New Women's Writing : Contextualising Fiction, Poetry and Philosophy [1 ed.] 9781527523401, 9781527508149

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New Women’s Writing

New Women’s Writing: Contextualising Fiction, Poetry and Philosophy Edited by

Subashish Bhattacharjee and Girindra Narayan Ray

New Women’s Writing: Contextualising Fiction, Poetry and Philosophy Edited by Subashish Bhattacharjee and Girindra Narayan Ray This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Subashish Bhattacharjee, Girindra Narayan Ray and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0814-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0814-9

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Subashish Bhattacharjee and Girindra Narayan Ray Women’s Poetry, First World War and Working Class Experience in British Munition Factories ..................................................................... 14 Argha Banerjee Atoms, Freud and Gender in Nature: The New Modern Woman Emerges in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ....................................... 30 Sharon Worley Otherness as Philosophy: A Consideration of Iris Murdoch’s Ethics and Aesthetics............................................................................................ 39 Girindra Narayan Ray Children of the Windrush and the Question of Identity ............................. 55 Camille Alexander “Free! Body and Soul Free!”: The Docile Female Body in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” .............................................................. 65 Kristin M. Distel Space as a Psychological Resource in Dorothy Parker's Short Stories ...... 79 Isabel López Cirugeda The Creative Elle in Colette’s Incomplete Autofiction Gigi ..................... 92 Irina Armianu (En)Gendering Travelogy in Lessing and Morrison ................................ 104 Arup K. Chatterjee

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Contents

“Who Am I?”: Between the Burden of the White House, Clutches of Political Agency and the Eagerness for Privacy in Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving ............................................................. 116 Samya Achiri Bestial Representations of Otherness in Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales ..... 130 Antonia Peroikou Sisterly Reflections: Betrayal and Abandonment in Reyna Grande’s Dancing with Butterflies .......................................................................... 142 Cristina Herrera A Grandmother’s Seduction: Narrative Slippage and Ethnic Othering in Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?” ................................................................... 161 Bi-ling Chen The Female Prometheus: Agency and the Gaze in Natasha Tretheway’s Bellocq’s Ophelia .................................................................................... 177 Jane Alberdeston Coralin My Waist, My Foot, My Breast: Patriarchal Definitions of Beauty and Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room .................................................... 191 Emine Gecgil Reading Lolita in Tehran, Crescent and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life: Toying with National and Ideological Hegemonies in the Middle East ..... 206 Siham Arfaoui Caste, Gender, and Violence: Reading Mahasweta Devi's Bayen and Draupadi ........................................................................................... 220 Arunima Ray Bridging the Binaries of Gender Construction in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Science Fiction ........................................................................................ 230 Pritika Nehra Jewish Hummingbirds and the Converted Voice: Bee Season’s Miriam from Novel to Screenplay to Film ........................................................... 243 Inbar Kaminsky About the Contributors ............................................................................ 262

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume of essays is the result of the sincere assistance and guidance of several academicians. The first mention should be made of Prof Geraldine Forbes, who patiently addressed queries regarding the chapters in the formative months (and later, years) of the volume. We also take this opportunity to thank our students, colleagues, friends and teachers at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Department of English, University of North Bengal, and Department of English, Coochbehar Panchanan Barma University, whose presence and aid has been instrumental in getting the essential motivation for the volume. The editorial staff of The Apollonian, who executed a particularly brilliant ‘Features’ section for the second issue of the first volume, which germinated the seeds that have grown into this volume. We would also like to thank the respective Editors of the journals for permission to re-publish the following essays: Samya Achiri’s “Who Am I?”: Between the Burden of the White House, Clutches of Political Agency and the Eagerness for Privacy in Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving, which appeared in the journal Forum for World Literature Studies (Vol. 7, No. 4, December, 2015). Bi-ling Chen’s A Grandmother’s Seduction: Narrative Slippage and Ethnic Othering in Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?”, which appeared in the journal Journal of Ethnic American Literature (2012). Pritika Nehra’s Bridging the Binaries of gender Construction in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Science Fiction, which appeared in the journal Creative Forum (Jan-Jun 2015, Special issue on Women’s Writing). Sharon Worley’s Atoms, Freud and Gender in Nature: The New Modern Woman Emerges in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which appeared in the journal The Apollonian (Vol. 1, Issue 2, December, 2014).

INTRODUCTION SUBASHISH BHATTACHARJEE AND GIRINDRA NARAYAN RAY

I Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements argued that “[most] of our women are not represented in the ‘standard’ reference books in the field” (Blain et al viii-ix). This statement has been echoed as recently as 2014 when Joanne Harris claimed that “‘[w]omen’s fiction’ is still a sub-category” (quoted in The Guardian). It has become progressively more difficult, with contemporary genre-bending, to identify subcategories that have gradually become defunct within the category of women’s writing. The above statement by Joanne Harris, among many others similarly poised, constitutes a part of a generous amount of vitriolic directed towards women’s writing. Commentators have been divided on their positions concerning the deletion of the sub-category of ‘women’s writing’. While critics of the sub-category such as Joanne Harris argue against the obsolete status of the nomenclature, others have argued in favour of such an appellation as necessary to distinguish the broad genre of women’s writing from works by their male counterparts. Dale Spender had stated quite accurately in his 1980 book Man Made Language: The English language has been literally man made and… it is still primarily under male control…. This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently, have ensured the invisibility or ‘other’ nature of females, and this primacy is perpetuated while women continue to use, unchanged, the language which we have inherited. (12)

The statement may still be said to hold currency when we look at the contemporary scenario despite apparent changes in the social and cultural outlook that have given precedence to women and their personalised mode of writing. The patriarchal bias in writing has been a mainstay not merely in

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Introduction

literary works that are decidedly serious or academic in nature but also equally or perhaps more noticeably, in popular literary modes. Despite the sharp increase in women writers over the past several decades, the literary output by these writers remains outside serious academic consideration, and consideration is given to a select group of writers who are considerably normative in the genres of sections that they represent. The eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries may have been witness to the upsurge of women adopting the pen, but the twentieth century served as the period when women opted for a more personalised, subjective utilisation of the pen, independent of the patriarchal bias and repressive manoeuvres that have haunted the genre of women’s writing for a considerable period of time. Considering the rather belligerent stance towards women’s writing for the greater part of the twentieth century, the resistance of women’s writing by women has not been equally regressive, as Joanna Russ has commented: “In considering literature written by women during the last few centuries in Europe and the United States, we don’t find the absolute prohibition on the writing of women qua women that has buried so much of the poetic and rhetorical tradition of black slave America” (6). The sweeping remark has been contested as fallacious, containing no indicator as to the ethnic and racial divisions which aggravate resistance to the writing by women in several cultures. More recent criticism has argued that ethnicity and race are past symptoms, as is class, and the present status of women's writing is hinged on a radicalization of the position that women can attain in a largely patriarchal field of creative writing (Zamora; Milne). Further changes in the social scenario have led to an increasing space for women's writing, giving voice to diverse ethnicities within the gender specificity of women’s writing. The shift had initially begun in the genre of ‘black women’s’ writing, and then gradually embraced across other ethnic and racial segments over the period of several decades, extending beyond Joanna Russ’s rather recent contention that cis white women’s writing has been normative towards the development of women’s writing as a category or a genre. The literary taxonomy of women’s writing, or ‘feminist literature’ as some critics have opted to term the genre, is a development that is independent of the social and political movement which came to prominence largely in the early twentieth century with its particular nomenclature. Women’s writing has consistently challenged patriarchal norms by the simple act of creation independent of male intervention, and whether this act is militant or not is relegated to a secondary debate. Simone de Beauvoir specified the role of the writing female vis-à-vis the passive woman demanding equality: “Much more interesting are the insurgent females

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who have challenged this unjust society; a literature of protest can engender sincere and powerful society” (718). Women’s writing may have the underpinnings of active resistance towards a patriarchal mode of writing but they are not specifically reactive. Rather, to borrow from the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the reaction is gradually displaced by an action that is creative and enterprising. This, elliptically, validates Beauvoir’s position despite the apparent contradiction—Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, or the Brontë sisters did not strive towards a militant assertion of identity through their writing, but the assertion was produced tacitly, questioning patriarchal literary hegemony through covert means. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita’s comments expand the ambit of the analysis to which women’s writing is subjected to. In the Introduction to the first volume of Women Writing in India they wrote that they “believe that a feminist literary history must map the play of forces in the imaginative worlds in which women wrote, and read their literary initiatives not as an endless repetition of present day rebellions or dreams of triumph, but as different attempts to engage with the force and the conflict of the multiple cross-cutting determinations of those worlds” (1991 26). Indeed, women’s writing has expanded beyond the rigmarole of conventional and archetypal analyses that relegate an oppositional and rebellious status of the genre. Tharu and Lalita further attacked the canonical representation of women’s writing in their Introduction to the second volume of Women Writing in India: Solitary figures such as Virginia Woolf or Rebecca West apart, the involvement with women’s writing or the idea of retrieving a lost tradition of women’s literature has actually developed only over the last twenty years and has been largely an American one. Since this is the work that is also the most easily available and most easily assimilable into existing critical paradigms, it has seemed very attractive to many feminist scholars and to sections of the literary establishment. (1993 16)

The cultural stagnation which pre-Modernist literature had experienced in terms of women's writing, towards the end of the nineteenth century, was more political than one could assuage with the aid of critical devices. For a surprisingly long period of time, English literature of women had to hark back to the legacy of the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and going further back, to Austen, Mary Shelley, and even Aphra Behn. During this period of extended absence of women writers, works by male writers, however, continued to thrive, and it was read as a sign of the age that showed a sustained diminution of women’s contribution to literature. The period may be said to reflect the

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Introduction

carcinogenic intensity of Luce Irigaray’s remark when she states that “[if] our cultures or societies become ossified, age, perish, it is because they are constructed from a fixed, one could say a dead, energy. The forms that structure them persist for a time, indeed proliferate like cancerous cells” (57). The return of women’s writing as part of the mainstream as well as in establishing itself firmly within the superscripted tenet of the avant-garde took place from the inception of Modernism onwards. This prevented further aggrandisement of a patriarchy-led literary practice while simultaneously situating itself at the juncture of widespread feminist upheavals. The thrust of women’s writing has gradually widened hereafter, including genres that were not explored previously, opening the field for the inclusion of writing by women of all cultural backgrounds, and preparing a scaffolding for the projection of women’s writing on a par with that of their male counterparts. Some of the earliest racially reformative writings by women were produced by the women of colour—the African American women who opted for writing as the means to escape their condition as well as to strengthen the position of double bind that they found themselves subjected to: In their writing, black women problematize the notion of community. Rather than paying it lip service, they scrutinize the community as it existed in the past in order to question whether or not and in what form it might exist in the future. Contemporary black women writers tend to associate the existence of community with their mothers’ generation, while they see themselves struggling and writing against the devastating influence of late capitalist society, particularly as it erodes the cultural identity of black people, replacing cultural production with commodity consumption. (Willis 214)

The contribution of the black women writers to the wider genre of women’s writing is immense. The racial and cultural inclusiveness that has been accepted as a common phenomenon in women’s writing would not have been a possibility without the intervention of these women writers. The growing acceptance of black women writers allowed for a proliferation of reactive writing which addressed historically embedded as well as immediate issues on an equal footing. The evolution and trajectory of black women’s writing, therefore, can be mapped comparatively with the space of postcolonial women’s writing. This comparison may have arbitrary conclusions but is essential towards the conceptualisation of the obstacles that both these sections had to encounter and overcome in order to assert themselves as not merely a part of an established genre, or genres, but a genre in itself, replete with its own intricacies.

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Women's writing, even when viewed from the reformist position that has given it a distinction amidst writing that is generally differentiated on the basis of other markers and qualifiers, has gradually started to establish itself as a centred projection of certain archetypes. This chiefly includes the notion of white heterosexual women being solely authorised to produce legitimate literature created by women. The notion is further fuelled by the widespread acknowledgment of this writer class in most major literary awards. Therefore, the historical and cultural shift propelled by the women who opted to write is responsible for building structures which resist the interference of other modes. The anti-canon thereby is assimilated into another canon of a particular section of women writing. Nancy Armstrong addresses this re-establishment of canon when she says that “[cultural] authority does not remain ‘decentered' for very long, if at all; it invariably forms new centers.” And, “[by] capturing such authority specifically on behalf of disenfranchised voices,” women's writing “simultaneously seized authority from women's traditional lack of economic and political power and handed over that power to groups who lacked the means to represent themselves” (115). It is necessary that women’s writing be separated from its heterosexual white middle-class woman bias. While the issue of race has been broached in the works of authors who have challenged the racial canon, the issue of sexuality has been largely uncontested in critical debates. However, the steady development of analyses building on the contribution of lesbian writers since the 1970s and the 80s is an indicator of the interrogative position that women writers have taken towards the representations of sexuality in and related to literary works. Susan Gubar’s statement at the turn of the millennium expressed the monumental change that lesbian women’s writing has undergone over the past four decades: In literature and criticism, lesbian writing has undergone a sort of renaissance from the seventies on. Not since the flowering of lesbian letters during the first few decades of the twentieth century has the vitality of lesbian creativity been so evident. Indeed, if by ‘lesbian literature and criticism’ we mean writing about and by publicly self-proclaimed homosexual women, the contemporary phenomenon remains unprecedented in English and American literary history—a beginning (naissance) rather than a return (renaissance). (45)

The contemporary period is not devoid of its prejudices against the positioning of women writers as prominent within their own genres. The genre of postmodern fiction, for one, is rife with such examples where male authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo or Cormac McCarthy are

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readily counted whereas women fictioneers are allotted secondary status. Maroula Joannou assesses this abject lacuna when she writes: The fact that women writers, with honourable exceptions such as Angela Carter and, … Jeanette Winterson, do not readily come to mind in connection with the innovative postmodern novel, and are not to be found in any significant numbers at the forefront of stylistic experimentation during this period, should not distract from the importance of the attempts of individual women to articulate an alternative to the androcentric discourse in literature. (10)

And the compartmentalisation of women as separate literary producers outside the norm of specific patriarchal literary genres is not limited to postmodern fiction or even to the genre of fiction. A more detailed study would have been able to assess the projection of women poets and playwrights and their systematic rejection from arbitrary canons of literature. This seclusion and rejection is the symptom of a greater malady, one which has persistently survived across centuries and that which has its roots strongly embedded also in the critical disregard that later women writers have often had to struggle with. Women’s writing has the natural precedent of biological distinction from men. This also forms the foundation for the concept of the écriture feminine. “An obvious way in which the content of women’s writing might be expected to differ from that of men’s would be by virtue of the experiences it records. Men’s and women’s biological experiences are different. Historically the differences have been emphasized and supplemented by marked differences in upbringing, education and pursuits” (Larrissy 102). Furthermore, while the biological differences have been acculturated in the female psyche, they have also been used as paradigms that were deconstructed to create newer and evolving forms of women’s writing. While early examples of women’s writing sought to portray the nature of relationship thus strained along lines of biology as may be evidenced in a work such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which attempted to address the issue of reproduction and procreation as an event that could possibly endow women with power, later and more contemporary writers have undertaken the task of challenging the predetermined nature of biological disposition, as can be seen in works such as the novels of Jeanette Winterson. The critical contentions presented in this book can possibly be induced a philosophical fervour through Toril Moi’s summarisation, in Sexual/Textual Politics, of the positions endorsed by Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous:

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For Kristeva […] there is a specific practice of writing that is itself ‘revolutionary', analogous to sexual and political transformation, and that by its very existence testifies to the possibility of transforming the symbolic order of orthodox society from the inside, whereas for Cixous, [woman] is wholly and physically present in her voice—and writing is no more than the extension of this self-identical prolongation of the speech act. The voice in each woman, moreover, is not only her own but springs from the deepest layers of her psyche: her own speech becomes the echo of the primeval song she once heard. (11; 112)

The positions which Kristeva and Cixous put forth attempt to break down the parochial conventions and structures that characterise writing. However, while Kristeva and Cixous are celebratory in their estimation of the powers of the women who write and the effect their writing produces, Elaine Showalter is cautiously optimist. Her primary argument is that women’s writing has been marginalised and therefore contains the trajectory of this marginalisation and repression. Showalter, in her 1981 essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” had stated: The dominant culture need not consider the muted, except to rail against ‘the woman's part’ in itself. Thus we need more subtle and supple accounts of influence, not just to explain women's writing but also to understand how men's writing has resisted the acknowledgment of female precursors. […] women's fiction can be read as a double-voiced discourse, containing a ‘dominant’ and a ‘muted’ story. (344)

Hélène Cixous further contends that the process of writing is a traversal of sexuality, stating that “[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 one and the other, not fixed in sequence of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another” (“Medusa” 254/46). The intervention with which Cixous and Kristeva, as much as Showalter, endow a potential theory of women’s writing is further strengthened with input from Deleuze and Guattari who write in A Thousand Plateaus: [W]riting should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. The rise of women in English novel writing has spared no man: even those who pass for the most virile, the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence and Miller, in their

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Introduction turn continually tap into and emit particles that enter the proximity or zone of indiscernibility of women. In writing, they become-women. (276)

Verena Conley, while discussing women’s writing in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s statements, makes an observation that interfaces with the contemporary shifts in women’s writing, one of becoming-woman even through the process of writing: The writer intersects with the philosopher on several points. […] To write oneself (out of painful situations) and to singularize through recourse to aesthetics and ethics, away from grammars of repression, were tantamount to engaging in a poetic revolution that would open the way to—the still modernist notion of—political revolution. Artist, more than theorists of all stripes, were felt to be endowed with ‘radar’ like antennae, more capable of ‘perceiving’ virtualities or structures-other. […] Becomings will be initiated primarily by women. Since man is called to the scene of castration more than woman and since he has more to lose than she in the present order of things, it will be easier for women to experiment with changes and, in the process, to bring about changes in men. (22-23; 25-26)

The attribution of this heightened role to literature and writing in the present volume as a zone of contest for female identity is because, to cite Barbara Johnson, “[it] can best be understood as the place where impasses can be kept open for examination, where questions can be guarded and not forced into premature validation of the available paradigms. Literature, that is, is not to be understood as a predetermined set of works but as a mode of cultural work, the work of giving-to-read those impossible contradictions that cannot yet be spoken” (13). The contradiction that women's writing presents have often been spoken (of) and dissected in popular and critical spheres, but much remains to be (done, and to be done with the proper concern about what is to be done) explored despite the steadily increasing number of such works.

II Argha Banerjee writes on the women poets of the First World War who worked in and narrated the experiences of the British munitions factories. The essay highlights writings by a class of women who have been largely neglected in the study of literature emerging from the World Wars. The poems by these women poets successfully bring forth the sense of social prejudice that often worked against the women working in these factories and also serve to show the social conditions from which the poets

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emerged. The essay looks into the works by a number of women poets to present a comprehensive picture of the phenomenon. Sharon Worley’s essay presents Virginia Woolf’s depiction of a feminist consciousness in her seminal work, To the Lighthouse (1927) as derived from and reflecting Sigmund Freud’s theory of the subconscious, modern physics and modern art. Woolf relies on all three areas in her analysis of gender role models and nature in the novel, to enlighten the aforementioned modern feminist consciousness of the reader through the literal deconstruction of society and nature in words and images. G.N. Ray’s essay “Otherness as Philosophy” is an exploration of Iris Murdoch’s philosophy that animates and gives depth to the question of the relation of ethics and aesthetics. Her importance is that she is one of the English pioneers who challenged the contemporary analytical philosophy with the new awareness of Otherness that happened to be the central focus of the later Continental philosophy. Otherness as a point of departure in the cognition of the Self also determines the realism of her art, which presumes a deeper relation between ethics and aesthetics. Camille Alexander’s essay bears on Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (2007), Vernella Fuller’s Going Back Home (2012) and Elizabeth Nunez’s Boundaries (2011) to show how the children of the post-Empire Windrush generation who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s to Caribbean parents in the U.K. struggled with identity formation and often sought to repatriate to the Caribbean to escape the increasing alienation that they were subjected to. Kristin M. Distel’s essay is an analysis of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” in its depiction of the home as a patriarchal power structure and the way in which domestic patriarchy regulates and limits the female bodily experience. The story, which operates on the premise of misinformation of the death of the protagonist’s husband, is an apt instance of the operability of the power structures in the sphere of the household. Isabel López Cirugeda’s essay looks at the spatial appropriation of New York City and Midtown Manhattan in the short stories of Dorothy Parker. The essay ties the various emotions of absent syncretism in Parker’s fiction to the geographical space of the city, filtering down to the microcosm of the house, the personal space that is a stage for domestic or subject-specific realisations. The essay shows how Dorothy Parker appropriates the city and the home for the portrayal of the psyche of the characters in her stories. Irina Armianu’s essay is a study of Colette’s incomplete autofiction, Gigi. Armianu establishes Colette within a larger frame of her contemporary French writers such as Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide,

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and intends to uncover her creative resources and their influences on French literature at the beginning of the twentieth-century Belle Époque. Arup K. Chatterjee writes on the issue of travelogy in selected works by Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison. The essay undertakes the task of creating a class of criticism that accords similar status to women’s travel writing as has been granted to that by men. By drawing on writing itself, and a writing that is inclusive of travelling, Chatterjee creates the space for a study of travelogy in the works by the two novelists. The essay looks at the writing by these women as inclusive of travel on a plane similar to the inclusion of sexual, economic and political relations of signs. Samya Achiri’s paper evaluates Nadine Gordimer’s novel, Occasion for Loving, to reflect on the impact of the apartheid on the white people of conscience. The minoritisation of these empathisers within a white minority in the country is played as the fulcrum against which their desire to be politically active and more involved is dependent on. Achiri uses a theoretical framework derived from Lacan, Bakhtin and Bhabha to demonstrate that after an arduous psychological journey, the female protagonist of the novel succeeds in constructing an identity of her own. While the previous essay highlights Angela Carter’s continued relevance and importance in the genre of the gothic, Antonia Peroikou looks at the figure of the non-human or the inhuman in her fairy tales. By presenting a reading of bestiality, from the theoretical perspective of animal studies, the essay reinvents some of the more obscure areas of possible intervention in Carter’s works. Cristina Herrera presents a study of award-winning Chicana author Reyna Grande’s critically acclaimed novel, Dancing with Butterflies. The essay analyses how the act of looking in the mirror and seeing oneself or another holds great significance when discussing the novel, with its multiple passages describing mirrors, and the metaphorical reference to the relationship between a pair of sisters whose lives are connected and shaped through Mexican folkloric dance. Bi-ling Chen's essay reads the “seductive” characterisation of the grandmother in Gish Jen's “Who's Irish?” The essay deconstructs the character's humour and practical sensibility which leads most readers of the short story to support her views. By creating a strong sense of Chinese identity in the grandmother, Gish Jen prepares the stage for an assimilative experience that the readers are susceptible to in the first-person. Jane Alberdeston Coralin presents a reading of Pulitzer-winning poet Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia where she seeks to return to the work of folding and unfolding to show how the new generation of Black

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women’s poetry continues its journey away from the dominant culture’s construct of Blackness. Emine Gecgil presents a reading of Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room and its study of sexual fetishism. The essay looks at the ways in which sexual fetishism works towards validating androcentric discourses of sexual practice. The essay serves to highlight the methods that are applied in alternate sexual practices and deviant methodologies in order to appropriate or re-appropriate the female figure and disable her autonomy over her own body. Siham Arfaoui presents a study of three literary works that question the national and ideological hegemonies of the Middle East. The novels in question are Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. The novels and collection of poems crisscross at the level of redrawing geopolitical and religio-sectarian conflicts in Iran, Iraq or in between. Arunima Ray’s essay examines the need for looking into the specificities of the problems faced by the gendered subaltern and examines the various relations of power that affect their lives at micro-levels and looks for the possible discourses of resistance that might emerge from these texts. Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Bayen’ and ‘Draupadi’ represent the subaltern space of India. While ‘Bayen’ is the story of a so-called untouchable community, ‘Draupadi’ represents a tribal community. Both the stories represent a woman protagonist fighting alone against larger and powerful forces. La Tanya L. Rogers’s essay reads the Black Surrogate character of Hester in Pulitzer-winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s play in the Blood (1999), which offers a scathing social commentary on identity, womanhood, and motherhood by revisiting Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). In Parks’s play, Hester, or LaNegrita (the Black) is a homeless mother of five children who makes her home under a bridge and inscribes the letter “A” in the dirt repeatedly. Parks' African American Hester encounters a series of characters, male and female, who offer her advice on abstinence while taking advantage of her sexually. Pritika Nehra writes on the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, whose works, while not presenting answers or alternatives to gender constructions, pose those gender questions which are otherwise never raised. She breaks binaries of ethnicity and gender in, as the essay argues, terms of content and performance in a holistic perspective. Inbar Kaminsky presents a study of transmedial evolution of Myla Goldberg’s novel Bee Season to its screenplay by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and subsequent film adaptation by the directors Scott McGehee and David

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Siegel. The alterations in the narrative by a woman and of a girl as it passes through the stages of adaptation are significant in the cueing transition of gender representations across multiple modes of media.

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. “What feminism did to novel studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory. Ed. Ellen Rooney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 99-118. Print. Blain, Virginia, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements (Eds.). The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990. N.p. Print. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Brighton: Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1981. 245-64. Print. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. Routledge Critical Thinkers. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Conley, Verena Andermatt. “Becoming-Woman Now.” Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 18-37. Print. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953. Print. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1987. Print. Flood, Alison. “Women’s fiction is a sign of a sexist book industry.” The Guardian. Web. Fri 16 May 2014. Gubar, Susan. Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Print. Irigaray, Luce. Sharing the World. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. Print. Johnson, Barbara. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Print. Joannou, Maroula. Contemporary Women’s Writing: From The Golden Notebook to The Color Purple. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print. Larrissy, Edward. “Poetry and Gender.” A Companion to TwentiethCentury Poetry. Ed. Neil Roberts. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 101-112. Print.

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Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. Second Edition. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Print. Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Eds. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. New Delhi: Pearson, 2007. 325-48. Print. Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Print. Tharu, Susie J. and K. Lalita. “Introduction.” Women Writing in India, Volume I: 600 B.C. to the Present. Eds. Susie J. Tharu and K. Lalita. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991. 1-18. Print. Tharu, Susie J. and K. Lalita. “Introduction.” Women Writing in India, Volume II: The Twentieth Century. Eds. Susie J. Tharu and K. Lalita. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1993. N.p. Print. Willis, Susan. “Black women writers: taking a critical perspective.” Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Eds. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn. Reprint. New York and London: Routledge, 1986. 211-37. Print.

WOMEN’S POETRY, FIRST WORLD WAR, AND WORKING-CLASS EXPERIENCE IN BRITISH MUNITION FACTORIES ARGHA BANERJEE

Munitions jobs for women were created by the male state and male industrial employers, because of the (male) war, and were permitted by the powerful, dominant male trade unions. Thus women workers’ status and experience as workers was overlaid with their status as women in a patriarchal society. (Woollacott 89)

Emily Kinnaird’s popular refrain: “Every girl in the fighting line/ Is willing to do or die,” (Kinnaird 162) sung by women cordite workers during their night shift at H.M. Factory Gretna, Scotland, symbolises the resilient spirit and deep involvement of British working women in manufacturing shells during the years of the First World War. Poetry, adaptations of popular tunes, jingles and lyrics were an integral part of women’s war labour in most of these shell factories. Focusing primarily on some of the factory and service newspapers, this essay tries to reconstruct the cultural impact of women’s work experience as evinced through evidence in verse written and published by working women. This large body of publications1 well documents women’s work experience in the shell factories, often in considerably great detail. Most of these poetic testimonies articulate working class women’s feelings and mood of the hour, besides documenting the general extent and nature of their work experience during the years of the First World War. In her analysis of “Working-Class Women’s Factory Newspapers,” Claire Culleton refers to these papers as ‘political manifestos’, as she argues most of them carry veiled voices of deep resentment and protest against victimisation of women workers through ‘unfair labour policies’ and other various forms of exploitation at the workplace: […] in their articulation of women’s wartime experience, the writers characteristically censure factories for unfair labour policies; they criticise the long hours and point to dangerous working conditions, hazardous materials, lacklustre facilities, and insensitive or cruel superintendents; they poke

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fun at the national rationing system to reveal its inadequacies; they wax eloquent on what seemed to some the dissolving class structure in Britain; they mourn the loss of co-workers and loved ones and condemn gender discrimination. It is this sense then that I argue that women’s factory and service newspapers were political manifestos. (Culleton 122)

At the outset, it is important to note that patriotism was not always the motivating force for most women munitions workers who queued up for shell work. Pecuniary concerns drove most of them from various parts of the country to enlist; especially as munitions wages were relatively higher as compared with other prevalent forms of labour. While for some women it was a starting point of their professional careers most others required the money to sustain their families in the absence of male earning members. The separation allowances for the male breadwinners were not received by all, and even those who received them often found it inadequate to maintain their families. Unlike a profession like nursing, which stayed in tune with the conventional gender stereotype, women’s involvement in shell making contributed a great deal to the cultural anxiety of the period. Hall Caine’s contemporary reflection on women’s involvement in the Woolwich arsenal work amply testifies to the initial cultural anxiety: “there is at first something so incongruous in the spectacle of women operating masses of powerful machinery… that for a moment, as you stand at the entrance, the sight is scarcely believable” (Caine 20). Caine’s initial astonishment is echoed by Mary Collins in “Women at Munitions Making,” where she questions the compatibility of the task of shell making with the inherent conventional feminine nature: Their hands should minister unto the flame of life, Their fingers guide The rosy teat, swelling with milk, To the eager mouth of the suckling babe Or smooth with tenderness, Softly and soothingly The heated brow of the ailing child... But now, Their hands, their fingers, Are coarsened in munitions factories... ‘Kill, Kill’. (Collins 32)

Collins’s anxiety is further echoed in a poem contributed by Marguerite E. M Steen to the May 1917 issue of The Bombshell magazine, the official organ of the NPF or the National Projectile Factory at Templeboro. The lyric entitled “‘In the Midst of Life’: On a visit to NPF” focuses on the intrinsic incompatibility of shell labour with female nature, as the poet

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wonders: “The ladies with their fair hands,/ Their light hands, their dear hands,/ the ladies with their small hands are now creating death!” (Steen 10) While the poem goes on to portray the nerve wrecking labour of women in the munitions factory, it also deplores the fact that their entire effort is directed towards death and destruction. The lyric asserts that such perseverance is irreconcilable with inherent female principles of love, life, and creation. In her discussion of women's shell labour, Newman argues that “no poem points out the irony that the munitions that killed workers on the Home Front were intended to kill Germans on the battlefield” (Newman 95). Steen’s lyric does underline the fact that shell labour is not only inimical to female nature but is also synonymous with the notion of death, be it anywhere on earth: “The dark wings, the long wings,/ The sweeping of the sure wings, the mighty wings of death!” (The Bombshell Vol. 1 No. 3 1917, 10) Ironically, Steen deliberately evokes maternal imagery in her short lyric, asserting that women’s ‘laboured breath’ (The Bombshell Vol. 1 No. 1 1917, 10) and pain has been channelled and redirected to celebrate the cause of death instead of creation, largely on the instigation of the patriarchal state. Such lyrical evidence further underlines the strands of ambivalence deeply rooted in women’s work experience during the years of the war. Beyond the intrinsic nature of the work, one of the most interesting features of women’s shell labour was the diverse conglomeration of class and ethnicity in the formation of the labour force. Largely inspired by the relatively higher wages, women labourers working in shell factories came from miscellaneous backgrounds. As Woollacott points out, “The women who made up this cohort were a mixture of ages, classes, sexualities, races, ethnicities, and regional and national origins and represented enormously varied standards of living, cultures, and political views” (Woollacott 37). Poetry also re-echoes this diverse involvement of women from various quarters of the British society, as this worker at the National Projectile Factory reflects: “In a factory I am working amid thousands of other girls,/ Projectiles roll around my feet; o’er head machinery whirls,/ There are tall girls and small girls, and girls with a pedigree,/ There are fat girls and lean girls, as any you may see,/ There are nice girls and nasty girls, and girls of high degrees,/ In fact there is every kind of girl in this large factory,/ With old girls and young girls who labour side by side” (The Bombshell Vol. 2 No. 9 1918, 50). By 1915, the state propaganda was targeted more towards recruitment from the middle-upper class British women into munitions work, as it was unanimously believed that such recruits would be relatively easier to dismiss from labour in case of changing circumstances of the war. It was also

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widely assumed that women from the working class in all probability were more likely to unite and resist sacking. The mixture of class at the workplace no doubt fostered a feeling of sisterhood among labourers from diverse backgrounds. However, social friction too was an inevitable feature of such a conglomeration, as Woollacott argues: Not all the dynamics operating among women munitions workers were amiable. One widespread dynamic was the tension, even hostility, generated when middle- and upper -class women, doing “their bit for the war effort,” mixed with working class women. When women of different classes rubbed shoulders in the dense, noisy, and often grimy atmosphere of munitions factories, they cooperated as necessary to facilitate the work, but antagonism thrived. (Woollacott 40)

Such antagonism is also echoed in verse, as working class women ventilated their occasional laxity in work: “But list, a spy is on the track, She thinks to catch us on the hop;/ I’d like to break her belly back,/ Or hit her whack, right on the top/ Of her not very shapely head/ The blighter, how I wish her dead” (Munitions N.p.). Irrespective of class friction, breaking into a new territory of work front was not an easy form of transition for most women. The shell labour was tough, monotonous, repetitive and exacting. To keep alive the spirit against heavy odds, especially to cheer themselves during the long tedium of night shifts, women munitions workers sang songs of the wartime popular culture. In addition, like the suffrage movement, they often adapted well-known tunes to suit and serve the purposes of the new lyrics they had composed to them. These lyrical adaptations served a variety of purposes for the labourers. Besides boosting solidarity it also aided in distinguishing workers in various sheds and shifts. They often fostered a new sense of identity to working women, infusing “a vivid awareness of the nature of munitions work and of the war at the front, as well as a desire to valorise their own role in it” (Woollacott 192). “The Girls with Yellow Hands,” a song from an explosives factory at Faversham in Kent testifies to the indefatigable mood of the hour: The boys are smiling though they rush against a barb’ed trench; The girls are smiling though destruction hovers o’er their bench; And when the soldiers sweep along through lines of shattered strands, Who helped them all to do their job? The girls with yellow hands. (Woollacott 193)

Some women workers were well aware of the short tenure of their wartime assignment, for them motivation for temporary employment came largely

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from conventional patriotism: “The day will come when the war is won,/ And work is finished for rifle and gun/ You will be proud of the work you’ve done, / In making shells” (Ibbotson 46). For most women, working in the munitions factory was a perilous task, fraught with various forms of dangers. Besides being obvious targets of German Goths and Giant Bomber air assaults, the job in itself was potentially hazardous. While flaunting their new lifestyle, working class women workers also voiced their concerns of sudden death which they feared would descend abruptly from nowhere: “We’re all here today, mate,/ Tomorrowperhaps dead,/ If Fate tumbles on us/ And blows up our shed” (Bedford 6). Factory papers, however, lauded the composure of most women workers in seeing through periods of raid alarm. As this declaration in Bombshell testifies: “the workers here are to be congratulated on their behaviour and self-control during the recent Air Raid warnings. Few can avoid experiencing some vague, uncanny feelingpartly excitement, partly anxietywhen a warning is given and the lights are dimmed or extinguished so that the suppression of anything in the nature of alarm is all the more praiseworthy” (The Bombshell Vol. 9 No. 1 1917, 15). A large number of women munitions workers who handled explosives while filling shells with lethal substances such as TNT (trinitrotoluene) and lethal gases or chemicals had to be extra cautious largely due to the hazardous nature of the job (Woollacott 35). During the years of the war “an unknowable number of women workers died in industry accidents, hundreds of other women workers died from toxic jaundice or TNT poisoning,” while “others suffered from black powder poisoning, or were poisoned by cordite ingestion, one of the most dangerous explosives handled by women, or died from protracted exposure to acid fumes, varnish, asbestos, gas and emery dust” (Culleton 75). In accordance with one study carried out at the Woolwich Arsenal, “37 percent of women shell fillers suffered from abdominal pain, nausea and constipation, 25 percent had skin problems, 36 percent suffered from depression and irritability”. The same study reports that in the period of the war “349 cases of TNT poisoning were reported with 109 deaths” (DeGroot 134). Words to certain factory songs often referred “specifically to working with TNT and its emblematic yellowing, presumably to arrogate whatever glamour was possible to a discoloration that must have been a social embarrassment as well as an indication of poisoning” (Woollacott 193). A song from the south of Scotland exemplifies how the workers strived hard to keep their wits intact while indulging in such dangerous labour in a cordite factory: “Give honour to the Gretna girls,…/ And when they are in the factory/ Midst the cordite and the smell,/ We’ll give three cheers for

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the Gretna girls/ And the others can come as well’ (Woollacott 193). Fear also prevailed over the chance of possible explosion at the workplace. Parodies reflecting on the women cordite workers’ relative affluent lifestyle also articulated such apprehensions: “Worthwhile, for tomorrow/ If I’m blown to the sky,/ I’ll have repaid mi wages/ In death—and pass by” (Bedford 6). Other working class contributions like “Through the Window” or “Ten Little Dornock Girls” also narrate apprehensions and dangers of working with ‘N/G’ (nitro-glycerine) and acid fumes: “Seven little Dornock girls did some N/G mix;/ One was overcome with fumes, And then there were six. […]/ Three little Dornock girls went to work quite new;/ The Acid fumes did smother one,/ And then there were two” (Culleton 130). Beyond the perilous nature of shell labour, women’s involvement in factory work also facilitated the proliferation of a unique work culture in most factories. Workers of a particular shift often organised concerts for their own entertainment or for injured soldiers in retreat. Besides this, they also participated in sports competitions (like football/hockey) or even in the more conventional hair length or hat-making contests. Workshops at Woolwich arsenal had their own songs to foster a sense of identity among the workers and further correlate them with the Tommy’s labour at the Front. This lyric published in Woolwich Pioneer (16 February 1917) relates the tireless efforts of women workers toiling in their night shift: 1 Way down in Shell Shop Two You’ll never find us blue We’re working night and day To keep the Huns away. 2 All we can think of tonight Are the shells all turning bright Hammers ringing, girls all singing And the shop seems bright. 3 To our worthy foreman here Give three good hearty cheers Our wounded heroes too We’re mighty proud of you. 4 And the boys who’re still out there Good luck be always their share And bring them all back Everyman Jack To their dear old folks at home. (Thom 154)

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Several poems by working-class women specifically addressed the extreme stress associated with the tedious night time labour. As “The Night Shift” testifies, women not only sang to relieve themselves from the monotony of wearisome labour, but indirectly, also complained of the undue exploitation and extreme stress associated with the task: “Sing a song of six inch shells/ Whizzing round and round,/ Four and twenty maidens/ Asleep upon the ground./ When the shop’s inspected/ These maidens do not shirk,/ Isn’t it’s dreadful thing/ To give them so much work?” (Shell Chippings 10) In spite of the work-related stress and exploitation, evidence in verse also provides a unique testimony of the rigorous competition between labourers working in various shifts of a factory. This published extract from “That Other ShiftO, I’m so Happy: ‘By “B” Shift’” carried by the Cardonald News narrates how female workers in a particular shift often raced against time to beat the production record of another shift and create a new record of shell production in the factory: The stampers gazed with eager eyes upon the weigher staid. Oh, beat that other shift, they cried, who have a record made. We don’t care what becomes of us if we can just surpass The 1506a total grand!the other shift did pass. The time is four, the work is hit, the sweat is running fast. 1303 the total now. ye gods! can they be passed?... The time is rushing quickly on towards the final hour, But beat that other shift we will, and quite above them tower.... 1510! The record broke! And happy we are all To know how well we answered our charge hand’s stirring call. (Cardonald News 3)

Beyond the competitive spirit, some women workers were related to their shell labour as compensatory for the loss of male members of the family. This is clearly evinced in a short lyric like “The Shell Works of Life”, where the female worker engenders her war labour while simultaneously honing her technical skills: “When you make a shell it resembles a man/ They’re both of them built on a similar plan,/ We’ll say you are born, that is where you began/ A ROUGH FORGING/ Some shells and men stray in the turning of Fate, And some don’t get centered and never go straight” (The Bombshell Vol. 9 No. 1 1917, 12). Continuing to explore the worker’s relation with a shell, on analogous lines of a relationship between a man and a woman, this working-class evidence in verse touches on various aspects of shell labour: forging, boring, blending, screwing and polishing down to the final inspection of the finished product by the superintendent.

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Work in the shell factory often implied adherence to a strict code of discipline and a deep internalisation of stringent factory rules and regulations for women labourers. Accordingly, women munitions workers created various lyrical codes in order to boost their work culture. The lyrical adaptation in “The Munitions Alphabet” underlines the pressing need to adhere to the exacting discipline and conduct of factory labour: “A’s the Arrival at seven on the tick/ B is the Bustle top get to work quick,/ C is the Chatter that goes on at lunch/ D stands for Dot, who is one of the bunch/ E might be Envie, or Edith you see/ F is the Fun and Frolic at ten” (Shell Chippings 4). The factory workshop which introduced and familiarised women labourers with technical skills also created its own version of the alphabets: “A is the Army of fair Munitioneers/ B is the Belting, from which we all keep clear./ C stands for Calipers or Chuck if you will/ D is the Drilling machine, also the Drill/ E is the Engine that turns on the lathe/ F is the Foreman so steady and grave” (Shell Chippings 4). While these lyrical codes were created to boost and inculcate a stern sense of discipline, poetic exercises also document deep resentment against the stifling nature of factory imposed rules and regulations on working class women. One such amusing lyric published in Munitions: Being Some Verses and Sketches from a War Worker’s Factory testifies how one ‘Miss E Gower’ compensates for the over-discipline in factory premises during her leisure: “Here’s a lightning sketch of Miss E Gower,/ Engaged in smoking her ‘‘tenth in an hour,’’/ ‘‘Smoking’s forbidden on duty’’, they say,/ So she smokes all her leisure time away” (Munitions N.p.). Other lyrics also testify to the pervasive fear that plagued most women munitions labourers at work: “We’d love a smoke, but dare not do it,/ For if found out we’d surely rue it;/ We sit and sigh and pine for heat,/ Or something really good to drink,/ For on night shifts we cannot eat,/And sometimes hardly time to think” (Munitions N.p.). In such tight exacting circumstances, women shell workers eagerly looked forward to their customary short breaks from work: “‘Cease Work’ the buzzing noise is stopped,/ machines are now at rest,/ the girls go rushing down to lunch,/ Which they enjoy with zest. /Making the most of one short hour,/ Then back to do their best” (Shell Chippings 7). Employing women automatically implied that they would be docile at the workplace and would incur fewer expenses for the state. However, in actual circumstances, it was witnessed that the “owners frequently shared with the male unionists a patriarchal resistance to the presence of women” (Woollacott 94). Such a resistance on certain occasions also took the ugly form of ‘male sabotage’ against their female colleagues. As Culleton points out: “many women make reference to stolen tools, and point the

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finger at scornful male co-workers who sabotaged their work by nailing shut the women's workstations, for example, pouring oil over tools, or refusing to answer questions about the job” (Culleton 112). A parodic adaptation of Kipling’s “If” reveals the quiet hostility women workers encountered at their workplace from their male colleagues: “If you can bear to have your tools all taken/ Each day, and never stop to curse the thief/ If when your tubs want emptying, you’re forsaken/ By men, who prefer a plate of beef” (Culleton 112). Among other forms of discrimination, working class women also complain of their petitions being dismissed by male authorities without commensurate scrutiny: “The Super received it […]/ He merely perused it/ Then quietly abused it./ And- pushed it through the window” (Culleton 129). This male resistance was further complicated for most employers as they had to provide additional amenities for women labourers in the factory. These included separate toilet provisions and amenities like washing, changing, canteen and first aid, all of which were sanctioned by the Ministry of the Munitions. Once these provisions were provided, the male labourers too benefited a lot from them. Women workers who were employed in providing these facilities in the factory also engaged in hard labour. “A Song of Templeboro” appreciates such labour in different quarters of the factory: “It’s sung by a maid demure and staid of the staff of the Works Canteen O!/ It’s a song of plates and pies and porkas when they work there’s no time for talkthey know there are women behind the gunwho are helping fathers and brothers and sons” (The Bombshell May 1917, Vol. 2 No. 2, 10). The canteen, as various poetic evidence affirms, was a veritable spot for relaxation and social exchange to which most munitions workers looked forward to during the exacting labour. Several poems, including parodies, came to written on several of these facilities provided by the factory, most of which boosted the relative congeniality and hospitality of the workplace for women workers. In fact, as The Ministry of Munitions Journal (December 1916-November 1917) informs, the welfare facilities provided in the shell factories were lauded by Madame Hamon who headed the contingent of French Women Munitions makers’ visit to England during the war (The Ministry of Munitions Journal 52). An interesting feature of women’s shell labour was the issue of their factory earnings and the deep curiosity it generated in contemporary British society. Poetry testifies to the social lacunae generated due to the extensive involvement of working class women in shell making. For the middle and upper classes, the mass scale access of so many working class women labourers into munitions factories implied that household aid was excruciatingly difficult to come by during the years of the war. Grumbling

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about ‘‘the servant problem” which was already an integral feature of bourgeois life in Britain, was further exacerbated by the war as it dwindled the supply of servants with most of them opting for better-paid jobs in munitions factories. Nina Macdonald’s “Sing a Song of War-Time” lightheartedly articulates the problem: “Mummie does the house-work,/ Can’t get any maid,/ Gone to make munitions,/ ‘Cause they’re better paid” (Reilly 69). The social inconvenience that this situation generated perhaps also contributed to a proliferating social outrage with tales of working-class comfort circulating in the society. Tales about women workers buying expensive fur coats, silk dresses, elaborate jewellery, and gramophones; drinking excessively and eating delicacies infiltrated upper echelons of the society. A lyric published in the Bombshell embodies the underlying deep scorn and anger of the hour: “Think not that she has trousers on/ Her little tongue for once was bound,/ Her eyes were pools of charming light,/ Hard times ahead you scarce would mind/ With all your new found wealth./ New uncrowned queen of women kind,/ Munition maid” (The Bombshell Vol. 2 No. 9 1918, 13). However, the most eloquent depiction of this cultural anxiety was captured by Madeline Ida Bedford in her famous parodied version of a munitions worker’s evident pride in her new lifestyle: Earning high wages? Yus, Five quid a week. A woman, too, mind you, I calls it dim sweet. Ye’are asking some questions But bless yer, here goes: I spend the whole racket On good times and clothes. … Afraid! Are yer kidding? With money to spend! Years back I wore tatters, Now—silk stockings, mi friend! I’ve bracelets and jewellery, Rings envied by friends; A sergeant to swank with, And something to lend. I drive out in taxis, Do theatres in style. And this is mi verdict It is jolly worthwhile. (Bedford 6)

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Women’s Poetry, First World War, and Working-Class Experience

During the years of the war, working women in general often found themselves chided for what the larger society branded as profligacy on their part. Irrespective of the source and nature of their earnings, they were frequently censured and reproached for what the society thought to be excessive self-indulgence in adverse circumstances of the war. Given the exacting nature of shell labour and the much deserved newfound financial independence, it was quite natural for women workers to take due pride in their earnings and nascent financial independence. As DeGroot points out, “when Vera Brittain’s parents complained about the shortage of servants and good chocolate, they would not have been consoled by the fact that the poor had never enjoyed those luxuries, war or not” (DeGroot 209). For working class women, patriotism or wartime labour also implied (like their male working class counterpart) shielding a social system, which had not given them their due. As Emily Orr’s “Recruit from the Slums” testifies, the working class had a lot of pent-up anger towards the state: “She gave us little she taught us less,/ And why we were born we could hardly guess/ Till we felt the surge of battle press/ And looked the foe in the face” (Reilly 87). Amidst such circumstances the natural joy of collecting wages, following hard labour is well exemplified in a lyric like “Pay Day”: “Look and applaud the splendid way/ We fall in for our weekly pay/ ‘Hurry there, please,’ the foreman cry,/ As ticket in hand, we pass them by./ Eagerly each her ticket shows,/ the money in hand from the office goes,/ Home ward bound, or, right away,/ Some buy silk stockings with their pay” (Munitions N.p.). Lyrics published in the Shell Magazine, a factory newspaper of Leeds, also discuss workers’ attitudes towards their wages. In one such lyric, “Making Shells”, the writer addresses her colleagues and advises them to be reconciled with their wages by comparing them with those of the Tommies serving at the Front: “If you sometimes think your rate of pay/ Is not sufficient, just quietly say/ ‘Tommy for one and two pence a day/ Is risking shells’” (Shell Magazine 46). However, contrary to the public opinion of wasteful extravagance, many munitions workers invested their money in buying war bonds and helping the cause of the state. The factory papers often issued appeals for such contribution in verse: “Now by the memory of our gallant dead,/ And by our hopes of peace through victory won,/ Lend of your substance, let it not be said/ You left your part undone./ Lend all and gladly. If this a bitter strife/ May so by one brief hour be sooner stayed,/ Then is your offering spent to ransom life,/ A thousand times repaid” (The Bombshell Vol. 1 No. 1 March 1917, 8). Poetry records how working women responded to such appeals and generously donated to the cause: “We’re working on munitions to help win the war,/ Now England needs more money, so has called on us once more;/ Right

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gladly would we aid her by giving of our own,/ That’s why we are so busy putting money in War Loan/ So that our gallant fighting men can with conviction say/ “Our women tried to aid us every possible way’” (Munitions N.p.). Besides exemplifying to the diverse nature of women’s work experience in shell factories, the most interesting feature of the majority of these factory newspapers and magazines lay in the large number of parodies they carried. The most popular ones were several versions of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” (including a Canteen version) or nursery rhymes like “Ten Little Indians”, “Sing a Song of Six Pence”, “The House that Jack Built” or Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. In an incisive and extensive analysis of some of these parodies, Claire Culleton explores how revelatory these adaptations are in portraying the victimisation and discrimination of women workers at their workplace. The various versions of these parodies testify to the grit and endurance of the working-class women’s labour: “If you last the Shift of eight long hours/ At night and never turn a hair ‘pro tem.’/ You’re a success, andall the mighty powers/ Will say you’re just the Forewoman for them” (Culleton 112). Beyond such resilience, some parodies also tend to dilute the erroneous preconceived notions and myths of involving women in the skilled labour force during the war. A parody of Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” carried by the WAAC Magazine (3 January 1919), derides an MP who had earlier proclaimed that more than fifty women are likely to be required to compensate for the job carried out by of a single male labourer (Culleton 115). Most of these parodies, as it has been argued, have a crucial cultural validity, revealing a lot about working class women's feelings, emotions, values, and concerns. Working-class women also had valid reasons behind their choice of particular poems for adaptations. For instance ‘the hoodwinking of innocent young oysters’ in “The Walrus and Carpenter” easily aided them to portray the initial civilian frenzy and the deep sense of betrayal thousands of working class women felt, on being recruited and then made redundant following demobilization of troops. Post-war redundancy of munitions labourers undermined “the integrity and intensity” (Culleton 115) and passion of most of these workers. The deep political awareness of working class women about their rights is clearly evinced in the fact that most of these parodies served as veiled forms of protests, an assertion of their rights and grievances at their workplace. Often these parodies were written to arouse and exhort political awareness among fellow workers: Each issue instructed its working class readership on what Murphy (Paul Murphy) calls ‘the proper thought and action.’ Importantly working-class parodists drew upon and exploited a number of recognizably middle -and

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Women’s Poetry, First World War, and Working-Class Experience high-brow texts, texts normally introduced to a culture through what Louis Althusser has called its ideological state apparatuseschurches, schools, the mediaand that reproduce and uphold dominant class ideologies. To instruct their readers on the proper thought and action, women writers and editors relied on a constellation of nascent literary techniques that would come to define modernist literatureirony, irresolution, politicism, anxiety, self-reflexive commentary, juxtaposition and allusion, to name a few— and focused their wit and class consciousness on reopening beloved classics. (Culleton 122)

Pointing at the ‘refreshingly literary’ nature of the working-class parodies, Culleton highlights how women workers toiling in factories, in spite of being ‘minimally educated’ were able to imbibe an ‘allusive literacy’ that aided them to adapt rhymes and other classic texts to convey their own political message (Culleton 118-120). Benefiting from their early school reading of poetry and supplementing it from their exposure to public libraries during the years of the war, working-class women were desperate to voice their views and concerns. Behind all these renderings and adaptations, was also the deep despair and apprehension that their wartime efforts might go unacknowledged when the war story was narrated later. The toil of munitions labourers, though occasionally acknowledged, didn’t really do justice to the extensive form of labour women engaged in during the time. The usual laudatory messages like the one carried by Daily Express (19 August 1918) were generally perfunctory by nature: “Where are the girls of the Arsenal? Working night and day; Wearing the roses off their cheeks/ For precious little pay. […] If it were not for the munition lasses, Where would the Empire be?” A general undertone of despair also rings through most workers’ testimonies and reflections on shell labour, especially ones written on the brink of the termination of the war. Cecil Walton’s reflection in the souvenir booklet of Cardonald National Projectile Factory, Glasgow, fails to conceal the underlying void that ‘soon it will be but a memory’: Our work in the war is done. We have answered the call of the troops for ammunition, and the task which was given us, and in which we set out with such determination, has been accomplished. Soon it will be but a memory. But there will ever remain with us the knowledge that while it was not out to fightwe worked. (Cardonald National Projectile Factory Souvenir Booklet 24)

It was an excruciatingly difficult task, especially for most working-class women to dissociate themselves from their work experience upon demobilisation of the troops. Some workers found it difficult to forget the various

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bondings they formed at the workplace. “Dear Isobel” (a lyric ‘suggested on bidding goodbye to a beautiful Irish girl, on her leaving the N.P.F, Cardonald, for her home in Ireland’) captures the cohesiveness and close bonding workers shared in these factories: “The hour has come when thou must go,/ With sad regret must say farewell;/ When thou must brave the deadly wave,/ And leave the band, dear Isobel!/ What happy days were spent, when we/ Together turned the war-like shell/ Thou’rt gone! Perchance, I’ll see no more/ Thy sunny smile, dear Isobel!” (Cardonald News Vol. 2 No 2, 3) In spite of being aware of the short tenure of their assignments, most working women found it extremely difficult to give up their jobs, especially after experiencing the financial independence and the accompanying self-respect they generated even though it was for a brief span of time. Evidences in oral history also testify to this deep sense of despair. As one of the workers, Amy Elizabeth May reflected on her assignment: “I cried me eyes out when I leftthat was the sort of life I led” (Culleton 133). Anna Smith’s reflection in verse is symbolic of the deep emotional void women workers faced on being dismissed from their jobs: Never, Dornock, never more Shall I hear they hooter roar: The Hun has fled, and Peace has come. The Factory Works have ceased to hum. And I must seek for work afar More suited now to Peace than war. But where’er I go, I’ll always mind The friends I’ve met, both true and kind. No more we’ll be searched by the Bobby. No more khaki trousers we’ll wear, No more will be breathe in the Acid, That rose in great fumes in the air ‘No more!’ ‘No more!’ (Dornock Souvenir Magazine)

According to critical opinion, such evidence in women’s verse forms the female counterpart of the male trench experience. Culleton argues that the haunting spectacle of her work experience, would continue to torment her: “litany of the memories she’ll be haunted bythe constant searches at work, the corrosive smell of the acid, the ill-fitting trousers and overallsin a particularly female version of shell shock, a kind of horror experienced only by women in the arsenals and one articulated time and time again in women’s factory newspapers” (Culleton 134). Such testimonies in verse in factory papers not only portray the female version of camaraderie

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and horror but also desperately convey an intense passionate desire to narrate feelings and emotions and reach out to the future generation of readers. For the reader too, the experience is a revelatory one: “reading women’s factory newspapers now […] we recover those muted messages stashed in the hollow nooks of shell packaging, lost to the recesses of time, and recover historically vital working class voices” (Culleton 134).

Notes 1

Publications such as WAAC Magazine, WRNS Magazine (published by the Women’s Royal Naval Service), Cardonald News (published by workers at the National Filling Factory in Glasgow), The Georgetown Gazette (published by workers at the Scottish Filling Factory in Glasgow), Shell Chippings, A ‘Six Eight’ Munition Magazine (an anniversary souvenir of women’s work in the Bootle munition factory), Home Service Corps Review, Carry On: The Armstrong Munition Workers Christmas Magazine, The Clincher: The House Journal of Castle Mills, Bombshell: The Official Organ of the NPF (National Projectile Factory), Templeboro, The Patriotic Gazette, The C.R.O., and The Ladies Field all carried diverse forms of verse testifying the wide gamut of experiences women encountered in their war labour.

Works Cited Bedford, Madeline Ida. “Munition Wages.” The Young Captain: Fragments of War and Love. London: Erskine Macdonald, 1917. Print. The Bombshell, Vol. 1. No. 1 March 1917. Print. The Bombshell, Vol. 1, No. 3, May 1917. Print. The Bombshell, Vol. 2, No. 9, Nov 1917. Print The Bombshell, Vol. 9, No. 2, Nov 1918. Print. Caine, Hall. Our Girls: Their Work for the War. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1916. Print. Cardonald News, Vol. 2. No. 2, P. 3, Docu. Ref.: Mun VII/39 Imperial War Museum. London. Print. Collins, Mary. “Women at Munitions Making.” In Branches Unto the Sea. London: Erskine Macdonald, 1916. Print. Culleton, Claire. Working-Class Culture, Women and Britain 1914-1921. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Print. DeGroot, Gerard. Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War. London and New York: Longman, 1996. Print. Dornock Souvenir Magazine. Print.

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Ibbotson, A.H. “Making Shells.” The Shell Magazine: An Original Souvenir by Employees of the National Ordinance Factory No 1 Newlay, Leeds. Print. Imperial War Museum Sound archive, Item SR 684, Reel 4. Kinnaird, Emily. Reminiscences [of the YMCA]. London: John Murray, 1925. Print. Munitions: Being Some Verses and Sketches from a War Workers’ Factory, ‘Somewhere in England’, August 1917. Print. Munitions: Cardonald National Projectile Factory Near Glasgow, 19151919, Souvenir booklet published by private subscription at the Factory, January 1919. Print. Newman, Viv. Women’s Poetry of the First World War: Songs of Wartime Lives. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Essex, 2004. Print. Reilly, Catherine (Ed.). Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War. London: Virago Press, 1981. Print. Shell Chippings. Reprint. The Imperial War Museum. Print. The Ministry of Munitions Journal, December 1916-November 1917, Nos. 1-12. Print. Thom, Deborah, Nice Girls Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998. Print. Woollacott, Angela. On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994. Print.

ATOMS, FREUD AND GENDER IN NATURE: THE NEW MODERN WOMAN EMERGES IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE SHARON WORLEY

The fragmentation of the material world, shown through associative streams of imagery, mirrors that of the social structure as it is represented in To the Lighthouse through the characters. Scholars have remarked on the associative stream of consciousness patterns in Woolf's prose that mirror those of her literary contemporaries, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Abstraction in modern art movements form a parallel with literary modernism, and also reflect the influence of modern physics through the breakdown of matter into movements of atoms and energy. Woolf's scientific approach encompasses both modern physics, which measures waves of light, water, and sound, as well as the uncharted territory of the Freudian subconscious. By juxtaposing the social interactions of her characters, who suggest the normalcy of middle-class life, with associative streams of imagery, based on the elements of water, wind, and fire, the author appeals to the reader's subconscious in her articulation of the fragmentation of both society and nature. In the modernist consciousness of the early twentieth-century, this fragmentation of imagery in both art and literature parallels modern scientific discoveries which seek to uncover the natural laws governing civilization and nature. The character, Lily Briscoe, is the composite of Woolf, an author, and her sister, Vanessa Bell, an artist, who emerges as both a feminist and a modern woman in relinquishing traditional gender role models in favor of forging new paths towards feminist liberation. Taken collectively Woolf, the omniscient narrator, and Briscoe, the feminist artist, represent the author/artist-observer who dissects society and nature in search of new modern alternatives. The portrait of the artist that emerges in To the Lighthouse is that of a dispassionate and objective observer of the ebb and flow of life’s moments, landmarks, and momentary sensations. In this work, Woolf’s feminist implications are stated subliminally through the associative imagery she concocts.

