Visions of Doom, Plots of Power: The Fantastic in Anglo-American Women's Literature 9783964567819

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Anne Koenen Visions of Doom, Plots of Power

Leipziger Schriften zur Kultur-, Literatur-, Sprachund Übersetzungswissenschaft Bd. 10 HERAUSGEBER/EDITORS Anne Koenen; Elmar Schenkel; Wolfgang F. Schwarz; Anita Steube; Ludwig Stockinger; Alfonso de Toro; Gerd Wotjak BEIRAT/ADVISORY BOARD: Angelika Hofimann-Maxis; Karlheinz Kasper; Edgar Mass; Albrecht Neubert; Monika Ritzer; Ekkehard Stärk

Anne Koenen

Visions of Doom, Plots of Power The Fantastic in Anglo-American Women's Literature

Vervuert Verlag • Frankfurt am Main • 1999

Als Habilitationsschrift auf Empfehlung des Fachbereichs Neuere Philologien der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main gedruckt mit Unterstützung der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Koenen, Anne: Visions of doom, plots of power : the fantastic in Anglo-American women's literature / Anne Koenen. - Frankfurt am Main : Vervuert, 1999 (Leipziger Schriften zur Kultur-, Literatur-, Sprachund Übersetzungswissenschaft ; Bd. 10) Zugl.: Frankfurt (Main), Univ., Habil.-Schr., 1993 ISBN 3-89354-270-1

© Vervuert Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Umschlaggestaltung: Michael Ackermann; Photo: Tracey Moffatt: „Laudanum", 1999 (Nr. 1 von 19); mit freundlicher Genehmigung der L.A. Galerie Lothar Albrecht, Frankfurt/M. Gedruckt auf säure- und chlorfreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier Printed in Germany

For my parents Katharina and Erich Koenen

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe special thanks to two friends for their generous support in the planning and writing of this book: from my early, still unformed ideas to the final version, Giinter H. Lenz at the Institute fur England- und Amerikastudien, Frankfurt, and Elizabeth Abel at the English Department, Berkeley, encouraged me and accompanied me with their friendship, their ideas and advice. I am deeply grateful for their immeasurable help. Many people helped in the writing of this book, contributing not only their interest, careful reading, and critical commentaries, but also their emotional support. Among them, I want to thank especially Martin Christadler, Carla Golden, Roberta Hamilton, Klaus J. Milich, Leila May, and Ilene Philipson. My time spent with the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, was invaluable for the writing of the book; the Bain Group offered both an interdisciplinary intellectual context for discussions of ideas and an institutional frame for the many friendships that developed. The staff at the English Department and the secretary at the Beatrice Bain Research Group at Berkeley were always supportive during my research; I owe a special note of gratitude to Julio Guillermo from the main library. I am indebted to two institutions, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, for providing me with the financial support to pursue this project. Steven Wheatley and Manfred Briegel gave these institutions a friendly human face; I very much appreciate their understanding and kindness. Particular thanks go to my colleagues at Leipzig University for their support and friendship; to Thomas Richter additional thanks for taking care of the computer-related aspects of getting the book ready for publication.

ix CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The Fantastic A s Feminine M o d e - Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso

2.

3.

4.

1

Sea

9

The Corruption of Paradise - Marginalization and The Other

10

Fantasy as the Feminine Mode - Contested Realities

12

The Tangible Silence - Structure and the Female Voice

26

Fantasy and Realism - Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre

28

Theories o f the Fantastic

37

Definitions and Theories of the Fantastic

40

The Center, Marginalization, and Definitions of the Fantastic

44

Psychoanalysis and the Function of the Fantastic

48

The Constraints of Realism, the Freedom of Fantasy

51

Women's Fantasies of Power

54

Literary Signs of the Fantastic - The Disruption of Order

57

A History o f Fantasy in White Women's Literature

73

"Female Gothic"

74

Women's Ghost Stories

76

The Home and the Family as Prison

78

Edith Wharton - Realism and Silencing, Fantasy and History

81

Edith Wharton - Symbiotic Intimacy

85

The Exotic as Place of the Fantastic

88

Women, Sexuality, and the Uncanny

95

The Fantastic in the Literatures o f W o m e n o f Color

105

Folklore and Literature, Magic and Lies

107

"Quiet as it is kept" - Hidden Histories

112

X

Toni Morrison - Beloved and the Ghost of Slavery

117

Toni Morrison - Magic Women and the Places of the Past

126

Toni Morrison - Female and Male Ways of Coping in Sula

129

Not A Story To Pass On

131

5. Ambiguous Dreams - Utopia as a State of Mind

145

Herland - The New "Empire of the Mother"

149

Male Nightmares - Herland Revis(it)ed

154

Dream-Lands - Places of the Future, Places in the Mind

159

New States of Mind - Humanity and Androgyny

168

Ethnicity and Utopia

178

6. The Past as Nightmare - Dystopia as a State of Body

191

Swastika Night - "Nothing she is and nothing she must become"

192

Individual and Community - Isolation and the Need for Female Solidarity

196

Writing the "I" and History - Dystopian Discourses and Silencing

199

The Past as Nightmare - The Body and Control

204

Traveling to the Past - Slavery as Dystopia

211

Barbarians, Heroes, and Villains - The World as Text

215

Male Dreams, Women's Nightmares

220

7. Sea-Changes - Metamorphoses as Plots of Power

227

Vampires - Women Who Make Him Shudder

232

Surfaces - Masks and Clothes

238

Shifting Identities - Beauty, Power, and the Gothic

242

Sea-Changes - Of Cyborgs, Female Men, and Male Women

247

Metamorphosis as Naturalized and Supernatural Phenomenon

257

8. Alien(N)ations - Home, Displacement, and Aliens

267

The Uncanny Kitchen - Domestic Routines and Invisibility

270

xi Burning Down the House or The Heat Death of the Universe

275

Sleeping with the Enemy - Identifying with the Alien

277

Mainstream and Outsiders - Bodily Harm

283

Retreat from Civilization and Home - Lolly Willowes and Housekeeping

286

Ubi Non Bene, Ibi Non Patria

293

9. Conclusion

303

The Fantastic, Feminism, Postmodernism, and A Politics of Location

304

The Personal Is Political - A Family Thriller

310

Gender and the Fantastic

312

10. Bibliography

321

Primary Works

321

Secondary Works

323

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was told as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as women wear it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

INTRODUCTION

Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. [...] As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. They tell me I am in England but I don't believe them. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Female vampires prowl the streets at night, spreading terror; suburban housewives have tender affairs with monsters and happily leave the earth on alien spaceships; ostensibly occupied with needlework, grandmothers and spinsters work to overthrow a dystopian patriarchy by creating a woman's language.1 These briefly sketched plots reveal the potential of the fantastic as an escape from the restrictions of realism, imposed by the laws of probability and verisimilitude which Joanna Russ satirized as a choice between marriage, madness, and death for the female protagonist. I demonstrate that, beyond fantasy's potential for more versatile plots, a special affinity exists between women's writing and fantasy as a literary mode. In contrast to realism, the fantastic purposely and consciously violates verisimilitude and describes realities which have been excluded from hegemonic constructions of reality as non-existent, as impossibilities in a supposedly natural order. Like the fantastic, the experiences and literary representations of women white women and, to an even larger extent, women of color - have been silenced in white patriarchal discourses.2 Fantasy exposes the constructedness of "their world" and subverts totalizing interpretations in the juxtaposition with the articulation of the repressed. The Greek term "phantastikos" means "that which is presented to the mind, made visible, visionary, unreal."3 In the debate about definition and function of the fantastic, two of these aspects constantly recur: the status of fantasy as the "unreal," defined in opposition to a reality whose ontological status is understood to be problematic; and its function to "make visible" the individually and/or socially repressed, as psychoanalysis demonstrates; theorists of the fantastic emphasize its transgressive potential, its violation of not only natural laws, but socially constructed "grammars" of the real. Fantasy in the context of this work does not signify a genre, but a literary mode,4 an aesthetic category that permeates literature; the fantastic in the (post)modern text is no longer contained in separate genres like science fiction, but mixes freely with realism.5 I am especially interested in those

2 "mainstream" texts usually not perceived as fantastic where fantasy disrupts a mimetic narrative and disturbs its course, as in the works of authors like Marilynne Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, and Toni Morrison; Toni Morrison's work is representative of contemporary writings by women of color in taking recourse to cultural traditions to incorporate the fantastic. The scope of this study includes writers from the US, Canada, and Great Britain, acknowledging the fact that the commonalities between the "feminine fantastics" outweigh cultural differences6 that are more pronounced in comparison to the male tradition of the respective countries.7 My study intends to fill a gap in contemporary literary criticism: theories of the fantastic consistently either ignore women's contributions or subsume them under norms developed on the basis of white men's literature; feminist literary criticism, on the other hand, either privileges the realist text or, in the case of French critics, the experimental text, with the fantastic relegated to footnotes. Recent publications on feminist Utopias or science fiction concentrate on genre rather than mode; the fantastic elements in "mainstream" women's literature, however, are persistently overlooked. The book is organized into two parts: part I establishes the theoretical, historical, and cultural background for a reading of the fantastic in contemporary women's literature. Like Rosemary Jackson in her Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, I am not only interested in the "poetics," but also the "politics" of fantasy as mode.8 My intention here is to develop a frame of reference that allows to realize how women's literature challenges our notions of a fantastic in which white men's literature has been taken as normative. Although the fantastic as a mode permeates literatures of different cultures and periods, its specific manifestations are placed in specific historical contexts and must be read accordingly; the fantastic, although striving to subvert the "real," cannot ever be absolutely free of the real; otherwise, it would be unintelligible literature. Thus, social categories like gender and race have to be considered in theories of the fantastic. After the opening chapter that reads Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea as a fundamental statement about the potential of the fantastic for women's writing, as a feminine mode, the chapter on theory delineates the (male) norm, while pursuing my guiding question developed in the Rhys-reading and revising the established theories by considering gender and race. In insisting on social position and perspective as relevant categories, I critique the problematic, because universalizing, positing of one "consensus-reality" as a foil for the fantastic; corresponding with that infusion of the fantastic with social dynamics is the refutation of theories that construct the fantastic as an individual, no longer communal discourse in contemporary literature.

3 The chapters on white women's literary history and minority women's literatures9 provide some of the answers to the approaches delineated in my revision of established theory and identify common elements and basic features by concentrating on exemplary texts and authors, Edith Wharton's ghost stories and Toni Morrison's novels, with references to related texts. Part II then reads a wide variety of contemporary women's texts with the interest to identify what features, if any, they have in common, and what these shared features might mean for the function of the fantastic in women's literature, what conclusions one can draw from common usages. By focusing on specific and particular forms of the fantastic, namely Utopian and dystopian narratives, tales of metamorphoses, and texts of "Alien(N)ation," the first three chapters demonstrate how women's use of the fantastic sets its own standards that differ from men's, while the chapter on alienation and the home deals with a manifestation of the fantastic unique to women's literature, for reasons that are obvious: women writers here react to women's identification with the home/family. These texts of "Alien(N)ation" also provide concrete examples of the interplay between social grammar, literary conventions, and narrative mode - individual quests for an identity beyond the confines of society, subject of a multitude of realist texts in men's literature, necessitate the fantastic in women's literature. These readings show the fantastic in women's literature as a mode used to articulate a desire for control, to write plots of power, particularly evident in the tales of metamorphosis, where, in dramatic contrast to the motifs use in men's literature where it signifies extreme alienation and a loss of control, change is interpreted as an access to power that in turn is seen as a source of identity. Fantasy opens up a space for the articulation of female desire without being impeded by the demands for a plausible social context that would reinscribe the marginalization of women. In analyzing "women writers" and their use of the fantastic, I do not understand "woman" as an exclusive category based on supposedly essential and natural elements; I refer to female authors who write out of an awareness of the mechanics of sexual politics and the cultural construction of "woman." 10 "Femininity" and "woman" are cultural fictions,11 after all, not unchangeable categories of truth, in spite of cultural efforts to naturalize these fictions. I am aware of the danger inherent in having to invoke terms like "feminine" and "masculine" in the discussion of literatures that mostly strive to deconstruct gender; of the dangers of having to create a counterhegemonic discourse with "the master's tools," as Audre Lorde calls it, and of being caught in a "reverse discourse." 12 After all, as Ruth Bleier mourns, "patriarchal consciousness is our conceptual prison," 13 we can neither tran-

4 scend binary thinking nor speak from an Archimedian point "outside." Since I am interested in the dynamics of hegemonic power rather than biology, it should be apparent that many of the points I make about the potential of fantasy as a mode for women writers applies to minority writers or writers of the so-called "Third World" as well, who also write from a marginalized place,14 although the functions and specific manifestations of that mode would probably differ, as the analysis of the literatures of women of color suggests. And finally: the fictions of white women and women of color15 are discussed - with some exceptions, Octavia Butler's work for example16 - in separate chapters, because the use of the fantastic in the work of women of color has to be understood on the background of a cultural legacy of the integration of the fantastic and the real and has its own implications. In my readings of fantastic texts, I draw on a variety of critical methods, among them theories of the fantastic and various psychoanalytic theories like Freud's contributions to "phantasy" and feminist Object Relations Theory,17 sometimes supported by references to social and biographical context. This eclectic approach reflects my conviction that there is not one infallabile approach for all texts and that one single interpretative frame of reference would not have done justice to the wide variety of the manifestations and functions of the fantastic in women's literature where the texts respond differently to theory. Notes 1 2

3

4

5

These are the plots of fictions discussed later in the book; while the vampire plot is obviously widespread, the other examples are Rachel Ingalls' Mrs. Caliban, and Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue. By "patriarchy" I understand "the multiple cultural and socioeconomic systems that institutionalize and hence perpetuate exclusively male hegemonic power." Carolyn J. Allen, "Feminist Criticism and Postmodernism" in Joseph Natoli, ed., Tracing Literary Theory (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 297. These encyclopedic definitions are given in Lance Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty. An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy (New York et al.: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 14; Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London/New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 13. Frederic Jameson defines a mode as a "particular type of discourse [...], a temptation and a mode of expression across a whole range of historical periods, seeming to offer itself, if only intermittently, as a formal possibility which can be revived and renewed." quoted in Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, p. 7. See Paul Coates, The Realist Fantasy. Fiction and Reality since Clarissa (New York: St Martin's Press, 1983), p. 8: "One working condition of a modernist text would be

5 that it mixes styles with the aim of subverting both realism and fantasy"; see p. 1. For the postmodern text, see Lance Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty. 6 Differences that do exist in the Utopian genre, for example. 7 The same similarities are true for the genre Utopia; see "Vorwort" in Hartmut Heuermann and Berndt-Peter Lange, eds., Die Utopie in der angloamerikanischen Literatur (DUsseldorf: Bagel, 1984), p. 8. 8 See Jackson, Fantasy, p. 6; see also Gisela Ecker, "The Politics of Fantasy in Recent American Women's Novels," Englisch Amerikanische Studien, Vol. 6, No. 3 (September 1984): 503-509, with its programmatic title. 9 That chapter concentrates on African American literature and Toni Morrison's novels because I think it is essential that white feminist critics judge minority women's literature in the context of their own cultural and literary traditions, not only in the context of a "women's literature" for which actually white women's literature has set the standards. Since I am more familiar with African American literary tradition than other literatures, I have focused on black women writers, while offering comparisons with other minority women's literatures. 10 Thus, writers like Shirley Jackson who have extensively used the fantastic, but with no guiding interest in gender-implications, are not within the range of my study. - The term "feminist" which might have offered itself instead of "woman" is problematic because many writers, especially women of color, reject this label (Alice Walker has coined "womanist" instead, for example.) See Rosalind Coward, "Are Women's Novels Feminist Novels?" in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 225-240. For a discussion of the reaction the term "feminist fiction" elicits in critics and writers, see Alix Kates Shulman, "The Taint" in Philomena Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions. The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 177-185. Her short and preliminary list of "feminist writers" overlaps to a large extent with the writers discussed here, namely Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Alice Walker, and Fay Weldon. — Similarly, African American writers are defined by some critics as those writing out of an understanding of and interest in African American culture and in racism. See Toni Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (London/Sidney: Pluto Press, 1984,1983 1 ), p. 339-345. 11 I am aware that "race" equally is a social construct. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 12 Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House" in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown MA: Persephone Press, 1981), p. 98-106; p. 99. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans, by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 101. See Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature" in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference, p. 78-106; p. 82, for the analysis of a similar problem in the discourse about "race", namely the "manichean allegory - a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and Other, subject and object. The power

6

13 14

15

16

17

relations underlying this model set in motion such strong currents that even a writer who is reluctant to acknowledge it and who may indeed be highly critical of imperialist exploitation is drawn into its vortex." The binary oppositions enumerates by JanMohamed have been used identically to describe gender-difference, if "white and black" is substituted by "man and woman." Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984), p. 199. In that approach, I am close to poststructuralist interpretations of gender: "This contention produces, as a site of political attention and engagement, a 'space' rather than a sex: the margin, the repressed, the absence, the unconscious, the irrational, the feminine - in all cases the negative or powerless instance." In that approach, the subject of feminism "is a structural position - variously occupied by the feminine, the body, the Other." Laura Kipnis, "Feminism: The Political Conscience of Postmodernism?" in Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 149-166; p. 159/160. Another problem arises here: I am aware that the qualifiers in "minority woman" or "woman of color" should demand that I use "white women" consistently. I have only specified "women" as "white women," though, where the context might have been misleading; I do not mean to appropriate a universal status of "white women." The chapters on theory, minority women's literature and Utopian literature by white women deal with this problem. For a discussion of these terms, see Mary Childers and Bell Hooks, "A Conversation about Race and Class" in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 60-81; p. 67. - 1 use the terms "minority women" and "women of color," the first term, because in sociological usage, it implies a category of power, and the second because it has emerged as the preferred term in writings by women of color, although they have not dismissed "minority women." See the chapters on dystopian novels and metamorphoses, and the discussion of science fiction and African American literature in the chapter on dystopias. See Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 12, who acknowledges the problematic nature of the term "feminist," "given the pluralistic nature of feminist ideology and its diverse political and cultural manifestations." I use Object Relations Theory to explain differences in the manifestations of the fantastic in men's and women's literature, for example in the gendered differences in the protagonists' experience of metamorphosis, and not to suggest any conclusions with regard to style or language, as Judith Kegan Gardiner does in "On Female Identity" in Elizabeth Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 177-192; p. 185. For a critique of Object Relations Theory as a tool in feminist literary criticism see Nina Baym, "The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory" in Shari Benstock, ed., Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 53, and Renate Hof, "Writing Women into (Literary) History: Toward a Poetics of Gender?" in Giinter H. Lenz, Hartmut Keil and Sabine Br&ck-Sallah, eds., Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag/St. Martin's Press, 1990), p. 211-224; p. 217, who points out that those characteristics derived from Object Relations Theory to

7 describe "feminine" style (like "open, fluid, non-linear, fragmented, and polysemic language") equally apply to "predominantly male, so-called 'postmodern' authors." I agree with Hof that - in the context of deconstructing biological and essentialist notions of gender - we have to abandon "the search for a uniquely female language, or rather the notion of a female aesthetics", (p. 217).

THE FANTASTIC AS FEMININE MODE - JEAN RHYS'S WIDE SARGASSO

SEA

"Let her identity [...] be buried in oblivion." Rochester in Jane Eyre about Bertha [...] the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie [...] "He" in Wide Sargasso Sea

Rochester's curse of Bertha Antoinette Mason in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is not only a demand to erase any memory of her existence, but also comments on Bronte's novel and women's literary tradition, for Bronte, the author, joins her male protagonist in silencing Bertha, and leaves a blank where Bertha's story could or rather should be.1 The conspicuous absence of Bertha's story has inspired many feminist critics during the last years, and the figure of Bertha has been interpreted as so typical of women's literature that a classic in feminist literary criticism took its title from the madwoman in the attic.2 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys,3 published in 1966 after some twenty years of writing, stands out as the literary re-creation of Bertha's voice imagined long before the "new" women's movement took a feminist and critical interest in Jane Eyre as one of the major texts of the nineteenth century. By 1945, Rhys had already written half of the novel, commenting in her correspondence (collected in The Letters of Jean Rhys) that it "might be the one book I've written that's much use."4 Starting from sketches of life in the West Indies, Rhys sets out to tell "the real story - as it might have been." (153) Determined to counter the strong bias against the West Indies in Bronte's novel, Rhys had finished the first draft by 1959. (159) Her letters till the final publication reveal the careful planning of the novel as well as the pains she took in writing it, describing in detail questions of structure, characters, names, and places.5 Rhys first wanted the title to be "The First Mrs. Rochester," but had early premonitions that this direct reference to Bronte's novel would not do. (50, 143) In a letter in March 1958, she first mentions the title "Wide Sargasso Sea," adding that "nobody knew what I meant." (154) This shift from direct reference to mystery reflects the novel's careful avoidance of Rochester's name6 as well as the shift from individual to

10

nature, from England to the West Indies, all these being central concerns of the novel. As conscious as Rhys is of names and naming, both in her novel and in her letters, the shift also signifies the denial and rejection of patriarchal naming, a major theme of the novel. Finally, the "Wide Sargasso Sea" becomes the objective correlative of the gulfs that separate opposites: not only the West Indies and England, but men and women, white and black, sane and insane, gaps that are wide and unbridgable.7 The Corruption of Paradise - Marginalization and The Other The moment recalled in Part I is the one just after the split of the mythical unity, and there are kernels of irritation in a world that is perceived as woman-dominated: Mr Mason comes to personify the intrusion of the male, logocentric, Protestant world. But mythical unity and the strength of female community are still so close and powerful that female support (from Christophine, Aunt Cora, the nuns in the convent) can diminish the impact of the personal split that corresponds with the split of the world. The women's community of the convent is the most dramatic image of this healing force, a world where neither men nor mirrors are allowed. Disunity and the invasion of the mythical world are interpreted by the novel as the intrusion of male logos and its fatal orientation towards binary oppositions. Wide Sargasso Sea opens with a military metaphor connoting hierarchy, conflict, and the need for unity: "They say when trouble comes close ranks." The sentence immediately and unobtrusively establishes one of the dominant themes of the novel, the other. "They" are respectively men (vs. women), whites (vs. blacks), English (vs. Caribbeans), Protestants (vs. Catholics), "sane" and rational (vs. "insane" and fantastic). The inherent domination of binary oppositions is suggested by "ranks," denoting hierarchy. This metaphor is from a male domain, the military, but the presences most felt in the first paragraphs and in the entire first part of the novel are female. "Jamaican ladies," "my mother," Christophine are the first representatives of the female-dominated world of Part I that closes with the image of a female enclave, the convent, and the mother-figures of the nuns. Fathers are only introduced in the second paragraph and immediately linked to death - Antoinette's father and Mr Luttrell, the other male, are both dead, as is the mother's male horse.8 Death pervades Part I, and is throughout associated with maleness. Death has also invaded the Garden of Eden of Antoinette's childhood and spoiled it, but memories of an Edenic state are still strong and linger seductively.9 As indicated by the myths, symbols,

11

dreams, and, of course, by the dominance of women,10 that Edenic state is interpreted as matriarchal and linked to the maternal. But the Garden of Eden "had gone wild," mothers no longer favor and protect their daughters (Antoinette's mother rejects her for her crippled brother Pierre); domination has corrupted the world; reason marginalizes fantasy and myth; nightmares of marriage trouble Antoinette. The "wildness" of the Garden of Eden is linked to phallic sexuality and the snake; the loss of innocence that leads to the corruption of paradise is linked to the (ultimately unsuccessful) repression of the other. The others are women and blacks: Wide Sargasso Sea is as much a novel about racism and imperialism as it is about sexism and Victorianism. As the paragraph directly joining the lament of the lost Eden shows, the abolition of slavery has not been able to restore lost innocence - once the mechanism of oppression has been set in motion, there is no turning back, the corruption is not reversible. Apathy, hate, revenge as well as incompleteness abound. The mother prefers the son, the father is dead, Tia - Antoinette's black alter ego rejects her with racial resentment; Antoinette is alone in the corrupted garden, or nearly alone, since Christophine is still there. Like the mammy in the literature of the US-American South, Christophine - the name is deeply ironic, since she is the antagonist of conventional Christianity and male order - is a tower of strength and a source of female wisdom, and it is to her that Antoinette will turn in times of distress." Without ever stating the similarity of their worldviews explicitly, the novel indirectly constructs an affinity that results from their respective marginalization and informs their ways of looking at reality -at different points in the novel, Christophine and Antoinette repeat each other's arguments that England is not real and that English men are obsessed with money. Christophine represents the quintessential other: she is black, female, dedicated to myth and obeah rather than to reason and logic, she violates male law, is loyal to women. In the end, she is unable to rescue Antoinette with her support and magic against the combined forces of reason, money, and male "justice," a justice Christophine perceptively equates with slavery.12 Yet Christophine herself is the only one in the novel to "survive whole,"13 another ironic comment by Rhys since Christophine is also the most disadvantaged by race, class, and gender. Exactly this total marginality saves her: she is not implicated in the guilt of oppression, far removed from the center of power, and she is firmly rooted in the "other" culture. Her support for Antoinette notwithstanding, she keeps a distance from the white woman, never identifying with the culture of her oppressors nor showing the dependent love for white children that the mammy-cliche suggests.14 While

12

marginal in the social matrix, she is central to the novel: as Spivak notices, she is the "first interpreter and named speaking subject" in the text, and "most important, it is Christophine alone whom Rhys allows to offer a hard analysis of Rochester's actions."15 Fantasy as the Feminine Mode - Contested Realities

Reality might disconcert her, bewilder her, hurt her, but it would not be reality. "He" in Wide Sargasso Sea

Closely connected with the subject of the other is Rhys's exploration of fantasy/madness versus logic/reason, one of the most powerful oppositions in Wide Sargasso Sea.16 Rhys's text is a literary comment on fantasy as a mode,17 a denunciation of the marginalization of the fantastic, revealing the patriarchal re-definition of fantasy as madness as a hegemonic strategy to establish one exclusive construction of reality. The dominant mode of Part I, a narrative saturated with black culture and female dominance, is fantasy and dream, myth and magic. Part II, "his" narrative, follows the struggle against fantasy, an attempt to re-write fantasy as madness, while Part III in turn redefines sanity by focusing on fantasy and dream. Fantasy is the mode of the "other," women and blacks, and reason/rationality the mode of dominance, of male and white supremacy. The concepts of the other and of sanity/madness are inseparably related. As Jackson observes, "[f]rom a rational, 'mono-logical' world, otherness cannot be known or represented except as foreign, irrational, 'mad,' 'bad."'18 We have seen how otherness permeates the novel on every level and finds its most explicit expression on the level of worldviews in obeah. While Part I is immersed in the "other" mode, Part II links fantasy and otherness to all the interpretations Jackson mentions: first the other is perceived as alien, then as opposed to reason, then equated with madness, and finally labeled "bad," a deviation to be punished and destroyed. The novel rejects these interpretations through its structure: the use of Antoinette as a first-person narrator denies the stigmatization of her fantasy as madness. Madness, to carry Jackson's point further, is always a definition from the outside, from an objectifying distance, never from the inside.

13

In Part I, the novel evokes a mythical past where the concept of otherness and the marginalization of fantasy do not exist. Myth is characterized by unity with nature, identity with oneself. This mythical past is present on two levels, first on a collective level as the after-image of an Edenic state and as the temporary reconstruction of a mythical refuge; indeed, Part I depicts the passage from myth to history.19 On the second level, the individual one, Antoinette's childhood recalls mythical time: there is no sharp distinction between herself and the world, the world and "objects" are animated.20 But Tia's betrayal, the mother's rejection, and the preparation for the mother's remarriage provoke the end of this identity, and after the first of her three dreams, Antoinette wakes up "knowing." (27) This knowledge is about nonidentity and the end of mythical, i.e. cyclical time: "knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing." (22) Knowledge signifies her fall from grace, and the un-sameness she perceives is of course her own, it marks the beginning of a split subjectivity, "not myself any longer" (28), a split for which mirrors become the dominant symbol. The concept of change introduces time in its threatening and destructive aspects,21 and change afflicts the place of her childhood where "talk about Christophine changed Coulibri" (31) when Antoinette becomes aware that Christophine's obeah is not the "normal" mode, but is interpreted from the outside as dangerous and "alarming." Change is not perceived superficially ("Coulibri looked the same"), but on a deep subjective level ("it didn't feel the same.").22 The "objective," priviliged sense of seeing is here reduced to reveal nothing; the stress is on Antoinette's subjectivity. Antoinette's perception in Part I is dominated by fantasy, dreams, and nightmares,23 yet already threatened to be marginalized by male reason. Rhys acknowledges the power of fantasy and discredits reason by giving Annette's and Antoinette's dreams the power of prophecy. "Reason" in Wide Sargasso Sea is interpreted as instrumental rationality bent on the destructive domination of the other - nature, women, blacks. The battle between fantasy and reason, between pleasure and reality principle,24 is personified sometimes to the extent of being allegorical - in the marriages AnnetteMason, Antoinette-Rochester. In their "fantastic marriage" (28)25 that is a clash between fantasy and reason, or, in the words of the novel, dance and money (30, 22), Annette and Mason constantly fight about perceptions and interpretations of reality. Reflected in the ritual nature of their fights are a fundamental conflict between the worldviews and the failure to bridge the gap between reason and fantasy. Focusing on her lack of rationality, Mason wants Annette to "be reasonable" and "have some reason;" he complements these standard exhortations by accusations that she "imagines" things when

14 she insists on leaving Coulibri because she senses danger. The novel, of course, sides with Annette's view and discredits his by letting her fears come true when Coulibri is burnt down by rioting blacks. The Englishman's refusal to listen and his attempt to marginalize her vision invite disaster and finally, by causing the death of her son and the loss of Coulibri, drive Annette into "madness" - a Cassandra whose warnings have been ignored.26 Even in the turmoil of the riot, Mason rigidly clings to his conviction that there is no "reason" to be alarmed. (38) The conflict between him and Annette culminates in their public struggle when she insists to follow her "imagination" and go back to rescue the parrot; her portrayal in that scene, likening her to an aggressive, but speechless animal, anticipates both her subsequent stigmatization as mad and the fate of her daughter Antoinette: Annette has stopped speaking, "only fought him silently, twisting like a cat and showing her teeth." (41) By an ironic turn, Rhys again validates Annette's perception against Mason's outraged rejection of her ideas. Noticing that the blacks quiet down, Antoinette first credits this respite from danger to God's intervention whom Mason had just invoked in a prayer - "mysterious God heard Mr Mason at once." (42) But when she "opens her eyes," she sees the truth: it is not mysterious God who has intervened but the very parrot her mother Annette had wanted to save.27 Mason's narrow insistence on reason not only drives Annette into "madness" and finally death, but robs Antoinette of her home Coulibri and her mother.28 The pattern of her mother's struggle with male rationality will be exactly repeated in Antoinette's marriage with Rochester, who will further displace her and drive her into madness, so that she will suffer the same fate as her mother.29 The novel follows that process in Part II where the struggle between "father" reason and "mother" fantasy moves from its relatively episodic position in Part I to the center. Yet Antoinette is first allowed a time of recovery in her Aunt Cora's care and in the convent. After the burning of Coulibri and Tia's rejection of her, Antoinette had experienced the first signs of schizophrenia: "We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass." (45) The convent, a female enclave where even the bishop's influence is minimal, is a place without looking-glasses, these omnipresent symbols of alienation in women's literature;30 it is Antoinette's "refuge," a place of mysticism, and, significantly, a place where binary oppositions are invested with a different meaning: "That was how it was, light and dark, sun and shadow, Heaven and Hell" (57) in "a place of sunshine and death." (56) Oppositions are perceived neither as competing nor as hierarchical, but as necessary and inevitable conditions, co-existing in their own right.

15 Antoinette's time of being "bolder, happier, more free," of being untroubled by her nightmares is terminated when Mr Mason hints at an arranged marriage. Profoundly disturbed, she is haunted by "a feeling of dismay, sadness, loss, [that] almost choked me." (59) The "choking" implies a premonition of her silencing; immediately after Mason's visit, she has her dream again, a dream full of anxiety about marriage and phallic sexuality which Antoinette equates with being in hell. Part I closes with the announcement of her mother's death - the end of the female-dominated world - and a strong sense of foreboding as one of the nuns tells Antoinette: "Soon I will give the signal. Soon it will be tomorrow morning." (61) While Part I celebrates a mythical female community and is dedicated to fantasy, Part II, his narrative, is the dawn of a new "morning," a period characterized by struggles to set up patriarchal reason over fantasy. This part protocols Rochester's battle with reason and fantasy, a fight both internal, that is introspective when he records his struggle with the seductive power of fantasy, and external, that is "communication" when he writes his dialogues with Antoinette. The different modes inform their ways of speaking: while Antoinette's narrative is highly elliptical and impressionistic, his aims at "realism," recording places, exact time, dialogues, causal connections. Rochester's narrative becomes the exorcism of the fantastic, a painful struggle not to succumb to magic and myth. Resonances of the antagonism between reason and fantasy permeate his narrative, and the function of the high proportion of dialogue is to record this conflict, the clashing of two different modes. Yet the dialogues are only attempts at understanding the "other," attempts that are doomed to failure because in the end Rochester cannot tolerate fantasy, he cannot face the other without the impulse to dominate or annihilate; Antoinette, in turn, is driven to desperation by a man whose worldview is utterly alien to her. It should be noted that Rhys's exploration of the modes is not essentialist or biologically deterministic, neither "fantasy" nor "reason" are defined as innately female or male modes. By providing historical context (money, religion, slavery, laws), she places her protagonists in cultural matrixes that shape them. Indeed, one could argue that Part II follows Rochester missing his opportunity to "become whole," and Rhys, far from denouncing her character, portrays him as a torn man, vexed by his decisions. Although the novel sees matriarchy and fantasy as primary and patriarchy and reason as their corruption, Rhys is careful to portray Rochester's masculinity as a product of specific historical constellations; he is not only the villain, but a victim as well.

16 Part II also has its mythic paradise, Granbois, but here the idea of paradise is filtered through the mind of the representative of male reason who is not immune to its powers, but who ultimately is driven to destruction. Although deeply seduced by "magic" (sexuality, nature, the other, fantasy), his guiding principle, reason, alienates him from blacks, women, and nature, and moments of unity are extremely rare for him; the intensity of his attraction is mirrored in the vehemence of his compensatory revulsion. The shift from the woman-centered world of Part I to the male logocentric world of Part II, apparent in the change of narrators, is at once suggested by Rochester's repeated invocation of the "Dear Father," a communication both imaginary (when he composes letters never meant to be sent) and real.31 Letters figure prominently in his narrative and are quoted extensively - a hint at the appropriation of language for practical communication and information at the expense of more "fantastic" discourse. The letters further reveal an emphasis on the written rather than oral language and serve to provide authentication for his fears; they add a "realistic" touch to his story.32 The Father in his letters, both his biological father and by implication the patriarchal God, is invoked to counteract the mythical mountains of Granbois, Antoinette's special place.33 That God of Part II, especially in the scenes with Daniel, is a Puritan god, linked to money and measuring time; he is a god of vengeance.34 Rochester is the intruder into the world of fantasy where he introduces linear, "scientific" (as opposed to natural, cyclical) time. Throughout the novel, different concepts of time are pitted against each other, and linear concepts are associated with male figures who often bear watches. Not only is the introduction of time an indicator of the destruction of myth, but also on the individual level - an indicator of the passage from the pleasure to the reality principle, that is in the "timing" of pleasure. Rochester, the man who distrusts sexuality and treasures time, represents both reality principle and linear time. The incarnation of patriarchal reasoning is the clock made of gold (125) the clock measuring time by an "objective," scientific method, not by subjective experience or natural cycles. The harmony of (wo)man with nature is destroyed by vectorial time, civilization disregards the cycles of nature. Especially since the concept of time as valuable was developed in the Protestant ethic, measuring time has become a prerequisite for capitalism, and is thus rightly linked by the novel to gold. Rochester's obsession with time surfaces during times of crisis, most pronounced when communicating with Daniel. Closing an episode by observing "[i]t was five minutes to three"

17

(103), and registering that the "black and gilt clock on a shelf struck four" (125), he betrays his ambition to assess time scientifically and precisely, an obsession that seems strangely out of place in the mythic realms of Granbois. Here, people rely on oral history to keep record of time, where a "hundred years, a thousand years [are] all the same to le Bon Dieu and Baptiste too." (163) Like theirs, Antoinette's concept of time is "not civilized" (68), counting time not objectively, but measuring it by significance and subjectively: "For five years. Isn't it quick to say. And isn't it long to live." (130) This interpretation of time will dominate Part III, where chronology has so completely broken down that it invites being read as madness: "Nights and days and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers." (184)35 The subjective "distortion" of time reminds of its arbitrary character in dreams; in Part I, in her second dream, Antoinette states that "the seconds pass and each one is a thousand years," (60), a statement recalling Rhys's description of falling in love in Voyage in the Dark (published 1934) as "You shut the door and you pull the curtains and then it's as long as a thousand years and yet so soon ended." Yet Rhys never discredits this perception as madness, rather associating it with the feminine mode, with dream, myth and fantasy. Antoinette's and Rochester's respective relationship to time is typical of their fundamentally different attitudes to nature in general. Marked by the mythical unity with nature of her childhood, Antoinette recognizes nature as a force in its own right, beyond the human mind and control, while Rochester is afraid of nature and driven by the need to dominate, to demystify it in an Enlightenment-inspired approach. Rhys denies any heroic dimension to that attitude by having Antoinette trace Rochester's conquering impulses back to anxiety: "It is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else." (130) Later, he will identify especially that "indifference" (172), the concept of a world that does not revolve around him, as the source of his hatred and his urge to control and destroy. In Antoinette's phrase, the "something else," the other referred to, is nature, and Rochester has to dominate it in order to feel at ease and not threatened. Nature is "that green menace" (149), "something unknown and hostile" (129), the forest is hostile (104), the moon "an alien moon" (88)36 Rochester is particularly afraid of the sensuality of nature: his overall rejection of sensuality - not only do his wife's sensuality and sexuality finally disgust him, but he constantly suffers from attacks on his senses corresponds with his imprisonment in logic and reason. He resents the overpowering scents (79), does not like the "too highly seasoned food" (80),

18 perceives sounds as "deafening" (81); everything seems to be grotesquely out of proportion or "fantastically" enlarged:37 there are "hundreds of fireflies," "a large moth, so large that I thought it was a bird," and the colors are "extreme," the climate is too hot.38 And his wife Antoinette is part of this alien place, she too is an "Other": Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger. (70) It was all very brightly coloured, very strange, but it meant nothing to me. Nor did she [...] (76)

These two statements capture the essence of his precarious sense of self in which the other is experienced as strange, alien, threatening, as disconcerting, an opposition to be overcome and subjugated. Again and again, he emphasizes that his wife is "very strange," "a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did." (93) Some of his comments on her strangeness suggest that he suspects even more upsetting otherness in her. His obsession with clarity, purity, and cleanness has sexual as well as racial implications,39 and his very first description of Antoinette hints at that, displaying his tendency to construct otherness: I watched her critically. She wore a tricorne hat which became her. At least it shadowed her eyes which are too large and can be disconcerting. She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. (67; emphasis added)

Never trusting his senses, Rochester keeps searching for "deeper meaning" in a state of mind close to paranoia, always suspecting people of talking behind his back, laughing at him, or being dishonest with him. His dependence on analytical reason prevents him from finding peace and unity: I went early to the bathing pool and stayed there for hours, unwilling to leave the river [...] It was a beautiful place, - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing -1 want what it hides - that is not nothing.' (87)40

What the senses perceive is "nothing," only what is behind sensual perception - reason - "is not nothing," a position that reflects the domination of reason over the senses in one of the central binary oppositions in Western philosophy. The material world is interpreted as an obstacle in realizing the secret, a secret that he comes close to at night: "But always the music, a music I had never heard before." (90) This music has no identifiable source

19 and exemplifies what Todorov calls the "effacement of the limit between subject and object" that is at the core of fantastic literature and that upsets the "rational schema" of the objectification of persons and things.41 In the novel, that fusion of subject and object represents Antoinette's mode, while his mode insists on division. One of the reasons why Rochester does not and cannot love Antoinette is her opposition to his worldview, her otherness expressed in her refusal to accept his reality that "would not be reality." Rochester and Antoinette never agree on what constitutes reality: If these mountains challenge me, or Baptiste's face, or Antoinette's eyes, they are mistaken, melodramatic, unreal (England must be quite unreal, and like a dream she said.) (103)

In the couple's dialogues, Rochester emerges as firmly rooted in the realityprinciple, a strong believer in objectivity and rationality (who never admits his attraction to the magic in speech), and Antoinette as never far removed from her childhood perceptions when "everything was alive, not only the river or the rain, but chairs, looking-glasses, cups, saucers, everything." (37) All fantasy and dream, she is "undecided about fact, any fact." (87) What is "reality" - the myth and magic of Granbois or his world, the civilized England? 'Is it true,' she said, 'that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends [...] said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.' 'Well,' I answered annoyed, 'that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.' 'But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?' 'And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?' 'More easily,' she said, 'much more easily. Yes, a big city must be like a dream.' "No, this is unreal and like a dream,' I thought. (80/81)42

Tellingly, Rochester equates "dream" with "unreality," challenged and thus annoyed by her refusal to conform to his construction of reality. He is upset that her "ideas were fixed" (94), that she is not a young girl he can mould in his image, but a woman firmly rooted in her own beliefs. At the novel's climax, Antoinette's and Rochester's worldviews collide, with fatal consequences. Desperately intent on making Rochester love her, Antoinette resorts to obeah, an unfortunate choice since his system of beliefs is so far removed from her reality that only a misunderstanding can result. His frame of reference does not allow him to interpret the love-potion as anything but an attempt to kill him. The novel has Antoinette set out on her

20 quest for the magic potion in a paragraph immediately following his looking up "obeah" in a book; the book warns that, though "nonsense," obeah has been known to cause "cases of sudden mysterious death [...] attributed to poison." (107) Thus the ground has been prepared for disaster, and the powerful sexual desires unleashed by obeah must further frighten a man like Rochester who is fighting to establish control over his life, trying to resist the attractions of magic. The actual scene of love-making is covered in silence as one critic observes, Rochester does not have the language to describe it43 and is experienced by Rochester as being buried alive. Being buried alive according to Freud - is for some people the "most uncanny thing of all," a "terrifying phantasy,"44 - and Rochester has been thoroughly repelled by the fantastic and uncanny at this time of his honeymoon. Sexuality and the pleasure-principle threaten to undermine the control of the reality-principle, and orgasmic sexuality is perceived as subversive of male order: "It was not a safe game to play - in that place. Desire, Hatred, Life, Death came very close in the darkness." (94) Suspending time, sexuality also diffuses the line between subject and object, corroding binary oppositions - all these functions of the fantastic as well. In addition, Rochester is repelled by Antoinette's sexual desire, using it to declare her mad: "She'll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would - or could. Or could." (165)45 The violent love-making marks Rochester's actual "killing" of Antoinette; he covers her sleeping body like a corpse, "as if I covered a dead girl." (138) No longer tempted by magic, he now rejects the music that has come to signify his inner peace and a unity formerly unknown.46 In the end, he rejects magic in favor of reason, but the concept of sanity that he represents is appalling enough. The way he phrases his rejection suggests an equation between "it," magic, and her, Antoinette: "All the conflicting emotions had gone and left him wearied and empty. Sane." (172) "No more damned magic." (180) "I hated its beauty and magic." (172) Rhys makes sufficiently clear that living the reality-principle alone cripples his personality: Rochester's reason and sanity are interpreted by the novel as the inability to accept ambivalence, magic and beauty; it is a state of mind characterized by absence - empty - and aggressive rejection. If sanity is thus defined as a deficiency, Rhys has also commented on insanity and madness and redefined it. Actually, Rochester himself comes close to realizing this: Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. (172)

