, while the fact that she is the fundamental agent of all planetary life is blithely ignored. Similarly women’s activities—cooking, planting, harvesting, preservation, storage, home-building, decorating, maintaining, doctoring, nursing, soothing, and healing, which, along with the bearing, nurturing, and rearing of children are ignored as blithely—with consequences that are likely to be as disastrous to the sum and quality of planetary life in the end. An anti-background bias is bound to have social costs that have so far remained unexplored, but elite attitudes toward workers, non-white races, and women are all part of the price we pay for indulging in over-valuing the foreground. In the Western mind, shadows are something that highlight the foreground. Contrast this with the tribal view that the mutual relationships among shadows and light in all their varying degrees of intensity create a living web of definition and depth, and significance arises from their interplay. Traditional and contemporary tribal arts and crafts testify powerfully to the importance of the perception of equalized balance of all elements in a field in tribal perception, aesthetics, and social systems. Traditional peoples perceive their world in a unified-field fashion that is far from the single-focus perception that generally characterizes Western masculinist monotheistic modes of perception. Because of this, their cultures are consistently misperceived and misrepresented by folklorists, ethnographers, artists, writ-

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ers, and social workers. A number of scholars have, in recent times, addressed themselves to this issue, but they have had little success because the demands of type are, after all, linear and fixed, while the requirements of tribal literature are spherical and moving. The one is unidimensional, monolithic, and chronological while the other is multidimensional and a-chronistic. How one teaches or writes about the one in terms of the other is problematic. This paper itself is a pale representation of a tribal understanding of the Kochinnenako tale. As I reread what I have written, I am acutely aware that much of what I have said is likely to be understood in ways I did not intend; and I am also aware of how much I did not say that probably needed to be said if the real story of the transfer of responsibility from one segment of the tribe to the other is to be made clear. In the end, the tale I have analyzed is not about Kochinnenako or Sh-ah-cock and Miochin. It is about the change of seasons, and it is about the centrality of woman as agent and empowerer of that change. It is about how a people engage themselves as a people within the spiritual cosmos of their lives and in an ordered and proper way that bestows the dignity of each upon all with careful respect, folkish humor, and ceremonial delight. It is about how everyone is part of the background that shapes the meaning and value of each one’s life. It is about propriety, mutuality, and the dynamics of socio-environmental change.

NOTES 1. John M. Gunn, Schat-Chen: History, Traditions and Narratives of the Queres Indians of Laguna and Acoma. Albuquerque, New Mexico: Albright and Anderson, 1917. (Reprinted, New York: AMS, 1980.) Gunn, my mother’s great uncle, lived among the Lagunas all of his adult life. He spoke Laguna (Keres) and gathered information in somewhat informal ways while sitting in the sun visiting with older people. He married Meta Atseye, my grandmother, years after her husband (John Gunn’s brother) died, and may have taken much of his information from her stories or explanations of Laguna ceremonial events. She had a way of “translating” terms and concepts from Keres into English and from a Laguna conceptual framework into an American one—as she understood it. For example, she used to refer to the Navajo people as “gypsies,” probably because they traveled in covered wagons. 2. An unpublished manuscript in my possession written by John Gunn after Schat-Chen is devoted to his researches and speculations into this idea. 3. Gunn, Schat-Chen, pp. 217–22. 4. Woman-hating among American Indian women often shows up in a displaced form where it is expressed as publically destructive actions against white women (or others who are not “Indian enough”) who write or speak about Indian subjects, particularly about women’s spirituality. 5. In his Keresan Texts (Vol. VIII, Part I, Publications of the American Ethnological Society, New York: The American Ethnological Society, 1928), Franz Boas writes “The second and the fourth of the shiwana appear in the tale of summer and winter. . . . Summer wears a shirt of buckskin with squash ornaments, shoes like moss to which parrot feathers are tied. His face is painted with red mica and flowers are tied on to it. . . . Winter wears a shirt of icicles and his shoes are like ice. His shirt is shiny and to its end are tied turkey feathers and eagle feathers.” p. 284.

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6. Boas, p. 288. Boas says he made the same mistake at first, having misheard the word they used. 7. When my sister, Carol Lee Sanchez, spoke to her university Woman’s Studies class about the position of centrality women hold in our Keres tradition, one young woman, a self-identified radical feminist, was outraged. She insisted that Ms. Sanchez, and other Laguna women, had been “brainwashed” into believing that we had power over our lives. After all, she knew that no women anywhere have ever had that kind of power; her feminist studies had made that “fact” quite plain to her. The kind of cultural chauvinism that has been promulgated by well-intentioned but culturally entranced feminists can lead to serious misunderstandings such as this one, and in the process become a new racism based on what becomes the feminist canon. Not that feminists can be faulted entirely on this . . . they are, after all, reflecting the research and interpretation done in a patriarchal context, by male-biased researchers and scholars, most of whom would avidly support the young radical feminist’s strenuous position. It’s too bad, though, that feminists fall into the patriarchal trap. 8. For a detailed exposition of what this dynamic consists of, see Adrienne Rich, “Compulsive Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer 1980). Rpt. as a pamphlet with an updated foreword (Denver: Antelope Publications, 1982), 1612 St. Paul, Denver, Colorado 80206. 9. Elaine Jahner, a specialist in Lakota language and oral literature, has suggested to me that the Western obsession with Western plot in narrative structure led early informant George Sword to construct narratives in the Western fashion and tell them as Lakota traditional stories. Research has shown that Sword’s stories are not recognized as Lakota traditional stories by Lakotas themselves; but the tribal narratives that are so recognized are loosely structured and do not exhibit the reliance on central theme or character that is so dear to the hearts of Western collectors. As time has gone by, the Sword stories have become a sort of model for later Lakota storytellers who, out of a desire to convey the tribal tales to Western collectors, have changed the old structures to ones more pleasing to American and European ears. Education in Western schools, exposure to mass media, and the need to function in a white-dominated world have subtly, but perhaps permanently, altered the narrative structures of the old tales and with them the tribal conceptual modes of tribespeople. The shift has been away from associative, synchronistic, event-centered narrative and thought to a linear, foreground-centered one. Concurrently, tribal social organization and interpersonal relations have taken a turn toward authoritarian, patriarchal, linear, and misogynist modes—hence the rise of violence against women, an unthinkable event in older, more circular and tribal times. 10. For a detailed analysis of the term and the deliberate misinformation regarding the status of women in those cultures Anglo colonizers were earliest in contact with, see Robert Steven Grumet’s article, “Skunksquaws, Shamans and Tradeswomen: Middle Atlantic Coastal Algonkian Women During the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives, Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, eds. (New York: Praeger Special Studies, J. F. Bergine Publishers, 1980), pp. 46–53. According to Grumet the English equivalence-term for Skunksquaw was “Queen” or even “Empress.”

GLORIA ANZALDÚA

LA CONCIENCIA DE LA MESTIZA towards a new consciousness (1987)





















Por la mujer de mi raza hablará el espíritu.

José Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged una raza mestiza, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza de color—la primera raza sínetesis del globo. He called it a cosmic race, la raza cósmica, a fifth race embracing the four major races of the world.1 Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices, his theory is one of inclusivity. At the confluence of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly “crossing over,” this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an “alien” consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands. Una lucha de fronteras / A Struggle of Borders Because I, a mestiza, continually walk out of one culture and into another, because I am in all cultures at the same time, alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan simultáneamente.

The ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity. Internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness. The mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness. In a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways, la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another. Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of a dark-skinned mother listen to?

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El choque de un alma atrapado entre el mundo del espíritu y el mundo de la técnica a vecas la deja entullada. Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war. Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference2 causes un choque, a cultural collision. Within us and within la cultura chicana, commonly held beliefs of the white culture attack commonly held beliefs of the Mexican culture, and both attack commonly held beliefs of the indigenous culture. Subconsciously, we see an attack on ourselves and on our beliefs as a threat and we attempt to block it with a counter-stance. But it is not enough to stand on the opposite riverbank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counter-stance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and, for this, it is proudly defiant. All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counter-stance stems from a problem with authority—outer as well as inner—it’s a step toward liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

A TOLERANCE FOR AMBIGUITY These numerous possibilities leave la mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking,3 characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and

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the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. She can be jarred out of ambivalence by an intense, and often painful, emotional event that inverts or resolves the ambivalence. I’m not sure exactly how. The work takes place underground—subconsciously. It is work that the soul performs. That focal point or fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the possibility of uniting all that is separate occurs. This assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm. En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. La encrucijada / The Crossroads A chicken is being sacrificed at a crossroads, a simple mound of earth a mud shrine for Eshu, Yoruba god of indeterminacy, who blesses her choice of path. She begins her journey.

Su cuerpo es una bocacalle. La mestiza has gone from being the sacrificial goat to becoming the officiating priestess at the crossroads. As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has

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produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. We are the people who leap in the dark, we are the people on the knees of the gods. In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly, but if the center holds, we’ve made some kind of evolutionary step forward. Nuestra alma el trabajo, the opus, the great alchemical work; spiritual mestizaje, a “morphogenesis,”4 an inevitable unfolding. We have become the quickening serpent movement. Indigenous like corn, like corn, the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions. Like an ear of corn—a female seedbearing organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture. Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads. Lavando y remojando el maíz en agua del cal, despojando el pellejo. Moliendo, mixteando, amasando, haciendo tortillas de masa.5 She steeps the corn in lime, it swells, softens. With stone roller on metate, she grinds the corn, then grinds again. She kneads and moulds the dough, pats the round balls into tortillas. We are the porous rock in the stone metate squatting on the ground. We are the rolling pin, el maíz y agua, la masa harina. Somos el amasijo. Somos lo molido en el metate. We are the comal sizzling hot, the hot tortilla, the hungry mouth. We are the coarse rock. We are the grinding motion, the mixed potion, somos el molcajete. We are the pestle, the comino, ajo, pimienta, We are the chile colorado, the green shoot that cracks the rock. We will abide.

El camino de la mestiza / The Mestiza Way Caught between the sudden contraction, the breath sucked in and the endless space, the brown woman stands still, looks at the sky. She decides to go down, digging her way along the roots of trees. Sifting through the bones, she shakes them to see if there is any marrow in them. Then, touching the dirt to her forehead, to her tongue, she takes a few bones, leaves the rest in their burial place. She goes through her backpack, keeps her journal and address book, throws away the muni-BART metromaps. The coins are heavy and they go next, then the greenbacks flutter through the air. She keeps her knife, can opener and eyebrow pencil. She puts bones, pieces of bark, hierbas, eagle feather, snakeskin, tape recorder, the rattle and drum in her pack and she sets out to become the complete tolteca.6 Her first step is to take inventory. Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja. Just what did she inherit from her ancestors? This weight on her back—which is the

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baggage from the Indian mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage from the Anglo? Pero es diffícil differentiating between lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto. She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of. Luego bota lo que no vale, los desmientos, los desencuentos, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio, hondo y enraízado, de la gente antigua. This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward the dark-skinned, women and queers. She strengthens her tolerance (and intolerance) for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar. Deconstruct, construct. She becomes a nahual, able to transform herself into a tree, a coyote, into another person. She learns to transform the small “I” into the total Self. Se hace moldeadora de su alma. Según la concepción que tiene de sí misma, así será. Que no se nos olvide los hombres “Tú no sirves pa’ nada— you’re good for nothing. Eres pura vieja.”

“You’re nothing but a woman” means you are defective. Its opposite is to be un macho. The modern meaning of the word “machismo,” as well as the concept, is actually an Anglo invention. For men like my father, being “macho” meant being strong enough to protect and support my mother and us, yet being able to show love. Today’s macho has doubts about his ability to feed and protect his family. His “machismo” is an adaptation to oppression and poverty and low self-esteem. It is the result of hierarchical male dominance. The Anglo, feeling inadequate and inferior and powerless, displaces or transfers these feelings to the Chicano by shaming him. In the Gringo world, the Chicano suffers from excessive humility and self-effacement, shame of self and self-deprecation. Around Latinos he suffers from a sense of language inadequacy and its accompanying discomfort; with Native Americans he suffers from a racial amnesia that ignores our common blood, and from guilt because the Spanish part of him took their land and oppressed them. He has an excessive compensatory hubris when around Mexicans from the other side. It overlays a deep sense of racial shame. The loss of a sense of dignity and respect in the macho breeds a false machismo that leads him to put down women and even to brutalize them. Coexisting with his sexist behavior is a love for the mother which takes precedence over that of all others. Devoted son, macho pig. To wash down the shame of his acts, of his very being, and to handle the brute in the mirror, he takes to the bottle, the snort, the needle, and the fist. Though we “understand” the root causes of male hatred and fear, and the subsequent wounding of women, we do not excuse, we do not condone, and we will no longer put up with it. From the men of our race, we demand the admission/acknowledgment/disclosure/testimony that they wound us, violate us, are afraid of

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us and of our power. We need them to say they will begin to eliminate their hurtful put-down ways. But more than the words, we demand acts. We say to them: We will develop equal power with you and those who have shamed us. It is imperative that mestizas support each other in changing the sexist elements in the Mexican-Indian culture. As long as woman is put down, the Indian and the Black in all of us is put down. The struggle of the mestiza is above all a feminist one. As long as los hombres think they have to chingar mujeres and each other to be men, as long as men are taught that they are superior and therefore culturally favored over la mujer, as long as to be a vieja is a thing of derision, there can be no real healing of our psyches. We’re halfway there—we have such love of the Mother, the good mother. The first step is to unlearn the puta/virgen dichotomy and to see Coatapopeuh-Coatlicue in the Mother, Guadalupe. Tenderness, a sign of vulnerability, is so feared that it is showered on women with verbal abuse and blows. Men, even more than women, are fettered to gender roles. Women at least have had the guts to break out of bondage. Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity. I’ve encountered a few scattered and isolated gentle straight men, the beginnings of a new breed, but they are confused, and entangled with sexist behaviors that they have not been able to eradicate. We need a new masculinity and the new man needs a movement. Lumping the males who deviate from the general norm with man, the oppressor, is a gross injustice. Asombra pensar que nos hemos quedado en ese pozo oscuro donde el mundo encierra a las lesbianas. Asombra pensar que hemos, como femenistas y lesbianas, cerrado nuestros corazónes a los hombres, a nuestros hermanos los jotos, desheredados y marginales como nosotros. Being the supreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian, Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australia and the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with each other—the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas and information from one culture to another. Colored homosexuals have more knowledge of other cultures; have always been at the forefront (although sometimes in the closet) of all liberation struggles in this country; have suffered more injustices and have survived them despite all odds. Chicanos need to acknowledge the political and artistic contributions of their queer. People, listen to what your jotería is saying. The mestizo and the queer exist at this time and point on the evolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls. Somos una gente Hay tantísimas fronteras que dividen a la gente, pero por cada frontera existe también un puente. —Gina Valdés7

Divided Loyalties. Many women and men of color do not want to have any dealings with white people. It takes too much time and energy to explain to

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the downwardly mobile, white middle-class women that it’s okay for us to want to own “possessions,” never having had any nice furniture on our dirt floors or “luxuries” like washing machines. Many feel that whites should help their own people rid themselves of race hatred and fear first. I, for one, choose to use some of my energy to serve as mediator. I think we need to allow whites to be our allies. Through our literature, art, corridos, and folktales we must share our history with them so when they set up committees to help Big Mountain Navajos or the Chicano farmworkers or los Nicaragüenses they won’t turn people away because of their racial fears and ignorances. They will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead. Individually, but also as a racial entity, we need to voice our needs. We need to say to white society: We need you to accept the fact that Chicanos are different, to acknowledge your rejection and negation of us. We need you to own the fact that you looked upon us as less than human, that you stole our lands, our personhood, our self-respect. We need you to make public restitution: to say that, to compensate for your own sense of defectiveness, you strive for power over us, you erase our history and our experience because it makes you feel guilty—you’d rather forget your brutish acts. To say you’ve split yourself from minority groups, that you disown us, that your dual consciousness splits off parts of yourself, transferring the “negative” parts onto us. (Where there is persecution of minorities, there is shadow projection. Where there is violence and war, there is repression of shadow.) To say that you are afraid of us, that to put distance between us, you wear the mask of contempt. Admit that Mexico is your double, that she exists in the shadow of this country, that we are irrevocably tied to her. Gringo, accept the doppelgänger in your psyche. By taking back your collective shadow the intracultural split will heal. And finally, tell us what you need from us.

BY YOUR TRUE FACES WE WILL KNOW YOU I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t, we haven’t. The dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance. By taking away our self-determination, it has made us weak and empty. As a people we have resisted and we have taken expedient positions, but we have never been allowed to develop unencumbered—we have never been allowed to be fully ourselves. The whites in power want us people of color to barricade ourselves behind our separate tribal walls so they can pick us off one at a time with their hidden weapons; so they can whitewash and distort history. Ignorance splits people, creates prejudices. A misinformed people is a subjugated people. Before the Chicano and the undocumented worker and the Mexican from the other side can come together, before the Chicano can have unity with Native Americans and other groups, we need to know the history of their struggle and they need to know ours. Our mothers, our sisters and brothers, the guys who hang out on street corners, the children in the playgrounds, each of us must know our Indian lineage, our afro-mestisaje, our history of resistance.

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To the immigrant mexicano and the recent arrivals we must teach our history. The 80 million mexicanos and the Latinos from Central and South America must know of our struggles. Each one of us must know basic facts about Nicaragua, Chile, and the rest of Latin America. The Latinoist movement (Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Spanish-speaking people working together to combat racial discrimination in the marketplace) is good but it is not enough. Other than a common culture we will have nothing to hold us together. We need to meet on a broader communal ground. The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working-class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads. El día de la Chicana I will not be shamed again Nor will I shame myself.

I am possessed by a vision: that we Chicanas and Chicanos have taken back or uncovered our true faces, our dignity and self-respect. It’s a validation vision. Seeing the Chicana anew in light of her history. I seek an exoneration, a seeing through the fictions of white supremacy, a seeing of ourselves in our true guises and not as the false racial personality that has been given to us and that we have given to ourselves. I seek our woman’s face, our true features, the positive and the negative seen clearly, free of the tainted biases of male dominance. I seek new images of identity, new beliefs about ourselves, our humanity and worth no longer in question. Estamos viviendo en la noche de la Raza, un tiempo cuando el trabajo se hace a lo quieto, en el oscuro. El día cuando aceptamos tal y como somos y para en donde vamos y porque—ese día será el día de la Raza. Yo tengo el conpromiso de expresar mi visión, mi sensibilidad, mi percepción de la revalidación de la gente mexicana, su mérito, estimación, honra, aprecio, y validez. On December 2nd when my sun goes into my first house, I celebrate el día de la Chicana y el Chicano. On that day I clean my altars, light my Coatalopeuh candle, burn sage and copal, take el baño para espantar basura, sweep my house. On that day I bare my soul, make myself vulnerable to friends and family by expressing my feelings. On that day I affirm who we are. On that day I look inside our conflicts and our basic introverted racial temperament. I identify our needs, voice them. I acknowledge that the self and the race have been wounded. I recognize the need to take care of our personhood, of our racial self. On that day I gather the splintered and disowned parts of la gente mexicana and hold them in my arms. Todas las partes de nosotros valen.

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On that day I say, “Yes, all you people wound us when you reject us. Rejection strips us of self-worth; our vulnerability exposes us to shame. It is our innate identity you find wanting. We are ashamed that we need your good opinion, that we need your acceptance. We can no longer camouflage our needs, can no longer let defenses and fences sprout around us. We can no longer withdraw. To rage and look upon you with contempt is to rage and be contemptuous of ourselves. We can no longer blame you, nor disown the white parts, the male parts, the pathological parts, the queer parts, the vulnerable parts. Here we are weaponless with open arms, with only our magic. Let’s try it our way, the mestiza way, the Chicana way, the woman way. On that day, I search for our essential dignity as a people, a people with a sense of purpose—to belong and contribute to something greater than our pueblo. On that day I seek to recover and reshape my spiritual identity. ¡Anímate! Raza, a celebrar el día de la Chicana. El retorno All movements are accomplished in six stages, and the seventh brings return. —I Ching Tanto tiempo sin verta casa mía, mi cuna, mi hondo nido de la huerta. —“Soledad”8

I stand at the river, watch the curving, twisting serpent, a serpent nailed to the fence where the mouth of the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf. I have come back. Tanto dolor me costó el alejamiento. I shade my eyes and look up. The bone beak of a hawk slowly circling over me, checking me out as potential carrion. In its wake a little bird flickering its wings, swimming sporadically like a fish. In the distance the expressway and the slough of traffic like an irritated sow. The sudden pull in my gut, la tierra, los aguaceros. My land, el viento soplando la arena, el lagartijo debajo de un nopalito. Me acuerdo como era antes. Una región desértica de vasta llanuras, costeras de baja altura, de escasa lluvia, de chaparrales formados por mesquites y huizaches. If I look real hard I can almost see the Spanish fathers who were called “the cavalry of Christ” enter this valley riding their burros, see the clash of cultures commence. Tierra natal. This is home, the small towns in the Valley, los pueblitos with chicken pens and goats picketed to mesquite shrubs. En las colonias on the other side of the tracks, junk cars line the front yards of hot pink and lavender-trimmed houses— Chicano architecture we call it, self-consciously. I have missed the TV shows where hosts speak in half and half, and where awards are given in the category of Tex-Mex music. I have missed the Mexican cemeteries blooming with artificial flowers, the fields of aloe vera and red pepper, rows of sugar cane, of corn hanging on the stalks, the cloud of polvareda in the dirt roads behind a speeding pickup truck, el sabor de tamales de rez y venado. I have missed la yegua colorada gnawing the wooden gate of her stall, the smell of horse flesh from Carito’s corrals. He hecho menos las noches calientes sin aire, noches de linternas y lechuzas making holes in the night.

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I still feel the old despair when I look at the unpainted, dilapidated, scrap lumber houses consisting mostly of corrugated aluminum. Some of the poorest people in the U.S. live in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, an arid and semi-arid land of irrigated farming, intense sunlight and heat, citrus groves next to chaparral and cactus. I walk through the elementary school I attended so long ago, which remained segregated until recently. I remember how the white teachers used to punish us for being Mexican. How I love this tragic valley of South Texas, as Ricardo Sánchez calls it; this borderland between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. This land has survived possession and ill-use by five countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the U.S., the Confederacy, and the U.S. again. It has survived Anglo-Mexican blood feuds, lynchings, burnings, rapes, pillage. Today I see the valley still struggling to survive. Whether it does or not, it will never be as I remember it. The borderlands depression that was set off by the 1982 peso devaluation in Mexico resulted in the closure of hundreds of valley businesses. Many people lost their homes, cars, land. Prior to 1982, U.S. store owners thrived on retail sales to Mexicans who came across the border for groceries and clothes and appliances. While goods on the U.S. side have become 10, 100, 1,000 times more expensive for Mexican buyers, goods on the Mexican side have become 10, 100, 1,000 times cheaper for Americans. Because the valley is heavily dependent on agriculture and Mexican retail trade, it has the highest unemployment rates along the entire border region; it is the valley that has been hardest hit.9 “It’s been a bad year for corn,” my brother, Nune, says. As he talks, I remember my father scanning the sky for a rain that would end the drought, looking up into the sky, day after day, while the corn withered on its stalk. My father has been dead for 29 years, having worked himself to death. The life span of a Mexican farm laborer is 56—he lived to be 38. It shocks me that I am older than he. I, too, search the sky for rain. Like the ancients, I worship the rain god and the maize goddess, but unlike my father I have recovered their names. Now for rain (irrigation) one offers not a sacrifice of blood, but of money. “Farming is in a bad way,” my brother says. “Two to three thousand small and big farmers went bankrupt in this country last year. Six years ago the price of corn was $8.00 per hundred pounds,” he goes on. “This year it is $3.90 per hundred pounds.” And, I think to myself, after taking inflation into account, not planting anything puts you ahead. I walk out to the back yard, stare at los rosales de mamá. She wants me to help her prune the rose bushes, dig out the carpet grass that is choking them. Mamagrande Ramona también tenía rosales. Here every Mexican grows flowers. If they don’t have a piece of dirt, they use car tires, jars, cans, shoe boxes. Roses are the Mexican’s favorite flower. I think, how symbolic—thorns and all. Yes, the Chicano and Chicana have always taken care of growing things and the land. Again I see the four of us kids getting off the school bus, changing into our work clothes, walking into the field with Papí and Mamí, all six of us bending to the ground. Below our feet, under the earth lie the watermelon seeds. We cover them with paper plates, putting terremotes on top of the plates to keep them from

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being blown away by the wind. The paper plates keep the freeze away. Next day or the next, we remove the plates, bare the tiny green shoots to the elements. They survive and grow, give fruit hundreds of times the size of the seed. We water them and hoe them. We harvest them. The vines dry, rot, are plowed under. Growth, death, decay, birth. The soil prepared again and again, impregnated, worked on. A constant changing of forms, renacimientos de la tierra madre. This land was Mexican once was Indian always and is. And will be again.

NOTES 1. José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica: Misión de la Raza Ibero-Americana (México: Aguilar S.A. de Ediciones, 1961 ). 2. Arthur Koestler termed this “bisociation.” Albert Rothenberg, The Creative Process in Art, Science, and Other Fields (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 12. 3. In part, I derive my definitions for “convergent” and “divergent” thinking from Rothenberg, pp. 12–13. 4. To borrow chemist Ilya Prigogine’s theory of “dissipative structures.” Prigogine discovered that substances interact, not in predictable ways as it was taught in science, but in different and fluctuating ways to produce new and more complex structures, a kind of birth he called “morphogenesis,” which created unpredictable innovations. Harold Gilliam, “Searching for a New World View,” This World (January 1981), p. 23. 5. Tortillas de masa harina: corn tortillas are of two types, the smooth uniform ones made in a tortilla press and usually bought at a tortilla factory or supermarket, and gorditas, made by mixing masa with lard or shortening or butter (my mother sometimes puts in bits of bacon or chicharrones). 6. Gina Valdés, Puentes y Fronteras: Coplas Chicanas (Los Angeles, Calif.: Castle Lithograph, 1982), p. 2. 7. Richard Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Cary F. Baynes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 98. 8. “Soledad” is sung by the group Haciendo Punto en Otro Son. 9. Out of the twenty-two border counties in the four border states, Hidalgo County (named for Father Hidalgo, who was shot in 1810 after instigating Mexico’s revolt against Spanish rule under the banner of la Virgen de Guadalupe) is the most poverty-stricken county in the nation as well as the largest home base (along with Imperial in California) for migrant farm-workers. It was here that I was born and raised. I am amazed that both it and I have survived.

JANE TOMPKINS

ME AND MY SHADOW (1989)





















I wrote this essay in answer to Ellen Messer-Davidow’s ‘The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms,’ which appeared in the Fall 1987 issue of New Literary History along with several replies, including a shorter version of this one. As if it weren’t distraction enough that my essay depends on someone else’s, I want, before you’ve even read it, to defend it from an accusation. Believing that my reply, which turns its back on theory, constituted a return to the ‘rhetoric of presence,’ to an ‘earlier, naive, untheoretical feminism,’ someone, whom I’ll call the unfriendly reader, complained that I was making the ‘old patriarchal gesture of representation’ whose effect had been to marginalize women, thus ‘reinforcing the very stereotypes women and minorities have fought so hard to overcome.’ I want to reply to this objection because I think it is mistaken and because it reproduces exactly the way I used to feel about feminist criticism when it first appeared in the late 1960s. I wanted nothing to do with it. It was embarrassing to see women, with whom one was necessarily identified, insisting in print on the differences between men’s and women’s experience, focusing obsessively on women authors, women characters, women’s issues. How pathetic, I thought, to have to call attention to yourself in that way. And in such bad taste. It was the worst kind of special pleading, an admission of weakness so blatant it made me ashamed. What I felt then, and what I think my unfriendly reader feels now, is a version of what women who are new to feminism often feel: that if we don’t call attention to ourselves as women, but just shut up about it and do our work, no one will notice the difference and everything will be OK. Women who adopt this line are, understandably, afraid. Afraid of being confused with the weaker sex, the sex that goes around whining and talking about itself in an unseemly way, that can’t or won’t do what the big boys do (‘tough it out’) and so won’t ever be allowed to play in the big boys’ games. I am sympathetic with this position. Not long ago, as organizer of an MLA session entitled ‘Professional Politics: Women and the Institution,’ I urged a large roomful of women to ‘get theory’ because I thought that doing theory would admit us to the big leagues and enable us at the same time to argue a feminist case in the most unimpeachable terms—those that men had supplied. I busily took my own ad-

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vice, which was good as far as it went. But I now see that there has been a price for this, at least there has been for me; it is the subject of my reply to Ellen. I now tend to think that theory itself, at least as it is usually practiced, may be one of the patriarchal gestures women and men ought to avoid. There are two voices inside me answering, answering to, Ellen’s essay. One is the voice of a critic who wants to correct a mistake in the essay’s view of epistemology. The other is the voice of a person who wants to write about her feelings (I have wanted to do this for a long time but have felt too embarrassed). This person feels it is wrong to criticize the essay philosophically, and even beside the point: because a critique of the kind the critic has in mind only insulates academic discourse further from the issues that make feminism matter. That make her matter. The critic, meanwhile, believes such feelings, and the attitudes that inform them, are soft-minded, self-indulgent, and unprofessional. These beings exist separately but not apart. One writes for professional journals, the other in diaries, late at night. One uses words like ‘context’ and ‘intelligibility,’ likes to win arguments, see her name in print, and give graduate students hardheaded advice. The other has hardly ever been heard from. She had a short story published once in a university literary magazine, but her works exist chiefly in notebooks and manila folders labelled ‘Journal’ and ‘Private.’ This person talks on the telephone a lot to her friends, has seen psychiatrists, likes cappuccino, worries about the state of her soul. Her father is ill right now, and one of her friends recently committed suicide. The dichotomy drawn here is false—and not false. I mean in reality there’s no split. It’s the same person who feels and who discourses about epistemology. The problem is that you can’t talk about your private life in the course of doing your professional work. You have to pretend that epistemology, or whatever you’re writing about, has nothing to do with your life, that it’s more exalted, more important, because it (supposedly) transcends the merely personal. Well, I’m tired of the conventions that keep discussions of epistemology, or James Joyce, segregated from meditations on what is happening outside my window or inside my heart. The public-private dichotomy, which is to say, the public-private hierarchy, is a founding condition of female oppression. I say to hell with it. The reason I feel embarrassed at my own attempts to speak personally in a professional context is that I have been conditioned to feel that way. That’s all there is to it. I think people are scared to talk about themselves, that they haven’t got the guts to do it. I think readers want to know about each other. Sometimes, when a writer introduces some personal bit of story into an essay, I can hardly contain my pleasure. I love writers who write about their own experience. I feel I’m being nourished by them, that I’m being allowed to enter into a personal relationship with them. That I can match my own experience up with theirs, feel cousin to them, and say, yes, that’s how it is. When he casts his leaves forth upon the wind [said Hawthorne], the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him. . . . As if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. . . . And so as thoughts are frozen and utterance, be-

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numbed unless the speaker stand in some true relation with this audience—it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk. (Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Custom-House,’ The Scarlet Letter, pp. 5–6)

Hawthorne’s sensitivity to the relationship that writing implies is rare in academic prose, even when the subject would seem to make awareness of the reader inevitable. Alison Jaggar gave a lecture recently that crystallized the problem. Western epistemology, she argued, is shaped by the belief that emotion should be excluded from the process of attaining knowledge. Because women in our culture are not simply encouraged but required to be the bearers of emotion, which men are culturally conditioned to repress, an epistemology which excludes emotions from the process of attaining knowledge radically undercuts women’s epistemic authority. The idea that the conventions defining legitimate sources of knowledge overlapped with the conventions defining appropriate gender behavior (male) came to me as a blinding insight. I saw that I had been socialized from birth to feel and act in ways that automatically excluded me from participating in the culture’s most valued activities. No wonder I felt so uncomfortable in the postures academic prose forced me to assume; it was like wearing men’s jeans. Ellen Messer-Davidow’s essay participates—as Jaggar’s lecture and my précis of it did—in the conventions of Western rationalism. It adopts the impersonal, technical vocabulary of the epistemic ideology it seeks to dislocate. The political problem posed by my need to reply to the essay is this: to adhere to the conventions is to uphold a male standard of rationality that militates against women’s being recognized as culturally legitimate sources of knowledge. To break with the convention is to risk not being heard at all. This is how I would reply to Ellen’s essay if I were to do it in the professionally sanctioned way. The essay provides feminist critics with an overarching framework for thinking about what they do, both in relation to mainstream criticism and in relation to feminist work in other fields. It allows the reader to see women’s studies as a whole, furnishing useful categories for organizing a confusing and miscellaneous array of materials. It also provides excellent summaries of a wide variety of books and essays that readers might not otherwise encounter. The enterprise is carried out without pointed attacks on other theorists, without creating a cumbersome new vocabulary, without exhibitionistic displays of intellect or esoteric learning. Its practical aim—to define a field within which debate can take place—is fulfilled by New Literary History’s decision to publish it, and to do so in a format which includes replies. (Very nice, Jane. You sound so reasonable and generous. But, as anybody can tell, this is just the obligatory pat on the back before the stab in the entrails.) The difficulty with the essay from a philosophical, as opposed to a practical, point of view is that the theory it offers as a basis for future work stems from a confused notion of what an epistemology is. The author says: ‘An epistemology . . . consists of assumptions that knowers make about the entities and processes in a domain of study, the relations that obtain among them, and the proper methods for investigating them’ (p. 87). I want to quarrel with this definition.

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Epistemology, strictly speaking, is a theory about the origins and nature of knowledge. As such, it is a set of ideas explicitly held and consciously elaborated, and thus belongs to the practice of a sub-category of philosophy called epistemology. The fact that there is a branch of philosophy given over to the study of what knowledge is and how it is acquired is important, because it means that such theories are generated not in relation to this or that ‘domain of study’ but in relation to one another: that is, within the context of already existing epistemological theories. They are rarely based upon a study of the practices of investigators within a particular field. An epistemology does not consist of ‘assumptions that knowers make’ in a particular field; it is a theory about how knowledge is acquired which makes sense, chiefly, in relation to other such theories. What Messer-Davidow offers as the ‘epistemology’ of traditional literary critics is not their epistemology, if in fact they have one, but her description of what she assumes their assumptions are, a description which may or may not be correct. Moreover, if literary critics should indeed elaborate a theory of how they got their beliefs, that theory would have no privileged position in relation to their actual assumptions. It would simply be another theory. This distinction—between actual assumptions and an observer’s description of them (even when one is observing one’s own practice)—is crucial because it points to an all-important fact about the relation of epistemology to what really gets done in a given domain of study, namely this: that epistemology, a theory about how one gets one’s knowledge, in no way determines the particular knowledge that one has. This fact is important because Messer-Davidow assumes that if we change our epistemology, our practice as critics will change, too. Specifically, she wants us to give up the subject-object theory, in which ‘knowledge is an abstract representation of objective existence,’ for a theory which says that what counts as knowledge is a function of situation and perspective. She believes that it follows from this latter theory that knowledge will become more equitable, more self-aware, and more humane. I disagree. Knowing that my knowledge is perspectival, language-based, culturally constructed, or what have you, does not change in the slightest the things I believe to be true. All that it changes is what I think about how we get knowledge. The insight that my ideas are all products of the situation I occupy in the world applies to all of my ideas equally (including the idea that knowledge is culturally based); and to all of everybody else’s ideas as well. So where does this get us? Right back to where we were before, mainly. I still believe what I believe and, if you differ with me, think that you are wrong. If I want to change your mind I still have to persuade you that I am right by using evidence, reasons, chains of inference, citations of authority, analogies, illustrations, and so on. Believing that what I believe comes from my being in a particular cultural framework does not change my relation to my beliefs. I still believe them just as much as if I thought they came from God, or the laws of nature, or my autonomous self. Here endeth the epistle. But while I think Ellen is wrong in thinking that a change of epistemology can mean a change in the kinds of things we think, I am in sympathy with the ends she has in view. This sympathy prompts me to say that my professionally correct

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reply is not on target. Because the target, the goal, rather, is not to be fighting over these questions, trying to beat the other person down. (What the goal is, it is harder to say.) Intellectual debate, if it were in the right spirit, would be wonderful. But I don’t know how to be in the right spirit, exactly, can’t make points without sounding rather superior and smug. Most of all, I don’t know how to enter the debate without leaving everything else behind—the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet. I find that when I try to write in my ‘other’ voice, I am immediately critical of it. It wobbles, vacillates back and forth, is neither this nor that. The voice in which I write about epistemology is familiar, I know how it ought to sound. This voice, though, I hardly know. I don’t even know if it has anything to say. But if I never write in it, it never will. So I have to try. (That is why, you see, this doesn’t sound too good. It isn’t a practiced performance, it hasn’t got a surface. I’m asking you to bear with me while I try, hoping that this, what I write, will express something you yourself have felt or will help you find a part of yourself that you would like to express.) The thing I want to say is that I’ve been hiding a part of myself for a long time. I’ve known it was there but I couldn’t listen because there was no place for this person in literary criticism. The criticism I would like to write would always take off from personal experience. Would always be in some way a chronicle of my hours and days. Would speak in a voice which can talk about everything, would reach out to a reader like me and touch me where I want to be touched. Susan Griffin’s voice in ‘The Way of All Ideology.’ I want to speak in what Ursula LeGuin, at the Bryn Mawr College commencement in 1986, called the ‘mother tongue.’ This is LeGuin speaking: The dialect of the father tongue that you and I learned best in college . . . only lectures. . . . Many believe this dialect—the expository and particularly scientific discourse—is the highest form of language, the true language, of which all other uses of words are primitive vestiges. . . . And it is indeed a High Language . . . Newton’s Principia was written in it in Latin . . . and Kant wrote German in it, and Marx, Darwin, Freud, Boas, Foucault, all the great scientists and social thinkers wrote it. It is the language of thought that seeks objectivity. . . . The essential gesture of the father tongue is not reasoning, but distancing—making a gap, a space, between the subject or self and the object or other. . . . Everywhere now everybody speaks [this] language in laboratories and government buildings and headquarters and offices of business. . . . The father tongue is spoken from above. It goes one way. No answer is expected, or heard. . . . The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. It is conversation, a word the root of which means ‘turning together.’ The mother tongue is language not as mere communication, but as relation, relationship. It connects. . . . Its power is not in dividing but in binding. . . . We all know it by heart. John have you got your umbrella I think it’s going to rain. Can you come play with me? If I told you once I told you a hundred times. . . . O what am I going to do? . . . Pass the soy sauce please. Oh, shit . . . You look like what the cat dragged in. (pp. 3–4)

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Much of what I’m saying elaborates or circles around these quotes from LeGuin. I find that having released myself from the duty to say things I’m not interested in, in a language I resist, I feel free to entertain other people’s voices. Quoting them becomes a pleasure of appreciation rather than the obligatory giving of credit, because when I write in a voice that is not struggling to be heard through the screen of a forced language, I no longer feel that it is not I who am speaking, and so, there is more room for what others have said. One sentence in Ellen’s essay stuck out for me the first time I read it and the second and the third: ‘In time we can build a synchronous account of our subject matters as we glissade among them and turn upon ourselves’ (p. 79). What attracted me to the sentence was the ‘glissade.’ Fluidity, flexibility, versatility, mobility. Moving from one thing to another without embarrassment. It is a tenet of feminist rhetoric that the personal is political, but who in the academy acts on this where language is concerned? We all speak the father tongue, which is impersonal, while decrying the fathers’ ideas. All of what I have written so far is in a kind of watered-down expository prose. Not much imagery. No description of concrete things. Only that one word, ‘glissade.’ Like black swallows swooping and gliding in a flurry of entangled loops and curves . . .

Two lines of a poem I memorized in high school are what the word ‘glissade’ called to mind. Turning upon ourselves. Turning, weaving, bending, unbending, moving in loops and curves. I don’t believe we can ever turn upon ourselves in the sense Ellen intends. You can’t get behind the thing that casts the shadow. You cast the shadow. As soon as you turn, the shadow falls in another place. Is still your shadow. You have not got ‘behind’ yourself. That is why self-consciousness is not the way to make ourselves better than we are. Just me and my shadow, walkin’ down the avenue. It is a beautiful day here in North Carolina. The first day that is both cool and sunny all summer. After a terrible summer, first drought, then heat-wave, then torrential rain, trees down, flooding. Now, finally, beautiful weather. A tree outside my window just brushed by red, with one fully red leaf. (This is what I want you to see. A person sitting in stockinged feet looking out of her window—a floor to ceiling rectangle filled with green, with one red leaf. The season poised, sunny and chill, ready to rush down the incline into autumn. But perfect, and still. Not going yet.) My response to this essay is not a response to something Ellen Messer-Davidow has written; it is a response to something within myself. As I reread the opening pages I feel myself being squeezed into a straitjacket; I wriggle, I will not go in. As I read the list ‘subject matters, methods of reasoning, and epistemology,’ the words will not go down. They belong to a debate whose susurrus hardly reaches my ears. The liberation Ellen promises from the straitjacket of a subject–object epistemology is one I experienced some time ago. Mine didn’t take the form she outlines, but it was close enough. I discovered, or thought I discovered, that the post-structuralist way of understanding language and knowledge enabled me to

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say what I wanted about the world. It enabled me to do this because it pointed out that the world I knew was a construct of ways of thinking about it, and as such, had no privileged claim on the truth. Truth in fact would always be just such a construction, and so, one could offer another, competing, description and so help to change the world that was. The catch was that anything I might say or imagine was itself the product of an already existing discourse. Not something ‘I’ had made up but a way of constructing things I had absorbed from the intellectual surround. Post-structuralism’s proposition about the constructed nature of things held good, but that did not mean that the world could be changed by an act of will. For, as we are looking at this or that phenomenon and re-seeing it, re-thinking it, the rest of the world, that part from which we do the seeing, is still there, in place, real, irrefragable as a whole, and making visible what we see, though changed by it, too. This little lecture pretends to something I no longer want to claim. The pretense is in the tone and level of the language, not in what it says about post-structuralism. The claim being made by the language is analogous to what Barthes calls the ‘reality effect’ of historical writing, whose real message is not that this or that happened but that reality exists. So the claim of this language I’ve been using (and am using right now) lies in its implicit deification of the speaker. Let’s call it the ‘authority effect.’ I cannot describe the pretense except to talk about what it ignores: the human frailty of the speaker, his body, his emotions, his history; the moment of intercourse with the reader—acknowledgment of the other person’s presence, feelings, needs. This ‘authoritative’ language speaks as though the other person weren’t there. Or perhaps more accurately, it doesn’t bother to imagine who, as Hawthorne said, is listening to our talk. How can we speak personally to one another and yet not be self-centered? How can we be part of the great world and yet remain loyal to ourselves? It seems to me that I am trying to write out of my experience without acknowledging any discontinuity between this and the subject matter of the profession I work in. And at the same time find that I no longer want to write about that subject matter, as it appears in Ellen’s essay. I am, on the one hand, demanding a connection between literary theory and my own life, and asserting, on the other, that there is no connection. But here is a connection. I learned what epistemology I know from my husband. I think of it as more his game than mine. It’s a game I enjoy playing but which I no longer need or want to play. I want to declare my independence of it, of him. (Part of what is going on here has to do with a need I have to make sure I’m not being absorbed in someone else’s personality.) What I am breaking away from is both my conformity to the conventions of a male professional practice and my intellectual dependence on my husband. How can I talk about such things in public? How can I not. Looking for something to read this morning, I took three books down from my literary theory shelf, in order to prove a point. The first book was Félix Guattari’s Molecular Revolution. I find it difficult to read, and therefore have read very little of it, but according to a student who is a disciple of of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘molecular revolution’ has to do with getting away from ideology and enacting revolution within daily life. It is specific, not programmed—that is, it does not have a ‘method,’ nor ‘steps,’ and is neither psychoanalytic nor marxist, although

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its discourse seems shaped by those discourses, antithetically. From this kind of revolution, said I to myself, disingenuously, one would expect some recognition of the personal. A revolution that started with daily life would have to begin, or at least would have sometimes to reside, at home. So I open at a section entitled ‘Towards a New Vocabulary,’ looking for something in the mother tongue, and this is what I find: The distinction I am proposing between machine and structure is based solely on the way we use the words; we may consider that we are merely dealing with a ‘written device’ of the kind one has to invent for dealing with a mathematical problem, or with an axiom that may have to be reconsidered at a particular stage of development, or again with the kind of machine we shall be talking about here. I want therefore to make it clear that I am putting into parentheses the fact that, in reality, a machine is inseparable from its structural articulations and conversely, that each contingent structure is dominated (and this is what I want to demonstrate) by a system of machines, or at the very least by one logic machine. (p. 111)

At this point, I start to skip, reading only the first sentence of each paragraph. ‘We may say of structure that it positions its elements. . . . ’ ‘The agent of action, whose definition here does not extend beyond this principle of reciprocal determination. . . . ’ ‘The machine, on the other hand remains essentially remote. . . . ’ ‘The history of technology is dated. . . . ’ ‘Yesterday’s machine, today’s and tomorrow’s, are not related in their structural determinations. . . . ’

I find this language incredibly alienating. In fact, the paragraph after the one I stopped at begins: ‘The individual’s relation to the machine has been described by sociologists following Friedmann as one of fundamental alienation.’ I will return to this essay some day and read it. I sense that it will have something interesting to say. But the effort is too great now. What strikes me now is the incredibly distancing effect of this language. It is totally abstract and impersonal. Though the author uses the first person (‘The distinction I am proposing,’ ‘I want therefore to make it clear’), it quickly became clear to me that he had no interest whatsoever in the personal, or in concrete situations as I understand them—a specific person, at a specific machine, somewhere in time and space, with something on his/her mind, real noises, smells, aches and pains. He has no interest in his own experience of machines, or in explaining why he is writing about them, what they mean to him personally. I take down the next book: Poetry and Repression by Harold Bloom. This book should contain some reference to the self, to the author’s self, to ourselves, to how people feel, to how the author feels, since its subject is psychological: repression. I open the book at page 1 and read: Jacques Derrida asks a central question in his essay on ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’: ‘What is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be repre-

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sented by a text?’ My narrow concern with poetry prompts the contrary question: ‘What is a psyche, and what must a text be if it can be represented by a psyche?’ Both Derrida’s question and my own require exploration of three terms: ‘psyche,’ ‘text,’ ‘represented.’

‘Psyche is ultimately from the Indo-European root.’ (p. 1)—and I stop reading. The subject of poetry and repression will involve the asking and answering of questions about ‘a text’—a generalized, non-particular object that has been the subject of endless discussion for the past twenty years—and about an equally disembodied ‘psyche’ in relation to the thing called ‘a text’—not, to my mind, or rather in view of my desires, a very promising relation in which to consider it. Answering these questions, moreover, will ‘require’ (on whose part, I wonder?) the ‘exploration’ of ‘three terms.’ Before we get to the things themselves—psyches, texts—we shall have to spend a lot of time looking at them as words. With the beginning of the next paragraph, we get down to the etymology of ‘psyche.’ With my agenda, I get off the bus here. But first I look through the book. Bloom is arguing against canonical readings (of some very canonical poems) and for readings that are not exactly personal, but in which the drama of a self is constantly being played out on a cosmic stage—lots of references to God, kingdom, Paradise, the fall, the eternal—a biblical stage on which, apparently, only men are players (God, Freud, Christ, Nietzsche, and the poets). It is a drama that, although I can see how gripping Bloom can make it, will pall for me because it isn’t my drama. Book number three, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, is more promising. Section One is entitled ‘We “other Victorians.”’ So Foucault is acknowledging his and our implication in the object of the study. This book will in some way be about ‘ourselves,’ which is what I want. It begins: For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality. (p. 3)

Who, exactly, are ‘we’? Foucault is using the convention in which the author establishes common ground with his reader by using the first person plural—a presumptuous, though usually successful, move. Presumptuous because it presumes that we are really like him, and successful because, especially when an author is famous, and even when he isn’t, ‘our’ instinct (I criticize the practice and engage in it too) is to want to cooperate, to be included in the circle and the author is drawing so cosily around ‘us.’ It is chummy, this ‘we.’ It feels good, for a little while, until it starts to feel coercive, until ‘we’ are subscribing to things that ‘I’ don’t believe. There is no specific reference to the author’s self, no attempt to specify himself. It continues: At the beginning of the seventeenth century . . .

I know now where we are going. We are going to history. ‘At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem.’ Generalizations about the past, though pleasantly qualified (‘a certain frankness,’

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‘it would seem’), are nevertheless disappointingly magisterial. Things continue in a generalizing vein—‘It was a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open transgressions.’ It’s not so much that I don’t believe him as that I am uncomfortable with the level or the mode of discourse. It is everything that, I thought, Foucault was trying to get away from, in The Archaeology of Knowledge. The primacy of the subject as the point of view from which history could be written, the bland assumption of authority, the taking over of time, of substance, of event, the imperialism of description from a unified perspective. Even though the subject matter interests me—sex, hypocrisy, whether or not our view of Victorianism and of ourselves in relation to it is correct—I am not eager to read on. The point of view is discouraging. It will march along giving orders, barking out commands. I’m not willing to go along for the march, not even on Foucault’s sayso (I am, or have been, an extravagant admirer of his). So I turn to ‘my’ books. To the women’s section of my shelves. I take down, unerringly, an anthology called The Powers of Desire edited by Christine Stansell, Ann Snitow, and Sharon Thompson. I turn, almost as unerringly, to an essay by Jessica Benjamin entitled ‘Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination,’ and begin to read: This essay is concerned with the violence of erotic domination. It is about the strange union of rationality and violence that is made in the secret heart of our culture and sometimes enacted in the body. This union has inspired some of the holiest imagery of religious transcendence and now comes to light at the porno newsstands, where women are regularly depicted in the bonds of love. But the slave of love is not always a woman, not always a heterosexual; the fantasy of erotic domination permeates all sexual imagery in our culture. (p. 281)

I am completely hooked, I am going to read this essay from beginning to end and proceed to do so. It gets better, much better, as it goes along. In fact, it gets so good, I find myself putting it down and straying from it because the subject is so close to home, and therefore so threatening, that I need relief from it, little breathers, before I can go on. I underline vigorously and often. Think of people I should give it to to read (my husband, this colleague, that colleague). But wait a minute. There is no personal reference here. The author deals, like Foucault, in generalities. In even bigger ones than his: hers aren’t limited to the seventeenth century or the Victorian era. She generalizes about religion, rationality, violence. Why am I not turned off by this as I was in Foucault’s case? Why don’t I reject this as a grand drama in the style of Bloom? Why don’t I bridle at the abstractions as I did when reading Guattari? Well? The answer is, I see the abstractions as concrete and the issues as personal. They are already personal for me without being personalized because they concern things I’ve been thinking about for some time, struggling with, trying to figure out for myself. I don’t need the author to identify her own involvement, I don’t need her to concretize, because these things are already personal and concrete for me. The erotic is already eroticized. Probably, when Guattari picks up an article whose first sentence has the words ‘machine,’ ‘structure,’ and ‘determination,’ he cathects it immediately. Great stuff. Juicy, terrific. The same would go for Bloom on encountering multiple

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references to Nietzsche, representation, God the father, and the Sublime. But isn’t erotic domination, as a subject, surer to arouse strong feeling than systems of machines or the psyche that can be represented as a text? Clearly, the answer depends on the readership. The people at the convenience store where I stop to get gas and buy milk would find all these passages equally baffling. Though they might have uneasy stirrings when they read Jessica Benjamin. ‘Erotic domination,’ especially when coupled with ‘porno newsstands,’ does call some feelings into play almost no matter who you are in this culture. But I will concede the point. What is personal is completely a function of what is perceived as personal. And what is perceived as personal by men, or rather, what is gripping, significant, ‘juicy,’ is different from what is felt to be that way by women. For what we are really talking about is not the personal as such, what we are talking about is what is important, answers one’s needs, strikes one as immediately interesting. For women, the personal is such a category. In literary criticism, we have moved from the New Criticism, which was antipersonal and declared the personal off-limits at every turn—the intentional fallacy, the affective fallacy—to structuralism, which does away with the self altogether—at least as something unique and important to consider—to deconstruction, which subsumes everything in language and makes the self non-selfconsistent, ungraspable, a floating signifier, and finally to new historicism which re-institutes the discourse of the object—‘In the seventeenth century’— with occasional side glances at how the author’s ‘situatedness’ affects his writing. The female subject par excellence, which is her self and her experiences, has once more been elided by literary criticism. The question is, why did this happen? One might have imagined a different outcome. The 1960s paved the way for a new personalism in literary discourse by opening literary discussion up to politics, to psychology, to the ‘reader,’ to the effects of style. What happened to deflect criticism into the impersonal labyrinths of ‘language,’ ‘discourse,’ ‘system,’ ‘network,’ and now, with Guattari, ‘machine’? I met Ellen Messer-Davidow last summer at the School of Criticism and Theory where she was the undoubted leader of the women who were there. She organized them, led them (I might as well say us, since, although I was on the faculty as a visiting lecturer, she led me, too). At the end of the summer we put on a symposium, a kind of teach-in on feminist criticism and theory, of which none was being offered that summer. I thought it really worked. Some people, eager to advertise their intellectual superiority, murmured disappointment at the ‘level’ of discussion (code for, ‘my mind is finer and more rigorous than yours’). One person who spoke out at the closing session said he felt bulldozed: a more honest and useful response. The point is that Ellen’s leadership affected the experience of everyone at the School that summer. What she offered was not an intellectual performance calculated to draw attention to the quality of her mind, but a sustained effort of practical courage that changed the situation we were in. I think that the kind of thing Ellen did should be included in our concept of criticism: analysis that is not an end in itself but pressure brought to bear on a situation. Now it’s time to talk about something that’s central to everything I’ve been saying so far, although it doesn’t show, as we used to say about the slips we used to

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wear. If I had to bet on it I would say that Ellen Messer-Davidow was motivated last summer, and probably in her essay, by anger (forgive me, Ellen, if I am wrong) anger at her, our, exclusion from what was being studied at the School, our exclusion from the discourse of ‘Western man.’ I interpret her behavior this way because anger is what fuels my engagement with feminist issues; an absolute fury that has never even been tapped, relatively speaking. It’s time to talk about this now, because it’s so central, at least for me. I hate men for the way they treat women, and pretending that women aren’t there is one of the ways I hate most. Last night I saw a movie called Gunfight at the OK Corral, starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. The movie is patently about the love-relationship between the characters these men play—Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. The women in the movie are merely pawns that serve in various ways to reflect the characters of the men, and to advance the story of their relationship to one another. There is a particularly humiliating part, played by Jo Van Fleet, the part of Doc Holliday’s mistress—Kate Fisher—whom he treats abominably (everybody in the movie acknowledges this, it’s not just me saying so). This woman is degraded over and over again. She is a whore, she is a drunkard, she is a clinging woman, she betrays the life of Wyatt Earp in order to get Doc Holliday back, she is no longer young (perhaps this is her chief sin). And her words are always in vain, they are chaff, less than nothing, another sign of her degradation. Now Doc Holliday is a similarly degraded character. He used to be a dentist and is now a gambler, who lives to get other people’s money away from them; he is a drunk, and he abuses the woman who loves him. But his weaknesses, in the perspective of the movie, are glamorous. He is irresistible, charming, seductive, handsome, witty, commanding; it’s no wonder Wyatt Earp falls for him, who wouldn’t? The degradation doesn’t stick to Kirk Douglas; it is all absorbed by his female counterpart, the ‘slut,’ Jo Van Fleet. We are embarrassed every time she appears on the screen, because every time, she is humiliated further. What enrages me is the way women are used as extensions of men, mirrors of men, devices for showing men off, devices for helping men get what they want. They are never there in their own right, or rarely. The world of the Western contains no women. Sometimes I think the world contains no women. Why am I so angry? My anger is partly the result of having been an only child who caved in to authority very early on. As a result I’ve built up a huge storehouse of hatred and resentment against people in authority over me (mostly male). Hatred and resentment and attraction. Why should poor men be made the object of this old pent-up anger? (Old anger is the best anger, the meanest, the truest, the most intense. Old anger is pure because it’s been dislocated from its source for so long, has had the chance to ferment, to feed on itself for so many years, so that it is nothing but anger. All cause, all relation to the outside world, long since sloughed off, withered away. The rage I feel inside me now is the distillation of forty-six years. It has had a long time to simmer, to harden, to become adamantine, a black slab that glows in the dark.) Are all feminists fueled by such rage? Is the molten lava of millennia of hatred boiling below the surface of every essay, every book, every syllabus, every newsletter, every little magazine? I imagine that I can open the front of my stomach

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like a door, reach in, and pluck from memory the rooted sorrow, pull it out, root and branch. But where, or rather, who, would I be then? I am attached to this rage. It is a source of identity for me. It is a motivator, an explainer, a justifier, a no-need-to-say-more greeter at the door. If I were to eradicate this anger somehow, what would I do? Volunteer work all day long? A therapist once suggested to me that I blamed on sexism a lot of stuff that really had to do with my own childhood. Her view was basically the one articulated in Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, in which the good child has been made to develop a false self by parents who cathect the child narcissistically. My therapist meant that if I worked out some of my problems—as she understood them, on a psychological level—my feminist rage would subside. Maybe it would, but that wouldn’t touch the issue of female oppression. Here is what Miller says about this: Political action can be fed by the unconscious anger of children who have been . . . misused, imprisoned, exploited, cramped, and drilled. . . . If, however, disillusionment and the resultant mourning can be lived through. . . . then social and political disengagement do not usually follow, but the patient’s actions are freed from the compulsion to repeat. (p. 101)

According to Miller’s theory, the critical voice inside me, the voice I noticed butting in, belittling, doubting, being wise, is ‘the contemptuous introject.’ The introjection of authorities who manipulated me, without necessarily meaning to. I think that if you can come to terms with your ‘contemptuous introjects,’ learn to forgive and understand them, your anger will go away. But if you’re not angry, can you still act? Will you still care enough to write the letters, make the phone calls, attend the meetings? You need to find another center within yourself from which to act. A center of outgoing, outflowing, giving feelings. Love instead of anger. I’m embarrassed to say words like this because I’ve been taught they are mushy and sentimental and smack of cheap popular psychology. I’ve been taught to look down on people who read M. Scott Peck and Leo Buscaglia and Harold Kushner, because they’re people who haven’t very much education, and because they’re mostly women. Or if not women, then people who take responsibility for learning how to deal with their feelings, who take responsibility for marriages that are going bad, for children who are in trouble, for friends who need help, for themselves. The disdain for popular psychology and for words like ‘love’ and ‘giving’ is part of the police action that academic intellectuals wage ceaselessly against feeling, against women, against what is personal. The ridiculing of the ‘touchy-feely,’ of the ‘Mickey Mouse,’ of the sentimental (often associated with teaching that takes students’ concerns into account), belongs to the tradition Alison Jaggar rightly characterized as founding knowledge in the denial of emotion. It is looking down on women, with whom feelings are associated, and on the activities with which women are identified: mother, nurse, teacher, social worker, volunteer. So for a while I can’t talk about epistemology. I can’t deal with the philosophical bases of feminist literary criticisms. I can’t strap myself psychically into an apparatus that will produce the right gestures when I begin to move. I have to deal with the trashing of emotion, and with my anger against it. This one time I’ve taken off the straitjacket, and it feels so good.

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NOTE Parts of this essay are reprinted from New Literary History 19 (Autumn 1987), by kind permission.

WORKS CITED Benjamin, Jessica 1983. ‘Master and Slave: the Fantasy of Erotic Domination,’ in The Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. New York: Monthly Review Press: 280–9. Bloom, Harold 1976. Poetry and Repression: Revision from Blake to Stevens. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel 1980. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Copyright 1978 by Random House, Inc. [Originally published in French as La Volonté de savoir. Paris: Éditions Gaillimard, 1976.] Griffin, Susan 1982. ‘The way of all ideology,’ in Made from the Earth: an Anthology of Writings. New York: Harper and Row: 161–82. Guattari, Félix 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed, intro. David Cooper. New York: Penguin Books. [First published as Psychanalyse et transversalité (1972), and La Révolution moléculaire (1977).] Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1960–1. The Scarlet Letter and Other Tales of the Puritans. Ed. with an intro. and notes by Harry Levin. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co. LeGuin, Ursula 1986. ‘The Mother Tongue,’ Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin (Summer): 3–4. Miller, Alice 1983. The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books.