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This poses a dilemma for women prior to the feminist movement of the 1970s and employment equality. Woolf does not articulate the political and moral implications of her philosophy until after women win the right to suffrage in Britain in 1928 with her publication of “A Room of One’s One” (1929). In the absence of a cogent political feminist agenda referencing equal rights and women’s suffrage, Woolf’s novel is inspired by intellectual cross-currents forming the modernist consciousness. In writing drafts of her essay, “A Room of One’s One,” Woolf addresses the issue of gender and civilization in terms similar to those outlined by Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontents: [I] {one} can think [back] through [my] ones mothers, as through [my] ones fathers; [I can think] one can think of [civilization] creating as the [inheritors of]{as a part} civilisation; or as an alien … when I walked down Whitehall, {there had been} a distinct break in my consciousness; [had] From being the natural inheritor of civilization, its statues, its government buildings, its triumphal arches, I had suddenly become an alien, a critic: &{as if I had thought back through a different universe to a woman in a tree; who had denied that this civilization was any of her doing}. (Women and Fiction 27)

Christine Froula observes that this passage demonstrates the transition from the gender pronoun “she” to the universal “one,” Woolf evades the gender analysis of Freud which suggests that women evolve or devolve in response to their fear of nature, while men evolve by conquering their fear of nature. In choosing the pronoun “one” for the title of the essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf seeks to “take claim to civilization,” rather than becoming alienated from it (16-17). In conquering the forces of nature in a literary genre, Woolf turned to modern physics which appeared to deconstruct the natural elements on which civilization and its Freudian drives were founded. In her article, “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World,” Louise Westling writes, Woolf “integrated the radical ontological and epistemological perspectives suggested by quantum physics” (855). Einstein’s theories, which were well known among the generation of intellectuals of the 1920s, suggested a new rhetoric to Woolf, who sought to achieve “a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all of the traces of the minds [sic] passage through the world; & achieve in the end, some kind of whole made of shivering fragments” (A Passionate Apprentice 393). More recently, Paul Brown has argued that Einstein affirmed Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen’s theory that “the boundaries of consciousness were fixed” (41):

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Atoms, Freud and Gender in Nature In To the Lighthouse, Woolf depicts a relative world but also directly interrogates the issues of objectivity and realism that interested her father and that Einstein spent the remainder of his career trying to prove. Woolf's exploration of the fuzzy boundaries between subjects and objects coincides with the quantum physical understanding of a holistic universe. (40)

Woolf projected her feelings, and those of her characters, onto nature like a romantic poet, but analyzed them like a modern scientist. Following the departure of her close friend Vita Sackville-West, Woolf contemplates her feelings in terms of dissipating atmospheric effects and confides in her diary on 8 February 1926: Of a dim November fog; the lights dulled & damped. I walked towards the sound of a barrel organ in Marchmont Street. But this will disperse; then I shall want her, clearly & distinctly. Then not—& so on. One wants to finish sentences. One wants that atmosphere … to me so rosy & calm… She taps so many sources of life … sitting on the floor this evening in the gaslight … the invigoration of again beginning my novel … All these fountains play on my being & intermingle. (Women and Fiction 57)

Woolf's lesbian feelings towards her friend found full expression in her feminist impulses and desire to deconstruct traditional gender roles in society. Her modern consciousness, which integrated an awareness of modern science and modern art with literary theory, allowed Woolf to effectively create tangential visual and verbal realms of reality and fantasy where traditional gendered social obligations recede like the rhythms of light, water, and atmosphere to reveal new possibilities from the eclectic decaying layers of civilization. The intersection of psychology and gender in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is apparent in her study of character archetypes and revision of gender roles. Woolf, however, claimed not to have studied Freud despite the fact that she and her husband, Leonard Woolf, became the psychoanalyst’s English publisher. She acknowledged having “glanced” at the proofs, but insisted that her knowledge was purely superficial and her application of his techniques “instinctive” (Broughton 152). In fact, as Panethea Broughton has shown, Woolf’s knowledge of Freud was filtered through her relationship with Roger Fry, who continuously confided his interpretation of Freud in his letters to Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell (155). Woolf quoted extracts from these letters in writing her biography of Fry (Roger Fry 188, 196). On March 11, 1919, for example, Fry wrote to Bell that his “reading of Freud would amuse you by its extreme indecency. Nearly everything from painting to book collecting is explained as a mere outcome of anal-eroticism” (Sutton 448; Broughton 155). While Woolf is

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not believed to have read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) until she was writing Fry’s biography in 1939, she clearly shared some of Freud’s ideas which she learned through her association with Fry while she was writing To the Lighthouse. Freud defines the “ocean feeling” that some people experience as something “limitless, boundless and eternal” which “is a feeling of an indissoluble connection, of belonging inseparably to the world as a whole” (2). Freud’s dissection and analysis of society’s motivating drives and instincts inspired Woolf’s literary dissection of social role models as portrayed through the characters of the Ramsays onto whom she projected her parents’ personalities. Woolf, however, rejected Freud’s claim that instinct was stronger than reason and was the primary building block of civilization. On the other hand, according to Broughton, Woolf agreed that the “conscience is an internalization of external authority necessary for repressing civilized man’s libidinous and aggressive instincts” (156). According to Nicky Platt, “debate in Bloomsbury circles during the mid-1920s appears to have been especially stimulated by psychoanalytic theories, and in particular the challenge they threw down to artists’s sense of their own worth and vision” (158). The artists resented Freud’s claim that their artistic impulses implicated them as neurotics and sexual perverts. As a result of her association with the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf became acquainted with the art criticism of Fry and his essay, “The Artist and Psycho-Analysis” (1924). The scientific approach to art which this essay explores influenced Woolf’s portrayal of the artist’s approach to traditional social role models as a response to the ‘psycho-analytic physics’ of the natural world. According to Fry, Freud analyzes the Bohemian artist in contradistinction with the successful bourgeoisie artist who sublimates his unsatisfied libido in the creation of fantasy (“The Artist and Psycho-Analysis” 358). The Bohemian artist rejects social responsibility and the primitive taboos which gave rise to the social custom of marriage. Fry also references Freud’s theory of language as evidence that “all human activities … have their ultimate origins in some part of the purely animal and instinctive life of our earliest ancestors” (352). Fry concurs with Freud on the most basic level that art arises from biological origins and social rivalry, and that its primary use is to convey feelings. This preoccupation with the instinctive element of science suggests that art be used scientifically as an exploratory venue. Fry affirmed the modernist view that by creating images, the artist or author, references an associative stream of feelings associated with those images so that “we shall get from the contemplation of the form the echo of all the feelings

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belonging to the associated objects” (355). The connection between civilization and art is important because it contains the nascence of human values and the building block of social structures. By analyzing and referencing these codes contained within her associative figurative imagery, the artist or author can delve into the human psyche in order to re-evaluate and reorder society. From the perspective of modern feminism, this is an essential activity. It not only liberates the feminist author, Woolf, who seeks to exorcise the memory of her parents who have died but also opens up new vistas for future generations of feminists who dare to renounce traditional social gender roles in favour of modernism. Woolf’s introduction to modern art began in 1910 with Fry’s exhibition of Post-Impressionism at the Grafton Galleries. According to Fry, in his essay “The Post-Impressionists” (1910), modernism emerges in art with the Impressionist, Claude Monet, who “changed his severe, closely constructed style for one in which the shifting, elusive aspects of nature were accentuated” (83). Paul Cezanne, the Post-Impressionist, drew upon this aspect of style while emphasizing design and architectural effects comparable to primitive art (83). John Hawley Robert notes the correlation between the abstraction of form in art and the simplification of characterization in Woolf’s novels, stating that she attempted to “do in the novel what Picasso and Cezanne did in art.” In the absence of traditional plot structures, “human relationships form a design … or composition in which individual personalities give way to an agreement among formal parts.” He also notes that the character, Lily Briscoe’s “ideas about art are identical with those of Roger Fry” (835). More recently, Jonathan Quick argues that the modernist style in art was a major influence on Woolf’s development. By 1924, according to Quick, she engages in a rational analysis which presents her characters as liberated and modern as a result of her recognition that “human consciousness,” like modern art, had changed (548). By viewing Woolf’s fragmentation and formal analysis of the artist and her relationship to traditional social constructs as the tandem result of Freudian theory and modernist formalism in art and physics, a theory of the subconscious in art and literature emerges where Woolf seeks to reveal the underlying structure of social obligations while breaking them apart to reveal new modern feminist alternatives. Seeking to find meaning in life through the aesthetic pleasures of transitory, fleeting moments, Woolf’s protagonist, Lily Briscoe, is an observer who recognizes that the dismantlement of social constructs and their responsibilities in the modern world is rewarded with aesthetic and intellectual pleasures as well as the achievements of artists and writers. While Woolf’s sister, Vanessa,

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conformed to social expectations by marrying and having a child, Woolf resisted these social responsibilities. Delving into the Freudian subconscious realm of social origins and sexual taboos, Woolf’s portrayal of the characters based on their parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, is also an act of scientific analysis, in which she reveals the origins of the social institution of marriage, while seeking to exorcise it of its necessary conformity in the modern world. Woolf uses symbolism in To the Lighthouse to contrast nature with the works of civilization, and specifically, men. The sea is contrasted with the phallic Freudian symbol of the lighthouse, while the tree in Lily Briscoe’s painting represents the organic family tree and the artist’s choice to reject nature’s subservient gendered role. Faced with the prospects for a gender neutral society and full equality, Lily Briscoe focuses on the tree as a symbol of her emerging yet androgynous gender equality. Through her contemplation of the passage of time and the ageing process, as portrayed through the lives of the Ramsays, Briscoe realizes that she is emerging as an independent woman and artist in a man’s world. By the end of the novel, Lily Briscoe arrives at the correct placement of the tree in the centre of her painting, and at the same time realizes that she does not need a man to complete her life or her identity, while Mr. Ramsay, whose character is based on Woolf’s father, the academic national biographer, Leslie Stephen, cannot get past ‘Q’, or queen and matriarchy, in the alphabet (37). This poses a new problem in a society dominated by a patriarchal social structure. It requires the feminist to deconstruct and restructure society. She has to rethink the problems of industry and nature while nurturing future generations. The shifting modern world offers new solutions for changes in the social structure. This modernism can be expressed in modern art with its dissolving forms. It also approximates the fragmentation of society and new discoveries in quantum physics, in which the natural world is broken down into waves and atoms. Finding the place of the modern woman among the debris of the past is the new purpose of the feminist. She forestalls marriage and children to establish her own identity and career. The prose of To the Lighthouse reveals the dissipation of nineteenthcentury century social constructs by making analogies with the waves and atoms of modern physics. Social interactions among characters in the novel are juxtaposed against temporary shifts of matter represented by the elements of wind, water, and fire in which atoms coalesce into patterns like waves for a brief time, before breaking apart to congeal in other shifting designs.

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Mr. Ramsay represents the husband and male gender who has been the gardener of the world. He is “sensible, just” (69). He also outlives his wife. Together, they tend the garden, mend the greenhouse and raise the next generation. As divorce becomes a centrepiece of modern life, Woolf examines its basis in primordial origins. Here again, Freud and Fry, are her inspiration. In modern psychology, the imprint of the family social structure was regarded as the most important influence on the psychological development of the human personality. In her diary, Woolf writes about her development of her parents’ characters within the novel. The patriarchal role of her father was the centrepiece in which she portrayed him “sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf 18-19). Placed at the centre of the social structure, Woolf deconstructs his authority and patriarchy. In the modern world, women do not need men as providers or defenders. But what is more interesting, is that according to contemporary scientific theories, she reveals this theorem for the reader’s subconscious to intuit amid the literal fragmentation of modern atoms and currents harnessed by modern technology. It is only within traditional gendered roles that Mrs. Ramsay is able to take on an authoritative role. She is like a queen descending upon her court when she holds a dinner party (82). She places herself in the role of the impresario who is responsible for both nurturing and entertaining her guests. The “beef, the bay leaf, the wine” form aesthetic currents of matter in fluids which parallel other actions such as the family of rooks whose black wings “cut into scimitar shapes” as they beat “out, out, out” (83) into the waves of air. Conversations also follow these patterns. Coffee is “that liquid the English call coffee.” Butter and cream are also corrupted by the “English dairy system” about which Mrs. Ramsay speaks emphatically with “warmth and eloquence.” Fire is another element which mimics human conversation, and which leaps from “tuft to tuft of furze,” while her children and husband laugh (105). Inspired by the self-reflexive examples of her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, the characters Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay act out traditional bourgeoisie roles. Throughout the novel, Woolf reflects upon life's memories which are constructed as a series of fleeting and disconnected moments. The act of dining is an important landmark in middle-class social constructs which transition the reader from the primitive problems of famine to the civilized world of social class and etiquette. However, as modern society emerges, the rules of etiquette will not be broken “for the Queen of England or the Empress of Mexico” (82), even in sarcasm. Despite her children’s praises, Mrs. Ramsay fears she is a failure when she

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discovers that her life has no real meaning and she no longer loves her husband. Lights symbolize the significance of coming together as a community. The house is lit up for the guests and the illumination can be seen from outside. It represents hospitality. When Mrs. Ramsay acts the part of the hostess at the dinner party, she is “like some queen, who finding her people gathered in the hall, looks down upon them … and acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion” (84-85). The dinner is the basis of the community which establishes a “pecking order” in the social status of her guests. The dinner, consisting of Boeuf en Daube is the centrepiece of her life’s work and creative endeavours. She arranges her guests about the table and serves them soup. As a group, the guests come together, but without aesthetic beauty. Adjectives like “merging, flowing and creating” suggest the creative role that Mrs. Ramsay plays in bringing the guests together. It is a rhythm, flux and flows comparable to the waves of the ocean, and forms a parallel with another descriptive series: “listening…, sheltering and fostering” (86). Isolated and alone like “a weak flame guarded by a newspaper,” the guests lack the context of a cohesive whole or social group. Mrs. Ramsay’s task is to facilitate conversation and interaction among her guests as well as feed them. She becomes, in the capacity of the hostess, a creator in Woolf's concept of the universe which lacks concrete material solidity. Within the passage of time, humans, like atoms formed of particles of dust, are suspended in fluid and transported through the waves. These elements are interspersed like symphonic movements within the broader structure of nature’s elements: the wind and waves. “The nights are now full of wind and destruction” which causes the trees to bend and break, while leaves and branches are scattered across the lawn (132) foreshadowing Mrs. Ramsay’s death. These are the elements which are reflected on the human soul and mark the passage of hours until death forces us to return to the earth’s nucleus and Freud’s ocean of life. Both Woolf, the omniscient narrator, and Briscoe the artist, emerge from this literary forge to construct new possibilities. The synthesis of modern science with modern art and literature facilitates the conquest of past and opens new horizons for future feminists. Woolf’s treatment of nature suggests that as a woman she was forced into a subservient gendered role, unable to fully join the modern world with its scientific discoveries and harnessing of natural forces by technological innovations. Instead, she forges a path for future generations of feminists who bravely confront the forces of nature and dare to leave their own footprints in the sand.

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Works Cited Broughton, Panthea Reid. “Virginia is Anal: Speculations on Virginia Woolf’s Writing “Roger Fry” and reading Sigmund Freud.” Journal of Modern Literature. 14 (1) (Summer 1987): 151-157. Brown, Robert Tolliver. “Relativity, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness in To the Lighthouse.” Journal of Modern Literature. 32.3 (2009): 3962. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1929. Buckinghamshire, UK: Chrysoma Associates, Ltd., 2000-2005. Web. 24 April 2014. Retrieved from: http://www2.winchester.ac.uk/edstudies/courses/level%20two%20sem %20two/Freud-Civil-Disc.pdf Fry, Roger. A Roger Fry Reader. Ed. Christopher Reed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print. Platt, Nicky. “When Freud Gets Useful: Retaining the Commonplace in Virginia Woolf’s Pointz Hall.” Woolf Studies Annual. 16 (2010): 15574. Quick, Jonathan R. “Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism.” The Massachusetts Review. 26 (4) (Winter 1985): 547-70. Robert, John Hawley. “‘Vision and Design’ in Virginia Woolf.” PMLA XLIV (September 1946): 835-47. Sutton, Denys. Letters of Roger Fry. London: Chatto and Wyndus, 1972. Print. Westling, Louise. “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World.” New Literary History. 30 (4). Case Studies. (1999): 855-75. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Vol. 3 1925-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Print. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Print. —. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals of Virginia Woolf, 18971909. Ed. Mitchell Leaska. New York: Hogarth Press, 1990. Print. —. Roger Fry. London: Hogarth Press, 1940. Print. —. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Print. —. Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of “A Room of One’s Own”. Ed. S.P. Rosenbaum. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1992. Print.

OTHERNESS AS PHILOSOPHY: A CONSIDERATION OF IRIS MURDOCH’S ETHICS AND AESTHETICS GIRINDRA NARAYAN RAY

Murdoch’s preoccupation as a philosopher and a writer is the twentieth-century human condition and what philosophy has made of it. The twentieth-century individual is alienated. For him, Murdoch says, God, Reason, Society, Improvement and the Soul all are being quietly wheeled off. He is frightened and alone. He “finds his religious and metaphysical background so impoverished that he is in some danger of being left with nothing of inherent value except will-power itself” (Murdoch, “Existentialists and Mystics”, 172). But philosophy, Murdoch laments, makes a virtue of this situation. The individual is looked upon as the “lonely brave man”, trying to be “cheerfully godless”. Solipsism is exalted by invoking a vocabulary of will, action, sincerity and freedom. Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum” crystallizes this situation of radical subjectivism which through Kant reaches the culmination in the existentialists. Descartes’s metaphor is one of dualism and of violent antagonism: “the subject facing the object in a kind of hidden antagonism” (Barrett 180). Murdoch takes issue with this kind of conceptualization which in its false assertion of self and fails to tackle the question of value, reality, and freedom. Commenting on the scenario, she observes: We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity […] We have bought the liberal theory (of personality) as it stands, because we wished to encourage people to think of themselves as free, at the cost of surrendering the background. (“Against Dryness” 222)

She laments that there is a void in the present-day moral philosophy which is still Cartesian and ego-centric. We need instead a moral philoso-

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phy in which the concept of “love” can once again be made central, and which would give us back our lost vision of reality, relationship, and personality. These are, indeed, interrelated, and in her moral philosophy, she formulates a conception of personality congruent with her vision of reality and relationship. So far as her vision of reality and relationship is concerned, she projects it in terms of her idea of love as its basic element. Here echoes of the “I-Thou” relation as articulated by Martin Buber or of the question of the Other, or “duties towards others,” as raised by Simone Weil (Weil 174), are unmistakable, showing her departure from the prevailing analytical tradition of philosophy. However, as a prelude to expounding her own philosophical position, she starts by examining this tradition critically. Murdoch focuses on the prevalent picture of human personality as “free,” “lonely,” and “self-contained” individual. In Anglo-Saxon philosophy, she observes, this anthropology is the heritage from Hume and Kant. She argues that from Hume through Bertrand Russell, with friendly help from mathematical logic and science, “we derive the idea that reality is finally a quantity of material atoms and that significant discourse must relate itself directly or indirectly to reality so conceived” (“Against Dryness” 219-20). This picture divests the individual of the “inner life” or the “substantial self,” as Murdoch has termed it. Whatever inner life it concedes is identifiable only through public concepts based on overt behaviour. Another such image of man “as a free rational will” originates with Kant and flows through Bentham and Mill to the present age. The metaphysical background having disappeared and the deities like Reason, Science and History having failed, the individual is seen as “alone”. But with the assertion of will, he himself becomes God, the Kantian man-god whose “proper name is Lucifer” (Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” 80). This Luciferian man is attractive but misleading. As Murdoch explains, “offspring of the age of science,” he is “confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe” (ibid.). Courage is his virtue and will is the essential centre of his self and the creator of value. Stuart Hampshire is the doughty champion of this picture of man as rational and totally free: “He is morally speaking monarch of all he surveys and totally responsible for his actions. Nothing transcends him” (“Against Dryness” 220). The Hampshire man, also the man of the behaviourists, utilitarians, and existentialists in varying degrees, is “an object moving among other objects in a continual flow of intuition into action. Touch and movement, not vision, should supply our metaphors” (“The Idea of Perfection” 4). This picture gives little importance to the “inner

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life” that Murdoch speaks of. The “real” for Hampshire, Murdoch points out, is something public, open to the observers, and the inner world is only parasitic upon it. Man’s being is seen as his “overtly choosing will,” the essential centre of the self. Morality is an expression of this will, and the fundamental virtue is sincerity. Analytical philosophy represented by the later works of Wittgenstein alters the approach only marginally: “The individual is pictured as solitary. There is no transcendent reality, there are no degrees of freedom […]. Certain dramas, more Hegelian in character, are of course enacted within the soul; but the isolation of the will remains. Hence angoisse” (“Against Dryness” 211). Murdoch challenges this contemporary philosophy that exalts will, choice and sincerity but ignores sin and love. It can certainly inspire action, but it seems to do so, Murdoch says, by a sort of romantic provocation rather than by its truth. Its very metaphor of will breeds only fantasy which is “an imagined inflation of the self”. Kant himself wants to find something clean and pure outside the mass of the selfish empirical psyche, but he looks in the wrong place and “his enquiry led him back again into the self, now pictured as angelic, and inside this angel-self his followers have tended to remain” (“The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” 83). From this Murdoch rightly concludes that “our picture of ourselves has become too grand, we have isolated, and identified ourselves with, an unrealistic conception of will, we have lost the vision of a reality separate from ourselves, and we have no adequate conception of original sin” (“On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” 47). What, therefore, stands in the way of “the vision of reality separate from ourselves” is our fantasy that thrives on a “fat relentless ego,” defended , not curbed, by contemporary philosophies in the name of will. The age-old problem for moral philosophy centres around this ego and the techniques for its defeat. In her plea for a realistic ethics, Murdoch invokes the authority of Freud because it is he who presents “a realistic and detailed picture” of this ego as a system of quasi-mechanical energy, relentlessly looking after itself. The chief task of moral philosophy is, therefore, to suggest the means of purification and reorientation of this ego so that the true vision of reality outside one's narrow self is possible. Murdoch opposes her concepts of “substantial self” and “idea of perfection” against the “isolated will” of the empiricists and existentialists. In the absence of such a positive conception of the soul as a substantial and continually developing mechanism of attachments, Murdoch says, the freedom that the philosophers of will speak of degenerates into mere self-assertion and right action into some sort of ad hoc utilitarianism. Her ethical realism posits, therefore, a process of continual “unselfing” or annulling of “will” as a

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prerequisite to achieving the objectivity to cognize Others or reality outside oneself. For her, this gives rise to the true vision of reality, which is itself moral, because it teaches us to discover the autonomous reality of the Other without “being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self” (“On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” 65). Freedom, too, is conceived as the attainment of this vision. Murdoch defines its nature, in contrast to the empiricists and existentialists, as “not the sudden jumping of the isolated will in and out of an impersonal logical complex”, but as “a function of the progressive attempt to see a particular object clearly” (“The idea of Perfection” 23). Thus Murdoch’s metaphor of vision in determining her ethics premises a process of perfection through the dialogics of the Self and the Other. In Murdoch’s philosophical oeuvre there is no reference to the French philosophers like Levinas or Derrida with whom continental philosophy attained revolutionary dimensions in terms of the radicalization they inaugurated through such concepts as “otherness,” “alterity” and “difference”. Identity was reconceptualized in terms of difference and the self through a reorientation towards the Other. That an intellectual exchange between them did not take place, does not in any way take away from her relevance and importance in what is later known as the postmodern age of thought and culture. She never used the word “postmodern” either, but in her critique of the prevalent analytical and empiricist philosophy she has surely anticipated much of it and much of what Levinas as the philosopher of alterity has said at length later in the sixties of the last century. Levinas, too, starts by critiquing Western philosophy which he terms as “ontology” that offers primacy to the “Ego” or the “Self” or the “Same” as Levinas calls it following Plato. The domain of the Same remains ontological one in the sense that it becomes what it is by subsuming the Other, its alterity and particularity. As Simon Critchley sums up, “The ontological event that defines and dominates the philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger, for Levinas, consists in suppressing or reducing all forms of otherness by transmuting their alterity into the Same” (Critchley 5-6). His book Totality and Infinity published in 1961 is a resistance against this totalizing/totalitarian gesture of the Same or for that matter the Western Logos. Ethics, for Levinas, consists in this very persistent resistance against the totalitarianism of the Same. Ethics, therefore, is critique, or what Critchley calls “the critical mise en question of the liberty, spontaneity, and cognitive enterprise of the ego that seeks to reduce all otherness to itself” (Critchley 5). The ethical, in other words, is the location of a point of alterity, or what Levinas also calls ‘exteriority’ (extériorité), that cannot be reduced to the Same. This exteriority is named “face” by Levinas and is defined as “the way in which the other [l’Autre] presents himself, exceed-

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ing the idea of the other in me” (Levinas 43). Like Murdoch, Levinas, too, accords primacy to the ethical, that is the primacy of the interhuman relationship, “an irreducible structure upon which all the other structures rest” (Levinas 79). Thus Murdoch’s contemporary relevance comes to the fore when she is placed against this scenario of the continental philosophy's concern with which she has so much of commonality. She is, of course, wedded to old phrases like “substantial self” which contemporary discursivity rejects. Similarly disavowed is the idea of “unity” that she foregrounds. But she strikes a balance in the prevailing situation of either absolute “unity” in the Self or the Same as referred to above or the absolute disjunction premised in the contemporary discursivity. She would show how entities like self and other, art and morality, freedom and necessity are separate and yet complementary, and when the other-centred approach is adopted, how it can presuppose “open-endedness,” “hospitality” and “morality”. In this context, one would remember the caveat that Derrida issued, as he said: “Pure unity or pure multiplicity—when there is only totality or unity and when there is only multiplicity or disassociation—is a symptom of death” (Derrida quoted in Caputo 106). Murdoch robustly propounds her other-centred approach and yet foregrounds unity which remains ever open to the Other. This she proposes to carry on through the cultivation of a virtue that suppresses the self and prepares for the imaginative apprehension of the other outside oneself. Love, according to her, is that virtue which occasions this process of “unselfing,” a process that enriches the self itself through a cognition of the other. John Bayley also means something similar when he says that love unites us to reveal “the difference between us” (Bayley 7). Or, as Lawrence puts it, through love we are “burnt apart into separate clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness” (Lawrence 28). Thus she places love against will, attention against fantasy in her system and affirms with great conviction that if the emphasis is on will, the result is Angst, but if on love, the result is freedom and right action on the part of the subject. This concept of love is also central to the aesthetics of Murdoch. It is an author’s love for his characters, “a delight in their independent existence as other people … a respect for their freedom” (Bayley 7). Thus love, art, and morals, for Murdoch, collaborate in relating us with the good, the real and the beautiful by piercing the veil of selfish consciousness: “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness” (“Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” 93). This is what Murdoch calls her monism to which she is

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temperamentally inclined, and this is clearly her realism in both ethics and aesthetics. She rounds it off with a criticism of Kant and Hegel. The metaphor of vision, so central to her, is unimportant to Kant for whom “virtue is not knowledge of anything; it is rather an ability to impose rational order. We respect others, not as particular eccentric individual, but as coequal bearers of universal reason” (“The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” 248). According to Murdoch, Kant’s limitation is his fear of history, his fear of the particular. What he prescribes is the universal use of reason which is the locus of freedom. But it is an empty freedom, demanding an impossibly total perceptual comprehension of nature. Hegel, too, abhors the contingent, the particular, but he humanizes the demand of the Kantian reason, and his individual attains a total understanding of a given historical social reality. Unlike Kant, he, therefore, pictures virtue in terms of knowledge. But in the Hegelian universe, there is only one being, “the whole which cannot allow anything outside itself and which struggles to realize all that is apparently other” (“The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”). As a result, there is no “tragic freedom” in Murdoch’s sense, a concept which she relates to her concept of love. It is conceived as an exercise of the imagination in an unreconciled conflict of dissimilar beings. It belonged to the Greeks, lost now, especially when the neo-Kantian man dominates the scene. Murdoch, of course, refers to Kant’s concept of the Achtung, the only emotion conceded by Kant, the emotion in the face of the sublime or a respect for the moral law. But the Kantian Achtung, she argues, degenerates into the latter-day Angst, a kind of fright, not freedom, that the neo-Kantian will feels in the presence of another personality, not under its immediate control. Contra Kant and Hegel, clearly, Murdoch accepts the particularity of the individual. For her, virtue is freedom, knowledge, recognition of the Other. This is what she has called the “tragic freedom,” “tragic because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves,” and “freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness” (“The Sublime and the Good” 52). If love for Murdoch is the discovery of reality, the reality of the Other, and morality inheres there, then it is no less so for art either. She is quite emphatic about it as she observes: Art and morals are, with certain provisos … one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the extremely difficult

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realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (ibid. 51)

She also speaks of “prayer,” a form of love, seeking grace in order to overcome empirical limitations of personality; of “attention” which she borrows from Simone Weil to mean attention to reality away from the self. The opposite of love, prayer, attention, imagination or realism is fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images, the sources of false consolation and the enemy of both art and morals. It prevents discovery of the world and the individual and hence cuts one off from morality and freedom. It is this sense of realism that conflates Murdoch’s ethics and aesthetics and clashes with Kant’s. The shortcomings of Kant’s aesthetics are, according to Murdoch, the same as the shortcomings of his ethics. His aesthetics is built mainly on his theory of the beautiful which is “the experience of a conceptless harmony between the imagination and the understanding”. Art for him “as the production of the beautiful is not a matter of discovering or imparting truths—it is rather the production of a certain kind of quasi-thing” (“The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” 248). Kant conceives art on the analogy of a fairly small perceptual object, selfcontained, strictly purposeless, yet with an air of purpose, existing for its own sake. Freedom is not involved: “In art we enjoy an immediate intuitive inexplicable understanding of a unique quasi-sensible object … freedom is not involved, since reason is not in play” (ibid. 249). Nor is morality involved, since it is a sort of play, not an activity of the reason. This aesthetics gives rise to what is later called art’s autonomy upheld through movements like formalism and symbolism. So if his ethics is responsible for the rise of the free, lonely, existentialist modern man, then his aesthetics is equally responsible for the rise of formalism in its lopsided autotelic development. Kant, however, treats beauty as a symbol of the good. But here, too, he gives an advantage to the natural over artistic beauty, especially in its contentless and unintellectualized purity. Gadamer would react by pointing out that art’s “definiteness is by no means a fetter for the mind, but in fact opens up the area in which freedom operates in the play of our mental faculties” (Gadamer 47). Murdoch who cherishes high goals for art would charge that Kant is afraid of the particular and that he is suspicious of beauty’s possible lapse into charm if concept entered. His aesthetics, therefore, remains transcendental in terms of the beautiful, while his art was ready only to concede production of a certain kind of quasi-thing as an analogy of the free rational act: “It is the construction of something clean, free, empty, self-contained, not contaminated by the messiness of emotion,

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desire, or personal eccentricity” (“The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” 249). In contrast, Murdoch brings in the theory of the imagination that promises to hold in unity the real and the ideal, almost as compellingly as did Schelling by way of reviving neo-Platonism: “Art is vision or intellectual intellection. Both the philosopher and the artist penetrate into the essence of the universe, the absolute” (Wellek 75). Murdoch builds her aesthetics on Platonic ideas but by revitalizing the imagination, thereby, as Daniel Majdiak points out, being “linked with the spirit of Romanticism” (Majdiak 359). She, however, has remained all the time sharply critical of its Kantian brand which generates demonic fantasy. As she observes, Kant’s theory of the sublime had in it the possibility of a concept of the imagination. But his focus has remained the formlessness of nature rather than “the vast spectacle of humanity” and its “unutterable particularity”. However, the mistrust of art in contrast to beauty is as old as Plato and is still being debated. Murdoch argues both against and through Kant and Plato to defend the unique realism of art. If Kant’s mistrust of art is due to concepts that enter it, Plato’s mistrust issues basically from the same reason but his phrasing leads to other implications. He refers to the devious egoism of the human soul which makes use of art as a source of fantasy and consolation. That is why it is more illusory than revelatory of the truth. This situation of imprisonment in illusions is exemplified by Plato’s Cave myth which at the same time symbolizes the process of purification that must be initiated in order to see the truth. Escape from the Cave and approach to the good by looking at the “Sun” itself entails a progressive discarding of the relatively false goods, of hypothesis, images and shadows. Plato is of the opinion that this process cannot be so easily commandeered by human art. He prefers rather dialectic to effect such a change and would prefer natural beauty over art as the spiritual agent to initiate such an escape: Art gives magically induced satisfaction to the lower part of the soul, and defaces beauty by mixing it with personal sorcery. Beauty gives us an immediate image of good desire, the desire for goodness and the desire for truth. (The Fire and the Sun 45)

Murdoch fully agrees with Plato here. She also considers that the escape spoken of by Plato is convincing both via the theory of Forms and his moral psychology. She seems satisfied with Plato’s ontological argument as to why one should have the desire for the good and joy. His conception of Eros provides the answer. Identified as sexual love and transformed sexual energy, it remains “a principle which connects the commonest human desire to the highest morality and to the pattern of divine creativity in

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the universe” (The Fire and the Sun 76). This desire takes the form of a yearning to create in and through beauty which may appear now as sexual love, now as love of fame, now as love of wisdom. As a critical Platonist, Murdoch defends Plato on these very arguments and conceptions which also constitute her own province both as a philosopher and as an artist. The Cave myth that symbolizes a passage from illusion to reality through a process of purification is, indeed, very central to Murdoch’s own system. She also shares Plato’s charge against art’s inherent unreliability as a way to reality. But she defends art against Plato on the very grounds on which he extols dialectic and natural beauty. She draws on Plato’s vision but makes use of Kant’s qualified position as a clue, to begin with: “Kant, though suspicious of beauty because of its possible lapse into charm, was prepared to treat it as a symbol of the good … and could not art at least be so regarded, even if we take Plato’s objections seriously?” (ibid. 77) Murdoch is confident about the value of good art. She could refute the charge of art’s unreliableness by pointing to the existence of the great works of art. But she has other reasons. Great art, she says, can be on the same level as natural beauty if it is free from the possessive human egoism and fantasy. The more it is so, the more contingent it is, approaching Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose,” or Plato’s ideal Form. That great art achieves this level is even accepted by Kant and Plato, indirectly but indubitably, in what they say about its genesis. Plato’s reference to inspiration (when poets are not their empirical selves) and Kant’s to genius in the production of art point to this fact. In both the cases nature as a spiritual agent is privileged, exactly in proportion to the lessening of human interference in the form of self-centred aims and images providing consolation. In both the cases it is “the high-temperature fusing power of the creative imagination” that has been assumed to be at play, which as it reflects and searches, constantly says no and no and no to the prompt easy visions of self-protective self promoting fantasy. (Like the daemon of Socrates which said only “No”.) The artist’s freedom is hard won, and is a function of his grasp of reality. (ibid. 79)

Thus for all its sins art, too, can show “the created world in the pure light of the Forms”. But for human art, or any human effort for that matter, Murdoch can claim only degrees of freedom or success, and an element of dualism is inherent in the phenomenon where representation and reality are involved. Yet when supreme success comes, it comes in spite of it through an achieved unity of form and reality, image and people. The present age being dominated by the discourse of difference has taken a deeper cognizance of this inherent duality or indeterminacy between illusion and

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truth, form and content, language and meaning. Adorno’s is one of the most succinct analyses of this duality referred to here, speaking of which Eagleton points out that “delusion is art’s very mode of existence, which is not to grant it a license to advocate delusion. If the content of the art work is an illusion, it is in some sense a necessary one” (Eagleton 352). Successful creation of this illusion to reveal the non-illusory in all its contingency implies the role of creative imagination in art. Murdoch speaks of a similar dichotomy but also refers to art’s inherent realism: Art presents the most comprehensible examples of the almost irresistible human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy and also of the effort to resist this and the vision of reality which comes with success. (“On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” 64)

Precisely, as Murdoch envisages, art despite an inherent dualism as spoken of above can have a claim to realism that is identical with the good in its mode of operation and necessity. It demands the same unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention as morality. Realism, thus, remains for Murdoch a moral achievement that makes possible the vision that something particularly other than oneself is true: The more the separateness and differentness of other people is realized and the fact seen that another man has needs and wishes as demanding as one’s own, the harder it becomes to treat a person as a thing. That it is realism which makes great art great remains too as a kind of proof. (ibid. 66)

This realism as a moral discipline is indispensable both for the artist in his creative process and the audience in his appreciation. In both the cases what is involved is the overcoming of one’s obsessive self. The virtue that is required in this exercise is love in ethics and imagination in aesthetics, defined by Murdoch as “the perception of individuals”. Again, this realism is ingrained in art’s ontological urge for the perfection of form, an activity that necessitates “unpossessive contemplation” in a “pilgrimage from appearance to reality”. It is never afraid to show life in all its contingencies and randomness, chance and death, making it clear that virtue lies in contemplating this form that art creates and that teaches that nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous. This sense of realism comes out through “a juxtaposition, almost an identification, of pointlessness and value” (“The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts” 87). Murdoch’s sense of freedom is correlated with this vision of reality, and with this vision she encounters the neo-Kantian ego whose metaphor is that of will and action, responsible, according to her, for so much ill in modern thought.

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Murdoch is a novelist not adventitiously. Her attitude to life itself determines her vocation as a novelist, and her claim for the novel and the novelist is equally based on this attitude, its ethics and aesthetics. The picture of the novelist proper is that of a “phenomenologist” who has always understood that human reason is not a single unitary gadget the nature of which could be discovered once and for all: The novelist has had his eye fixed on what we do, and not on what we ought to do or must be presumed to do. He has a natural gift that blessed freedom from rationalism which the academic thinker achieves, if at all, by a precarious discipline. He has already been, what the very latest philosopher claim to be, a describer rather than an explainer and in consequence, he has often anticipated the philosopher's discoveries. (Sartre 10)

What is stressed here is “a determination to render what is ‘real’ as opposed to illusory or fantastical, in spite of the complex and multiform nature of the material” (Stubbs 103). Perhaps this is the most central part of Murdoch’s fictional doctrine—the emphasis that the novelist must record what is “real”. The specific nature of this “real” is the real impenetrable human person, and the underlying spirit of realism active here is the acceptance of the existence of a plurality of these real persons loved by the author. A great novelist, Murdoch observes, is “essentially tolerant, that is, displays a real apprehension of persons other than the author as having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being” (“The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” 257). This sense of otherness, plurality, or variety, is thought to be the differentia specifica of the novel as a genre also by Bakhtin, another great theorist of the novel of the twentieth century. On his view, “the novel is the characteristic text of a particular stage in the history of consciousness not because it marks the self’s discovery of itself, but because it manifests the self’s discovery of the other” (Holquist 75). The unity of self and other from this standpoint is a mutually enriching mode: Consciousness of self is achieved in the movement toward the discourse of the other, whereby I become other to myself; here I behold myself through the eyes of another and lend an ear to my own discourse through the resonance of the other’s discourse. (Patterson 134)

Murdoch is all praise for this realism, reflected in character portrayal in the great nineteenth-century novels. “When we think of the works of Tolstoy or George Eliot,” says Murdoch, “we are not remembering Tolstoy and George Eliot, we are remembering Dolly, Kitty, Stiva, Dorothea and Casaubon” (“The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” 266). Murdoch considers it a triumph of the novel against the contemporary philosophy of

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Hegel. But with the decline of this realism, a corresponding retreat from character set in. The novelist ultimately succumbed to the contemporary neurotic situation, and one no longer finds in him the compassion and love for his characters, or the non-violent apprehension of difference. The two contemporary philosophies aggravating the situation are linguistic empiricism and the Sartrean type of Existentialism. They throw up a picture of the lonely man, subjected to convention (Ordinary Language Man) and neurosis (Totalitarian Man). Both exhibit a terror of anything which encloses the agent or threatens his supremacy as a centre of significance. Murdoch asserts that these philosophies have utterly failed to provide standpoints for considering real human beings: Neither pictures virtue as concerned with anything real outside ourselves. Neither provides us with a standpoint for considering real human beings in their variety, and neither presents us with any technique for exploring and controlling our own spiritual energy. (“The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” 255)

The literary movement connected with this general consciousness is properly Symbolism. Murdoch takes the movement as a clear and selfconscious symptom of the maladies spoken of above. In common with the linguistic empiricists and existentialists, the symbolists abhor messiness. They are anti-Romantic in the Hulmean sense that perfection since the Renaissance has been erroneously conceived in human terms, resulting in an art which is vague, formless and messy. In order to avoid messiness in their symbols, they wanted “small, clean, resonant and self-contained things”. Murdoch complains that the motive here is the same fear of contingency. And it is no surprise that prose literature, especially the novel should have suffered under the circumstances. It is condemned to “being either a poem in disguise or else a piece of informative prose, a pamphlet, a human document, or else a piece of journalism” (ibid. 264). We are offered either “things” or “truths,” never the real persons. Murdoch does not think that the situation is inevitable. She is critical of the philosophers who succumb to the situation and exult in a state of pseudo-freedom. She buckles heroically to fight the situation of convention and neurosis with the help of a new and vigorous set of concepts. Especially, she wants to restore the lost concept of the “whole man” and thereby the glory of the novel itself: “We must be willing consciously to defend against science, against philosophy, against political theories, against even some forms of literature, a conception of the whole human being” (ibid. 270). In this mission, Murdoch finds a community of concern with such novelists of the

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earlier generation like D. H. Lawrence who equally zealously looked upon the novel as a tremulation that “can make the whole man alive trembling”. Her anxiety about the emerging situation and the concomitant decline of the novel in the nineteenth-century sense of realism has been shared by a number of critics, W. J. Harvey being one of them, who celebrated liberalism as a state of mind acknowledging the plenitude, diversity, and individuality of human beings in society. But he too seems inclined to a belief that man will have to face the challenge of the new situation by forging some new imaginative mode: It may well be, of course, that we are moving towards a form of society where such a state of mind is no longer visible, that liberalism is a luxury rarely allowed by history. In this case, the novel will, like other art-form in the past, cease to be an available imaginative mode and will be supplanted by other art-forms, either entirely new or drastic mutations of the novel itself. (Harvey 26)

Murdoch is no less aware of the situation than Harvey but she contests the view that it is inevitable. In this regard, so far as the English situation is concerned, she enjoys support from another critic. As Bernard Bergonzi has it, the tradition of the realistic novel still persists in England while it has meanwhile given way to the nouveau roman on the Continent: If we turn to the recent pronouncements of the English novelists and critics, we find ourselves in a different intellectual world from that inhabited by Moravia and Robbe-Grillet. Here character is seen, not as an obsolescent feature of the novel whose existence can no longer be justified … but as something self-evidently essential. And if there seems to be a prevalent decline in the importance of character, then this may be deplored but not regarded as historically inevitable. (Bergonzi 52)

Another powerful defence comes from John Bayley who, as is well known, has collaborated with Murdoch in this salvage work. He emphasizes that the characters must exist and they should be loved by their creators and critics: What I understand by an author’s love for his characters is a delight in their independent existence as other people, an attitude towards them which is analogous to our feelings towards those we love in life; and an intense interest in their personalities combined with a sort of detached solitude, a respect for their freedom. This might be—indeed should be—a truism, but I suppose it to be no longer. The writers whom we admire today do not appear to love their characters and the critics who appraise their books show no sign of doing so either. (Bayley 7-8)

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Murdoch considers the situation to be symptomatic of the modern malaise created by solipsism which she is out to fight by a vigorous rethinking about it. She finds a kindred spirit also in what Raymond Williams says about it: When I think of the realist tradition in fiction, I think of the kind of novel which creates and judges the quality of a whole way of life in terms of the qualities of persons … who, while belonging to and affected by and helping to define this way of life, are also in their own terms, absolute ends in themselves. (Williams 304-5)

In this interpenetration of the individual and society, of author and character, Murdoch posits her realism. But as a novelist, she would never forget that “the centre of value is always in the individual human person— not any one individual person, but the many persons who are the reality of general life” (Williams 305). Both Williams and Murdoch deplore the division of the novel into either “social documentary” or “personal documentary,” in Murdoch's phrase “journalistic” or “crystalline”. The division itself points to a deep crisis in human experience and thinking. Murdoch demands that more creative efforts, imagination, and concepts be called for in order to understand and overcome the situation rather than fall into fantasy and consolation. She speaks of the capacity of love to restore the lost balance which means by implication envisioning a different reality to be achieved through moral struggles in life and through creative tensions between known experience and new forms of understanding in aesthetics. The truly creative effort of our time, Williams says, is the struggle for a relationship of a whole kind. But he, too, never loses sight of the tension that can be great, tension between experience and art forms. He, therefore, considers “creative discovery” more to the point here than “an act of will”. Bergonzi refers to the dominance of two poles in the contemporary situation, “totalitarian aestheticism,” on the one hand, and “naïve moral realism” on the other, and observes that “the tensions between the real world of shared human meanings and experience and the multitudinous forms of fiction must be preserved and not allowed to collapse towards either pole” (ibid. 85). Murdoch’s creative domain too shows signs of this tension. To be precise, however, it remains a domain of unity-in-tension between form and contingency, image and people, and it is a creative tension that resists the totalizing design of any one pole. It remains a domain of unity where the Self discovers itself not at the expense of the Other but by discovering the Other and recognizing it as Other.

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Works Cited Bayley, John. The Characters of Love. London: Constable, 1960. Print. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1972. Print. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. New York: Fontana/Collins, 1977. Print. Caputo, John D. (ed.) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Print. Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. 1992. Indian Rpt. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007. Print. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Print. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Print. Harvey, W. J. Character and the Novel. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965. Print. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Print. Majdiak, Daniel. “Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14, 1972. Murdoch, Iris. “Against Dryness.” The Novel Now. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. New York: Fontana/Collins, 1977. Print. —. “Existentialism and Mystics.” Essays and Poems Presented to Lord David Cecil. Ed. W. Robson. London, 1970, Print. —. “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’.” The Sovereignty of Good. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Print. —. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. 1953. London: Fontana/Collins, 1967. Print. —. The Sovereignty of Good. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Print. —. “The Novelist as Metaphysician.” Listener XLII, 16 March, 1950. —. “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.” Yale Review, XLX, Winter 1959. —. “The Sublime and the Good.” Chicago Review XIII, Aug. 1959. —. “The Idea of Perfection.” The Sovereignty of Good. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Print. —. “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts.” The Sovereignty of Good. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Print.

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—. The Fire and the Sun. London: Oxford University Press, 1977. Print. Patterson, David. “Mikhail Bakhtin and the Dialogical Dimensions of the Novel.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44 (2) Winter, 1985. Stubbs, Patricia. “Two Contemporary Views on Fiction: Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark.” English, V, 23, Autumn, 1974. Weil, Simone. Lectures on Philosophy. Tr. Hugh price. London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Print. Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism, Vol. 2. London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Print. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. 1961. London: Penguin Books, 1965. Print.

CHILDREN OF THE WINDRUSH AND THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY CAMILLE ALEXANDER

The term “identity” is as complex and contested a term as “Caribbean.” Both terms are subject to political, ideological, and, to some extent, ontological shifts, thus contributing to the fluidity of their nature. Despite its ambiguous nature, identity is defined as “the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another” (“Identity”). In other words, identity means that an individual is simply him- or herself and not someone else. This definition does not take into consideration the factors, social, cultural, and familial, that contribute to identity formation, which is how people become who they are. It also fails to address the complexity, or perhaps difficulty, of identity formation in a pluralistic society. The term Caribbean, like identity, cannot be clearly defined despite claims to the contrary. According to ethnicity theorist Ralph R. Premdas, “The Caribbean as a unified region that confers a sense of common citizenship and community is a figment of the imagination” (2). Premdas further states that “the Caribbean even as a geographical expression is a very imprecise place that is difficult to define” (2). With this statement in mind and the rather ambiguous nature of identity, the question should be raised of how Caribbean people can possibly claim to have a unified sense of self when the region is “populated by a diverse polyglot of peoples” (Premdas 2). This question is particularly intriguing when one considers the children of the Caribbean diaspora and how they construct their identities. For example, if they are born and reared in the U.K., are their identities Caribbean, British, or an interesting combination of both? These questions are raised by authors Andrea Levy in Fruit of the Lemon (2007) and Vernella Fuller in Going Back Home (2012). Levy and Fuller use the post-WWII diaspora experience referred to as the Windrush period to examine the nature of identity formation among children born to this generation of Caribbean immigrants in the U.K. The Empire Windrush, a former German passenger ship taken as a war prize during World War II, docked in Tilbury, London on June 22, 1948

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(Phillips para. 4). Its arrival marked the first large-scale wave of Caribbean immigration into the U.K. post-WWII and the beginning of the Windrush era. The Empire Windrush travelled from Trinidad to England, stopping briefly in Jamaica where 492 Jamaicans boarded to travel to England for work (“Arrival of the Empire Windrush” para. 1). The group was largely comprised of former servicemen, many of whom immigrated to the U.K. with the intention of working for a few years to rebuild war-torn England and return home (Phillips para. 1). Others intended to rejoin the RAF and settle permanently in the U.K. (para. 3). By the 1970s the first generation of children born to Windrush parents came of age in a country in which they were legal citizens but also somewhat excluded from the idea of full English citizenship. In Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (2007) and Fuller’s Going Back Home (2012), the dichotomous position of the Windrush children as both British and Caribbean placed many of them in the predicament of questioning who they were and where they belonged. Some of the children adopted a hyphenated identity acknowledging both the country of their birth and their parent’s country of origin, while others, unable to live in England, reversed the immigration process and returned to the Caribbean. The texts demonstrate that although these children are English by birth, they often feel a closer attachment to the Caribbean, particularly to the island of their parents’ birth, Jamaica, than they do to England. The arrival of the Empire Windrush in Tilbury was not the catalyst for Afro-Caribbean residence in the U.K. in general or in England in particular. According to social scientist Louis Kushnick, the “existence of a black population in Britain was the result of Britain’s imperialist history” (17). Because of the Anglophone Caribbean’s colonial attachment to Great Britain, Caribbean workers were recruited from the region to help rebuild the post-WWII U.K. and to replace the workers lost during the war (Kushnick 17). Blacks were largely viewed by Britons as “cheap labor” or “workers who would be willing to do the worst jobs at the lowest pay” (Kuchnick 17). In all likelihood, the Jamaicans on board the Empire Windrush were immigrating to fill these needs as well as to earn enough money to return to Jamaica under better economic circumstances. Based on their complexions and on the transient nature of their initial immigration into the U.K., many people of the Windrush generation did not fully integrate into British society, remaining always attached to “home” or the Caribbean. This attachment to home and residence in the U.K. complicated their children’s ability to form a sense of self. Kushnick also notes that British imperialism constructed classifications of people such as African American and Afro-Caribbean (17). This could be expanded to include Black British, a catchall phrase for any person re-

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siding in the U.K. who is not of European descent or who has varying shades of brown skin. These classifications placed the children of the Windrush in the challenging and uneasy position of determining how to identify themselves. Were they British, British-Caribbean, Black British, or something else? In other words, based on the nature of their parents’ attachment to the Caribbean, their births, residence in the U.K., and their physical differences from “traditional” British citizens, what cultural identity should they more closely align with? According to postcolonial theorist Stuart Hall, cultural identity is, essentially “one, shared culture” (223). More specifically, a cultural identity reflects “the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide … people with stable, continuous frames of reference and meaning” (223). For the immigrants of the Windrush generation, maintaining a cultural identity in the U.K. was complicated by their residence in a “foreign” country. However, as their identities were firmly rooted before they left the Caribbean, they were better able to cope with the social and cultural issues they faced in their new environment. Their children were probably less equipped to do so. In Fruit of the Lemon (2007), Andrea Levy, through the experiences of protagonist Faith Jackson, addresses some of the issues the children of the Windrush face because they lack a grounded cultural identity, which their parents developed during their formative years in the Caribbean. Faith is the daughter of Wade and Mildred, who immigrated to England on a ship much like the Windrush and like their real-life counterparts, the Jacksons endured overcrowded housing, low wages, and discrimination. By the 1970s when their two children come of age, the Jacksons are contemplating returning to Jamaica, the symbolic gesture of which is a collection of boxes they keep in the basement. Faith’s life is problematized by her lack of self-knowledge and a clear history of her family as both Jamaicans and people with roots and a history. She lacks a strong cultural tie to Jamaica or to England. According to Faith, this lack of attachment occurs because “There was no ‘oral tradition’ in our family” (Levy 4). If she asked a question about her family history, she was told, “That was a long time ago” (Levy 4). More interesting facts about her family’s history that slip past her parents’ guarded accounts is quickly followed with the instructions to “not go blabbing it to [her] friends, not to repeat it to anyone” (Levy 4). Faith’s lack of a family history leaves her, to some extent, rootless and adrift. The lack of a familial oral tradition in the Jackson home is particularly troubling as it demonstrates the tremendous gap that exists between their lives in England, the family’s Jamaican roots, and Afro-Caribbean culture,

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which places considerable emphasis on orature. According to literary critic Jorge Emilio Rodríguez, the oral tradition in the Caribbean is not “merely the faithful container and the vehicle of a folk culture preserved through compilations” (177). Rodríguez suggests that Caribbean oral tradition is critical to the reproduction and continuity of regional cultural traditions. This element of Caribbean identity is removed from Faith’s interactions with her parents thus exacerbating her feelings of rootlessness and isolation in England. By editing and revising elements of their history, the Jacksons leave Faith with very little idea of her identity and no way of asserting her selfhood in England’s national culture of socially isolating the Other. The Jackson’s avoidance of family oral history is also an issue because the children of the Windrush coped with the complexities involved in constructing their identities in a society that was not entirely open to their presence. A large part of constructing an identity is knowing one’s history. According to literary theorist Brenda F. Berrian, “Several Englishspeaking Caribbean women writers stress the importance of knowing one’s history” (200). Emphasizing the importance of self-knowledge can be said of Levy’s novel as she implies that not knowing the self leaves people like Faith at odds with Hall’s “one true self” and with the environment in which they live (223). Levy, through Faith’s experiences, delves into the difficulty of identity formation among children of the Caribbean diaspora growing up in the U.K. demonstrating that at times immigrant parents fail to provide their children with the historical information and perhaps familial ties needed to construct a composite identity that is both British and Caribbean, and a strong sense of self that gives these children the ability to withstand the social attempts at “othering” that many face as children of colour in a predominantly White country. An example of the social issues the Windrush children face is living in social isolation to some extent. Levy seems to suggest that without a family history, strong ties to the Caribbean, and the nurturing required to develop a sense of self, the children become lost. In Vernella Fuller’s Going Back Home (2012),the Browns give their daughters, Joy and Esmine, a strong sense of Hall’s “one true self” (223). They accomplish this task by reinforcing the belief in their daughters that they are British and as such have the rights of citizenship but also by maintaining a close emotional and physical attachment to Jamaica. Joy’s mother reminds the girls that “This is [their] home … [They] were born here” (Fuller 9). Their father, Joseph, acknowledges that they are English, but he also wants the girls to have a close attachment to Jamaica. He often tells Joy that after her birth, he travelled to Jamaica where he sat under a mango

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tree and buried her umbilical cord. The burying of a child’s umbilical cord is both a symbolic and tangible act by Caribbean people to acknowledge and maintain an attachment to the child’s ancestral home. Home, in this instance, is Jamaica. Therefore, it is not surprising that Joy has the strong desire to “be a daughter [of Jamaica] like her father was its son” (Fuller 6). Joseph wants his daughters to understand that despite growing up in England, which he refers to as a “wretched and God-forsaken country,” they are “not rootless”; they “come from somewhere” and “belong somewhere” (Fuller 16-17). Joseph instils a sense of cultural identity in his daughters marked by an attachment to “home” or Jamaica. At eighteen, Joy makes the difficult decision to return to Jamaica despite her mother and younger sister's wishes to the contrary. On the family's final trip to Jamaica together, she realizes that it is not her father's influence, but her own desire to reconnect. In the coming years, Joy graduates from university, becomes a lawyer, and gets a job with a firm. Joy and Esmine’s parents are killed in a car accident, and, soon after, Joy is the victim of a violent hate crime. It is at that point that Joy makes the final decision to go home because “England is leaving too many scars” on her body and her psyche (Fuller 10). Unlike Joseph Brown in Going Back Home (2012), Wade Jackson in Fruit of the Lemon (2012) is somewhat attached to England and his wife Mildred feels the same way. Whereas Joy Brown wants to return to Jamaica, which she views as her home, Faith Jackson lacks even a tenuous attachment to Jamaica. According to educational theorist Nas Rassool, the “identities and subjectivities of [Afro-Caribbeans] have been shaped very powerfully by the social dislocation effected by slavery, and subsequently, the experience of colonialism followed by immigration settlement in the U.K.” (26). Rassool’s theory could be expanded to state that settlement in the U.K. has also contributed to the lack of a well-formed identity and subjectivity in the children of the diaspora. An example of a child of the Caribbean diaspora in the U.K. who lacks a solid sense of self is Faith, and the reasons for this detachment and cultural dislocation are directly related to her experiences in England both within and outside of the home. At the beginning of the novel, Levy provides some insight into the issues a Windrush child might have faced living in the U.K. through Faith. First and foremost are the constant references to race and origin. The boys in grammar school taunted Faith daily with comments such as “Faith is a darkie and her mum and dad came on a banana boat” (Levy 3). During history lessons, Faith, who is traumatized by the insults, imagines the boys looking at her and stating, “Your mum and dad came on a slave ship. They are slaves” (Levy 4). Faith graduates from an art school and her life seems

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to proceed as planned. After graduation, she gets a job working for a clothing designer, who her college tutor is convinced hires her only because she is “black and everyone else on the course” is White (Levy 31). Faith is also told that her “work has an ethnicity which shines through,” which she questions as she “was born and bred in Haringey,” North London (Levy 31). On the surface, there is no more to the comments and innuendos directed at Faith than racism and ignorance. These comments demonstrate that racist attitudes and ideologies permeated the British society and culture in which the Windrush children lived, and the children’s experiences with racism contrasted slightly from their parents’. According to the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, previous research on racism typically views these beliefs as static and unchanging, but this is an erroneous perspective as racism evolves and adapts in response to social and cultural fluctuations (467-468). Faith and Joy live in a country with a strong social culture of racism that was constitutionally reinforced by a “series of racist immigration laws enacted between 1962 and 1971, passed by both Conservative and Labour governments” (Kushnick 18). According to Kushnick, these bipartisan immigration laws were justified and eventually codified because they helped to allay White British fears of being overrun by Others, outsiders, people of colour who were simply not British because of their complexions. The absurdity of these particular laws rests in the fact that the very people they were meant to exclude were, first and foremost, British as they originated from British colonies. Second, immigrants comprised the workforce being relied upon to rebuild post-WWII England by taking the jobs White Britons refused to take. However, these laws do provide some support for Bonilla-Silva’s theory that racism is fluid, adapting continuously to social and cultural changes. When these laws were enacted, the Windrush generation had already settled throughout the U.K. and their children were coming of age. The laws were not meant to send the immigrants who had already settled home but to discourage further immigration into the U.K. from the so-called Third World. The backlash of these laws was to encourage discrimination against Windrush children but in a different form than their parents experienced. Their parents, who should have understood their predicament, were, for the most part, quite ignorant of the discrimination enacted almost daily against their children. When confronted with the possibility of Joy leaving England because of persistent racism, Joy’s mother reminds her that “This is your home, child. You were born here” (Fuller 9). Joy is told to “stay and fight for [her] right as a British person” because “it will be different for [her] generation with their “education, English accents” (Fuller 11; 12).

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The reality, as Joy explains to her parents, is that the children of Caribbean immigrants face institutionalized racism while young and vulnerable. Joy states that “all these years in that fine grammar school [she was] frightened stiff, terrified by those constant threats of expulsion” for attempting to speak up for herself (Fuller 10). Institutional racism is at the core of Joy’s problems in school, and Naz Rassool’s research provides some motives for this issue. Rassool writes that the “Racial discourse in Britain has historically focused on the image of immigrant = alien = problem to be managed” (23). These “homogenized views, grounded in cultural determinism” have defined the social and educational experiences of children of immigrants since the 1960s (Rassool 23). Therefore, British education and teachers by default, whether intentionally or not, reinforce hegemonic views about Others as requiring to be cared for by being controlled. This rather paternalistic view of non-Europeans permeated the British, and possibly other European, classrooms. Faith has her own experience with racism when she is told that her design work is ethnic by her tutor. Joy and Faith differ in their approaches to addressing institutional racism. Joy, after meeting her career goals in England, immigrates to Jamaica, whereas Faith feels so defeated and abused by the U.K.’s racist social structures that she has a nervous breakdown. Through Faith’s experiences, Levy demonstrates that without a strong sense of self, an attachment to a cultural group, or a clearly-articulated family history, the children of the Windrush children, and perhaps other immigrant children by extension, cannot survive in an alien and hostile environment. In contrast, Fuller uses Joy to demonstrate that negative social experiences do not have to permanently scar the children of the Caribbean diaspora living in the U.K. Joy, although physically assaulted for not being White, is not emotionally damaged by the assault and does not immediately pack up and leave England. Her attachment to her friends and social life does suffer as she becomes less engaged; however, she is still determined to attempt to remain in England for her career and for the sake of her sister. Although Joy feels more attached to Jamaica, she has a strong familial, social, and cultural attachment to England as it is there, in this physical space, that her cultural identity first forms and develops. Hall expands his definition of cultural identity to include two additional theories. First, cultural identity is a “shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (Hall 223). Second, cultural identity “is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’ (225). Here, Hall acknowledges the intervention of “history, culture, and power” in identity formation (225). Joy and Faith

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have a cultural identity. However, Joy’s cultural identity is simply a part of who she is, whereas Faith’s cultural identity develops after her one and only trip to Jamaica. It is there, in that physical space, that she finally connects with her family through their oral history. Sadly, it is not Faith’s parents who help her to identify with Jamaica or her cultural identity. Faith’s Auntie Coral, the older sister of her mother, serves as the surrogate mother, expanding Faith’s understanding of her family and its history. Eventually, Faith describes these stories as wrapping her “in a family history” and swaddling her “tight” while also allowing her to take “back that family to England” (326). Because of the way that their cultural identities are formed, the first definition of cultural identity fits Joy whereas the second definition better describes Faith. The idea of a “one true self” is familiar to Joy, particularly regarding living in Jamaica because in Jamaica she “can go anywhere … without having to explain, without needing to justify why [she] exists” (Fuller 10). For Joy, Jamaica becomes home because in England she is treated like an uninvited and unwelcomed visitor. An example of this treatment is being “called filthy names as [she] goes about [her] business” and her physical assault (Fuller 10). There is an attachment to Jamaica that is not based solely on her father’s stories of home but on her own feelings of attachment to the one place in which she feels a kinship with others, forming a firmer link than even a biological connection could provide. As a woman of colour in England, Joy probably feels detached from English people, with whom she shares neither physical attributes, a common origin, nor socio-cultural codes. Despite this disconnection, Joy does view herself as both British and Jamaican. Perhaps this hyphenated identity can be stated as Afro-British, Black British, or British Caribbean. Faith, as a child whose parents have not fully disclosed the nature of their lives in Jamaica through oral histories, is initially not connected to Jamaica. Her reference to being “born and bred in Haringey” reinforces the theory of her disconnection from Jamaica in particular and the Caribbean as a whole (Levy 31).For Faith, England is home, but her visit to Jamaica helps to encourage the development of her growing sense of self. She is, according to Hall, “becoming.” After visiting Jamaica, connecting with her family, hearing those family stories from Auntie Coral that her parents were unwilling or unable to share, and developing a feeling of rootedness, Faith becomes more capable of viewing herself as British and Caribbean; English and Jamaican. To that end, before Faith leaves Jamaica, she states, “I am the bastard child of Empire and I will have my day” asserting that she is the spiritual daughter of both countries and, at some point, this must be acknowledged (Levy 327).

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In 1966, Jamaican poet Louise Bennett wrote the poem “Colonization in Reverse.” The last stanza of the poem states, “Wat a devilment a Englan! Dem face war an brave de worse, But me wonderin how dem gwine stan Colonizin in reverse” (Bennett lines 41-44). In this, the final lines of the poem, Bennett questions how England will reconcile itself to a new pattern of colonization—one in which White British do not have the upper hand. Reverse colonization opened up a new experience in which the Africans, Asians, and Caribbeans who were once British subjects immigrated to the U.K. in a large enough influx to draw attention and cause concern. One of the results of this reverse colonization process was the birth of a generation of children who came of age during the time of the codification of racist laws meant to staunch the overflow of immigrants into the U.K. These children had to adapt to survive, constructing identities that allowed them to acknowledge the country of their parent’s birth as well as their own. In the two novels, both Joy and Faith realize that they are English because they were born in England. However, at the conclusion of the novels, they realize that they are attached to Jamaica and England and those attachments form an integral part of their identities. Joy immigrates to Jamaica. When she leaves England, she realizes that she is going home but also that she has left home. As Faith prepares to return to England from Jamaica, she experiences similar feelings of the home being located in two places. Levy and Fuller show that it is not only the country of birth that determines who a person is or where she belongs. Also, home is not necessarily one, fixed location. Family history, culture, or social attachments can also play a significant role in reaffirming Hall’s theory of who a person “is” and who she will “become.”

Works Cited “Arrival of the Empire Windrush.” BBC History. 2014. Web. 10 Sept. 2014. Bennett, Louise. “Colonization in Reverse.” 1966. Web. 21 May 2013. Berrian, Brenda F. “Claiming an Identity: Caribbean Women Writers in English.” Journal of Black Studies 25.2 (1994): 200-216. JSTOR. Web. 30 Oct. 2013. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation.” American Sociological Review 62.3 (1997): 465-480. JSTOR. Web. 19 Mar. 2014. Fuller, Vernella. Going Back Home. 1992. Jamaica: Top Mountain Press, 2012. Kindle EBook.

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Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Upper Saddle River: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. 222-237. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. “Identity.” Dictionary.com. Web. Kushnick, Louis. “‘We’re Here Because You Were There’: Britain’s Black Population.” Trotter Review 7.2 (1993): 17-19. JSTOR. Web. 21 May 2013. Levy, Andrea. Fruit of the Lemon. 2000. New York: Picador, 2007. Kindle EBook. Phillips, Mike. “Windrush—The Passengers.” BBC History. Summer 1998. Web. 3 Mar 2014. Premdas, Ralph R. “Ethnicity and Identity in the Caribbean: Decentering the Myth.” Kellogg Institute. Working Paper #234. The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, 1996. Web. Rassool, Nas. “Flexible Identities: Exploring Race and Gender Issues among a Group of Immigrant Pupils in an Inner-City Comprehensive School.” Journal of Sociology of Education 20.1 (1999): 23-36. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. Rodríguez, Jorge Emilio. “Oral Tradition and the New Literary Canon in Caribbean Poetry.” A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Ed. A. James Arnold. Vol. 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997. 177-186. Google Books. Web.