21 The "progress" of his line of reasoning is paradigmatic: the change of tone in his description of insanity, the gradual development from envy of those who know the secret to a stigmatization of the insane and finally the desire to restrain and control them point to his repressions. The paragraph ends with his hope that one day even the memory of the secret will fade, and all traces of its existence will have vanished. This determined pursuit of the insane is necessary exactly because they know more, a knowledge that he has forbidden himself because it conflicts with the reality-principle and questions it. The novel interprets this as a significant loss, and Rochester's narrative ends on a note of regret and mourning for something that has already been successfully repressed so that only its absence haunts him: "Who would have thought that any boy would cry like that. For nothing. Nothing ..." (173) The crying boy is black - thus able (and, from Rochester's cultural position that feminizes the racial other, allowed) to cry; the boy is his shadow figure, his "darker" self,47 acting as Rochester's substitute in mourning the departure from the Edenic island. While the alter ego mourns, the rational Victorian male is only haunted by echoes of absence and loss, unable to consciously experience and articulate this loss. These are Rochester's last words: His narrative must end because he is no longer a man capable of creating poetry and literature, he has killed his creative side, is dominated by destructive energies. Having declared his hatred of magic and beauty, he now violently renounces art: "I hate poets now and poetry. As I hate music which I loved once." (164) A man who rejects sensuousness must also reject aesthetics,48 since imagination, fantasy, and aesthetics belong to the pleasure-principle and are opposed to his order of reason. Thus the closure of Part II is as necessary as it is convincing: Rochester has "nothing" left to tell, language has been reduced to a commodity for communication and robbed of its magic, of fantasy, of imagination, it is no longer poetic language, literature. This closure also implies that in the end the silencing of women will lead to men's loss of poetic language. And Antoinette, the woman, led away like a prisoner (and as a prisoner, it turns out), cannot and will not speak for him: "I don't understand you. I know nothing about you, and I cannot speak for you..." (171) Across that gulf of non-understanding, he only "scarcely recognized her voice" (170/171), a voice changed by the desperate struggle that she lost. But the agony of the final scene of Part II dispels any notion of triumph in this victory of male over female, of reason over magic, of reality over fantasy. There are no winners, only losers, and he admits as much: "Not for me and not for her." (172) She is reduced to a "ghost in the grey daylight" (170), a

22 projection of the grayness of England where she will be his captive in the attic, despised and unloved; and he will forever ache from his yearning that must be repressed: "Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it." (172)49 The horror of that conscious anticipation and acceptance of his life as loss is only superceded by a vision of their future relations: "You hate me and I hate you. We'll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred." (170) The scene of leaving the myth and magic of Granbois is disconsolate, utterly distressing in its projection of gender-relations in a world he establishes as real. We know from his last word that he has "nothing;" his prediction (or hope) that she "will have nothing" (170), however, will not come true: she will be allowed by the novel to live her dream, while he disappears, only mentioned in passing by Antoinette as "that man," nameless, a shadowy figure of terrible authority in the cold world of England. While Rochester has reduced language to a commodity, Antoinette's relationship to language is highly ambivalent. The first reference to words, when she finds the dead horse, epitomizes her strong belief in the magical power of words; she does not speak of it, "for I thought if I told no one it might not be true." (18) This concept of language as creating truth and reality underlines the novel's aim: creating a reality that Jane Eyre denies, since not telling Antoinette's story means suppressing the truth. Parallels in Wide Sargasso Sea are the untold story of St. Innocenzia and the silence about Annette. The magical idea of words and language dominates Part I, while in Part II the dialogues record Antoinette's growing distrust of words: "words are no use, I know that now." (134) This distrust originates in his appropriation of language now that he is the master of words and tells the story - he uses language to shape the world in his image as indicated by his renaming of her. His is the master narrative, not only demonstrated in the dominance in volume of his part, but in his use of language to distort, for example by lying, and to deny what does not suit his ideas by stigmatizing it as mad. Yet in the end, it is Antoinette who has the last word in the novel. Unlike him, she has been dispossessed of language as communication, but not of language as art. Telling her story is the ultimate triumph over his lies: "They [old days] are forgotten, except the lies. Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow." (131) Telling the last part of her story creates truth as in the first part of the novel. In Part III, Antoinette's voice erupts again when the structure of the novel allows the triumphant return of the repressed. This last part provides the synthesis to the two earlier parts in projecting a Utopian image; it also

23 demonstrates how effectively Rhys has deconstructed binary oppositions in the novel. The opening statement by Grace Poole for the first time explicitly50 links Rhys's novel to Jane Eyre. Poole, a shadow of the maternal figures of Part I, provides information about Antoinette - shivering, thin, neither old nor young. There is no mention of madness, only of that "girl who lives in her own darkness [...] she hasn't lost her spirit." (178) It is important that Antoinette's mind is defined as darkness, both in its implications for the interpretation of the very last sentences of the novel and in its relation to the binary opposition between light and dark that the novel explores and finally explodes. After Grace Poole has stated that Antoinette lives in darkness, the first sentence that Antoinette speaks shows her awakening from darkness, thus immediately establishing the general tone of Part III. This first sentence - "In this room I wake early" - also links Part III closely with the first part of the novel, which ended with the promise "Soon it will be tomorrow morning," so that Rochester's narrative and the time it covers constitute Antoinette's night, her real darkness. Yet at this point of the novel we are no longer sure about the respective connotations of light and dark. Rhys, who set out in Wide Sargasso Sea to attack the destructive force of binary oppositions, has succeeded once again in evading a major pitfall, this time of attacking these oppositions, but staying within their system. Rhys explodes the traditional connotations of binary oppositions in the course of the novel, and in Part III both poles have been endowed with such a multitude of contexts and meaning that traditional connotations have collapsed. Thus darkness not only signifies Antoinette's mental darkness, i.e. her madness, but has also been connected with Tia's and Christophine's physical darkness; finally, Antoinette has stated that she belongs "in the dark." (136), and in the protective darkness of the night she can move freely along the passages of Thornfield Hall. And of course all these different connotations are played upon our general understanding that darkness has been associated with the female principle in Western philosophy. Thus, darkness signals what society calls madness, but also a coming home, an achievement of unity. The other binary opposition that has been deconstructed is even more significant for a reading of Part III: the Western idea of death as an end, as the ultimate boundary has been effectively eroded in the first two parts. Antoinette's statement that "there are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about" (128), implies a redefinition of death inherent also in the frequent references to obeah with its concept of zombies, the living dead. Rochester, for example, cites a book about obeah: "A zombi is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead." (107) This

24 blurring of the border between life and death has been underlined by the explicit linking of death and sexuality: "I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers." (92) "Die then. Sleep. It is all I can give you. [...] I wonder if she ever guessed how near she came to dying. In her way, not in mine." (94) Here even Rochester has to acknowledge that there are different concepts of death.51 "In her way," death means the loss of meaning in life, as personified in her mother, and in this sense, Antoinette has long been dead before she recaptures meaning and purpose at the end of the novel.52 The collapse of the traditional interpretations of categories like life-death and lightdark will be essential in reading the novel's closure. Part III also functions to acknowledge the power of Antoinette's fantasy and imagination, in a narrative strategy parallel to Rhys's subtle authentication of fantasy in Part I. In her short monologue in Part II, Antoinette has a prophetic vision of the future: For I know that house where I will be cold and not belonging, the bed I shall lie in has red curtains and I have slept there many times before, long ago. How long ago? In that bed I will dream the end of my dream. ( I l l )

Part III indeed shows her dreaming the end of her dream, and it is dedicated to Antoinette finally living her dream - a dream that starts out as a nightmare. Antoinette's voice is now beyond reason and logic, and chronology has been abandoned completely. Having lost all sense of time, Antoinette returns in mind - if not in body - to the sensuous perceptions of her childhood: "Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has a meaning." (185) But there is no denying that she is seriously disturbed, she hears noises, and images of split personality, especially mirrors, permeate this last part. Even the mirror symbol has become ambivalent: while the absence of mirrors in the matriarchal context of the convent signifies peace of mind and unity, here, in the patriarchal home as prison, it rather symbolizes isolation and the absence of identity: There is no looking-glass here and I don't know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself and yet not quite myself. [...] Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I? (180)

Without the reflection of herself in the mirror (and, by implication, Rochester), Antoinette is thrown back upon her own and forced to enquire after a sense of identity and purpose. It is exactly the recapturing of these qualities that is outlined in Part III and accomplished at the end of the novel.

25

Most critics who have chosen to discuss the novel's ending concede that it is "triumphant in a way" (Rhys's own words53) since by dying Antoinette triumphs over Rochester, but they interpret the closure as highly ambivalent because physical death is perceived as the ultimate defeat. I want to argue that this reading overlooks important aspects of the novel like Rhys's redefinition of death, and that it focuses on the "real," negating the novel's fantastic elements. In linking the end of Wide Sargasso Sea directly to Jane Eyre, critics establish an interpretation based more on intertextuality than an exact analysis of Rhys's text; only by their familiarity with Jane Eyre can they be so sure of what will follow - Bertha/Antoinette will burn down Thornfield Hall and jump to death. Rhys's novel, however, does not end with Antoinette's death. Not only does the choice of Antoinette as the first-personnarrator forbid the actual rendering of the death-scene, but Rhys deliberately ends the novel on a totally different note: all the images of the last pages and specifically of the very last sentence have positive connotations. Antoinette's third dream, now completed, cites previous images of the novel and weaves them into a visual presentation of her life: Her dream starts in the mansion in England, then leads her back to the West Indies and Coulibri, then fuses the two places, and closes with the pool at Coulibri. Thus in her dream Antoinette has come full circle to the beginning of the novel, to the place of her childhood. She jumps to join Tia, her dark alter ego, and to heal her schizophrenic split of personality as well as to achieve a reconciliation between black and white. This achievement of identity leaves her with a new sense of meaning and purpose when she wakes up: "Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do." What she has to do is living her dream, acting out her dream of burning down Thornfield Hall and jump to join Tia, and this, of course - believing in the dream as guidance and living the dream - can be seen as the very definition of Utopia. The novel ends with an overdetermined, multilayered image of a stunning complexity, with an abundance of connotations that are all opposed to death as it is understood in Western thought: "But I shielded it [the flickering candle] with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage." Not only is the image one of movement and not stasis/death, but the flickering candle that does not expire and flares up instead is a staple metaphor for life and survival. Connected with this image of deliberately chosen life we get an image of knowledge, as the light at the end of a tunnel, or dark passage, signifies epiphany after a period of spiritual darkness. Most important, Rhys invokes rebirth, the dark passage and traveling down that passage (as well as the term "see the light of life") suggesting birth. The rebirth-motif is interwoven with the dream, the parrot invoking the image of

26 the burning parrot of Part I and this in turn invoking the phoenix that rises from the ashes, the mythical symbol of rebirth. The "wall of fire protecting me" (189)54 will become Antoinette's place of rebirth. Thus, the end suggests that Antoinette will achieve a new state of being and consciousness, the synthesis of Part I and II. Rhys wisely defines this consciousness only vaguely as living the dream - Antoinette's Utopian state of mind cannot be described, although there are strong hints that it is close to her childhood and the fantastic mode of Part I. This mode, the myth, has been constituted by the rebirth-images that embody a cyclical concept of time and by the emphasis on dreams. The ending of Wide Sargasso Sea is a promise of rebirth and a celebration of the re-emergence of the suppressed female voice, thus stating the novel's concern in its last images, namely the impossibility of repressing the feminine mode forever. This is also exemplified in the very act of writing Wide Sargasso Sea because the novel takes up the repressions of Jane Eyre and dramatizes its silences. "Passage" in Rhys's last image in the novel is a term that also refers to writing, and perhaps Antoinette's new sense of purpose is never meant to connect to Bronte's novel, i.e. the death of Bertha/Antoinette, but to Rhys's novel itself - the telling of her story may be why Antoinette was brought here and what she has to do. The Tangible Silence - Structure and the Female Voice Wide Sargasso Sea does not merely retell Bertha's story in an act of overcoming that deeply felt silence in Jane Eyre, but dramatizes this silence, lets us feel what is missing, elevates the blank to a conscious level, haunts us with the ruptures in the feminine voice. The subtext of Jane Eyre, the voice of the oppressed, surface here to disturb us, and the questions that Rhys raises redefine Jane Eyre completely in a powerful retrospection. By not simply retelling Bertha's story and filling the silence with this story, but by embodying this silence in structure, Rhys avoids an obvious pitfall covering up the silence would deny the persistence of silence in women's literature. If women's literature in a patriarchal society by necessity is structured by omissions, ruptures, and silences, qualities many feminist critics recognize as the characteristics of the feminine "voice," then to give voice to Bertha and thus to pretend that there is no longer a silence would have been a statement of belief in an unproblematic representability of women.55 It is one of the important and brilliant achievements of Rhys's novel to both tell Bertha's story and render the silence tangible. This double function is realized by structure - the suppression of the female voice by the

27 male in a patriarchal society is the major structural element of Wide Sargasso Sea,56 Literary criticism so far has evaded discussing this structure, merely taking it for granted,57 although the division into three parts, three different narratives told by two (with Grace Poole's brief comments, three) people, certainly seems worth noticing. Part I and II give voice to Antoinette, the Bertha of Jane Eyre, yet for the largest part of the book, Part II, her voice is silenced is favor of "his" voice. By far the longest monologue, "his" (by implication Rochester's) voice takes over at a significant moment: the event between Part I and II is Antoinette's marriage with Rochester, so that by implication it is the patriarchal institution of marriage that silences woman and allows her voice to erupt again only in a mode that his worldview marginalizes as madness - the fantastic where time is suspended, where things acquire a different meaning, where borders are violated.58 Antoinette is allowed to relate her childhood and adolescence, but from the moment of her marriage, the man controls the narrative. Rochester's narrative also functions, as numerous critics have discussed, to add complexity to Bronte's Byronic hero and to juxtapose the male voice with the female, but the decisive function is to reveal Rochester as the master of words, dominating history and literature with his master-narrative.59 Antoinette's narratives draw our attention to the disruptive force of the suppressed, indeed to the impossibility of repressing the "other" forever. While Part I echoes mythical time when women's voices were not yet suppressed, Part III demonstrates the triumphant return of the suppressed that haunts literature and history. Re-interpreting Antoinette's fate in England within the framework of the fantastic mode constitutes Rhys's most radical redefinition of Jam Eyre - not only has she demonstrated how hegemonic discourse operates (by repression and marginalization), but she has made room for an alternative construction of reality. The tripartite structure of Wide Sargasso Sea functions on more levels, though. In Part I, the frame of reference, the system that interprets the world, is mythical. We have seen how the author subtly validates and reinforces the mythical worldview of the women characters that is under attack by Mr Mason's logic and reason. In Part II, author and narrator no longer share the same worldview; while Rochester, like Mason, is an exponent of reason and logic (and Protestant ethics), Rhys's approach is predominantly psychological, thus in a way paralleling Rochester's view but also keeping an analytical distance from her narrator.60 Psychology is the theory of cognition of Rochester's rationality (a science developed in the nineteenth century focusing on individuality), yet psychology is also the science that uses myth

28 as a model and paradigm for its interpretations, so that in a sense it is the science where myth lives on. It is significant that Part I which stands for (mythical) identity and unity also establishes an identity between the author's and narrator's worldview, while in Part II, centered on disintegration and the increasing split in identity, disunity is reflected in the difference between the author's and narrator's worldviews. In Part III, finally, the movement of increasing disintegration is counteracted by a movement towards the finding of a new identity. After opening Part III with references to a split personality, Rhys closes the book with images of unity and identity. This tripartite structure and the parts' relationship to each other invite a dialectical interpretation in which Part I would be understood as stating a thesis, Part II the anti-thesis, and Part III at aiming at a new identity or synthesis. In the historical-philosophical model, for which the historical example has been Greek myth, stage one has been associated with the assumption of an identity between subject and object, an undivided identity characteristic of myth.61 The second stage signifies the split or disintegration of that unity into subject and object and the emergence of reflexivity, thought in the sense of self-consciousness. Reflexivity, by introducing time, postulates finiteness, concepts that are absent from the mythical world of stage one. Stage three, finally, has Utopian dimensions; synthesis implies the restoration of the identity between subject and object on the basis of a new consciousness that is not (yet) defined. Following the dialectical model closely, Rhys, however, links the different stages to the male and female modes of perception and projects the dream as Utopian closure. Fantasy and Realism - Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre In defining fantasy as the feminine mode and giving voice to Antoinette/Bertha, Rhys thoroughly challenges Charlotte Bronte's construction of a world where a female desire for freedom can be integrated into the existing order without fundamental structural changes. Wide Sargasso Sea explains why Bertha in Jane Eyre has an "uncanny"62 effect on Jane (who is "insensible from terror"63) and the reader: the social order represented by Rochester rests on the oppression of women, blacks, and the working people, builds on the repression of their voices; Bertha's "uncanny" appearance disrupts the complacent picture of social harmony that negates conflicts of power. Jane Eyre's strategy to contain the subversive implications of her (supernatural) powers as "the vampire"64 is to put her into a realistic framework - not humanizing her, but naturalize and denigrate her as a "wild

29 beast" and a "lunatic." Bertha, described as "coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile," as "intemperate and unchaste"65 by Rochester, is denied any sympathy by Jane whose descriptions are permeated with disgust: "The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy looks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors. I recognized well that purple face - those bloated features."66 A similar movement to construct Antoinette as "uncanny" and thus as outside of his "natural order" is attempted by the man in Wide Sargasso Sea when he describes her alternately as a "ghost" and as a "doll with a [...] doll's voice" and a "doll's smile" (171); in Freud's seminal essay on "The 'Uncanny',"67 the doll in "Der Sandmann" is the focus of his literary analysis.68 In contrast to these Eurocentric perceptions of the uncanny as (among other things) a violation of borders, the African Caribbean context in Wide Sargasso Sea with its references to zombies both counteracts "his" efforts to stigmatize Antoinette as uncanny and the rationalization of supernatural forces. And, as demonstrated, the textual strategy of letting Antoinette speak for herself denies that labeling. In Jane Eyre, Bertha is denied voice, while several lengthy speeches by Rochester and others express sympathy with his situation and provide legitimacy for his actions. Bertha's muteness allows the novel and Jane to recognize Rochester's right to imprison his wife - whether that right is derived from her "uncanniness" as a subversion of "natural" order or from her sexuality as a violation of a naturalized male order, is ultimately irrelevant in Jane Eyre. What is significant, however, is that her very existence is an irritation in the novel's desire to believe in marriage as an institution untainted by social hierarchies. To realize that desire, the marriage between Jane and Rochester is removed to a location "deep in the wood,"69 and, of course, Bertha has to die. Bertha's death, passed over with a "Good God!," is necessary for Jane's happy marriage not only on a legal level, but also because it re-stabilizes the social order of Victorian England: Bertha's existence and condition question the design of the bourgeois family where patriarchal authority is absolute, painting a picture of marriage and the home as prison. Having expelled Bertha, the novel's closure can celebrate marriage as a symbiotic union of equals. The fantastic in Wide Sargasso Sea, in contrast, articulates a version of the truth that challenges the construction of reality in Jane Eyre and established readings of the novel. The Rochester who emerges at the end of Part II is a crippled man - not bodily crippled as in Jane Eyre, but mentally and psychologically, since he has repressed his "feminine" side. Rhys's interpretation of Rochester in turn re-defines Bronte's; Wide Sargasso Sea thus not only points to the repression of Bertha's/Antoinette's voice in Jane

30

Eyre, but complicates an optimistic reading of the union between Rochester and Jane; her ecstatic "Reader, I married him" now makes us wonder about the price she has to pay. We can no longer agree with Gilbert and Gubar who judge Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre to be "stronger than he was when he ruled Thornfield, for now, like Jane, he draws his powers from within himself, rather than inequity, disguise, deception,"70 and who see his mutilation as an expression of this change, completely ignoring that Jane's happiness rests on the death of another woman.71 In Rhys's reading, Rochester's bodily mutilation is neither a symbol of castration (he is blind) nor a narrative device that brings him to an equal level with Jane, but an expression of his psychological crippling. In leaving Granbois and rejecting wholeness and fantasy, he has decided to suppress the other forever, to marginalize fantasy and dream as madness. He does not "become like Jane," but rather she becomes like him: subject to the reality principle, losing the secret. Adrienne Rich suggests as much when she writes that as a powerless woman in Victorian England, Jane needs to "curb her imagination,"72 an act necessary to save her from resembling "this woman" who is Antoinette/Bertha. Although Rich implies a link between imagination and "insanity" here, her interpretation of Jane's final reunion with Rochester is revealed as naive by Jean Rhys. Rich substantiates her optimism by speculating that Jane, after having inherited a fortune, is now Rochester's equal - but we know that Bertha/Antoinette is also an heiress; in patriarchal Victorian society, however, this does not make her an independent equal, but rather a victim for Rochester who marries her for her money.73 Relocating the scene of action from England to the Caribbean in the first two parts, Wide Sargasso Sea also exposes the repressions of Jam Eyre revolving around money and racist exploitation. Bronte starts on a project to investigate the importance of money and power from a gender-perspective, but fortunes in Jane Eyre are acquired off-stage, miraculously accumulated in the Caribbean and on Madeira, prudently handled by their owners;74 the source of the characters' wealth never becomes problematic. By moving her novel to the scene of imperialist exploitation, Rhys confronts us with the (ex) slaves whose labor built white fortunes. That dis- and re-location of Jam Eyre not only prevents a naive feminist reading of Jane's new financial independence as a woman's chance to achieve equality, regardless of oppressions based on race and class, but, in the juxtaposition of two cultures, presents a critical evaluation of the centrality of money as the basis for personal and social relations in Rochester's world. In her cell in the attic, Antoinette finally realizes: "Gold is the idol they worship." (188)75 And the novel acknowledges money and class as a source of conflict among women:

31 both Antoinette and Grace Poole recognize that Rochester has established their antogonistic relationship of prisoner-warden with his money. Although recognizing gender as a common bond because "the world outside [...] can be a black and cruel world to a woman." (178), Grace, after an initial reluctance, finally agrees (the price has been doubled) to "serve the devil for [...] money." (177) Watching her "sitting at the table counting money" and smiling at "a gold piece" (179), Antoinette can have no illusion of solidarity; rather, the scene establishes a sense of betrayal and thus connects to an earlier episode in the novel. When also musing about money, Antoinette hears a cock crow: "That is for betrayal, but who is the traitor?" (118) The traitor, it turns out, is not only Rochester - it is also a woman, Grace, who accepts Rochester's bribe,76 and it is, by implication, Jane Eyre. Where a realistic text like Jane Eyre ultimately has to re-inscribe hegemonic constructions of reality and to accomodate its heroine's desires to the existing social order,77 Wide Sargasso Sea destabilizes the representation of that reality by exposing its limits and repressions, by questioning its dominance in the contrast with a vision of an entirely different order. Reality in Rhys's novel is a contested territory; the voices of those who are marginalized and silenced in white supremacy articulate a radically different perspective on reality. Incorporating myth and magic, Wide Sargasso Sea represents that perspective by writing the fantastic as the mode of the other, of women and blacks. Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

A version of this chapter was published in the Jean Rhys Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1990), p. 15-26. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1984, 19791). All subsequent references given to Wide Sargasso Sea in the text are to the Norton edition of 1982. The Letters of Jean Rhys. Edited by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. (New York: Viking, 1984), p. 39. Later Rhys stated that "it fascinates me even more than anything else I've ever tried to write." The Letters of Jean Rhys, p. 178. Subsequent references are given in the text. The Letters of Jean Rhys, pp. 153, 154, 157-171, 196ff. Antoinette only refers to him as "that man" and "he;" if he renames her from Antoinette into Bertha, she refuses to speak his name. The shift also denies the direct parallel to Jane Eyre. — "Gold Sargasso Sea" is the title of a Creole song, and Rhys has written a poem "Obeah Night," that talks about the sea "strewn with wrecks and weed-infested." The Letters of Jean Rhys, p. 253 and 264.

32 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Nancy R. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 212, points out that while Antoinette has no father, Rochester never mentions his mother. These identifications with maternal or paternal ancestry have of course important implications for their narratives. Death is present in the "smell of dead flowers." p. 19. See Nebeker, Jean Rhys, p. viiiff., for comments on this matriarchal myth and the "prehistoric goddess-worship." On the figure of the Mammy, see Selma James, The Ladies & the Mammies. Jane Austen and Jean Rhys (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1983), p. 61ff. "No more slavery! She had to laugh! 'These new ones have Letter of the law. Same thing.'" p. 26. For this concept in Black culture, see Alice Walker in John O'Brien, ed., Interviews with Black Writers (New York, 1973), p. 192. See Selma James, The Ladies & the Mammies, and Gayatri Chakravortry Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 262-281; p. 27If. Spivak, "Three Women's Texts," p. 271 and 272. For an exploration of binary opposition in Wide Sargasso Sea, see also Elizabeth Abel. "Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys." Contemporary Literature 20.2 (Spring 1979): 155-177. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text, focuses on the expression of the "muted idiom" of women as the "dream text" and also emphasizes the different constructions of reality; she contends that "the narrative model [of Wide Sargasso Sea] derives from a woman's relation to her mother." p. 137) Apart from specifics, my interpretation generally differs from hers in my emphasis on fantasy as a mode for women and blacks, my reading of Wide Sargasso Sea as a text in its own rights (while Harrison focuses on an intertextual reading with Jane Eyre; she claims that Rhys's text remains "within the constrained framework of Bronte's", p. 141), and in my interpretation of the novel's closure (see Harrison, p. 181ff.). Harrison's study is the best analysis of Rhys's novels that has been published so far. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London/New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 173. For an analysis of these structural features, see below. e.g. the "friendly furniture," p. 27. See Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966, 1951'), p. 191. Later in the novel, meeting Christophine for the last time, Antoinette remarks: '"You smell the same."' (p. 108) On the importance of myth see Nebeker, Jean Rhys, pp. 126-144. On the connection between fantasy and the pleasure principle and reason and the reality principle, see Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. Nebeker, Jean Rhys, also sees Mason's "narrowness of [...] white male reason" as the "greatest sin." Yet she interprets Annette's reaction as "unreasoning insanity which cannot be appeased and only results in further madness." I cannot agree here; Rhys never discredits Annette's perception as insanity and madness (e.g. Christophine

33

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

45

doubts this labeling repeatedly; p. 157 and 160). Rhys rather values Annette's prophetic vision. It is interesting to remember here that Cassandra also listened to birds; thus Annette's closeness to the parrot parallels the myth. In mythology, the parrot is interpreted as the representation of God and the soul. See Louis James, Jean Rhys, p. 63f., note 31. Regarding the significance of birds in Parts I and II, it is certainly no coincidence that the family estate bears the name of yet another bird - Co(u)libri is French for humming-bird. The repetition of the conflict and its solution stress the fundamentally cyclical concept of time in the novel. See e.g. Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976). The letters are mentioned on pp. 67,70,75,162. The rise of the epistolary novel was linked to an increasing expectation of more realism in literature. In myth, mountains often represent the Great mother, they are a realm of the feminine. "Vengeance is Mine." p., 122. - Christianity has been the definite turning-point in time-concepts: Christ's birth and death cannot be understood as cyclic, but only as linear, and history is seen in the bible as a linear chronology from genesis to apocalypse. See p. 189: "They brought me yesterday or the day before yesterday, I don't remember. Perhaps it was long ago." The forest and the moon, like mountains, are also traditionally feminine spheres. See Jackson, Fantasy, p. 175, for similarities between the grotesque and the fantastic, for example as "art of estrangement." pp.81, 108,79,80,77. pp. 71, 73, 77. - Of course, racial purity is subject to his double-standard. It only matters with regard to his wife, not for his mistresses. At the end of his narrative, he echoes this "nothing," now convinced that the secret has escaped him forever. - See Jackson, Fantasy, p. 91: "They [literary fantasies] express a desire for the imaginary, for that which has not yet been caught and confined by a symbolic order. [...] A fantastic text tells of an indomitable desire, a longing for that which does not yet exist". Tzevtan Todorov, The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca/New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 116. That characterization of England as "unreal" is repeated later in the novel by Christophine who doubts that "there is such a place." ( I l l ) Louis James, Jean Rhys, p. 59. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny"'("Das 'Unheimliche"') in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 24 vols, ed. and trans, by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 218-252; p. 244; see Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 150. Moreover, that fantasy, as Freud explains, relates to intra-uterine existence and thus to female genitals which, on the next page of his essay, he identifies as yet another powerful source of the uncanny for "neurotic men." (p. 245) In 19th-century Victorian medical discourse, theories which see a causal relationship between female sexuality and madness were quite popular. See Carroll Smith-

34

46

47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

55

56

57

58 59 60 61 62 63

Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct. Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 188. "But whatever they were singing or saying was dangerous. I must protect myself." (p. 149; see also p. 90) - Only for one moment at the end of his narrative will Rochester have doubts that "everything I had imagined to be truth was false. Only the magic and the dreams are true - all the rest's a lie." p. 167f. In a Jungian interpretation this would mean, by implication, his anima, his feminine side. "Aesthetics" literally means "pertaining to the senses." It is astounding that most criticism of Wide Sargasso Sea manages to overlook the extent to which we are made to sympathize with "him." That sympathy ends, of course, after he has turned his back on Antoinette, magic, and the Caribbean. Mr. Mason's name is the novel's first reference to Jane Eyre. The association of orgasmic sexuality with death is of course not his original idea, but has a long tradition. Many critics refer to Antoinette's "living death" without realizing the obvious reference to obeah. See Selma James, The Ladies & the Mammies, p. 90. The Letters of Jean Rhys, p. 157. The burning down of Thornfield Hall recalls the burning of the slave-master's mansion in Part I, an act of insurrection against oppression through the cleansing force of fire. See for example Margaret Homans. "Her Very Own Howl: The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction." in Signs, Vol. 9, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 186-205. - Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London/New York: Methuen, 1985) This is also, as Louis James (who does not, however, comment on the main structure) has noted, a pervasive feature: "the story works at an intense emotional voltage. Everything serves to hold this power - the terse prose rhythms, the spectrum of brilliant sense impressions, the narrative flow itself, which becomes increasingly jagged and elliptical, leaping from vivid episode to vivid episode, but leaving shadow gaps which tantalise and haunt the reader's imagination." Louis James, Jean Rhys (London/New York: Longman, 1978), p. 49. The exceptions are Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text, and Elizabeth R. Baer. "The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway." in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland, eds., The Vogaye In. Fictions of Female Development (Hanover, London: University Press of New England, 1983), pp. 131140. Baer comments briefly in passing on the function of Part II: "Rochester here signals his possession of Antoinette by appropriating her voice." p. 140. Harrison's analysis is more detailed, but is focused on the general question of silencing. Part I has 44 pages, Part II 108 pages with 11 pages in between that Antoinette narrates. Part III has 18 pages, two of which are Grace Poole's monologue. This also solved structural problems for Rhys who felt that the entire novel could not be sustained by a madwoman's voice. The Letters of Jean Rhys, p. 157. This becomes apparent in the comments on Rochester's childhood. Nebeker has commented on the novel's relationship to Greek myth. Helen Nebeker. Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage (Montreal: Eden Press, 1981), p. viii/ix. See the next chapter on theory for a discussion of the uncanny. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth et al.: Penguin, 1984, 18471), p. 312.

35 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

74

75

76 77

Brontg, Jane Eyre, p. 311. Bronte, Jane Eyre, p. 333, p. 334. Bronte, Jane Eyre, p. 321. See the chapter on theory for a discussion of this essay. There is no evidence that would suggest that Rhys was aware of Freud's essay or intended a reference to it. Bronte, Jane Eyre, p. 455. Gilbert/Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 369. See Nina Baym, "The Madwoman and Her Languages. Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory" in Shari Benstock, ed., Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), who asks herself how Gilbert and Gubar can "'read' a woman's death as a good thing for women?" (p. 48) Baym "can't ignore the work Bronte has put into defining Bertha out of humanity." (p. 48) Adrienne Rich, "Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman. (1973)" in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York/London: Norton, 1979), p. 99. Rich, "Jane Eyre," p. 105: "Coming to her husband in economic independence and by her free choice, Jane can become a wife without sacrificing a grain of her Jane Eyreity." - See Rochester's justification of his marriage to Bertha which revolves around paternal authority and the acquisition of wealth, and Antoinette's loss of her money through marrying "him" in Wide Sargasso Sea. When Jane inherits, she immediately identifies with a Puritanical ethos: "one begins to consider responsibilities, and to ponder business; on a base of steady satisfaction rise certain grave cares, and we contain ourselves, and brood over this bliss with a solemn brow." Bronte, Jane Eyre, p. 408. Here, Antoinette comes to repeat an insight Christophine had articulated much earlier: "for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else." (p. 114) Antoinette's disgust with gold becomes apparent when she looks at the rings that her aunt has given her to provide a minimum of financial independence, rings hidden in a little silk bag: "but when I opened it, one of the rings was plain gold." (115; emphasis added) Offering that bribe that comes from Rochester is the housekeeper, yet another woman that serves as a mediator of patriarchal power. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text, p. 241/242, although generally less critical of Bronte's text than I am (she never comments on Jane's complicity in marginalizing and expelling Bertha), explains the limitations of Jane Eyre with "historical context" that "compelled Bronte to locate some important aspects of her own constitution of self within the confines of the father-text." I suggest a different sequence: writing within the form of the "father-text," Bronte cannot violate the rules of plausibility dictated by historical context.

THEORIES OF THE FANTASTIC

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Muriel Rukeyser, "Kaethe Kollwitz" (1976) Dans les lois immuables de l'univers quotidien, une fissure s'est produite [...]. Roger Caillois, "Préface," Fantastique (1958) It is in this gap that the modem fantastic is situated. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (19S\) Man hunts and struggles. Woman intrigues and dreams; she is the mother of fantasy, the mother of the gods. She has second sight, the wings that enable her to fly to the infinite of desire and the imagination. Jules Michelet

Is there a special relationship between women/women's writing and fantasy, as Jules Michelet claims and the analogies in the epigraphs suggest? Do they share the same "Utopian" space - in a gap or a void, that is nowhere - outside of or in between dominant discourses? Gender difference is at the heart of Western dualistic thinking - "male" and "female" respectively have been invested with a number of qualities constructed as opposed in a hierarchical relationship. While "male" represents culture, light, reason, rationality, "female" represents those qualities perceived as their inferior opposites: nature, darkness, fantasy, and madness. Femininity thus constitutes "the underside, the repressed, of a classical or rational/conceptual discourse."' That definition of woman as the "other" permeates culture. Not only social institutions, but language and narrative patterns are saturated with male hegemony, perpetuating the marginalization of women. In recent years, after a period of a reflectionist orientation towards supposedly authentic "images," feminist criticism has increasingly focused on the ideological dimensions of literary patterns.2 If culture is founded on the exclusion of

38

women as the other, then writing from a woman's point of view, as Muriel Rukeyser suggests, questions and undermines these very foundations. Feminism, essentially a Utopian concept, has challenged the fundamental values of patriarchal society; women's writing3 has expressed the improbable; as Virginia Woolf has stated, a writer's femaleness "might, at the very least, consist in 'leaving a blank or outraging our sense of the probable."'4 And writing from the position of the other and challenging dominant values again coincides with definitions of the fantastic, as we will see. Women splitting the world open by writing their improbable interpretations of "reality" do not merely add yet another perspective in a scenario of cultural pluralism, but deconstruct a misogynist tradition and challenge androcentric literary paradigms, exposing ideological premises and violating patriarchal order. "Outraging our sense of the probable" pushes women writers toward the fantastic that allows the construction of alternative scenarios with their own logic of the probable; the fantastic is a mode which offers the potential of what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has defined as "writing beyond the ending," a violation of and departure from established narrative conventions like the marriage plot or the plot of female punishment that are "social, sexual, and ideological affirmations" of the existing social grammar.5 Writing from the outside, the unacknowledged position of the other undermines androcentric notions of a "natural" order of things that, in Nancy K. Miller's words, "assumes that the truth devolving from verisimilitude is male." What passes as universal experience and its encoding in literature are "organizations, when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture."6 Both Miller and Teresa de Lauretis concede that women's desire cannot be expressed in the realistic mode where it is contained in erotic plots of love and marriage;7 in de Lauretis's analysis, the time and place of female desire is located in the "now" and "nowhere," that is the fantastic.8 This "nowhere" that the fantastic and women's writing share and occupy together does not imply total silencing - as Toni Morrison has observed, "a void may be empty, but is not a vaccuum."9 In different theories, fantasy has been identified as the discourse of the "other," the marginalized, as a mode of desire that threatens to open a fissure in our constructions of reality. The same binary logic that constructs woman and man as gendered opposites, pits fantasy and reason against each other, privileging the rational. Fantasy has been linked to the irrational and madness in Freudian psychoanalysis;10 in Lacanian psychoanalysis, it has been associated with the imaginary and semiotic, outside of or subversive of the symbolic, beyond the law of the Father, with theorists like Hélène Cixous

39 seeing women as closer to the imaginary." Since "male" occupies the place of the center and norm, "female" is relegated to the margins outside the norm where it resides with madness and the fantastic. Yet psychoanalysis (that places fantasy in a gap as well12) warns that the marginalized will move to center-stage, that the repressed will surface again. In Sigmund Freud's seminal essay "Das 'Unheimliche'" of 1919 that has influenced psychoanalytic interpretations of the fantastic's function, the fantastic/ uncanny is the return of the repressed. Women's fantastic literature as diverse as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Edith Wharton's ghost stories, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale has as its driving force the articulation of the repressed, the breaking of women's silencing; the female body and female desire as the site and aim of oppression and silencing are placed at the center of these fictions. We have seen in the discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea that the identification of women with the body, madness, and irrationality legitimizes the oppression of discourses potentially disruptive of social order. This silencing works on different levels: suppressing women writers or marginalizing their contributions to literature by judging them "minor" because they do not conform to a male norm. The unequal representation of women in the canon of "high" literature in turn mirrors both these normative standards as well as historical forces that impeded women's access to the more reputable genres.13 Not surprisingly, then, women's fantastic literature is most often situated in marginal genres like the Gothic novel, science fiction, and ghost stories, genres that are often not considered "serious" literature by critics, among them feminist critics as well.14 In Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the female narrator draws attention to the structure of her story:15 I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. [...] I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. 6

The identification of the (fragmented) text with the (mutilated and female) body, central to this passage, reflects both a cultural history of identifying women with their (reproductive) bodies and French feminist theories that women write their bodies. In Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) that deals with slavery by using the fantastic in form of a ghost, white men steal Sethe's milk, an act of sexualized violence that appropriates her nurturing;17 the same men force her to produce the ink with which they write the official (and supposedly exclusive) version of her violation.18 Another example of this intimate connection between the black female body and silencing are the

40 muted women in Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) whose only means of bearing witness against the atrocities of the slaveholders is procreation. The connection holds true for white women's literary history as well: in Edith Wharton's ghost story "Mr. Jones" (1928), the body (that is its iconic representation in a painting), and not a written document, leaves the only trace that remains of a woman's history. In Atwood's dystopian novel that compares the text to a mutilated body, fantasies of women's control over their bodies are conflated with fantasies of control over their (hi)stories. When the handmaid, not knowing whether she herself or her testimony will survive the dystopian nightmare, explains that "[b]ecause I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are" (251), she wills a sympathetic Utopian audience into being - violating her culturally imposed silence thus creates utopia.19 Her fragmented narrative anticipates the fates of the female text; either a Utopian context will give it voice, or it will be silenced by male hegemony, or - and that is the closure that Atwood chooses - it will serve as a corrective that subverts official and dominant constructions of history. Definitions and Theories of the Fantastic Le fantastique [...] manifeste un scandale, une déchirure, une irruption insolite, presque insupportable dans le monde réel. Roger Caillois, "Preface," Fantastique (1958) The truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world. John Barth, Chimera (1972)

The fantastic meant in this study and in the different theories discussed here is the post-Romantic, post-Enlightenment fantastic. Certainly, in mythic figures like nymphs and in mythical distortions of time, we recognize fantastic elements; yet for the contemporary artist and audience, such a distinction of the fantastic from the realistic would not have made sense - in pre-Enlightenment art, verisimilitude did not hold the central place it achieved later, and the fantastic was an integral part of culture and literature.20 Only a cultural context that privileges reason and science gives rise, in a dialectic countermovement, to fantasy as an articulation of the repressed.21 With the secularization of Enlightenment, fantasy (together with madness) becomes marginalized in the eighteenth century;22 to date back that marginalization, as some theorists do, to Plato's dismissal of the fantastic,

41

together and in one category with the female (and madness) as obstacles to knowledge, in Book X of The Republic2\ is to ignore whether the Greek philosophers' world-view allowed for such an antagonistic modern interpretation.24 What rather happened is that later attackers of the fantastic used Greek aesthetics to supply arguments in support of their own biases, disregarding the different epistemological contexts. 5 Literary theory has neglected the fantastic for the longest time. Hélène Cixous thus talks about Freud's "Das 'Unheimliche'" as "[psychoanalysis taking possession of an aesthetic domain neglected by aesthetics."26 In the mid-seventies, the first systematic literary approach, Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic (1970), was uncontested as "the only theoretical work specifically on Fantasy."27 In 1982, in the opinion of another critic who laments the sorry state of research on the subject, Todorov's study is still the "most rigorous analysis" to date.28 Kathryn Hume observes in 1983 that "[c]ritically, fantasy is all but uncharted territory," and that we hence lack "an analytic vocabulary for exploring and understanding the fantastic."29 Hume blames the lack of critical attention on "the western cultural bias in favor of imitation,"30 that is the realist mode. Although recent developments, especially postmodernism's preference for fantasy,31 have begun to counteract and correct that bias, fantasy for many critics still has the odium of escapism, a frivolous mode inferior to realism.32 When Hume laments the lack of a critical vocabulary, that complaint has to include the confusion over central terms. "Fantasy" and "the fantastic" are used synonymously to denote a literary mode, but also refers to fantasy as a genre. Differing markedly from Todorov's "uncanny,"33 Freud's "uncanny," although covering most of the fantastic, is not identical with it;34 it excludes the genre "fantasy," since the uncanny proceeds from a "conflict of judgement" in the literary fantastic. In French theory, finally, "le phantastique," for example in Caillois's theory of the "récits de terreur," is closer in its specifity to the uncanny and the sublime than to the fantastic; and Lacan's definition of "le fantastique" is more specific than Freud's uncanny from which it proceeds.35 While the occasional early studies focus mainly on catalogues of motifs of the fantastic,36 Todorov, in his groundbreaking and influential study, conceives of the fantastic as a genre, as his subtitle, "A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre" indicates. For him, the fantastic is "that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature confronting an apparently supernatural event."37 Critics after Todorov reject his insistence on hesitation as the constitutive element of the fantastic as an unnecessarily narrow definition, that, locating the fantastic in the protagonist's reaction,