LINDA S. KAUFFMAN

THE LONG GOODBYE against personal testimony, or an infant grifter grows up (1992)



















We lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. MARGARET ATWOOD, THE HANDMAID’S TALE

Since this is essay is written against the grain of individualism, novelistic discourse,1 and personal testimony, let’s dispense with the personal immediately: for 400 years, every male Kauffman was a Protestant minister and missionary. Racking his brain to invent the occupation that would be most rebellious and least remunerative, my father became a Bible salesman. I was his sidekick: together we sold Bibles and religious paraphernalia to servicemen in bus stations up and down the Southern California coast, pitching piety and scoring sales, though privately we scorned the suckers. My job: to “look innocent.” I was five. (One item I remember vividly: a trippy 3-D color picture of Jesus that lit up when you plugged it in; to my infant eyes, Jesus looked like a psychedelic cartoon, “turned on” in both senses of the word.) Since he had the IQ of a genius, my father disdained bosses and nine-to-five routines: instead, he worked successively in various kinds of sales, and as our fortunes declined, as a milkman, cab driver, and grifter. My most vivid childhood memories: the glittering marquees on the strip in Vegas, especially the huge cowboy tipping his hat at the Golden Nugget, who reminded me of Howdy Doody, and the Silver Slipper, which reminded me of Cinderella. Another sublime memory is the Long Beach Pike, a pretty seedy scene in those days; my antics amused the carneys while Dad conned the sailors, all of us grifting according to our gifts. From the age of eleven, I worked nights in his janitor business, cleaning banks, offices, and the model homes spreading over Orange County, California, in the 1960s like mould on cheese. Although legitimate, this job was the most humiliating: how dare the morons traipsing through these houses look at me with pity, while I cleaned around them? While polishing the tellers’ windows in banks, I cultivated murderous fantasies, malevolently sizing up the huge fortress-like safes and thinking, “Let’s blow this sucker up, Dad!” Once he began to drink and

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gamble in earnest, we successively lost the furniture, the car, finally the only house we’d ever own. My mother and I waitressed for $1.25 per hour each to raise my college money, and ate at the restaurant, since the only staple in steady supply at home was vodka. Once the newspapers and telephone were cut off, we lived in virtual seclusion. Long before Reagan invented the rhetoric of a “safety net” for the “truly needy,” we had fallen right through. Depending on my mood, my past strikes me as having all the makings of an Arthur Miller tragedy or Beckettian comedy. I developed a chameleon-like ability to move up and down the socioeconomic ladder, for I was raised to imitate the gentility of my reverend ancestors, despite our chronic lack of cash. In the 1950s, I remember literally being homeless (I was so young, I thought we were “camping”); but eventually we managed to “pass” in the middle class, living largely on credit. No wonder my doctoral dissertation was on Dickens and Faulkner: my family alternately resembled the Micawbers and the Pockets, the Compsons and the Snopeses. As the last sentence indicates, I clearly believe that our intellectual work as feminists is directly related to our personal histories; that our subjective experiences influence our politics, that our psychic traumas affect our teaching and writing. So what’s my beef? First, I dislike the “our” in the previous paragraph; among many other assumptions it takes for granted, the one that is probably most accurate is therefore most troubling: “we” all do the same kind of labor, i.e., feminist work in higher education in America. Are “we” feminist scholars solipsistically talking only to ourselves? Second, it’s too easy to validate my credentials. My checkered past is too easy to transform into a Nixonian Checkers speech of bathos. By insisting on the authority of my personal experience, I effectively muzzle dissent and muffle your investigation into my motives. “I’ve suffered more than you” is a false (albeit fashionable) piety, as if we needed to (or could) distance ourselves from bourgeois banalities. It elicits a phony competition to prove that “I was poorer than you.” (My mother used to joke, “I was so poor, I didn’t have a mother.”) Third, the facts of “my life and hard times” rearrange themselves generically into one of several novelistic lines, including, but not limited to, the following: • The nobility of suffering. That’s the first lie: suffering never ennobles, it only humiliates, and—if you’re lucky—enrages. • Ms. Horatio Alger: anybody in America can rise to the top with hard work, and fulfill the American dream. That lie disguises the randomness of existence: it is only by chance that I am not a welfare mother, a stripper, or a waitress. In this light, the fact that I am white and was at least able to forage in the middle class considerably outweighs the fact that I am female. The lie’s corollary: I raised myself by my bootstraps; so better had you—what we might currently call “the Clarence Thomas syndrome.” • Revolutionary impulses led me to the university. In fact, I sought the university precisely because I saw it as a haven from the chaos and craziness of “real life”; far from scorning “the ivory tower,” I was, I

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smugly thought, fleeing into one. Unfortunately, carrying on the Kauffman trait of exquisite bad timing, shortly after I arrived at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1967, police and National Guard patrols put the university under siege: classes were suspended, curfews imposed, students were beaten and arrested. As the Bank of America burned down, the National Guard murdered a student who was trying to protect the bank’s precious property. Kevin Moran perished, but the bank rose from the ashes with a new fortress-like design within weeks. • The anti-war movement radicalized me. I have no nostalgia for those years (1967–1971). They were as close as I ever want to come to total chaos: one couldn’t depend either upon the students, the police, or the National Guard for rationality, much less protection. Incredibly, scarcely 20 years ago some Americans found it normal to be murdering students on campuses, from Kent State to Jackson State, from Augusta to Santa Barbara. Not only did I learn how quickly a police state can become the norm, but I discovered how many Americans would avidly support one. • Out of the impassioned radical evolved an impassioned feminist. I owe to my mother whatever semblance of normality my childhood had; I owe my feminism to her fierce insistence that I escape the traps that thwarted her, and to the model my older sister provided of an escape route: studying English literature. At the time, that solution did not seem nearly so quixotic as it does in retrospect: in 1972 we naively believed that the university was the most egalitarian of institutions, the one most receptive to social change and justice. Instead, it turned out to be among the most reactionary and entrenched. In contrast to law school and medical school, which at least rely on quantitative measurements in evaluation, English departments in those days relied on the vaguely F. R. Leavisite criteria of qualitative response to “felt life.” Leavisite standards still dominated English departments in the 1960s and 1970s, and—make no mistake—they still dominate in the evaluations of many full professors to this day. My sister, Kay Austen, is now an ex-English professor. While tenured at the University of Hawaii, she fell ill. The University seized the opportunity and terminated her in retaliation for her affirmative action work. For the past ten years she has battled paralyzing illness while waging a sex discrimination case of Bleak House proportions against the University. Court testimony revealed that University officials conspired to deny her health care when her condition was “gravely life-endangering.” Testimony also revealed that they considered putting her under surveillance when she was living 6,000 miles away. Whether she ever finally “wins” this case or not, the University remains the victor—precisely by forcing each individual victim of discrimination to go through the long, arduous process over and over again.2 I want feminist scholarship to reach an audience that transcends the academy, but that doesn’t prevent me from mourning the decimation (I use that word literally) of a generation of feminist scholars who have been exiled from academic life by sexual harassment, retaliation, and discrimination in the past twenty-five years.

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Is it even possible to write against the grain of individualism? When you read my opening gambit, didn’t it make you (whether you know me personally or not) want to know more? That is precisely my point: there is something fatally alluring about personal testimony. Even theoretical texts can be co-opted by critics who insist on interpreting in the same old way. It happens to feminists, materialists, post-structuralists alike. One reason I devoted the past decade to writing about love and epistolary fiction was to see whether it was possible to wrest signification away from representation by demonstrating that even love—the emotion that’s supposed to be the most private, the most authentic, the most inviolate—is artifice, a construct. The French have known this for a long time: “Some people would never have been in love, had they never heard love talked about,” said La Rochefoucauld. Consider Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux: Barthes’s aim was to emphasize the fragmentary and discursive aspects of the text, rather than to create the lover-as-hero, because: If you put the lover in a love story, you reconcile him with society because telling stories is a coded activity. Society tames the lover through the love story. I took Draconian measures so the book would not be a love story, so the lover would be left in his nakedness, a being inaccessible to the usual forms of social recuperation, the novel in particular. (Barthes, 1985: 302–03)

But (here’s the grifter’s voice again): Americans are hooked on authenticity and sincerity. Ironically, in the English translation, Barthes’s “Draconian measures” are co-opted from the title forward: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments makes the lover, not discourse, primary; it reduces his analysis to psychology, when his aims were figural and structural. It suggests that we are reading the real sentiments of a lover named Roland Barthes, as if he were merely a lovelorn columnist, some French version of Ann Landers or Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Imagine substituting the word feminist for lover in the passage above: you reconcile the feminist to society because telling stories is a coded activity, as I tried to demonstrate by highlighting the implied narrative lines in my own history. Society tames the feminist through the story in particular, the allure of personal testimony in general. Are feminists succeeding in finding ways to make their work inaccessible to the usual forms of social “recuperation”—a word that in French simultaneously connotes co-option? Lest you accuse me of setting up a minor strain in feminist criticism as a “straw woman,” I am arguing that such recuperation infects not just feminist criticism, but reader-response criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, materialist criticism, and even post-structuralism. Let me take another improbable example: at a conference, when Jacques Derrida hears the rumor that he is in analysis, he asks, Who am I and what have I done so that this might be the truth of their desire? . . . This must signify something not negligible in the air of their times and the state of their relation to what they read, write, do, say, live, etc. (Derrida, 1980: 203)

I have purposely seized upon Barthes and Derrida because post-structuralist strategies are supposed to preclude the kinds of responses I am describing. Even if “we” (and here my presumption is glaring) are post-structuralist, postmodernist,

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anti-humanist feminists, “we” are avid consumers of true confessions, suckers for sentimentality. (As you’ll see below, I am not in the least exempt from these lapses myself.) How can I as a feminist describe and account for “the air of [our] times and the state of [our] relation to what we read, write, do, say, live, etc.” more precisely? A few symptomatic reflections follow. One can obviously use the personal voice without forgetting history, society, politics. More difficult to resist is the temptation to view the personal as inherently paradigmatic, the individual life story as coherent, unified, orally inspiring. It makes us see similarity where in fact there are only differences—irresolvable, irreconcilable differences at that. Invocations to personal experience are appealing because they imply that one can surmount injustice and triumph over adversity. In fact, most disappointments last a lifetime, and many injuries are irremediable. The older I get, the less I’m able to construct a moral even to my own story that doesn’t lie with every word. As Laurie Anderson says about New Yorkers, “There are ten million stories in New York City, and no one knows which is theirs.” The air of our times and the state of our relation to what we read, write, do, say, live, involves our saturation in images and in the cult of personality, which reduce protests, movements, ideas to People magazine or “Entertainment Tonight” sound bites; one projects an image to be tagged, marketed, commodified. (Look what happened to Jesus!) In the eighteenth century the quintessential medium was the essay; today it is the celebrity interview. We live in a society that no longer nourishes itself with beliefs but with images; the image always has the last word (Debord, 1970; Barthes, 1985). Have feminists defused the power of the image? Hardly. Can they do so? Probably not. But many have been engaged for the past decade in deconstructing the images in advertising, cinema, literature, and popular culture through which femininity is constructed. Other feminists, however, reduce “Theory” to a passing fad, philosophy to a season’s fashion. Right now, I’m haunted by one particularly audacious image, publicizing a new magazine called Allure. It features a Chinese woman in Maoist dress in a grainy black and white photograph. One spot of vivid color relieves her (primitive, totalitarian) drabness: her lips are a vivid red. The copy reads: Why 6,000,000 women who used to carry a little red book now carry a little red lipstick. Beauty makes a statement. And when nail polish becomes political, and fashion becomes philosophy, Allure magazine will be there. With reporting about fragrance and fitness, cosmetics and culture, travel and trends. Allure: the revolutionary beauty.

How are we going to confront the fact that feminism has become another product, and that we are implicated in its commodification? That’s one thing I hoped Feminisms and Institutions would do: front the facts of complicity with social institutions, examine the complexities of shifting allegiances and conflicting commitments by engaging men and women in dialogue (Kauffman, 1989b). Complicity is not a pleasant topic. One of the sobering discoveries I’ve made as a feminist is that institutions shape us more than we shape them. No one in 1972 could have predicted that feminism would make such remarkable inroads in our educational, legal, civil institutions. Nor did anyone dream that the Equal Rights Amendment would fail, that the nation would so passionately embrace neo-conservatism, that the world would be gripped again by the fervor of fundamentalism. Despite our

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desire to believe in the myth of (Enlightenment) progress, such are the facts. One of the profound paradoxes confronting feminists in the 1990s is that, despite the massive transformations feminism has wrought, we are facing increasingly intransigent conservative powers that will remain in force far into the next century. (If he lasts as long as Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Thomas will be on the bench until 2031.) I wanted to see if it was possible to protest against feminism’s commodification and to attack the premises of bourgeois individualism—the cornerstone supporting the American mythology of the individual as a unique, coherent, unified self. One of the ways that feminism obviously cooperates in promoting that ideology is through literature. The case of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is illustrative. The novel, published in 1962, is usually heralded as one of the first manifestos of the modern women’s liberation movement. Anna Wulf is represented as suffering a schizophrenic “breakdown” at the hands of sexist society; since her “illness” results in a paralysis of the will and a writing block, evidence of her “cure” is that the novel commences with her novella “Free Women.” Fiction is thus reduced to a tragic representation of life: “life” is reduced to a tale of individual malaise. The implicit message is that you cannot change society, only yourself. Such interpretations perpetuate narcissism and personal passivity instead of inspiring political action and social change (Ohmann, 1983; Newton and Rosenfelt, 1985). In fact, the novel is a sustained critique of subjectivity and of the individual’s obsession with the personal. Ella (one of Anna Wulf’s multiple “selves”) reflects, “How boring these emotions are that we’re caught in and can’t get free of, no matter how much we want to” (Lessing, 1962: 318).3 Far from focusing on the individual, the novel disassembles the history of the twentieth century, ranging from Stalinist Russia to Algeria, Korea, China, Africa, America, and Indochina. Lessing insists that what we call the psyche is influenced as much by social, political, and economic traumas as by the personal. Here’s an antidote to individualism from Lessing herself: When The Golden Notebook came out, I was astonished that people got so emotional about that book, one way or another. They didn’t bother to see, even to look at, how it was shaped. . . . What I’m trying to say is that it was a detached book. It was a failure, of course, for if it had been a success, then people wouldn’t get so damned emotional when I didn’t want them to be. (Howe, 1967: 311–13)

Lessing’s only failure, in my view, was to underestimate readers’ and reviewers’ capacity to fold all attempts to go beyond what is now known as “the representational fallacy” back into the criteria of bourgeois realism—the view of literature as a reflection of individual experience. Elaine Showalter, for example, insists that Lessing “will have to face the limits of her own fiction very soon if civilization survives. . . . Either she will have to revise her apocalyptical prophecies (like other millenarians), or confront, once again, the struggling individual” (Showalter, 1976: 313). But in Lessing’s view, it is precisely the ideology Showalter endorses that may lead to apocalypse, for the individual cannot be confronted in isolation, separated from a complex matrix of international politics, environmental issues, multinational economics, and global military conflict. Margaret Atwood chillingly depicts the consequences of that ideology in The Handmaid’s Tale: apocalypse is

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inevitable if we continue to be sunk in subjectivity. Atwood almost seems to take Showalter’s ideas to their absurd but logical conclusion; the novel is a sustained parody of the theory of gynocriticism: “You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant” (Atwood, 1986: 127). In many ways, the same prophecies Lessing made in 1962 are reaccentuated and defamiliarized by Atwood 24 years later: organizing military coups, destabilizing governments, resettling “undesirables” and repressing civil liberties have all come to seem “normal.” When The Handmaid’s Tale appeared in 1986, few of us were aware of the extent to which her dystopia was already a reality in some parts of the world: Nicolae Ceausescu forced women to bear up to five children to increase the nation’s power, and women were subjected to forced gynecological examinations every three months to make sure they hadn’t had abortions. The enormity of these crimes has only come to the world’s attention since the Romanian revolution in 1989, although Atwood explicitly describes these horrors in the novel’s historical note: Rumania . . . had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy tests on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility. (Atwood, 1985: 305)

Lessing and Atwood wonder what drives people collectively to embrace their own repression. What vicissitudes of psychic life account for the appeal of fascism? Experimental novelists have been trying to lead us away from the ideology of individualism and toward avant-garde conceptualizations for the past 75 years, but academic critics have frequently recuperated and reprocessed them like American cheese—bland, but familiar. As a feminist literary critic I want texts to challenge the boundaries of realism, of genre, of narrative, not to subordinate the (anti-representational anti-bourgeois, anti-narrative) other into the same—the same old story. In the past decade, many feminists have either challenged or surmounted the dichotomy described above between Anglo-American New Criticism and French post-structuralism. Many more (myself included) have practically re-tooled in order to incorporate materialist analyses. Didn’t we say goodbye to personal testimony, with its valorization of the power and autonomy of individual psyche, a long time ago? As Teresa de Lauretis observed in 1984, What we call “Experience” should instead be defined as a process shaped co-equally by the relation of the inside and the outside: Experience has a mobile relation to the reality it encounters, the subjectivity it assumes, and the discursive practices within which it unfolds. Subjectivity is constructed from experience, but what one comprehends as subjective are in fact material, economic, and interpersonal social and historical relations. (de Lauretis, 1984: 150)

In fact, however, the appeal to the personal and the concomitant repudiation of “theory” seems to be making a pretty snappy comeback, presaged in 1983 by Elaine Showalter’s “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year,” which warns feminists of the “seductions” of “male Theory” in general and post-structuralism in particular (Showalter, 1983). The notion that feminists

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are being “seduced” by so-called “male Theory” has persisted throughout the decade. Barbara Christian reinforces Showalter’s view that “Theory” is a passing fashion when she argues that literature has been taken over by Western philosophers who are intimidating people of color, feminists, radical critics, and creative writers with a language “which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene” (Christian, 1989: 229).4 In my view, the languages of critical theory are difficult because of their foundations in disciplines that were long isolated from literary studies. That the New Critics actively sought such isolation for ideological purposes has been well documented.5 But the sentiment is nonetheless representative of a current strain (in both senses of the word) in feminism. Seduced by “male Theory,” we have lost touch, so the argument goes, with the revolutionary fervor of the first wave of feminism, and only by once again focusing on our own consciousness can we recapture the spirit of an earlier age. But isn’t it at least possible that rather than blaming (“male”) Theory, we must confront a totally transformed economic and historical moment? The only sure thing about all idyllic epochs, as Raymond Williams once observed, is that they are always gone. Let’s face it: that’s true of feminist idylls too. Perhaps we should recall some of our mistakes in the idyllic old days, like Patricia Spacks’s disclaimer that she did not discuss the work of black women in The Female Imagination because she was “reluctant and unable to construct theories about the experience [she hasn’t] had” (Spacks, 1975: 5). Remember the searing question Alice Walker asked? “Spacks never lived in the 19th century Yorkshire, so why theorize about the Brontës?” (Walker, 1983: 372). Walker attacked the theoretical weakness and unexamined assumptions of bourgeois individualism in (white) feminist literary criticism. (Below, I discuss some mistakes in my own earlier scholarship.) In “Me and My Shadow,” Jane Tompkins similarly warns that theory is “one of the patriarchal gestures women and men ought to avoid.” She argues that “the female subject par excellence, which is her self and her experiences, has once more been elided by literary criticism” (Tompkins, 1989: 122).6 To Tompkins, feminism’s function is to facilitate self-discovery about one’s victimage at the hands of patriarchy, to idealize woman’s superior moral sense, her “Sentimental Power” (Tompkins, 1985).7 The cumulative effect of this approach is to discourage investigation of any complicating factors that may weaken the stance of victimization or moral superiority. It avoids the complicated question of collusion and complicity either in one’s own oppression, or with institutions. The underlying premise is that writing reflects a world already bathed in the emotional light that the solitary woman projects. This strain of feminism thus resurrects the mirror and the lamp of Romanticism, the movement most closely aligned with the expressive theory of art. The criteria of value are sincerity and authenticity, which inevitably lock us back into the very dichotomies (male intellect versus female institution; head versus body, etc.) that so many other feminists have spent so much time trying to dismantle. Ironically, the argument that women can only write about themselves has been the cornerstone of sexist criticism of women writers since Sappho (Kauffman, 1986). This hyperbolically sexualized rhetoric nonetheless persists, refiguring the feminist as Clarissa, virtuous victim who must vigilantly ward

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off the masculine seductions of loveless, disembodied “Theory.” Nancy Miller confesses, “Barthes has seduced me”; she also refers to “the appeal of a headier (sexier . . . ) destabilization from deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and neo-Marxist perspectives. . . . The chapters of this book all testify to my awareness of their seductions” (Miller, 1988: 3, 17).8 If we keep perpetuating this tired rhetoric, feminist criticism will—like Clarissa—end up starving itself to death. What “male Theory” is hurting most, such critics agree, is women’s feelings. Says Tompkins: “I’m tired of the conventions that keep discussions of epistemology . . . segregated from meditations on what is happening . . . inside my heart . . . I have to deal with the trashing of emotion, and with my anger against it” (Tompkins, 1989: 122–23, 138). Christian’s words are almost identical: she yearns for the integration “between feeling/knowledge, rather than the split between the abstract and the emotional” (Christian, 1989: 229). This integration, she argues, would allow the black woman to “pursue herself as subject” (Christian, 1989: 235). Such protests belie a nostalgia for a clear, transparent language that never did exist. Self-division does not result from some plot by theorists to persecute writers. Instead, the vicissitudes of psychic life are far more complex, as is language’s mastery over us, with all its internal tensions and contradictions. The yearnings for integration and unity fly in the face of the discoveries in linguistics, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism about the construction of the subject—namely that (like Anna Wulf), we are always beside ourselves in multiple senses. Striving for integration through self-expression can only be viewed as a quixotic enterprise when one considers the structure of the unconscious. The political efficacy of such self-regard (in both senses of the word) is also questionable. Moreover, what is happening “inside our hearts” is subject to convention as much as discussions of epistemology are, as my discussion of love made clear earlier. The ideology informing such yearnings for integration is seldom made explicit, nor is it clear how such integration could advance the collective cause of social justice for women, African-Americans, or African-American women. To return to my discomfort with the use of the collective “we”: how can “we” overcome the tendency to be hermetically sealed, like Clarissa in her coffin, in academic obsessions? The last thing I want is for feminism to embalm itself by becoming the new orthodoxy. On the one hand, we maintain that the university is a microcosm of society; that the work we do in academia is political work. I think that is true. Nevertheless, social injustice and racial inequality cannot be conflated with a contest of faculties—a distinction Tompkins, Christian, and Miller all blithely ignore. Tompkins confesses that she once told a panel at the Modern Language Association Convention to “‘get theory’ because I thought that doing theory would admit us to the big leagues” (Tompkins, 1989: 122). Nancy Miller’s concept of politics is bounded in a nutshell: the seminar table and fellowship panel: she broods over “problems between ‘us’ and ‘them’ [which] loomed large in institutional terms—tenure, promotions, journals, fellowships, etc.” We can’t do political work within the university unless we constantly remind ourselves that it is a sphere of relative privilege and entitlement—a reminder that makes it difficult to sympathize with Miller’s unabashed confession that “To the extent that I was vividly untenured, I of course worried at all times about everyone” (Miller, 1988: 13). Beyond the politics of the profession—ranging from Christian’s indictment of those whom she perceives as controlling the “critical scene” to

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MLA panels and academic “big leagues”—lies a vaster political arena and a harsher national mood. The allure of personal testimony makes it easy to conflate the feminist with the academic perspective. Like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, all one sees is in miniature. Radical work goes on in universities, but only if one turns the telescope around. One of the advantages of the theoretical project of dismantling traditional disciplines and of undoing the traditional divisions—the disciplining of academics—is that the interrelations between culture and society, power and ideology can no longer masquerade as innocent or invisible. Whereas Christian protests that “there has been a takeover in the literary world of Western philosophers from the old literary elite, the neutral humanists” (Christian, 1989: 225), she does not seem aware that “neutral humanists” is a non sequitur, if not an oxymoron. Christian is dedicated to offering new readings to promote a black female literary tradition, but new readings alone will not insure the preservation of that tradition. Ironically, Marxists, feminist theorists, African-American scholars, and students of popular culture have all contributed to exposing what is at stake in the production of literary texts and movements. One of the most exhilarating facets of reconceptualizing academic study today is the opportunity to help students comprehend this process and to demystify its operation. Continually exposing and undermining the construction of knowledge is vital to every project of redefining feminism. That project is perpetual—and perpetually threatened by co-option and commodification. One strain of feminism that has been commodified most successfully is the therapeutic model. Tompkins chides those who see pop psychologists like M. Scott Peck and Leo Buscaglia as “mushy” and “sentimental” (Tompkins, 1989: 138), but she fails to see how by endorsing them she uncritically perpetuates individualism. What cannot be ignored is how such books promote that ideology: the individual—removed from history, economics, and even from the unconscious— is depicted as someone who always has choices, and whose choices are always “free.” Adversity is merely the product of a “bad attitude, negative thinking, or low self-esteem.” To be a subject (to recognize oneself as a free and unique being) is itself an effect of subjection to ideology. In this light, it is clearly a delusion that by throwing off the straitjacket of formal expository prose, anyone will be revealing her “true,” unique self. Writing about yourself does not liberate you, it just shows how ingrained the ideology of freedom through self-expression is in our thinking. It’s worth mentioning the other best-sellers that have proliferated recently, disseminating similar messages: Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Love Them; The Dance-Away Lover; The Peter Pan Principle; Smart Women, Foolish Choices; Men Who Can’t Love; and Women Who Love Too Much. One cannot ignore the ways in which these books exploit feminism as a commodity, complete with sophisticated and expensive marketing research campaigns to target consumers. Indeed, the audience for such books seems to be insatiable. Not only are these books targeted for an exclusively female audience, but they are relentless in their insistence on “normality”—not to mention heterosexuality. In the guise of teaching women how to deal with their feelings, these books feed on the media hype about the socalled man-shortage. They assiduously avoid analysis of historical and socioeconomic factors, reproducing instead the tired stereotypes of Woman as Victim, as

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masochist, as “Love Junkie” who needs to be “cured” of her “addiction” to love through a strict regimen of group therapy and confession. Femininity as disease: where have we heard that before? These are the books that are seriously engaged in reproducing femininity for mass-market consumption. What is not negligible in “the air of our times and the state of our relation to what we read, write, do, say, live, etc.” is how resilient individualism is, and how relentlessly it co-opts feminism. While we are being exhorted to focus on our feelings, a lot of people are falling through the cracks in our society. It is no accident that the hysterical hyperbole about “family values” reached its apex just as the actual kinship system began to recede (Mitchell, 1975: 227–31). The same anomaly applied to individualism: the hyperbole about the individual masks an alarming erosion of civil liberties in the United States. The bathtub has been gradually heating for some time now: • September 1989: The U.S. Court of Appeals overturns a lower court order to shut down the “High Security Unit” (HSU) at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lexington, Kentucky. Designed specifically to control women convicted of politically motivated crimes, the HSU has been denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union as a “living tomb”; by Amnesty International as “deliberately and gratuitously oppressive”; and by the Soviet Union as a U.S. human rights violation. Gilda Zwerman’s extensive research on women in American prisons reveals that this High Security Unit utilizes and manipulates the “terrorist” label in order to justify the “special” treatment of political prisoners [and represents] an expansion in the use of incapacitation, surveillance, and deterrence as mechanisms for social control and repression to a degree heretofore unprecedented in the U.S. correctional system.9

Along with Alejandrina Torres, a Puerto Rican nationalist, Susan Rosenberg was HSU’s first inmate, and remained there for nearly two years. Convicted of carrying weapons and explosives for a radical group, Rosenberg is serving 58 years for a crime that—had she “merely” been a terrorist at an abortion clinic—would have garnered her a suspended sentence. • October 7, 1989: The Senate passes a House-approved amendment, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms, preventing federal funding of “obscene” art and requiring all recipients of National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities grants to sign an affidavit certifying that the monies will not be used to produce works that contain “depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitations of children or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific merit.” Reminiscent of the loyalty oaths of the 1950s, the three categories are presented as if they were synonymous “perversions”; who will define “serious merit” remains unspecified. The cumulative effect is to force artists to steer clear of what they think the public might find indecent, which is a far broader category than obscenity.10 Playwright Arthur Miller observes that self-censorship is already so widespread that it has allowed freedom to be “killed without a trace.”11

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• February 6, 1990: A bill introduced in the Washington State legislature, sponsored by Republican Jim West, would make it a crime for people under the age of 18 to engage in sex, including “heavy petting.” The fine: 90 days in jail and five thousand dollars, unless they decide to marry. • April 21, 1990: The Reverend Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association target photographer David Wojnarowicz’s work by taking two homosexual images out of context from a larger collage and mailing the enlarged images to every member of Congress, as well as 178,000 pastors on the American Family Association’s mailing list. Wojnarowicz, now dead from AIDS, filed suit and won a Pyrrhic legal victory.12 • September 1990–January 1991: 11 out of 15 fund-raising letters from three leading Religious Right groups targeted homosexuality as the most dangerous menace in America today.13 I am not implying that these incidents are unproblematic. They are not equivalent to one another. They may not even be among the worst examples of the current state of affairs. I’ve purposely included injustices that might not normally be regarded as specifically feminist concerns, because it is precisely the interconnection of feminist issues with other injustices that urgently needs our attention in the 1990s. My examples are symptoms of other dilemmas facing the nation: how far are we willing to go in suspending the Constitution to combat drug trafficking, pornography, health epidemics, crime? Wherever we turn, the most vulnerable institutions and individuals are under attack: not just the arts and humanities, but women, children, immigrants, the aged, the poor, the infirm. The aim is to widen the net of surveillance, to create language and action that transforms police campaigns into a “‘war’ on ____” fill in the blank). We no longer question either the desirability or the necessity of surveillance and punishment. What does it say about our society that we can only conceive of social problems and solutions in terms of crime and disease? When the infrastructure of our cities is collapsing, when millions are hungry and homeless, when our financial institutions are imploding, how do we still find the means to siphon off enormous resources to fund preposterous pornography commissions, to put rap singers on trial, to demand urine samples from employees, to persecute those with AIDS? The Right has replaced the specter of communism with enemies from within—within the body politic and the body: leftists and feminists within the university, microbiological bogeys, viruses in the immune system, in computers, in the womb (Haraway, 1989; Petchesky, 1987; Treichler, 1988). Under the banner of “normative health,” repression is proliferating at a prodigious pace. I’m conscious of the paradox involved in engaging in a critique of individualism on the one hand and arguing for the preservation of civil rights on the other hand. The mythology of individual freedom and choice is inflated in direct proportion to the erosion of civil liberties, which are undergoing the most massive assault since the McCarthy era. That assault is intricately interwoven with an assault on the poor, the disenfranchised, the intellectually, politically, and sexually suspect. The Right has turned the rhetoric of equality against its citizens: “equal rights for unborn women” and “crime victims’ rights,” like the “pro-life” anti-abortion

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campaign, cunningly disguise the repression which is actually being promoted. To offer one more example: the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose wisdom and good judgment is so fresh in our minds since the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill travesty, will soon vote on a “pornography victims’ compensation act,” which would allow the so-called “victims” of pornography to sue producers and distributors of films, books, etc. The Accused is one type of film that could be removed from shelves, since it depicts a gang-rape.14 For the first time in history, the logic of civil rights is turned away from its traditional support of expression: censorship would mean a furthering of civil rights (Downs, 1989: 60). Feminists can protest against these repressions without necessarily endorsing the ideology of individualism. We can agree that the individual is the product of power, and still recognize that, today in America, that power is becoming increasingly concentrated among fundamentalists and conservatives, whether one turns to education, politics, religion, media, advertising, economics, or the law. What can I as a feminist literary critic do? I can address the misapprehensions of representation: What has led us to view symbols and representations as dangerous menaces, the dissemination of which must be controlled? I can use my own personal history to critique the underlying assumptions about person and story, as I have tried to do here. Moreover, I’m the perfect candidate to critique “women’s ways of knowing” and “sentimental power” because my first book, Discourses of Desire, was at some points an implicit endorsement. In one passage, I remark: I have tried to expose the devaluation of the sentimental as another form of repression, with ramifications as serious at the end of the twentieth century as sexual repression was at the end of the nineteenth. (Kauffman, 1986: 316)

I now see that such an approach to sentimentality has led in directions I couldn’t have predicted—although I now think I should have been able to predict them. Feminism’s greatest strength has always been its capacity for self-critique, and it would be a great pity to see that capacity muted by the insistence on consensus. Feminist criticism has confronted numerous dilemmas in the past decade: how to engage in post-structuralist theory without losing sight of the material body? What does it mean to be constituted as a subject in and of language? Which texts (and which ideologies) survive and why? I think we still have the most to learn from the ruptures, limitations, and contradictions in our thinking. In Special Delivery, I propose and enact a conscious strategy of what I call “infidelity”: one can show how one’s own arguments may subsequently become inadequate; one can even confess how one’s desires may be in conflict with the theoretical stances one endorses. One can highlight rather than blithely eliding the paradoxes that are irreconcilable, the consequences that are irremediable. As Special Delivery went to press, I discovered a similar argument in Sandra Harding’s Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? In a chapter entitled “Reinventing Ourselves as Other,” she exhorts us to provide “traitorous” identities and social locations, and to engage in traitorous readings of the assumptions we make in and about texts (Harding, 1991: 288–95). Such assumptions include racist, regional, heterosexist, and sexist assumptions. I would add that sexism infects both genders; as a discursive construct, can’t we finally put to rest that bête noire, “the white male”? As a feminist, I have not everything to do, but something. Even while endors-

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ing post-structuralist strategies, I cannot wait for the revolution that has no model to come before I act. (But I can continue to deconstruct the terms in which the arguments are framed, and the assumed ideology underlying them.) Rather than contributing to the successful working of the machinery of society, I want my work to be a counterfriction to the machine. Despite the fact that my family were the black sheep of generations of Protestants, I wholeheartedly endorse the word’s etymology in protest. We are living in a politically exhausted culture, and still responding to it with exhausted genres. Personal testimony can sometimes be eloquent, but it is not an infinitely inexhaustible genre. Too often it reinforces the blind belief that we are all intrinsically interesting, unique, that we deserve to be happy. My happiness, frankly, is not very important in the grand scheme of things. I never thought feminism was about happiness. I thought it was about justice. The times demand a frontal attack on the complex political alliances—civil, legal, economic, educational, religious—that are acting in conspiracy, explicitly and implicitly, to boil us alive. Atwood is right; it takes effort to ignore, and a united front ill serves feminism at this particular historical moment. While some warn against betraying “mothers,” or trashing the “sisterhood,” this merely reveals the relentless rhetoric of familialism (another staple of bourgeois ideology) in yet another guise. Meanwhile, far more serious betrayals are unfolding before our eyes. When I began this essay, the Helms debate was just heating up; it already seems long ago and far away. In fact, as you read them, didn’t the dates I mentioned seem antiquated? Have they already ceased to alarm us? Now, in September 1991, it is abundantly apparent just how cheap and easy personal testimony is: Clarence Thomas is relying on the same maudlin strategy to silence dissent at the confirmation hearings for his appointment to the Supreme Court. Deflecting every political challenge, every question of intentionality, and every issue of constitutional interpretation, he invokes the supreme authority of personal experience: nobody knows the troubles he’s seen because he’s from Pinpoint, Georgia, son of a sharecropper. His invocation to personal authority disguises his opportunism, his indebtedness to the civil rights movement he now repudiates, his cynicism. Today’s grifters aren’t in Vegas; they are testifying in a circus-like atsmosphere15 on Capitol Hill. Feminism is far more than the effort to “express” “women’s personal experience,” and its “territory” extends far beyond the bonds of family, beyond the lecture hall, beyond academia. Growing up among grifters, I learned early how illusions are fabricated, how false piety smells. That doesn’t mean I have no illusions, no hopes, dreams, etc. It does mean that I want continually to cast doubt on the status of knowledge—even as we are in the process of constructing it—a perpetual project. By resisting the flattering temptation to talk solely to and about ourselves, we can concentrate on defying repressions that have already come to seem “normal.” The pace of contemporary events is like a speeding convertible; we can ill afford to be enchanted by the rear-view mirror. Rather than mythologizing ourselves or the past, can’t we total those disabled vehicles and—at long last—wave goodbye to all that?

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NOTES 1. The connections between the ideology of bourgeois individualism and the novel as a genre have been made by Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Lennard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Linda Kauffman, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), among many other recent studies. 2. In March 1991, Kay Austen won 10 years’ back pay and 10 years’ front pay in the first court ruling to find the university liable for sex discrimination. Federal Judge Samuel P. King ruled that Austen was subjected to “harassment, retaliation and discrimination”: “the record is clear that the University of Hawaii administration closed ranks to support him against her.” 3. My views of The Golden Notebook and The Handmaid’s Tale are developed in greater depth in Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 4. Gender and Theory is structured dialogically so that each essay is followed by a critique: see Michael Awkward’s “Appropriative Gestures: Theory and Afro-American Literary Criticism,” in response to Christian, and Gerald M. MacLean’s “Citing the Subject,” in response to Tompkins. 5. In addition to Ohmann, op. cit., see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke, and Chris Weedom, Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (London: Methuen, 1985). 6. I suspect (and sincerely hope) that I am the “unfriendly reader” to whom Tompkins refers in her essay, because critique is an invaluable aspect of engagement between women who are friends as well as feminists; conversely, by generously playing the role of “unfriendly reader” of Special Delivery, Jane immeasurably improved my book. 7. See also Mary Field Belencky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986). Carol Gilligan’s work has also been instrumental in promoting this view; in addition to In A Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), see “Joining the Resistance: Psychology, Politics, Girls and Women,” Michigan Quarterly Review 29: 4 (Fall 1990): 501–36. 8. In Getting Personal, Miller recycles the same rhetoric to defend Tompkins and attack Gerald MacLean in their exchange in Gender and Theory. For an alternative interpretation, see Mary Poovey’s review article in Modern Philology (May 1991): 415–420. 9. Cited by Patricia Golan, “America’s Most Dangerous Woman?” On the Issues 13 (1989): 15–21. 10. The New York Times, November 10, 1990. 11. The Washington Post, November 13, 1990. The New York Times reported on September 18, 1991, that government documents were released that show that the National Endowment for the Arts bowed to political pressure in rescinding the grants it had initially recommended for Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller (New York Times, p. B1, 3). The next day, the Senate voted 68 to 28 to prohibit the NEA from awarding grants that would promote materials that depict “sexual or excretory activities or organs” in an “offensive way” (New York Times, September 20, 1991, p. B2). 12. Wojnarowicz’s lawsuit was settled in August 1990. Reverend Wildmon was asked to send a “corrective letter” to subscribers on the American Family Association’s mailing list, and Wojnarowicz was awarded one dollar. 13. Right-Wing Watch 1:4 (February 1991): 2.

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14. The New York Times, November 7, 1991. 15. Or should I say peep-show atmosphere? After this essay went to press, the Senate Judiciary Committee was forced to postpone the Senate vote in order to give the appearance of taking sexual harassment seriously: law professor Anita Hill testified that Thomas sexually harassed her when she worked for him in the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—the very agency that is supposed to investigate such abuses. On October 15, 1991, the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas’s nomination by a vote of 52–48. The same senators who glossed over Thomas’s credibility when he insisted that he never discussed Roe v. Wade felt no compunction about trying to destroy the credibility of Professor Hill, labelling her a “perjurer,” a “fantasist,” and alluding repeatedly to her “proclivities.” Ironically, in the kangaroo court of the media, Clarence Thomas “won” because his testimony was passionate and personal: as if suddenly remembering that he was black, he compared the Senate hearings to a “high-tech lynching.” Anita Hill was deemed too cool, dispassionate, impersonal. Few spectacles so vividly demonstrate the abuses of personal testimony; with this one, I rest my case.

WORKS CITED Atwood, Margaret, 1986. The Handmaid’s Tale. Boston: Houston Mifflin. Barthes, Roland, 1985. The Grain of the Voice: Interviews. 1962–1980. trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Hill and Wang. Christian, Barbara, 1989. “The Race for Theory,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 225–37. de Lauretis, Teresa, 1980. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Debord, Guy, 1970. Society of Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red Press. Derrida, Jacques, 1980. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Downs, Donald Alexander, 1989. The New Politics of Pornography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, Donna, 1989. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” Differences 1:1:3–43. Harding, Sandra, 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Howe, Florence, 1967. “A Talk with Doris Lessing,” Nation 6 March: 311–13. Kauffman, Linda S., 1992. Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, 1986. Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———, ed. 1989a. Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———, ed. 1989b. Feminism and Institutions: Dialogues on Feminist Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lessing, Doris, 1962. The Golden Notebook. New York: Simon and Schuster, reprinted Bantam Books, 1991. Miller, Nancy K., 1991. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge. ———, 1988. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Mitchell, Juliet, 1975. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women. New York: Vintage. Newton, Judith and Deborah Rosenfelt, eds. 1985. Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture. New York: Methuen.

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Ohmann, Richard, 1983. “The Shaping of the Canon of U.S. Fiction, 1960–75” Critical Inquiry 10: 199–223. Petchesky, Rosalind, 1987. “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13:2: 263–92. Showalter, Elaine, 1976. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———, 1983. “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year,” Raritan Review 3: 130–49. Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 1975. The Female Imagination. New York: Knopf. Tompkins, Jane, 1985. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, 1989. “Me and My Shadow,” in Gender and Theory, ed. Linda S. Kauffman. Oxford: Blackwell. Treichler, Paula, 1988. “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Dougles Crimp. Cambridge: MIT Press. Walker, Alice, 1983. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM

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Johnella Butler notes that women’s studies scholars in their “task of changing the world . . . are cast with [Black studies, Asian American studies, Latino studies, and American Indian studies] with whom in many ways we are uneasy.” The tensions between women’s studies and ethnic studies, according to Butler, rise from the fact that women’s studies scholarship, theory, and pedagogy are being radically altered by the scholarship of women of color; that women’s studies “is privileged because it is peopled largely by white women who move more freely than men or women of color throughout the academy.”1 Butler’s candid account of the contested site within women’s studies to accommodate the experiences and scholarship of women of color counters the usual attempts to gloss over the dis-ease that she has characterized in Euro-American feminist responses to ethnic scholarship. Butler’s account recognizes the absence of symmetrical, like-minded relations between the two groups, one concerned with gender issues, especially the imbalance of power and the attempt to rectify these historical imbalances between women and men, and the other concerned with analysis of race and ethnicity, specifically, the imbalance of power between dominant white groups and peoples of color and the attempt to change the unequal sets of relationships. The asymmetrical goals of feminist and ethnic scholars within the same instructional structures have given rise to conflict and hostility.2 The gender/ethnic split is mirrored, moreover, in both communities, among white feminists who, according to some women of color, have been defining feminism in narrow terms privileged by their positions as whites; and among men of color who, “desiring to maintain power over ‘the women’ at all costs, have been among the most willing reinforcers of the fears and myths about the women’s movement, attempting to scare us away from figuring things out for ourselves.”3 Nevertheless, feminist and ethnic literary discourses, although demonstrating this asymmetry in relation to each other, are often inextricably intertwined. Both practices have led to personally charged readings whose impetus and power relate critically suspect notions such as experience, the subjective, and the local, to ideologies undergirding literary evaluation. Feminist and ethnic literary criticisms resist and interrogate the claim that aesthetic criteria form a dominant,

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autonomous, objective, privileged position.4 Both are said to lack a specifying theory. Although feminist literary criticism is seen as more sociopolitically driven than literary by critics such as Ellen Messer-Davidow,5 other critics such as Hazel V. Carby have questioned the value of an essentially Black theory and practice of criticism, noting of Henry Louis Gates’s ethnic-based theory that “the exposition of uniquely black literary strategies is accomplished as much through the work of Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Jacques Lacan and others as it is through the insights of a wide range of African-American critics including Houston Baker, Amiri Imamu Baraka and Sterling Brown.”6 Generally, feminist and ethnic critics oppose hegemonic disciplines. Many have presented themselves as cultural pluralists and revisionists, calling attention to, among other things, neglected or omitted texts that, even by established standards, should be admitted into the canon.7 They operate as interventionists disrupting the totalizing naturalization of white male culture. These common purposes, however, do not imply that feminist and ethnic criticisms share inherently sympathetic identities or areas of overlap that allow them to synthesize critical orientations. Even when, bound together in a common cause of revising the canon, both feminist and ethnic critics select similar ethnic texts, one cannot assume that they share integral or identical traditions. My essay attempts to unpack textual instances where ethnic and feminist issues have intersected, to analyze how their diverging emphases necessitate an ethnic-cultural nuancing of conventional Euro-American feminist positions on gender/power relations and a feminist critique of ethnic-specific identity. For my argument, I focus on Asian American women’s writing. In the analysis of ethnic identity politics and feminist ideological conjunctions, I argue, first, that Asian American (restricted here to Japanese, Chinese, and Korean American) literature has been an active site of masculinist views and feminist resistance, and, second, that these women’s texts are symptomatic of the struggle to refigure the subject between the often oppositional demands of ethnic and gender identity. The tension, to my mind, is not merely or wholly over the question of who should be read—female or male writers, whose canon is it, anyway?—but over how representation of the subject is negotiated between ethnic and feminist thematics. The polarities between feminist and masculinist assertions of identity were already in place in the traditional East Asian patriarchal constructions of society.8 They were further exacerbated by a history of racism (similar histories apply to Chinese, Japanese, South Asian, and Filipino male immigration and delayed or difficult entry for women) that disempowered Asian males and separated them for long periods from women and families, and by the entry of Asian social norms into a differently restrictive American culture.9 These polarities can be seen as still operative in the debates over Asian American women marrying out and in the debates that occasionally flare up to illuminate the problems of power relations between Asian American women and men.10 In was only in the 1970s that the notion of a body of Asian American literature recognizable as a separate canon became common. This literature can be said to represent the paradoxical phenomenon known as a “new tradition.” Even as the texts are self-conscious expressions of “a new political consciousness and identity,” their commentaries locate them in a “recovered” ethnic history. Texts like Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts

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and China Men are like a slow development of photographs taken years ago; even as their textuality appears for the first time before our eyes, we are reminded that the images were posed in a time already past, that history and textuality form one subject.11 The commentator observes the coloration of the text as it appears for the first time with a postmodern consciousness of the text’s belatedness, an awareness that the images are to be understood in the contexts of a lapidary of discourses on and from the past: memoir, myth, family and community history, folk tales, talk-story.12 This insistence on past narratives, whether as Old World culture and values, immigrant history, race suffering, communal traditions, or earlier other language traces, is a marked feature of much Asian American literature and criticism, just as the recovery of a woman’s culture, woman’s language, and neglected women’s texts and traditions forms a major feature of feminist criticism.13

DEFINING THE FIELD Three publication events mark the increasing acceptance of an “Asian American” canon: the appearance of three anthologies (Asian American Authors, 1972; AsianAmerican Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, 1974; Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, 1974) in the early seventies; the first (and still the only) book-length study of the literature, Elaine H. Kim’s Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context in 1982; and the 1988 Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (King-kok Cheung and Stan Yogi) which conferred academic legitimacy to the field through its publication by the Modern Language Association Press.14 These publications relate coherent historiographies of an Asian American literary tradition and of the contesting of that tradition. In doing so, they also provide a grounding for the culture and affect its identity formation for the future. Like feminist critics, these ethnic-identified critics share the task of identifying stereotypes and countering them. Their criticism in the 1970s, exemplified by the influential introduction of Aiiieeeee!, was restricted to a critique of stereotypes of the emasculated Asian American male. These authors modeled their thinking on the militant African American antiacademic rhetoric manifested in Ishmael Reed’s work.15 Unfortunately, they also adopted the sexist stance of Reed’s position and the attack on male stereotypes reiterated and reinforced stereotypes of females. In the Aiiieeeee! Introduction, the animus against stereotypes appears specially reserved for women writers of Chinese American descent who were accused of collaborating with white supremacists in propagating the stereotypes of the submissive, patriotic, model, and “dual-personality” (a psychological term used by sociologists of the fifties to explain the consequences of biculturality on Japanese Americans) Asian American.16 Chinese American women writers were conspicuous for their absence from these anthologies. In the issue of the Yardbird Reader (1974) guest edited by Frank Chin and Shawn Wong, only four women writers are represented: two Japanese American short story writers, Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi; a Filipina poet, Cyn. Zarco; and a Chinese-German American poet, Mei Berssenbrugge; as against eleven men, of whom eight are Chinese Americans. In

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Aiiieeeee!, again only four women writers are included against ten men, and only one of the women was Chinese American as opposed to five Chinese American male writers. One may be led to conclude from these selections that this ethnic literature up to the 1970s was full of talented male writers and most deficient in women writers. The 1991 Big Aiiieeeee!, which despite the title is a completely different anthology from the 1974 anthology, is even more severe in its exclusion of Chinese American women writers, who are entirely unrepresented.17 That the 1974 selection is distorted is evident from the editors’ introduction, which is replete with references to Chinese American women scholars and writers whose works are critiqued and denigrated. The 1974 anthology can be said to be superseded by the 1991 anthology, but its editorial arguments are still significant today as they helped form a generation of opinion on Asian American cultural identity. The opening sentence of this introduction signals the content of that quarrel—who owns the ground of this ethnic writing: “In the 140-year history of Asian America, fewer than ten works of fiction and poetry have been published by American-born Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino writers.” The statement suggests that the anthology will include as Asian American only the work of American-born citizens of Asian descent. Yet the anthology does not bear out this conclusion, as Carlos Bulosan, Louis Chu, Oscar Penaranda, and possibly Sam Tagatac are foreign-born. The preface to the anthology similarly negotiates this categorical ambivalence. The anthology is claimed as “exclusively AsianAmerican. That means Filipino-, Chinese-, and Japanese-Americans, American born and raised, who got their China and Japan from the radio, off the silver screen, from television, out of comic books.” But the editors equivocate later to include the foreign-born, explaining that “between the writer’s actual birth and the birth of sensibility, we have used the birth of the sensibility as the measure of being an Asian-American.”18 Although a recognizable ethnicized sensibility is assumed, it is defined negatively, as one that has “no actual memories of life in Asia.” Asian American, therefore, is a category reserved only for citizens who are totally grounded in American life and who have received their images of Asia from an American collective and popular imagination. The facts of Asian immigration to the United States, however, are such that any definition of what an Asian American sensibility is must always be provisional. The first Chinese entered the United States in 1820; by 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress, there were 107,488 Chinese in the United States, less than 0.02 percent of the population; when the act was repealed in 1943, Chinese made up only 0.05 percent of the population.19 Similar restrictive and repressive legislation kept the numbers of Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and other Asian Americans low. The changes in the immigration laws in 1965 that altered the race quota to a nationality criterion, and the Family Reunification Act of 1968 led to an explosion of the Asian population; “the population of Americans of Asian and Pacific Island descent has more than doubled in the past decade—up from an estimated 3.5 million in 1980 to about 7.3 million in 1990, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. California leads the nation with about 2.8 million people of Asian and Pacific Island descent—up 127% since 1980.”20 In the face of the rapid increase and changing ethnic cultures of non-American-born Asian Americans now resident in the United States, to limit this literature to the writings produced by American-born Asians is indefensibly arbitrary. Indeed, Cheung and

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Yogi’s Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography gave the body of Asian American writing a contemporary breadth of references that Aiiieeeee! and its successor, The Big Aiiieeeee! did not even attempt. The bibliography substantiates the recent transformations of the field, particularly in regard to the contributions from the newer Asian immigrant groups—the Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Southeast Asian, each of whom is given a separate category. Containing 3,395 items, the bibliography is already in need of a new edition, particularly in order to include a cross-reference to writing by Asians and works by and of Asian American women. Aiiieeeee! set out to be more than a collection of works by writers of Asian descent. The editors asserted an authority as culture makers and namers, authorizing their version of Asian American sensibility. In their introduction, they assailed the assumption of continuity between Asian American culture and Asian culture. The positive valuation of Asian culture undergirding the American perception of the Asian American, they argued, was “a work of racist art” to keep the Asian American estranged from America. This reified representation insists on an identity as Old World Asian, preventing the perception of dynamism, hybridity, New World vitality, and other more interactive qualities that characterize a burgeoning ethnic culture in the United States. Offering Black American culture as their model, the editors argued that Asian Americans should “invent” their culture, not passively accept the distortions of high Asian cultural elements that white Americans foist on them. Consequently, they certified as authentic only those writers who exhibited “Asian American,” rather than an Asian or Euro-American, sensibility. This sensibility, the editors concluded, was specifically constructed through male-centered language and culture: “Language is the medium of culture and the people’s sensibility, including the style of manhood. . . . On the simplest level, a man in any culture speaks for himself. Without a language of his own, he is no longer a man.”21 The assumption, therefore, is that Asian American men who assert “manhood” decide, possess, and exhibit the legitimate cultural national sensibility. Elaine H. Kim’s chapter, “Chinatown Cowboys and Warrior Women,” in her study Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, provides an early critique of the masculinism evident in the Aiiieeeee! introduction. Analyzing Frank Chin’s essays and dramas, Kim concludes that his “sexism, cynicism, and sense of alienation (among other factors) have prevented him from creating protagonists who can overcome the devastating effects of racism on Chinese American men.”22 In a recent essay, Kim revises her critique to render a more harmonious, less oppositional reading of Asian American writing. Agreeing in part with the Aiiieeeee! editors, Kim argues that U.S. race and gender hierarchies have objectified Asian Americans as permanent outsiders and sexual deviants: “Asian men have been coded as having no sexuality, while Asian women have nothing else.” Although such social realities have resulted in differences between nationalist and feminist concerns, the woman’s voice in works such as Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, she asserts, “dissolves binary oppositions of ethnicity and gender.”23 My own reading of Asian American literature demonstrates less a solution than a continuous negotiation between often conflicting cultural constructions of ethnicity and gender. To my mind, in the last fifteen years, after publication of

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Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in 1976, the literature has been the site of conscious and explicit conflict, between women’s ideas of culture and cultural nationalism as claimed by some males, preeminently presented in the Aiiieeeee! introduction, and more curiously elaborated as neo-Confucianist ideology in Frank Chin’s essay “Come All Ye Asian American Writers,” in The Big Aiiieeeee!24 This gender split was explicitly caused by the intervention of feminist issues and is marked historically by the publication of two anthologies of women’s writing in 1989, The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology and Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women. These anthologies, although not directly addressing the masculinist ideology that undergirded the 1970s’ literary movement, exhibit a difference from the earlier anthologies in their constituting of ethnic subject and culture. Primarily, they are a stage for women who claim, not the minor representation given in the 1970s’ anthologies, but all the attention. Men are present in the work but often appear as aggressors or as ignorant of women’s needs: “He beat me with the hem of a kimono”; “Father’s belt”; “Men know nothing of sex.”25 Moreover, the works counter stereotypes of Asian American women in Asian and white cultures. Making Waves features sociological and historical essays that analyze images of Asian women in the media (“Lotus Blossoms Don’t Bleed: Images of Asian Women”) and express the dilemma of living biculturally in societies that insist on a hegemonic identity (“Growing Up Asian in America”).26 More significantly, in contrast to the 1970s’ male critique of the concept of “dual personality,” the anthologies foreground the instabilities of identity and represent the oscillating and crisscrossing of national, racial, and subjective borders that characterize the experience of biculturalism: “How is one to know and define oneself? From the inside—within a context that is self defined, from a grounding in community and a connection with culture and history that are comfortably accepted? Or from the outside—in terms of messages received from the media and people who are often ignorant?”27 Kesaya E. Noda’s essay, for example, beginning in “confusions and distortions,” resolves itself in its construction of “I am racially Japanese,” “I am a Japanese American,” “I am a Japanese American woman.” This tripartite construction of Asian American identity, affirmatively propositional, counters the 1970s’ syllogistic construction: “I am not Asian,” “I am not white American,” “I am Asian American (male).” The feminist intervention in the evolving tradition of this writing has led to a reclamation of mother/other origin, an affirmation of continuity or relation between origin and present tense, and a new foregrounding of gender identity. Paradoxically, the absence of an attempt to illuminate an Asian American sensibility has resulted in the affirmation of sensibilities marked by softened categories, elastic cultural spaces, and a more global antihegemonic construction of identity. In contrast to the Aiiieeeee! anthology, neither women’s anthology attempts to explicate an exclusive boundary of ethnic sensibility. In fact, the selection of works that manifest emotional and physical bonds to a non-American homeland indicates an elastic sense of identity to encompass the past of Asian national identity as well as an American writing present. Moreover, no attempt is made to separate the selections into ethnic groups; works by South Asian, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian American women appear side by side, organized thematically or sequentially. Thus, together with an increased diver-

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sity of Asian national representations is a decreased emphasis on categorical national difference. The very multiplicity appears to result in a blurring of national boundaries and an assertion of organizational principles through commonalities of experience rather than differences of attributes. The 1980s’ selections of Asian American women’s writing share with the 1970s’ anthologies general themes of immigrant concerns and first-generation conflicts, acknowledgement of cultural sources and roots in Asian societies, and thematics of family bond/conflicts. The Forbidden Stitch foregrounds new writing that manifests “subjectivity as gendered,” inclusive of a “contemporary Asian American culture [that] is not dictated from a central committee.”28 The editors of the 1980s’ anthologies worked in collectives, as communities of women. The ethnic culture of these anthologies is nonauthoritative, decentered, nondogmatic, unprogrammatic, uncategorizing, inclusive, qualities that some feminist theoreticians such as Carol Gilligan argue characterize female sensibilities.29 The editors avoided propositions that constructed universalist notions of Asian American women’s experiences. In the introductory essay to Making Waves, for example, Sucheta Mazumdar argues that for Asian Americans whose histories of exclusion, isolation, discrimination, exploitation, and internment result in “severe trauma,” “ethnic identity supersedes gender and class. For women of color, concerns arising out of racial identity are an integral aspect of their overall identity.” Yet even within this general observation many exceptions exist. As Mazumdar elaborates: The impact of gender on Asian women in America varies enormously even within the same class and ethnic group. While the idea that female children are of less value than male children permeates all Asian cultures . . . the effect of this value-system on an American-born woman is quite different than on an immigrant one.

For the Asian-born woman, moving away from a relatively closed patriarchal world into a relatively democratized, egalitarian, interrogative America, immigration can be a liberalizing and freeing experience. Mazumdar cites a national survey of college-educated woman from India living in the United States that showed 33.3 percent of the women working in the technical fields and 50 percent in the academic fields described themselves as feminists.30 Traditional Asian valuation of authoritarian husbands is frequently subverted by the working woman’s growing economic independence and interaction in larger social relations that reflect different, more positive values of the female.