“FREE! BODY AND SOUL FREE!”: THE DOCILE FEMALE BODY IN KATE CHOPIN’S “THE STORY OF AN HOUR” KRISTIN M. DISTEL

In 1894, Kate Chopin wrote her well-known short story, “The Story of an Hour,” an extremely brief but gripping narrative that Susan Cahill describes as “One of feminism’s sacred texts” (3). This paper explores the story’s depiction of the home as a patriarchal power structure and the way in which domestic patriarchy regulates and limits the female bodily experience. In order to contextualize my analysis, a short summary of Chopin’s story is necessary. Louise Mallard, a young wife who is “afflicted with heart trouble,” receives news that her husband has been killed in a train accident (352). After experiencing a brief “storm of grief,” Louise excuses herself to “her room” and, once alone, eventually admits that she is enormously relieved that her husband has died, that she may now “live for herself” (353). She is at first deeply reluctant to acknowledge and is actually ashamed of her relief, but she quickly embraces the notion of autonomy; she eagerly anticipates a long life in which she will not have to conform to her husband’s wishes. Louise repeatedly whispers to herself, “Free! Body and soul free!” After Josephine, Louise’s sister, coaxes her out of her room and back downstairs, Mr. Mallard walks in the front door. He had been mistakenly listed among people killed in the accident. Upon seeing her husband, Louise immediately dies. The doctors determine that Louise has “died of heart disease—of joy that kills” (354). Critics have long grappled with the question of whether Brently Mallard actually mistreats or oppresses his wife; indeed, the text itself makes this question rather complicated. One of the most inscrutable passages in the story summarizes this contradiction: “And yet she had loved him— sometimes. Often she had not” (353). Louise’s tepid feelings toward her supposedly deceased husband do not prove that her husband oppressed her, and the overt absence of love certainly does not indicate that the Mallard home was an oppressive space. Such an analysis is complicated by the fact that Louise herself seems unable to decide whether her husband has

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mistreated her. The text reveals that Brently Mallard “had never looked save with love upon” Louise, but the narrative then complicates his character significantly by revealing that Brently had a “powerful will bending hers in … blind persistence” (353). Brently’s feelings toward his wife and the extent to which he loved her are, almost certainly, questions without definitive answers; such questions are also, in large part, beyond the scope of the present paper. Regardless of his intentions or degree of love and affection, he bears responsibility for the creation of Louise’s docile body. Perhaps the strongest evidence within the story of Louise’s moderated and restricted embodiment is her delight in realizing that she could “live for herself” as a widow, followed, of course, by her sudden death at having her independence stripped away upon seeing her husband, who is very much alive. Though reactions to grief vary enormously, Louise’s behavior is a highly telling and non-normative response to news of a spouse’s unexpected death. Louise’s reactions, both her joy and her death, indicate the extreme docility of her body within the confines of marriage, as well as her degree of subjugation within the penal structure of the Mallard household. My argument will examine Louise’s female embodied experience through multiple lenses, primarily employing Foucault’s concept of docile bodies created through authoritative surveillance and Sandra Bartky’s theory of gendered shame and powerlessness. I will also examine Louise's physical comportment and “heart trouble,” as well as themes of infantilization, silence, and the complex nature of her suppressed identity, which Angelyn Mitchell has termed Louise’s “double consciousness.” Scholars have not yet addressed Chopin’s story through a Foucauldian lens, nor have critics assessed the issue of Louise’s embodiment as a response to patriarchal social structures, including the structure of her own home. In examining the story through the aforementioned lenses, my paper will supplement research on this important short story and, I hope, advance the current discourse on Kate Chopin’s feminist fiction. Overall, this essay will position the Mallard home as a penitentiary and situate Louise as a docile body—an infantilized, silenced prisoner whose behaviour signifies an internalized sense of shame and oppression.

Foucault: Mallard Home as Penitentiary Bernard Kolaksi’s work on Kate Chopin’s oeuvre reveals that Americans were not reading Chopin’s work widely until the mid-to-late 1970s, which coincides with the 1975 publication of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (4). However, as previously mentioned, a Foucauldian reading of

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“The Story of an Hour” does not yet exist. I claim that Foucault’s theory of modern power and the penitentiary is essential to a thorough understanding of Chopin’s story, particularly in terms of Louise Mallard’s role within the household. I argue that the Mallard home mirrors the disciplinary structures that Foucault examines in Discipline and Punish. The Mallard home is the seat of Brently Mallard’s power; the physical structure of the home reinforces Louise’s subjugated role within the household. Foucault argues: Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time, it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. (187)

Brently’s exertion of disciplinary power is subtle; indeed, it is essentially invisible, which is in keeping with Foucault’s definition. As previously mentioned, Louise herself seems unable to determine whether she loves her husband, but her relief at his death signifies a relationship in which she was the subjugated Other within the home. Her role as the wife of a subtly authoritative husband causes her to become the hypervisible subject of invisible disciplinary power. She wields no observable power within the Mallard household; however, she is the focal point of the household in that Brently Mallard’s authority rests upon his wife being a docile body and subservient subject. Foucault’s claim that the subjects of discipline, not the wielders of authority, must be visible is particularly applicable to “The Story of an Hour.” Brently Mallard is present only for a very small portion of the story. He arrives just seconds before his wife dies. The story also does not provide background information or a history of the couple’s marriage; readers do not see Brently leave for work that morning, nor do readers encounter Brently at any other portion of the story (on his return trip home, for example). The actual presence of Brently Mallard is unnecessary to the story because, according to Foucault, the person who exerts power does not need to be visible. Indeed, the authoritative person’s very power lies in the fact that s/he is invisible. The prisoner, in this case, Louise, responds to the presence of power, regardless of whether s/he can see the person who holds authority over her. Louise is a docile body both in and out of her husband’s presence. It is only upon his supposed death— when it is physically impossible for him to surveil her—that she is completely free.

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While Brently Mallard is largely invisible throughout the story, Louise is constantly visible. Louise is the subject of nearly every scene and sentence within the story. This hypervisibility is in keeping with Foucault’s claim that the prisoner within a penitentiary is the subject of “compulsory visibility.” Readers are aware of Louise’s motions, her physical body movements, and her comportment, which will be addressed later in this paper. Richards (Brently’s friend, who shares the news of Brently’s supposed death) and Josephine, Louise’s sister, constantly scrutinize Louise’s body; Brently, too, surveils his wife’s movement. Chopin writes, “Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of ‘killed.’ He … had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message” (352). Richards acts as an agent of Brently Mallard’s power. In Brently’s absence, Richards is significantly positioned “near” Louise in this intensely private moment of grief. The text makes a point of explaining that Richards is Brently’s friend; he has no particular relationship to Louise herself. However, he essentially functions as Brently in absentia. In hovering “near” Louise as she grieves, his physical presence ensures that Louise remains a visible, docile subject who exhibits proper expressions of grief. The power that both Richards and Josephine wield suggests that they act as surrogates for Brently and ersatz wardens in the Mallard home. When in the presence of Richards and Josephine, Louise embodies the normative role of a grieving widow: “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms” (352). It is not until Louise is alone that she can physically and emotionally acknowledge the freedom that her husband’s death will afford her. Like Richards, Josephine acts as an agent of Brently Mallard’s power. It is not simply because Louise is a woman that she is a docile body and subjugated Other. Rather, it is specifically because she is a wife that she is the subject of such strict patriarchal control. Such criticisms of marriage as an unjust patriarchal institution are in keeping with much of Chopin’s oeuvre. When Louise excuses herself to her room so that she might be alone, Josephine aggressively demands that Louise let her into the room: “Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. ‘Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door— you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door’” (354). The passage implies that because Louise is alone and thus unobservable except through the keyhole, her body is dangerously uncontained. This reinforces the concepts of surveillance and subtle disciplinary power that permeate the text. That Brently has secured, in the

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form of Richards and Josephine, agents of his power working on his behalf and in his absence signifies the extent to which he has maintained the docility of his wife’s body. Regardless of Brently’s intent or his feelings toward his wife, an application of Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power indicates that Brently Mallard does truly oppress Louise and regulate her embodied experience. This oppression is inextricable from Louise’s lack of autonomy and freedom as a woman. Sonia Kruks’s analysis of gender and humiliation is useful in understanding Louise’s position within the Mallard home. Kruks writes, “To feel humiliated, or more generally to feel shame, is to undergo an experience not merely of consciousness but also of embodied—and thus gendered—existence. … The ‘pain’ of humiliation might well be discursively inflicted, but it is viscerally lived” (146-147). A thorough definition of the word “humiliate” is necessary for a useful application of the preceding quotation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “humiliate” as “To make low or humble in position, condition, or feeling” (“Humiliate”). According to Kruks’s definition, then, Chopin’s story suggests that Louise suffers humiliation in the household; like Brently’s exertion of disciplinary power, though, Brently’s humiliation of his wife is subtle and indeed may not align with some modern, normative uses of the term “humiliate.” Nevertheless, because Brently subjugates his wife so that she may not exceed the bounds of his patriarchal control, he does indeed humiliate her according to the definitions provided above. Kruks claims that when a person experiences humiliation, a sense of shame is present not only in the sufferer’s mind but also in the body; humiliation serves as a reminder of the person’s gender and the normative roles that accompany the designation of “man” or “woman” (146). Humiliation serves to reinforce dyadic gender roles: men more often function as those who inflict humiliation and shame, and women are generally the ones whose bodies physically experience and operate within the confines of humiliation and shame. Brently (and, by extension, Josephine) and the subtle disciplinary power he exerts consistently remind Louise of her position as a gendered and inferior subject within the Mallard home. Her reaction to the news of his death and her immediate death upon learning that he was alive indicate that her Otherness is perpetually before her, reminding her of the gendered body that she occupies but is not permitted to control.

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Shame and the Female Body Because Kruks links together humiliation and shame as gendered experiences, an examination of shame as a gendered concept is warranted. Sandra Bartky’s “The Pedagogies of Shame” provides a particularly useful overview of the ways in which shame limits and regulates women’s lived experiences. Bartky argues that women experience shame more deeply and more frequently than do men, a fact which reinforces Kruks’s argument about the gendered nature of humiliation. In what is perhaps Bartky’s most powerful claim, she argues, “In women, shame may well be a mark and token of powerlessness” (“Pedagogies” 226). During the time in which Louise’s body is docile—that is, while she believes her husband to be alive and again when she dies at the sight of him—she is almost entirely powerless within her marriage and home. While in the presence of Brently’s surrogate agents of power, the only power Louise can wield is to go to her room—and, as previously discussed, Josephine continually knocks on the door and demands to be let in. Within Chopin’s story, shame functions as a form of discipline. Even in Brently’s absence, Louise monitors her behavior and restrains both her speech and bodily movements in response to others who exert his power. I would argue that in part, this restraint arises from Louise’s internalization of hegemonic patriarchal power and the normative expectations for female conduct. On the subject of accepting and enacting others’ expectations, Bartky writes, “Shame is the distressed apprehension of the self as inadequate or diminished. It requires, if not an actual audience before whom my deficiencies are paraded, then an internalized audience with the capacity to judge me, hence internalized standards of judgment” (“Pedagogies” 227). The first line of Chopin’s story reveals the “inadequate” and “diminished” nature of Louise’s physical body: “Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble” (352). The text immediately identifies Louise’s body as defective and insufficient; she is physically Othered by both her gender and her illness. Thus, Louise’s body is simultaneously a site and source of shame. That she has internalized others’ expectations for her behaviour is apparent in her normative expression of grief. To do otherwise in the presence of her judges would indeed be shameful. She must remove herself from her audience, her judges—from the panopticon—in order to eschew the sense of shame that has controlled her body and her emotions. Louise’s body is dangerous because it is potentially uncontrollable. As her relief at her husband’s death indicates, she is resistant to the apparatuses of control that Brently has implemented. Both Foucault and Bartky take up the concept of resistance and indicate that resistant bodies are seen as

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particularly dangerous because they instinctively reject, or at least desire to reject, feelings of shame. Bartky argues that those who wield power now recognize that if they can “transform the minds” of resistant subjects, control of their subjects’ bodies is eventually possible (“Foucault, Femininity,” 79). Louise obviously resents the fact that marriage has stripped her of her autonomy; while her body obeys, her mind rejects the power that others exercise over her. While alone in her room she realizes, “There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself” (353). The text reveals in this key passage that Louise’s body and life have not been her own; Brently has lived her life “for her.” To resist his power to do this would be a shameful rejection of hegemonic male authority, an eschewal of her avowed identity as a wife. Thus, within this story, Louise’s shame in regard to her own subversive happiness functions as a type of discipline. While she is among Richards and Josephine, she reminds herself that it is wrong to welcome the freedom that widowhood provides. She knows that happiness is, in this moment, shameful. She disciplines herself in the presence of the people who regulate her body, and she experiences normative feelings of shame at her own burgeoning sense of individuality. As Foucault argues in “The Gentle Way of Punishment,” discipline need not be harsh or even over in order to be effective; gentle discipline is often extremely effective in achieving the ends of the person who holds power (104). Partly because Brently’s oppression has been subtle and partly because his discipline has been highly effective, Louise has begun to monitor her own behaviour. This is most clearly observable in her constrained physical movements and speech, to which I will turn later in my paper. Bartky concurs with John Deigh, who claims that shame prompts the subject to feel as though she must hide or otherwise conceal her body from her judges (Barkty, “Pedagogies” 228, and Deigh 243). J. Brooks Bouson refers to shame as “the master emotion,” one that “induces secrecy and a hiding response” (5). It is plausible, then, that Louise escapes to her room because she must hide her nascent feelings of shame—the latent yet intensifying relief—that begin to invade her body.1 Indeed, when she enters her room, her body is the subject of the narrative’s focus: “She sank [into her chair], pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul” (352). This sensation of being “pressed down” is a physical response to the shame that Louise has internalized. Bartky claims that shame is sometimes “a physical sensation of being pulled inward and downward” and gives rise to “the necessity for hiding and concealment” (228). Though she is drained and overwhelmed, she

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becomes the owner of her body and her lived experience within the protected space of her room.

Gendered Space: Louise’s Room The physical space of Louise’s room is, as previously mentioned, free from surveillance, though not from interruption and potential intrusion. As Louise initially resists but then joyfully embraces her freedom as a widow, she is dangerously invisible. According to Foucault’s theory of the penitentiary, an invisible prisoner is dangerous and unacceptable. Josephine functions as Louise’s guard and seeks to recover control of the escaped prisoner. Louise’s defiance directly contradicts the normative exertion of power in the household. Foucault maintains that each prisoner must be a responsive and obedient body: “Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. … Everyone is locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked” (187, 196). Significantly, Louise does not “answer to [her] name” or open the door and “show [her]self when Josephine demands that she do so. This rejection signifies that Louise is no longer the model prisoner or wife. That Louise disobeys her guard reveals the extent to which she has rejected the concept of compulsory docility. Josephine’s acts of pounding on the door and demanding to be admitted are ineffectual; Louise does not respond until she wants to do so. Behind a closed, locked door, Louise is outside the scope of the panoptical structure of the Mallard home.

Louise’s Bodily Comportment Louise’s transformation from a docile body to an unrestrained body is particularly evident in the change in her bodily movements. In many ways, Louise’s comportment reflects the common ways in which women tend to restrain and control their own bodies so that they do not take up too much physical space or exceed invisible bounds by which women are expected to abide. “Throwing Like a Girl,” Iris Marion Young’s classic study of feminine comportment, delineates the physical behaviours observable in most women in terms of the ways that they use—or rather, do not use— their bodies. She writes, “Girls tend to remain relatively immobile except for their arms, and even the arms are not extended as far as they could be” and that women’s movements “are frequently characterized … by a failure to make full use of the body’s spatial and lateral potentialities” (32). When

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Louise’s body is completely docile and under surveillance of Richards and Josephine, she is held within her sister’s arms. Josephine is the agent of power, and Louise is the docile, even childlike body that Josephine contains. Before Louise rejects the identity of the docile body, the only physical descriptions the text provides of Louise’s body and its comportment are that she is “afflicted with heart trouble” and that she hides in her sister’s arms. The lack of bodily movement or even descriptions of movement reinforces the docility of her body; she is controlled and measured, even in her grief. Louise’s experiences within her room, however, signify a drastic change in her relationship to her body. The text provides rich descriptions of Louise’s body. Once Louise claims that she is “free, free, free!,” her body responds to this new sense of autonomy: “Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body” (353). Most significantly, Louise stretches out her arms and exceeds the normative boundaries within which women are expected to operate: “And she opened and spread her arms out … in welcome” (353). When Louise determines that her body no longer needs to be docile because her husband— the person who controls her body—has died, she is physically freer in her bodily movements. She decides when and whether to open the door in response to Josephine’s incessant knocking. She determines who may or may not enter her physical space and actually tells Josephine to “Go away” (354). The imperative tense of Louise’s terse statement indicates the sense of boldness with which she will now determine who may or may not come close to her body. She is also more keenly aware of her body’s state of health. When Josephine insists that Louise must open the door because she “will make [her]self ill,” Louise answers, “I am not making myself ill” (354). Louise’s knowledge of her own body and its abilities is reminiscent of Susan K. Cahn’s description of bodies with invisible illnesses; like Louise, Cahn is deeply familiar with her body and what it can endure (17). Louise both uses and understands her body in ways that were heretofore inaccessible to her as a docile body. The above-quoted passages are also significant because they are among the first words Louise speaks within the story: she does not speak until she is alone. Once she claims that she is “free,” she uses her body more liberally and unreservedly. After rejecting shame and embracing her individuality, Louise also becomes an agent and actor, rather than one who is acted upon. She is no longer a body that others may touch and regulate. She reclaims control of her body. Chopin writes, “She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sis-

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ter’s waist, and together they descended the stairs” (354). Josephine is no longer the one who reaches for, touches, or guides Louise. In gripping Josephine’s waist, Louise determines who will come close to her body and who may touch her, a transformation that Mary Papke has termed Louise’s “rebirth” (63). Louise usurps control of her own physical body.

Loss of Identity The docility of Louise’s body is further ensured by the text’s withholding of the character’s name. Louise is referred to as “Mrs. Mallard” or otherwise identified as Josephine’s sister until she is alone in her room. Readers only learn Louise’s first name when Josephine demands admission to Louise’s room.2 Mary Papke has argued that because Josephine is the first person to use Louise’s name, the text thus suggests that Josephine is introducing her sister to a protected community of women (63). Such an analysis seems to neglect Josephine’s role as an extension of Brently Mallard’s power, however. While it is certainly true that Josephine is, to some extent, simply comforting her sister, she also actively participates in the regulation of Louise’s body. Louise’s namelessness is part of what Chopin scholar Angelyn Mitchell has termed Louise’s “double-consciousness”: “a divided state of the female psyche engendered by the cultural constructs of gender and by the biological determinants of sex” (59-60). Louise’s two selves occupy different physical spaces: “her room” versus the rest of the house, which is subject to panoptical surveillance. In her room, she is Louise. In the highly regulated space of the house at large, though, she is Mrs. Mallard. This dyadic conflict results in the erasure of her identity; “Louise” may only exist when she is free from observation. Scholars such as Mark Cunningham have argued that this clash between identities contributes to Louise’s death. Cunningham claims that Louise does not actually see Brently return, and thus his appearance and the resultant forfeiture of her freedom cannot be the cause of her death. Rather, according to Cunningham, Louise is so overwhelmed by her newfound sense of independence that that very notion of selfhood kills her (49). Similarly, Allen F. Stein has claimed that Louise dies from “a weakness of resolve” (65). Such readings are deeply problematic in that they strip Louise of any control over her own body. Cunningham's and Stein’s analyses suggest that as a woman, Louise is incapable of enduring news that might upset her delicate feminine body.

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Longevity and the Unhealthy Female Body The text’s description of Louise is complex: she is youthful, but she is also fragile and in poor health: “She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength” (353). These seeming contradictions actually serve to reinforce Louise’s role as ideally feminine: she is young, and she is ill. The combination of these traits serves to make her deeply docile and dependent. Even the lines of her face indicate that she passively accepts oppressive attempts to control her. In keeping with the aforementioned concept of double-consciousness, though, Louise consists of two selves. Diana Tietjens Meyers argues that women who embody two contradictory selves are “doomed to spend a significant part of … life distraught by the mismatch between one’s inner nature and one’s outer appearance” (157). This “mismatch” is particularly evident in Louise’s prayers: “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” (354). Angelyn Mitchell argues that Louise’s prayer “reflects Mrs. Mallard’s femininity: women are biologically created with the capacity to sustain the creation of life and, subsequently, are concerned with preserving life” (63). Such an analysis seems to reinscribe Louise’s body with the very normative gender role that she eagerly eschews, though. The story makes no mention of Louise as a mother or a maternal figure; if anything, as I will discuss below, Louise is positioned as a child within the structure of the home. To suggest that she desires a long life because she (presumably) has the potential to carry a child overlooks the limitations that marriage has placed upon Louise’s physical and emotional lives.

Infantilization In contrast to Louise’s preoccupation with ageing and longevity is the infantilization of her character. Indeed, the text describes her as “a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams” (353). Attempts to protect Louise indicate that Richards and Josephine’s belief that she is not only a grieving woman but also a child. The great deal of attention both Richards and Josephine pay to Louise does not stem solely from the fact that they are concerned about her health and wellbeing after receiving the news of her husband’s death. Rather, the consistent attempts to invade her physical space, both in terms of her body and her room, reiterate Louise’s docility.

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The care with which Louise is treated does not actually serve her needs as a grieving person but rather further makes her an object that Josephine and Richards must monitor, regulate, and control. This concept of attention and individualisation as barriers to selfhood is central to Foucault’s concept of training the bodies of prisoners. Foucault writes, “In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent” (193). Thus, the fact that Louise seems to be the subject of concern and care within the story does not necessarily indicate that such care meets her needs; rather, it further entrenches her in a model of subjugation to her caretakers’ power and judgment.

Conclusion “The Story of an Hour” defies simplistic analyses of gender binaries and power dynamics. Though Brently is indeed an authoritative figure and Louise is a docile body, Louise is also oppressed by the surrogate agents of Richards and Josephine. The text criticizes the institution of marriage and the compulsory female oppression that accompanies it. In this text, women can occupy a position of power so long as they use it to oppress a fellow female body. Power does not take the form of overt discipline or obvious attempts to subjugate another. Rather, in keeping with Foucault’s analysis of power and Bartky’s interpretation of shame, power in “The Story of an Hour” is the insistence that a docile body be incessantly visible and obedient; the body must feel ashamed of and thus hide feelings of independence or resistance.

Notes 1

As Deigh points out, there has long been a belief that shame bespeaks worthlessness (245); Louise calls this paradigm into question, though, because she acknowledges that living “for herself” has great worth. If she saw herself as worthless, then living for and with herself alone would engender a sense of dread. Deigh claims that a person who feels shame will often hide because the acknowledgement of said shame threatens the individual’s sense of worth. 2 Most scholars who analyze “The Story of an Hour” refer to Louise only as “Mrs. Mallard,” a puzzling habit that seems to further entrench Louise in an identity that she clearly rejects.

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Works Cited Bartky, Sandra. “Foucault, Feminism, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. 6186. Print. —. “The Pedagogies of Shame.” Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life. Ed. Carmen Luke. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. 225-241. Print. Bouson, J. Brooks. Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Print. Cahill, Susan. Women and Fiction: Short Stories by and about Women. New York: New American Library, 1975. Print. Cahn, Susan K. “Come Out, Come Out, Whatever You’ve Got! or, Still Crazy after All These Years.” Feminist Studies 29.1 (2003): 7-18. Print. Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1970. 352-354. Print. Cunningham, Mark. “The Autonomous Female Self and the Death of Louise Mallard in Kate Chopin's “Story of an Hour.”” English Language Notes 42.1 (2004): 48-55. Deigh, John. “Shame and Self-Esteem: A Critique.” Ethics 93.2 (1983): 225–245. Web. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979. 164–69, 170–95. Print. “Humiliate, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2015. Web. Koloski, Bernard. Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction. London: Prentice Hall International, 1996. 3-4. Print. Kruks, Sonia. “Going Beyond Discourse: Feminism, Phenomenology, and ‘Women’s Experience.” Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. 131-152. Print. Meyers, Diana Tietjens. “Miroir, Memoire, Mirage: Appearance, Aging, and Women.” Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women’s Agency. New York: Oxford, 2002. 148-166. Print. Mitchell, Angelyn. “Feminine Double Consciousness in Kate Chopin's ‘The Story of an Hour’.” Ceamagazine: A Journal of the College English Association, Middle Atlantic Group 5.1 (1992): 59-64. Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. New York: Greenwood, 1990. 62-64. Print.

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Stein, Allen F. Women and Autonomy in Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 58-65. Print. Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl.” On Female BodyExperience. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 27-45. Print.

SPACE AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL RESOURCE IN DOROTHY PARKER’S SHORT STORIES ISABEL LÓPEZ CIRUGEDA

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) has traditionally been better acknowledged for her wisecracks in the Vicious Circle of the Algonquin Hotel rather than for her profuse work as a critic, satirist, poet and Hollywood screenwriter. It has only been in the last years that critics have revisited her works, mainly from a feminist perspective (Melzer 1997, Pettit 2000, 2005).One remarkable feature of her production is the deep contrast between her satiric tone and the bitter nature of her themes: the impossibility of communication between men and women, the innate tendency of some people to dominate others and human mediocrity in general. This frame provides her voice with a sentimental register much unexpected from a humorist. Parker’s narrative collection, a corpus of 48 short stories, could be divided into three main categories regarding their formal aspects: conventional short stories, monologues, and sketches. Most of them picture a minimalistic single scene showing rivalry between two characters, in which the politically correct tone contrasts with the crudity in which one of them gets imposed on the most sensitive one in the couple. By following a qualitative methodology based on the works by Bachelard (1994), Prado Biezma (1999) Ryan (2012) and Caracciolo (2013), this essay aims to show how Dorothy Parker embraces symbolism in the scarce spatial references in her narrative to indirectly show psychological traits and to design that psychological battle between the main characters of each story by pointing to the cruelty of the oppressor and the quiet suffering of the victim. The analysis will consist of a revision of the spatial frames in which the actions take place and their narrative and aesthetic function, to finally concentrate on their symbolism. Space is not regarded as a key element in the narratives of the 20th century. As stories refer to human actions, they describe or at least evoke one or several settings, integrated by different objects, arranged in a specific way and provided with certain sociocultural implications. In a gen-

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eral sense, that is, if we refer to geographical locations, New York City, and most precisely Midtown Manhattan, where 31 of her stories are located, is the recurrent spatial reference for Parker. Different landmarks are assumed to be known by the reader. For instance, she ridicules a character that lives in Riverside Drive, but would rather move to Park Avenue, with no extra explanations; or she assumes Greenwich Village as a universal referent for lack of sophistication. In the autobiographical “Soldiers of the Republic”, she feels immediately recognized as someone from West End Avenue as if it “was writ across my face […] by a customs officer’s chalked scrawl” (253) even in Europe in the 1930s.In fact, the contents of her contributions to Vanity Fair and New Yorker magazines were focused on showing the city to the readers from all the country. New York is described as the only place in which culture, fashion or show business can be found. However, Manhattanites are systematically accused of being ruled by superficiality and holding veiled animosities against their neighbours. The presence of the city in the corpus is so significant that, even in the stories set in other locations, comparisons are always established. There are three other possible scenarios: 1. The suburban world surrounding the city (12 stories), in which the way of life is alienating. The clearest example of this is Mr. Wheelock, the unadapted husband of “Such a Pretty Little Picture”, whose only entertainment consists in daydreaming about leaving his supposedly perfect house and family. 2. The rest of the United States (3 stories), which is mentioned to remark the apparent lack of attractiveness of cities like Des Moines. Acerbic comments intensify when describing the South. Accents are ridiculed while stereotypes of gallantry are dismantled with the description of the romantic commotion caused by a Northerner in “Lolita”. 3. The rest of the world (2 stories), which Parker regularly identifies with European tourist destinations. “The Cradle of Civilization” criticizes American ethnocentricity and frivolousness in the same way as those sketches set in New York. “Soldiers of the Republic” is a very dramatic exception in which Parker is extremely respectful so as to motivate international concern for the Spanish civil war. Space can also be understood in a restrictive sense, which means to be referred to a limited scenario, which can be either private or public. Parker shows a preference for the first sense of space. Personal homes are the most common setting for Parker’s short stories, which makes sense with

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her domestic scenes. The economy imposed on every element of the short story due to its shortness obtrudes any long descriptive passage and, therefore, her descriptive techniques follow the main trend of avoiding profuse representations assuming that the reader is interested in “the plot and not the map” (Ryan 138). Nevertheless, details appear subordinated to the psychological description of the characters in the sense that they show significant information of their social, love or familial life. Consequently, a chest of drawers is only mentioned if the main character looks with disappointment at the night gown purchased for the occasion and never worn (“The Lovely Leave”) and the only information about the room, when the action is happening, is that it was painted in tones matching the owner’s eyes, so as to remark on her egocentrism (“Song of the Shirt, 1941”). The most representative example of the description of an inner space is the fragment devoted to the house of the Bains’ which serves as an introduction to the story “The Wonderful Old Gentleman”. Parker profusely describes the setting, a living room, which is equalled to a museum of horror provided with the most atrocious objects, seemingly chosen to perturb visitors, in this case, the readers. Parker chooses to end the description with these words: “Mr. and Mrs. Bain not only had twenty-eight years of the room to accustom themselves to it, but had been staunch admirers of it from the first” (Parker 37). This fact characterizes them as ostensibly prone to masochism and prepares us for the consequent development. In “Too Bad”, the hypothesis of space as a symbolic element is reinforced. In the two parts of the story devoted to the conversation on the Weldons’ divorce, nothing is stated about the venue, but a mere allusion to a spoon suggesting the ladies are having a cup of tea. On the contrary, in the part describing a typical evening at the Weldons’, the dining room is important from the very first line, in which the hopeless wife is pictured making a great, infructuous effort to improve it aesthetically. The scene is psychologically interesting in the sense it reflects the degree of anxiety in which Grace Weldon faces everyday actions and the complex of inferiority she suffers in relation to her role as a housewife. This choice of this setting is not casual, as dining rooms are many times pictured as the social official image for married couples. The only two exceptions are “The Custard Heart” and “The Bolt Behind the Blue”, where the rooms do not reflect any male presence as they are not relevant in the house or as there is not a husband to be represented. The house’s appearance is assumed to be a reflection of the wife’s skills, and that is why so many psychological connotations are triggered. This makes the scene in “Too Bad” more revealing than it seems: while the wife seems desperately unable to make any per-

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sonal contribution to her dining room, the equally awkward but polite attitude of the husband will remark this metaphor of their marriage as a correct house no one feels passionate about. The same situation, portrayed in a more extreme context, is reproduced in “Big Blonde”, where the evolution of the disintegration of the couple will be marked by the removement of the framed pictures of each spouse at the side of their bed. In this case, the bedroom, rather than the dining room, is considered as the most representative image for the Morses, and this scenario of marriage failure will be chosen by the wife as a deathbed in an interrupted and misunderstood suicidal attempt. The apartment owned by newly-wed Emmy in Midtown Manhattan in “The Game” is extremely expensive and even the tiniest detail has been carefully chosen by interior designers. Her dining room, and her marriage, as the story will show, has been designed to the point that pencil marks can be seen on the floor to indicate where the furniture has to be disposed of, in a similar way to many homes in the neighbourhood. Every object included in it “might one day be moved intact to the American wing of some museum, labelled, Room in Dwelling of Well-To-Do Merchant, New York, Circa Truman Administration” (288). Unless it does not look very different from the house owned by middle-class Weldons, this one is perceived as highly satisfactory by its dwellers, who do not seem guilty about having it arranged by professionals. More precisely, Parker chooses to set her story at the house inaugural party, an event which is perceived as a key date for the later life of the marriage. Thanks to the description of the house, the reader is in a position to know that the character tries to balance her alarming lack of talent, knowledge, and spontaneity with her wealth. Her nervous attitude combined with her shy satisfaction suggests that Emmy herself is aware of the determining circumstances of her social being. The connection between the house and its dwellers does not only talk about economic resources and personal taste but also about personality traits. Living spaces are conceived as mirrors reflecting hidden aspects of the life or mind of those who inhabit them. The many exotic or unusual objects such as triangular or octagonal trays owned Miss Noyes in “Glory in the Daytime” (225) talk about snobbism; the uneasiness shown by the male character in “Dusk Before Fireworks” evidences his state of hopelessness in the face of the exhibition of his many proofs of infidelity to Katherine (154). In general, not many middle points are found in the corpus, as the stories point to remarkable cases of insecurity or vanity. Home can be perceived in a very different way depending on the fluctuations of the state, as it happens in “The Lovely Leave”. In the first case,

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the romantic Mimi McVicker initially envisions exalted her living room as the scenery of her reencounter with her husband, who is receiving military instruction to fight in World War II. However, when he finally gets home, he considers it as a resting place with many facilities that were nonexistent in his camp. This dissension on their expectations, which turns the place into a real battlefield until the final reconciliation, is a meaningful way to show inner differences between men and women, mainly consisting in a remarkable dependence on romance in the latter. Despite Parker’s love for dogs, flowers constitute the main reference to non-human life in her work. They appear in practically every story with the same uses as houses themselves: they are used to impress male characters, who rarely set their attention on them; flower arrangements are considered as a basic skill for middle-class wives, while the upper-classes merely rely on flower shops for this issue. This detail also contributes to depict the main character, her own perception, and her social success: She had never known a patient to receive so many flowers, or such uncommon ones [.] Care and thought must have been put into the selection that they, like the other fragile and costly things, she kept about her, should be so right for young Mrs. Cruger. No one who knew her could have caught up the telephone and lightly bidden the florist to deliver her one of their five-dollar assortments of tulips, stock and daffodils. Camilla Cruger was no complement to garden blooms. (170)

The symbolic language of flowers, landmark of her poetic production, is also mentioned in her stories, as in “Dusk Before Fireworks”, where poppies express forgetfulness (151). Despite Parker’s confessed technophobia, which included rejection of cars, electronic appliances (Meade 196) and cinema itself, which is paradoxical for a screenwriter—she wrote the script for A Star Is Born (1937), among many others—she conceded an important role to telephone in her stories. References to their manipulation evoke those antique, voluminous models in which the intervention of a phone operator was still required. In fact, “Sorry, the Line is Busy”, a modernist piece considered by some authors as her first story (Calhoun, Melzer), deals with the work of a telephonist silently witnessing scenes of loneliness and disencounter shown by pieces of conversation. Years later, she would retake one of the conversations in “Long Distance”, with just the words on the woman’s side showing despair while trying to get romantic attention: Slowly she cradled her telephone, looking at it as if all frustrations and bewilderments and separations were its fault. Over it she had heard his voice, coming from far way. All the months, she had tried not to think of

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This excerpt is clearly descriptive of the situation: it is irrationally blamed for the physical distance between the woman and her husband. The living room is once again the scenario of sentimental failure and confrontation between expectations and reality. Tense wait over the phone is paramount in “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl”, “Dusk Before Fireworks”, “Long Distance” and, of course, “A Telephone Call”. Parker’s theory on the matter seems to be that physical distance is provoked by emotional distance and not vice versa, as the anxiety of women is persistently matched with an alarming lack of interest on the side of males. Frustration evidenced in the characters and the many culinary and aesthetic arrangements made for and systematically ignored by the husbands dramatically contrast with the self-assuredness and boast of power displayed by Mrs. Matson (“Little Curtis”) regarding her house and household which she carefully controls so as to avoid possible misuse of resources. To the overconfident character, her house is a bastion of defence for their own egocentrism. The narrative voice declares that Matson preferred the term home to define it because of its institutional connotations. By making use of a narrative structure centred on the way back home, Parker uses the moment of physical approximation to describe her feelings about it: She always enjoyed the first view of her house as she walked toward it. It amplified in her her sense of security and permanence. There it stood, in its tidy, treeless lawns, square, and solid and serviceable. You thought of steel-engravings and rows of Scotts’ novels behind glass, and Sunday dinner in the middle of the day, when you looked at it. You knew immediately that within it no one ever banged a door, no one clattered up- and downstairs, no one spilled crumbs or dropped ashes or left the light burning in the bathroom. […] she liked to think of its cool high-ceilinged rooms, of its busy maids, of little Curtis waiting to deliver his respectful kiss (63).

Therefore, the concept of her own home adequately reflects a convenient sense of order and grandeur. The line of thought reveals a lack of humanity behind this lifestyle in which even her son is just another piece inside a perfect microcosm. This exposition presents parallelisms with the coming of Mr. Durant to his own house after cruelly leaving and firing his pregnant secretary:

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In high humor, he left his car at his street, and walked in the direction of his house. It was a mean night, but the insinuating cold and the black rain only made more graphic his picture of the warm, bright house, the great dish of steaming fish chowder, the well-behaved children and the wife who awaited him. (63)

His list respects his order of priorities, and it is added that he decided to decelerate his steps so as to prolong his children and wife’s wait. The narrator adopts his own point of view when finding proofs of respect for his great authority. Another common trait in the two stories is the presence of a reading room, known in this case as ‘Father’s den’, some kind of male equivalence of the dining room and specifically designed to remark the higher intellectual capacities of the ‘head of the family’—denied by the satiric voice of the narration. Mr. Durant’s selection of books makes his wife, Fan, “who never had time to get around to reading [think] of her husband as one of the country’s leading bibliophiles” (31). While female characters often mention the library as a source for reading material, men reserve this corner for themselves up to the point that greedy Mrs. Whittaker (“The Wonderful Old Gentleman”) finds it adequate that her brother-in-law inherits her father’s book collection. It is significant that all male characters who do not try to act as heads of the family feel relieved from offering this image of cultivated men. Herbie Morse (“Big Blonde”) “boasted, probably not in all truth, that he had never read a book in his life” (108). Even the writer Freeman Pawling, a character inspired by Ernest Hemingway, who was an acquaintance of Parker’s (“Oh, He’s Charming!”) is criticised as a misanthrope who does not regret his lack of knowledge about contemporary literature (54-55). As most of the stories portray scenes of dysfunctional couples, Parker, who avoids direct references to sexual drive or to frustrations derived from it, and who used to make derisive remarks about them in her work as a critic, finds in the threshold of bedrooms the ideal place to describe this type of tension. Maida Allen (“The Banquet of Crow”), in her personal obstinacy to believe that her husband would return home after leaving her, considers it excessive complacence to accompany him to the bedroom they used to share when he eventually comes back to it to grab his suitcase. The previously mentioned Mimi McVicker (“The Lovely Leave”), a character directly linked to the previous one, hesitates about following her husband around the house when he comes back during his brief leave. Their nervousness is repeatedly put in contrast with their apparent total lack of interest in them. The door marks both the beginning and the end of their visits and, in the first example, of any hope of reconciliation, at least on the side

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of the reader, because the character persists with the idea. In the second one, the door demarcates the beginning and the end of the argument. If the shyness of the couple to show their affection triggered the fight, they are eventually capable of solving the disencounter in the same place of access to their home. This way, the title acquires an unexpected meaning, as “lovely” applies to the word “leave”, not in his time out of the military camp, but in the last-minute reconciliation after going back to it. The universal relation between the bedroom and the couple justifies some symbolism of some stories. In “Glory in the Daytime” Mrs. Murdock’s walk responds to her feelings: she leaves her house with her harsh husband in excitement to meet her idol, and then she comes back with renewed hopes on her marriage, soon to be destroyed by her husband again. The story ends with her defeated walk towards her bedroom. Even the slam at the door of Mrs. Ewing after discovering that after all her effort it is her daughter who does have a boyfriend is remarkable. Two other stories with a parallel structure reserve a privileged role for this element into its spatial coordinate. The door of Mr. Durant’s office, which had held for months a satisfactory space for his affair with his secretary Rose, turns too inconsistent against possible third parties to hold the confession of her pregnancy, which leads him to leave her. Moreover, at the end of the story, inside his home, the door leading to the dining room is metamorphosed into a kind of gate through which he leads his wife to the stable of marital harmony—or the submissive behaviour they both identify with it—as an end to all the events that had perturbed him throughout the story. For her part, Mrs. Matson starts her story by strongly pushing a door of a shop with a board asking not to use it, a meaningful description of the attitude of the character. The door acts as a wall for their castle and as a metaphor of the psychological barriers she builds to leave out everything escaping from her control: she locks her son so that he can reflect and, in an act which is remarkable enough to end the story, she closes the door behind her visits which have shown her an unwanted glimpse about how her motherhood is perceived out from her house. The scenes taking place in a porch—another space of access to the house—are conditioned by its supposed use for romance. The flirtatious nature of Lolita’s mother makes her pay special attention to this space before her daughter’s wedding. As the voice of the story uses this character’s point of view, it only suggests the porch was finally substituted for flings in his car so as to avoid her intrusive presence. “Such a Pretty Little Picture" devotes a privileged moment to this part of the house. The fact that such a tedious scene is developed in a place typically reserved for lovers

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makes it even more disappointing, even if their acquaintances get a good impression out of it. There is a clear distinction between the most private part of the house, on the upper floor, and the space open to the servants or guests. The difference is felt in “The Wonderful Old Gentleman”, in which the aforementioned torture room contrasts with the comfort of that for the exclusive use of the wonderful gentleman; or the rich chambers mentioned in “The Custard Heart”, Mrs. Lanier’s private space. Decorated with her own portraits, they are reserved to her melancholic thoughts. Therefore, its access remains forbidden to her husband and is only available to her successive admirers and her maid, in charge of her appearance. “Horsie” introduces a character that, due to her condition of a nurse taking care of a woman and her newborn daughter, has access to both floors of the house. This condition is regarded as unwanted for the two sections of the house. However, this opinion has been filtered through the ideas of the new father and therefore the narrator could be considered as unreliable in the terms defined by Booth (158-159). The big disappointment about having to share the space downstairs and in dinners hides the resentment for having been ejected from the bedroom on the upper floor and, extensively, from his marital life. If dining rooms represent the social life of the couple, bedrooms show the state of their union with no intermediaries involved. The pictures of the Morses, which are successively removed, the yawning at the Weldons’ bedroom, revealing of his boredom and provoking her irritation; the heavy perfume of Mimi trying to catch her husband’s attention, and the equally intense sound of his doorbell, claiming for other kinds of attention, are the few details transmitting information about the couples. The metonymy house-inhabitant becomes central in “I Live on Your Visits” where Parker makes use of the reduced dimensions and the unhealthy condition of the hotel room where the main character lives so as to increase the effects of the absorbing personality that Parker wants to show to her readers. The importance of space in this story makes her describe a room similar to the one she had at the Volney hotel, transformed into a horrific scenery in which the claustrophobic effect starts from the first sentence: “The boy came into the hotel room and immediately it seemed even smaller” (306). There is a reference to the obsessive presence of mirrors which multiply the already overwhelming company of her mother. The decoration is complemented with a series of photographs of her child when he was a kid and lived with her and that he had unsuccessfully tried to remove. The room seems also full of the voice of the mother grotesquely trying to imi-

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tate the sound of a little girl, yet another evidence that she does not accept the fact that her child has grown up. She has turned her dwelling into a scenic space in which she displays her scenic skills, where the many mirrors coexist with high-voltage light bulbs in contrast with the tenebrous corridor, as a stage to declaim, with a completely inadequate velvet gown with a tail, magnificent, and victimized monologues. It must be taken into account that “I Live on Your Visits”, together with other stories such as “The Wonderful Old Gentleman” or “Lady with a Lamp”, presents a fight between two characters that is shown through a psychological distribution of space, so that each of them is progressively invading the space for the other. The story is strictly built around the duration of the visit, even if his last words are muted before the sonority of the lapidary words of the mother as a final end. The only interest is in the confrontation between the two characters, mother and son. In fact, the moment in which they separate appears as a pause—however, Parker can’t resist slipping in her discourse the son’s discovery about the mother’s lie about her precarious life. The sensation of being out of breath is perfected thanks to the smoke and the apparition of a third character who, sinisterly hidden, does not show any proof of her presence until the situation is clearly profiled. Her aim is to reinforce the mother’s point of view and to implacably criticize the son. His good intentions will prove useless as her mother extends her net to keep him, with the foreseeable opposite result. In “Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street”, the search for a quiet house to live in becomes, after the arrival of a butler, in a nightmare of a difficult way out for the main character resembling Dorothy Parker: [M]emory draws her merciful gray curtain. She does, for that matter, over all the events of Horace’s, stay with us. I do not know how long that was. There were no days, there were no nights, there was no time. There was only space; space filled with Horace. […] Horace was there. Horace was always there. I have known no being so present in a house as was Horace. I never knew him open a door, I never heard his approaching football; Horace was off the room and then, a thousand times more frequently, Horace was in it. I sat at my typewriter, and Horace stood across from it and spoke to me […] We had no thoughts, no spirits, no actions. We ceased to move from room to room, even from chair to chair […] There we were, world without end, with Horace. (242)

As the mother in “I Live on Your Visits”, Horace monopolizes space. Besides, her continuous allusions to the home of Mrs. Hofstadter on Jose-

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phine Street make this location a much more meaningful place than the one in which action is actually taking place. Hotels, appearing on numerous stories, are often considered as a permanent residence and not just temporary accommodation for holidays — this other function appears in “Travelogue”, “Here We Are” and also the article “A Summer Anthology” (379-386). Especially divorced men use hotels as residence, to which Parker would dedicate the play The Ladies of the Corridor. “Horsie” and, to a greater extent, “The Bolt Behind the Blue” show a peek to lower-class houses, but “Clothe the Naked” is the one that makes a difference in the corpus. The main character, Big Lannie, frequently visits two-floor houses, while Parker denounces that two of the children had died due to the lack of “fresh food and clean spaces and clean air behind them” (244). After the birth of her grandson Raymond, blind at birth and abandoned by his parents, she hired “one room with a stove in it” (245). However, later, there is a mention of the confinement of the child for the winter months and how he could finally feel the change of season even in those “smokey, stinking rooms of the house” (249). This implies contradiction with the previous information and could be considered as a symptom of the fact that, despite her manifest preference for the disfavoured which is reflected in her use of an over-sentimental tone lacking her stereotypical criticism, Parker did not visualize the houses in the South with the same precision as penthouses in Manhattan. It is remarkable, though, that none of the homes described, either houses in the suburbs, apartments in the city, rooms with a kitchen or hotels are profiled as a pleasant place to live. Regarding ‘public spaces’, the corpus includes offices, streets, parties, speakeasies, different means of transport, shops, libraries, hospitals, schools and churches. As they cannot reflect the character’s personality, so their description is absolutely absent and several times they are only mentioned briefly to describe lifestyles. Offices make a distinction between working women and those who stay home and are usually assisted by maids. As female characters are obsessed with the idea of romance, they tend to be suspicious of this kind of venue. Even when normally portrayed men are not so passionate creatures, in some cases work is used in the corpus as an excuse for infidelity. The street, usually a positive setting, reflects the anemic state of the character and also their self-esteem and different paternalistic, discriminatory—tragic in the case of “Clothe the Naked”—or flirtatious attitudes. Public transport shows stinginess—“Little Curtis”—or the unattractive life of commuters—“Such a Pretty Little Picture”—while particular cars or taxis, generalized in her times, become many times the setting of sketches

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of young dating couples. Private parties are also a common location for this kind of stories. They are characterized by the confluence of many guests and sometimes an orchestra. Even when the surreal situations produced in them are sometimes provoked by alcohol consumption, the stories with this main theme are usually set in speak-easies, the taverns of the 1920s during the Prohibition. The space dedicated to war is also relevant in the corpus. Parker held a strong political commitment which leads her to voluntary work in World War II. Consequently, her option was to use her writing to motivate her compatriots instead of offering some form of escapism. “The Lovely Leave” shows the emptiness of a wife’s habitual venues once her husband has left home to serve as a soldier. Somehow, his camp has become the office other characters were jealous about as she expresses in her most lucid line: “[Y]ou have a whole life—I have half an old one” (281). “Song of the Shirt, 1941” shows the perspective of a volunteer whose patriotic views transform her own house into a prolongation of the headquarters where she sews shirts. The main space of war is a café in Valencia in “Soldiers of the Republic”, an autobiographic story, in which she is interested about the lives of some Spanish soldiers in the civil war on a leave. In this case, leisure is no longer described as relaxed or superficial. Instead, the surrounding deprivation makes the Spaniards aware of the need to spend the evening in a public place as they did before the war so as to express their aspiration to follow with their lives. A closer reading of Dorothy Parker’s narrative exceeds the condition of a portrait of the society in a certain place and time, but rather, this emblematic picture of New York in the 1920s is used to show intrinsic human needs, such as to be loved and recognized; or tensions as those derived from relationships. She uses daily settings to draw schematically fights among characters, who seem to impersonate human types, especially those of male and female nature, or dominant and shy prototypes whose antagonism will irrevocably lead to the repetition of their conflicts. Finally, the image of New York in the corpus is not so much that of a setting but of a protagonist. Even when Parker does not describe it profusely, the idea of the city in the collective unconscious was partly forged by her work, together with those by Edith Wharton or Woody Allen. Despite showing the violence imposed by money, it appears in her works from a loving perspective and from her consideration of the best landscape and modus vivendi created by human beings.

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Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994. (Poétique de l'espace 1st ed. 1958). Print. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Print. Calhoun, Randall. A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1992. Print. Caracciolo, Marco. “Narrative Space and Readers’ Response to Stories: A Phenomenological Account”. Style 47.4 (2013): 425-444. Gaines, James R. Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table. Brooklyn Heights, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Print. Kinney, Arthur. Dorothy Parker. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Print. Meade, Marion. What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Penguin, 1989. Print. Melzer, Sondra. The Rhetoric of Rage: Women in Dorothy Parker. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Print. Parker, Dorothy. Complete Stories. New York: Penguin Classics, 1995. Print. Pettit, Rhonda, S. A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction. Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000, Print. Pettit, Rhonda S., ed. The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker. Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Print. Prado Biezma, Javier del. Análisis e interpretación de la novela. Cinco modos de leer un texto narrativo. Madrid: Síntesis, 1999. Print. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Space”. In: Hühn, Peter (ed.): The Living Handbook of Narratology. 2012. Web: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/space. 27 June, 2016.

THE CREATIVE ELLE IN COLETTE’S INCOMPLETE AUTOFICTION GIGI IRINA ARMIANU

Why are Colette’s writing in general and her short story Gigi, in particular, presenting such an unusual creative vibe and powerful feminist message? While addressing her elliptic style one needs to read Colette within the larger frame of contemporary French writers: Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. This article intends to uncover Colette's surprising creative resources and their influence on French Literature at the beginning of the twentieth-century Belle Époque. Published in 1944, Gigi brilliantly manifested theatrical skills and inspired various dramatic and cinematographic representations1 based on its feminist agenda. Building a feminist myth was not a specific literary aim for Colette but a great achievement for her legacy. Our reading of Gigi’s story seeks to provide new and interdisciplinary insight into precisely those ways in which the fiction is intimately related to the Belle époque’s reality. In doing this one must pay attention to a diversity of literary, psychoanalytical, and socio-feminist dimensions in Gigi. Away from an autobiographical reiteration of a young Colette, the poetic and realistic sense in this narrative has nonetheless a direct link with her time2. Gigi is close to the surrealist inspiration of the writer’s essential creative liberty as in the contemporary Jean Cocteau’s orphic poetry and prose3 or to Gide’s realism of emotion and rebellion against moral limitations. It is natural for all these writers to doubt their society at the turn of the century and to question its morals. The story of Gigi brings to attention the topic of love, female sexuality, and a certain sense of inner power that any woman inherits by birth, as Colette seem to suggest. Neither the plot nor the omniscient narrative voice can possibly talk about these themes openly, mainly because Colette’s writing here and otherwise in all her literature is implicitly theorizing. Her writing is full of suggestions (like the meaning of life from the old courtesans’ perspective), metaphors (the way the women dress and speak says all about their personalities and educa-

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tion), and ellipses (many things rest unsaid to be more striking for the readers). By intentionally avoiding naming her characters or their taboos Colette underlines feminist issues and looks for the foundation of a new feminist language. Her style is subversive of the well-established counter-feminism much like Proust’s subtly masked references to homosexuality for his characters’ hidden sexuality. Counter-feminism is defined as producing comments on feminist issues by exposing and exaggerating male domination in a patriarchal society. This is exactly the kind of exaggerated patriarchal situation that Colette’s characters experience through the wellestablished social status as demimondaines: large fortunes contributing to the inferior status of women and their submission to the male characters. Following an intrinsic and imaginary logic of autofictional narratives, the end reveals deeper truths about someone’s subjectivity through the imaginary dimension of the character’s story.4 In comparison with Colette’s other stories Gigi begins with a classical ‘‘belle époque” plot and culminates in the amazing awakening of Gigi, the female character related to the author’s personal mythology. Endowed with remarkable easiness in opposition to the more descriptive Proustian divagations or Gidean philosophical approach, Colette’s writing changes from one publication to another. In this regard, La Naissance du Jour presents a more mature and refined personal style. However, her stories remain all in the same area of essentialist description and autofictional resonance. In the light of early counter-feminism, the poetics of narration, the portrait, and other literary strategies can be useful to understand the longlasting fame of Colette (a personal mythology related to her female characters, all confronting decisive social and psychological obstacles). Her writing is creative beyond the simple words on paper by inviting to further interpretations. Gigi may be a perfect way to explore the author's own destiny.5 Colette’s writing is creative and psychologically revealing because it is visual, seductive, and populated with exciting characters, obsessed with love and self-esteem. The demimondaines have a clear consciousness of their class and social status. Love is a mirage, their target, and their forbidden zone of human imaginary. Colette brings a very informed gaze into this world. The author herself had the advantage and the disadvantage to marry Willy, a notorious art critic, and a popular writer, at a very young age. Even if he took advantage of her early literary talent by appropriating her work under his name, Willy was nonetheless a window for the young Colette into the artistic world of La Belle Epoque (The Belle Époque 18901914). Her emancipation from this enslaving marriage took Colette to new

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horizons not always socially conformist and serene. She has played in 1907 a mime role in the revue spectacle Rêve d'Égypte at Moulin Rouge. From this experience and some friendships or alleged homosexual relations with artistic stars such as Natalie Barney, Josephine Baker, or Missy one gets the image of an extravagant Colette exploring the high world as much as the demimondaines and the female actors (two social classes sometimes competing for the wealthy businessmen’s attention). This young Colette experiments with her sexuality much like Gigi whose sexuality is forbidden by her grandmother Madame Alvarez and Aunt Alicia. At the heart of Colette’s writing is to fictionalize herself in the literary text, which should be the defining feature of the autofiction as a narrative form inspired by psychoanalytic theory.6 The recreation of herself in the past comes from a happy older and wiser Colette. Despite her adventurous past, Colette received public recognition by accepting La Légion d’Honneur for both her later humanitarian actions during the First World War and for her literary celebrity. Her third marriage in 1935 with Maurice Goudeket coincides with Colette’s election to L’Académie Royale de Belgique, followed in 1945 by her election to L’Académie Goncourt. All these honours along with her celebrity make it a case of a philosophy of happiness, free creativity, and free will in the process of women’s liberation. Fifty novels stand for these themes of resonance: life in society with detailed notes on social behaviour, love, the impossible balance in couple/marriage, and autobiography as a means of recounting the past and redirecting the present. The inciting characters are profoundly marked by the author’s theatrical style where life is experienced directly without too many comments. A special technique in Gigi’s world is the space populated almost exclusively with women. The elliptic style of Colette is relevant in their names. Gigi only has her first name since she is under Madame Alvarez’s custody. She needs to wait and change this master with the man who is meant to take care of her, a rich and socially recognized man like Gaston. This is the plan designed by her female tutors (Alvarez and Alicia); a sound plan for any of the demimondaines as they project their lives around money, drama, accompanying a rich man’s youth till the time of his marriage. Thus Gigi goes from childhood to maturity without the smallest chance of acquiring a name. Colette is not explicit about this nameless state of her character and the very possibility of a family name is not even imaginable in Gigi’s world. Still, the question is inevitable in the reader’s mind since Gigi’s grandmother has a name implying a Spanish national identity while she is obviously French. She calls herself after the name of a dead lover and engages an entire disguising machinery (a very white

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makeup, clothes, attitude and Spanish expression of her face) to adapt her appearance to her name. She gains social status. Moreover, she gets the social respect associating herself to Gaston, a very popular socialite and the only male character in the story. Colette describes this nomenclature and one can feel her irony even if she has no direct comments. Gaston too fits the pattern of a constructed identity as a direct product of his social milieu. In this regard, Colette follows Balzac’s theory showing the characters as a direct result of their social and material condition. Gaston Lachaille is a man and his family name is literally a brand and a very powerful one since this is the source of his social status and fortune. As a wealthy heir of his parent’s sugar empire, he is supposed to party with mistresses and demimondaines such as Liane de Pougy and make the cover of scandal magazines. Raised in this societal adulation for rich men, Gigi is attracted by his celebrity and reads about her friend’s love dramas in the scandal papers. Her initiative is meaningless against such powerful social incentives. If Madame Alvarez and Alicia are the successful products of a bourgeois society Gigi is just an apprentice with a shy personality merely trying to escape these social rules out of curiosity. Her only education is miserable: how to eat certain dishes, how to control herself and her body, how to please a man, and when to talk. However, she revolts and would often make fun of the old women. Colette herself finds a relief in her Gigi but her laughter is a bitter one because the young girl has no chance in liberating herself. In the end, her simple name identifies Gigi with an innocent child, with no chance to educate herself, or to discover her own identity. The only world she knows is the one presented by the old courtesans based on a masculine system of values. The system is accidentally the object of Gigi’s mockery: Grand-mère me dit: “défense de lire des romans, ça donne le cafard. Défense de mettre de la poudre, ça gâte le teint. Défense de porter un corset, ça gâte la taille; défense de s’arrêter seule aux vitrines des magasins … Défense de connaître les familles des camarades de cours, surtout les pères qui viennent chercher leurs filles à la sortie du cours…” (Colette 41)7

The rules are strict and by avoiding any comments (Gigi doesn’t understand them and Colette restrains herself from discussing these selfimplied bylaws) Colette stresses their credibility and opens it to the public’s comments and irony. Do Mme. Alvarez and Alicia care about this social system? Although scandalous their blindness incites Gigi to revolt. Coincidentally, Colette makes her point on the issue of marriage through the two old ladies. They place the marriage among the forbidden

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things in life because of the numerous interdictions and rites of the demimondaines. Both ladies and Gigi’s mother Andrée make a common front with Gaston in raising Gigi for a brilliant career of courtesan instead of a modest marriage with an employee or of ending up as an honest middleclass working woman. Many of Colette’s critics have noticed this aspect. “The mother’s scorn emanates, of course, less from her than from a society that debases women’s work both by underpayment and by denigration, and sometimes, as for Andrée, even by condemnation” (Cohen 793-809). Any kind of sexual encounters is forbidden to courtesans until they manage to seal an official liaison with a rich protector. Gigi is not allowed to explore the world inside out, to find her sexuality, as she is not allowed to search for a social identity. She is also forbidden to talk or play with her colleagues at school. The subversive message is almost imperceptible and for a moment we believe in all the good intentions in Gigi’s faulty education. Not only is Gigi missing a family name8 but also she cannot name her body parts. She simply doesn't know a name as if denying her a linguistic reality the aunts can make that reality disappear. Both sexuality and the power to think critically are the big taboos. By refusing to acknowledge the possibility of a female subjectivity the story triggers an immediate reaction against the entire society caused by the outrageous injustice made to Gigi. Gigi herself has an almost physical reaction to the different constraints: luxury clothing bothers her, she suffocates in the repressing dress given by Alicia, her hair keeps popping up, and she won't stop asking questions about everything around her. Our sympathy goes towards this ingenious character. This is the best occasion for Colette to set the record straight about a young girl's education. Colette’s elliptic style gives the reader the critical distance to appreciate her irony and to understand the subversive discourse in stating the truth by avoiding it. Going back to the first part of the twentieth century Colette must have been compelled to create a neutral space for her readers where she would be allowed to bring into the public sphere some of the individual constraints and social taboos. In this regard, she gained authority by promoting her truth through the autofiction. Another step was to avoid mass disapproval by showing socially permissible characters. Colette managed to bring in her texts a hidden agenda as a negative part of what has been shown. The real message is waiting in the shadow to fill in the gaps of her ellipses. A secret reading pact is spontaneously born between Colette and her readers. In this imaginary space female subject can be many things unimaginable in real life conditions: she can decide for herself as in Gigi, she can love another woman, as in Le pur et l’impur, she can explore her sexuality

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and her desires as in Chèri, and most importantly she can find a voice of her own and change the rules as it goes, as do all her female characters. Revealing everything by avoiding the direct comment is a manifest sign of Colette’s quiet revolt against literary censorship, social stigma, and the gendered qualifications of her time. The literary is the domain of both fantasy and reality where Colette mystifies her persona. This made possible to explore her subjectivity into its deepest abyss. In the psychoanalytical theory of the auctorial subjectivity, Julia Kristeva discovered new creative resources through the Freudian processes of sublimation (Kristeva 8). Thus a human subject, in this case, Colette, can achieve alternative gratifying identities. In this ideal space the subject can reinvent himself in an additional world for aesthetic creativity: La désexualisation signifie que, dans le cours de la sublimation, la pulsion change de but et d’objet: au lieu de viser la satisfaction des zones érogènes, l’activité du sujet lui procure des plaisirs idéaux, des satisfactions attachées par exemple à la beauté idéale des êtres, des choses, ainsi qu’aux propres productions de l’auteur, faites de mots, de couleurs, de sons, qui deviennent des représentants de son narcissisme et de son Moi idéal. (Kristeva 30)9

The pleasure is not sexually orientated but aesthetic. One of the authors cited by Kristeva is Marcel Proust, a brilliant case of what the French call la jouissance du texte littéraire (‘the enjoyment of literary text’; Kristeva 103). For Colette too the human subject reaches ecstasy at its own reflection in the literary mirror. In this, her imagination is prolific in suggestions, connotations, and metaphorical expressions, thus technically matched to her elliptic style. Colette will never get out of fashion. Her characters live on the vanity of human nature, endowed with a substantial psychoanalytical dimension. Her writing has a permanent value speaking to the public about our humanism. If the autofiction is not a form of autobiography this is because it tells a story much truthful to the human subject’s life experience. This is also because the fiction builds on the subconscious traces, the only part that we cannot fake or change. The way Marie Darrieussecq theorizes the autofiction it might not be complete as a definition of the genre but it is revelling for its essence, underlining the role of the deep part of the subconscious in telling an autofictional story. The autofiction is a relatively new concept in the narrative theory and still a very controversial one. In 1977 Serge Doubrovsky10 in Livre brisé staged the scene for authorizing the theoretical concept of autofiction. He finds a previous tradition of the genre in Céline, Breton, Genet, and Colette. The new genre builds a prolific space of expression for different minorities: racial, social, homosexual, or feminist, usually describing identity

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crises. The definition of the genre and its evolution can be retraced in Colette’s works from the more manifestly autobiographical Claudine à l’école [Claudine at school] and Claudine à Paris [Claudine in Paris] to La maison de Claudine [Claudine’s home], to the more fictionalized Sido and La naissance du jour [The break of dawn]. The need for a new genre in analyzing Colette’s stories comes partially from the impossibility of ranging works like La naissance du jour in the more rigorously defined space of autobiography. In Gigi, the fictional part (la part de la fiction) is strong although still under biographical ascendant. Colette manages to reiterate her classical themes like the childhood (young Gigi is continuously submitted to her relatives). The story of Gigi becoming a woman explores the elliptic enunciation of untold truths by this invisible pact with the public where Gigi gets so close to Colette’s auctorial persona. The narrative of Gigi has all the signs of an autobiographical writing: the inspired feminine discourse so personal to Colette, the continuous societal pressure of fulfilling the feminine role (marriage and children or prostitution) circumscribing Gigi’s education and destiny as well as Colette’s own struggles in life with love and marriage. However, the plot is invented. In spite of her will to think and speak for herself, Gigi is far from the revolutionary Colette. Why isn’t Gigi exactly an autobiographical writing? The author only projects herself in Gigi. She doesn’t recount her past. If the autobiographical identification of Colette is imminent in her characters as Claudine, Annie, or Renée, here Colette only experiments with her past childhood and mistakes. The literary creation of Gigi is subversive of social taboo and family dominance. The fact did not escape the fine eye of Stéphanie Michineau who in her study mentioned the feminist issues of the time as well as the social implications of feminine writing: ‘‘Ecrire son autobiographie pour une femme, semble, en effet, difficile à concevoir à l’époque de Colette où la condition feminine est mise à mal: l’autofiction est, semble-t-il, le seul recours mis à leur disposition...’’ (Michineau 19).11 The genre is also the key to Colette’s success. It represents the means to educate a public inclined to search for the author’s personal mythology. By going after a constructed image, a fictional ‘herself’, the author passed the border of the reality and the truth into a domain of improbable fiction. Colette projects in Gigi a young woman, as herself at the age of her first marriage. She places Gigi in the same socio-cultural mentality and she gives her the same aspirations or expectations. Colette matured while she becomes a woman and a writer. Gigi too finds her identity while she passes the threshold of womanhood.12 Colette takes consecutively the voice of two places. She is the one speaking beyond the omnipresent voice of a

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very elusive narrator and beyond Gigi’s reflections or dialogue: ‘‘À porter le nom espagnol d’un amant défunt, Mme Alvarez avait acquis une pâleur beurrée, de l’embonpoint, des cheveux lustrés à la brillantine.’’13 The autofiction gives wings to the imagination and lets the author rewrite her story. Colette’s fiction is not an exception and Gigi’s truth is closer to Colette than the historical reality. Fiction doesn’t lie because it comes from a deeper psychological truth. The phantasmatic image of human nature can sometimes be more revealing and more literarily productive than the simple reiteration of the historical facts. In one of the pictures representing Colette as a dancer in a revue show14 her exotic costume is very revealing in a sexy and non-prudish pose. Her nakedness reminds the seductive icon of the banana skirt of Josephine Baker. It must be something in the air of La Belle Époque, a sense of liberation. The physical beauty, a sign of visual pleasure, is also an egotistic pleasure of loving her body and expressing herself through the body. However, this is not entirely the case for Colette’s heroines who manifest an element of distortion and of alienation of their body. In the case of Gigi, her body is a constant target for Madame Alvarez, Alicia, and her mother’s surveillance. They analyze her posture; criticize her features like her mouth, her face, and her neck. In contrast with Colette herself the women in her writings are intentionally traumatized and covered. They need to control their body as much as they need to control their desires. The clever Alvarez explains to Gigi why women need to hide their true nature: if men are superstitious, women mustn’t show their fearless courage. Women need to expose a fragile and vulnerable nature (a fake personality but an acceptable one). Gigi doesn’t subscribe to the above. She answers to the readers’ insidious burning wish to break the rules. In many regards, her popularity transferred to the novelette’s popularity. Hence the numerous theatrical and cinema adaptations among which are an initial Broadway production; a 1949 adaptation at Hollywood—Gigi, with Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, and Leslie Caron; and a 1965 mise en scène by Jean-Michel Rouzière, with Muriel Baptiste, Philippe Dehesdin, Paul Guers, Jacqueline Ricard at Théâtre du Palais-Royal. Colette is to the present as famous for drama not only in her work but also in her life.15 The characters and the conflict, the significance of names, the elements of autobiography, the psychoanalysis, and last but not least Colette’s special relation to her public built on the hypothesis of Colette the artist as the only possibility to make explicit her view on life: healing old wounds and liberating her true identity. In other words, Colette believes in the thera-

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peutical force of the literary. Her success stands for revealing the truth about life in her literary works. Colette’s immense literary success and social recognition continued in her work’s adaptations on the scene or on the big screen. The 1958 Gigi film adaptation got no less than nine Oscars (among these also the Oscar for the best movie). The director, Vincente Minnelli (from MGM) did not change the plot. In the movie transcript, written by Allan Jay Lerner, the characters (Gigi, played by Leslie Caron, Gaston Lachaille by Louis Jourdan, Mme Alvarez by Hermine Gingold, Alicia by Isabel Jeans, Liane by Eva Gabor) are deeply involved in the musical reproduction of a Parisian haute société. A new character, Honoré Lachaille-Maurice Chevalier, an experienced dandy much like Gaston but older, opens the scene to explore this encapsulated world. He has the savoir-vivre and can offer to Gaston a mirror to explore his own life. Because of this double Gaston is a deep character and opens the eyes on a true and egalitarian relationship with Gigi. He truly surpasses the system’s codes. In this regard, the movie does for the masculine character what the book refused to do. It gave him a psychological profile, hence a respectful image and a decisive role to play. What was unsaid or avoided in the book appears in the movie as a secondary discourse beyond the seductive appearance of the rich and happy. As a musical, the production has a misleading happy ending for any noninitiated public. To understand the movie completely one needs to explore its literary model too. The visual arts are at their best in the movie’s colourful images with its aristocratic dresses and royal gestures or in the cartoons building the generic. The painting of this perfect world, the local colours, and the nostalgia for this past are everywhere in the movie although less obvious in the initial story. Colette applied aesthetic techniques and social observation. Her involvement is an obvious choice and a literary therapy. As with her literary texts by the construction of plot and the unfolding of character, her legacy attends to feminist values at their early stages. There are ways in which autofictional writing provides the means to trespass the private and to express a deeper truth. In this Colette has been recognized as one of the most creative writers of her time. Claudine à l'école, La Maison de Claudine, Claudine à Paris, and Claudine en ménage—her earliest and vast work manifests a clear inclination towards a kind of intuitive and creative autobiography.