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confines the fantastic to a place between the uncanny and the marvellous.38 And indeed, Todorov contends that the literary fantastic has disappeared in the twentieth century, thus excluding texts like Kafka's "Die Verwandlung." Theoretical approaches either limit the fantastic to a genre (like Todorov) or identify it as an aesthetic category, a literary mode, the opposite of realist representation.39 In my analysis of women's literature, I conceive of fantasy as a mode that may dominate a text, or that may intervene sporadically in a mainly realistic mode, but I am not interested, as will become apparent, in the genre "fantasy," in texts with fantasy as the structuring device of an alternative world where the fantastic is not seen as a disruption of the order of things.40 Theories of fantasy as a mode in turn range from structuralist interests in pervading motifs to sociological interpretations of the cultural function of fantasy and psychoanalytic definitions. What nearly all of these approaches, however disparate, have in common is that they refer to some extratextual "reality" since fantasy as a mode "can be defined only in contrast to what might be loosely called the 'real'."41 All fantastic literature has to incorporate a certain amount of "realism" to be effective as communication: "While in theory the writer of fiction can 'remake' the world as he or she pleases, in practice no writer can create an entire world from scratch. Such a novel would be infinite, incomprehensible, or both."42 It is impossible to "avoid defining [the imaginary world] in terms of what it is not, the world of reality."43 Commonly, the fantastic is perceived as the opposite or the negative of the real, as a violation of natural laws, either giving a context for or leading to the violation of rules and of a social grammar. Minimal consensus among theorists is that the fantastic constitutes a departure from consensus reality, of what we - at a given historical moment - experience as real: "a deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and normal" and "contravening normal reality;"44 as "negating the normal," "a correction of the normative schema set up by the repertoire of the text" and a "disconnection of the reader from his familiar world of everyday routine;"45 "an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility;"46 "the impossible seeping into the possible;"47 the "anti-real [...] against an established real;"48 "non-fact, impossibility;"49 it "contravenes the real and violates it."50 Hélène Cixous as well, in her analysis of Freud's "Das 'Unheimliche'," concludes that the fantastic is relational, exists only in opposition to the norm and the familiar.51 The fantastic violates verisimilitude, describes things and events that either could not happen (according to our rationality) or have not happened yet; thus, it comprises not only the supernatural and the irrational, but also genres like science fiction

43 and Utopian literature that usually strive to found their narratives on rational and scientific principles and explanations. Sometimes the fantastic is seen as a deviation from a reality established in the narrative world itself; Rabkin for example, whose prime example of a fantastic text is Alice in Wonderland, situates it in the moment when "the ground rules of a narrative are forced to make a 180° reversal, when prevailing perspectives are directly contradicted."52 This approach avoids the reference to a problematic concept of "reality" outside the text, but would again not account for Kafka's "Die Verwandlung." Yet another approach defines the fantastic in terms of implied audience and shared beliefs between author and audience.53 The relationship between "the novel and some external, empirically verifiable world,"54 although not irrelevant, does not suffice to explain the fantastic since scientific progress may render "realistic" for the audience what was fantastic at the time of publication.55 Rather, the shared concepts of authorial audience and author, the "communicative process between text and reader,"56 matter, together with the signals of the text that mark events as fantastic and as departures from a specific historical construction of reality. The function of the fantastic's violation of consensus reality arises in its defamiliarizing effect; Darko Suvin, for example, placing himself in the tradition of the Russian formalists and Brecht, identifies it as a device of estrangement and cognition.57 In the gap or fissure that the fantastic effects in the real, familiar readings of temporality, spatiality, and causality that depend on the natural laws are rendered invalid, creating epistemological confusion. Consequently, it "invokes wonder by making the impossible seem familiar and the familiar seem new and strange."58 Thus, from the Enlightenment on, the fantastic has exposed "neglected aspects of reality and deficiencies in understanding and evaluation."59 What these diverse approaches collectively overlook in their references to "consensus reality" is, as the term already suggests, that in a given society and culture there may be more than the one reality established by consensus, albeit differently privileged in hegemonic discourse; depending on social categories like gender, race, and class, shared systems of beliefs may differ. This does not imply that the established theories are naive about reality as a category; indeed, the authors hasten to assure that it is a "referential category whose privileged ontological status is arbitrarily determined."60 These theories consistently focus on the necessity to historicize definitions of the fantastic, since violations of the "real" and "possible" depend on historical perceptions of these categories. However, what is real is also a contested cultural category at a given moment, especially in an increasingly multi-

44 cultural society; the term "consensus" hides the dimension of hegemonic power on which it rests. Lance Olsen, significantly in viewing the fantastic in the context of postmodernism, is the only one who mentions how concepts of consensus reality are ethnocentric and thus make definitions of the fantastic biased.61 The Center, Marginalization, and Definitions of the Fantastic With few exceptions,62 white male authors constitute the source-material for theories of the fantastic and thus set up the critical norm. As diverse as approaches to the fantastic are, they share one feature: they are largely oblivious to the categories of gender and race, except where they emerge as influential elements in white male authors' use of the fantastic. In their insistence on the juxtaposition of the fantastic to one consensusreality, theories of the fantastic cannot account for the fantastic in minority literatures. Theories of South American Magic Realism (also perceived as a mode by critics63) that are based on "the juxtaposition of two different rationalities - the [South American] Indian and the European - in a syncretic fictitious world-view based on the simultaneous existence of several entirely different cultures in Latin America" are much more adequate.64 Like the South Americans, the writers of minority fictions in the US can draw on two different cultures - on their "native" cultures that integrate fantasy and magic with the real, and on the hegemonic white culture that is orientated towards rationality and marginalizes the fantastic. Alejo Carpentier, one of the major proponents of Magic Realism, credits "lo real maravilloso" to "the Indians and blacks who still believe in myth and magic"65 and who accept "the superstitious as part of daily life," resulting in a fusion of fantasy and reality.66 That integrated world-view in turn culturally clashes with the dominant rational world-view, permitting a "fictional space created by the dual inscription of incompatible geometries."67 These dual inscriptions have major consequences for the function of the fantastic: where in white male literature, an individual protagonist's experience of the fantastic is pitted against the surrounding worlc,68 that experience in minority literatures (as in Magic Realism) is communal - not coincidentally, Wide Sargasso Sea as a fundamental text on fantasj as the discourse of the repressed stresses different world-views, the white man's versus the white women's and blacks', and not individual manifestations of the fantastic; it rejects an individualistic reading of Antoinette ¿s mad. Antoinette's and Christophine's magic interpretation of the world estiblishes their consensus reality, and its marginalization by white male supremacy is a

45

result of hegemonic intervention. The communal aspect of the fantastic in minority literatures both allows to use the fantastic for political purposes and removes the dimension of (disturbing and horror-inducing) defamiliarization in the context of these cultures; bell hooks, who prefers the term "imagination" to "fantasy," concludes that "[f]or the colonized mind to think of the imagination as the instrument that does not estrange us from reality, but returns us to the real more fully, in ways that help us to confront and cope, is a liberatory gesture."69 The conclusion that in (post)modern literature, fantasy is "no longer a communal form,"70 certainly does not hold true for minority literatures. Nancy Gray Diaz observes that the social orientation distinguishes Magic Realism from the fantastic in Western literature described by Todorov, that there is "a vital political and historical relationship between the configurations of the narrative world and those of the external world."71 Equally, in ethnic literatures like African and Native American fictions, the social commitment of literature stands in the tradition of understanding art as collective and ritualistic72 to which the concept of l'art pour l'art is alien.73 African American art and literature is "consciously committed,"74 "functional, collective and committing or committed."75 In the relation between the two world-views, social hegemony manifests itself; in Wide Sargasso Sea, we have seen how white male supremacy stigmatizes and (literally and metaphorically76) polices the world-views of women and people of color. Although minority traditions of the integration of the fantastic still exist,77 they are hidden by the dominant world-view and repressed, and thus relegated to the place of the fantastic. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) uses the metaphor of invisibility to suggest the oppression of Chinese American interpretations by the "solid" American world-view.78 That invisibility of marginalized world-views in the context of white culture leads to critical misconceptions. When Brian Atteberry laments that a "fundamental bias against fantasy" in American folklore has impeded the development of fantastic literature, such a statement has obviously been construed by equating "American" with "white" and by ignoring the folklore of ethnic groups like African Americans and Native Americans where such a bias certainly does not exist.79 In The Woman Warrior, for example, the heroine is exasperated because she cannot separate "reality" from "fantasy" in her mother's stories that are informed by a cultural tradition of integrating the fantastic. African belief systems acknowledge three different states of being, "the land of the living, the land of the unborn, and the land of the ancestors and the dead."80 Lawrence Levine summarizes this background of African American folklore in a passage that I quote at length because many of the concepts described here,

46 like the function of the spirits of the dead, are typical of Chinese American and Native American traditional cultures as well: Life was not random or haphazard. Events were meaningful; they had causes which Man could divine, understand, and profit from. Human beings could "read" the phenomena surrounding them and affecting them because Man was part of, not alien to, the Natural Order of things, attached to the Oneness that bound together all matter, animate and inanimate, all spirits, visible or not. [...] Survival and happiness and health depended upon being able to read the signs that existed everywhere, to understand the visions that recurrently visited one, to commune with the spirits that filled the world: the spirit of the Supreme Being who could be approached only through the spirits of the pantheon of intermediary deities; the spirits of all the matter that filled the universe - trees, animals, rivers, the very utensils and weapons upon which Man was dependent; the spirits of contemporary human beings; the spirits of ancestors who linked the living with the unseen world.8

Freud, derogatively referring to "primitive" world-views, parallels this collective "animistic conception of the universe" with early stages in individual development82 that serve as a source of the uncanny; he does not pursue, however, the implied question of the relevance of perspective for the fantastic which he only touches upon in passing, but remains firmly imbedded in discussing differences in an exclusively white male context.83 The fantastic in the literatures of women of color is set as the "native mode" against the rationalism of the dominant culture. Its appearance in the text signals a re-evaluation or celebration of minority culture, a (re)capturing of a (past) cultural wholeness that often achieves Utopian dimensions. Thus, the fantastic is predominantly equated with the whole of minority culture, and its function of re-writing history is often associated with female or maternal figures. The loss of this mythical past is connected with the loss of the native language, subjection to linear time, and alienation. Toni Morrison uses the reference to pre-Enlightenment world-views to characterize the traditional concept of the world, where the spiritual is as real as the material and where no master-slave relationship to nature exists.84 Critics have speculated that this integration of the fantastic is mirrored in languages, Hopi for example, that "incorporate the occult intrusions" and would "not exclude any dimensions of reality in the first place."85 These concepts are not translatable into the English language; in Beloved, where the African language is literally the lost mother-tongue, the concepts survive, though, as echoes: Nan was the one she knew best, who was around all day, who nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm and half of another. And who used different words. Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now. [...] What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma'am

47 spoke, and which would never come back. But the message - that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp sheets against her chest, she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood.86

Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) acknowledges that language builds reality, contending that the Native American interpretation of the world is not expressable in English, that it vanishes behind totally different and privileged concepts of reality in "the conqueror's language imposed on us"87: "all the names for the source of this growth were buried under English words, out of reach," a "truth which she had no English words for."88 Maxine Hong Kingston notes how conflicting concepts of community and individuality are mirrored in the English and Chinese languages' different constructions of the word "I," in both oral and written discourse. Equally, novels by white women like Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984) propose an interpretation of the world from a female perspective that cannot be expressed in the English language since it exceeds the limits of its culture.89 That interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis does not propose a total silencing of critical discourse - as Houston A. Baker, Jr., points out, even taken in its extreme form, Whorfs hypothesis would still allow inversion and negation90 but suggests an interaction between language and cultural reality where "language does become a mechanism for social change."91 Baker finds that African American were not absolutely restricted within "the categories of European languages," that "vocabulary is less important than the underlying codes, or semantic fields, that governed meaning."92 This is "the meaning out of a code" that Sethe can no longer actively reproduce, but which still lingers as an echo. One of the manifestation of the concept that "nothing is dead,"93 of the fluid boundary between life and death is the presence of ghosts in minority women's literatures. This motif should be understood in the context of their specific cultures and not be subsumed under a general (white) tradition; Angela Carter whose work has often been compared to Magic Realism is aware that in contrast to Third World writers like Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she cannot use a folklore where ghosts "are actually real."9* In Beloved, the ghost relates to the tradition of conjuring and voodoo;95 in The Woman Warrior (subtitled "A Memoir of a Childhood among Ghosts") and Ceremony, to the ghosts in Chinese American and Native American myths.96 Maxine Hong Kingston recalls how during her childhood she thought that "the world was made of spirits, ghosts, vampires," because the people around her "saw spirits and creatures."97 When the editors of Haunting the House of Fiction celebrate that women's ghost stories violate the boundaries between life and death and substitute a

48 fluid line instead, that observation holds only true for the dominamt USculture. In the literatures of women of color, such a gendered distinction does not make sense, and the writers of course cannot violate boundaries that do not exist within their cultures in the first place.98 The opposition of that approach to the dominant ideology and its repression by cultural hegemony becomes apparent in the writer Stephen Talbot's comment that "the white American literary establishment does not believe in ghosts. Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingson believe in ghosts." This, critic John Leonard speculates, is the reason why both writers initially did not gain the recognition and literary awards they deserved." Psychoanalysis and the Function of the Fantastic Freud reverts to the universal, or nearly so; as if the Unheimliche were recognized in the same way by everyone. A rather paradoxical hope, one might think, since it is in the nature of the Unheimliche to remain strange. Hélène Cixous, "Fiction and Its Phantoms" (1975)

While literary theories have identified different definitions and narrative structures, they have increasingly looked to psychoanalysis to investigate the function of the fantastic since it frequently gives expression to unconscious desires. The expulsion of the unconscious100 and its manifestations from the "real" and "realism" and their marginalization as madness and fantasy by rationalism and positivism has marked fantasy as a subject for psychoanalysis.101 As early as 1908, Freud's essay on "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming" implies the antagonistic connection of literature to the reality-principle and repression. The writer "creates a world of phantasy" much like the child plays and the adult day-dreams, all these activities placing the activists in opposition to "reality."102 The "driving power behind phantasies" are "unsatisfied wishes," and the phantasies take us back to an infant state, prior to the reality-principle, "in which this wish was fulfilled."103 Drawing on the obvious semantic closeness of "dream" and "day-dream," Freud then indirectly ascribes the same source to daydreams/phantasies as to dreams, namely the repressed: "wishes [...] which were consequently repressed and pushed back into the unconscious."104 After having established the connection between repression, the pleasure-principle and phantasies, Freud then contends that phantasies are gender-specific: "almost exclusively" erotic in content for women, for "their ambition is

49 generally comprised in their erotic longings," while men's wishes comprise power/ambition and the erotic equally.105 Fantasy in the Freudian sense, where it is always opposed to reality and the reality-principle, thus provides a "setting for desire,"106 a desire that is disruptive. From Freud's seminal essay "Das 'Unheimliche'" ("The 'Uncanny"') on, psychoanalytic approaches to fantasy/the fantastic have defined it as the return of the repressed.10' Freud, in opposing the uncanny to reality and to verisimilitude and by linking it to phenomena like doubles and automatons, tends to equate it with the fantastic, with what Cixous calls "the unrecognized and unrecognizable spheres" in her discussion of the essay.108 Freud defines the uncanny as "something which is familiar and oldestablished in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."109 After providing a catalogue of fantastic motifs in psychoanalytic histories - "animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man's attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex" -, he adds, as if in an afterthought, female genitals as the source of the uncanny; although, in confining that observation to "neurotic men," he introduces the importance of perspective, he neglects to investigate into gender-aspects in his general argument.110 He closes his reflections with some remarks on the literary fantastic, where the issue of perspective crops up once again in the question why some texts elicit uncanny reactions in the readers, while others - with similar fantastic motifs - fail to do so; gender as a potential influential category is never mentioned in these reflections. In "Die Verneinung" (1925), Freud defines the fantastic as a "cognizance of what has been displaced."111 The spatial orientation of Freud's metaphor (definitions of the fantastic as well as of women's literature are obsessed with space) is taken up in Laplanche and Pontalis's images that argue for the centrality of the fantastic: Psychoanalysis does not intend to uncover objective causes in reality as much as it seeks to change our very attitudes to that reality. This it achieves by effectively deconstructing that positivist dichotomy in which fantasy is simply opposed to 'reality,' as an epiphenomenon. Psychoanalysis dismantles such a 'logic of the supplement' to reveal the supposedly marginal operations of fantasy at the center of all our perceptions, beliefs, and actions.112

Although that assertion does not seem to lend itself easily to a social interpretation, its thrust to establish fantasy at the center rather than at the margins introduces questions of cultural hegemony. Elizabeth Abel, in an article on "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis," calls for an "infusion of the social," specifically of social categories like race and class, into psychoanalytic approaches, in order to counteract its individualist bias and,

50 in acknowledging material conditions, to make it useful as a tool for feminist criticism.113 While theories of the fantastic still neglect gender, race and class, gender has of course always been central to psychoanalysis on the individual-psychological level; it has been "socialized" in contemporary analyses that link the repressed to the socio-political oppression of women. Referring to Freud's (in)famous "blind spot" in his interpretation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" in "Das 'Unheimliche'," several critics like Hélène Cixous have exposed the "minimizing of Olympia," the repression of the doll, that is of the woman in the text.114 Cixous's critique of Freud implies an insistence on perspective in the analysis of the fantastic's function. In focusing on the symbolism of the eyes (and thus on the Oedipus-complex and castration-anxiety), Freud fails to see the doll; from this narrowed perspective, he overgeneralizes and fails to recognize that the uncanny shifts if viewed from different positions. Jane Marie Todd takes Cixous's critique one step further, arguing that the unseen woman in Freud's essay directly points to women as the socially repressed. Elaborating on Freud's parapraxis of substituting "Schleiermacher" (veilmaker) for "Schelling" in a later edition, she identifies this Freudian slip as duplicating the movement of the uncanny he describes: "the double movement of the Unheimliche (veiling and unveiling) is also the movement of 'Das Unheimliche' - of Freud's essay."115 Freud's denial of the woman is at the core of his interpretation of Hoffmann's story, a repression not merely individual, but cultural: "Olympia's castration [the loss of her eyes] signifies nothing other than this social oppression of women. [...] The answer is that the male perceives the female gaze as 'penis envy."'116 Referring to these studies, Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith identifies as the source of the (male) American uncanny "the suppressions and repressions involved in sexual interaction," that is the fear of female sexuality and the silencing it prompts.117 Different approaches like Foucault's and Laing's stress the connection between the (socially or individually) repressed, madness/psychosis, and the fantastic, a connection often made in women's literature like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). For Laing, fantasy is related to the repressed, madness, and social categories; in The Divided Self, he talks about the fantastic status of the self at the onset of psychosis when a person loses his or her orientation in reality. Foucault mentions asylums as "huge reserves of the fantastic" and talks about the "obstinate return" of the displaced fantastic.118 Although these approaches infuse psychoanalysis with gender as a social category, they still mainly look at the fantastic from a dominant male

51 perspective. For women, obviously, being the object and source of the male fear of female sexuality, the fantastic as the return of the repressed must have different manifestations and different functions. Women writers, as we will see, use the fantastic to avoid being confined to erotic plots and to create plots of power. The Constraints of Realism, the Freedom of Fantasy I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976) Patriarchal Conciousness is our conceptual prison. But if we are born into it and it is all we know, how do we comprehend it as a prison, let alone destroy it for a vision of freedom that is not inherently apparent? Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender (1984)

The Woman Warrior's open rejection of authenticity and realism and its proud emphasis on the fantastic nature of "such women" whose reality-status is ambiguous was for a long time not paralleled in American feminist theory that was characterized instead by a bias for realism and the realist text." 9 Expectations of authenticity and demands that texts should provide role models and mirror "reality" "truthfully" and be founded on the legitimacy of experience, permeated these earlier writings, much as in minority literatures.120 Although it is true that the majority of feminist writing is in the realist mode,121 critics unnecessarily narrow the field of fantastic literature by limiting their focus and analyses to fantastic genres like Utopias and science fiction and by persistently ignoring the fantastic in "mainstream" writing.122 Only with the influence of poststructural ism and the writings of French critics like Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Luce Irigaray (who, building on Lacan's theories, call for a disruption of the symbolic order and center on the semiotic/imaginary) has a limited interest in fantasy developed,123 but still largely focused on genre,124 which in turn, since these genres are marginal in the literary canon, reinforces the perception of women's literature as predominantly realist. Fantasy does not necessarily imply the experimental style cherished by French criticism, although it may use it, like Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), nor are fantastic texts self-reflexive as a rule. Fantasy as a mode does achieve, however, a defamiliarizing effect by disrupting and violating cultural beliefs like the

52 construction of gender, even where the text is neither self-reflexive nor experimental. Thus, fantasy escapes the limitations of realism on the level of "content" and succeeds to deconstruct hegemonic constructions of reality by articulating the repressed, while sometimes paralleling this defamiliarizing effect in an experimental style and formal transgressions.125 There has not yet been a study of fantasy as a mode and its function and manifestation in women's literature. Rosemary Jackson, in her Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, relegates her remarks to a (necessarily brief) footnote on "fantasy as a countercultural form," noting the increasing importance of non-realist texts in feminist writings and claiming that "no breakthrough of cultural structure seems possible until linear narrative (realism, illusionism, transparent representation) is broken or dissolved."126 Under the influence of poststructuralism, feminist critics in recent years have focused on the ideological dimensions of narrative conventions like linearity, finality (closures that are ideologically implicated), and patterns like the "two-suitor pattern."127 They have pointed out that the requirements of verisimilitude constrain women's writing in realist fiction and prohibit the expression of a feminist vision of the world.128 Realism can criticize the social oppression of women, but it cannot transcend a socio-cultural frame of misogyny by projecting alternatives, cannot envision a different order: mainstream fiction can deal with the present situation, suffering, and struggles of a female protagonist - or by extension non-white or politically radical or otherwise alienateed protagonists - but because the solution to the oppressive situation experienced by that character must be limited to the world as it is, such a solution must be limited to an individual choice: to live in the system as it is, to go mad, or to die. Given the world as it is, a collective solution and/or a radical change in the social structure is not possible in mainstream realist fiction. 129

Joanna Russ, in an early publication, achieves hilarious results by substituting female protagonists for men in conventional plots; as she demonstrates, "A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a bear" simply won't do as serious or probable literature since it does not coincide with social constructions of femininity; it can only be read as parody.130 Luce Irigaray warns of the restrictions of a "defensive or offensive mimeticism" that entails "the risk of absorbing the meaning/direction of discourse."131 And as early as 1972, Ellen Morgan, although ultimately privileging the realist text in her evaluation, writes: "It is next to impossible for a realistic novel to be written which defies the sex-role system, for society everywhere upholds this system, and social realities are the staples of the realistic novel."1 2 As Ruth Bleier suspects, it might be impossible to break out of "our conceptual prison," there is no Archimedean point outside

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of patriarchal ideology; and, as we have seen, the fantastic has to relate to "reality." Yet realist fiction is enmeshed in reality, has either to confirm or to oppose it;133 thus, the visionary part of feminist fiction - feminism being a Utopian concept - is inexpressable in realism.134 This fundamental problem is reflected in narrative plots that either restrict the heroine to traditional female roles, typically in relation to men, or that punish her for straying from this course. The traditional closures marriage, madness, or death - seal these fates. Joanna Russ and Nina Baym, among others, have exposed the gender-specific limitations of cultural and literary myths, refuting the claim that these myths are gender-neutral and "universal."135 Science fiction has gained increasing reputation among feminist critics for its potential to offer alternative plots, for, as Teresa de Lauretis states, "telling new stories so as to inscribe into the picture of reality characters and events and resolutions that were previously invisible, untold, unspoken (and so unthinkable, unimaginable, 'impossible.')"136 The fantastic provides the means to write "improbable" plots that are not confined to satire or comedy, as in Joanna Russ's examples. Another variation of the interaction between verisimilitude and narrative conventions can be observed in Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). The fate of the heroine Celie ends neither in the traditional female closure of marriage, madness, or death nor does it follow the traditional African American plots of victimization or a quest for freedom that implies alienation from the community.137 Instead, Walker's closure rejects all traditional roles and grants Celie control over her own body and desire within the context of the community. Not coincidentally, that violation of narrative standards as an expression of a cultural matrix led many critics to discuss the ending as "fantastic," "fairytale-like," or Utopian, obviously striking them as improbable; in fact, nothing overtly fantastic happens.138 This example demonstrates that, in realist literature, established conventions may be violated;139 however, this strategy often results in offending notions of verisimilitude since the literary conventions mirror the social text of a culture. In the specific case of The Color Purple, the social matrix renders a concept of a black women as an agent rather than a victim Utopian.140 The discrepancy between social and literary text irritates and provokes a fantastic reading to bridge that gap; the text becomes "implausible." Along with narrative patterns, feminist critics, together with postmodern critics, have questioned the neat compartmentalization of literature into genres, especially the distinction into "high" and "mass" literature, a feature of modernism. Suspecting that dichotomy as yet another tool of cultural hegemony, they have begun to turn their attention to formerly despised forms

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like science fiction (to date more in theory than in practice, however) and consolation literature.141 As Andreas Huyssen observes: It was especially the art, writing, film making and criticism of women and minority artists with the recuperation of buried and mutilated traditions, their emphasis on exploring forms of gender- and race-based subjectivity in aesthetic production and experiences, and their refusal to be limited to standard canonizations, which added a whole new dimension to the critique of high modernism and to the emergence of alternative forms of culture.142

This multiplicity which reflects a growing social awareness of diverse cultural groups like women and minorities, undermines the homogenizing and exclusionary tendencies of the canon. African American women writers like Paule Marshall and Alice Walker have elaborated on how their literary tradition has been marginalized by the distinction in high and low culture; being legally prevented from learning to read and write and excluded from the canon, black women had to express their creativity in folklore and ways traditionally dismissed as "subliterary.1,143 White women's contributions, although less radically silenced, were often marginalized in "minor" (often used synonymously with popular) genres.144 Women's Fantasies of Power the need to create spaces where one is able to redeem and reclaim the past, legacies of pain, suffering, and triumph in ways that transform present reality. Fragments of memory are not simply represented as flat documentary but constructed to give a "new take" on the old, constructed to move us into a different mode of articulation. bell hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness" (1990)

The prevalent definitions of the fantastic, in their references tacitly privileging white male literature, recognize the fantastic in the opposition between a communal, established reality, suggesting that the fantastic is marginal and in conflict with the center; without ever acknowledging the decisive importance of perspective, they thus imply that the fantastic is actually a discourse of marginal and powerless groups, of, among others, women. The fantastic and women's writing are not only situated in the same place by spatial metaphors - in gaps and fissures of the dominant discourse but,

55 as we have seen, share a place as the socially repressed. In psychoanalysis, the fantastic, as that which ought to have remained hidden but has surfaced to disturb our reading of the world, is by implication defined as the rhetoric of the oppressed. If the uncanny is the familiar and (socially) repressed that has come to light and made visible the unseen of a culture, then its effect in white men's fictions must differ from women's and minority literatures. When Hélène Cixous critizes Freud's tendency to universalize the uncanny in "Das 'Unheimliche'," such a critique should not be limited to the individual psychological function of the uncanny/fantastic, but be extended to its social function. If for different (male) individuals with their respective psychological histories the uncanny manifests itself differently, as Freud observes, then the perception of the uncanny will necessarily reflect the heterogeneity of social groups as well. "Castration anxiety" that is a source of the uncanny in "Das 'Unheimliche'," whether interpreted literally or metaphorically as an issue of social power, cannot affect women (who are already "castrated" or powerless) in the same way it affects men (who have everything to lose). The fantastic return of the repressed in white men's literature must indeed have a disconcerting, frightening, and "uncanny" effect since it gives voice to that which has been silenced in order to establish and define white male supremacy and since it deconstructs the reality based on that supremacy. The literatures of women and minorities (groups who constitute the socially "unseen" and have chosen invisibility as one of their central metaphors), on the other hand, follow the expressed purpose to make visible the invisible and unseen; the fantastic thus is potentially a mode to break open hegemonic discourses and, in that gap, articulate a construction of reality that places women's and minorities' marginalized perspectives at the center and opens up new ways of seeing. What may be uncanny in men's literature, may thus be empowering rather than threatening; the fantastic offers a potential to recreate (hi)story - it is a visionary and Utopian mode. A case in point: if novels written by women bring an "unseen" of culture to light (for example visualizing an alternative to patriarchy) and thus disturb the social order, such a manifestation is not necessarily uncanny for women (although it may be, if they identify with male ideology), since it creates a space for their desires. However, being confronted with these manifestations of the unseen would "logically" produce an uncanny effect for men who, by their gender and as part of a social structure, are implicated in repression; their response is inextricably based on their complicity in keeping something unseen, and that unseen is women (among other things, of course). And indeed, male reviews of feminist utopias, especially of Joanna Russ's The Female Man,

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often reveal an "uncanny" reading; James Tiptree, Jr.'s, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?," in writing a feminist Utopia as male nightmare, thematizes exactly this antagonist discrepancy in reading. Thus, it should not surprise us that women's writing encompasses numerous fantastic moments that are not "uncanny," although these moments, rather than refuting Freud's analysis of the function of the uncanny/fantastic, confirm his views, if based on the fundamental aspect of gendered differences in the reading of the uncanny. What is uncanny for men does not necessarily appear uncanny to women, what elicits anxiety in male writers' texts may evoke triumph in women's fictions. Conversely, it should not take us unawares that the uncanny in women's and minority fictions is a fantastic extension and exaggeration of the status quo or the past, that is, a reflection of white male hegemony; what passes as reality in white male fiction is thus deconstructed as a politics of silencing and repression, as discussed in the chapter on dystopias. Consequently, from the perspective of the marginalized in women's and minority writings, the psychoanalytic tendency to collapse the fantastic and the uncanny has to be revised. The fantastic in women's and minority literatures differs in two other respects from its use in white male literature. Plots that are acceptable as plausible and perfectly realistic in men's literature may need the fantastic to be plausible: the established male plot of the lone adventurer with anti-social tendencies who seeks out the solitude of the wilderness slips into the fantastic in fictions with female protagonists, as discussed in the chapter on "Alien(N)ation;" the same process applies to fictions about a quest for one's roots, for the past.145 And the fantastic in minority and women's literature has strong communal and social elements; even where narratives or scenes seem to portray individual experiences of supernatural encounters or madness, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony,146 they invite a reading in the context of collective victimization and white male appropriation of power, as the analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea suggests. Both white and minority women's fictions share a focus on recreating history; the centrality of history in women's fantastic fictions has two reasons: writing women's histories violates dominant expectations of historiography with its emphasis on the heroic, public life, and scientific and political achievements, and thus inevitably subverts androcentric norms; and marginalized groups have not had access to official sources, so that from their critical perspective, official historiography is clearly seen as a cultural fiction that serves ideological interests.147 When a critic asserts that Angela Carter is "reinventing the cultural history of women (since it was all invented

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to begin with),"148 that statement strikes at the core of the silencing of women and of cultural myths about gender that together consolidate male hegemony. The fantastic, beyond the earlier feminist attempts to uncover "forgotten" female models in the past, empowers women writers to break out of the circle of cultural fictions and develop their own alternative maps of desire. One of these visions that serve as a model of mythical unity in novels as diverse as Wide Sargasso Sea, Beloved, and Housekeeping, is the motherdaughter bond; it is the "writing and rewriting of a heretofore buried or subversively oral matrilineal tradition, or the invention - either through inversion or compensation - of alternate mythical and even historical accounts of women."149 The mother-daughter-dyad comes to represent the prototypical example of a Utopian space outside the confines of patriarchal domination, beyond the reaches of misogynist reality. Mothers and daughters alike are irresistably drawn to re-live that time, and are thus drawn into the fantastic.150 When Nancy K. Miller asks whether there is a "place in which the ambitious wish of a young woman asserts itself,"151 a place for the female dream of power, the analysis of the fantastic in women's writing provides an answer: exactly in the gap, the fissure in the real revealed by the fantastic can these dreams be situated, in the "now" and "nowhere" that de Lauretis defines as the place of female desire. The potential of the fantastic to allow the articulation of plots of power and desire is manifested most dramatically in the gender-specific interpretations of metamorphosis, in narratives where transformation - in marked opposition to men's literature - is a chance for empowerment. This approach to metamorphosis, in turn, exposes the genderblindness and bias of theories of the fantastic, where men's interpretations are taken as the normative literary manifestation of the fantastic. Literary Signs of the Fantastic - The Disruption of Order The day will come when you see him for the first time, and he sees you. The first time means the last; it means that you'll never see him again. But don't be frightened. You don't have to say good-bye to each other, for you've done that long ago. What a good thing it is that you have said good-bye already! Ilse Aichinger, "Story in A Mirror" (1954)

One of the signs of the fantastic, as in Ilse Aichinger's rewinding of a woman's life from deathbed to uterus, is the displacement of time and/or

58 space,152 a feature that critics identify as a pervasive characteristic of women's literature as well.153 "Story in A Mirror," by distorting time, strangely disrupts the relationship of cause and effect, so that in Aichinger's reverse temporal order of things death is the beginning of life: "It's as well that your mother died, because you wouldn't have been able to manage your little brothers much longer by yourself."154 Further examples are May Sinclair's "Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched" (1923)155 and James Tiptree, Jr.'s, (Alice Sheldon's) "Fault" (1968), where an individual's time is desynchronized from "the general temporal matrix" of time,156 causing a complete isolation in this temporal gap. More common temporal displacements in fantastic literature are projections into the future or time-travels back into the past, which, together with spatial displacements onto unknown islands, secluded valleys, and interstellar space, provide the staple of Utopian literature and science fiction. If coordinates of reality like time and space, cause and effect are violated in the fantastic, the same is true for boundaries. In the figures of ghosts, vampires, and zombies as in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Angela Carter "The Lady of the House of Love" (1979), the distinction between life and death becomes transparent; in visions of androgyny and metamorphoses from woman to man, gender is deconstructed, as in Virginia Woolf s Orlando (1928); and in the merging of identities, as in Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1981), ego-boundaries become permeable and ultimately vanish; in the transformation from inanimate matter into animate matter, categories of classification are negated. The resulting confusion is often underlined by the negation of the primacy of the gaze as a means of (re)cognition. The emphasis on darkness in many fantastic writings, especially the Gothic, does not only allude to a cultural equation of the repressed with darkness, but refers to a condition when "light/vision/the power of the look are suspended,"157 confronting the protagonists with powers beyond the grasp of rationality.158 On a textual level, fantastic literature is characterized by selfreferentiality, constantly drawing attention to the artificiality of its signs and de-familiarizing established readings. The fantastic elements do not refer to an extra-textual reality, but only to themselves and the absence, the gap it signals, it draws "attention to its own practice as a linguistic system."1 In that gap between signifier and signified, as Rosemary Jackson has shown, "nameless things" can be articulated and "thingless names" appear, a "discourse without an object" develops.160 One of these features is the fantastic's literalness (a feature, again, that it shares with women's literature161), specifically the literalization of metaphor that refuses transcendence.162 In

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Kafka's "Die Verwandlung," for example, Gregor Samsa "is not like a monstrous insect, he is this insect."163 The literalization of language is an alienating device that deconstructs the illusion of mimetic interpretation, a "conceptual reorganization of semantic space;"164 in Teresa de Lauretis's view, this textual maneuver has social implications in the "effect of assigning to verbal signs some kind of use-value in addition to their exchange value, of going against the entropic enterprise of a society in which signs circulate bearing no relation to the material reality of the users."165 Similarly, J. Hillis Miller refers to "the terrible performative power that figures of speech may have."' 66 In fantastic literature by women, the self-reflexivity that Rabkin sees as one of the constitutive factors of the fantastic text167 is one of the most prominent and pervasive features, reflecting women's consciousness of and rebellion against their historical silencing: from ghost stories of the mideighteenth century to Wide Sargasso Sea to minority women's literature to dystopian novels, the texts dramatize and circle around the struggle for a female voice and a way to write women's lives. This way is explicitly associated with the fantastic in many fictions, from Jean Rhys's programmatic strategies in Wide Sargasso Sea to the unveiling functions of the ghosts in Edith Wharton's "Mr. Jones" and "Kerfol" to the recourse to folklore in minority women's literature or the literalization of women's marginality in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. The texts often employ narrative strategies of fragmentation (as in The Handmaid's Tale), of multivocality (as in The Left Hand of Darkness), of self-conscious references to their textuality (as in Heroes and Villains), of violating genre-boundaries (as in The Woman Warrior and The Left Hand of Darkness). Joanna Russ's The Female Man is a text that combines all these features: the novel shares the perspective of four women who are versions of one woman under different historical and socio-political circumstances; they are joined by the author, yet another version of the same woman, who intrudes with comments and writes anticipatory reviews of her book; the text refers to other texts by which it was influenced. In the closure, Russ dismisses the audience and the book in a final scene where all the women appear together and the author hopes for a Utopian future that will render her feminist protest obsolete: I said goodbye and went off with Laur, I, Janet; I also watched them go, I, Joanna; moreover I went off to show Jael the city, I Jeannine, I Jael, I myself." Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. [...] Go, little book, [...] and take your place bravely on the book racks of bus terminals and drugstores. [...]

60 Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free.168

Notes Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, "Feminist Film Criticism. An Introduction," in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, eds., Re-Vision (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 11. 2 See e.g. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing A Woman's Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989, 19881) on autobiographies; Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of Fiction Exclude Women Authors," American Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer 1981): 12-39; reprinted in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 63-80; Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Jan. 1981). 3 Which I do not understand as a biological category, but defined by authorship and subject-matter. See definitions of African American literature as an equivalent, for example in Toni Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (London/Sidney: Pluto Press, 1985,19841), p. 342. 4 Quoted in Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 21. 5 DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending, p. 21. 6 Miller, "Emphasis Added", p. 46; emphasis added. 7 Miller, "Emphasis Added," refers to Freud's analysis of male and female fantasies and his idea that women's fantasies are limited to the erotic. See below and the chapter on metamorphoses for a more detailed discussion of Freud's speculation. 8 Teresa de Lauretis, "Now and Nowhere: Roeg's Bad Timing" in Re-Vision, p. 150168. 9 Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (1989): 1-34; p. 11. 10 See Joachim Metzner, "Die Vieldeutigkeit der Wiederkehr. Literaturpsychologische Überlegungen zur Phantastik," in Christian W. Thomsen and Jens Malte Fischer, eds., Phantastik in Literatur und Kunst (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), p. 79-110; Gerhard Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction: Its 'Reality' Status, its Historical Development and its Transformation in Postmodern Narrative," REAL, Vol. 1, eds. Herbert Grabes, H.J. Dillinger and Hans Bungert (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1982): 267-364; Victor Bürgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, eds., Formations of Fantasy (London/New York: Methuen, 1986). See also Carolyn J. Allen, "Feminist Criticism and Postmodernism" in Joseph Natoli, ed., Tracing Literary Theory (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 278-305; p. 284: "Thus woman in Lacanian theory is fantasy, a place where man's lack is projected, the Other, the not-man." 11 See Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction. Medusa's Face (Houndmills et al.: Macmillan Press, 1989), p. ix, who sees the fear and repression of 1

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13

14

15

16 17 18

19 20 21

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female sexuality at the heart of the uncanny in (male) American literature. His theory is discussed in more detail in the chapter on literary history. See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," in Formations of Fantasy, p. 6: fantasy here is "between subjective and objective, between an inner world [...] and an external world." [emphasis added] - See Jacques Lacan, "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis," in "Preface," Formations of Fantasy, p. 2: "die Ideen einer anderen Lokalität, the idea of another locality, another space, another scene, the between perception and consciousness." [emphasis added] See John Guillory, "Canon," in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990): 233249; especially p. 239. And K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 40 and p. 115: "'Gender' and 'genre' are frequently paired words in the feminist critique, and are encountered most often in connection with the complaint that women have at their disposal far fewer of the traditional literary genres than men have always had, and continue to have." See Nina Baym, "The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory" in Shari Benstock, ed., Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 46 who rejects that dismissal of popular women's genres. Theorists of autobiography claim that this feature is typical of women's autobiographies. For a summary of these theories that claim that women's autobiographies (The Handmaid's Tale poses as autobiography) are structurally different from men's, see Anne Koenen, "Democracy and Women's Autobiographies," Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1991). Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (Toronto: Seal Books, 1986, 19851), p. 251. And then distorts that violence into the stereotype of the Black Mammy. For a detailed discussion of Morrison's Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), see the chapter on minority women's literature. The interaction between reproduction and (literary) production is explored in Anne E. Goldmann, "'I Made the Ink': (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved," Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 313-330. For the connection between reader and Utopia see the chapter on Utopias. See Dieter Penning, "Die Ordnung der Unordnung," p. 39. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente. (¡947) Theodor W. Adorno. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon, 1965, 19611), on the rise of secular agencies and discourses of control under the guise of reason. This marginalization was of course a drawn-out process that did not affect all groups of society equally at the same time; differences between city and country, for example, were relevant. See Lance Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty. An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy (New York et al.: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 15. See Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis. Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York/London: Methuen, 1984), p. 6, where she questions whether their "assumptions allowed them to recognize fantasy at all."