INVENTING NEW PLOTS For the woman writer whose ethnic community is patriarchal, ethnic and feminist values and identities must inevitably intersect in potentially uneasy, conflicting, or violent ways. In male-centered ethnic societies, the woman usually remains on the margin, invisible, mute, or constrained to limited stereotypical roles of possession—child or mother, domestic worker, or sexual object. Most assertions of female identity of qualities falling outside the subordinate ranks

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and delineated kinship roles may be read as subversive of male power and, by implication, of one’s ethnic community. To be a free woman, such a woman must be at some level a “no name woman,” that is, outcast from her ethnic community. Thus, Kingston’s aunt, a “no name woman” who carries an illegitimate child, has broken the Chinese patriarchal laws of kinship and descent, has become a non-Chinese, a nonhuman, and drowns herself in the well, an act of retribution for breaking the name of the father, the final patriarchal control over all women. In the intersection of race and gender identity, the woman who represents the urgencies of her gender (her sexuality, her maternality) against a race imperative is in a position to be violently erased. But that is in the traditional master plot of ethnic patriarch as villain and ethnic woman as victim. Rejecting this race and gender plot (encompassing female infanticide, clitoridectomy, child brides, dowries, brideburning, catalog brides, enforced purdah, suttee—the archetypal patterns of female oppression and male masterhood),31Asian American women have been busy inventing new plots that are complicated by race and class issues. One alternative narrative to the representation of woman as a victim to patriarchy is that of the disempowering of the central male figure in the Asian kinship nexus by a racist and classist white American society. Through the eyes of Asian American daughters, the father’s humiliations, losses, and pathetic struggles against white social authority are both indictments against racism (and therefore an assertion of ethnic protest) as well as evidence of patriarchal impotence (and therefore a stripping away of ethnic core identity). Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston’s 1974 Farewell to Manzanar constructs this double-edged critique of Asian/American cultures in its portrayal of the gradual emasculation of the powerful Papa figure. Because Papa “didn’t want to be labelled or grouped by anyone,” the daughter has grown up in an allwhite neighborhood. Because he had terrified her with the threat, “I’m going to sell you to the Chinaman,” she grows up with “this fear of Oriental faces.” “Papa had been the patriarch,” she tells us explicitly. The internment process changed him to “a man without a country. . . . He was suddenly a man with no rights who looked exactly like the enemy.” The Japanese values that supported his patriarchal role, through the internment, have become erased; he is now “without a country,” “the enemy.” In the face of the FBI arrest, “all he had left . . . was his tremendous dignity.”32 Nine months later, Papa returns from North Dakota to join his family in the camp in Manzanar. “He was not the same man. Something had happened to him in North Dakota.” The first unforgettable object the young Wakatsuki sees on her father’s return is his cane, a symbol both of his weakened physical self and also of his demoralized spirit. For even after his limp goes away, he uses the cane “as a kind of swagger stick, such as military officers use.” The humiliation resulting from his imprisonment leads to Papa’s distortion of patriarchal values into an abusive and futile machismo: “When he was angry he would wield [the cane] like the flat of a sword, whacking out at his kids or his wife or his hallucinations . . . a sad, homemade version of the samurai sword his great-great-grandfather carried in the land around Hiroshima, at a time when warriors weren’t much needed anymore, when their swords were both their virtue and their burden.” The father’s identity is inextricably bound up with a samurai, a male warrior, genealogy; but in the new country, this identity is superseded and superannuated. “The camp was

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where our lifelines intersected,” Wakatsuki Houston writes. “That intersection— for me a birthplace,” whereas “things finished for him there”33 is one daughter’s ruthless rewriting of the race and gender plot. In the life story, Asian patriarchal identity dies at that very intersection of the birth of feminist consciousness. When Wakatsuki Houston wrote, “It [the cane symbolizing samurai tradition and Asian patriarchal self-construction] helps me to understand how Papa’s life would end in a place like Manzanar,” she did not mean his literal and physical death. In fact, his physical presence as alcoholic, abusive husband and father looms large in the daughter’s life: “With Papa back our cubicle was filled to overflowing . . . what crowded the room . . . was Papa himself, his dark, bitter, brooding presence.” In her proleptic statement, Wakatsuki Houston was representing the antinomies of patriarchal tradition and evolving feminist consciousness in their mutually erasive positions, foreshadowing the death of her ethnic past and its displacement by a feminine discourse. This discourse bears little resemblance to the attitudes associated today with feminists, for hers was a prefeminist world. In her explorations in the camp, the young girl sees an orphan being confirmed in a Catholic ceremony: “She was dressed like a bride, in a white gown, white lace hood, and sheer veil, walking towards the altar” . . . I was pierced with envy . . . that this girl, this orphan, could become such a queen.”34 The self-image the young Japanese American girl desires is the idealized white female future, the girl as bride and queen. The Japanese father does not passively stand by as his daughter buys into the assimilative code. In an illuminating instance, he resists her baptism into Catholicism on the grounds that “you get baptized now, how are you going to find a good Japanese boy to marry?” He recognizes in his daughter’s apparent religious fervor the subversion of his control. The daughter’s dreams of being “the white-gowned princess” are obstructed by her father, and in counterresistance she turns to practicing her baton, a complex symbol of male sexual mastery that reappears later to figure her prefeminist discourse: “Angrily I would throw [the baton] into the air and watch him twirl, and catch him, and throw him high, again and again and again.”35 The chapter “The Double Impulse” spells out the place of gender in the ethnic dilemma. Released from Manzanar, the young girl still carries the trauma of racial hurt with her. She has internalized the internment into “true shame,” “some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved.” From this shame of ethnic identity come the related impulses—“the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be acceptable,” to assimilate, which is another form of death of ethnicity. Her “birth” as an American is enabled by her other identity as female. As the lead majorette in the Girl Scouts, which she describes as “like a sorority,” she finds “intuitively that one resource I had to overcome the war-distorted limitations of my race would be my femininity.” “The boys in the band loved having us out there in front of them all the time, bending back and stepping high, in our snug satin outfits and short skirts. Their dads, mostly navy men, loved it too.” Wakatsuki tells us, “I was too young to consciously use my sexuality or to understand how an Oriental female can fascinate Caucasian men,”36 indicating her later adult discomfort with the forms of complicity that women traditionally engage in so as to do well in patriarchal systems. Yet one should not underestimate her prefeminist understanding that her

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“feminine” resource can liberate her from ethnic-specific patriarchal control and violence nor the consequent psychic dislocation of her complicity in white patriarchal definitions of the feminine which she seeks as an alternative to her father’s “good Japanese-boy husband” paradigm. Her unhappy confusion of identity is plangently represented in the narrative of what should have been the culmination of her white-female dream, her crowning as carnival queen. To win the event, she had dressed as an exotic, “with a flower-print sarong, black hair loose and a hibiscus flower behind my ear.” For the ceremony, however, she accepts her parents’ version of a respectable and modest image and wears a “frilly ball gown that covered almost everything and buried my legs under layers of ruffles . . . a white-gowned figure out of Gone with the Wind.” Caught between a host of possible images, “an odori dancer for Papa,” a princess, or “this kind of [Hollywood] heroine,” the young woman becomes conscious of the shabby and provisional, the unsatisfactory nature of her self-construction. “It was too late now not to follow this make-believe carpet to its plywood finale, and I did not yet know of any truer destination.”37 Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote this life story in collaboration with her Anglo writer-husband and has since published only autobiographical essays. For this Asian American woman to give birth to a self outside her traditional Asian patriarchal constructions of dutiful daughter and wife, she had to seek acceptance through exploiting her sexuality and her exoticism in a white patriarchal world, denying the integrity of both her ethnic and her female self. This dilemma posed in the narrative is also manifest in the questions surrounding the text’s authorship. Written as an autobiography in the first person, the book’s signature is shared with an Anglo male. Thus, even in its Japanese American woman’s voice, it is compromised in its very assertion of ethnicity and femininity. The overlap, doubleness, of authorship is not simply a matter of coauthorship, for the text presents itself as a first-person ethnic woman’s life story. As Mary V. Dearborn argues in Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture, the absence of self-possession, the duplicity of ethnic women’s texts, and its appropriation by white males, are noticeable features of ethnic women’s literature.38 The theme of intergenerational tension and conflict, specifically between an Old World patriarch and a daughter who is attracted to New World culture with all its promise of privileged womanhood, is not peculiar to Asian American literature. Dearborn points out that it forms the major theme of works by earlier ethnic woman writers.39 Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers narrates the daughter’s bitter struggle to break free from an oppressive, exploitative, tradition-bound father to a liberated life.40 Wakatsuki Houston’s narrative, however, differs from this common thematic in that, as Thomas Sowell points out, “The ‘generation gap’ between first and second generations of Japanese American was . . . greater than in other immigrant groups.” Moreover, the internment experience, which functions in Japanese American literature as slavery does in African American writing, provides the major intergenerational coloration. As Sowell describes it, “Life within the internment camps considerably altered traditional Japanese roles and patterns of life. The very low wages paid for performing various tasks in camp were the same for women as for men, for young or old, and so the role of the father as primary breadwinner was completely undermined.”41 The internment experience, as illustrated in Wakatsuki Houston’s story, marks the moment in Japanese

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American culture, between ethnicity as patriarchal discourse and the emergence of the Japanese American woman as subject, seeking a different constitution of her female self. A similar intergenerational conflict between Old World patriarch and American daughter is manifested in Chinese American women’s writing. For example, the strict patriarch in Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (although he escapes the emasculation that the Japanese father suffers in Farewell to Manzanar) is compelled finally to change his views on the inferior status of his fifth daughter.42 Wong offers an alternative ethnic/gender plot in which the patriarch retains his position and the daughter represses her female subjectivity in order to succeed in her ethnic identity as her father’s son.43 These two Asian American daughters’ narratives demonstrate that their identities form sites of conflict between the different ideological valuations of the individual, the community, and gender that distinguish Asian cultures from U.S. culture. In the process of countersocialization, from Asian and Confucianist values to Euro-American values, inevitable conflicts occur within each woman simultaneously with external difficulties in her roles as obedient daughter and independent individual and professional. The contradictions between Asian and U.S. (that is, Euro-American) socially inscribed positions for women and the internal resistance within the Asian woman to those cultural elements that seemingly would liberate her from patriarchal constraints are evident in the 1984 novel Clay Walls, by a second-generation Korean American woman, Kim Ronyoung.44 The novel traces the lives of a Korean couple who flee the Japanese imperialists in Korea for a Korean immigrant community in Los Angeles. Haesu, a Yangban, or aristocrat, is married against her will to Chun, the third son of a farmer, a landless peasant or Sangnyom, a lower-class person. Because a high-ranking American missionary has intervened for Chun, Haesu’s parents cannot refuse without losing face. As an object of possession and exchange, Haesu is handed over to Chun to maintain her family’s social status. Arriving in California, Haesu attempts to help her husband economically by working as a domestic. We first meet her refusing to scrub the toilet for a wealthy Euro-American woman. As an American immigrant, she has lost her traditional superiority, but adherence to her Korean ethnic identity allows her to maintain her class identity. Her aristocratic ethnic status permits her to resist both a new classist (based on capital) American society as well as her traditionally lower-class husband. Through Haesu’s character, the novel dramatizes the oppression of women within traditional Korean patriarchal society. Although Chun desires his wife physically, he functions within this structure where women are commodified as objects of exchange and as sexual creatures to serve male desire. For example, although Haesu resists his advances, he takes her in an act clearly represented as marital rape: “Pressing his chest against her nipples and jamming his knees against her thighs, he formed a human vise. She wanted to scream herself free. . . . Grunting like a barnyard animal, he collapsed in a heap on top of her.” After a bitter quarrel and violation, the narrator tells us, “She did not know the word for what he had done to her. ‘That thing’ is how she referred to coitus. She didn’t know the word for rape.” Haesu’s ignorance of the word figures her ignorance of her rights as a human in U.S. culture. Her understanding of her marital relations is based on her education in Confucianist society. When Chun tells her,

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“Money is a man’s affair,” the narrator emphasizes that he is speaking for a community: “The terms were clear. They did not originate with Chun. Their roles had been handed down through the centuries, made clear by Confucius centuries ago.”45 These early scenes offer familiar feminist grievances. We are prepared to read Haesu as a feminist heroine, socially and morally superior to the male, whose acculturation in the Euro-American ideology of individual rights will set her on a female identity divergent from the traditional Asian identity. Instead, the novel offers a complex narrative of female resistance to male domination in more differentiated terms than this prescribed feminist position would allow. Haesu notes the inequity in status between female and male in Korean society: “As long as a man provided for his family, he was beyond criticism. A woman, on the other hand, was measured by how well she served the men in her family, first her father, then her husband and, finally, her son.”46 Yet, although voicing a criticism of this dominant male position, Haesu abandons the critique for a different kind of resistance that does not undermine the traditional role of the female as mother and homemaker. The novel’s development falls in line with and supports the very division of gender roles that it explicitly criticizes in its opening. The questioning of the value of gender divisions occurs at a level of social tragedy that obscures it and foregrounds instead issues of race and class. Haesu’s choice—to stay home and raise her three children—represents an immigrant Asian woman’s perspective that, although critical of aspects of Confucianist values, chooses to remain within that social structure, using its attributes for her own ends. Her ends preclude the feminist objective, “women’s sacred duty to herself”; instead, they encompass the welfare of her children, her family’s economic security, and her community status. Haesu incorporates material attributes of U.S. culture—for example, less constrained dress and social intercourse, shedding women’s enforced physical seclusion—without challenging the overt values of her ethnic society. Indeed, once the children arrive, the novel concentrates on concerns of racial inequality that Haesu fears will prevent her children from achieving success in the United States. The narrative moves from a discourse and critique of gender relations to a discourse and critique of race relations. The novel’s second part focuses on Chun and undermines whatever critique of patriarchy may have been inferred from the first part. Chun is represented as the victim of U.S. racial legislation and Asian patriarchal values. Under Confucianist teaching, the husband is identified as the provider. Without social standing and without emotional bonds, this economic function is the only legitimation Chun receives from Haesu. When he loses the business because of corrupt municipal policies, and his savings through a gambling addiction, he loses his tenuous economic function in the family. He leaves Los Angeles for Reno and dies years later without returning to his family. Having no money, the traditional Korean patriarch becomes a “nothing,” erased in the matriarchal bonded family. Chun’s final annihilation is figured in the safe, “the only thing that belonged to Papa,” which the desperate Haesu forces open, only to find “nothing in here.”47 In the power relation between Chun and Haesu, potentially feminist issues of patriarchal oppression staged in the arranged marriage and of male violence represented in the scenes of marital rape are diffused and dispersed by more pressing representations of the bondage of the male, of female psychosexual punishment of the male, of male frustration, disempowerment, and erasure. Clay

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Walls reminds us that in U.S. culture, the immigrant Asian male, burdened by racial legislation, is more threatened with dysfunction than the Asian woman. The woman, supported by the presence of her children and the social network of her ethnic community, survives. The novel also demonstrates how, in U.S. culture, certain cultural values are disabling for Asian males, such as the male’s primary identity with the economic function of provider and the construction of masculine pride and stoicism. Yet for Haesu, other Korean cultural values help her survive. The traditional seclusion of women in the home offers her the psychic resources to support her children through piecework sewing, and the traditional value of children gives her an overriding motive for economic struggle. Clay Walls does not provide a Euro-American-style feminist text. Its focus is on the transformation of individuals caught between ethnic cultures rather than between gender roles. Moving from gender to ethnicity, the perspective inevitably moves from women’s domestic issues to ethnic social issues. In communities where men appear to be under greater adaptive stress than women, as is generally the case for people of color in the United States, the cultural/social perspective also foregrounds men and their struggles in a race- and class-, as well as gender-, divided society. That Clay Walls is not produced from within a Euro-American feminist agenda is most clearly evidenced in the portrayal of Faye, Haesu’s youngest child and only daughter. As a second-generation American-born Korean American, Faye may be expected to display greater sensitivity to the unequal positions of femalemale power. Faye’s character, however, reproduces the race-class-gender nexus in her immigrant mother’s life. Faye rejects the working-class illegitimate Willie who defiantly plays up his low status in the community. She accepts her mother’s injunction against finding a profession and works instead, with her mother’s permission, as a drill-press operator during the Pacific War, a gesture of patriotism rather than of individual fulfillment. Her future as a worker is figured in the description of her job: “to drill holes in precisely the same place on identical pieces of dull black metal.” Like Haesu’s, the course of Faye’s life is predicated on men; following her mother’s example, she waits for and finds a Korean American man, the kind of upper-class man that Haesu had wanted for herself. Her mother educates her in Korean female submissiveness: “In Korea, children do what their parents say. Parents do everything for their children and the children respect them for it.” (This homily excludes the sons who had left home earlier for their own adventures.) Haesu arranges a blind date between Faye and Daniel Lee, an assimilated Korean American from an all-white Connecticut town, a Yale graduate and U.S. Army officer, who speaks English “without a trace of an accent.” Daniel is the fantasy male rescuer whose figure “solves” the unequal class conflict that troubled the first-generation marriage and reconciles for Haesu/Faye the contradictory desires for preserving the integrity of a Korean ethnic identity and for assimilation into white U.S. society. Daniel as male authority manifests what all the other Korean American characters have been unable to do, the ability to negotiate conflicting ethnic cultural demands without anxiety and stress: “I live among one group of people while my commitments are to another. WASP assumptions require that I be one thing and my ancestry demands another. . . . [B]ut we who live here have something in common. If not physically then intellectually. In many cases, experientially.”48 The careers of the Korean American female

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protagonists, as delineated in Clay Walls, are dependent on men; women do not interrogate male social dominance or transgress traditional female roles.

ASIAN AMERICAN FEMINISM In the texts discussed, the Asian American female, in order to pursue her interests in a race-conscious society, has to modify her rejection of patriarchal ethnic identity. Mitsuye Yamada asserts that “being a feminist activist is more dangerous for women of color” and that feminist agendas should be accommodated within an affirmation of ethnic culture: “Asian Pacific women need to affirm our culture while working within to change it.”49 Her position assumes an overlapping of categories that will enable the conventional and stereotypical hostility between ethnic cultures, traditionally organized for patriarchal ends, and emerging women’s identities, expressed in socially transforming concerns for the rights of women, to be defused, synthesized, or merged into a new sensibility. The construction of gender need not be contingent on the ethnic versions of female roles and experiences, nor need the construction of ethnicity depend on patriarchal constructions of an ethnic group; feminist identity, therefore, should be recoverable inside Asian American culture and history. Yet Kim’s Clay Walls, Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s career provide a caution against too easily assuming the merger of ethnic and feminist identities. While Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir, Farewell to Manzanar, demonstrates her resistance to ethnic-identified patriarchy, her 1985 autobiographical essays in Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American Womanhood, like the narrative of Faye’s growing up, erase that earlier resistance and return as if without a memory to the usual constructions of Japanese cultural values that mute women’s voices and concerns. In Beyond Manzanar, Wakatsuki Houston recuperates her Japanese roots by recuperating a Japanese mother whose figure integrates the American mode of individualism (she marries for romantic love) and “a prized identity” of peers and community almost exclusively of Japanese descent. Wakatsuki Houston privileges the maternal component in the ethnic community, equates it with “service,” and conflates the narrative of maternal service with that of approved female subordination: “My mother, already inherently prepared to subordinate herself in their relationship . . . zealously sought for ways to elevate [the husband’s] position in the family.” The author’s internalized conflict, between aggressive, assertive attitudes identified as “Caucasian” in ethnic culture and submissive passive, receptive characteristics identified as Japanese woman, surfaces in her marital relation to her Caucasian husband. Wakatsuki Houston “solves” this “double identity” by claiming “cultural hybridness,” an acceptance of cultural and psychological divergence in her personality. Her resolution, however, can be read as itself a compliance with both racist and sexist constructions of female identity; as she admits in her essay, “The Geisha, the Good Wife, and Me,” there are roles that “Westerners, including me, have amalgamated into one stereotype . . . the submissive, docile, self-sacrificing, artlessly perfect Japanese wife.”50 Wakatsuki Houston’s later essays move the dilemma of the woman in a patriarchal ethnic community from the problem of patriarchy to the solution of sexist role playing. Farewell to Manzanar had foregrounded a plot in which the female protagonist

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seeks and finds a woman’s identity, no matter how partial and unsatisfactory, outside the Japanese father’s version, a self-representation that locates content in white America’s version of the princess, exotic native, or Hollywood heroine. This ethnically transgressive yet American assimilative mode of self-representation is one common form of the intersection of ethnicity and feminism in much Asian American writing. In two randomly selected poems in the 1986 Asian American Special Edition of Contact II, for example, Genny Lim and Karen Tei Yamashita situate their representations of woman in recognizably feminist yet nonethnically identified codes.51 Treating sexuality with a remarkable candor and explicitness associated with the emphasis on writing the body that feminist literary criticism has privileged, both poems break any stereotypical notions the reader may have concerning Asian American female modesty, submissiveness, and passivity. Indeed, stereotypes aside, they transgress common social rules of female behavior that still pervade middle-class societies of any ethnic camp. Lim’s title, “If Sartre Was a Whore,” immediately places the poem in a Western cultural orientation; the stanzas describe a larger-than-life female energy principle: They call her whore because she fucks with pleasure They sneer because she loves women Queen bee She sucks life’s nectar from one-night stands.

This figure of bisexual energy and the pleasure principle contains nothing of stereotypes of Asian American women in its representation.52 Similarly, Yamashita’s “Midwifs” with its playful uses of jazz rhythms and linguistic registers borrows its diction and images from African American blues lyrics: Say man lady hootche kootche woman huddled on you hootche kootche womb baring breasts to wet lips and tongues of father the son, ghosts in dreams caress the nights in middle age sing crazy like a loon.53

Both poems appear to demonstrate that the construction of female sexual energy need not be ethnic-bound. Yet, although these poems operate outside the context of Asian ethnicity, or at least allude to it chiefly by transgression and exclusion, as representations they are no less culture-bound because they displace references to images, ideas, and behavior commonly associated with Asian-ethnic societies and locate their women’s content instead in European and African American contexts. The choices of that preeminent European philosopher Sartre and the jazz-influenced diction and rhythms offer a counter-European and African American ground in these poems, illustrating that when Asian American writers write from non-Asian American centers, they are already situated in another ethnic domain. We should read the poems of Lim and Yamashita as constructed

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within a Western tradition of l’écriture féminine.54 In this Western feminist poetics, women’s physicality, maternality, sexuality, and eroticism are foregrounded as a defiant inscription of female experience outside the forms of phallocentric and logocentric poetics. As Susan Rubin Suleiman suggests, women’s writing is claiming the right to “dirty” words and to subjects long forbidden to women by a patriarchal discourse that in idealizing women as other than material had deprived women of the power of the material.55 In these two poems, their subjects, idioms, jazz syncopations, metaphors, and figures are coded Euro-African American. These poems construct women’s bodies but go outside Asian American culturespecific codes to do so. It is generally accepted that one tradition of women’s writing in the FrenchAnglophone tradition is a writing of the body as reflected in thematics and choice of diction. A tradition of ethnic immigrant writing is also grounded on a body of thematics (Old World/New World conflict; alienation/assimilation; intergenerational tensions rising out of cross-cultural differences, and so forth). In such a contrasting morphology, Farewell to Manzanar and Clay Wall may be considered more ethnic than feminist texts. But if we also consider that the theme of women’s oppression by patriarchal structures and the representation of women’s struggles to free themselves from these ancient bonds form another tradition of women’s writing, then surely these two books, which unreel the twisted strands of the cultural pressures of descent (being born into an ethnic community) and consent (attempting to constitute a woman’s identity of one’s own outside the imprisonment of culture), meet at the intersection of ethnic and feminist traditions. In contrast, by placing their poems in a European and African American rhetorical context, Lim and Yamashita demonstrate a conscious decision to forgo the complexities of intersecting Asian American and feminist cultures, choosing instead to position themselves in other cultural contexts in which female sexuality can be assertively represented without the countering repressions of culture-specific patriarchal attitudes. Reading the different representations of woman by these writers, we are reminded of how ethnic and gender identities are continuously negotiated in tension against each other, the very act of naming and re-presenting, that is, of writing, composed of strategies of identity that challenge each other in a dialogical mode within the texts themselves. The challenge of pluralism, of an ideology that seeks to include divergent, even conflicting, cultural components, is acutely articulated in such texts, situated in the intersections of ethnic and feminist identities.

NOTES 1. Johnella E. Butler, NWSAction 2 (Winter 1989); 1, 2. 2. Many women of color scholars have written of what Barbara Christian has called the “conflict of choice and possibility,” caused by divergent ethnic and feminist lines of inquiry. See her article, “But Who Do You Really Belong To (Black Studies or Women’s Studies?)” in Across Cultures: The Spectrum of Women’s Lives, ed. Emily K. Abel and Marjorie L. Pearson (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1989), 18. Patricia Zavella indicts “the early feminist criticisms of the nuclear family” and asserts that for some Chicanas “the white, middle-class focus of American feminism” implied a form of racism (see “The Problematic Relationship of Feminism and Chicana Studies,” in Across Cultures, 26).

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3. Barbara Smith, Introduction, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table–Women of Color Press, 1983), xxv. 4. See Donna Perry, “Procne’s Song: The Task of Feminist Literary Criticism,” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Perry nicely summarizes feminist literary criticism’s political agenda, pointing out that it originates in the critic’s recognition that women, whatever their race or color, experience the world differently from men, that their status outside the dominant white male middle-class culture allows (or even compels) them to critique it. . . . The feminist literary critic is committed to changing the world by challenging patriarchal assumptions, judgments, and values, particularly as they affect women (p. 293). 5. Ellen Messer-Davidow argues that the “subject of feminist literary criticisms appears to be not literature but the feminist study of ideas about sex and gender that people express in literary and critical media”; from that premise, she calls for a position of “perspectivity” which assumes that “we as diverse knowers must insert ourselves and our perspectives into the domain of the study and become, self-reflexively, part of the investigation.” See “The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms,” New Literary History 19 (Autumn 1987): 11, 88. 6. Hazel V. Carby, “Telling Fruit from Roots,” Times Literary Supplement, 29 Dec. 1989–4 Jan. 1990, 1446. 7. For a critique of the problematics of pluralism raised by feminist literary inquiry, see Annette Kolodny, “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” Feminist Studies 6 (Spring 1980): 1–25; reprinted in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 144–67. Although Kolodny acknowledges that pluralism “seems to threaten a kind of chaos for the future of literary inquiry,” she asserts that the task for feminist critics is “to initiate nothing less than a playful pluralism, responsive to the possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods” (p. 161). 8. For discussions of women’s positions in traditional Asian patriarchal social structures, see Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983); Marilyn Blatt Young, ed., Women in China: Studies in Social Change and Feminism (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1973); Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983); Susan Pharr, Political Women in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984); Alice Chai, “Korean Women in Hawaii,” in Women in New Worlds, 1903–1945, ed. Hilah F. Thomas and Rosemary Skinner Keller (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981), 77–87; Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (1972; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1974), esp. the chapter, “When the Sand-Grouse Flies to Heaven,” 170–99; Sylvia A. Chipp and Justin J. Green, eds., Asian Women in Transition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980); Judy Chu, “Southeast Asian Women in Transition” (Paper presented at the Immigration Women Project Conference, Long Beach City College, California, Sept. 1984); Beverley Lindsay, ed., Comparative Perspectives of Third World Women (New York: Praeger, 1980); and Perdita Huston, Third World Women Speak Out: Interview in Six Countries on Change, Development, and Basic Needs (New York: Praeger, 1979). Recent studies of the role of international corporate capital and development in further eroding Asian women’s human rights include Rachel Grossman, “Women’s Place in the Integrated Circuit,” Southeast Asia Chronicle 66 (Jan.–Feb. 1979): 2–17/Pacific Research 9 (July–Oct. 1978): 2–17; and Marlyn, “The Sale of Sexual Labor in the Philippines: Marlyn’s Story,”

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introduced and translated by Brenda Stoltzfus, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 22, no. 4 (1970): 13–19. 9. Sexual dysfunction and misogyny among Chinese immigrants, resulting from long separations from their womenfolk, a social phenomenon created by the various Asian exclusion acts between 1882 and 1943, are documented, for example, in Paul C. P. Siu’s study, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, ed. John Duo Wei Tchen (New York: New York University Press, 1987), esp. 250–71. Sucheta Mazumdar points out that “for immigrant women arrival in America can be liberating. Societal norms of the majority community frequently provide greater personal freedom than permitted in Asian societies” (p. 15). See “General Introduction: A Woman-Centered Perspective on Asian American History,” Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 1–22. Psychological studies have posited that “conflicts between traditional Chinese roles and feminist orientations may exist for many Chinese American females.” See Stanley Sue and James K. Morishima, “Personality, SexRole Conflict, and Ethnic Identity,” in The Mental Health of Asian Americans: Contemporary Issues in Identifying and Treating Mental Problems, ed. Stanley Sue and James K. Morishima (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982), 93–125. 10. The hostility roused in Asian American men at Asian American women who date or marry outside their ethnic community has not yet been documented, but various personal writings testify to this phenomenon. See, for example, Tommy S. Kim’s “Asian Goils Are Easy,” Tealeaves (Fall 1989), 24: “oriental sluts with attitudes/ I’m so, special so unique— no/ boy Chinee/ understand me—no / satisfy need. . . . / A race of Wong-/ wanna-be’s: Suzie/ feeling sick/ ’cause she needs white dick/ to fix an itch/ in her too-tight twat,” and so forth. 11. See Carol Neubauer, “Developing Ties to the Past: Photography and Other Sources of Information on Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men,” MELUS 10, no. 4 (1983): 17–36, for a discussion of how Kingston uses photographs to help develop her strategy of memory in her memoirs. 12. For discussions of Kingston’s postmodernist genre collages, see Linda Ching Sledge, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men: The Family Historian as Epic Poet,” MELUS 7 (198): 3–22; and Marilyn Yalom’s “The Woman Warrior as Postmodern Autobiography,” in Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior,” ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim (New York: Modern Language Association Press, 1991). 13. For examples of historical and archival recoveries, see, for example, Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Him Mark Lai, A History Reclaimed: An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese-Language Materials on the Chinese of America, ed. Russell Leong and Jean Pang Yip (Los Angeles: Resource Development and Publications, Asian American Studies Center, University of California, 1986); Mark Him Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, eds. and trans., Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (San Francisco: HOC DOI, 1980); and Sau-Ling Wong, “Tales of Postwar Chinatown: Short Stories of The Bud, 1947–1948,” Amerasia 14 (1988): 61–79. 14. Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas, eds. Asian-American Authors (1972; rpt., Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1976); David Hsin-Fu Wand, ed., Asian-American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (New York: Washington Square Press, 1974); Frank Chin et al., eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974; rpt., Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983); Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); King-Kok Cheung and Stan Yogi, Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: MLA Press, 1988). Since the essay was written a number of other books have appeared. See Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Sau-ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to

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Extravagance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 15. Ishmael Reed encouraged Frank Chin and Shawn Wong; Chin appeared in Yardbird Reader, no. 2 (1973): 21–46; and Yardbird Reader, no. 3 (1974): vi–x. Chin and Wong guest edited the special Asian American issue of Yardbird Reader, no. 3 (1974). Reed’s invective against African American women writers for the feminist critiques of African American male abuse which he claims is a form of scapegoating that plays to racist sentiments is manifest in his polemical satire, Reckless Eyeballing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). 16. See Aiiieeeee!, 14–15, for a criticism of the stereotype of the demasculinized male in Asian American culture. 17. The Big Aiiieeeee!, ed. Jeffery Paul Chan et al. (New York: Meridan, 1991). 18. See Chin et al., 3, ix, xi. 19. Jack Chen, The Chinese of America (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 3. 20. George White, “A Spicy Market,” Los Angeles Times, 21 Aug. 1991, D2. 21. Chin et al., 35. 22. Kim, 189. 23. Elaine H. Kim, “‘Such Opposite Creatures’: Men and Women in Asian American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 29 (Winter 1990): 69, 71. 24. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New York: Knopf, 1977); Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee!, 1–92. 25. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Mayumi Tsutakawa, eds., The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology (Corvallis, Ore.: Calyx, 1989), 85, 91, 79. 26. Making Waves, 308, 243. 27. Kesaya E. Noda, “Growing Up Asian in America,” in Making Waves, 244. 28. Lim and Tsutakawa, 14. 29. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 30. Sucheta Manzumdar, “General Introduction: A Woman-Centered Perspective on Asian American History,” in Making Waves, 15, 16. 31. Although such a catalog of social phenomena oversimplifies and overgeneralizes Asian women’s status as victims of patriarchy, it does point to a history of unequal power relations in Asian societies. 32. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Bantam, 1974), 8, 9, 12, 6. 33. Ibid., 32, 32. 34. Ibid., 47, 83. 35. Ibid., 83, 84. 36. Ibid., 114, 117. 37. Ibid., 124, 128, 130. 38. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York: Oxford Press, 1986). See Dearborn’s discussion of the ethnic woman’s “compromised authorship,” 17–30. 39. Dearborn elucidates the thematic of the immigrant daughter’s struggle against the Old World patriarch in texts as diverse as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers: “If one’s own father is renounced, indeed, erased, the bastardized immigrant is free to adopt the founding fathers as her own. Moreover, by this act, she adopts an American identity” (p. 88). 40. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (1925; rpt., New York: Persea Books, 1975) 41. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 170, 173. On the disintegration of issei families during the internment, see also Ann Umemoto,

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“Crisis in the Japanese American Family,” Asian Women (Berkeley: Asian Women’s Journal, 1971), 31–34. 42. Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945; rpt., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989). 43. See an expanded discussion of Jade Snow Wong’s authbiography in Shirley Geoklin Lim, “The Tradition of Chinese-American Women’s Life-Stories: Thematics of Race and Gender in Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,” in American Women’s Autobiography, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). 44. Kim Ronyoung, Clay Walls (1984; rpt., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990). 45. Ibid., 17, 30, 28. 46. Ibid., 28. 47. Ibid., 188. 48. Ibid., 271, 275, 298. 49. Mitsuye Yamada, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981), 71–75, 74, 35. 50. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American Womanhood (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1985), 9, 12, 18, 23, 27. 51. Genny Lim, “If Sartre Was a Whore,” Contact/II (Winter/Spring 1986): 28; Karen Tei Yamashita, “Midwifs,” Contact/II (Winter/Spring 1986): 29. 52. For discussions of popular U.S. stereotypes of Asian American women as erotica, see Frank Gibney, “Those Exotic (Erotic) Japanese Women,” Cosmopolitan (May 1975), 166, 180–81; Elaine Louie, “The Myth of the Erotic Exotic,” Bridge 2 (April 1973): 19–20; Kay Carter, “Dragon Lady/Geisha Girl: Hollywood’s Mythical Asian Female,” Neworld 2 (Fall 1975): 37–53. 53. Yamashita, 29. 54. For examples of discussions on l’écriture féminine, see New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), esp. 161–186, which takes up the questions: “In what ways does women’s writing call attention to the fact that the writers are women?” and Isn’t the final goal of writing to articulate the body?” (see Chantal Chawaf, “Linguistic Flesh,” 177) 55. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Re-Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Exoticism,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 7–29.

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As promised, this chapter will pick at the vicissitudes of the native informant as figure in literary representation. I am working here with rather an old-fashioned binary opposition between philosophy and literature; that the first concatenates arguments and the second figures the impossible. For both the native informant seems unavoidable. Let us hold on to this opposition, if only as a différance, one pushing at the other so that our discourse may live. I wrote in the last chapter that when the Woman is put outside of Philosophy by the Master Subject, she is argued into that dismissal, not foreclosed as a casual rhetorical gesture; and that the ruses against the racial other are different. Such textual tendencies are the condition and effect of received ideas. Resistance and the object of resistance often find their best articulation in such available tendencies as a picking field for interpellations given and taken. I can grasp the fierce energies of nineteenth-century bourgeois feminism in Northwestern Europe, whose inheritors we, as women publishing within the international book trade, at least partially are, as having been interpellated as resistance within that picking field. Such narratives are “true” because they mobilize. As in all instituting, however unsystematic, the subject of feminism is produced by the performative of a declaration of independence, which must necessarily state itself as already given, in a constative statement of women’s identity and/or solidarity, natural, historical, social, psychological. When such solidarity is in the triumphalist mode it must want “to celebrate the female rather than deconstruct the male.”1 But what female is the subject of such a celebration, such a declaration of independence? If it entails an unacknowledged complicity with the very males we refuse to deconstruct, a persistent critique may be in order.2 It is a truism to say that the law is constituted by its own transgression; that trivial intimacy is the relationship between nineteenth-century feminism and the axiomatics of imperialism. Reading women writing, men celebrating the female, men and women critiquing imperialism in the substance and rhetoric of their text, I seem to have done little more than reiterate a well-known narrative: Northwestern European male philosophers foreclosed the “native informant” in order to establish the Northwestern European subject as “the same,” whether from above or from below. Women publishing are not-quite-not-native informants, even for feminist

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scholars. When publishing women are from the dominant “culture,” they sometimes share, with male authors, the tendency to create an inchoate “other” (often female), who is not even a native informant but a piece of material evidence once again establishing the Northwestern European subject as “the same.” Such textual tendencies are the condition and effect of received ideas. Yet, against all straws in the wind, one must write in the hope that it is not a deal done forever, that it is possible to resist from within. In order to resist, we must remind ourselves that it should not be possible, in principle, to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. When I first wrote these words, these two obvious “facts” were certainly disregarded in the reading of nineteenth- century British literature. By contrast today, a section of so-called postcolonialist feminism insists upon these facts with a certain narcissism. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms. Again at the time of the first writing of this chapter, some of us had hoped that, if these “facts” were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but also in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the “worlding” of what could once be called “the Third World,” and now increasingly, taking the second World into uneven account, is called “the South.” In the event, the current conjuncture produces a “culturalist” dominant that seems altogether bent to foster the consideration of the old Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English/French/German/Dutch translation; delivering the emergence of a “South” that provides proof of transnational cultural exchange. It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism. An isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm. It is supported and operated by an information-retrieval approach to “Third World” (the term is increasingly, and insultingly, “emergent”) literature, which often employs a deliberately “non-theoretical” methodology with self-conscious rectitude. I have written at length on this phenomenon in the post-Soviet world. In this chapter I examine its prefiguration in the literature of the nineteenth century. I consider two twentieth-century texts that undertake to alter the case, to refigure earlier texts with critical intimacy. There is an asymmetrical glimpse of a postcolonial writer who is exorbitant to this itinerary. First a most celebrated text of feminism: Jane Eyre.3 Let us plot the novel’s reach and grasp, and locate its structural motors. Let us then read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre’s reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis—even a deconstruction—of a “worlding” such as Jane Eyre’s.4 Rhys and Shelley critique the axiomatics of imperialism in substance and rhetoric. Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha” displaces those axiomaties into postcolonial discourse.

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I need hardly mention that the object of my investigation is the printed book, not its “author.” To make such a distinction is, of course, to ignore the lessons of deconstruction. As I have indicated in the previous chapter, one kind of deconstructive critical approach would loosen the binding of the book, undo the opposition between verbal text and the bio-graphy of the named subject “Charlotte Brontë,” and see the two as each other’s “scene of writing.” In such a reading, the life that writes itself as “my life” is as much a production in psychosocial space (other names can be found) as the book that is written by the holder of the named life—a book that is then consigned to what is most often recognized as genuinely “social”: the world of publication and distribution.5 To touch Brontë’s “life” in such a way, however, would be too risky here.6 We must rather take shelter in a more conservative approach which, not wishing to lose the important advantages won by U.S. feminism, will continue to honor the suspect binary oppositions—book and author, individual and history—and start with an assurance of the following sort: my readings here do not seek to undermine the excellence of the individual artist. If even minimally successful, the readings will incite a degree of rage against the imperialist narrativization of history, precisely because it produces so abject a script for a female we would rather celebrate. I provide these assurances to allow myself some room to situate feminist individualism in its historical determination rather than simply to canonize it as feminism as such. Sympathetic U.S. feminists have remarked that I do not do justice to Jane Eyre’s subjectivity. A word of explanation is perhaps in order. The broad strokes of my presuppositions are that what is at stake, for feminist individualism in the age of imperialism, is precisely the making of human beings, the constitution and “interpellation” of the subject not only as individual but also as “individualist.”7 This stake is represented on two registers: childrearing and soul-making. The first is domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction cathected as “companionate love”; the second is the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission. As the female individualist, not-quite-not-male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what is at stake, the “native subaltern female” (within discourse, as a signifier) is excluded from any share in this emerging norm.8 If we read this account from an isolationist perspective in a “metropolitan” context, we see nothing there but the psychobiography of the militant female subject. In a reading such as mine, by contrast, the effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the “subject-constitution” of the female individualist. To develop further the notion that my stance need not be an accusing one, I will refer to a passage from Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s “Caliban,” although, as I hope will be clear by the end of this book, I myself do not think that the postcolonial should take Caliban as an inescapable model.9 José Enriqué Rodó had argued in 1900 that the model for the Latin American intellectual in relationship to Europe could be Shakespeare’s Ariel.10 In 1971 Retamar, denying the possibility of an identifiable “Latin American Culture,” recast the model as Caliban. Not surprisingly, this powerful exchange still excludes any specific consideration of the civilizations of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Incas, or the smaller nations of what is now called Latin America.11 Let us note carefully that, at this stage of my argument, this “conversation” between Europe and Latin America (without a specific consideration of the political economy of the “worlding” of the “native”) provides a sufficient thematic description of our attempt to confront the ethnocentric and

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reverse-ethnocentric benevolent double bind (that is, considering the “native” as object for enthusiastic information-retrieval and thus denying its own “worlding”) that I sketched in my opening paragraphs. In a moving passage in “Caliban,” Retamar locates both Caliban and Ariel in the intellectual in neo-colonialism: There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity: both are slaves in the hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of the air, although also a child of the isle, is the intellectual. The deformed Caliban—enslaved, robbed of his island, and taught the language by Prospero—rebukes him thus: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” (C 28)

As we attempt to unlearn our so-called privilege as Ariel and “seek from [a certain] Caliban the honor of a place in his rebellious and glorious ranks,” we do not ask that our students and colleagues should emulate us but that they should attend to us (C 72). If, however, we are driven by a nostalgia for lost origins, we too run the risk of effacing the “native” and stepping forth as “the real Caliban,” of forgetting that he is a name in a play, an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text.12 The stagings of Caliban work alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be Caliban legitimizes the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in an article on history and women’s history, shows us how to define the historical moment of feminism in the West in terms of female access to individualism.13 The battle for female individualism plays itself out within the larger theater of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of “the creative imagination.” FoxGenovese’s presupposition will guide us into the beautifully orchestrated opening of Jane Eyre. It is a scene of the marginalization and privatization of the protagonist: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. . . . Out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it” (JE 9). The movement continues as Jane breaks the rules of the appropriate topography of withdrawal. The family at the center withdraws into the sanctioned architectural space of the withdrawing room or drawing room; Jane inserts herself—“I slipped in”—into the margin—“A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing room” (JE 9; emphasis mine). The manipulation of the domestic inscription of space within the upwardly mobilizing currents of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in England and France is well known. It seems fitting that the place to which Jane withdraws is not only not the withdrawing room but also not the dining room, the sanctioned place of family meals. Nor is it the library, the appropriate place for reading. The breakfast room “contained a book-case” (JE 9). As Rudolph Ackerman wrote in his Repository (1823), one of the many manuals of taste in circulation in nineteenth-century England, these low bookcases and stands were designed to “contain all the books that may be desired for a sitting-room without reference to the library.”14 Even in this already triply off-center place, “having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly closed, I [Jane] was shrined in double retirement” (JE 9–10). Here in Jane’s self-marginalized uniqueness, the reader becomes her accom-

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plice: the reader and Jane are united—both are reading. Yet Jane still preserves her odd privilege, for she continues never quite doing the proper thing in its proper place. She cares little for reading what is meant to be read: the “letterpress.” She reads the pictures. The power of this singular hermeneutics is precisely that it can make the outside inside. “At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.” Under the clear panes of glass, the rain no longer penetrates, “the drear November day” is rather a one-dimensional “aspect” to be “studied,” not decoded like the “letterpress” but, like pictures, deciphered by the unique creative imagination of the marginal individualist (JE 10). Before following the track of this unique imagination, let us consider the suggestion that the progress of Jane Eyre can be charted through a sequential arrangement of the family/counter-family dyad. In the novel, we encounter, first, the Reeds as the legal family and Jane, the late Mr. Reed’s sister’s daughter, as the representative of a near incestuous counter-family; second, the Brocklehursts, who run the school to which Jane is sent, as the legal family and Jane, Miss Temple, and Helen Burns as a counter-family that falls short because it is only a community of women; third, Rochester and the mad Mrs. Rochester as the legal family and Jane and Rochester as the illicit counter-family. Other items may be added to the thematic chain in this sequence: Rochester and Celine Varens as structurally functional counter-family; Rochester and Blanche Ingram as dissimulation of legality—and so on. It is during this sequence that Jane is moved from the counter-family to the family-in-law. In the next sequence, it is Jane who restores full family status to the as-yet-incomplete community of siblings, the Riverses. The final sequence of the book is a community of families, with Jane, Rochester, and their children at the center. In terms of the narrative energy of the novel, how is Jane moved from the place of the counter-family to the family-in-law? It is the active pouvoir-savoir or making-sense-ability of imperialism that provides the discursive field.15 (My working definition of “discursive field” must assume the existence of discrete “systems of signs” at hand in the socius, each related to a specific axiomatics. I have explained in detail elsewhere in what way such a definition would be at a greater level of social instantiation than the ground-level sub-individual or pre-antic “murmur” or network of pouvoir [to be able to] and savoir [to know] reduced to force and utterance as theorized by Foucault. I am identifying these systems as discursive fields. “Imperialism as social mission” generates the possibility of one such axiomatics. I hope to demonstrate through the following example how the individual artist taps the discursive field at hand with a sure touch, if not with transhistoricaI clairvoyance, in order to make the narrative structure move. It is crucial that we extend our analysis of this example beyond the minimal diagnosis of “racism.”)16 Let us consider the figure of Bertha Mason, a figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism. Through Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole, Brontë renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate, so that a good greater than the letter of the Law can be broached. Here is the famous passage, in the voice of Jane: “In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not . . . tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled

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like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face” (JE 295). In a matching passage, given in the voice of Rochester speaking to Jane, Brontë presents the imperative for a shift beyond the Law: propelled as if by divine injunction rather than human motive. In the terms of my argument in this chapter, we might say that this is the register not of mere marriage or sexual reproduction but of Europe and its not-yet-human Other, of soul-making. The field of imperial conquest is here inscribed as Hell: “One night I had been awakened by her yells . . . it was a fiery West Indian night. . . . “‘This life,’ said I at last, ‘is hell!—this is the air—those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can. . . . Let me break away, and go home to God!’ . . . “A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure. . . . It was true Wisdom that consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path. . . . “The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty. . . . “‘Go,’ said Hope, ‘and live again in Europe. . . . You have done all that God and Humanity require of you.’“ (JE 310–311; emphasis mine)

It is the unquestioned pouvoir-savoir of imperialist axiomatics, then, that conditions Jane’s move from the counter-family set to the set of the family-in-law. Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton have seen this only in terms of the ambiguous class position of the governess.17 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, on the other hand, have seen Bertha Mason only in psychological terms, as Jane’s dark double.18 I will not enter the critical debates that offer themselves here. I will simply develop the suggestion that nineteenth-century feminist individualism could conceive of a “greater” project than access to the closed circle of the nuclear family. This is the project of soul making beyond “mere” sexual reproduction. Here the native “subject” is not almost an animal but rather the object of what might be termed violation, in the name of the categorical imperative.19 I am using “Kant” in this essay as a metonym for that most flexible ethical moment in the European eighteenth century that I have read in the previous chapter. Kant words the categorical imperative, conceived as the universal moral law given in pure reason and “prescribe[d by practical reason] to practical thought (to empirical will) [as] . . . actualize me,” in the following way: “Everything in creation which he [man] wishes and over which he has power can be used merely as a means; only man, and, it with him, every rational creature, is an end in itself.”20 It is thus a moving displacement of Christian ethics from religion to philosophy.21 As Kant writes: “The possibility of such a command as, ‘Love God above all and thy neighbor as thyself,’ resonates well [stimmt zusammen] with this. For, as a command, it requires attention [Achtung] to a law which orders love and does not leave it to arbitrary choice to make love the principle.” The “categorical” in Kant cannot be adequately represented in determinately grounded action. Indeed, it is Jean-Luc Nancy’s central argument in l’impératif

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catégorique that the categorical imperative is the mark of alterity (love does not depend on the freedom of choice, as the text quoted would imply) in the ethical. The dangerous transformative power of philosophy, however, is that its formal subtlety can be travestied in the service of the state. Such a travesty in the case of the categorical imperative can justify the imperialist project by producing the following formula: make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in himself; in the interest of admitting the raw man into the noumenon; yesterday’s imperialism, today’s “Development.”22 This project is presented as a sort of tangent in Jane Eyre, a tangent that escapes the closed circle of the narrative conclusion. This tangent is the story of St. John Rivers, who is granted the important task of concluding the text. At the novel’s end, the allegorical language of Christian psychobiography— rather than the textually constituted and seemingly private grammar of the creative imagination that I noted in the novel’s opening—marks the inaccessibility of the imperialist project as such to the nascent “feminist” scenario. The concluding passage of Jane Eyre places St. John Rivers within the fold of Pilgrim’s Progress. Eagleton pays no attention to this but accepts the novel’s ideological lexicon, which establishes St. John Rivers’s heroism by equating a life in Calcutta with an unquestioning choice of death. Gilbert and Gubar, by calling Jane Eyre “Plain Jane’s Progress,” see the novel as simply replacing the male protagonist with the female. They do not notice the distance between sexual reproduction and soul making, both actualized by the unquestioned idiom of imperialist presuppositions evident in the last part of Jane Eyre: “Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth [St. John Rivers] labours for his race. . . . His is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. . . . His is the ambition of the high master-spirit[s] . . . who stand without fault before the throne of God; who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb; who are called, and chosen, and faithful” (JE 455). Earlier in the novel, St. John Rivers himself justifies the project: “My vocation? My great work? . . . My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race—of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance—of substituting peace for war—freedom for bondage—religion for superstition—the hope of heaven for the fear of hell?” (JE 376). Imperialism . . . and its territorial and subject-constituting project attempt a violent deconstruction of the oppositions insisted upon in this passage. When Jean Rhys, born on the Caribbean island of Dominica, read Jane Eyre as a child, she was moved by Bertha Mason: “I thought I’d try to write her a life.”23 Wide Sargasso Sea, the slim novel published in 1965, at the end of Rhys’s long career, is that “life.” I have suggested that Bertha’s function in Jane Eyre is to render “indeterminate the boundary between human and animal and thereby to weaken her entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the Law.” When Rhys rewrites the scene in Jane Eyre where Jane hears “a snarling, snatching sound, almost like a dog quarrelling” and then encounters a bleeding Richard Mason (JE 210), she keeps Bertha’s humanity intact. Grace Poole, another character originally in Jane Eyre, describes the incident to Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea: “So you don’t remember that you attacked this gentleman with a knife? . . . I didn’t hear all he said except

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‘I cannot interfere legally between yourself and your husband.’ It was when he said ‘legally’ that you flew at him” (WSS 150). In Rhys’s retelling, it is the duplicity in Richard that Bertha picks out in the word “legally”—not a mere bestiality in herself—that prompts her violent reaction. In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as a personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism. Antoinette, as a white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in Jamaica, is caught between the English imperialist and the black native. In recounting Antoinette’s development, Rhys reinscribes some thematics of Narcissus. There are, noticeably, many images of mirroring in the text. I will quote one from the first section. In this passage, Tia is the little black servant girl who is Antoinette’s closest companion: “We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. . . . When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. . . . We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass” (WSS 38). A progressive sequence of dreams reinforces the mirror imagery. In its second occurrence, the dream is partially set in a hortus conclusus, an “enclosed garden”— Rhys uses the phrase (WSS 50)—a Romance rewriting of the Narcissus topos as the place of encounter with Love.24 In the enclosed garden, Antoinette encounters not Love but a strange threatening voice that says merely “in here,” inviting her into a prison that masquerades as the legalization of love (WSS 50). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Narcissus’s madness is disclosed when he recognizes his other as his self: “Iste ego sum.”25 Rhys makes Antoinette see herself as her other, Brontë’s Bertha. In the last section of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette acts out Jane Eyre’s conclusion and recognizes herself as the so-called ghost in Thornfield Hall: “I went into the hall again with the tall candle in my hand. It was then that I saw her—the ghost. The woman with the streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her” (WSS 154). The gilt frame encloses a mirror: as Narcissus’s pool reflects the selfed other, so this “pool” reflects the othered self. Here the dream sequence ends, with an invocation of none other than Tia, the other that could not be selfed, because the fracture of imperialism rather than the Ovidian pool intervened. (I will return to this difficult point.) “That was the third time I had my dream, and it ended. . . . I called ‘Tia’ and jumped and woke” (WSS 155). It is now, at the very end of the book, that Antoinette/Bertha can say: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do” (WSS 155– 156). We can read this as her having been brought into the England of Brontë’s novel: “This cardboard house”—a book between cardboard covers—“where I walk at night is not England” (WSS 148). In this fictive England, she must play out her role, act out the transformation of her “self” into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction. I must read this as an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer.26 Rhys sees to it that the woman from the colonies is not sacrificed as an insane animal for her sister’s consolidation. Critics have remarked that the Wide Sargasso Sea treats Rochester with under-

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standing and sympathy.27 Indeed, he narrates the entire middle section of the book. Rhys makes it clear that he is a victim of the patriarchal inheritance law of entailment rather than of a father’s natural preference for the firstborn: in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester’s situation is clearly that of a younger son dispatched to the colonies to buy an heiress. If in the case of Antoinette and her identity, Rhys utilizes the thematics of Narcissus, in the case of Rochester and his patrimony, she touches on the thematics of Oedipus. (In this she has her finger on our “historical moment.” If, in the nineteenth century, subject-constitution is represented as childbearing and soul making, in the twentieth century psychoanalysis allows Northwestern Europe to plot the itinerary of the subject from Narcissus [the “imaginary”] to Oedipus [the “symbolic”].28 This subject, however, is the normative male subject. In Rhys’s reinscription of these themes, divided between the female and the male protagonist, feminism and a critique of imperialism come together.) In place of the “wind from Europe” scene, Rhys writes in the scenario of a suppressed letter to a father, a letter that would be the “correct” explanation of the tragedy of the book.29 “I thought about the letter which should have been written to England a week ago. Dear Father . . .” (WSS 57). This is the first instance: the letter not written. Shortly afterward: Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition. No provision made for her (that must be seen to). . . . I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love. No begging letters, no mean requests. None of the furtive shabby manoeuvres of a younger son. I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. And yet . . . (WSS 59)

This is the second instance: the letter not sent. The formal letter is uninteresting; I will quote only a part of it: Dear Father, we have arrived from Jamaica after an uncomfortable few days. This little estate in the Windward Islands is part of the family property and Antoinette is much attached to it. . . . All is well and has gone according to your plans and wishes. I dealt of course with Richard Mason. . . . He seemed to become attached to me and trusted me completely. This place is very beautiful but my illness has left me too exhausted to appreciate it fully. I will write again in a few days’ time. (WSS 63)

And so on. Rhys’s version of the Oedipal exchange is ironic, not a closed circle. We cannot know if the letter actually reaches its destination. “I wondered how they got their letters posted,” Rochester muses. “I folded mine and put it into a drawer of the desk. . . . There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up” (WSS 64). It is as if the text presses us to note the analogy between letter and mind. Rhys denies to Brontë’s Rochester the one thing that is supposed to be secured in the Oedipal relay: the Name of the Father, or the patronymic. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the character corresponding to Rochester has no name. His writing of the final version of the letter to his father is supervised, in the strictest possible sense,

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by an image of the loss of the patronymic: “There was a crude bookshelf made of three shingles strung together over the desk and I looked at the books, Byron’s poems, novels by Sir Walter Scott, Confessions of an Opium Eater. . . . and on the last shelf, Life and Letters of . . . The rest was eaten away” (WSS 63; emphasis mine). It is one of the strengths of Wide Sargasso Sea that it can mark, with uncanny clarity, the limits of its own discourse; in Christophine, Antoinette’s black nurse. We may perhaps surmise the distance between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by remarking that Christophine’s unfinished story is the tangent to the latter narrative, as St. John Rivers’s story is to the former. Christophine is not a native of Jamaica; she is from Martinique. Taxonomically, she belongs to the category of the good servant rather than that of the pure native. But within these borders, Rhys creates a powerfully suggestive figure. Christophine is the first interpreter and named speaking subject in the text. “The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said” (WSS 18). Although she is a commodified person (“‘she was your father’s wedding present to me,’ explains Antoinette’s mother, ‘one of his presents’” [WSS 18]), Rhys assigns her some crucial functions in the text. It is Christophine who judges that black ritual practices are culture specific and cannot be used by whites as cheap remedies for social evils such as Rochester’s lack of love for Antoinette. Most important, it is Christophine alone whom Rhys allows to offer a hard analysis of Rochester’s actions, to challenge him in a face-to-face encounter. The entire extended passage is worthy of comment. I quote a brief extract: She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth now. She don’t come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she don’t come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No, it’s you come all the long way to her house—it’s you beg her to marry. And she love you and she give you all she have. Now you say you don’t love her and you break up. What you do with her money, eh? [And then Rochester, the white man, comments silently to himself:] Her voice was still quiet but with a hiss in it when she said “money.” (WSS 130)

Rhys does not, however, romanticize individual heroics on the part of the oppressed. When the Man refers to the forces of Law and Order, Christophine recognizes their power. This exposure of civil inequality is emphasized by the fact that, just before the Man’s successful threat, Christophine had invoked the emancipation of slaves in Jamaica by proclaiming: “No chain gang, no tread machine, no dark jail either. This is free country and I am free woman” (WSS 131). As I mentioned above, Christophine is tangential to this narrative. Rhys’s text will not attempt to contain her in a novel that rewrites a canonical English book within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native. No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been an incommensurable and discontinuous other into a domesticated other that consolidates the imperialist self. (I will continue to emphasize this point in the book.) The Caliban of Retamar, caught between Europe and Latin America, reflects this predicament. We can read Rhys’s inscription of Narcissus as a thematization of the same problematic.

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Of course, we cannot know Jean Rhys’s feelings about the matter. We can, however, look at the scene of Christophine’s inscription in the text. Immediately after the exchange between her and the Man, well before the conclusion, she is quietly placed out of the story, with neither narrative nor characterological justification: “‘Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know.’ She walked away without looking back” (WSS, p. 133). A proud message of textual—“read and write”—abdication. In my estimation, the staging of the abdication is a singular strength, not a weakness, of Wide Sargasso Sea.30 Indeed, if Rhys rewrites the madwoman’s attack on the Man by underlining the abuse of “legality,” she still cannot deal with the passage that corresponds to St. John Rivers’s own justification of his martyrdom, for those justifications have been displaced into the current idiom of modernization and development. Attempts to construct the “Third World Woman” as a signifier remind us that the hegemonic definition of literature is itself caught within the history of imperialism. A full literary reinscription cannot easily flourish in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system operating as Law as such, an alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of human sciences busy establishing the “native” as a self-consolidating other. In the Indian case at least, it would be difficult to find an ideological clue to the planned epistemic violence of imperialism merely by rearranging curricula or syllabi within existing norms of literary pedagogy. For a later period of imperialism—when the constituted colonial subject has firmly taken hold— straightforward experiments of comparison can be undertaken, say, between the functionally witless India of Mrs. Dalloway, on the one hand, and literary and cultural production in India in the 1920s, on the other. But the first half of the nineteenth century resists questioning through literary history or criticism in the narrow sense as defined by the axiomatics for (and against) colonial disciplinary production because both are implicated in the project of producing Ariel. To reopen the fracture without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins, the literary critic must turn to the archives of imperial governance.31 Mary Lou Emery (see note 30) makes a case that Jean Rhys uses specifically Caribbean stylistic strategies that enrich the reading of the book. I find most persuasive her explication of such details as “being marooned.” Her bolder suggestion—that the textual practices of Wide Sargasso Sea borrow from and enact the technique of the obeah—complicates my conviction that the other cannot be fully selfed. I can only see this as a mark of the limits of the desire to self the other, a desire that is reflected in Rhys’s own poem “Obeah Night,” the last two lines of which are a subscript: “Edward Rochester or Raworth / Written in Spring 1842.”32 As in the case of Friday in Foe, a novel I read later in this chapter, I must see the staging of the departure of Christophine as a move to guard the margin. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein emerges out of a different conjuncture of British class history. A text of nascent feminism, it remains cryptic, I think, simply because it does not speak the language of feminist individualism that we have come to hail as the language of high feminism within English literature. Barbara Johnson’s brief study tries to rescue this recalcitrant text for the service of feminist autobiography.33 Alternatively, George Levine reads Frankenstein in the context of the creative imagination and the nature of the hero. He sees the novel as a book

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about its own writing and about writing itself, a Romantic allegory of reading within which Jane Eyre as unself-conscious critic would fit quite nicely.34 I propose to take Frankenstein out of this arena and focus on it in terms of that sense of English cultural identity that I invoked at the opening of this essay. Within that focus we are obliged to admit that, although Frankenstein is ostensibly about the origin and evolution of man in society, it does not deploy the axiomatics of imperialism for crucial textual functions. Let me say at once that there is plenty of incidental imperialist sentiment in Frankenstein. My point, within the argument of this essay, is that the discursive field of imperialism does not produce unquestioned ideological correlatives for the narrative structuring of the book. The discourse of imperialism surfaces in a curiously powerful way in Shelley’s novel, and I will later discuss the moment at which it emerges. Frankenstein, however, is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction (family and female) and social subject-production (race and male). That binary opposition is undone in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory—an artificial womb where both projects are undertaken simultaneously, though the terms are never openly spelled out. Frankenstein’s apparent antagonist is God himself as Maker of Man, but his real competitor is also woman as the maker of children. It is not just that his dream of the death of mother and bride and the actual death of his bride are associated with the visit of his monstrous homoerotic “corpse,” unnatural because bereft of a determinable childhood: “No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing” (F 115). It is Frankenstein’s own ambiguous and miscued understanding of the real motive for the monster’s vengefulness that reveals his competition with woman as maker: “I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature” (F 206). It is impossible not to notice the accents of transgression inflecting Frankenstein’s demolition of his experiment to create the future Eve. Even in the laboratory, the woman-in-the-making is not a bodied corpse but “a human being.” The (il)logic of the metaphor bestows on her a prior existence that Frankenstein aborts, rather than an anterior death that he reembodies: “The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being” (F 163). In Shelley’s view, man’s hubris as soul maker both usurps the place of God and attempts—vainly—to sublate woman’s physiological prerogative.35 Indeed, indulging a Freudian fantasy here, I could urge that, if to give and withhold to/ from the mother a phallus is the male fetish, then to give and withhold to/from the man a womb might be the female fetish in an impossible world of psychoanalytic equilibrium.36 The icon of the sublimated womb in man is surely his productive brain, the box in the head. In the judgment of classical psychoanalysis, the phallic mother exists only by virtue of the castration-anxious son; in Frankenstein’s judgment, the hysteric

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father (Victor Frankenstein gifted with his laboratory—the womb of theoretical reason) cannot produce a daughter. Here the language of racism—the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission—combines with the hysteria of masculism into the idiom of (the withdrawal of) sexual reproduction rather than subject-constitution; and is judged by the text. The roles of masculine and feminine individualists are hence reversed and displaced. Frankenstein cannot produce a “daughter” because “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate . . . [and because] one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (F 158). This particular narrative strand also launches a thoroughgoing critique of the eighteenth-century European discourses on the origin of society through (Western Christian) man. Should it be mentioned that, much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, Frankenstein declares himself to be “by birth a Genevese” (F 31)? In this overtly didactic text, Shelley’s point is that social planning should not be based on pure, theoretical, or natural-scientific reason alone, which is her implicit critique of the utilitarian vision of an engineered society. To this end, she presents in the first part of her deliberately schematic story three characters, childhood friends, who seem to represent Kant’s three-part conception of the human subject: Victor Frankenstein, the forces of theoretical reason or “natural philosophy”; Henry Clerval, the forces of practical reason or “the moral relation of things”; and Elizabeth Lavenza, that aesthetic judgment—“the aerial creation of the poets”—which, according to Kant, is “a suitable mediating link connecting the realm of the concept of nature and that of the concept of freedom . . . (which) promotes . . . moral feeling” (F 37, 36; CJ 39). (In Chapter 1, I have tried to show that, in the unplanned place of the sublime in the planned section reserved for the aesthetic—as structurally withdrawn as Jane Eyre’s curtained retreat—it is the foreclosure of the native informant that permits Kant’s text to bridge nature and freedom. I will here try to show that Mary Shelley’s text attempts to foreground a version of the native informant in the Monster. In my estimation, then, it may be argued that Shelley’s text is in an aporetic relationship with the narrative support of philosophical resources it must use [do I resonate with Frankenstein because my relationship with deconstruction may be similar?]; to ask the Monster’s questions toward Kant’s solution of the antinomy would be to destroy the permissible narrative that allows the system to stand.37 And indeed, the system does not stand, also because, as in Kant, the male subject seeks to operate it alone.) The three-part subject does not operate harmoniously. That Henry Clerval, associated as he is with practical reason, should have as his “design . . . to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade” is proof of this, as well as part of the incidental imperialist sentiment that I speak of above (F 151–152). It should be pointed out that the language here is entrepreneurial rather than missionary: “He came to the

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university with the design of making himself complete master of the Oriental languages, as thus he should open a field for the plan of life he had marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his eyes towards the East as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise. The Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages engaged his attention” (F 66–67). But it is of course Victor Frankenstein, with his strange itinerary of obsession with natural philosophy, who offers the strongest demonstration that the multiple perspectives of the three-part Kantian subject cannot co-operate harmoniously if woman and native informant are allowed into the enclosure. Frankenstein creates a putative human subject out of natural philosophy alone. According to his own miscued summation: “In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature” (F 206). It is not at all farfetched to say that Kant’s categorical imperative can most easily be mistaken for the hypothetical imperative—a command to ground in cognitive comprehension what can be apprehended only by moral will—by putting natural philosophy in the place of practical reason. I should hasten to add here that just as readings such as this one do not necessarily accuse Charlotte Brontë the named individual of harboring imperialist sentiments, so also they do not necessarily commend Mary Shelley the named individual for writing a successful Kantian allegory. The most I can say is that it is possible to read these texts, within the frame of imperialism and the Kantian ethical moment, in a politically useful way. Such an approach must naively presuppose that a “disinterested” reading attempts to render transparent the interests of the hegemonic readership. (Other “political” readings—for instance, that the monster is the nascent working class—can also be advanced.) Frankenstein is built in the established epistolary tradition of multiple frames. At the heart of the multiple frames, the narrative of the monster (as reported by Frankenstein to Robert Walton, who then recounts it in a letter to his sister) is of his almost learning, clandestinely, to be human. It is invariably noticed that the monster reads Paradise Lost as true history. What is not so often noticed is that he also reads Plutarch’s Lives, “the histories of the first founders of the ancient republics,” which he compares to the “patriarchal lives of my protectors” (F 123, 124). And his education comes through “Volney’s Ruins of Empires,” which purported to be a prefiguration of the French Revolution, published after the event and after the author had rounded off his theory with practice (F 113). Volney’s book is an attempt at an enlightened universal secular, rather than a Eurocentric Christian, history, written from the perspective of a narrator “from below.”38 This Caliban’s education in (universal secular) humanity takes place through the monster’s eavesdropping on the instruction of an Ariel—Safie, the Christianized “Arabian” to whom “a residence in Turkey was abhorrent” (F 121). In depicting Safie, Shelley uses some commonplaces of eighteenth-century liberalism that are shared by many today: Safie’s Muslim father was a victim of (bad) Christian religious prejudice and yet was himself a wily and ungrateful man not as morally refined as her (good) Christian mother. Having tasted the emancipation of woman, Safie could not go home. The confusion between “Turk” and “Arab” also has its counterpart today. Although we are a far cry here from the unexamined and covert axiomatics of imperialism in Jane Eyre, we will gain nothing by celebrating the time-bound pieties that Shelley, the daughter of two anti-evangelicals, produces. It is more

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interesting for us that Shelley differentiates the Other, works at the Caliban/Ariel distinction, and cannot make the monster identical with the proper recipient of these lessons. To me, the scrupulous distancing is a mark of the book’s political importance. Although he had “heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the helpless fate of its original inhabitants,” Safie cannot reciprocate his attachment. When she first catches sight of him, “Safie, unable to attend to her friend [Agatha], rushed out of the cottage” (F 114 [emphasis mine], 129). In the taxonomy of characters, the Muslim-Christian Safie belongs with Rhys’s Antoinette/Bertha. And indeed, like Christophine the good servant, the subject created by the fiat of natural philosophy is the tangential unresolved moment in Frankenstein. The simple suggestion that the monster is human inside but monstrous outside and only provoked into vengefulness is clearly not enough to bear the burden of so great a historical dilemma. At one moment, in fact, Shelley’s Frankenstein does try to tame the monster, to humanize him by bringing him within the circuit of the Law. He “repair[s] to a criminal judge in the town and . . . relate[s his] history briefly but with firmness”—the first and disinterested version of the narrative of Frankenstein—“marking the dates with accuracy and never deviating into invective or exclamation. . . . When I had concluded my narration I said, ‘This is the being whom I accuse and for whose seizure and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power. It is your duty as a magistrate’” (F 189,190). The sheer social reasonableness of the mundane voice of Shelley’s “Genevan magistrate” reminds us that the radically other cannot be selfed, that the monster has “properties” that will not be contained by “proper” measures: “I will exert myself,” he says, “and if it is in my power to seize the monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his crimes. But I fear, from what you have yourself described to be his properties, that this will prove impracticable; and thus, while every proper measure is pursued, you should make up your mind to disappointment” (F 190). In the end, as is obvious to most readers, distinctions of human individuality seem to fall away from the novel. Monster, Frankenstein, and Walton seem to become each other’s relays. Frankenstein’s story comes to an end in death; Walton concludes his own story within the frame of his function as letter writer. In the narrative conclusion, he is the natural philosopher who learns from Frankenstein’s example. At the end of the text, the monster, having confessed his guilt toward his maker and ostensibly intending to immolate himself, is borne away on an ice raft. We do not see the conflagration of his funeral pile—the self-immolation is not consummated in the text: he too cannot be contained by the text. And to stage that non-containment is, I insist, one of Frankenstein’s strengths. In terms of narrative logic, he is “lost in darkness and distance” (F 211)—these are the last words of the novel—into an existential temporality that is coherent with neither the territorializing individual imagination (as in the opening of Jane Eyre) nor the authoritative scenario of Christian psychobiography (as at the end of Brontë’s work). The very relationship between sexual reproduction and social subjectproduction—the dynamic nineteenth-century topos of feminism-in-imperialism—remains problematic within the limits of Shelley’s text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength.