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Notes 1

Colette, as one of the most successful writers on the big screen or on the stage, made herself the subject of the drama representation as in Herbert Lottman’s Colette. 2 The monographic value in Gigi has been an immediate attraction for La Belle Epoque’s image with all the specific details about the fashion, the cars, and the names of famous actresses and libertines such as Liane de Pougy, as well defined by Charles Hérisson in ‘‘A propos de Gigi: Littérature et sociologie.’’ The French Review 35.1 (Oct., 1961): 42-49. 3 Contemporary to Colette and very close to her personal style Jean Cocteau too built his literary and visual art with an exquisite sense for the creative inspiration to choose its own language and style giving to the work a mind of its own: ‘‘Le mensonge et l’inexactitude le soulegent quelques minutes, lui procurant la petite deliverance d’une mascarade. Il décollede ce qu’il éprouve de ce qu’il voit. Il invente. Il transfigure. Il mythifie. Il crée. Il se flatte d’être un artiste’’ (Jean Cocteau 14). [The fictional and the uncertain release the artist for a moment, in giving him the small relief of a counterfeit. He differentiates between what he feels and what he sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mystifies. He creates. He flatters himself of being a real artist.] 4 Right from the beginning the autofiction, a new concept in literary criticism, established its terms on the field of fictionalization in Serge Doubrovsky’s novel Fils, as a new possible combination between reality and fiction. 5 The big temptation is to identify Gigi with Colette herself reading in her narrative a simple “pacte romanesque” as defined by Philippe Lejeune in Le Pacte autobiographique but the facts don’t check and Gigi’s story goes beyond the reality and lets us better understand the author’s truth by empathy. 6 In searching the narrative parameters to establish the autofictional writing as a narrative genre Jacques Lecarme discusses the frontiers between the fiction and the autobiography in Fiction Romanesque et autobiographie (Lecrame 417-418). 7 All original texts are in French followed by my English translation: ‘‘my grandmother said: ‘do not read novels, this could give you a nostalgic mood. Do not use powder; this will alter your skin. Do not use a corset, this will deform your waist; do not stop by yourself at the store windows … Do not meet with your colleagues’ families at school, especially with those fathers coming to pick-up their daughters at the end of the class…’’’ (Colette 41) 8 The lack of a name for the female characters is one of the main revealing signs for the writer’s elliptic style as rightfully noticed in Susan Cohen’s An Onomastic Double Bind 793-809. 9 ‘‘The desexualizing means that, during the process of sublimation, the impulse changes its target and object: instead of aiming for erogenous areas, the subject’s activity offers him ideal pleasures, satisfactions related to the beauty in human beings, in the world of objects or in his own works, made of words, colors, sounds, which become representative of his narcissism and of his ideal ego’’ (Kristeva 30).

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10

In 1999 Serge Doubrovsky put on the cover of Laissé pour conte the subtitle ‘’autofiction'", a term that he will explain later in Autobiographie/Vérité/ Psychanalyse. 11 ‘‘For a woman, to write an autobiography seems rather difficult during Colette’s times when feminine condition was idle: the autofiction is for a woman, apparently, the only means to do it…’’ (Stéphanie Michineau 19). 12 Exploring these politics of freedom and emancipation in tandem with acquiring a name one can notice Colette’s transition from Sidonie Gabrielle Colette to Colette Willy and finally to the simple Colette while looking for a literary place and authority. 13 ‘‘To better appropriate the name of a dead old lover, Madame Alvarez painted herself with a buttery paleness colour, with certain stoutness, and with hair made up with gloss’’ (Colette 30). 14 Colette played in 1906 the mime at the cabaret of Moulin-Rouge. 15 ‘‘It was never been easy to separate the woman from the actress’’ (Margaret Crosland XI).

Works Cited Cocteau, Jean. Journal d’un inconnu. Paris: Grasset, 1953. Print. Cohen, Susan D. “An Onomastic Double Bind: Colette’s Gigi and the Politics of Naming.” PMLA 100.5 (1985): 793-809. Print. Colette. Gigi. Paris: Hachette, 2009. Print. Crosland, Margaret. Colette, the Difficulty of Loving: A Biography. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, Inc., 1973. Print. Darrieussecq, Marie. ‘‘L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.’’ Poétique 107 (1996): 369-370. Print. Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Print. Hérisson, Charles. ‘‘Apropos de Gigi: Littérature et Sociologie.’’ The French Review 35.1 (1961): 42-49. Print. Lecarme, Jacques. ‘‘Fiction romanesque et autobiographie.’’ Universalia. Encyclopedia Universalis, Paris (1984): 417-418. Print. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, coll. “Poétique”, 1975. Print. Lottman, Herbert. Colette. Paris: Fayard, 1990. Print. Kristeva, Julia. L’amour de soi et ses avatars. Demesure et limites de la sublimation. Nantes : Ed. Pleins Feux, 2005. Print. —. Le génie féminin : la vie, la folie, les mots. Vol. 3: Colette. Paris: Fayar, 2002. Print. Michineau, Stéphanie. L'Autofiction dans l'œuvre de Colette. Paris: Publibook, coll. “EPU”, série “Lettres & Langues—Lettres moderns”, 2008. Print.

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Schiesari, Juliana. “Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers.” Flash Points 10.3 (2012). Print.

(EN)GENDERING TRAVELOGY IN LESSING AND MORRISON ARUP K. CHATTERJEE

In Tourists with Typewriters Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan question the lack of a feminine geography in social and cultural studies which perpetuates the stagnation of female travel writing as suspended between a secondary economy (oiko-nomy) of the private and (forbidden) sexual transgression (101-118). Paradoxically women’s travel writing has not afforded the same degree of criticism that has been labelled, often severely, against travel writing, otherwise, and even colonial narratology in general, given the fact the former is so rarefied in the reading imagination. Given the facts of envoyage (endless wanderings of the envois) desinterrance (the detouring and deferred itinerary of the secret message), it is improbable for us to presume any sanctity in the homogenous structure of a travel narrative (Derrida and Malabou 18). This line of inquiry, while closing in on the erstwhile uncensored pleasures of travel writing, however, opens up a new arena altogether of travelogy, which can be said to determine writing itself, and thus all writing in one way or another must be a representation of travelling, just as it also is a representation of sexual, economic and political relations of signs, their referrers and referents. Being is in the theatricality of the construction of the dwelling for the sake of phenomenological consumption by the (big) Other. In this modern notion of being, it can be said to be divided between processes of travelling and tourism, in a travelogic system of semiotics. Briefly, travelogy is the intensity of the (re)construction of the heim (home), against the order of the unheimlich (the space of the haunted house): it is how much home the traveller creates against the forces of the uncanny. Doris Lessing’s African Laughter (AL, 1992) comprises narratives from four of her itineraries, from 1982, 88, 89, and 1992, in Zimbabwe— the place where she also spent her childhood—concerning the domestic chores of a nation, as such. Deploying the aesthetics of what Sarah de Mul has termed the “acoustic bricolage” Lessing creates a text(ure) of a multitude of voices at the cost of her own emphatic v(o)ice signature: “the pri-

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macy of the eye is downplayed for the sake of the aural” (147). This implies a committed effacing of not only the phallogocentric inscription of the travelling self but also a progressively non-anthropological exercise, unlike the systematic ideology of othering that Western travel narratology has formalized. De Mul justifies her classification as: […] acoustic bricolage circumvents the often-assumed mimetic analogy in Western travel writing between realist language and the mapping of the non-Western people and places visited. Acoustic bricolage estranges the readers and prevents them from fully understanding and domesticating the Zimbabwean everyday into clear-cut meanings. (140) With such a convention emerges a multitude of voices of the travelled, as opposed to the seemingly benign, yet homogenising voice of the traveller. This technique can also be thought of as imitating the rhizomatic structure of nomadology as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Lessing undergoes departures from her own nature, which is at once conflictingly Marxist or feminist or Western, and all these identities are arranged in antithetical order. In the “unruly [a]temporality” of the quotidian Lessing attempts to go against the authoritative cartography of Western epistemology, and in this regard marks a travelogy unique to her gender. Along with a political restructuring of the idea of Zimbabwe the writer also undergoes her own spatial transitions: the autobiographicity of Zimbabwe is inseparable from that of Lessing’s own in African Laughter. Her association with radical Communist politics, both in London and Southern Rhodesia, which she also writes about in Under my skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), finds a more personal voice in African Laughter, one that belongs to the other, the native. The atemporality and nomadism of the quotidian experience becomes a tool of resistance to the “control and mapping” (de Mul 143) of the black Zimbabweans who are now provided a polyphony of voice(s) by Lessing. The journeys are never linear and homogenous but are possibly about traversing the space in numerous desinterrances. Her itineraries are titled informatively or topically such as “Talk on the Verandahs,” “in the offices,” “The Mashopi Hotel,” “Aids,” “Corruption,” “Witchcraft” “The Travelling Classes,” “The Farmers in the Mountains,” “Aid Workers Talk,” and so on. She creates Foucauldian heterotopia and heterochronies out of the spaces of Zimbabwe, without resorting to a teleological narrative in space and time. She does not reorganize her narrative retrospectively but provides it so nonsequentially that sometimes she herself flexes into the narrated in the voice of an absent narrator other than herself:

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(En)Gendering Travelogy in Lessing and Morrison Marxist student: The Bourgeois Revolution has failed. Now we must have a Revolution of the Proletariat. Black farmer: Transport, it’s all transport. If only Comrade Mugabe would organize transport… White man (born in the country, plans to stay in it, on innumerable boards, committees, charitable governing bodies): First you take the brakes off investment. But that won’t change anything until something else happens… training, training, training… it’s training that we need, TRAINING. (AL 416–417)

The white man, born in the country and intending to head its bourgeois institutions even in an independent system is the fear/fantasy of Lessing’s own efforts. Besides, it cannot be premised that all the characters who speak are at once mimeses of exact events but could rather be, as the acoustic bricolage suggests, characters from different episodes brought together by the fiction of an event. Lessing’s nomenclature of the white settler’s voice—in the chapter titled “a Commercial Farm”—as “babyish querulous grumbling” (AL 183) is the anti-colonial equivalent of the Western anthropological discourse that denies a legible voice to the subaltern, denominating the latter as childlike and “noble savage,” without the strength of articulation. Her censuring attitude towards the white farmers is based on an inherent critique of the dogma of progress which Christopher Lash claims as the “twin” of nostalgia. Both these aesthetics govern an ideology of lack in the present which is sought to be fulfilled in the representation of the bygone past or an immediacy of glorious future, to come (82). Instead of the ideology of progress Lessing envoyages into a memory of oppression—concerning the racial hierarchy of the Rhodesian Railways—which has been wiped out in the present conditions of the Zimbabwean Railways. The latter, though not free from its own industrial glitches, is at least free of squashed black faces that would be earlier restricted to only two compartments (AL 245). Owing to the railways being a transient geography in themselves, the transition from the geography of the Rhodesian to the Zimbabwean platform is neither nostalgic or progressive but significant in its acoustic bricolage and more so in the comfort that the writer derives from this as something natural, or homely to her cause of reemigration. From this obvious scheme of travel—although non-sequential and nonhomogenising—which does address a geographical shift in the author’s native spatiality, we move to a rather less obvious representation of travel, in The Golden Notebook (1962), where the question of representing space in a feminine travelogy takes the backseat, while the more prominent focus

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is on the creation of a geography of alterity. Each of the four notebooks are spatial situations, that may well be identified—as the author herself guides us to see—with spaces quarantined from one another for the sake of organization and intellectual order. The Golden Notebook brings out the schism in a recuperating coloniality—between Lessing’s character Anna Freeman Wulf (from The Golden Notebook), and Anna’s character, Ella (from the Yellow Notebook). Wulf is an image of Lessing’s migrancy, while Ella is the essentially reluctant tourist that the traveller (Wulf) needs for the subsistence of the Other, and therefore itself. The narrative within the narrative embodies Lessing’s travelogical conflict with the unheimlich in this dialectic of travel and tourism. The textual and mental spaces she (Lessing/Wulf) creates to reclaim the physical dwelling (she has lost) are heterotopias—quarantined spaces of hybridity—where libidinal and political contradictions of the traveller and the tourist can both abide as distinct slice(s)-of-time (Foucault 30). There can be no travelling, and more so no tourism, without a requisite architectural imagination, which is either based on an observation of an extant built landscape, or one which is barren in comparison with the traveller’s native geography, thereby becoming the site of an architecture to come. At the heart of the Golden Notebook there lies a key architectural metaphor: The four notebooks were identical, about eighteen inches square, with shiny covers, like the texture of a cheap watered silk. But the colours distinguished them—black, red, yellow and blue. When the covers were laid back, exposing the four first pages, it seemed that order had not immediately imposed itself. In each, the first page or two showed broken scribblings and half-sentences. Then a title appeared, as if Anna had, almost automatically, divided herself into four, and then, from the nature of what she had written, named these divisions… The first book, the black notebook, began with doodlings, scattered musical symbols… then a complicated design of interlocking circles, then words: black dark, it is so dark. (59)

Arguably, within one of these notebooks is the home (heim) of Anna’s character Ella. The former unsurprisingly bears the surname homonymous to Virginia Woolf, signifying a figure of unacknowledged radicality bordering on suicide. On the question of suicide, the intertextuality between Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and The Golden Notebook, as well as the intertextuality between the notebooks themselves comes through in Tommy’s

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(Molly’s son) suicide attempt, which in the manner of a sublimation precludes the suicidal overtones predicated on the ominous surname, given the resonance, of Septimus’ suicide (from Mrs. Dalloway) and Woolf’s own in real life, that it evokes. However, before his suicide attempt, leading to his blindness, Tommy questions Anna: “Why the four notebooks? What would happen if you had one big book without all those divisions and brackets and special writing?” Anna answers, “chaos.” The scrambled mess that Anna’s life has otherwise become due to masculine infidelity and the claustrophobia of contracting creative spaces—felt chiefly during the film adaptation of Anna’s own novel Frontiers of War, based on her African experiences, where the filming intends to distort the authorial logic—leading to her writer’s block finding a metonymic resolution in the division of the four notebooks. They are heterotopic insofar as they create the sanitaria of restitution for the fragmented imagination of the writer. Where Tommy errs in his idealisation of the organized whole as opposed to Anna’s divided selves is on the question of the prosthetic partitioning which, according to Michel Foucault, permeates even real spaces, such as the brothel or the motel where illicit sexuality is practically encouraged and is otherwise made illegitimate outside: The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains… Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled… (27)

The very fact that creative restitution is brought in Anna due to this colonizing of the inner peregrinations of the feminine space must imply there is a colonized. And this abject figure comes in the identity of Ella, the constant shadow of the third. The novel Shadow of the Third is part of Anna’s Yellow Notebook, in the form of a manuscript which features the central protagonist Ella, and her tormenting romantic and literary lives. It is important to remind us that a part of the heim Anna constructs for herself is also the space where Ella may reside. The latter is an exemplary tourist, in the scheme of the novel, both insofar as travel and sexuality are concerned. According to Jonathan Culler’s “The Semiotics of Tourism” the tourist is overwhelmed by the sign or the counterfeit rather than what is socially accepted as the real:

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The tourist looks for caricature; travel agents at home and national tourist bureaus abroad are quick to oblige. The tourist seldom likes the authentic (to him often unintelligible) product of a foreign culture. He prefers his own provincial expectations. The French chanteuse singing English with a French accent seems more charmingly French than one who simply sings in French. (Boorst qtd. in Culler)

Ella’s endless waiting for Paul Tanner, the polygamous male, instead of choosing a partner in fidelity, her reminiscences of her sojourn in Paris—the only city where she is shown travelling to, being the archetypal tourist destination—with him, and her editorship of the magazine Women at Home, define the characteristics of a rarefied travel, or evolution of touristic elements in her. The only other time she is shown travelling apart from being to Paris is when she visits Paul at his house, during the absence of his wife Muriel. It is on her that Ella had been casting the shadow of the third so far, only to realise now how she herself has become this shadow. The recognition of the self as the shadow—the touristic caricature—of the other is not merely shattering for the feminine ego but also a literal shattering of the heim which she had been constructing with Paul as the potential sharer. The devastation of the incomplete heim comes as a result of Anna’s necessity for anamnesis, which is to say in order for one writer to cope with the spatial trauma of the sexual battlefield that London had become, she must create another in whom she can perform the recuperative mimesis of her own unheimlich. This is how Anna may still be homed, and in her Lessing might as well. But, in the process, two women, Ella and Muriel, are severely de-homed. Lesing’s travelogy confronts patriarchal autonomy over spaces that constricts feminine spaces insomuch as whatever order and meticulousness there might be in them can come as a consequence of the unheimlich becoming of another woman’s home. Ella and Muriel perform the role of what I would like to call here the infinite surrogate(s), the vehicular device through which another establishes her travelogy in surrogacy. Arup K Chatterjee defines the concept as follows: […] the infinite surrogate is the soiled and used currency coin whose currency is contained in its circulability and pace of its travel, it is the newspaper that refuses to go out currency and is archived at an uneasy spot from where it can be readily decoded back to an alter-travelogic currency; it is the envelope, the letter, the courier, the telegraph and the worldwide web, with a controllable mechanism and an uncontrollable travellance. (5) Likewise, in being the infinite surrogates both the women stand not for themselves but as representative vehicles in the signifying chain of progressive female de-homing, or female passivity in travel. The woman

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needs the infinite surrogate to be de-homed in order to establish a cultural tradition of femininity and feminism in the context of travel. To this, we shall return in the course of the discussion on Toni Morrison. The confinement of women to roles of sessility within the domestic space, while the road is reserved for masculine travelogies, is ably demonstrated in the fabulous representation of women’s mobility seen as transgression in Helene Cixous’s discussion on the travelling pursuits of Little Red Riding Hood who “makes her little detour, does what women should never do, she allows herself the forbidden … and pays dearly for it” (4344). Apart from this, women, in general, have been designated as upholders of a normative domestic space and the question of mobility emerges, therefore, as already gendered (Ganser 13). The construction of new spaces, and architecture itself, is based on an economy of the normative masculinity of the traveller, as Doreen Massey explains: Space and place, spaces and places, and our senses of them (and such related things as our degrees of mobility) are gendered through and through. Moreover, they are gendered in a myriad different ways, which vary between cultures and over time. And this gendering of space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in which we live. (186)

Accordingly, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), with its 17th-century settings of slave-migrations, highlights this (en)gendering of spaces in a narrative which negotiates with the usurpation of the female body as an object of, not merely masculine control, but requisite sessility, and passivity. The novel begins in the marketplace of slavery and bonded labour that America had begun becoming in the late 1600s. The chief patriarch of the novel: Jacob Vaark enters that marketplace from Europe. He has found his way through Atlantic fog, dropped off at an unnamed coast by unnamed sloopmen, wading ‘over pebbles and sand to shore’, across mud and swamp grass, over boarded planks finally to a village, mimicking the advance of civilisation. (Adams 2008)

However, it is the journey of Florens, a slave girl, which A Mercy seeks to contrast with this archetypal male conundrum of entering the New World. Majdah Atieh and Susan Deeb see, in Florens’s African American road narrative, a reversal of the travelogic norms and the dialectic of the home and the road, whereupon the latter becomes more Heimlich for Florens than the heim itself. Her encountering the benevolent community of native travellers, who she is culturally taught to be afraid of, is an instance of

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subverting the qualms of masculinist fables of travel which indoctrinate women with a “geography of fear” (263). While other road narratives such as Doris Betts’s Heading West and Sharlene Baker’s Finding Signs represent a female escape from conventions of sessilty, seeking freedom on the road, A Mercy takes Florens to the Blacksmith, thus allowing her to experience more deeply the very geography of her fear. Finding a stag on the road Florens reflects: “It is as though I am loose to do what I choose, the stag, the wall of flowers. I am a little scared of this looseness. Is that how free feels? I don’t like it. I don’t want to be free of you because I am live only with you” (A Mercy 70). The Blacksmith, who she secretly wishes to be owned by, sexually and intellectually, provides her a discourse on slavery, which is it is not governed by the official status of being a slave, but is truly determined by the inner freedom of the human slave. However, a misinterpretation of this, leading to a perpetuation of the inner slavery of Florens, results in her total renunciation of fear, following the reactionary racial insolence in her. The realisation of her racial otherness as the catalyst, rather than the recipient, of fear, transforms the geography of fear to what Wallace Stegner has termed “geography of hope.” Florens’s journeys privilege the representation of fear over the prevalent notions of liberty and security on the road, and her subsequent command over this cultural fear through communal bonds of sorority she acquires with Rebekka (who she wants to save from smallpox) and Daughter Jane: “community doesn’t contribute to the male tactics [by the isolationist Vaark Jacob] of survival as it does with Florens” (Atieh and Deeb 275). The coping with an impending geography of fear instils in Florens the courage to be harsh on herself, taking her person away from comfort and domesticity to the ruthless road where she finds her solace and heim. A Mercy parallels Lessing’s African Laughter owing to this impersonation of the other that both the narrators perform in a—self-effacing—polyphony of the road. The travelogy of a female Florens implies a travelogy also for the slave subject, both of whom are perpetually in exile, even at home. The richness of the Biblical leitmotif is compounded by the voice of orality that Morrison brings about in the numerous voices that tell the story finally becoming of Florens: “she creates something that lives powerfully as an invented oral history and that seems to demand to be taken as a parable, but one whose meaning—which lives in the territory of harshness and sacrifice—is constantly undermined or elusive” (Adams 2008). Henceforth, the road becomes the new creed of the enslaved, a new home and destination. A Mercy is therefore staged as a prequel to Beloved (1988), a novel which problematizes the issue of African-American rehabilitation in postslavery America. And the utter inagency involved in the Middle passage of

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the slaves from Africa to the New World is spectralized in the figure of Beloved. The only process of recapturing the trauma and exorcising the painful history of slavery—somehow gleaning a positive cultural memory of the inhuman institution—is embodied in the spirit of Beloved, who at once travels in real and imaginary time zones, back and forth. The Derridean prophecy “Time is out of joint” (1994 20) haunts in her presence. In the 22nd chapter of Beloved Morrison’s eponymous Beloved assumes the infinite surrogate. In what she writes, or speaks aloud to the reader, as a testimony falsifies her mother, Sethe, and her sister, Denver’s claims from the previous chapters. There is no evidence in her two testimonies of her murder by Sethe or any evidence of the overarching hedonism of racialism. Beloved is too void of the intellect to understand either. What she instead testifies is to a sea of corpses. Her testimony of Sethe incriminates the latter only insofar as her not being there. “Three times I lost her”. Beloved’s testimony accounts for her pain as a result of Sethe’s absence. It does not account for Sethe’s act of mercy killing but for the faceless face that reflects on the surface of the sea. It is a faceless persona that “she goes in the water” with. At once, she is Sethe’s mother, herself, and the spiritus mundi of the entire population of the legendary “sixty million and more” who on their Middle passage to America, over the Atlantic, could not die completely. Beloved is the image of the traversal, of a journey that was without an end, of the masks that seemed to merge into one faceless persona in their unfinished deaths. She is the alibi for the slaveholders whose personae were nowhere around in her testimony and yet wreaked a monstrous sea change in the history of the Afro-American community. And thus Beloved travels; she traverses the extremities between America and Africa; she traverses the shores back and forth. She crosses the bridge over to Sethe to remind her of the catastrophe. Beloved being the infinite surrogate has died twice: once on the middle passage, and the second time when Sethe kills her. Of this second story, she has a memory that is metonymically displaced. It is not death that she refers to this second incident by, but departure, and displacement. Face becomes the metonymic equivalent of the regenerate community that was buried alive in the Atlantic. Face also is the face of Sethe, and the face of motherhood. Beloved is the faceless courier; she is not the mother, daughter or the woman who can regenerate but can merely transfer and transmit. She is the spectre of her own being that can merely repeat the traversal which is the deadening suicide and the internalised facelessness of the slave. Beloved cannot be plotted on the graph; her travelogy is uncontrollable, and her ipseity beyond the identification of her as Sethe’s dead child. She brings, therefore, another graph into play. She is the Messianic

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arrival without messianicity. To a state of forced restitution at 124 Bluestone, Cincinnati she adds her own autograph. That Sethe and her next generation, in Denver, have some promise of existence and identity is because of the massive chequered squares that have been wiped away from the graph of their lives. To these Beloved brings another graph by disturbing the velocity with which the impressions of the white history have overwhelmed oral Afro-American memories. “I AM BELOVED and she is mine” (Beloved 214). The hierarchy of capitalisation in this claim foregrounds the nature of the claimant over her claim. Sethe is the face Beloved can never assume, inasmuch as it is the very face which she has come to distort. As the infinite surrogate of the Afro-American community, Beloved traverses a marathonic distance in little over five pages. She is the spectre that runs after (in both senses of the word) her own death, struggling for a complete burial. Even Sethe’s act of selling her body could not fulfil her desire to give her child a burial with the complete epitaph she wanted. Thus, “Dearly Beloved” was condensed to “Beloved.” The Beloved who was protected from slavery and kept away from the processes of tenders and claims, could not be claimed wholly by her mother even in the epitaph. Similarly, Beloved’s claim over Sethe is one that is annihilated at its utterance. To claim one must have a face; to be claimed one must be decreed with a face. To die one must not be already dead. And that which defies the logos of face, claim, tender, victory or death is the infinite surrogate—the unclaiming, unclaimable, unburiable, and unplottable entity that Beloved is:“Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative—looked at too long—shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there” (Beloved 275) Beloved leaves like the faint whisper of the neighbourhood gossips. She leaves thus as a fragment of incomplete news from a newspaper: “her footprints come and go, come and go” (Beloved 275). She turns in the cornfields like a scrap of newspaper reminding of an insignificant event that came to pass on a day when the news highlighted something rather significant, instead. The infinite surrogate is ridden with physical memories of the spiritus mundi whose skins it touched upon, soiled by the sweat of many hands. And, it travels only once it is dead, reversing topographies that its contemporary times had seen. In this collation of texts by Lessing and Morrison the aspect of travelogy returns to haunt the signifying chain of mobility which for centuries has been entirely taken away not only from women in general, but the agency of the domestic and the cultural as such. Travel is already ever multicultural and is derived from the metaphysics of presence, a phallogo-

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centrism, which deprives it of its oral/aural tekhne and therefore the sexual subjectivity of travelling. Instead of incorporating the tendencies of the masculinist ideologies of travel Lessing’s and Morrison’s protagonists travel not towards secure hegemonies but are rhizomatic and even nomadological in their multiplicity of voices. The image of Beloved, or the fragments of African Laughter are made up of the images of the living slave corpses of the Atlantic, or the recuperating Zimbabwean postcolonial spirit, respectively. Where Anna Wulf struggles to engender the spaces of London in seeking sororities with real and fictitious doppelgangers of herself, Florens paves the way to her own travelogy which, in their last meeting together in A Mercy, is summarized by the Blacksmith as: “Own yourself, woman … You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind” (139).

Works Cited Atieh, Majda and Susan Deeb. “Remapping the Male Road of Terror: Black Women’s Geography of Healing in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.2 (2014): 254-278. Chatterjee, Arup K. “Economy of the Travelled.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2012): 1-16. Cixous, Helene. “Castration or Decapitation?” Signs 7.1 (1981): 41-55. De Mul, Sarah. “Zimbabwe and the Politics of the Everyday in Doris Lessing’s African Laughter.” Migratory Settings. Eds. Murat Aydemir and Alex Rotas. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. —. Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida. With Catherine Malabou. Trans. David Willis. California: Stanford University Press, 2004. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27. Ganser, Alexandra. Roads of her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives 1970-2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Print. Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political Writings. Ed. Manfred Stassen. New York and London: Continuum, 2003. Print.

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Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Print. Jacques Lacan. Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Emanuel Berman. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Print. Lash, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York & London: Norton & Company, 1991. Print. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. London: Harper Collins, 1999. Print. —. African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Print. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Print. Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. London & New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988. —. A Mercy. New York: Vintage, 2008. Print. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin, 2006. Print.

“WHO AM I?”: BETWEEN THE BURDEN OF THE WHITE HOUSE, CLUTCHES OF POLITICAL AGENCY AND EAGERNESS FOR PRIVACY IN NADINE GORDIMER’S OCCASION FOR LOVING1 SAMYA ACHIRI

[T]he real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way, my material is profoundly influenced by politics. (Nadine Gordimer, interviewed by Jannica Hurwitt)

Like the wide range of characters in Nadine Gordimer’s early long fiction, white women of conscience are strangled by the condition of living in South Africa in the light of apartheid legislations. The latter inflict unbearable psychological wounds, for being white equals conspiracy. The outer pressures are filiatively tied with the inward anxieties and the psychological traumas since the first forges the second. Therefore, Gordimer’s female characters are subject to a twofold coercive system which prevents them from living as ordinary people and leading a private life. The lack of a sense of belonging is the overriding trauma that disturbs them. They refuse willingly to align themselves with the rest of whites, and at the same time, they are not seen to fulfil an effective role in the struggle by black people, at best, if not radically discarded. This leads them to feel as outsiders living on the margins of life; subsequently, they do not only have a troubled sense of belonging to South Africa, but the whole world becomes too small to encompass them. The paper brings Gordimer’s female protagonist of Occasion for Loving, a white woman of conscience, to the fore to investigate her possibilities for forming a personal identity under the influence of the abovemen-

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tioned factors. It revolves around the idea that this woman’s voice and personality are greatly influenced and largely shaped by circumstances she goes through to reach maturity. These circumstances, of course, since they are the product of a particular ideological system at a certain point of time in history and in a specific geographical setting which is South Africa make the experience of this woman unique. As such, one wonders in what way the trio of time, place and ideology can impinge on the life of this sensitive creature, named Jessie, in particular, and South Africa’s white women of conscience as a whole. Further, is she really able to form a personal identity? That is, can she live a private life and escape the demands of the public realm? And if so, what is the process? Nadine Gordimer’s fiction is generally seen as presenting readers with white women who are not able to reconcile the traumas implicated by their biological whiteness in a land in which acting against the government’s system is a difficult alternative to espouse. For this reason, these women are usually perceived as voiceless, locked in a tricky situation. However, by taking Occasion for Loving’s female protagonist, Jessie, as a case in point, the paper demonstrates the opposite. Before attaining a sense of a redeemed self, Jessie goes through a tremendously arduous psychological journey that runs in parallel with the structure of the narrative. She passes through three consecutive psychological stages2: contemplation and alertness, stigma and self-questing, relief and reconciliation. Each of these stages corresponds amazingly with one stage of human development in Jacques Lacan’s model. These striking similarities will help to analyze her movement towards forming an image of her “self”. Accordingly, the paper will be structured into three main points; each will demonstrate how the protagonist perceives herself in a particular stage. From Homi K. Bhabha, two key concepts are borrowed, the borderline and the unhomely lives, to point out the dilemmas and the troubles that Gordimer’s female character is trapped in. Borderlines are “the locations of culture” in which new dimensions of existence leap to the surface. Unhomeliness is not a physical condition rather it is a moment of psychological confusion in which the individual fails to locate himself within the usual conditions of his living, and his life turns to be too strange to him. Jessie falls in an intensely harming state of confusion which leads her to question her being in South Africa much in the same way Bhabha describes the state of unhomeliness. Once she crosses the threshold of the state of the unhomely, Jessie’s voice emerges in the midst of others, daringly, in an attempt to negotiate a sense of privacy. This echoes, in essence, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic novel which embraces “a diversity of social speech types […] and a diversity of individual voices”

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(262). Whether extrinsically or intrinsically, in this novel, voices do always compete before a sense of resolution takes place. On this ground, Gordimer builds the novel. This intermarriage between psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and dialogism seeks to bring to light the Gordimerian theory of white female identity construction in apartheid South Africa.

“In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms”3 Nadine Gordimer’s novels include usually a long array of characters, amongst emerge female protagonists whose lives impart how living in the turmoil apartheid caused looks like. She does not narrate their stories, but they are responsible for re/presenting themselves. A close reading of Gordimer’s novels reveals that the process of female identity formation in a tense political context is more complicated in comparison with the process the characters portrayed through the ideal lens of the liberal Gordimer go through. On this basis, the process Liz in The Late Bourgeois World and Rosa in Burger’s Daughter, as examples, undergo to gain an appreciation of their selves is more intricate compared to Jessie’s in Occasion for Loving, though hers cannot be minimized, simply because concrete political activism in the lives of both Liz and Rosa is a daily commodity that cannot be easily relinquished. Jessie starts her search for a meaning for her life as a twice-married woman. In this first stage of her development, contemplation and alertness, most of the action takes place in her mind. Through moments of contemplation, she recalls her past. She analyzes cautiously her past through the eyes of the present. The technique of flashback helps the readers to know the character: who she is and from where she comes. Juxtaposing the past and the present successfully spawns comprehension. In view of that, she becomes alert to the psychological emptiness, loneliness, and estrangement she endures. She comprehends that the mode of life apartheid generates renders her as an isolated creature oscillating between two blocks, the oppressor and the oppressed. After an important event suddenly crops up, she hurriedly steps towards re-examining her roles in life. As a matter of fact, she spots no progress because she is still dominated by roles already assigned to her. For Lacan, the human being during the first stage of his development is a dependent creature co-existing as one entity with someone else. It is the same case for Gordimer’s female protagonist; she understands that she does not possess a private identity as she is reliant on her family and the will of the collective. The demand for recognition is henceforth her main preoccupation. Not surprisingly then, she rejects the im-

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posed ideals that make her “destiny” forcibly yields to “political terms” and steps to the next psychological stage. Jessie is strangely attached to her mother for most of her life. The novel opens with Jessie in her late thirties; she is married to a liberal-minded professor of history. She, next to her job, leads an ordinary life as a mother of four children. As a pregnant woman, she goes to consult a doctor to discover the cataclysmic lie around which her mother configured her life. Jessie had gone to a heart specialist to see if the old ailment had left any weakness that might make a normal birth dangerous for her, and he had told her with empathic quiet that not only was her heart perfectly normal, in fact, it was not possible that a heart ailment serious enough to keep a child out of school for years could leave no sign of damage (OFL 74). Definitely, after she “clipped her wings and brainwashed her” (74), the mother does not make out of Jessie an over dependent human being only but terribly a woman without a self. She does not pass a normal childhood and leaves her mother’s house only to her husband’s. As the novel opens, Jessie sits in her garden. The quietude carries to her mind the “illusion of silence and motionlessness” (3) typical of her mother’s house. She feels for some time that “she had never left her mother’s house” (3). This is indicative of the lack of vitality that characterizes her current life in person as well as that of most women, for this is the life mode emblematic of the standards of white bourgeoisie—this minority— in South Africa and reminiscent of the Victorian stereotype. She is vigilant that she accepts submissively the roles she occupies throughout her life, whether motherhood or marriage. In the moments of contemplation, “[t]he past [rises] to the surface of the present, free of the ambiguities and softening evasions that had made it possible in the living” (83). She constantly watches herself in her three little daughters playing without inhibitions. Unlike them, “there was no excitement” of such things “for the little bourgeois girl from the mine” (192). The coming of the lively girl Ann from England to the Stilwells’ house awakens in Jessie the desire to pursue “the life dreamt and not lived” (67). By breaking the routine of that house, Ann becomes in a relatively short time the source of life. She is an open-minded girl who optimistically, unlike Jessie, enjoys living under whatever circumstances. Curiously attracted to everything, discriminatory laws are, to her, the last hurdle to think about. Her eagerness to discover the unknown leads her to fall in love with a black man and to cross the colour line the white government mapped. Ann does what the years could not do in Jessie; she rejuvenates in her an inner yearning for privacy. “At last,” Jessie has “time to ask herself why

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she lived, and … she had scarcely begun to know to formulate the question, let alone grope for the possible answers” (19). In Lacan’s theory, the identification of the human being, in the mirror stage, with an object outside the body is actually a misidentification or a misrecognition. It is a misrecognition in the sense that the subject (child) conceives the image in the mirror as “me”. Logically, the mirror in which the subject sees his reflection and identifies with is not only the real mirror but other people or objects he encounters as well. The subject is usually accompanied by people who confirm the connection between him and the images he sees. Because the object the subject identifies with subsists outside the body and may change, the ego or “I identity”, to Lacan, is always on some level a kind of fiction (Žižek 25). In this regard, the first sense of the self that Jessie has throughout the first stage of her development is misrecognition. The image of the self she gains is a duplicate figure of her caregiver. In Lacan’s terms, she sees her reflection in the people surrounding her, and she identifies with this reflection. She mystifies herself with other characters which display a pivotal role in her life. The first insight Jessie gets into herself is of course provided by her disturbed mother. Elizabeth Grosz contends that the Mirror Stage does not only provide the subject with “an image of its own body in a visualised exteriority, but also duplicates the environment, placing real and virtual space in contiguous relations” (87). The subject, as a consequence, besides gaining an understanding of itself, establishes spatial relationships. Environment is not taken here to refer only to the character’s own house or entourage but rather to the whole county which falls under the mercy of the successive white regimes to be likened to a white house. Taking into account what has been revealed about this female character’s life, she maintains a mutual relationship with the space she inhabits i.e. Jessie is not only supposed to act in this environment as a white citizen, but she is also fraught with its prejudicial legislations that engender two categories of human beings. For this reason, the house in the novel appears as an indicator of psychological emptiness that causes boredom; frailty prevails everything. Notwithstanding the fact that she lives with her family in the same house, there is no strong familial relationship that ties them in common sense. Their lives are cold in spite of the heat that politics incorporates. There is no strong contact between Jessie and her mother and then her husband. Even though she lived for a long time with her mother in the same house, resentment grows instead. In the same way, as pointed to above, she maintains a troubled sense of belonging to what is normally considered as her homeland, South Africa. This tortured land, white house, holds a white European minority that exerted its hegemony over, roughly, 90̃ of the whole population es-

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tablishing itself as the leading class with its bourgeois life standards. Unfortunately, such standards dispossess Jessie of her right to feel at home in this land as she has been taught since her childhood that she should not, for example, mix with the mine workers who resided nearby. What is worse, these standards succeed in keeping her in a total isolation to, according to her mother, save her purity, for the white woman is the “vessel for the virtues of ‘white civilization’ in the ‘heart of darkness’” (Visel 33). From a different angle, however, the motif of the house in Gordimer’s fiction is, according to Susan Pearsall, “associated with inherited features and, like the idea of ‘culture’, also represents those traits the subject inherits but that are not considered ‘genetically fixed’” (109). Since the inherited conditions are not genetically fixed, they can be thus changed. Ironically, Jessie inherits her mother’s mode of life and, strangely, her destiny: both lost the first husband and married again. Gordimer’s female protagonist comprehends at a certain point in her life that she must rid herself of the external factors that render her a manipulated object. These hereditary traits resemble resonantly the past for the protagonist in her present situation. In Homi Bhabha’s perspective, this is a borderline situation where “past and present, inside and outside no longer remain separated as binary oppositions but instead commingle and conflict” (Mcleod 217). The present does conflict with the past in the character’s mind in order not to allow a space for it to overshadow her anymore. From the border spaces her mind works, “something begins its presencing” (Location of Culture, original emphasis 5). It is the longing for personal freedom, for self-assertion, and for recognition. And this is how the second psychological stage starts.

“There are possibilities for me, certainly; but under what stone do they lie?”4 Of the three stages, the second is the most complicated. Jessie enters the stage of stigma and self-questing more convinced that she is the product of her society rather than of herself. Not satisfied with her current position, she strives to find her own voice in life exploring the possibilities available to her. Summative of this stage is the first epigraph of The Late Bourgeois World: “[t]here are possibilities for me, certainly; but under what stone do they lie?” What applies to Liz applies also to Jessie; nevertheless, each woman makes a distinctive experience. As it appears, the epigraph comprises two segments. Whilst the first segment “[t]here are possibilities for me, certainly” concedes the availability of other options to live by in South Africa, the second one “but under what stone do they lie?” is suggestive of the difficulty to grope for them.

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Pursuing a private life is not an easy task, for Gordimer’s female protagonist is hampered by many obstacles. The foremost predicament is, of course, the government’s system which leaves no choice other than to act against it or to remain silent. All the borderline situations the novel unfolds lead her to maintain an attitude, at least an intermediate position which is “refusal”. Before this, she emerges from these borderlines usually embarrassed because of her inability to alter the odds. Her status as a member of the society of the white oppressor adds to her embarrassment. She passes through a very difficult psychological state of loss and confusion interrogating her existence in such a tormented land. These are the features of the “liminal space”. It is also the very stage of puzzlement which Bhabha terms as the unhomely. The “uncanny voice of memory” (“World and Home” 146), or the unhomely, is put into play with the voice of the present, seen in the demands and the pressures imposed on the heroine, and the monologic voice of apartheid. Worth noting here is that “neither “voice” nor “dialogic” is usually related to individual subjects in a given text”, and that “Bakhtin distinguishes ordinary dialogue between individuals from a dialogic relationship between ‘voices’” (Eigler 196). The notion of the dialogic “includes tension and struggle between antagonistic ‘voices’” (197) or discourses that constitute the narrative, be they two interlocutors or more in the common sense of dialogue or two competing forces like it is the case in Gordimer’s apartheid fiction between apartheid and the oppressed majority. Gordimer exploits a set of literary techniques to help the readers to absorb the perplexity this character is locked in. She does not exhibit the physical traits of her character, rather she ponders the workings of the mind. In point of fact, the main terrain of action throughout most of the novel becomes the character’s mind. This does not sound strange for a writer who believes in the brainpower and sufferings of her white women of conscience. Another technique is the sudden shift in point of view, first person and third person narration, which brings many views in opposition and raises voices against one another. This technique adeptly makes the text a site of contention between the “personal” and the “political”5, yet it appends more ambiguity to the protagonist’s confusion because the reader cannot guess who is speaking sometimes unless he concentrates especially when Jessie is accompanied with her husband. The interior monologue is one more device that is useful to understand how this female character questions herself. It is closely linked to the previous technique, as between the use of one narrative perspective and a short monologue. The latter, of course, is interrupted by the third narrative perspective alluding to the fact that the personal is always disturbed by the political in this land.

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To end the confusion, the protagonist must confront her apprehension as well as all the outer pressures. Through reviving a previously mentioned black male character, the confrontation takes place. Of course, the novel centres on many twists that can be sorted out as sub-climaxes, and this encounter is one since it changes markedly the course of action. According to Lacan, this stage is the realm of the father, or the male character which Jessie abruptly encounters. Khursheed Qazi equates the father, the figure responsible for socialization, with the “society’s ideologies: its beliefs, values, and biases; its system of government, laws, educational practices, religious tenets” (8). In this instance, the black male character is one aspect of the political. Our interactions with and reactions to this ideology, the political, make us who we are and this is what happened to Jessie. Finally, Jessie understands in this stage that the “self [is] the creation of man” (OFL 19). To feel at home, as Gordimer believes, one must come to grips with the “concealed side” (Writing and Being 45), the true sense of the self lurking somewhere. Ann, interestingly, mirrors Jessie but not in consistency with Lacan’s terms i.e. Ann is the mirror which penetrates the shell to reveal the concealed side of Jessie. Even she worked as a “secretary to an association of African musicians and entertainers” (OFL 18), Jessie is still unable to unlock herself from the cage of the white bourgeois life. The latter certainly dictates living as a minority within a minority. How can a liberal woman who strongly believes in the merit of the human soul, be it black or white of course, break free from her isolation and come to life again to be effectively a member of the multi-coloured South African society? The only possible way, Ann illustrates, is to cross the racial borders beyond all expectations. Occasion for Loving shows how Ann and Jessie are involved physically and mentally in many borderline situations. Gordimer’s characters attempt to escape alienation taking refuge hopefully in those borderland spaces where they meet people across the racial bar. The pervasive liminality of these spaces puts Jessie in a tricky state of contestation with herself and her race. The most obvious example is that of Ann who and her black lover Gideon Shibalo visit Western Transvaal, a township6, to see James Mapulane. The Stilwells, Jessie and her husband were completely aware that the couple was constantly under high risk since the relation is criminalized by the government, fearing harm that was more likely going to fall as a whole on the black part. If Ann’s presence was discovered by the commissioner, the results would be unknown. Alongside, Gideon appears on the beach with Jessie and her daughters. Amazed because the white inhabitants of the town think seriously that “some arrangements ought to be made … a part of the beach ought to be set aside for them

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[Blacks]” aiming “to enjoy [their] beautiful beach in privacy” (263, emphasis added), Jessie cannot embarrassingly utter a single word. Apartheid legislations grimly mediate the whole country: “nothing was innocent, not even here [the beach]. There was no corner of the whole country that was without ugliness” (264). This incident makes Jessie more vigilant of a deeply entrenched race consciousness between whites and blacks. After a short time, Ann unexpectedly returns back to England with her husband to leave the poor Gideon wandering solely. Jessie is annoyed by the fact that Ann does not show the least commitment to the man she risks everything for. Actually, Ann is unfaithful towards not only one man rather towards the African life she tastes and the coloured people she eagerly mixes with in “Lucky Star” and “Tommie’s”. This indifferent attitude exasperates Jessie to harshly criticize her: “[a] fat lot she cares about people like that. In a whole year, has she ever really said anything, except “It was marvelous fun” or “Let’s do this” or “So-and-so’s got a marvelous idea, we’re going to…”” (208-9, original emphasis). Homi Bhabha sees in the borders a fascinating ability to fashion “a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (Location of Culture 7). Likewise, the departure of the Davises, Ann with her husband, bestows Jessie with a new kind of an understanding of the erroneous attitudes of her white community towards the other race in South Africa. Jessie does not emerge safe from these experiences. “[H]er consciousness was a plot without theme” (OFL 197), the third person narrator unfurls. This is a clear sign of the wounding effects of the state of the unhomely appalling Jessie: is it possible for a person to fall in love with another and at the same time destroying him? Jessie herself could not come to terms with this impasse, and she cannot endure thinking wordlessly. Thus, she unveils these feelings to her husband. Tom tries to calm her down by finding a justification for Ann: “[b]ut what could the bloody woman do, if she didn’t want him, or couldn’t face wanting him?” (286). But to Jessie: “[s]he didn’t have to stick to him to harm him; it was done already” (286). In a long conversation with Tom, Jessie makes her claims and fear more understandable: “Ah, Tom , don’t ask me to postulate it .We don’t see black and white and so we all think we behave as decently to one colour face as another. But how can that ever be, so long as there’s the possibility that you can escape back into your filthy damn whiteness? How do you know you’ll always play fair? […]” “Yes, yes, but all right—what ‘harm’ could you do or I do to Len and Gideon or anybody else?”

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“But how can you be sure, while one set of circumstances governs their lives and another governs yours?” Tom said shortly, “I don’t see Ann thinking about this, tough.” […] […] “If she really loves him, as you say, what harm can she do him?” [Tom] “First he couldn’t get out on his scholarship because he’s black, now he can’t stay because she’s white. What’s the good of us to him? What’s the good of our friendship or her love?” (278)

The above passage reveals three clusters of dialogical relationships which construct the novel. The most apparent level of this sort of relationships takes place between Jessie and the other characters all over the narrative, significantly with her husband. The resulting dialogue is not only a kind of questioning or blaming as it seems; however, it is fundamentally a search for the meaning of life in South Africa within the norms of the white bourgeois class. The second type of the dialogical relationships is observable between the voice of the liberal white minority Jessie is representative of in this novel and the white minority enjoying life at the expense of the other races. Ann and her husband escape back into their “filthy damn whiteness” once they are finished exploiting the Africans and Africa respectively. Most important is the third type which raises the monologic voice of apartheid and the voice of two-thirds of Coloured South Africans, who refuse to live according to a “one set of circumstances” governing “their lives”, against each other. Similarly, Gideon Shibalo, though drunk, does not falter to announce his true feelings to Jessie: “[w]hite bitch—get away” (296). It is the moment of confrontation of Jessie.

“I am the place in which something has occurred”7 The phase of relief and reconciliation extends between the moment of confrontation and the moment Jessie gains a deep self-awareness, psychological relief, and reconciliation. This actually does not take, unlike the preceding phase, a great deal of time. The implications of the moment of confrontation pave the way for new possibilities of living to spring. Relief is the phase during which Jessie throws away all the shackles used to circumscribe her soul. In comparison with the other phases, she displays a notable maturity since she enters the realm of the ‘Real’ where she acts beyond any kind of interference. By taking an extremely crucial decision, she ascribes voluntarily a particular identity to herself. This woman, how-

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ever, whether she chooses a new stance for her life or accepts an already assigned one according to her own terms, of course, remains the product of the South African society. Jessie could not forget Gideon Shibalo’s words; they open her eyes to another reality. She understands that she is not the only tortured self under apartheid in South Africa and, on the contrary, there are voiceless millions like Gideon whom apartheid dispossesses of all the rights accessible to whites: the right to speak up, to get a passport, and even to love across the colour line. One of the most potent ironies Gordimer creates to describe the alienated selves apartheid spawns comes from Jessie’s memory of a mad woman who “was sewing without any thread in the needle … connecting nothing with nothing” (OFL 40). For the Stilwells, this experience discloses the inefficacy of their liberal attitudes, their “stony silence” (286). And in the case that apartheid is not abandoned, nothing will bring the buried selves to life again. Jessie’s consciousness of herself and the world surrounding her escalates considerably, hence a favourable change in personality. Indeed, echoing Gordimer’s epigraph which is cited above, Jessie becomes a “place in which something has occurred.” At the end of her inner journey, Jessie finds the thread whereby to connect the fragments of her ‘self’. Her efforts to attain a sense of awareness and privacy lead her to end up committed. Commitment is not simply a political act through which the individual is supposed to be fully immersed in politics. To Gordimer, “it is seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life” (Hurwitt 140). Well, commitment seems to escape literal representation as in the case of the Real with its unchangeable nature. The thread of order and logic in Jessie’s situation is her decision to continue meeting people across the racial divide in the “Lucky Star”, “where coloured and white people mixed” (OFL 100), ending by that the authority of apartheid over her life. Again, the Real manifests itself through this very act, for an actual nature implies people contacting one another, as this is the nature of human beings, beyond all systems of symbolization that create races and incarcerate their relations. Robin Visel emphasizes the above saying that Jessie “who has learned to see herself as another, starts to become one by removing herself from the protection of her white society” (37, emphasis added). In this regard, the occasion for loving of the title stands for a moment to love one’s self first and the other second. Jessie, at the end of the novel, becomes a new person: “[t]he ribbon of her identity … there was no coil of it continuing from the past. I was; I am: these were not two different tenses, but two different people” (OFL 18-9). In the realm of the Real, “the uninterpreta-

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ble dimension of existence” (Qazi 10), Gordimer’s woman is metaphorically born again. She realizes that ideology is “only a curtain that is embroidered and makes everything bleak” (10). Therefore, she seeks a meaning for her existence beyond this curtain. She succeeds in managing a definition for her ‘self’ in which maturity, high self-esteem, and action based on her own determination are pervasive. The trio of place, time and ideology seems, on the surface, to have no impact on her decision. Nevertheless, as I mentioned few lines up, this woman more or less is the outcome of the interplay of these external forces. Gordimer presents her readers with a woman who endeavours to find her own voice in her own country crossing many psychological stages. She ends her journey of spiritual renewal as committed. For this reason, Gordimer’s female heroines’ journeys are frequently criticized for being predetermined as they arrive at the same point they depart from. During her journey, which is both external and internal, Jessie experiences a radical change at the level of her personality and the way she perceives herself and the turmoil of her country. Between the point of departure and the point of arrival, many things change to denote the movement of time and her growing consciousness of the workings of apartheid. The meaning of living under the despotism of apartheid is tasted by Jessie only when she traverses the colour bar and is caught in physical and mental borderline situations like that of the beach. Her and Ann’s experiences with Gideon Shibalo allude to a series of segregationist legislations such as the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952 which imposed further constraints on the natives who lived or rather were condensed into the poor urban residential areas. In her article “Othering the Self: Nadine Gordimer’s Colonial Heroines”, Robin Visel contends that Gordimer’s “female characters are […] internal battlegrounds in which the conflicts of South African society are played out” (35). The most remarkable conflict occurs always between the personal and the political i.e. between the need to enjoy a personal life and the burden of the political engagement that falls upon one’s conscience. The process of identity construction in Gordimer’s fiction includes always a figure of reference designating the political with which the protagonist is constantly juxtaposed and confronted to gain maturity. In Occasion for Loving, the political is exceptionally signified by two characters; Jessie’s mother represents the dying white regime while Gideon Shibalo is its counterforce i.e. the anti-apartheid campaign. Through emphasizing the role of the conflicting events in restricting and shaping the character’s life, Gordimer is using an outstanding technique to foreground that the public and the private realms cannot be set apart in apartheid South Africa. Un-

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derstanding the impossibility of setting them apart would unquestionably resolve other dilemmas.

Notes 1

In this paper, “political agency” does not refer necessarily to the concrete political involvement as in many of Nadine Gordimer’s novels but typically to the fact of challenging every segregationist act including crossing the racial bar. 2 In “White Women In South Africa: An Inferior Gender Within a Superior Race” (Thesis 1989), Tamar M. Copeland, reading the novels of Nadine Gordimer, devised six stages to describe how self-perception of the white women contributes to make them understand their past to create the future. However, as the title indicates, Copeland perceives these women as an inferior gender within a superior race. This paper takes one novel, Occasion for Loving, as a case study to investigate how Gordimer’s female protagonist Jessie finds her voice, self-image, amidst three incarcerating factors in particular. For this reason, she passes through a psychological journey of three stages. The paper is against the idea that gender is a source of victimization. 3 The epigraph of Occasion for Loving . 4 The epigraph of The Late Bourgeois World . 5 See Baena Molina, Rosalía. “Revising South African History: Multiple Perspectives in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer.” Miscelánea 16 (1995): 25-44 which is specified to tackle this point. 6 Homelands, reserves, townships, and bantustans are among the various terms created to designate the areas black people lived in separately from whites. 7 The epigraph of Burger’s Daughter.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 1981. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. “The World and the Home.” Social Text, No.31/2, Third World and Post Colonial Issues (1992): 141-153. JSTOR. 10 Jan. 2012. —. The Location of Culture. London, New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Eigler, Friederike. “Feminist Criticism and Bakhtin’s Dialogic Principle: Making the Transition from Theory to Textual Analysis.” Women in German Yearbook 11 (1995): 189-203. JSTOR. 14 Jan. 2012. Gordimer, Nadine. Burger’s Daughter. 1979. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Print. —. Occasion for Loving. 1963. New York , London: Penguin books, 1994. Print.

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—. Writing and Being: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print. —. “The Art of Fiction LXXVII: Nadine Gordimer.” 1980. Jannika Hurwitt. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Eds. Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. 127-160. Print. —. The Late Bourgeois World. 1966. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion. London: Routledge, 1995. Print. Holcombe, John. “Jacques Lacan.” Textctc.com. 2007. Web. 16 Dec. 2011. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print. Pearsall, Susan. ““Where the Banalities Are Enacted”: The Everyday in Gordimer's Novels.” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (Spring 2000): 95-118. JSTOR. 10 Jan. 2012. Qazi, Khursheed Ahmad. “Lacanian Concepts—Their Relevance to Literary Analysis and Interpretation: A Post Structural Reading.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, Vol. II, No. IV (December 2011): 1-12. Web. 01 Feb. 2012. Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Visel, Robin Ellen. “Othering the Self: Nadine Gordimer’s Colonial Heroines.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Vol.19, No.4 (1988): 33-42. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Cartesian Subject without the Cartesian Theatre.” The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists. Eds. Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander. New York: SUNY Press, 2000. 23-40. Print.

BESTIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF OTHERNESS  IN ANGELA CARTER’S FAIRY TALES ANTONIA PEROIKOU

In a 2004 interview, Elizabeth Roudinesco asks Jacques Derrida about the border between the human and inhuman, the classification of beings into different categories and generally the question of animality in modern society. Derrida’s response is concise and to the point: The “question of animality” is not one question among others of course. I have long considered it to be decisive (as one says), in itself and for strategic value; and that’s because, while it is difficult and enigmatic in itself, it also represents the limit upon which all the great questions are formed and determined, as well as all the concepts that attempt to delimit what is “proper to man”, the essence and future of humanity; ethics, politics, law, “human rights”, “crimes against humanity”, “genocide” etc. (Derrida & Roudinesco 62-63)

Throughout history, many philosophers have tried to investigate the human by trying to understand the minds of other creatures. They analyzed the human/animal binary with respect to the “irreconcilable distinctions” between them that have set them apart and rendered the latter inferior to the former. What Jacques Derrida does with his ten-hour address at the 1997 Cérisy conference titled The Animal That Therefore I Am, is engage with other philosophers such as René Descartes, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger and analyze the question each poses with respect to the animal, tracing those elements that, according to them, the animal lacks rendering it, therefore, inferior to man. In a deconstructive gesture, he actually tries to look at man through the eyes of the animal, not just any imaginary being but an actual, real life cat and to discover what it sees when it looks at a naked man. Derrida traces back those instances in history and mythology where man claimed superiority over the beasts, constantly projecting his own failings onto them. The title of Derrida’s essay, which is a clear allusion to Descartes’ rather famous “I think therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum), serves to introduce the reader not only to the questions Derrida will be posing but also to his

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unique, dense and ambiguous style of writing. Admittedly, Descartes is one of the most influential philosophers to have ever dealt specifically with the question of the animal. In his Discourse on the Method in 1637, Descartes disputes the fact that an animal is an embodied soul, and instead argues that an animal is like a machine, an automaton: the soul in an animal, if it can be called such, works like a battery, giving it the spark necessary to keep it alive. Animals, he suggests, have no consciousness or selfconsciousness and no moral feeling. A living creature that does not think, according to Descartes, is in various ways inferior since its behaviour could be easily explained in mechanistic terms. Thinking beings, on the other hand, are capable of novel behaviour and speech, both stemming from their ability to reason and employ their logic. In Descartes’ own words: It is also very worthy of remark, that, though there are many animals which manifest more industry than we in certain of their actions, the same animals are yet observed to show none at all in many others: so that the circumstance that they do better than we does not prove that they are endowed with mind … on the contrary, it rather proves that they are destitute of reason, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs: thus it is seen, that a clock composed only of wheels and weights can number the hours and measure time more exactly than we with all our skin. (Descartes 74)

Essentially, in Cartesian terms, due to their limited mental capacities, animals are significantly inferior to men. An analysis of such a claim would lead to the conclusion that at a fundamental level, Descartes proposes that whatever is in the interests of animals is always mediated by human preconceptions of what constitutes rationality or a superior being. Hence, humans can use animals however they like, without any legal or ethical repercussions, if they stand to gain any (socially dictated) resource from them—whether it be food, clothing, information, sport, or entertainment. Fundamentally, Descartes’ mechanistic theory of animal souls is closely linked to the absence of pain and its theological implications are staggering: if animals have souls and are not merely machines, then God is an unjust and cruel entity that allows and sanctions the unjust suffering of these creatures. If however, animals are presented as mere automata devoid of immortal souls, they are unable to feel pain or misery, thus rendering God a benevolent and just deity. Consequently, what Descartes dismisses is animals’ ability to suffer, since such an acknowledgment would call for a radical reconfiguration of the notions of humanity, animality and the divine. The importance therefore of Descartes’ thinking concerning the

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relationship between humans and animals is enormous and the consequences are multifaceted since it is still considered one of the most (if not the most) influential philosophies on the question of animality of the past five hundred years. “This Cartesian legacy,” suggests Derrida in the Roudinesco interview, “determines all of modernity” (Derrida & Roudinesco 65). It is a theory that governs modern thought when it comes to the human/animal relationship and it distinguishes reaction from response—with everything that such a distinction entails. “The Cartesian theory assumes, for animal language, a system of signs without response: reactions but no response” (Derrida & Roudinesco 65). In modernity, Derrida adds, the concept of “right” depends on that Cartesian moment of the exclusion of animals from the cogito and thus from subjectivity, from freedom, and from sovereignty. The Cartesian “text” itself “represents” this large structure of repression with the “systematicity of the symptom” (Derrida & Roudinesco 65). Derrida thus traces a crucial problem regarding the recognition of animal rights, since, “To recognize rights for ‘animals’ is a surreptitious or implicit way of confirming a certain interpretation of the human subject, which itself will have been the very lever of the worst violence carried out against nonhuman living beings” (Derrida & Roudinesco 65). As a response to the violence against animals, to the violence one does “whenever something like ‘the animal’ is named” (Derrida & Roudinesco 63), Derrida coins the term “animot”. He insists that every time he says something like “the animal” or “the animals” during his speech, one should think of “animot” instead. Fundamentally, the philosopher urges readers to “envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity” (Derrida 47). Just like the plural animaux is heard within the singular animot “recalling the extreme diversity of animals that the animal erases” and which, “when written, makes it plain that this word [mot] ‘the animal’ is precisely only a word” (Mallet x), difference is, for Derrida, not something to be overcome or conquered. Difference should instead be pluralized, calling attention to the differences that have traditionally served to distinguish between sexes and species. Derrida moves beyond binary oppositions that serve to define notions through a process of mutual othering, traditionally constructed by the dominant party, towards a direction where the absence of clear distinctions and names is conceivable. “The animal [or animot] that therefore I am,” Derrida asserts, is “a man who is also a woman” (Derrida 58) inextricably linking all three names “man”, “woman”, “animal” and questioning the Cartesian ergo sum.