62 25 See Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis, p. 6/7. 26 Hélène Cixous, "Fiction and Its Phantoms," New Literary History, 7 (1975): 525-548; p. 527. Freud himself complains about the lack of "treatises on aesthetics" in "The 'Uncanny'" (p. 219), and concludes his essay with some tentative remarks on an "aesthetic inquiry" into the fantastic. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 24 vols, ed. and trans, by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), Vol. 17. 27 Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 118. 28 Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 272; see equally Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London/New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 5. 29 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis, p. xv and 3. 30 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis, p. xiv. See similarly Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty, p. 14ff. and Anne Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy. A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature since 1945 (London et al.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 10-11. 31 See Leslie A. Fiedler, "The New Mutants," Unfinished Business (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 187-208 (first published 1965 in Partisan Review) for an early example of the evalution of the relationship between the fantastic (especially science fiction), minority groups, and postmodernism (and the rejection of a distinction into high and mass culture). 32 As late as 1983, for example, a critic, finding the cause for his depreciation selfevident, complains that Angela Carter's fiction (which quite openly declares itself fantastic) suffers from a lack of mimesis. Quoted in John Haffenden, ed., Noxelists in Interview (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 91. 33 Todorov's uncanny is not defined by functions like repression, but by a hesitation between supernatural and natural explanations for a phenomenon. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975, 19701). 34 Freud, although not stating this explicitly, seems to conceive of the fantastic as a genre, not a mode, as I do. Freud's exploration of the function of the fantastic does cover, though, all fantastic literature that violates social orders (what he calls a "conflict of judgement", p. 250). It does not cover certain tendencies in sciencs fiction (for example technology-oriented space operas), a genre that "spends much of its time convincing the reader that its seeming impossibilités are in fact explainable if we extrapolate from the world and the science we know." David Attebeny, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 2. - Jentsch, Freud's source on the uncanny, actually does define it as the hesitation ("intellectual uncertainty") that Todorov later sees as constitutive of the fantastic. Freud, "The 'Uncanny'", p. 221. - Freud's definition of the fantastic diffus from Todorov since Todorov's uncanny is not defined by functions like repression. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975,19701). 35 See Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet" in Sioshana Felman, ed., Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Oherwise (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 22: "This experience, called depersonalization, in the course of which the imaginary limits betweer subject

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and object change, leads us to what is called in the strict sense the fantastic dimension [le fantastique]." See Roger Caillois, Fantastique. Soixante récits de terreur (Le Club Français du Livre, 1958). Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 25. What Todorov defines as the fantastic, David Punter calls "paranoiac fiction." The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London/New York: Longman, 1980), p. 404. For such a critique, see Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 65f., and Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 273. For such approaches, see Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 273; Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, and the essays by Reimer Jehmlich ("Phantastik - Science Fiction Utopie. Begriffsgeschichte und Begriffsabgrenzung", p. 13) and Hans Holländer ("Das Bild in der Theorie des Phantastischen", p. 77) in Phantastik in Literatur und Kunst. Freud, "The 'Uncanny'," refers to these texts (he cites fairy tales as an example) as exempt from his reflections on the uncanny: "In fairy tales, for instance, the world of reality is left behind from the very start [...] that feeling [of the uncanny] cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgement", (p. 250) Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 268. Peter Rabinowitz, "Assertion and Assumption: Fictional Patterns and the External World," PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 3 (May 1981): 408-419; p. 413. Laplanche/Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," p. 6; see Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes. Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986) p. 127. Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis, p. xii and 77. Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 273,283,275. W. R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 4. Alberto Manguel, "Foreword" in, Alberto Manguel, ed., Black Water. More Tales of the Fantastic (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1990), p. xviii-xx; p. xix. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, p. 17. W. R. Irwin, quoted in Larry McCaffery, "Form, Formula, and Fantasy" in, George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, eds., Bridges to Fantasy (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 23. Joanna Russ quoted in Jackson, Fantasy, p. 22. Cixous, "Fiction and Its Phantoms," p. 208; Cixous also situates the fantastic in a gap (p. 208). Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, p. 12. See Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 269 and 273 Rabinowitz, "Assertion and Assumption," p. 411. H.G. Wells's novels are a case in point. Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 269. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1979), especially "Estrangement and Cognition," p. 3-15; see similarly Fredric Jameson, "WorldReduction and the Emergence of Utopian Narrative" in Harold Bloom, ed., Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (New York et al.: Chelsea House Publishers,

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1987), p. 26 and 29; see also Jackson, Fantasy, p. 109 and Ortega y Gasset, quoted in Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 275. Atteberry, The Fantasy Tradition, p. 3. Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 290. McCaffery, "Form, Formula, and Fantasy," p. 23. Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty, p. 17. Exceptions are theories of Gothic literature; Lloyd-Smith, The American Uncanny, although mostly analyzing male authors, is conscious of gender- and racial-biases in theories and literature. Amaryll Chanady, "Origins and Development of Magic Realism in Latin American Fiction" in Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski, eds., Magic Realism and Canadian Literature. Proceedings of the Conference on Magic Realist Writing in Canada (Ontario: University of Waterloo Press, 1986), p. 53. Chanady, "Origins and Development," p. 55. Alejo Carpentier quoted in Chanady, "Origins and Development," p. 53. Alejo Carpentier quoted in Geoff Hancock, "Magic or Realism: The Marvellous in Canadian Fiction," in Magic Realism and Canadian Literature, p. 36. Robert R. Wilson, "The Metamorphoses of Space: Magic Realism," in Magic Realism and Canadian Literature, p. 72. Jackson, Fantasy, p. 16, contends that modern fantasy "is no longer a communal form." In her excellent analysis, she does not deal with minority literatures. bell hooks, "Narratives of Struggle" in Philomena Manama, ed., Critical Fictions. The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 55. hooks, referring to Márquez, rejects fantasy as "narratives of escape" and "simple Walt Disney-style invention," opposing the "imaginative" of the colonized to this fantasy without social commitment (by which she obviously means fantasy as a genre). Jackson, Fantasy, p. 16. Nancy Gray Diaz, The Radical Self. Metamorphosis to Animal Form in Modern Latin American Narrative (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), p. 5. Paula Gunn Allen, "Introduction", Spider Woman's Granddaughters. Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 1-26. See Addison Gayle, Jr., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972, 19711), for example the contribution by Larry Neal, "Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic" (1970), p. 15: "The integral unity of culture, politics, and art. Spiritual. [...] art addressed primarily to Black and Third World people." See Herbert Read, Art and Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945) on the role of art in traditional societies. Neal, "Some Reflections," p. 15. Leopold Senghor quoted by Ron Karenga, "Black Cultural Nationalism," in The Black Aesthetic, p. 32. "He" in Wide Sargasso Sea silences Christophine by threatening with the police. For an opposing view, see Michelle Wallace in Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions, p. 139, who, in discussing Beloved, contends that it is "too late to correct the discarding and discounting of Afro-centric myth, magic, or spirituality" and that "we must choose to recount and recollect the negativity, the discount, the loss." I think her example -

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Morrison's novel - demonstrates that this statement is too one-sided, as Wallace herself seems to concede in insisting on the importance of myth. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 6: the heroine has "to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America." Atteberry, The Fantasy Tradition, p. vii; see also p. 14 and 16 where he reiterates the statement that there "is a strong distrust of the fantastic" both in lore and literature. He once mentions (on p. 14) Native American lore as an example of the prevalence of the fantastic, but he does not follow that line because that lore was marginalized in the majority culture. Without ever stating why, Atteberry is obviously only interested in majority culture. Lauretta Ngcobo, "African Motherhood: Fact and Fiction" in Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions, p. 195. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Afro-American Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford/London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1978,19771), p. 58. See Janheinz Jahn, Muntu. The New African Culture (New York: Grove Press, 1961,19581), for an account of African concepts and world-views, especially the chapters on "Ntu (African Philosophy)" and "Nommo (The Magic Power of the Word)". In "Hantu (History of Literature)", Jahn comments on the importance of music vis-à-vis literature. — See Jackson, Fantasy, p. 70/71, who discusses Freud linking "the uncanny to an animistic mode of perception which defies the reality principle. He identifies this mode on both a phylogenetic (cultural) and ontogenetic (individual) level, in terms of man's evolution towards a human 'reality."' Freud, "The 'Uncanny'," p. 240. See Freud, "The 'Uncanny'," p. 242f., p. 247 (where he mentions the animistic worldview of "our primitive forefathers"), p. 252. Anne Koenen, Conversation with Toni Morrison, University of California, Berkeley, November 1987. David Murray, "Anthropology, Fiction and the Occult: The Case of Carlos Castaneda" in Peter B. Messent, ed., Literature of the Occult. A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981), p. 171-182; p. 179. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 62. Leslie Marmon Silko, "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective" in Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions, p. 91. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Signet, 1978), p. 72, p. 71. Suzette Haden Elgin, "Women's language and near future science fiction: a reply," Women's Studies, Vol. 14, p. 175-181; p. 177. Elgin's dramatization of the interplay of language and cultural matrix in her novel Native Tongue is discussed in the chapter on dystopias. Houston A. Baker, Jr., The Journey Back. Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 156 and 183f., note 2. Elgin, "Women's language," p. 178. Baker, The Journey Back, p. 156 and 157. Wilfred Cartey on concepts in African cultures, quoted in Barbara Rigney, '"A Story to Pass On': Ghosts and the Significance of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved' in Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction, p. 232.

66 94 Angela Carter in John Haffenden, ed., Novelists in Interview (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 81. Carter says that she has "to invent much more" and that her sources are literary rather than folklore. 95 Kingston in Angeles Carabi, "Special Eyes: The Chinese-American World of Maxine Hong Kingston," Belles Lettres, Winter 1989: 10-11; p. 10. 96 The ultimate ironic comment on the difference in world-views is the practice of Chinese Americans in The Woman Warrior to refer to white Americans as ghosts: the same people who try to establish their interpretation of what is real as normative are declared unreal and denied reality themselves within their own frame of interpretation. Several Chinese American critics have contested that this linguistic practice actually exists. - For an examplary interpretation of The Woman Warrior in the context of Chinese American culture, see Gayle K. Fujita Sato, "Ghosts as Chinese-American Constructs in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior" in Carpenter/Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction, p. 193-214. 97 Maxine Hong Kingston in Angeles Carabi, "Special Eyes," p. 10. 98 See Dennis R. Hoilman, '"A World Made of Stories': An Interpretation of Leslie Silko's Ceremony," South Dakota Review, 17 (Winter 1979/1980): 54-66; who, with obviously a white audience in mind, contends that a "possible source of confusion in the novel is its lack of distinction between human and supernatural characters" and who sees one of the functions of the traditional myths as "a means of introducing essential cultural background without resorting to long passages of anthropological exposition." (p. 56) In these statements, the discrepancy between the culture of the mainstream (white) readers and the minority cultures becomes emblematically visible. 99 "Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story," (a TV-profile of Maxine Hong Kingston), June 27, 1990, Channel 9 (KQED), 8:30 p.m. 100 See Doris Lessing, "Doris Lessing at Stony Brook," who complains that "[o]ur culture has made an enemy of the unconscious." (p. 67) in A Small Personal Voice (New York: Vintage, 1975) - See the chapter on Utopias. 101 See Jehmlich, "Phantastik - Science Fiction - Utopie," p. 26. 102 Sigmund Freud, "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming" in Sigmund Freud, Character and Culture. With an Introduction by the Editor Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 35. 103 Freud, "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," p. 37 and 38. 104 Freud, "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," p. 39; see Freud's "The Uncanny/Das 'Unheimliche'" for an elaborate discussion between repression and the return of the repressed as fantastic/uncanny. 105 Freud, "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," p. 37. That contention has of course been contested by feminists; see Nancy K. Miller's "Emphasis Added." In my chapter on metamorphoses, it becomes clear that women use the fantastic explicitly to write plots of ambition and power that would be "improbable" in realism. 106 Laplanche/Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," p. 6. 107 Of course, there are also psychoanalytic approaches that expel the fantastic by naturalizing it as "madness", as in interpretations of Kafka's "Die Verwandlung" that reduce the text to a case-study in schizophrenia, a "mental catastrophe in disguise." See Harold Skulsky, Metamorphosis. The Mind in Exile (Cambridge et al.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 172.

67 108 Cixous, "Fiction and Its Phantoms," p. 527. See p. 533 where she equates the Unheimliche with the fantastic, the Heimliche with the rational. 109 Freud, "The 'Uncanny'," p. 214. 110 Freud, "The 'Uncanny'," p. 243 and 245. 111 Freud, "Die Vemeinung," / "Negation," (1925) Standard Edition, XIX: 235-239; p. 23. 112 Laplanche/Pontalis "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," p. 2. 113 Elizabeth Abel, "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions," in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 184-204. Abel specifically talks about Object Relations Theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Feminists like Margaret Homans and Toril Moi have also accused Lacan of retreating to a-historical fundamentalism and biologistic generalizations in his gendered distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1980), p. 4f., Toril Moi, Sextual/Texual Politics (London/New York: Methuen, 1985). 114 Cixous, "Fiction and Its Phantoms," p. 532; p. 535. Cixous asks: "And what if the doll became a woman? What is she were alive? What if, in looking at her, we animated her? " (p. 538), but does not pursue these questions. - In The Critical Difference, Barbara Johnson has observed that psychoanalysis generally "has no identity apart from its status as a repetition of the structure it seeks to analyze." Quoted in Richard A. Barney, "Uncanny Criticism in the United States" in Natoli, ed., Tracing Literary Theory, p. 177-212; p. 197. 115 Jane Marie Todd, "The Veiled Woman in Freud's 'Das Unheimliche'," Signs, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1986): 519-528; p. 522. - Robert Galbreath, "Fantastic Literature as Gnosis," Extrapolation, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 1988): 330-337; p. 333, sees the fantastic "by its very nature" preoccupied with "revelations, unveilings." 116 Todd, "The Veiled Woman," p. 525 and 526/7. 117 Lloyd-Smith, The American Uncanny. 118 Quoted in Hoffmann, "The Fantastic in Fiction," p. 297; Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 54. 119 See Rita Felski's critique: "the criteria for a feminist reading of women's literature within American criticism as a whole remain largely anchored in a reflectionist model which measures the work's ability to reproduce realistically female experience." Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 26. See Nelly Fuiman, "The politics of language: beyond the gender principle?" in Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, eds., Making a Difference (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 63 and Fleenor, "Introduction," p. 8/9, for similar evaluations. That orientation reflects the early stages of feminism when demands for literary models dominated discussions, and it also permeated other media, like cinema. See "Feminist Film Criticism" in Re-Vision, p. 6, where "fairly simple notions of realist representation" in early feminist criticism are challenged. 120 This stage seems to be necessary in the literatures of marginalized groups; see the chapter on minority literatures. Bonnie Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women. Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), complains that "most lesbian

68 novelists write to provide their readers with an authentic portrayal of lesbian life, not a new mythology. In place of mythmaking, lesbian writers and readers often expect fiction to 'tell it like it is' that is, to tell the truth about lesbians in order to replace existing lies and stereotypes." p. 23. See p. 71 and p. 19 where she deplores the absence of experimental and fantastic writing by lesbian authors. 121 See Deborah Rosenfelt, "Feminism, 'Postfeminism,'and Contemporary Women's Fiction," in Florence Howe, ed., Tradition and the Talents of Women, forthcoming, p. 269. - See Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women, who observes that such a preference for social realism has dominated lesbian writings. She sees this tendency reinforced by the expectations of an audience hostile to experimental techniques, (p. 19) - See my chapter on minority women's literature for a discussion of realist literature in African American writing. 122 A case in point are publications about Toni Morrison's Beloved that ignore that the title-figure is a ghost. 123 See Ann Rosalind Jones, "Inscribing femininity: French theories of the feminine" in Making a Difference, p. 80-112, for a summary of these theories. See p. 92: "Frenchwomen's high estimation of fantasy and revised myth." 124 The exception is Nancy Walker, Feminist Alternatives. Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women (Jackson/London: University of Mississippi Press, 1990). Her definition of the fantastic, however, is so all-embracing ("madness and its 'variants' dreams, daydreams, and fantasies", p. 60) and not sharply distinguished from irony that it becomes a rather vague category, detecting fantastic elements in the daydreams of the protagonist in Marge Piercy's realist novel Small Changes. 125 The confusion becomes apparent when e.g. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, treats Margart Atwood's Surfacing as a "realistic" text, although the novel is an indictment of numerous values - rationality, logos, linear time - that realism stands for. 126 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 186, note 10. Similarly, Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, "Women and the Word According to Garp," in Judith Spector, ed., Gender Studies. New Directions in Feminist Criticism (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986), p. 64, state: "It is the very structure of the novel itself, its narrative conventions, that most strongly defends the equation of author and patriarch. Several modem theorists have pointed out the ways in which the conventions of the narrative, and particularly of the novel, give expression to and serve the interests of patriarchy. [...] This paternal authority is inscribed in narrative form through the structuring of a significant sequence of events that moves towards a conclusion which bestows finality and integrity on the text. The conventions of the novel - sequence, finality, integrity - are therefore not neutral." See also Dianne Sadoff, "Storytelling and the Figure of the Father in 'Little Dorritt,'" PMLA, Vol. 95, No. 2 (1980), p. 235. 127 See Jean Kennard, Victims of Convention (Hamden CT: Archon Books, 1978); Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity, p. 8/9 finds similar biases in poetry, "aspects of literary tradition that make it difficult and even undesirable for such women to think of themselves as potential poets." - Feminists are of course not the first to be suspicious narrative genres and conventions; Herbert Read, for example, calls realism "a bourgeois prejudice" (quoted in Punter, The Literature of Terror, p. 20), a line of socialist criticism that follows Brecht rather than Lukacs. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), links the novel to the bourgeoisie and the Protestant

69 ethic, an ethic of "denial, restraint, deferred gratification." See Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (London: Verso, 1987), p. 11. 128 See Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added," and Jane Marcus, "A Wilderness of One's Own: Feminist Fantasy Novels of the Twenties: Rebecca West and Sylvia Townsend Warner" in Susan Merrill Squier, ed., Women Writers and the City. Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 134-160; p. 158: "for women, the fantasy novel rejects realism as inadequate to convey the female sense of'life!' as Orlando says." See Joanna Russ, "Reflections on Science Fiction: An Interview with Joanna Russ," Quest, Vol. II, No. 1 (Summer 1975): 40-49; p. 41, who also mentions that "avant-garde fiction" mixes the two modes freely. 129 Marilyn Hacker, "Science Fiction and Feminism," Introduction to Joanna Russ's The Female Man (Boston: Gregg Press, 1977), quoted in Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible. Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York/London: Methuen, 1986), p. 60/1. See Marilyn Hacker, "Science Fiction and Feminism: The Work of Joanna Russ," Chrysalis, No. 4 (1977): 67-79. 130 Joanna Russ, "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write" in Susan Koppelman Cornillon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction. Feminist Perspectives (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1973), p. 3ff. 131 Luce Irigaray, "Is the Subject of Science Sexed?," Cultural Critique, No. 1 (Fall 1985), p. 85. 132 Ellen Morgan, "Humanbecoming: Form and Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel" in Images of Women, p. 189f.; see also Virginia Allen and Terri Paul, "Science and Fiction: Ways of Theorizing about Women" in Donald Palumbo, ed., Erotic Universe. Sexuality and Fantastic Literature (New York et al.: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 165185; p. 180. 133 See Allen/Paul, "Science and Fiction," p. 174 and 170. 134 For a general assessment of the visionary potential of fantastic literature - specifically science fiction - see Jameson, "World Reduction," p. 26/27, who identifies as "[o]ne of the most significant potentialities of SF as a form [the] capacity to provide something like an experimental variation on our own empirical universe." (p. 26) 135 Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood," p. 12-39. - See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1984, 19791), on gender-politics reflected in genre: "Most Western literary genres are, after all, essentially male - devised by male authors to tell male stories about the world." 136 Teresa de Lauretis, "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, Contexts," in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 1-19; p. 11. de Lauretis mentions the (science) fiction of Joanna Russ and James Tiptree Jr. as examples. 137 See Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil (Urbana et al.: University of Illinois Press, 1979), for an analysis of narrative patterns in African-American literature. 138 See Keith Byerman, "Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction," who calls the closure a "fairy-tale solution." Quoted in Gilnter H. Lenz, '"Ethnographies': American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology," Propects 16 (1991): 1-40; p. 31. Robin Bates, "Getting Man off the Eyeball: Alice Walker's Utopian Project" in Mirko Jurak, ed., Cross-Cultural Studies. American, Canadian and European Literatures: 1945-1985 (Ljubljana, 1988), p. 93-99, interprets the story

70 as a "fairy tale melodrama" (p. 96) and a "Utopian project [that] must be placed in another realm, [...] on the other side of the grave." (p. 97) Bates arrives at her conclusion by pointing out that, according to a government telegram, Celie's sister had drowned and can thus not be re-united with her. The novel would thus contain an overtly fantastic element in her return from the dead. (I rather interpret the telegram as yet another example of messages either crossed or not received in a text that abounds with vexed communication.) 139 In Writing Beyond the Ending, Rachel Blau DuPlessis discusses such violations in women's literature, also mentioning how this strategy privileges the fantastic text. 140 See Lenz, "'Ethnographies'," p. 32, who interprets the closure as "Utopian" and as a '"fictional history' of African and African-American unity." 141 See Jameson, "World-Reduction," who sees "paraliterary" forms taking over the former functions of "high art" that nowadays suffers from "that tyrannical 'reality principle' which functions as a crippling censorship over high art" (p. 26/27). 142 Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern" in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 249. 143 See Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," Ms., May 1974: 64-70, 105, and Paule Marshall, "From the Poets in the Kitchen," New York Times Book Review, Jan. 9, 1983: 3, 34f.; see Angela Carter in Haffenden, ed., Novelists in Interview, p. 92: "Folklore is the fiction of the poor". 144 See John Guillory, "Canon," in Lentricchia/McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, p. 233-249; especially p. 239. And K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 40: "A shift in emphasis from 'literature' to écriture permits attention to be given to what earlier critics consider marginal or subliterary forms, such as letters and journals." p. 115: "'Gender' and 'genre' are frequently paired words in the feminist critique, and are encountered most often in connection with the complaint that women have at their disposal far fewer of the traditional literary genres than men have always had, and continue to have." 145 I am of course not suggesting here that white men's literature of searching for one's "roots" will always be realistic, but that such a quest in minority and women's literature has to be fantastic. 146 That aspect is discussed in more detail in the chapter on minority women's fictions. 147 That view has become increasingly influential in theorizing history, as in the works of Hayden White. 148 Michele Grossman, '"Born to Bleed': Myth, Pornography, and Romance in Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'," the minnesota review, Nos. 30/31 (Spring/Fall 1988), p. 154. 149 Elizabeth J. Ordôflez, "Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women: Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Future," MEL US, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 1982): 19-28; p. 19. 150 I do not suggest that all women's fantastic literature idealizes the mother-daughterbond; actually, many fictions, especially in Gothic literature, portray that bond as highly problematic. 151 Miller, "Emphasis Added," p. 40. 152 See Manguel, "Foreword," p. xix: "tales of unconventional time and space." 153Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 11: "Women's fiction manifests alienation from normal concepts of time and

71 space"; see Carol A. Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1988), p. 78, on the fantastic figure of the vampire in the "timeless never-never land of the Gothic novel"; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, "The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality" in Juliann E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (Montreal/London: Eden Press, 1983), p. 211, on women's literature as "existing beyond the reach of spatial or temporal constraints." 154 Use Aichinger, "Story in A Mirror" (1954) in Franz Rottensteiner, ed., The Slaying of the Dragon. Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination (San Diego et al.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 157. 155 May Sinclair's "Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched" (1923) in Manguel, ed., Black Water, tries to describe a reverse effect of temporal sequences: "You think the past affects the future. Has it never struck you that the future may affect the past?" (p. 219) - As Klaus Milich has pointed out in a conversation, these reversals of time-sequences and their cause and effect finally reach linguistic and conceptual limits; his efforts to write a novel in which people live out of the future instead of out of the past have so far failed, since nearly all our familiar categories would become obsolete. Thus, such a concept is still thinkable, but not describable. - See my discussions of the similar problems with the concept of androgyny in the chapter on Utopias. 156 James Tiptree Jr., "Fault" in Warm Worlds and Otherwise. With an introduction by Robert Silverberg (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), p. 170. 157 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 120. 158 See Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination. Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (London/Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 24 and 26 where she talks about night/darkness as a time and condition when a person is "less analytical or rational, less strictly controlled." 159 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 37. 160 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 40; see Cixous, "Fiction and Its Phantoms," p. 231, where she talks about death as a subject of the fantastic and as a "signifier without signified." 161 See Margaret Homans's analyses of the relationship between women's writing and literalization, for example "Dreaming of Children: Literalization in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights" in Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic," p. 257-280. Homans points to the metaphysical aspects of figurative language versus the "literal" that is "always elsewhere", and thus, from a dominant male perspective, in the same place with women (and nature); the literal "is traditionally classified as feminine." (p. 257) 162 See Angela Carter in Haffenden, ed., Novelists in Interview, p. 92: "Another way of magicking or making everything strange is to take metaphor literally"; Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty, p. 21, and J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 1; Atteberry, The Fantasy Tradition, p. 2. 163 Peter U. Beicken, quoted in Skulsky, Metamorphosis, p. 239, note 17. See Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty, p. 21. 164 Teresa de Lauretis, "Signs of Waonder" in de Lauretis, ed., The Technological Imagination (Madison: Coda Press, 1980), p. 170. 165 de Lauretis, "Signs of Waonder," p. 164. See p. 163. 166 Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 1. 167 Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, p. 165-177. 168 Joanna Russ, The Female Man (New York et al.: Bantam, 1978, 19751), p. 212/213.

A HISTORY OF FANTASY IN WHITE WOMEN'S LITERATURE

Wherever and whenever the restraints of society have seemed repressive and fantasy and imagination have appeared threatened, the Gothic [...] has thrived. Robert Spector, The English Gothic (1984) How appalling the thought that with her voice ceased her existence! Harriet Spofford, "Circumstance" (1860) the unchronicled lives of the greataunts and greatgrandmothes buried there so completely that they must hardly have known when they passed from their beds to their graves. 'Piled up like dead leaves,' Jane thought, 'layers and layers of them, to preserve something forever budding underneath.' Edith Wharton, "Mr. Jones" (1928)

Read together with Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Edith Wharton's ghost story "Mr. Jones" (1928) demonstrates the persistence of themes and functions of the fantastic in white women's literary history. Wharton's story dramatizes the fluid line between death and life, a major feature of the ghost story and one of Rhys's primary concerns in Wide Sargasso Sea. "Mr. Jones," a rewriting of Wharton's earlier "Kerfol," is the story of a young heiress, married off to a man who keeps her like a prisoner in their house while he travels extensively. Her extreme loneliness causes precarious states of mind "madness" and she dies under obscure circumstances. The enveloping plot reads like Rhys's aim in re-writing Bronte's novel: a woman sets out to unravel the buried 'leaves' of another woman's life, 'dead' pages that do not tell women's stories.1 Literary history reveals that women authors have always written fantastic literature, if often in less established genres like the Gothic novel or the ghost story. Fantasy as a mode has of course existed since people began telling stories, it is an integral part of myth and folklore. Yet what might be called the "modern" function of fantasy did not evolve until Enlightenment radically marginalized fantasy, and the Gothic which protested against this silencing of fantasy serves as the literary origin of "modern" fantasy as a

74 mode.2 Myth, folkore, and legend still inspire fantastic literature,3 but Rosemary Jackson sees the more immediate sources of fantasy as a mode "in that literature of unreason and terror which has been designated 'Gothic.'"4 At the heart of the tradition in Anglo-American literature, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has influenced the Gothic, and is credited with having given birth to a whole genre, science fiction. "Female Gothic" The Gothic has been called "largely a woman's domaine,"5 and it can be argued that women's status as outsiders or the other in Victorian society "privileged" the perception of the disruptive effects of industrialization, urbanization, and a centralization that included not only social structures, but also a unification of thought under the signs of rationality and science, with myth and oral tradition relegated - like women - to the margins.6 Writers used the Gothic to articulate their social critique vis-à-vis the more "mainstream" realistic novels that many critics identify as complying with the ideological needs of the middle-class during industrialization;7 and the freedoms of the genre, provided by the fantastic, allowed for subversive elements even in conservative works of "conventional" writers like Ann Radcliffe.8 For a long time, the Gothic was considered a minor genre, unworthy of serious criticism,9 its inferior status often attributed to a lack of realism.10 The last two decades, however, have seen a revival of the Gothic which critics ascribe both to the return of the repressed" and to the increasing complexity of modern life where, as one critic sarcastically observes, it is "much easier to believe in magic than it is to believe in current cosmology or particle physics" and where "[t]he nature of reality is so totally absurd."12 This revival has been accompanied by an unprecedented critical interest in the Gothic. Early critics like de Sade and Devendra Varma (The Gothic Flame, 1957) had already identified the fantastic in the Gothic as subversive, as "the surrealistic expression of those historical and social factors which the ordinary chronicle of events in history does not consider significant."13 The Gothic novel claims that the reality of the world presents itself differently if viewed from a place outside the dominant center of society,14 that "what is customarily hallowed as real by society and its language is but a small portion of a greater reality."15 In some contemporary Gothic literature, like Angela Carter's, this approach has been sharpened into the postmodernist stance that there is no "real world," only a web of fictions. Other critics understand the Gothic as a literature of protest, as trying to articulate "the

75 socially unspeakable,"16 as pointing to "the loss registered through the fantastic,"17 all these identifications designating absences. Jackson warns that the subversive potential of the fantastic may be used for an ultimate reconcialition with society, an observation that is also true for genres like romance literature and "Sword and Sorcery"-fantasies where the fantastic "acts out and defeats subversive desires."18 The Gothic violates taboos, like the incest taboo,19 and explores and disrupts boundaries: between sleep and wakefulness, life and death, sanity and madness, the self and the other, masculine and feminine, the real and fantasy.20 The disruption of order produces anxiety in the protagonists and, in turn, the readers: "the root cause of horror in the genre is the protagonist's inability to control sexuality, to thus define masculine and feminine and create legitimate identity."21 One of the ways the Gothic acts out these anxieties about boundary confusion is by constructing extreme polarities which the texts then try to unite.22 The preferred atmosphere of twilight where boundaries blur corresponds with these elemental issues; BayerBerenbaum notes that the "absence of clear boundaries and distinctions in setting is compounded by haze and darkness, permitting infinite possibilities that would be dispelled by clear perception."23 The "haze" in turn is mirrored in the fictional structure that "inverts romance structures: the quest, for example, is twisted into a circular journey to nowhere."24 Arguing against a tendency to "masculinize the canon,"25 recent studies in the Gothic have re-claimed the genre as a woman's form, with some feminist critics postulating a causal link between the marginality of the genre and its popularity among women writers.26 The primary point of interest in these studies is to locate the specific feminine contributions to the genre and to explore the reasons why the Gothic has been of continuing interest and importance in women's writing, given the resurgence of the Gothic in contemporary historical romances.27 Standard Gothic features subvert gender identity and thus offer women the possibility to write beyond gender stereotypes: ghouls are creatures neither male nor female; female vampires flaunt "male" sexual aggressiveness; and characters like Bronte's Rochester show a preference for crossdressing.28 In the nineteenth century, the Gothic allowed to portray heroines outside of the confines of domestic spaces, "the woman who moves, who acts, who copes with the vicissitudes and adventure."29 DeLamotte finds that the Gothic is obsessed with boundaries of the self and tends to externalize the "dark" side in doubles and monsters; yet women do not subscribe to the vision of "the evil Other as a disguised version of the self," instead identifying the evil Other as a social reality, "profoundly alien

76 and hostile, to women and their concerns."30 Anger about these hostile forces is - in DeLamotte's analysis - the driving force in the female Gothic fantasy. Most studies see as one of the essential dichotomies in the Gothic the juxtaposition of extremely polarized gender identities, a polarization that corresponds with the confusion about gender-identity - in that dualistic interpretation, masculinity and femininity represent opposite poles of perception and behavior, even "modes of reality."31 Other critics draw attention to the Gothic's questioning of domesticity, the "failed home," where the "conventions of the Gothic novel" "speak of what in the polite world of middle-class culture cannot be spoken."32 Fleenor identifies the conflict with the (all devouring) mother at the heart of the "female Gothic."33 Angela Carter, whose work constantly relates to the Gothic, catalogues Gothic features, describing Gothic tales [...] of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious - mirrors; the externalized self; [...] The Gothic tradition [...] grandly ignores the value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibalism. Character and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. [...] It retains a singular moral function - that of provoking unease. [...] We live in Gothic times.34

Women's Ghost Stories The ghost story is a direct child of the Gothic, emerging in the middle of the nineteenth century and differing from the supernatural folktale by its written form. Critics diagnose a decline of the genre in the early twentieth century, an observation that is only true if unspecified by gender, since the form continues to be popular among women writers. Predominantly realist writers like Edith Wharton and Sarah Orne Jewett have ventured into the realm of the fantastic regularly and published ghost stories, and especially the authors of local color literature are highly represented, due to local color's attentiveness to folklore.35 Much of this literature has remained obscure and inaccessible; authors like Harriet Prescott Spofford, who were successful and much praised during their lives, were forgotten, their work dismissed summarily as of no lasting value. Some critics explain the diminished popularity of these authors with the literary tastes of "an age that demanded literary realism."36 Only recently have collections of short stories revived the "supernatural" tales and fictions by women writers.37 These collections evade narrow generic definitions by understanding the term "supernatural" as

77 embracing a wide variety of genres like the ghost story, science fiction, surrealism, "fantasy" (as a genre), and Utopian tales. The authors whose fictions are represented cover a wide spectrum from Elizabeth Phelps to Leonora Carrington; but the anthologies fail to consider supernatural fictions written by Anglo-American women of color. The tradition that emerges is thus predominantly white, neglecting or ignoring the contributions of minority women writers. The supernatural tale and the ghost story are popular genres, but, like the Gothic until quite recently, have not received much scholarly attention. Especially the contributions of women have been neglected;38 the first booklength study, a collection of critical essays, identifies a "series of tendencies, not inevitabilities" of specific female approaches that establish a distinct tradition.39 Noting that women writers in Great Britain and the US were more influenced by each other than their respective national male traditions, the editors Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar recognize the "critique of mainstream male culture, values, and tradition" as one of the interests of the women writers.40 One advantage of the fantastic mode, discussed in the chapter on theory, becomes immediately obvious in analyzing the plots of ghost stories: the absence of traditional "romantic" or "erotic" plots and the variety of alternative "female" plots. We find stories of female creativity ("A Curious Experience," 1971, by Norah Lofts, "The Yellow Wallpaper," 1892, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), confrontations with (male) violence ("The Renegade," 1948, by Shirley Jackson), woman as the object of male creativity and the male gaze ("The Cloak," 1955, by Isak Dinesen), the socially mediated shock of aging ("The Foghorn," 1934, by Gertrude Atherton), anger and revenge ("Breakages," 1975, by Fay Weldon, "Hell on Both Sides of the Gate," 1962, by Rosemary Timperley, "Ranson Cowl Walks the Road," 1988, by Nancy Varian Berberick, "True Love," 1988, by Patricia Russo).41 From this multitude of themes, two major concerns and functions of the ghost story emerge: the exploration of female desire, often projected onto the exotic ("Miss Mary Pask," 1925, by Edith Wharton, "The Ghost," 1928, by Catherine Wells, "The Bloody Chamber," 1979, by Angela Carter, "What Did Miss Carrington See?," 1870, by Emma Cobb), and selfreflexive stories about women, writing, and silencing ("Mr. Jones," 1928, and "Kerfol," 1916, by Edith Wharton, "The Yellow Wallpaper," 1892, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Shadowy Third," 1923, by Ellen Glasgow).42 The thematic concerns of ghost stories show an obsession with the boundaries between life and death and transgressions of these boundaries; they dramatize female experience beyond the confines of historical and

78 cultural restrictions; they share Rhys's reluctance - or the fundamental impossibility - to precisely define these transgressive visions that would present alternative visions of the world. The Home and the Family as Prison In stories like "Kerfol," "Mr. Jones" (Edith Wharton) and "The Yellow Wallpaper" (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), cultural critique focuses on the home and the family as important institutions and symbols of repressions. While in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the politics of literary convention did not admit domestic violence as a respectable subject in realist literature, women authors use the fantastic to dismantle home and the family from Victorian idealizations. Isolation emerges as a major theme of ghost stories, and the home is a sinister place, fraught with danger, as in the Gothic novel. The female protagonists often live in remote places; if they do live in more populated areas (as in Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed"), they are emotionally isolated. Sometimes isolation is carried to an extreme by showing the heroine to be literally imprisoned, invariably by male relatives, most often the husbands, representatives of symbolic hegemony. Marriage and the nuclear family are interpreted as institutions of unbearable loneliness for women who are powerless, at the mercy of arbitrary male tyrants.43 Violence is less physical than psychological, although sometimes there are hints at sexual abuse as in Wharton's "The Lady's Maid Bell." Unprotected by law and without the support of mothers or female friends,44 women find only horror in marriage. Homes are not shelters, but prisons; husbands not loving family men, but prison guards and executioners; marriage not an institution that protects women but subjects them to male control. Unlike the overwhelming majority of fictions in other genres, the sentimental novels of the nineteenth century for example, not one of these stories idealizes marriage as the proper (and blissful) "happy ending" for women. Neither is the closeness of marriage interpreted as joyful intimacy - in "Afterward" by Edith Wharton, intimacy is revealed to be nothing but a figment of the imagination, anyway, at least against the background of restrictive and alienating gender-roles. Wharton's "The Fullness of Life" suggests that this closeness may be found outside of marriage; in this story, Wharton (in 1893) uncannily anticipates the conflict in her own life between a husband with whom she was never close and a lover with whom she found happiness. In their isolation, the female protagonists are prevented from enjoying the company of other women; typically, the women are motherless; and the fathers, after having passed their daughters from their own control to another

79 male, do not interfere to protect their daughters (or do not hesitate to join in the abuse). The only woman in these scenarios is an occasional maid, prevented by inferior social position from interfering in favor of their mistresses, as in Wharton's "The Lady's Maid Bell" and Ellen Glasgow's "The Shadowy Third." The women are helped by female ghosts, though. Being motherless and thus, by implication, unprotected in the real, the fantastic is used by the authors to re-create a strong mother-daughter-bond; in these scenarios, the association with the fantastic also invests the maternal figures with more powers than they had in the real. In a typical story, "La Femme Noir" (1850) by Anna Maria Hall,45 the young protagonist is "never permitted to invite any one to the castle, nor to accept an invitation. Monsieur fancied that by shutting her lips, he closed her heart." (61) Monsieur, her uncle, exaggerates her loss of maternal protection by heaping "odium on her mother's memory." (63) After he discovers that she has fallen in love, he literally keeps her "a close prisoner" (65), "locked in a chamber." (63) His motives in trying to separate her from her young lover are clearly incestuous.46 A female ghost, the "femme noir" of the title, comes to her rescue; her power enhanced by her command of the natural elements (a violent thunderstorm accompanies her), she succeeds in frightening the proud aristocrat into submission. Although the closure is provided by a wedding between the young woman and her lover, the story contradicts and revokes this promise of happiness, finally warning against marriage. Not only is the heroine unconscious when dragged to the altar (hardly an image of women's eagerness to enter matrimony), but the tale of her fate is framed by an older woman's storytelling that sternly warns young women of men: "All men are tyrants." (60) The matriarch exhorts her listeners as belonging to an "age of disbelief' (62), referring explicitly to their disbelief in ghosts, but implicitly also to their blind faith in men. That enveloping scene juxtaposes the split into a motherless real and the maternal fantastic with a vision of a female community in the real, a community that serves to pass on knowledge and to render support.47 The stories suggest that women are powerless in the "natural" world of logic and reason, (male) law and social institutions, but powerful in the "supernatural" of ghosts, inferring a close association of the female with the supernatural and the displacement of female power in an age of rationalization. The old storyteller in "La Femme Noir" is emblematic here: the scene of her passing on her wisdom to younger women refers to oral culture (and its affinity to the supernatural and the fantastic), women's central role in tradition-building (as opposed to her marginalization in written culture), and bonds between women that the emergence of the nuc-

80 lear family destroys. Historically, the connection of female power and the supernatural is evident in the witch hunts of the middle ages in Europe, when a tradition of female expertise (largely based on a knowledge of nature) was marginalized and finally destroyed by a growing, exclusively male, professionalization. Again and again, the stories link isolation to madness, with the male and female protagonists identifying reverse causal relations - the men justify isolating the women by declaring them mad,48 while the women see madness as a result of isolation. The extreme isolation and lack of communication are reminiscent of sensory deprivation as a method of torture that destroys identity - the wives are sometimes mute and deaf, as in "Mr. Jones," or kept in enforced physical passivity that strives to establish a regression to childlike dependence, as in "The Yellow Wallpaper;" patriarchal hegemony is thus inscribed in the female body. Not surprisingly, these exaggerations of the feminine role - silence and passivity carried to their extremes - lead also to precarious states of mind that the outside world may well label as madness. In stories like "La Femme Noir," The Yellow Wallpaper," "Kerfol," "Mr. Jones," "The Shadowy Third" (and Wide Sargasso Sea), the subject of isolation and madness represents the struggle over the control of women's lives, and, significantly, the narration of women's histories. The male tyrants, not content with physically controlling the women, also try to silence them, to prevent them from speaking; thus, any traces of women's suffering and victimization should be erased. "Kerfol" shows how effective this method is in ultimately excluding women from history; this powerlessness of women with the written word can be contrasted with women's power and access to (hi)story in oral cultures as in "La Femme Noir." Deprived of communication and their voices stigmatized as mad, the women nonetheless struggle to leave testimonies of their lives. The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" violates the prohibition to tell her story, and in other stories, women use the fantastic to discover the hidden and secret stories of other women's lives.49 In several stories, the men's rationale for imprisoning women stems from sexual jealousy; in others, no apparent motives are mentioned. That adultery should enter the plots is only logical in this context, given that is signifies women's violation of one of the fundamental laws of patriarchy. Common is the men's urge - and, given women's legal status in the nineteenth century/ beginning of the twentieth century, the opportunity - to control women's lives, especially to restrict and control their communication and discourse. Obviously, a violent dread of female power, rebelliousness, and subversiveness must correspond with this desire to dominate (and a dread of female sexuality, as will be discussed below). And the fantastic twists of

81 ghost stories reaffirm male fears: the women's association with the fantastic, with ghosts, does undermine patriarchal reality, hints at women's bonds with supernatural powers, and is beyond male power. Equally, by telling their own stories, women undermine hegemonic constructions of reality.50 Edith Wharton - Realism and Silencing, Fantasy and History Edith Wharton's ghost stories, published after the peak of the genre, are paradigmatic in subject matter and the use of the fantastic, especially when compared to Wharton's realistic fictions, and in the scholarly preference for her realistic works. She is best known as a realist, a writer of novels like The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Custom of the Country (1913), and critics like Nevius Blake count her among the "first generation of realists"51 in American fiction, while others even accuse her of being "too chillingly rational in her treatment of experience."52 Josephine Donovan locates a "self-identification as masculine [...] in her nearly universal use of the masculine I-narrator" and sees her cut off from "a genuine reconnection with feminine literary traditions."53 Yet throughout her career, Wharton also wrote "chilling" literature of a quite different nature (seen through women's eyes), neither realistic nor rational, but fantastic, ghost stories dating from the 1890s to the 1930s. The stories cover a wide variety of subjects that do connect to female tradition. But did these fantastic stories express something that could not be said in the realistic works?54 In this context, it is useful to recall that Wharton's exploration of gender-relations was frequently attacked by her contemporaries as indelicate like the story "Summer" in 1921, while "Old Maid" was rejected by magazines as "too unpleasant" and "too vigorous."55 During Wharton's literary career, subjects like illegitimacy, adultery, sexuality in general were considered inappropriate material, especially for a woman writer.56 Around 1919, Wharton wrote the exposé of a novel, "Beatrice Palmato," that even by today's standards is graphic erotic literature which, significantly, was meant to be "some kind of ghost story" with the title "Powers of Darkness."57 The exposé and a fully developed scene have survived among the Wharton papers; for obvious reasons, Wharton never intended to publish it during her lifetime. The discrepancy between the discretion of Wharton's published work and the explicitness of the unpublished fragment indicates the restraints that literary decorum placed on women writers, the areas that had to be covered with silence, the gaps in the social construction of reality, the "unseen" of culture. Wharton, who often pointed out the moral value of social