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Earlier, I offered a reading of woman as womb holder in Frankenstein. I would now suggest that there is a framing woman in the book who is neither tangential, nor encircled, nor yet encircling. “Mrs. Saville,” “excellent Margaret,” “beloved Sister” are her address and kinship inscription (F 15, 17, 22). She is the occasion, though not the protagonist, of the novel. She is the feminine subject rather than the female individualist: she is the irreducible recipient-function of the letters that make up Frankenstein. I have commented on the singular appropriative hermeneutics of the reader reading with Jane in the opening pages of Jane Eyre. Here the reader must read with Margaret Saville in the crucial sense that she must intercept the recipient-function, read the letters as recipient, in order for the novel to exist.39 Margaret Saville does not respond to close the text as a frame. The frame is thus simultaneously not a frame, and the monster can step “beyond the text” and be “lost in darkness.” Within the allegory of our reading, the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text. It is satisfying for a postcolonial reader to consider this a noble resolution for a nineteenth-century English novel. Shelley herself abundantly “identifies” with Victor Frankenstein.40 Shelley’s emancipatory vision cannot extend beyond the specular situation of the colonial enterprise, where the master alone has a history, master and subject locked up in the cracked mirror of the present, and the subject’s future, although indefinite, is vectored specifically toward and away from the master. Within this restricted vision, Shelley gives to the monster the right to refuse the withholding of the master’s returned gaze—to refuse an apartheid of speculation, as it were: ‘‘‘I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. . . . How can I move thee?’ . . . [He] placed his hated hands before my [Frankenstein’s] eyes, which I flung from me with violence; ‘thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me’” (F, 95, 96). His request, not granted, is, as we have seen, for a gendered future, for the colonial female subject. I want now to advance the argument just a bit further, and make a contrastive point. The task of the postcolonial writer, the descendant of the colonial female subject that history did in fact produce, cannot be restrained within the specular master-slave enclosure so powerfully staged in Frankenstein. I turn to Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay” to measure out some of the differences between the sympathetic and supportive colonial staging of the situation of the refusal of the withholding of specular exchange in favor of the monstrous colonial subject; and the postcolonial performance of the construction of the constitutional subject of the new nation, in subalternity rather than, as most often by renaming the colonial subject, as citizen.41 In the process, the native informant advances into the contemporary context described in the last section of the previous chapter. Devi’s work is focused on the so-called original inhabitants or adivasis (and the formerly untouchable lowest Hindu castes) in India, over 80 million at last count, and massively underreported in colonial and postcolonial studies.42 There are 300-odd divisions, most with its individual language, divided into four large language groups. I have frequently made the obvious point that, in the interest of placing the subaltern into hegemony—citizenship of the postcolonial state,

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constitutional subjectship—the movement Devi is associated with imposes a structural unity upon this vast group. This is an ab-use of the Enlightenment rather than divisive identitarianism. In “Pterodactyl,” Devi foregrounds this ab-usive (or catachrestic—there is no literal referent for the concept “original Indian nation” or adim bharatiya jati) spirit of aboriginal unity in her postscript: “[In this place no name—such as Madhya Pradesh or Nagesia—has been used literally. Madhya Pradesh is here India, Nagesia village the entire tribal society. I have deliberately conflated the ways, rules and customs of different Austric tribes and groups, and the idea of the ancestral soul is also my own. I have merely tried to express my estimation, born of experience, of Indian aboriginal society, through the myth of the pterodactyl.]—Mahasweta Devi.”43 At the end of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust writes lengthily of the task before him, the writing, presumably, of the many-volumed book that we have just finished. Devi’s gesture belongs to this topos. After the experience of the entire novella, the author tells us that the only authority in the story is rhetorical. She hands us the gift of a small but crucial aporia, the truth-value of the story, as an interpolation within square brackets, “the severe economy of a writing holding back declaration within a discipline of severely observed markers.”44 This truth is not exactitude. We cannot “learn about” the subaltern only by reading literary texts, or, mutatis mutandis, sociohistorical documents. “It is just that there be law, but law is not justice.”45 It is responsible to read books, but book learning is not responsibility. The native informant is not a catachresis here, but quite literally the person who feeds anthropology. The closing note of the novella tells us that the author will not be one. In the story itself there are at least two powerful figures who cannot be appropriated into that perspective. Part of that immunity to appropriation comes through the theme of the resistance to Development (hinted at in the interstices of my reading of Marx) as aboriginal resistance. The most extreme case is that of Shankar, who could rather easily have filled the bill for an authentic native informant, but to whom the very suggestion would be irrelevant: “‘I can’t see you. But I say to you in great humility, you can’t do anything for us. We became unclean as soon as you entered our lives. No more roads, no more relief—what will you give to a people in exchange for the vanished land, home field, burialground?’ Shankar comes up close and says, ‘Can you move far away? Very far? Very, very far?’” (IM 120). Devi stages the workings of the postcolonial state with minute knowledge, anger, and loving despair.46 There are suppressed dissident radicals, there is the national government seeking electoral publicity, there are systemic bureaucrats beneath good and evil, subaltern state functionaries to whom the so-called Enlightenment principles of democracy are counter-intuitive. Then there is the worst product of postcoloniality, the Indian who uses the alibis of development to exploit the tribals and destroy their life system. Over against him is the handful of conscientious and understanding government workers who operate through a system of official sabotage and small compromises. The central figure is Puran Sahay, a journalist. (Devi herself, in addition to being an ecology-health-literacy activist and a fiction writer, is also an indefatigable interventionist journalist. I have been scrupulous about not accusing authors. There is no such tax on praise.)

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The conception of Puran’s private life, delicately inscribed within the genderemancipation of domestic society among the committed section of the metropolitan and urban lower-middle-class, would merit a separate discussion. In the novella he leaves this frame scenario to climb the Pirtha hills and descend into the Pirtha valley, aboriginal terrain in development. (This “unframing” of Puran may also be a “liminalizing.”) The fruit of his travels is the kind of organizing reportage that Devi herself undertakes, in the form of a report for his ally Harisharan. We do not see the more public report he will write for the newspaper Dibasjyoti. There is also a report not (to be) sent, but “sent” to the extent that it is available in the literary space of the novella, that challenges each claim of the decolonizing state with a vignette from these hills. Like the monster in Frankenstein, Puran too steps away from the narrative of this tale, but into action within the postcolonial new nation: “A truck comes by, Puran raises his hand, steps up.” I have so far summarized a story involving subaltern freedom in the new nation. But that story is also a frame. Before I proceed to disclose the curious heart of the story, let me remind the reader that the indigenous caste-Hindu non-elite self-“free”ing women, Saraswati, Puran’s woman-friend, and the wives of the other committed workers, wait in the frame outside this frame. The narrative of subaltern freedom and even middle-level indigenous female (self-) emancipation cannot yet be continuous.47 The heart, then: a story of funeral rites, and through it the initiation of Puran, the interventionist journalist, into a subaltern responsibility that is at odds (asymptotic, asymmetrical, aporetic, out of discursivity, différend) with the fight for rights. An aboriginal boy has drawn the picture of a pterodactyl on the cave wall. Puran and a “good” government officer do not allow this to become public. No native informant, again. Through his unintentionally successful “prediction” of rain, Puran becomes part of the group’s ongoing historical record. He sees the pterodactyl. Or, perhaps, the pterodactyl reveals itself to him in the peculiar corporeality of the specter.48 If the exchange between the nameless monster (without history) and Victor Frankenstein is a finally futile refusal of withheld specularity, the situation of the gaze between pterodactyl (before history) and a “national” history that holds aboriginal and non-aboriginal together is somewhat different. There can be no speculation here; in a textual space rhetorically separated from the counter-factual funeral, the aboriginal and the non-aboriginal must pull together. Here is Puran as the pterodactyl looks, perhaps at him: You are moveless with your wings folded, I do not wish to touch you, you are outside my wisdom, reason, and feelings, who can place his hand on the axial moment of the end of the third phase of the Mesozoic and the beginnings of the Kenozoic geological ages? . . . “What do its eyes want to tell Puran?” . . . There is no communication between eyes. Only a dusky waiting, without end. “What does it want to tell: We are extinct by the inevitable natural geological evolution. You too are endangered. You too will become extinct in nuclear explosions, or in war, or in the aggressive advance of the strong as it obliterates the weak, . . . think if you are going forward or back. . . .” “What will you finally grow in the soil, having murdered nature in the application of man-imposed substitutes?” . . . The dusky lidless eyes remain unresponsive. (IM 156–157)

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For the modern Indian the pterodactyl is an empirical impossibility. For the modern aboriginal Indian the pterodactyl may be the soul of the ancestors, as imagined by the author, who has placed her signature outside the frame.49 The fiction does not judge between the registers of truth and exactitude, simply stages them in separate spaces. This is not science fiction. And the pterodactyl is not a symbol. The pterodactyl dies and Bikhiya, the boy struck dumb—withdrawn from communication by becoming the pterodactyl’s “guardian,” its “priest”—buries it in the underground caverns of the river, walls resplendent with “undiscovered” cave paintings, perhaps ancient, perhaps contemporary. The aboriginal is not museumized in this text. He allows Puran to accompany him. The burial itself is unlike current practice. Now, Shankar says, they burn bodies, like Hindus. “We bury the ash and receive a stone. I’ve heard that we buried the bodies in the old days.” And this memory is contained, of course, within the imagination of an imagined identity, fictive practices. This mourning is not anthropological but ethico-political. (Puran has situated his study of anthropology, transcodings of the native informant’s speech, as useful but unequal to these encounters.) Puran, a caste-Hindu, remote stranger in a now Hindu-majority land, earns the right to assist at the laying to rest of a previous aboriginal civilization, itself catachrestic when imagined as a unity, in a rhetorical space that is textually separate from a frame narrative that may as well be the central narrative, of the separate agendas of tribal and journalistic resistances to Development, each aporetic to the other, the site of a dilemma. The funeral lament, the unreal elegy that must accompany all beginnings, is placed at the end of the narrative, just before Puran hops on the truck, and the postscript signed by the author begins. The subject of the elegy is suspended between journalist-character and author-figure: Puran’s amazed heart discovers what love for Pirtha there is in his heart, perhaps he cannot remain a distant spectator anywhere in life. Pterodactyl’s eyes. Bikhiya’s eyes. Oh ancient civilization, the foundation and ground of the civilization of India, oh first sustaining civilization, we are in truth defeated. A continent! We destroyed it undiscovered, as we are destroying the primordial forest, water, living beings, the human. A truck comes by. Puran raises his hand, steps up. (IM 196)

In my estimation, and in spite of strong critical objections, the Wide Sargasso Sea is necessarily bound by the reach of the European novel. So is “Pterodactyl.” It too invokes aboriginal narrativity, as Rhys does obeah. We have no choice but to allow the literary imagination its promiscuities. But if, as critics, we wish to reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing to the nostalgia for lost origins, we must turn to the archives of imperialist governance. I have not made that move in this chapter. In the next chapter, by way of a modest and inexpert “reading” of “archives,” I try to extend, outside of the reach of the European novelistic tradition, the most powerful suggestion in Wide Sargasso Sea: that Jane Eyre can be read as the orchestration and staging of the self-immolation of Bertha Mason as a “good wife.” The power of that suggestion remains unclear if we remain insufficiently knowledgeable about the history of the legal manipulation of widow-sacrifice in the entitlement of the British government in India. In that

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sense, my efforts in the next chapter may be considered a step in one direction of a less restricted practice of cultural studies. It is by way of such moves, rather than merely by deciding to celebrate the female, that feminist criticism can be a force in changing the discipline. To do so, however, it must recognize that it is complicitous with the institution within which it seeks its space. That slow labor might transform it from opposition to critique. Let me describe a certain area of this complicity in a theoretical and a historical way: A restricted use of a critical or resistant approach may lead to the discovery that the basis of a truth-claim is no more than a trope. In the case of academic feminism the discovery is that to take the privileged male of the white race as a norm for universal humanity is no more than a politically interested figuration. It is a trope that passes itself off as truth and claims that woman or the racial other is merely a kind of troping of that truth of man—in the sense that they must be understood as unlike (non-identical with) it and yet with reference to it. In so far as it participates in this discovery, even the most “essentialist” feminism or race-analysis may be engaged in a tropological deconstruction. As it establishes the truth of this discovery, however, it begins to perform the problems inherent in the institution of epistemological production, of the production, in other words, of any “truth” at all. By this logic, varieties of feminist theory and practice must reckon with the possibility that, like any other discursive practice, they are marked and constituted by, even as they constitute, the field of their production. If much of what I write here seems to apply as much to the general operations of imperialist disciplinary practice as to feminism, it is because I wish to point at the dangers of not acknowledging the connections between the two. (These problems—that “truths” can only be shored up by strategic exclusions, by declaring opposition where there is complicity, by denying the possibility of randomness, by proclaiming a provisional origin or point of departure as ground— are the substance of deconstructive concerns. The price of the insight into the tropological nature of a truth-claim is the blindness of truth-telling.)50 My historical caveat is, in sum, that feminism within the social relations and institutions of the metropolis has something like a relationship with the fight for individualism in the upwardly class-mobile bourgeois cultural politics of the European nineteenth century. Thus, even as we feminist critics discover the troping error of the masculist truth-claim to universality or academic objectivity, we perform the lie of constituting a truth of global sisterhood where the mesmerizing model remains male and female sparring partners of generalizable or universalizable sexuality who are the chief protagonists in that European contest. In order to claim sexual difference where it makes a difference, global sisterhood must receive this articulation even if the sisters in question are Asian, African, Arab.51 Or so some of us had thought. In today’s atmosphere of triumphalist globalization, where the old slogan of “Women in Development” has been blithely changed into “Gender and Development,” and a hard-hatted white woman points the way to a smiling Arab woman in ethnic dress upon a World Bank publicity pamphlet, such utopianism is consigned to the future anterior.

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NOTES 1. Review of Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, in News from Nowhere 6 (Spring 1989): 64. 2. For a similar caution, see Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands (London: Zed, 1987), p. 9. 3. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: n.p., 1960); hereafter JE, followed by page numbers. 4. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966); all further references to this work, abbreviated WSS, will be included in the text. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (New York: New American Library, 1965); all further references to this work, abbreviated F, will be included in the text. Mahasweta Devi, “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” in Imaginary Maps, tr. Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 95–196 (references to this work, abbreviated IM, will be included in the text). For “worlding,” see Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Works: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964) (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), pp. 137–212. Heidegger’s idea, that the lineaments of the conflict in the making of the text are set or posited in it insofar as it is a work of art, is useful here. What I am doing with these texts is obviously influenced by my sense of how the setting-to-work mode of deconstruction is a reinscription of Heidegger’s privileging of art (see Appendix). 5. I have tried to do this in my essay “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” in Spivak, In Other Worlds, pp. 30–45. 6. In the previous chapter, the deconstructive approach to “a life,” to the “credit of a proper name” has been discussed (see note 94). Brontë’s life has been and continues to be worked over with rather different presuppositions. In addition to Rebecca Fraser, Charlotte Brontë (London: Methuen, 1988), and The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and Her Family (New York: Crown, 1988); Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865), The Life of Charlotte Brontë, a lovely semi-erotic contemporary biography, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975); Margot Peters, Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975); and Tom Winnifrith, A New Life of Charlotte Brontë (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988); there is the considerable correspondence and The Life and Works of Charlotte Brontë and Her Sisters (London: John Murray, 1920–1922), started in 1899 by the indefatigable Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and continuing on to 1929. All we can do is to point at the structure of foreclosure in the novel in the pages that follow. 7. As always, I take my formula from Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–186. For an acute differentiation between the individual and individualism, see V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Studies in Language, 1973), pp. 93–94, 152–153. For a “straight” analysis of the roots and ramifications of English “individualism,” see C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962). 8. I am constructing an analogy with Homi Bhabha’s powerful notion of “not-quite/notwhite” in his “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambiguity of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 132. I should also add that I use the word “native” here in reaction to the term “Third World Woman.” It cannot, of course, apply with equal historical justice to both the West Indian and the Indian contexts nor to contexts of imperialism by transportation. The subaltern will be defined in the next chapter. Here suffice it to say that she is seen over against the emergent bourgeoisie of the colonies, whose share in female emancipation is another story. Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre is not, in that sense, a subaltern. As I will argue later, she is removed from bourgeois class mobility by her madness; the mad are subaltern

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of a special sort. It should also be added that the category of subalternity, like the category of exile, works differently for women. 9. Roberto Fernandez Retamar, “Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” tr. Lynn Garafola et al., in Massachusetts Review 15 (Winter-Spring 1974): 7–72; all further references to this work, abbreviated C, will be included in the text. 10. José Enriqué Rodó, Ariel, ed. Gordon Brotherston (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967). 11. Gordon Brotherston, the editor of Ariel, went on to write The Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through Their Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), a book inspired by a sense of the effective foreclosure of the native Americas in the debate over the question of Latin American identity. 12. For an elaboration of “an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text,” see Chapter 3. 13. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Placing Women’s History in History,” New Left Review 133 (May-June 1982): 5–29. I should perhaps add here that I find it increasingly difficult to resonate with the consequences that Fox-Genovese has drawn from this insight in the intervening decades. 14. Rudolph Ackermann, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics (London: R. Ackermann, 1823), p. 310. 15. For an explanation of pouvoir-savoir as making-sense-ability, see Spivak, “More on Power/Knowledge,” in Outside, pp. 34–36. 16. This precaution seems to be particularly important. That “racism” is an immensely complex issue is evident. (One can begin to sense its theoretical complexity by consulting the work of Anthony Appiah, Kimberle Crenshaw, Kendall Thomas, and Patricia Williams, among others.) But its dismissive and diagnostic use is another matter. Since its first publication in 1985, the essay version of this chapter has been reprinted at least eleven times and continues to be at an alarming rate. In its original version, the essay arose out of the shock of the discovery of the axiomatics of imperialism in a text well known since childhood in immediately post-Independence India. Thus the essay bore no mark of the awareness of class-bound complicity that has slowly developed thereafter. A simple invocation of race and gender, with no bridle of auto-critique, covers exploitation over successfully. This, I believe, is the source of the popularity of the earlier version. 17. Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (New York, Barnes & Noble, 1975); this is one of the general propositions of the book. 18. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 360–362. 19. In the context of the female of unspecified race, Derrida sees Kant as the “categorical pornographer” (Glas [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986], p. 128). 20. Lyotard, Lessons, p. 175, and Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 90. The next passage quoted from Kant is from p. 86. 21. For a comparison with the unavailability of this historical conjuncture for Islam, see Spivak, “Reading The Satanic Verses,” in Outside, pp. 238–240. 22. I have tried to justify the reduction of sociohistorical problems to formulas or propositions in Chapter 3. The “travesty” I speak of does not befall the Kantian ethic in its purity, as an accident, but rather exists within its lineaments as a possible supplement, as I argue in Chapter 1. On the register of the human being as child rather than heathen, my formula can be found, for example, in “What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant, “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,” “What Is Enlightenment?” and a Passage from “The Metaphysics of Morals,” tr. and ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). Dan Rather spoke of the Haitians as “children” during a September 1994 CBS Evening News report of the U.S. occupation of Haiti. See also Spivak, “Academic Freedom,” in Pretexts 5.1–2 (1995): 117–156.

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23. Jean Rhys, in an interview with Elizabeth Vreeland, quoted in Nancy Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 128. Maggie Humm (Border Traffic: Strategies of Contemporary Women Writers [New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1991], pp. 62–93) and others have subsequently fleshed out the West Indian background much more thoroughly than I have been able to. Humm’s excellent essay unaccountably thinks I “downplay” Christophine. To repeat: I think it is one of the strengths of Rhys’s novel that it stages the non-containment of Christophine. Of course she is a powerful mother-figure, but in the end and textually, she’s let go. 24. See Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth Century, tr. Robert Dewsnap et al. (Lund, Sweden: Gleepers, 1967), chap. 5. 25. For a detailed study of this text, see John Brenkman, “Narcissus in the Text,” Georgia Review 30 (Summer 1976): 293–327; and Spivak, “Echo,” in Donna Landry and Gerald McLean, eds., The Spivak Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 126–202. 26. I must assure Arun P. Mukherjee that I do not think this is the only violence perpetrated by imperialism (“Interrogating Postcolonialism: Some Uneasy Conjunctures,” in Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee, eds., Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context [Shimla: Indian Inst. of Advanced Study, 1996], p. 19). It is just that people like her and me may be affected by it unwittingly, so it’s worth pointing out. 27. See, e.g., Thomas F. Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979), pp. 108–116. It is interesting to note Staley’s discomfort with this and his consequent dissatisfaction with the novel. 28. Of course this is a crude summary of Lacan’s purging the Freudian scenario of its narrative content. All use of “theory” in this book is either reconstellative or scrupulously “mistaken.” For the reconstellative use of psychoanalysis, see pp. 283–286. It continues to fascinate me how critics swear by the universal applicability of the meager ground of evidence used by Freud and Lacan. 29. I have tried to relate castration and suppressed letters in my “The Letter as Cutting Edge,” in In Other Worlds, pp. 3–14. 30. Mary Lou Emery’s contextually richer opinion is somewhat different (in Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990]). I cannot, of course, be “responsible” within Christophine’s text (in terms of available psychobiographies), as I have tried to be with Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in the next chapter. And one would need to be thus “responsible” in order to venture a judgment about the representation of Christophine. These are the limits and openings of a non-locationist cultural studies, one that does not keep itself confined to national origin. 31. Gauri Viswanathan’s work in progress is an excellent example of this turn. 32. Jean Rhys, “Obeah Night,” in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed. Paula Burnett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). It is interesting that in the novel, Rhys performs a gesture undermining the superscript. She does not allow Rochester a name. 33. Barbara Johnson, “My Monster / My Self,” Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 2–10. 34. Mary Poovey, “My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism,” PMLA 5.95.3 (May 1980): 332–347. See also George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 23–35. 35. In the late 1980s, I had suggested that the reader consult the publications of the Feminist International Network for the best overview of the current debate on reproductive technology. In the mid-1990s, I would suggest following, on the one hand, UN publications, and on the other FINRRAGE. In the final analysis, there is no substitute for field reports by local women. This book ends with a tiny bit of that with respect to child labor. 36. For the male fetish, see Freud, “Fetishism,” SE 21: 152–157. For a more “serious” Freudian study of Frankenstein, see Mary Jacobus, “Is There a Woman in This Text?” New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982): 117–141. My “fantasy” would of course be disproved

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by the “fact” that the opposition male/female is asymmetrical, and that it is more difficult for a woman to assume the position of fetishist than for a man; see Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23 (Sept.-Oct. 1982): 74–87. Again, a category “mistake.” I had written the above before undertaking a study of Melanie Klein. I should do without the apology now. I have expanded this point of view in Spivak, “‘Circumfession’: My Story as the (M)other’s Story,” forthcoming. 37. For the notion of permissible narratives, see Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works (London: Hogarth, 1975), pp. 317, 328. 38. [Constantin François Chasseboeuf de Volney], The Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, tr. pub. (London: n.p., 1811). In Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian has showed us the manipulation of time in “new” secular histories of a similar kind. The most striking ignoring of the monster’s education through Volney is in Sandra Gilbert’s otherwise brilliant “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve,” Feminist Studies 4 (June 1980). Her subsequent work has most convincingly filled in such lacunae; see, e.g., her piece on H. Rider Haggard’s She (“Rider Haggard’s Heart of Darkness,” Partisan Review 50.3 [1983]: 444–453). 39. “A letter is always and a priori intercepted, . . . the ‘subjects’ are neither the senders nor the receivers of messages. . . . The letter is constituted by its interception” (Jacques Derrida, “Discussion,” after Claude Rabant, “II n’a aucune chance de l’entendre,” in Affranchissement du transfert et de la lettre, ed. Rene Major [Paris: Confrontation, 1981], p. 106; my translation). Margaret Saville is made to appropriate the reader’s “subject” into the signature of her own “individuality.” 40. The most striking internal evidence is the “Author’s Introduction” that, after dreaming of the yet-unnamed Victor Frankenstein figure and being terrified (through, yet not yet quite through, him) by the monster in a scene she later reproduced in Frankenstein’s story, Shelley began her tale “on the morrow . . . with the words ‘It was on a dreary night of November’” (F xi). Those are the opening words of chapter 5 of the finished book, where Frankenstein begins to recount the actual making of his monster (F 56). 41. It should be mentioned that Mahasweta Devi’s work is by no means representative of contemporary Bengali (or Indian) fiction and therefore cannot serve as an example of Jamesonian “third world literature.” 42. Dhirendranath Baske, Paschimbanger Adibasi Samaj (Calcutta: Shubarnorekha, 1987), vol. 1, projected from p. 17. 43. IM 196; translation modified. The catachresis involved in “original Indian nation” is not just that there is no one “tribe” including all aboriginals resident in what is now “India.” It is also that the concept “India” is itself not “Indian,” and further, not identical with the concept Bharata, just as “nation” and jati have different histories. Furthermore, the sentiment of an entire nation as place of origin is not a statement within aboriginal discursive formations, where locality is of much greater importance. I point this out in some detail because, first, the word “catachresis” is one of the worst offenders in the general crime of inaccessibility; second, even the most hegemonic identity would show itself to be catachrestic under close scrutiny; and, finally, the (ab)-use of the Enlightenment in the interest of building a civil society brings the subaltern discursive formation into crisis, makes it deconstruct. It should also be mentioned that the word “tribal,” although no longer internationally favored because of the African situation, may still be found in domestic usage in India, where the word is used over against “caste.” 44. Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 32. 45. Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 947. 46. Devi joined the legendary undivided Communist Party of India in 1941. She has been as much a part of the anti-colonial struggles as she has been witness to the failure of decolonization. There is little “colonial discourse” writing in her fiction. In “Choli ka pich-

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he” [Behind the bodice], in Devi, The Breast Stories, tr. Spivak (Calcutta: Seagull, 1997), p. 140, there is a brilliantly ironic moment against putting all the ills of contemporary society at the door of British colonialism. 47. A small moment in the text which contributes to Puran’s liminalization. But it is the denegation of such differences that can give rise to the global sisterhood required for the financialization of the globe. Who is silenced by the female hero? (See pages 353–421, the last movement of the book.) 48. Derrida, Specters, p. 6 and passim. 49. For the labyrinthine dynamics of the author’s signature promising that (the gift of) the text is factually counterfeit, see Derrida, Given Time, pp. 107–172. The interest here is not merely “speculative.” It has something like a relationship with the fact that, reading literature, we learn to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. 50. The references to these concerns are to be found pervasively in Paul de Man’s later and Jacques Derrida’s earlier work. For specific references, see de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 205, 208–209, 236, 253; and Derrida, “Limited inc: abc,” Glyph 2 (1977). 51. Because the Latin American countries have had a more direct and long-standing relationship with U.S. imperialism, the relationship and demands are more informed and specific even when oppressive. Rigoberta Menchu can be sidearilized by the Latin American Studies Association.

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I’d like to begin with an anecdote. At a semiofficial gathering at the residence of the Indian ambassador to the United States in 1996 celebrating the tentative ties recently developed between India and the United States, the ambassador showed his appreciation for the large Indian expatriate population by constantly referring to their obvious (to him) allegiance to the “homeland.”1 He assumed that most of the Indian audience had been born in India, had close, personal ties to the country, and frequently returned there for a visit. He encouraged them to invest in the future of India by participating in the various U.S.-Indian corporate collaborations in the making. India’s entry into the twenty-first century as a major player in global capitalism was assured with this crucial transnational alliance evolving around corporate culture. And then there was a significant pause. Any nervousness we (Indians) might feel at the dilution of “our” culture as a result of these mergers and incursions was false, he said. To prove his point he asked the Indian women in the audience to stand up. Look, he said—and the men and white women in the room turned and duly observed—at what they are wearing. These “daughters of India” are all dressed in saris or salwar kameezes. Not one is wearing a Western dress. Indian men, however, with a few exceptions in Nehru jackets, had, I presumed, been co-opted because they wore Western suits.2 Two lessons can be gleaned from the ambassador’s use of this visual aid. Generally, tradition is a hard thing to let go of, and more significant, even if men had to adapt because they were part of the ephemeral public life, women could always be counted on to affirm the continuity of tradition. Thus, if Indian women continued to wear Indian clothes while living in the United States, then the fear of “tradition” and “culture” being contaminated in India was minimal. The ambassador had maneuvered carefully around a potentially explosive ideological minefield. He had begun by assuming that every Indian person in the room that night was a voluntary expatriate and had then gone on to appeal to their national sentiment by evoking nostalgia for the homeland. Having achieved that, he then asked them to imagine themselves as pivotal players in a transnational global economy by addressing their larger, more cosmopolitan fiscal interest. Instead of leaving us (men and women) delighting in or debating our positions as

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economically motivated citizens of the world, however, the ambassador, preempting a possible backlash against his privileging of monetary concerns, closed with a decisive return to a substantial symbol of national proportions. In doing this, the ambassador did not just reproduce a gendered separation of spheres. He allowed men to function as citizens of the world while always cognizant of their primary role as an Indian subject; Indian women were part of the ambassador’s global vision only as uncontaminated purveyors of an inherent national culture. I recount this incident out of many to suggest the continuing presence of the nation in discourses that seek to supersede and subvert its constrictive confines such as internationalism, transnationalism, global capitalism, academic multiculturalism, and even corporate-style multiculturalism.3 And no matter which strategic discourse we deploy in our turn away from the nation, the mobilization of the category of “woman,” despite all the debates in feminist studies ranging from woman as essence to woman as difference to woman as concept-metaphor, appears to return us once again to its threshold.4 Perhaps one could argue that the ambassador was deploying a strategic nationalism to produce an identity around which a diverse group of displaced Indians could cohere. As Spivak has said, “a strategy suits a situation,” yet the repetition of the reproduction of nation under the sign of “woman” prevents a “critique of the ‘fetish-character’ (so to speak) of the masterword.”5 This absence of persistent critique of the strategic use of an essence results in the overdetermination of the essence and produces an unproductive essentialist position long after the event demanding the strategy is resolved. The anecdote establishes at least one substantive trajectory in a supposedly postcolonial diasporic moment of the legacy of national identifications. It helps illuminate the vexed historical continuity between colonial and nationalism and other global movements such as diaspora and transnationalism. In this book I participate and intervene in key discourses that have surrounded nationalism over the last decade, engaging particularly with the paradigm of identity and its investment in nationalism. More important, this book challenges the androcentric bias of most modern national imaginings. In the variously inflected critical pronouncements on the invention, imagination, and narration of nations, the inclusion of woman under the sign of the nation repeatedly lays bare the deep ambivalence of the relationship of woman to nation.6 Most theorists of nationalism have been male, but conveniently to disregard the play of sexuality and gender as an integral element in the separation of the libidinal/private from the public/collective seems to come perilously close to the discourse of nationalists who continue to yoke gender to the articulation of the nation even as they seek forcefully to separate the micropolitical from the macropolitical.7 The desire to keep the two spheres distinct is mandated by the use of the ubiquitous trope of nation-as-woman in all nationalist discourses. As the editors of Nationalisms and Sexualities point out, the efficient functioning of this particular trope depends “for its representational efficacy on a particular image of woman as chaste, dutiful, daughterly or maternal” (Parker et al. 6). Kumari Jayawardena has argued convincingly that the emergence of feminist movements in various parts of the so-called third world is intricately tied to anti-imperialist and nationalist struggles waged by a modernized and “enlightened” middle class. But this alliance has exacted its toll on women whose claims for recognition as

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equal citizens in the new, independent nation-state have been repeatedly set aside by an indigenous government that has to attend to more “pressing” concerns. The form and content of these nationalist movements and independent nation-states, both secular and religious, are multifarious, but it is crucial that discourses and practices concerning the role and specificity of gender and its relation to the positions of women be analyzed when we seek to examine the proliferation of nationalisms and nationalist discourses.8 Here I attempt to do more than pay mere lip service to “the woman question.” I underscore the necessity of a more comprehensive understanding of gender as a category, one that goes beyond an initial commitment to the representation of a specific constituency to an inquiry that challenges the assumptions behind the masculinist, heterosexual economy hitherto governing the cultural matrix through which an Indian national identity has become intelligible. Despite McClintock’s subversive formulation that “all nationalisms are gendered, all are invented and all are dangerous—dangerous not in Eric Hobsbawm’s sense of having to be opposed, but in the sense that they represent relations to political power and the technologies of violence” (352), Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” continues to provide the framework for many theoretical peregrinations. Renan’s foundational text, operating within an unmarked masculine frame, cannot position woman as anything other than a reproductive vessel necessary for the proliferation of populations in the various countries he uses to advance his theory of the nation as “a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.”9 In more contemporary inventions, imaginations, and narrations of nations, one can clearly trace an itinerary of forgetting, when in the interest of producing and maintaining a paternal/fraternal extended community, most male theorists fail to critique nationalism’s repressive and homogenizing relationship to gender. It might appear outdated, but it seems prescient to reiterate what seems to be obvious:10 every aspect of our sociopolitical reality is gendered, and the presumption of a gender-neutral methodology perpetuates the fiction of a transgendered universality that is nothing but a euphemism for a universal masculinity.11 The issue for theorists committed to examining what Spivak has called the “homely tactics of everyday pouvoir/savoir, the stuff of women’s lives” is simultaneously epistemic and political (Outside in the Teaching Machine 35). My recounting of the anecdote about the ambassador reveals the quotidian production of woman as the sign of sex and gender. In these times, the emphasis on the transnational dimension of cultural formation has made us aware not only of the multivalent ways in which cultures are constructed and traditions are invented but also the retroactive nature of most social and psychic affiliations. The inherent danger in the dispersal of local identifications thus wrought is mediated through the figure of “woman” and thereby helps contain the threat of ambivalence enabled by spatial displacements by resituating the myth of culture’s particularity in the national. If we concur with Foucault that, in the struggle for nationhood, territory itself becomes the foundation for authority (“Governmentality” 93), the assertion of that authority seems inextricably linked to discourses about the nature and function of women. Consider the views of two very differently positioned theorists to illustrate this point. First, from George Santayana, “Our nationalism is like

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our relationship to women: too implicated in our moral nature to be changed honourably and too accidental to be worth changing” (quoted in McClintock 353). These words offer us an obvious idealization of masculinity that rehearses the hierarchy of gender difference. Second, from George Mosse, “Woman as a national symbol was the guardian of the continuity and immutability of the nation, the embodiment of its respectability” (18). This sentiment exemplifies the place assigned to woman when such idealizations of masculinity become the foundation of the nation. The fundamental assumptions undergirding the two positions are challenged by the following assertion made by the members of the Women’s Conference to the Lothian Committee on Indian Political Reforms set up in 1932 in response to the committee’s decision to rule out adult franchise: “We women wish to be citizens in our own rights, independent of any of our male relations. . . . We do not think that women’s rights as a citizen should depend upon her marriage, which in the majority of cases in India at present is not entirely under her control” (Chattopadhyay 99). In contrast to Santayana’s and Mosse’s use of woman as sign, we hear women demand recognition of their agency in the public sphere outside a conventional patriarchal framework with its rigid structures of gender identity. En-Gendering India explores the manipulation of gender politics in the exercise of national rule. In examining certain aspects of the nationalist movement in India, I show how Benedict Anderson’s observation that “in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a national identity, as he or she ‘has’ a gender” (16), accurate on one level, fails to take into account the systemic differential relationship between identities constructed at the intersection of gender and nationality. Over the last decade, a number of scholars have shown in myriad ways how the adoption of a feminist standpoint can transform our understanding of nationalism. In the Indian context alone, feminist scholars from various disciplines have revolutionized our understanding of British colonial discourse, Indian nationalism, and the role of women in colonial and modern India.12 Earlier evaluations of the Indian feminist movement, such as those offered by Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi and by Kumari Jayawardena, revealed its close connections to nationalist and anti-imperialist maneuvers. Liddle and Joshi paid meticulous attention to the ways in which factors such as class, caste, and urban and rural locations tended to complicate any easy connections presumed to exist between modernization and emancipation. Religious diversity and communalism, on the other hand, were not seen as significant categories of analysis. Only in retrospect, given the contemporary politico-religious situation not only in India but elsewhere in the subcontinent as well, does one feel the need for a reevaluation. The anthology Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, edited by Kukum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, is particularly significant in this context because it marks a turning point in feminist research in India. Writing toward the end of the eighties, the editors argue for a crucial understanding and rearticulation of the present in terms of the “regulation and reproduction of patriarchy in the different class and caste formations within civil society” in colonial India (1). Even though their desire is to depict women from every stratum of society, they mourn their inability to do so because the essays focus mainly on the dominant Hindu middle class in North India under direct British rule. I read this emphasis as a telling moment in the genealogical excavation undertaken by the essayists in this

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collection. It is precisely the self-reflexive nature of much of the essays, the return to the present as a middle-class space (occupied by most of the researchers), that marks the impossibility of producing other genealogies. The innovativeness of this anthology lies in its careful uncovering of the manner in which a particular kind of “new woman” emerged in the liminal space between colonial subjection and an incipient nationalism. Yet the unearthing of the lineage of this new woman fails to provide the kind of “dialectical relation of ‘feminisms’ and patriarchies, both in the inventions of the colonial state and in the politics of anti-colonial movements” (5) that its editors seek to explicate. The absence of any discussion about the Muslim community and other castes makes such dialectical relationships, however implicit, extremely friable, especially because communalism would appear to be quite central for the operation of any such dialectic. As we move from the eighties to the nineties and witness the premeditated demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992 and the increasing visibility of militant women activists in the Hindu Right, we gradually see a more concentrated effort among the intelligentsia in India and abroad to come to grips with the issue not only of communalism but also of its manipulations of gender ideology.13 A number of feminists are deeply committed to undertaking such a reassessment. Much like the contributions in Recasting Women, the work of these researchers too is marked by a self-reflexive turn, this time in relation to the manner in which their earlier leftist feminist presuppositions were marked by errors and omissions as a result of their particular, often hegemonic, location in a hierarchical society. Tanika Sarkar’s uneasiness, for example, in the face of women’s empowerment enabled by and within the Hindu Right organizations is quintessential (“Woman as Communal Subject” 2057–62). Today, feminists can no longer ignore the appeal of a communal sensibility for women who are increasingly reshaping the emergent public sphere of the new Hindu nation. This specific historical reemergence of right-wing Hindu ideology demands a long and careful backward look at the nationalist movement’s own ambivalent relationship to the woman question and its imbrication in the production of a putative, secular, socialist India that merely glossed over rather than addressed the diverse claims made on one’s identity as Indian. The unexamined nature of our investment in a modern secular India exploded from within in the early 1990s, and many feminists in India and Indian feminists elsewhere realize the need to evaluate their hitherto unmarked subjectivities as upper-caste, middle-class, and Hindu women. In En-Gendering India I endeavor to chart the multiple and shifting articulations of such an ambiguous relationship in three historically linked discourses—British colonialism, Indian nationalism, and postcolonialism—by concentrating on the representation of the “native” woman. I establish how the figure of the “native” woman as upper-class Hindu woman becomes the crucial site through which Indian nationalism consolidates its identification with Hinduism. I thus underline not only the links between colonial and nationalist discourses but also the presence of sectarian religious mobilization in the very inception of the nation that, in the early 1990s, would lead to the implosion of India’s secular self-image. The historical parameters of this study are the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the independence and partition of India in 1947.14 These two events are so crucial for

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the representation and self-representation of India that they are constantly being retold, with each recounting rooted in the historical specificities of the moment of narration as well as the ideological predilections of the teller. The rebellion proper may be said to have begun with the revolt at Meerut on May 10, 1857, and the seizure of Delhi the next day. It technically ceased with the fall of Gwalior on June 20, 1858. The uprising changed the face of British imperialism from feigned benevolence to an unambivalent, enforced foreign rule beginning with the savage reprisals by a hysterical British population occupying the cities and garrisons at Calcutta, Kanpur, Lucknow, and Delhi. The event has produced a discursive site that continues to be mined by historians and writers seeking to rationalize and fictionalize through their representations the reasons, the horror, and the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion.15 The second date records another momentous event which occurred almost one hundred years later and which has also transfixed the imagination of writers. The partition and holocaust of 1947, the division of British India into Pakistan and India—a carving up of geographic space along religious lines that in one stroke granted independence to a supposedly Hindu India and created a new nation, Pakistan, to be predominantly populated by Muslims—continues to determine relationships between Hindus and Muslims in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as testified to by the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India. In En-Gendering India, I argue that after 1857 the figure of the Hindu woman begins to function as a crucial semiotic site in and around which the discourses of imperialism, nationalism, an Indian postcolonialism, and feminism are complexly inscribed. As I mentioned above, the crisis marked by the Sepoy Rebellion changed the modus operandi of imperial government in India from that of a purported benevolent ruler to an unequivocal taskmaster. The English imagination was terrified by the exaggerated depictions of inhuman atrocities perpetrated by Indian men on innocent English women and children. The idea of protecting the image of the English nation threatened by rebellious indigenous mutineers could be upheld, I contend, by extending the boundaries of the imagined English nation to include the oppressed Indian woman. This incorporation is nonrealizable at its inception, however, because the female “native” body is the nonliminal site of otherness that makes possible the realization of the imagined community. Thus the rhetoric of benevolence extended toward the subjugated “native” woman by the English nation highlights the paradoxical position of the Indian woman in an imperial economy. This putative inclusion of the doubly other (Indian and woman) threatened the myth of the homogeneity and purity of the British nation even as its various proponents struggled to consolidate the power of the empire through their writings. The Indian woman became a further contested site of appropriation when Indian nationalists sought to advance their agenda by fusing their desire for an independent nation with the independence of the Indian woman, who, they argued, could never achieve her “pure” status as an equal participant in the domestic or public spheres within the boundaries of a spurious imagined community. Thus the discourses of imperialism and nationalism became increasingly intertwined as each sought to gain control over the representations of the Indian woman. The complex trajectory charted by these interdependent and often contradictory discourses did allow for the production of an indigenous movement centered

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around the “woman question” that can be loosely termed “feminism.” This emergent movement further complicated the representations of Indian women by the two dominant discourses, and it is the various articulations of the problematics of gender construction in nation formation that I seek to explore in EnGendering India. What further exacerbates this embattled constitutive site of the construction of the Indian nation is the rise of communal sensibility that identified an emergent Indian cultural nationalism as pristinely Hindu. In The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Gyanendra Pandey asserts that Indian nationalism had two clear phases. In its early stage it conceived of the nation as an aggregate of different communities coalescing along religious and class lines. In its later phase, influenced by the “modern” discourses of secularism and rationality, it attempted to interpellate a diverse body of people as citizens of a nascent nation irrespective of individual alliances along the lines of caste, class, or religion. In this latter period then, communalism was, at least on the surface, challenged as the very antithesis of a unified nation. But examining the development of the discourse of the nation along the axis of gender leads one to realize the persistent structure of the relation of women to the idea of the active, political citizen of the nationto-come. The woman who became synonymous with the country in the second half of the nineteenth century was specifically an upper-caste Hindu woman, and the adaptation of this dynamic in the later phase of the nationalist movement continues to manifest itself in the internecine conflicts that increasingly divide the population of postindependent India along communal and caste lines. Thus, one way to describe the subject matter of this book is to say that I examine the rival and shifting representations of the Indian woman in British imperial and Indian colonial and postcolonial writings after 1857. In addition, in each chapter I seek to theorize the enunciation of an “authentic woman” of India in texts that are equally committed to the production of a national space called “India.” I use the phrase “woman of India” because it is precisely the spatial congruence between the two terms that becomes the obsessive focus of national conjuncture in the colonial and postcolonial texts I discuss. The discursive productions of the Indian woman in the various discourses of imperialism, nationalism, communalism, feminism, and postcolonialism allow me to deconstruct essentialist binary oppositions—to bring into play diverse marginalities in order to undermine the insular, homogeneous nature of “great maneuvers.” By inflecting my analyses of these often contradictory discourses with a theory of ideology, I attempt materially to ground Foucault’s position that power manifests itself as a multiplicity of force relations, as the interplay of various discursive fields with their immanent necessities and developments. My book both participates in and extends the area of discourse charted by earlier scholars such as Brantlinger, Viswanathan, and Sharpe. It also attends, in the spirit of more recent works such as Suleri’s Rhetoric of English India and Grewal’s Home and Harem, to both sides of the colonial and postcolonial divide.16 I focus on the formation of a particular political community that construes political identity as the assertion of a national identity in response to imperial government. Inclusion within the “we” of this national citizenry, however, does not depend only on a single “constitutive outside” exterior to the community. The conceptualization of the Indian nation, even as it rests primarily on the issue

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of self-governance, is equally predicated on a commonality that is disrupted by the particularity of identifications of those who also wish to be a link in the chain of equivalence set up by the construction of the national “we.”17 In choosing to analyze the ways in which gender and religion complicate the representation of the desired national subject, I engage with the manner in which the polarized dynamic—us and them—inherent in the discourses of both nationalism and imperialism is continually being undermined by the “shifting representations of the space of alterity occupied by women within the formation of nationalist [and imperialist] subjectivities.”18 I have chosen to concentrate almost exclusively on literary texts, predominantly the novel, written by South Asian and British authors of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet my focus on the novel should not suggest to the reader that this book is about the emergence of the novel in the subcontinent and the ways in which the novel was shaped and transformed by the expectations and class biases of a particular audience. Neither is it about the confluence of different literary traditions. What I attempt in this book is a particular analysis of the intersections of the discourses of gender and nation formation and their representations in certain novels and other narratives. The novel in India emerged at a specific historical juncture, and like all cultural productions, the “Indian novel” (this designation is merely instrumental) reflects and refracts the political, social, and economic needs and desires of certain social groups that have the power to shape and interpret “reality.” One could claim that in the early part of the nineteenth century, many Indian languages had produced prose writings that claimed to be novels, though it took about two decades for the form to consolidate itself. In retrospect one could see the emergence of a new literary form in both Yamuna Paryatan, published in Malayalam in 1857, and Alaler Charer Dulal, published in Bengali in 1858. The rise of the novel and its popularity among the reading public was no doubt aided by the enormous growth in the second half of the nineteenth century of the publishing industry, which, as Tapti Roy points out, was “perhaps the largest indigenous enterprise in Calcutta” (30). The growth of print culture benefited both literate and nonliterate audiences as books transformed existing urban performances. For example, “Kathakatha, a conventional form of recital of Pauranic tales accompanied by singing and theatrical performance, . . . found a new textual medium in the printed book” (46). Wenger’s catalog of Bengali books available for sale in 1865 shows a total of 901 books as opposed to only 332 in 1857 (in Roy 50). More pertinent to my purposes here is the striking increase in works of prose fiction and drama.19 Other catalogs of the time also confirm the growing popularity of varieties of prose fiction and drama. This unprecedented proliferation of printed texts created a problem not only for the colonial state, which sought to discipline the content and form of texts in circulation, but also for the indigenous elite, who sought cultural hegemony. As Roy puts it, “The new intellectual elite sought to demarcate a cultural zone that would be regulated by normative practices laid down and enforced by institutions set up and run by the dominant practitioners of that culture” (54). In the 1870s Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the first Bengali novelist and perhaps the leading literary figure of his time, became

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a relentless advocate of literary taste, using the journal he edited, Bangadarshan, to define and enforce literary and aesthetic standards. The criteria for this new “high culture” were derived from two sources—classical (read “Sanskrit language and literature”) and modern (read “English”). To quote Roy, “The two sources were united into a conception of a high culture by their supposed relation to the building of a ‘nation’” (56).20 Thus it would be accurate to state that the novel emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in colonial India as a result of the spread of English among educated Indians. As Meenakshi Mukherjee notes, “It is not an accident that the first crop of novels in India, in Bengali and Marathi, appeared exactly a generation after Macaulay’s Educational Minutes making English a necessary part of an educated Indian’s mental make-up were passed” (3). This is not to say that the novel as it developed in India was purely derivative. When we talk about the Indian novel we must pay close attention to the recasting of this genre in a unique milieu with its own complex historical and literary evolution. Thus, for example, despite the efforts by nineteenth-century Indian writers consciously to produce a novel, we see distinct traces of prenovelistic forms of storytelling. To put it succinctly, the novel in India was a curiously productive amalgam of indigenous narrative traditions and certain formal and thematic elements of contemporary British Victorian novels. The influence of the colonizer’s culture was, of course, mediated by what was actually being read by educated Indians, in translation or in English, such as Wilkie Collins, Marie Corelli, Benjamin Disraeli, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Walter Scott. Though the novel did not develop uniformly in India, one can suggest, based on the various texts produced in Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, and Urdu between 1858 and 1899, that the emergence of the Indian novel was a pan-Indian phenomenon.21 Mukherjee divides the novels being written in India in the nineteenth century into three categories: the novels of purpose that utilized the new form “for social reform and missionary enterprise” (16); historical fiction/romance that combined historical detail with supernatural ingredients to re-create a past ethos; and realist social novels. Thus as the nationalist spirit began to take root among the Indian intelligentsia, one could see it being reflected in all its contradictions in the writings of the time, particularly in the new genre flourishing among the educated elite. If nationalism is a discourse that constructs its own narrative, one can imagine the imbrication of the novel, as an emerging genre, in the construction of that narrative. If, again, the significant accomplishment of English education was the transformation wrought in modes of knowing, the novel and the narration of a nationalist discourse essentially represented a Western rationalist worldview. Thus as Shivarama Padikkal demonstrates: Whether the novels are reformist or revivalist in content, their fundamental shaping force is rationalism. For rationalism, the nation is basically a cultural concept. . . . If one kind of nationalist response is to bemoan our lack of cultural unity and the specific cultural qualities which had laid the foundation of European progress and the stable modern nation-state, another response was to revive the traditional culture in order to prove that India too had a great civilization, and to cull out from old histories, records and stories those elements which would aid the conception of nationhood. (223–24)

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Between 1870 and about 1930, both historical and social novels were published; they were most immediately concerned with the idea of progress and its achievement within the parameters of the yet-to-be-realized nation. The idea of an independent nation and the creation of a novel identity for the unfettered national citizen was marked by the conflict (which continues today) between “modernity” and “Indian-ness,” a conflict particularly fraught with difficulties for the new educated class that sought to create a “homogenous, unified, pan-Indian ‘common sense’ of ethical, epistemological and social beliefs. It was as part of the larger enterprise of imagining a modern nation that the English educated class tried to construct an identity for itself” (Padikkal 224). In a significant departure from the Western novel that reiterated as its dominant theme the rupture between the individual and society, the novel in India during the heyday of nationalism took as its moral and ethical obligation a recasting of social identity in an ongoing confrontation with the colonizing power. Thus the novel often became the site for the expression of the political and social ambitions of the upper caste and middle class as they sought to imagine a culturally powerful Indian nation grounded in a common tradition. The three Indian novels on which I focus embody the internal contradictions of the Indian discourse of nationalism in my vernacular, Bengali. My choice was also guided by the emphasis in the three novels on the figure of the Indian woman to capture these contradictions. The female Indian protagonists in the three novels—Anandamath, Devi Chaudhurani, and The Home and the World (Ghare Baire)—variously epitomize, often simultaneously and differentially, the revival of an ideal, an ideal which is yet to be realized and which is being destroyed in the imaginative renditions of the Indian nation. I believe it is imperative to move beyond the colonial scene to include contemporary postcolonial Indian and Pakistani writers who are recharting the political and epistemological field of colonial India, because it reminds the postcolonial subject how crucial it is constantly to deconstruct a given or accepted historiography by introducing other genealogies that have hitherto been precluded from investigation. To this end, in this book I have included two novels by women writers from the Indian subcontinent who re-create through the voices and depiction of the fraught lives of their female protagonists the conflicting and violent years leading up to the partition of 1947. Informing the issues discussed throughout the book—most insistently in its last chapter—are current debates about the nature and status of third world literature, a debate that attained prominence with the publication of Fredric Jameson’s essay “Third World Literature in an Age of Multi-National Capitalism.” Aijaz Ahmad’s response to Jameson’s essay captured the fierce resistance of a number of postcolonial scholars to Jameson’s sweeping formulations about third world literature and nationalism. In “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Ahmad primarily focuses on the impossibility of postulating a global theory of “third world” literature. He attempts to invalidate Jameson’s major premise that all “Third World cultural productions” can be read as national allegories because they have something in common, namely, that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society.”22 The most recent entry in the ongoing debate is Madhava Prasad’s “On the Question of a Theory of (Third World)

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Literature.” Prasad offers us an innovative way to theorize about literature by reintroducing the allegorical dimension at the level of class, thereby denying the inviolate bifurcation of the globe into the first and third worlds. Prasad argues for a perception of certain social formations as “a time-space of subject formations, necessarily determined by imperialism, colonialism, developmentalism, and experimentation with bourgeois democracy and other forms of nation-statehood” rather than as a “geography with its millenia [sic] of cultural history” (58); one could then retain the signifier “third world” as used by Jameson in its strategic relational aspect in order to highlight the inequalities that remain the hallmark of global capitalist economy. Prasad’s emphasis on subject formations as primarily constituted by their entry into some form of nation-statehood allows him to draw a trajectory that defines all social formations “as structures of administration by representation on the model of the bourgeois democracies of Europe. The nation-state, with a representative rule approximating in varying degrees to the primary models, is the politically, economically and ideologically privileged unit of participation in the global order” (71). In this formulation, Jameson is faulted not for reading third world texts as national allegories but for restating the opposition between first world and third world texts as that between Freud and Marx. According to Prasad’s hypothesis all literatures at this point in socioliterary history should be inscribed in their national context to underline the hypervisibility of the national framework in third world configurations and its apparent invisibility in the Western context (73). This would entail a collapse of the distinction between the aesthetic and the political in Western literary theories which, in claiming the invisibility of the national framework in Western literatures, seeks to read the individualist emphasis solely in terms of a private, libidinal thrust. The repression of the allegorical is necessary to advance the theory of a depoliticized realm of the aesthetic that foregrounds the “individualist” and autonomous status of the Western text. To move beyond a binary representation of world literature as an opposition between the first world and the third world, Prasad insists on a theory of literature that would begin by “redefining the libidinal/private in its allegorical status (its relation to particular nations but especially to particular classes—a class allegory) and collapsing the distinction which originates in capitalist ideology” (78). In this reconfigured allegorical reading, the distinction between first and third world texts can still be considered within a theory of modes of production. This time, however, the theory is wrenched from its developmental framework, which posits a center of free space, ensuring the formation and participation of a free citizen who enjoys full representation in a putative, liberal pluralist democracy that foregrounds a cultural rather than a national identity based on the notion of “free will.” To this center is opposed a magnetically charged involuntary field that necessitates the formation of collective communities that in their stage of secondary or tertiary development advocate a nationalist will at the expense of individual subjecthood. Prasad’s notion of class allegory would reintroduce the idea of privilege into the center of free space, which in turn would highlight the obscured formation of class-based communities. This would enable us to distinguish between the bourgeoisie who thrive under a nation posited as “a community of private individuals” (75) from other classes who continue to conceive nation-states in terms of territorially biased imagined communities.

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Prasad’s emphasis on class as an overdetermined signifier that cannot and should not be overlooked in any discursive undertaking takes away with one hand what it bestows with the other. Even as he forces us to recognize the importance of class boundaries in the literary productions of the first world, he fails to address how gender intersects with class to confound and contradict class affiliations. One wonders whether Prasad foresees a kind of socialist-feminist coalition with class-based labor forces along the lines of that suggested by Christine Delphy.23 It is difficult to assess because his discussion is so centered on the interjection of space-time-class subject formations in what has been the divide between the first world and the third world. Prasad does not merely emphasize class in writing from a loosely marxist “positionality.” My point, which is not just a matter of splitting hairs, is that the widespread influence and practice of feminist studies in every field today should suggest to all theorists and critics that feminism is not merely a choice “among competing perspectives” but rather “a choice which cannot but undergird any attempt at a [critical/theoretical] reconstruction which undertakes to demonstrate our sociality in the full sense, and is ready to engage with its own presuppositions of an objective gender-neutral method of inquiry” (Sangari and Vaid 2–3). The emphasis in the three essays discussed above is the positing of the discursive formation of nation as a significantly masculinist, public discourse independent of the machinations of the domestic/familial. The essays yet again ignore my point here: that the study of nationalism and “third world literature” as such must be made to acknowledge the reality of the feminist intervention as both micropolitical and macropolitical. Dipesh Chakravorty echoes the above sentiment when in an evaluation of the work done by the Subaltern Studies historians he admits that, though the enterprise of the collective was motivated by an “explicit spirit of opposition to the elitist and teleological narratives that both marxist and nationalist traditions . . . had promoted in Indian historiography” (10), their engagement with feminism as a significant oppositional theoretical grid came only after Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the male orientation of their reconstructive projects. In her brilliant essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak reveals that any theory of representation dealing critically with the domains of ideology, subjectivity, politics, the nation, the state, and the law must attend to the specific discursive uses of the category of gender in order not to generate yet another moment of theoretical epistemic violence. She argues that the peasant “consciousness” evoked in the various subaltern countermovements uncovered and charted by the Subaltern Studies collective is always already male because “the ‘subject’ implied by the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counterpossibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups” (287). Even though the methodology of the collective cannot be accused of reifying the notion of the feminine as indeterminate, it, in its originary moments, has failed to trace the “doubly effaced” trace of sexual difference in the “itinerary of the subaltern subject” (287). The archival, interventionist historiography of the collective needs to confront the aporia in its methodology that progresses on the assumption that all forms of silences can be equally measured, retrieved, and represented via the lost figure of the indigenous, insurgent classed/cast(ed) subaltern. Spivak addresses a particular gendered issue—sati (widow burning)—not only to complicate the notion of free will but also to suggest that in every act of re-

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trieval and reconstruction by the collective, “the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant” (287). Carefully scrutinizing both Brahmanic codes and texts as well as imperialist discourses surrounding the abolishing of sati, Spivak comes to the conclusion that “between patriarchy and imperialism, subject constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into the violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (306). Jenny Sharpe provides an impassioned reading of Spivak’s critique of the methodology of the collective. According to Sharpe, Spivak does not fault the collective for ignoring women’s participation in rebellions—the collective is scrupulous in documenting such instances. What remains problematic is the failure on the part of the members of the collective to examine critically those instances where “the symbolic exchange of women appears at crucial moments . . . for explaining the mobilization of peasants across villages. . . . Spivak notes that the project of writing a history from below repeats the subaltern male’s indifference to sexual difference.”24 In the various narratives considered in this book, I repeatedly raise the question of the haunting absence of the myriad ways in which gender inflects discourses of nationalism. In the particular examination of Clear Light of Day and Cracking India I show how two representative novels by South Asian women writers approach the complex interweavings of diurnal domestic life and the political upheavals of a colonized country on the verge of independence from the point of view of its female protagonist. Even as they can be read as national allegories, they also reveal how the production of a unified, homogeneous entity such as the two nations created by the partition hinges, to a large degree, on the determinate subject position of “woman” for its articulation. In choosing novels by two women writers, I am not only concerned with reading women’s lives and highlighting women authors. Throughout my book I have taken very seriously Joan Scott’s cautionary remark that to “study women in isolation perpetuates the fiction that one sphere, the experience of one sex, has little or nothing to do with the other” (32). In Chapter 1 I discuss Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s political and philosophical writings and the role of the female revolutionary in his novels Anandamath (1882) and Devi Chaudhurani (1884). Bankim Chatterjee is an important intellectual figure of the Bengal renaissance who sought to renew a supposedly debased Bengali vernacular with feminine undertones with a vigorous infusion of masculine rationality. In doing this, he created a body of nationalist literature that was militaristic and combined “the moral firmness of the neo-Hinduism emerging after the Sepoy Mutiny period with secular English science and efficiency, a combination to be realized in the ‘world’ by rhetoric, persuasion, intellectual and verbal force” (Schwarz, “Sexing the Pundits” 240). I open the book with consideration of these two novels because they are engaged in the production of a particular Indian Hindu identity during the initial moments of the empire’s consolidation of its presence in the colony. Bankim’s novels project into the present a constructed glorious Hindu past that is then eulogized by militant nationalists in their demand for an independent “Mother India” during the height of the independence movement. I closely analyze the discourse of an incipient Hindu nationalism advocated in

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both texts and critically examine the function and representation of the Indian woman as militant leader and activist in a chiefly male and ascetic guerrilla organization. Anandamath, in particular, echoes some of the tenets of the contemporary Hindu Right. Bankim’s emphasis on the need to eulogize a virile Hindu community in his elaboration of a timeless and pure Hindu India is echoed in the current polemical discourse of communalism that seeks to erect a Hindu nation via a systemic erasure of the body politic represented by the Muslim minority. In my consideration of Shanti, the female revolutionary who infiltrates the all-male rebel group in Anandamath, I underscore how the anomalous presence of a woman in drag shores up the a priori construct of the Hindu subject as male. I explore the manner in which, in both novels, woman’s power is celebrated and curtailed in its evocation of a glorious Hindu past—embodied, as I will contend, in the very essence of a Hindu woman—as a fertile ideological ground for the unveiling of a viable modern Indian/Hindu nation by the Hindu subject who is masculine, aggressive, and not vitiated by a rampant sexuality. Chapter 2 returns us to the scene of the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, a rebellion at least partly fueled by English ignorance of the significance of certain Hindu and Muslim religious tenets. I examine Harriet Martineau’s popular history British Rule in India (1857), Meadow Taylor’s novel Seeta (1872), and Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896), concentrating on an imperial determination of the social and spatial imaginary of India as necessarily Hindu. Ronald Inden argues that “historians of religion and Indologists have not only taken their Hinduism to be the essential religion of India; they have viewed it as the exemplification of the mind of India. . . . The essence of that mind was its ‘feminine’ imagination, source of the dream-like world-view of Indians. She was an inferior substitute for the West’s masculine, world-ordering rationality” (4). The mutiny marked a crucial shift in the colonial imagining of India as unantagonistically feminine. The three texts, separated by fifteen- and twenty-year intervals, articulate a certain recasting of this fundamental characterization of India as Hindu and feminine by embodying its typicality in the Indian woman. Martineau’s history is especially intriguing because of the structural modality of the gaps in her representations of Indian women. In Taylor’s and Steel’s fictional accounts of the mutiny, the depiction of the Indian woman not only helps contain the rising threat of the desire of the “natives” to free themselves but also contributes to an absolute othering of India as immutably Hindu. Taylor’s reworking of the Hindu epic Ramayana in his portrayal of the character of Seeta and Steel’s evocation of the image of the Indian woman as always already “sati” participate in the narration of an essential unity called India. In extended investigations of Martineau’s history and Steel’s novel, I use the abolition of sati as a point of entry into two very different texts: in her book, Martineau refuses to evoke the gendered discourse of the white man’s burden; Steel ultimately validates this discourse in the image of the Hindu widow Tara setting fire to herself even as the British soldiers quell the mutineers and take back Delhi. I will argue that both Martineau’s reticence and Steel’s loquacity on the subject of sati mark sites of uncharacteristic disempowerment in an otherwise empowered discourse of colonialism. My reading of the structural aporia in Martineau’s text and the “structure of feeling” that undergirds Steel’s novel undercuts both the fiction of absolute colonial domination and the fallacy of the

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totality of otherness by insisting that the narratives which secure the position of the colonizer necessitated the repression of certain internal cultural facts that resurface as unspeakable sites in the territory of the other. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on two partitions, the temporary partition of Bengal in 1905 and the division of the subcontinent in 1947. Chapter 3 plunges us into an India quite different from that imagined in the pages of Chatterjee or the British writers. In this chapter I read Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World in conjunction with his writings on nationalism and the woman question. Tagore’s novel is quite well known in the West, and not only because Satyajit Ray made a movie based on it. Recently, in the pages of the Boston Review, the novel was resurrected as an admirable exemplification of the principles of cosmopolitanism in a debate about “education and political identity” in the United States. I discuss the ramifications of this debate at greater length in the chapter. The novel, published in 1915, revolves around the nationalist furor generated by the partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905. In response to the typical British tactic of divide and conquer, the nationalists advocated the swadeshi movement—the boycott of British goods. The palimpsest-like structure of the novel and its complex points of view articulated in the narrative voices of the three primary characters—Nikhilesh, Sandip, and Bimala—make the text especially suitable for a complex dialogic reading. The novel addresses issues of communalism, nationalism, and the “woman question” via the changing relationships between the three individuals. I focus primarily on the evolution of the character of Bimala as she moves, literally and figuratively, from the home to the world. Of particular interest is Tagore’s complicated position on the status of women and the manner in which the sign of the “new woman,” as depicted in the character of Bimala, an upper-caste Indian wife of a Hindu zamindar (landowner), becomes the flash point, in the rhetoric of the Indian nationalists, for igniting the cultural destiny of the Indian nation. I conclude the chapter with an analysis of “Sultana’s Dream,” a feminist utopia written in 1905 in English by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Bangladeshi Muslim literary scholar and activist. This utopia, with its outline of the positive gains achieved by women no longer restricted by purdah, provides another destiny for the sign of the “new woman” that challenges those eulogized by nationalists envisaging a new nation. While the chapter on Tagore addresses the repercussions in a colonial space of the partition of Bengal along religious lines, Chapter 4 concerns the legacy of the partition of 1947 for two emergent postcolonial nation-states as detailed in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India. Set in Delhi and Lahore, respectively, both novels offer a critique of the nationalist agenda that led to the partition and allow the postcolonial reader to engage with the deconstruction of identities that are posited as necessary for the formulation of coherent political communities. I attempt to bring to the surface the contingency and ambiguity of every identity, especially that of “woman,” as illustrated in these two novels. Even though the primary texts in this book are “literary” ones, my analysis of the discourses of nationalism, imperialism, and gender construction in Indian and British texts is greatly indebted to what Grewal characterizes as “an emerging field of transnational feminist cultural studies” (18). It is through the deployment

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of a carefully scrutinized, differentially positioned, and geopolitically refracted feminist theoretical lens that I bring into play novels and tracts written in nineteenth-century Bengal, Victorian novels and histories, and contemporary, postcolonial South Asian novels written in English. I resist a purely literary comparative framework for the examination of contradictory narratives in the construction of a Hindu India and a Hindu female identity. By consistently questioning the liminal form of the nation through the ideological emphasis on gender, I suggest how these narratives are themselves implicated in the production of history and knowledge not only in the more obvious diachronic sense (as in the chronological passage from colonialism to postcolonialism) but also in its paradoxical differential synchronicity. The construction of a Hindu India by both the nationalists and the imperialists not only occurs in a colonial moment but equally anticipates the possibility of a realm beyond imperialism and independence. In the Epilogue I suggest how such constructions persist in the discourses of the Hindu Right both in India and the United States. As India follows the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary of independence by exploding nuclear devices, we need to pause and take stock of the various narratives of decolonization and postindependent national histories that continue to deploy “woman” as both sign and subject.