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American writer, feminist and animal rights advocate Carol J. Adams, in an interview with Tom Tyler, states: “Human became a definition not only about humans versus (other) animals, but also defining who among Homo sapiens would have the power to act as ‘humans’—voting, holding property, making laws, committing violence with impunity” (Adams & Tyler 120). Human thus became a label inextricably associated with power. If feminism, however, only seeks to establish women’s “humanness” while maintaining the boundary between man and other animals, then, according to Adams, the truly radical insight of feminism is completely defeated. Feminism is for her a “transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities” (120). All oppression is interconnected and no creature is truly free until all is free from “abuse, degradation, exploitation, pollution, and commercialization” (120). In short, feminism does not merely address the relations between men and women but functions also as an analytic tool “that helps expose the social construction of relationships between humans and other animals” (Adams 9). Aware of Derrida’s investigation, she takes matters a step further by connecting the ways in which animals are consumed literally and how women are consumed visually through the objectification of their bodies. In her book The Sexual Politics of Meat, published in 1994, she identifies how violence distances humans from animals by naming them as objects, as “it”. Patriarchal culture insists that the male pronoun “he” is not only generic by referring to all human beings but also specific by referring only to males, masking the violence behind the lack of a generic pronoun to refer to “real animals” (93). She asserts that both women and animals are linked by, what she calls “fused oppression” (102); they are turned into commodities, promoting species and gender inequality. Language, she asserts, fuses women’s and animals’ inferior status within a patriarchal culture. Adams also refers to the story of the Fall in the Genesis in order to trace this fused oppression. The woman and an animal, which in this case is the serpent, are essentially blamed for the fall whereas Adam “is entitled to name both Eve (after the Fall) and the other animals (before the Fall)” (105). Since that initial moment of nomination, patriarchal culture has felt entitled to continue naming those which it oppresses; Stereotyping through dualism occurs with both women and animals: they are either good or evil, emblems of divine perfection or diabolical incarnations, Mary or Eve, pet or beasts […] We learn of the parallel categories of […] married women and domesticated animal—and ponder the relationship between these legal categories and husbands and husbandmen, battered women and battered chicks. (Adams 105)

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In essence, both Derrida and Adams propose the blurring and disruption of any form of binary thinking, starting from the human/animal, man/woman binaries through a conscious manipulation of the main tool that is used by the former to suppress the latter, i.e., language. One literary genre that allows for such distortion of reality is the fairy tale, a privileged space in which gendered, racial and social ideals infiltrate mythical traditions to create a fusion of the imaginary with the real, enabling the distortion of boundaries. According to Jack Zipes, the fairy tale enables the speaker/writer to posit him/herself “against language to establish identity and to test the self with and against language and each word marks a way toward a future different from what have already been decreed [with] freedom to play with options that no one has ever glimpsed” (Zipes 7). With her works, and especially with The Bloody Chamber collection, Angela Carter, however, moves away from the traditional fairy tale to open up a new space within the genre to create a new world that not only plays with the boundaries of real/imaginary but also distorts our traditional view of the fairy tale itself. The creatures that Carter creates are neither completely human nor completely animal but hybrids; they are distinct singularities that cannot be subsumed under any species concept and do not fall into any categories. Therefore, there can be no generalizations concerning their abilities, features, attributes and characteristics; they hold the dispersed position of Derrida’s “animot”. At the same time, with her works, she marks the proximity between woman and animal, in an effort to expose the emptiness of traditional notions of womanhood and animality and to foreground questions of subjection and re-negotiate the notions of affinity and alterity, proximity and distance. To begin with, with her fairy tales Carter initially tries to negotiate the boundaries of humanity and animality creating imaginary narratives that play with the imbalances between the two. One such fairy tale is “The Tiger’s Bride”, a rewriting of the traditional tale of “The Beauty and the Beast”. After her father sells her to the Beast, the female protagonist goes to his mansion in order to pay her father’s debt, only to realize that what he really wants is not a servant or someone to serve his sexual appetite but “the sight of a young lady’s skin that no man has seen before” (Carter 163). After the girl refuses to expose herself to the Tiger out of selfrespect, he decides to expose himself to her instead. They ride together to the river where she “must” see him and is forced to look at him. He takes his mask and his clothes off, all those things that he has put on in order to achieve the perfect image of the human, but inevitably made him look carnivalesque, revealing his true figure in all its bestiality. She is forced to see everything, his hairy body, his paws, his teeth, but what she feels at the

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time is not fear but awe; to such an extent that she feels her “breast ripped apart as if I [she] suffered a marvelous wound” (166). At this point, it is not the animal that looks at the human but the human that stares at the animal body in all its glory and experiences a mixture of dread, from the sight of pure raw power, and amazement at the same time for the magnificence of nature; “nothing about him reminded me of humanity” (166). After being exposed to the Tiger’s bestiality, she decides to explore the limits of her humanity and expose her body to his gaze. She hesitates at first, but it is pride and not shame that prevents her fingers from completing the task. At this point, it is worth mentioning that this is her first step towards losing her humanity since shame over one’s nakedness, as Derrida established, is a “property” exclusive to humans, and the girl seems to be devoid of any shame. Her fingers pause momentarily, but she eventually finishes her task: “I showed his grave silence my white skin, my red nipples” (166). This is the most crucial part of the narrative: the other is naked revealing, not what differentiates one from the other but actually what connects the two through their “likeness”. She now sees that there is a bestial side in her too, that she has an unexplored territory of her mind and body that has just surfaced a side she wishes to embrace to the fullest. Of course, the gaze might have brought all these elements to light, but it is the touch that serves to truly equate the two and make them “alike”: she goes naked to the Beast’s chambers and he licks her with his abrasive tongue and her skin peels off to reveal the beautiful fur that is hiding underneath, turning her into an animal; And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.(Carter 169)

Essentially, by removing all clothing and remaining naked, she is able to reach her bestial side and as the diamond earrings he has gifted her, forged out of his tears, turn back into liquid she transforms into an animal herself. The Beast demanded from her the abominable since “it is not natural for humankind to go naked, not since first we hid our loins with fig leaves” (168) but what she eventually realized is that once she removed those artificial constructs that made her human, she was able to access the true essence of herself, her bestial nature. The woman who was traded by her father like a commodity in order to pay for his gambling debts and the Beast who was treated like an outsider, a pariah and was forced to live in isolation, now realize that they are more alike than different. Instead, however, of conforming to the demands of traditional fairy tales that would

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have the Beast turn human and live happily ever after with his beautiful wife, Carter’s tale provides a much more interesting and subversive ending with the woman becoming the animal. In this way, instead of being subjected to the patriarchal culture by conforming to her assigned role as a commodity, the woman is released and liberated from its oppression through the acceptance and assimilation of her animality. On the other hand, the Tiger’s demand could be read as his desire to enforce his masculine dominance over her, in essence, to see her body at its most vulnerable and to objectify this body would give him the utmost power over her. This is a kind of voyeurism where a person receives sexual gratification from looking at other people naked or in compromising positions; the look, the gaze is viewed as penetrating the woman, going through her to give him sexual gratification. Voyeurism, which is an obsessive act performed by a person (usually male), during which the sexual objectification of others provides sexual gratification, is traditionally considered as an active position, compared to exhibitionism, its supposedly passive opposite. It is an action that would very much empower the Beast and give him some sort of control over the woman’s body and mental state. What happens next is quite remarkable since the girl decisively refuses to expose herself to the Beast, subverting the norms and destabilizing the power balance that exists between them. Whereas the Beast held all the power, with her refusal to take her clothes off, she also refuses to give him any authority, control and, in effect, any satisfaction. What she proposes instead is even more extreme since she doesn’t allow him to look at her face but only at her body from the waist down. She is completely aware that she is objectified and differentiates between the face and the genitals, refusing to accept anything other than what he would give to a prostitute. Revealing the face and baring the soul naked and not just the body would enslave the woman and render her inferior, but her offer to reveal only the genitals shifts the power structure and changes the way they see each other: “I will pull my skirt up to my waist … there must be a sheet over my face … if you wish to give me money … you should give me only the same amount of money that you would give to any other woman in such circumstances” (Carter 161). The Beast, realizing that he could see the woman’s body but not break her spirit, moves from the active to the passive role and decides to take his clothes off in front of her, to expose himself and let her see who he really is. He unveils himself to her and at that moment he becomes “the Beast” releasing his power over to her. At this point she identifies with the animal: she views the magnificence and deliberate vulnerability of the Beast and relates to him. She takes her clothes off, intentionally exposing herself to him and ridding herself of her femi-

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nine constraints, of the artificiality of female construction only to embrace completely her animal side. They see each other naked, unmasked; they occupy both active and passive roles. Another very emblematic tale that serves to further problematize the notions of difference and kinship between man/woman and animal is “Wolf-Alice”. The protagonist, Wolf-Alice, is a woman raised by wolves from infancy and trained by nuns to perform simple elemental tasks in order to manage the Duke’s household, after hunters killed her wolfmother. She occupies a liminal existence; she is stuck between two worlds, a predicament that she realizes through her menstruation and her reflection in the mirror. Like Wolf-Alice, the Duke is neither human nor animal but also trapped in a liminal existence, not really belonging to the real or the metaphysical: he is real enough to feed on human corpses but not real enough to have a reflection. An outsider, physically and mentally, unable to communicate with anyone, in the eyes of the townspeople, he is a beast that needs to be exterminated for the well-being of the community. Persecuted by the townsfolk who attack him with torches, pitchforks, and guns, the Duke is wounded but eventually saved at the last minute by WolfAlice. She starts licking his wounds, like her wolf-mother had taught her, and helps him come to terms with his own animality as he now begins to have a reflection in the mirror: As she continued her ministrations, this glass, with infinite slowness, yielded to the reflexive strength of its own material construction. Little by little, there appeared within it … at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke. (Carter 228)

This is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the story as it highlights the proximity between the female and the non-human; the animal, that is marginalized and persecuted by humans, is saved by a very unlikely hero, the female creature. In essence, Carter tries to present readers, not with the perspective of the hunter but that of the animal, of the other, of the one followed and persecuted. At the same time, she perverts readers’ expectations of who and how a hero “should” be, empowering the female creature to take action and liberate herself and the Duke from the constraints and oppression of human society. A further example of Carter’s fascination with the re-negotiation of presupposed notions of womanhood and animality is “The Company of Wolves”, a rewriting of the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale. In Carter’s story, Little Red meets the hunter in the forest and is very much attracted to him. He is incredibly handsome and courteous and when he

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meets Little Red in the woods, her hand is already on her knife so “he laughed with a flash of white teeth when he saw her and made her a comic yet flattering little bow” (216). Therefore, he proposes a wager as to who will get to granny’s house faster. If she loses, she will have to give him a kiss and she deliberately wants to delay in order to lose the wager. The man had already been hunting since the girl is able to see the bloody carcasses of the game birds he had shot earlier on, a fact which gives her a sense of safety and protection. The hunter then offers to carry her basket, a cunning way to make sure that she has no access to her knife, the only thing that might save her life. Little Red “forgot to be afraid of the beasts” (216) and so she let it go. The hunter arrives at granny’s house earlier, transforms into a wolf, eats the grandmother, then tidies the mess and dresses like he was before, so Little Red does not get suspicious right away. What Carter does with this character is quite fascinating since this stereotypical figure of the saviour, the hunter, the male hero, is exactly who turns into a beast and eats the grandmother: “The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed. The wolf is a carnivore incarnate” (217). The hunter and the animal turn out to be the same individual, and, therefore, the person Little Red should be hiding from is the exact same one she felt most secure with, the one she was attracted to. Within the physical body of the hunter, therefore, exist his two natures: the wolf and the man, the beast, and the human, a hybrid. When she finally realizes what has happened he is able to expose his bestial side to her with “eyes that now seemed to shine with a unique, interior light, eyes the size of saucers, saucers full of Greek fire, diabolic phosphorescence”. What follows is one of the most fascinating parts of the narrative since the wolf is now in a position to taunt, negotiate with, boss around, threaten Little Red and finally reach a settlement where he is to take her virginity but spare her life. The girl knows there is no one to rescue her since the hunter is the wolf and she has to find the means to save herself so she tries to entice him into sleeping with her to remain alive. Little Red knows “she was nobody’s meat” (219), she trusts her own animal drives and in a way becomes a “carnivore incarnate” (219) herself, not so much hungry for meat but for flesh while at the same time embodying it. Carter offers a wonderful chance to Little Red to save herself: with the “villain” and the “hero” being the same person, the woman is forced to “do or die” because, if she does not step up and negotiate, manipulate her feminine charms to her advantage she will be eaten and her bones will be crackling in the fireplace like those of her grandmother’s. Thus, she is immediately empowered, claiming the right to exist in the world and using

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any resource available to her, in order to survive, whereas the wolf/hunter employs his rational thinking to gain as much as he can from their “transaction”. Finally, “The Erl King” is a tale narrated in the first person by a female narrator describing the Erl King himself and his way of life. At the beginning, she issues a warning, “Erl-King will do you grievous harm” (Carter 187), a caution she herself does not follow since she visits him in order to observe his ways and make love to him. Even though she professes that she is not afraid of him, she admits that she is, “only, afraid of vertigo … Afraid of falling down” (Carter 189). It becomes clear, therefore, that the female narrator becomes the submissive female, trapped in a destructive relationship with the dominating male, summoned by him upon request, afraid of his effect on her, but simultaneously in love with him. His touch, “both consoles and devastates” (Carter 190) while she indulges his appetite to control and even consume her. At some point, she realizes that he is weaving a cage to put her in, a bird cage to trap her forever along with his other birds. “I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do,” she admits, “for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages” (Carter 191). The reader realizes that despite the fact that the Erl-King is in harmony with nature, the birds he keeps were previously women, who “have lost their flesh when they were dipped in the corrosive pools of his regard and now must live in cages” (Carter 192). The narrator, however, does not appear to despise or hate the Erl-King at any point; rather, she still describes him in affectionate terms of the way he lays his head on her lap, stroking his hair, and is even aroused by his domineering attitude. During the end of the first person narrative, she devises a plan in order to free herself from his hold and kill him, taking “two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind[ing] them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain” (Carter 192), strangling him in the process. The narration then shifts to the third person, with the narrator describing how the girl will open up the cages, releasing the birds, who, in turn, transform back into girls. Instead of submitting herself entirely to him, becoming another animal subjected to the ErlKing’s dominance, she decides to murder him freeing both herself and the others. Once again, Carter underscores the inextricable link between womanhood and animality; in this case, however, happiness is not achieved through accepting the animal side, but through breaking the bonds that ensnare the female protagonist under male domination, empowering her, at the same time, to assume the role as creator of her own fate, her own future and more importantly, her own narrative.

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Essentially, with The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida successfully genders the question of the animal. The possibilities of this gesture for postmodern feminist thinking are vast and very significant. During roughly the same period, in The Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams suggests that what “fuses women’s and animals’ inferior status within a patriarchal culture” (Adams 102) is language, and it is through that avenue that the rehabilitation of both terms should commence. The genre of the fairy tale is a space that continues to serve a “meaningful social function not just for compensation but for revelation: for the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society”, providing at the same time “comforting counsel about how we can insert our selves cunningly into our daily struggles to turn the course of the world's events in our favor” (Zipes 29). Through her works and more specifically The Bloody Chamber collection, Angela Carter, attempts to interrogate human identity and the limits and boundaries of what makes us human. The boundaries between the human and the animal, as well as between man and woman, repeatedly fail, and Carter's protagonists are precisely creatures that continually disturb any philosophical certainties surrounding binary thinking and expose its failure. Very much aware of the link between the frustrating plurality and indeterminacy of animal beings, and the violent response this very plurality and indeterminacy occasions in Man, Carter’s characters force readers to understand the human as response-able and to re-think the issue of their own responsibility towards each other, towards their others, towards women, towards animals and most importantly, towards themselves.

Works Cited Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. New York, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. Print. Carter, Angela. Burning you Boats: Collected Stories. London: Vintage, 2006. Print. Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow... A Dialogue . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida. New York : Fordham University Press , 1997. Print. Descartes, René. A Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. The Floating Press, 2009. Print. Mallet, Marie L. “Foreword.” Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York : Fordham University Press , 2008 . ix-xiii. Print.

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Zipes, Jack. “The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale.” The Lion and the Unicorn 12.2 (1988): 7-31. Print.

SISTERLY REFLECTIONS: BETRAYAL AND ABANDONMENT IN REYNA GRANDE’S DANCING WITH BUTTERFLIES CRISTINA HERRERA

Studies also suggest that that when a mother looks at her daughter, she sees herself. She is constantly reminded of her mistakes, yearnings, dreams, successes, and failures. When the daughter looks at her mother, she often sees herself and rejects the image in the mirror. (Brown-Guillory 2)

Although the above epigraph refers to maternal writings by women of colour, this chapter takes as its starting point Elizabeth Brown-Guillory’s description of the act of looking at and seeing the other: the mother seeing herself in her daughter’s face and the daughter’s rejection of that image she sees in the mirror. As Brown-Guillory posits in the introduction to her edited collection of scholarly essays that unpack the complex maternal relationships in writings by women of colour, much of the tension and strain between mother and daughter is a result of seeing (or not) seeing each other; and this friction between recognizing oneself in the other yet denying that mirror image, according to Brown-Guillory, is at the crux of the maternal relationship. Equally significant to this passage is the way in which looking at the other is described as the act of looking in a mirror, as if one reflects the other. For my purposes, “seeing” is defined not merely as visual sightedness, but instead, connotes an understanding or acknowledgment of a person’s experiences, history, indeed, the individual’s very existence. One might question why a chapter whose title does not allude to the maternal relationship would reference Brown-Guillory’s significant volume, but as I suggest in the pages to follow, the act of looking in the mirror and seeing (and of course, not wanting to see) oneself or another, holds great significance when discussing the Chicana writer Reyna Grande’s 2009 novel, Dancing with Butterflies, a text with multiple passages de-

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scribing mirrors, the act of looking in the mirror, and eyesight, references that largely allude to the tense and conflicted relationship between a pair of sisters, Elena and Adriana, two of the novel’s characters whose lives are connected and shaped through Mexican folkloric dance or folklórico. The troubled relationship between Elena and Adriana centres on Adriana’s sense of hurt, betrayal, and abandonment by her older sister stemming from events several years in the past, just after their mother’s death from a horrific car accident; as we learn in the novel, Adriana is initially unable to forgive Elena for what she sees as her role and responsibility in their abusive father’s arrest, coupled with Elena’s decision to move away to college soon after their father’s incarceration, two events that force Adriana to live with paternal grandparents who subject her to immense cruelty and punishment. Although their father, Gerardo, reduces the two young sisters to be mere objects of his brutal beatings, Adriana’s futile efforts to hold on to a distorted version of “family”1 cause her to cast blame on Elena, who defends her actions as evidence of her sisterly love and protection. This chapter will examine the novel’s extensive use of mirror imagery to discuss Elena and Adriana’s complex sisterhood that is wrought with their shared experiences with the trauma of their father’s violence and their motherlessness, resulting in feelings of betrayal, guilt, abandonment, and even estrangement from each other. In particular, I argue that the many references to mirrors symbolize the sisters’ refusal to see in each other their shared history of pain and maternal loss; if mirrors reflect our images, if they reflect what we cannot deny in and about ourselves, as I discuss in the pages to follow, then the novel’s repeated examples of the sisters’ act of looking in the mirror reveal their attempts to reject the mirror’s symbolic function as a reflection of each other. Both Elena and Adriana examine themselves in mirrors to seek out reminders of their mother and to contemplate their present lives that are marred by Elena’s grief over her stillborn daughter and her impending divorce, as well as Adriana’s harmful patterns of dating physically and emotionally violent men; yet even as they struggle with this pain, they are at first unable to recognize each other’s damaged psyches, much less offer support and empathy.2 It is only when the sisters acknowledge their shared pain and “see” what the other reflects, that they may reconcile as sisters and articulate their desire to heal their fractured relationship. And as the novel suggests, acknowledging and seeing the other’s pain is crucial to their survival within an environment that marginalizes and makes invisible the lives and stories of Chicana sisters.

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What Does the Mirror Behold? Mirror Imagery in Literature In Chicana writer Denise Chávez’s 2001 novel, Loving Pedro Infante, the protagonist, Tere Ávila, ponders the hurt that she has caused her married lover's daughter, Andrea, who learns of the affair when she discovers Tere kissing her father, Lucio. Throughout the novel, Tere's obsession with Pedro Infante movies creates illusions of a life with her married lover that will, as we know, never come to fruition. Significantly, however, there is a moment near the end of the novel when Tere, at last, admits this fact to herself, and while looking in a mirror, she is forced to finally confront and reveal her identification with Andrea, for she, too has experienced the betrayal of a father's infidelity and secrets: Instead of a thirty-something-year-old woman, this is what I saw: A Little Girl. Nine Years Old… The woman in the mirror knew what the little girl didn’t. That eventually, over time, all things would work out for the best. They had to … Andrea was a strong little girl. She wouldn’t understand what everything meant, until one day she would look in the mirror and see things as they really were. And at that moment she would grasp the unvarnished, illusionless reality of those characters who made up the movie of her life. (282-283)

Although the novel traces Tere's struggle to create an empowered and fulfilling life unlike the women characters from Pedro Infante films who are usually victims of male abandonment or cruelty, this moment signals her psychic awakening, so to speak. While in the throes of her affair with Lucio, Tere refuses to “see” Andrea as a victim, preferring to deny her own culpability, and it is only when Tere risks alienating important people in her life, that she reveals the pain of her own father's betrayal. For Tere, this moment of looking in the mirror provides a startling vision of clarity that she had, up to that point, been lacking. The mirror functions as a reflection of the pain and truth that Tere had been reluctant to acknowledge; and in “seeing” Andrea as herself, she develops the strength needed to end her relationship with Lucio and to not only share her own experiences of pain but to accept the consequences of the pain she has wrought on the young girl. Tere can no longer escape Andrea's image that is reflected back to her, and this important act of looking in the mirror is a much-needed moment to confront a truth she had been at pains to deny.

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A well-known refrain that is often used in response to criticism or judgment is “look in the mirror,” suggesting that one who casts judgment need only glimpse herself in the mirror to see her own flaws that she is quick to see in others. This response suggests that “mirrors don’t lie,” that like Tere Ávila, once we confront the mirror, we can no longer deny perhaps uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Further, as in Tere’s example, the act of looking in the mirror forces the recollection of a painful memory that she had been withholding in her attempts to not only create a fantasy life with Lucio but to resist acknowledging the pain she has caused Andrea, a girl very much like herself. That is, when Tere at last looks in the mirror, she sees not only herself but a younger Tere who holds much in common with Andrea. Feminist scholars have examined writers' use of mirror imagery to convey themes of narcissism, gazing, and self-introspection and their connection to the act of looking in the mirror, a theory initially conceptualized by Jacques Lacan. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney cites Lacan's well-known theory of the “mirror stage,” which suggests that “looking, being looked at, and looking at oneself shape one's identity,” and this statement certainly applies to the above-referenced passage from Chávez's novel, as Tere is forced to confront the mirror's triggering of a memory that has greatly shaped her future relationships with herself and male lovers (56). For Lacan, the mirror holds great significance in the origin and formation of one's self-identity that is acknowledged during a child's infancy: “It is the moment, from around six to eighteen months, in which the child first recognizes that its mirror image is in some sense itself. That is to say, the child misidentifies with the spectral other as the object of desire and begins to internalize an image of itself that is whole and unified, not the fragmented by-product of the flux of sensations that is its actual experience” (Dimovitz 4). Yet this “mis-identification” with the object in the mirror may hold different consequences for female children, who “may find that the larger world, where looking and being looked at have gendered meanings, perpetuates and even exacerbates the frightening difference between her image and herself” (Sweeney 58). Transitioning beyond the mirror stage, according to Lacan, rests on learning and seeing the difference between the image in the mirror and the self. As Jenijoy La Belle argues in her seminal study, Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass, this moment of looking in the mirror suggests that “the reflection in the glass is at once both the self and a radical otherness, an image privileged with a truth beyond the subjective and at the same time taken to be the very essence of that subjectivity” (9). For Tere, as La Belle’s statement suggests, the image in the mirror is the cornerstone of her identity and

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sense of selfhood, given that her experience with her father’s betrayal in many ways shapes her romantic relationships with men, the very men who are unable or unwilling to “see” Tere as anything other than a passive body. Looking in the mirror, according to some texts, which may very well be applied to Chávez’s novel as well as Grande’s, may “signify moments of self-recognition or self-discovery” (Sweeney 56). In Grande’s novel, looking in the mirror also functions as an act of self-confrontation; that is, this moment is often utilized by characters to seek out truths in themselves that they are otherwise unable to articulate. Sweeney's analysis of distinctly gendered implications resulting from the mirror stage brings to light the theoretical concept of the gaze, which feminist critics have extensively critiqued because of its relationship to the social, cultural control of women.3 Unlike looking in the mirror, which may be used for women as a tool for self-study (La Belle 9), “gaze can be a way of domination in interpersonal and social relationships, and in the case of a man’s gaze upon a woman, it is a form of domination that objectifies woman as the desired object, an object whose sole function is to give pleasure to the male” (de Valdés 63). But while Grande’s characters are well-aware of their objectification by the gaze and make references to such occasions, their glimpses in the mirror, I would suggest, offer moments of subjectivity and complex insightfulness—namely, a search for truths that the mirror may conjure, or even visual clues or signs of their mother’s features held in their faces. For the sisters, particularly in the case of Adriana, who risks re-enacting her mother’s habits, such as promiscuity, for example, the mirror’s reflection symbolizes her visibility, her need to be seen and acknowledged within multiple discourses that would otherwise render her invisible because of her identity as a brown, working-class Chicana. If, as La Belle posits, “by taking the mirror into their own hands, women are eliminating the mirror as tyrant, as dominant male” (180), what may be said of the mirror’s function in a novel by a Chicana writer? While scholars have noted the mirror’s symbolic source of self-identity in literature by Anglo women writers (Dimovitz, La Belle, Bonca, Sweeney), Grande’s novel further complicates the scholarship by connecting the act of looking in the mirror to Chicana sisterly subjectivity, an agency denied to the sisters by their shared trauma of paternal abuse and their mother’s violent death. In Laura Gutiérrez Spencer’s insightful discussion of mirrors and masks in Chicana poetry, one of the few critical works to address this theme in writings by Chicanas, the author argues that for Chicanas, looking in the mirror is related to “the development of an ethnic and personal identity” that is in constant negotiation with Mexican and American cultures that are often at odds (70). Looking in the mirror, I would add, may

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act as a symbolic guide toward maternal, even sisterly connection; and further, recognizing each other’s pain and trauma also works against dominant systems of oppression that reduce Chicanas and women of color to the unseen and invisible.4

Connection and Disconnection: Sisters and Sisterhood in Dancing with Butterflies Although I take as my focal point of analysis Dancing with Butterflies’ use of mirror imagery to discuss the tense relationship between the sisters, Elena and Adriana, the novel is also invested in unpacking the source of this friction, particularly the sisters’ traumatic family history that is marked by violence and abandonment. Perhaps most telling is the way in which looking in the mirror recalls the trauma that is the source of their inability to connect as sisters. Speaking of Denise Chávez’s novel, Face of an Angel, Maya Socolovsky suggests that the Dosamantes women’s “experiences of abuse … are communal, collective, and historically determined [and] need to be remembered communally, through story” (189). Yet it is precisely Adriana and Elena’s inability to collectively remember their trauma that fractures them. As Cathy Caruth explains, “one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another,” and “trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” (8). In Adriana’s recollection of their father’s horrific beating that ultimately led to his incarceration, however, it is Elena’s face that triggers such a violent memory, and rather than speak of the reality of her father’s brutality, this moment is instead remembered as evidence of Elena’s “guilty look” for her role in the supposed breakup of their family (18): I remember feeling a stinging on my neck, and then Dad froze; the belt he was hitting me with was suspended in midair. Elena screamed. I touched my neck where I felt the stinging and my fingers got wet with something sticky. Dad tossed his belt on the floor and just stood there staring at me. Elena rushed to the phone, but when Dad yanked it out of her hand she ran out of the house. I don’t remember what happened after that, but the next time I opened my eyes I was being carried on a stretcher to the ambulance… Now that she’s about to have her baby, I tell myself maybe it’s time to let things go, to kiss and make up. But it isn’t in me. When I look at her, I remember. (18-19)

If trauma “is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise availa-

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ble” (Caruth 4), then Adriana bears the literal wound of her father’s violence.5 But this anger at her victimization is misplaced and misdirected at Elena, and rather than acknowledge her sister’s fear and her own resulting trauma from witnessing such violence, Adriana can only remember sisterly betrayal. Unlike what Lourdes Torres calls “transformative remembering,” defined as a form of remembering that is “active and dynamic” in its gesture toward “recovery and discovery,” both Elena and Adriana instead use guilt and resentment as manifestations of their problematic remembering (228). Even more unsettling is how Elena’s pregnancy and impending motherhood further contribute to Adriana’s inability to articulate her pain to her sister. For Adriana, Elena’s maternal possibilities serve as another source of resentment, which is not surprising, given that their own motherlessness leads to these feelings of abandonment, isolation, and pain. While Adriana accuses Elena of acting “as if Mom never existed” (76), the irony of this statement is Elena’s inability to forget their mother’s violent death and the subsequent pain she experiences when looking at Adriana’s face: “If only she didn’t look so much like our mother. Just looking at her hurts” (71). Adriana’s close resemblance to their mother, Cecilia, renders the mere act of looking as a source of pain and memory of her absence and death; Elena is at first unable to distinguish her sister’s face from her mother’s. In a dramatic scene, the connection between maternity, violence, and family resemblance is further drawn in another memory Adriana recalls: [Elena] hardly talks about her and she hates it when I ask her about Mom. Dad used to hate it, too. “Why do you need to talk about your mother?” he would ask. “Because I can’t remember what she looks like,” I would tell him. “Look in the mirror, girl. There you’ll see your mother. You have her fucking face!” Slap. When Dad would hit me harder than he meant to, and I would get a bloody nose, or a cut lip, or a black eye, I would stand in front of the mirror and know he was right. I did see my mother in the mirror. For some reason, I would forget I was actually looking at myself. (76)

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As in the tradition of much Chicana literature, which demonstrates the “inescapable danger women face, particularly when they refuse to stay within the limits of societal mores” (Johnson 48), so, too does Grande narrate graphic scenes of familial violence perpetuated on the bodies of Chicanas by male family members. But perhaps an important question we should ask is why Adriana uses these moments of violence to remember her mother? Why does she want to see her mother’s abused face? Why is this the only way she can connect with her mother? Moreover, is this form of remembering productive and potentially healing? Interestingly, while Elena goes to great lengths to avoid thinking of her mother and her own experiences with trauma that she has withheld from her sister (168, 245, 322), Adriana actively seeks out the mirror to study the reflection, to search for signs of a mother that she risks forgetting. What is rather troubling is Adriana’s initial inability to connect with her dead mother in any way other than by studying her battered face, and in this deeply disturbing scene, bearing the marks of her father’s rage renders her unable to distinguish her face from Cecilia’s, the same sensation felt by Elena when she looks at Adriana. The fusion of her face and identity with her mother’s is not only chilling, but it signifies Adriana’s sense of loss over a self she cannot construct except through her memories of her mother’s and her own victimization. Experiencing the physical, psychic pain of her father’s fists, Adriana tries to embody her mother’s pain as well, to feel the “cut lip, or a black eye,” which suggests that for trauma victims, “the body dictates that violence and trauma … leave the survivor preoccupied with the memory of it” (Culbertson 169). In her repeated patterns of dating and sleeping with cruel men similar to her father, she continues seeking the mirror to glimpse evidence of her mother’s features. Her relationship with her lover, Emilio, is characterized by his beatings and violent sex that leave her damaged and ashamed of what she sees as her own complicity: “When I turn on the light I’m blinded for a moment, but I open my eyes and gasp. I look at the woman in the mirror. Matted hair, bruised and swollen cheeks, bite marks all over her neck and tits. I feel a rush of anger … I recognize the face before me” (199). As in the scene I cited earlier, here Adriana uses her beatings as a form of maternal connection, but significantly, the resemblance to her mother now fills her with a “rush of anger.” Adriana is no longer Adriana but Cecilia, “the woman in the mirror,” and whereas the earlier passage describes the troubling fusion of their faces, here she separates from herself to essentially embody Cecilia’s reflection in the mirror. The anger she feels is not directed at Emilio, however, but instead at her mother. Once again, the act of looking in a mirror recalls a memory of Cecilia

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criticizing Adriana’s folkloric dancing; unlike the other dancers who are “as graceful as butterflies,” Cecilia disparages her daughter as looking “like a moth compared to the other girls” (199). In an ironic homage to her mother’s insult, Adriana brands herself with a moth tattoo, and because her mediocre dancing ability makes it impossible to connect with Cecilia through dance, she instead tries to cope with the pain of her mother’s rejection by drawing similarities between their bruised and battered faces. The tattoo itself is a sort of self-mutilation or self-wounding.6 Adriana's complex feelings of maternal rejection and failure demonstrate how “the mother is dead but no less powerfully present. In fact, the mother's absence becomes a haunting presence that bears directly on the daughter's difficult struggle to achieve selfhood as well as to express her unacknowledged rage or her sense of precariousness in the world” (Rubenstein 311). For Adriana, this battle to “achieve selfhood” plays out in her emotionally unfulfilling, abusive relationships with men and in her performance of an exaggerated, hyper-Mexicanidad that Elena critiques for its lack of sincerity: “Adriana often says she's proud of her Mexican roots, but she doesn't need to dress like Frida Kahlo to prove it” (70). In what Elena sees as a costume-like appearance of Mexicanidad, coupled with Adriana's resemblance to Cecilia that she actively traces to connect with her mother, the novel suggests that Adriana, in essence, wants to become Cecilia, to embody her mother’s presence through dress and, tragically, through violence. But as Gutiérrez Spencer notes, this heavy use of makeup shows how “cosmetic masks serve as a barrier to a true representation of a woman’s inner self … The use of cosmetics and other forms of masking can also be interpreted as an attempt to protect one’s self from a harsh social context” (77-78). In the case of Adriana, this excessive makeup may be read as a shield to hide an authentic self that she views as unworthy and even deserving of mistreatment from men. Further, her use of cosmetics is an attempt to present herself as a “true” Mexicana, demonstrating her troubled efforts to construct an identity in a meaningful way. The power of Cecilia’s ghostly presence, through her resemblance to Adriana, is felt by Elena, who also struggles to cope with her mother’s death and her hatred toward Gerardo, her non-biological father who molested her, a secret she has withheld from loved ones, including Adriana (337-338). In fact, Elena’s decision to quit folkloric dance following the death of her newborn daughter, is partly due to the pain caused by seeing Adriana’s growing resemblance to their mother, but rather than confront and acknowledge this pain, she instead flees the dance studio and any reminders of the passion she holds for folklórico: “When Adriana tilts her head a certain way I can almost see our mother. I tell myself it’s a good

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thing I’ve stopped dancing. This way, I no longer have to look at Adriana’s reflection in the mirror. How many times did my stomach do a somersault when I would catch a glimpse of Adriana’s face in the mirror, and it was like seeing Mom’s ghost dancing before me?” (186). In Elena’s efforts to escape dance because of its reminders of her mother, and her inability to separate her living, breathing sister from her dead mother, we see Grande’s multiple allusions to a Gothic tradition and the uncanny, which as Tanya González points out, is a tradition used among Chicana/o and Latina/o writers, despite the relative absence of scholarship on this thematic trope (46). The presence of ghosts in literature is usually attributed to the Gothic tradition (Rubenstein 312), and women writers of colour have long used this tradition to make social critiques with regard to gender, power, race, and sexuality (González 55). While I do not suggest that Dancing with Butterflies be read as a Gothic text, we must question Grande’s multiple references to these uncanny moments where both Adriana and Elena struggle to make sense of the reflection in the mirror.7 As Socolovsky explains, references to ghosts may “signal a failure to work through loss” (196), suggesting that a symbolic exorcism of the sisters’ mother, that is, the need to reconcile their own, unique histories from their mother that is reflected in the mirror, may, in fact, propel them to a sisterly union and healing of their victimization. Ghosts, both literal and symbolic, as in the case of both sisters’ belief that they can “see” their mother in the mirror, also “represent the dreaded past and provoke anguished memory,” according to Laurie Vickroy (170). For both sisters, this “dreaded past” must be exorcised through their collective, shared articulation of pain, which is initially vocalized through their feelings of guilt, betrayal, and abandonment. Part of this healing entails sharing and speaking their collective pain and their own experiences with abuse and violence. Adriana bears the physical wounds of Gerardo’s violence as well as the subsequent markers of abuse from her lovers, but Elena instead represses her abuse at the hands of Gerardo and only divulges this when she finds herself in a sexually inappropriate relationship with her high school student: I struggled against him, but he was too strong for me. He managed to pull down my underwear, to leave me exposed to his gaze … As I make my way down to the beach I think about that frightening moment. It was never repeated and my father never brought it up. But I felt dirty after that and wondered if I had done something to make him behave that way. The day I picked up the phone and called the police, I thought about that day, about the many times he hurt Mom, with me not doing anything about it. I had stood aside, time after time, and not helped my mother; even though she

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Sisterly Reflections: Reyna Grande’s Dancing with Butterflies said she didn’t want me to get involved, I should’ve done something. The anger and the hatred, the guilt and she shame I carried inside me, surfaced at that moment. It gave me the courage I needed to finally make that call— for my mother it was too late, but I thought I could still save Adriana. Have I harmed Fernando by loving him? I hadn’t meant to hurt him, to take advantage of his innocence. I never wanted to hurt him. (338-339)

As Culbertson reminds us, the trauma of physical harm “is often permanent” even when wounds or scars not visible to the eye (172).8 Significantly, the abuse is recalled not only for the physical act of Gerardo’s inappropriate touching but through his “gaze,” once again demonstrating the distinctions between introspection through the mirror and the violating, sexualizing gaze of the patriarch. Elena’s grief over her newborn daughter’s death and the resulting marital estrangement and divorce is transferred onto her relationship with Fernando, a boy just shy of eighteen and nine years Elena’s junior, who shares her passion for Mexican folkloric dance. Unable to return to folklórico because of its association with both her mother and sister, Elena is drawn to Fernando's similar enthusiasm for this art form; but instead of speaking of her pain to her sister, she instead engages in a taboo relationship to mask her mourning for both her daughter and her long-dead mother. Moreover, though Elena reveals the molestation she suffered at the hands of Gerardo, she expresses the fear that she too has become Gerardo through her relationship with Fernando. She is indeed able to use her rage toward Gerardo to make the empowered decision to have him arrested, but her implication that she shares commonalities with an abuser is rather troubling. Elena is a victim of Gerardo’s sexual and physical abuse, but her reluctance to divulge this secret to anyone nevertheless suggests that “silence, as a perpetrator of pain, struggles against attempts to recall and tell the past” (Socolovsky 191). Elena’s flashback of Gerardo's abuse may be read as a side effect of trauma (Bouson 9), and her inability to speak of her victimization through any other means but through flashback and self-guilt over her relationship with Fernando is significant, as “what is not said or cannot be remembered is equally revealing of traumatic memories” (Vickroy 146). Further, the multiple traumas experienced by Elena—Gerardo's physical and sexual abuse and giving birth to a stillborn daughter—are located in the body, specifically the womb, marking the link between Elena's identity as both daughter and mother, void of the identity of sister that she has yet to salvage in her relationship with Adriana. While I have not thus far extensively discussed the novel’s thematic concern with folklórico, I do not wish to ignore this important subtext,

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given that dance is both a source of connection and friction between Elena and Adriana. While both sisters continue their mother’s devotion to dance, it is Elena who has inherited Cecilia’s talent and Adriana’s frustration with her inability to replicate Elena and Cecilia’s footwork at first leads her to ignore her true passion, singing. Adriana uses folklórico as another way of embodying her mother and connecting with her, even despite her knowledge that her talent will never equal Elena’s: “I want to keep dancing Folklórico. It’s the only thing I have left of my mother. When I’m dressed in a China Poblana costume, or any costume for that matter, and my head is adorned with a big braid with colourful ribbons, I can see her in me, and I remember her so clearly, as if she were on the other side of the mirror looking back at me” (91). In yet another moment of fusion, Adriana desires to embody her mother as well as her talent that she has not inherited. In fact, Adriana’s attempts to fuse with her mother is also reflected in her daily attire, what Elena interprets as a performance of Mexicanidad; but for Adriana, this use of Mexican clothing symbolizes her troubling inability to create a self unlike her mother. Though Adriana believes that dance is all that remains of her mother’s memory, this statement is all the more telling for its failure to see Elena as a source of maternal recollection. Instead, Adriana uses folklórico to compete with Elena’s talent, as if Elena's dancing prowess renders her closer to Cecilia. The irony, of course, is that Cecilia is dead: how can either sister connect with a dead mother, except through memory? But in fact, Adriana attempts to repress her love of singing to engage in an art form for which she holds no passion as if this is the only way to keep her mother’s memory alive. In contrast, Elena at first quits dancing because of its deep ties to her mother. What is more, however, is that dancing forces her to not only be within close proximity to her estranged sister, but Elena is astute enough to spot Adriana’s dancing flaws and intuitively knows the reasons behind Adriana’s stubbornness to continue dancing: “I look at the dancers in the large mirrors and skip over my own reflection. Instead, my eyes fall on Adriana dancing in the row in front of me. Every time she turns to look in the mirror, she frowns. She misses a step. Our eyes connect for a moment, and I feel a stabbing pain in my abdomen to see her disdain toward me” (65). While Adriana seeks out the mirror and desires to see the image no matter the violence that is reflected within it, Elena actively avoids looking at herself. Yet she does look at Adriana, but even when she looks at her sister, she can only see flaws and resentment. What is striking in this description of Elena’s reluctance to look at herself is its allusion to multiple passages in the novel that describe Elena’s poor eyesight, her removal of glasses, and Adriana’s accusation of stubborn “blindness,” a refusal to see

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Adriana’s pain (168, 236, 322). Elena at first desires a form of literal blindness, as if removing her glasses or avoiding the image of the mirror will erase memories and shield her from the pain these memories conjure. Adriana also uses the mirror to project “disdain” to her sister, unlike the moments she inspects the mirror for signs of her mother. Interestingly, when the sisters are confined to the same mirror, both use the object to reject sisterly attachment, and in the case of Elena, to deflect her own image all while detecting flaws in Adriana’s movement. Despite their feelings of betrayal, however, there are multiple, touching moments in which Elena and Adriana connect on a highly intimate, sensory level. Although fleeting, these moments, I would suggest, touch on the sisters’ innate desires to communicate complex feelings of attachment, love, and mourning. For example, it is Adriana who prepares a celebratory dinner for Elena’s twenty-seventh birthday, and her decision to make mole con pollo, a Mexican dish of chicken stewed with a rich chocolate sauce, enables a powerful connection to Cecilia, who often prepared the dish for the sisters’ birthdays (245). Elena’s sensory, emotional reaction to the meal that is lovingly prepared by Adriana reveals the ways in which food functions as a mode of identity construction and empowerment between female family members.9 Although Elena at first is stung by the food's reminder of her mother (245), she acknowledges her sister's hard work and dedication to prepare the meal: “The thought that she learned to cook this for me pleases me” (245). Perhaps most significant in Adriana's preparation of mole for her sister is its communication of maternal and sisterly love, a gentle insistence to Elena that healing their estrangement largely rests on speaking of their mother’s death and the subsequent traumas that have resulted from her loss. Through this preparation of a distinctly maternal dish, Adriana suggests to Elena the impossibility of permanently forgetting or avoiding speaking of their mother who serves as the emotional link between the sisters. In another reference to food, however, it is Adriana’s recollection of a memory when her grandparents used starvation as punishment, which triggered her early resentment toward Elena. When she vomits the meal prepared by her grandmother, the very food that is cruelly withheld, Adriana “finally started to believe what my grandparents said was true: if Elena really loved me, she wouldn’t have left me behind” (272). In stark contrast to the intimacy fostered by the sharing of a maternal food item, their grandmother’s cooking instead is purged through Adriana’s bodily rejection. Her grandmother’s cooking is not the source of love but is instead a harsh reminder of Elena’s absence. Sharing food with Elena provides a momentary source of comfort for both sisters, but in this tragic memory, food is a symbol of violence and abandonment.10

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Given that their shared history of violence severs their bond, it is not ironic that it is precisely the cause of their mother’s death, a brutal automobile accident that forces Elena and Adriana to forgive each other. In a haunting moment, Adriana suffers an almost fatal accident while driving with her violent lover, Emilio, who flees the scene of the crash. It is Adriana’s near death in this violent manner, the very manner that killed their mother that shocks Elena into admitting her role in her sister’s suffering. While indeed Elena is not responsible for the brutality inflicted upon her younger sister by their father and grandparents, her acceptance and acknowledgment of Adriana’s trauma and her own literal and emotional escape from their past, at last, creates a path to sisterly healing: I tell her that when [a friend] called to say she was in the hospital, I was seized by a fear so great it took my breath away. The first thing I thought was that she was dead and I hadn’t told her that I loved her, that I was sorry I’d left. I realize now it was a mistake. She was right to be angry because the truth is, I did it out of selfishness. I ran away to San Jose to escape a life that was unbearable. I lied to myself that she would be fine without me. Once I was there, so far from Los Angeles, so far from my grandparents, from Dad, I felt as if I could finally breathe, and I didn’t regret leaving. But when I returned to Los Angeles, I knew there was a price I had paid to get my college diploma—the love of my sister. (367)

Although resonating with feelings of guilt and doubt, this monologue is the first time Elena speaks of Adriana’s suffering and the pain she further inflicted upon her sister in her own survival tactics of psychological escape. And though Adriana’s car accident may be read as a chilling moment of déjà vu, what is most striking is that Elena is not startled by her sister’s resemblance to Cecilia; instead, she notes Adriana’s absence of makeup and accessories (367), items usually worn to create a stronger similarity to their mother. Without the presence of cosmetics, Elena finally sees through the symbolic mask worn by her sister. Unlike earlier moments in the novel where Adriana’s mere presence causes a ghosting of Cecilia, resulting in both sisters’ inability to distinguish between the two women, here Elena sees Adriana as the “young and vulnerable” sister she was at pains to ignore (367). Not so ironically, it is Adriana’s potentially tragic experience with death that Elena must confront if healing is to take place. Both Elena’s acknowledgment of this pain, along with Adriana’s desire to be seen by the sister who left her behind, serve as sources of sisterly union and empowerment. For example, it is Elena who at last aids Adriana in accepting her singing talent, teaching her that loving an art form not practiced by their mother is not akin to daughterly betrayal. Most important to Adriana’s desire to cultivate her musical talent is its dissimilari-

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ty to the folkloric dance perfected by her mother and sister: “Female charro suits. I always wondered what I would look like wearing one of those, singing in front of an audience, filling them with the essence of mariachi music. To make people cry, and laugh at the same time, just with my voice” (370-371). If practicing folklórico creates an unsettling mirroring of a long dead mother, Adriana’s acceptance of her singing talent, encouraged by Elena (373), demonstrates an empowered sense of identity that she had been lacking while holding on to the destructive rage and resentment toward Elena. Adriana’s longing to don the charro suit, a marker of traditional Mexican masculinity,11 rather than her mother’s dance costumes, no longer signals the troubling desire to embody Cecilia and her earlier attempts to create a ghostly resemblance to her battered mother. In a beautiful moment of sisterly love that occurs near the novel’s conclusion, Elena and Adriana subtly speak of their mutual and individual trauma through their collective examination of a well-known painting of Frida Kahlo’s hanging on Adriana’s wall. While Elena had often judged Adriana’s obsession with Mexican attire, she learns to appreciate her sister’s psychological, intellectual complexity that she had been unable to truly see: “She looks at The Two Fridas hanging on the wall. The two Fridas holding hands—one Frida with a damaged, broken heart, slowly bleeding to death from a cut vein, while the other Frida is alive, her heart intact. “You know, I realize now why you love this painting so much,” she says. “The question is,” I say, looking at the two Fridas, “which of the two do you want to be?” (373) The irony of the painting, of course, is that both halves make up the same woman, suggesting the almost impossibility of fracturing the “damaged” self from the living self.12 To become whole, both Fridas must acknowledge the other’s existence; in a similar fashion, the sisters’ pain must be collective, must be made visible to the other. Perhaps most telling of this moment’s significance is its reliance on a Kahlo painting to forge a bond between the two women; whereas earlier in the novel Elena had criticized her sister’s Frida Kahlo-like dress, she now identifies with Adriana’s connection to an artist who refused to deny the reality of pain in her daily life. Yet in Adriana’s question to Elena, she warns of the damage caused by holding on to pain that does not unite but instead severs. In Reyna Grande’s numerous allusions to mirrors, the author demonstrates her knowledge of the literal and symbolic power of these objects. My earlier references to Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante also suggest a recurring motif of mirror imagery in Chicana literature that scholars have yet to explore. For the characters Elena and Adriana, avoiding the mirror or searching the reflection held within it, symbolically reveals the trou-

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bling relationship that has brewed for over a decade. Looking in the mirror is psychically and emotionally painful, yet for the sisters, it is at first their failure to “see” each other’s hurt that renders their relationship damaged. If the mirror holds our reflections, then the mirror’s symbolic gesture toward self-recognition also moves the sisters toward a collective acknowledgment of their shared and unique struggles with trauma.

Notes 1

Contemporary Chicana writers have long explored the contradictions inherent to notions of “family” that subject female family members to unequal gender roles, patriarchy, and often, sexual and/or physical violence. Texts such as Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings, Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel, Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek,” and Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters, for example, critique the gendered violence, sexual double standard, and patriarchy in Chicano families. See Saldívar-Hull, Danielson, Johnson, and Rojas for further discussion. 2 For the purposes of this article, I do not engage in a discussion of empathy. I am most interested in the novel’s exploration of the symbolic use of mirrors and its connection to the sisters’ initial failure and inability to see and acknowledge each other’s pain, whereas empathy is understood as the feeling of another’s pain. For an analysis of empathy in literature, please see Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” 3 The gaze is similarly related to mirroring, but scholars note that one should not be confused with the other. While gazing holds gendered implications because of the relationship to power and powerlessness, that is, the power granted to men within patriarchy to gaze or even objectify women as objects, mirroring, according to Teddi Chichester Bonca, connotes “reflecting” or “imitating” (204). In her discussion of the poet Percy Shelley’s relationship with his sisters, she notes that the sisters “obediently (and flatteringly) reflect[ed] his ideas, his personality, and his desires to confirm his sense of self-worth” (86). In this light, mirroring represents a rather unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship between two individuals that rests on one’s sacrifice of self-identity. For a more thorough discussion of gaze and viewing, see also Jacobs. 4 See Danielson’s excellent article, “The Birdy and the Bees” for a discussion of violence, invisibility, and queer Chicana subjectivity. 5 For a discussion of violence and wounding, see Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano. 6 See López’s article, “Violent Inscriptions.” 7 Please see Sweeney’s discussion of the mirror’s connection with the uncanny, particularly in the short stories of Edith Wharton. 8 See also Tiffany Ana López’s article, “Violent Inscriptions.” 9 See Abarca’s Voices in the Kitchen and Herrera. 10 See Abarca, “Families Who Eat Together.” 1 See Yolanda Broyles-González.

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12

For a discussion of Kahlo’s art and its connection to Chicana feminist literature, see Suzanne Bost.

Works Cited Abarca, Meredith E. “Families Who Eat Together, Stay Together: But Should They?”Rethinking Chicana/o Literature Through Food: Postnational Appetites. Eds. Nieves Pascual Soler and Meredith E. Abarca. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 119-140. Print. —. Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from WorkingClass Mexican and Mexican American Women. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2006. Print. Bonca, Teddi Chichester. Shelley’s Mirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice, and Sorority. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Print. Bost, Suzanne. Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Print. Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet as it’s kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. Print. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, ed. Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1996. Print. Broyles-González, Yolanda. “Ranchera Music(s) and the Legendary Lydia Mendoza.” Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Eds. Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 183-206. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Print. Castillo, Ana. The Mixquiahuala Letters. New York: Doubleday, 1986. Print. Chávez, Denise. Loving Pedro Infante. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001. Print. Cisneros, Sandra. “Woman Hollering Creek.”Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991. 43-56. Print. Culbertson, Roberta. “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self.” New Literary History 26.1 (1995): 169-195. Project Muse. Web. 28 Aug. 2014. Danielson, Marivel. “The Birdy and the Bees: Queer Chicana Girlhood in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings.”Chicana/Latina Studies 7.2 (Spring 2008): 56-95. Print. Dimovitz, Scott. “‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’: Angela Carter’s Short Fiction and the Unwriting of the Psychoan-

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alytic Subject.” Literature Interpretation Theory 21.1 (2010): 1-19. Print. de Valdés, María Elena. The Shattered Mirror: Representations of Women in Mexican Literature. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1998. Print. González, Tanya. “The (Gothic) Gift of Death in Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001).” Chicana/Latina Studies 7.1 (Fall 2007): 44-77. JSTOR. Web. 3 Sep. 2014. Grande, Reyna. Dancing with Butterflies. New York: Washington Square Press, 2009. Print. Herrera, Cristina. “‘Delfina, ¡más tacos!’ Food, Culture, and Motherhood in Denise Chávez’s A Taco Testimony.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 13.2 (2010): 241256. Print. Jacobs, Karen. The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Print. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. “Violence in the Borderlands: Crossing to the Home Space in the Novels of Ana Castillo.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 25.1 (2004): 39-58. JSTOR. Web. 2 Sep. 2014. Keen, Suzanne. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative 14.3 (Oct. 2006): 207-236. JSTOR. Web. 9 Sep. 2014. La Belle, Jenijoy. Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Print. López, Tiffany Ana. “Violent Inscriptions: Writing the Body and Making Community in Four Plays by Migdalia Cruz.” Theatre Journal 52.1 (Mar. 2000): 51-66. JSTOR. Web. 3 Sep. 2014. Rojas, Maythee. “Violent Acts of a Feminist Nature: Estela Portillo Trambley’s Striking Short Fiction.” MELUS 33.3 (Fall, 2008): 71-90. Print. Rubenstein, Roberta. “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15.2 (Autumn, 1996): 309-331. JSTOR. Web. 28 Aug. 2014. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Print. Socolovsky, Maya. “Narrative and Traumatic Memory in Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel.” MELUS 28.4 (Winter, 2003): 187-205. Print. Spencer, Laura Gutiérrez. “Mirrors and Masks: Female Subjectivity in Chicana Poetry.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 15.2 (1994): 69-86. JSTOR. Web. 8 June 2015. Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: Gazing in Edith Wharton’s “Looking” Glass.”” Speaking the Other Self: American

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Women Writers. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997. 54-75. Print. Torres, Lourdes. “Violence, Desire, and Transformative Remembering in Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams.” Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression. Eds. Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Pertusa. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. 228-239. Print. Trujillo, Carla. What Night Brings.Willimantic, CT: Curbstone, 2003. Print. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Print. Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2001. Print.

A GRANDMOTHER’S SEDUCTION: NARRATIVE SLIPPAGE AND ETHNIC OTHERING IN GISH JEN’S “WHO’S IRISH?” BI-LING CHEN

In his book, A Rhetoric of Irony, renowned narratologist Wayne Booth alerts readers of any work written in the form of dramatic monologue to the narrator’s questionable creditability: “Such ironic portraits are perhaps more frequently slanted the other way around, with a character giving away more weaknesses or vices than he intends” (141). This is also a fundamental reading skill that I have tried to instil in my students. But every time when I teach Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?”, neither my students, most of whom are its first-time readers, nor I, an experienced one, can resist the charm and humour of the sixty-eight-year-old Chinese immigrant who has a lot of complaints about her career-driven daughter, about her often unemployed Irish-American son-in-law, and about her unruly mixed grandchild. Our sympathy for her is so strong that most of us are willing to forgive her tyrannical approach to her granddaughter. In fact, back in the spring semester of 2003 when a student said, “The granddaughter really needs a good spanking!” many of his classmates nodded vehemently. A student from the fall semester of 2010 was especially fond of the grandma’s “strong sense of her Chinese identity.” She gains the student’s respect because “she sticks to her principles at all cost.”1 We were indignant about her daughter’s banishment of her from their household to save her own marriage with “the lazy bum.” We felt relieved that at the invitation of her daughter’s mother-in-law, she becomes a permanent resident in her house and an honorary Irish. This heart-warming denouement surely tempts us to think that compromise and compassion might just be the best solution of generational and interracial conflicts. Deceptive simplicity indeed characterizes Jen’s “Who’s Irish?”. Although the grandmother wins us over with her wit and feistiness, the author diminishes her narrator’s reliability by subtly exposing the cracks of her seemingly plausible logic. The spell that the grandmother casts upon the reader comes undeniably from Jen’s manipulations of our ambivalent

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relationship with our livelihood and productivity, of our unacknowledged unease with the ways the young are raised and the elderly are cared for in the industrialized America, and of our guilty pleasure in ethnocentrism and stereotyping. Without this awareness we can hardly begin to analyze the biases that the grandma’s story threatens to perpetuate, including the myths of Confucian filial piety and work ethic; the clichés of miscegenation and generational degeneracy; the folkloric romantic beliefs in the intrinsic connections between ethnic groups and cultural norms. If the narrator’s colourful Pidgin English and status as an immigrant who has fulfilled the American Dream add to the emotional authenticity of her grievances, her binary cognition of the crises she experiences in her interpersonal relationships renders her perspective narrow and onedimensional. Her tendency to label certain social values and character traits as either Chinese or Irish, either Confucian or American, is demonstrated in her arbitrary definitions of such words as fierce and wild. In her mindset, anything belongs to the former categories is superior to anything that falls into the latter ones. Therefore, fierce, a word she associates with such qualities as diligence and aggressiveness that help her and her daughter achieve prosperity, is organically Chinese and good. But, wild, a stereotypical description of Irish girls that she also sees in her three-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, is bad. To get a deeper sense of the narrator’s rhetorical pattern and dichotomous reasoning, let us take a look at the opening pages of the story:2 In China, people say mixed children are supposed to be smart, and definitely my granddaughter Sophie is smart. But Sophie is wild, Sophie is not like my daughter Natalie, or like me. I am work hard my whole life, and fierce besides. My husband always used to say he is afraid of me, and in our restaurant, busboys and cooks all afraid of me too. Even the gang members come for protection money, they try to talk to my husband. When I am there, they stay away. If they come by mistake, they pretend they are come to eat. They hide behind the menu, they order a lot of food. They talk about their mothers. On, my mother have some arthritis, need to take herbal medicine, they say. Oh, my mother getting old, her hair all white now. I say, Your mother’s hair used to be white, but since she dye it, it become black again. Why don’t you go home once in a while and take a look? I tell them, Confucius say a filial son knows what color his mother’s hair is. My daughter is fierce too, she is vice president in the bank now. Her new house is big enough for everybody to have their own room, including me. But Sophie take after Natalie’s husband’s family, their name is Shea. Irish. I always thought Irish people are like Chinese people, work so hard on the

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railroad, but now I know why the Chinese beat the Irish. Of course, not all Irish are like the Shea family, of course not. My daughter tell me I should not say Irish this, Irish that. (3)

Factual errors and logical problems recur in these passages. First, nowhere in Confucius’ dialogues with his disciples can we find him defining a good son by his awareness of the colour of his mother’s hair. What the Master states in The Analects, Book IV, Chapter 21 is: “A man should not be unaware of the age of his father and mother. It is a matter, on the one hand, for rejoicing and, on the other, for anxiety” (Lau 35). Another aspect of filial piety that Confucius comments upon is in the opening chapter of Classics of Filial Piety: “Our bodies—to every hair and bit of skin—are received by us from our parents, and we must not presume to injure or wound them. This is the beginning of filial piety” (Legge 1). Almost every Chinese person raised in a Confucian society is able to recite these two sayings and detect the narrator’s self-serving distortion of them. Funny and effective as her gibe sounds, it foreshadows the more serious fabrications she makes later. Second, if wildness is an essentially Irish temperament that results in their owners’ recalcitrance in the workplace and unstable employment, then aren’t the gang members whom the narrator frightened away also wild and unemployed but Chinese? Third, just as the Chinese folk believe that mixed children are supposed to be smart has no scientific foundation, there is no statistical evidence that Chinese immigrants fare better than Irish immigrants in the United States. The financially and politically powerful Kennedys, for instance, are Irish. Their success demonstrates that fierceness and industriousness are not solely possessed by the Chinese. Although the narrator qualifies her assertions by admitting that not all Irish are like the Shea family, her Chinese-versus-Irish, Confucian-versus-American rationale sustains throughout her narrative. In the narrator’s chauvinistic and solipsistic argument, “supportive,” a concept inducing moral practice and/or emotional involvement valued by every culture, becomes a dirty word that America’s me-generation uses to demand more from the older generations—a dirty word that does not exist in the Chinese language. Because of her resentment that her married daughter no longer puts her needs before everyone else’s, the narrator claims: “In China, daughter take care of mother. Here it is the other way around. Mother help daughter, mother ask, Anything else I can do? Otherwise daughter complain mother is not supportive. I tell daughter, We do not have this word in Chinese, supportive” (5). Natalie, with her extra responsibilities as wife and mother, understandably, wants the narrator to adjust to the new circumstances and show her moral support by getting

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along with John and helping them take care of Sophie. But the narrator complains that her daughter uses her as a free babysitter while letting her unemployed husband stay idle. While mentally still living in a feudal China, she conveniently forgets that, according to Chinese tradition, a married daughter has to live with her husband’s family rather than stay with her biological parents; attending to her husband’s needs and taking care of her parents-in-law should be her priorities. Natalie’s inclusion of her widowed mother in her new family despite her constant criticism of John indicates that she is trying her best to be a dutiful daughter. Piecing together the narrative fragments about their relationship, readers will find that, in their actions, both the mother and the daughter are eclectic Confucians, practicing mutual support with compromises. Yet, by interpreting Natalie’s self-assertion as unfilial and her own assistance in grandchild care as an exploited labour, the narrator twists a rhetorical strategy that there is no such a word as “supportive” in Chinese into a selfdefeating reality, depriving herself of a sense of authenticity that both oldfashioned and enlightened Chinese parents respectively enjoy. For those who live vicariously through their children’s accomplishments, they would volunteer to babysit if they had the time and energy. Modern and enlightened Chinese parents, on the other hand, no longer interfere with their grown children’s spousal choices or expect their children’s proximity and constant care in their old age, as the narrator does for Natalie’s. It is the old woman’s insistence on upholding her parental dominance and authority in racial terms that widens the cultural gaps within the family. Irish and Chinese culinary differences become a means by which she crosses the boundary of in-laws to give parental advice and humiliate the Shea brothers. Even at the Thanksgiving dinner, she is unable to show hospitality and refrain from talking about such touchy issues as unemployment. When the Shea brothers explain that they cannot find work because of the recession, she tells them that when she and her husband came to the United States, they did not speak English and had no money, but eventually made it by selling Chinese food: “Of course, I understand I am just lucky, come from a country where the food is popular all over the world. I understand it is not the Shea family’s fault they come from a country where everything is boiled” (4). Her seemingly modest attribution of her success to the culinary superiority of Chinese food to Irish food does not conceal her contempt for the Shea brothers’ being either on disability pay or severance pay. But these compensations suggest that the Shea brothers did have regular jobs. A person has to be injured at workplace or fall seriously ill to receive disability pay. The causes of being laid off or fired could be various, but the kind of work that would grant

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severance pay must be of long-term rather than temporary nature. Ignoring these factors as well as the fact that they are exploring the possibility of starting a car business, the narrator insinuates that they are simply lazy: “Even the black people doing better these days, some of them live so fancy, you’d be surprised” (4). When one of the brothers comes up with the idea that he can try selling Pad Thai and turn it into the new pizza, the narrator snaps: “You people too picky about what you sell. Selling egg rolls not good enough for you, but at least my husband and I can say, We made it. What can you say? Tell me. What can you say? Everybody chew their tough turkey.” Why can’t she express some enthusiasm about their restaurant idea, which, after all, is inspired by the business she and her late husband had? Given her Chinese chauvinism, she is probably unhappy that they choose not to follow the exact footstep of hers. That is, she wants them to sell Chinese food, not Thai food. The narrator takes the Shea brothers’ silence as a sign of her triumph in making them feel ashamed of their alleged lack of work ethic, but they might just decide not to continue the unpleasant conversation with the overbearing woman who imposes parental pressure on them. Readers can easily imagine that this could also be the daily dynamics between her and John. Any self-respecting man would feel a little depressed over unemployment and even becomes reticent at times, especially if he has a mother-in-law constantly on his back. According to the narrator, John responds tersely to her inquiry into why he has no job and still cannot babysit: “Because he is a man, and that’s the end of the sentence” (5). Although the narrator makes it sound as if John only wanted to work out in the gym and avoid the responsibility of childcare, the amount of time she babysits everyday betrays that John does help out. Since Natalie is the VP of a bank, her working plus commute hours cannot be just six hours. Who else but John would take care of Sophie after the narrator’s shift is over? It is possible that John uses those six hours to look for an employment, and that his exercise in the gym might take place after his job-seeking activities. When he tells the narrator that he needs to be a man, he could be indicating that he needs to work to feel like a man, and babysitting Sophie during the day would prevent him from finding a job. His brusque answer could suggest that he is just tired of her nagging; a rude macho voice could serve to cover his endangered sense of masculinity as well as shut her up. Unfortunately, this strategy only reinforces her doubts of his intelligence and manhood: “Plain boiled food, plain boiled thinking. Even his name is plain boiled: John. Maybe because I grew up with black bean sauce and hoisin sauce and garlic sauce, I always feel something is missing when my son-in-law talk” (5).