82 conventions, may have been particularly reluctant to violate these standards, although she did regret in the case of George Eliot that she "never ceased to revere the law she transgressed."58 The conflict between "passion and duty" that Wharton saw as a characteristic of Eliot's literature is evident in her own writing as well; in the realist fiction, duty triumphs, while her ghost stories explore the "sexual pathology of everyday life" and all that which society would rather hide from view.59 The fantastic mode offered Wharton an opportunity to explore subjects without the restraining forces of realism and to give passion its due. In her "Preface" to The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, she triumphantly declares that "the 'moral issue' question must not be allowed to enter into the estimating of a ghost story," and that there are no "fixed rules."60 Critics have wondered that Wharton who (in the original manuscript of her autobiography A Backward Glance) confesses to be terrified of the supernatural, should be so attracted to the genre. It is telling that her first acquaintance with the "world haunted by formless horrors" should coincide with the disappearance of inhibitions, of "the torturing moral scruples which had darkened my life hitherto;"61 and Judith Fryer points out that Wharton perceived the creative process in terms of being haunted, structured like a ghost story.62 The fantastic thus represents both liberation and threat, fascination and repulsion, and ultimately the potential to create women's literature beyond the confines of a male tradition. Like other women writers, Wharton uses fantasy to address the question of the silencing of women by literary conventions that restrict representations to conform to patriarchal notions of womanhood, burying transgressive desires in silence.63 "Mr. Jones," published in 1928, is a careful revision of the earlier "Kerfol" (1916) which the critic Cynthia Wolff praises as Wharton's best ghost story. Both stories gradually reveal the "buried leaves" of women's lives, women who have been kept like prisoners by their husbands, deprived of communication. The people who recover the stories are initiated into the mysteries by ghosts, their curiosity about the unknown women spurned by portraits, the visual rather than the verbal.64 The isolation of women in marriage emerges as one of the major subjects in Wharton's ghost stories; the psychological isolation in "Mr. Jones" and "Kerfol" corresponds with spatial isolation, and even in settings like the industrious New York of the 1930s, Wharton conveys the same sense of women being completely cut off from the public world outside the home. Domestic places are closely identified with women; in "Mr. Jones," the place is "mute and solitary," exactly like the protagonist Juliana, and exudes "a silence distilled from years of solitude." (170)

83 Like Wide Sargasso Sea, "Mr. Jones" and "Kerfol" celebrate women's ultimate triumph over repression, while Wharton's realistic fictions do not break the silence. The story of the Countess Olenska's abuse at the hands of her husband in The Age of Innocence (1920) is hushed up by New York society and by Wharton herself who only alludes vaguely to such abuse and never allows the countess to speak for herself, while the fantastic finally opens the potential for a representation of female suffering in "Kerfol" and "Mr. Jones." The changes Wharton made in rewriting "Kerfol" are profound.65 While the earlier story has a male first-person narrator, "Mr. Jones" has a female protagonist, Lady Jane, whose perspective is dominant. While the man in "Kerfol" is beckoned by ghost-dogs to explore the story of Anne de Cornault and finds extensive evidence in the records of her murder-trial, Lady Jane faces more serious obstacles: the function of the ghost, Mr. Jones, is to guard the silence about the dead woman who is referred to only as "also his wife" in the church records. The sole evidence - in addition to the portrait - of the Viscountess Thudeney's existence are a letter of her own writing and the marriage document. No written document, only the portrait bears her first name, the only name not signifying possession by a male: Juliana, Viscountess Thudeney, 1818, is the inscription. Like Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, Miss Partallo loses her identity with the wedding and from then on only exists in relation to her husband - as "Viscountess Thudeney," "Lady Thudeney," and "also his wife." The uncovered stories have changed significantly, too: although the woman's story in "Kerfol" is more dramatic and mysterious (a murder case involving the ghosts of pet dogs66), the story in "Mr. Jones" is ultimately more chilling and devastating, yet also more triumphant. Anne de Cornault is married for her looks and her youth, Miss Portallo in "Mr. Jones" for her money, again like Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea. Although the French woman is extremely lonely, she does enjoy the company of her dogs for some time and a young nobleman falls in love with her, so that there is at least a fantasy of a better life for Anne. The same restrictions of movement confine Lady Thudeney in the later story, yet her loneliness is utterly unrelieved and infinitely more fundamental: she is a deaf-mute, her body having inscribed her husband's verdict of isolation. Her only company are servants who, probably being illiterate, cannot even communicate with her by writing notes. While the records of Anne's trial are extensive transcriptions of the proceedings, offering a wealth of information about her life (albeit filtered and biased), there is only one letter about Lady Thudeney. But Juliana is the

84 author o f this letter, thus preserving her own voice, while all we know about Anne has been written by others. The story of Anne de Cornault is quite accessible: her story (set around 1600) has become part of the folklore in this region of Brittany; the life she led after the trial is known in rough outlines; the dog-ghosts, "clouds o f witnesses" (83), represent her point o f view and invite - by being impressive, if mute witnesses - investigation into her fate. "Mr. Jones," on the other hand, reveals mainly a story of silence: biographical facts like birth or death remain obscure, lost forever: "No names, dates, honors, epithets, for the Viscountess Thudeney." (172) Of all the official documents, only the marriage contract survives, a reminder of her passing from one dependent position (as daughter) to another (as wife). The ghost represents her husband's point o f view, forever trying to bury her story in silence, discouraging investigation o f her life. Nobody living in the English mansion has ever heard of her. Yet in making the silence in "Mr. Jones" more impenetrable, Wharton also enhances the ultimate triumph of Lady Jane over this patriarchal effort to obliterate women's history: in the end, Lady Jane does find the letter written in Juliana's voice. Her discovery represents the inevitable return of the repressed, located, like the fantastic, in gaps and under surfaces: "there's a gap" (188) in the papers that draws attention to itself, an opening in the wall that has been plastered over and thus points to something that has been hidden. Of course, patriarchy has erased so much evidence that only bare traces o f Juliana's and women's lives in general survive, even if women like Lady Jane set out to recover that history. Since both Anne de Cornault and the Viscountess die childless, one o f the few reasons society remembers women and honors them - in their role as mothers, and, in the social classes described in the two stories, mothers o f heirs - does not apply to them. Women have no power over the public records of historiography; these documents - trial records, marriage contracts - distort or hide women's histoiy. Women's command over language and the written word in "Mr. Jones" and "Kerfol" is tenuous and fragile, and the visual arts bear the most revealing testimony in "Mr. Jones": the portrait shows Juliana marked by her fate and gives her first name; in it, the text tells us, she comes alive. Literally, the function of the fantastic to render visible the socially unseen is manifest here in an image. In each o f the stories, the fantastic is embodied in a ghost: in "Kerfol," the animal-ghosts appear twice, and Mr. Jones has never disappeared; Margaret McDowell dismisses the figure o f the ghost as unimportant, while Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith stresses that Jones, although socially Juliana's inferior, can achieve a position o f "absolute authority" over her on the basis

85

of his male gender.67 In the context of Wharton's emphasis on uncovering (hi)story, though, the ghosts' function in the stories obviously relates to silencing: the dogs disrupt Anne's silencing, Mr. Jones maintains the conspiracy of silence. His main purpose in "life" seems to be to guard the secret of Juliana's suffering. Paradoxically, it is exactly his interfering presence that draws attention to her history and thus actually furthers the reconstruction of her life. What Wharton suggests in that revision of the ghosts' function is that repression will always leave traces that can be deciphered; that without the fantastic, however, women's hidden histories will forever remain buried under leaves. Due to the different gendered lives of women and men, their histories will be radically different: men's realistic, abundant with documents; women's fantastic and sketchy, so scarce in outline that fantasy is needed to fill the gaps and reconstruct the hidden story, to re-interpret the meaning of their lives. This is of course what Rhys does in Wide Sargasso Sea, and what defines the function of the fantastic in minority women's literature. Edith Wharton - Symbiotic Intimacy

Wharton rejected her early story, "The Fullness of Life" (1893), later on aesthetic grounds and denounced it as an "excess of youth,"68 refusing to have it included in The Greater Inclination. Cynthia Griffin Wolff agrees with Wharton's judgment, dismissing the story as an immature achievement that reflects Wharton's "inability to represent a convincingly adult relationship between the sexes;" instead, she continues, Wharton depicts "an image of total oneness, fusion, a complete (and infantile) identification."69 Nearly forty years later, in "Pomegranate Seed" (1931), Wharton again tackled the issue of close intimacy between the sexes, with major revisions, however: where "The Fullness of Life" places intimacy/fusion (literally) in heaven and thus as a Utopian ideal,70 the later story focuses on ambivalence and the difficult negotiation between intimacy, distance, and desire. "Pomegranate Seed" is another of Wharton's stories of marital distress and presents a constellation she frequently uses in her ghost stories: the intrusion of a third person or force into the twoness of marriage. Here, the ghost of the first wife returns to claim the husband's affection and attention, writing letters whose messages are undecipherable (except for the address) to all but the husband. Although the title invites a reading as an update on the Greek myth of Persephone,71 the actual concern of the story is less the interaction between husband and ghost, but a stern warning of the dangers of symbiotic intimacy between husband and (second) wife. Wolff points out

86 that Wharton's biography reveals a shying away from intimacy prior to her relationship with Fullerton, an attitude that found its way into her early writings. What Wharton attacks in this late story, though, is an excess of intimacy, portrayed as a threat to identity and a violation of privacy. Indeed, "Pomegranate Seed" is one of the few fantastic stories that makes the connection between love, loss of ego boundaries and merging of identities its subject. This transformative dimension of love, although potentially a source of the fantastic, is rarely dealt with in either ghost stories or contemporary fantastic fictions.72 In stories like "Kerfol," "Mr. Jones," and "The Lady's Maid Bell," Wharton uses secluded settings to suggest the imprisonment and isolation of women in marriage; although "Pomegrante Seed" is set in a busy, modern New York, the same claustrophobic effect is achieved. The heroine first welcomes this isolation, exulting about her home as "her tiny islet" "in the very heart of the hurricane." (243) She much prefers solitude to the company of friends, "since it [being alone] was another way of being with Kenneth." (244) This phrase in the opening paragraphs already suggests the fusion of two identities, since Charlotte Ashby no longer makes a distinction between her self and her husband. Her thoughts reveal that, though aware of the potential problems, she is unable to withstand the temptation of abandoning her/self in the relationship. She implies that her husband's earlier behavior indicated the same desire for merger - "The feeling he had given her at times of being too eagerly dependent on her, too searchingly close to her, as if there were not air enough between her soul and his." (258) At the time of the narrative, though, his orientation is clearly towards distance, if not separation, while Charlotte insists on breaking down any barriers of privacy, unable to tolerate his independence: she feels "excluded, ignored, blotted out of his life" (255), and even wants to control his past. Her attempts to force intimacy - secretly watching him and confronting him with her suspicions about the letters, pressing for a confession - are necessarily disastrous and make him only retreat more, desperately yearning for distance. The fantastic in "Pomegranate Seed" are the letters written by a ghost, the husband's first wife. These letters "had merged in one another in her mind, become one letter, become 'it'." (201) "It" is a message too obscure to be read, signifying the unspeakable in their increasingly alienated relationship, a contested territory of complicated gender-relations. In Lloyd-Smith's words, the letter "generates the uncanny [...] The ultimate trace is the trace that is not there at all [...] all these marks of elision are the negative inscriptions that register deformations in experience."73

87 Those "deformations of experience," although vastly different for men and women, effect both genders similarly in one respect: "Pomegranate Seed" is also a story about the nature of desire, a desire fueled by absence: hers by his retreat into privacy, his by the blank wall where his wife's portrait used to hang and the nearly blank pages of her letters, absences that symbolize her absence. The power of the first wife's ghost is exactly her invisibility, her elusiveness and unavailability; desire dies when the object of desire comes too close; it is only possible from a distance. The letters taunt him with promises of meaning, which finally always eludes him, and thus sustain their irresistable attraction. The setting at night and in winter links Charlotte's life to Persephone's, equating marriage with death of the female self. In the course of the marriage, "home" has acquired a sinister meaning for Charlotte who "always wavered on the doorstep and had to force herself to enter." (200) While the outside world is alive with bustling life and light - "illumination," "aflare," "blaze of light" -, the inside is shadowy and increasingly dominated by the absence of another female figure. In the myth, that figure is of course the mother, Demeter; in Wharton's story, it is the first wife, a rival rather than a protective woman, whose absence haunts the home. In the context of the story of Hades and Persephone, night not only acquires the connotation of intimacy and sexuality, but a tug of war between the sexes over "knowledge." Myths like Persephone eating the forbidden pomegranate seeds and Psyche's violation of the taboo to look at Eros emphasize male insistence on the privilege of establishing rules and the punishment of women who dare to question the taboo, who insist to "know." That punishment, in turn, is typically the denial of intimacy, the loss of love in Psyche's story and "Pomegranate Seed." The husband's "mastery of face and voice," his "contemptuous composure" indicate that he is "master of the situation,"74 while she is "in the dark with her conjectures," in "a stifling fog," "in darkness," unable "to penetrate the mystery" of "the whole blurred business."75 The opposition between (male) mastery and (female) paralyzing inability to see reflects social constructions of gendered hegemony, and Charlotte's attempts to "know," to change these power-relations in her favor, end in defeat. The turning point comes when she confronts her husband with the mystery, forcing the secret out into the open, demanding an explanation, asking to share his knowledge. Like Psyche, Charlotte pays for her desire to know with the loss of intimacy; like Eros, her husband disappears.

88 The Exotic as Place of the Fantastic While Western culture, post-Enlightenment, is dedicated to reason and scientific explanation of cause and effect and has subdued the fantastic, this is not true for other cultures where a sharp distinction between reality and the fantastic often does not exist, where the fantastic is experienced as an integral part of life.76 In white women's early literature of the supernatural, such cultures are sought out as sources of the fantastic. Typically, we never get an inside view of these cultures; the writers use them as a foil for their supernatural tales, making no attempts to comprehend or respect the integration of fantasy and reality. The inside view is largely absent from contemporary collections of supernatural tales as well, only partly due - I suspect - to the collective authorship of oral tradition in African American, Native American and Chinese American culture.77 The functionalization of "exotic" cultures in white women's fantastic stories becomes highly problematic once we examine the attributes assigned to these cultures, attributes that reveal an ethnocentrism and racism some feminists critics tend and prefer to overlook.78 Consistently, the foundation of the stories is a typical division into primitive and civilized which utilizes "the Other as an object for appropriation, for observation, for visualization, for explanation."79 The strategy to escape restricting gender discourses by writing about other cultures backfires as the authors become entangled in a web of racism. Harriet Prescott Spofford's "The Amber Gods" (1863) is saturated with the exotic, used as a frame of reference to create her unconventional heroine Yone; a "heathen God," "Indian spices," "an Asian imp," "a Chinese idol," "Arabian Nights," and numerous references to the West Indies provide a foil for the narrator who describes herself as having been reborn in the West Indies: "all that tropical luxuriance snatched me to itself at once, recognized me for kith and kin; and mama died, and I lived." (24) The same passage had already linked Yone and the exotic to fantasy: "I'm a cosmopolite, and have a right to all my fantasies. Not that they are fantasies, at all; on the contrary, they are parts of my nature." (23) The equation of Yone with the exotic and fantastic 0 sets her against the puritanical New England society, the embodiment of the reality principle; sensuality is placed in opposition to spirituality. The exotic emerges as the antithesis of New England life, a projection of the repressed, of sexuality, the body, and fantasy. As a projection, it is oblivious of the "natives" of the foreign cultures; reflecting and magnifying the chauvinism of the author, Yone rejoices: "What a blessing it is that the blacks have been imported there - their swarthiness is in such consonance." (31) In Yone's celebration of slavery on aesthetic

89 grounds, blacks have disappeared as subjects, their individual and collective fate of no interest except in its relation to the representatives of the dominant culture. Yone's association with the exotic sets her apart from the constraints and conventions of her society. One of her extraordinary features is her command of the gaze. As numerous critics have pointed out, the male gaze objectifies women;81 mirrors are the pervasive symbols of the consequent alienation in women's literature. Yone completely subverts this familiar scenario by controlling the gaze. If Rosemary Jackson points out that a feminist feature of Emma Cobb's "What Did Miss Darrington See?" is "the insistence on her power to see [...], on the strength of her look,"82 Spofford's approach in "The Amber Gods" deserves even more critical acclaim. From the beginning, when we see (through her eyes) Yone in front of the mirror, enraptured by her own image,83 Yone commands the "ways of seeing" of the other characters as well as the readers'. Repeatedly, she demands, "See me!" and "look at it!"84 That control is most pronounced in her romantic relationship with Rose, a painter whose profession should make him the expert. Their first meeting is auspicious, though, of the subsequent role-reversal when he is unable to actively control his gaze: "He didn't look at the amber at all; he didn't look at me; I seemed to fill his gaze without any action from him, for he stood quiet and passive." (26) From then on, she manipulates and controls his perception, and, significantly, sets out to change his ways of seeing as an artist as well, musing: How can he paint gray, faint, half-alive things now? He must abound in color. - be rich, exhaustless: wild sea-sketches, - sunrise, - sunset, - mountain mist rolling in turbid crimson masses [...], South American splendors, - pomps of fruit and blossom, - all this affluence of his future life must flash from his pencils now. (25) Till this time, it had been the perfection of form rather than tint that had enthralled him; he had come home with severe ideas, too severe; he needed me, you see. (30)

In Yone's artistic imagination, symbolic colors - gray for New England and the reality principle, "severity;" an "exhaustless" abundance of brilliant colors for the exotic, and the pleasure principle - divide past and present from a fantastic "future." Critics describe Yone as "a psychic vampire," "spiritually stillborn"85 and as "perversely fascinating."86 Yet in many respects, her portrait reads like a nineteenth-century white version of Toni Morrison's Sula (1973). Yone is "without centre" (52), while Morrison's protagonist has "no center, no speck around which to grow."87 Sula's thwarted creative instincts as a suppressed artist "with no art from" make her "dangerous," a characterization that applies to Yone as well; though gifted

90 with a considerable artistic talent, especially her remarkable sense of color, she does not find an appropriate medium and rather establishes herself as a work of art: "he, who worshipped beauty, saw how thoroughly I possessed it; he has told me that through me he learned the sacredness of color." (52i Like Sula, Yone defies convention, especially notions of feminine proprietj; like Sula, Yone becomes dangerous by disregarding the social demands of community, following her selfish interests instead. There are major differences, of course, in Spofford's and Morrison's conceptions of their protagonists, differences that reflect their historical and cultural backgrounds. While Spofford, writing in the nineteenth century without a feminist discourse to draw on, creates Yone as an individualistic rebel without ever going into the social reasons for her rebellion and her ultimate failure, Morrison pictures Sula at the intersection of racism and patriarchy, doubly oppressed as an African American woman who is "neither whi'.e nor male" and for whom thus "all freedom and triumph was forbidden."'8 For Sula, the "exotic" cannot be a Utopian place of individual freedorr.; her exploration of the world outside her community and her growing determination to define herself is left by Morrison in a gap, between chapters - a promise of freedom that, as Sula's reminiscences reveal, was never fulfilled.89 Although the exotic allows Spofford to conceive of a woman like Yone, the strategy of situating her in the fantastic finally means that there is no place for her in New England-reality: the text expels her along with the exotic, she has to die. In a brilliant stroke, though, Spofford testifies again to the power of the fantastic in allowing Yone to speak from the beyond, to narrate her own story, including her death. Morrison, writing a century after Spofford and from a different cultural background, does exactly the same, having Sula yearn to share the death-experience with her friend Nel. Thus, both writers, creating heroines who are, in Morrison's words, "out of sequence"90 with their communities' notions of proper female roles, mythologize these heroines, and, as ghosts that speak after death, place them in the fantastic. Here again, as in Hall's "La Femme Noir," the association of women with the supernatural is interpreted as empowering, in contrast to their failure and impotence in the real. If "The Amber Gods" is the apologia of the sensuous woman, "Her Story" (1863) is the repudiation of all she stands for. Called an "important forerunner" of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892),91 the story focuses on one woman's madness. The narrator recounts how her marriage was destroyed by a woman who is a replica of Yone. Contaminated in the eyes of the narrator by her exposure to foreign cultures (travels to Italy

91 and France), she is a representative of darkness92 and eroticism/the exotic, as the subsequent combination of sin and slime with the tropical implies: "She was the thing of slime and sin, a splendid tropical growth of the passionate heat and the slime: it was only her nature." (161) The convergence of darkness, moral corruption and (female) sexuality with the exotic (tropical) constructs the familiar image of the exotic as the antithesis of civilized ethics. "Her Story," though, consciously refers to the exotic as a projection since the narrator may be mad, this image may well stem from insane sexual jealousy or a jealousy not sexual at all - her effacement in marriage and motherhood prompts her to long for the unrestrained "nature" the other woman stands for.93 This ambivalence which we can also feel, although to a lesser degree, in the creation of Yone, is yet another turn of the screw in constructing the exotic as a place that offers welcome liberation from repression, but only at the price of "slime," moral degradation perceived as inherent in a free sexuality - a bias that ends up reaffirming the exact cultural norms the stories perceive, however vaguely, as constraining for women. "Nature," synonymous with sexuality in the projections of the exotic by women writers, is a focal point of ambivalence, as Emma Cobb's "What Did Miss Carrington See?" and Harriet Spofford's "Circumstance" demonstrate. Emma B. Cobb's "What Did Miss Carrington See?" (1870) is judged to be "consciously feminist" by Rosemary Jackson because it "refuses to participate in an unrealistic, romantic prescription for the way women and men must relate to one another."94 Even more potentially subversive is the reversal of gender roles, although this feature is complicated and finally cancelled out by the use of the exotic. He, a young Cuban, is passionate, emotional, physically beautiful, while she is controlled, intellectual, with a face "neither beautiful nor plain in features." (39) With this use of inverted stereotypical gendered descriptions, Cobb feminizes the other culture and its male representative and opens a possibility for the woman, Miss Darrington, to assume a position of masculine privilege on the grounds of ethnic superiority. The questioning of the typically feminine role which allows Miss Darrington to reject romance and lead a fulfilled life as a "spinster" remains trapped in a system of gendered and ethnic hierarchies, possible only by turning the man into a representative of an exotic culture defined by "feminine" characteristics like passion and emotion.95 The text does not stop here; again and again, Cobb uses the common interpretation of the exotic culture as both inferior and highly sexualized; the Cuban's high social position and his education do not matter in this evaluation. The story calls him "the child of some past civilization," "a very ordinary young savage," "a barbarian," and likens him to animals in the jungle - a "half-savage beast."

92 (43) Miss Darrington, in turn, firmly rejects the sexuality represented in the Cuban. In the "contrast between her own complex but balanced nature and this romantic and ardent, though untutored soul" (43), the story celebrates a problematic victory of culture over nature, of denial over abundance, of reality over pleasure principle: "My life is one of labor and care; and this brief holiday we have spent together has the charm which only rare pleasures have." (48) Miss Darrington chooses the Protestant ethic, an ethic of "denial, restraint, deferred gratification."96 Even in its fantastic elements which consist literally of the return of the repressed when Miss Darrington is visited by the ghost of the dead Cuban, the story subordinates the exotic/fantastic/erotic since even this supernatural vision does not shatter her reality: "she did not choose to indulge herself in morbid fantasies upon the subject." (54) Thus rejecting the erotic as linked to death, "morbid," Miss Darrington remains complacent in her dedication to reason. Only mild remorse touches her, while the man, even in death locked in his dependency and devotion, appears from the beyond "to give to her the greeting of lips that were sealed, the last loving look of eyes that were forever closed to all on earth beside!" (57) Even that last appearance in the story freezes him in the traditional female role: mute and speechless, devoted and emotionally dependent. It is easy to realize how a woman's dedication to work rather than love might assume feminist implications because it evades the normative erotic plots. Yet the story's ethnocentrism, by equating Latin American culture with sexuality and lack of cultural restraint, detracts from these intentions, adds a conservative, if not racist note; and even the feminist intentions fail since the story ultimately confirms the superiority of the traditionally masculine over feminine. In "Circumstance" (1860), Harriet Prescott Spofford starts out to celebrate a similar triumph of culture over nature, but then hovers undecidedly between the two poles, as the story begins to suspect the price for an alliance with (male) culture as too high. Set on the frontier, the exotic here is captured in the "stealthy native or deadly panther tribes" of the opening paragraph, likening the ethnic and cultural other to wild beasts and destruction. The fantastic element is a panther - called the Indian Devil - who attacks a nameless woman on her way home through the wilderness; she first perceives the fantastic animal in a "gap," in "twilight." (85) Here again, the fantastic opens up areas that might be potentially liberating but are rejected as dangerous. When the woman is attacked by the sexualized beast, she holds him at bay by singing; Spofford's feminist insistence on the female voice and

93 female creativity culminates in the protagonist's epiphany: "How appalling the thought that with her voice ceased her insistence." (90)97 But this female voice in the wilderness, released through the contact with nature and sexuality, is curiously contained within (patriarchal) civilization: "the sound that issued thence came by reason." (86) What enables her to keep singing all night are thoughts of family and home, "the log-house and what might be passing within it." (88) These very forces imply her silencing: whenever her thoughts linger too much on her family, her voice fails and she stops singing, "dreaming of safety." (88) As Bendixen notes, her final return to her role as wife and mother means losing her voice.98 Specifically, the restraining influence of reason and civilization, symbolized in home and family, are set against aggressive sexuality, art seen as sublimation of the erotic that is interpreted as violation: a "living lump of appetites" (89) submits her to "savage caresses that hurt like wounds." (90) Judith Fetterley identifies the nineteenth-century feminist discourse on unrestrained male sexuality behind this scenario and notes how Spofford's critique is displaced from the white male onto to Native Americans since circumstances dictate that "hostility must be accomplished by stealth."99 That displacement is not only racist, but complicates and counteracts the feminist concerns of "Circumstance." After Spofford has set up everything to suggest the superiority of culture, even at the cost of the female voice, and has the heroine return with her family to her log-cabin, the closure is confused. Upon their return, they find their home in ruins: "Desolation and death were indeed there, and beneficence and life in the forest." (96) But that equation of home with death and nature with life is immediately revoked by linking the destruction to Native Americans - never explicitly named, but "Tomahawk and scalping knife" are sufficient hints. In a final gesture, Spofford invests nature with death and destruction because that destruction is ascribed to Native Americans who have been associated with nature throughout the story. Since the story has set up the white settlers as representing civilization against the Native Americans as "beasts," nature ultimately becomes ambivalent. This ambivalence and confusion suggest that the taming of the female voice through male civilization leads to silencing, but that the wilderness, the "wild zone" (in Elaine Showalter's words100), although tempting in the freedom it offers, is threatening in exacting a prize from the powerful forces of eros and thanatos, "morbid" as in Cobb's narrative. Moreover, the racist use of the exotic to suggest contamination with violent male sexuality precludes Spofford from perceiving the wild zone as a female space, centering on a conflict instead that is ultimately a question of alliance with the "civilized" white male over the "beastly" Native

94 American. In a typical conclusion that reflects much o f nineteenth-century feminists' racist hesitation or outright rejection to form political alliances with minorities, the protagonist chooses white male civilization and safety, even at the cost o f her voice and freedom. Edith Wharton's "Miss Mary Pask" (1925) is a late example and compelling variation o f the displacement o f female desire onto foreign cultures, here France. More specifically, the setting is Brittany, a place associated with a strong folklore (as in her " K e r f o l " ) where the existence o f mythical figures like vampires and furies seems likely, even to the reasonable male narrator who is characterized by his " N e w England conscience" and his "sense o f duty," qualities opposed to the uncanny atmosphere o f Brittany. The nameless man who suffers from nervous disorders relates how he went to visit Mary Pask, first assuming she is alive and well; then he seems to remember that she died some time ago; and in the end, her sister reveals that she is indeed alive. The atmosphere o f his visit is Gothic fog and darkness "thick as a blanket" (133) obscure his vision, correspond with his befuddled state o f mind and re-inforce his confusion. Wharton wrote the story when she was sixty-three years old and may well have been inspired by her distress about aging and her doubts about the legitimacy o f female desire in general.101 Female desire is seen and judged through male eyes, the eyes o f the man who visits Miss Pask (whose marital status is exposed in the title, while her sister's is disclosed in the first sentence). The narrator could not be less reliable, suffering as he does from numerous gaps in memory, debilitating fevers, and nervous breakdowns, a highly unconventional choice o f narrator in a genre that usually takes great pains to establish the credibility o f the narratives, for example in elaborate framing stories.102 Thus, Wharton disavows the traditional uncanny and fantastic twice: by making it clear that there never was a ghost and by subverting the narrator's credibility. The place o f established, yet unusual figures like vampires as the source of the uncanny/fantastic is taken up by the familiar spectre o f sexual repression103: "The happenings o f that night had to be overlaid with layer upon layer o f time and forgetfulness before I could tolerate any return to them." (130) More specifically, female desire has an uncanny effect on him; he alludes to his encounter with Mary Pask in terms that hint at a sexual affair by referring to "the night in question" and stating his inability to speak o f "the affair" (130), filling his next sentences with emphatic disclaimers o f her desirability, even negating her right to feel desire. This violent denial seems uncalled for, now that he knows that the woman he met was not a ghost - why should he be so afraid, so extraordinarily appalled?

95 In the descriptions of her physique, he again mixes sexual overtones and revulsion: touching her hands, "round, puffy, pink, yet prematurely old [...] and shriveled," "his flesh rose in ridges of fear." (136) Miss Pask is quite straightforward about her erotic interest, not only asking him to spend the night with her, but unveiling her fantasies: "If a man came along someday and took a fancy to you?" (140) His reaction, again, is curiously charged with sexuality: "I stood there - we stood there - lost to each other in the roaring coiling darkness. My heart seemed to stop beating; I had to fetch up my breath with great heaves that covered me with sweat." This is his last observation before he flees the scene in panic, a panic caused less - as he would us believe - by the conventional supernatural of ghosts than her sexual advances. Indeed, the encounter has left him speechless: "I couldn't answer I couldn't go on looking at her." (139) He has been turned into a powerless, mesmerized victim by a sexual aggressor. His earlier construction of Miss Pask as a vampire - she lives at night because the sunlight hurts her, she sleeps during the day in the garden's soil - underlines the convergence of the fantastic with female sexual aggressiveness.104 And behind the images of suffocation - in the fog, in the dark - lurks the fear of women's sexuality, as Freud has shown. Conjuring up a multitude of frightening mythical women - the Medusa, the furies, vampires, the Bride of Corinth - helps him rationalize that only a dead woman could express desire, and exert such powers over his mind and body as to paralyze and silence him. Thus, he is obsessed with "the night in question" as long as he still thinks her dead, while the realization that she is indeed a living person calls for immediate repression, the need to bury female desire and the uncanny it generates under "layer upon layer of time." Yet the repressed returns: he has to tell the story, and the uncanny triumphs over his efforts at repression. Women, Sexuality, and the Uncanny The male gender of the narrator in "Miss Mary Pask" is crucial for the story's escape from ethnocentrism, since it serves to expose the mechanics of power behind the displacement of female desire and its conflation with the exotic/the fantastic in a male-dominated social reality. Identifying female sexuality as the source of the uncanny for the male in "Miss Mary Pask" points to a fundamental difference in fantastic literature by men and women. Wharton's definition and her insistence on repression and the failure of repression as "uncanny" parallel Freud's definition of only six years earlier in "Das 'Unheimliche"' (1919). Linking the uncanny to castration anxiety,

96 Freud refers explicitly to female genitals and female sexuality as sources of the uncanny.105 His interpretation of "Der Sandmann," as many critics have pointed out, curiously doubles the structure of the uncanny in repressing the woman in E. T. A. Hoffmann's text; his misreading points to the social position of women as the unseen, "secret and hidden" (Freud's terms for the source of the uncanny), and ultimately uncanny in representing the other side of castration anxiety, "not fearing that fate, but implicitly threatening with it."106 Considering this, we finally understand the terror of Wharton's narrator. Referring to Freud, Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith, understands the uncanny in American fiction as repression of sexuality, more specifically: Male fear of female sexuality, with its accompanying repressions in the forms of silencing, political incapacity, even ownership (there is a connection here with slavery and the perception of black people as uncanny [...]), imposed infantilism, hysteria, the denial of female sexuality endorsed by clitorectomy, and male sadism; all ¿lis returns in fiction in an absenting or doubling of female attributes, the uncanniness of women or children, and the problematics of homosexuality.107

This is, as Lloyd-Smith also points out, a male perception of the uncanny (as portrayed in Wharton's male narrator) which women writers do not share (although some of them do share the racism of their male colleagues), as the ghost stories discussed here demonstrate. Instead, in a reverse movement, women's fantastic literature circles around this silencing and the mechanics of social forces and powers behind it: around the silencing of the female voice and the silencing of female desire.'08 And women writers ultimately celebrate the return of the repressed in stories where the historical silence is disturbed by uncovering women's voices through the fantastic. Notes 1 2 3 4

In some languages - English and German for example - "leaves" denotes both foliage and the pages of a book, as in to "leaf through a page." See e.g. Eric Rabkin, ed., Fantastic Worlds. Myths, Tales, and Stories (Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 1979). See for example in the genre "Fantasy", and in Angela Carter's work. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London/New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 95. - See Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, eds., Science Fiction: History - Science - Vision (New York: Oxford, 1977); Pamela Sargent, "Introduction," in Pamela Sargent, ed, The New Women of Wonder (New York, 1978), p. xiii; Judith Spector, "Science Fiction and the Sex War: A Womb of One's Own," in Judith Spector, ed., Gender Studies. New Directions in Feminist Criticism (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986), p. 16

97 5

Paul Coates, The Realist Fantasy. Fiction and Reality since Clarissa (New York: St Martin's Press, 1983), p. 3 6 Interestingly, children's literature which emerged in the Victorian age has a dominant fantastic component; and children, like women, are marginal in terms of power in society. - See Anne McWhir, "The Gothic Transgression of Disbelief: Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis," in Kenneth Graham, ed., Gothic Fictions. Prohibitions/ Transgressions (New York: AMS Press, 1989), p. 3Iff, for a discussion of folkbeliefs before the eighteenth century. 7 See e.g. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957); Toni Morrison comes to this conclusion by comparing the emerging genre of the (realistic) novel to folklore (with its strong elements of fantasy). "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (London/Sidney: Pluto Press, 1985, 19841), p. 340. - See also Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (London: Verso, 1987). 8 See Ellen Moers, Literary Women. The Great Writers (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1977), p. 191. 9 See Juliann E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (Montreal/London: Eden Press, 1983), p. 8; Robert Donald Spector, The English Gothic. A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley (Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press, 1984) 10 Juliann Fleenor, The Female Gothic, p. 8; Robert Donald Spector, The English Gothic, p. 46ff. 11 See Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination. Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (London/Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 11.

12 Fay Weldon in John Haffenden, ed., Novelists in Interview (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 317; see Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 3f.; and Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination, p. 11. 13 Quoted in David Punter, The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London/New York: Longman, 1980), p. 17. 14 See Punter, The Literature of Terror, p. 406/7. 15 Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination, p. 21. 16 David Punter quoted in Jackson, Fantasy, p. 97. 17 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 101. 18 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 96. 19 Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination, p. 28: the Gothic "resists sexual, political, or religious taboos." 20 Punter, The Literature of Terror, p. 67: the Gothic "constantly blurs the boundaries of reality and fantasy..." 21 William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desires. A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 84. 22 Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desires, p. 104: "[Female characters] are drawn into the dynamic opposition that is central to the Gothic definition of masculine and feminine identity." See Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination, p. 33, where she mentions "the fusion of opposites in the Gothic, the destruction of gender identities." 23 Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination, p. 24.

98 24 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 101; on the level of imagery, the prevalence of the maze in Gothic literature - satirized in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle - is an example. 25 Eugenia DeLamotte, Perils of the Night. A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. vii; see Ellen Moers, Literary Women, especially her chapter "Female Gothic"; Juliann Fleenor, "Introduction," and Margaret Homans, "Dreaming of Children: lateralization in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights" in The Female Gothic, p. 257-280. 26 Fleenor, "Introduction," p. 7. 27 See the studies by Kay Mussell, Fantasy and Reconciliation (Westport, CT/New York: Greenwood Press, 1984); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance. Mass Produced Fantasies for Women (New York/London: Methuen, 1982); Jean Radford, ed., The Progress of Romance. The Politics of Popular Fiction (London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) 28 See Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination, p. 41, 33. 29 See Ellen Moers, "Female Gothic" and "Traveling Heroinism: Gothic for Heroines", Literary Women; especially p. 191f. 30 DeLamotte, Perils of the Night, p. viii. 31 DeLamotte, Perils of the Night, p. viii. 32 Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. ix and ix. 33 Fleenor, "Introduction," The Female Gothic. 34 Angela Carter, Fireworks. Nine Profane Pieces (London: Penguin, 1987, 19741), p. 132/3; another feature of the Gothic is literalization, see Margaret Homans "Dreaming of Children: Literalization in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights" in Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic, p. 257-280; p. 248. See the chapter on theory for literalization as a feature of the fantastic. 35 Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction. Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 8. 36 See Alfred Bendixen, "Introduction" in Bendixen, ed., "The Amber Gods", in his remarks on Spoffords "The Amber Gods", p. xi and p. xix: "Spofford's romantic imagination seemed out of step with a nation already moving toward realism." 37 See Alfred Bendixen, ed., Haunted Women (New York: Ungar, 1985); Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ed., What Did Miss Carrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (New York: Feminist Press, 1989); Richard Dalby, ed., The Virago Book of Ghost Stories (New York et al.: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1987); Alan Ryan, ed. , Haunting Women (New York: Avon Books, 1988): Kathryn Placek, Women of Darkness. Original Horror and Dark Fantasy by Contemporary Women Writers (New York: Tor Horror, 1988) 38 Carpenter/Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction, p. 20; Bendixen, ed., "The Amber Gods", p. xi. 39 Carpenter/Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction, p. 1. 40 Carpenter/Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction, p. 1. 41 These stories are anthologized in: "The Foghorn," 1934, by Gertrude Atherton in Alfred Bendixen, ed., Haunted Women. The Best Supernatural Tales by American

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Women Writers (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985);"A Curious Experience," 1971, by Norah Lofts and "Breakages," 1975, by Fay Weldon in Richard Dalby, ed., The Virago Book of Ghost Stories (New York et al.: McGraw Hill, 1989, 19871); "The Renegade," 1948, by Shirley Jackson, "The Cloak," 1955, by Isak Dinesen, and "Hell on Both Sides of the Gate", 1962, Rosemary Timperley in Alan Ryan, ed., Haunting Women (New York: Avon Books, 1988); "Ranson Cowl Walks the Road", 1988, by Nancy Varian Berberick, and "True Love", 1988, by Patricia Russo in Kathryn Ptacek, ed., Women of Darkness. Original Horror and Dark Fantasy by Contemporary Women Writers (New York: Tor Honor, 1988). "The Yellow Wallpaper," 1892, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman has been anthologized widely, for example in Haunting Women and Haunted Women. Carpenter/Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction, identify maternal legacy and violence against women as pervasive themes of ghost stories. - The stories are anthologized in: Edith Wharton, "Miss Mary Pask," 1925, "Mr. Jones", 1928, "Kerfol," 1916, in Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Illustrated by Laszlo Kubinyi (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973); Catherine Wells, "The Ghost", 1928, in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories-, Angela Carter, "The Bloody Chamber," 1979, in Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1979); Emma Cobb, "What Did Miss Carrington See?", 1870, in Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ed., What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989); Ellen Glasgow, "The Shadowy Third," 1923, in The Virago Book o Ghost Stories. In similar contemporary fantastic fictions, discussed in the chapter "Alien(N)ation", the stress is on alienation. The mothers in the stories are mostly dead. It is generally striking how many mothers in literature and popular culture are "killed off', from novels like Bronte's Jane Eyre to movies like Bambi. In What Did Miss Darrington See? Timperley's story in Haunting Women (where she is called "the foremost writer of ghost stories in England today," p. 117), also about incest, is much more candid, due to its later publication date. In contemporary (African American) literature, Toni Cade Bambara's short stories dramatize such communities of women. See "The Johnson Girls" in Gorilla, My Love (1972) and "Witchbird" in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977). See Rochester in Bronte's Jane Eyre and my discussion of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea in the first chapter. A similar theme opens Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, discussed in the chapter on minority women's literature. See Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior where the function of women's writing/speech is defined as such. Nevius Blake, Edith Wharton. A Study of Her Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), p. 2. Quoted in Blake, Edith Wharton, p. 3/4. Josephine Donovan, After the Fall. The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow (University Park/London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 45, 83. - The neglect of fantastic aspects of a literary work also leads critics of Lillian Hellman's autobiographies to a similar accusation of being male-identified;

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66

see Anne Koenen, "Democracy and Women's Autobiographies," Amerikastudien/ American Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1990): 321-336. Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith juxtaposes Wharton's conformity under "the constraints of the visible" in the realist novels with her venturing "into the realm of the unseen, that is, into the area that her society preferred to be unable to see." Uncanny American Fiction. Medusa's Face (Houndmills et al.: Macmillan, 1989), p. 138. - For Wharton's concept of realism, see Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words. The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 111,113,115. Quoted in R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton. A Biography (New York et al.: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 435/6; see Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 104. See Blake, Edith Wharton, p. 4, where he relates an anecdote about F. Scott Fitzgerald obviously believing in the power of sexual subjects to disconcert a lady like Wharton when trying to provoke her by telling a story about a brothel. Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 415, dates the fragment thus. See Wolff, p. 300, for the title. Public access to the story was gained in the 1960s. 1902 in a review of Leslie Stephen's George Eliot, quoted in Blake, Edith Wharton, p. 112. Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction, p. 139. Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Illustrated by Laszlo Kubinyi (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), p. 4. - Subsequent references to individual ghost stories in the text are to this edition. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, p. 276 and 275. Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space. The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 158: "Wharton suggests in this chapter [of her autobiography called "The Secret Garden"] that the process of creativity is, for her, a ghost story." Contemporary criticism agrees on this point, although the individual critics place different emphases. Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction, p. 140, observes Wharton's "interest in the haunting by absence in everyday life rather than by presence in an extraordinary one." - Donovan, After the Fall, interprets silencing both socially and individually, p. 47: "I propose that Wharton's rebellion and fear were not so much directed against her own other personally as against the historical position of the traditional woman and the historical silence and muteness of her preliterate, nonoedipal experience." Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison as well stress the power of the visual in re-creating female (hi)stories; in the last part of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette remembers her life in pictures; and in Beloved, the protagonists perceive of the past as pictures. See the chapters on Rhys and on minority women's literature. In No Man's Land, Vol. II, Sex-Changes (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1989), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss Wharton's ghost stories along similar lines, without the interest in the re-writing aspect and the resulting clues of Wharton's motivations for the revisions. Donovan, After the Fall, p. 72, interprets "Kerfol" as a story of "demonic female revenge, in this case against a patriarch who violates the precultural bond between women and animals." Rather than seeing the animals as central to the story, I regard their existence merely as one element in the story's emphasis on questions of power and control.