NOTES All citations for the primary texts under consideration will be provided in the individual chapter. I have chosen to spell Indian words without potentially cumbersome diacritical marks or combinations of letters. 1. The invitation was extended to me as an Indian professor teaching in the area, and I understand that the idea of an Indian woman teaching English at an American university was, to the ambassador, both intriguing and appealing. 2. The fetishization of identity through clothing, in the ambassador’s assertion of cultural veracity, failed to take into account the “Indian” space wherein these women chose to dress as Indian women. The inability often to wear one’s indigenous garb in a Western public space was completely ignored by the ambassador, who had to assume that all the Indian women present always dressed as such. In her essay “White Skin/Black Masks: The Pleasures and Politics of Imperialism,” Gail Ching-Liang Low addresses the manner in which “clothes act as signifiers within the locus of desire and pleasure” (89) in the phenomenon of cultural cross-dressing in Anglo-Indian fiction—“the fantasy of the white man disguised as ‘native’” (83). In a fashion, even though the ambassador was recoding the issue of cultural cross-dressing for different purposes, he reiterated Low’s point that “clothes trap the essence of the east; they objectify it” (89). 3. For an interesting evaluation of corporate-style multiculturalism and its influence on the public sphere, see the essays, introduced by Evan Watkins, in Social Text 44 (1995). 4. Arjun Appadurai, in “The Heart of Whiteness,” writes: “Even as the legitimacy of nation-states in their own territorial contexts is increasingly under threat, the idea of the nation flourishes transnationally. Safe from the depredations of their home-states, diasporic communities become double loyal to their nations of origin” (804). 5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In a Word: Interview,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine 3–4. 6. For example, in Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, a household name among scholars of nationalism today, addresses the manner in which issues of ethnicity, race, and class are imbricated in the evolution of nationalist beliefs. But his engagement with the

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axis of gender is slight, to say the least. As Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out, Anderson’s use of the “language of fraternity and comradeship” to capture the idea of the modern nation as an imagined community “displays the androcentrism of modern national imaginings.” The absence of gender in Anderson’s speculation of the rise and growth of the modern nation cannot simply be explained by arguing that “women ‘don’t fit’ the descriptors of the imagined community. Rather, the nation by definition situates or ‘produces’ women in permanent instability with respect to the imagined community, including, in very particular ways, the women of the dominant class. Women inhabitants of nations were neither imagined as nor invited to imagine themselves as part of the horizontal brotherhood” (131). 7. This consistent oversight by contemporary critics of nationalism is responsible for much of my ambivalence toward their work, which, as Deborah Gordon notes in the context of feminist decolonizing ethnography, produces a kind of subordination that “is not located in marginalization nor does it indicate a conspiracy to silence feminists. Rather it is a management of feminism produced out of a masculinist feminism with specific troubles for feminist ethnographers (or in this case feminist critics of nationalism)” (8). 8. For example, a collection of essays edited by Deniz Kandiyoti, Women, Islam, and the State, seeks to attend to the postindependence trajectories of modern states in their various deployments of Islam to shore up different nationalisms and state ideologies. The essays show how both hegemonic and oppositional groups use these various transformations of Islam to control the problematic space designated by the phrase “the woman question.” . . . The “ways in which women are represented in political discourse, the degree of formal emancipation they are able to achieve, the modalities of their participation in economic life and the nature of the social movements through which they are able to articulate their gendered interests are intimately linked to state-building [or nation-building] processes and are responsive to their transformation” (2). 9. Renan 13. If, according to Renan, a “nation’s existence is [metaphorically speaking] a daily plebiscite” (19), then it is only men who constitute the population that exercises the right to national self-determination. 10. It is quite another thing altogether to read a 1990 essay such as Timothy Brennan’s “The National Longing for Form” and discover no engagement with the way in which gender must have troubled his subject, “myths of the nation.” A singular belief that emerges from Brennan’s essay is that to understand the male agon of nation building and the explication of its principle “one, yet many” in the chosen genre of the novel, one can confidently ignore the gender dynamics of the subject. One has to read Brennan’s essay alongside Doris Sommer’s “Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America” (in the same anthology, Nation and Narration) to realize how the discursive repetition of the structure of the nation in the novel (primarily the romance) is equally a “marriage of gen(d)res” (82). Sommer “locates an erotics of politics . . . to show how the variety of social ideals inscribed in the novels are all ostensibly grounded in the ‘natural’ romance that legitimates the nation-family through love” (76). 11. Such an anthology as Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Grewal and Kaplan, on the other hand, articulates critiques of colonialism, nationalism, modernity, and global economic structures by unpackaging their complex relation to gender and sexuality. The subtitle of the first part, “Gender, Nation, and Critiques of Modernity,” is not a reflection of singular aspects of the essays that follow. Every author, in seeking to engage with the idea of transnational feminist practice situated in a politics of location, is committed to a deep theoretical investigation of the gendered relationships between ideological structures and epistemological apparatuses. 12. Some of the most innovative and interesting work has been done by Gayatri Spivak, Lata Mani, Jenny Sharpe, Sara Suleri, Inderpal Grewal, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Tejaswani Niranjana, Kumkum Sangari, Sudesh Vaid, Susie Tharu, and Tanika Sarkar. 13. One of the many anthologies that have emerged in response to the challenge meted

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out by the Hindutva movement is Women and the Hindu Right, edited by Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia. In many of the essays in this anthology the writers try to revise and rethink feminism’s relationship to right-wing movements. 14. A “sepoy” was an Indian soldier in the British colonial army. The British representation of the 1857 uprising as a “mutiny” is a deliberate hierarchical circumscription of the more encompassing effect of the movement as a significant rebellion that challenged the inherent power dynamics of colonial rule. 15. For an annotated bibliography of mutiny writings in English, see Ladendorf, Revolt in India. For an extensive bibliography on mutiny fiction, see Gupta, India in English Fiction, and for a review of mutiny novels, see Shailendra Singh, Novels on the Indian Mutiny (Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1980). 16. Sara Suleri reads the colonial narrativization of an “English India” “against the grain of the rhetoric of binarism that informs, either explicitly or implicitly, contemporary critiques of alterity in colonial discourse” (3). She further destabilizes the taxonomic power of imperial cultural knowledge by exploring the reinscription of the idiom of English India in the migrant postcolonial narratives of Naipaul and Rushdie. A genealogy of colonial discourse, of the kind developed by Suleri, constantly compounds the double focus of the analytic dimension inherent in a term such as “postcolonial.” In her nuanced analysis of the metaphor of travel, Inderpal Grewal suggests “the particular ways in which knowledge of a Self, society, and nation” were and continue to be formed in colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial spaces. She reveals the ways in which “movement within space came to be ideologically inscribed in the nineteenth century in British culture, and . . . how such ideologies were [then] deployed by non-Europeans” (4). 17. Here I rely heavily on Chantal Mouffe’s essay “Citizenship and Political Identity” 28–32. 18. Nalini Natarajan, “Woman, Nation, and Narration in Midnight’s Children,” in Scattered Hegemonies, ed. Grewal and Kaplan, 76–77. 19. Roy documents the “phenomenal rise in the popularity of drama and its emergence in the late nineteenth century as the most prolific form of literary production” in Bengal (50). She also contends that this phenomenon has not been adequately investigated. 20. The imposition of disciplinary norms definitely encountered resistance. But it is precisely the negotiation of the boundaries of taste and respectability that reveals how “national” culture had to be repeatedly legitimized not just in relation to colonial expectations but also in terms of its relation to the “popular.” 21. For a discussion of the development of late-nineteenth-century Hindi literature and its negotiations with the canons of inherited English literary taste and popular demands, see Chadra, The Oppressive Present. 22. A. Ahmad 69. See Schwarz and Prasad for contradictory critiques of Ahmad’s position. Because Ahmad does not concern himself with the feasibility of terminology such as “first world” and “third world” or the problems generated by such distinctions, I guide the reader toward Ahmad’s and Prasad’s essays for discussions on the subject. Let me say briefly that Ahmad’s assertion that we live in one world and that the idea of the “third world” is not empirically grounded (7–9) is not always convincing, because his analysis relies largely on his own experiences as an intellectual from Pakistan. Despite his marxist affinities with Jameson, Ahmad distinguishes his subject position from Jameson’s in terms that recrudesce the familiar opposition between Western and non-Western worlds. 23. See Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, trans. Diana Leonard (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). 24. Sharpe 18. Sharpe goes on to emphasize the tremendous significance of Spivak’s critique and her undertaking in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”: “She [Spivak] identifies the subaltern woman as one who cannot be simply reduced to her class or caste position. She interrupts the project of making subaltern classes the subject of history with a ‘text about the (im)possibility of “making” the subaltern gender the subject of its own story’” (18).

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rite your self. Your body must be heard.” Since Hélène Cixous first issued this call in 1975, there have been continual attempts to sort out just what it means, what a discourse that lets the “body . . . be heard” would look like, and whether it is even possible. What would it mean for the body to have a language? What would the body say? One could take these questions literally, but their real import is to raise the issue of sexual difference, to suggest that perhaps bodily differences extend into the realm of language. One of the central questions of feminist literary theory has concerned the existence of l’écriture féminine, “feminine writing,” which might be specifically gendered and different from the kind of writing usually valued in Western culture. Although not restricted to writers who are biologically sexed female (Cixous offers Jean Genet as one of her examples), feminine writing nonetheless is seen here to vary along gender lines, to correspond to culturally determined gender codes: his language is rational, logical, hierarchical, and linear; her language is arational (if not irrational), contralogical (if not illogical), resistant to hierarchies, and circular. Feminist criticism has built on—and questioned—the idea that gender makes itself apparent not only in bodies but in writing. Sometimes these questions have centered on the body of the writer, sometimes on the representation of bodies in a text, and sometimes on the reader’s body, but one of the ongoing debates of feminist literary theory and criticism has been on the role of the body in literary study. The title of this section is the plural “bodies” to denote just how many different bodies we might be writing about: not just the gendered but the raced body; not just the body of the writer, but also of the reader or the fictional character; not just the able body, but the disabled one. The writers of these essays challenge not only the silencing of the female body in Western discourse, but the very definitions of the body that have been used, including those by feminists themselves. When one writes “the female body,” what sort of generalization is that? Are all female bodies the same, or do we mean only those bodies that are unambiguously female? Only bodies that are whole? white? free? What role does sexuality play in understanding those bodies? How does the reality of lived bodies connect to a literary text that is about fictional bodies, bodies that never actually existed? As we shall see, in the years since Cixous called for a writing of the body, feminist critics have teased out many questions about relations between bodies and language. The essays in this section represent diverse methodologies, but most take a poststructural approach to the body; readers may find “The Pattern of Feminisms Redux” section of the general introduction to this volume useful for its explanations of some basic assumptions about poststructural and psychoanalytical methodologies. Many of the authors in this section (but especially Cixous, Mulvey, Spillers, and Butler) assume a working knowledge of Derridean and Lacanian thought of the 1970s and 1980s. Most of these essays also assume a post-Foucaultian view of the body as being indistinguishable from our systems of knowledge of and writing about it; what we experience is not simply “the body,” but what we know—have learned—of that body from discourses about the body, be they scientific, literary, or spiritual. Hélène Cixous’s influential and often-cited essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (published in French in 1975; revised and translated into English 1976), is impossible to summarize, and for good reason. Simultaneously, this essay is about and is

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feminine writing. Here, Cixous both discusses and illustrates her theories of women’s writing; it is not linear, logical, or progressive—that is, it is not constrained by traditional (masculine? patriarchal?) notions of argumentation and development. The movement of the essay is more fluid than direct, more experiential than argumentative. Cixous aims for her reader to understand the nature of women’s writing as much from the way in which she writes as from what she writes about. Cixous’s essay is highly quotable and challenging. Her claim that women writers always retain a bit of the mother in them (“There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.”) provides a richness of evocation and metaphor that has spoken to a large number of feminist writers and critics. But such claims also remain troubling to feminists who have a resisted a sense of being tied to the biological. Cixous’s writing provides a central focus for questions of separatism, biological determinism, and bodily metaphors—how far should we take our insistence on difference? “The Laugh of the Medusa,” as its title might suggest, ultimately celebrates that which in women has been denigrated for centuries and urges us to embrace “difference” and to use it. Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), shifts our focus from writing the body to the way we look at women’s bodies in the movies. Mulvey, an avant-garde filmmaker herself, turns her attention toward women as objects of desire in traditional Hollywood films. Asking how we get pleasure from films, and whether that pleasure is oppressive to women, Mulvey argues that the classic narrative film of the thirties and forties exploits women by coding the erotic as a specifically male province within the dominating patriarchal order. In these films, the camera is used to display women’s bodies as the objects of fetishistic or voyeuristic gazes (sexually “abnormal” ways of looking), which make them concurrently alluring and threatening. To allay that threat—which Mulvey links, through the use of psychoanalytic theory, to the castration complex—traditional cinema uses three techniques: women are punished at the end of films, their bodies are fragmented by camera shots, or they are made into sexual icons. Mulvey urges new techniques of filmmaking that will end this oppressive use of women as nothing more than objects of desire and that will make film viewing a more self-conscious and egalitarian experience than it currently is. (In her rethinking of this essay, “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey addresses the question of women spectators and female heroines more directly.)1 In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), Hortense Spillers, like Cixous, examines the relationship among language, the body, and ownership, and between maternity and language. Unlike Cixous, however, Spillers grounds her analysis in a specific history of racialized and enslaved bodies that were literally owned and traded; furthermore, she examines a maternity in which relations between mother and child were subjected to an accounting in which motherhood equaled the (re)production of additional slave labor. Moving away from l’écriture féminine, and into a more material context, Spillers situates her discussion of “the body” within the history of dominance—specifically, a history of the captive body. Acknowledging the power and attraction of the poststructural impulse to turn the body into a metaphor, Spillers nonetheless asks us to remember that “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse.” She seeks to examine the intersection between myth-making, human

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biology, and the “project of culture,” and points to the captive body as a site that “brings into focus a gathering of our social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless.” Spillers reads social theories of the African American family in the context of a history of dominance, enslavement, and torture, a history in which families were violently sundered, paternity was often denied, and maternity was stripped away. When language and the dominant culture are understood to be ruled by the “Law of the Father,” she asks, what happens to language and literature in a dominated culture in which fathers have been systematically dispossessed? (For an explanation of the Law of the Father, see the “The Pattern of Feminisms Redux” in the general introduction to this volume.) Does one become subject to a “Law of the Mother”? What happens to naming, then, in a culture embedded in a literal history of stripping away of real names and in which the figural relation between language and maternity/paternity is tainted by the violent rending apart of families? Spillers argues that the loss of land, name, and parents becomes a “metaphor of displacement for other human and cultural features and relations,” including the relation to gender, one’s own body, and language. In our excerpt from the influential book Gender Trouble, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions” (1999), Judith Butler sets out the basic tenets of her theory of the performance of gender: “‘the body’ [is] shaped by political forces with strategic interests in keeping that body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex.” Butler begins with a question about one feminist assumption, especially among theorists: that the category woman is an obvious one, and that it is marked by a sexed body. What would happen, Butler asks, if we did not just assume that sex precedes gender and that the body is somehow outside the system of signification in which signifiers are always arbitrary? Using the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Butler suggests that cultural norms establish the boundaries of the body rather than some immutable truth about the body itself. Even (or maybe especially) clear distinctions between the inside and the outside of the body become unclear when examined through Butler’s analysis; only through a process of defining otherness do we come to a sense of self, and that otherness is always culturally defined and “tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control.” Butler turns her attention to drag and cross-dressing to explore the relationships between anatomical sex, gender, and performance, arguing that they challenge our usual ideas about a “true gender identity.” When gender performance does not match anatomical sex, it becomes clear that assuming a gender is imitative, and “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” The performance of gender, then, becomes in fact a parody of gender, but a parody for which there is no original; it is “a fantasy of a fantasy,” “an imitation without an origin.” Furthermore, gender is not an act in the sense that one consciously chooses moments to “be a woman” or to “be a man,” but in the sense that we come to embody our gender over time. Indeed, Butler claims, “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.” It is thus not really internal, but not really external either. It doesn’t express an inner truth but, then again, isn’t entirely imposed from the outside. Although such an argument might seem to suggest that

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we can therefore freely take up whatever gender performance (or not) that we might like, Butler reminds us that such performances take place within a system of meaning, and that “gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. . . . [W]e regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right.” In “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals” (2002), Diane Price Herndl takes up questions of identity and bodily performance from the point of view of the breast-cancer patient. Are there ways that a feminist is expected to perform breast cancer correctly? Audre Lorde was the feminist writer who had the courage to speak publicly about the politics of cancer, mastectomy, and environmental toxins in the late 1970s, and who set a kind of standard for a feminist response to cancer. She decried the silence surrounding breast cancer and argued that women should stop wearing prostheses in order to make breast-cancer patients visible to each other and to the culture at large. In an essay that is part celebration of Lorde’s courage, part self-justification, and part poststructural analysis of cultural and biomedical changes, Price Herndl looks at her own decision to undergo reconstruction after a mastectomy in light of theories of the posthuman body (that is, a body that is manifestly not a “natural” body, but one marked by its interaction with technology). Poststructural theory posits subjects who are always already alien to themselves, partial, and contradictory. In light of such a challenge to the idea of “self,” how can one find a way to unproblematically “perform” the self after a radical challenge to its integrity? Refusing to discredit either Lorde’s or her own decision, Price Herndl tries to locate them within cultural moments: “The challenge for me personally and for feminism more generally, I think, is to find a way to understand the difference between a postmodern, posthuman view of the body and an earlier feminism’s view without having to regard either as necessarily wrong. Each is historically situated, responding to different cultures, different crises in women’s embodiment.” She urges us to confront the myths of self-making (the myth that we can be self-determining) and argues that disability theory gives us a way to understand such myths as creations of arbitrary “norms” of the body. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that an extended dialogue between feminist and disability studies could amplify both fields. In “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” (2002), she argues that feminist disability studies can “augment the terms and confront the limits of the ways we understand human diversity, the materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences. . . . [I]ntegrating disability as a category of analysis and a system of representation deepens, expands, and challenges feminist theory.” Defining disability as a “culturally fabricated narrative of the body, similar to what we understand as the fictions of race and gender,” GarlandThomson examines four important domains of feminist theory to which feminist disability studies can make significant contributions: representation, the body, identity, and activism. “Understanding how disability functions along with other systems of representation clarifies how all the systems intersect and mutually constitute one another,” she claims. She points out that female bodies are almost always represented—as are disabled bodies or raced bodies—as somehow lacking, incomplete, or inadequate: “Female, disabled, and dark bodies are supposed to be dependent, incomplete, vulnerable, and incompetent bodies. Femininity and race are performances of disability.” In evoking the “performative,” Garland-

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Thomson employs Butler’s theory to examine how real, lived, material bodies are constructed discursively by a “disability system” to be disabled. Within such a system, bodies are read, and represented, as normal or not in ways that intersect with gender, race, and class. In readings of several representations—from medical texts to advertising to fashion photography and even Barbie—Garland-Thomson explains how feminist theory and disability studies work together to enrich our reading strategies. When feminist literary theorists and critics look at the body, they most often study either bodies represented in a text or, less often, the body of the writer as it is expressed in a text, but Robyn Warhol-Down, in “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence” (2003), analyzes the body of the reader of a text or the viewer of a film. How are our bodies implicated in, important to, the reading process? And how is our reading gendered? Warhol-Down uses the term effeminacy to describe a kind of gendered reader; although the term is often used in a pejorative way to refer to “womanish” manners or to gay men, she is using it differently. In her introduction to the book from which this essay comes, Having a Good Cry, she describes her “swerve . . . away from gender theory’s high road” as a matter of “claiming ‘effeminate’ as a new honorific to refer positively to gendered—which is not necessarily or not only to say sexualized—traits of persons who do not meet culturally determined standards of ‘masculinity.’” So what happens to the body of the effeminate reader when she encounters a text that appeals to her enjoyment of the marriage plot but offends her feminist politics? A cringe: that ultimate sign of mixed feelings, the inward wincing that signals embarrassment and shame. Warhol-Down argues that too often literary theory has taken a reader’s desire to be analogous, or even equivalent, to sexual desire; maybe, she argues, our bodies are involved in the gendered reading experience in other ways. Marriage plots, those “boy meets girl / boy loses girl / boy gets girl” stories that are so marked in our culture as “women’s novels” or “chick flicks,” may best exemplify how narrative readings can be gender performances. She argues, “The pattern of affect the marriage plot sets up—the alternation of excitement and shame—is, I would argue, partly constitutive of effeminate emotional experience in mainstream U.S. culture: it may indeed mirror or stand metaphorically for sexuality, but it does something more—and, I am arguing—something different from that: it puts the effeminate reader’s body through a pattern of affective paces that add up, over a lifetime of reading, to the experience of gender itself.” In a reading of the movie Pretty Woman, Warhol-Down describes the way her body responds to the narrative twists and turns. She demonstrates the gendering of affective response to reveal the gendering not only of reading but of bodies themselves.

NOTE 1. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Framework 6 (1981): 15–17.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

THE LAUGH OF THE MEDUSA (1975)





















I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time—a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the (feminine) new from the old (la nouvelle de l’ancien). Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project. I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say “woman,” I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must be said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the “dark”—that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute—there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes—any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible. I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular

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as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden. I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naïveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a . . . divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble. And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great—that is for “great men”; and it’s “silly.” Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty—so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until next time. Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women—female-sexed texts. That kind scares them. I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s up to him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us once men have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.1 Now women return from afar, from always: from “without,” from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond “culture”; from their childhood which men have been trying desperately to make them forget, condemning it to “eternal rest.” The little girls and their “ill-mannered” bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror. Frigidified. But are they ever seething underneath! What an effort it takes—there’s no end to it—for the sex cops to bar their threatening return. Such a display of forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock.

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Here they are, returning, arriving over and again, because the unconscious is impregnable. They have wandered around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they’ve been given a deadly brainwashing. You can incarcerate them, slow them down, get away with the old Apartheid routine, but for a time only. As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they’re taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark. Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcissism! A narcissism which loves itself only to be loved for what women haven’t got! They have constructed the infamous logic of antilove. We the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies—we are black and we are beautiful. We’re stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking. What happiness for us who are omitted, brushed aside at the scene of inheritances; we inspire ourselves and we expire without running out of breath, we are everywhere! From now on, who, if we say so, can say no to us? We’ve come back from always. It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her—by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay, by going out ahead of what the New Woman will be, as an arrow quits the bow with a movement that gathers and separates the vibrations musically, in order to be more than her self. I say that we must, for, with a few rare exceptions, there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity; exceptions so rare, in fact, that, after plowing through literature across languages, cultures, and ages,2 one can only be startled at this vain scouting mission. It is well known that the number of women writers (while having increased very slightly from the nineteenth century on) has always been ridiculously small. This is a useless and deceptive fact unless from their species of female writers we do not first deduct the immense majority whose workmanship is in no way different from male writing, and which either obscures women or reproduces the classic representations of women (as sensitive—intuitive—dreamy, etc.).3 Let me insert here a parenthetical remark. I mean it when I speak of male writing. I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that, until now, far more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy; that this is a locus where the repression of women has

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been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that’s frightening since it’s often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction; that this locus has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (and not sexual difference), where woman has never her turn to speak—this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures. Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism. With some exceptions, for there have been failures—and if it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be writing (I-woman, escapee)—in that enormous machine that has been operating and turning out its “truth” for centuries. There have been poets who would go to any lengths to slip something by at odds with tradition—men capable of loving love and hence capable of loving others and of wanting them, of imagining the woman who would hold out against oppression and constitute herself as a superb, equal, hence “impossible” subject, untenable in a real social framework. Such a woman the poet could desire only by breaking the codes that negate her. Her appearance would necessarily bring on, if not revolution—for the bastion was supposed to be immutable—at least harrowing explosions. At times it is in the fissure caused by an earthquake, through that radical mutation of things brought on by a material upheaval when every structure is for a moment thrown off balance and an ephemeral wildness sweeps order away, that the poet slips something by, for a brief span, of woman. Thus did Kliest expend himself in his yearning for the existence of sister-lovers, maternal daughters, mothersisters, who never hung their heads in shame. Once the palace of magistrates is restored, it’s time to pay: immediate bloody death to the uncontrollable elements. But only the poets—not the novelists, allies of representationalism. Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffman would say, fairies. She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history, first at two levels that cannot be separated. a) Individually. By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. Our naphtha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars—black or gold—nonassessed values that will change the rules of the old game. To write. An act which will not only “realize” the decensored relation of

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woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing . . . )—tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak. A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman. b) An act that will also be marked by woman’s seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the antilogos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process. It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language. Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away—that’s how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak—even just open her mouth—in public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine. It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem. Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn’t painfully lost her wind). She doesn’t “speak,” she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the “logic” of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she’s saying, because she doesn’t deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when “theoretical” or political, is never simple or linear or “objectified,” generalized: she draws her story into history. There is not that scission, that division made by the common man between the logic of oral speech and the logic of the text, bound as he is by his antiquated relation—servile, calculating—to mastery. From which proceeds the niggardly lip service which engages only the tiniest part of the body, plus the mask. In women’s speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating, which, once we’ve been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retains the power of moving us—that element is the song: first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman. Why this privileged relationship with the voice? Because no woman stockpiles as many de-

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fenses for countering the drives as does a man. You don’t build walls around yourself, you don’t forgo pleasure as “wisely” as he. Even if phallic mystification has generally contaminated good relationships, a woman is never far from “mother” (I mean outside her role functions: the “mother” as nonname and as source of goods). There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink. Woman for women.—There always remains in woman that force which produces/ is produced by the other—in particular, the other woman. In her, matrix, cradler; herself giver as her mother and child; she is her own sister-daughter. You might object, “What about she who is the hysterical offspring of a bad mother?” Everything will be changed once woman gives woman to the other woman. There is hidden and always ready in woman the source; the locus for the other. The mother, too, is a metaphor. It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself and return in love the body that was “born” to her. Touch me, caress me, you the living no-name, give me my self as myself. The relation to the “mother,” in terms of intense pleasure and violence, is curtailed no more than the relation to childhood (the child that she was, that she is, that she makes, remakes, undoes, there at the point where, the same, she mothers herself). Text: my body—shot through with streams of song; I don’t mean the overbearing, clutchy “mother” but, rather, what touches you, the equivoice that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force; the rhythm that laughs you; the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable; body (body? bodies?), no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other; that part of you that leaves a space between yourself and urges you to inscribe in language your woman’s style. In women there is always more or less of the mother who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stands up against separation; a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes. We will rethink womankind beginning with every form and every period of her body. The Americans remind us, “We are all Lesbians”; that is, don’t denigrate woman, don’t make of her what men have made of you. Because the “economy” of her drives is prodigious, she cannot fail, in seizing the occasion to speak, to transform directly and indirectly all systems of exchange based on masculine thrift. Her libido will produce far more radical effects of political and social change than some might like to think. Because she arrives, vibrant, over and again, we are at the beginning of a new history, or rather of a process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another. As subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places. Woman un-thinks4 the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield. In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history. As a militant, she is an integral part of all liberations. She must be farsighted, not limited to blow-by-blow interaction. She foresees that her liberation will do more than modify power relations or toss the ball over to the other camp; she will bring about a mutation in human relations, in thought, in all praxis: hers is not simply a class struggle, which she carries forward into a much vaster movement. Not that in order to be a woman-in-struggle(s) you have to leave the class struggle or repudiate it; but you have to split it open, spread it out, push it

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forward, fill it with the fundamental struggle so as to prevent the class struggle, or any other struggle for the liberation of a class of people, from operating as a form of repression, pretext for postponing the inevitable, the staggering alteration in power relations and in the production of individuals. This alteration is already upon us—in the United States, for example, where millions of night crawlers are in the process of undermining the family and disintegrating the whole of American sociality. The new history is coming; it’s not a dream, though it does extend beyond men’s imagination, and for good reason. It’s going to deprive them of their conceptual orthopedics, beginning with the destruction of their enticement machine. It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded— which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate. Hence the necessity to affirm the flourishes of this writing, to give form to its movement, its near and distant byways. Bear in mind to begin with (1) that sexual opposition, which has always worked for man’s profit to the point of reducing writing, too, to his laws, is only a historico-cultural limit. There is, there will be more and more rapidly pervasive now, a fiction that produces irreducible effects of femininity. (2) That it is through ignorance that most readers, critics, and writers of both sexes hesitate to admit or deny outright the possibility or the pertinence of a distinction between feminine and masculine writing. It will usually be said, thus disposing of sexual difference: either that all writing, to the extent that it materializes, is feminine; or, inversely—but it comes to the same thing—that the act of writing is equivalent to masculine masturbation (and so the woman who writes cuts herself out a paper penis); or that writing is bisexual, hence neuter, which again does away with differentiation. To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death—to admit this is first to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of the one and the other, not fixed in sequences of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another. A process of different subjects knowing one another and beginning one another anew only from the living boundaries of the other: a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between, from which woman takes her forms (and man, in his turn; but that’s his other history). In saying “bisexual, hence neuter,” I am referring to the classic conception of bisexuality, which, squashed under the emblem of castration fear and along with the fantasy of a “total” being (though composed of two halves), would do away with the difference experienced as an operation incurring loss, as the mark of dreaded sectility. To this self-effacing, merger-type bisexuality, which would conjure away cas-

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tration (the writer who puts up his sign: “bisexual written here, come and see,” when the odds are good that it’s neither one nor the other), I oppose the other bisexuality on which every subject not enclosed in the false theater of phallocentric representationalism has founded his/her erotic universe. Bisexuality: that is, each one’s location in self (répérage en soi) of the presence—variously manifest and insistent according to each person, male or female—of both sexes, nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex, and, from this “self-permission,” multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my body and the other body. Now it happens that at present, for historico-cultural reasons, it is women who are opening up to and benefiting from this vatic bisexuality which doesn’t annul differences but stirs them up, pursues them, increases their number. In a certain way, “woman is bisexual”; man—it’s a secret to no one—being poised to keep glorious phallic monosexuality in view. By virtue of affirming the primacy of the phallus and of bringing it into play, phallocratic ideology has claimed more than one victim. As a woman, I’ve been clouded over by the great shadow of the scepter and been told: idolize it, that which you cannot brandish. But at the same time, man has been handed that grotesque and scarcely enviable destiny (just imagine) of being reduced to a single idol with clay balls. And consumed, as Freud and his followers note, by a fear of being a woman! For, if psychoanalysis was constituted from woman, to repress femininity (and not so successful a repression at that—men have made it clear), its account of masculine sexuality is now hardly refutable: as with all the “human” sciences, it reproduces the masculine view, of which it is one of the effects. Here we encounter the inevitable man-with-rock, standing erect in his old Freudian realm, in the way that, to take the figure back to the point where linguistics is conceptualizing it “anew,” Lacan preserves it in the sanctuary of the phallos (φ) “sheltered” from castration’s lack! Their “symbolic” exists, it holds power—we, the sowers of disorder, know it only too well. But we are in no way obliged to deposit our lives in their banks of lack, to consider the constitution of the subject in terms of a drama manglingly restaged, to reinstate again and again the religion of the father. Because we don’t want that. We don’t fawn around the supreme hole. We have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the negative. The feminine (as the poets suspected) affirms: “ . . . And yes,” says Molly, carrying Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing: “I said yes, I will Yes.” The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable.—It is still unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack. And we believed. They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss. That would be enough to set half the world laughing, except that it’s still going on. For the phallologocentric sublation5 is with us, and it’s militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration. They haven’t changed a thing: they’ve theorized their desire for reality! Let the priests tremble, we’re going to show them our sexts! Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one. But isn’t this fear convenient for them?

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Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing. Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex. That’s because they need femininity to be associated with death; it’s the jitters that give them a hard-on! for themselves! They need to be afraid of us. Look at the trembling Perseuses moving backward toward us, clad in apotropes. What lovely backs! Not another minute to lose. Let’s get out of here. Let’s hurry: the continent is not impenetrably dark. I’ve been there often. I was overjoyed one day to run into Jean Genet. It was in Pompes funèbres.6 He had come there led by his Jean. There are some men (all too few) who aren’t afraid of femininity. Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity, about their eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain miniscule-immense area of their bodies; not about destiny, but about the adventure of such and such a drive, about trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at one time timorous and soon to be forthright. A woman’s body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor—once, by smashing yokes and censors, she lets it articulate the profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction—will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language. We’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we’ve been made victims of the old fool’s game: each one will love the other sex. I’ll give you your body and you’ll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them? Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word “silence,” the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word “impossible” and writes it as “the end.” Such is the strength of women that, sweeping away syntax, breaking that famous thread (just a tiny little thread, they say) which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord, assuring them—otherwise they couldn’t come—that the old lady is always right behind them, watching them make phallus, women will go right up to the impossible. When the “repressed” of their culture and their society returns, it’s an explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed and equal to the most forbidding of suppressions. For when the Phallic period comes to an end, women will have been either annihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence. Muffled throughout their history, they have lived in dreams, in bodies (though muted), in silences, in aphonic revolts. And with such force in their fragility; a fragility, a vulnerability, equal to their incomparable intensity. Fortunately, they haven’t sublimated; they’ve saved their skin, their energy. They haven’t worked at liquidating the impasse of lives with-

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out futures. They have furiously inhabited these sumptuous bodies: admirable hysterics who made Freud succumb to many voluptuous moments impossible to confess, bombarding his Mosaic statue with their carnal and passionate body words, haunting him with their inaudible and thundering denunciations, dazzling, more than naked underneath the seven veils of modesty. Those who, with a single word of the body, have inscribed the vertiginous immensity of a history which is sprung like an arrow from the whole history of men and from biblico-capitalist society, are the women, the supplicants of yesterday, who come as forebears of the new women, after whom no intersubjective relation will ever be the same. You, Dora, you the indomitable, the poetic body, you are the true “mistress” of the Signifier. Before long your efficacity will be seen at work when your speech is no longer suppressed, its point turned in against your breast, but written out over against the other. In body.—More so than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation, women are body. More body, hence more writing. For a long time it has been in body that women have responded to persecution, to the familial-conjugal enterprise of domestication, to the repeated attempts at castrating them. Those who have turned their tongues 10,000 times seven times before not speaking are either dead from it or more familiar with their tongues and their mouths than anyone else. No, I-woman am going to blow up the Law: an explosion henceforth possible and ineluctable; let it be done, right now, in language. Let us not be trapped by an analysis still encumbered with the old automatisms. It’s not to be feared that language conceals an invincible adversary, because it’s the language of men and their grammar. We mustn’t leave them a single place that’s any more theirs alone than we are. If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this “within,” to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. And you’ll see with what ease she will spring forth from that “within”—the “within” where once she so drowsily crouched—to overflow at the lips she will cover the foam. Nor is the point to appropriate their instruments, their concepts, their places, or to begrudge them their position of mastery. Just because there’s a risk of identification doesn’t mean that we’ll succumb. Let’s leave it to the worriers, to masculine anxiety and its obsession with how to dominate the way things work— knowing “how it works” in order to “make it work.” For us the point is not to take possession in order to internalize or manipulate, but rather to dash through and to “fly.”7 Flying is woman’s gesture—flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous techniques; for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers. It’s no accident that voler has a double meaning, that it plays on each of them and thus throws off the agents of sense. It’s no accident: women take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They (illes)8 go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture,

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dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down. What woman hasn’t flown/stolen? Who hasn’t felt, dreamt, performed the gesture that jams sociality? Who hasn’t crumbled, held up to ridicule, the bar of separation? Who hasn’t inscribed with her body the differential, punctured the system of couples and opposition? Who, by some act of transgression, hasn’t overthrown successiveness, connection, the wall of circumfusion? A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter. For once she blazes her trail in the symbolic, she cannot fail to make of it the chaosmos of the “personal”—in her pronouns, her nouns, and her clique of referents. And for good reason. There will have been the long history of gynocide. This is known by the colonized peoples of yesterday, the workers, the nations, the species off whose backs the history of men has made its gold; those who have known the ignominy of persecution derive from it an obstinate future desire for grandeur; those who are locked up know better than their jailers the taste of free air. Thanks to their history, women today know (how to do and want) what men will be able to conceive of only much later. I say woman overturns the “personal,” for if, by means of laws, lies, blackmail, and marriage, her right to herself has been extorted at the same time as her name, she has been able, through the very movement of mortal alienation, to see more closely the inanity of “propriety,” the reductive stinginess of the masculine-conjugal subjective economy, which she doubly resists. On the one hand she has constituted herself necessarily as that “person” capable of losing a part of herself without losing her integrity. But secretly, silently, deep down inside, she grows and multiplies, for, on the other hand, she knows far more about living and about the relation between the economy of the drives and the management of the ego than any man. Unlike man, who holds so dearly to his title and his titles, his pouches of value, his cap, crown, and everything connected with his head, woman couldn’t care less about the fear of decapitation (or castration), adventuring, without the masculine temerity, into anonymity, which she can merge with, without annihilating herself: because she’s a giver. I shall have a great deal to say about the whole deceptive problematic of the gift. Woman is obviously not that woman Nietzsche dreamed of who gives only in order to.9 Who could ever think of the gift as a gift-that-takes? Who else but man, precisely the one who would like to take everything? If there is a “propriety of woman,” it is paradoxically her capacity to depropriate unselfishly, body without end, without appendage, without principle “parts.” If she is a whole, it’s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros, an immense astral space not organized around any one sun that’s any more of a star than the others. This doesn’t mean that she’s an undifferentiated magma, but that she doesn’t lord it over her body or her desire. Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering that centralized body (in political anatomy) under the dic-

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tatorship of its parts, woman does not bring about the same regionalization which serves the couple head/genitals and which is inscribed only within boundaries. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide. Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours, daring to make these vertiginous crossings of the other(s) ephemeral and passionate sojourns in him, her, them, whom she inhabits long enough to look at from the point closest to their unconscious from the moment they awaken, to love them at the point closest to their drives; and then further, impregnated through and through with these brief, identificatory embraces, she goes and passes into infinity. She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. When id is ambiguously uttered—the wonder of being several—she doesn’t defend herself against these unknown women whom she’s surprised at becoming, but derives pleasure from this gift of alterability. I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation. Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea we feed. “Ah, there’s her sea,” he will say as he holds out to me a basin full of water from the little phallic mother from whom he’s inseparable. But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fish or not, opaque or transparent, red or black, high or smooth, narrow or bankless; and we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves. . . . More or less wavily sea, earth, sky—what matter would rebuff us? We know how to speak them all. Heterogeneous, yes. For her joyous benefits she is erogenous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous: airborne swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn’t, of him, of you. Woman, be unafraid of any other place, of any same, or any other. My eyes, my tongue, my ears, my nose, my skin, my mouth, my body-for-(the)-other—not that I long for it in order to fill up a hole, to provide against some defect of mine, or because, as fate would have it, I’m spurred on by feminine “jealousy”; not because I’ve been dragged into the whole chain of substitutions that brings that which is substituted back to its ultimate object. That sort of thing you would expect to come straight out of “Tom Thumb,” out of the Penisneid whispered to us by old grandmother ogresses, servants to their father-sons. If they believe, in order to muster up some self-importance, if they really need to believe that we’re dying of desire, that we are this hole fringed with desire for their penis—that’s their immemorial business. Undeniably (we verify it at our own expenses—but also to our amusement), it’s their business to let us know they’re getting a hardon, so that we’ll assure them (we the maternal mistresses of their little pocket signifier) that they still can, that it’s still there—that men structure themselves only by being fitted with a feather. In the child it’s not the penis that the woman desires, it’s not that famous bit of skin around which every man gravitates.

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Pregnancy cannot be traced back, except within the historical limits of the ancients, to some form of fate, to those mechanical substitutions brought about by the unconscious of some eternal “jealous woman”; not to penis envies; and not to narcissism or to some sort of homosexuality linked to the ever-present mother! Begetting a child doesn’t mean that the woman or the man must fall ineluctably into patterns or must recharge the circuit of reproduction. If there’s a risk there’s not an inevitable trap: may women be spared the pressure, under the guise of consciousness-raising, of a supplement of interdictions. Either you want a kid or you don’t—that’s your business. Let nobody threaten you; in satisfying your desire, let not the fear of becoming the accomplice to a sociality succeed the old-time fear of being “taken.” And man, are you still going to bank on everyone’s blindness and passivity, afraid lest the child make a father and, consequently, that in having a kid the woman land herself more than one bad deal by engendering all at once child—mother—father—family? No; it’s up to you to break the old circuits. It will be up to man and woman to render obsolete the former relationship and all its consequences, to consider the launching of a brand-new subject, alive, with defamilialization. Let us demater-paternalize rather than deny woman, in an effort to avoid the cooptation of procreation, a thrilling era of the body. Let us defetishize. Let’s get away from the dialectic which has it that the only good father is a dead one, or that the child is the death of his parents. The child is the other, but the other without violence, bypassing loss, struggle. We’re fed up with the reuniting of bonds forever to be severed, with the litany of castration that’s handed down and genealogized. We won’t advance backward anymore; we’re not going to repress something so simple as the desire for life. Oral drive, anal drive, vocal drive—all these drives are our strengths, and among them is the 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, if it should happen to strike our fancy, the unsurpassed pleasures of pregnancy which have actually been always exaggerated or conjured away—or cursed—in the 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 says a lot about the power she seems invested with at the time, because it has always been suspected, that, when pregnant, the woman not only doubles her market value, but—what’s more important—takes on intrinsic value as a woman in her own eyes and, undeniably, acquires body and sex. There are thousands of ways of living one’s pregnancy; to have or not to have with that still invisible other a relationship of another intensity. And if you don’t have that particular yearning, it doesn’t mean that you’re in any way lacking. Each body distributes in its own special way, without model or norm, the nonfinite and changing totality of its desires. Decide for yourself on your position in the arena of contradictions, where pleasure and reality embrace. Bring the other to life. Women know how to live detachment; giving birth is neither losing nor increasing. It’s adding to life an other. Am I dreaming? Am I misrecognizing? You, the defenders of “theory,” the sacrosanct yes-men of Concept, enthroners of the phallus (but not the penis): Once more you’ll say that all this smacks of “idealism,” or what’s worse, you’ll splutter that I’m a “mystic.” And what about the libido? Haven’t I read the “Signification of the Phallus”?

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And what about separation, what about that bit of self for which, to be born, you undergo an ablation—an ablation, so they say, to be forever commemorated by your desire? Besides, isn’t it evident that the penis gets around in my texts, that I give it a place and appeal? Of course I do. I want all. I want all of me with all of him. Why should I deprive myself of a part of us? I want all of us. Woman, of course, has a desire for a “loving desire” and not a jealous one. But not because she is gelded; not because she’s deprived and needs to be filled out, like some wounded person who wants to console herself or seek vengeance. I don’t want a penis to decorate my body with. But I do desire the other for the other, whole and entire, male or female; because living means wanting everything that is, everything that lives, and wanting it alive. Castration? Let others toy with it. What’s a desire originating from a lack? A pretty meager desire. The woman who still allows herself to be threatened by the big dick, who’s still impressed by the commotion of the phallic stance, who still leads a loyal master to the beat of the drum: that’s the woman of yesterday. They still exist, easy and numerous victims of the oldest of farces: either they’re cast in the original silent versions in which, as titanesses lying under the mountains they make with their quivering, they never see erected that theoretic monument to the golden phallus looming, in the old manner, over their bodies. Or, coming today out of their infans period and into the second, “enlightened” version of their virtuous debasement, they see themselves suddenly assaulted by the builders of the analytic empire and, as soon as they’ve begun to formulate the new desire, naked, nameless, so happy at making an appearance, they’re taken in their bath by the new old men, and then, whoops! Luring them with flashy signifiers, the demon of interpretation—oblique, decked out in modernity—sells them the same old handcuffs, baubles, and chains. Which castration do you prefer? Whose degrading do you like better, the father’s or the mother’s? Oh, what pwetty eyes, you pwetty little girl. Here, buy my glasses and you’ll see the Truth-Me-Myself tell you everything you should know. Put them on your nose and take a fetishist’s look (you are me, the other analyst—that’s what I’m telling you) at your body and the body of the other. You see? No? Wait, you’ll have everything explained to you, and you’ll know at last which sort of neurosis you’re related to. Hold still, we’re going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away. Yes, the naïves to the first and second degree are still legion. If the New Women, arriving now, dare to create outside the theoretical, they’re called in by the cops of the signifier, fingerprinted, remonstrated, and brought into the line of order that they are supposed to know; assigned by force of trickery to a precise place in the chain that’s always formed for the benefit of a privileged signifier. We are pieced back to the string which leads back, if not to the Name-of-the-Father, then, for a new twist, to the place of the phallic-mother. Beware, my friend, of the signifier that would take you back to the authority of a signified! Beware of diagnosis that would reduce your generative powers. “Common” nouns are also proper nouns that disparage your singularity by classifying it into species. Break out of the circles; don’t remain within the psychoanalytic closure. Take a look around, then cut through! And if we are legion, it’s because the war of liberation has only made as yet a tiny breakthrough. But women are thronging to it. I’ve seen them, those who will

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be neither dupe nor domestic, those who will not fear the risk of being a woman; will not fear any risk, any desire, any space still unexplored in themselves, among themselves and others or anywhere else. They do not fetishize, they do not deny, they do not hate. They observe, they approach, they try to see the other woman, the child, the lover—not to strengthen their own narcissism or verify the solidity or weakness of the master, but to make love better, to invent. Other love.—In the beginning are our differences. The new love dares for the other, wants the other, makes dizzying, precipitous flights between knowledge and invention. The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still; she’s everywhere, she exchanges, she is the desire-that-gives. (Not enclosed in the paradox of the gift that takes nor under the illusion of unitary fusion. We’re past that.) She comes in, comes-in-between herself me and you, between the other me where one is always infinitely more than one and more than me, without the fear of ever reaching a limit; she thrills in our becoming. And we’ll keep on becoming! She cuts through defensive loves, motherages, and devourations: beyond selfish narcissism, in the moving, open, transitional space, she runs her risks. Beyond the struggle-to-the-death that’s been removed to the bed, beyond the love-battle that claims to represent exchange, she scorns at an Eros dynamic that would be fed by hatred. Hatred: a heritage, again, a reminder, a duping subservience to the phallus. To love, to watch-think-seek the other in the other, to despecularize, to unhoard. Does this seem difficult? It’s not impossible, and this is what nourishes life—a love that has no commerce with the apprehensive desire that provides against the lack and stultifies the strange; a love that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies. Wherever history still unfolds as the history of death, she does not tread. Opposition, hierarchizing exchange, the struggle for mastery which can end only in at least one death (one master—one slave, or two nonmasters ≠ two dead)—all that comes from a period in time governed by phallocentric values. The fact that this period extends into the present doesn’t prevent woman from starting the history of life somewhere else. Elsewhere, she gives. She doesn’t “know” what she’s giving, she doesn’t measure it; she gives, though, neither a counterfeit impression nor something she hasn’t got. She gives more, with no assurance that she’ll get back even some unexpected profit from what she puts out. She gives that there may be life, thought, transformation. This is an “economy” that can no longer be put in economic terms. Wherever she loves, all the old concepts of management are left behind. At the end of a more or less conscious computation, she finds not her sum but her differences. I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve never seen me before: at every instant. When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking. Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen

NOTES 1. Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/passivity

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from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a “dark continent” to penetrate and to “pacify.” (We know what “pacify” means in terms of scotomizing the other and misrecognizing the self.) Conquering her, they’ve made haste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man has of getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for his own, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understand how man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, might feel resentment and fear of being “taken” by the woman, of being lost in her, absorbed or alone. 2. I am speaking here only of the place “reserved” for women by the Western world. 3. Which works, then, might be called feminine? I’ll just point out some examples: one would have to give them full readings to bring out what is pervasively feminine in their significance. Which I shall do elsewhere. In France (have you noted our infinite poverty in this field?—the Anglo-Saxon countries have shown resources of distinctly greater consequence), leafing through what’s come out of the twentieth century—and it’s not much—the only inscriptions of femininity that I have seen were by Colette, Marguerite Duras, . . . and Jean Genet. 4. Dé-pense, a neologism formed on the verb penser, hence “unthinks,” but also “spends” (from depenser).—Tr. 5. Standard English term for the Hegelian Aufhebung, the French la relève. 6. Jean Genet, Pompes funèbres (Paris, 1948), p. 185 [privately published]. 7. Also, “to steal.” Both meanings of the verb voler are played on, as the text itself explains in the following paragraph.—Tr. 8. Illes is a fusion of the masculine pronoun ils, which refers back to birds and robbers, with the feminine pronoun elles, which refers to women.—Tr. 9. Reread Derrida’s text, “Le style de la femme,” in Nietzsche aujourd’hui (Union Générale d’Editions, Coll. 10/18), where the philosopher can be seen operating an Aufhebung of all philosophy in its systematic reducing of woman to the place of seduction: she appears as the one who is taken for; the bait in person, all veils unfurled, the one who doesn’t give but who gives only in order to (take).

LAURA MULVEY

VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA (1975)























I INTRODUCTION (a) A Political Use of Psychoanalysis This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as its starting-point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as linchpin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarise briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she firstly symbolises the castration threat by her real lack of a penis and secondly thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end. It does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plentitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud’s famous phrase). Woman’s desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she

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must gracefully give way to the word, the name of the father and the law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning. There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings closer an articulation of the problem, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy? There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory: the sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina. But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught. (b) Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions about the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Technological advances (16mm and so on) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself to a formal mise en scène reflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for the birth of a cinema which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint. The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of

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satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions. This article will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning and, in particular, the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.

II PLEASURE IN LOOKING/FASCINATION WITH THE HUMAN FORM A The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia (pleasure in looking). There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples centre on the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and forbidden (curiosity about other people’s genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,’ Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pregenital auto-eroticism, after which, by analogy, the pleasure of the look is transferred to others. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other. At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an il-

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lusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer. B The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when children’s physical ambitions outstrip their motor capacity, with the result that their recognition of themselves is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than they experience in their own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which, reintrojected as an ego ideal, prepares the way for identification with others in the future. This mirror moment predates language for the child. Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the I, of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother’s face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing it. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that presubjective moment of image recognition. While at the same time, the cinema has distinguished itself in the production of ego ideals, through the star system for instance. Stars provide a focus or centre both to screen space and screen story where they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary). C Sections A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second

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of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation polarises in terms of pleasure. But both are formative structures, mechanisms without intrinsic meaning. In themselves they have no signification, unless attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, and motivate eroticised phantasmagoria that affect the subject’s perception of the world to make a mockery of empirical objectivity. During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully complementary fantasy world. In reality the fantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox.

III WOMAN AS IMAGE, MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK A In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combines spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical song-anddance numbers interrupt the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it: What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the ‘buddy movie,’ in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative; the gaze

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of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no man’s land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe’s first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall’s songs in To Have and Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative; it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon, rather than verisimilitude, to the screen. B An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen. The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extradiegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor co-ordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of his imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism), all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action. (There are films with a woman as main protagonist, of course. To analyse this phenomenon seriously here would take me too far afield. Pam Cook and Claire Johnston’s study of The Revolt of Mamie Stover in Phil Hardy [ed.], Raoul Walsh [Edinburgh, 1974], shows in a striking case how the strength of this female protagonist is more apparent than real.) C1 Sections III A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is

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associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.) But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the visually ascertainable absence of the penis, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/ defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg’s work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia. C2 Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projected upsidedown so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator’s undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but ingenuous: ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the

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woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable; but revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount, rather than narrative or identification processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look. Sternberg plays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be onedimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers and so on reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary, shadowy presences like La Bessière in Morocco act as surrogates for the director, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite Sternberg’s insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other spectators watching her on the screen, their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Morocco, Tom Brown has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see. In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, although fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism can be the subject of the film, it is the role of the hero to portray the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law—a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power (Marnie)—but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness—the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock’s skillful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The spectator is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis, which parodies his own in the cinema. In an analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the

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cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is reborn erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally giving him the opportunity to save her. Lisa’s exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries’s voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photojournalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the fantasy position of the cinema audience. In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from one flashback from Judy’s point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie’s voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result, he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. In the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie’s active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie’s erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through; she is punished. Thus, in Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look boomerangs: the spectator’s own fascination is revealed as illicit voyeurism as the narrative content enacts the processes and pleasures that he is himself exercising and enjoying. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal superego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking. Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Rutland’s gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words; he can have his cake and eat it.

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IV SUMMARY The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object) and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which mould this cinema’s formal attributes. The actual image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the content and structure of representation, adding a further layer of ideological significance demanded by the patriarchal order in its favourite cinematic form—illusionistic narrative film. The argument must return again to the psychoanalytic background: women in representation can signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent this threat. Although none of these interacting layers is intrinsic to film, it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. The place of the look defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows and so on. Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged. To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the screen appears directly

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(without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishisation, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him. This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible guest,’ and highlights the way film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.

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1 Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented. W. E. B. DuBois predicted as early as 1903 that the twentieth century would be the century of the “color line.” We could add to this spatiotemporal configuration another thematic of analogously terrible weight: if the “black woman” can be seen as a particular figuration of the split subject that psychoanalytic theory posits, then this century marks the site of “its” profoundest revelation. The problem before us is deceptively simple: the terms enclosed in quotation marks in the preceding paragraph isolate overdetermined nominative properties. Embedded in bizarre axiological ground, they demonstrate a sort of telegraphic coding; they are markers so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean. In that regard, the names by which I am called in the public place render an example of signifying property plus. In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness. The personal pronouns are offered in the service of a collective function. In certain human societies, a child’s identity is determined through the line of the Mother, but the United States, from at least one author’s point of view, is not one of them: “In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so far out of line with the rest of American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male, and in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well” [Moynihan 75; emphasis mine]. The notorious bastard, from Vico’s banished Roman mothers of such sons, to Caliban, to Heathcliff, and Joe Christmas, has no official female equivalent.

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Because the traditional rites and laws of inheritance rarely pertain to the female child, bastard status signals to those who need to know which son of the Father’s is the legitimate heir and which one the impostor. For that reason, property seems wholly the business of the male. The “she” cannot, therefore, qualify for bastard, or “natural son” status, and that she cannot provides further insight into the coils and recoils of patriarchal wealth and fortune. According to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s celebrated “Report” of the late sixties, the “Negro Family” has no Father to speak of—his Name, his Law, his Symbolic function mark the impressive missing agencies in the essential life of the black community, the “Report” maintains, and it is, surprisingly, the fault of the Daughter, or the female line. The stunning reversal of the castration thematic, displacing the Name and the Law of the Father to the Territory of the Mother and Daughter, becomes an aspect of the African-American female’s misnaming. We attempt to undo this misnaming in order to reclaim the relationship between Fathers and Daughters within this social matrix for a quite different structure of cultural fictions. For Daughters and Fathers are here made to manifest the very same rhetorical symptoms of absence and denial, to embody the double and contrastive agencies of a prescribed internecine degradation. “Sapphire” enacts her “Old Man” in drag, just as her “Old Man” becomes “Sapphire” in outrageous caricature. In other words, in the historic outline of dominance, the respective subjectpositions of “female” and “male” adhere to no symbolic integrity. At a time when current critical discourses appear to compel us more and more decidedly toward gender “undecidability,” it would appear reactionary, if not dumb, to insist on the integrity of female/male gender. But undressing these conflations of meaning, as they appear under the rule of dominance, would restore, as figurative possibility, not only Power to the Female (for Maternity), but also Power to the Male (for Paternity). We would gain, in short, the potential for gender differentiation as it might express itself along a range of stress points, including human biology in its intersection with the project of culture. Though among the most readily available “whipping boys” of fairly recent public discourse concerning African-Americans and national policy, the “Moynihan Report” is by no means unprecedented in its conclusions; it belongs, rather, to a class of symbolic paradigms that 1) inscribe “ethnicity” as a scene of negation and 2) confirm the human body as a metonymic figure for an entire repertoire of human and social arrangements. In that regard, the “Report” pursues a behavioral rule of public documentary. Under the Moynihan rule, “ethnicity” itself identifies a total objectification of human and cultural motives—the “white” family, by implication, and the “Negro Family,” by outright assertion, in a constant opposition of binary meanings. Apparently spontaneous, these “actants” are wholly generated, with neither past nor future, as tribal currents moving out of time. Moynihan’s “families” are pure present and always tense. “Ethnicity” in this case freezes in meaning, takes on constancy, assumes the look and the affects of the Eternal. We could say, then, that in its powerful stillness, “ethnicity,” from the point of view of the “Report,” embodies nothing more than a mode of memorial time, as Roland Barthes outlines the dynamics of myth [see “Myth Today” 109–59; esp. 122–23]. As a signifier that has no movement in the field of signification, the use of “ethnicity” for the living becomes purely appreciative, although one would be unwise not to concede its dangerous and fatal effects.

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“Ethnicity” perceived as mythical time enables a writer to perform a variety of conceptual moves all at once. Under its hegemony, the human body becomes a defenseless target for rape and veneration, and the body, in its material and abstract phase, a resource for metaphor. For example, Moynihan’s “tangle of pathology” provides the descriptive strategy for the work’s fourth chapter, which suggests that “underachievement” in black males of the lower classes is primarily the fault of black females, who achieve out of all proportion both to their numbers in the community and to the paradigmatic example before the nation: “Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. . . . A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage” [75]. Between charts and diagrams, we are asked to consider the impact of qualitative measure on the black male’s performance on standardized examinations, matriculation in schools of higher and professional training, etc. Even though Moynihan sounds a critique on his own argument here, he quickly withdraws from its possibilities, suggesting that black males should reign because that is the way the majority culture carries things out: “It is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating under one principle, while the great majority of the population . . . is operating on another” [75]. Those persons living according to the perceived “matriarchal” pattern are, therefore, caught in a state of social “pathology.” Even though Daughters have their own agenda with reference to this order of Fathers (imagining for the moment that Moynihan’s fiction—and others like it—does not represent an adequate one and that there is, once we dis-cover him, a Father here), my contention that these social and cultural subjects make doubles, unstable in their respective identities, in effect transports us to a common historical ground, the socio-political order of the New World. That order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join. This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: 1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same time—in stunning contradiction—the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of “otherness”; 4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general “powerlessness,” resonating through various centers of human and social meaning. But I would make a distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subjectpositions. In that sense, before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree

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of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard. One of the most poignant aspects of William Goodell’s contemporaneous study of the North American slave codes gives precise expression to the tortures and instruments of captivity. Reporting an instance of Jonathan Edward’s observations on the tortures of enslavement, Goodell narrates: “The smack of the whip is all day long in the ears of those who are on the plantation, or in the vicinity; and it is used with such dexterity and severity as not only to lacerate the skin but to tear out small portions of the flesh at almost every stake” [22]. The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose—eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet. These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually “transfers” from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments? As Elaine Scarry describes the mechanisms of torture [Scarry 27–59], these lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh create the distance between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity and the culture, whose state apparatus, including judges, attorneys, “owners,” “soul drivers,” “overseers,” and “men of God,” apparently colludes with a protocol of “search and destroy.” This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside. The flesh is the concentration of “ethnicity” that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away. It is this “flesh and blood” entity, in the vestibule for “pre-view” of a colonized North America, that is essentially ejected from “The Female Body in Western Culture” [see Suleiman, ed.], but it makes good theory, or commemorative “herstory” to want to “forget,” or to have failed to realize, that the African female subject, under these historic conditions, is not only the target of rape—in one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind—but also the topic of specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar province of male brutality and torture inflected by other males. A female body strung from a tree limb, or bleeding from the breast on any given day of field work because the “overseer,” standing the length of a whip, has popped her flesh open, adds a lexical and living dimension to the narratives of women in culture and society [Davis 9]. This materialized scene of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh “ungendered”—offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.