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The narrator’s culinary metaphor is a perfect dramatic irony, revealing her penchant for spicing things up in order to draw attention and gain sympathy from her silent conversationalist who, the reader gathers, is another Asian immigrant about her age but not of Chinese origin. This gives the narrator complete freedom to switch back and forth the authority of an insider of Chinese culture (by nature and nurture) and of an expert of Irish culture (by proximity and legal relationship) without getting her prejudices detected or challenged. Despite her denial that she was never against John and Natalie’s marriage, her fundamental aversion to miscegenation is embedded in her arbitrary connection of an ethnic group’s foodways and its members’ IQ. As Werner Sollors points out in his influential book, Beyond Ethnicity, that “[c]ontrastive and dissociative nature of ethnic behaviour is not prompted by any ethnic tradition but by the attempt to thwart a non-ethnic otherness, to reduce complex authentic identity to contrastive one-dimensionality in the name of ethnicity” (28). The narrator feels the need to privilege her Chineseness over John’s IrishAmericanness because, deep down, her rigid sense of racial, ethnic, and gender boundaries are disturbed by his living under the same roof, by his emotional and sexual power over Natalie, and by his failure to play the role of a major bread-winner. Although John eventually finds a job as an insurance salesman, the narrator remains suspicious of his IQ and competency while criticizing Natalie’s wifely supportiveness of his new employment: “My daughter buy him some special candy bars from the health-food store. They say THINK! on them, and are supposed to help John think” (6). Following her analogies of cooking, eating, and ethnicity, the narrator expresses her worries that her granddaughter’s blood might have been polluted by John’s “bad” genes: “Sophie is three years old American age, but already I see her nice Chinese side swallowed up by her wild Shea side” (6). How does John’s consumption of plain boiled Irish food and trendy American sugar-free candy bars make Sophie wild? We may wonder. There is certainly no distinction between nature and nurture in the narrator’s essentialist vocabulary. Her verbal and cognitive leap from food habits to ethnic character is a wild and creative act itself. But she argues that creative is another unmentionable word in Chinese culture: “In China, we talk about whether we have difficulty or no difficulty. We talk about whether life is bitter or no bitter. In America, all day long, people talk about creative” (8). Since creativity is not valued in her upbringing, she can neither recognize that quality in herself nor can she appreciate it in others. Her view of Sophie’s former babysitter, Amy, is an example. The young woman plays the guitar, wears the kind of shirts that show her

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belly-button, and allows the toddler to run around without her diaper and shoes on. While Natalie is able to separate Amy’s desire to be creative from her lack of discipline with Sophie, the narrator associates the babysitter’s permissiveness with her artistic aspiration. To the grandma, both traits are interchangeable with the word ‘wild’. Her circular logic continues to go round and round. After criticizing Amy’s defective childcare, she notwithstanding attributes Sophie’s recalcitrance to her Irish nature: “I think if Sophie was not wild inside, she would not take off her shoe and clothes to begin with” (8). Then immediately, she contradicts her own belief in the power of heredity, arguing that through proper external interference—that is, spanking—Sophie’s Chinese side can beat her Irish side. Physical punishment of a child can become a habit for the adult disciplinarian, and the punished child will surely imitate the adult's aggression when they interact with others. Since the grandma finds that spanking indeed makes Sophie leave her clothes on, she naturally adopts paddling to resolve tougher conflicts between them. Although she omits this detail to her confidant, the bruises on the child’s face and body after the foxhole incident reveal that she did not just poke at her granddaughter with a stick and that harsher punishments than spanking had happened before. Sophie’s fondness of grabbing her grandma’s hair while giving her kisses and her penchant for hitting her playground friends’ mothers are the tell-tale signs of the narrator’s bad influence on the child. The narrator blames Sophie’s violent conduct on her playmate, Sinbad, whose mother indulges his repeated kicks on herself and his encouragement of Sophie to follow suit. What the reader needs to question is how Sinbad’s mother deals with him at home. Given the fact that female caregivers are the targets of both Sinbad’s and Sophie’s attacks, it is possible that the boy’s mother, like the narrator, practices domestic child abuse as well. Natalie, who must have received corporal discipline from her fierce mother when she was a child, has no other choice but to move the old woman out of her house to end the negative cycle in her family. The narrator’s insistence on realizing her prized “Chinese” virtue— fierceness—and her rejection of such “American” values as supportiveness and creativity make her a female stereotype of what Sollors humorously labels as “the unmeltable ethnic grandfather” in the Melting Pot (234). Her nostalgia for the Chinese customs in which she grew up and against which she gauges John’s American circumstances provokes him to “start the send her back to China thing” (6); her misconceived attempt to stall generational degeneracy, ironically, facilitates its happening. If Bess’s naming her an honorary Irish and a permanent resident in her house

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symbolizes mainstream American society’s gradual acceptance of its minority members, the narrator does not seem to have accepted the fact that ethnicity and personal identity are not static but constantly being invented anew. Therefore, the second part of Bess’s joke—“she isn’t going anywhere,” though meant to be affirmative of her promise to the narrator, can serve as a warning that her binary outlook of the world will not lead her anywhere. In portraying the narrator as a clever but obstinate Chinese immigrant who ends up becoming an honorary Irish, Jen by no means advocates a full-scale assimilation. The generally chronological yet episodic structure of the story, the occasionally inconsistent tenses in the narration of the same incident, and the invisible mental ellipses between the lines propel the reader to ask questions beyond the one that initially lures him into the narrative—“Who’s Irish?” If Irish identity can be subjected to doubt, fragmentation, and transformation, so can the definitions of Chinese and American. Who’s Chinese? Who’s American? More specifically, why does Gish Jen choose Irish rather than, say, German or English to represent American white power? Why is Bess not named by the narrator an honorary Chinese, or why does Bess not proclaim herself as one? What can mainstream Americans and minorities learn from each other’s concepts of creativity and productivity (namely, living philosophy) in their attempt to share the American Pie? While immigrants of Western and Northern European ancestries have never doubted their racial identity, those of Irish, Jewish, Eastern and Southern European origins have had to struggle for their legal white status. Having been put in the same category as African Americans and indentured Chinese, Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century strived to claim their whiteness by unionizing and driving their co-workers of other ethnicities out of work, as documented by Noel Ignatiev in his book, How the Irish Became White. But the courts and Congress of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century still considered Irish immigrants an inferior race. To limit their chances for naturalization, Ian Haney-Lopez points out in his White by Law: the Legal Construction of Race, the US government labelled the Irish non-white: “You would expect the courts to come up with a definition for what this phrase ‘white person’ means.” But the courts only “establish the nonwhiteness of the particular person before them” (qtd. in Cheng, 129). The conspicuous parades in major American cities on St. Patrick’s Day seem to indicate that mainstream America finally accepts the racial and cultural identities of Irish immigrants. Yet, compared to such a nation-wide celebration, I would add here, the lion dance performed by Chinese Americans during the lunar New Year stays

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largely within the confines of China Town. This proves that whiteness remains a norm in the national psyche of the United States, a norm that leads to the narrator’s defensive Chinese chauvinism as well as the Shea family’s unconscious racism. Deprivation intensifies desire. Arguably, to people whose ancestors’ Caucasian identity was arbitrarily denied, whiteness is not only a norm but also a treasure. The Shea brothers’ endless comments on Sophie’s brownness reveal that whiteness is of a higher value to them. “So brown, they say. Even John say it. She never goes in the sun, still she is that color, he say. Brown. They say, Nothing the matter with brown. They are just surprised. So brown. Nattie is not that brown, they say, It seems like Sophie should be a color in between Nattie and John” (6). It never occurs to them that they should trace their own family tree to see whether the baby’s dark skin comes from their side of the blood line, given the history of intermarriages between Irish and the darker-looking Spanish. They simply assume that a child of an Asian and Caucasian couple should look paler than Natalie and advance towards John’s fair looks. The lot of mixed children in American society has never been consistent, as Vincent Cheng observes in his Inauthentic: the Anxiety of Culture and Identity: “Children of mixed ancestries were variously considered legally white or legally nonwhite, depending on the miscegenation laws of different states” (129). At present, the category of “Other” does not give mixed children a sense of legitimacy and dignity either. In addition to the issue of legally white or not, the Shea brothers’ assumption of “racial progress” is associated with a subconscious fear rooted in the pseudo-scientific studies about mixed children that Cynthia Nakashima critiques: “[M]ultiracial people are physically, morally, and mentally weak; that multiracial people are tormented by their genetically divided selves; and the intermarriage ‘lower’ the biologically superior white race” (qtd. in Cheng, 131). In the back of their minds, they could be thinking that Sophie’s dark skin might prevent her from succeeding in white-dominated America, even though the evidence of minorities’ achievements speaks otherwise. In a society where racial equality is the official ideology, blatant racist remarks are easy to rebuke, as the narrator’s humorous retort to the Shea brothers shows: “Maybe John is not her father” (6). It is seemingly innocent statements like Bess’s that are stifling: I was never against the marriage, you know, she say. I never thought John was marrying down. I always thought Nattie was just as good as white. I was never against the marriage either, I say. I just wonder if they look at the whole problem. (my emphasis)

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A Grandmother’s Seduction: Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?” Of course you pointed out the problem, you are a mother, she say. And now we both have a granddaughter. A little brown granddaughter, she is so precious to me. I laugh. A little brown granddaughter, I say. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how she came out so brown. We laugh some more. (7, my emphases)

Although Bess means to be conciliatory, the undertone is that white ways of thinking and behaving are the standards against which all minorities are measured. That “Nattie was as good as white” could be a viewpoint expressed with the benefit of hindsight, since her son is now relying on Natalie for financial and emotional support. Even if Bess had never had a problem with Natalie’s race, it could be because she had already met white standards, including having a distinguished career. The complaints by minorities that they have to work harder than Caucasians in order to be considered as equals are not unfounded. Natalie’s “as good as white” position in the Shea family is a case in point. Through the shifting tenses in the narrator’s dialogue with Bess, Jen hints at both parties’ denial of their respective reservations about Natalie and John’s marriage since day one. The narrator uses the present tense to diffuse her ingrained apprehension, sounding as if she only notices the problem after it happens: “I just wonder if they look at the whole problem.” Bess, a native speaker of English, on the other hand, uses the past tense to make the narrator solely responsible for their shared, if not verbally acknowledged, doubts about the marriage, succeeding in diluting her part in perpetuating racism: “Of course you pointed out the problem, you are a mother.” Like her sister-in-law, Bess is a mother as well as a woman who has lived through American society’s racial tensions; therefore, it is hard to believe that she did not think about what the narrator thought about. Although the bond they build through their role as the little girl’s grandmothers helps them laugh away her brownness, the former’s blindness to her own racism and the latter’s failure to detect it prove that there is still a long way to go before the United States reaches genuine racial equality. Both ChineseAmericans and Irish-Americans are hyphenated ethnic groups in the mainstream society, yet there remains a hierarchy of these ethnicities. Hence, neither Bess nor the narrator seems to find it necessary—either just for nominal fun or for expressing mutual appreciation—for the IrishAmerican woman to assume the title of honorary Chinese. Without overtly politicizing the interactions between this pair of sisters-in-law, Jen manages to call for a more balanced power between Caucasians and Asians. Watching bloopers on TV and sharing a few laughs like the narrator and Bess are certainly not enough for those who

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sense an urgent need to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western outlooks of life. Even to this day, more than a decade after “Who’s Irish?” was written, non-whites’ celebration of their ancestral traditions is regularly distorted into a sign of anti-patriotism, a sign incongruous with their American citizenship. Likewise, mainstream society’s adoption of minority cultures has yet to go beyond the realm of ethnic food, trinkets, and clothes. The mere satisfaction of the palate does not lead to an understanding and acceptance of the others’ ways of thinking and living. Nor does the sense of novelty derived from wearing fashionable ethnic outfits help to de-exoticize Asian Americans. The demand of assimilation ultimately generates feelings of dispossession and isolation, in spite of the economic and social advancements such a suppression of minority heritage produces. Leaving the ending of her story with much more to be desired, Jen provokes the reader into seeking out the genuine (as opposed to superficial) commonality and disparity between Eastern and Western living attitudes. Such a project requires long-term efforts, but for the benefit of instructors of this story, a comparative inquiry into work ethics and child-rearing—two major issues about which the narrator holds strong opinions—can serve as a starting point. How different is the Confucian work ethic from the Protestant work ethic? How tolerant are the practitioners of either work ethic about depression—a chronic illness from which John Shea seems to suffer? Confucianism, though not a religion per se, has successfully instilled in its believers the correlation among diligence, education, and prosperity. The Protestant work ethic, a concept popularized by Max Weber’s work and dominating such Western capitalist countries as the United States, is rooted in the Calvinist doctrine that personal salvation results in hard work and worldly success. Neither work ethic has explicitly addressed the issue of depression and its impact on productivity, but the stigma of laziness is attached to this medical/psychological problem in both Chinese and American cultures. According to a survey conducted among the Chinese students at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in 2010, depression is seen as a character flaw or even as a punishment from Heaven because of their relatives’ wrongdoings.3 Odd as the Chinese students’ second interpretation of depression may sound, the reasoning is not too remote from the Calvinist view that industriousness and earthly glory are the consequences rather than the causes of a chosen person’s salvation, although in Christianity one is solely judged by one’s own deeds while in the Buddhism-tinged Confucian culture the salvation of one’s soul can be affected by the actions of one’s kith and kin. For in both beliefs, the ability to work hard, be free from depression, and enjoy prosperity is a blessing

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from Heaven. Theology aside, Adel Gabriel’s review of the clinical reports published between 1995 and 2007 shows that people in North America and a few Northern and Western European countries, where Protestantism and capitalism prevail, also tend to relate depression to personality weakness.4 The biases and merits of Confucian and Protestant work ethics, for better or worse, converge in Corporate America. In casting judgmental comments on John Shea, Jen’s narrator is actually in line with the majority of Americans. Education (parenting as well as schooling), a component relatively inconspicuous though undoubtedly embedded in the Christian doctrine, is accentuated in Confucianism, and has often been cited to explain the high academic achievements of East Asian students and American students with East Asian backgrounds. The clichés/truisms associated with this phenomenon are the strict, overbearing Asian parents and the rule-abiding, socially reserved Asian kids. Western parents, by contrast, tend to be more liberal, allowing their children to flourish according to their aptitude and choices rather than trying to shape their future with excessive supervision. Such cross-cultural researchers as Weihua Niu and Robert Sternberg confirm this difference between Eastern and Western styles of rearing and educating the young. Asians believe that “the goal of education is to prepare people to be responsible and qualified members of a larger society, so it is important to teach basic skills and basic knowledge to children before they enter society” (Niu and Sternberg, “Cultural Influences,” 228). Obedience and imitation in the early stage of learning are required. Memorization of taught materials is seen as foundation-building, a preparation for character development as well as for any advanced studies that will help the individual become a contributory social being. Americans, however, believe that “children are born with the ability to figure things out, so schools should supply and nourish, but not dictate to or mould young minds” (228). Authorities’ impositions would risk stifling youngsters’ self-discovery and development of independent thinking. The freedom of self-expression is seen as integral to learners’ self-esteem which ultimately leads to their creativity. Mainly focusing on contemporary situations (1990s-2000s), Niu and Sternberg’s report has not highlighted the historical moments in which such a sharp divergence between Eastern and Western styles of parenting and schooling happened. I would like to point out that the approach of tender loving care did not become an ideology in the United States until Dr. Benjamin Spock championed it in 1946 through his book, Baby and Child Care. Likewise, the concept that learning should be fun is a postWorld War II Western invention; influential books in this vein include

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1997). Gish Jen’s narrator, in fact, is not the only person born before 1945 who believes that physical discipline helps to cultivate children’s good behaviour, which in turn facilitates effective learning at school. Flogging and reciting passages from the Bible, as shown in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), are regular features of the Irish educational system in the early twentieth century. Even mainstream Americans need not reach too far back in their memory to recall the old maxim: “Spare the rod; spoil the child.” The countless debates generated by Amy Chua’s recent bestseller, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), demonstrate how the lack of historical understanding of any cross-cultural issues can get people mired in the rot of East versus West. The Eastern camp insists that intense parental involvement is key to a child’s success and that learning requires discipline—fun has no place in it. To them, academic achievements and proper manners can be unfailingly translated to personal prosperity and good citizenship, which is not always the case in reality (I am speaking from the angle of a person growing up in a Confucian culture). The Western camp refuses to see that independent thinking and creativity are rarely inborn but built upon basic knowledge and skills, the command of which is partly attained through memorization. Without a fundamental intellectual reservoir from which to draw information and inspiration, average learners, according to my teaching experiences at different American universities, can hardly exercise imagination and connect the dots, let alone distinguish unoriginal ideas from fresh insights and be genuinely creative. Niu and Sternberg’s research, despite the above-mentioned flaw, rightly cautions us against imposing contemporary Western definitions of creativity on Asians and vice versa. In fact, in his 1999 collaboration with T.I. Lubart—“The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms”— Sternberg gives a brief but useful survey regarding the word “creativity” in Western languages that, when read together with his work with Niu, can help the reader of “Who’s Irish?” put in perspective the grandmother’s prejudice against the artsy type of people like Amy. Abidance by rules rather than freedom of action is essential in the ancient Greek view of artistic creativity; art is associated with techne in Greek, signifying technique and craft. In the Middle Ages, the realm of creato ex nihilo (creation from nothing) was considered solely occupied by God; poetry was art/craft, a human activity, not creativity. It was not until the Romantics came along in the late eighteen century and the early nineteenth century that art began to be recognized as creativity, and as the only action that deserved such a holy name. Since then, the idea that artists, like God,

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can create something out of nothing has dominated the Western mind, and discussions about creativity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been extended to sciences, businesses, and everyday functions, thus the comments from Jen’s Chinese immigrant: “In China we talk about whether we have difficulty or no difficulty. … In America, all day long, people talk about creative” (8). According to Niu and Sternberg’s studies, the Chinese concept of creativity comes from Daoism’s emphasis on “the endless producing and renewing changes of nature” (“Contemporary Studies” 270). While the West cherishes novelty in any shape or form of each individual’s act, the Chinese prefer to see every new invention as a part of the Dao (natural, universal order), which is constantly changing.5 Art for art’s sake (i.e. self-expression for its own sake) is inadvisable; inspiring others and bringing good to society and Nature is the most important goal of creativity. Currently, “the moral component of creativity is missing in the Western conception” (273), whereas artistic appreciation is minor in the Chinese value system. But just as the definitions of creativity and ways of child-rearing and schooling change throughout Western history, cultural values held by Asians or Asian Americans are not set in stone. Ultimately, recognition of each culture’s nuances (contemporary as well as historical), and acceptance of mutual influences between East and West, between mainstream Americans and minorities, are a key to interracial power balance. “Who’s Irish?” is only about thirteen-page long, but with this economical dramatic monologue, Jen effectively mocks the human tendency to inflate personal subjectivity into representative objectivity while revealing the moldability of individuals and cultures. In terms of the history of Chinese-American writings, Jen also breaks away from the patterns established by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. The Chinese immigrant mother in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior barely has a voice of her own, fierce and scary as she is in her daughter’s portrayal of her. In The Joy Luck Club, Tan allows her mother figures to tell their own stories, but those narratives are mainly about their lives in China, and Tan makes them sound as if they were embodiments of an eternal Chinese culture immune from changes. Although Jen’s narrator shares their Chineseversus-American mentality, she does not live in a Chinese ghetto; the problems she confronts are not just typical conflicts between immigrant mothers and their Americanized daughters. They cover issues that resonate with everyone’s concerns nowadays: unemployment, childrearing, domestic care and social security for the handicapped, the retired, and the elderly in a society where various races, ethnic groups, generations, and genders compete with one another for the increasingly unreachable

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American Dream. Undoubtedly, “Who’s Irish?” deserves to be widely read and studiously taught.

Notes 1

I have taught “Who’s Irish?” at such institutions as the University of Connecticut, Salem International University, and the University of Central Arkansas. These remarks were from students in my Asian American Literature classes. I would like to thank them for sharing their thoughts about this story, especially Daniel Kim and Melanie F. Brunet. 2 All quotes are from “Who’s Irish?” in Who’s Irish? 3 Research conducted in the 1990s about the Chinese attitude towards depression also showed that most people viewed depression as a character flaw and a social stigma. I choose to use this undergraduate research because it is the newest one which informs us not only of the remaining Chinese bias against this mental illness but also of the Buddhist-Confucian influence on the Chinese mindset. For details, see Molly Grames and Cortney Leverntz’s report, “Attitudes Toward Persons with Disabilities: A Comparison of Chinese and American Students.” UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research XIII (2010): 1-6. 4 See Gabriel’s article “Depression Literacy among Patients and the Public.” Primary Psychiatry 17(2010): 55-64 5 For further details about the philosophical roots of Eastern and Western views of creativity, see Niu and Sternberg’s article, “The Philosophical Roots of Western and Eastern Conceptions of Creativity.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 26 (2006): 18-38.

Works Cited Booth, Wayne C. “Ironic Portraits.” A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Print. Cheng, Vincent J. “Asian American Identity.” Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2004. 125-70. Print. Confucius. The Analects. Trans. D. C. Lau. Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 2000. Print. —. “The Scope and Meaning of the Treaties.” The Hsiao King, or Classics of Filial Piety. Trans. James Legge. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010. Print. Jen, Gish. “Who’s Irish?” Who’s Irish? New York: Vintage, 1999. 3-16. Print. Lubart, T. I., and Robert Sternberg. “The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms.” Handbook of Creativity. Ed. Robert J. Sternberg. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. 3-15. Print.

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Niu, Weihua, and Robert J. Sternberg. “Cultural Influences on Artistic Creativity and Its Evaluation.” International Journal of Psychology 36 (2001): 225-41. Print. Niu, Weihua, and Robert J. Sternberg. “Contemporary Studies on the Concept of Creativity: The East and the West.” Journal of Creative Behavior 36 (2002): 269-88. Print. Sollers, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Print.

THE FEMALE PROMETHEUS: AGENCY AND THE GAZE IN NATASHA TRETHEWEY’S BELLOCQ’S OPHELIA JANE ALBERDESTON CORALIN

As a child, I remember the small summery scent of sheets pulled off the line, crickets singing bluegrass in the seams. There is the requisite act of folding, the careful exercise, the domestic precision involved in, as Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Bean Eaters” offers, “putting things away” (Brooks 97). There is always the act of looking, what is re-viewed in work, as in: are the sheets being folded the right way; has a daughter been careful to note the creases, the gathers, the fabric’s special nature? No matter: with a shake of the head, another woman (mother, grandmother, aunt, etc.) will swoop in, scoop up all the novice’s handiwork and go off to another corner of a house to refold, revise the chore. What is buried in those pleats for the novice, and for the revisionist? Is it a starter’s kit for “how to be” woman, how to be clean, how to be upright, a black woman in opposition to the white imaginary, in constant confrontation with the corollary of the black feminine vision. It is a silent conversation between black women, spoken in terms of interiority, the interiority of the home, the city as home, and the interiority of the body. These tropes fold and unfold in the demolition and construction of self, a response spoken through the teeth in storytelling. Poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander in The Black Interior says the written literature of African American women—is rich and diverse, but it is not a body of work so vast that there is not a great deal of room for formal innovations that open up the way we see ourselves and record that which is unreconciled and perhaps irreconcilable inside us. That is sometimes a source of our great power. (104)

Where Simone de Beauvoir asks, “If … we admit provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?” Alex-

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ander in her text answers this question by positing black women within the reading of power and its existence in the psychic interior of recordkeeping, the storytelling of an age. The medium of the poem suggests the space for emotional return and revision, a form of channeling, which translates to Alexander’s moment of ‘innovation’. The poem becomes a historical document, a stage for contemporary Black women’s narratives to showcase the multiplicity of experience and also the uniformity of it. The poem-space unfolds for view the nation’s undulating racialized and gendered architecture; however, while offering this moment of unfolding, in which the truth is exposed for all to see, it also contains a moment of rescue, in which the narrative-subject folds the story back into herself, protecting it, the way a woman might fold a secret into her body, closeguarded to protect it from marring the descending narrative. This exploration of Pulitzer-prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey in her collection Bellocq’s Ophelia seeks to return to the work of folding and unfolding to show how the new generation of Black women’s poetry (descendant from and in reverence to the Black Arts Movement’s mission of self-realization and actualization, under the territory of contemporary narrative poetry’s realm of reflection) continues its journey away from the dominant culture’s construct of Blackness. These poems could be labelled as Black feminist, as they ask the reader to use what she knows to resolve or begin to resolve the problems of physical and emotional exile and return. These poems circumnavigate the past and the present through the palimpsests of home, and body, city and story, the power that shines through their words, helping Black womanhood recover from the deep creases of experience which define what it is to be her today. Additionally, further discussion will argue that in Trethewey’s experiment an ekphrastic poem-space becomes malleable, evolutionary, signifying the poem’s “Promethean” possibilities to regenerate life, to find power in the act of looking back. Like the male viewers of Edouard Manet’s painting “Olympia” hung in the Salon of Paris in 1865, the poet Trethewey turns the gaze back on the reader, who is forced to revise their flat perceptions of black womanhood (PBS para. 2). Trethewey’s “Ophelia” juxtaposes and then interposes the character of the prostitute as both photographer and objectified sitter, then the hidden viewer or audience, and finally, the anonymous reader, all sharing in the composition of the triptych-like narrative, in which the main character retells her epistolary story, slowly gaining agency over the details of her life. The painting “Olympia” confronted 19th-century societal views of nudity, the painter turning the model’s gaze away from the corners of the frame, a stance oppositional to 19th-century mores. Olympia stares back at

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the male viewer, her eyes full and assertive in her nudity. She holds her hand at her crotch, a guarded gesture which signals which part of her body is unavailable to the viewer. It is a double-sworded agency, signalling feminist power—to control the body and how the body is viewed. The composition becomes a fiery dare, which forces the 19th-century male viewer to incriminate himself, address his own carnality in a gallery’s public sphere. And the viewer must accept this daring glare, because though her lips are tightly drawn, Olympia is not muted—she speaks. Like Manet, Natasha Trethewey finds a way for the mute(d) to speak. In the poems of Bellocq’s Ophelia, she awakens the camera’s blinding flash and gives Zeus’s fire to her imagined subject, a New Orleans Storyville prostitute named Ophelia. The poems centre on a series of untitled photographs, portraits of early twentieth century light-skinned African American prostitutes. As prostitution was legal in New Orleans at that time, it is believed that the pictures were taken by E. J. Bellocq as part of a commercial venture; they were to be used for Blue Books, as advertising for New Orleans brothels (Wallis 12). Throughout Trethewey’s text, they are called octoroons, an antiquated racial category created to indicate the percentage of “blackness” in a person. This ethnic categorizing pit blackness against a scale of whiteness, pushing African-Americans into the insurmountable pressure of proving their citizenship, its definition completely unassociated with the contemporary understanding of the term. Through the painful experiences of the main character, the reader becomes part of Trethewey’s poetic exercise to see an African-American woman grow through the experience of igniting her power through constant circumnavigation of her self and body through the exercise of “passing” and the laboured exploration of her visibility. Trethewey’s poems are an exercise in re-telling, filling a peculiar silence, as many of the Storyville photographs were lost, burned or thrown away after Bellocq’s death in 1947 (Wallis 6). She discovers a truth; in ways only a poet can, she unearths a lost narrative of a time gone. This “truth” becomes a task, a measurement of Bellocq’s Blue Book images and Trethewey’s poems in order to ascertain who “tells the more accurate a story” (Helios 31). Trethewey needles the images of the women in the frame, scraping to discover truer narratives underneath the palimpsest of knowledge. Hortense Spillers in her seminal article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” states “the names 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 … assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness” (2).

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The “signifying property plus” in Bellocq’s Ophelia is the black woman’s body, which has been inscribed with the lexicon of the white imaginary and the subject’s continued struggle, or better yet, fight to not only repair the damage done, but to evolve from the exercise. The title “A Female Prometheus” serves to analogize Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia as an example of the principle of creation through the exercise of finding one’s humanity. The analogy of Zeus’s fire exists in unpacking or better yet unfolding that knowledge. Shelley’s creation is deemed monster in the eyes of all he encounters, yet he is most human for his experiences, and more specifically, his search for his beginnings, hence his humanity. In the Ophelia narrative, her ability to ultimately thwart colonial precepts through the exercise of storytelling returns to her, not humanity, as she is always human, but citizenship or its beginnings. The term monster complicates itself, in the longheld imaginary of blackness being monstrous or bestial. Therefore, the term troubles the text, as the act of finding agency is an act of becoming human, of finding oneself within its chaos. However, the idea of the monstrous as a product of the out/inward gaze reduces the interference of conscience here in the text. If the world sees Ophelia as a monstrosity, then the world sees Ophelia as both a desired thing and an abjection of that desire. The monstrous, at times a being untouchable, is both agent and subject embodied within the colonized body. In the collection’s cover image, E.C. Bellocq’s sitter is named Ophelia and her frame is engulfed in ostrich feathers and seed pearls. In the picture, she is expressionless (at least, there’s no smile). The viewer cannot see what is in the direction of her gaze; it almost seems she is lost. Her body leans both toward and away from the viewer, the image appearing as if the photograph has been taken from the vantage point of a ladder; this stiff positioning unsettles the viewer, providing an unfamiliar distance, as if the subject were unapproachable, untouchable, and unattainable. In the poem excerpt “February 11”, Trethewey writes .

February 1911 There are indeed all sorts of men who visit here: those who want nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones of a woman’s voice; others prefer simply to gaze upon me, my face turned from them as they touch only themselves. (17)

Theorist Julia Kristeva named the abject as something being “…neither subject nor object”. Kristeva continues that abjection is

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one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. (Powers of Horror 10)

While Kristeva’s theory speaks to the viewer of the horror, it is in Bellocq’s Ophelia that a theory plays out within the subject’s story. Violet/Ophelia cannot be assimilated into being by the photographer’s gaze. The lens, a spasm of the photographer’s desire, does not capture her, hence, she becomes expressionless, lost in her own reverie. The constructs of that public desire to both fondle and revile her for her “otherness” problematizes the gaze. Ophelia then must, like Shelley’s monster, learn how to chart her agency between inside/outside the brothel, inside/outside her body, and inside/outside her mind. In many instances, throughout the text, the main character, Ophelia, does exactly that: she learns to love herself by pushing beyond the boundaries society constructed for her. This is the main character’s desire. Ekphrasis, in Bellocq’s Ophelia, becomes a platform, in which the monster, awakened by the energy of the poet’s imagination, gets a chance to speak, to tell her story. This (like Olympia, like the monster) is Trethewey’s desire. In the collection’s “Countess P’s Advice for New Girls”, the subject offers the reader a visitor’s view of an evening in the brothel: Look, this is a high class house—polished Mahogany, potted ferns, rugs two inches thick. The mirrored parlor multiplies everything – One glass of champagne is twenty. You’ll see Yourself a hundred times. For our customers You must learn to be watched. Empty Your thoughts—think, if you do, only Of your swelling purse. Hold still as if You sit for a painting. Catch light In the hollow of your throat; let shadow dwell In your navel and beneath the curve Of your breasts. See yourself through his eyes— Your neck stretched long and slender, your back Arched—the awkward poses he might capture In stone. Let his gaze animate you, then move As it flatters you most. Wait to be Asked to speak. Think of yourself as molten glass— Expand and quiver beneath the weight of his breath. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Become what you must. Let him see whatever He needs. Train yourself not to look back. (11)

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This speaker (as she does in the arc of the poems within the collection) animates the relationship between a cast of characters: the photographer, the objectified sitter, poet, anonymous viewer, and finally, the reader. In the poem, the reader is turned [as if the brothel were a hallway of mirrors—labyrinthine and inescapable] and made to see the symbolic weight of one’s “reflection”, as in through medium of the polished house, the “mirrored parlor”, the “one glass of champagne is twenty”, each being lenses through which the women see themselves, and so the narrator. Iyla Parkins in her article “Textualizing Visibility” states that “In apparently privileging vision as the most reliable means by which to access truth, spectacle seems to confirm the conventional subject-object split, in which subjects are agents with world-making capacities, and objects are passive and reflective” (3). Violet/Ophelia’s “world-making capabilities” are extracted from the promise of liberty, one in which she attempts to free herself from the physicality of her situation (leaving the brothel for the town on day trips) and her psychological circumstance (her letters to a relative, as there is an obscure, slant perception of home in her text). In this small set of instructions (how-to-be), the subject sets a scene, as would an artist or a photographer. Parkins’ “world-making” allows her to navigate between her conditions/contradictions of blackness (i.e., the insolubility of liberty in her situation and reflexive and exhaustive attempts to secure it). Yet, Violet/Ophelia engages power in one other way—in this brief guide, she attempts to rescue anyone like her from danger. “Let him see whatever/ He needs. Train yourself not to look back.” Not only is the reader and the subject of the poem being confronted by their reflection, the subject recognizes the inclination to “look back” and warns to tame said inclination. The reader is not included in the knowledge of at whom one should not look, but the reader imagines that those brothel subjects of similar circumstance as the narrator would be endangered by a recognition of the viewer’s gaze, as in Manet’s Ophelia, who dares return the gaze of the museum onlooker. However, there’s another painting of the same period in which the subject is posed so that her exposed breast and countenance confront the onlooker: Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist’s Portrait d'une négresse (1800, Musée du Louvre). In this painting, the narrative which intersects desire and the tabooed black woman’s body is subverted by the sitter’s return gaze. In fact, differently from Manet’s Ophelia, the negresse in the narrative of this painting does not serve a white master within the scene; there is no exoticized tableau of an upper-class home life, such as is seen in other works of the Orientalist frame (yet, it must be noted that the truer narrative rests within the painter/mistress and her sitter/servant dichotomy) [Smalls,

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19thc-artworldwide.org]. There is only the sitter and the affront of her partial nudity. In her gaze, she owns this pose. She is relaxed against the slope of the chair’s back; the fabric of her wrap gathered beneath her bosom. And then there is in her expression directness and determination. More so than in the pose, it is this expression which guides the viewer away from the colonizing of her body. Her demeanour permits nothing else. In “Countess P.’s Advice for New Girls”, it is understood that the returned gaze can be dangerous as it reflects a recover of the power of selfrealization. And while these instructions may offer a “how-to-be” a prostitute in a brothel, they also offer an opportunity to understand that it is part and parcel of a larger drama, discovering an ability to pilot one’s own circumstance, and, so, one’s desire: “Let his gaze animate you, then move/ As it flatters you most” (Bellocq’s Ophelia 11). Though “flatters” can be read as a way in which the subject continues to satisfy the client’s desire, it can also be read as a way for the subject to please herself. In this small way, she controls her body and even a small engagement of liberty reigns large. While the poem does not in effect name the consequences of a returned glance, it can be inferred that there are house rules which must be followed, rules learned and practiced. Through acceptance of posturing or shaping her body to channel the light in a particular way or in a flattering way, the subject is in some way complicit in the way in which she is manoeuvred and manipulated, not solely literal, as a sitter for a photograph, but as an agent in the act of essentializing that is being inflicted upon her (Trethewey 11). In his introduction to his book Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination, Darieck Scott offers that “though sexuality is used against us, and sexual(ized) domination is part of what makes us black, though sexuality is a mode of conquest and often cannot avoid being deployed in a field of representation without functioning as an introjection of historical defeat, it is in and through that very domination and defeat also a mapping of political potential, an access to freedom” (9). It is in the poems that arise in the latter part of the collection that the reader begins to see the fruit of Violet/Ophelia’s struggle, as she moves from sitter to photographer. This new situation, which will be discussed later, opens a way to agency. The very specific trauma engaged between the poem’s “instruction” and the slight nod to a buried narrative begins to reveal power. The narrator is named Violet by the brothel’s madam. Her true name is Ophelia, though the reader cannot be sure either that that is her name. By giving the main character a pseudonym, Trethewey distracts the reader’s gaze and moves the focus on the prostitute’s rebellion, her ability to rean-

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imate herself through the metaphor of the naming exercise. Trethewey may have lifted Violet out of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 99, in which he laments that the flower stole all its beauty from his poem. It is the flower which gains the ability of speech, of poetry, of colour, even, as does Bellocq’s Violet/Ophelia. It can also attempt to mirror Shakespeare’s crossdressing Viola of his Twelfth Night (Violet being a derivative of Viola). As the reader later learns in Trethewey’s collection, Violet/Ophelia, an octoroon, struggles to “pass” as a white woman outside of the brothel, and outside of Storyville. Violet’s yearning to “pass” is a symptom of her discomfort with her positioning in society. In the prologue poem, “Bellocq’s Ophelia”, Trethewey’s narrator introduces us to the British painter’s John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia”, in which the tragic unrequited love of Shakespeare’s Hamlet lies drowning in a flower-laced pond. The painting itself is ekphrastic, as Millais pulled the story from Hamlet, though in Hamlet, the details of the girl’s death are never divulged. Trethewey then offers another layer to the growing palimpsest. The poet reconciles the layering of one character over another in this mellifluous dialogue between the selves, in which Violet, the subject, retells her story, thus gaining power over the details of her existence; this arduous work, on behalf of what some might deem a nameless, forgotten human, and so brings to light the true rationale: to bring a woman to life. Elizabeth Alexander opened the discussion with the question of the unreconciled and the reconciled (140) quality of Black women’s experience. But how can one reach a definition of what reconciled/unreconciled means to a people? To reach that point, readers in some ways must dissect history; interrogate the psychic corollaries between being both property and citizen of the nation in which they live. It is how contemporary poetry’s reanimated narratives from the past chart a passage, through both joy and suffering. “The taking” in the third stanza of the same poem (in contrast with Millais’ painting of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in the first stanza) further argues for control of the female body. The poem both unfolds this new narrative in the virtual “undressing” of the subject: from the divan, to the hair spilling over, flowers on a pillow, a thick carpet to the thigh. She is a “nameless inmate”, naked, her nipples “offered up hard and cold” (Trethewey 3). One would imagine “warmth” to denote agency, the prostitute becomes self-realized in her sensuality; however, Violet is sexual, as opposed to sexualized or sensual. Her cold and marble-like nipples contradict the representation of Violet as a sex worker. She is statuesque and, unlike the sculpture in Jean Louis Gerome’s painting “Pygmalion”, whose artist, with a kiss, brings the subject he created, yet unfinished, to life, Vio-

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let/Ophelia cannot be moved to life by the white male gaze. It is her own self-realization, her perception of identity which makes her breathe. The poem-space begins to move from the confines of its own setting and becomes a palimpsest of interiority: as inmate, Violet/Ophelia circumvents only the brothel and its surrounding walls, similar to Hamlet’s Ophelia who ghosts the halls of Elsinore. The idea of movement becomes the foil for how Trethewey writes Violet out of her dilemma of race and class. Violet, in writing letters home (here, home is intangible, almost unimaginable), escapes from the page of history; here she is afforded a voice. In the second poem of the work, “Letter Home”, Ophelia writes about a painfully useless job search, her desire to overcome her hard past, and toiling in the fields. Ophelia very much wants us to know that she yearns to navigate around who she is or was: Do I deceive anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown as your dear face, they’d know I’m not quite what I pretend to be. I walk these streets a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine, / a negress again (7)

Her use of the word “must” in the act of lowering her eyes demonstrates Violet’s absolute rejection of society’s mores, which work to strip her of the freedom to move, both physically, through space and time, but also mentally and emotionally move, grow, experience, learn. “There are enough things here to remind me of who I am” (7). But this does not last long, as, towards the end, Ophelia re-inscribes her power. There is a wrinkle in this tarp: in the middle of the collection, there’s another poem, seemingly narrated in the third person, but towards the end clearly second person. This poem offers a pinhole (barroom) view of a woman one could understand to be Violet/Ophelia, though the subject of the poem remains nameless (and here it must be remembered that Violet is not truly Violet, Ophelia is never really Ophelia). The poem, “Photograph of a Bawd Drinking Raleigh Rye” interrupts the reader’s growing intimacy with Violet/Ophelia and breaks away from seeing herself as her confidant (34). The first and last poems are in the third person and therefore, they can be attributed to those of an outsider privy to either Bellocq’s work or a client of the red-light district’s complex gems. Her name is never truly known, but it is clear she lives in the city, quietly submerged and passing, she hopes, unnoticed. And how is it that this city, New Orleans, sees but

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doesn’t see her? She is suspect, anyway, and this guilt initially cripples her. Violet writes: Just the other day I fancied myself a club woman, like you, in my proper street clothes…

and So attired, I ventured out. beyond the confines of the district, to do my share of good deeds, visit the sanitarium, a sick sister, her body, invaded by the invisible specter of our work./ Later, my visit over, I walked out into bright afternoon, the sun harsh, scouring everything—face the face a man recognized. (And here I hesitate to tell you—) I was escorted to the police station, guilty of being where I was not allowed… (28-29)

Here her recognition and that of the stranger (who was no stranger, but client) fold into themselves. The unfolding comes in how the city (in collaboration with nature) unmasks her, though she wears no mask. She is revealed not only for being a prostitute, but for her blackness, as the client who reports her to the police knows she is an octoroon, a strange animal, exotic, both desired and reviled for her mystery. And it is the ekphrastic moment which unmasks her for the reader, a circular view in which the reader becomes the eyes of the city, watching and measuring Ophelia as she trespasses the walls of her confinement. So, the reader is complicit and culprit. And, the city, in this poem, outside of the brothel and the district, which denote home, is dangerous. Even Violet/Ophelia’s attempt to rename herself a “club woman” and do good deeds for the city are cancelled out by her station and her colour. She cannot pass in the city the way she imagines she can. In the complexity of the contemporary African-American text, Violet violates the spaces between being both victim and offender; she is victimized by nameless, at times, faceless guards, the watchers of propriety, and she offends by finding ways to circumvent her race. However, because it is ekphrasis in action, it is understood that the desire of the author is to tell the true tale, to come as close to the heartbeat pulsing in the pulp those photographs. Anything short of the elaborate lacework of life would be a lie:

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Disclosure—January 1912 When Bellocq doesn’t like a photograph he scratches across the plate. But I know other ways to obscure a face—paint it with rouge and powder, shades lighter than skin, don a black velvet mask. I’ve learned to keep my face behind the camera, my lens aimed at a dream of my own making. What power I find in transforming what is real—a room flushed with light, calculated disarray. Today I tried to capture a redbird perched on the tall hedge. As my shutter fell, he lifted in flight, a vivid blur above the clutter just beyond the hedge—garbage, rats licking the insides of broken eggs.

Trethewey brings us into the sting of that awareness: Violet’s blackness shines through the dust of white face powder and layers of fine linen. Inside the brothel, she is safe and white, no matter that she knows she is not pure (the layering of that purity leaning into morality and skin colour, as Violet’s father was white). Outside of the brothel, she initially blisters in the knowledge of her blackness, hiding softly under her own fear. This poem is a perfect example of the unresolved aspects of blackness in the challenge that is self-love: We are no surprise to the locals, though visitors from the North make a great fuss, and many debates occur between them as to whether one can tell, just by looking, our secret. The vilest among them say, I can always smell a nigger

and In the parlor today, a man resolved to find the hint that would betray me, make me worth the fee. He wore a monocle, moved in close, his breath hot on my face. I looked away from my reflection— small and distorted—in his lens (26)

The client’s monocle pretends to be a mirror that Violet turns from, but it is not a mirror and so does not reflect her own face, but the man’s prejudiced view of who he wants Violet to be for the brevity of the sex- mo-

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ment. It is Violet who can never be moved to love herself as she is consistently interrogated on the relevance of her birth and her existence. Though she believes she has one foot in both camps, white and black, she actually has neither but drifts in a limbo of shade. Violet/ Ophelia, does not have the same liberty; her sex work in some ways relies on her passing, on her being able to bridge those two worlds of race. Her (and her fellow prostitutes’) passing is tenuous; her role as sex worker complicates her agency, as each man who enters becomes a subliminal attempt to prove, not patronage, but paternity. In the poem “Father”: I would stumble over a simple word, say lay for lie, and he would stop me there. How I wanted him to like me, think me smart, a delicate colored girl—not the wild pickaninny roaming the fields, barefoot. I search now for his face among the men I pass in the streets, fear the day a man enters my room both customer and father (38)

Trethewey shapes the protagonist out of the imaginary of the white gaze; the collection begins with Bellocq’s camera eye, peering at the “small mound of her belly, the pale hair/ of her pubis—these things—her body/ there for the taking” (3). The viewer, just as the reader, takes, stripping. Or attempts to take. And yet, the reader must reconcile against the argument, as at the end of the poem, there is a twist, unexpected: “But in her face, a dare” (3). In the South Florida Sun Sentinel, writer John Vitali wrote, “More than mere photographs, these are love letters that open like windows onto the temple of Aphrodite. Women are free to step into and out of the picture frame to learn firsthand from these religious adepts. It brings them back to life. It turns them into lovers” (2002). However, being a lover is far from Ophelia’s compulsion, as it is her circumstance that leads her to Trethewey’s vision of Storyville, not a temple to Aphrodite, but a quasi-haven for the exiled. What Violet/Ophelia recovers, what belongs to Violet/Ophelia is her strength, her ability towards the collection’s end, to complete the dare. Though the ferocity of her intent is at times a prison, Ophelia confronts her jailers. In Wordimage: Lyric Ekphrasis and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Anne Keefe tells us that the “reality is a life Trethewey has taught us to imagine is a life in which being means being seen” (86). Although the medium of the photograph attempts to steal or drown Ophelia, it fails because of her reclaimed dominion. The places in her body most vulnerable to view are no longer available by the strength of her countenance. Violet helps Ophelia become the watcher and the client.

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She coaxes Bellocq to let her take pictures, and, so, Violet, engaging her agency again, towards the end of the collection, escapes Shakespeare’s Ophelia’s catastrophic demise. The transposition of the photographer and subjects’ gaze in the poem, this arrangement, this beautifully layering of gazes, reorganizes the power of the black female subject. Deborah E. McDowell, a feminist scholar, argues in her article “Black Feminist Thinking” that care should be taken in the structuring of narratives. In offering these histories, what particular knowledge is being imparted? She calls this historical knowledge emplotment, an intriguing marriage between narrative plot and employment (African American Literary Theory 558). McDowell’s conversation is related to literary hierarchies created by scholarly notice of particular narratives and narrators, the subconscious omissions of the diverse narratives of the American experience. I think it’s important to include poets in that discussion, as poetry, like that of Trethewey’s, provides an intact vision of “historical knowledge.” In her response to a question on the act of remembering in an interview with New York Times writer Deborah Solomon, Trethewey states that “For the sake of sanity, there is a lot of necessary forgetting. But the trick is to balance forgetting with necessary remembering, to avoid historical amnesia” (2007). Ophelia makes her own way to record, to storytell, to resist, her power rising out of the folds of the story’s fabrics. She keeps her history close to the bone. In At the Bottom of the River, fiction writer Jamaica Kincaid writes “how bound up I know I am to all that is human endeavor, to all that is past and to all that shall be, to all that shall be lost and leave no trace. I claim these things then-mine and now feel myself grow solid and complete, my name filling up my mouth” (82). Violet/Ophelia exhumes the buried narrative; her mouth fills with her truth and this becomes a moment to speak up, and be heard, to infiltrate the national conversation. Trethewey bravely surfaces this drowned story through her own fascination with Bellocq’s photographs. Like Trethewey, Violet dares to dare. The way the poem is read does not rely solely on theory or production; there is praxis here too, as Ophelia acts. She is doubletongues, and resists through narrative. She resists because of it. Trethewey revolutionizes and remedies through assemblage, recovering the self through Ophelia’s testimony, where she leaves the realm of the victim and sheds the skin of monster. By taking camera in hand and turning the lens on the world, she (and Trethewey, through the act of ekphrasis) simply becomes.

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Works Cited Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior: Essays. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004. Print. “Edouard Manet's Olympia 1865.” PBS Culture Shock. 26 Jan 2000. Internet. Web. 20 Oct 2014. Keefe, Anne. “Wordimage: Lyric Ekphrasis and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century.” Order No. 3541079 Rutgers, The State University of New JerseyNew Brunswick, 2012. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 25 June 2016. Kincaid, Jamaica. At the Bottom of the River. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Print. Kristeva, Julie. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, 8 -11. McDowell, Deborah E. “Black Feminist Thinking: The “Practice” of “Theory”.” African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. Winston Napier. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 557-579. Print. Moody, Joycelyn. “Naming and Proclaiming the Self: Black Feminist Literary History Making”. Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender and Culture. Ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. Print. Parkins, Ilya. “Texturing Visibility: Opaque Femininities and Feminist Modernist Studies.” Feminist Review 107 (2014): 57-74. ProQuest. Web. 25 June 2016. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Print. Smalls, James. “Slavery is a Woman: “Race,” Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait d'une négresse (1800).” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3:1 (2004). Web. Retrieved 21 June 2016. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17:2 (1987): 64-81. The Johns Hopkins University Press. JSTOR. Web. 25 June 2016. Trethewey, Natasha. Bellocq’s Ophelia: Poems. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002. Print. Vitale, John. “Artistic Portraits Of Prostitutes Provide A Poet’s Muse.” South Florida Sun—Sentinel: 12d. 05 May 2002. Proquest. Web. 25 June 2016.

MY WAIST, MY FOOT, MY BREAST: PATRIARCHAL DEFINITIONS OF BEAUTY AND LISA LOOMER’S THE WAITING ROOM EMINE GECGIL

Women of different eras have been oppressed through the discourses of the body. As Janet Wolff highlights, contemporary practices deem women inferior as a result of the sexist ideologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and still today, women are equated with the body, female sexuality is denied, and femininity is reduced to reproduction (417). Undoubtedly, the female body is at the heart of the question of inequality between men and women, and thus feminist theatre has addressed oppression by designating experiences unique to women, highlighting the reclamation of the female body from patriarchal victimization (Aston 9). The portrayal of the body as a feminist dramaturgical device has emerged in the form of staging physical or mental disabilities, body altering practices for purported beautification purposes, or gynaecological surgeries like mastectomy or hysterectomy due to pathological as well as cultural reasons. Since the definition of beauty varies from one culture to another, it manifests itself through social values, which are exerted by the patriarchal system. This is no less true for Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room (1994), in which idealized norms of beauty resulting from sexist ideologies are constructed in the form of body-altering practices. In the play, footbinding, corseting and breast implants function as dramaturgical devices that allow women who are the victims of their cultures’ exacting notions of beauty to come to terms with their own bodies, reject male-imposed norms of female beauty, and achieve a sense of sisterhood. By analyzing the body politics of the play, I aim to demonstrate how the protagonists see their feet, waist, and breasts, how they have to bear the consequences of body-altering practices, and how they ultimately come to terms with their bodies. Women have long been associated with the body and have thus been devalued whereas men have been equated with the mind and therefore construed as intellectually superior. Male-dominated western society has written about women as objects and has degraded them. However, today,

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women are writing about their own bodies, appraising and celebrating it. How women’s bodies have been constructed and politicized therefore becomes a central question for contemporary feminism and textual representations. Building upon poststructuralist theories, feminist writers have examined how the hegemony of masculine power in western cultures holds women’s bodies biologically and socially under control (Atkinson 83). Arguing the possibility of a feminist cultural politics of the body, Wolff states that the body has been systematically repressed and marginalized in Western culture with specific practices controlling and defining the female body (415). While the female body is being reconstructed within a feminist scope, it has been mostly associated with notions of beauty. As Erica Reischer and Kathryn S. Koo convey, cultural ideals of beauty are an expression of social values (298), and the social order defends itself by reducing the meaning of femininity to “formulaic and endlessly reproduced ‘beautiful’ images” (Wolf 18). Robin Tolmach Lakoff and Raquel Scherr also argue that the beauty myth tells women that physical perfection is the key to selffulfilment, which changes to meet specific needs at a particular time and place. People in power define beauty, and as the possession of power changes, its definition shifts with it (177-78). Therefore, at certain periods of time and in certain regions of the world bound feet, long necks or thin waists have been identified with beauty and used to reduce women to body parts and distract them from the acquisition from social equality by creating focal points of obsession. As Mary K. DeShazer contends, “[f]or many women writing the body, autonomy is impossible until violation and its aftermath have been painfully inscribed” (56). This is definitely true for Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room, in which three female characters reclaim their bodies only after their bodily integrity and decency is violated. The play is a masterful rendering of body politics and medical politics with an eye towards undermining the patriarchy. Multicultural and shown from different angles, the play deals with three women from three different historical periods, whose stories converge when they meet in a doctor’s waiting room. The narrative’s non-linear crosscutting through time and place illuminates how the definitions of beauty are culture-specific, and the play conveys that women are the bearers of the consequences of efforts to “beautify” themselves based on cultural and male-dominated notions of beauty. With its feminist, political and medical discourse, The Waiting Room challenges the status quo and even threatens it through the characters it presents. The protagonists are introduced at the beginning of the play in a doctor’s waiting room, and the audience learns they are three women, Vic-

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toria, Forgiveness from Heaven, and Wanda. Victoria is a nineteenthcentury English woman, who wears a whalebone corset, and is diagnosed with hysteria. Not surprisingly, her husband, who is a physician, believes her hysteria results from too much education and wants her to have her ovaries removed, which he believes will cure her over-stimulation. Forgiveness from Heaven is an eighteenth-century Chinese woman, whose bound feet cause her an extraordinary amount of pain. Despite the fact that she is constantly seeking treatment for lost toes, she still believes her three-inch bound feet make her desirable to her husband, who is sexually aroused by the feet and has an obvious foot fetish—the price of which is paid by Forgiveness. The third woman is Wanda, a late twentieth-century American woman, who has had many cosmetic surgeries and is now suffering from breast cancer due to complications of silicone breast implants. In order to understand the body politics of the play, and how the protagonists eventually come to terms with their bodies despite physical degradations in the name of beauty, it is necessary to delve into the body-altering practices of the play, namely corseting, footbinding and breast implants, and the consequences of these male-sanctioned practices.

Nineteenth Century Body Politics and the Corset Scholarship on nineteenth-century women’s history and dress explores the power of corsets to regulate women’s behaviour as well as to signify women’s subordinate position (Fields 355–56). One of the four pillars of the Cult of True Womanhood, submissiveness is taught to a woman at an early age, and clothing is an important part of this lesson. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a prominent presence in the First Wave Feminism conveyed: The comfort and convenience of the woman is never considered, from the bonnet string to the paper shoe, she is the hopeless martyr to the inventions of some Parisian imp of fashion. Her tight waist and long trailing skirts deprive her of all freedom of breath and motion. No wonder man prescribes her sphere. She needs his help at every turn. (Stanton 237)

As Victoria explains in The Waiting Room, she received her first corset when she was fourteen, and when she was asked whether it hurts, she humorously replies “only when I breathe” (12). An activist of the Progressive Era, Helen Gilbert Ecob listed in The Well-Dressed Woman (1892) the disabilities caused by a restrictive dress. She noted that the corset “reduces the waist from three to fifteen inches and pushes the organs within downward” (28). In the play, Victoria suffers from malformation: “my doctor

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says the corset’s compressing my stomach, dislocating the kidneys, crushing my liver, and constricting the heart,” yet adds “but it is pretty, isn’t it?” (49) While her misogynist husband finds her figure stimulating (in fact in one scene he even rapes the debilitated woman), there is no doubt that such deformations in the anatomy of the nineteenth century women resulted in all sorts of pathologies, including fainting due to “restricted blood flow, [but] not from romantic ideals” (Ecob 24). When Victoria introduces her disease—hysteria—she says “It’s a disease of the ovaries,” which adds another layer to how she is oppressed by her husband and the society in which she lives. She informs the audience that “… the ovaries control the personality. I’ve done some reading on the matter. Though my husband says that reading makes me worse” (13). As conveyed by Gilber Geis and Ivan Bunn, according to the Greeks, hysteria was a medical condition confined to women, and resulted from “the discontented womb [that] wander[ed] upward.” Furthermore, marriage, intercourse, and conception were believed by the Greeks to be the cure since they reinscribed the gender roles of wife and mother, and brought the womb and the woman back into place. In Paris, during the 1880s, hysteria was cured by the removal of the ovaries, and in London and Vienna by the surgical removal of the clitoris (129), all of which were designed to remove stimulation that supposedly caused the hysteria. Furthermore, through Victoria, Loomer informs the audience of these horrific old Victorian medical practices, adding some humour. Well, we’ve tried everything else! Injections to the womb—water, milk, tea, a decoction of marshmallow. I’ve stopped reading and writing, stopped stimulating my emotions with operas and French plays. Last week the doctor placed leeches on my vulva … Some were quite adventurous, actually, and travelled all the way to cervical cavity! The pressure from the corset’s forcing my uterus out through my vagina …. And according to my husband, my hysteria is only getting worse! My husband says I’ve all the classic symptoms of ovarian disease: troublesomeness, eating like a ploughman, painful menstruation—a desire to learn Greek! Attempted suicide, persecution mania, and simple cussedness! Last night I sneezed continuously for twenty-seven minutes, and tried to bite my own husband! What can I do!? I shan’t be beaten across the face and body with wet towels like an Irish woman—I JUST WANT THE DAMN THINGS OUT! (15)

It is obvious that Victoria is victimized by her husband and the conservative Victorian society in which she lives. She downplays the pressure from her corset, simply ignoring the fact that her uterus is coming out through

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her vagina. It seems that if there is an ovarian disease, it is a likely result of the corset, and not mental or physical stimulation Regina Merkell Morantz and Sue Zschoche argue that the belief system of the nineteenth-century medicine was centered on the oppression of women, and the cultural prejudices of the doctors influenced their treatment. Therefore, they practiced harsh therapies to control their female patients, many of whom did not adhere to the ideal of true womanhood. Their treatments isolated women from the social sphere and made them dependent (568). Likewise, in The Waiting Room, Victoria is victimized by her husband, Oliver, who is a physician. Oliver treats his wife with the rest cure, which was devised by the nineteenth-century American physician Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell believed that total rest and removal of all stimuli would cure hysteria and other female illnesses such as neurasthenia. Loomer reminds the audience of the rest cure and substitutes Oliver for Mitchell. Victoria describes the rest cure as a peaceful period, “six weeks on one’s back in a dimly lit room” with “no reading, no visitors, no … potty” (13–14). The rest cure, according to her, does not work as she “… had too much education and [her] uterus has atrophied commensurately” (14). Such was an attempt to silence the women of the nineteenth century and keep them within the domestic sphere. Interestingly, Victoria reads Freud, thereby inviting the audience to psychoanalyze the characters in the play. Victoria learns that Freud feels that hysteria can be treated not by operating on the ovaries, but rather by treating the mind (21). However, Oliver favours nineteenth-century surgical practices to cure hysteria. After one of her hysterical fits takes place in the play, Oliver, aroused by her weakness and threatened by her growing intellect, even rapes her, as intercourse was considered a treatment for hysteria, which put women in their place. Surgical removal of the ovaries is a last resort, and once he realizes Victoria cannot be cured through sexual intercourse, he asks the twentieth century physician, Douglas, to remove her ovaries immediately as “the poor child is talking about Freud now, wondering if the problem in her ovaries might be cured via the mind” (25). For Oliver, “A sick woman should never be exposed to medical information, which can only confuse an already weakened and gullible mind” (25). As Loomer illustrates through Douglas and Oliver, who juvenilise, demean and debilitate women, not much has changed in the way male-dominated medicine views its female patients. The way Victoria is oppressed is not limited to her garments, though. She is sexually deprived as well. For the nineteenth-century woman, eroticism and pleasure out of sex were completely tabooed and limited to men. Victoria tells Forgiveness “erotic tendencies are one of the primary symp-

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toms of the ovarian disease” (14). She is so suppressed that she thinks a woman cannot have erotic tendencies. Masturbation, “the vice” as she names it, “leads to lesions, TB, dementia” (14). In fact, she even straps her children’s hands down at night to prevent them from committing the vice. Such precautions are reminiscent of the recommendations made by John Harvey Kellogg in his Plain Facts for Old and Young (1881). A fierce advocate of sexual abstinence, Kellogg claimed that sexual desires were harmful to the body, and therefore called masturbating the “solitary vice,” “self-abuse,” and “self-pollution.” In order to treat “self-abuse” and its effects, he advised parents to prevent children from this solitary vice by bandaging or tying their hands (315). Thus, Victoria as a sexually deprived woman follows the advice of her day to prevent her children from committing such acts. Loomer channels Victoria’s repressed sexual urges through reflexive responses such as tics and bites. As understood from the stage directions, “whenever she says the word ‘husband,’ her lower arm flings out from the waist, as if to swat someone” (13). Furthermore, her biting habit grows as a reaction to the oppression she experiences. How androcentrism mutilates women is best reflected when Victoria says: “I bit his nose! And now he’s wondering if a few teeth might not be removed as well. Along with the uterus. And the ovaries, of course” (49). Seemingly, what Victoria goes through underlines the fact that a woman’s disobedience to her husband would not go unpunished. She has a hysterectomy at the end, not an ovariectomy, although her husband wants both. However, while she is in the recovery room with Wanda, she says to her “Just the uterus! I made an agreement with my husband” (60). Considering the malformation in her uterus due to the whalebone corset, hysterectomy was inevitable, yet her compromise with her husband is supposedly an attempt to reclaim her body. Throughout the play, Victoria educates herself, gaining an inquisitive outlook on the practices performed by her husband. Towards the end, she reads Women Who Love Too Much (1990), a bestseller self-help book by Robin Norwood, which aims to teach women to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy love, helping them to change the way they love and do away with the abusive men to whom they are attracted. She learns from the book that her relationship with her husband is a mere addiction. “I don’t believe I love my husband at all,” she says picking up the book (60). At the end of the play, she proves more assertive towards her husband not giving up her books. Although it costs her the uterus, she reconciles with her body and becomes aware of the male-dominated world around her.