101 67 Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction, p. 145. Margaret B. McDowell, "Edith Wharton's Ghost Stories," Criticism XII (Spring 1970): 133-151. 68 Quoted in Lewis, Edith Wharton. A Biography, p. 86. 69 Wolff, A Feast of Words 70 Written at the end of the nineteenth century, the use of the beyond as a Utopian place is connected to a tradition of "consolation literature" by women; the novels of Stuart Phelps are an example. 71 With, as Josephine Donovan points out, reversed gender roles: "the Persephone figure is a male and the Hades figure a female." After the Fall, p. 82. I find Wharton's references to myth too confused - what, in the constellations of the story, are the functions of the second wife and the husband's mother when related to the myth - to be satisfying for an understanding of the story. 72 The absence of these "erotic plots" of metamorphoses will become evident in the chapter on metamorphoses. In Wharton's story, the excessive yearning for merger has to fail; as Nancy Chodorow has argued in The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1978), men feel more threatened by merger, due to their rigid ego boundaries. 73 Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction, p. 147. See p. 146, where he observes that the "expression of the inarticulate" is a main principle in Wharton's ghost stories. 74 The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, pp. 210,209, 205 75 The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, pp. 205,215,208,209,206; one should note that the text consistently places Charlotte "in the dark" and thus in Hades, one of the examples where Wharton's allusions to the myth become confused. See footnote 71. 76 See the chapters on theory and minority women's literatures. 77 The influence of that concept of collective authorship can be detected in Alice Walker's epigraph and dedication of The Color Purple and in Leslie Silko's Ceremony with its numerous references to myth. The traditional folklore is collected in separate anthologies like Paula Gunn Allen's Spider Woman's Granddaughters. Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), or in ethnologic literature. 78 See the introduction to What Did Miss Darrington See? 79 Donna Haraway, quoted in Jane Donawerth, "Utopian Science: Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction by Women," NWSA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Autumn 1990): 535-557; p. 546. See Josette Feral, "The Powers of Difference," in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds., The Future of Difference (Boston: K.G. Hall, 1980): 88-94, p. 88: "Michel de Certeau asserted that 'theorizing always needs a Savage.' The Savage in the West has always been the Woman." As I will discuss, the women in the fictions here try to escape that category by making the racial/cultural other into the Savage. 80 See Bendixen, "Introduction," in "The Amber Gods", p. xxiv/v, who sees in Yone "the most significant embodiment in New England fiction of what Freud later called the pleasure principle." 81 See for example John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972), and feminist film criticism. 82 Rosemary Jackson, "Introduction," What Did Miss Darrington See?, p. xxiii. 83 p. 15: "the reflection grows finer and deeper while I gaze, till I dare not do so any longer." 84 pp. 59; 17.

102 85 Barton Levi St. Armand, '"I Must Have Died at Ten Minutes Past One': Posthumous Reverie in Harriet Prescott Spofford's 'The Amber Gods'" in Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, Charles L. Crow, eds., The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920, (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 99-120; p. 104. 86 Bendixen, "Introduction" in "The Amber Gods", p. xxiv. 87 Toni Morrison, Sula (New York, 1979), p. 103. 88 Sula, p. 44. 89 See Anne Koenen, "'Tell Me about It. The Big City' - The City in Black Women's Literature," Storia Nordamericana, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1990): 35-50. 90 Anne Koenen, '"Women out of Sequence': An Interview with Toni Morrison," in Gtlnter H. Lenz, ed., History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture (Frankfurt/New York, Campus, 1984), p. 207-221. 91 Bendixen, "Introduction," in "The Amber Gods", p. xxvi. 92 See p. 155: "her dark riding-habit"; her hair has "that red tint in its darkness" and she has "dark eyes" (157). 93 Bendixen "Introduction," sees the narrator as "a victim of her husband's callousness and her rival's scheme" (p. xxxi), but I also see her as a victim of social and cultural repression. Given her precarious state of mind, it is not even certain whether the other woman actually was her sexual rival. 94 Rosemary Jackson, "Introduction," p. 38. 95 Critics have pointed out how, in Colonialist discourse, the other is often feminized; see Nancy Hartsock, "Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories," Cultural Critique, No. 7 (Fall 1987), p. 193, who (referring to Said's studies) observes that in the construction of power relations "orientalism," "the orient is often feminized." See Kumkum Sangari, "The Politics of the Possible," Cultural Critique, No. 7 (Fall 1987), p. 171. 96 Lovell, Consuming Fictions, p. 11. 97 See Judith Fetterley, Provisions. A Reader from 19th-century American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985): 261-267, who interprets this line as "a far less optimistic point" in the "personal and aesthetic power" of this woman. In linking the woman's very existence to her voice, though, Spofford emphasizes the subject of silencing discussed in this chapter. 98 Bendixen, "Introduction," p. xxviii; see Anne Dalke, "'Circumstance' And the Creative Woman: Harriet Prescott Spofford," Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 1985): 71-85, arrives at a different reading (with which I don't agree since it disregards the question of racism): "Her family enables her to survive; she finds within it not only a wellspring of creativity by eventual deliverance as well." (p. 81) interprets the story as a fundamental statement against realism: "Spofford suggests in her story that the 'realist school,' which James commends in his review, is inadequate to encompass the exigencies of female circumstance." I am much more skeptical since Spofford continually contradicts her own moves in the story. 99 Fetterley, Provisions, p. 267. Although Fetterley critiques the racist displacement, she does not comment on how it counteracts the feminist intentions of the story. 100 Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," in Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 243-270.1 use Showalter's "wild zone" here as a Utopian vision in fantastic

103 literature; as a description of the status quo, I find the concept of a place outside of patriarchy problematic. 101 See the biographies on Wharton. 102 See Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, as an example. 103 Jennice G. Thomas reads "Miss Mary Pask" as a story about "the possibilities of vengeance for a supposedly powerless spinster," "the buried power of female anger" at her lack of female company. Thomas sees the narrator's interpretation of sexual interest as a misreading of Pask's longing for female company, lured into that mistake by familiarity with legends about figures like vampires that "serve to reinforce the links between death, evil, and female sexuality within the male imagination." (p. 114) "Spook or Spinster? Edith Wharton's 'Miss Mary Pask'," in Carpenter/Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction. See pp. 108, 112, 114. - I am not sure whether Thomas is not denying Miss Pask's sexuality here; I don't see the narrator so much as misreading her loneliness than recoiling from the power of female sexuality, an interpretation that is underlined by the replacement of the supernatural by female sexuality. 104 See the chapter "Metamorphoses" on vampires. 105 Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny"' (1919) Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 24 vols, ed. and transl. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), vol. 17, p. 219-252 106 Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith, p. 4. See Helene Cixous, "Fiction and its Phantoms," New Literary History, 7 (1975): 525-548, and Jane Marie Todd, "The Veiled Woman in Freud's 'Das Unheimliche'," Signs, vol. 11, no. 3 (1986): 519-528. 107 Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction, p. ix/x. 108 See Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction, p. x, who sees women's writing of the uncanny about "experiences of male power and brutality, and the uncertainties of inscriptions and confusions of identity for women and children." The one woman writer whom he discusses is Edith Wharton.

THE FANTASTIC IN THE LITERATURES OF WOMEN OF COLOR

Her tongue is all de weapon a woman got. Folktale quoted in Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935) [...] the ghost in the machine [...] Toni Morrison on black literature, Things Unspoken" (1989)

"Unspeakable

It is not my job to be an archivist, preserving the ancient myths [...] Legends change from one speaker to another speaker, and there is no definite version. Maxine Hong Kingston, Belles-Lettres (1989) Folklore is the fiction of the poor. Angela Carter, Novelists in Interview (1985)

The tension between silence and speaking is central in the literatures of women of color. In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," (1989), an essay on African American literature and the canon that captures this struggle in its title, Toni Morrison calls black literature "the ghost in the machine." With this metaphor, she establishes a connection between black literature and the fantastic, then proceeds to elaborate on yet another fantastic metaphor, "invisibility," when referring to the blindness of the canon towards minority literature: We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily 'not there'; that a void may be empty, but is not a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them.1

In characterizing Beloved (1987), Morrison talks about the echoes that surround absences and silences,2 gaps in individual and collective memories and histories that have to be filled; in commenting on The Bluest Eye (1970), her first novel, she points out "the emptiness left by a boom or cry," taboos that have to be broken to counter a void of "unbeing."3 This general principle of African American literature of filling a void and disturbing a social silence is realized in Beloved's story that overcomes a silence in both African American and white discourse and in The Bluest Eye where it is "the stroke

106 that announces something more than a secret shared, but a silence broken, a void filled, an unspeakable thing spoken at last."4 Equally, Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) opens with the caveat, "You better not never tell nobody but God," a paternal prohibition that the novel increasingly undermines and violates. Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988) mentions in its second sentence that "[everybody] knows but nobody talks about the legend of Sapphira Wade." In the first scene of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), an old woman waits year for year "for the day she could tell her daughter." Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983) implores a Native-American creation myth about Spider woman and her daughters who "sent their thought into the void," then introduces her protagonist's awareness of the gaps, "that much of what had gone before was missing." And Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) revolves around "trying to name the unspeakable."5 Although trying to name the unspeakable reminds of definitions of the fantastic, the fantastic in minority women's literature is another fantastic than that of white Anglo-American (women's) literature, focused as it is on "survival as essential and all-encompassing,"6 based as it is on the integration of the fantastic in traditional ethnic cultures7 - it is, in the words of Paula Gunn Allen, the devotion "to the old ways of kinship with the supernatural,"8 or, in the words of Marjorie Pryse, "folk magic as art and fiction as a form of conjuring."9 When naming white women's fictions that have influenced them, minority women writers often mention novels with strong fantastic tendencies; Maxine Hong Kingston's favorite book, for example, is Virginia Woolf s Orlando, because it transgresses the boundaries of time, sex, and biology and because of its fantastic approach to history,10 and Toni Morrison, although feeling closest to writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Leslie Silko and Maxine Hong Kingston, also names Alice Hoffman and Marilynne Robinson." In both minority and white women's literature, the female body is the symbolic space of women's dreams and nightmare visions. In African American women's literature, the struggle for control over the female body invariably invokes a historical legacy that has denied black women control over their bodies, reproduction, and children in slavery when their "economic value" was based on labor as well as on reproductive "capacities" - they were, in Beloveds words, "property that reproduced itself without cost."12 The scenarios of patriarchal control over the female body that women's fantastic fictions (both black and white13) define as constitutive of dystopian societies were a historical reality for black women during slavery, and often after slavery as well. In social and literary discourses, African

107 American women were either excessively sexualized, or de-sexed in a counter-movement meant to correct these stereotypes, but ultimately only reflective of different, but equally distorted attitudes.14 Correspondingly, since white hegemony has denied black women's freedom of choice and the legitimacy of their desire, images of control over their bodies in African American women's literature express a Utopian dimension. Speculations that African American women do not write Utopian fictions 15 proceed from the unarticulated premise that literary expressions would be similar for black and white women. Yet Morrison's fantasies of self-determined desire expressed in the protagonists Sula and Hannah in Sula and Reba in Song of Solomon are Utopian; they are not embedded in a typically Utopian context of a better, perfect society, but are projected on and realized in an individual in the context of the black community. By breaking the silences of sexist and racist discourses, minority women writers construct their communities' histories not only against the ethnocentric distortions of white historiography, but also against genderbiases. This dual orientation rediscovers traditional communal orientations (that in white women's fantastic literature serve as Utopian features) and interprets them from a position of "double jeopardy." 16 While the writers share the focus on their communities, their cultural traditions and the interventions of white supremacy, they arrive at different evaluations of gendered relations within the communities: while some Latina, Chinese American and African American authors like Alice Walker, Cherie Moraga and Maxine Hong Kingston identify machismo, misogyny, and homophobia, Toni Morrison describes the "egalitarianism of oppression" and Native American writers connect to a heritage of women-centered myths. Folklore and Literature, Magic and Lies Theme for Negro writers will emerge when they have begun to feel the meaning of the history of their race. Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937) Man cannot express that which does not exist - either in the form of dreams, ideas or realities - in his environment. Ralph Ellison, "Richard Wright's Blues" (1945)

Minority women's orientation towards their oral cultures, a tradition often symbolized in a maternal figure, explicitly counteracts the racist and

108 misogynist politics of the canon: "[...] reclaiming the mother tongue is much more than reproducing a dialect or marshaling a new vocabulary; it is also bringing to life a rich oral tradition in which women have actively participated."17 Leslie Silko points out the intricate relationship between Pueblo speaker and audience in constructing a story, aiming to recreate this "spider's web" in her work and let her audience "experience English in a structure that follows patterns from the oral tradition."18 In the discussion about black literature, theorists have aimed again and again to deconstruct the dichotomy between high literature and folklore,19 often referring to music as the model of literature; Richard Wright, in 1937, argues that in the blues, spirituals, and folktales of folklore "the Negro achieved his most indigenous and complete expression,"20 and Alice Walker, in a gendered reading of that dichotomy nearly fifty years later in 1974, comes to the conclusion that "[w]e have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high - and low."21 In his programmatic essay "Negro Youth Speaks" (1925) on the aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke still celebrates that "reason and realism have cured us of sentimentality; instead of the wail and appeal, there is challenge and indictment."22 In the unfortunate opposition between "sentimentality" and "challenge," realism emerges as the only mode of social commitment, an argument that contradicts Locke's appreciation only a paragraph earlier of the gift of a natural irony, of a transfiguring imagination, of rhapsodic Biblical speech, of dynamic musical swing, of cosmic emotion such as only the gifted pagans knew, of a return of nature, not by way of the forced and worn formula of Romanticism, but through the closeness of an imagination that has never broken kinship with nature.23

That approach overlooks the subversive potential of folklore where racism and white people are often the target of ridicule and criticism, where for example signifying as "the slave's trope" that relates to African culture subverts white systems of signification;24 folklore as the "fiction of the poor" has historically been "an outlet for protesting social injustice."23 The issue of realism and its prevalence in minority literatures was intricately linked to the question of audience;26 faced with a dual audience (which, in fact, meant a predominantly white audience), writers were constrained by the demand for authenticity, their literature "often read and evaluated against an elusive concept of authenticity."27 As a consequence, Richard Wright fears the presence of a "mental censor" restraining artistic expression.28 The stress on authenticity is mirrored in the authenticating strategies of the slave narratives29 and frequent attacks on writers who are

109 suspected of misrepresenting their communities and thus of reaffirming stereotypes.30 Zora Neale Hurston, as an anthropologist, developed a professional interest in folktales, in what the narrators themselves, pointing to their position outside white realism, called "lies." Unlike many of her predecessors and contemporaries, she did not look down on these tales as exotic, and did not share the devaluation of magic as "superstition," instead declaring that whites "have a nerve to laugh at conjure" when their own religion was so blatantly magical as well.31 Robert Hemenway, in his introduction to Mules and Men, mentions that some of Hurston's strongest opponents were representatives of the black middle-class who "thought of the folk heritage as [...] a legacy of ignorance which could be used to justify racism."32 That concern may well have prevented black writers, for example in the Harlem Renaissance, from making full use of their cultural heritage. 3 To realize the potential of these folktales, Hurston explains, she had to gain self-consciousness first, use the "spy-glass of Anthropology to look" at the familiar tales.34 Yet in her own fiction, she was ambivalent about questions of representation, arguing in "What White Publishers Won't Print" (1950) for authentic images, especially of upper-class blacks, with explicit references to a white audience's prejudices and literature's potential to correct stereotypes.35 In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), on the other hand, she states in the second paragraph that for women, "The dream is the truth." That definition reminds of - or anticipates - Rhys's definition of fantasy as the feminine mode. Addressing the question of audience in "Blueprint for Negro Writing," Richard Wright, equally torn as Zora Neale Hurston in his evaluation of folk culture, complained already in 1937 that "[rjarely was the best of this writing addressed to the Negro himself' and argues against a simplistic "imaginative conception" that perceives of literature as a "carbon copy of reality;"36 Ralph Ellison regrets that "[t]oo many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience," with the result that they "plead the Negro's humanity."37 Yet it was only with the socio-political changes of the nineteen-sixties, the emergence of the New Black Renaissance of the nineteen-seventies, and the development of the Black culture debates of the same time,38 that intended audience and focus of black literature changed.39 Toni Morrison articulates this shift for her own work: "I always wanted to read Black books in which I was enlightened, I as a Black personf...] There are not many books like that. Even the best of them are explaining something to white people."40 That shift applies to other minorities as well where, as in African American literature, autobiography was the prevailing literary form for a long time. Latina writer

110 Alma Goméz states that she is "sick of being a damn anthropologist for people about myself."41 The new orientation and the search for an aesthetics that "reflects their own multicultural legacies"42 has meant that writers turn to their oral traditions43 and increasingly use the fantastic, a fact often neglected in criticism or still devalued in favor of a call for a mimetic representation supposed to provide role models.44 The magic or fantastic integrated in folklore is apparent in figures like the conjure woman, the mediary role of the dead, and zombies; in tales that provide explanations for events like the creation of the world45 or phenomena like the existence of white people;46 and in protective beliefs in amuletts and spells,47 all these structures that allow interpretative control of the world. The literary appropriation of folklore as representation of a worldview that questions white value-systems and challenges hegemonic perceptions of reality is a recent phenomenon. In the older fictions, folklore was mainly used to advance the plot or lend "local color" to characters (mostly characters portrayed as either old, poor, or uneducated); it is only contemporary fictions that use folklore to "defend, explain, and raise questions about the nature of the society"48 and to incorporate its seamless fusion of fantasy and realism as a structuring device.49 In many contemporary novels, the traditional stories not only coexist with the new fictions, but are intricately interwoven, thus transforming the old myths; this approach that duplicates folklore's structure of incorporating both invention and fact places the authors within a tradition of collective authorship - Alice Walker acknowledges her indebtedness to the collective voices in epigraphs, Leslie Silko pays her tribute to the communal folklore by developing her novel in the frame of myth. That approach has created controversy in minority groups. Attacked by members of her community as misrepresenting Chinese myths, Maxine Hong Kingston points out that the task of the writer differs from the task of a chronologist, exceeding the limits of collection and reproduction.50 In a fictionalized account of this question in Leslie Silko's Ceremony (1977), the medicine-man Betonie rejects a conservative stance, since it would neglect to deal with the vital experience of the community's suffering from white racism. In a world changed by the confrontation with the dominant white culture, he claims, it "became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong."51 The writers reject a conservative stance as ultimately weakening the power of folk culture by relegating it to a museum of myths that bear no relevance on the present. One of the syncretic adaptations in Ceremony is a new myth that explains the appearance of white people and their obsession with destruction

Ill as the result of Indian witchcraft, much like LeRoi Jones's play A Black Mass (1966) that explains whiteness as the disastrous failure of a black conjure experiment. This imaginative approach to mythology has not only been the target of criticism from more conservative members of minority groups, but has also been misunderstood: Maxine Hong Kingston mentions that her revisions of myths (partly motivated by her intent to correct their male bias) in The Woman Warrior and China Men were ignored when the novels were translated and the myths were changed back into their original versions. Kingston suspects that "[t]he translators just assumed I got the myths wrong, so they put them right again."52 In the traditional world-view, white Western attitudes represent a degeneration from an earlier way of life.53 Scientific approaches to reality and truth and their claim to represent truth and objectivity are exposed as fatally flawed - the objectification of nature leads to a contempt for life; white people in Ceremony see "only dead objects" in nature;54 their rationality culminates in the threat of nuclear holocaust in Silko's novel. In Morrison's Beloved, schoolteacher's obscene abuse of Sethe and his pseudoscientific classification of her as an animal are attributed to the same instrumental rationality. The clash between two cultures and different interpretations of the world is omnipresent in the novels and often personified, as in Ceremony, where Tayo comes to question science as the "true source of explanations" of "causes and effects," listening instead to his grandmother's memories of the "magical" past.55 The core of this magic consists of a web of stories which animate nature and assume an interdependent rather than dominant relationship to nature. Likewise, in Beloved, schoolteacher's methods are contrasted in Paul D's reading of the signs of nature to find his way out of slavery, stressing a different literacy based on black culture.56 That a schoolteacher should be the representative of the worst aspects of science in Beloved is no coincidence. Schoolteachers and schools are symbols of indoctrination rather than learning in contemporary minority women's literature, a tendency that differs markedly from earlier literature where learning is mostly equated with freedom and where schools are often interpreters between the two cultures, agencies that still the desire for cultural transformation.57 Speaking from a contemporary anti-assimilationist position, Paula Gunn Allen rejects education as "a primary tool of conquest," part of a "cultural rather than physical genocide."58 Literacy, defined by white terms of knowledge, is "not particularly useful to tribal people who were once able to survive and prosper without it."59 In Ceremony, Tayo's cousin Rocky, under the influence of formal school-learning, identifies with

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white culture and dismisses the traditional lore as "superstitious."60 In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the schoolroom is the scene of the protagonist's silencing; in Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the juxtaposition of the Dick-and-Jane-primer with the Breedloves, a black family, exposes schooltexts as a tool of white middle-class ideology; in Maya Angelou's / Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1970), the (con)text of a graduation has to be changed radically to make sense for the black graduates.61 In these fictions, science is a threat to minority cultures, aimed at total domination and the destruction of the traditional world-view. Maxine Hong Kingston recalls in an interview how, as a child, terrified by the ghosts with which the Chinese American world was populated, she wanted to become "a scientist, an engineer, to have a very rational life" with the goal to control and destroy "the supernatural world."62 As Paula Gunn Allen mentions, one of the characteristics of the traditional culture is the emphasis on community, defying the individualistic ethos of white society. A result both of a different ethos and a survivalstrategy in the face of racism,63 this sense of community is threatened by the contact with white culture as well. Christianity is the agent of individualism by promising the salvation of individuals in Ceremony, both in Sula and in Beloved, Toni Morrison dramatizes the threat that the black community perceives in individualism; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior juxtaposes the communal bonds in the old China and the despair of a tribal person alone with the atomization of the community in the United States. Critics warn (white) feminists who idealize community as Utopian that community might be as oppressive as Western individualism, since it "denies difference by positing fusion rather than separation as the social ideal."64 Minority women's novels do not succumb to the danger of idealizing the sense of community nostalgically; especially where the community's identity and its "social ideal" are built around restrictive gender-roles, they locate a conflict for their female protagonists.65 They are reluctant, though, to dismiss community, suspicious whether the individualism of white society would indeed be more beneficial for women of color. Instead, they negotiate between difference and identification66.

"Quiet as it is kept" - Hidden Histories If recreating history is a central issue of white women's fantastic fiction, it is even more crucial in minority women's texts, to the extent that one critic claims that "generic distinctions such as those of Hayden White between history ('discourse of the real') and narrative fiction ('discourse of desire')" do

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not make sense, since minority women write against distorted fictions that are neither real nor desirable.67 Through the use of the fantastic, history is consciously constructed as "always" situated "within 'textual' boundaries." One of the functions of the fantastic is to re-invent ethnic histories against the odds of such a biased official historiography - in both Morrison's Sula and Silko's Ceremony, for example, soldiers from ethnic minorities are severely traumatized by the slaughter of the white man's wars, their experience not covered by the official stories; in Kindred (1979), Octavia Butler uses time-travel to re-create the history of slavery,69 while Toni Morrison uses a ghost in Beloved; in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the fate of a nameless aunt can only be approximated by the use of fantasy. Thus, the concept of history as a "fantastical construct"70 moves to center stage. In Latin American literature, the Magic Realists as well blend the fantastic with realism to invent their own reality,71 and see oral tradition as a corrective of official historiography.72 In Alejo Carpentier's view, folklore offers an authentic and unmediated approach to a "magic reality" which has ceased to exist in Europe (and the US), where the fantastic has been domesticated and conventionalized.73 Theorists like Alejo Carpentier (in his preface to El Reino de este Mundo, 1949) have identified its social and collective orientation as characteristic of Magic Realism, distinguishing it from the individualistic fantastic in (male) Western literature that is "artificial" and subjected to laws.74 Carpentier similarly greets the return of "something that the West has long forgotten; "the rebirth of art as collective action,"75 and explicitly refers to the cultures of oppressed ethnic groups like Indios and blacks as a source of the fantastic.76 The struggle to establish a voice and re-create a history against silencing is similar to the fantastic's function in white women's literary history as discussed in the previous chapter;77 but in addition to a gender-specific approach to silencing, an orientation towards the whole ethnic community prevails, an orientation that most certainly includes men who were silenced by racism as well - the iron "bit" in Morrison's Beloved that fills Paul D's mouth, making speech impossible, is a very real example that becomes symbolic of racist efforts to stifle black voices. Minority women often write against an imposed muteness reinforced by double marginalization as evidenced in the numerous expositional episodes that revolve around racist and sexist silencing.78 Kingston has likened the prohibition to speak under which her heroine suffers - "You must not tell anyone" - to the opening of Morrison's The Bluest Eye: "Quiet as it is kept."79 In all these fictions, the political function of silencing is apparent. The nameless aunt in The Woman Warrior serves as a warning of what happens to female transgression: not only does the

114 silencing destroy her chances for happiness after death, but it also erases any traces of female rebellion in history and deprives women of role models. The narrator feels that she is asked to "participate in her punishment,"80 and by complying with the demand to maintain silence, she would have ultimately punished herself as well. Equally, the racist implications of silencing become apparent. African American literature like Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Toni Morrison's Beloved confront and destroy pernicious stereotypes like the castrating black woman and the black mammy;81 Toni Morrison's novels and Toni Cade Bambara's short stories reject the identification with white norms that devalue the black family as dysfunctional; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior questions the cliché of the passive, compliant Chinese American; Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984) deals with the alienation and victimization by sexual exploitation, alcoholism, and Christianity. The question of telling is closely connected to the issue of narrative control and dramatized in the novels. In Ceremony, the fight over narrative control culminates in the struggle to control the closure of the novel; in The Woman Warrior, the narrator strives to break silences that negate female and Chinese experience, finding her voice in the closure of the book in a maternal tradition of storytelling; and in Beloved, the search for an adequate medium to fill the gap in the lore where Beloved's story belongs is visualized in the characters' painful articulation of their memories. These novels connect finding a voice with an affirmation of the fantastic, from Kingston's and Silko's blending of myth and realism to Morrison's use of a ghost as the catalyctic agent to tell the history of slavery. In Beloved, the issue of the female body and appropriation of the word are linked directly: when, on the last pages of the novel, Sethe remembers the thing she regrets most, namely having produced ink for the schoolteacher who later forces her to breast-feed his nephew;82 when Sethe has to sell her body for ten minutes to be able to buy an inscription on Beloved's tombstone, the only official writing that will remind of her existence and death. In these scenes, historiography and social science are contrasted with their "victims," the objects of their discourse that misrepresents history. Even Sethe's attempt to set a memorial for Beloved reveals the ultimate powerlessness of the oppressed to counter-write history in the "real," to appropriate the patriarchal white power of naming83: the written word for which Sethe (again) has to pay with her body is a word misunderstood: Beloved, in the preacher's address, does not refer to the deceased, but to those who are left behind. Here again, the relation to the written word is tenuous, and history in Beloved is consequently not recreated through a meticulous search for historical sources and documents that more often than

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not prove to be meager anyway;84 although Morrison was inspired to write Beloved by a newspaper-clipping about a black woman accused of infanticide, her recognition that that story was not part of the "lore"85 immediately concentrates on oral tradition as the medium of historiography in African American culture. Beloved shows how the experience of slavery is re-created through telling, through the stories that Paul D and Sethe share, that Baby Suggs remembers. Where a historical approach focused on documents would just (if at all) provide the rough outlines of a slave's life, and only whenever he or she came into contact with white power, Morrison's use of oral tradition and the fantastic is able to provide an inside view of slavery, making the slaves subjects rather than objects of historiography. The fantastic is thus not only an integral part of that oral tradition, but also necessary to fill the gaps left in the lore; and the use of the fantastic expresses a concept of history where the purpose "is not to record the 'facts' but to reach a deeper meaning and to project a minority ethos."87 In Magic Realism, history "insistently raises the question of how it is to be known" in a context of a heterogeneity of "historical sedimentation that results from the physical coexistence over time of different ethnic groups [...] each laden with its respective cultural freight;"88 complex interactions between cultures89 and the mechanics of dominance forbids an approach to history that would follow "a linear interpretation of the past."90 Beloved's story in Morrison's novel represents an example of that approach in African American literature: the text, unlike the linear slave-narratives with their trajectory from slavery to freedom, circles around the gaps and silences in historiogaphy, using the fantastic in the form of a ghost to reconstruct slavery and to explore the meaning of history.91 Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) equally follows the victimization of minorities by the written word and by social "science" in Nanapush's explanation to his granddaughter: A/

once the bureaucrats sink their barbed pens into the lives of Indians, the paper starts flying, a blizzard of legal forms, a waste of ink by the gallon, a correspondence to which there is no end or reason. That's when I began to see what we were becoming, and the years have borne me out: a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match.92

Here, writing is interpreted as a weapon in the hands of the white majority that will disempower the Native Americans. And in the image of the dead "pressed trees," the novel resumes one of its major subjects, the close relationship of the tribe to the woods, "woods inhabited by ghosts and

116 roamed by Pillagers,"93 woods that are chopped down by white men who create a "death road" of trees,94 a work that Beloved calls "the sin [...] of slicing trees for a living" (47). Tracks captures the magical quality of the woods even in the image of their final destruction: Around me, a forest was suspended, lightly held. The fingered lobes of leaves floated on nothing. The powerful throats, the column of trunks and splayed twigs, all substance was illusion. Nothing was solid. Each green crown was held in the air by no more than splinters of bark.95

The woods represent traditional culture, a place of interdependence with and respect for nature and a place of traditional magic, a "world-view that has included all things, natural and supernatural, within the net of essential existence."96 In the spectacle of the suspended trees, an animistic world-view undermines the primacy of the gaze as the privileged "rational" sense - what the white men see is "an illusion." Yet that objectifying white-world view already prevails in nineteen-twentyfour when Nanapush is still hoping to maintain the traditional ways; not only do the whites kill the forest, Nanapush is also forced to use "pressed trees" as a strategy of survival: "To become a bureaucrat myself was the only way that I could [...] find a ledge to kneel on." But his attitude is clearly marked by a critical distance - he will use white science, but does not believe in it. Characteristically, the novel ends with the image of living trees: "We gave against your rush like creaking oaks" is Nanapush's testimony to the survival of traditional culture. In cinema as well, minority women are beginning to use fantasy to recreate history: in the first full-length feature-film by an African American woman director, "Daughters of the Dust" by Julie Dash (1992), an unborn child tells the story of her ancestors' life on an island off the coast of Carolina. Set at the turn of the century and told largely in Gullah (with subtitles during parts of the movie), "Daughters of the Dust" reconstructs an idyllic black community close to magic and ritual; that wholeness, though, even in the movie, is doomed to become an experience of the past, since the families are on the point of leaving the island and going North. Throughout these fictions, the past and cultural traditions are equated with places - either rural areas as in Morrison's Song of Solomon or homelands like Africa, China, and Indian reservations; while urban landscapes represent the decay of traditional cultures and assimilation to white American culture. Assimilation in turn is interpreted as alienation and corruption, the intrusion of alien concepts of reality. In contrast, the places of the past are mythical (and associated with the fantastic), replete with promises of spiritual wholeness, empowering magic, and interpretative

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control of the world; folklore, as Ralph Ellison stated in 1955, announces "the Negro's willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensibilities as to the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to define these crucial matters for him."97 Toni Morrison - Beloved and the Ghost of Slavery Something must be wrong with my milk, she [Eva] thought. Sula She sat in this room holding her son on her lap, staring at his closed eyelids and listening to the sound of his sucking. Ruth in Song of Solomon "Then you can do exactly what you bitches have always done: take care of white folks' children." Son to Jadine, Tar Baby "Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children." Sethe in Beloved Denver took her mother's milk right along with the blood of her sister. Beloved

As the epigraphs demonstrate, mothering and nurturing, mother's milk and nursing, hold a central place in Morrison's work. In a triangle of the appropriation of black women's nurturing by white society, the "tainting" of the mother's milk, and excessive nurturing, the novels explore the disastrous effects of the interventions of white supremacy into the black family, especially the bond between mother and child, and here especially the mother-daughter relationship. That relationship oscillates between the concept of a more material mothering, portrayed in Geraldine in The Bluest Eye and Eva and Hannah in Sula, and the excessive mothering of Ruth in Song of Solomon, Nel in Sula, and Sethe in Beloved where mother-daughterrelationships are at the center. In Beloved, the dynamics of white intervention into the mother-daughter-dyad and the resulting deficit in nurturing make the protagonists hunger for a compensation for that deficit. The real,

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characterized by destructive white social forces and loss (and narrated in the realistic mode), necessitates the Utopian, a place of blissful mother-daughtersymbiosis (told in the fantastic mode). Both the collective and individual strands of the novel evoke the fantastic: the collective, because, as we have seen, a historiography from a marginalized perspective has to reinvent history; and the individual, because the extinction of the separation of self and other in the mother-child-symbiosis is a fantastic element. The fantastic permeates Toni Morrison's work, culminating in Beloved; among black women writers, she is the one who has used the fantastic most consistently." It is the fantastic of black culture - conjure women, signs interpreted as omens, ghosts or the living dead of voodoo -, used both as motif and structuring mode in a fusion of fantasy and realism that effectively exposes the fundamental deficiencies and excesses of a one-sided rationalistic world-view. Morrison identifies that mode as "another way of knowing things," as a "cosmology, the way in which Black people looked at the world," as blending "the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world at the same time with neither taking precedence over the other."100 In that orientation, her use of the traditional magic differs from Alice Walker's. Walker, in several short stories in In Love and Trouble (1973), uses folklore, as Trudier Harris demonstrates, "for the purposes of defining characters and illustrating relationships between them as well as for plot development."101 In The Color Purple, she chooses a Utopian ending, an ending, however, not related to black tradition, but to romance - Celie's longing (for a job, a house, and a family of her own) is certainly Utopian for a black woman of her time, but, by spelling out the American Dream, does not violate the parameters of American society, its transgression paradoxically finally reaffirming the very system the novel has set out to defy.102 In contrast, Morrison's Beloved has "[n]o compound of houses, no neighborhood, no sculpture, no paint, no time, especially no time, because memory, pre-historic memory, has no time."103 Where earlier writers plead for cultural sameness, Morrison radically uses folklore and its tradition of the spirits of the dead to make a critique more devastating and fundamental than any realistic novel could, since its very mode strikes at the heart of Western civilization, questioning a post-Enlightenment instrumental rationality that objectifies blacks in particular and the other in general. Residing outside of linear time, in myth, Beloved's story and the fantastic re-creation of slavery disrupt the dominant discourse and its repressions. Beloved, Toni Morrison's novel about slavery, repeatedly warns and mourns in its closing paragraphs that "It was not a story to pass on." Yet Beloved's story does not vanish without a trace, as the closure also states: QO

119 Sometimes the photographs of a close friend or relative - looked at too long - shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don't, because they know things will never be the same if they do. (emphasis added)

Something familiar that lurks beneath the surface, detectable only by shifts in perception, excluded from conscious discourse - that situating of Beloved's story nearly paraphrases Freud's definition of the uncanny as something familiar that ought to have remained hidden and, when it comes to light, returns as the fantastic that disturbs our familiar reading of the world, so that "things will never be the same." Beloved's story thus, if and when it surfaces, is defined as the uncanny, as it indeed is in Morrison's novel: Beloved is the literalized ghost of slavery, haunting black literature. And that fantastic is real as well - you "can touch it." Beloved recreates black individual and collective history out of the "void" that Morrison mentions in "Unspeakable Things Unspoken." The fantastic has to fill "the empty space of not knowing about Halle" (95) and to listen "for the holes - the things fugitives did not say; the questions they did not ask. [...] for the unnamed, unmentioned people left behind." (92) In that gap lurks the story of the traumatic dispossession of the black woman's nurturing and the destruction of the black family, evoked in the novel's opening that introduces the familiar fantastic subject of the haunted house, albeit with its own implications, in its own cultural and historical context, differing from white women's literature. Here, the haunted house does not symbolize a gendered conflict between female powerlessness and male violence in the nuclear family,104 but a racial conflict between black powerlessness and white violence that disastrously affects the black family. The unspeakable at the center of Morrison's novel is a staple of the Gothic. Morrison establishes a creative tension between different poles: individual and community, oppression and Utopia, realism and fantasy. These poles invite a reading in the context of historiography as a social discourse and psychoanalysis as an individual discourse. To read minority literatures in the context of psychoanalysis is not without dangers - on the one hand, as mentioned, traditional minority cultures do not subscribe to the individualistic ethos of white society, and, on the other hand, a reading that would focus exclusively on the individual and his or her psychology would be at the expense of social context and neglect questions of hegemony. At its worst, such a reading would "explain away" social conflicts as individual neuroses105 and would also naturalize the fantastic as schizophrenic manifestations. And such an approach has of course been denounced in

120 minority literature itself - both in Leslie Silko's Ceremony and Toni Morrison's Sula, white psychologists fail to grasp the despair of minority men traumatized by war; in Ceremony, Tayo remembers "the things the white doctors had yelled at him - that he had to think only of himself, and not about the others, that he would never get well as long as he used words like 'we' and 'us.'"106 Where science and its focus on the individual fail, a recourse to ancient forms of communal healing - ceremonies and rituals - succeeds. Thus, a psychoanalytic approach, as mentioned in chapter 2, has to be contextualized and historicized. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., points out that using "Western critical theory uncritically" is a form of neocolonialism; but this does not necessarily imply dismissing a critical approach simply because it is European, but rather that "the concern of the Third World critic should properly be to understand the ideological subtext which any critical theory reflects and embodies, and the relation which this subtext bears to the production of meaning."107 It will become obvious how the construction (or rather destruction) of the black family differs dramatically from the bourgeois family of a turn-of-the-century Vienna, yet it will also become apparent that Morrison's focus on early infancy enters into a critical dialogue with feminist Object Relations Theory. In Beloved, the disastrous effects of "not good enough mothering"108 are put into the sociohistorical context of slavery, specifically the appropriation of nurturing by white slaveholders which is distorted into the pernicious cliché of the Black mammy, a stereotype that twists a violation into a voluntary act. Son's bitter accusation in Tar Baby that black women have always taken "care of white folks' children" represents a variation of that cultural lie. Beloved exposes that lie by focusing on the black women's experience, just as it approaches slavery from the black perspective, making blacks the subjects rather than the objects of historiography.109 If the fantastic is the "unseen and unsaid of a culture," what is the silence and invisibility of Beloved! Repression is a strategy of survival for the protagonists who spend their days with "the serious work of beating back the past;" (73); Sethe's mind is "busy with the things she could forget." (191) The text, unlike the linear slave-narratives with their trajectory from slavery to freedom, circles around these gaps and silences, incorporating and duplicating as a structural principle Sethe's motions: "Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask." (163) The repressed, the loss and absence is of course Beloved; what has remained unsaid is her story. In a wider sense, if we consider Sethe's positioning simultaneously as a mother and daughter, the loss is of

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mothering. In yet a wider circle, it is the collective suffering of the black community, from the middle passage to slavery and after, is racism and genocide. The central scenes, the repressed that the text circles as Sethe's memory refuses to dwell on the all too "familiar" (literally, since the scenes are all family-scenes), are all related to mothering and nurture: Sethe's murder of her daughter; her own mother's murder of her children by white men, and schoolteacher and his nephews stealing Sethe's milk. It is important that the violation of the black women's body in Beloved is not rape, as in other African American women writers' fictions about slavery,110 but the appropriation of Sethe's nurturing: white men force her into a maternal role and steal milk from her baby, thus depriving her child while usurping her nurturing for white society. Nursing and the breast figure centrally in the symbiotic mother-child bond of early infancy.1" In Beloved, the intervention of slavery disrupts that bond and introduces deprivation and violence, captured in the image of Sethe's milk mingling with her baby's blood quoted in the epigraph. The intervention also causes hunger; Sethe remembers her own deficits as a daughter when white children were nursed first (not even by her mother, but by another black woman) and left her unfulfilled, and that memory, together with the trauma of schoolteacher's obscenity, triggers her determination to mother her children: [...] I'll tend her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else - and the one time I did it was took from me - they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby. [...] The one I managed to have milk for and get it to her even after they stole it; after they handled me like I was a cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses. (200)

The white (male) intervention sets in motion a chain-reaction: the violent deprivation upsets the balance between nurturing and individuation - there is not enough mothering, there is too much separation imposed from the outside, a separation, moreover, not linked, as in the "classical" white model, to the father, but to white men.112 The black father is robbed of paternal authority and reduced to a child himself, to an impotent spectator on the margins of this violence; Halle, forced to watch the scene behind the stable, unable to interfere, is left blabbering and severely disturbed, smearing his face with butter in yet another reference to milk. Racist intervention destroys the black family - by denying a place to the father who is "replaced" by white authority, by disrupting the bond between mother and children.