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Among the myriad uses to which the enslaved community was put, Goodell identifies its value for medical research: “Assortments of diseased, damaged, and disabled Negroes, deemed incurable and otherwise worthless are bought up, it seems . . . by medical institutions, to be experimented and operated upon for purposes of ‘medical education’ and the interest of medical science” [86–87; Goodell’s emphasis]. From the Charleston Mercury for October 12, 1838, Goodell notes this advertisement: ‘To planters and others.—Wanted, fifty Negroes, any person, having sick Negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for Negroes affected with scrofula, or king’s evil, confirmed hypochondriasm, apoplexy, diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach and intestines, bladder and its appendages, diarrhea, dysentery, etc. The highest cash price will be paid, on application as above.’ at No. 110 Church Street, Charleston. [87; Goodell’s emphasis]

This profitable “atomizing” of the captive body provides another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between one human personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions. To that extent, the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory. The captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless. Even though the captive flesh/body has been “liberated,” and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. Faulkner’s young Chick Mallison in The Mansion calls “it” other names—“the ancient subterrene atavistic fear—” [227]. And I would call it the Great Long National Shame. But people do not talk like that anymore—it is “embarrassing,” just as the retrieval of mutilated female bodies will likely be “backward” for some people. Neither the shameface of the embarrassed, nor the not-looking-back of the self-assured is of much interest to us, and will not help at all if rigor is our dream. We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us. The symbolic order that I wish to trace in this writing, calling it an “American grammar,” begins at the “beginning,” which is really a rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation. The massive demographic shifts, the violent formation of a modern African consciousness, that take place on the subsaharan Continent during the initiative strikes which open the Atlantic Slave Trade in the fifteenth century of our Christ, interrupted hundreds of years of black African culture. We write and think, then, about an outcome of aspects of African-American life in the United States under the pressure of those events. I might as well

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add that the familiarity of this narrative does nothing to appease the hunger of recorded memory, nor does the persistence of the repeated rob these well-known, oft-told events of their power, even now, to startle, in a very real sense, every writing as revision makes the “discovery” all over again.

2 The narratives by African peoples and their descendants, though not as numerous from those early centuries of the “execrable trade” as the researcher would wish, suggest, in their rare occurrence, that the visual shock waves touched off when African and European “met” reverberated on both sides of the encounter. The narrative of the “Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself,” first published in London in 1789, makes it quite clear that the first Europeans Equiano observed on what is now Nigerian soil were as unreal for him as he and others must have been for the European captors. The cruelty of “these white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair,” of these “spirits,” as the narrator would have it, occupies several pages of Equiano’s attention, alongside a firsthand account of Nigerian interior life [27 ff.]. We are justified in regarding the outcome of Equiano’s experience in the same light as he himself might have—as a “fall,” as a veritable descent into the loss of communicative force. If, as Todorov points out, the Mayan and Aztec peoples “lost control of communication” [61] in light of Spanish intervention, we could observe, similarly, that Vassa falls among men whose language is not only strange to him, but whose habits and practices strike him as “astonishing”: [The sea, the slave ship] filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted to terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to see if I was sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions, too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke (which was different from any I had very heard), united to confirm me in this belief. [Equiano 27]

The captivating party does not only “earn” the right to dispose of the captive body as it sees fit, but gains, consequently, the right to name and “name” it: Equiano, for instance, identifies at least three different names that he is given in numerous passages between his Benin homeland and the Virginia colony, the latter and England—“Michael,” “Jacob,” “Gustavus Vassa” [35; 36]. The nicknames by which African-American women have been called, or regarded, or imagined on the New World scene—the opening lines of this essay provide examples—demonstrate the powers of distortion that the dominant community seizes as its unlawful prerogative. Moynihan’s “Negro Family,” then, borrows its narrative energies from the grid of associations, from the semantic and iconic folds buried deep in the collective past, that come to surround and signify the captive person. Though there is no absolute point of chronological initiation, we might repeat certain familiar impression points that lend shape to the business

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of dehumanized naming. Expecting to find direct and amplified reference to African women during the opening years of the Trade, the observer is disappointed time and again that this cultural subject is concealed beneath the mighty debris of the itemized account, between the lines of the massive logs of commercial enterprise that overrun the sense of clarity we believed we had gained concerning this collective humiliation. Elizabeth Donnan’s enormous, four-volume documentation becomes a case in point. Turning directly to this source, we discover what we had not expected to find— that this aspect of the search is rendered problematic and that observations of a field of manners and its related sociometries are an outgrowth of the industry of the “exterior other” [Todorov 3], called “anthropology” later on. The European males who laded and captained these galleys and who policed and corralled these human beings, in hundreds of vessels from Liverpool to Elmina, to Jamaica; from the Cayenne Islands, to the ports at Charleston and Salem, and for three centuries of human life, were not curious about this “cargo” that bled, packed like so many live sardines among the immovable objects. Such inveterate obscene blindness might be denied, point blank, as a possibility for anyone, except that we know it happened. Donnan’s first volume covers three centuries of European “discovery” and “conquest,” beginning 50 years before pious Cristobal, Christum Ferens, the bearer of Christ, laid claim to what he thought was the “Indies.” From Gomes Eannes de Azurara’s “Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1441–1448” [Donnan 1:18–41], we learn that the Portuguese probably gain the dubious distinction of having introduced black Africans to the European market of servitude. We are also reminded that “Geography” is not a divine gift. Quite to the contrary, its boundaries were shifted during the European “Age of Conquest” in giddy desperation, according to the dictates of conquering armies, the edicts of prelates, the peculiar myopia of the medieval Christian mind. Looking for the “Nile River,” for example, according to the fifteenth-century Portuguese notion, is someone’s joke. For all that the pre-Columbian “explorers” knew about the science of navigation and geography, we are surprised that more parties of them did not end up “discovering” Europe. Perhaps, from a certain angle, that is precisely all that they found—an alternative reading of ego. The Portuguese, having little idea where the Nile ran, at least understood right away that there were men and women darker-skinned than themselves, but they were not specifically knowledgeable, or ingenious, about the various families and groupings represented by them. De Azurara records encounters with “Moors,” “Mooresses,” “Mulattoes,” and people “black as Ethiops” [1:28], but it seems that the “Land of Guinea,” or of “Black Men,” or of “The Negroes” [1:35] was located anywhere southeast of Cape Verde, the Canaries, and the River Senegal, looking at an eighteenth-century European version of the subsaharan Continent along the West African coast [1:frontispiece]. Three genetic distinctions are available to the Portuguese eye, all along the riffs of melanin in the skin: in a field of captives, some of the observed are “white enough, fair to look upon, and well-proportioned.” Others are less “white like mulattoes,” and still others “black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere” [1:28]. By implication, this “third man,” standing for the most aberrant

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phenotype to the observing eye, embodies the linguistic community most unknown to the European. Arabic translators among the Europeans could at least “talk” to the “Moors” and instruct them to ransom themselves, or else. . . . Typically, there is in this grammar of description the perspective of “declension,” not of simultaneity, and its point of initiation is solipsistic—it begins with a narrative self, in an apparent unity of feeling, and unlike Equiano, who also saw “ugly” when he looked out, this collective self uncovers the means by which to subjugate the “foreign code of conscience,” whose most easily remarkable and irremediable difference is perceived in skin color. By the time of De Azurara’s mid-fifteenth-century narrative and a century and a half before Shakespeare’s “old black ram” of an Othello “tups” that “white ewe” of a Desdemona, the magic of skin color is already installed as a decisive factor in human dealings. In De Azurara’s narrative, we observe males looking at other males, as “female” is subsumed here under the general category of estrangement. Few places in these excerpts carve out a distinct female space, though there are moments of portrayal that perceive female captives in the implications of socio-cultural function. When the field of captives (referred to above) is divided among the spoilers, no heed is paid to relations, as fathers are separated from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from sisters and brothers, mothers from children—male and female. It seems clear that the political program of European Christianity promotes this hierarchical view among males, although it remains puzzling to us exactly how this version of Christianity transforms the “pagan” also into the “ugly.” It appears that human beings came up with degrees of “fair” and then the “hideous,” in its overtones of bestiality, as the opposite of “fair,” all by themselves without stage direction, even though there is the curious and blazing exception of Nietzche’s Socrates, who was Athens’s ugliest and wisest and best citizen. The intimate choreography that the Portuguese narrator sets going between the “faithless” and the “ugly” transforms a partnership of dancers into a single figure. Once the “faithless,” indiscriminate of the three stops of Portuguese skin color, are transported to Europe, they become an altered human factor: And so their lot was now quite contrary to what it had been, since before they had lived in perdition of soul and body; of their souls, in that they were yet pagans, without the clearness and the light of the Holy Faith; and of their bodies, in that they lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings—for they had no knowledge of bread and wine, and they were without covering of clothes, or the lodgment of houses; and worse than all, through the great ignorance that was in them, in that they had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in bestial sloth. [1:30]

The altered human factor renders an alterity of European ego, an invention, or “discovery” as decisive in the full range of its social implications as the birth of a newborn. According to the semantic alignments of the excerpted passage, personhood, for this European observer, locates an immediately outward and superficial determination, gauged by quite arbitrarily opposed and specular categories: that these “pagans” did not have “bread” and “wine” did not mean that they were feastless, as Equiano observes about the Benin diet, c. 1745, in the province of Essaka:

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Our manner of living is entirely plain; for as yet the natives are unacquainted with those refinements in cookery which debauch the taste; bullocks, goats, and poultry supply the greatest part of their food. (These constitute likewise the principal wealth of the country, as the chief articles of commerce.) The flesh is usually stewed in a pan; to make it savory we sometimes use pepper, and other spices, and we have salt made of wood ashes. Our vegetables are mostly plaintains, eadas, yams, beans and Indian corn. The head of the family usually eats alone; his wives and slaves have also their separate tables. . . . [Equiano 8]

Just as fufu serves the Ghanaian diet today as a starch-and-bread-substitute, palm wine (an item by the same name in the eighteenth-century palate of the Benin community) need not be Heitz Cellars Martha’s Vineyard and vice-versa in order for a guest, say, to imagine that she has enjoyed. That African housing arrangements of the fifteenth century did not resemble those familiar to De Azurara’s narrator need not have meant that the African communities he encountered were without dwellings. Again, Equiano’s narrative suggests that by the middle of the eighteenth century, at least, African living patterns were not only quite distinct in their sociometrical implications, but that also their architectonics accurately reflected the climate and availability of resources in the local circumstance: “These houses never exceed one story in height; they are always built of wood, or stakes driven into the ground, crossed with wattles, and neatly plastered within and without” [9]. Hierarchical impulse in both De Azurara’s and Equiano’s narratives translates all perceived difference as a fundamental degradation or transcendence, but at least in Equiano’s case, cultural practices are not observed in any intimate connection with skin color. For all intents and purposes, the politics of melanin, not isolated in its strange powers from the imperatives of a mercantile and competitive economics of European nation-states, will make of “transcendence” and “degradation” the basis of a historic violence that will rewrite the histories of modern Europe and black Africa. These mutually exclusive nominative elements come to rest on the same governing semantics . . . the ahistorical, or symptoms of the “sacred.” By August 1518, the Spanish king, Francisco de Los Covos, under the aegis of a powerful negation, could order “4000 negro slaves both male and female, provided they be Christians” to be taken to the Caribbean, “the islands and the mainland of the ocean sea already discovered or to be discovered” [Donnan 1:42]. Though the notorious “Middle Passage” appears to the investigator as a vast background without boundaries in time and space, we see it related in Donnan’s accounts to the opening up of the entire Western hemisphere for the specific purposes of enslavement and colonization. De Azurara’s narrative belongs, then, to a discourse of appropriation whose strategies will prove fatal to communities along the coastline of West Africa, stretching, according to Olaudah Equiano, “3400 miles, from Senegal to Angola, and [will include] a variety of kingdoms” [Equiano 5]. The conditions of the “Middle Passage” are among the most incredible narratives available to the student, as it remains not easily imaginable. Late in the chronicles of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Britain’s Parliament entertained discussions concerning possible “regulations” for slave vessels. A Captain Perry visited the Liverpool port, and among the ships that he inspected was “The Brookes,”

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probably the most well-known image of the slave galley with its representative personae etched into the drawing like so many cartoon figures. Elizabeth Donnan’s second volume carries the “Brookes Plan,” along with an elaborate delineation of its dimensions from the investigative reporting of Perry himself: “Let it now be supposed . . . further, that every man slave is to be allowed six feet by one foot four inches for room, every woman five feet ten by one foot four, every boy five feet by one foot two, and every girl four feet six by one foot . . . ” [2:592, n]. The owner of “The Brookes,” James Jones, had recommended that “five females be reckoned as four males, and three boys or girls as equal to two grown persons” [2:592]. These sealed inequalities complement the commanding terms of the dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing project of African persons that De Azurara’s narrator might have recognized. It has been pointed out to me that these measurements do reveal the application of the gender rule to the material conditions of passage, but I would suggest that “gendering” takes place within the confines of the domestic, an essential metaphor that then spreads its tentacles for male and female subject over a wider ground of human and social purposes. Domesticity appears to gain its power by way of a common origin of cultural fictions that are grounded in the specificity of proper names, more exactly, a patronymic, which, in turn, situates those persons it “covers” in a particular place. Contrarily, the cargo of a ship might not be regarded as elements of the domestic, even though the vessel that carries it is sometimes romantically (ironically?) personified as “she.” The human cargo of a slave vessel—in the fundamental effacement and remission of African family and proper names—offers a counter-narrative to notions of the domestic. Those African persons in “Middle Passage” were literally suspended in the “oceanic,” if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet “American” either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all. Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imagine the captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could say that they were the culturally “unmade,” thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that “exposed” their destinies to an unknown course. Often enough for the captains of these galleys, navigational science of the day was not sufficient to guarantee the intended destination. We might say that the slave ship, its crew, and its human-as-cargo stand for a wild and unclaimed richness of possibility that is not interrupted, not “counted”/“accounted,” or differentiated, until its movement gains the land thousands of miles away from the point of departure. Under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into “account” as quantities. The female in “Middle Passage,” as the apparently smaller physical mass, occupies “less room” in a directly translatable money economy. But she is, nevertheless, quantifiable by the same rules of accounting as her male counterpart. It is not only difficult for the student to find “female” in “Middle Passage,” but also, as Herbert S. Klein observes, “African women did not enter the Atlantic slave trade in anything like the numbers of African men. At all ages, men outnumbered women on the slave ships bound for America from Africa” [Klein 29]. Though this observation does not change the reality of African women’s captivity

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and servitude in New World communities, it does provide a perspective from which to contemplate the internal African slave trade, which, according to Africanists, remained a predominantly female market. Klein nevertheless affirms that those females forced into the trade were segregated “from men for policing purposes” [“African Women” 35]. He claims that both “were allotted the same space between decks . . . and both were fed the same food” [35]. It is not altogether clear from Klein’s observations for whom the “police” kept vigil. It is certainly known from evidence presented in Donnan’s third volume (“New England and the Middle Colonies”) that insurrection was both frequent and feared in passage, and we have not yet found a great deal of evidence to support a thesis that female captives participated in insurrectionary activity [see White 63–64]. Because it was the rule, however—not the exception—that the African female, in both indigenous African cultures and in what becomes her “home,” performed tasks of hard physical labor—so much so that the quintessential “slave” is not a male, but a female—we wonder at the seeming docility of the subject, granting her a “feminization” that enslavement kept at bay. Indeed, across the spate of discourse that I examined for this writing, the acts of enslavement and responses to it comprise a more or less agonistic engagement of confrontational hostilities among males. The visual and historical evidence betrays the dominant discourse on the matter as incomplete, but counter-evidence is inadequate as well: the sexual violation of captive females and their own express rage against their oppressors did not constitute events that captains and their crews rushed to record in letters to their sponsoring companies, or sons on board in letters home to their New England mamas. One suspects that there are several ways to snare a mockingbird, so that insurrection might have involved, from time to time, rather more subtle means than mutiny on the Felicity, for instance. At any rate, we get very little notion in the written record of the life of women, children, and infants in “Middle Passage,” and no idea of the fate of the pregnant female captive and the unborn, which startling thematic bell hooks addresses in the opening chapter of her pathfinding work [see hooks 15–49]. From hooks’s lead, however, we might guess that the “reproduction of mothering” in this historic instance carries few of the benefits of a patriarchalized female gender, which, from one point of view, is the only female gender there is. The relative silence of the record on this point constitutes a portion of the disquieting lacunae that feminist investigation seeks to fill. Such silence is the nickname of distortion, of the unknown human factor that a revised public discourse would both undo and reveal. This cultural subject is inscribed historically as anonymity/anomie in various public documents of European-American mal(e)venture, from Portuguese De Azurara in the middle of the fifteenth century, to South Carolina’s Henry Laurens in the eighteenth. What confuses and enriches the picture is precisely the sameness of anonymous portrayal that adheres tenaciously across the division of gender. In the vertical columns of accounts and ledgers that comprise Donnan’s work, the terms “Negroes” and “Slaves” denote a common status. For instance, entries in one account, from September 1700 through September 1702, are specifically descriptive of the names of the ships and the private traders in Barbados who will receive the stipulated goods, but “No. Negroes” and “Sum sold for per head” are so exactly

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arithmetical that it is as if these additions and multiplications belong to the other side of an equation [Donnan 2:25]. One is struck by the detail and precision that characterize these accounts, as a narrative, or story, is always implied by a man or woman’s name: “Wm. Webster,” “John Dunn,” “Thos. Brownbill,” “Robt. Knowles.” But the “other” side of the page, as it were, equally precise, throws no face in view. It seems that nothing breaks the uniformity in this guise. If in no other way, the destruction of the African name, of kin, of linguistic, and ritual connections is so obvious in the vital stats sheet that we tend to overlook it. Quite naturally, the trader is not interested, in any semantic sense, in this “baggage” that he must deliver, but that he is not is all the more reason to search out the metaphorical implications of naming as one of the key sources of a bitter Americanizing for African persons. The loss of the indigenous name/land provides a metaphor of displacement for other human and cultural features and relations, including the displacement of the genitalia, the female’s and the male’s desire that engenders the future. The fact that the enslaved person’s access to the issue of his/her own body is not entirely clear in this historic period throws in crisis all aspects of the blood relations, as captors apparently felt no obligation to acknowledge them. Actually trying to understand how the confusions of consanguinity worked becomes the project, because the outcome goes far to explain the rule of gender and its application to the African female in captivity.

3 Even though the essays in Claire C. Robertson’s and Martin A. Klein’s Women and Slavery in Africa have specifically to do with aspects of the internal African slave trade, some of their observations shed light on the captivities of the Diaspora. At least these observations have the benefit of altering the kind of questions we might ask of these silent chapters. For example, Robertson’s essay, which opens the volume, discusses the term “slavery” in a wide variety of relationships. The enslaved person as property identifies the most familiar element of a most startling proposition. But to overlap kinlessness on the requirements of property might enlarge our view of the conditions of enslavement. Looking specifically at documents from the West African societies of Songhay and Dahomey, Claude Meillassoux elaborates several features of the property/kinless constellation that are highly suggestive for our own quite different purposes. Meillassoux argues that “slavery creates an economic and social agent whose virtue lies in being outside the kinship system” [“Female Slavery,” Robertson and Klein 50]. Because the Atlantic trade involved heterogeneous social and ethnic formations in an explicit power relationship, we certainly cannot mean “kinship system” in precisely the same way that Meillassoux observes at work within the intricate calculus of descent among West African societies. However, the idea becomes useful as a point of contemplation when we try to sharpen our own sense of the African female’s reproductive uses within the diasporic enterprise of enslavement and the genetic reproduction of the enslaved. In effect, under conditions of captivity, the offspring of the female does not “belong” to the Mother, nor is s/he “related” to the “owner,” though the latter “possesses” it, and in the

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African-American instance, often fathered it, and, as often, without whatever benefit of patrimony. In the social outline that Meillassoux is pursuing, the offspring of the enslaved, “being unrelated both to their begetters and to their owners . . . , find themselves in the situation of being orphans” [50]. In the context of the United States, we could not say that the enslaved offspring was “orphaned,” but the child does become, under the press of a patronymic, patrifocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal order, the man/woman on the boundary, whose human and familial status, by the very nature of the case, had yet to be defined. I would call this enforced state of breach another instance of vestibular cultural formation where “kinship” loses meaning, since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations. I certainly do not mean to say that African peoples in the New World did not maintain the powerful ties of sympathy that bind blood-relations in a network of feeling, of continuity. It is precisely that relationship—not customarily recognized by the code of slavery— that historians have long identified as the inviolable “Black Family” and further suggest that this structure remains one of the supreme social achievements of African-Americans under conditions of enslavement [see John Blassingame 79 ff.]. Indeed, the revised “Black Family” of enslavement has engendered an older tradition of historiographical and sociological writings than we usually think. Ironically enough, E. Franklin Frazier’s Negro Family in the United States likely provides the closest contemporary narrative of conceptualization for the “Moynihan Report.” Originally published in 1939, Frazier’s work underwent two redactions in 1948 and 1966. Even though Frazier’s outlook on this familial configuration remains basically sanguine, I would support Angela Davis’s skeptical reading of Frazier’s “Black Matriarchate” [Davis 14]. “Except where the master’s will was concerned,” Frazier contends, this matriarchal figure “developed a spirit of independence and a keen sense of her personal rights” [1966: 47; emphasis mine]. The “exception” in this instance tends to be overwhelming, as the African-American female’s “dominance” and “strength” come to be interpreted by later generations, both black and white, oddly enough as a “pathology,” as an instrument of castration. Frazier’s larger point, we might suppose, is that African-Americans developed such resourcefulness under conditions of captivity that “family” must be conceded as one of their redoubtable social attainments. This line of interpretation is pursued by Blassingame and Eugene Genovese [Roll, Jordan, Roll 70–75], among other U.S. historians, and indeed assumes a centrality of focus in our own thinking about the impact and outcome of captivity. It seems clear, however, that “Family,” as we practice and understand it “in the West”—the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of “cold cash,” from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice—becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community. In that sense, African peoples in the historic Diaspora had nothing to prove, if the point had been that they were not capable of “family” (read “civilization”), since it is stunningly evident, in Equiano’s narrative, for instance, that Africans were not only capable of the concept and the practice of “family,” including “slaves,” but in modes of elaboration and naming that were at least as complex as those of the “nuclear family” “in the West.”

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Whether or not we decide that the support systems that African-Americans derived under conditions of captivity should be called “family,” or something else, strikes me as supremely impertinent. The point remains that captive persons were forced into patterns of dispersal, beginning with the Trade itself, into the horizontal relatedness of language groups, discourse formations, bloodlines, names, and properties by the legal arrangements of enslavement. It is true that the most “well-meaning” of “masters” (and there must have been some) could not, did not alter the ideological and hegemonic mandates of dominance. It must be conceded that African-Americans, under the press of a hostile and compulsory patriarchal order, bound and determined to destroy them, or to preserve them only in the service and at the behest of the “master” class, exercised a degree of courage and will to survive that startles the imagination even now. Although it makes good revisionist history to read this tale liberally, it is probably truer than we know at this distance (and truer than contemporary social practice in the community would suggest on occasion) that the captive person developed, time and time again, certain ethical and sentimental features that tied her and him, across the landscape to others, often sold from hand to hand, of the same and different blood in a common fabric of memory and inspiration. We might choose to call this connectedness “family,” or “support structure,” but that is a rather different case from the moves of a dominant symbolic order, pledged to maintain the supremacy of race. It is that order that forces “family” to modify itself when it does not mean family of the “master,” or dominant enclave. It is this rhetorical and symbolic move that declares primacy over any other human and social claim, and in that political order of things, “kin,” just as gender formation, has no decisive legal or social efficacy. We return frequently to Frederick Douglass’s careful elaborations of the arrangements of captivity, and we are astonished each reading by two dispersed, yet poignantly related, familial enactments that suggest a connection between “kinship” and “property.” Douglass tells us early in the opening chapter of the 1845 Narrative that he was separated in infancy from his mother: “For what this separation is [sic] done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result” [22]. Perhaps one of the assertions that Meillassoux advances concerning indigenous African formations of enslavement might be turned as a question against the perspective of Douglass’s witness: is the genetic reproduction of the slave and the recognition of the rights of the slave to his or her offspring a check on the profitability of slavery? And how so, if so? We see vaguely the route to framing a response, especially to the question’s second half and perhaps to the first: the enslaved must not be permitted to perceive that he or she has any human rights that matter. Certainly if “kinship” were possible, the property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would then “belong” to a mother and a father. In the system that Douglass articulates, genetic reproduction becomes, then, not an elaboration of the life-principle in its cultural overlap, but an extension of the boundaries of proliferating properties. Meillassoux goes so far as to argue that “slavery exists where the slave class is reproduced through institutional apparatus: war and market” [50]. Since, in the United States, the market of slavery identified the chief institutional means for maintaining a class of enforced servile labor,

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it seems that the biological reproduction of the enslaved was not alone sufficient to reenforce the estate of slavery. If, as Meillassoux contends, “femininity loses its sacredness in slavery” [64], then so does “motherhood” as female blood-rite/right. To that extent, the captive female body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange. While this proposition is open to further exploration, suffice it to say now that this open exchange of female bodies in the raw offers a kind of Ur-text to the dynamics and signification and representation that the gendered female would unravel. For Douglass, the loss of his mother eventuates in alienation from his brother and sister who live in the same house with him: “The early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories” [45]. What could this mean? The physical proximity of the siblings survives the mother’s death. They grasp their connection in the physical sense, but Douglass appears to mean a psychological bonding whose success mandates the mother’s presence. Could we say, then, that the feeling of kinship is not inevitable? That it describes a relationship that appears “natural,” but must be “cultivated” under actual material conditions? If the child’s humanity is mirrored initially in the eyes of its mother, or the maternal function, then we might be able to guess that the social subject grasps the whole dynamic of resemblance and kinship by way of the same source. There is an amazing thematic synonymity on this point between aspects of Douglass’s Narrative and Malcolm El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz’s Autobiography of Malcolm X [21 ff.]. Through the loss of the mother, in the latter contemporary instance, to the institution of “insanity” and the state—a full century after Douglass’s writing and under social conditions that might be designated a postemancipation neo-enslavement—Malcolm and his siblings, robbed of their activist father in a kkk-like ambush, are not only widely dispersed across a makeshift social terrain, but also show symptoms of estrangement and “disremembering” that require many years to heal, and even then, only by way of Malcolm’s prison ordeal turned, eventually, into a redemptive occurrence. The destructive loss of the natural mother, whose biological/genetic relationship to the child remains unique and unambiguous, opens the enslaved young to social ambiguity and chaos: the ambiguity of his/her fatherhood and to a structure of other relational elements, now threatened, that would declare the young’s connection to a genetic and historic future by way of his own siblings. That the father in Douglass’s case was most likely the “master,” not by any means special to Douglass, involves a hideous paradox. Fatherhood, at best a supreme cultural courtesy, attenuates here on the one hand into a monstrous accumulation of power on the other. One has been “made” and “bought” by disparate currencies, linking back to a common origin of exchange and domination. The denied genetic link becomes the chief strategy of an undenied ownership, as if the interrogation into the father’s identity—the blank space where his proper name will fit—were answered by the fact, de jure of a material possession. “And this is done,” Douglass asserts, “too obviously to administer to the [master’s] own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable” [23]. Whether or not the captive female and/or her sexual oppressor derived “pleasure” from their seductions and couplings is not a question we can politely ask.

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Whether or not “pleasure” is possible at all under conditions that I would aver as non-freedom for both or either of the parties has not been settled. Indeed, we could go so far as to entertain the very real possibility that “sexuality,” as a term of implied relationship and desire, is dubiously appropriate, manageable, or accurate to any of the familial arrangements under a system of enslavement, from the master’s family to the captive enclave. Under this arrangements, the customary lexis of sexuality, including “reproduction,” “motherhood,” “pleasure,” and “desire” are thrown into unrelieved crisis. If the testimony of Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs is to be believed, the official mistresses of slavery’s “masters” constitute a privileged class of the tormented, if such contradiction can be entertained [Brent 29–35]. Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs recounts in the course of her narrative scenes from a “psychodrama,” opposing herself and “Mrs. Flint,” in what we have come to consider the classic alignment between captive woman and free. Suspecting that her husband, Dr. Flint, has sexual designs on the young Linda (and the doctor is nearly humorously incompetent at it, according to the story line), Mrs. Flint assumes the role of a perambulatory nightmare who visits the captive woman in the spirit of a veiled seduction. Mrs. Flint imitates the incubus who “rides” its victim in order to exact confession, expiation, and anything else that the immaterial power might want. (Gayle Jones’s Corregidora [1975] weaves a contemporary fictional situation around the historic motif of entangled female sexualities.) This narrative scene from Brent’s work, dictated to Lydia Maria Child, provides an instance of a repeated sequence, purportedly based on “real” life. But the scene in question appears to so commingle its signals with the fictive, with casebook narrative from psychoanalysis, that we are certain that the narrator has her hands on an explosive moment of New-World/U.S. history that feminist investigation is beginning to unravel. The narrator recalls: Sometimes I woke up, and found her bending over me. At other times she whispered in my ear, as though it were her husband who was speaking to me, and listened to hear what I would answer. If she startled me, on such occasion, she would slide stealthily away; and the next morning she would tell me I had been talking in my sleep, and ask who I was talking to. At last, I began to be fearful for my life. . . . [Brent 33]

The “jealous mistress” here (but “jealous” for whom?) forms an analogy with the “master” to the extent that male dominative modes give the male the material means to fully act out what the female might only wish. The mistress in the case of Brent’s narrative becomes a metaphor for his madness that arises in the ecstasy of unchecked power. Mrs. Flint enacts a male alibi and prosthetic motion that is mobilized at night, at the material place of the dream work. In both male and female instances, the subject attempts to inculcate his or her will into the vulnerable, supine body. Though this is barely hinted on the surface of the text, we might say that Brent, between the lines of her narrative, demarcates a sexuality that is neuter-bound, inasmuch as it represents an open vulnerability to a gigantic sexualized repertoire that may be alternately expressed as male/female. Since the gendered female exists for the male, we might suggest that the ungendered female—in an amazing stroke of pansexual potential—might be invaded/raided by another woman or man.

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If Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were a novel, and not the memoirs of an escaped female captive, then we might say that “Mrs. Flint” is also the narrator’s projection, her creation, so that for all her pious and correct umbrage toward the outrage of her captivity, some aspect of Linda Brent is released in a manifold repetition crisis that the doctor’s wife comes to stand in for. In the case of both an imagined fiction and the narrative we have from Brent/Jacobs/Child, published only four years before the official proclamations of Freedom, we could say that African-American women’s community and Anglo-American women’s community, under certain shared cultural conditions, were the twin actants on a common psychic landscape, were subject to the same fabric of dread and humiliation. Neither could claim her body and its various productions—for quite different reasons, albeit—as her own, and in the case of the doctor’s wife, she appears not to have wanted her body at all, but to desire to enter someone else’s, specifically, Linda Brent’s, in an apparently classic instance of sexual “jealousy” and appropriation. In fact, from one point of view, we cannot unravel one female’s narrative from the other’s, cannot decipher one without tripping over the other. In that sense, these “threads cable-strong” of an incestuous, interracial genealogy uncover slavery in the United States as one of the richest displays of the psychoanalytic dimensions of culture before the science of European psychoanalysis takes hold.

4 But just as we duly regard similarities between life conditions of American women—captive and free—we must observe those undeniable contrasts and differences so decisive that the African-American female’s historic claim to the territory of womanhood and “femininity” still tends to rest too solidly on the subtle and shifting calibrations of a liberal ideology. Valerie Smith’s reading of the tale of Linda Brent as a tale of “garreting” enables our notion that female gender for captive women’s community is the tale writ between the lines and in the notquite spaces of an American domesticity. It is this tale that we try to make clearer, or, keeping with the metaphor, “bring on line.” If the point is that the historic conditions of African-American women might be read as an unprecedented occasion in the national context, then gender and the arrangements of gender are both crucial and evasive. Holding, however, to a specialized reading of female gender as an outcome of a certain political, socio-cultural empowerment within the context of the United States, we would regard dispossession as the loss of gender, or one of the chief elements in an altered reading of gender: “Women are considered of no value, unless they continually increase their owner’s stock. They were put on par with animals” [Brent 49; emphasis mine]. Linda Brent’s witness appears to contradict the point I would make, but I am suggesting that even though the enslaved female reproduced other enslaved persons, we do not read “birth” in this instance as a reproduction of mothering precisely because the female, like the male, has been robbed of the parental right, the parental function. One treads dangerous ground in suggesting an equation between female gender and mothering; in fact, feminist inquiry/praxis and the actual day-to-day living of numberless American women—black and white—have gone far to break the enthrallment of a female subject-position to the theoretical

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and actual situation of maternity. Our task here would be lightened considerably if we could simply slide over the powerful “No,” the significant exception. In the historic formation to which I point, however, motherhood and female gendering/ungendering appear so intimately aligned that they seem to speak the same language. At least it is plausible to say that motherhood, while it does not exhaust the problematics of female gender, offers one prominent line of approach to it. I would go farther: Because African-American women experienced uncertainty regarding their infants’ lives in the historic situation, gendering, in its coeval reference to African-American women, insinuates an implicit and unresolved puzzle both within current feminist discourse and within those discursive communities that investigate the entire problematics of culture. Are we mistaken to suspect that history—at least in this instance—repeats itself yet again? Every feature of social and human differentiation disappears in public discourses regarding the African-American person, as we encounter, in the juridical codes of slavery, personality reified. William Goodell’s study not only demonstrates the rhetorical and moral passions of the abolitionist project, but also lends insight into the corpus of law that underwrites enslavement. If “slave” is perceived as the essence of stillness (an early version of “ethnicity”), or of an undynamic human state, fixed in time and space, then the law articulates this impossibility as its inherent feature: “Slaves shall be deemed, sold, taken, reputed and adjudged in law to be chattels personal, in the hands of their owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever” [23; Goodell emphasis]. Even though we tend to parody and simplify matters to behave as if the various civil codes of the slave-holding United States were monolithically informed, unified, and executed in their application, or that the “code” itself is spontaneously generated in an undivided historic moment, we read it nevertheless as exactly this: the peak points, the salient and characteristic features of a human and social procedure that evolves over a natural historical sequence and represents, consequently, the narrative shorthand of a transaction that is riddled, in practice, with contradictions, accident, and surprise. We could suppose that the legal encodations of enslavement stand for the statistically average case, that the legal code provides the topics of a project increasingly threatened and self-conscious. It is, perhaps, not by chance that the laws regarding slavery appear to crystallize in the precise moment when agitation against the arrangement becomes articulate in certain European and New-World communities. In that regard, the slave codes that Goodell describes are themselves an instance of the counter and isolated text that seeks to silence the contradictions and antitheses engendered by it. For example, aspects of Article 461 of the South Carolina Civil Code call attention to just the sort of uneasy oxymoronic character that the “peculiar institution” attempts to sustain in transforming personality into property. 1) The “slave” is movable by nature, but “immovable by the operation of law” [Goodell 24]. As I read this, law itself is compelled to a point of saturation, or a reverse zero degree, beyond which it cannot move in the behalf of the enslaved or the free. We recall, too, that the “master,” under these perversions of judicial power, is impelled to treat the enslaved as property, and not as person. These laws stand for the kind of social formulation that armed forces will help excise from a living context in the campaigns of civil war. They also embody the untenable

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human relationship that Henry David Thoreau believed occasioned acts of “civil disobedience,” the moral philosophy to which Martin Luther King, Jr. would subscribe in the latter half of the twentieth century. 2) Slaves shall be reputed and considered real estate, “subject to be mortgaged, according to the rules prescribed by law” [Goodell 24]. I emphasize “reputed” and “considered” as predicate adjectives that invite attention because they denote a contrivance, not an intransitive “is,” or the transfer of nominative property from one syntactic point to another by way of a weakened copulative. The status of the “reputed” can change, as it will significantly before the nineteenth century closes. The mood here—the “shall be”—is pointedly subjunctive, or the situation devoutly to be wished. The slave-holding class is forced, in time, to think and do something else in the narrative of violence that enslavement itself has been preparing for a couple of centuries. Louisiana’s and South Carolina’s written codes offer a paradigm for praxis in those instances where a written text is missing. In that case, the “chattel principle has . . . been affirmed and maintained by the courts, and involved in legislative acts” [Goodell 25]. In Maryland, a legislative enactment of 1798 shows so forceful a synonymity of motives between branches of comparable governance that a line between “judicial” and “legislative” functions is useless to draw: “In case the personal property of a ward shall consist of specific articles, such as slaves, working beasts, animals of any kind, stock, furniture, plates, books, and so forth, the Court if it shall deem it advantageous to the ward, may at any time, pass an order for the sale thereof” [56]. This inanimate and corporate ownership—the voting district of a ward—is here spoken for, or might be, as a single slave-holding male in determinations concerning property. The eye pauses, however, not so much at the provisions of this enactment as at the details of its delineation. Everywhere in the descriptive document, we are stunned by the simultaneity of disparate items in a grammatical series: “Slave” appears in the same context with beasts of burden, all and any animal(s), various livestock, and a virtually endless profusion of domestic content from the culinary item to the book. Unlike the taxonomy of Borges’s “Certain Chinese encyclopedia,” whose contemplation opens Foucault’s Order of Things, these items from a certain American encyclopedia do not sustain discrete and localized “powers of contagion,” nor has the ground of their concatenation been desiccated beneath them. That imposed uniformity comprises the shock, that somehow this mix of named things, live and inanimate, collapsed by contiguity to the same text of “realism,” carries a disturbingly prominent item of misplacement. To that extent, the project of liberation for African-Americans has found urgency in two passionate motivations that are twinned—1) to break apart, to rupture violently the laws of American behavior that make such syntax possible; 2) to introduce a new semantic field/fold more appropriate to his/her own historic movement. I regard this twin compulsion as distinct, though related, moments of the very same narrative process that might appear as a concentration or a dispersal. The narratives of Linda Brent, Frederick Douglass, and Malcolm El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz (aspects of which are examined in this essay) each represent both narrative ambitions as they occur under the auspices of “author.” Relatedly, we might interpret the whole career of African-Americans, a decisive factor in national political life since the mid-seventeenth century, in light of the

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intervening, intruding tale, or the tale—like Brent’s “garret” space—“between the lines,” which are already inscribed, as a metaphor of social and cultural management. According to this reading, gender, or sex-role assignation, or the clear differentiation of sexual stuff, sustained elsewhere in the culture, does not emerge for the African-American female in this historic instance, except indirectly, except as a way to reenforce through the process of birthing, “the reproduction of the relations of production” that involves “the reproduction of the values and behavior patterns necessary to maintain the system of hierarchy in its various aspects of gender, class, and race or ethnicity” [Margaret Strobel, “Slavery and Reproductive Labor in Mombasa,” Robertson and Klein 121]. Following Strobel’s lead, I would suggest that the foregoing identifies one of the three categories of reproductive labor that African-American females carry out under the regime of captivity. But this replication of ideology is never simple in the case of female subject-positions, and it appears to acquire a thickened layer of motives in the case of African-American females. If we can account for an originary narrative and judicial principle that might have engendered a “Moynihan Report,” many years into the twentieth century, we cannot do much better than look at Goodell’s reading of the partus sequitur ventrem: the condition of the slave mother is “forever entailed on all her remotest posterity.” This maxim of civil law, in Goodell’s view, the “genuine and degrading principle of slavery, inasmuch as it places the slave upon a level with brute animals, prevails universally in the slave-holding states” [Goodell 27]. But what is the “condition” of the mother? Is it the “condition” of enslavement the writer means, or does he mean the “mark” and the “knowledge” of the mother upon the child that here translates into the culturally forbidden and impure? In an elision of terms, “mother” and “enslavement” are indistinct categories of the illegitimate inasmuch as each of these synonymous elements defines, in effect, a cultural situation that is father-lacking. Goodell, who does not only report this maxim of law as an aspect of his own factuality, but also regards it, as does Douglass, as a fundamental degradation, supposes descent and identity through the female line as comparable to a brute animality. Knowing already that there are human communities that align social reproductive procedure according to the line of the mother, and Goodell himself might have known it some years later, we can only conclude that the provisions of patriarchy, here exacerbated by the preponderant powers of an enslaving class, declare Mother Right, by definition, a negating feature of human community. Even though we are not even talking about any of the matriarchal features of social production/reproduction—matrifocality, matrilinearity, matriarchy—when we speak of the enslaved person, we perceive that the dominant culture, in a fatal misunderstanding, assigns a matriarchist value where it does not belong; actually misnames the power of the female regarding the enslaved community. Such naming is false because the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false, once again, because “motherhood” is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance. The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve. This human and historic development—the text that has been inscribed on the benighted heart of the

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continent—takes us to the center of an inexorable difference in the depths of American women’s community: the African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated—the law of the Mother—only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father’s name, the Father’s law. Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an “illegitimacy.” Because of this peculiar American denial, the black American male embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood—the power of “yes” to the “female” within. This different cultural text actually reconfigures, in historically ordained discourse, certain representational potentialities for African-Americans: 1) motherhood as female blood-rite is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social enactment; 2) a dual fatherhood is set in motion, comprised of the African father’s banished name and body and the captor father’s mocking presence. In this play of paradox, only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to “name”), which her culture imposes in blindness, “Sapphire” might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment.

WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Blassingame, John. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford UP, 1972. Brent Linda, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. L. Maria Child. Introduced by Walter Teller. Rpt. New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1973. Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. De Azurara, Gomes Eannes. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Trans. C. Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London: Hakluyt Society, 1896, 1897, in Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1932, 1:18–41. Donnan, Elizabeth. Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America; 4 vols. Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1932. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave, Written by Himself. Rpt. New York: Signet Books, 1968. El Shabazz, Malcolm El-Hajj Malik. Autobiography of Malcolm X. With Alex Haley. Introduced by M. S. Handler. New York: Grove Press, 1966.

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Equiano, Olaudah. “The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself,” in Great Slave Narratives. Introduced and selected by Arna Bontemps. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. 1–192. Faulkner, William. The Mansion. New York: Vintage Books, 1965. Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Rev. with forward by Nathan Glazer. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1966. Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Goodell, William. The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice Shown By Its Statues, Judicial Decisions, and Illustrative Facts; 3rd ed. New York: American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1853. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. Klein, Herbert S. “African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” Robertson and Klein 29–39. Meillassoux, Claude. “Female Slavery.” Robertson and Klein 49–67. Moynihan, Daniel P. “The Moynihan Report” [The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965]. The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy: A Transaction Social Science and Public Policy Report. Ed. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967. 47–94. Robertson, Claire C., and Martin A. Klein, eds. Woman and Slavery in Africa. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Smith, Valerie. “Loopholes of Retreat: Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Paper presented at the 1985 American Studies Association Meeting, San Diego. Cited in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” New Literary History 18.2 (Winter 1987): 360. Strobel, Margaret. “Slavery and Reproductive Labor in Mombasa.” Robertson and Klein 111–30. Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed. The Female Body in Western Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1984. White, Deborah Grey. Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.

JUDITH BUTLER

BODILY INSCRIPTIONS, PERFORMATIVE SUBVERSIONS (1999)





















“Garbo ‘got in drag’ whenever she took some heavy glamour part, whenever she melted in or out of a man’s arms, whenever she simply let that heavenly-flexed neck . . . bear the weight of her thrown-back head. . . . How resplendent seems the art of acting! It is all impersonation, whether the sex underneath is true or not.” —PARKER TYLER, “THE GARBO IMAGE,” QUOTED IN ESTHER NEWTON, MOTHER CAMP

Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics. These constructs of identity serve as the points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics itself is shaped. In the case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interests, the perspectives, of “women.” But is there a political shape to “women,” as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view? How is that identity shaped, and is it a political shaping that takes the very morphology and boundary of the sexed body as the ground, surface, or site of cultural inscription? What circumscribes that site as “the female body”? Is “the body” or “the sexed body” the firm foundation on which gender and systems of compulsory sexuality operate? Or is “the body” itself shaped by political forces with strategic interests in keeping that body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex? The sex/gender distinction and the category of sex itself appear to presuppose a generalization of “the body” that preexists the acquisition of its sexed significance. This “body” often appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from a cultural source figured as “external” to that body. Any theory of the culturally constructed body, however, ought to question “the body” as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse. There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century, understand “the body” as so much inert matter, signifying nothing or, more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal feminine. There are many occasions in both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s work where “the body” is figured as a mute facticity, anticipating some

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meaning that can be attributed only by a transcendent consciousness, understood in Cartesian terms as radically immaterial. But what establishes this dualism for us? What separates off “the body” as indifferent to signification, and signification itself as the act of a radically disembodied consciousness or, rather, the act that radically disembodies that consciousness? To what extent is that Cartesian dualism presupposed in phenomenology adapted to the structuralist frame in which mind/body is redescribed as culture/nature? With respect to gender discourse, to what extent do these problematic dualisms still operate within the very descriptions that are supposed to lead us out of that binarism and its implicit hierarchy? How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender significations are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance? Wittig suggests that a culturally specific epistemic a priori establishes the naturalness of “sex.” But by what enigmatic means has “the body” been accepted as a prima facie given that admits of no genealogy? Even within Foucault’s essay on the very theme of genealogy, the body is figured as a surface and the scene of a cultural inscription: “the body is the inscribed surface of events.”1 The task of genealogy, he claims, is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history.” His sentence continues, however, by referring to the goal of “history”—here clearly understood on the model of Freud’s “civilization”—as the “destruction of the body” (148). Forces and impulses with multiple directionalities are precisely that which history both destroys and preserves through the entstehung (historical event) of inscription. As “a volume in perpetual disintegration” (148), the body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of history. And history is the creation of values and meanings by a signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body. This corporeal destruction is necessary to produce the speaking subject and its significations. This is a body, described through the language of surface and force, weakened through a “single drama” of domination, inscription, and creation (150). This is not the modus vivendi of one kind of history rather than another, but is, for Foucault, “history” (148) in its essential and repressive gesture. Although Foucault writes, “Nothing in man [sic]—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men [sic]” (153), he nevertheless points to the constancy of cultural inscription as a “single drama” that acts on the body. If the creation of values, that historical mode of signification, requires the destruction of the body, much as the instrument of torture in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony destroys the body on which it writes, then there must be a body prior to that inscription, stable and self-identical, subject to that sacrificial destruction. In a sense, for Foucault, as for Nietzsche, cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed—that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values. Within the metaphorics of this notion of cultural values is the figure of history as a relentless writing instrument, and the body as the medium which must be destroyed and transfigured in order for “culture” to emerge. By maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription, Foucault appears to assume a materiality prior to signification and form. Because this distinction oper-

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ates as essential to the task of genealogy as he defines it, the distinction itself is precluded as an object of genealogical investigation. Occasionally in his analysis of Herculine, Foucault subscribes to a prediscursive multiplicity of bodily forces that break through the surface of the body to disrupt the regulating practices of cultural coherence imposed upon that body by a power regime, understood as a vicissitude of “history.” If the presumption of some kind of precategorial source of disruption is refused, is it still possible to give a genealogical account of the demarcation of the body as such as a signifying practice? This demarcation is not initiated by a reified history or by a subject. This marking is the result of a diffuse and active structuring of the social field. This signifying practice effects a social space for and of the body within certain regulatory grids of intelligibility. Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger suggests that the very contours of “the body” are established through markings that seek to establish specific codes of cultural coherence. Any discourse that establishes the boundaries of the body serves the purpose of instating and naturalizing certain taboos regarding the appropriate limits, postures, and modes of exchange that define what it is that constitutes bodies: Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.2

Although Douglas clearly subscribes to a structuralist distinction between an inherently unruly nature and an order imposed by cultural means, the “untidiness” to which she refers can be redescribed as a region of cultural unruliness and disorder. Assuming the inevitably binary structure of the nature/culture distinction, Douglas cannot point toward an alternative configuration of culture in which such distinctions become malleable or proliferate beyond the binary frame. Her analysis, however, provides a possible point of departure for understanding the relationship by which social taboos institute and maintain the boundaries of the body as such. Her analysis suggests that what constitutes the limit of the body is never merely material, but that the surface, the skin, is systemically signified by taboos and anticipated transgressions; indeed, the boundaries of the body become, within her analysis, the limits of the social per se. A poststructuralist appropriation of her view might well understand the boundaries of the body as the limits of the socially hegemonic. In a variety of cultures, she maintains, there are pollution powers which inhere in the structure of ideas itself and which punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined. A polluting person is always in the wrong. He [sic] has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed over some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone.3

In a sense, Simon Watney has identified the contemporary construction of

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“the polluting person” as the person with AIDS in his Policing Desire: AIDS, Pornography, and the Media.4 Not only is the illness figured as the “gay disease,” but throughout the media’s hysterical and homophobic response to the illness there is a tactical construction of a continuity between the polluted status of the homosexual by virtue of the boundary—trespass that is homosexuality—and the disease as a specific modality of homosexual pollution. That the disease is transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids suggests within the sensationalist graphics of homophobic signifying systems the dangers that permeable bodily boundaries present to the social order as such. Douglas remarks that “the body is a model that can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.”5 And she asks a question which one might have expected to read in Foucault: “Why should bodily margins be thought to be specifically invested with power and danger?”6 Douglas suggests that all social systems are vulnerable at their margins, and that all margins are accordingly considered dangerous. If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a site in which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment. Since anal and oral sex among men clearly establishes certain kinds of bodily permeabilities unsanctioned by the hegemonic order, male homosexuality would, within such a hegemonic point of view, constitute a site of danger and pollution, prior to and regardless of the cultural presence of AIDS. Similarly, the “polluted” status of lesbians, regardless of their low-risk status with respect to AIDS, brings into relief the dangers of their bodily exchanges. Significantly, being “outside” the hegemonic order does not signify being “in” a state of filthy and untidy nature. Paradoxically, homosexuality is almost always conceived within the homophobic signifying economy as both uncivilized and unnatural. The construction of stable bodily contours relies upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and impermeability. Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively reinscribe the boundaries of the body along new cultural lines. Anal sex among men is an example, as is the radical re-membering of the body in Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. Douglas alludes to “a kind of sex pollution which expresses a desire to keep the body (physical and social) intact,”7 suggesting that the naturalized notion of “the” body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries. Further, the rites of passage that govern various bodily orifices presuppose a heterosexual construction of gendered exchange, positions, and erotic possibilities. The deregulation of such exchanges accordingly disrupts the very boundaries that determine what it is to be a body at all. Indeed, the critical inquiry that traces the regulatory practices within which bodily contours are constructed constitutes precisely the genealogy of “the body” in its discreteness that might further radicalize Foucault’s theory.8 Significantly, Kristeva’s discussion of abjection in The Powers of Horror begins to suggest the uses of this structuralist notion of a boundary-constituting taboo for the purposes of constructing a discrete subject through exclusion.9 The “abject” designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered “Other.” This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of

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the “not-me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject. Kristeva writes: Nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.10

The boundary of the body as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness. As Iris Young has suggested in her use of Kristeva to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an “expulsion” followed by a “repulsion” that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/ sexuality axes of differentiation.11 Young’s appropriation of Kristeva shows how the operation of repulsion can consolidate “identities” founded on the instituting of the “Other” or a set of Others through exclusion and domination. What constitutes through division the “inner” and “outer” worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control. The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit. For inner and outer worlds to remain utterly distinct, the entire surface of the body would have to achieve an impossible impermeability. This sealing of its surfaces would constitute the seamless boundary of the subject; but this enclosure would invariably be exploded by precisely that excremental filth that it fears. Regardless of the compelling metaphors of the spatial distinctions of inner and outer, they remain linguistic terms that facilitate and articulate a set of fantasies, feared and desired. “Inner” and “outer” make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. And this stability, this coherence, is determined in large part by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject. Hence, “inner” and “outer” constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the “inner world” no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspect. The critical question is not how did that identity become internalized? as if internalization were a process or a mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? In what language is “inner space” figured? What kind of figuration is it, and through what figure of the body is it signified? How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth?

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FROM INTERIORITY TO GENDER PERFORMATIVES In Discipline and Punish Foucault challenges the language of internalization as it operates in the service of the disciplinary regime of the subjection and subjectivation of criminals.12 Although Foucault objected to what he understood to be the psychoanalytic belief in the “inner” truth of sex in The History of Sexuality, he turns to a criticism of the doctrine of internalization for separate purposes in the context of his history of criminology. In a sense, Discipline and Punish can be read as Foucault’s effort to rewrite Nietzsche’s doctrine of internalization in On the Genealogy of Morals on the model of inscription. In the context of prisoners, Foucault writes, the strategy has been not to enforce a repression of their desires, but to compel their bodies to signify the prohibitive law as their very essence, style, and necessity. That law is not literally internalized, but incorporated, with the consequence that bodies are produced which signify that law on and through the body; there the law is manifest as the essence of their selves, the meaning of their soul, their conscience, the law of their desire. In effect, the law is at once fully manifest and fully latent, for it never appears as external to the bodies it subjects and subjectivates. Foucault writes: It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within, the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those that are punished [my emphasis].13

The figure of the interior soul understood as “within” the body is signified through its inscription on the body, even though its primary mode of signification is through its very absence, its potent invisibility. The effect of a structuring inner space is produced through the signification of a body as a vital and sacred enclosure. The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, the body presents itself as a signifying lack. That lack which is the body signifies the soul as that which cannot show. In this sense, then, the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner/outer distinction itself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such. In Foucault’s terms, the soul is not imprisoned by or within the body, as some Christian imagery would suggest, but “the soul is the prison of the body.”14 The redescription of intrapsychic processes in terms of the surface politics of the body implies a corollary redescription of gender as the disciplinary production of the figures of fantasy through the play of presence and absence on the body’s surface, the construction of the gendered body through a series of exclusions and denials, signifying absences. But what determines the manifest and latent text of the body politic? What is the prohibitive law that generates the corporeal stylization of gender, the fantasied and fantastic figuration of the body? We have already considered the incest taboo and the prior taboo against homosexuality as the generative moments of gender identity, the prohibitions that produce identity along the culturally intelligible grids of an idealized and compulsory heterosexuality. That disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within

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the reproductive domain. The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender—indeed, where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another. When the disorganization and disaggregation of the field of bodies disrupt the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence, it seems that the expressive model loses its descriptive force. That regulatory ideal is then exposed as a norm and a fiction that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe. According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or incorporation, however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of a corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the “integrity” of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. If the “cause” of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the “self” of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “core” precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity. If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity. In Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, anthropologist Esther Newton suggests that the structure of impersonation reveals one of the key fabricating mechanisms through which the social construction of gender takes place.15 I would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity. Newton writes: At its most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion.” Drag says [Newton’s curious personification] “my ‘outside’

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appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine.” At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself] is feminine.”16

Both claims to truth contradict one another and so displace the entire enactment of gender significations from the discourse of truth and falsity. The notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch/ femme identities. Within feminist theory, such parodic identities have been understood to be either degrading to women, in the case of drag and cross-dressing, or an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within the practice of heterosexuality, especially in the case of butch/femme lesbian identities. But the relation between the “imitation” and the “original” is, I think, more complicated than that critique generally allows. Moreover, it gives us a clue to the way in which the relationship between primary identification—that is, the original meanings accorded to gender—and subsequent gender experience might be reframed. The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance. As much as drag creates a unified picture of “woman” (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary. In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity. The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original; just as the psychoanalytic notion of gender identification is constituted by a fantasy of a fantasy, the transfiguration of an Other who is always already a “figure” in that double sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect—that is, in its effect—postures as an imitation. This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization. As

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imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself. In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction. According to Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” the imitation that mocks the notion of an original is characteristic of pastiche rather than parody: Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost it humor.17

The loss of the sense of “the normal,” however, can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when “the normal,” “the original” is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived. Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony. A typology of actions would clearly not suffice, for parodic displacement, indeed, parodic laughter, depends on a context and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered. What performance where will invert the inner/outer distinction and compel a radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions of gender identity and sexuality? What performance where will compel a reconsideration of the place and stability of the masculine and the feminine? And what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire. If the body is not a “being,” but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, then what language is left for understanding this corporeal enactment, gender, that constitutes its “interior” signification on its surface? Sartre would perhaps have called this act “a style of being,” Foucault, “a stylistics of existence.” And in my earlier reading of Beauvoir, I suggest that gendered bodies are so many “styles of the flesh.” These styles are never fully self-styled, for styles have a history, and those histories condition and limit the possibilities. Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act,” as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning. Wittig understands gender as the workings of “sex,” where “sex” is an obligatory injunction for the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize itself in obedience to a historically delimited possibility, and to do this, not once or twice,

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but as a sustained and repeated corporeal project. The notion of a “project,” however, suggests the originating force of a radical will, and because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, the term strategy better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right. Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction “compels” our belief in its necessity and naturalness. The historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other than those punitively regulated cultural fictions alternately embodied and deflected under duress. Consider that a sedimentation of gender norms produces the peculiar phenomenon of a “natural sex” or a “real woman” or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions, and that this is a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes existing in a binary relation to one another. If these styles are enacted, and if they produce the coherent gendered subjects who pose as their originators, what kind of performance might reveal this ostensible “cause” to be an “effect”? In what senses, then, is gender an act? As in other ritual social dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation.18 Although there are individual bodies that enact these significations by becoming stylized into gendered modes, this” action” is a public action. There are temporal and collective dimensions to these actions, and their public character is not inconsequential; indeed, the performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame—an aim that cannot be attributed to a subject, but, rather, must be understood to found and consolidate the subject. Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. Gender is also

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a norm that can never be fully internalized; “the internal” is a surface signification, and gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a “ground” will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration, indeed, a gendered corporealization of time. The abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which, in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this “ground.” The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction. If gender attributes, however, are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal. The distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial. If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction. That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality. Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible.

NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 148. References in the text are to this essay. 2. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 4. 3. Ibid., p. 113. 4. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: AIDS, Pornography, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 5. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 115. 6. Ibid., p. 121. 7. Ibid., p. 140. 8. Foucault’s essay “A Preface to Transgression” (in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) does provide an interesting juxtaposition with Douglas’ notion of body boundaries constituted by incest taboos. Originally written in honor of Georges Bataille, this essay explores in part the metaphorical “dirt” of transgressive pleasures and the association of the forbidden orifice with the dirt-covered tomb. See pp. 46–48. 9. Kristeva discusses Mary Douglas’s work in a short section of The Powers of Horror:

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An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), originally published as Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1980). Assimilating Douglas’ insights to her own reformulation of Lacan, Kristeva writes, “Defilement is what is jettisoned from the symbolic system. It is what escapes that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based, which then becomes differentiated from a temporary agglomeration of individuals and, in short, constitutes a classification system or a structure” (p. 65). 10. Ibid., p. 3. 11. Iris Marion Young, “Abjection and Oppression: Unconscious Dynamics of Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia,” paper presented at the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Meetings, Northwestern University, 1988. The paper will be published in the proceedings of the 1988 meetings by the State University of New York Press. It will also be included as part of a larger chapter in her forthcoming The Politics of Difference. 12. Parts of the following discussion were published in two different contexts, in my “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1989) and “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 20, No. 3, Winter 1988. 13. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 29. 14. Ibid., p. 30. 15. See the chapter “Role Models” in Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 16. Ibid., p. 103. 17. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA.: Bay Press, 1983), p. 114. 18. See Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). See also Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Thought,” in Local Knowledge, Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

DIANE PRICE HERNDL

RECONSTRUCTING THE POSTHUMAN FEMINIST BODY TWENTY YEARS AFTER AUDRE LORDE’S CANCER JOURNALS (2002)



















Feminist cultural criticism is not a blueprint for the conduct of personal life (or political action, for that matter) and does not empower (or require) individuals to rise above their culture or to become martyrs to feminist ideals. It does not tell us what to do. . . . Its goal is edification and understanding, enhanced consciousness of the power, complexity, and systemic nature of culture, the interconnected webs of its functioning. It is up to the reader to decide how, when, and where (or whether) to put that understanding to further use in the particular, complicated, and ever-changing context that is his or her life and no one else’s. —SUSAN BORDO, UNBEARABLE WEIGHT

This is an essay about the feminist politics of visibility, silence, and the body. I warn you up front that there is a distinct possibility that it is a theoretical version of self-justification, a meditation on a fall from one version of feminist politics, a confession. I warn you up front that it is about the conflict of finding myself at odds with a feminism that I greatly admire and about coming to terms with not living up to Audre Lorde. I warn you up front that today, three months after my mastectomy and breast reconstruction, may be too soon for me to achieve academic distance from the body of the breast cancer patient and the politics of prosthesis, reconstruction, disability.