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Beauty in Captivity: Footbinding and its Implications Historian Dorothy Ko maintains that the present understanding of footbinding is shaped by a number of sources written by men, which include missionary accounts, literary studies of the custom’s origins, and erotica. She concludes that although these writings define contemporary readings of footbinding as a man-to-woman story, it is, in fact, a woman-to-woman story. It is in the voices of women, between the binder and the bound (169). In The Waiting Room, the audience gains knowledge about footbinding from Forgiveness From Heaven, a wealthy eighteenth-century Chinese woman with bound feet. She gives the audience a detailed account of her bound feet, unknowingly revealing to the audience how “the threeinch golden lotus” can become the mark of the bodily and psychological oppression of women as well as a source of female beauty as defined by the patriarchal system. Women are victimized at the very hands of their mothers, who serve as patriarchal proxies, which inflicts a major blow to the delicate relationship between mothers and daughters. One day mother say to me “Forgiveness From Heaven, today is lucky day by the moon. Time to start binding…” […] Then mother takes bandage, place on inside of instep, and carry over small toes to force them in and towards the sole. Then bandage is wrapped around heel nice and toes are drawn close, real close together. (12–13)

As understood from the stage directions, she explains, with pride, the procedure that she underwent. Unaware of the fact that footbinding degrades and infantilizes women, reducing them to invalids, she “recounts her ordeal with a cheeriness bordering on relish,” which was how it was perceived by Chinese society. Got smaller! Soon the flesh became putrescent, and little pieces sloughed off from the sole as toes began to putrefy. (Laughs) When I ate salted fish, my feet would swell and pus would drip … Mother would remove bindings, lance corns with a needle, and wipe the pus and blood and dead flesh…. And every two weeks, I changed shoes, each pair one quarter inch smaller … And after two years, my feet were practically dead—so no more pain! Finally, all the bones were broken and four toes bent in nice neat row towards plantar. (13)

Radical feminists Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin direct their invectives against the sexual and patriarchal elements of bound-feet society. Daly portrays footbinding in terms of men’s decision to torture and mutilate women to satisfy their erotic desires (134–52), while Dworkin equates

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plastic surgery, which she alleges is a form of patriarchal oppression, with footbinding (95–117). Furthermore, Ko notes that footbinding engraved the doctrine of the separate spheres on the female body, being the most visible symbol of the containment that women suffered in male-dominated Chinese family society (149). Women in Chinese society gave footbinding a new set of meanings, particularly as a celebration of womanhood, and domestic virtues were tied to the practice of footbinding (Cassel 40). In order to contain them within the domestic sphere, young girls’ feet were bound at the age of six, the period at which boys were taught to be more visible and active in public sphere (Ko 169). This fact reinforces Forgiveness From Heaven’s story, whose feet was first bound at the age of five, and who was betrothed by her father to her husband at the age of nine. Wives with small feet reinforced masculinity for the husband, and unless women were delicate and reticent, he would seem too effeminate (Ko 148). As Suzie Lan Cassel contends, a woman’s ability to endure pain and remain obedient is an important trait that made her valuable to her husband (40). Her suffering strengthens his masculinity, which parallels what Forgiveness from Heaven says: “Men crazy for golden lotus. Feel much love and pity for your suffering” (14). In eighteenth-century Chinese society, bound feet were considered to be the most erogenous zone of the female body. These “golden lotuses” were evidence of an obvious foot fetish in this patriarchal society. In a manic state, Forgiveness From Heaven rejects the medical examination of Dr. Douglas, who shows the intern the toes. When Douglas and the intern try to grab Forgiveness’s foot, she keeps kicking them away, exclaiming “Examine? Examine! You want to smell! And lick and bite and suck! … I’m a married woman! My husband will kill you—you even look at my feet!” (62). Conveying that “[b]ound feet make buttocks larger, more attractive,” Forgiveness believes that her bound feet are erogenous and contribute to her sexuality, and therefore they are off-limits, even to doctors. Sigmund Freud observed in his 1927 essay “Fetishism” that footbinding was a symbol of the castration of women as well as that of men’s own castration fears. He conveys that by mutilating the female foot and then revering it like a fetish after being mutilated, the Chinese rewarded women for their obedience while being castrated (157). According to Freud, foot fetishes also depend on “a coprophilic smell desire which has been lost by repression,” where the “[f]ilthy and ill-smelling foot is the sexual object in the perversion, which corresponds to foot fetishism” (Freud, Basic Writings 567-68). Likewise, Forgiveness From Heaven’s feet smell bad, yet she does not wash them as “my husband, he’s crazy for the smell” (12).

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Through deliberate allusions to Freud, Loomer enables the audience to psychoanalyze these victimized women in the play. Loomer skillfully adds humor to Forgiveness’ tragic story as she does with Victoria’s in order to shock the audience and bring them to an awareness of the hazards of the patriarchal body politics. When Victoria, Forgiveness and Wanda come together in the waiting room, each informing the others of her condition, Forgiveness mentions the possibility of her foot being amputated. As the audience is just about to empathize with her, she states “What I need a foot for, at my age?” (50) Indeed, this sarcastic statement, even if not intended as such by Forgiveness herself, carries a provoking message for women today. It suggests that the patriarchy immobilizes women and makes them reticent, mutilating them physiologically and psychologically through body and mind-altering processes, ultimately bringing them to a “what-do-I-need-a-foot-for?” mindset in which they embrace their incapacitated state, even reinforcing their abuse. Throughout the play, Forgiveness From Heaven is not aware of the fact that her body is being victimized by androcentric notions of beauty and sexuality until she watches “Stupid Pet Tricks” on Late Show with David Letterman, in which—with a painkiller-addled mind—she empathizes with the animals that are locked away with chains on their feet (68). Later tranquilized with a shot administered by the nurse, Forgiveness hallucinates meeting her husband, who leaves her for his fifth wife, giving the audience the impression that she finally understands how she has been abused and victimized by her husband. The final scene of the play is when Forgiveness’ soul awakens and begins to unwrap her feet, “as if unwrapping the bound years … first with the relief of the aging woman, then faster with the joy of the bound five-year-old child”(75). “She dances and dances, spinning off the yoke of the centuries” (76). Although she loses her life, her liberated soul reconciles with her now independent body, and through dancing, she reacts against the patriarchal system which tries to contain both her mind and body.

The Uncanny Notion of Beauty: Breast Implants and Cancer In The Waiting Room, the third protagonist, through whom Loomer challenges and satirizes patriarchal society and its notions of beauty, is Wanda, a character with whom the audience can easily identify as she is a contemporary woman diagnosed with breast cancer due to leaking silicone breast implants. DeShazer states that feminist playwrights portray women’s bodily betrayal and suffering as they are diagnosed with cancer, and

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presents their struggle for autonomy and their multiple subjectivities (57). Likewise, The Waiting Room connects between the personal and the political, expressing outrage at cancer and its invasive treatments, as well as analyzing cultural factors that cause cancer and challenging medical establishment (DeShazer 54). Women modify their bodies to please the patriarchy and end up suffering both physiologically and psychologically. As the play progresses, Wanda moves from ignorance to anguish and later to autonomy, confessing how male-dominated society manipulates the notions of beauty. Described as a forty-year-old “modern gal from Jersey,” Wanda has “enormous breasts and perfected everything else, too” (Loomer 7). Loomer portrays her as a modern woman, who has sacrificed herself for the beauty myth, which trapped late twentieth and twenty-first-century womanhood through cosmetic surgery. For many feminist critics, the rise of cosmetic surgery as a means of body modification represents the ongoing oppression of women by the ideology of femininity and the cultural tyranny of beauty (Reischer & Koo 306). As Keith Cohen maintains, cosmetic surgery marks artificial beauty, which is designed for the benefit of subjective onlookers, in other words, men. Artificial beauty positions the beautiful woman as an object, and declares the importance of the onlooker as a subject (157). Wanda has thus objectified herself for the benefit of patriarchy. In the examining room, she lists the surgical procedures that she underwent: I had my nose done. And they left too much cartilage, so I had to do it again. Then I had to have the chin enhancement to match. And cheekbones. Uh… lipo—tummy and thighs… my tits… I got them for my [thirtieth] birthday. They were a present. From my father… Tits in, tits out… new tits in… new tits out… plus the tits I have now. (17)

As she confesses to her nurse, Brenda, it is not surprising that her first breast implants came as a birthday gift from her father, which reveals how fathers, if not husbands in Wanda’s case, define beauty and force women to conform to these definitions of beauty very early in their development. The patriarchal system prompts inferiority in women regarding their bodily shape and appearance, permanently damaging their self-esteem. “[N]obody ever called me ‘Pancake’ again” (17), a statement in which Wanda articulates her previous inferiority due to her flat chest, which conveys the reason for having breast implants. It is obvious that Wanda has lost control of her own body, leaving it in the hands of patriarchal society through cosmetic surgeries. After she learns the possibility of malignant cancer in her breast, her nurse tries to

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cheer her up by saying: “We don’t even know you got cancer. Where you goin’ get cancer? You don’t have a single body part that’s real” (40). What Brenda says jokingly reveals the truth that her body is not real; it is not hers but medically constructed. In the recovery room, after surgery, Wanda says “They took a—they took my breast…. And my tits of course… And they took some lymph nodes to see if they’re … ‘clean’” (60). According to DeShazer, the repetition of “they took” illustrates Wanda’s lack of agency as “took” bears the negative connotation of theft (68). As the doctor informs her about the malignant lymph nodes, she refuses his treatment, saying “All my life I let guys do pretty much what they wanted with my body” (71). This is a groundbreaking confession because, with this statement, Wanda reconciles with her body and realizes how she has been manipulated. The fact that she could not control her life up to that point forces her to awaken to her cancer and finally become her own person. … this cancer… it’s in my body. It’s not in your body, or the good doctor’s body… this cancer is… mine. For better or worse, till death do us apart, it’s about one thing I got left that’s all – mine. And if I want to take it to Tijuana or Guadafuckinglajara—I’ve never been out of tri-state area… If I want to die. If I want to call my doctor and say “No thank you very much,” or “Please God help me!”—for once in my lousy screwed up life, it’s MY BODY! MY BODY! MINE! (70)

This climactic moment in Wanda’s life not only represents a feminist plight but marks her awakening in which she claims her body back, accepting to get the unproven treatment in Mexico. Through her revelation, she admits having placed patriarchal values in the center of her life, objectifying and victimizing herself at the hands of cosmetic industry. Although at the end of the play she has a mastectomy, she has peace of mind, having enough strength to fight against the patriarchal system that objectifies her. The last scene of the play, in which Wanda makes up a story to entertain Forgiveness From Heaven proves that Wanda has come to terms with her body, and as a woman she is now aware of how the patriarchal system tries to trivialize women, and making them succumb to the body-altering practices and the universally-defined patriarchal norms of beauty: Once upon a time, there were three sisters. All of them stupid. One thought her feet were too big, one thought her waist was too big, and the really stupid one thought her tits weren’t big enough. So they went to Magician and said, “Make us perfect.” And he held up a magic mirror which made the sisters look alike. (74)

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As understood from the beginning of this made-up “fairy-tale,” Wanda emphasizes that women do not have control over their bodies. The magician acts as a proxy of patriarchal system fostering women to become uniform in bodily shape and appearance. Wanda continues as “… [a]nd the magician said ‘You too can look just like this.’ And the sisters gave him a pile of gold, and the Magician worked his magic … But after years, the magic started to … go bad (74–75). While telling the story, Wanda speaks of herself as a woman who has had three breast implants and has been victimized by the beauty myth, which imposes that women must be sexy, in other words, “breasty.” As Cohen states, these myths about beauty have helped manufacturers to sell breast implants and enabled surgeons to sell breast augmentation surgeries, by shaping women’s assessment of the product’s utility (167). The breast implant industry is criticized through Wanda’s statement to the nurse during the initial examination. “It’s funny. I can keep a couch six years. I can’t keep a pair of tits for six months” (17). The magic Wanda mentions is not long-lived, thus women seek more cosmetic surgeries in the name of beauty. And sisters went back to the Magician and he said, “Hey, I said I’d make you perfect. I didn’t say you’d be perfect forever. Check out the shingle. It says, ‘Magician’ not ‘God’”. And the sisters were really pissed off. What did they do? […] First, they took all the mirrors in the kingdom and smashed ‘em … and recycled the glass. Then they told all their girlfriends and daughters, “Next time you look into mirror, don’t go to the magician, come to us.” And when the women came to check out their thighs and their noses and all their other problems, they had to look in the sisters’ eyes. And the sisters would say, “Oh, gimme a break, you look fine.” At first the women didn’t believe them, ‘cause who believes you when you tell ‘em they look good, right? But the sisters kept saying, “You’re beautiful.” (75)

Wanda’s revelation paves the way for the establishment of a gynocentric community, the celebration of womanhood. Women-identified women escape from patriarchal imprisonment and find consolation in sisterhood. Female bonding is what they need to heal their wounds. Feminist discourse finds its way to change the androcentric world for the better through the depiction of the physiological and psychological sufferings of these three women. The female body has been reshaped in culturally different ways, ranging from age-old corseting and footbinding to contemporary body modification practices and cosmetic surgeries. Throughout the play, Victoria, Forgiveness From Heaven and Wanda evolve as characters from ignorance

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to autonomy. These women’s bodies reflect cultural norms of beauty while at the same time seeking the strength to struggle against them. The waiting room, in which these three women occasionally meet, acts as a catalyst, enabling the three women to get over their patriarchal oppression. They politicize what they have been going through, reminding the audience “The Personal is political,” the slogan coined by Carol Hanisch in 1968, which characterizes the second wave of feminist movement. The gatherings of these women in a waiting room echo with the consciousnessraising groups of the late 1960s, through which “women in small groups could explore the political aspects of personal life” to understand how their lives were manipulated by the patriarchy (Rosen 238). Victoria, Forgiveness, and Wanda dredge up each other’s histories, and through personal revelations, what seems normal to each woman turns out to be coercive practices that epitomize patriarchal oppression and repressive body politics. When these women tell their stories, “the personal no longer [seems] a purely individual problem, but the result of deep cultural, social, and economic forces and assumptions” (Rosen 239). Having learned to see the world through men’s eyes, each of these women begins to view life through the eyes of a woman, finding remedies for each other’s oppression and celebrating their womanhood.

Works Cited Aston, Elaine. Feminist Theater Practice: A Handbook. New York: Routledge. 1999. Print. Atkinson, Michael. “Pretty in Ink: Conformity, Resistance and Negotiation in Women’s Tattooing.” Rethinking Society in the 21st century: Critical Readings in Sociology. Eds. Michelle Webber and Kate Bezanson. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. 2008. 83–93. Print Cassel, Susie Lan. ““... the binding altered not only my feet but my whole character”: Footbinding and First-World Feminism in ChineseAmerican Literature.” Journal of Asian American Studies. 10.1 (February 2007): 31–58. Print. Cohen, Kerith. “Truth & Beauty, Deception & Disfigurement: A Feminist Analysis of Breast Implant Litigation.” William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law. 1.1 (1994): 149–182. Print. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press. 1978. Print. De Shazer, Mary K. Fractured Borders: Reading Women’s Cancer Literature. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 2005. Print. Dworkin, Andrea. Women Hating. New York: Penguin. 1974. Print.

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Ecob, Gilbert. The Well-Dressed Woman: A Study in the Practical Application to Dress of the Laws of Health, Art, and Morals. New York: Fowler & Wells. 1892. Internet Archive. Web. 20 April 2015. Fields, Jill. “Fighting the Corsetless Evil: Shaping Corsets and Culture, 1900-1930.” Journal of Social History. 33.2 (1999): 355–384. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press. 152– 159. Print. —. The Basic Writings. Trans. Dr. A.A. Brill. New York: Random House. 1938. 567–568. Print. Geis, Gilbert and Ivan Bunn. A Trial of Witches: A seventeenth-century witchcraft prosecution. New York: Routledge. 1997. Print Kellogg, John Harvey. Plain Facts for Old and Young. Burlington, 1881. Project Gutenberg. Web. 22 April 2015. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1994. Print. Lakoff Robin Tolmach and Raquel Scherr. Face Value: The Politics of Beauty. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1984. Print. Loomer, Lisa. The Waiting Room. New York : Dramatists Play Service Inc. 1998. Print. Morants, Regina Markell and Sue Zschoche. “Professionalism, Feminism and Gender Roles: A Comparative Study of Nineteenth-Century Medical Therapeutics.” The Journal of American History. 67.3 (December 1980): 568–88. Print. Murton, Michelle Mock. “Behind the ‘barred windows’: The Imprisonment of Women’s Bodies and Minds in the Nineteenthcentury America.” WILLA. 4 (1995): 22–26. Print. Norwood, Robin. Women Who Love Too Much. New York: Pocket Books. 1990. Print. Reischer, E. And Kathryn S. Koo. “The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 33 (2004): 297-317. Print. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin. 2006. Print. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “Women’s Servility to Marriage and Fashion.” Eds. Cheris Kramarae and Ann Russo. The Radical Women’s Press of the 1850s. New York: Routledge. 1991. 236–37. Print. Wolff, Janet. “Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics.” Ed. Amelia Jones. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge. 2010. 414–425. Print.

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Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: William Morrow and Company. 2002. Print.

READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, CRESCENT, AND I LOVE A BROAD MARGIN TO MY LIFE: TOYING WITH NATIONAL AND IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST SIHAM ARFAOUI

Literary representations of contemporary conflicts in the Middle East throughout the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries are currently amounting to a global imaginary. In fact, they are expanding in number, ethnicity, colour and genre and going beyond national borders to reemerge in the form of world literature. As a matter of fact, such narratives as Reading Lolita in Tehran and Crescent (both published in 2003) and more recently I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, a collection of poems published in 2011, interestingly crisscross at the level of redrawing geopolitical and religio-sectarian conflicts in Iran, Iraq or in between. Further on, in embodying the U.S. as a main catalyst in the conflicting region, the considered works amount to world war stories, irrespective of national wholeness. Thematically speaking, this intertextual feature encourages a combined examination of the war stories by Azar Nafisi, Diana Abu-Jaber, and Maxine Hong Kingston with identity and conflict in the Middle East as major perspectives. My interest in their literary corpus is broadly grounded in its generic difference, but also in the political involvement of the writers concerned either as Diasporas from the warring nations or regarding their outspoken engagement to world pacifism. Altogether, Nafisi, Abu-Jaber, and Kingston reconfigure the eventful Middle East, extending from the IranIraq War in the 80s to the Persian Gulf War in the 90s, and the Invasion of Iraq in 2003. By intertwining stories about warring nations, the writers under consideration offer interesting insights and open up myriad controversies regarding the identitarian reverberations of patriotic disillusionment, political activism/opposition, and cultural dislocation. As it will be shown through the current discussion, their attempts to evoke the identitarian parameters which can be encompassed in issues of political oppression

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and/or transnational political activism in resistance to war remain in dialogue with cultural and ideological hegemonies. Opting for a temporal logic at the level of organization that would ensure clarity, I shall first examine Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and the ways in which its embodiment of the war between Iran and Iraq remains entangled in the writer’s identity as an Iranian intellectual woman who ponders upon the mobilization for the warfare through religious fanaticism in deep connection to the corruption of the Iranian regime. Chronologically, this will prepare the path to look into Abu-Jaber’s Crescent and its negotiation of the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s and the consequential intervention of the U.S. Since this conflict reaches us from at least three angles, I will place emphasis on the Iraqi diaspora’s sense of exile, the hybrid’s desperate endeavour to recuperate a hyphenated sense of home, and the American photographer’s attempt to discredit the image of the Iraqi and Arab as terrorists. Later, the move to Kingston’s memoir in verse shall bring to focus the nexus of identity and conflict in the Middle East through the angle of a female speaker who is born in the U.S. as a major front that has played a dynamic role in the aforementioned conflicts in the region, yet her perspective is far from being pro-establishment. Through Broad Margin, I shall discuss similar controversies from the standpoint of a political activist who joins the peace demonstrations against the U.S. announced war on Iraq in 2003 in order to demonstrate a determined celebration of pacifism to the detriment of over reactive violence. Initially, it should be mentioned that Nafisi's memoir features two types of conflict, internal and external, both of which are set within the context of the post-revolutionary Islamic rule in Iran. While I use the internal conflict to refer to the ideological battle between the Radical Islamists and the Leninist-Marxist secularists the external conflict concerns the Persian War involving Iraq and Iran. In a similar framework, Nafisi states: The polarization created by the regime confused every aspect of life. Not only were the forces of God fighting an emissary of Satan, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, but they were also fighting agents of Satan inside the country. At all times, from the very beginning of the revolution and all through the war and after, the Islamic regime never forgot its holy battle against its internal enemies. (158)

The passage highlights the deep connection between an outside conflict with Iraq and an inside conflict with the Iranian subversion. The former seems to have been twisted to the advantage of winning the internal conflict. Nafisi deals with both issues in the chapter titled “Austen” which

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divulges an ambivalent stance vis-à-vis the Persian War. It is a stance through which the writer’s identity as an Iranian oscillates between or develops from temporary detachment to criticism and, finally, disillusionment. Up to a certain extent, it is crucial to point out the memoirist’s distinct aloofness from ideological discourses on political conflicts, at least at the onset of her academic life. Still a Ph.D. student at the University of Oklahoma, Nafisi has been compelled to join the Iranian student movement. She explains: “My father’s imprisonment and my family’s vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me toward politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist” (85). Having moved back to Iran after completing her post-graduate studies, Nafisi is faced afresh with the controversial interpellation of the political in academia. As an academic in Iran, she struggles with the presumption of detachment from political matters. On campus, she tries “to ignore the posters and notices pasted haphazardly on the walls” (188). Here, I have a sense of the memoirist witnessing an internal struggle between immersion and disinterest, indirectly enforced by the consequent aftermath of any involvement. Nafisi comments: “Somehow these shabby posters and their slogans interfered with my work; they made me forget that I was at the university to teach literature” (189). Essentially, the statement poses the problem of the campus being ideologically manipulated by those in power. All along Reading Lolita in Tehran, teaching in the midst of fervent war proves almost impossible and irrelevant, just like Nafisi’s starting notion of detachment. In fact, Nafissi indicates that classes are often disrupted by the Islamic associations, “playing military marches to announce a new victory, or to mourn for a member of the university community who had been martyred in the war” (208-09). Ironically, she herself has become “an avid and insatiable collector,” by saving “pictures of martyrs, young men, some mere children, published in the daily papers beside the wills they had made before going to the front” (159). From herein seems to start Nafisi’s journey further from the detachment vis-à-vis a war discourse which cynically exploits patriotic feelings of anger and panic following foreign attacks. Given such cynicism, Nafissi could not hold but bring to the fore of her memoir the extremist, oppressive manipulation of the supposed border conflict between Iran and Iraq. In the process, she divulges the ways in which the Islamist regime promotes a fundamentalist agenda in mobilizing the Iranians for the warfare. All forms of criticism were now considered Iraqi-inspired and dangerous to national security. Those groups and individuals without a sense of loyal-

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ty to the regime’s brand of Islam were excluded from the war effort. They could be killed or sent to the front, but they could not voice their social or political preferences. (Nafisi 159)

In such a context of political oppression, nationalism and fundamentalism become ideally mingled to make a vicious discrepancy between the good Iranian patriots and the bad subversive Iranians. While the former adhere to the regime’s ideology and the war effort, proving dutifulness, allegiance, and self-sacrifice the latter are deemed not just disloyal and unpatriotic, but additionally dissidents susceptible to execution. In relation to this, Nafisi demonstrates that the regime’s war propaganda distorts universal ethics of humanity only to the service of what is called a fundamentalist brand of Islam which is based on radicalism and fervency. In fact, she states: Iran’s war with Iraq was the same as the war carried on by the third and most militant imam, Imam Hussein, against the infidels, and the Iranians were going to conquer Karballa, the holy city in Iraq where Imam Hussein’s shrine was located. (158)

Leaning on this discourse, the war leaders and fighters attempt to draw their holy mission as pure martyrdom, by naming every troop after the prophet or a Shiite Saint. Ironically, Ayatollah Khomeini and some of his followers have encouraged “what became known as ‘human wave’ attacks,” formed mainly of youngsters (Nafisi 208). Here, there is an implicit reference to the promises of heaven and automatic forgiveness for the martyred young soldiers, in turn, showing the extent to which war fanatics can even twist religion to serve their agendas. By the end of the considered chapter in Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi works at disrupting the general acceptance of the war as a national cause and/or a holy battle towards emphasizing the Iranians’ disillusionment. This is achieved by expressing the latter’s awareness of the wide breach between truth and reality as well as of their oppositional silence. For example, Nafisi states “the world of the viewers was one of silent defiance, a defiance that was meaningful only in the context of the raucous commitment demanded by the ruling hierarchy, but otherwise permeated, inevitably and historically, by resignation” (209). In this vein, striking disillusionment has been reinforced by the consequent military defeats, especially, as “people expressed anti-war sentiments or cursed the perpetuators of the war” (Nafisi 209). The other reinforcement, Nafisi seems to explain, behind the rejection of militarism lends itself to a new generation of enlightened or moderate Islamists who are keenly aware of the degree of political corruption which

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is rooted in the involved war. The writer refers to the emerging progressive Islamists who had begun to sense all that was not right with the direction their revolution was taking and decided it was time to intercede. The lack of progress in the war with Iraq was taking its toll. Those who had been ardent revolutionaries at the start of the revolution—people now in their late teens and early twenties—and the younger generation, who were coming of age, were discovering the cynicism and corruption of the leaders who had taken power. (176)

The leaders evoked have won nothing but hatred and disgust, ironically, begetting resentment mingled with disappointment among Iranians. The whole thing uncovers the possible connections between the identity flows of (non)fictional Iranian characters towards a fervent silent opposition, mainly among academics, to the considered conflict. Interestingly, published in the same year as Reading Lolita in Tehran, Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent raises similar identitarian controversies in its re-imagination of the First Gulf War. The novel offers an interpretation of the pull to romanticism in making sense of the absurdity and non-sense of a warring tyranny. With a special focus on the fictional stance of the Iraqi diaspora in the U.S., Crescent does not just critique despotic regimes but additionally ponders the diaspora’s cultural dislocation and the exile’s struggle with memory. All along, it debates a pivotal inversion of the mainstream media’s stereotyped image of the Iraqi, the Arab and, consequently, the Arab American as terrorists. In the process of contesting the will of the centre to subjugate the periphery, using Johan Galtung’s terms, Crescent does not exonerate the autocratic desire of the centre of the periphery from criticism (as cited in Perry 2006).1 As a matter of fact, the novel connects the confiscation of the national liberties, mainly the freedom of expression, to the expansion of Ba’athism in Iraq, which came to power not long before Hanif’s escape to England (Abu-Jaber, p. 119).2 In this context, Crescent gets its meaning as a political satire from the fact of evoking state violence, as pointed out by Hanif upon alluding to “many why-nots in Iraq. It’s a tricky place for Iraqi men—there’s the army, jail, torture, hangings. I’m wanted by the government for dodging army duty” (Abu-Jaber 119). An Iraqi exile newly appointed as a university teacher in the United Sates, Hanif first escapes the army duty in Iraq (Abu-Jaber 292) and then runs away to England (Abu-Jaber 119). In between, he develops an activist spirit by engulfing himself, his sister and younger brother in secret denunciations of the Ba’athist government (Abu-Jaber 292). He admits that his brother’s subversive revolutionary tendencies are no less than a mirror of his own giv-

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ing in to political activism, “working, in the grand Iraqi tradition, on overthrowing the leadership—reading and writing mainly subversive poetry” (Abu-Jaber 119). This developing, overturning struggle puts at stake the whole family which has been molested by Saddam’s security agents, resulting in the arrest of the younger brother before his thirteenth birthday and the sister’s execution (Abu-Jaber 119). However, it should be noticed that in parallel with critiquing the responsibility of the Iraqi state for engendering political oppression, Abu-Jaber’s target goes beyond establishing dictatorship as an Iraqi tradition.3 In a close context, Crescent evokes exile as a forced option. In fact, before running away from Iraq, Hanif dreams of a new place, away from the new president, as far away as the other side of the world, a place where he will no longer have to look at his brother and sister not-sleeping, where he will not have to count his heart beats, his breaths, the pulse in his eyelids. (Abu-Jaber 14)

Apart from enabling the protagonist to escape persecution, exile also represents an occasion to escape his guilt-ridden conscience for endangering the life of his two siblings and the harmony of his family. Later, he explains to Sirine: The fact of exile is bigger than everything else in my life. Leaving my country was like—I don’t know—like part of my body was torn away. I have phantom pains from the loss of that part—I’m haunted by myself. I don’t know—does any of that make any sense? It’s as if I’m trying to describe something that I’m not, that’s no longer here. (Abu-Jaber 162)

As pointed out, even after settling himself in Los Angeles, Hanif cannot do without an overwhelming sentiment of dislocation. He turns out completely lost to the hauntings of the past, hence, evoking the trauma of imposed immigration. In addition to exploring the exile’s psychological impertinence, the novel ponders into the more recent war on terror inside and outside the United States as a propagandistic rhetoric which aims to legitimize the notion of exclusive surveillance. The connection it makes between the gaze enforced by the C.I.A. agents and invisibility reflects a broader foreign policy which ebbs and downs depending on the fluctuations of the multilayered conflicts in the Middle East. In fact, the novel under consideration explicitly equates surveillance and discrimination as a controlling strategy towards the Arab immigrant community. Ironically, the intruding gaze of the C.I.A. agents, who become regular customers in Um-Nadia’s café and a familiar complementary segment of its general scene, turns state

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surveillance into mere harassment of ordinary immigrants (Abu-Jaber 18). As a matter of instance, it is essentially due to the C.I.A. investigations that the Egyptian proprietors of the Middle-Eastern café felt compelled to sell out their restaurant to Um-Nadia (Abu-Jaber 18). In the name of the war on terror, surveillance becomes associated with deeply destabilizing effects which range from putting in practice the official stigmatization of the Arab in the U.S. to foregrounding “the loneliness of the Arab” (AbuJaber 19). Um-Nadia deems this loneliness “all-consuming”, commenting that it “is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother’s lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country” (Abu-Jaber 19). In other words, nothing compensates the Arab immigrant for being targeted with accusing fingers, not his family, let alone his social mobility. The challenge to this strategic exclusion reaches its apex when articulated from the mainstream perspective of Nathan as an American character. In fact, the novel excels in destabilizing the ideological uses of terrorism, by unravelling the role of media in the perpetuation of this stereotypical image. In the following excerpt, Nathan gives us a self-critical view of his own struggle with comprehending this concept: ‘[W]hen I was twenty-one, I didn’t know about the world at all. But I had this idea about cowboys and Indians and submarine commanders and Russian spies. I used to be unhappy because I thought that all the bad guys were already caught and there wasn’t much excitement left in the world. And then one day I went to see Black Sunday. You know—the one with Bruce Dern where the terrorists take over the Goodyear Blimp? But I came home thinking, oh, good, there’s still terrorists! ‘So I thought of that as my mission. I mean, don’t we all want to have missions? I started dreaming of going to someplace like Lebanon or Iraq and hunting down terrorists […] You know, like James Bond? […] I had this thought about going over to the Middle East and uncovering terrorist spies. I would take their photos and send them to the C.I.A. or some place.’ (Sic, Abu-Jaber 252-53)

The eminence of this passage lends itself to pointing out the vague and elusive quintessence revolving around the notion of terrorism, especially, when the latter is linked to the discourse of the American mission in the world. What brings Nathan down-to-earth is the reality-proof to which he subjects his distorting biases. His ultimate visit of the Middle East is evidence of the mythical propaganda encompassing similar discourses. This first-

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hand experience provides a counter-narrative to the master narrative. Nathan relates I travelled through all these different countries, and this amazing thing happened—the people there were really nice to me [...] I felt like I’d finally found something real. Like I’d regained my senses,” inferring “I never found my terrorist, though, unless […] it was me. (Abu-Jaber 253)

This very emphasis on the chasm between truth and reality draws attention to Nathan’s contribution to a reverse discourse which, ironically, ends up disfiguring his proper image as a villain par excellence. Such a disruptive impulse in Crescent has the asset of preparing the path for the ensuing analysis of Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life on the basis of its resistance to the U.S. interventionism in Iraq in 2003. In an evocative temporal and thematic textual conversation with Crescent, Kingston’s Broad Margin relies on the perspective of a ChineseAmerican political activist, struggling for global peace. The memoir complicates the identity issues concurrent with a major contemporary conflict in the Middle East which is tackled from a positioning which is neither Iraqi nor Iraqi-American. The writer’s struggle for pacifism and later imprisonment are analysed as resistant acts which aim at making the pacifiers’ voice as advocates of non-violence heard. It mirrors an oppositional spirit of non-violence, which provides a thematic fil-conducteur all throughout and creates several degrees of irony. Kingston approaches her home country’s invasion of Iraq as a woman activist with a strong background in civil struggles against militarism. Her participation in the 2003 demonstrations in front of the White House relocates her peace demonstrations in San Francisco against the war in Vietnam (135). In both events, Kingston expresses an anti-war sentiment while celebrating the mobilization for pacifism. Moreover, she equally points out the symbolic coincidence of the time setting of the peace demonstrations in 2003 with the International Women’s Day, thus, evoking the crucial role that women can play in supporting the worldly need for peace. She holds: “In Washington, D.C.,/ on International Women’s Day, 2003, our peace/ dragoness was a mile long, winding our way/to the White House. 1,000,000 people/ marched in Rome. And thousands of Shiite/ and Sunni Muslims together in Baghdad” (135-136). Other references to the anti-war demonstrations which recur from Italy to Iraq, uniting the two major and rival Muslim sects, the Shiite and the Sunni, highlight a global struggle for peace. In Kingston’s description of the peace demonstrators, she stresses the value of peace as a common pursuit. This is reinforced through the domi-

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nant festival-like demonstrations intermitted by singing, dancing and ululations as tokens of hope and life. In the middle of the park, drummers—Native Americans— drummed banging day and night; the President won’t sleep till he calls off Shock and Awe. Wave to the drummers, dance to the drumming. Sing, and dance to our singing, ululation, and “Give peace a chance ...” Wave to the peace marchers, wave to the police, wave to the children of Iraq. Everyone I saw was nonviolent. (Kingston 137)

By waving to the drummers, the White House police, the peace marchers and the Iraqi children, the demonstrators call for nonviolence as a key strategy for civilians, leaders, and the future generation. More than this, nonviolence amounts to a tool of transnational dialogue, thus, transcending cultural barriers, religious and historical animosities. Herein, the writer is overwhelmed with an overcoming ecstasy, a feeling springing from the mass gathered to fight for such elevated values of peace and life (135). Peace demonstrations are an occasion for empathy, solidarity, and interconnection, rather than sectarian rivalry and East/West disparities. The memoirist is keen on showing not merely the demonstrators’ disagreement with their nation’s declaration of war, but also a deeper symbolical oppositional stance. This is mirrored in the challenging gesture of walking on the White House sidewalk, supposed to be a restricted zone. We read: “We walked backward, broke the yellow tape,/ up onto the curb, into the ‘restricted/ zone (White House sidewalk).’/ Slowly, imperceptibly moving so as not to provoke/ Violent arrest. Singing, ‘Salaam, peace,/ Shalom’” (Kingston 139-140). This particular trespass is less provocative of the white house security than an adamant emphasis on the peace pursuit. It is described as a willingly smooth transgression, tellingly accompanied with peaceful greetings which are translated in at least three languages, Arabic, English, and Hebrew. In a hint to the challenging choice of the White House—described as “Our house, our street”—as a setting for the antiwar demonstrations, Kingston highlights the unprecedented hindrance of the demonstrators from reaching the front fence (136). She affirms “[f]or the first time in history, the area in front/ of the White House fence was banned to demonstrators” (136). Being stopped at Pennsylvania Avenue, the demonstrators have re-organized themselves in sit-ins “upon the historic Ground,” singing “Our house, our street” (Kingston 136). The recurrence of this phrase sends out a message to the demonstrators’ leaders and representatives of their controversial accountability.

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In the meantime, Kingston acknowledges the looming despair which emanates despite the demonstrators’ solidarity for non-violence; albeit a sense of despair rather inspiring perseverance than submission. She states: “I was desperate for miracle,/ perhaps the reason I could open my arms wide/ and gather up great big pink/ balls of Peace, and hurl them east toward Iraq,/ and turn and hurl them at the White House” (139). The symbolic gesture of flinging the pink balls East and West sends out an appeal to both Iraq and the U.S. to reach out for an agreement that would terminate the ominous declaration of war. It amounts to an adamant emphasis on a peace pursuit, translated in at least three languages, Arabic, English, and Hebrew. Ironically, Kingston contrasts the activists’ investment in peacemaking as opposed to the invincible number, rank and power of the guards called upon in reaction. “The many kinds of police/ Kept arriving—first, the Law Enforcement/ Park Rangers, who I think are Federal Police;/ then came the Metropolitan Police, which included/ mounted police and motorcycle cops,/ then SWAT teams/ TAC squads” (Kingston 138). Gradually, the 25 women demonstrators have been encircled by an incredible number of cops (Kingston 140). Implicitly, Kingston suggests the absurdity of exhibiting such explicit evocations of invincible supremacy and arrest threats in attempting to dissuade just 25 peaceful demonstrators who remain unshakable in their non-violent cause. Even through Kingston’s detention experience, there is a pointer to an ironical poetics of resistance. In fact, the writer wants us to grasp the value of rest that could accompany her confinement in a cell “like a toilet stall” (145). Even though she has been handcuffed and dispossessed, she ponders: At last, the solitary confinement of my dreams. Nothing to fear. I could live here. I could live here a long time, And be content. As a girl, I knew I could take solitary, if only I got to see movies. Older all I need would be books and pencil and paper. But here I am, and I don’t feel like reading. And I don’t feel like writing. Can’t write, hands tied in back. Rest. Perfect rest. (145)

For Kingston, the confinement turns out an opportunity for both writing and taking a break. Ironically, it grows into a perfect muse. In a further irony, the jailed is gradually recast as a creative community or tribe. In fact, Kingston is not the only imprisoned rebel figure but is

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adjoined in this fate by the famous Native American novelist Alice Walker, writer of The Colour Purple. In Walker’s companionship, Kingston discovers their Buddhist affinities: “I’m glad, we’ve both had Buddhist practice, and know:/ Sit, be quiet. Breathe out./ Breathe in” (p. 146). A commune Buddhist practice of meditation is what draws the jailed writers closer to each other and equips Kingston with endurance as a necessary pacifist skill to cope with her stigmatization as “a wanted/ felon” (149). Even more, the jail experience loses its association with disgrace and intimidation to take on a deep resistant token, especially, once the prison cell ends up full of the 25 women demonstrators loudly singing “This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine./ Oh, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine./ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine […] On the children of Iraq, I'm gonna let it shine” (Kingston 147). This way, the demonstrators soon resume their celebratory spirit by re-singing slogans and melodies about life, love, and sympathy for the children of Iraq. Singing for similar values in group transcends the constraints of the arrest in order to take up a resistant halo. It mocks the loss of Kingston’s fourth title, The Fifth Book of Peace, in San Francisco fire before seeing light or even the tongue mutilation of the Chinese author of Book of Peace to abort adamant, peaceful struggles (148). In an ironical articulation of further resistance, Kingston states that even though the peace demonstrations have not been sufficiently strong enough to deter the declaration of war, yet they contributed in making the violent American attacks less disastrous than it was planned: “I do believe: Because/ the world protested, the tonnage of bombs was not as/ massive as planned. And we hit few civilians” (Kingston 151). A parallel assumption remains important in enabling the writer to keep faith in her pacifist cause, as she admits “The peace we have made shall have consequences./ All affects all” (151). Despite all, the statement may sound a candid glorification of the supremacy of the United States and trivialize the documented catastrophic aftermath of its intervention in Iraq. In a very significant closure to the poem, the speaker offers the reader a bell of peace whereby one single strong stroke is capable of awakening the dormant minds and shaking them up into awareness. Outperforming the noise of explosions, the bell ring imposes a serene silence followed by Buddha’s voice, as it breathes in and out, sending out serenity and peace. Please stand on a roadside, and hold The Bell of Peace, a golden bowl, on your proffering hand, and think this thought: ‘Body, speech, and mind in perfect oneness, I send my heart along with the sound of this bell.

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May all the hearers awaken from forgetfulness, And transcend the path of anxiety and sorrow. Touch bell stick to bell, warming it, Breathe in, breathe out, then make one sure stroke. The ring changes the air. The ring rings through din. The din stills. The ring makes silence all around, all around. Explosions cease. Bombardment ends. Combatants stop to enjoy the sound of Buddha’s voice. The ring gathers time into one moment of peace. (Kingston 212)

In reinforcement of peace, such a section amplifies the magical power of Buddha as a universal icon of non-violence. In the same respect, the closing lines of the poem shake the leaders and the troops involved in the military action in Iraq into a sense of an absurd mission. In one instance, the speaker scornfully likens an American aircraft and its noisy engine to “an insect,” “a white fly” (Kingston 212). In a pointer to cowardice, she explicitly ridicules the idea of the unequal fight between sophisticated military weaponry and unprotected civilians: “We are cowards, killing without facing those we kill, / without giving our victims a chance at us” (Kingston 212). Afresh, the speaker becomes sarcastic of waging such an unequal war: Yell ‘Coward’ up at the drone, Then turn toward the air base and yell At it, ‘Coward! Coward! Coward! Coward!’ Your voice carries all the way to Virginia, Where the computer specialist is presenting the buttons. He hears you, wakes up, stops warring. (Kingston 213)

It is crucial to mention that the pacifiers’ voice becomes powerful and convincing enough to reach out for the coward “computer” soldiers. In a very significant rebellion against the system from within, the fighting soldiers react by stopping the war. In so doing, they epitomize the identity of the global citizen that Kingston seeks to achieve. In inference, Kingston’s poem speaks to the subversive core of AbuJaber’s and Nafisi’s narratives as mirrors of the anti-warfare discourse of nowadays. To a certain extent, it foreshadows the growing opposition among American citizens to the interventionist foreign policies in the Middle East and the current criticisms targeting these strategies among the American academia. However, at certain points of toying with equal representations, the same gestures can become insecure by idealizing the target-

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ed hegemonies or remnants of them and/or perpetuating their nations as disparate regions torn by violent political and sectarian differences. Overall, the considered writings have responded to the crises and requirements of the eventful twenty-first century in complex, interrelated ways. Through the examined trio, the different literary perspectives towards conflict in the Middle East overlap at several levels, extending from the incrimination of political oppression to the criticism of a controversial foreign intervention in the region. In the process, they demonstrate the importance of the intellectual elite in the peaceful resistance against the crises, anxieties, and traumas which are often associated with conflicting nations. Herein, resistance is indiscernible outside pacifism. It overcomes national borders and reconfigures the individual as a citizen of the world community, albeit the ideological as well as geographical discrepancies. The other crucial dimension in which the involved texts converse with each other has to do with the note of hope for a better future. While Nafisi seems to wager on the younger generation and its decisive role in putting an end to internal conflicts Abu-Jaber emphasizes the centrality of intercultural dialogues in transcending conflicts. When the latter was interviewed by Robin E. Field (2006) she stated “what I hope for Crescent is that it is a simple, human story about love and fear and jealousy that can transcend culture and have an immediacy that will speak to a lot of different people” (216). As such, Abu-Jaber highlights “a vision of life that, while haunted by past suffering and loss, holds out hope for the future” (Mercer and Strom 46). The whole idea suggests a quest, albeit utopian, for the great romantic story in the current global conflicting mood, above all, with respect to the shocking Israeli attacks on Gaza in July 2014. Even more, it has affinities with Kingston’s romantic conception of the global citizen who is committed to world pacifism regardless of hegemonic expectations and drives; be they nationalistic or other.

Notes 1

I am basing my understanding of the centre and the periphery on the definitions provided by Johan Galtung as he speaks of “the center of the Center (that is, the ruling class of a developed country) and the center of the Periphery (the ruling class in underdeveloped countries)” (as cited in Perry, 2006). 2 Ba’athism could be defined as an Arab political party whose theoretical basis resides in the “promotion of pan-Arab socialism” (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online). 3 Crescent attempts to target absolutist authority as a global phenomenon affecting other subcontinents such as Latin America (Abu-Jaber 287).

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Works Cited Abu-Jaber, Diana. Crescent. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. Print. “Baath·ism.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online. Web. February 2014. Field, Robin E. “A Prophet in her own town: An interview with Diana Abu-Jaber.” MELUS 31.4 (2006), 207-225. Kingston, Maxine Hong. I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. New York: Random House, 2011. Print. Mercer, L. and Strom, L. “Counter narratives: Cooking up stories of love and loss in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry and Diana Abu-Jaber’s crescent.” MELUS, 32.4 (2007), 33-46. Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003. Print. Perry, Glenn E. “Imperial democratization: Rhetoric and reality.” Arab Studies Quarterly, 28, ¾ (2006): 55-86. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Print.

CASTE, GENDER, AND VIOLENCE: READING MAHASWETA DEVI'S “BAYEN” AND “DRAUPADI” ARUNIMA RAY

“Bayen” and “Draupadi,” two of Mahasweta Devi's eminent short stories, are authentic fictional representations of the Dalit/tribal lifeworld. The stories are set in post-independence India, but the setting and the ambience are a far cry from what post-colonial modern India might be expected to look like. The space that Mahasweta Devi deals with is occupied by people belonging to the lowest of the low, and hence poverty, exploitation and superstition happen to be its permanent reality. When it comes to the women, their situation is singularly debased, for the exploitation that they suffer is multi-layered. Through this paper, I want to examine the various colluding hegemonic discourses responsible for the continuance of this oppressive situation. What is intriguing is that the so-called feminist and Marxist counter-discourses too could achieve precious little here. My effort will be to look at the specificities of the problems that they suffer from and discourses of resistance if any that might emerge from the texts. Mahasweta Devi is an activist writer and the prime focus of her works has always been the subalterns. The most important achievement of her writing career has been re-writing the history of the subalterns, especially the Dalits and the tribals. Her commitment towards the untouchable/tribal communities is total, for most of the characters that we come across in her various novels and short stories are real-life characters. She has tirelessly worked for them for their uplift and has even gone to the most remote and inaccessible areas on foot. In her introduction to Agnigarbha (1978), a collection of her stories about the Naxalite movement, where “Draupadi,” under discussion here, was also first published, she wrote: All the factors that led to the eruption of the movement remain unchanged … The exploitation of the starving peasants continues unabated … Rural India has the appearance of an enormous graveyard … This movement has

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been the most significant and inspiring event for a number of decades in this country. (qtd. in Bandyopadhyay viii)

In fact, the Naxalite movement has presently taken a stronger hold in the underdeveloped and remote areas of the country, for exploitation still remains rampant. The movement has taken a much more complex and violent shape in recent years. About her social commitment, Mahasweta Devi said in an interview, “Once I became a professional writer, I felt increasingly that a writer should document his own time and history” (Bandyopadhyay vii). Mahasweta Devi’s tireless endeavours to understand this segment of contemporary history and articulate it continue to this day. In India, the caste system follows rules of purity and pollution. The work the so-called untouchables engage in is itself seen as a source of pollution. They keep the society clean and pure by purging away its discarded and polluting substances but paradoxically become unclean and untouchable themselves. In the story “Bayen,” the particular community in question, an untouchable one, also called the Dom community, burns or cremates dead bodies. The protagonist of the story is Chandidasi Gangadasi who has inherited the work of burying dead children from her father. She believes she belongs to the family of the great Kalu Dom who gave shelter to the great King Harish Chandra when he lost his kingdom. In return, the King gave him all the cremation grounds of the world as a gift. Chandidasi Gangadasi keeps to her family legacy and very devotedly does the work of burying the dead children. She is a proud and, considers herself to be, a lucky girl, for she gets married to Malindar Gangaputta, the only man in the Dom community who can sign his name and has a permanent government job at the morgue. Things went well with them till Chandidasi had a child and she began to feel pain for every dead child that she had to bury. But she, as a woman, was alone in her pain, for even Malindar, her husband, failed to empathize with her. Her breasts ached with milk at the thought of the dead children. She decided not to do the work anymore. Her community immediately branded her a witch and ostracized her. In the background, the larger picture is the strife-ridden untouchable society, victim of the age-old rules of caste, community, and superstitions. The caste system is a patriarchal structure where rules are laid down according to Brahmanical patriarchal norms. Each person is born into a particular caste and is supposed to do the work that is allotted to the caste. Chandidasi is a Dom, a community, which burns dead bodies. She knows that by deciding not to carry on her professional work she would be breaking rules which are sacrosanct and could not be broken. Her apprehension is expressed by the author as she says:

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Caste, Gender, and Violence Being a member of this particular race, could she, Chandi, reject this traditional occupation? Dare she, and let God wreak his wrath on her? Her fear grew greater every day. (Devi in Basu 34)

Hence when she refuses to do the work fixed for her by virtue of her caste, she defies the Hindu caste norms, and within the community, it is its own patriarchy that does this surveillance. It is indeed strange that even though the untouchable communities are badly oppressed by the caste structure, being within the Hindu fold, they too follow it, and sometimes quite stringently, much to the detriment of their own people and especially their women. Chandidasi’s motherly instincts overpowered her on the day she buried Tukni, the last child she had vowed to bury, and her breasts started oozing milk. The villagers observed this strange phenomenon with suspicion and put her under a watchful scanner. Her husband, Malindar, too, once he really started believing that she might be a witch, proved to be no exception here. What was mere fear gradually took the form of a solid belief in Malindar. Her every move and every action seemed to him to be pointing towards the fact that she was a witch. Such is the power of superstitious beliefs. As the author says: Fear grew in Malindar. Didn’t he sometimes fear that perhaps Chandi was slowly changing into a witch? … Perhaps it was true what people were saying. (Devi in Basu 37)

The community, powerful as it is, literally transforms her into Chandi bayen. Once she becomes their target, there is no way left for her to escape the wrath of the community. Only an excuse was needed to brand her a witch. As the author says: The Dom community did not forget her. The Doms were keeping an eye on her, to her complete ignorance. Covertly or otherwise, a society can maintain its vigil if it wants to. There is nothing a society cannot do. (Devi in Basu 37)

So she was soon declared a witch and it was no one but her husband who did it. He preferred to side with his community and not with his wife. He got his drum, beat it and declared, “I, Malindar Gangaputta, hereby declare that my wife is a bayen, a bayen!” (Devi in Basu 38) Her frantic efforts to explain to her husband or to her community that she was not a bayen fell on deaf ears. The story is a sad commentary on how a community can chastise a spirited woman. Obviously, she had been an object of envy, having both good looks and good luck on her side. But she ‘crosses’ all limits when she chooses to give up the work of her ances-

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tors! She is pitted against her powerful and superstitious community all alone. The community dubs her a witch and destroys her for good. Mahasweta’s representation of the Dom community only tells us how primitive the community still remains. Though set in post-colonial India, the community has still not been part of the modernizing agenda of the country. Malindar is the only man who can sign his name and his son, the intelligent young lad, goes to school. It is from the wall magazine in his school that he knows about the Untouchability Act of 1955 and the Constitution of India which says that all are equal. Mahasweta punctures the false pride of the so-called elites of the nation who take pride in the ostensible progress of the nation by exposing these areas which still remain in the dark. The story also focuses on the patriarchal discourses of the caste system which control the lives of women. The caste system views a woman’s body as suspect and hence it is always women and that too the lower-caste women who are branded witches. The various fluids that come out of a woman’s body at different times through menstruation, lactation, childbirth are seen as inauspicious. Chandidasi was at a lactating phase having recently given birth to her son Bhagirath when the incident happened. Her breasts heavy with milk oozed milk all the time. But the superstitious people thought that she was breastfeeding dead children just like a Bayen would do. Calling a woman’s body inauspicious is a ploy on the part of the patriarchal caste structure to dub a woman’s body polluting and hence inferior and low. For no rhyme or reason and for no fault of their own many women suffer the fate of Chandidasi. Witch-cult is a violent system whereby once declared a witch, one has no escape from social ostracization. It is a violent way of objectifying a woman as low and evil. Violence is part of the caste system and it is generally used to punish people, especially women, for breaking the caste rules. Violence in the forms of rape, molestation, and social ostracization is often justified as punishments meted out to women from the so-called lower castes to teach them a lesson and break their spirit so that they dare not go out of hand. The witch-cult is one such violent punishment. Chandidasi is a normal woman and her aspirations are no different from those of any other normal woman. She loves her husband and her son and wants to be with them. Her longing for her son is well-articulated in the story. But this politics of power that the community plays separates the mother from the son forever. Perhaps the community, totally downtrodden and emasculated, bereft of any dignity otherwise, looks for a scapegoat of their own to beat and feel powerful and proud.

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Though Chandidasi is shown as spirited, yet Mahasweta Devi did not want to project her as a subject of resistance. For in the beginning, if Chandidasi tried her best to explain to her community that she is not a witch, in the end, she really believed that she was one. When her son Bhagirath comes to meet her on the sly one day, she reprimands him for doing so, for now, she too believes that her presence is evil. Concerned about her son, Bhagirath, she once goes to meet her husband Malindar to caution him about the son. What she finds there is that people from her own community were conspiring to derail the train and rob it. At the sight of the ‘witch’, they flee. Chandidasi gives up her life trying to prevent the train accident. The government declares that she would be given an award posthumously for her bravery. While alive she could not get the confidence and trust of her community. At death, she not only proves them wrong but also embarrasses them. Thus Chandidasi’s redemption comes only at her death and she is elevated from victimhood. It proves false this very superstitious system called witch-cult. Devi’s play on the ironic helped her achieve the necessary subversion. If “Bayen” showcases patriarchy and superstition existing within a socalled untouchable and backward community, “Draupadi” is the story of Draupadi, one belonging to an exploited tribe that has taken up arms to fight exploitation. In India, the tribes consist of about one-sixth of the Indian population. These Austro-Asiatic tribes live in the forests and lead an agrarian life. Their customs and ways of life are sometimes starkly different from those of other Aryan communities. They are said to be the original people before the Aryan invasion and introduction of various hierarchical structures like the caste system. But now they are exiles in their own land. “Draupadi” is the story about a woman belonging to one such tribal community. Draupadi Mejhen, or ‘Dopdi’ as her people call her, has joined the Naxalites and has vowed to destroy the exploitative landlords and government officials. When the story starts, Draupadi is wanted by the police and has a price on her head. The time span of the story is very short. It begins with Draupadi seeing her picture in a poster put up by the police and her endeavour to escape. But she is followed and apprehended. In custody, she is gang-raped by the police to break her down completely and to extract information from her. She shows her defiance by refusing to be clothed and confronts the police officer naked. In the background is the story of exploitation of the tribes by the upper caste and upper class and the consequent armed struggle being carried on by the tribals under the Naxalites. The story revolves around Draupadi’s courage, resistance and her challenge to her rapists.

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Dopdi is not romanticized by Mahasweta, a self-conscious social activist that she is, unlike most of the upper-caste or upper-class comrades who often indeed are. She is a normal woman who loves her husband and enjoys ordinary and mundane things of life. But she is an intelligent and determined woman who has experienced exploitation and wants to do away with it. She is a trained guerrilla fighter and adept at selfconcealment. While she is being followed by Senanayak, the Police officer, and his people, she thinks of her dead husband Dulna Majhi who had told her that once they were into this movement, they would never have a normal family life, but they would at least get rid of landlords and exploitation. She adores her forefathers and her tribe that always protected their women’s honour. Rape is something unknown to the tribes. All this stands in stark contrast to the sexual violation that she will experience within a matter of hours from the representatives of the so-called advanced communities. Draupadi’s reason for joining the Naxalite movement was her firsthand experience of exploitation and genuine concern for her people. She is just a cadre and not one of the leaders of the movement. The leaders obviously are the educated Bengali middle-class men like Arijit. It is Arijit’s advice that echoes throughout the text and it cannot be denied that Arijit’s guidance makes her courageous. Arijit’s motive, of course, cannot be questioned for he genuinely feels for the subalterns. Enough instructions are given at the training camps about what happens when one is captured. Draupadi knew about the torture and was made aware by Arijit that her sex could be an additional problem. But Draupadi had sworn by her dead husband that she would not betray the comrades. All these came back to her mind while she was being followed. Draupadi’s true subjectivity comes only at the end when she is arrested and raped in custody. Dopdi had passed out and when she woke up she found her limbs tied to four posts and her body sticky with her own blood. She could feel that her vagina was still bleeding and that her breasts were bitten and nipples were torn. Now that she has regained sense, she is raped repeatedly throughout the night. In the morning she is given a piece of cloth and Senanayak, the police officer, orders her to be brought in. When the guard orders her to move, she stands up. She tears her cloth with her teeth and starts walking naked towards Senanayak’s tent. The guard feels afraid of her strange behaviour and runs for orders. What happens after this scares Senanayak, for he has never encountered a behaviour so strange. As the author narrates: Draupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds.

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What is this? He is about to bark. Draupadi comes closer. Stands with her hands on her hip, laughs and says, The object of your search, Dopdi Mejhen. You asked them to make me up, don’t you want to see how they made me? Where are her clothes? Draupadi’s black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but can you clothe me again? Are you a man? … Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts and for the first time, Senanayak feels afraid of an unarmed target, terribly afraid. (Devi in Spivak 196)

Senanayak wanted to use her vulnerability as a woman and break her down completely. But this very same body which had been the site of vulnerability becomes the site of her resistance and strength when she challenges Senanayak with it and in doing so she becomes a subject of resistance, using her body as an instrument of insurrection. The voice of the male leadership fades at this point, for Draupadi now acts on her own as a subject. In this context, it is important to mention that “Draupadi” is a rewriting of the episode of Draupadi’s disrobing in the epic Mahabharata. In the Mahabharata, Draupadi is the wife of the Pandavas. She has five husbands as against the Hindu Law which allows only one husband for a married woman. In a game of dice, her husbands lose everything to their cousins and enemies, the Kauravas. They had nothing else to stake but their wife Draupadi. When they lose her, too, Draupadi is dragged into the court and Duryodhan the enemy leader orders to strip her publicly and humiliate her. Draupadi becomes an object of transaction between her husbands and their enemies. But because of the divine intervention of Lord Krishna, they fail to strip her. By the boon of God, she remains clothed infinitely. Mahasweta Devi rewrites this episode in “Draupadi”. Her story is a story of demythologization and hence of mundane power relation and at that the gendered one. In her story, Dopdi Mejhen is stripped and raped violently many times. Senanayak and his men, the representatives of the Government and hence of the law, punish her for her political activities. But whereas Draupadi of the Mahabharata prays to God to save her from humiliation, Dopdi Mejhen challenges the male authority with her nakedness. She insists on remaining naked. In doing so, she challenges the masculinity of her rapists for they fail to humiliate and break her down. She also rises above male leadership in her own movement, for she now

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experiences what can happen only to a woman and that too something for which no advice can be effective. Her challenge comes from her own self, from within and as a woman and not from the leaders. As Spivak rightly says in the context: Rather than save her modesty through the implicit intervention of a benign and divine (in this case it would have been godlike) comrade, the story insists that this is the place where male leadership stops. (Spivak 184)

Draupadi Mejhen comes out triumphant in the story even after a gangrape and Senanayak for the first time is scared. He is scared of a woman whom he has himself ordered to be raped in order to break her down completely. Talking of Draupadi’s triumph and her reasons for being so, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan says: Very Simply: Dopdi does not let her nakedness shame her, her torture intimidate her, or her rape diminish her. But this refusal is not to be read as a transcendence of suffering, or even simply as heroism. It is instead simultaneously a deliberate refusal of a shared sign-system (the meanings assigned to nakedness, and rape: shame, fear, loss), and an ironic deployment of the same semiotics to create disconcerting counter-effects of shame, confusion and terror in the enemy (what is a “man”?). (Sunder Rajan 353-354)

Sunder Rajan also suggests how culture and tradition can itself be reinterpreted in the Indian context as a resistance to patriarchal domination and that the Draupadi story is a case in point. It has been an important episode no less than that of Sita in the Ramayana in the hands of the feminists for effective re-reading and re-interpretation. Mahasweta Devi’s story too is a reinterpretation and Dopdi indeed goes beyond Draupadi of the Mahabharata and does what she could not do. One vital question, however, arises in the context of Dopdi’s stripping and rape. Why is it that Dopdi Mejhen could challenge the authority with her nakedness whereas Draupadi had to pray to god to save her from humiliation? The answer possibly lies in Dopdi’s inheritance of tribal culture. Dopdi being tribal is outside the Brahmanical patriarchal structure where the sexuality and the body of a woman are closely guarded. Dopdi Mejhen is relatively free of such burdens. The name Draupadi was given her by her upper-caste mistress and she perhaps did not even understand the implication of the name and its allusions to this Brahmanical text belonging to the Aryans. She definitely does not belong to that tradition. Being outside it frees her from Brahmanical patriarchal norms and their ideologies.

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In the context of these unique experiences of women, Spivak in the introduction to “Draupadi” rightly says: “I can be forgiven if I find in this an allegory of the woman’s struggle within the revolution in a shifting historical moment” (Spivak 184). This is a vital question brought up by Spivak, for women’s struggle as a collective force should emerge from these experiences of women. Even within revolutionary organizations, women’s struggle is singular and different and needs separate spaces to be addressed. Both the stories “Bayen” and “Draupadi” show how women from various subjugated communities have to deal with various hegemonic power relations. Power works in intricate and layered manners and the gendered subaltern is at the receiving end of it all. Caste, gender, ethnicity, superstition, violence, etc. affect women in various ways. It is important to note how women respond to various atrocities emerging from these complex relationships at micro levels. It is also important to note how women show resistance and deal with the issue of their identity. The two stories show two unique cases how both the women put up the fight against various odds. These should become the cornerstones for feminist studies, preoccupations, and praxis. There should be women’s organizations specifically for subaltern women and these should take note of their specificities, differences and experiences. Maybe Dalit feminism for Dalit women could be one such platform that could work for them and work for all, for in emancipating themselves they would also emancipate others suffering similar oppressions. In fact, today various Dalit and lower-caste women’s organizations have come up and they are demanding a rethinking of the women’s issues from the standpoint of the specificities of their locations in the society. As Anupama Rao in the ‘Introduction’ to her book Gender and Caste says: The demands by Dalit and other lower-caste women are not merely for inclusion, but for an analysis of gender relations as they are inflected by the multiple and overlapping patriarchies of caste communities that produce forms of vulnerability that require analysis … The symbolic economies of gender and sexuality and the material reality of the economic dispossession of Dalit women, therefore, need to be viewed together. (Rao 5)

Indeed several economies have to be constantly taken into account in order to locate the causes of the continued phenomenon of violence and discrimination perpetrated against women in general and Dalit women in particular in a bid to get rid of them. But this need not and should not render the question of commonality dispensable. Indeed, an intersection of the specific locationality and commonality can make the struggle viable

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and theoretically valid. But for this intersection, the former might lead to a self-identical position, while the latter in its totalizing vision might subsume rather than articulate the marginal. The basic issue of discrimination and the moves beyond it can in the end help join the varied locations to give rise to the required moments of intersection. A wholesome Dalit feminist standpoint can indeed be a case in point in this respect because it has already within it an inherent counter-hegemonic discourse not only against social, cultural and gender oppressions and inequality but also against the economic ones. It can perhaps extend its fight against discrimination and inequality of all sorts further into more and more terrains such as environment, animals, resources and so on, thereby reaching out for an ethics which is new, necessary and congruent to the enterprise itself.

Works Cited Bandyopadhyay, Samik (Ed). “Introduction.” Mahasweta Devi: Five Plays. Calcutta: Seagull, 1999. vii-xv. Print. Basu, Tapan (Ed). Translating Caste. New Delhi: Katha, 2002. Print. Devi, Mahasweta. Bayen. Trans. Mahua Bhattacharya. Translating Caste. Ed. Tapan Basu. New Delhi: Katha, 2002. 25-41. Print. —. Draupadi. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. 179-196. Print. Rao, Anupama (Ed). “Introduction.” Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism: Gender and Caste. Series Editor Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003. 1-47. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics New York and London: Methuen, 1987. Print. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing: Meanings for Our Times.” Ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Signposts. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999. 332-359. Print.

BRIDGING THE BINARIES OF GENDER CONSTRUCTION IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S SCIENCE FICTION PRITIKA NEHRA

Ursula K. Le Guin considers her novels as “experiments in imagination” which according to her, are no different from what a scientist like Einstein does when he “shoots a light ray through a moving elevator” or when “Schrodinger puts a cat in a box” (Le Guin 1989a 158). About “The Left Hand of Darkness”, she writes, My Gethenians are simply a way of thinking. They are questions, not answers; process, not stasis. One of the essential functions of science fiction I think precisely is this kind of question-asking: reversals of a habitual way of thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination. (Le Guin 1989a 159)

She does not present answers or alternatives to the gender constructions but her novels pose those gender questions which are otherwise never raised. Le Guin creates a new understanding of gender in separating the sexual roles from the social identity of her characters. She breaks the binaries of self/other, light/darkness, color/white, master/slave learning/unlearning, father tongue/ mother tongue, communication/understanding, he/she. In my analysis, I present how she raises these questions both in terms of content and performance in a holistic perspective. In her view, writing is not a solitary business of the writer but it also involves readers which complete the process of writer’s imagination, in making it alive in understanding and bringing various interpretations of the text. Writing is a “collaborative” work that engages the readers. It is an everyday struggle to build a world of freedom and emancipation through imagination. She writes, [The] writer is trying to get all the patterns of sound, syntax, imagery, ideas, emotions working together in one process, in which the reader will be drawn to participate. The role that the writer performs in this engagement

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with the text is that the writer tries to get the reader working with the text in an effort to keep the whole story going along in one piece in the right direction. (Le Guin 1989b 199)

She finds that a narrative work may fail on two accounts namely, if the reader fails to engage with it or fails to read it (e.g. the male readers are unable to understand the reversal in case of “The Left Hand of Darkness” which Le Guin accepts as the fault in her writing—the problem being that of representation), since it is the reader who “makes it live” and “an unread story is not a story” but mere “little black marks on wood pulp”; secondly, if the “writer fails to imagine, to image, the world of the narrative, the work fails” (Le Guin 1989b 197). In “The Left hand of Darkness”, Le Guin weaves a utopian world on the planet Winter, in an attempt to offer a world without the divide between male/female, light/dark, master/slave, white/colour binaries by combining them into a whole. It is love that brings in the perception of completeness of others and also of the self, in her characters. The protagonist Genry Ai, a young black man from Earth on the planet winter, is unable to see the people of this planet the way they see each other. He sees a “Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own” (Le Guin 1994a 27). His views about Estraven (a courtier, a politician who invited him to dinner) reflect on the character of Estraven as a person in whom the binaries of man and woman are synthesized. Ai disliked and distrusted the “soft supple femininity” in Estraven yet it was “impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence”. Nevertheless when Ai thought of Estraven as a man he “felt a sense of falseness, of imposture: in him” for the reason that “his voice was soft and rather resonant but not deep, scarcely a man’s voice, but scarcely a woman’s voice either…” (27). He could not regard him either as a man or a woman. Ai uses the generic pronoun “He” to describe the androgynous people of the planet. However, it is during the “estrous cycle” that what Ai sees primarily as males on the planet are able to develop both male and female reproductive organs. The citizens are potentially capable of performing both the traditional gendered roles of mother and father. In a most provocative sentence, Le Guin writes, “The King was pregnant” (99). Le Guin’s characters here have the freedom and capacity to choose either of them rather than being forced by social norms to perform either of them for a particular gender. Gender for her is a “transformative experience”.