122 The subject of thwarted motherhood returns, with another turn of the screw, in the subject of infanticide, when Sethe kills Beloved rather than surrender to separation and renewed slavery. Rather than being a victim again, Sethe chooses to be an agent, exerting the only choice she has left as a black woman. Her desparate act is born by her refusal to "love small" as a mother in slavery, as her mother-in-law remembers; yet there is literally no place for good-enough-mothering (that becomes Utopian) in slavery, the short idyll of Sweet Home long having been disavowed by white patriarchy and slavery."3 In observing that "unless carefree, motherlove was a killer" (132) - and, as Beloved amply demonstrates, motherlove during slavery was anything but carefree -, the novel directly puts the blame for Beloved's death where it belongs, to those social forces that intervene in the expression of motherlove. And Sethe's own need for mothering had been thwarted as well: in the scenes of her childhood, the mother is a distant figure speaking an unintelligible language. The special emphasis on language, understanding and memory introduces the subject of black women's roles as bearers of culture and the importance of oral tradition. Sethe had been separated from her mother: Nan had to nurse whitebabies and me too because Ma'am was in the rice. The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk that belongs to you; [...] I'll tell Beloved about that; she'll understand. She my daughter. [...] like a daughter which is what I wanted to be and would have been if my ma'am had been able to get out of the rice long enough before they hanged her and let me be one. [...] I wonder what they was doing when they was caught. Running, you think? No. Not that. Because she was my ma'am and nobody's ma'am would run off and leave her daughter, would she? Would she, now? (203)

Thus, Sethe is positioned at the center of two mother-daughter dyads: as the mother of a daughter, her milk is stolen by whites, she kills the daughter; as a daughter, she does not get enough milk because whites steal it, and her mother is killed. This double positioning starts a confusion of identities by associating both mother and daughter with violent death and lack of nurturing. In the Utopian yearning to compensate for that lack in the real, mother and daughter, Sethe and Beloved, return to the symbiotic bliss of the pre-Oedipal period. We have seen that black mothering has no place in slave society, is Utopian; in Beloveds interpretation, it can only exist in the fantastic. The fantastic merging of identities in which mothers and daughters become one and indistinguishable counteracts their separation in the real. And the retreat of the characters into the pre-symbolic symbiotic stage114 effectively removes

123 the mother-daughter dyad from the influence of the real, a reality confined in the bonds of slavery. Where white society has already disavowed the black father, this retreat now finally explodes the family as "germ-cell" of civilization where gendered and racial identities should be forged by immersion into a pre-Oedipal stage where the "Law of the (white) Father" does not rule. In Luce Irigaray's and Julia Kristeva's work, maternity is interpreted as "a conceptual challenge to phallogocentrism" where "gestation and nurturance break down the oppositions between self and other, subject and object, inside and outside."115 In Beloved's reenactment of symbiosis, self and other merge, a merging set in motion when Sethe first meets Beloved. Remembering her mother and her words about how Sethe might recognize her dead body, she recognizes in the girl the ghost, the "dead body" of her daughter, who is metaphorically reborn when Sethe's water breaks. Sethe turns into the passive, nurtured child, "was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved's eyes." (57) Beloved turns into the mother, Sethe, "[d]ressed in Sethe's dress [...] She imitated Sethe, talked the way she did, laughed her laugh [...] It was difficult for Denver to tell who was who." (241) Beloved rejoices that "I am not separate from her [...] her face is my own." (210) And consequently, "Beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother, Sethe the teething child." (250) These mergers are not without danger and resentment; inevitably, the mother-daughter dyad is pulled towards individuation, towards a reconstitution of self, towards the symbolic. And in this re-entry into the symbolic and the social, Morrison adds yet another Utopian touch. It is not the re-entry into the Law of the White Father who would intervene in the mother-daughter dyad; rather, it is the black community that, by its intervention, reclaims Sethe for the social and the real. And the reconstitution of a nuclear family at the end of the novel, in the context of the novel and of slavery, is not an affirmation of cultural hegemony, but its subversion. As Leila May demonstrates, Morrison, by writing in a father (and a father, moreoever, created not from biology but from conscious choice), establishes an Afro-American family against a racist system that has striven to destroy it." 6 Where slavery disavows the black father - Sethe's is never even mentioned, Halle infantilized - and fills the gap with white patriarchal power, Morrison fills that gap with an egalitarian vision of gender-relations where Paul D recognizes friendship rather than romantic love as the basis of his bond with Sethe. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Morrison rejects romantic love as one of the "most destructive ideas in the history of human thought."117 In opposition to this concept of the majority

124 culture that is characterized by envy, insecurity, and possessiveness, Morrison connects her notion of love to the blues.118 That notion is described alternately as "lust and simple caring for" in The Bluest Eye, "bright and easy affection, a playfulness" in Sula, and friendship in Beloved."9 Morrison stresses the egalitarian dimension of that love which she calls "the egalitarianism of oppression."120 Sethe and Paul share the experience of the dehumanizing efforts of white supremacy - Sethe having been classified and used as an animal by schoolteacher, Paul D having been driven to despair by the iron-bit to the degree that he envies a rooster.121 When Sethe and Paul D help each other to remember and heal, images of fragmentation and violence are contrasted with the careful composition of a quilt. While Sethe wonders, "And if he bathes her in sections, will the parts hold?," Paul D, examining the quilt, remembers Sixo describing his woman: "She is a friend of mine. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather and give them back to me in all the right order." (272/3) Thus, fragmentation of the black family is counteracted in an image of unity, a movement that African American critics have identified as a Utopian project in black literature122 and that Paul D expresses as the need for "some kind of tomorrow." (273) Similarly, the collective discourse of historiography, a discourse rooted in black folklore, has succeeded not only in "telling" Beloved's story, but the story of thwarted mothering of all black women during slavery.123 And the story triumphs because, as the last paragraphs suggest, it was told in the fantastic mode - drawing on a cultural tradition of the integration of the fantastic and refusing to submit to dominant white expectations of black literature as ethnographic, as representative and representational. Morrison sees the fantastic mode as a way of defying white hegemony, as resisting its definition of life and as refusing to make blacks the victims rather than the subjects of history.124 In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken,"125 Toni Morrison regrets having made concessions to an implied white audience in Sula by not going into medias res with Shadrack's war-experience. In Beloved, she frustrates those who expect African American literature to be "imitative and mimetic," "realistic and revealing."126 Instead, she confronts that audience's world-view - characterized as excessive instrumental rationality in schoolteacher's scientific obscenities - with an insistence on black culture. That insistence is not yet another facet in a cultural pluralism where difference is trivialized and ultimately subsumed under white hegemony, but a subversive approach that questions the very foundations of the forces that oppress blacks. What earlier writers who argued for cultural sameness might have avoided in order not to alienate white readers, Morrison deliberately chooses to make a critique that is both devastating and fundamental, striking

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at the very heart of Western civilization, questioning a post-Enlightenment reason that objectifies the Other - African Americans, women, nature.127 There does remain one gap, though, "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (199), after Beloved's story, formerly absent from the lore, has been told.128 Significantly, in trying to fill it, the novel fuses the individual and collective strands of the narrative. In Beloved's monologue of eight pages, the merging of mother-daughter and the desire for nurturing blend with haunting memories of the middle-passage. In an interview, Morrison recalls her reluctance to dwell "on that era" and goes on to state that half of the sixty million who are mourned in the novel's epigraph, "died in those ships."129 Unlike slavery, the middle passage has gone largely unrecorded in African American literature; in Beloved, it is contained in the monologue which represents something like the collective unconscious of African Americans, as indicated in the eternal present and the fantastic distortion of time: "it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too." (210) Prominent figure during the passage is a potential maternal figure whom Beloved desires: "the woman is there with the face I want the face that is mine." (211) And, in a shift, the woman becomes mother: "Sethe's is the face that left me" (213) Similarly, the only brief reference to the middle passage outside the monologue also relates to mothering and is an unspeakable thing as well: when Sethe remembers "something she had forgotten she knew" (62), that memory is of her mother tossing her children by white men into the ocean, keeping only Sethe: "She threw them all away but you." (63) Again, there is a fantastic distortion of time - numerous pregnancies during a passage from Africa to America - that transforms Sethe's ma'am into a symbol of all African American mothers who refuse to bear and nurse the white man's children. Memory is essential: Beloved stresses that repression, both individual and collective, hurts and ultimately has to fail. Formerly, Sethe's "deprivation had been not having any dreams of her own at all" (20), since all her energies are absorbed by the demanding task of keeping the horrible past at bay, and people are crippled by the weight of their past.130 But acknowledging the past opens Utopian possibilities for the characters, lets them dream. Sethe's recollections allow her to relive the past with Beloved and to fantasize an alternative history in which she kills the white man instead of her daughter;131 and the African American community has to deal with the very real ghost of slavery to free itself from the disastrous effects of white hegemony, for example its effects on the black family. That process is not painless, either; as Amy, the white woman who helps Sethe give birth and whose name is an abbreviated Latin version of „Beloved", remarks:

126 "Anything dead coming back to life hurts." (35) But only confronting the past can heal; and the healing process of memory, of personal and collective historiography interwoven, is the project of Beloved, the novel, a project that only makes sense if embedded in cultural tradition, a tradition embracing the fantastic. Toni Morrison - Magic Women and the Places of the Past While Beloved is Morrison's most obvious use of the fantastic, her other novels are by no means unconnected to black cultural tradition and the fantastic. Sula, with its insistence on the legitimacy of black women's desire and fantasies of control over the reproductive female body (emphasized by the prevalence of images of the mutilated body in general in the novel132), is Utopian in granting Sula and her mother Hannah sexual desire unthreatened by male violence, rape, and unwanted pregnancies; these Utopian images are all the more striking against the background of African American women's violation in slavery.133 Sula is thus a Utopian answer (albeit an individual and not communal utopia) to Beloveds exploration of the dystopian abuse of black women's bodies in slavery, of the nightmarish experience of white intervention into black relationships (between mother and child, woman and man) that disallowed black women's desire. Sula is replete with references to a magic that shapes the black community's interpretation of life and that serves as an explanation of extraordinary events like Hannah's death and the unusual phenomenon of a woman like Sula. The community and the novel mythologize Sula, thus granting her power in the imagination where she has to fail in the real. Sula, a "woman out of sequence,"134 is a pariah in her community because she sets herself as an individual against communal identity in her desire to create herself beyond the confines of the community's demands on a woman's life. In a conversation with her grandmother, Sula's insistence on individual autonomy clashes with Eva's expectations that Sula assume a place in the generational line of Peace-women and have children of her own. That expectation is not identical with white society's reduction of women to reproduction; rather, if read in the context of African American women's literature, it corresponds with a social function of reproduction as bearing witness, as evidenced in Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) where reproduction is a crucial link in passing on oral tradition from mother to daughter, the only means they have to testify against slavery and racism. "Making generations"135 is a communal mandate that insists on a historical experience that historiography silences:

127 My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn't live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were supposed to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we'd never forget.136

Both in Sula and in Corregidora, the protagonists break that chain of witnessing passed on through a maternal line; where Jones still ascribes the break to biological reasons (Ursa Corregidora had a hysterectomy), Sula deliberately chooses not to have children, preferring to make herself instead. In that determination, she challenges the community, sets herself apart and becomes isolated, is perceived as dangerous and evil by the community. Unlike Kingston's no-name-woman, "a tribal person alone," Sula finds consolation in the thought that "my lonely is mine" (123), although her early death could suggest her failure. However, as in Rhys's novel, death signifies an ultimate defeat only in the real, but a triumph on a different level. Dying and being "completely alone" are described as places "where she [Sula] had always wanted to be" (128); and death, as in Wide Sargasso Sea, is not an end, but the beginning of another mode of being. Morrison, duplicating and complementing on the narrative level the community's mythologizing of Sula, allows her heroine to talk from the beyond:137 Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn't have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling. "Well, I'll be damned," she thought, "it didn't even hurt. Wait'll I tell Nel." (128)

Death is a liberation (no needs, no pain), joyful (she smiles), with a shift from reason (realization) to other modes of perception (the senses). Death cannot destroy her power over the imagination of the community; there are only a "few who were not afraid to witness the burial of a witch" (129). And, the novel suggests, she succeeds to "tell Nel." It is after visiting Sula's grave and remembering Sula's death that Nel has her epiphany and cries out for - of course - Sula. In Song of Solomon (1977), the boundary between life and death is questioned in the figure of Circe. On meeting her, Milkman is confounded: "Perhaps this woman is Circe. But Circe is dead. This woman is alive." (243) Accompanied not by the mythical swine, but Weimaraners, a pack of "golden-eyed dogs,"138 she appears out of the dark, an apparition that immediately pulls him back into his childhood dreams. Like the man's shock

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in Edith Wharton's "Miss Mary Pask," his border-experience suspends him between repulsion and fascination, a suffocating stench suddenly miraculously transformed into a "sweet spicy perfume." (241) Where Wharton's protagonist thinks of vampires, Milkman feels himself to be in the presence of a witch, a powerful witch whose helpless victim he becomes: He had had dreams as a child, dreams every child had, of the witch who chased him down dark alleys [...] So when he saw the woman at the top of the stairs there was no way for him to resist climbing up toward her outstretched hands, her fingers spread wide for him, her mouth gaping open for him, her eyes devouring him. In a dream you climb the stairs. She grabbed him, [...] he knew that always, always at the very instant of the pounce or the gummy embrace he would wake with a scream and an erection. Now he had only the erection. (241/2)

Circe, the witch and conjure-woman, provides for Milkman the last clue in his search for what turns out to be not the gold he had hoped for, but his cultural heritage. The novel describes her as having been a mid-wife, and her function for Milkman is to give birth to his new identity as a man grounded in African American tradition, not white materialism. His aunt Pilate, another woman-character linked to cultural heritage, conjure and magic,139 has set him on his way for his quest; and both Pilate's and Circe's existential status is ambivalent. Pilate's, because her having been born without a navel suggests that she made herself, Circe, because it is unclear whether she is dead or alive. The mythologizing of birth and death in these two women marks them clearly as representatives of a different world-view that is not subjected to science and clear boundaries. In both Sula and Song of Solomon, Morrison uses the fusion of the fantastic and real in traditional culture, but the combined evidence of her work suggests that this integrated approach is fast becoming a phenomenon of the past, as exposure to mainstream American world-view increases. In Sula, Nel instinctively feels disturbed by the lack of shadows in the retirement-home of 1965: "The lobby was luxurious - modern - but the rooms she peeped into were sterile green cages. There was too much light everywhere; it needed some shadows." (143) In this modern world, where science (sterility) and confinement (cages) go together, the lack of shadows suggests that the fluid borderlands of the past have been destroyed. In that world, Eva, once the powerful matriarch of a large house, is reduced to an insignificant old woman, "the once proud foot [...] now stuffed gracelessly into a pink terrycloth slipper." (144) Equally, in Song of Solomon, Milkman's journey of immersion, his descent140 into black culture leads backwards in space and time - back to the place in the South his family came from, and

129 back to times when Circe was not yet alone, but integrated in a black community. In Tar Baby (1981), Eloe is another black community in the South where magic is still part of the black world. Here, Morrison adds a gender-specific twist by having her protagonist Jadine hesitate between the promise of cultural identity (personified in a black man, Son) and the promise of individual identity; Morrison's interest was to explore whether a contemporary black woman "would choose to be entirely modern or if she chooses to rely on that past."141 Jadine's decision is complicated by gender: [...] the night women [...] wanted her to settle for wifely competence when she could be almighty, to settle for fertility rather than originality, nurturing instead of building. [...] Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?142

Like Sula, by refusing to conform to the community ideal of a nurturing woman, she is "out of sequence," her desire for personal liberation as a woman at odds with her desire to "become black," to stop being what Morrison describes as "the white man's creation."143 Toni Morrison - Female and Male Ways of Coping in Sula In Sula, the first character whom we meet is Shadrack, who will be constantly linked to the title-heroine throughout the rest of the novel. In these two protagonists, Morrison captures gender-specific manifestations of black people's determination to survive displacement and marginalization, strategies of survival that both incorporate the fantastic: "Sula as (feminine) solubility and Shadrack's (male) fixative."144 Shadrack's experience in World War I, originally intended as opening scene by Morrison,145 immediately focuses on different interpretations of the world and on the boundaries between reality and the fantastic in these interpretations. Shadrack's traumatizing experience, although real, demonstrates what theorists of the fantastic have called the increasingly fantastic nature of (post)modem society he turned his head a little to the right and saw the face of a soldier near him fly off. Before he could register shock, the rest of the soldier's head disappeared under the inverted soup bowl of his helmet. But stubbornly, taking no direction from the brain, the body of the headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether the drip and slide of brain tissue down its back.147

130 The reference to the concept of the living (and walking) dead in voodoo148 and the hint at inversion - with a kitchen-utensil as war-paraphanelia introduce the fantastic and its inherent confusion of boundaries. Shadrack's anxiety that things "would not explode or burst forth from their restricted zones" (7) and his worry that the hospital grounds have "no fences, no warnings, no obstacles at all between concrete and green grass" (9) represent his fundamental confusion in a white world that insists on a clear boundary (between death and life) which his experience demonstrates him is fluid. The dominant interpretation excludes his history, his past, denies his identity, because its neat categorizations of real and fantastic make no sense to him, a perception in which the author validates him. Shadrack's anxiety is only calmed when he, having "no past, no language, no tribe" (10) in the white veteran's hospital and being cut off from his community, finally rediscovers his identity as a black man by looking at his face: "There in the toilet water he saw a grave black face. A black so definite, so unequivocal, it astonished him. He had been harboring a skittish apprehension that he was not real - that he didn't exist at all." (11) His sense of invisibility, nurtured by his disconnection from the black community, is reinforced by his confinement in a mental hospital where his anguish is treated as psychic disorder, that is personalized and cut off from the very real and social phenomenon of war.149 He cannot be cured in such a context that reproduces his invisibility; only in the black community, where his obsessive ritualization of death-experience in the National Suicide Day becomes accepted as an integral part of life, can he find a way to cope with the experience of mass-slaughter. While Shadrack's survival strategy focuses on the use of ritual to hold danger at bay and succeeds to be integrated into the community's culture, Sula's violation of taboos must threaten the community. In her Utopian fantasy, a Dionysian, orgiastic disruption of boundaries and rules is the precondition for her acceptance: Oh, they'll love me all right. [...] After all the old women have lain with the teenagers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black ones; when guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mother's trim [...] (125)

Sula's fantasy, typically focused on sexuality as an anti-social force,150 marks her as a representative of the pleasure principle, while her friend Nel whose mother had driven "her imagination underground" (16), stands for the reality principle. In the life of Nel, we follow the realistic conventional plot for women - courtship, marriage, and motherhood, old age in the service of the

131 church - that is acceptable to the community. Sula, who thrives on danger, is the prototypical repressed artist,151 lives a life that defies the usual female plot. That she has no ego, no self, cannot lie, breaks laws, violates taboos marks her as an individual dangerous for her social group; that emotions "dictate her behavior" (121) and work "don't do nothing" for her (122) put her outside the Protestant work-ethic of the dominant culture. We have seen how Morrison, rather than using Sula's death as punishment, enhances her protagonist's mythic stature and her association with the fantastic by allowing her to speak from the beyond. In Nel's conventional plot as well, the moment comes when the repressed - her yearning for Sula - returns triumphantly. The central metaphor for the women's friendship is vision: friends in Nel's dreams are "smiling sympathetic eyes" (44) and Sula remembers their friendship as being "two throats and one eye" (126); when Sula returns after her long stay in the city, Nel feels "like getting the use of an eye back, having a cataract removed." (82) The cataract that obstructs seeing is later replaced by the image of the gray ball of fur that hovers on the periphery of Nel's vision; that fur ball symbolizes repression, the deliberate effort not to see, reminiscent of Freud's definition of the fantastic: Nel has to concentrate on not looking at it, thus limiting her vision. In her epiphany, when she finally allows herself to confront her despair about the loss of Sula, that "soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze." (149) A confusion and merger of identities, a typical sign of the fantastic, triggers the epiphany when Eva mistakes Nel for Sula, shattering Nel's complacent pride of "her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable." (146) In the end, the recollection of the friends' earlier merger when they were "two throats and one eye"152 prevails and dominates the closure: "We was girls together" finally collapses the artificial boundaries that Nel constructed between her rational self and her irrational friend. Not A Story To Pass On The context of Morrison's repetition of "this is not a story to pass on," suggests that this sentence, if read with a slight change of emphasis, points to one strategy with which minority women writers cope with silencing and the loss of the mother-tongue. If the emphasis is on "story" and we remember that the last paragraphs mention numerous non-verbal traces that Beloved leaves, we detect how Morrison (who was inspired by Munch's paintings when writing the novel153) connects her fantastic story to non-verbal signs like the "rustle of a skirt," "her footprints." These signs are sensual,

132 predominantly visual, going back to the roots of the term "phantastikos," and also relating to dreams - Beloved's story is "like an unpleasant dream" (275) - that work in images and pictures. Beloved constantly perceives of stories as pictures, as when Sethe is described as "stepping] into the story that lay before her eyes" (29) and as usually "see[ing] the picture right away of what she heard." (69) Silences are defined as "the things neither had word-shapes for" (99), and memories as visual, as when "a house burns down, it's gone, but the place - the picture - stays." (37) Correspondingly, the suppressed artists in Morrison's novels, like Pauline and Sula, long for the visual medium to express themselves, and Baby Suggs craves color. Sethe has no documents that remind of her experience of slavery except her own body that, after a savage beating, has become a "sculpture" (17); and it is the dead body of her baby-girl that reminds of slavery as collective past. Contrasted with the powerlessness of black women vis-à-vis the word is the association of words with white male power - be it in schoolteacher, the mason in the graveyard, and finally, in the strongest connection, in patriarchal religion. Baby Suggs "quit[s] the Word" (177) after the disasters of her life, and substitutes the word/Word with her craving for color in a bleak world of contrasting blacks and whites. If the Bible is the central "master text" of Western civilization, then Baby Suggs's repudiation of the Word displaces white male authority and creates an empty space which is then taken by African American folklore, which in turn is identified with mothers rather than fathers.154 Morrison's distrust of language puts her in striking contrast to earlier black writers' emphasis exactly on literacy as a means to freedom, as in Douglass's autobiography; it leads her to redefine literacy. Literacy, as Robert Stepto shows, means being able to understand the mechanisms of racism and oppression.155 Morrison redefines literacy as being able to understand the black past, culture, and society, and claims that a literacy that is acquired on white terms, in white people's language, reflecting white definitions, is insufficient in understanding black experience. Her emphasis shifts the focus of literacy from coping with white society to the black community, especially the black family, a distinction that is characteristic of literature by black men versus black women in general. While for example Douglass's autobiography and Richard Wright's Black Boy devote their energy to confrontations with white society and either drop the black family in passing or show a considerable disdain for it, Morrison focuses on the traces that slavery left on the black family, most often traces left on the bodies of black women. In re-creating their history, the members of the black community have to learn to read these body-signs. Thus, Beloved's story

133 might be a picture that we have to bear in mind, pictures of the footprints and the photographs mentioned in the last sentences. Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) is a case-example of how the non-verbal disrupts conscious repressions and forces memory where words refuse to tell. Passing is a novel that works hard to repress the memory of slavery; in the milieu of upper-middle-class wives who correct the fit of their silk stockings and gather for tea in the afternoon, the characters do not want to linger on the past; the word slavery is never even mentioned in the novel, although title and subject (passing probably as a result of the rape of a black woman during slavery) make that omission glaring. Yet a tea-cup, which the protagonist Irene purposely smashes during a tea-party, becomes a symbol of slavery, a forceful presence that points to the silences of the text. That tea-cup has been inherited by Irene from her ancestors and is a relic that in other black fictions, like Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" for example, would be a venerated piece that triggers reminiscences of the past and black endurance. Irene, though, does not want to deal with the past, speaking of the tea-cup originating "thousands of years ago,"156 an exaggeration that is supposed to magically obliterate the more immediate past; she'd rather destroy that past and anything that reminds of it. In a scene where the false tones are painful, with Irene speaking frivolously of the "underground subway" instead of the "underground railroad," she states: "I had an inspiration. I had only to break it, and I was rid of it for ever. So simple!"157 But the novel exposes that repression as impossible; again, other signs exist, and again it is the body of a black woman - Clare, the light-skinned woman who passes for white, is a living reminder of slavery, since the subject of mulattoes and passing in black literature has always had echoes of the rape of black women by white men during slavery.158 It is telling that the quilt has become a symbol of black women's literature, a visual artefact defined by color and shape; Beloved mentions "the quilt patched in carnival colors" (272).159 That linking of expression, of minority women's interpretations of the world and history to the non-verbal leads back to the political dimensions of representation, literature and historiography. Alice Walker, in "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," mentions a quilt that hangs in the Smithsonian Institute, attributed to "an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago."160 That anonymous artist becomes the representative of all the African American and minority women in general whose creative urges have been denied expression, their creativity manifested - as Walker develops her argument - most often in the composition of color and form in everyday life. It is that tradition of a "low" culture and its infusion with the fantastic, together with the

134 enormous influence of African American music, that we detect in African American women's literature and that counterbalances the white male master-discourse.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28,1 (1989): 1-34; p. 11. Toni Morrison in a conversation with Anne Koenen, November 1987, Wheeler Hall, University of California, Berkeley. Morrison, "Unspeakable Things," p. 22. Morrison, "Unspeakable Things," p. 22. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976) (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 6. Octavia Butler, "The Future Isn't What It Used to Be: A Panel of Science Fiction Writers," Nov. 3,1991, San Francisco Bay Area Book Festival. Starting from the premise that "reality is a relative term without any definite scientific or philosophical basis," Herbert Read in Art and Society (Pantheon Books, 1945) comments on the "collective spirituality" of the artist in traditional societies and the "twofold order of reality, the one visible, palpable, and subordinate to the essential laws of motion; the other invisible, intangible, 'spiritual', forming a mystic sphere which encompasses the first." Paula Gunn Allen, ed., Spider Woman's Granddaughters. Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 111.

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Maijorie Pryse, "Introduction," in Maijorie Piyse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring. Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 2. Maxine Hong Kingston at a reading from Tripmaster Monkey, Berkeley, Black Oaks Books, July 29,1990. Toni Morrison in conversation with Anne Koenen, Berkeley, November 1987. Robinson's Housekeeping is discussed in the chapter "Alien(N)ation"; Alice Hoffman's novels often have strong fantastic elements. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 228; subsequent references given in the text are to this edition. - Anne E. Goldmann's '"I made the ink': (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved," Feminist Studies 16, No. 2 (Summer 1990): 313-330, explores the implications of that role in the context of silencing. - Susan Stanford Friedman, "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse," Feminist Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 1987): 49-82, explores the relationship between creativity and procreation critically, warning against the dangers of essentialism and biological determinism, but also following a literary history of subversive adaption in women's literature. See the discussion of Octavia Butler's Kindred in the chapter on dystopias. Butler is the only well-known African American woman writer who publishes science fiction.

135 14 See Sander L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature" in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 223-261; Alice Walker comments on the desexing of black women in white women's art in "One Child of One's Own: A Meaningful Digression within the Work(s)" (1979) in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (London: The Women's Press, 1984), p. 373/4. 15 See Elaine Hoffman Baruch, "Introduction" in Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), p. 205 16 So the title of one of the first publications of African American women on sexism. See Frances Beale's "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" in Toni Cade, ed., The Black Woman (New York: New American Library, 1970). 17 King-Kok Cheung, '"Don't Tell': Imposed Silence in The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior," PMLA, Vol. 103, No. 2 (March 1988): 162-174; p. 162. - Another aspect of the canon that minority writers question is genre politics. See e.g. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahonta's Daughters. Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Chapter 1, "A Case Study of American Indian Female Authorship." 18 Leslie Marmon Silko, "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective" in Philomena Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions. The Politics of Imaginative Writings (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 83. 19 In the contemporary discussion, that deconstruction has been paralleled by postmodemism's rejection of the dichotomy where folklore (as the name already implies) was dismissed not only because of its oral form, but also as "mass" culture. 20 Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (originally published in New Challenge) in Addison Gayle, Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972, 19?1'), p. 317. See also Ralph Ellison, "The Art of Fiction: An Interview," (first published 1955 in the Paris Review) in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972, 19641), p. 171, on the role of folklore. On Wright's ambivalent position on folklore, see Günter H. Lenz, "The Radical Imagination: Revisionary Modes of Radical Cultural Criticism in Thirties America," in Steve Ickringill, ed., Looking Inward - Looking Outward: From the 1930s through the 1940s (Amsterdam, 1990), p. 94-126; p. 108f. 21 Alice Walker, "In Seach of Our Mothers' Gardens," Ms., May 1974: 64-70,105; p. 70. 22 Alain Locke, "Negro Youth Speaks," in Addison Gayle, Jr., The Black Aesthetic, p. 21. 23 Locke, "Negro Youth Speaks," p. 21. 24 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The blackness of blackness: a critique of the sign and the Signifying Monkey" in Gates, ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York/London: Methuen, 1984), p. 285-323. 25 Lina Ddgh quoted in Brian Atteberry, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 4; Degh talks about European folklore here, but her observation also applies to African American folklore. 26 See Hortense J. Spillers, "Afterword. Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women's Fiction" in Maijorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring, p. 249-261; p. 259. Spillers observes an allegiance to '"talking1 to 'the people' in the now-familiar accents of representation and mimesis" and states: "The day will come, I would dare

136 to predict, when the black American women's writing community will reflect the currents both of the new new [sic] critical procedures and the various literatures concurrent with them." 27 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 11. See for example Barbara Christian's analysis in "Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary AfroAmerican Women's Fiction" in Maijorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring, p. 233-248; p. 235, 237, where she talks about the "need to establish 'positive' images". 28 Richard Wright, "How Bigger Was Born," Native Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, 19401), p. 24. 29 See Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil. A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana/Chicago/London: Univerity of Illinois Press, 1979); a typical example is Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) (Garden City, NY: 1973), that has two authenticating prefaces, one of which (by Wm. Lloyd Garrison) states: "I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements: that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination." (p. xiv) The white posture of authority that has to lend credibility to the black's life-story, "written by himself' (as the title adds), is continued in the tradition of the mixture of ethnography and autobiography often found in minority literatures (and which led, as Mary Dearborn mentions, to the creation of the term "bi-autobiography" in Native American literature). That mixture, in turn, is sometimes mimicked, but not necessarily affirmed in its implications, in fiction, as in Emest Gaines The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and Shirley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (1986). 30 See the book reviews in Freedomways in the seventies that often assume that stance, e.g. Norma Rogers' review of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, "A Mockery of AfroAmerican Life," Freedomways, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1978): 107-109. 31 Zora Neale Hurston in a letter to Langston Hughes, April 30, 1929, quoted in Robert Hemenway, "Introduction" to Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (Bloomington/ London: Indiana University Press, 1978,19351), p. xx. 32 Hemenway, "Introduction," p. xxvi. 33 In Private Demons. The Life of Shirley Jackson (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1988), Judy Oppenheimer relates an anecdote about Ralph Ellison: "Shirley's interest in the occult did not appeal to Ellison; he had grown up around people who believed in the power of signs and omens; as an adult, he wanted nothing to do with that sort of thing." (p. 104); that, of course, does not touch Ellison's evaluation of folk-magic in his literature. - See Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston. A Literary Biography. with a Foreword by Alice Walker (Urbana/Chicago/London: University of Illinois Press, 1980, 19771), p. 55. 34 Zora Neale Hurston, "Introduction," Mules and Men (Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 3. One of the tales she relates is an exploration of genderantagonism in which the man goes to God for help, while the woman turns to the devil. See the chapter "Alien(N)ation" and its discussion of Lolly Willowes for a parallel in white women's fiction. In practice, however, Zora Neale Hurston followed a "participant observer"-approach in collecting folk material. See bell hooks, "Saving Black Folk Culture: Zora Neale Hurston as Anthropologist and Writer" in Yearning.

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45 46

47

race, gender, and cultural politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 135-144; p. 137. Zora Neale Hurston, "What White Publishers Won't Print" in Alice Walker, ed., I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, with an introduction by Mary Helen Washington (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1979), p. 169-173. Wright, "Blueprint," p. 316 and p. 325. In "How Bigger Was Born," Wright's introduction of 1940 to Native Son, he grapples again with questions of representative representation (what will the Black middle class think) and implied white audience, personified in white bankers' daughters: "Never did they [the black middle class] want people, especially white people, to think that their lives were so much touched by anything so dark and brutal as Bigger." p. 26 and 31. See also his comments on the role of folklore. Ellison, "The Art of Fiction: An Interview," Shadow and Act, p. 170. These debates are represented for example in Addison Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic. See The Black Aesthetic, see Pryse, "Introduction," in Maijorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring. Toni Morrison in Paula Giddings, "The Triumphant Song of Toni Morrison," Encore, 12.12.1977: 26-30; p. 30. Alma Gomez, Cherrie Morga, Mariana Romo-Carmona, con Myrtha Chabran, "By Word of Mouth," in Alma Gomiz, Cherrie Moraga and Mariana Romo-Carmona, eds., Cuentos. Stories by Latinos (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983), p. x. Cheung, '"Don't tell'," p. 162; Cheung does not comment on the fantastic as vital part of these legacies nor on its role in the writers' efforts to "transplant their native dialects to their texts." Leslie Silko, among others, has explicitly referred to the importance of oral tradition, its communal function and its element of "witchcraft" for her work. See Elaine Jahner, "The Novel and Oral Tradition: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko," Book Forum, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1981): 383-388. See for example Cheung in her excellent article '"Don't tell'." Rightly observing the importance of "imaginary beings" in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, she then states in the next paragraph that, in Kingston's novel, the No Name Aunt becomes a "real" role model for Kington's heroine, overlooking that the aunt is yet another "imaginary being"; the narrator has to re-create her figure out of a profound silence around her story. That re-creation needs the fantastic. See the creation myths in Silko's Ceremony. See again Ceremony, and Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men. When Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 1978, 19771), observes the "realism that pervaded black folktales" (p. 99), he does not dismiss the fantastic elements, but rather draws a distinction to "pure fantasy and romanticism", that is, he insists on the function of the fantastic as a means of control (see p. 62f.) and as a strategy for survival, (p. 99). Historical sources often emphasize the competence of traditional cultures, for example during slavery, in medicine, and Western medical science has increasingly been forced to realize that the attention given to spirituality in traditional medicines is less a

138 manifestation of "superstition" than of a holistic approach now imitated by some Western physicians. 48 Hennig Cohen quoted in Trudier Harris, "Folklore in the Fiction of Alice Walker: A Perpetuation of Historical and Literary Traditions," Black American Literature Forum, Spring 1977: 3-8; p. 3. Cohen observes that "folklore in American literature has been put to work in a number of ways -among them, to advance the plot, to characterize, to provide structure, and to defend, explain, and raise questions about the nature of society." 49 Scott Momaday, for example, in The Way to Rainy Mountain (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973, 19691), p. 2, concludes: "The imaginative experience and the historical experience express equally the traditions of man's reality." 50 See L. A. Chung, "Chinese American Literary War," San Francisco Chronicle, August 26, 1991: D3,4; p. D3. The article refers to the slanders against Kingston and Amy Tan, brought forth by the editors of the anthology Big Aiiieeeee (Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Shawn Wong, Lawson Inada). Maxine Hong Kingston has answered criticism like this several times, for example in an interview in Belles Lettres (Winter 1989), while Tan commented for the first time in the Chronicle, stating that "this kind of thinking is a dangerous thing for a writer." The debate centers on the tacit assumption that minority literature should be representative and representational and provide "authentic" images, implying that the intended audience is white. This becomes apparent when Wong objects that "people" don't know enough about Chinese culture to realize "when we change Chinese myths." (D4) David Mura, a Minnesota writer, resists this implication: "I had to learn Irish mythology to read Yeats. [...] What is going to happen is Asian American writers are going to feel more free to write to their (Asian) audiences and know that their (other) audiences will do their own work." (D4) - For a summary of and comments on criticisms of Kingston's use of myth, see King-Kok Cheung, "The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must A Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?" in Conflicts in Feminism, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, p. 234-251. 51 Leslie Silko, Ceremony (New York: Signet, 1978), p. 133. 52 In Lisa Lynch, "Ghost Writer. Writer Maxine Hong Kingston: the imagined and the imaginative," Express, Vol. 12, No. 37 (June 22, 1990): 1-22; p. 20. 53 See the chapter on Jean Rhys who interprets this degeneration in terms of gender. Toni Morrison sees the opposition between a mythical and a rational interpretation of the world; she characterizes traditional Black culture as "pre-Enlightenment." Toni Morrison in conversation with Anne Koenen, Berkeley, November 1987. 54 Ceremony, p. 142. 55 Ceremony, p. 99. See Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1966) for a similar personification of the conflict. 56 Toni Morrison sees this intimate knowledge of nature as a survival technique (most slaves who escaped did not know how to read maps) as well as an expression of a relationship to nature that is not defined by domination and conquering. Toni Morrison in conversation with Anne Koenen, Berkeley, November 1987. 57 See for example Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945). 58 Paula Gunn Allen, "Introduction," Spider Woman's Granddaughters, p. 12 and 14. 59 Allen, "Introduction," p. 15. Allen also observes that literature was used "as part of the indoctrination process." (p. 16).

139 60 Ceremony, p. 53. 61 See Anne Koenen, "Democracy and Women's Autobiographies," Amerikastudien/ American Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1991) for a detailed discussion of these scenes. 62 Maxine Hong Kingston in Angeles Carabi, "Special Eyes: The Chinese-American World of Maxine Hong Kingston," Belles Lettres, Winter 1989: 10-11; p. 10. 63 See Ralph Ellison, "Richard Wright's Blues," in Shadow and Act, p. 90: "The preindividualistic black community discourages individuality out of self-defense. Having learned through experience that the whole group is punished for the actions of the single member, it has worked out efficient techniques of behavior control." 64 Iris Marion Young, "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference" in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 307. 65 Examples are the story of the No Name Aunt in The Woman Warrior; Sula's violation of the expectations of the black community; the sense of claustrophobia that haunts Jadine in Morrison's Tar Baby when she visits a traditional community. This conflict is not present in Native American literature where more egalitarian concepts of gender-relations are influential. 66 Young, "The Ideal," p. 311, points out that identification "often occurs as an oppositional differentiation from other groups, who are feared or at best devalued." Since her argument is aimed at white feminists (and focused on the dynamics of the city), it does not fully apply to minority women's literature. 67 Elizabeth J. Ordofiez, "Narrative Texts By Ethnic Women: Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Future," MEL US, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 1982): 19-29; p. 20. 68 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London/New York: Routledge, 1988, 19841), p. 106. Waugh talks about Coover and Doctorow here. 69 Kindred is discussed in the chapter on dystopias. 70 Deborah McDowell used this term in her talk "Transferences" on March 5, 1992, at the University of California at Berkeley. Her talk was part of the Colloquium Series "Frontiers in African American Studies." 71 Octavio Paz in Mechtild Strausfeld, ed., Materialien zur lateinamerikanischen Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977,19761). See Kumkum Sangari, "The Politics of the Possible," Cultural Critique, No. 7 (Fall 1987): 157-187; on Mdrquez's interpretation of history that rejects the positioning of "the real and the marvellous as antithetical realms." p. 159. 72 Strausfeld, Materialien, p. 10 and 19. 73 Strausfeld, Materialien, p. 18. 74 See Nancy Gray Diaz, The Radical Self. Metamorphosis into Animal Form in Modern Latin American Narrative (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988). Diaz does not differentiate between male and female Western literature. And Sangari, "The Politics of the Possible," p. 165/66. See the chapter on theory. - Alejo Carpentier, "Ober die wunderbare Wirklichkeit Amerikas. Vorwort zu 'Das Reich von dieser Welt' (1949)" in Strausfeld, Materialien, p. 326 and 327. 75 Alejo Carpentier, "Invention, Underdevelopment, Modernity" in Alternating Current (New York: Viking Press, 1973,19671).

140 76 Caipentier, "Über die wunderbare Wirklichkeit Amerikas," p. 328-330. Carpenticr mentions Voodoo several times, and refers to the ritual, communal character of dance in the Americas. 77 It should be noted that the women's movement's exploration of "herstory" has focused on the history of white women; see Peggy Pascoe, "Introduction: The Challenge of Multicultural Women's History," Frontiers, Vol. XII, No. 1 (1991): 1-4. 78 Gayl Jones, in her novels Eva's Man (1976) and Corregidora (1975), dramatizes this struggle in "mute" women incapable of finding their voice. 79 Maxine Hong Kingston in Carabi, "Special Eyes," p. 10/11. 80 The Woman Warrior, p. 18. 81 Gayl Jones's Eva's Man addresses the question of the "emasculating, castrating" woman in a complex movement of literalization of metaphor and metaphorization of the literal, inquiring into the racist historical background of the stereotype; black women's literature is pervaded by images of motherhood that expose the black mammy - that found one expression in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) - as a racist construct; Morrison's Beloved is one of these critical fictions. 82 French feminist criticism has of course drawn a metaphorical parallel between female body fluids and literary production, of "ink as milk." See Hélène Cixous who writes: "My breasts overflow! Milk. Ink." quoted in Ann Rosalind Jones, "Inscribing Femininity: French theories of the feminine" in Making A Difference. Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 88. See footnote 12. 83 See Margaret Homans, '"Her Very Own Howl': The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction," Signs, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter 1983): 186-205; p. 192: She sees "Eva's appropriation of the power of naming" as ineffectual, as symbolized in the tombstones with the inscription that repeats the word "Peace": "Not only are the names she confers transient compared to the durability of the name of the absent father; but also as 'Peace' changes in death from a name to a wish or command, the father's name almost becomes the performative that Eva's naming categorically failed to be." 84 See James Horton, "The Life and Times of Edward Ambush: An Illustration of Social History Methodology" in Gilnter H. Lenz, éd., History and Tradition in AfroAmerican Culture (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1984), p. 3-16; Horton's endeavor to re-create the lives of ordinary black people through documents demonstrates the almost insurmountable obstacles of this task. 85 Morrison in conversation with Koenen, November 1987. 86 Morrison in conversation with Koenen, November 1987. 87 Josaphat B. Kubayanda, "Minority Discourse and the African Collective: Some Examples from Latin American and Caribbean Literature," Cultural Critique, No. 6 (Spring 1987): 113-130; p. 123 on "Minor Literary Reconstructions of History." 88 Sangari, "The Politics of the Possible," p. 159 and 158. 89 Pascoe, "Introduction: The Challenge of Multicultural Women's History," p. 2/3, sees the need for historians to revise their concepts of culture. She calls for a rejection of "outdated anthropological models that tend to see cultures as separate, static, and free from internal and external domination" and demands to "bring questions of power relations within and between cultures right to the center of our research", p. 2 and 3.