INVISIBILITY AND SILENCE: AUDRE LORDE AND THE VOICING OF BREAST CANCER I wanted to be glad I was alive, I wanted to be glad about all the things I’ve got to be glad about. But now it hurts. Now it hurts. Things chase themselves around inside my eyes and there are tears I cannot shed and words like cancer, pain, and dying. Later, I don’t want this to be a record of grieving only. I don’t want this to be a record only of tears. I want it to be something I can use . . . something I

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can pass on. . . . My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived. (Lorde 45–46)

Twenty years ago, Audre Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy; The Cancer Journals is the book that came out of that experience. In addition to recording some of her actual journals, her meditations on her fury and mourning, it includes essays about the silence that surrounded breast cancer and mastectomy at that time and about the falseness of prosthesis and reconstructive surgery. The essays articulate a theory of prosthesis as a means of silence, as a way of hiding women with breast cancer from one another and therefore keeping them from being able to share their sense of rage and the knowledge they have gained from the experience. She argues further that prosthesis hides breast cancer from public awareness, allowing people to ignore its politics. She claims that prosthesis works as a lie, a way for a woman to pretend cancer did not happen to her, a way to avoid the reality of amputation. Finally, she states that the emphasis on looking normal after mastectomy works to keep women within a stereotypical femininity, treating their bodies as aesthetic objects. As did other feminists of her generation, Lorde begins the work of giving voice to women and to women’s issues that had remained hidden, shameful, unspoken.1 For her, that silence is the silence over breast cancer. Her confrontation with mortality drives her to think of her silences and of the ultimate silence, death: “In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?” (19). Her fear about that complete silence brings her to speak out about cancer and to reveal to the world the consequences of her amputation. She decided both to speak out about cancer and to exhibit her body’s difference; she decided on an ethical course of action that would turn her private experience of fear, pain, and mourning into politics. Lorde related voice to the visual and, in doing so, made the personal political. Emerging from surgery, she realizes that one of the greatest difficulties for her is her lack of role models, the lack of a tradition that will guide her, that will tell her what to do. She asks, “Where are the models for what I’m supposed to be in this situation?,” and laments, “Where were the dykes who had had mastectomies?” (29, 50). The silence surrounding breast cancer even as late as the 1970s was startling. Cancer itself in the late 1970s was being attributed to a particular—and bad—personality type. Depression, repressed emotions, and succumbing to stress were designated as causes of cancer; thereby the patient was blamed for her illness (see, e.g., Sontag 50–57). Breast cancer carried the added weight of being not only gender-specific (though men do get breast cancer) but somehow sexual as well. Even today, some men are embarrassed about the disease (I have male colleagues who have not yet said the word cancer to me although I taught all the way through chemotherapy and surgery and they saw me almost daily). Women’s breasts, the object of such obsession in our culture, were nonetheless still unspeakable. Breast cancer, even among women, was unspoken. Lorde writes, “I needed to talk with women who shared at least some of my major concerns and beliefs and visions, who shared at least some of my language.” Her painful

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conclusion, though, was, “But there were none. This is it, Audre. You’re on your own” (42, 29). Lorde enters a world of ethical narration and becomes a model for other women facing cancer. She goes public as the dyke with the mastectomy, to talk about the experience of cancer and of living one-breasted. She undertakes a writing project that Arthur Frank, in The Wounded Storyteller, contends is at the heart of the postmodern illness narrative: claiming a voice. Frank argues that the medical experience is essentially colonizing, that the patient is forced to be passive, to leave the work of healing to the heroic physician. The person telling her illness narrative, though, demands “to speak rather than [be] spoken for and to represent [herself] rather than [be] represented or, in the worst cases, rather than [be] effaced entirely” (13). It was a sense of being effaced that Lorde encountered in the few women who did talk to her about the experience of cancer. When a representative of Reach for Recovery visited her in the hospital, it was to deliver a pink lamb’s-wool prosthesis; when Lorde visited the surgeon’s office without the prosthesis, the nurse told her she should wear it, because she was bad for morale in the office. In both cases, the women were urging her to deny the reality of her loss, were suggesting that she not only could but should efface the change. Lorde writes of her visitor from Reach for Recovery, “Her message was, you are just as good as you were before because you can look exactly the same. Lamb’s wool now, then a good prosthesis as soon as possible, and nobody’ll ever know the difference. But what she said was, ‘You’ll never know the difference,’ and she lost me right there, because I knew sure as hell I’d know the difference” (42). Frank writes, “Telling stories is a form of resistance” (170), and Lorde’s story is precisely that: resistance against the effacement of her disease and loss. Her choice to live without a prosthesis or a reconstruction is to make visible her difference. Instead of wearing a prosthesis, she chooses to wear breast cancer, to wear difference. But she makes it clear that even though such a choice is not an easy one, for her to make another choice would be a denial of who she has become: I looked at the large gentle curve my left breast made under the pajama top, a curve that seemed even larger now that it stood by itself. I looked strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself, and therefore so much more acceptable than I looked with that thing stuck inside my clothes. For not even the most skillful prosthesis in the world could undo that reality, or feel the way my breast had felt, and either I would love my body one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself. Then I climbed back into bed and cried myself to sleep, even though it was 2:30 in the afternoon. (44)

Refusing to acknowledge one’s difference, she argues, is to remain alien to oneself. Perhaps this is the point at which much of contemporary feminist theory departs from Audre Lorde. Guided by poststructural theories, many feminists now see all subjects as essentially alien to themselves. That alienation is a condition of postmodernity, a condition of the subjectivity that is always different from itself. The earlier feminist politics that urged an acceptance of self, an embrace of self,

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and a move toward self-loving did not always recognize that internal difference. Lorde’s is not an unsophisticated position, but it is grounded in an understanding of self in which one can eventually know the self and not be alien to oneself and in which one can make decisions about a relation to the body that may not be comfortable for many postmodern feminists.

“I AM TALKING HERE ABOUT THE NEED FOR EVERY WOMAN TO LIVE A CONSIDERED LIFE”: RECONSTRUCTING THE FEMINIST BODY Twenty years after Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer, so was I. I had options she didn’t have, including the opportunity to just have the lump removed rather than to lose the whole breast. It was an obvious choice for me. But ten months after that first surgery and after nine months of chemotherapy, the cancer came back, and I had no choice but to have a mastectomy. What I did have a choice about (again, one unavailable to Lorde) was whether to have reconstructive surgery done, not with silicon implants but with my own body tissue. In early February, I sent this e-mail message to the group of women on whose support I depend: At a couple of crisis points in my life, I’ve found myself singing in the shower without really stopping to think about what I’m singing. The first time was in grad school, the morning I was to start doing my written exams. Carl noticed that I was singing the Roches’ “You’re being weeded out” at the top of my lungs. Well, one morning this week I caught myself singing Laurie Anderson “I want stereo-FM installed in my teeth, / And take this mole off my back and put it on my cheek, / And while you’re at it, why don’t you give me some of those high-heeled feet?” Which is to say that after an agonizing weekend of decision-making, I’ve decided to subject myself to plastic surgery, and to do it at the same time as the mastectomy (next Friday, on February 19). They’ll be taking my belly off and moving it up, to build a new “breast.” As the plastic surgeon put it, the silver lining to this is that one gets a free tummy-tuck. Which probably should come under the rubric of “be careful what you wish for,” as any number of times I’ve looked in the mirror and wished that someone could just cut that belly fat off. Ooops. Ah, chemotherapy and steroids giveth and surgery taketh away. And medical subject I am, now, thoroughly. Part of the ritual humiliation of this is the “examination” at the plastic surgeon’s: my breasts and belly were hefted, measured with calipers, compared to plastic forms. Then I was photographed, naked but for my socks and a pair of paper “modesty” panties—elastic and blue paper, every designer’s dream—but, to comfort me, the doctor and his assistant assured me that my face wouldn’t be in the pictures. Though I did have to hold up a card for the first one that identified me by name and patient number. Mug shot, indeed. But the choice I’ve made is interesting to me on a couple of levels. First, I’ve had to put my beliefs about the relationship between mind and body into practice in a way I never really expected to. But I believe that mental healing is as important as physical and I believe that having the surgery done

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right away, so that by May I’m recovering from both surgery and radiation, means that I can get on with my life sooner. And I believe that is important. Second, I’ve had to assess my limits. I’ve had to measure how much loss I can stand. And all the theorizing about the body that I’ve ever done didn’t prepare me for how I’d choose. At the same time that I’ve chosen in favor of my mind, my spirit, my emotions, I’ve also chosen to preserve as much of my physicality intact as I can, and it turns out that is important to me. It is just too Lacanian to imagine my body parts being removable. That image in the mirror is whole, after all. To enhance the lighter side of all this, the university payroll office made a mistake on my W-2 form, and checked the box for “deceased” instead of “pension plan.” Which may be, to conclude, a comment on just how postmodern all this is.

Looking back on this message, I don’t know if the “agonizing” in the second paragraph half covers what that week of decision making was like. (One problem with breast cancer surgery is that such decisions need to be made relatively quickly, usually within two weeks, if only because of the terror of it; I wanted that tissue out of me.) I had always assumed, before I had breast cancer, that I would choose what I thought was the feminist alternative: refusing reconstruction or prosthesis, Lorde’s choice. Things have changed since her experience—in part because of her experience. Now, living without a prosthesis is an alternative that is open, out there, always mentioned as one possibility.2 I thought it was the right choice. I thought it was the feminist choice. And I couldn’t do it. Feminist theorist fails, I told myself at first. Then I rethought what I meant by feminist theory and realized that feminist relations to the body are different now than they were twenty years ago for Lorde and that feminist relations to breast cancer are different. I am not often in the position of thinking that feminism has made great strides; too often I look at the sexism of the world around me, at the disavowal of feminism by a younger generation, and fall into the trap of thinking that we’ve achieved so little. But when it comes to breast cancer, the difference that feminism has made is undeniable. Lorde’s refusal to wear a prosthesis was an open avowal of something that had remained hidden; the result, I realized, was that I didn’t have to wear breast cancer in the same way. Lorde’s resistance made possible many other acts of resistance, so that today breast cancer is no longer silent. Books on it have become widely available, and almost all encourage survivors to become vocal about the disease—about environmental toxins that are almost certainly to blame for the rising incidence of the disease, about the politics of funding research, and about the emotional issues of survival. Other artists have begun speaking out about breast cancer, about both the experience of the disease and the politics of it, often at once. For example, in a move in the visual arts that was analogous to Lorde’s literary one, the New York Times Magazine put a photograph on its 15 August 1993 cover of the photographer Matuschka, with her mastectomy scar exposed. “You Can’t Look Away Anymore,” the cover declared. The collection Art. Rage. Us: Art and Writing by Women with Breast Cancer similarly includes photographs like Diana Young’s self-portrait, One in Eight (a reference to American women’s chances of being diagnosed with

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breast cancer). In the photograph, Young—whose scars reveal a double mastectomy—is seated with six other women and one little girl, all of whom are topless. One doesn’t have to look far for women who have had breast cancer and who are willing to reveal it. There are breast cancer foundations, support groups, Web sites;3 there is Race for the Cure; the post office has even issued a breast cancer stamp. Lorde’s mission to make breast cancer visible, to give it voice, has succeeded. My (almost) unconscious evocation of Anderson’s postmodern music was an indicator of some of the marks of that change. The 1990s have seen the emergence of the “posthuman.”4 While in 1979 Lorde could choose to love her one-breasted body as an alternative to remaining alien to herself, postmodern art and theory during the 1980s and 1990s have challenged the idea that any of us are ever anything but alien to ourselves; in fact, they celebrate the alien within us. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” is a call not to return to the pre-technological body but to embrace the simulacrum body: From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse . . . , about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. . . . From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. (155)

It is both, of course, but accepting that doubleness is to embrace partiality and contradiction. My choice to have reconstruction was to leap with both feet into the posthuman, the partial, and the contradictory. My new “breast” reflects that: it is me to the extent that it is my own tissue, but it is alien because it has been moved, reshaped, and changed by technology. I am now partial, because a part of me is missing—I keep using scare quotes around “breast” as an indicator that this flesh is not an actual breast, doesn’t feel like one now and never will—and because my choice reveals a partiality for a normal appearance. Of course, to say that I chose to become posthuman is a lie. From the moment that I began my interaction with technology (And when was that? I ask myself. When I had the first mammogram? When they did the first surgery? When they installed a plastic fitting under my skin to do chemotherapy more easily? When I was born?), I was already posthuman. Is my new “breast” any less a visible sign of my interaction with technology than a mastectomy scar would be? To a certain extent, yes. It is certainly less visible to other people when I am wearing clothes. This invisibility of what happened to me is at the heart of Lorde’s resistance to prosthesis. Hiding the amputation of mastectomy is, she argues, a way to deny what has happened, to try to pretend that nothing has happened: After a mastectomy . . . there is a feeling of wanting to go back, of not wanting to persevere through this experience to whatever enlightenment might be at the core of it. And it is this feeling, this nostalgia, which is encouraged by most of the post-surgical counseling for women with breast cancer. This regressive tie to the past is emphasized by the concentration upon breast

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cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense. (56)

For the posthuman feminist, Lorde’s claims have a double edge. First, although I had what might be called by some cosmetic surgery, cancer was never a cosmetic problem to me. The treatment for cancer was the cosmetic problem. Covering my bald head while I was undergoing chemotherapy was a cosmetic issue. Deciding whether to present myself to the world as one-breasted or not was a cosmetic choice. But cancer, with or without reconstruction, goes to the bone. It cannot be solved or cured by a visible change in my body. Prosthesis is technology, and it never lets me forget. Its artificiality is palpable. I am alien to myself forever. I will never be able to pretend this didn’t happen to me. Second, despite my alienness to myself, I do have to confront the fact that what I have done makes it easier for other people to dismiss the reality of cancer or at least to think that it is something that can be taken care of easily. Cancer will never and can never be cosmetic for me, but that doesn’t mean that other people can’t miss that. I thought when I made the choice to have the reconstructive surgery that I could still follow part of Lorde’s lead and make breast cancer visible by talking about it, by claiming the identity of a woman with breast cancer, and that would outweigh my choice to make cancer less manifest to others. I thought that my voice would outweigh the visible. And so I openly talk about breast cancer to lots of women. I describe what has happened to me and talk about the statistics, the state of cancer research, what we know and don’t know about prevention. That voicing of breast cancer, though, doesn’t always work. After I had surgery, I was in the beauty shop and talking about it. One of the cosmetologists was listening eagerly. (The importance of setting and character has not escaped me, by the way.) I thought she was with me, understanding how it felt to live posthumanly, to have one’s skin lifted, to have tissue removed and rearranged, to have over nineteen inches of scars across my abdomen and “breast.” I thought she heard me talking about the pain, about spending five weeks on narcotics, about the fact that two months later I still couldn’t use my stomach muscles to sit up. Instead, what she said was “Maybe I could get that surgery. They could cut off all this flab on my belly and make my boobs bigger!” The guilt I spiraled into was overwhelming. What had I done? Had my belief that the voice could belie the visible been self-delusion? Had I let my secret wish for a tummy tuck and a cosmetically enhanced body rule my choices? Was I that wrong?

FOREVER ALIEN TO MYSELF: AESTHETICS, DISABILITY, AND THE FEMINIST BODY Cancer is not a cosmetic issue, but prosthesis and reconstruction are. For Lorde, a statement like this one is a lie, a misunderstanding of the interconnection between cancer and the placebo of replacement. Worse, it is a delusion that keeps women within a certain stereotype of femininity: “This emphasis on the cosmetic after surgery reinforces this society’s stereotype of women, that we are only what

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we look or appear, so this is the only aspect of our existence we need to address. Any woman who has had a breast removed because of cancer knows she does not feel the same” (Lorde 58). Looking the same, feeling the same, self-knowledge: for Lorde, these issues are intimately connected. She believes in an integrity of self, in which, when one knows one’s difference, one lives it, reveals it. Voice and visibility are the same for her. In the twenty years since she wrote The Cancer Journals, we have come to think about bodies differently, to see bodies as produced, as, in fact, forever alien to ourselves. The challenge for me personally and for feminism more generally, I think, is to find a way to understand the difference between a postmodern, posthuman view of the body and an earlier feminism’s view without having to regard either as entirely wrong. Each is historically situated, responding to different cultures, different crises in women’s embodiment. Does reconstructive surgery fall prey to this culture’s insistence on feminine beauty at any cost? Of course it does. Does it also help rethink the borders of the natural, sexual, and what counts as feminine beauty? Yes, it does that too. Audre Lorde looked at her one-breasted body and decided to love it as it was. She staged a kind of feminist self-claiming that was and still is crucial. But there are other scenes of self-loving. I made my decision standing in a dressing room at my favorite countercultural clothes shop, looking in the mirror. Michel Foucault (and Lorde) might well describe my moment of self-regard as the instant when I gave in to the self-disciplining of our culture, when I decided to give in to the demand that I look normal. I see that moment as one in which, like Lorde, I decided to love my body but in the full realization that, one way or another, it would never be normal, that I would always be alien to myself. In the full postmodern, posthuman realization that all bodies are constructed, that all bodies are a production—of gender, of the normal, of beauty, of ability—I really had no choice. Mastectomy scar or reconstructed breast, neither would leave me untouched. The myth most of us embody is that we get a choice. The myth is that we are born, not made, that being abled or disabled, male or female, visibly different or normal is something real. The myth is that there is a right way of doing things, that there are right choices about the body, that all bodies are the same. Disability studies questions the lines we draw to make ourselves believe in that myth. Is the visible embodiment of difference what it takes to make one different? Is the choice of a cosmetically created normality a sign that one is giving in to the cultural demands for a specific femininity, or is it a disavowal of the whole idea of the normal? In Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes: My intention is to . . . disclos[e] how the “physically disabled” are produced by way of legal, medical, political, cultural, and literary narratives that [comprise] an exclusionary discourse. Constructed as the embodiment of corporeal insufficiency and deviance, the physically disabled body becomes a repository for social anxieties and such troubling concerns as vulnerability, control, and identity. . . . I intend to counter the accepted notions of physical disability as an absolute, inferior state and a personal misfortune. Instead, I show that disability is a representation, a cultural interpretation of physical transformation or configuration. . . . Disability, then, is the attribution of corporeal deviance—not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do. (6)

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Disability studies challenges that myth of the “is” as well as the myth of the “should.” In the era of the posthuman feminist body, there cannot be a “blueprint for the conduct of personal life” (Bordo 30). Paula Rabinowitz, in an essay on the posthuman and the feminist, has argued that the voices of posthuman bodies are “only accessible through vast networks of mediation prone to recuperation and misinterpretation at best,” that “the posthuman, alien and marginal . . . , probably cannot speak because it is always spoken through stories that someone else has already told” (98). This may be true. Certainly my own attempt to speak the posthuman at the beauty shop was subjected to misinterpretation. But that experience will not keep me from continuing to try to speak it. Lorde is right: “Any woman who has had a breast removed because of cancer knows she does not feel the same.” And the ethical imperative of breast cancer is that I must continue to try to voice that difference, from myself and from the normal. When Lorde made her choice to live one-breasted without the mask of the prosthesis, she wrote, “I must consider what my body means to me. I must also separate those external demands about how I look and feel to others, from what I really want for my own body, and how I feel to my selves. . . . Every woman has a right to define her own desires, make her own choices.” I like to think that even though she added to this the caveat “But prostheses are often chosen, not from desire, but in default” (67), she would understand what I did, she would see that I am living my difference and that the difference between my voice and my visible self is part of that difference. June 1999

NOTES 1. I am comparing Lorde’s work on silence with that of Tillie Olsen in Silences and Adrienne Rich in On Lies, Secrets, and Silences. 2. Admittedly, though, it is an option that is often mentioned but then immediately marked as different. For instance, Susan Love (in the book usually thought of as the bible of breast cancer, Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book) quotes Audre Lorde, mentions the artists Matuschka (whose photographic self-portraits reveal her mastectomy scars) and Deena Metzger (who covered her amputation with a tattoo of a tree), and writes: “Having the self-confidence to feel comfortable without the appearance of a breast is wonderful but most of us are products of our culture and need to feel that we are cosmetically acceptable to the outside world. In some cases, there are actual penalties for failing to appear ‘normal’: If your nonconformity will cost you your job, for example, you’re likely to want to wear a prosthesis . . . at least part of the time or choose reconstruction” (385–86). 3. There are too many breast cancer resources on the Internet to list them all. Here are a few of the better sites. The NABCO (National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations) site is a good repository of information and links to other sites (www.nabco.org). The New York Times site Women’s Health includes many links about breast cancer and other women’s health issues (www.nytimes.com/specials/women/whome/). Though I share many of Lorde’s reservations about the American Cancer Society’s politics, its site, the Breast Cancer Network (www2.cancer.org), provides some good information about the disease and about activism. A good site for women’s stories about breast cancer is the Breast Cancer Lighthouse (commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/bcl/). The breast cancer support group Y-Me has an excellent site listing resources for both women with the disease and for survivors (www.y-me.org/).

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One thing that almost all these sites have in common is an activism component; I take that as sign that feminism has made a difference in women’s relation to the disease. 4. The term posthuman comes from an exhibit curated by Jeffrey Deitch in 1992. In Bad Girls and Sick Boys, Linda Kauffman defines the term: “Posthuman signifies the impact technology has had on the human body. Any candidate for a pacemaker, prosthetics, plastic surgery, or Prozac, sex reassignment surgery, in vitro fertilization, or gene therapy, can be defined as posthuman” (2). In their collection, Posthuman Bodies, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston locate the posthuman body in postmodern, poststructural theory and claim, “Posthuman bodies are the causes and effects of postmodern relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences. The posthuman body is a technology, a screen, a projected image; it is a body under the sign of AIDS, a contaminated body, a deadly body, a techno-body; it is, as we shall see, a queer body” (3).

WORKS CITED Anderson, Laurie. “Monkey’s Paw.” Strange Angels. Warner Brothers, 1990. Art. Rage. Us.: Art and Writing by Women with Breast Cancer. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Deitch, Jeffrey. Post Human. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1992. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 15.2 (1985): 65–108. Reprinted as “A Cyborg Manifesto” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals: Special Edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1997. Love, Susan, with Karen Lindsey. Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book. 2nd edition. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995. Kauffman, Linda. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Metzger, Deena. Tree and the Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them. Oakland: Wingbow P, 1983. Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delacorte P, 1978. Rabinowitz, Paula. “Soft Fictions and Intimate Documents: Can Feminism Be Posthuman?” In Halberstam and Livingston. 97–112. Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silences: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Anchor Books / Doubleday, 1990. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON

INTEGRATING DISABILITY, TRANSFORMING FEMINIST THEORY (2002)





















Over the last several years, disability studies has moved out of the applied fields of medicine, social work, and rehabilitation to become a vibrant new field of inquiry within the critical genre of identity studies. Charged with the residual fervor of the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Studies and race studies established a model in the academy for identity-based critical enterprises that followed, such as gender studies, queer studies, disability studies, and a proliferation of ethnic studies, all of which have enriched and complicated our understandings of social justice, subject formation, subjugated knowledges, and collective action. Even though disability studies is now flourishing in disciplines such as history, literature, religion, theater, and philosophy in precisely the same way feminist studies did twenty-five years ago, many of its practitioners do not recognize that disability studies is part of this larger undertaking that can be called identity studies. Indeed, I must wearily conclude that much of current disability studies does a great deal of wheel reinventing. This is largely because many disability studies scholars simply do not know either feminist theory or the institutional history of Women’s Studies. All too often, the pronouncements in disability studies of what we need to start addressing are precisely issues that feminist theory has been grappling with for years. This is not to say that feminist theory can be transferred wholly and intact over to the study of disability studies, but it is to suggest that feminist theory can offer profound insights, methods, and perspectives that would deepen disability studies. Conversely, feminist theories all too often do not recognize disability in their litanies of identities that inflect the category of woman. Repeatedly, feminist issues that are intricately entangled with disability—such as reproductive technology, the place of bodily differences, the particularities of oppression, the ethics of care, the construction of the subject—are discussed without any reference to disability. Like disability studies practitioners who are unaware of feminism, feminist scholars are often simply unacquainted with disability studies’ perspectives. The most sophisticated and nuanced analyses of disability, in my view, come from scholars conversant with feminist theory. And the most compelling and complex analyses of gender intersectionality take into consideration what I call the ability/disability system—along with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.

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I want to give the omissions I am describing here the most generous interpretation I can. The archive, Foucault has shown us, determines what we can know. There has been no archive, no template for understanding disability as a category of analysis and knowledge, as a cultural trope, and an historical community. So just as the now widely recognized centrality of gender and race analyses to all knowledge was unthinkable thirty years ago, disability is still not an icon on many critical desktops. I think, however, that feminist theory’s omission of disability differs from disability studies’ ignorance of feminist theory. I find feminist theory and those familiar with it quick to grasp the broad outlines of disability theory and eager to consider its implications. This, of course, is because feminist theory itself has undertaken internal critiques and proved to be porous and flexible. Disability studies is news, but feminist theory is not. Nevertheless, feminist theory is still resisted for exactly the same reasons that scholars might resist disability studies: the assumption that it is narrow, particular, and has little to do with the mainstream of academic practice and knowledge (or with themselves). This reductive notion that identity studies are intellectual ghettos limited to a narrow constituency demanding special pleading is the persistent obstacle that both feminist theory and disability studies must surmount. Disability studies can benefit from feminist theory and feminist theory can benefit from disability studies. Both feminism and disability studies are comparative and concurrent academic enterprises. Just as feminism has expanded the lexicon of what we imagine as womanly, has sought to understand and destigmatize what we call the subject position of woman, so has disability studies examined the identity disabled in the service of integrating people with disabilities more fully into our society. As such, both are insurgencies that are becoming institutionalized, underpinning inquiries outside and inside the academy. A feminist disability theory builds on the strengths of both.

FEMINIST DISABILITY THEORY My title here, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” invokes and links two notions, integration and transformation, both of which are fundamental to the feminist project and to the larger Civil Rights Movement that informed it. Integration suggests achieving parity by fully including that which has been excluded and subordinated. Transformation suggests re-imagining established knowledge and the order of things. By alluding to integration and transformation, I set my own modest project of integrating disability into feminist theory in the politicized context of the Civil Rights Movement in order to gesture toward the explicit relation that feminism supposes between intellectual work and a commitment to creating a more just, equitable, and integrated society. This essay aims to amplify feminist theory by articulating and fostering feminist disability theory. In naming feminist disability studies here as an academic field of inquiry, I am sometimes describing work that is already underway, some of which explicitly addresses disability and some of which gestures implicitly to the topic. At other times, I am calling for study that needs to be done to better illuminate feminist thought. In other words, this essay, in part, sets an agenda for future work in feminist disability theory. Most fundamentally, though, the goal of

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feminist disability studies, as I lay it out in this essay, is to augment the terms and confront the limits of the ways we understand human diversity, the materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences. The fundamental point I will make here is that integrating disability as a category of analysis and a system of representation deepens, expands, and challenges feminist theory. Academic feminism is a complex and contradictory matrix of theories, strategies, pedagogies, and practices. One way to think about feminist theory is to say that it investigates how culture saturates the particularities of bodies with meanings and probes the consequences of those meanings. Feminist theory is a collaborative, interdisciplinary inquiry and a self-conscious cultural critique that interrogates how subjects are multiply interpellated: in other words, how the representational systems of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and class mutually construct, inflect, and contradict one another. These systems intersect to produce and sustain ascribed, achieved, and acquired identities—both those that claim us and those that we claim for ourselves. A feminist disability theory introduces the ability/disability system as a category of analysis into this diverse and diffuse enterprise. It aims to extend current notions of cultural diversity and to more fully integrate the academy and the larger world it helps shape. A feminist disability approach fosters complex understandings of the cultural history of the body. By considering the ability/disability system, feminist disability theory goes beyond explicit disability topics such as illness, health, beauty, genetics, eugenics, aging, reproductive technologies, prosthetics, and access issues. Feminist disability theory addresses such broad feminist concerns as the unity of the category woman, the status of the lived body, the politics of appearance, the medicalization of the body, the privilege of normalcy, multiculturalism, sexuality, the social construction of identity, and the commitment to integration. To borrow Toni Morrison’s notion that blackness is an idea that permeates American culture, disability too is a pervasive, often unarticulated, ideology informing our cultural notions of self and other (1992). Disability—like gender—is a concept that pervades all aspects of culture: its structuring institutions, social identities, cultural practices, political positions, historical communities, and the shared human experience of embodiment. Integrating disability into feminist theory is generative, broadening our collective inquiries, questioning our assumptions, and contributing to feminism’s intersectionality. Introducing a disability analysis does not narrow the inquiry, limit the focus to only women with disabilities, or preclude engaging other manifestations of feminisms. Indeed, the multiplicity of foci we now call feminisms is not a group of fragmented, competing subfields, but rather a vibrant, complex conversation. In talking about feminist disability theory, I am not proposing yet another discrete feminism, but suggesting instead some ways that thinking about disability transforms feminist theory. Integrating disability does not obscure our critical focus on the registers of race, sexuality, ethnicity, or gender, nor is it additive. Rather, considering disability shifts the conceptual framework to strengthen our understanding of how these multiple systems intertwine, redefine, and mutually constitute one another. Integrating disability clarifies how this aggregate of systems operates together, yet distinctly, to support an imaginary norm and structure the relations that grant power, privilege, and status to that norm. Indeed, the

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cultural function of the disabled figure is to act as a synecdoche for all forms that culture deems non-normative. We need to study disability in a feminist context to direct our highly honed critical skills toward the dual scholarly tasks of unmasking and re-imagining disability, not only for people with disabilities, but for everyone. As Simi Linton puts it, studying disability is “a prism through which one can gain a broader understanding of society and human experience” (1998, 118). It deepens our understanding of gender and sexuality, individualism and equality, minority group definitions, autonomy, wholeness, independence, dependence, health, physical appearance, aesthetics, the integrity of the body, community, and ideas of progress and perfection in every aspect of cultures. A feminist disability theory introduces what Eve Sedgwick has called a “universalizing view” of disability that will replace an often persisting “minoritizing view.” Such a view will cast disability as “an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum” (1990, 1). In other words, understanding how disability operates as an identity category and cultural concept will enhance how we understand what it is to be human, our relationships with one another, and the experience of embodiment. The constituency for feminist disability studies is all of us, not only women with disabilities: disability is the most human of experiences, touching every family and—if we live long enough—touching us all.

THE ABILITY/DISABILITY SYSTEM Feminist disability theory’s radical critique hinges on a broad understanding of disability as a pervasive cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations. At the same time, this system has the potential to incite a critical politics. The informing premise of feminist disability theory is that disability, like femaleness, is not a natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of misfortune. Rather, disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body, similar to what we understand as the fictions of race and gender. The disability/ability system produces subjects by differentiating and marking bodies. Although this comparison of bodies is ideological rather than biological, it nevertheless penetrates into the formation of culture, legitimating an unequal distribution of resources, status, and power within a biased social and architectural environment. As such, disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations; second, it is a relationship between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self. The disability system excludes the kinds of bodily forms, functions, impairments, changes, or ambiguities that call into question our cultural fantasy of the body as a neutral, compliant instrument of some transcendent will. Moreover, disability is a broad term within which cluster ideological categories as varied as sick, deformed, crazy, ugly, old, maimed, afflicted, mad, abnormal, or debilitated—all of which disadvantage people by devaluing bodies that do not conform to cultural standards. Thus, the disability system functions to preserve and validate such privileged designations as beautiful, healthy, normal, fit, competent, intelligent—all of which provide cultural capital to those who can

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claim such statuses, who can reside within these subject positions. It is, then, the various interactions between bodies and world that materialize disability from the stuff of human variation and precariousness. A feminist disability theory denaturalizes disability by unseating the dominant assumption that disability is something that is wrong with someone. By this I mean, of course, that it mobilizes feminism’s highly developed and complex critique of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality as exclusionary and oppressive systems rather than as the natural and appropriate order of things. To do this, feminist disability theory engages several of the fundamental premises of critical theory: 1) that representation structures reality, 2) that the margins define the center, 3) that gender (or disability) is a way of signifying relationships of power, 4) that human identity is multiple and unstable, 5) that all analysis and evaluation have political implications. In order to elaborate on these premises, I discuss here four fundamental and interpenetrating domains of feminist theory and suggest some of the kinds of critical inquiries that considering disability can generate within these theoretical arenas. These domains are: 1) representation, 2) the body, 3) identity, and 4) activism. While I have disentangled these domains here for the purposes of setting up a schematic organization for my analysis, these domains are, of course, not discrete in either concept or practice, but rather tend to be synchronic.

REPRESENTATION The first domain of feminist theory that can be deepened by a disability analysis is representation. Western thought has long conflated femaleness and disability, understanding both as defective departures from a valued standard. Aristotle, for example, defined women as “mutilated males.” Women, for Aristotle, have “improper form”; we are “monstrosit[ies]” (1944, 27–8, 8–9). As what Nancy Tuana calls “misbegotten men,” women thus become the primal freaks in Western history, envisioned as what we might now call congenitally deformed as a result of what we might now term genetic disability (1993, 18). More recently, feminist theorists have argued that female embodiment is a disabling condition in sexist culture. Iris Marion Young, for instance, examines how enforced feminine comportment delimits women’s sense of embodied agency, restricting them to “throwing like a girl” (1990b, 141). Young concludes that “women in a sexist society are physically handicapped” (1990b, 153). Even the general American public associates femininity with disability. A recent study on stereotyping showed that housewives, disabled people, blind people, so-called retarded people, and the elderly were all judged as being similarly incompetent. Such a study suggests that intensely normatively feminine positions—such as a housewife—are aligned with negative attitudes about people with disabilities (Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick 2001).1 Recognizing how the concept of disability has been used to cast the form and functioning of female bodies as non-normative can extend feminist critiques. Take, for example, the exploitation of Saartje Bartmann, the African woman exhibited as a freak in nineteenth-century Europe (Fausto-Sterling 1995; Gilman 1985). Known as the Hottentot Venus, Bartmann’s treatment has come to

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represent the most egregious form of racial and gendered degradation. What goes unremarked in studies of Bartmann’s display, however, are the ways that the language and assumptions of the ability/disability system were implemented to pathologize and exoticize Bartmann. Her display invoked disability by presenting as deformities or abnormalities the characteristics that marked her as raced and gendered. I am not suggesting that Bartmann was disabled, but rather that the concepts of disability discourse framed her presentation to the Western eye. Using disability as a category of analysis allows us to see that what was normative embodiment in her native context became abnormal to the Western mind. More important, rather than simply supposing that being labeled as a freak is a slander, a disability analysis presses our critique further by challenging the premise that unusual embodiment is inherently inferior. The feminist interrogation of gender since Simone de Beauvoir (1974) has revealed how women are assigned a cluster of ascriptions, like Aristotle’s, that mark us as Other. What is less widely recognized, however, is that this collection of interrelated characterizations is precisely the same set of supposed attributes affixed to people with disabilities. The gender, race, and ability systems intertwine further in representing subjugated people as being pure body, unredeemed by mind or spirit. This sense of embodiment is conceived of as either a lack or an excess. Women, for example, are considered castrated, or to use Marge Piercy’s wonderful term, “penis-poor” (1969). They are thought to be hysterical or have overactive hormones. Women have been cast as alternately having insatiable appetites in some eras and as pathologically self-denying in other times. Similarly, disabled people have supposedly extra chromosomes or limb deficiencies. The differences of disability are cast as atrophy, meaning degeneration, or hypertrophy, meaning enlargement. People with disabilities are described as having aplasia, meaning absence or failure of formation, or hypoplasia, meaning underdevelopment. All these terms police variation and reference a hidden norm from which the bodies of people with disabilities and women are imagined to depart. Female, disabled, and dark bodies are supposed to be dependent, incomplete, vulnerable, and incompetent bodies. Femininity and race are performances of disability. Women and the disabled are portrayed as helpless, dependent, weak, vulnerable, and incapable bodies. Women, the disabled, and people of color are always ready occasions for the aggrandizement of benevolent rescuers, whether strong males, distinguished doctors, abolitionists, or Jerry Lewis hosting his telethons. For example, an 1885 medical illustration of a pathologically “love deficient” woman, who fits the cultural stereotype of the ugly woman or perhaps the lesbian, suggests how sexuality and appearance slide into the terms of disability (Fig. 1). This illustration shows that the language of deficiency and abnormality simultaneously to devalue women who depart from the mandates of femininity by equating them with disabled bodies. Such an interpretive move economically invokes the subjugating effect of one oppressive system to deprecate people marked by another system of representation. Subjugated bodies are pictured as either deficient or as profligate. For instance, what Susan Bordo describes as the too-muchness of women also haunts disability and racial discourses, marking subjugated bodies as ungovernable, intemperate, or threatening (1993). The historical figure of the monster, as well, invokes disability, often to serve racism and sexism. Although the term has expanded to en-

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Fig. 1. 1885 physiogometric drawing of a supposedly pathologically “Love Deficient” woman. compass all forms of social and corporeal aberration, monster originally described people with congenital impairments. As departures from the normatively human, monsters were seen as category violations or grotesque hybrids. The semantics of monstrosity are recruited to explain gender violations such as Julia Pastrana, for example, the Mexican Indian “bearded woman,” whose body was displayed in nineteenth-century freak shows both during her lifetime and after her death. Pastrana’s live and later her embalmed body spectacularly confused and transgressed established cultural categories. Race, gender, disability, and sexuality augmented one another in Pastrana’s display to produce a spectacle of embodied otherness that is simultaneously sensational, sentimental, and pathological (Thomson 1999). Furthermore, much current feminist work theorizes figures of hybridity and excess such as monsters, grotesques, and cyborgs to suggest their transgressive potential for a feminist politics (Haraway 1991; Braidotti 1994; Russo 1994). However, this metaphorical invocation seldom acknowledges that these figures often refer to the actual bodies of people with disabilities. Erasing real disabled bodies from the history of these terms compromises the very critique they intend to launch and misses an opportunity to use disability as a feminist critical category. Such representations ultimately portray subjugated bodies not only as inadequate or unrestrained but at the same time as redundant and expendable. Bodies marked and selected by such systems are targeted for elimination by varying historical and cross-cultural practices. Women, people with disabilities or appearance impairments, ethnic Others, gays and lesbians, and people of color are variously the objects of infanticide, selective abortion, eugenic programs, hate crimes, mercy

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killing, assisted suicide, lynching, bride burning, honor killings, forced conversion, coercive rehabilitation, domestic violence, genocide, normalizing surgical procedures, racial profiling, and neglect. All these discriminatory practices are legitimated by systems of representation, by collective cultural stories that shape the material world, underwrite exclusionary attitudes, inform human relations, and mold our senses of who we are. Understanding how disability functions along with other systems of representation clarifies how all the systems intersect and mutually constitute one another.

THE BODY The second domain of feminist theory that a disability analysis can illuminate is the investigation of the body: its materiality, its politics, its lived experience, and its relation to subjectivity and identity. Confronting issues of representation is certainly crucial to the cultural critique of feminist disability theory. But we should not focus exclusively on the discursive realm. What distinguishes a feminist disability theory from other critical paradigms is that it scrutinizes a wide range of material practices involving the lived body. Perhaps because women and the disabled are cultural signifiers for the body, their actual bodies have been subjected relentlessly to what Michel Foucault calls “discipline” (1979). Together, the gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and ability systems exert tremendous social pressures to shape, regulate, and normalize subjugated bodies. Such disciplining is enacted primarily through the two interrelated cultural discourses of medicine and appearance. Feminist disability theory offers a particularly trenchant analysis of the ways that the female body has been medicalized in modernity. As I have already suggested, both women and the disabled have been imagined as medically abnormal—as the quintessential sick ones. Sickness is gendered feminine. This gendering of illness has entailed distinct consequences in everything from epidemiology and diagnosis to prophylaxis and therapeutics. Perhaps feminist disability theory’s most incisive critique is revealing the intersections between the politics of appearance and the medicalization of subjugated bodies. Appearance norms have a long history in Western culture, as is witnessed by the anthropometric composite figures of ideal male and female bodies made by Dudley Sargent in 1893 (Fig. 2). The classical ideal was to be worshiped rather than imitated, but increasingly, in modernity the ideal has migrated to become the paradigm that is to be attained. As many feminist critics have pointed out, the beauty system’s mandated standard of the female body has become a goal to be achieved through self-regulation and consumerism (Wolf 1991; Haiken 1997). Feminist disability theory suggests that appearance and health norms often have similar disciplinary goals. For example, the body braces developed in the 1930s to ostensibly correct scoliosis, discipline the body to conform to dictates of both the gender and the ability systems by enforcing standardized female form similarly to the nineteenth-century corset, which, ironically, often disabled female bodies. Although both devices normalize bodies, the brace is part of medical discourse while the corset is cast as a fashion practice. Similarly, a feminist disability theory calls into question the separation of re-

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Fig. 2. 1883 anthropometric composite figures by Dudley Sargent of normative man and woman in European culture. (Courtesy of the National Museum of American History.) constructive and cosmetic surgery, recognizing their essentially normalizing function as what Sander L. Gilman calls “aesthetic surgery” (1998). Cosmetic surgery, driven by gender ideology and market demand, now enforces feminine body ideals and standardizes female bodies toward what I have called the “normate”—the corporeal incarnation of culture’s collective, unmarked, normative characteristics (1997, 8). Cosmetic surgery’s twin, reconstructive surgery, eliminates disability and enforces the ideals of what might be thought of as the normalcy system. Both cosmetic and reconstructive procedures commodify the body and parade mutilations as enhancements that correct flaws to improve the psychological well-being of the patient. The conception of the body as what Susan Bordo terms “cultural plastic” (1993, 246) through surgical and medical interventions increasingly pressures people with disabilities or appearance impairments to become what Michel Foucault calls “docile bodies” (1979, 135). The twin ideologies of normalcy and beauty posit female and disabled bodies, particularly, as not only spectacles to be looked at, but as pliable bodies to be shaped infinitely so as to conform to a set of standards called normal and beautiful. Normal has inflected beautiful in modernity. What is imagined as excess body fat, the effects of aging, marks of ethnicity such as supposedly Jewish noses, bodily particularities thought of as blemishes or deformities, and marks of history such as scarring and impairments are now expected to be surgically erased to produce an unmarked body. This visually unobtrusive body may then pass unnoticed within the milieu of anonymity that is the hallmark of social relations beyond the personal in modernity. The purpose of aesthetic surgery, as well as the costuming of power, is not to appear unique—or to “be yourself,” as the ads endlessly

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promise—but rather not to be conspicuous, not to look different. This flight from the nonconforming body translates into individual efforts to look normal, neutral, unmarked, to not look disabled, queer, ugly, fat, ethnic, or raced. Beauty, then, dictates corporeal standards that create not distinction but utter conformity to a bland look that is at the same time unachievable, so as to leash us to consumer practices that promise to deliver such sameness. In the language of contemporary cosmetic surgery, the unreconstructed female body is persistently cast as having abnormalities that can be corrected by surgical procedures which supposedly improve one’s appearance by producing ostensibly natural-looking noses, thighs, breasts, chins, and so on. Thus, our unmodified bodies are presented as unnatural and abnormal while the surgically altered bodies are portrayed as normal and natural. The beautiful woman of the twenty-first century is sculpted surgically from top to bottom, generically neutral, all irregularities regularized, all particularities expunged. She is thus nondisabled, deracialized, and de-ethnicized. In addition, the politics of prosthetics enters the purview of feminism when we consider the contested use of breast implants and prostheses for breast cancer survivors. The famous 1993 New York Times Magazine cover photo of the fashion model, Matuschka, baring her mastectomy scar or Audre Lorde’s account of breast cancer in The Cancer Journals challenges the sexist assumption that the amputated breast must always pass for the normative, sexualized one either through concealment or prosthetics (1980). A vibrant feminist conversation has emerged about the politics of the surgically altered, disabled breast. Diane Price Herndl (2002) challenges Audre Lorde’s refusal of a breast prosthesis after mastectomy and Iris Marion Young’s classic essay “Breasted Experience” queries the cultural meanings of breasts under the knife (1990a). Another entanglement of appearance and medicine involves the spectacle of the female breast, both normative and disabled. In January 2000, the San Francisco-based The Breast Cancer Fund mounted a public awareness poster campaign, called Obsessed with Breasts, which showed women boldly displaying mastectomy scars. The posters parodied familiar commercial media sites—a Calvin Klein perfume ad, a Cosmopolitan magazine cover, and a Victoria Secret catalog cover—that routinely represent women’s breasts as only sexual in nature. The posters replace the now unremarkable eroticized breast with the forbidden image of the amputated breast (Fig. 3). In doing so, they disrupt the visual convention of the female breast as sexualized object for male appropriation and pleasure. The posters thus produce a powerful visual violation by exchanging the spectacle of the eroticized breast, which has been desensationalized by its endless circulation, with the medicalized image of the scarred breast, which has been concealed from public view. The Breast Cancer Fund used these remarkable images to challenge both sexism in medical research and treatment for breast cancer as well as the oppressive representational practices that make everyday erotic spectacles of women’s breasts while erasing the fact of the amputated breast. Feminist disability theory can press far its critique of the pervasive will-tonormalize the nonstandard body. Take two related examples: first, the surgical separation of conjoined twins and, second, the surgical assignment of gender for the intersexed, people with ambiguous genitalia and gender characteristics. Both forms of embodiment are regularly—if infrequently—occurring, congenital bodily variations that spectacularly violate sacred ideologies of Western culture.

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Fig. 3. Obsessed with Breasts poster. “It’s No Secret.” (Courtesy of The Breast Cancer Fund.) Conjoined twins contradict our notion of the individual as discrete and autonomous, quite similarly to the way pregnancy does. Intersexed infants challenge our insistence that biological gender is unequivocally binary. So threatening to the order of things is the natural embodiment of conjoined twins and intersexed people that they are almost always surgically normalized through amputation and mutilation immediately after birth (Clark and Myser 1996; Dreger 1998a; Kessler 1990; Fausto-Sterling 2000). Not infrequently, one conjoined twin is sacrificed to save the other from the supposed abnormality of their embodiment. Such mutilations are justified as preventing suffering and creating well-adjusted individuals. So intolerable is their insult to dominant ideologies about who patriarchal culture insists that we are, that the testimonies of adults with these forms of embodiment who say that they do not want to be separated is routinely ignored in establishing the rationale for medical treatment (Dreger 1998b). In truth, these procedures benefit not the affected individuals, but rather they expunge the kinds of corporeal human variations that contradict the ideologies the dominant order depends upon to anchor truths it insists are unequivocally encoded in bodies. I do not want to oversimplify here by suggesting that women and disabled people should not use modern medicine to improve their lives or help their bodies function more fully. But the critical issues are complex and provocative. A feminist disability theory should illuminate and explain, not become ideological policing or set orthodoxy. The kinds of critical analyses I am discussing offer a

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Fig. 4. March of Dimes poster child, 1949. (Courtesy of the March of Dimes.) counterlogic to the overdetermined cultural mandates to comply with normal and beautiful at any cost. The medical commitment to healing, when coupled with modernity’s faith in technology and interventions that control outcomes, has increasingly shifted toward an aggressive intent to fix, regulate, or eradicate ostensibly deviant bodies. Such a program of elimination has often been at the expense of creating a more accessible environment or providing better support services for people with disabilities. The privileging of medical technology over less ambitious programs such as rehabilitation has encouraged the cultural conviction that disability can be extirpated, inviting the belief that life with a disability is intolerable. As charity campaigns and telethons repeatedly affirm, cure rather than adjustment or accommodation is the overdetermined cultural response to disability (Longmore 1997). For instance, a 1949 March of Dimes poster shows an appealing little girl stepping out of her wheelchair into the supposed redemption of walking: “Look, I Can Walk Again!” the text proclaims, while at once charging the viewers with the responsibility of assuring her future ambulation (Fig. 4). Nowhere do we find posters suggesting that life as a wheelchair user might be full and satisfying, as many people who actually use them find their lives to be. This ideology of cure is not isolated in medical texts or charity campaigns, but in fact permeates the entire cultural conversation about disability and illness. Take, for example, the discourse of cure in get well cards. A 1950 card, for instance, urges its recipient to “snap out of it.” Fusing racist, sexist, and ableist discourses, the card recruits the Mammy figure to insist on cure. The stereotypical racist figure

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asks, “Is you sick, Honey?” and then exhorts the recipient of her care to “jes hoodoo all dat illness out o you.” The ideology of cure directed at disabled people focuses on changing bodies imagined as abnormal and dysfunctional rather than on changing exclusionary attitudinal, environmental, and economic barriers. The emphasis on cure reduces the cultural tolerance for human variation and vulnerability by locating disability in bodies imagined as flawed rather than social systems in need of fixing. A feminist disability studies would draw an important distinction between prevention and elimination. Preventing illness, suffering, and injury is a humane social objective. Eliminating the range of unacceptable and devalued bodily forms and functions the dominant order calls disability is, on the other hand, a eugenic undertaking. The ostensibly progressive socio-medical project of eradicating disability all too often is enacted as a program to eliminate people with disabilities through such practices as forced sterilization, so-called physician-assisted suicide and mercy killing, selective abortion, institutionalization, and segregation policies. A feminist disability theory extends its critique of the normalization of bodies and the medicalization of appearance to challenge some widely-held assumptions about reproductive issues as well. The cultural mandate to eliminate the variations in form and function that we think of as disabilities has undergirded the reproductive practices of genetic testing and selective abortion (Saxton 1998; Parens and Asch 2000; Rapp 1999). Some disability activists argue that the “choice” to abort fetuses with disabilities is a coercive form of genocide against the disabled (Hubbard 1990). A more nuanced argument against selective abortion comes from Adrienne Asch and Gail Geller, who wish to preserve a woman’s right to choose whether to bear a child, but who at the same time object to the ethics of selectively aborting a wanted fetus because it will become a person with a disability (1996). Asch and Geller counter the quality-of-life and preventionof-suffering arguments so readily invoked to justify selective abortion, as well as physician-assisted suicide, by pointing out that we cannot predict or, more precisely, control in advance such equivocal human states as happiness, suffering, or success. Neither is any amount of prenatal engineering going to produce the life that any of us desires and values. Indeed, both hubris and a lack of imagination characterize the prejudicial and reductive assumption that having a disability ruins lives. A vague notion of suffering and its potential deterrence drives much of the logic of elimination that rationalizes selective abortion (Kittay 2000). Life chances and quality are simply far too contingent to justify prenatal prediction. Similarly, genetic testing and applications of the Human Genome Project as the key to expunging disability are often critiqued as enactments of eugenic ideology, what the feminist biologist Evelyn Fox Keller calls a “eugenics of normalcy” (1992). The popular utopian belief that all forms of disability can be eliminated through prophylactic manipulation of genetics will only serve to intensify the prejudice against those who inevitably will acquire disabilities through aging and encounters with the environment. In the popular celebrations of the Human Genome Project as the quixotic pinnacle of technological progress, seldom do we hear a cautionary logic about the eugenic implications of this drive toward what Priscilla Wald calls “future perfect” (2000, 1). Disability scholars have entered the debate over so-called physician-assisted suicide as well, by arguing that

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oppressive attitudes toward disability distort the possibility of unbiased free choice (Battin, Rhodes, and Silvers 1998). The practices of genetic and prenatal testing as well as physician-administered euthanasia, then, become potentially eugenic practices within the context of a culture deeply intolerant of disability. Both the rhetoric and the enactment of this kind of disability discrimination create a hostile and exclusionary environment for people with disabilities that perhaps exceeds the less virulent architectural barriers that keep them out of the workforce and the public sphere. Integrating disability into feminism’s conversation about the place of the body in the equality and difference debates produces fresh insights as well. Whereas liberal feminism emphasizes sameness, choice, and autonomy, cultural feminism critiques the premises of liberalism. Out of cultural feminism’s insistence on difference and its positive interpretation of feminine culture comes the affirmation of a feminist ethic of care. This ethic of care contends that care giving is a moral benefit for its practitioners and for humankind. A feminist disability studies complicates both the feminist ethic of care and liberal feminism in regard to the politics of care and dependency. A disability perspective nuances feminist theory’s consideration of the ethics of care by examining the power relations between the givers and receivers of care. Anita Silvers has argued strongly that being the object of care precludes the equality that a liberal democracy depends upon and undermines the claim to justice as equality that undergirds a civil rights approach used to counter discrimination (1995). Eva Kittay, on the other hand, formulates a “dependency critique of equality,” which asserts that the ideal of equality under liberalism repudiates the fact of human dependency, the need for mutual care, and the asymmetries of care relations (1999, 4). Similarly, Barbara Hillyer has called attention to dependency in order to critique a liberal tendency in the rhetoric of disability rights (1993). Disability itself demands that human interdependence and the universal need for assistance be figured into our dialogues about rights and subjectivity.

IDENTITY The third domain of feminist theory that a disability analysis complicates is identity. Feminist theory has productively and rigorously critiqued the identity category of woman, on which the entire feminist enterprise seemed to rest. Feminism increasingly recognizes that no woman is ever only a woman, that she occupies multiple subject positions and is claimed by several cultural identity categories (Spelman 1988). This complication of woman compelled feminist theory to turn from an exclusively male/female focus to look more fully at the exclusionary, essentialist, oppressive, and binary aspects of the category woman itself. Disability is one such identity vector that disrupts the unity of the classification woman and challenges the primacy of gender as a monolithic category. Disabled women are, of course, a marked and excluded—albeit quite varied—group within the larger social class of women. The relative privileges of normative femininity are often denied to disabled women (Fine and Asch 1988). Cultural stereotypes imagine disabled women as asexual, unfit to reproduce, overly dependent, unattractive—as generally removed from the sphere of true

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Fig. 5. Barbie’s friend Becky, the school photographer.

womanhood and feminine beauty. Women with disabilities often must struggle to have their sexuality and rights to bear children recognized (Finger 1990). Disability thus both intensifies and attenuates the cultural scripts of femininity. Aging is a form of disablement that disqualifies older women from the limited power allotted females who are young and meet the criteria for attracting men. Depression, anorexia, and agoraphobia are female-dominant, psychophysical disabilities that exaggerate normative gender roles. Feminine cultural practices such as foot-binding, clitoridectomies, and corseting, as well as their less hyperbolic costuming rituals such as stiletto high heels, girdles, and chastity belts—impair women’s bodies and restrict their physical agency, imposing disability on them. Banishment from femininity can be both a liability and a benefit. Let me offer—with some irony—an instructive example from popular culture. Barbie, that cultural icon of femininity, offers a disability analysis that clarifies both how multiple identity and diversity are commodified and how the commercial realm might offer politically useful feminist counter images. Perhaps the measure of a group’s arrival into the mainstream of multiculturalism is to be represented in the Barbie pantheon. While Barbie herself still identifies as able-bodied—despite her severely deformed body—we now have several incarnations of Barbie’s “friend,” Share-A-Smile Becky. One Becky uses a cool hot pink wheelchair; another is Paralympic Champion Becky, brought out for the 2000 Sydney Olympics in a chic red-white-and-blue warm-up suit with matching chair. Most interesting however is Becky, the school photographer, clad in a preppy outfit, complete with camera and red high-top sneakers (Fig. 5). As she perkily gazes at an alluring Barbie in

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her camera’s viewfinder, this Becky may be the incarnation of what Erica Rand has called “Barbie’s queer accessories” (1995). A disabled, queer Becky is certainly a provocative and subversive fusion of stigmatized identities, but more important is that Becky challenges notions of normalcy in feminist ways. The disabled Becky, for example, wears comfortable clothes: pants with elastic waists, sensible shoes, and roomy shirts. Becky is also one of the few dolls with flat feet and legs that bend at the knee. The disabled Becky is dressed and poised for agency, action, and creative engagement with the world. In contrast, the prototypical Barbie performs excessive femininity in her restrictive sequined gowns, crowns, and push-up bras. So while Becky implies, on the one hand, that disabled girls are purged from the feminine economy, on the other hand, Becky also suggests that disabled girls might be liberated from those oppressive and debilitating scripts. The last word on Barbies comes from a disability activist who quipped that he would like to outfit a disabled doll with a power wheelchair and a briefcase to make her a civil rights lawyer who enforces the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). He wants to call her “Sue-Your-AssBecky.” 2 I think she would make a very good role model. The paradox of Barbie and Becky, of course, is that the ultra-feminized Barbie is a target for sexual appropriation both by men and beauty practices while the disabled Becky escapes such sexual objectification at the potential cost of losing her sense of identity and power as a feminine sexual being. Some disabled women negotiate this possible identity crisis by developing alternate sexualities, such as lesbianism (Brownworth and Raffo 1999). However, what Harlan Hahn calls the “asexual objectification” of people with disabilities complicates the feminist critique of normative sexual objectification (1988). Consider the 1987 Playboy magazine photos of the paraplegic actress Ellen Stohl. After becoming disabled, Stohl wrote to editor Hugh Hefner that she wanted to pose nude for Playboy because “sexuality is the hardest thing for disabled persons to hold onto” (“Meet Ellen Stohl” 1987, 68). For Stohl, it would seem that the performance of excessive feminine sexuality was necessary to counter the social interpretation that disability cancels out sexuality. This confirmation of normative heterosexuality was then for Stohl no Butlerian parody, but rather the affirmation she needed as a disabled woman to be sexual at all. Ellen Stohl’s presentation by way of the sexist conventions of the porn magazine illuminates the relation between identity and the body, an aspect of subject formation that disability analysis can offer. Although binary identities are conferred from outside through social relations, these identities are nevertheless inscribed on the body as either manifest or incipient visual traces. Identity’s social meaning turns on this play of visibility. The photos of Stohl in Playboy both refuse and insist on marking her impairment. The centerfold spread—so to speak—of Stohl nude and masturbating erases her impairment to conform to the sexualized conventions of the centerfold. This photo expunges her wheelchair and any other visual clues to her impairment. In other words, to avoid the cultural contradiction of a sexual, disabled woman, the pornographic photos must offer up Stohl as visually nondisabled. But to appeal to the cultural narrative of overcoming disability that sells so well, seems novel, and capitalizes on sentimental interest, Stohl must be visually dramatized as disabled at the same time. So Playboy includes several shots of Stohl that mark her as disabled by picturing her in her wheelchair, en-

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tirely without the typical porn conventions. In fact, the photos of her using her wheelchair invoke the asexual poster child. Thus, the affirmation of sexuality that Stohl sought by posing nude in the porn magazine came at the expense of denying, through the powerful visual register, her identity as a woman with a disability, even while she attempted to claim that identity textually. Another aspect of subject formation that disability confirms is that identity is always in transition. Disability reminds us that the body is, as Denise Riley asserts, “an unsteady mark, scarred in its long decay” (1999, 224). As Caroline Walker Bynum’s intriguing work on werewolf narratives suggests, the body is in a perpetual state of transformation (1999). Caring for her father for over twenty years of Alzheimer’s disease prompted Bynum to investigate how we can understand individual identity as continuous even though both body and mind can and do change dramatically, certainly over a lifetime and sometimes quite suddenly. Disability invites us to query what the continuity of the self might depend upon if the body perpetually metamorphoses. We envision our racial, gender, or ethnic identities as tethered to bodily traits that are relatively secure. Disability and sexual identity, however, seem more porous, although sexual mutability is imagined as elective whereas disability is seldom conceived of as a choice. Disability is an identity category that anyone can enter at any time, and we will all join it if we live long enough. As such, disability reveals the essential dynamism of identity. Thus, disability attenuates the cherished cultural belief that the body is the unchanging anchor of identity. Moreover, it undermines our fantasies of stable, enduring identities in ways that may illuminate the fluidity of all identity. Disability’s clarification of the body’s corporeal truths also suggests that the body/self materializes—in Judith Butler’s sense—not so much through discourse, but through history (1993). The self materializes in response to an embodied engagement with its environment, both social and concrete. The disabled body is a body whose variations or transformations have rendered it out of sync with its environment, both the physical and the attitudinal environments. In other words, the body becomes disabled when it is incongruent both in space and in the milieu of expectations. Furthermore, a feminist disability theory presses us to ask what kinds of knowledge might be produced through having a body radically marked by its own particularity, a body that materializes at the ends of the curve of human variation. For example, an alternative epistemology that emerges from the lived experience of disability is nicely summed up in Nancy Mairs’s book title, Waist High in the World (1996), which she irreverently considered calling “cock high in the world.”3 What perspectives or politics arise from encountering the world from such an atypical position? Perhaps Mairs’s epistemology can offer us a critical positionality called sitpoint theory, a neologism I can offer that interrogates the ableist assumptions underlying the notion of standpoint theory (Harstock 1983). Our collective cultural consciousness emphatically denies the knowledge of vulnerability, contingency, and mortality. Disability insists otherwise, contradicting such phallic ideology. I would argue that disability is perhaps the essential characteristic of being human. The body is dynamic, constantly interactive with history and environment. We evolve into disability. Our bodies need care; we all need assistance to live. An equality model of feminist theory sometimes prizes individualistic autonomy as the key to women’s liberation. A feminist disability

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theory, however, suggests that we are better off learning to individually and collectively accommodate bodily limits and evolutions than trying to eliminate or deny them. Identity formation is at the center of feminist theory. Disability can complicate feminist theory often quite succinctly by invoking established theoretical paradigms. This kind of theoretical intertextuality inflects familiar feminist concepts with new resonance. Let me offer several examples: the idea of “compulsory ablebodiedness,” which Robert McRuer (1999) has coined, extends Adrienne Rich’s famous analysis of “compulsory heterosexuality” (1986). Joan Wallach Scott’s germinal work on gender is recruited when we discuss disability as “a useful category of analysis” (1988, 1). The feminist elaboration of the gender system informs my use of the term disability system. Lennard Davis suggests that the term normalcy studies supplant the name disability studies in the way that gender studies sometimes succeeds Women’s Studies (1995). The oft-invoked distinction between sex and gender clarifies a differentiation between impairment and disability, even though both binaries are fraught. The concept of performing disability cites (as it were) Judith Butler’s vigorous critique of essentialism (1990). Reading disabled bodies as exemplary instances of “docile bodies” invokes Foucault (1979). To suggest that identity is lodged in the body, I propose that the body haunts the subject, alluding to Susan Bordo’s notion regarding masculinity that “the penis haunts the phallus”(1994, 1). My own work has complicated the familiar discourse of the gaze to theorize what I call the stare, which I argue produces disability identity. Such theoretical shorthand impels us to reconsider the ways that identity categories cut across and redefine one another, pressuring both the terms woman and disabled. A feminist disability theory can also highlight intersections and convergences with other identity-based critical perspectives such as queer and ethnic studies. Disability coming-out stories, for example, borrow from gay and lesbian identity narratives to expose what previously was hidden, privatized, and medicalized in order to enter into a political community. The politicized sphere into which many scholars come out is feminist disability studies, which enables critique, claims disability identity, and creates affirming counternarratives. Disability coming-out narratives raise questions about the body’s role in identity by asking how markers so conspicuous as crutches, wheelchairs, hearing aids, guide dogs, white canes, or empty sleeves can be closeted. Passing as nondisabled complicates ethnic and queer studies’ analyses of how this seductive but psychically estranging access to privilege operates. Some of my friends, for example, have measured their regard for me by saying, “But I don’t think of you as disabled.” What they point to in such a compliment is the contradiction they find between their perception of me as a valuable, capable, lovable person and the cultural figure of the disabled person whom they take to be precisely my opposite: worthless, incapable, and unlovable. People with disabilities routinely announce that they do not consider themselves as disabled. Although they are often repudiating the literal meaning of the word disabled, their words nevertheless serve to disassociate them from the identity group of the disabled. Our culture offers profound disincentives and few rewards to identifying as disabled. The trouble with such statements is that they leave intact, with-

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out challenge, the oppressive stereotypes that permit, among other things, the unexamined use of disability terms such as crippled, lame, dumb, idiot, moron as verbal gestures of derision. The refusal to claim disability identity is in part due to a lack of ways to understand or talk about disability that are not oppressive. People with disabilities and those who care about them flee from the language of crippled or deformed and have no other alternatives. Yet, the Civil Rights Movement and the accompanying black-is-beautiful identity politics have generally shown white culture what is problematic with saying to black friends, “I don’t think of you as black.” Nonetheless, by disavowing disability identity, many of us learned to save ourselves from devaluation by a complicity that perpetuates oppressive notions about ostensibly real disabled people. Thus, together we help make the alternately menacing and pathetic cultural figures who rattle tin cups or rave on street corners, ones we with impairments often flee from more surely than those who imagine themselves as nondisabled.

ACTIVISM The final domain of feminist theory that a disability analysis expands is activism. There are many arenas of what can be seen as feminist disability activism: marches; protests; The Breast Cancer Fund poster campaign I discussed above; action groups such as the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) and Not Dead Yet, which opposes physician-assisted suicide, or the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT). What counts as activism cuts a wide swath through U.S. society and the academy. I want to suggest here two unlikely, even quirky, cultural practices that function in activist ways but are seldom considered as potentially transformative. One practice is disabled fashion modeling and the other is academic tolerance. Both are different genres of activism from the more traditional marching-on-Washington or chaining-yourself-to-a-bus modes. Both are less theatrical, but perhaps fresher and more interestingly controversial ways to change the social landscape and to promote equality, which I take to be the goal of activism. The theologian and sociologist, Nancy Eiseland, has argued that in addition to legislative, economic, and social changes, achieving equality for people with disabilities depends upon cultural “resymbolization” (1994, 98). Eiseland asserts that the way we imagine disability and disabled people must shift in order for real social change to occur. Whereas Eiseland’s work resymbolizes our conceptions of disability in religious iconography, my own examinations of disabled fashion models do similar cultural work in the popular sphere, introducing some interesting complications into her notion of resymbolization. Images of disabled fashion models in the media can shake up established categories and expectations. Because commercial visual media are the most widespread and commanding sources of images in modern, image-saturated culture, they have great potential for shaping public consciousness—as feminist cultural critics are well aware. Fashion imagery is the visual distillation of the normative, gilded with the chic and the luxurious to render it desirable. The commercial sphere is completely amoral, driven as it is by the single logic of the bottom line.