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Perversion and abnormality in Karhiders The Average sexual cycle for the Gethenians lasts for 26 days, out of which the hormonal activity starts only on the 22nd or 23rd day when the individual “enters kemmer, estrus”. Before the 22nd day, the individual is a “somer, sexually inactive, latent”: “In the first phase of kemmer (karh. secher) he remains completely androgynous. Gender and potency are not attained in isolation” (118) He remains incapable of coitus without a partner. But once he finds a partner in kemmer, the hormones are stimulated. This second phase of kemmer (karh. thorharmen) is “the mutual process of establishing sexuality and potency” (118) The sex is not determined by their anatomy before this stage: “Normal individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether they will be the male or the female and have no choice in the matter” (119). Further, “once the sex is determined it cannot change during the kemmer-period” (119). If there is no conception the individual returns to the somer phase in few hours however if conception takes place it ends after 8.5 months of gestation and 6-8 months of lactation. While the male sexual organs remain intact during motherhood, “with the cessation of lactation, the female re-enters somer and becomes once more a perfect androgyne” (120). Also, it is quite possible that “the mother of several children may be the father of several more” (120) The Gethenians observe the ritual of vowing kemmering (karh. oskyommer) or monogamous marriage. It has no legal status and divorce is possible only once following which there is no remarriage. Incest is allowed with siblings without vowing except with parents however it is allowed in some tribes. Kemmerhouses allow promiscuity and coitus in groups as well. Since coitus takes places only during the fertile period the chances of conception are great. Nobody is barred from kemmerhouses “however poor or strange” (121) There is no rape or Oedipus complex on planet winter. Genry Ai observes: Karhiders discuss sexual matters freely, and talk about kemmer with both reverence and gusto, but they are reticent about discussing perversions-at least, they were with me. Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with a permanent hormonal imbalance toward the male or the female, causes what they call perversion; it is not rare; three or four percent of adults may be physiological perverts or abnormal-normals, by our standards. They are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies. The Karhidish slang for them is halfdeads. They are sterile. (86)

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Le Guin has reversed the understanding of perversion in the case of people of the planet Winter. While heterosexual societies consider incest, promiscuity, rape, homosexuality as signs of perversion but for Gethenians perversion is an unhealthy dependence on any partner for a prolonged period (namely cohabitation in marital relations). She presents the flipside of our society in this depiction.

Human versus gender Le Guin presents a different picture of identity for Gethenians in contrast with the gendered social identities of our present world. Ai observes that no rules or social practices of the heterosexual world are operative in winter. They are not regarded as men or women but rather the Gethenians are “respected and judged only as a human being”. He observes: [You] cannot think of a Gethenian as “it”. They are not neuters. They are potentials or integrals. Lacking the Karhidish “human pronoun” used for persons in somer I must say “he”, for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts lead me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman. (123)

The dominant factor in Gethenian life “is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world” (125). There is no domination in terms of gendering the social identities of the Gethenians. There has been no war on this planet. They use their aggression to stand the cold winter on their planet and not against each other for domination. Le Guin is creating a new alternative to understanding gender. She creates male characters which are androgynous. She separates the sexual roles from the social identity of her characters. She wants to avoid any sort of “sexual reductionism” (Le Guin 2004 285) in categorizing the characters in a male or female binary in terms of their sex and gender. Le Guin rejects any sort of sexual division of labour. She argues that “A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength—what has sex to do with that?” (13) In “The Left Hand of Darkness”, she writes of a world where work is done not for fulfilling the hierarchy of needs but for its own sake. She writes, “Work is done for its own sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life” (121). In contrast to a hierarchical and patriarchal society, in “The Left Hand of Darkness”, she presents a world where, [Y]ou cannot and must not do what a bisexual naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of man or woman, while adopting toward him a corre-

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Science Fiction sponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same of opposite sex. Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is non-existent here. They cannot play that game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a new-born baby? (94)

In her 1976 essay, “Is Gender Necessary?”, she makes clear that her novel emerged from the need to respond to the feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s i.e. “to define and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of gender” both for herself and for the society. She writes, I began … to want to define and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of gender in my life and in our society … The way I did my thinking was to write a novel. The Left Hand of Darkness is the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking, a thought experiment. (8)

She further clarifies the use of the generic pronoun “He” in English is not to bifurcate genders to be used for all genders. She writes, “I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for ‘he/she’. ‘He’ is the generic pronoun, damn it, in English.” (15) The novel is a “thought experiment” in representing the reality of gendered lives of our present world.

Gender as Performativity Le Guin’s understanding of gender can be understood in terms of Judith Butler’s view of performativity. Butler writes, “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act,” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Butler 2). She further clarifies: the regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies, and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. (Butler 2)

Such relationship between gender and sex is further complicated when it is combined with the notion of radical linguistic constructivism’ in that the ‘”sex” which is referred to as prior to gender will itself be a postulation, a construction, offered within language, as that which is prior to language, prior to construc-

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tion will, by virtue of being posited, become the effect of that very positing, the construction of construction. (Butler 5)

Such a construction of sex for Butler is “something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy” (Butler 5).

The culturally constructed Woman as the Artificial Man In “Introducing Myself” Le Guin writes, I am a man. Now you may think I’ve made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I’m trying to fool you, because my first name ends in a, and I own three bras, and I’ve been pregnant five times, and other things like that that you might have noticed, little details. But details don’t matter. I am a man, and I want you to believe and accept this as a fact, just as I did for many years. (Le Guin 2004 3)

In this introduction, she subverts the standard expectation of the readers from an autobiography author to assert an authority. She changes the expectation by revealing her disobedience to the normal pattern of erasing her woman’s voice; rather she asserts it by revealing her bodily experiences of pregnancy and of wearing bras and the cultural naming associated with her and also that she has become a man in entering the domain of the men i.e. writing which is controlled by male voices. She experiments with the genre of autobiographical writing in writing an introduction where she explores her own gendered body of an old woman in a fictionalized account of it. She discusses her own gender erasure as an “artificial man” and her failed attempt to perform it. In “The Language of the Night”, she considers exploring the possibility of revising her novels by complete erasure of the generic pronoun “he” but soon she realizes that it was unethical to do so in that “I was in fact disappearing myself in my own writingjust like a woman” (Le Guin 1989a 2). Her invincible spirit as a woman writer refuses to be under any erasure. By deliberately changing the pronoun her identity gets even more reinforced so she refuses to change it. In “Introducing Myself”, Le Guin writes about this artificial male identity of her writing self as “kind of second rate or imitation-man, a Pretend-aHim” (Le Guin 2004 4)

Difference between male and female writing experiences To draw a contrast with the writing of male writers, she compares her life as a writer to that of Hemingway in her book “The Wave in the Mind”

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and finds that unlike him, her writing is replete with syntax and she never had any of his possessions like his guns or his wives or even a beard like him.1 Her writing cannot be compared to the same standards as that of Hemingway. Further, she is ashamed of her failure as a writer primarily an artificial male writer. In an amusing and ironic style, she writes, Ernest Hemingway would have rather died than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And what brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. About the time they finally start inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven’t done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything. (Le Guin 2004 5)

Cosmetic Youth and reproductive fertility/ Menopause and Ageing as re-birth The life sentence is a metaphor for writing for women writers and the death sentence stands for male writers. The ordinary meaning associated with the metaphor or sentence here is imprisonment in case of the death sentence or suicide as it occurred in the case of Hemingway. The life sentence in the case of women writing emphasizes the life of writing which grows to full fruition and maturity through ageing. Unlike male writers who refuse to get old, she accepts her ageing and maturity as a new birth. She refuses to stay young perpetually in the domain of visibility through cosmetic means created by men. Unlike Hemingway who chose suicide over getting old, she refuses the option of self-murder. She writes, I keep thinking there must have been something that a real man could have done about it. Something short of guns, but more effective than Oil of Olay. But I failed. I did nothing. I absolutely failed to stay young. And then I look back on all my strenuous efforts, because I really did try, I tried to be a man, to be a good man, and I see how I failed at that. I am at best a bad man. A imitation phony second-rate him with a ten-hair beard and semicolons. (Le Guin 2004 7)

Since she refuses to adopt artificial means to stay young in the culturally constructed gender role and she also accepts ageing, an alternative emerges to her in pretending to be an old woman. She writes, “If I am no good at pretending to be a man and no good at being young, I might just as

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well start pretending that I am an old woman. I am not sure that anybody has invented old women yet; but it might be worth trying” (Le Guin 2004 7). Le Guin also refuses to accept the value of women only in terms of fertility but she also values menopause and old age in that it is equivalent to giving birth of her new self. It is the time when she is replete with all the changes that she had undergone in puberty and pregnancies and all other changes that continue until that time. She writes that in her menopause and old age a woman “must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. Not many will help her with that birth” (Le Guin 1989b 5).

Self and alienation from other Ai continues an internal dialogue with himself in the first person account where he says: I had arrived in Karhide in a queer kind of ship, and I differed physically from Gethenians in some respects; that wanted explaining. But my own explanations were preposterous. I did not, in that moment, believe them myself… “/believe you,” said the stranger, the alien alone with me, and so strong had my access of self-alienation been that I looked up at him bewildered. (Le Guin 35)

The boundaries between the self and alien get broken at this point of the first contact of Genly Ai with the Gethenians. He learns a lot about himself from them and also enriches their understanding by informing them that they are the other from his perspective. For Le Guin there are different kinds of others, The being can be different from you in its sex; or in its annual income; or in its way of speaking and dressing and doing things; or in the color of its skin, or the number of its legs and heads. In other words, there is the sexual Alien, and the social Alien, and the cultural Alien, and finally the racial Alien. (Le Guin 1989a 93)

To deny “any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it or deify it” (Le Guin 1989a 95) But in such a treatment of regarding the other as completely different from the self on all the possible grounds she writes, “you have its spiritual equality and its human reality” (Le Guin 95) It is an ethical question which results in ‘alienation’ of both the self and

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the other. She writes that in such a treatment of the other, “you have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself” (Le Guin 93). Le Guin is preoccupied with the question of personal as political. In “The Left Hand of Darkness”, Genly Ai introspects that why he was sent alone to the planet winter. He realizes: I thought it was for your sake [Estraven’s sake] that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but mere messenger-boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make if I make one is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. (Le Guin 259)

The personal concerns of the individual become political concerns for the society at large, for him and vice-versa. The divide between private and public seems to be broken for Le Guin.

Books/babies Le Guin refuses to accept the attitude of offering binary options between writing books for a woman writer or artist and having children. She plays on the idea of books as children in cases when other women writers proclaim that no other woman can write her books or “tells us that other women can have children but nobody else can write her books. As if ‘other women’ could have had her children—as if books came from the uterus!” (Le Guin 1989b 225). Such an understanding that necessitates a solitary woman writer in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is not acceptable to her. She is of the view that one can be both a mother and a writer. While she accepts the disparity between the material conditions of writing for male and female writers as presented by Woolf yet she disagrees in that there is no necessary requirement of fulfilling these conditions for writing since writing emerges from these disparate conditions sometimes.

Domestic work and material conditions of writing for women Her position is different from that of Virginia Woolf. Woolf insists on having all the material conditions fulfilled that are required for writing

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without any intrusion from the constraints of doing domestic work for a woman writer. Woolf insists that “it is necessary to have five hundred [pounds] a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry” (Woolf 110). This regular income of five hundred pounds a year, for Woolf “stands for the power to contemplate, the lock on the door means the power to think for oneself” (Woolf 110). For Woolf, it is necessary to have solitude, money, and freedom from the constraints of work to focus on writing. Le Guin considers Woolf as one of her “unteachers” and both of them agree that women fail in matching the cultural constructions and stereotypes of women. Yet Le Guin differs from her as she does not consider the material constraints and domestic work as hindrances to writing rather she finds that they are the sources in which her writing is embedded. Le Guin recognizes the disparity in the material conditions for writing in case of male writers and women writers, yet for her one can enrich one’s writing through the material conditions and the experiences of mothering as well. Motherhood is seen as empowering by Le Guin.2 Woolf, on the other hand, tries to subvert the myth of idealized and perfect motherhood in her failed and imperfect characterization of mothers who struggle to achieve it. Le Guin is concerned about the question of how motherhood can be an aid in the writing process. The process of writing about women’s experiences cannot be divorced from the material conditions of writing and motherhood. In “The Fisherman’s Daughter” she discusses the writing of Margaret Oliphant whose writing “profited from the difficult, obscure, chancy connection between the artwork and emotional/manual/managerial complex of skills and tasks called ‘housework’” (Le Guin 1989b 222). She explores the writings of many women writers who were mothers as well like Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Browning, Theodora Quinn, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her own mother. This attitude (‘books or babies’) towards women’s writing that is caught in an antagonistic binary of an exclusive relationship between motherhood and writing is another way of “putting a ban on woman artist’s full sexuality” (Le Guin 1989b 225). For her, there is no necessary connection between body and language of any particular gender. Rather she takes her inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir and she considers gender as a cultural construction.

Father Tongue/mother tongue She is acutely conscious of the politics of language in writing in that it is largely controlled by male writers in the domain. She urges women to resist against this stealing of women’s language by male writers who compel them to write in a masculine language. She appeals her women audi-

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ence to reclaim “our native tongue,” “our language they’re stealing,” to “[s]peak with a woman’s tongue” (Le Guin 2004 153). In contrast to the mother tongue, Le Guin considers that the father tongue is authoritative and linear. She is of the view that the language of white males is a double talk (hypocrites), she writes that “White man speak with forked tongue” (Le Guin 2004 149). The father tongue is the “essential gesture of … not reasoning, but distancing—making a gap, a space between the subject or self and the subject or other” (Le Guin 2004 147-148). One of the differences between the mother tongue and the father tongue is that the mother tongue when “spoken or written, expects an answer” (Le Guin 2004 150). Writing is largely a domain of the father tongue yet she writes in a language by which to present what she calls “your experience as your truth” (Le Guin 2004 150). She refuses to employ language to “deny, negate, disprove another experience” (Le Guin 2004 150). There is no binary struggle between the male experiences and female experiences. Instead of modelling her own narrative authority on the model of white Californians, she considers her narrative power to be similar to that of the Indian whose authority is an “authority without supremacy—a non-dominating authority” (Le Guin 2004 147-148). Particularly with regard to the role played by education, she is sceptical of the educational institutions. She calls them “institutions of the Patriarchy” (Le Guin 2004 147). All that is learnt in the Schools and colleges need to be unlearnt. She considers herself as a “slow unlearner” (Le Guin 2004 157). She draws her ability to “unlearn” from her “unteachers” namely the feminists “from Wollstonecraft and Woolf through the furies and glories of the seventies and eighties” (Le Guin 2004 151).

Communication/understanding Ai brings in animal imagery to describe his bland expressions sometimes. He says, “Can one read a cat’s face, a seal’s, an otter’s? Some Getherians, I thought, are like such animals, with deep bright eyes that do not change expression when you speak” (Le Guin 1994a 31). Le Guin’s characters in “The Left Hand of Darkness” can not only use the verbal means of communication but also the non-verbal and affective means of communication. They can “Mindspeak”, “mindhear” and “mindlie” as well. She even characterizes an entirely new category of people who are “listeners”, “empaths”, “paraverbalists” and “mindhearers”.3 It is not just communication with others but she is concerned about understanding each other through different routes of language, feeling, listening, and mind.

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Uniting the binaries Le Guin synthesizes the divide between male/female, light/dark, master/slave, white/color binaries by combining them into a whole. It is love that brings in the perception of completeness of others and also of the self, in her characters. In “The Left Hand of Darkness”, Genly Ai shows the yin-yang symbol to Estraven to describe him of his wholeness, “Light, dark. Fear, courage. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both are one. A shadow on snow” (Le Guin 19). Towards the end of the novel Ai is also able to uncover the differences between the Gethenians and the Terrans, but he also tells Estraven in the beginning that the problem lies in different ways of approaching the question. He tells him, You are isolated and undivided. Perhaps you are obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualisms. We are dualists too. Duality is essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other. “I and Thou”, he said. “Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex…” (Le Guin 16)

Further in the novel, Estraven recites the words of Tormer’s Lay to Ai to explain this unity with the reverberations of a Taoist synthesis or that of dialectical thinking. He recites, Light is the left hand of Darkness And darkness the right hand of light Two are one, life and death, lying Together like lovers in kemmer Like hands joined together, Like the end and the way. (Le Guin, 283)

Le Guin succeeds in presenting the different aspects and approaches to the question of gendered lives both from a one-sided binary perspective of Genly Ai in the beginning and from the holistic perspective of Gethenians. In this lies the vision for a future feminist practice.

Conclusion My analysis began with a contention namely to find holistic visions for future of emancipatory and feminist concerns. Feminist discourses tend to centre around single issues and in a reactive politics sometimes which never address the questions of transformation completely. Some gaps always remain. Le Guin offers a challenge to such defeatist feminist studies and offers an alternative to them in her holistic vision. She succeeds in questioning both the institutionalized and socially conditioned practices of

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patriarchy often passed as “natural”. She offers a vision for a full world without domination and the various consequences of having it for the sake of freedom and fulfilment.

Notes 1

Lisa Rashley discusses these concerns in her paper “Revisioning Gender: Inventing Women in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Nonfiction”, Biography, 30.1, 1997: 22-47. 2 Anne Anderson had discussed these concerns in her paper “Composing in a material World: Women writing in Space and Time”, Rhetoric Review, 17.2, 1998: 282299. 3 Robert Plank discusses communication as an important concern of Le Guin’s fiction in his paper “Ursula K. Le Guin and the Decline of Romantic Love”, Science Fiction Studies, 3.1, 1976: 36-43.

Works Cited Butler, Judith . Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Jose, Jim. “Reflections on the Politics of Le Guin’s Narrative Shifts.”. Science Fiction Studies, 18.2(1991): 180-197. Print. Le Guin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Walker and Company, 1994a. Print. —. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. (Rev. Ed.) New York: Harper Collins, 1989a. Print. —. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination. Boston: Shambhala, 2004. Print. —. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper Voyager, 1994b. Print. —. Dancing At the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove, 1989b. Print. Fitting, Peter. “So We All Become Mothers?: New roles for men in Recent Utopian Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies, 12.2(1985): 156183. Print. Plank, Robert. “Ursula K. Le Guin and the Decline of Romantic Love.” Science Fiction Studies, 3.1(1976): 36-43. Print.

JEWISH HUMMINGBIRDS AND THE CONVERTED FEMALE VOICE: BEE SEASON’S MIRIAM FROM NOVEL TO SCREENPLAY TO FILM INBAR KAMINSKY

The character of Miriam Naumann had been created by one JewishAmerican female writer and adapted to the screen by another JewishAmerican female writer. A hummingbird of a woman, Miriam embodies many complexities relating to her Jewish identity and the entanglement of gender roles in her private and professional life. This essay compares the characterization of Miriam in Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, Naomi Foner’s screenplay adaptation of Bee Season and the film Bee Season. While the film is certainly addressed in this article, Foner’s screenplay is treated as a separate narrative that sheds light on the significance of reworking the female voice in the context of Jewish-American narratives. However, it is important to note that screenplays are by definition evolving narratives with multiple drafts and the draft referred to in this essay is the final one submitted by Foner but is not the shooting script. Several key elements of Miriam’s characterization are discussed in relation to all three narratives—Miriam’s absence versus presence in the expository and concluding sections of the narratives; Miriam’s ‘converted’ Jewish identity; the kaleidoscope as a failed mother-daughter rite of passage; Tikkun Olam (the Kabbalistic concept of ‘repairing the world’) as artistic display and Miriam’s sexuality as absent company. As the mother of two children, Aaron and Eliza, and the wife of Saul, Miriam is often depicted as neglectful of her familial duties due to her lifelong passion for symmetry and alignment that quickly escalates and infringes upon societal and legal conventions. One review of the novel characterizes Miriam as “Eliza’s mother”, who is “always emotionally absent” and who “falls deeper into her secret life of petty theft” (Willens 124). This simplistic rendering of Miriam as a woman who breaks the laws

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of maternal propriety and material property fails to capture the complexity of her relationships with her children, her husband and ultimately herself. In another article, Goldberg’s Miriam is described as a “woman lawyer” who “decides to undermine convention and destabilize the world on a more microscopic level” (Berkowitz 136). Such depictions also underscore the perception of Miriam as a woman who undermines the stability of her family life and can, therefore, be considered an antagonist to Eliza’s character, who is the main protagonist of the novel as well as the film. The film is indeed told mainly from Eliza’s perspective, as illustrated in the first paragraph of the film’s synopsis that highlights Eliza’s kaleidoscopic vision rather than Miriam’s point of view, who is the forbearer of the kaleidoscopic gaze in the Naumann family: Eliza Naumann spells words. Lots of words. Hard words. Long words. And with an effortlessness and understanding that surprises everyone around her. Her teachers, her fellow students. But especially those closest to her: her father, mother, and brother. The people whose lives Eliza’s newfound genius will irrevocably change. BEE SEASON is the kaleidoscopic portrait of a modern American family whose picture-perfect surface conceals an underlying world of secret turmoil. (“Bee Season Production Notes” 2)

The adaptation of Bee Season has proven to be a complicated task and the differences between the novel and the film are evident but seem to translate well into the screen in the case of the mystical-visual elements of the story: The filmmakers are able to convey a very complete portrayal of both the mystic and mystical union. As the film is frugal with words and explanations, as well as cool and spares with its visual language, it is very different from the novel, which probes the characters’ motives, unearths their basic instincts and revels in their flaws in a profusion of words. (Cré 125)

This is not necessarily the case when dealing with the cinematic version of Miriam, who is portrayed in the film by French actress Juliette Binoche. The film occasionally glosses over essential moments in the novel and in the screenplay that characterize Miriam as a woman who defies the conventions of motherhood, sexuality, and artistic expression. The directors of the film, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, openly admit that their adaptation is loosely based on the novel because their first priority as filmmakers is the search for the emotional resonance of the scene—“Even with scripts in which we want the actors to say a very specific thing, it’s more about the emotional beat of the scene, than it is about sticking to the book, so to speak. We’ve always allowed a certain

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amount of freedom with the words” (Harris “Uncertainty”). This shift is certainly evident when one compares the characterization of Miriam in the final draft of Foner’s screenplay to the character who appears in the film; while screenplay Miriam is an elegant adaptation of the novel’s character in its inclusion of a few subtle yet useful changes, cinematic Miriam is often reduced to inexplicable clichés and therefore comes across as not only marginal but also a flat character. Both the novel and the screenplay are infused with imagery of shattered and fragmented visions, which are often attributed to Miriam. Whether it is her kaleidoscopic view of the world as an isolated and perfection-seeking child or the glass shards that become part of her artistic recreation of Tikkun Olam, Miriam is desperate to be seen in a very specific way—an artist exhibiting a unique talent in the remaking of the world. Ironically, it is not Miriam’s perspective that changes throughout the process of adaptation but rather the perspective of the reader/viewer, who is presented with a different Miriam in the shift from novel to film. In other words, cinematic Miriam is noticeably less engaging than her written counterparts (novel and screenplay alike) because her complexities are reduced to absolute flaws and the viewer is not privileged to her inner workings.

The Female Pulse: Miriam’s Nonlinear Presence In the novel, Miriam only enters the narrative after the expository section of the novel is concluded and the characters of Eliza, Aaron and Saul are well-formed. In her introduction to the reader, Eliza’s focalization of Miriam makes her seem more like a magical figure than a mother: Miriam Naumann is a hummingbird in human form, her wings too fast to be seen without a stop-motion camera. The silver in her hair makes her seem electric, her head a nest of metal wires extending through her body. Eliza can only imagine the supercharged brain that resides inside, generally equates the inside of her mother’s head with the grand finale of a July Fourth fireworks display. (Goldberg 19)

This depiction is certainly emblematic of the mother-daughter relationship in the novel; Eliza is desperately seeking her mother’s attention throughout the narrative but does not seem to capture her mother’s interest, with the exception of a few symbolic moments. Miriam genuinely tries to be Eliza’s mother within the short time span of these symbolic moments, yet they tend to end abruptly upon Miriam’s clear sense of failure to communicate.

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As opposed to the novel, which traces its exposition with the noted absence of Miriam, the screenplay presents Miriam on its very first page— “MIRIAM, late 30s, a woman for whom the awkwardness of childhood has turned into a unique style of quirky eccentricity. Angled haircut. Distinctive clothing. The mismatched stripes and plaids of childhood now turning heads” (Foner 1). The attributed importance to the non-linear plotline is certainly evident in the screenplay, as the internal monologues of past events in the novel are adapted into flashbacks that sever the linear time frame. Foner discusses the significance of reconstruction in relation to the process of adapting Bee Season into a screenplay—“... I struggle a lot now to make movies very visual. I feel an enormous debt to Charlie Kaufman, who has really returned screenwriting to an art form and allowed us to deconstruct it and use the visuals—it doesn’t have to be completely linear” (Callaghan, “Working Small”). According to Foner, the specific challenge of externalizing the internal voices of Bee Season is manifested in the form of ambiguities—“The internal voices of Goldberg’s characters had to be externalized and all their different points of view had to manifest. This is not a film that ties everything neatly together. It’s full of ambiguity, but so is life” (Josephs “‘Bee’ Spells Family”). Miriam is absent from the concluding section of the novel; tucked away in the mental ward, Miriam no longer functions as a mother or a wife because she refuses to get ‘better’. In a sense, Miriam prefers to remain segregated as long as she remains true to herself rather than renouncing her true self in order to be part of her family. As Saul suggests in his encounter with Miriam at the hospital, her recovery must entail not only remorse but the attribution of her performative display of Tikkun Olam to the simple irrational act of theft. Miriam is not willing to make this concession, not even for the sake of reuniting with her family—“But I’m not sorry, it wasn’t stealing, and if I could I would do it again” (Goldberg 237). The screenplay concludes as Miriam observes her daughter through the looking glass of the television screen during her stay in the psychiatric ward. Her parental recognition of Eliza is indeed ambiguous—not necessarily pride but rather the momentary acknowledgment of kinship. In doing so, Foner remains true to Miriam’s characterization in the novel as a woman whose maternal identity is fragmented: INT. PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL—DAY CLOSE ON the television. Eliza’s walks off the stage behind a bee monitor. For a second she turns back towards the camera. Looks directly into its black eye and smiles.

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Miriam smiles back. Then watches as her daughter disappears into AN EXPLOSION OF WHITE LIGHT from the flash strobes and television cameras. (Foner 124)

However, the final scene in the film presents Miriam as she is moved to tears and nodding in approval of her daughter’s screen image. The final emphasis on Miriam’s unambiguous maternal instinct is reflected through a line that does not appear in the screenplay—Miriam says to a woman sitting beside her, “She’s my daughter,” and the woman offers an awkward smile and nod in return. Beaming with parental pride, Miriam’s role as a ‘proper’ mother is restored in the film; the injured hummingbird has to be redeemed through her awakening maternal feelings. The image of the Jewish mother in films has certainly changed during the last few decades and she is no longer portrayed as the over-the-top cliché of a Jewish mother—“Pictured as a less parochial, more universalized figure, she [the Jewish mother] now negotiates contemporary issues of female identity: aging, sexuality, the competing obligations of career and family” (Ravits 29). Miriam’s character in the film is not the typical Jewish mother but it seems that several meaningful omissions from screenplay to film have rendered it almost impossible for the viewer to ‘hear’ the echoes of Miriam’s internal voice. Miriam’s struggles to define herself as a mother, an artist and a lover/wife are notably absent from the film. This void is subsequently filled by the end of the film after her art is deemed a crime not only by society’s standards but also by her husband; her instant redemption lies in her parental pride and thus cinematic Miriam is somewhat vindicated as a mother for being proud of her daughter’s achievements.

The Female Rite of Passage, or its Mirror-Image The film emphasizes the theme of fragmented vision as it is “filled with jagged shards of glass, and sometimes shot kaleidoscopically, through the windows of houses or cars...” (Morgenstern “Must We Spell It Out?”). The film’s visual themes are often expressed through images of shattered glass and kaleidoscopic view, both inherently linked to the character of Miriam in the novel but not necessarily attributed to her character in the film. In essence, Miriam’s character is not only marginalized in the film, it is also flattened; many of the ambiguities surrounding Miriam’s inner world are not included in the film even though they are adequately represented in the screenplay. The Kaleidoscope scene in the film is a prime example of such oversimplification—a significant line that appears both in the novel and the screenplay is subsequently dropped from the

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filmed scene and blurs the distinct impression of a failed daughter-mother moment. As the initial catalyst of perfectimundo in the novel, Miriam’s Kaleidoscope represents her first obsession, but more importantly, it can be also be considered as her first artistic vision. Looking at the world in search of symmetry, Miriam’s kaleidoscope becomes the means to reshape the images around her: Later that same year Miriam receives a kaleidoscope as a gift. When she first puts it to her eye, she forgets to breathe. It is a window into the world of the perfectly thrown stone, the land of Perfectimundo. Miriam wishes she could squeeze through the eyehole and into the tube, joining the flawless symmetry. (Goldberg 64)

Miriam’s decision to give her daughter her beloved kaleidoscope as a gift stands out as one of the few maternal moments in the novel. But the kaleidoscope rite of passage fails in the novel, Eliza does not grasp the symbolic and emotional meaning that the Kaleidoscope represents for Miriam: Miriam is staring at her so intently that she puts the toy to her eye again. Maybe her mother stuck something special inside the tube. She turns it a few more times, but no. It’s just a kaleidoscope. Miriam can taste her disappointment, goes to the sink for a glass of water. She needs the distance to stop herself from grabbing the gift back. (Goldberg 67)

Miriam is keenly aware of this symbolic failure—her gift to her daughter is her attempt to bestow upon Eliza her perspective, her way of looking at the world. But it is too late, Miriam concludes as she states, “I should have given it to you sooner. I suppose you’re too old now” (Goldberg 67), alluding to the fact that Eliza is already absorbed in the competitive realm of the spelling bee and her father’s enthusiastic approval. Thus, the mother-daughter rite of passage falls apart under the watchful eye of the family’s patriarch—“Unlike Eliza, who is afraid to look, Saul can see that the excitement is gone from his wife’s eyes” (Goldberg 67). In the screenplay, the exchange of the kaleidoscope takes place in Eliza’s bedroom and the failure of this rite of passage is much subtler, mainly due to the fact that there are no witnesses to acknowledge Miriam’s disappointment: She turns towards her daughter, cutting the conversation short. Hands her a small-gifted wrapped package … MIRIAM (cont’d)

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No. it doesn’t come apart. It’s a kaleidoscope. You look through it. See things … Her voice trails off. Eliza nods. Still not sure what to do with it… Her mother stares at her so hard she puts it to her eye again. Turns it a few more times… MIRIAM I should have given it to you sooner. I suppose you’re too old for it now. (Foner 30-1)

In the novel, when Miriam says to Eliza “I should have given it to you sooner. I suppose you’re too old now” (Goldberg 67), the reader cannot ignore Miriam’s disapproval of the botched exchange of Kaleidoscopic vision. This sentiment is echoed in the screenplay mainly due to the presence of the aforementioned line, which is absent from the scene in the film. By dropping the line that is most emblematic of this echoing failure from the filmed scene, the filmmakers have created an inherently different emotional impact. As a result, the filmed scene becomes neutral, hollowed out of the palpable tension and ambiguity surrounding Miriam’s identity as a mother. This is yet another example of how cinematic Miriam is flattened in comparison to her written precursors, whose conflict between a torn inner world and familial obligations is one of the key characteristics of the character in the novel and subsequently in the screenplay.

Three Women, One Jewish Question Just like everything else about Miriam, her Jewish identity is a mixture of intellectual curiosity and the compulsive need to observe social practice as an amateur anthropologist, an outsider looking in—“Though not religious, Miriam takes self-congratulatory pride in dating a Jew, on occasion even accompanying Saul to synagogue for the opportunity to analyze group religious ritual” (Goldberg 21). The complexity of Miriam’s Jewish identity, as well as that of the other principle characters, renders the novel a sense of authenticity precisely because it is not removed from other facets of modern life: What she [Goldberg] puts forward is not a religion or ethnicity that is isolated and keeps to itself, but a tradition that is genuinely in touch with many different (including secular) aspects of modern life, while at the same time being continually inspired by a rich Jewish history and culture. The Jewish identity postulated is one of interconnectedness, hybridity and an awareness of diversity without losing its own sense of ethnicity. (Lievens 93)

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Goldberg has commented on the significance of her childhood memories of growing up in a Jewish household to the creation of the Naumann family—“Making the family Jewish allowed me to rely upon my own memories of observance, including attending services” (BookBrowse). Goldberg’s emphasis on observance in relation to Jewish identity seems fitting in light of Miriam’s emotional detachment from her Jewish identity in the novel. With the exception of Tikkun Olam, Miriam is the ultimate observer who has no spiritual connection to Judaism. This becomes evident in the novel during Saul’s absence, which allows Miriam to express her indifference to the religious practices of her household—“He watches as she enters the kitchen to see if she notices anything strange, but Miriam doesn’t even glance at the space where the Shabbat candles should be. Aaron realizes that Shabbat’s occurrence or nonoccurrence tonight is completely up to him” (Goldberg 128). Since the lighting of the Shabbat candles is a mitzvah that is first and foremost the duty of the woman in Judaism, Miriam’s disinterest is indicative of her approach to Jewish rituals in general—they do not appear in the visual field of her passions. In the novel, Miriam is born into a Jewish-American family, the only daughter of Melvin and Ruth Grossman, who die in a car crash during her junior year in college. While some have attributed the cinematic upgrade in Saul’s profession and social status to the economical-commercial concerns of filmmaking (Cré 126-7), the shift in Miriam’s profession and Jewish identity cannot be so easily dismissed. Interestingly enough, while the production notes clearly state the change made in Saul’s character by shifting his occupation “from a temple cantor to a college professor” (“Bee Season Production Notes” 5), it makes no mentioning of Miriam’s shift from a born Jewish woman into a converted one, a shift of considerable symbolic meaning in light of the fact that Judaism determines one’s religious affiliation through one’s mother. Foner’s choice to turn Miriam into a convert serves to amplify Miriam’s otherness within her own family, all assumed to be born into Judaism, but it also cleverly plants a seed of doubt at this initial stage of the screenplay regarding the perceived unity of this seemingly happy family: SAUL You don’t think it’s medieval that most Jews don’t know what they’re saying in the service. It’s a singles match. Miriam’s serve. MIRIAM I guess that’s what attracted me. The mystery of it.

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SAUL And with the zeal of the converted...You missed a spot. (Foner 10)

Saul’s last aforementioned line, which refers directly to Miriam’s status as a convert, is excluded from the filmed scene but the cinematic presence of Hebrew uttered by Aaron, Eliza and Saul makes it clear— Miriam is an outsider within her own family. David Siegel, one of the film’s directors, has commented on Foner’s contribution to the shift in Saul’s profession and Miriam’s Jewish identity: “Saul’s transformation into a professor—which was Naomi’s idea—made sense because he has this very intellectual relationship with religion,” Siegel says. For similar reasons, Miriam, who has restrained herself to allow Saul to feel like the leader of the family, has been made a convert. “It’s a nice shorthand for how she gave up something to be with Saul,” Siegel explains. (Fishman “Spelling Errors”)

Yet, this intended symbolic sacrifice does not register in the screenplay or film. Miriam’s status as a converted Jew, much like her foreign accent in the film, is a subtle marker of the otherness. Thus, Miriam’s overall disinterest in the inner workings of her family is adapted in the screenplay and in the film into a faint sense of alienation. Foner has commented on the kinship between her background and that of the Naumanns in the novel, stating that she too had been raised in a family of “high-achieving New York Jews” (Vaucher “Writing Her Way Back”). Foner has also recently addressed the issue of her Jewish identity in a manner that ties in with one of the major themes of Bee Season—“I certainly think of myself as Jewish ... I think of my background as kind of tikkun” (Schleier, “Naomi Foner on ‘Very Good Girls’”). Yet, Foner has also stated that she identifies more with the social-intellectual facets of Judaism than its religious practice—“I remember standing up during my confirmation ceremony and saying I didn't believe in God ... But I also associated Judaism with an intellectual tradition and acts of social justice” (Josephs “‘Bee’ Spells Family”). Foner’s Miriam seems to be treading the same fine lines between cultural affiliation and religious practice, an unusual choice for a convert, but one that is in keeping with Miriam’s personality in the novel. Looking at the world through the reassuring false symmetry of the kaleidoscope, Miriam observes Judaism rather than take part in it because that is how she approaches life in general. Another interesting shift in Miriam’s identity is her chosen profession— while the novel depicts her as a lawyer, the screenplay depicts her as a microbiologist, a choice fitting Miriam’s characterization as obsessive.

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Miriam’s fixation on symmetry, so evident and detailed in the novel, is adapted into her new profession in the screenplay and the symmetry of cells caters to Miriam’s need for Perfectimundo: The assistant leaves. Miriam bends, looks through the lens again. HER POV Cells. Little chambers arranged in a version of the kaleidoscope’s symmetry. She moves the focus. Off the edge of the scope a small patch of abnormal cells. Starting to grow. She raises her head. Takes a breath and closes her eyes as she did outside her daughter’s bedroom. Stands. AMBIENT SOUND FADES. Her BEATING HEART is all we hear. [It plays through this and the following sequences.] (Foner 37)

In this scene, Miriam’s emotional reaction to nature’s symmetry is echoed in her heartbeat. The heartbeat transgresses narrative boundaries and continues to the next scene, propelling Miriam to act upon her desire and seek out a house from which an item can be taken in order to restore her inner balance. In doing so, Foner remains true to the novel, which uses the imagery of Miriam’s heartbeat in order to illustrate her fixation on Tikkun Olam— “Tik-kun O-lam, Tik-kun O-lam, beats her heart’s steady rhythm” (Goldberg 102). Her first act of trespass is preceded by this conflation of heartbeat and intent—“Her looser heart and larger lungs settle into a new rhythm, Tik-kun Tik-kun Tik-kun, that she can hear in the pulse in her ears” (Goldberg 109). However, in the film, the sound of the heartbeat is replaced with a soft glass sound effect that does not play throughout the following sequences and as a result, the corresponding scenes are less evocative of Miriam’s inner struggle. The tug of war between Miriam’s heart and mind has infiltrated her bloodstream in the novel and the screenplay, while the film settles for an amorphous sense of curiosity.

The Art of Tikkun Olam The Kabbalistic idea of Tikkun Olam is one of Bee Season’s main themes and its unusual emplotment in the novel concerns Miriam’s act of conflating the sacred and secular worlds: Miriam’s odd quest reveals a desire to find unity, structure, and beauty in the dull and chaotic world. Gradually, this yearning for and the attempts to achieve unity translate themselves in the performance of some kind of

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secular ritual. Her eagerness takes on the shape of an unfathomable and personal religion. (Lievens 91)

While Miriam does not explicitly evoke God or Judaism throughout her process of Tikkun Olam, there is no doubt that her quest is at least partially a spiritual one—“The storage facility becomes for Miriam a place of worship, the sculpture her object of devotion. No aspect of God is involved but elements of spirituality and transcendence certainly characterize Miriam’s sense of belief” (Lievens 92). Moreover, Miriam's Tikkun Olam certainly strives to incorporate traces of the Divine that can be found in the mundane (92). Thus, “The Jewish notion of tikkun, the restoration of the world, is hereby once more incorporated into an initially secular mysticism” (92). The cinematic scene that displays Miriam’s Tikkun Olam in the storage facility is a pivotal one and the directors of the film recall the process of creating that particular setting, which was meant to reflect Miriam’s mental vision of Tikkun Olam: We spent a lot of time planning the set until we had something that felt like it mirrored Miriam’s brain. In the end, it was photographs of installations by the artist Cornelia Parker that suggested the path we should follow. We covered the walls with stuff, layer upon layer, like a grotto of accumulation. And then in the middle we built a hanging spiral pathway, the centre of which was full of dancing, refracted light. We needed it to be impressive in scale but to retain the idea that one person, working alone, might have created this over the course of several years. We wanted explosive chaos and meticulous order; we wanted it to be awesome, horrible and beautiful. (Wood 28)

The artistic display of Tikkun Olam is also related to Miriam ‘pathology,’ namely her characterization as obsessive: In Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, Miriam Grossman’s childhood entrancement with order and perfection leads to adult kleptomania, an endlessly renewed quest to track down those scattered objects that fulfill her ideal so as to arrange them, unbeknownst to her family, into a beautiful, painstakingly organized alternate world. (Fleissner 107)

Fleissner elaborates on the proliferation of obsessive traits in Bee Season, which seem to extend to all the principle characters in the novel since “nearly every character feels the pull of that gorgeous order against the rough edges of the everyday” (Fleissner 108). This is especially relevant in the case of Miriam since “As the traits become generalized, they are inevitably recast, becoming harder to extricate from more valued abilities

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and interests at work in society at large” (Fleissner 109). Indeed, Miriam’s obsessive reworking of Tikkun Olam via artistic display is not morally judged and the neutral perspective of the novel enables the reader to treat Miriam’s obsessive traits as part and parcel of her artistic drive. In the novel, the theme of Tikkun Olam captures Miriam’s interest and attention from the very moment it is introduced to her by Saul. It is the only thing that Saul actually teaches Miriam, who seems indifferent to Saul’s inner world throughout the plot: The mystics believe that in the beginning of the world God’s Divine Light, containing all that is good, was enclosed in sacred vessels ... But because there was already sin in the world, these vessels could not contain the Light and shattered into countless pieces ... According to the mystics, it is our job to locate these shards and to mend them through good deeds, so that God’s light can be whole again. This is called Tikkun Olam, or the fixing of the world. (Goldberg 86-7)

It is Miriam’s deep sense of a shattered inner world that leads to her fascination with Tikkun Olam and her impulse to recreate it in a decadelong devotion to an artistic display of fragments, shards and stolen artefacts. Miriam’s display is indeed an art form, intended to evoke the spectator’s spiritual sense of alignment with the universe—“This space is not a passive object to be observed and left behind. It is interactive. Every person who steps inside becomes an object in its perfect order, associating with it in infinite, beautifully balanced ways” (Goldberg 225). Her audience is her husband, who is genuinely moved by his wife’s artistic display upon entering the storage room where Miriam has meticulously constructed her own version of Tikkun Olam—“White light floods a storage room the size of a small gym. The silence is immense. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Saul finally says very softly, in the kind of cautious voice reserved for libraries, museums, and cathedrals” (Goldberg 222). Saul is not simply impressed by the display, his aesthetic judgment borders on a spiritual experience: All around him, each object presents itself redefined, this its true function, this the reason for its creation. Saul feels the sudden urge to take off his shoes. He places them gently behind him on the button path, wanting to disturb this vision as little as possible. (Goldberg 224)

Miriam’s life-long obsession is finally validated as a work of art by finding its audience in Saul. Miriam is certainly craving some form of recognition of her artistic talent—she leads the police to the storage room after she is caught breaking into a house by saying “I suppose you’ll want

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to see the rest” (Goldberg 223), and upon hearing that the police took Saul to her storage room, she promptly asks him during his visit to the hospital—“Did they show you my kaleidoscope? ... Isn’t it beautiful?” (Goldberg 235). Goldberg has commented on Miriam’s characterization as obsessive and its impact on Miriam's roles as a mother and wife: I’ve always been fascinated by obsessive people, probably because I’m one myself. Miriam fascinates me because she’s already got what everyone else is looking for … She’s kind of stuck that way, because when you find something that you’re intensely involved in, living can become a compromise … But in reality, you have to eat, and you have to get up in the morning, and in Miriam’s case you have a family that you have to take care of. (Buchwald “A Conversation with Myla Goldberg”)

However, some scholars have deemed Miriam as narcissistic rather than obsessive, maintaining that the various shreds of her artistic display are perceived by Miriam as an extension of her physical body: One way to clarify this important threshold appears by way of the pathology Goldberg gives to the character of Miriam, who is depicted as living, since childhood, almost entirely in a narcissistic world in which various objects are encountered literally as bodily extensions-as missing pieces-of herself. (Eisenstein 30)

Whether either of these definitions applies, it is fair to state that Miriam continually makes the choice not to be fully present in the life of her family. Throughout the novel, Miriam chooses her art as well as her notion of truth and holds on to it in a way that could be easily characterized as devotion if she were a man. In a recent roundtable discussion of women directors, Foner commented on the split personality of female artists—“I don’t know any woman who isn’t constantly fighting between the exquisite selfishness required to be an artist and this exquisite selflessness that’s required to be a parent. Every minute when you have a child” (Horn “Sundance: Full transcript”). Miriam, in her desperate attempts to create a display of Tikkun Olam while clearly struggling with her role as a mother, is an illustration of this conflict. The struggle to reconcile these identities takes on the dichotomy of presence and absence in both the novel and the screenplay, as Miriam is emotionally invested in her artistic recreation of Tikkun Olam and emotionally detached from her family’s life. The screenplay certainly emphasizes the impression conveyed in the novel that Miriam is not

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simply a lost woman, but a lost artist, who is desperately trying to create a display befitting of her inner turmoil. The following scene from the screenplay depicts the encounter set in the novel between Saul and Miriam in the psychiatric ward. This scene is a compressed one since it manages to encapsulate the novel’s tense and volatile hospital visit as well as Saul’s impressions in the novel upon entering Miriam’s storage room and seeing her work for what it is—a stunning artistic display, which Saul feels privileged to have witnessed. The following passage from the scene conveys the only true intimacy that Miriam and Saul share in the novel, Miriam as the artist and Saul as her audience: INT. DAY ROOM PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL—DAY He stops at the entrance holding the shoebox he found under the bed. Miriam sits alone on a green couch in the corner of the room. He’s never seen her so still. She looks straight at him. MIRIAM Did you see it? SAUL Yes. MIRIAM (her face glowing now) It’s not finished yet … but it’s beautiful, isn’t it? SAUL I’ve never seen anything like it. MIRIAM It’s beginning to hold the light, Saul. (leans in to whisper) ...You showed me... SAUL How did I do that? MIRIAM Tikkun Olam ...The Shards. I put them together … To make things whole … To hold the light. She looks at him. SAUL Miriam … That’s a metaphor. A Poem. MIRIAM A poem. Yes. I made a poem. She has. The breath goes out of him. He’s very moved. Close to tears. He steps towards his wife and pulls her to him. (Foner 104)

This pivotal moment is shown in the film, but Saul’s expression is one of anger and frustration, it certainly does not retain the memory of beholding the mesmerizing beauty of Miriam’s Tikkun Olam. While the

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film denotes Miriam as simply mad by depriving her of Saul’s acknowledgement of her artistic talent, Foner’s screenplay grants Miriam artistic validation via her hospital encounter with Saul. In both the novel and the screenplay, social conventions have labelled Miriam as mad, but her husband considers her to be a mad artist.

In & Out: Sexuality as Absent Company Miriam’s sexuality is yet another facet of the presence/absence dichotomy. In the novel, Miriam is constantly trying to anchor her presence in the material world and she also resorts to sex in order to ground herself—“How can she tell him that she needs him inside her or she fears she will float away? That she is fighting something she must struggle to want to fight?” (Goldberg 143) But Miriam does not desire her husband or even sex for that matter; she only seeks the act of penetration in order to sense her own presence inside her body—“Goldberg depicts this pathology most strikingly in the sexual sequences of the novel, where Miriam does not care at all about her husband’s desire, reducing him instead entirely to his sexual organ” (Eisenstein 30). This becomes apparent when Miriam performs oral sex on her husband while he is still asleep, completely indifferent to his emotional needs: The next night Saul awakens to find himself hard inside his wife’s mouth. At first he thinks he is dreaming ... Only when he props himself up on his elbows and touches her shoulder does she finally look at him, seemingly startled to discover a person attached to the focus of her attention ... He looks at her, confusion in his eyes, but she’s not even looking at him, not even aware that he’s come. She’s still pumping up and down. He has to push her off before she stops. (Goldberg 153-4)

It has been suggested that Miriam’s sexual advances are tantamount to her accumulation of stolen objects in her manic pursuit for Tikkun Olam: In Miriam’s quest for communion and wholeness there are not really flesh and blood others with an alterity worth encountering, no lack in the Other, nothing opaque or mysterious or enigmatic around which a world of desire and love can organize itself. There are only objects to be integrated and owned. (Eisenstein 30)

This analogy has been pursued to the extent of equating Saul with Miriam’s stolen objects, a somewhat problematic approach that does not take into account the female perspective during sex and the inherent difference between accumulation and penetration:

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In fact, Miriam is not interested in her husband’s consent or company, she is only after the brief awareness of inhabiting a body—“When she first started and he had been completely soft, she wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted him to wake up. As he became harder she realized it didn’t matter. All she needed was him inside her” (Goldberg 154). While the novel depicts several other passages in which Miriam’s sexuality is a contradictory mix of the need for both corporeal attachment and detachment, the screenplay includes two scenes that capture this dissonance, both are notably absent from the film. The first is a scene in which Miriam performs oral sex and the confused Saul wakes up in the midst of an orgasm: INT. NAUMANN’S BEDROOM—NIGHT Miriam’s head bobs gently as it moves rhythmically between her husband’s legs. The room is dark. The CAMERA moves up Saul’s body to find his face as he wakens in the middle of a building orgasm. His confusion is mixed with his pleasure as he reaches for his wife’s hair. She watches him. Her eyes wide in the dark. Climbs up onto his body. Puts his hands on her naked breasts without speaking. He pulls her towards him. Comes. When his breathing returns to normal she’s still watching him. SAUL Miriam...? She rolls out of bed and heads towards the bathroom. WATER RUNS through the pipes. (Foner 73)

The second sex scene in the screenplay is another adaptation of a central moment in the novel, the only one in which Saul dares to confront his wife about her constant demand for absent sex: SAUL (cont’d) (into her ear, breathy) What do you want, just tell me what you want. MIRIAM I would like sex, please Saul steps back. Stricken. SAUL No. you wouldn’t. You’re dry. Every night it’s the same thing. I can’t be what you want.

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MIRIAM How would you know? She steps away. Saul grabs her. No gentleness now. They sink to the floor. He parts her legs. Puts himself inside. Looks at her face. Waiting for her to tell him to stop. She doesn’t. He thrusts. She closes her eyes. He can’t help himself. He comes. She arches against him. Cries out. Holds on tight. The first real emotion coming from her. Then silence. Neither moves. MIRIAM (cont’d) Thank you. Tears are streaming down his cheeks. He rolls away, pulls himself to his feet. Miriam watches the bathroom door close behind him. HER POV Herself alone in the endless reflection. She closes her eyes. (Foner 88-9)

As in the novel, this confrontation leads to a rough and alienated sexual encounter that serves as a turning point in the relationship between Saul and Miriam—it is by far the most honest exchange in course of their relationship. Both in the novel and in the screenplay, this particular sex scene finally unleashes the bubbling tension between the two, as physical proximity exposes emotional frustration rather than disguise it. With the exception of Miriam’s brief flashbacks to the love-making with Saul while he introduces her to the concept of Tikkun Olam, the only sex scene in the film plays out as a cliché of suburban intimacy—Miriam initiates, Saul is surprised but immediately responds, both are almost completely dressed, the encounter is brief and detached. The strong thematic connection between Miriam’s sexuality and her fleeting grip on the material world is not nearly as tangible as it is in the novel and in the screenplay. As a result, the brief moment of raw honesty between the Saul and Miriam is not captured on film. It can be said that the film Bee Season has marginalized and flattened Miriam’s character in several ways; her otherness, her obsessive traits and her complicated relationship with motherhood and sexuality have all been somewhat reduced to clichés. The film essentially abandons Goldberg’s and Foner’s delicate and sophisticated characterization of Miriam and creates a trivial female character, who subsequently has to be redeemed through a convention. Goldberg’s and Foner’s Miriam is a woman struggling with her dire need for self-expression, which often clashes with her role as a mother and wife. In the novel, Miriam has in fact given up her career as a lawyer for her secret passion to create a re-enactment of Tikkun Olam while transgressing societal boundaries of ownership. In the screenplay, Miriam’s artistry is reaffirmed through Saul’s gaze and her passion for her work on Tikkun Olam is not easily labelled as obsessive. The screenplay

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embraces the ambiguities surrounding Goldberg’s portrayal of Miriam and her constant struggle to find the balance between her domestic responsibilities and her artistic drives. The film, on the other hand, often resorts to formulaic moments in order to redeem Miriam as a mother while depriving her of an audience as an artist and eliminating her attempts to explore her corporeal presence through her sexuality.

Works Cited Bee Season. Dir. Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Perf. Flora Cross, Richard Gere and Juliet Binoche. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2005. Film. “Bee Season Production Notes.” HollywoodJesus.com. November 01, 2005. Web. June 21, 2014. Berkowitz, Michael. “Cops, Robbers and Anarcho-terrorists: Crime and Magical Realism’s Jewish Question.” A Companion to Magical Realism. Ed. Stephen Malcolm Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang. Suffolk, England: Boydell & Brewer, 2005. 131-141. Print. Book Browse. “A Conversation with Myla Goldberg about Bee Season.” Bookbrowse.com. June 14, 2011. Web. July 1, 2014. Buchwald, Laura. “A Conversation with Myla Goldberg.” Randomhouse.com. October 1, 2002. Web. July 1, 2014. Callaghan, Dylan. “Working Small.” Interview with Naomi Foner. Wga.org. 2005. Web. July 1, 2014. Cré, Marleen. “Through a Double Lens: the Portrayal of the Mystic in Bee Season.” Economically Speaking: Essays in Honour of Chris Braecke. Ed. Katja Pelsmaekers and Craig Rollo. Belgium: Maklu, 2007. 125138. Print. Eisenstein, Paul “Ambivalent Kabbalah: Myla Goldberg’s ‘Bee Season’ and the Vicissitudes of Jewish Mysticism.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 11.2 (2010): 24-37. Print. Fishman, Boris. 2005. “Spelling Errors: How Bee Season lost its sting on the screen.” Rev. of Bee Season by Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Tabletmag.com. November 11, 2005. Web. June 23, 2014. Fleissner, Jennifer, L. “Obsessional Modernity: The ‘Institutionalization of Doubt’.” Critical Inquiry 34.1 (2007):106-134. Print. Foner (Gyllenhaal), Naomi. Bee Season. Fox Searchlight Pictures/20th Century Fox. September 5, 2003. Screenplay. Print. Goldberg, Myla. Bee Season. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: Kindle Edition, 2002.

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Harris, Brandon. “Uncertainty.” Interview with David Siegel and Scott McGehee. Filmmakermagazine.com. November 11, 2009. Web. October 25, 2015. Horn, John. “Sundance: Full transcript of Women Directors’ Roundtable.” Interview with Naomi Foner. Latimes.com January 26, 2013. Web. June 27, 2014. Josephs, Susan. “‘Bee’ Spells Family D-y-s-f-u-n-c-t-i-o-n-a-l.” Interview with Naomi Foner. Jewishjournal.com. November 10, 2005. Web. June 27, 2014. Lievens, Bart. “Tracing the Roots of Creation: The Incorporation of Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism in Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season and Pearl Abraham’s The Seventh Beggar.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 25 (2006): 85-100. Print. Morgenstern, Joe. “Must We Spell It Out? In ‘Bee Season,’ Parents And Plot Are Too Controlled.” Rev. of Bee Season by Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Wsj.com. November 11 2005. Web. June 21, 2014. Ravits, Martha A. “The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture.” MELUS 25.1(2000): 3-31. Print. Schleier, Curt. “Naomi Foner on ‘Very Good Girls’ and Her Famous Children.” Interview with Naomi Foner. Blogs.forward.com. July 24, 2014. Web. July 26, 2014. Vaucher. Andrea R. “Writing Her Way Back To the Family Business.” Interview with Naomi Foner. Nytimes.com. October 31, 2004. Web. July 26, 2014. Willens, Susan. “Bee Season, and: The Autograph Man (review).” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23.2 (2005): 123-127. Print. Wood, Jason. “Spellbound.” Interview with Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Sight and Sound 15.12 (2005): 28-30. Print.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Argha Banerjee is currently the Dean of Arts, St Xavier’s College, Kolkata. He was a Commonwealth Research Scholar (2004-2007) at the Department of English, Sussex University, UK, where he wrote his D.Phil. thesis on First World War literature. He was given the Charles Wallace grant for post-doctoral research in the UK in 2014. He has authored three books: Female Voices in Keats’s Poetry (2002), Poetry of the First World War: A Critical Evaluation (2011), and Women’s Poetry and First World War (2014). Sharon Worley received her Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas (2007), and her MA in Art History from Tufts University (1991). She teaches Humanities, Art History, and English at area colleges in Houston, Texas including Sam Houston State University and the University of Houston Downtown. She is the former curator of the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester, MA. (1993-2000). She is the author of numerous publications on art history, literature and culture including the books Women’s Literary Salons and Political Propaganda During the Napoleonic Era: The Cradle of Patriotic Nationalism, (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), A Feminist Analysis of Gender and Primogeniture in Neoclassical Tragedy: the Literary Politics behind the French Revolution (Edwin Mellen Press, 2012) and Louise Stolberg’s Florentine Salon and Germaine de Staël’s Coppet Circle: Neoclassicism, Patronage and the Code of Freedom in Napoleonic Italy (Edwin Mellen Press, 2014). Girindra Narayan Ray is a Professor of English (retd.) at the Department of English, University of North Bengal and Visiting Professor, Salesian College, India. He is the author of numerous papers and has co-edited The Postcolonial Woman Question: Readings in Indian Women Novelists in English (2010) and Writing Difference: Nationalism, Identity and Literature (2014). Camille Alexander is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Kent, Canterbury. She has taught as a Faculty, Foreign languages, at the Community College of Qatar. She has earned an M.A. in Literature with concentrations in composition and rhetoric, Caribbean

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Literature and feminisms, and gender studies. She has presented at conferconferences in the U.S. and the Caribbean on topics such as Caribbean Literature, composition, and internationalizing the writing centre, and her scholarly work has been published in several academic publications. Kristin M. Distel is a doctoral student of English literature at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. She is researching modern and postmodern revisions of eighteenth-century ideologies, particularly focusing on the development of feminist communities. Her in-progress dissertation takes as its subject Mary Astell’s notion of separated gendered spaces. Kristin has recently presented papers at the University of Oxford, the University of Manchester, the Sorbonne, the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, and many other venues. Her poems have been published in Coldnoon, The Minetta Review, Flyover Country review, The broken Plate, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere. She has recently published scholarly articles on Toni Morrison, Larry Levis, Natasha Trethewey, Phillis Wheatley, and Mather Byles. Her co-edited volume, a reissue of Sherwood Anderson’s The Triumph of the Egg, will be published by Hastings College Press in Spring 2017. Isabel López Cirugeda is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha at the Faculty of Education of Albacete, Spain. There she teaches English as a Second Language and Methodology for the Teaching of English and is the Vice-Dean of Quality and International Relationships. Her doctoral thesis is about the literary production of Dorothy Parker. Her research interests also include linguistics and educational motivation. She has participated in international conferences and enjoyed scholarships for research stays abroad, including one at Harvard University. Irina Armianu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She obtained her Ph.D. from Rice University in 2010. Her interest French focuses on different areas of Modern French Thought as well as in teaching with technology, film studies, and women and gender studies. Her recently published papers include “The Romanian Dimension of Existence and the French Model,” “Kenizé Mourad and Early Middle Eastern feminism,” and “Le cineaste Cocteau: une conception artistique au Carrefour de la literature et des arts visuels.” Arup K. Chatterjee is a doctorate in English from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, his dissertation titled 'Hillmaking:

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Architecture and Literature from the Doon Valley.' He has taught English, as Assistant Professor, at colleges in the University of Delhi. In 2014-15 he was the recipient of Charles Wallace fellowship to the United Kingdom. He is the founding-chief-editor of Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing). He has also worked as a correspondent at The Telegraph, India. He currently works at Deloitte, India, as a project researcher and archivist. His book on the Indian Railways is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Samya Achiri is an Assistant Lecturer of literature at Oum El Bouaghi University, east Algeria. Her academic interests include Postcolonial Literature, and African Literature in particular, and Women’s Literature. The contemporary African novel is at the core of her current research. Antonia Peroikou is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Cyprus, in the field of Animal Studies. She acquired a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Nicosia and an MA in English Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies from the University of Cyprus in 2010. The aim of her Ph.D. thesis, titled "Of Jews, Animals, Women and Cyborgs: Writing Beyond "Man" from Kafka to Malamud", is to establish the centrality of the question of animality not only in philosophical but also in literary discourse. Cristina Herrera is an Associate Professor and Chair of Chicano and Latin American Studies, California State University, Fresno. She is the author of Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script (Cambria Press, 2014) and has co-edited Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing (with Paula Sanmartin, Demeter Press, 2014). Bi-Ling Chen, originally from Taiwan, is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas, where she teaches a variety of courses, including Asian American literature, British Literature survey, and World Literature. She has published in such journals as The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, The Journal of Ethnic American Literature, and East-West Connections. She is currently co-editing with John Zheng a book—Conversations with Gish Jen—which will be published by The University Press of Mississippi. Jane Alberdeston Coralin teaches English literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo. When not at UPRA, she offers workshops on poetry and other forms of creative writing to teachers and

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youth. Currently, she is working on both critical and creative projects; recently she completed her poetry manuscript: Anthems of a Puerto Rican Make-Believe. Emine Gecgil graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages Education at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She got her M.A. in English Language Teaching at Hacettepe University. She completed her Ph.D. in 2015 from Hacettepe University with the dissertation titled "By Women, For Women, About Women: Social Novels of the Progressive Era, 1900-1920." Currently, she is teaching at School of English Language at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and continues publishing articles on early twentieth-century women writers. She is also a board member of the American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT) for 2016-2018. Sihem Arfaoui is an Assistant Professor at the High Institute of Human Sciences of Jendouba, and Visiting Professor at Northern Borders University, KSA. She received her BA in English from IBLV, Carthage University and her MA and Ph.D. from the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of Sousse, Tunisia. Her recent publications include chapters in Writing Difference (2013), Dynamisme des Langues, Souveraineté des Cultures (2012), and Hyphen (2011). She has co-edited the conference proceedings on Indigenous Languages (2014), and, more recently, has coedited a volume of articles titled International Conference Proceedings on Creating Myths as Narratives of Empowerment and Disempowerment (2016) Arunima Ray is Assistant Professor of English at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi. She has obtained her Ph.D. degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, for her research on the caste and gender nexus in select modern Indian texts. She has to her credit a number of publications in this area. Her other areas of interest are Indian literature, postcolonial studies, Dalit studies and feminist studies. Pritika Nehra has training in Literary Criticism and Philosophy. She is pursuing doctoral research on the political thought of Hannah Arendt from the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences (H.U.S.S.), I.I.T., Delhi, India. Inbar Kaminsky holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Tel Aviv University; her doctoral thesis examines the alternative to corporeality in contemporary literature. Her publication record includes two essays

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published in Philip Roth Studies about Operation Shylock and Nemesis and two articles published in the following essay collections—Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces (Rowman and Littlefield) and Critical Reflections on Audience and Narrativity (Ibidem-Verlag). Two additional essays are forthcoming in 2016 in the following volumes—The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool UP) and Cityscapes of the Future (Rodopi).