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Fig. 6. Blind model with service dog. (Alberto Rizzo, photographer. Courtesy of WeMedia Inc.) As we know, it sweeps through culture seizing with alarming neutrality anything it senses will sell. This value-free aspect of advertising produces a kind of pliable potency that sometimes can yield unexpected results. Take, for example, a shot from the monthly fashion feature in WE Magazine, a Cosmopolitan knock-off targeted toward the disabled consumer market (Fig. 6). In this conventional, stylized, high fashion shot, a typical female model—slender, white, blonde, clad in a black evening gown—is accompanied by her service dog. My argument is that public images such as this are radical because they fuse two previously antithetical visual discourses, the chic high fashion shot and the earnest charity campaign. Public representations of disability have traditionally been contained within the conventions of sentimental charity images, exotic freak show portraits, medical illustrations, or sensational and forbidden pictures. Indeed, people with disabilities have been excluded most fully from the dominant, public world of the marketplace. Before the civil rights initiatives of the midtwentieth century began to transform the public architectural and institutional environment, disabled people were segregated to the private and the medical spheres. Until recently, the only available public image of a woman with a service dog that shaped the public imagination was a street-corner beggar or a charity poster. By juxtaposing the elite body of a visually normative fashion model with the mark of disability, this image shakes up our assumptions about the normal

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and the abnormal, the public and the private, the chic and the desolate, the compelling and the repelling. Introducing a service dog—a standard prop of indigents and poster children—into the conventional composition of an upscale fashion photo forces the viewer to reconfigure assumptions about what constitutes the attractive and the desirable. I am arguing that the emergence of disabled fashion models is inadvertent activism without any legitimate agent for positive social change. Their appearance is simply a result of market forces. This both troubling and empowering form of entry into democratic capitalism produces a kind of instrumental form of equality: the freedom to be appropriated by consumer culture. In a democracy, to reject this paradoxical liberty is one thing; not to be granted it is another. Ever straining for novelty and capitalizing on titillation, the fashion-advertising world promptly appropriated the power of disabled figures to provoke responses. Diversity appeals to an upscale liberal sensibility these days, making consumers feel good about buying from companies that are charitable toward the traditionally disadvantaged. More important, the disability market is burgeoning. At 54 million people and growing fast as the baby boomers age, their spending power was estimated to have reached the trillion-dollar mark in 2000 (Williams 1999). For the most part, commercial advertising presents disabled models in the same way as nondisabled models, simply because all models look essentially the same. The physical markings of gender, race, ethnicity, and disability are muted to the level of gesture, subordinated to the overall normativity of the models’ appearance. Thus, commercial visual media cast disabled consumers as simply one of many variations that compose the market to which they appeal. Such routinization of disability imagery—however stylized and unrealistic it may be— nevertheless brings disability as a human experience out of the closet and into the normative public sphere. Images of disabled fashion models enable people with disabilities, especially those who acquire impairments as adults, to imagine themselves as a part of the ordinary, albeit consumerist, world rather than as a special class of excluded untouchables and unviewables. Images of impairment as a familiar, even mundane, experience in the lives of seemingly successful, happy, well-adjusted people can reduce the identifying against oneself that is the overwhelming effect of oppressive and discriminatory attitudes toward people with disabilities. Such images, then, are at once liberatory and oppressive. They do the cultural work of integrating a previously excluded group into the dominant order—for better or worse—much like the inclusion of women in the military. This form of popular resymbolization produces counterimages that have activist potential. A clearer example of disability activism might be Aimee Mullins, who is a fashion model, celebrity, champion runner, Georgetown University student, and double amputee. Mullins was also one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People of 1999. An icon of disability pride and equality, Mullins exposes—in fact calls attention to—the mark of her disability in most photos, refusing to normalize or hide her disability in order to pass for nondisabled. Indeed, the public version of her career is that her disability has been a benefit: she has several sets of legs, both cosmetic and functional, and so is able to choose how tall she wants to be. Photographed in her functional prosthetic legs, she embodies the sexualized jock look that demands women be both slender and fit (Fig. 7). In her cosmetic legs, she captures the look of the high fashion beauty in the controversial shoot

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by Nick Knight called Accessible, showcasing outfits created by designers such as Alexander McQueen (Fig. 8). But this is high fashion with a difference. In the jock shot, her functional legs are brazenly displayed, and even in the voguishly costumed shot, the knee joints of her artificial legs are exposed. Never is there an attempt to disguise her prosthetic legs; rather all of the photos thematically echo her prostheses and render the whole image chic. Mullins’s prosthetic legs— whether cosmetic or functional—parody, indeed proudly mock, the fantasy of the perfect body that is the mark of fashion, even while the rest of her body conforms precisely to fashion’s impossible standards. So rather than concealing, normalizing, or erasing disability, these photos use the hyperbole and stigmata traditionally associated with disability to quench postmodernity’s perpetual search for the new and arresting image. Such a narrative of advantage works against oppressive narratives and practices usually invoked about disabilities. First, Mullins counters the insistent narrative that one must overcome an impairment rather than incorporating it into one’s life and self, even perhaps as a benefit. Second, Mullins counters the practice of passing for nondisabled that people with disabilities are often obliged to enact in the public sphere. Mullins uses her conformity with beauty standards to assert her disability’s violation of those very standards. As legless and beautiful, she is an embodied paradox, invoking an inherently disruptive potential. What my analysis of these images reveals is that feminist cultural critiques are complex. On the one hand, feminists have rightly unmasked consumer capitalism’s appropriation of women as sexual objects for male gratification. On the other hand, these images imply that the same capitalist system in its drive to harvest new markets can produce politically progressive counterimages and counternarratives, however fraught they may be in their entanglement with consumer culture. Images of disabled fashion models are both complicit with and critical of the beauty system that oppresses all women. Nevertheless, they suggest that consumer culture can provide the raw material for its own critique. The concluding version of activism I offer is less controversial and subtler than glitzy fashion spreads. It is what I call academic activism, the activism of integrating education, in the very broadest sense of that term. The academy is no ivory tower but rather it is the grassroots of the educational enterprise. Scholars and teachers shape the communal knowledge and the pedagogical archive that is disseminated from kindergarten to the university. Academic activism is most self-consciously vibrant in the aggregate of interdisciplinary identity studies—of which Women’s Studies is exemplary—that strive to expose the workings of oppression, examine subject formation, and offer counternarratives for subjugated groups. Their cultural work is building an archive through historical and textual retrieval, canon reformation, role modeling, mentoring, curricular reform, and course and program development. A specific form of feminist academic activism can be deepened through the complication of a disability analysis. I call this academic activism the methodology of intellectual tolerance. By this I do not mean tolerance in the more usual sense of tolerating each other—although that would be useful as well. What I mean is the intellectual position of tolerating what has been thought of as incoherence. As feminism has embraced the paradoxes that have emerged from its challenge to the gender system, it has not collapsed into chaos, but rather it has

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Fig. 7. Aimee Mullins using functional legs. (Courtesy of Nick Knight.)

Fig. 8. Aimee Mullins using cosmetic legs. (Courtesy of Nick Knight.)

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developed a methodology that tolerates internal conflict and contradiction. This method asks difficult questions, but accepts provisional answers. This method recognizes the power of identity, at the same time that it reveals identity as a fiction. This method both seeks equality, and it claims difference. This method allows us to teach with authority at the same time that we reject notions of pedagogical mastery. This method establishes institutional presences even while it acknowledges the limitations of institutions. This method validates the personal but implements disinterested inquiry. This method both writes new stories and recovers traditional ones. Considering disability as a vector of identity that intersects gender is one more internal challenge that threatens the coherence of woman, of course. But feminism can accommodate such complication and the contradictions it cultivates. Indeed the intellectual tolerance I am arguing for espouses the partial, the provisional, the particular. Such an intellectual habit can be informed by disability experience and acceptance. To embrace the supposedly flawed body of disability is to critique the normalizing phallic fantasies of wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness. The disabled body is contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality incarnate. My claim here has been that integrating disability as a category of analysis, an historical community, a set of material practices, a social identity, a political position, and a representational system into the content of feminist—indeed into all—inquiry can strengthen the critique that is feminism. Disability, like gender and race, is everywhere, once we know how to look for it. Integrating disability analyses will enrich and deepen all our teaching and scholarship. Moreover, such critical intellectual work facilitates a fuller integration of the sociopolitical world—for the benefit of everyone. As with gender, race, sexuality, and class: to understand how disability operates is to understand what it is to be fully human.

NOTES 1. Interestingly, in Fiske’s study, feminists, businesswomen, Asians, Northerners, and black professionals were stereotyped as highly competent, thus envied. In addition to having very low competence, housewives, disabled people, blind people, so-called retarded people, and the elderly were rated as warm, thus pitied. 2. Personal conversation with Paul Longmore, San Francisco, California, June 2000. 3. Personal conversation with Nancy Mairs, Columbus, Ohio, 17 April 1998.

WORKS CITED Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Retrieved 15 August 2002, from http://www.usdoj. gov/crt/ada/pubs/ada.txt. Aristotle. 1944. Generation of Animals. Trans. A. L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Asch, Adrienne, and Gail Geller. 1996. “Feminism, Bioethics and Genetics.” In Feminism, Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction, ed. S. M. Wolf, 318–50. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Battin Margaret P., Rosamond Rhodes, and Anita Silvers, eds. 1998. Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate. New York: Routledge.

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Bordo, Susan. 1994. “Reading the Male Body.” In The Male Body, ed. Laurence Goldstein, 265–306. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought. New York: Columbia University Press. Brownworth, Victoria A., and Susan Raffo, eds. 1999. Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability. Seattle, WA: Seal Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. ———. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1999. “Shape and Story: Metamorphosis in the Western Tradition.” Paper presented at NEH Jefferson Lecture, 22 March, at Washington, DC. Clark, David L., and Catherine Myser. 1996. “Being Humaned: Medical Documentaries and the Hyperrealization of Conjoined Twins.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 338–55. New York: New York University Press. Davis, Lennard. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso. de Beauvoir, Simone. (1952) 1974. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Press. Dreger, Alice Domurat. 1998a. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998b. “The Limits of Individuality: Ritual and Sacrifice in the Lives and Medical Treatment of Conjoined Twins.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 338–55. New York: New York University Press. Eiseland, Nancy. 1994. The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1995. “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of Hottentot Women in Europe, 1815–1817.” In Deviant Bodies: Cultural Perspectives in Science and Popular Culture, eds. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, 19–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fine, Michelle, and Adrienne Asch, eds. 1988. Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Finger, Anne. 1990. Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth. Seattle, WA: Seal Press. Fiske, Susan T., Amy J. C. Cuddy, and Peter Glick. 2001. “A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype Content: Competence and Warmth Respectively Follow from Perceived Status and Competition.” Unpublished study. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan M. Sheridan-Smith. New York: Vintage Books. Gilman, Sander L. 1999. Making the Body Beautiful. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1985. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hahn, Harlan. 1988. “Can Disability Be Beautiful?” Social Policy 18(Winter): 26–31. Haiken, Elizabeth. 1997. Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge. Harstock, Nancy. 1983. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically

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Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Discovering Reality, eds. Sandra Harding and Merrell Hintikka, 283–305. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel Publishing. Herndl, Diane Price. 2002. “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body: Twenty Years after Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 144–55. New York: MLA Press. Hillyer, Barbara. 1993. Feminism and Disability. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Hubbard, Ruth. 1990. “Who Should and Who Should Not Inhabit the World?” In her The Politics of Women’s Biology, 179–98. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1992. “Nature, Nurture and the Human Genome Project.” In The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, eds. Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, 281–99. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kessler, Suzanne J. 1990. Lessons from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kittay, Eva Feder. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge. Kittay, Eva, with Leo Kittay. 2000. “On the Expressivity and Ethics of Selective Abortion for Disability: Conversations with My Son.” In Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights, eds. Erik Parens and Adrienne Asch, 165–95. Georgetown, MD: Georgetown University Press. Linton, Simi. 1998. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York University Press. Longmore, Paul K. 1997. “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemmas: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal.” In The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, eds. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, 134–58. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lorde, Audre. 1980. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco, CA: Spinsters Ink. Mairs, Nancy. 1996. Waist High in the World: A Life among the Nondisabled. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. McRuer, Robert. 1999. “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” Paper presented at Modern Language Association Convention, 28 December, at Chicago, IL. “Meet Ellen Stohl.” 1987. Playboy, July: 68–74. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parens, Erik, and Adrienne Asch. 2000. Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights. Georgetown, MD: Georgetown University Press. Piercy, Marge. 1969. “Unlearning Not to Speak.” In her Circles on Water, 97. New York: Doubleday. Rand, Erica. 1995. Barbie’s Queer Accessories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rapp, Rayna. 1999. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” In her Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 23–75. New York: Norton. Riley, Denise. 1999. “Bodies, Identities, Feminisms.” In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, eds. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 220–6. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Russo, Mary. 1994. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. New York: Routledge. Saxton, Marsha. 1998. “Disability Rights and Selective Abortion.” In Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle (1950–2000), ed. Ricky Solinger, 374–93. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. “Gender as Useful Category of Analysis.” In her Gender and the Politics of History, 29–50. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silvers, Anita. 1995. “Reconciling Equality to Difference: Caring (f)or Justice for People with Disabilities.” Hypatia 10(1): 30–55. Spelman, Elizabeth, V. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 1999. “Narratives of Deviance and Delight: Staring at Julia Pastrana, ‘The Extraordinary Lady.’” In Beyond the Binary, ed. Timothy Powell, 81–106. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ———. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press Tuana, Nancy. 1993. The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Wald, Priscilla. 2000. “Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes, and Geography.” New Literary History 31(4): 681–708. Williams, John M. 1999. “And Here’s the Pitch: Madison Avenue Discovers the ‘Invisible Consumer.’” WE Magazine, July/August: 28–31. Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: William Morrow and Co. Young, Iris Marion. 1990a. “Breasted Experience.” In her Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, 189–209. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1990b. “Throwing Like a Girl.” In her Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, 141–59. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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THE CRINGE: MARRIAGE PLOTS, EFFEMINACY, AND FEMINIST AMBIVALENCE (2003)





















I was once sitting unsuspecting in my office when a student burst in, her face flooded with tears. This was normally a very cheerful person, a funny, bawdy, ex-hippie ex-nurse-midwife who’d come back to school to study English and write. I thought that something awful had happened, one of her kids killed? Wrong. She was crying because she’d just finished reading Jane Eyre for my class and was “so happy for Jane and Rochester!” —NAOMI JACOBS

When thirtysomething premiered on ABC in the fall of 1987, Jane Shattuc and I were both thirty-two years old. Junior faculty members at the University of Vermont, we did not know each other well, but the same demographics that marked us as the new nighttime serial’s ideal target audience—white, middle-class, upwardly mobile, (over)educated, politically progressive, East Coast–based, Midwest-born, professional women—almost overdetermined our friendship. That we would begin to talk was inevitable, particularly in a small New England college town where the addition of “feminist” to our other identity markers placed us, at that time, in a tiny minority within our community. Thirtysomething was to become one of the instruments by which we came to measure our sameness and our differences, as women and as feminists. We came together over an episode in that first season: Hope (the series’ married, childbearing, part-time professional heroine) endures a visit from her mother, a houseguest returning briefly to Philadelphia from her retirement home in Phoenix. Vaguely, we remember the issues the episode raised: Hope resists her mother’s attempts—through criticizing Hope’s behavior, through offering to buy Hope a dress—to continue shaping her daughter’s adult identity; Hope gets angry, treats her mother rudely, repents, and apologizes. Alone in our single-women’s apartments, Jane and I watched this episode; independently, we had very similar responses. Both of us cried, hard and aloud, during the reconciliation in the last five minutes of the show; both of us, immediately after it ended, called our mothers (Jane’s in Indiana, mine in California); and both of us, despite having been moved, felt embarrassed and annoyed by the fact that this commercially produced text had succeeded in manipulating

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us into taking the advice of those AT&T commercials (also capable of making us cry) to “reach out and touch someone,” or to spend money on a long-distance call. At work the next day we talked about this and were struck with the resemblance in our responses. In subsequent weeks, we would watch new episodes alone, and call each other at eleven on Tuesday nights, as often as not still in tears, asking, “Did you feel that one? Did it get you?” Still irritated, but fascinated by the appeal this crying experience held for both of us, we tried to understand the source of the feelings. Jane attributed her own crying during that first episode to frustration over the all-too-familiar scenes of mother-daughter conflict, but she concurred with my observation that the tears flowed most freely from elation over the resolution, the closure, the confirmation of the belief our culture (ironically enough, in both its traditional and its feminist manifestations) had engrained in us that differences between generations of women can be elided, and that the blissful mother-child unity psychoanalysis tells us existed before the mirror stage can be glimpsed again in moments of emotional epiphany. For me, the tears signify the relief that comes with the resolution of a powerful narrative line, moving from possession, to loss, to restitution. Call it “boy meets girl / boy loses girl / boy gets girl” or call it “daughter loves mother / daughter fights with mother / daughter reconciles with mother,” that narrative line is the same. And its resolution brings about irresistible feelings which I would attribute to our accumulated cultural and individual experience of countless stories following that same line: fairy tales, television dramas, romance novels, “realistic” novels, gossip, films. Particularly when it centers on a heterosexual pairing, that pattern has come to be known as “the marriage plot.” As we developed and cotaught a course at UVM called “Having a Good Cry,” Jane and I found our canonical example of the good cry to be the convention of crying at weddings, a tradition observed, often unwillingly, by countless American women despite our individual opinions about the actual desirability of the bourgeois expectations that wedding vows represent. We watch the couple take their vows, we know that for this moment—if for this moment only—they genuinely mean it when they say “I do”: the speech act of taking the vow makes it so. And yet we know, from experience and observation, that the perfect embodiment of the ideals represented in wedding vows must inevitably begin to crumble, even as the couple turns to walk back down the aisle. “It’s so beautiful,” the crying spectator often says at weddings: “it,” at the moment the couple speaks that vow, is the myth of American marriage taking momentary concrete form. But at that same moment, the spectator who is crying holds an awareness that this ideal is indeed a myth, and that once the couple is outside the safe space of ritual, the ideal will not exist in this almost tangible, crystallized way again. There is a sense of cringing, then, that accompanies the good cry we experience at weddings, a tincture of pain that accounts for its being a cry, not a giggle or a belly laugh. The cringe is associated with the inevitably provisional closure every wedding represents: at the end of the marriage plot, “boy gets girl,” and the story is over, but for flesh-and-blood brides and grooms the moment must pass. I see the marriage-plot pattern—and its associated emotional impact—as culturally instilled, not naturally present, and yet I believe it does function as a deep structure, not only in the narratives we are continually processing (in novels, on

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television, in movies), but also in the psychoanalytic account of basic human desire. For me, the “elation” part of the good cry comes with that familiar feeling of closure this narrative pattern habitually gives us; the “frustration” part comes with the gap between the gratification fictional closure brings and the uneasiness I feel at the infinite open-endedness of personal experience. But for me, neither the elation nor the frustration is experienced as specifically sexual, despite the erotic connotations of the vocabulary I am using here (“gratification,” “elation,” “frustration”) and despite this narrative pattern’s association with stories of a man and a woman “ending up together.” Everyone knows the marriage plot is structured by sex, and is, at some level, experienced as an emotional analogy to sex. But like the “good cry” that so often accompanies narrative resolution, the marriage plot is gendered, too, in ways that do not necessarily connote or invoke sexuality. Performing a very close reading of the Julia Roberts film, Pretty Woman—too close for comfort, close enough, even, for discomfort—can untangle some of the intertwined threads of gender and sexuality in the effeminate response to marriage plots.

READING TOO CLOSELY FOR COMFORT “Consider more closely,” Silvan Tomkins suggests, “the tumescent male with an erection.” He is sexually excited, we say. He is indeed excited, but no one has ever observed an excited penis. It is a man who is excited and who breathes hard, not in the penis, but in the chest, the face, and the nose and nostrils. But such excitement is in no way peculiarly sexual. The same excitement can be experienced, without the benefit of an erection, to mathematics—beauty bare—to poetry, and to a rise in the stock market. Instead of these representing sublimations of sexuality, it is rather that sexuality, in order to become possible, must borrow its potency from the affect of excitement. The drive must be assisted by affect as an amplifier if it is to work at all. (“Affect as Amplification,” 146)

Already we are close enough for discomfort: a look this close at the excited body in the context of academic reading makes me—for one—uncomfortable, as I immediately assume that no matter what Tomkins claims he is talking about, the gist of the passage must be primarily sexual. I don’t even need to invoke “Freudian symbols” to be directed by the language of “the tumescent male,” “erection,” and “penis” to move from the literal level of the picture Tomkins evokes to a psychoanalytic reading of the language that follows. Who could resist assigning sexual connotations to the unaccountable eruption linking mathematics and poetry—“beauty bare”—and to the stock market’s “rise”? Who could avoid arguing that even (or especially) when Tomkins disavows a necessary identity between excitement and sexual arousal, his writing almost parodically exhibits the very sublimation of sexuality he seeks to refute? When you note that Tomkins returned to these images in other writings using almost the same language (at a symposium twelve years earlier, Tomkins said, “No one has ever observed an excited penis. It is a man who is excited and who breathes hard, not in the penis,

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but in the chest, the esophagus, the face, and the nose and nostrils” [“Affect as the Primary Motivational System,” 103]), who could resist concluding that this is a classic case of the return of the repressed? Consider more closely, though, what Tomkins is saying—I mean, what he believes himself to be saying. What if he is right? What if “excitement is in no way peculiarly sexual”? What are the implications for a literary criticism whose closereading practice has for decades been suffused with the conflation of readers’ arousal and sexuality, usually expressed in terms of “desire”? Narrative theory, in particular, continually reverts to the trope of “desire” in discussing the emotional relation of readers to texts. As Peter Brooks (1985) so influentially put it, “Desire as narrative thematic, desire as narrative motor, and desire as the very intention of narrative language and the act of telling all seem to stand in close interrelation” (54); certainly they have come to stand in interrelation so close as uncomfortably to crowd out any competing notion of the feelings evoked by reading. Brooks was right, I think, to locate the warrant for his model in the literary texts it describes, for instance the European nineteenth-century novel, whose “ambitious heroes . . . may regularly be conceived as ‘desiring machines’ whose presence in the text creates and sustains narrative movement through the forward march of desire” (39). Never mind, for now, what Susan Winnett (1990) taught us to think about the phallocentrism of the way Brooks formulates that “forward march,” nor what Judith Roof (1996) points out about its inexorably heterocentric trajectory. What happens to our close-reading practice if we step even further away from Brooks than Winnett and Roof, move down the road Tomkins points out, and detach the affective experiences of reading from the sexually defined notion of desire? Consider more closely, now, the reader’s body. I can speak with authority (albeit discomfort) only about my own, and I am necessarily blind to the unconscious operations of the drives that motivate its actions: I only know, as we say, what I feel. One thing I do know is that I have never experienced an orgasm while reading. This is not to say that in the course of reading I never found myself in a state that led me to take other actions to reach that conclusion, but coming is not—for me—a physical effect of reading. Therefore, I understand all the literary-critical language of desire and climax as metaphorical. The building excitement of a sustained narrative line is like sexual arousal, but it is not sexual arousal; gratification at the climax of an intensely experienced narrative is like an orgasm, but it is not an orgasm. My project is to enlist Tomkins’s approach as an analogue to a literary criticism that would look more closely at what the body is doing while the reader reads, rather than always automatically making the metaphorical move into the language and analysis of sexual desire. Consider more closely, then, some manifestations of the body’s affective experience in Tomkins’s own text that are not, specifically, sexual. Tomkins differentiates himself from a psychological tradition he traces from Plato to Freud, by making a distinction between “primary drives” and “primary affects.” For Tomkins, a psychology based on “drives” is too limited and limiting of what he thinks of as “freedom of will”; his alternative to what he sees as Freudian determinism is a model of emotions understood in terms of their physical manifestations (“affects”), rather than their unconscious motivations (“drives”). To identify affects, Tomkins does close readings not of the subject’s dreams or discourse, but

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of the face. As Sedgwick and Frank explain, “More than the place where affects are expressed, Tomkins shows the face to be the main place in the body—though by no means the only one—where affect happens” (30). By the end of his career, Tomkins had “distinguished nine innate affects,” each of them associated with a particular facial expression: The positive are as follows: first, interest or excitement, with eyebrows down and stare fixed or tracking an object; second, enjoyment or joy, the smiling response; third, surprise, or startle, with eyebrows raised and eyes blinking. The negative affects are the following: first, distress or anguish, the crying response; second, fear or terror, with eyes frozen open in fixed stare or moving away from the dreaded object to the side, with skin pale, cold, sweating, and trembling, and with hair erect; third, shame or humiliation, with eyes and head lowered; fourth, contempt, with the upper lip raised in a sneer; fifth, disgust, with the lower lip lowered and protruded; sixth, anger or rage, with a frown, clenched jaw, and red face. (‘‘Affect as Amplification,” 142–43)

Collaborators and competitors of Tomkins have disputed the exact number of affects (some claim there are eleven; Tomkins himself began with a list of only eight), but—from a literary-critical point of view—it does not seem important to know whether this list is accurate or complete. As I have argued in my Introduction, what does seem important to me is the idea that emotion need not be understood as an interior essence expressed through the face, but that it could be seen as performative. If smiling, crying, trembling, and sneering are not windows on an interior state of feeling, but are themselves the constitutive performance of feeling, then we could make some drastic alterations in our understanding of the relation between reading and feeling. What if reading narratives is not motivated by a ‘drive” or “desire”; what if it does not reflect a more or less veiled or indirect acting out of an interior emotional state; what if the smiles, tears, tremors, and sneers evoked by narratives are themselves what make up the emotional component of the reading experience? For feminist criticism, thinking about the reader’s affective relation to narrative texts in terms of desire has been particularly compelling with reference to the marriage plot. To reach closure, the feminocentric marriage plot has to move from the action of “girl meets boy, girl loses boy” to the conclusion of “girl marries boy,” or at least “girl elicits gesture from hitherto reluctant boy suggesting that he will, in the future toward which the diegesis gestures, offer to marry her.” Following the metaphoric reasoning of desire-centered narrative theory, feminist critics have typically read the telos of marriage as the telos of heterosexual climax: if the heroine and hero get married, they will have sex; the readers’ desire to see the marriage come about is understood as the readers’ desire to see the protagonists come together sexually which—for the reader—will be, metaphorically speaking, to come. Readers who are addicted to marriage-plot narratives (whatever form those narratives may take: Harlequin romances, People magazine bios, mainstream Hollywood films, classic Victorian novels, Shakespearean comedies) follow a more or less predictable affective trajectory as they consume each new iteration of that plot: if the affect is understood as (sexual) desire, the trajectory follows that familiar parabola of mounting arousal gratified in the end by the climax of closure. Short of “immasculating” themselves to identify with this stereotypically mas-

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culinist model of desire, however, what are effeminate readers getting out of their readings of the marriage plot? Feminist criticism has taken important steps over the past two decades in the direction of finding alternative story lines, resistances to closure, new endings, and new teleologies that would be more compatible with models of female sexuality (whatever that might be), but these alternatives do not account for the persistent popularity of marriage-plot narratives among effeminate readers; if desire is really the motor driving narrative, the marriage plot always ends up enforcing effeminate readers’ complicity in their own sexual and cultural subjugation. Under this rubric, the marriage plot can only ever be oppressive or banal; to be sure, antiheterocentric reading strategies have recently produced some pretty compelling accounts of the marriage plot as inevitably just boring. Abject, melancholic, masochistic—these are the inexorable emotional end points of a desire-based model for effeminate reading of the marriage plot. For me, though, the marriage plot elicits mixed feelings—and if boredom is not usually one of them, I don’t think desire is, either. If I observe what the marriage plot does to my body—the physical signs of feeling it typically evokes—and look to Tomkins’s list of nine basic affects for names to attach to those feelings—a list that excludes desire—I find excitement, enjoyment, shame, and sometimes (though not usually) surprise. Taking a cue from Tomkins’s assertion that excitement need not necessarily denote sexual arousal, I am interested in looking at the patterns of affect underpinning marriage plots that may diverge from, or even entirely undermine, that old clichéd parabola of phallocentric heterosexual desire.

DISCOMFORTS OF READING PRETTY WOMAN To illustrate the idea I will take a close look at that worst of bad object choices for feminist critics, Pretty Woman (1990). If, as a feminist reader, I feel shame in getting excited about marriage plots, Pretty Woman brings me to the point of humiliation. No text makes more vivid for me the double experience of negative feminist political critique and positive physical readerly affect that always accompanies my reading experience as a lover of the marriage plot; at the same time, Pretty Woman provides the clearest example I can find of why the marriage plot is not necessarily a story about heterosexual consummation. The pattern of affect the marriage plot sets up—the alternation of excitement and shame—is, I would argue, partly constitutive of effeminate emotional experience in mainstream U.S. culture: it may indeed mirror or stand metaphorically for sexuality, but it does something more—and, I am arguing—something different from that: it puts the effeminate reader’s body through a pattern of affective paces that add up, over a lifetime of reading, to the experience of gender itself. Let me begin, just to get it over with, on the source of my shame at enjoying this movie, the negative feminist critique of Pretty Woman. Ideologically, the film’s gender politics are as backward as they can be, remarkably consistent with the nineteenth-century American cult of domesticity. Pretty Woman divides the world into the masculine sphere of commerce and politics (Richard Gere’s character, Edward, is the millionaire corporate buyout jock, with the financial power to acquire and dismantle companies, the political clout to tell Senate committees what to do, and the means to employ and outfit a courtesan to be at his “beck

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and call” for a week) and the traditionally feminine sphere of emotion, domesticity, consumption, and pleasure. The protagonist, Julia Roberts’s Vivian, and her colleague, Kit, are the women who have crossed that divide between the public and private spheres in the only way the film can imagine women as commercial beings: they are prostitutes. But Vivian, unlike Kit, has not lost touch with the presumably inborn femininity that qualifies her to step back into the role the woman is supposed to play within the private sphere: she is so innately noble, she weeps the first time she witnesses an opera, despite the fact that she has never been exposed to this cultural form before (Edward explains to her that you either get it the first time or it will never “be part of your soul”); she is so innately domestic, she instinctively refers to the penthouse hotel room where she sleeps with her temporary employer as “home” and repeatedly draws his attention to the emotional life he represses and neglects. Her role, as the classic domestic woman, will be to soften and humanize his commercial experience; her power is in her feminine influence over the man whose agency will show its effects in the public sphere. He is afraid of heights, he is afraid of commitment, he is afraid of feeling, he is afraid of intimate connection: her feminine influence will inspire him to overcome these fears, and to “do the right thing” by the rival businessman he has contemplated destroying. The “Pretty Woman’s” power is in her prettiness, her ability to draw the look: she exists to be looked at, to be the object of the gaze that is persistently, repeatedly framed as fixated on her body. Whether she is presented as a tramp or a lady, blonde-wigged and miniskirted or elegantly fitted up in her own luxuriantly red-dyed hair and “obscenely” expensive clothes, everyone on the street and in the hotel lobby always stares at her. The goal in her transformation from prostitute to acceptable companion for Edward is not that she would draw fewer stares in public, but that the stares would shift from lecherous shock to lecherous approval. She would be perfectly beautiful, he repeatedly tells her, if she would only stop fidgeting; all she needs to do to be a real lady is to act like one in public as she has already begun to do in private. Her reward for softening his masculine commercial impulses will be the climactic penultimate scene: he overcomes his fear of heights and of commitment, climbs her balcony, and “rescues her”: and she, in turn, follows the logic of domestic ideology and “rescues him right back” by accepting his apology for having suggested a long-term financial arrangement that would have made her his prostitute in perpetuity.l Now, we are to assume, she can be his wife instead. In all her prettiness she can be an icon of the kind of feminine power some first-wave Victorian feminists extolled, the model of femininity that postfeminists are embracing, which second- and third-wave feminists have endlessly (and, I think, definitively) analyzed as twentieth-century women’s subjugation. That’s only a fraction of what I could say about the regressive gender politics of this popular marriage-plot text (to be sure, many feminist commentators have said much more),2 but let’s call it enough. This standard feminist reading assumes that the plot’s motor is desire, its excitement primarily sexual. But what is odd about Pretty Woman as a marriage-plot movie is the fact that the sex comes first, not last. The protagonists are having sex—good sex, too, it’s implied—from the beginning of their storyline; sexual consummation is the starting point, not the end point, of their plot. In the representation of their relationship, this entails

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a curious reversal of the order in which physical intimacy builds: they have intercourse first, kiss later. The excitement of the storyline, then, is not about when orgasm will occur; orgasms are occurring throughout Vivian and Edward’s week together—they’re a given, they’re background noise, like the rising operatic motif (perversely invoking La Traviata) that recurs in the final scene. The orgasms just accompany the action. The excitement this movie evokes comes from other developments in the heroine’s life: the access to limitless resources that results from her alliance to a wealthy man; the opulence of the hotel penthouse, with its elaborate furniture, stunning view of L.A., and swimming-pool-sized bathtub; the endless supply of sumptuous food (he orders everything on the menu for her first room-service breakfast—the table groans under pancakes, eggs, cereal while she chooses that most elegant of yuppie breakfast items, a croissant; on their first evening out, her principal challenge is figuring out how to manage the table utensils that will convey the multicourse gourmet meal to her famously wide, smiling mouth); the lived fantasy of having carte blanche and personal “sucking up” service at a Rodeo Drive boutique and especially of avenging the snub she had received at a rival boutique by flaunting the commissions the saleswomen there had lost by slighting her. All this is carefully set up to contrast with the squalor of Vivian’s apartment building, the paucity of the prostitutes’ meals (Kit uses a bartender’s supply of citrus, olives, cherries, and cocktail onions as a “buffet”), and the shabbiness of the clothes she can afford (Vivian repairs the scuffs on her hip boots with magic marker). And there is the ancillary excitement of the possibility that, in marrying Vivian, Edward will change who she is: she will no longer be a struggling working woman risking disease, drug addiction, abuse, and death—all possibilities the movie invokes with its opening scene’s police investigation of a strung-out prostitute’s evident homicide—but a well-heeled wife; she will no longer be a trampy girl who gauchely places her body in inappropriate places (she is constantly sitting down on breakfast tables or department store display cases) and accidentally shoots escargot shells across elegant restaurants, but a well-behaved lady. Her identity, her very self will be transformed if he marries her. And, oh yes, of course, they’ll have sex—but they’ve been doing that all along anyway. They’ve even kissed on the mouth, long before the movie’s ending: the consummation of sexual desire is not what we’re waiting for. But what are the affects this plot invokes? As I watch, I experience interest/excitement (“eyebrows down, track, look, listen,” [Sedgwick and Frank, Silvan Tomkins Reader, 74]); enjoyment (“smile, lips widened up and out,” 74); and shame (“eyes down, head down,” 74). The accelerated pulse and pleasure of the interest and enjoyment alternate with the mild nausea of the shame, depending on whether I am attending to the text’s overt narrative or to my almost compulsively experienced ideological critique, both of the text and of my enjoyment. I can account for the mix in narratological terms: interest and enjoyment mark my face when I am responding to the intradiegetic level of the action, the exchanges among the characters; to the extent that I can participate at the extradiegetic level as a member of the film’s intended audience, I feel the widening up and out of my lips, the absorbed track-look-listen signifying excitement. But at a metadiegetic level that opens up when I adopt the perverse strategy of self-conscious, self-consciously feminist close reading, my eyes lower, my head is down: shame sets in.

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As I observe my own reactions, I cannot help but think of Elizabeth Bennet’s feeling, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, on seeing Mr. Darcy’s estate shortly after having refused his first offer of marriage: “To be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” Not to be mistress of Mr. Darcy, not specifically to get to have sanctioned sexual intercourse with him, but to be mistress of Pemberley. That something would be exactly what Vivian stands to gain by marrying Edward: access to economic resources and luxury, and a dramatic upwardly mobile change in social identity. If Pretty Woman’s marriage plot is not governed by the telos of sexual consummation, that doesn’t mean it is not a classic marriage-plot text; what it does mean is that the affective shape of the marriage plot has always been about something other than (or at least something that is not identical to) sexual desire. Even Jane Austen won’t let you forget this: witness Elizabeth’s notorious reply to her sister’s question about when she began loving Mr. Darcy: “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” Jane responds by entreating Elizabeth to “be serious,” and it’s easy to attribute Elizabeth’s joke to the heroine’s own self-conscious irony, or the double awareness Austen’s texts always evince of the ways middle-class women’s marital aspirations must combine sexual attraction with material security if they are to succeed under the model of companionate marriage. But Pretty Woman surprises me by showing how marriage-plot texts evince that double awareness even when they are not—like Austen novels—intentionally ironic, when their latent messages—as well as their manifest ones—are demonstrably both antiwoman and antifeminist. I would not be surprised if Jane Bennet’s response to Elizabeth’s joke had been “for shame, Lizzie”: indeed, given Austen’s practice of rendering dialogue in free indirect discourse, it might as well be what Jane says when she asks her sister to be serious. For if being mistress of Pemberley “might be something” there is definitely something shameful in the baldly economic and material sources of excitement I have been describing, the flaunted middle-class feminine wish for more and better stuff. Pretty Woman shames me by alternating scenes of material plenitude with scenes that reinforce the commercial nature of the transaction between the two protagonists, just as Edward shames Vivian when he reminds her that “we both screw people for money.” At another level of the diegesis, however, Pretty Woman engages the lover of marriage plots in a more subtle kind of shaming, a persistent reminder that this narrative exists in a tradition of marriage plots, and that its pleasures are as formulaically induced as they are materialistic. The scene I have been discussing immediately precedes a brief quotation from the Audrey Hepburn–Cary Grant movie, Charade, the last moment of that film, in which Hepburn’s lines make it clear that she is simultaneously accepting Cary Grant’s marriage proposal and admitting that she does not know his real name, does not even know whether he is a government agent, a con man, or a thief—“I love you,” she declares, “whoever you are.” As the remote in Vivian’s hand clicks off the TV, one of those metadiegetic moments occurs: evidently in spite of itself and its own project, Pretty Woman reminds us that Audrey Hepburn—that other, earlier gamine with the improbably wide smile and the impossibly thin body—and Julia Roberts are functionally the same pretty woman, the same heroine in the same narrative tradition, where marriage is the only possible outcome despite the absurdity of the circumstances leading to it. It’s a long and venerable tradition, a convention

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linking up such unlikely brides as Shakespeare’s Beatrice, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke. To invoke Nancy Miller’s classic characterization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and French euphoric and dysphoric novels, the heroine could get married or she could die: for the feminocentric marriage plot, there is no other conceivable end. The glimpse at the screwball-comic resolution of Charade places the self-conscious close reader momentarily outside Pretty Woman’s diegesis, inside a critical space where the ironies of the marriageplot convention come briefly and vividly into the foreground. Another such metadiegetic moment comes at Pretty Woman’s end: rather than concluding with the romantic climbing of Vivian’s balcony, the mutual rescue, the big kiss, the final scene pans back to show the couple standing in the midst of Vivian’s squalid neighborhood. Along with the theme from La Traviata, the soundtrack picks up the refrain of the black man who had been walking the streets in the opening scene, declaiming: “This is Hollywood, Hollywood, where dreams come true. . . .” Yes, it’s Hollywood: on the intradiegetic level, Hollywood is the town next door to Beverly Hills, the location of prostitution, drug addiction, poverty, and death; at the extradiegetic level of the film’s evidently intended reader, Hollywood is the source of movies that confirm fairy-tale wishes for “happy endings”; and at the metadiegetic level of the perverse lover of marriage plots, the self-consciously feminist close reader, Hollywood is the perpetuator and reinforcer of the myth behind the marriage-plot formula and its affective impact on its audience. Eyes down, head lowered: shame at the predictability and the crassness of it all mixes with the smile of enjoyment; eyes down, head lowered, smiling—this is the posture of gendered feeling that Hollywood inscribes on the faces of effeminate viewers of “chick flicks,” again and again, every time devotees of this genre read another marriage plot. What this body-conscious reading strategy has to offer to the effeminate/feminist reader is the added aspect of surprise; eyebrows raised, eyes blinking, I am startled by those metadiegetic moments where the mainstream popular text points to the ricketiness of its own machinery (the predictability, the formulaicness of it all). It’s physically impossible for a face to register the affects of shame—eyes lowered, head down—and surprise simultaneously: when my eyebrows go up and my eyes blink, the feeling of effeminate experience changes. For me the relief of the change offsets the discomfort of the ambivalence that inspires it.

NOTES 1. People Weekly ran an article about the movie’s producer, Laura Ziskin, emphasizing the career compromises she makes to accommodate motherhood. People credits Ziskin with “fighting for” the last bit of dialogue in the movie: “Richard says, ‘So what happened when he climbed the tower to rescue her?’ Julia says, ‘She rescued him right back!’ I didn’t want a movie whose message would be that some nice guy will come along and give you nice clothes and lots of money and make you happy,” Ziskin explains. “Those words at the end said these people changed each other.” 2. See the essays by Karol Kelley (1994), Madonne Miner (1992), and Harvey Roy Greenberg (1991) for discussions of the ways Pretty Woman reinscribes traditional gender roles; D. Soyini Madison (1995) adds a racially inflected perspective to her feminist reading of the film.

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WORKS CITED Jacobs, Naomi. Personal correspondence. 26 April 1990. Tomkins, Silvan. “Affect as the Primary Motivational System.” In Feelings and Emotions: The Loyola Symposium, edited by Magda B. Arnold, 101–10. New York and London: Academic Press, 1970. ———. “Affect as Amplification.” In Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, edited by Robert Plutchik and Henry Kellerman, 141–64. New York and London: Academic Press, 1980. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Winnett, Susan. “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure.” PMLA 105, no. 3 (May 1990): 505–18. Roof, Judith. Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Sedgwick, Eve and Adam Frank, eds. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Miller, Nancy K. The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

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Paula Gunn Allen retired from her position as professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1999. Her critical books include The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook (1991), Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature (1994), Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busing, Border-Crossing Loose Canons (1999), and Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (2004). She was a novelist, a poet, and a historian; she also edited several collections of American Indian women’s writing. She died in 2008. Gloria Anzaldúa was the author of Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Lloronas, Women Who Howl: Autohistorias-Torias and the Productions of Writing, Knowledge, and Identity (1996), and several bilingual children’s picture books, as well as a collection of interviews, Interviews/Entrevistas (2000, ed. AnaLouise Keating). She was also the editor of Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists-of-Color (1990) and co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and This Bridge Called Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002). She was completing her doctoral studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz at her death in 2004. Catherine Belsey, research professor of English at the University of Wales College of Cardiff, was the subject of an international conference held in 2007, “Literature and Culture: The Work of Catherine Belsey.” Her publications include Critical Practice (1980, 2002), John Milton: Language, Gender Power (1988), The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (1985), Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (1994), Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999), Culture and the Real (2005), and Why Shakespeare? (2008). Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. The author of several studies of the production of “personhood” in U.S. culture, especially through fantasies of citizenship, she has published The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

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(2008). She has also edited several books and two issues of Critical Inquiry that investigate issues of affect and normativity in American culture. She is at work on Cruel Optimism, a work that investigates negative emotions and the creation of a contemporary American identity. Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of twelve books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), Excitable Speech (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004), Undoing Gender (2004), and, most recently, a dialogue with Gayatri Spivak called Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007). She continues to write on contemporary politics, cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics. Barbara Christian was professor of Afro-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was the first black woman to receive tenure. Her extensive critical works include the widely known article “The Race for Theory” (1988) and “But Who Do You Really Belong To—Black Studies or Women’s Studies?” (1989), as well as several articles on the fiction of African American women including Gwendolyn Brooks, Paule Marshall, and Toni Morrison. She was best known as the author of Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition 1892–1976 (1980) and Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (1985). She died in 2000. Hélène Cixous is a novelist, dramatist, essayist, and founding theorist of contemporary French feminism. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Entre l’Ecriture (1986), The Newly Born Woman (with Catherine Clement, 1986), L’Heure de Clarice Lispector (1989), “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays (1991), Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993), The Hélène Cixous Reader (1994), Rootprints: Memory and Life-Writing (with Mireille Calle-Gruber, 1997), and Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1998). She founded the Centre d’Etudes Féminines and is professor of English literature at the Université de Paris VIII. Judith Fetterley, professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany, is the author of The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978) and Provisions: A Reader from Nineteenth-Century American Women (1985); she is the co-author of Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (with Marjorie Pryse, 2003) and co-editor of American Women Regionalists 1850– 1910: A Norton Anthology (1991). Among her extensive works on gender and sexual politics in American literature are “Reading about Reading: ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1986) and “‘My Sister! My Sister!’: The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie” (1998). Jane Gallop is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She has published widely on feminist, literary, and psychoanalytic theory. Her books include The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982), Reading Lacan (1985), Thinking through the Body (1988), Around

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1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (1992), Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), Anecdotal Theory (2002), and Living with His Camera (with photos by Dick Blau, 2003); she has edited Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation (1995) and Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (2004). Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is professor of women’s studies at Emory University. She is the author of Staring: How We Look (2008) and Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (1997), the editor of Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996), and the co-editor of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002). She has also published essays dealing with disabled women’s writing and performance. She is currently working on Cure or Kill: The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia, which traces eugenic thought through American literature. Sandra M. Gilbert is Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis. In addition to numerous volumes of her own poetry, Gilbert has written Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (2nd ed., 1990) and studies of women poets such as Dickinson, Levertov, Plath, Millay, Sarton, and Nin. More recently, she has published an interdisciplinary study, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (2007). She is widely known for her collaborative works with Susan Gubar, which include The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic (1986), No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (3 vols., 1987–1994), and Masterpiece Theater: An Academic Melodrama (1995). She and Gubar have also co-edited numerous volumes of writing by women. Susan Gubar, Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Indiana University, is the author of Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (1997), Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2000), Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (2003), and Rooms of Our Own (2006). She is widely known for her collaborative works with Sandra Gilbert, which include The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic (1986), No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (3 vols., 1987–1994), and Masterpiece Theater: An Academic Melodrama (1995). She and Gilbert have also co-edited numerous volumes of writing by women. Gubar is finishing a cultural biography of the disciple Judas. Barbara Johnson is professor of English and comparative literature and the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. In addition to editing several volumes of critical essays and translating the work of both Derrida and Mallarmé, she is the author of The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (1980), A World of Difference (1987), The Postmodern in Feminism (1992), Freedom and Interpretation (1993), The Wake of Deconstruction (1994), The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (1998), and Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Motherhood, Trials, Translation (2003), and, most recently, Persons and Things (2008).

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Linda S. Kauffman is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (1986), Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992), and Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (1998); she is the editor of several volumes of feminist criticism and theory, including Feminism and Institutions (1989), Gender and Theory (1989), and American Feminist Thought at Century’s End (1993). She is also the author of numerous articles and the winner of the Florence Howe Award for best feminist critical essay in 1988. Annette Kolodny is College of Humanities Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona and the author of The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975), The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (1984), and Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century (1998), as well as numerous essays on higher education and explorations of American literature and feminist theory, including a follow-up to her essay “Dancing through the Minefield” called “Dancing between Left and Right: Feminism and the Academic Minefield in the 1980s” (1988). She has also won numerous awards, including the Florence Howe Award for best feminist critical essay in 1980 and the Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary studies. Paul Lauter is the A. K. and G. M. Smith Professor of Literature at Trinity College, Connecticut, and the general editor of five editions of the Heath Anthology of American Literature. He has served as the president of the American Studies Association and has won the Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary studies. He was one of the founders of the Feminist Press and an editor there for fourteen years. He is the author of Canons and Contexts (1991) and From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies (2001), and the editor or co-editor of many volumes, including Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology (2000). Shirley Geok-Lin Lim is professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of Nationalism and Literature (1993) and Writing South/East Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994) as well as three collections of short stories, a book of memoirs, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), and a novel, Joss and Gold (2001). She is the co-editor of Reading the Literatures of Asian America (1992) and editor of Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1991), and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology (1989). Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi is professor of English at North Carolina State University and the author of Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference (1997), Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon (1999), and The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba (2008). Biddy Martin is the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the former provost of Cornell University. She is the author of Woman and Modernity: The (Life)Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé (1991) and Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian (1997), as well as articles on German literature and

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art nouveau, and on sexual difference and feminist criticism. She has published works such as “The Hobo, the Fairy, and the Quarterback” (1994) and “The Work of Love” (2005). Chandra Talpade Mohanty is professor of women’s studies and Dean’s Professor of Humanities at Syracuse University. She is the author of Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003), as well as numerous articles. She is the co-editor, with Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991), and, with Jaqui Alexander, of Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (1996). She has edited two series of scholarly books, “Gender, Culture, and Global Politics” and “Comparative Feminist Studies.” Laura Mulvey is professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her many articles include “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun” (1990); she is also the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), and Death Twenty-Four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006); she is the co-editor of Experimental British Television (2007). Diane Price Herndl is professor of English and director of women’s studies at Iowa State University. She is the author of Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (1993) as well as of essays on feminist theory, medical humanities, disability studies, and American fiction. Her recent work includes “Our Breasts, Our Selves: Identity, Community, and Ethics in Cancer Autobiographies” (2006), which won the Florence Howe Award for best feminist critical essay in 2007. She was one of the co-editors of Women’s Worlds: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women’s Writing in English (2007). Sangeeta Ray is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland. In addition to Engendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (2000), she is the author of essays on feminism and postcolonial theory, including “Ethical Encounters: Spivak, Alexander, and Kincaid” (2003). She is the co-editor of Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2000). Joanna Russ retired from her position as professor of English at the University of Washington in 1990, but has continued publishing. She is the author of numerous works of feminist science fiction and of critical studies, both of which often explore the concept of utopia. Her books include How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995), What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1997), and The Country You Have Never Seen (2005). She is probably best known as the author of the novel The Female Man (1975). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick taught graduate courses in English as Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and was the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Tendencies (1993), Dialogue on Love (1999), Touching Feeling:

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Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), and numerous articles on feminist and queer theory. She also published a volume of poetry, Fat Art/Thin Art (1995), co-edited several collections, and wrote a monthly advice column for several years in Mamm: Women, Cancer, and Community. She died in 2009. Elaine Showalter, Avalon Foundation Professor Emerita of English at Princeton University, is a founding theorist in Anglo-American feminist criticism. In addition to editing several feminist-criticism anthologies, including Speaking of Gender (1989), she is the author of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and Culture in England 1830–1980 (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1990), Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (1991), Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle (1993), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001), Teaching Literature (2003), and Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005). Hortense J. Spillers is the editor of Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (1991) and is author of Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003) as well as many essays on American and African-American literature and critical theory, including “All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race” (1996). She is the co-editor, with Marjorie Pryse, of Conjuring: Black Women Fiction and Literary Tradition (1985). She is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the author or editor of fifteen books of criticism, including In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2006), and, with Judith Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007). Spivak is the author of several studies of Yeats and the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and the fiction of Nahasweta Devi. Jane Tompkins is a teacher and writer, and is retired as professor of English and education and special assistant to the provost of the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (1996), West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (1992), and Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985) as well as the editor of Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1981). She is also the author of numerous articles on pedagogy and American literature. Robyn Warhol-Down is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Popular Forms (2003) and Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (1989); she is editor-in-chief of Women’s Worlds: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women’s Writing (2007) and co-editor of Women’s Work (1991). Her

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recent essays include several on the politics of the academy as well as “Teaching Gender and Narrative” (2008), “Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film” (2005), and “Physiology, Gender and Feeling: On Cheering Up” (2004). Bonnie Zimmerman is associate vice president for faculty affairs and professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University and is a past president of the National Women’s Studies Association. Her critical studies include The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969–l989 (1990), “George Eliot’s Sacred Chest of Language” (1993), “Lesbian Studies in an Inclusive Curriculum” (2000), and “The Past in Our Present: Theorizing the Activist Project of Women’s Studies” (2002). She is the co-editor of Professions of Desire (1995), The New Lesbian Studies (1996), and Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (2000).

ALTERNATIVE ARRANGEMENTS

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ALTERNATIVE ARRANGEMENTS FOR FEMINISMS REDUX



















ACADEMIA PAULA GUNN ALLEN, “Kochinnenako in Academe,” 284 LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye,” 328 ANNETTE KOLODNY, “Dancing through the Minefield,” 21 SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories,” 345 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314 ACTIVISM ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON, “Integrating Disability,” 487 LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye,” 328 BONNIE ZIMMERMAN, “What Has Never Been,” 40 AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMINIST THEORY BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” 238 ELAINE SHOWALTER, “A Criticism of Our Own,” 92 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 AUTHORITY/AUTHORSHIP HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 416 JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR, “Infection in the Sentence,” 9 LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye,” 328 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314 AUTOBIOGRAPHY GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye,” 328 DIANE PRICE HERNDL, “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body,” 477 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314

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BINARY OPPOSITIONS GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 CATHERINE BELSEY, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” 164 BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” 238 HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 416 JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 SANDRA M. GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR, “Infection in the Sentence,” 9 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314 BODY LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” 244 JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 BARBARA JOHNSON, “Apostrophe, Animation and Abortion,” 206 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 CLASS GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 CATHERINE BELSEY, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” 164 PAUL LAUTER, “Caste, Class, and Canon,” 70 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 CONFLICTS PAULA GUNN ALLEN, “Kochinnenako in Academe,” 284 GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye,” 328 PAUL LAUTER, “Caste, Class, and Canon,” 70 SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories,” 345 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314 DESIRE LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” 244 JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN, “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence,” 514 DISCOURSE CATHERINE BELSEY, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” 164 BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” 238 BARBARA JOHNSON, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 206 ANNETTE KOLODNY, “Dancing through the Minefield,” 21 BIDDY MARTIN and CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, “Feminist Politics,” 220 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314

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DOMESTICITY/HOME/FAMILY LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” 244 JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 BIDDY MARTIN and CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, “Feminist Politics,” 220 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 ETHNICITY/RACE PAULA GUNN ALLEN, “Kochinnenako in Academe,” 284 GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” 238 SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories,” 345 JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI, “Introduction” from Gender in African Women’s Writing, 113 BIDDY MARTIN and CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, “Feminist Politics,” 220 DIANE PRICE HERNDL, “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body,” 477 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 FEMINIST-THEORY ARCHEOLOGIES/GENEOLOGIES JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 ANNETTE KOLODNY, “Dancing through the Minefield,” 21 SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories,” 345 JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI, “Introduction” from Gender in African Women’s Writing, 113 ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON, “Integrating Disability,” 487 JOANNA RUSS, “Aesthetics,” 61 ELAINE SHOWALTER, “A Criticism of Our Own,” 92 BONNIE ZIMMERMAN, “What Has Never Been,” 40 FILM/TELEVISION LAURA MULVEY, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 432 ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN, “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence,” 514 FRENCH FEMINISM HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 416 JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories,” 345 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 ELAINE SHOWALTER, “A Criticism of Our Own,” 92 GAZE LAURA MULVEY, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 432 ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN, “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence,” 514 GYNOCRITICISM SANDRA M. GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR, “Infection in the Sentence,” 9 ELAINE SHOWALTER, “A Criticism of Our Own,” 92

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HISTORY GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 416 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 IDEOLOGY LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” 244 ANNETTE KOLODNY, “Dancing through the Minefield,” 21 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 BONNIE ZIMMERMAN, “What Has Never Been,” 40 IMPERIALISM/TOTALIZATION PAULA GUNN ALLEN, “Kochinnenako in Academe,” 284 JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI, “Introduction” from Gender in African Women’s Writing, 113 BIDDY MARTIN and CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, “Feminist Politics,” 220 SANGEETA RAY, “Introduction” from En-Gendering India, 390 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 INSTITUTIONS BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” 238 SANDRA M. GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR, “Infection in the Sentence,” 9 LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye,” 328 ANNETTE KOLODNY, “Dancing through the Minefield,” 21 JOANNA RUSS, “Aesthetics,” 61 ELAINE SHOWALTER, “A Criticism of Our Own,” 92 LESBIANISM GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 BIDDY MARTIN and CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, “Feminist Politics,” 220 BONNIE ZIMMERMAN, “What Has Never Been,” 40 MEN/MASCULINITY GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 JUDITH FETTERLEY, “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature,” 136 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me And My Shadow,” 314 MOTHERHOOD BARBARA JOHNSON, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 206 NATION JUDITH FETTERLEY, “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature,” 136 JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI, “Introduction” from Gender in African Women’s Writing, 113 SANGEETA RAY, “Introduction” from En-Gendering India, 390 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Gender Asymmetry,” 198 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365

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PERFORMATIVITY JUDITH BUTLER, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” 465 ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN, “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence,” 514 POSTCOLONIALISM JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI, “Introduction” from Gender in African Women’s Writing, 113 BIDDY MARTIN and CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, “Feminist Politics,” 220 SANGEETA RAY, “Introduction” from En-Gendering India, 390 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 PRACTICE CATHERINE BELSEY, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” 164 ANNETTE KOLODNY, “Dancing through the Minefield,” 21 PAUL LAUTER, “Caste, Class, and Canon,” 70 SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories,” 345 ELAINE SHOWALTER, “A Criticism of Our Own,” 92 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314 BONNIE ZIMMERMAN, “What Has Never Been,” 40 PSYCHOANALYSIS JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 LAURA MULVEY, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 432 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN, “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence,” 514 QUEER THEORY LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” 244 JUDITH BUTLER, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” 465 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 READING GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314 REPRESENTATION JUDITH FETTERLEY, “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature,” 136 ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON, “Integrating Disability,” 487 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 REPRODUCTION/REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS BARBARA JOHNSON, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 206 RHETORIC BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” 238 BARBARA JOHNSON, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 206

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SEXUALITY LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” 244 JUDITH BUTLER, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” 465 HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 416 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men, 181 SLAVE NARRATIVES HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 SPACE GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 SUBJECTIVITY/IDENTITY GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 303 CATHERINE BELSEY, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” 164 JUDITH FETTERLEY, “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature,” 136 SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories,”345 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 443 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 TEXTUALITY CATHERINE BELSEY, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” 164 JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction,” 146 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 VOICE BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” 238 LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye,” 328 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314 WOMEN’S LITERATURE LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” 244 BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” 238 SANDRA M. GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR, “Infection in the Sentence,” 9 JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI, “Introduction” from Gender in African Women’s Writing, 113 DIANE PRICE HERNDL, “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body,” 477 JOANNA RUSS, “Aesthetics,” 61 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts,” 365 WRITING HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 416 SANDRA M. GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR, “Infection in the Sentence,” 9 JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow,” 314

AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX

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AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX





















“Aesthetics” from How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), 61 Allen, Paula Gunn, 284 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 303 “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” (1986), 206 Belsey, Catherine, 164 Berlant, Lauren, 244 “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions” from Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999), 465 Butler, Judith, 465 “Caste, Class, and Canon” (1981/87), 70 Christian, Barbara, 238 Cixous, Hélène, 416 “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text” (1985), 164 “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence” from Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (2003), 514 “A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory” (1989), 92 “Dancing through the Minefield” (1980), 21 “The Father’s Seduction” from The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982), 146 “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature” (1993), 345 “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” (1986), 220 Fetterley, Judith, 136 “Four Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” from A Critique of Post-

colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), 365 Gallop, Jane, 146 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 487 “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles” from Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), 198 Gilbert, Sandra M., 9 Gubar, Susan, 9 “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism” (1990), 238 “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), 9 “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” (2002), 487 “Introduction” from Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), 181 “Introduction” from En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (2000), 390 “Introduction” from Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, Difference (1997), 113 “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature” from The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1977), 136 Johnson, Barbara, 206 Kauffman, Linda S., 328 “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian

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AUTHOR / TITLE INDEX





















Tale” from The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), 284 Kolodny, Annette, 21 “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness” from Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), 303 “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), 416 Lauter, Paul, 70 Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin, 345 “The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony, or an Infant Grifter Grows Up”(1992), 328

Ray, Sangeeta, 390 “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals” (2002), 477 Russ, Joanna, 61 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 181 Showalter, Elaine, 92 Spillers, Hortense J., 443 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 365 Tompkins, Jane, 314 “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” (2002), 244

Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana, 113 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), 443 Martin, Biddy, 220 “Me and My Shadow” (1989), 314 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 220 Mulvey, Laura, 432

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), 432

Price Herndl, Diane, 477

Zimmerman, Bonnie, 40

Warhol-Down, Robyn, 514 “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism” (1981), 40

PERMISSIONS

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PERMISSIONS





















The editors gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint essays from the following sources: Canons: Susan M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination; copyright © 1979 by Yale University Press; reprinted by permission. Annette Kolodny, “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism”; copyright © 1979 by Annette Kolodny, all rights reserved; originally published in Feminist Studies 6:1 (Spring 1980). Bonnie Zimmerman, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism,” originally published in Feminist Studies 7:3 (Fall 1981): 451–475; by permission of the publisher, Feminist Studies, Inc. Joanna Russ, “Aesthetics,” from How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Austin; University of Texas Press, 1983); copyright © 1983; reprinted by permission of the University of Texas Press. Paul Lauter, “Caste, Class, and Canon,” in A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); copyright © 1987 by Paul Lauter. Elaine Showalter, “A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory,” in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1989); reprinted by permission of the author. Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, “Introduction,” from Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Readings: Judith Fetterley, “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature,” from The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). Jane Gallop, “The Father’s Seduction,” from The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); copyright © 1982 by Jane Gallop; used by permission of the publisher. Catherine Belsey, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” in Feminist Criticism and Social Change, eds. J. Newton and D. Rosenfelt (London: Methuen, 1985). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Introduction” and “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles,” from Between Men: English Literature and Male

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Homosexual Desire; copyright © 1985 Columbia University Press; reprinted with permission of the publisher. Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation and Abortion.” Diacritics 16:1 (1986): 29–39; copyright © The Johns Hopkins University Press; reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” from Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Barbara Christian, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism” (1990). Lauren Berlant, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” from Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen Barber and David L. Clark (New York: Routledge, 2002). Histories: Paula Gunn Allen, “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale,” from The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); copyright © 1986, 1992 by Paula Gunn Allen; reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. Gloria Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards New Consciousness,” from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza; copyright © 1987, 1999 by Gloria Anzaldúa; reprinted by permission of Aunt Lute Books. www.auntlute.com. Jane Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1989). Linda S. Kauffman, “The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony, or an Infant Grifter Grows Up,” in American Feminist Thought at Century’s End: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992). Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature,” originally published in Feminist Studies 19:3 (Fall 1993): 571–595; by permission of the publisher, Feminist Studies, Inc. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Four Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” [“Literature,”], from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Sangeeta Ray, “Introduction,” in En-Gendering India; copyright © 2000 Duke University Press; all rights reserved; used by permission of the publisher. Bodies: Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1:4 (1975): 875–893; copyright © 1976 by The University of Chicago Press. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (1975): 6–18. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17:2 (1987): 64–81; copyright © The Johns Hopkins University Press; reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” from Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). Diane Price Herndl, “Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals,” from Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder et al., 2002; reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association of America. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” NWSA Journal 14:3 (2002): 1–32; copyright © 2002 by the National Women’s Studies Association Journal; reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Robyn Warhol-Down, “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence,” from Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2003).