141 On postmodern anthropology, see GUnter H. Lenz, "'Ethnographies': American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology," Prospects 16 (1991), p. 1-40. 90 Sangari, "The Politics of the Possible," p. 159. 91 Susan Willis, "Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison," pursues the relevance of history in Morrison's novels by focusing on the historical transition from the rural South to the capitalist North, also noting the similarities to South American writers, (p. 272) In the catalogue of historical themes in Willis's essay (published 1983), slavery is still notably absent. Willis does not comment on narrative mode and its relationship to African American cultural heritage, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black Literature and Literary Theory, p. 263-284. 92 Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: Holt and Company, 1988), p. 255. 93 Tracks,?. 2. 94 Tracks,?. 209. 95 Tracks, p. 223. 96 Wendy Kolmar, '"Dialectics of Connectedness': Supernatural Elements in the Novels by Bambara, Cisneros, Grahn, and Erdrich" in Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction. Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 236-249; p. 247. 97 Ralph Ellison, "The Art of Fiction," p. 172. 98 See Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London/New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 52, who sees this movement for a unity between self and other as "one of the cental thrusts of the fantastic." p. 52. 99 Spillers, "Afterword," p. 259, mentions Song of Solomon and Bambara's The Salt Eaters as examples of the few non-mimetic fictions by Black women writers. 100 Toni Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (London/Sidney: Pluto Press, 1985,19841), p. 342. 101 Trudier Harris, "Folklore in the Fiction of Alice Walker," p. 3. 102 Susan Willis's interpretation comes to a different conclusion in seeing Walker's "cottage industry solution" as a denial of capitalist production. "Black women writers: taking a critical perspective," in Making A Difference. Feminist Literary Criticism, p. 211-237; p. 221. 103 Morrison, "Unspeakable", p. 33. 104 See the chapter on literary history. 105 An extreme example of this kind of reading (that totally disregards the cultural context of African American literature) was related to me by a friend in Germany. She was stunned by a friend (who is not a literary critic) who read Beloved as the psychosis of a twentieth-century black woman who has flashbacks to the nineteenthcentury, acting out schizophrenic delusions. 106 Ceremony, p. 132. 107 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes,'" in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986): 1-20; p. 15. 108 The term was coined by Winnicott in his development of Object Relations theory that, differing from Freudian drive-theories that focus on the Oedipal phase, explains the construction of subjectivity as a result of the child's interaction with its primary caretakers (in Western cultures, mothers). Since this development inevitably and

142 necessarily involves frustrating the child's needs, there is no ideal mothering, only "good enough mothering." On the extreme sides, there is "too good mothering" and "not good enough mothering," both with consequences for the child's sense of self. Feminist Object Relations Theory, for example in the works of Nancy Chodorow, introduces the category of gender and explores how being "mothered" by a woman determines gender-identities. 109Toni Morrison in conversation with Anne Koenen, Berkeley, November 1987. Hayden White's studies on historiography stress the narrative component of historiography and reject its claim to objectivity. 110 For example in Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Gayl Jones's Corregidora. 111 See e.g. Melanie Klein's theories of the "good" and "bad" breast, where the child projects anger onto the "bad breast", thus preserving its idealization of the mother. See also the emphasis on mother's milk in French feminist theories of women's writing. 112 See Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987). 113 While the role of slavery is obvious, Morrison also takes pains to explain the patriarchal dimension in pointing out the white men's racist and misogynist reasons for not leaving Sweet Home under the rule of a white woman. 114 For the concepts of the symbolic and semiotic in French feminist theory, see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Inscribing femininity: French theories of the feminine," in Making A Difference. Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 80-113, especially p. 85ff.; see Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," and Elizabeth Abel "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions" in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism. 115 Jones, "Inscribing femininity," p. 86; see Domna C. Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva" in Nancy K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 157-182. Stanton criticizes the "hidden ontotheology of the maternal metaphor" (p. 161) in these French theorists' texts. 116 Leila May, '"Eat me, drink me, love me': Orality, Sexuality, and the Fruits of Sororal Desire in 'Gob(b)lin(g) Market' and Beloved," unpublished manuscript. 117 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1972,19701), p. 97. 118 Toni Morrison in Anne Koenen, '"Women out of Sequence': An Interview with Toni Morrison" in Gttnter H. Lenz, ed., History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1984), p. 21 Of. 119 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), p. 97; Sula (New York: Bantam, 1979), p. 82; (subsequent references given in the text are to these editions). Beloved, p. 272. 120 Toni Morrison in conversation with Anne Koenen, November 1987, University of California, Berkeley. 121 Morrison's choice of the rooster to demonstrate Paul D. "emasculation" by slavery illuminates ironically the use of the rooster as a symbol of masculinity in the Moynihan Report that'states that the "very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut." Quoted in Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society. Studies in Power and

143 Powerlessness (New York/Scarborough: New American Library, 1972, 1971'), p. 647. 122 See Hazel Carby, '"On the Threshold of Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, p. 315. 123 Barbara Rigney, '"A Story to Pass On.' Ghosts and the Significance of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved" in Haunting the House of Fiction, p. 229-235; p. 231, mentions the central place of the mother in the traditional African world: "The mother represents nommo, the creative potential, which is the sacred aspect of nature itself." 124 Toni Morrison in conversation with Anne Koenen, November 1987, University of California, Berkeley. 125 The title of the essay repeats, with only a slight change, Sethe's "unspeakable thoughts unspoken" in Beloved. 126 Morrison, "Unspeakable," p. 9. 127 Morrison is not alone in attacking Enlightenment (Toni Morrison in conversation with Anne Koenen, November 1987, University of California, Berkeley); see e.g. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes" and "Talkin' That Talk" in "Race," Writing, and Difference. 128 Toni Morrison in conversation with Anne Koenen, University of California, Berkeley, November 1987; the absence of Beloved's story from the lore was one of Morrison's motivations in writing the novel. 129 Toni Morrison in Bonnie Angelo, "The Pain of Being Black," Time, 22.5.1989: 46-48; p. 46. 130 See also pp. 4, 5, 42 and p. 41: "After Alfred he had shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing." 131 There is yet another parallel to psychoanalysis here in the healing potential of exploring and facing the past. Again, this process is collective and social rather than individualistic. 132 Shadrack's loss of sense of bodily boundaries, Eva's loss of a leg, Hannah's destruction by fire, Sula's cutting off her finger-tip are examples. 133 See similarly Sabine Brock-Sallah, "Women Writing: Plotting Against History" in Lenz et al., eds., Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies, p. 225237; p. 230f. 134 See Anne Koenen, '"Women out of Sequence," p. 207. 135 Gayl Jones, Corregidora (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 112. Toni Morrison was Jones's editor at Random House. 136 Corregidora, p. 9. 137 See the chapter on white women's literary history for parallels to Harriet Prescott Spofford's "The Amber Gods." 138 The dogs are described as having "intelligent child's eyes"; thus, in the subject of human intelligence in an animal's body, the text establishes a link to metamorphosis and the Greek myth where Ulysses's companions are transformed into swine by Circe's magic. 139 Pilate for example brews a concoction for Ruth that magically forces Ruth's husband Macon to resume sexual relations with her. 140 See Stepto, From Behind the Veil, for these narrative structures. 141 Morrison in Koenen, '"Women out of Sequence'," p. 220. 142 Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 269.

144 143 Morrison quoted in Anne Koenen, Zeitgenössische Afro-Amerikanische Frauenliteratur (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1985), p. 215. 144 Morrison, "Unspeakable," p. 26. 145 Morrison, "Unspeakable," p. 23f. 146 See the chapter "Alien(N)ation" on Pamela Zoline's "Heat Death of the Universe." 147 See the chapter on metamorphosis and the discussion of Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love" as another example where war is seen as an essentially fantastic experience that contradicts the dominant world-view's claim to rationality; a fantastic, moreover, that is terrifying. 148 See Silko's Ceremony, p. 129 and 240 for similar concepts in Native American culture. 149 See Susan Willis, "Black women writers," p. 233, who calls him a "lunatic." 150 Typically, because the fantastic is strongly connected to sexuality. 151 In "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens", Alice Walker wrote the theoretical article on the black woman's thwarted creativity, but Morrison has given the most convincing literary portraits of these women in Pauline (in The Bluest Eye) and Sula. 152 See p. 72: "they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one's thought from the other's." 153 Toni Morrison in Elizabeth Abel's class, November 1987, University of California, Berkeley. 154 See Ordöfiez, "Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women," p. 22, who sees this movement as generally important in minority women's literature. 155 Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil. 156 Nella Larsen, Passing (New York/London: Collier Books, 1971), p. 158. 157 Passing, p. 158. 158 Those cases where mulattoes were born of a union between white women and black men are rare for obvious historical reasons and would invoke the echoes of lynching. In Quicksand, Larsen's other (autobiographical) novel the epigraph, a quote from Langston Hughes's poem "Cross," immediately invokes these subjects: "My old man died in a fine big house/my ma died in a shack/I wonder where I'm gonna die/being neither white nor black?" 159 In traditional China, the quilt has been an emblem of (women's) storytelling; Maxine Hong Kingston relates in an interview that when female tale-tellers in China die, "they are buried wearing this colorful quilted rectangle around their necks." Lisa Lynch, "Ghost Writer," p. 12. 160 Walker, "In Search," p. 70.

AMBIGUOUS DREAMS - UTOPIA AS A STATE OF MIND

One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. Ursula K. LeGuin [sic], The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) [...] every act had become ritualized to serve the dramas of their dream life, which in turn dictated their waking life. Dorothy Bryant, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971)

"It isn't just that we don't see any men - but we don't see any signs of them." Jeffs observation in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915)' is an accurate description of contemporary feminist Utopias as well - most are literally no-man's lands and exclude men, and even in the few Utopias that admit men, like Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), those "signs" or qualities associated with masculinity are extinct. Rather, the "female man" (the title person of Joanna Russ's novel) symbolizes the longing of the writers for either androgyny or the rule of the female (not the rule of women). And often, the writers reject the "signs of men" literally, struggling in their fictions with an androcentric language. Most critics agree that the revival of the Utopian genre by feminist writers in the seventies (after the genre had already been declared dead, replaced by dystopian literature2) was due to the "concrete Utopia" of the women's movement,3 a general belief in the possibility of change that stimulated an unprecedented interest in the genre among women writers4 who used it to denaturalize a misogynist social order. Among the feminist Utopias published in the wake of the "new" women's movement are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Word for World is Forest (1972), and The Dispossessed (1974); Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971); Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974); Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975); Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976); James Tiptree, Jr.'s [Alice Sheldon's] "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976) and "Your Faces, Oh My Sisters, Are Filled with Light" (1976, as Raccoona Sheldon); Sally Gearhart, The Wanderground (1979); Rochelle Singer's The Demeter Flower (1980); Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres (1969), although French, is often included in critical studies

146 because of thematic similarities.3 An abundance of critical studies,6 typically focused on the constitutive factors of the Utopian society rather than literary aspects, have condensed the make-up of the "typical" feminist Utopia: it is either a community of only women or an egalitarian, two-sexed community; surprisingly, there are no matriarchies;7 it privileges the "communitarian, the ecological and the spiritual;" it is anarchic, nonmaterialistic and democratic; either rejects technology altogether or moderates its use; excludes men or projects an androgynous vision with alternatives to the nuclear family; it aims, with varying success, to establish multi-cultural and multi-ethnic communities.8 The critical focus on organization and institutions has tended to obfuscate what in my view is the really Utopian project of the feminist Utopia: to reject the emphasis on rationality of the traditional Utopia, to infuse Utopian writing with more fantasy, as exemplified in the many fictions that question the traditional emphasis on probability and write Utopia as a state of mind, found in dreams and founded on the pleasure principle. In its worldview, the feminist Utopian society, as will become apparent, resembles the traditional cultures evoked by minority women writers; minority culture is already at a place where feminist Utopias (all written by white women) are trying to get, a finding that would answer the speculations, often found in utopia-criticism, why minority writers don't write Utopias. In Utopias written by men, like Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, William Morris's News from Nowhere, and B. F. Skinner's Walden II, women do not fare well. Regardless of other radical social changes and Utopia's function as a discourse of social critique, the authors seem to be unwilling to challenge traditional gender-roles and the family: women are excluded from the supposedly male territory of politics, still confined to largely domestic chores like housework.9 With reason as the guiding principle in all these literary Utopias, the position of women is improved in such Utopian theories as Marcuse's where the pleasure principle is reevaluated. The reality principle (as the sum of norms and values that order and dominate the structures in a society, embodied for example in its institutions and relationships) and functional rationality as its expression, are linked to repression, domination, and deprivation. Rejecting Freud's diachronic and universalizing pessimism that the establishment of the reality-principle is inevitable for civilization, that civilization and culture are only possible at the price of oppression and sublimation, Marcuse develops the Utopian vision of a society based on the pleasure principle, that would infuse rationality with sensuality and deconstruct Freud's dichotomy. Marcuse

147 identifies the qualities of the pleasure principle as both subversive of oppression and aggression and as culturally interpreted as feminine. He speculates, thus, that the women's movement has the potential of a rebellion of "eros" against the reality principle, a rebellion that would achieve a synthesis of masculine and feminine, namely androgyny.10 The feminization of Utopia confronts women writers with a dilemma: persistently (like Marcuse), they find the privileging of reason at fault in the deficient present, yet the classic Utopia as a genre is characterized by a strong adherence to logos and realism, aiming at a politically convincing blueprint of a better society that is within the realm of the possible: "Denigration and praise can say no more than that it is the most realistic [...] form of fantasy."11 Although most critics agree that Utopian literature is a form of the fantastic,12 they also usually mention that it differs from other texts by not violating the natural laws of our known reality.13 Subversion and cognitive estrangement are not achieved by an inversion of natural laws, but by the juxtaposition of a better world; the fantastic in these classic Utopias is often confined to the access to the Utopian society.14 These Utopias argue that, if only we used our rationality consequently, Utopia would be within the realm of the possible, could be realized: they continue to believe in rationality. In contemporary criticism, these Utopian fictions have been increasingly suspected of being repressive and even totalitarian in their orientation towards rationality, uniformity, conformity, and insistence on rules. In the contemporary Utopian novels, women authors thus face the task of finding literary forms that correspond with the rejection of a one-sided rationality in their Utopian communities.15 Many writers depart from the classic Utopian structures represented in Gilman's Herland, and follow the paradigmatic subtitle of Le Guin's The Dispossessed, an "ambiguous Utopia,"16 showing Utopia not as a perfect and perfected ideal, breaking down generic barriers between Utopian and dystopian narratives: Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor contrasts the realistically described dystopian collapse of civilization with dream-like Utopian scenes; Marge Piercy interweaves a dystopian present with a Utopian future that encapsulates an alternative dystopian future; Sally Gearhart's and Rochelle Singer's Utopias are communities in the larger context of dystopian societies. As a result of the dialogue between Utopian and dystopian impulses, these literary Utopias do not portray static and perfect societies, but processes that withhold a final answer, connecting Utopia to the intervention of the historical present.17 They question binary oppositions; and their narrative patterns deviate from the traditional linear, didactic model; instead, we find loosely connected episodes that have severed all ties with the present as in The Wanderground\

148 or cluster protagonists as in The Female Man that represent alternative realities that prevent closure; or abandon any pretext to provide an exhaustive description of the wonders of Utopia. A major strategy has been to relinquish any connection with the Utopian project as a blueprint for social change and to present a "critical" Utopia as a state of mind, as in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, The Memoirs of a Survivor, and James Tiptree's "Your Faces, Oh My Sisters, Are Filled with Light,"18 thus undermining the emphasis on rationality and demanding nothing less than a radical change in our ways of perceiving the world, in the structures of our personalities. These critical Utopias do not "foreclose the agenda for the future in terms of a homogenous revolutionary plan,"19 but derive their primary power from the critique of the present, leaving options open of how a better society might be created in "reality." Instead of a place discovered by technology like time- or space-travel, the Utopian society is more and more described as a place visited in dreams, in altered states of consciousness.20 The stress is on the pleasure principle - on dream, play, sexuality, laughter, abundance as in Russ's Utopian (and characteristically named) Whileaway. Connected with the pleasure principle is, as discussed in the chapter on Wide Sargasso Sea, the rejection of linear, scientific time and a return to cyclical time, along with a general re-evalution of the relationship to nature - all these features of the contemporary feminist Utopia. These strategies move the Utopias further into the realm of the fantastic; the Utopias no longer pretend to have found a workable blueprint or a prediction for the future, a fact that criticism sometimes, misinterpreting their aims, laments as unrealistic.21 Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed shows how an emphasis on the reality principle and rationality (the protagonist, not by coincidence, is a mathematician) counteracts the Utopian impulse. The stress on hard work and scarcity and the condemnation that "excess is excrement" coincides with the marginalization of women, minorities and homosexuals in the novel, reinforced by structural decisions like the choice of a white heterosexual male as protagonist.22 Tom Moylan observes that the manner in which Le Guin presents her "oppositional value" results in "textual contradictions generated in the areas of gender roles, economic scarcity, radical opposition and centralized state and commercial power compromise Le Guin's Utopian novel."23 Russ's novel, on the other hand, built on the pleasure principle,24 corresponds on the textual level with "excess,"25 fragmentation, and multiple selves, resulting in a text that finally deconstructs itself: the versions of reality embodied in the four female protagonists are never integrated into one

149 totalizing vision of reality, but compete and stress the co-dependence of one "reality" on the other. In the representation of the Utopian society, the writers face the limitations of language and plots,26 of "male signs": androgyny is a concept inherently fantastic, and an analysis of novels like The Left Hand of Darkness shows how the authors get trapped into counter-writing their androgynous visions.27 Androgyny is a central issue in all the two-sex Utopias, especially in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. After enjoying immense popularity in the sixties and seventies, androgyny recently has become somewhat suspect not only because feminists question the traditionally male orientation of the concept,28 but also because that concept implies a "normative model of the unified self' 29 which postmodern critics firmly reject. Herland- The New "Empire of the Mother" The "mother text"30 of contemporary feminist Utopias, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), uses the classical Utopian device of a visitor from the present, "real" society to Utopia by (time)travel, a place that is located either in the future or in isolated white spots on the map, literally uncharted territory which is often an island or, in Gilman's case, a secluded valley. Following the didactic bent of the genre, the literary guide (and the readers with him/her) is then exposed to the advantages of the Utopian society (structurally allowing an indirect critique of contemporary society), only to be expelled from paradise in the end, returning to his or her historical reality with the conviction that a better world is indeed possible since it already exists somewhere/sometime. Our guide in Herland, Vandyck, is a man (one of a group of three), and thus initially reluctant to admit the superiority of the all-female society. The choice of a male first-person narrator admits some mild narrative tension into a genre noted for boredom through his pronounced skepticism and allows some gentle irony as his initial conviction of male superiority falters, but also poses grave problems that I will discuss. Herland is an exemplary model for contemporary feminist Utopias in the portrayal of Utopia not only as a blueprint, but as a state of mind, in its nascent rejection of dualistic thinking, its emphasis on the collective rather than the individual, the rejection of the nuclear family, the reverence of nature and the ideal of humanity/androgyny over androcentrism. Yet there are troubling problems as well that should serve as warnings. In analyzing these problems, I do not want to content myself with the obligatory reference to historical circumscriptions31 nor to succumb to the desire for "an

150 unproblematic feminist inheritance," as Cora Kaplan has called that chimera;32 instead, I find it necessary to look closely at Herlands contradictions and limitations, some of which - like essentialism and racism - continue to overshadow several contemporary Utopias; and Herlands reliance on the reality principle, its faith in rational persuasion and its negation of sexuality, sobatoges its subversiveness. These elements, although grounded in historical context, render Herland susceptible to recuperation by conservative ideologies of femininity. The collective spirit of Herlands society is apparent throughout. The women "think in we's" (129), support each other collectively instead of limiting their solidarity and affection to the nuclear family, as the male narrator had expected. Initially repelled by the lack of individualism that (one feels, inevitably) conjures up images of social insects like ants and bees (creatures that already served Freud as a symbol of repressed individualism33), the narrator slowly comes to appreciate the delicate balance between collective spirit and respect for privacy that discourages competition and promotes cooperation. Gilman's emphasis on the communal rearing of children links Herland to contemporary feminist Utopias and reflects her rejection of the home as retarding women's development and intellectual growth, a position influenced by Darwinian ideas of the public as the arena of progress.34 Instead of the home as the "empire of mother" (Henry Clarke Wright's phrase), the public sphere, the whole society is her empire.35 Gilman's visionary projection does not dare to deconstruct the biologically oriented ideals of femininity of her times; her Utopian trajectory - from Here to Maternity - thus becomes circular. The focus on attitudes and ideology together with social structures and institutions places Herland at a transitional point between classic Utopias as blueprints for social change and contemporary Utopias. In Herlands worldview, dominated by the idea of motherhood, the stress is on balance, on negotiating rather than opposing difference (with significant exceptions, as will become clear). The Herlanders' ethics do not embrace a theory of "the essential opposition of good and evil; life to them was growth." (102) Consequently, the women are ecologically-minded, abhor the mistreatment of any creature (even teaching their cats to stop killing birds), and their religion, a "Maternal Pantheism," venerates "Mother Earth." Herlands denial of sexuality, the glorification of motherhood and the closeness of its ideal humanity to the "cult of true womanhood" reflect Gilman's own historical situation; her view of asexuality as empowering, for example, was shared by many feminists in the nineteenth century.36 Yet Gilman's approach in Herland is in curious conflict with both her personal

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problems with the maternal role and her other texts. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," motherhood contributes to the breakdown of the protagonist; and in her earlier theoretical writings, Gilman downplayed the beneficial influence of maternal nurturing.37 Gilman oscillates between rejection and affirmation of nineteenth-century ideologies of feminity. Although one could explain the difference partly with social context - in Herland, motherhood does not confine women as it did in the oppressive misogynist atmosphere of "The Yellow Wallpaper" -, the total identification of women's aspirations in Herland with biological function and its critique in other writings mirrors Gilman's fundamental contradictions. Caught between Darwinism and feminism in her allegiances, she dramatically breaks with domesticity and the sentimentalization of motherhood in her theoretical writings. In her Utopian novel, though, she reinstates this idealized maternity by focusing on reproduction as the supreme criterion of female excellence, a reflection of her interest in Darwinism. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who interpret Herland as a feminist revision of Haggard's She (1887), locate the novel's problems in exactly this identification of "women primarily with the womb," the denial of sexuality, and its strategy of gender-reversal that undermines Gilman's intention by "defining it in precisely the terms set up by the misogyny it would repudiate."38 Gilman gets entangled in the "conceptual prison" Ruth Bleier laments. Unfortunately, the novel's problems are not confined to these points. Gilman's social critique is further counteracted by the definition of feminine humanity as incomplete and by the denial of difference, most disturbingly manifested in its racism. The Mothers are supposedly the most gentle people, and in her introduction to Herland, Ann J. Lane stresses the "peaceful collective action" that established their Utopia.39 That transition certainly looks less idyllic when we remember that the "infuriated virgins" of "Aryan" descent killed the male slaves (presumably not belonging to the Aryan races); of the female slaves, only "some" survive to render "invaluable service, teaching such trades as they knew" (55). The novel skips any information of their further fate, whether they were integrated into Utopia and allowed to reproduce or not; it is obvious, though, that mistress-slaveconflicts are covered in silence in both Herland as society and Herland as text. That strategy of problem-solving by denial is characteristic of Herland. When conflicts arise, they are repressed instead of articulated; both sexuality and aggression are thoroughly sublimated. The rule of the maternal seems to infantilize the inhabitants - Vandyck recognizes their conflict-solving strategies as the kind of manipulations ("tricks") usually practiced on and

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reserved for children.40 Worse, "[t]he language itself they had deliberately clarified, simplified, made easy and beautiful, for the sake of the children." (102) It does not become clear why or how the girls (there are only female children, so the use of generic terms like babies and children throughout Herland is strange and irritating) would profit or why the Mothers do not have more confidence in the learning-capacity of their offspring. And oddly enough for a culture built around the child, we never meet an individual girl; "these heavenly babies" in "the long sunny days" of their infancy are pushed to the margins of Utopia, figuratively as well as literally: they all spend their first years "in the warmer parts of the country." Thus, we are confronted with a curious denial of children's (or girls') actual presence paired with a glorification of their ideological value; motherhood is an abstract ideal, not a social or personal relationship ever described by the novel. Although the narrator insists that the women "differed individually in a wide range of feature, coloring, and expression" (78), Herland does not tolerate more than superficial difference. Vandyck joins the Mothers in detesting any "far-descended atavistic trace of a more marked femaleness" (130), prompting him to "somewhat" blame a woman for being raped by one of the other men. The Mothers punish any delinquent who exhibits "atavistic instincts" by withholding the joys of motherhood: "Two thousand years' disuse had left very little of the instinct; also we must remember that those who had at times manifested it as atavistic exceptions were often, by that very fact, denied motherhood." (92) The instinct is "sex-feeling," as Gilman specifies, although we are left to wonder how it might have manifested itself, given Gilman's strict denial of sexuality in general and of lesbianism in particular.41 Alima, the rape victim, is part of what the narrator calls reprovingly "a rather combative group: keen, logical, inquiring minds, not overly sensitive" (86); the juxtaposition of logical and sensitive and later of alluring/sexual and sensitive42 alerts us to Herland's repressive concept of femininity. The choice of a male narrator proves to be highly problematic, undermining not only the idea of female autonomy by denying the women control over the story,43 but also by forcing the subject of the integration of men, especially in the form of marriage, into the text, a problem consistently ignored in criticism.44 What might be a narrative device to make the novel's social critique more palatable45 or an early example of the open-ended Utopia that is always in progress (and Gilman firmly believed in progress), turns out to obfuscate and counteract the novel's main concerns. After two thousand years of a happy life without men, the women welcome the admission of men as a "wonderful event" (46); why, the novel never answers satisfactorily (it is

153 certainly not excitement over erotic potential, as male visions of all-female societies often speculate.) Selective historical amnesia seems to provoke a "colossal innocence" (137) among the women, as the narrator admiringly observes - although the women do remember slavery and polygamy, their excitement over the promises of a two-sexed society evidently blocks any memory of the problems of such a society. Darwinian references to "the bisexual order of nature" (88) and the "naturalness" of pairing (96) and evolution (144) are an astonishing recourse to biology that the novel has thoroughly discredited in other respects, notably in insisting that sexuality is a "psychological" rather than "physiological" phenomenon.46 The other explanation, "fatherhood," is equally mistifying, since - especially if connected with the biological argument - it contradicts the women's earlier observation that some male animals are just not interested in nurturing their offspring (and their history of polygamy does not provide examples of nurturing fathers either). Why do the women feel deficient without men, lamenting that they are "only half a people" and that their system is, "of course, limited"? (97) Does "only half a people" mean that Gilman perceives the women's concept of humanity as incomplete and lacking? Gilman's note in her autobiography of 1935 that "[t]here is now nothing to prevent women from becoming as fully human in their social development as men"47 confirms the suspicion that masculinity in Herland is ultimately the norm that defines humanity by implying that men, not women, are "fully human." In contrast, women, when constrained by gender-roles, emerge as "the feminine half of humanity that is undeveloped humans."48 Although Gilman, in the same statement, qualifies that women are not "undeveloped men," her arguments tend to equate humanity with masculinity. Consequently, the women in Herland fail to recognize the power-dynamics in what Elaine Showalter has identified as the dominant zone and what the Herlanders call "both-ways": "We have our woman-ways and they have their man-ways and their both-ways. [...] They must have a broader, richer, better one [system of living]."49 Confusing maledominanted culture/"both-ways" with humanity, the women feel lacking. By eliminating men and removing women from the home, Herland strives to explore the potential of women as human, femininity as humanity. Yet Herlands list of human/feminine traits, of "genuine femininity" (138), circles around adjectives like wise, sweet, quiet, serious, grave, gentle, restrained, calm, and perfectly patient. Together with the emphasis on mothering as the supreme calling of women, these virtues define the familiar Victorian ideal of woman as the moral guardian of man. Blind to the social order's investment in these qualities, Gilman re-affirms essentialist notions of

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femininity, although the novel claims that women are the norm and men "only male - the sex" (137) and once even declares that femininity is but a reflection of masculinity.50 Gilman's effort, however, to go beyond that social reality of reflection does not picture humanity/androgyny, but an idealized version of conventional femininity. This transpires when the men compare their previous expectations of an all-female society with the actual Utopia. Juxtaposed in their comparison are "frills" in costume with "unfailing dignity and good taste;" pettiness with social consciousness; jealousy with sisterly affection; hysteria with a calm temper. That juxtaposition points less to a discrepancy between femininity and humanity/androgyny than to the gap between one social manifestation of femininity and an abstract, idealized femininity. Finally, the novel does not even believe in this ideal femininity, indicating that it has to be supplemented by masculinity to embrace "bothways." Never having addressed issues of power - Herland, after all, is mostly a gift of nature, not a result of the women's fight against oppression -, the novel is blind to the hegemonic construction of "both-ways" that obscures its domination by male standards; woman's ways, in a patriarchal society, is either totally subordinated or contained in a "wild zone,"51 but also without the social power to influence the dominant zone. The fundamental problems opened up by the discussion of a re-integration of men are not solved by the final postponement of that decision - it neither qualifies the basic affirmation of a two-sexed society, nor does it consider questions of power-structure; and, finally, the all-female society has de facto already re-introduced the institution of marriage. Male Nightmares - Herland Revis(it)ed "If Utopias for men are often dystopias for women, might it be that dystopias for men are Utopias for women?" a literary critic wonders,52 and a feminist Utopia like "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976) invites the reversal of this question: "Might it be that Utopias for women are dystopias for men?" Certainly, James Tiptree's/Alice Sheldon's story, often misread as a straightforward Utopia,53 parodies the formulae of classic Utopias like Herland, along with established conventions of feminist Utopias; it is a man's nightmare vision of a female Utopia with no space for men.54 Generally ridiculing the genre formula of the visitor from our present who gradually is convinced of the advantages of the better society, "Houston, Houston" specifically revises Gilman's Herland. Both stories are structured around three men visiting an all-female society; through the perspective of one of these men (the least misogynist in each case), we learn

155 of the characteristics of the female Utopia and the different male reactions, ranging from sympathy to attempted rape in both cases. While the function of the (first-person) male narrator in Herland provokes the question of the integration of men, his function in "Houston" is to allow Tiptree to concentrate on male anxieties and fear and depict the all-female society not necessarily as a feminist ideal, but a projection of these fears and prejudices. Tiptree, although using a male narrator's perspective, undermines his account doubly by refusing him the first-person narration and by alluding to his use of drugs. Where Gilman's text promotes a basic optimism, Tiptree's is cynical about the chances of men's integration, and, in developing that cynicism, reveals the contradictions in Gilman's concept: If a precondition of Utopia is the absence of men, how legitimize their inclusion? If recognizing the superiority of the women's society is a matter of rationality, why does this rational approach fail so blatantly in the present? And finally, "Houston" is aware of the power-structures that Herland refuses to acknowledge. In Tiptree's story, three NASA-astronauts, caught in a solar time-warp, find themselves stranded in the future. The first contact with the all-female future is auspicious: the women wonder whether the crew of the men's spaceship are "aliens pretending to be people" (48) - a first suspicion which the text works to confirm on a metaphorical level where men turn out to be the "other" or alien. The women are puzzled by the historical phenomenon of "what they called dominance-submission structure: one of them gave orders and the others did whatever they were told, we don't know quite why." (52) The gulf of non-understanding, though, does not prevent the women from commiserating that the encounter may well be "very traumatic" for the men, who indeed have begun to question their sanity: "It's all insane, a dream." (54) They are in conceptual distress, the dream fast turning into a nightmare come true, an all-female society that encompasses everything they abhor: the women's communal life, their interest in "trivia," their neglect of technology and progress alienates them. They are "irretrievably trapped" in "[s]tructurelessness. Personal trivia, unmeaning intimacies." (36) And even the single positive feature that one of the men eagerly identifies as an abundant supply of sexual partners, is based on a complete misunderstanding: the women are lesbians (not that this term would make sense in an all-female future) and not interested in heterosexuality. The men are all deformed by their gender-socialization and roles; Tiptree's caricatures range from the traumatized insecure narrator and the pathological womanizer to the religious fanatic. They take themselves and their (now profoundly altered) space-mission dead serious; they are pathetic in their sense of importance and superiority with their visions of having to

156 re-establish what they perceive of as civilization. The women, on the other hand, are irreverent, giggling and chattering throughout this supposedly spectacular encounter between past and present (for them), between p-esent and future (for the men). The story unfolds on New Year's Eve - the dawn of a new year that will be entirely Eve's, Adam being an unredeemable relic of the past. Unlike Herland, "Houston" defines humanity completely by female standards; one of the women starts out telling the most sympathetic nan as much, "We think of you as different, you're more hu- more like us.' (79) When he asks them what they call themselves, coming up with a chace of "Women's World? Liberation? Amazonia?," the answer is "human bengs... Humanity, mankind... The human race." (98) In all of Tiptree's stories that are situated in the future, women have the power of defining humanity and men are the aliens, as indeed the women suspected during the first caitact, while in her fictions of the present, as "The Women Men Don't See," that power-relation is reversed and mirrors her historical present: women are the aliens.35 "Houston" insists that rationality fades before potent issues like arxiety, prejudice, and power, especially sexual politics. The first scene, introcucing the nightmarish quality of the events for the male narrator, directs attention to the immense (and sometimes absurd, as in this case) conflict-poteirial of sharply polarized gender-roles: the locus of action is a strictly gendersegregated place, a public toilet. Emotional trauma still haunts the adui man as a result of his violation of that gender-boundary (actually a misdemeanor in some US-states): accidentally rushing into the girls' room, "pale pecker" already exposed, he is shocked by: "The hush. The sickening wrongress of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle." (36) Later in the storj, that memory flares up again and prompts him to think: "I'll show you. I'm not a girl." (40) With these scenes, Tiptree explores that male gender-idenity is established in opposition to and denigration of the female.56 In the all-female future, his defensive inversion of the subject-object order of patrarchy (where a girl is not a boy, and where woman is the other, man the norn) has become the norm, but it cannot work for the protagonist, unbalances his psyche and triggers aggresssion since the inversion reminds him of his humiliation. Under a thin veneer of exasperated tolerance, his insecurity erupts as aggression whenever he feels he has to protect himself against gender-confusion and gender-inversion. The men are now all "not a gilt" in a world of women who are the norm and they the deviation. The first spaceship of the all-female future that the astronauts contact is called "Escondita" [sic],57 the feminine Spanish form for "hidden," and indeid the

157 men are forced to confront the female which in their society had been hidden from view. The result is disastrous: exactly because their identity is based on gender and the superiority of masculinity, a rational approach must fail. "Houston" also satirizes those male fantasies of all-female worlds where the arrival of men immediately converts women back to heterosexuality and patriarchy by the presence of the signifier, the phallus; Joanna Russ succinctly summarizes these plots: All the stories [...] use as their Sacred Object the male genitalia: possession thereof guarantees victory in the battle of the sexes. This victory is therefore a victory of nature, and so the battle may be won without intelligence, character, humanity, humility, foresight, courage, planning, sense, technology or even responsibility.58

In Tiptree's story, one of the men indulges in daydreams of aggressive sexual power, visualizing women "begging for it" and erecting "statues for me, my cock a mile high." (89) Nothing could be further from the truth, since the women pursue their own ends by exploiting his sexual interest - seeing him not as the superior male with the magical phallus, but as a sperm donor to refresh their genetic material. As in the toilet-scene, once again a "pale pecker" is exposed not to the awe, but to the "blaring giggles" of women, with male omnipotent illusions of power "a mile high" shrunk to life-size. Contrasted with the other two men, the main protagonist appears to be a positive exception at first; yet the narrative subverts his apparent liberalism and shows him caught in a web of contradictions.59 Profoundly insecure of his masculinity, his admiration of the other men reveals that, although not actively participating in their excesses, he endorses the politics of sexual domination. He agrees with them that man needs a "personal god, a fathermodel"(56), admires the "alpha male" (53), gets sexually excited by watching the attempted rape, and dismisses ideology as unimportant: "Everybody has aggressive fantasies. They didn't act on them. Never. Until you poisoned them." (96) This statement is of course wrong - the lives of all three men, as presented in the story, have consisted of acting out the ideology of male supremacy, and this attempt of blaming the victims of male violence is a well-known and insidious strategy. The difference between their earlier "normal" life and their aggressive excesses now is a matter of degree, not substance. One of the most important aspects of "Houston" is the revision of the relationship between individual and society.60 While the men utter their abhorrence of the "threat to individuality" posed in the female society, the women - who as clones all represent multiple selves - express their pity for the "poor singletons." (80) As in most male fantasies and the men's reaction

158 in Herland, the men's simile for the all-female society is of social insects, ants in this case.61 The women's society is perceived as "the structureless, chattering, trivial two-million-celled protoplasmic lump" (92), a community that disgusts the men because it is close-knit, without hierarchy, without heroic postures: "So much is missing. Marriage, love-affairs, children's troubles, jealousy squabbles, status, possession, money problems, sicknesses, funerals even." (76f) The absence of these problems, readily identified by the men as the subjects of "women's talk," i.e. never of relevance to them, worries him instead of signalling solutions. The reference to famous, male, writers on "love, conflict, heroism, tragedy" elicits the women's comment, "They're not very realistic" (77), a point about the ideological dimensions of literature that escapes the men's understanding. Their nostalgic reference to Shakespeare is Tiptree's ironic aside to Huxley's unquestioning idealization of "great" (male) literature in Brave New World. The final question that "Houston" raises concerns the possibility of a two-sexed, egalitarian Utopia when the narrator feels compelled to ask: "if you take the risk of giving us equal rights, what could we possibly contribute?" (97) Earlier in the story, he had mused about how he never really liked women with their "pervasive irrelevance. Human, of course. Biological necessity." (38) Now that women are the norm, he worries about the relevance of the male. The closure is thus a culmination of male anxieties that men are not even, like women, a biological necessity. It is Tiptree's tongue-in-cheek comment about role-reversal in feminist Utopias that unfold as a negative foil to misogynist societies and thus, instead of transcending patriarchal ideology, are caught in it. After exactly nine months with the women, the men are not reborn as human beings; they remain men, deficient and dangerous in their aggressiveness. Since the women do not experience their life as lacking in any respect, wanting men neither for sex nor fathering nor complementing their humanity, their answer is pessimistic, a stony silence that signifies that the men have nothing to offer. In negotiating the question of the feminist Utopia on the level of anxieties and attitudes that cannot be changed at will, Tiptree finds women's and men's visions of the perfect society at odds, the negative foils of each other. What the men remember fondly, the women perceive as a dystopian past; what the men experience as a nightmare, the women live as Utopia. Like Herland, the all-female future in "Houston" is a gift of nature, a genetic development that ends the birth of males; in "Houston's" context, though, that does not involve a lack of awareness of hegemony, but points to Tiptree's skepticism that a feminist Utopia might be supported by men. The focus on questions of hegemony is exemplified in the basic similarities between the women

159 "before" and "after" - they equally strike the narrator as trivial and structureless. Where Herlands narrator is struck by the immense differences in femininity, "Houston" shows that the context of power is important and re-defines superficially unchanged characteristics. The same qualities in a woman that evoke condescension in the man when the woman is powerless, as with his wife and sister, threaten him when women have power. Unlike Herland, "Houston" sees no reason, not even a biological necessity, to revert back to a two-sexed society. By writing a feminist Utopia as a man's nightmare, Tiptree comments on the incompatibility of male and female dreams. Dream-Lands - Places of the Future, Places in the Mind Connie in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is institutionalized in a mental word, diagnosis "schizophrenia;" the courier in Raccoona Sheldon's (Tiptree's other pseudonym) "Your Faces, Oh My Sisters, Are Filled with Light" has a history of psychiatric hospitalizations; the writer in Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You has numerous black-outs. The frequent invocation of "madness" in feminist Utopian novels that follow the classic visitor-to-the-future pattern is less a narrative device intended to suspend Utopia between actuality and hallucination than a structural device that radically questions rationality and sanity. Not only do these mad protagonists display more sensitive insights than the supposedly sane people who stigmatize them, they also represent a state of mind that is closer to the Utopian philosophies of the future, establishing a chain of associations of dreams/madness as repressed, the fantastic as the desire for the repressed, and that desire as Utopian. Madness as Utopian impulse, frequently romanticized in literary representation, in turn reflects on social practices like structural violence that are supposedly "sane" and connects to those psychoanalytic approaches that have interpreted schizophrenia as "a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation."62 The interpretation of madness as a social phenomenon and its construction in a hegemonic discourse is indebted to theorists like Michel Foucault and R. D. Laing whose gender-specific Jack and Jill example of denying legitimacy of perception as madness-producing is The Female Man's epigraph: "Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: 'It's all in your imagination.'" Sarah Lefanu argues convincingly that portraying Utopia thus as "an imaginary land, a nowhere land, a realm like the unconscious, where dreams may flourish and desires be realised" is closer to one meaning of the

160 ambivalent Greek term, outopia or "no place," than its other denotation, eutopia or "better place."63 Dreams, the "Royal Roads to the Unconscious," have their own registers of symbols, a "language" with an emphasis on the visual rather than the verbal that distinguishes many of the representations of utopia as well; here again the fantastic's ability to literalize metaphor opens ways for portraying the unconscious. A potential problem of the emphasis on dream, Jean Pfaelzer warns, is "the notion, prevalent these days from pop psychologists to discourse theorists, that all we have to do to change the world is change our minds."64 Yet foregrounding a state of mind rather than social organizations as Utopian demands that the travelers between worlds be more than fascinated spectators of utopia. Utopia does not exist by itself in remote parts of the globe or as an inevitable future; rather, it depends on the intervention of the protagonist. In some cases, as in The Memoirs of A Survivor and The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, utopia exists in a parallel universe that is governed by dream and only accessible by dream, that is altered states of consciousness. This double role of dream links utopia to the pleasure principle which in turn has profound and liberating consequences for the conceptualization of gender-roles and sexuality. Gender is not a primary issue in these novels; they all, however, insist that gender as a social category would be irrelevant in a society where the pleasure principle is not repressed, since those qualities traditionally perceived as feminine would be re-evaluated while sexuality would be liberated from the repressions of the nuclear family. Visions of a liberated female subjectivity in these fictions are contrasted with misogynist distortions of femininity; these distorted representations are alternately located in a possible dystopian future (Woman on the Edge of Time), the dystopian present (The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, The Word for World is Forest), or, as in The Memoirs of A Survivor, in the unconscious; Lessing shows how the dynamics of the reality-principle in the nuclear family produce a gendered subjectivity that is grotesque in its extremes. In all four novels, the critique is condensed in images of women as objects of a deformed male sexuality: in Le Guin, as recreational commodities for soldiers; in Piercy, as passively waiting high-class prostitutes; in Bryant, as exploited and abused lover; in Lessing, as the childwoman all tarted-up in red dress as an initiation rite into womanhood. Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest (1972) and Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971) depict societies organized around dreaming, around the use of the unconscious for a more balanced philosophy.65 The Kin ofAta Are Waiting for You and The Wordfor World is Forest describe Utopian societies where people control and live

161

their dreams, much like the Malaysian tribe, the Senoi, that Charles Tart describes in Altered States of Consciousness. Like The Word for World, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You often gives us the "original" terms of the Utopian society to describe especially important concepts, since, as Bryant observes, these are "ideas and thoughts without vocabulary" in the English language.66 Bryant's Utopian novel was originally published under the title "The Comforter," with the subtitle "A mystical fantasy" meant to deflect any misunderstanding of the novel as a Utopian blueprint;67 Bryant chose a male narrator for her description of a Utopian "state of mind," since the privileges of the male gender allowed for a sharp contrast between material gains and spiritual impoverishment in the real.68 The Utopian journey for the male firstperson narrator in Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You starts out as a horror vision like the astronauts' ordeal in "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" Multiple references to his experience in Utopia as "nightmare" reveal the man's resentment of his transition from reality into the Utopian state, his reluctance to accept Utopia. That rejection is largely based on the "primitive" character of Utopia which is not, as he had expected, a high-tech, affluent society, but agrarian and simple. Unlike the typical curiosity of visitors in classic Utopias, his reactions range from boredom and confusion about the "lack of sexual roles" to disinterest.69 His frustrated attempts at decoding the language sound like yet another bad dream where understanding seems to be imminent, but remains always elusive: "The language was familiar, but I could not understand a word. It was English, yet it was not. It did not sound like a foreign language. The rhythms and word order somehow made sense to me. But I could not understand the words." (33) Finding himself on the proverbial Utopian island, his hopes sink and he is on the point of despair, "waiting for the reality of [his] vision to sink into reality in [his] mind." (37) Eventually, he comes to re-interpret the nightmare as dream, a dream about a Utopian society where people live their dreams, where dreams are regarded as "real happenings" (65), where reason and common sense, although "indispensable," follow the dream. The reality of his "vision," it turns out, depends on his state of mind. The island disappears and reappears like a "shifting optical illusion." (39) Blindness depends on perspective, Utopia on the willingness to see. Ata resides where the fantastic is - in the gaps, shifting sights, "echoes of words" (220), "glimpses in dreams" - always misrepresented in "the faulty medium of words." (220)70 The major problem of the novel is its objectiflcation of femininity and blackness in Jungian symbols of the unconscious. In Augustine, the main female protagonist, femininity and blackness are used to complement the

162 narrator's psyche; her darkness, associated with fecundity and femininity, is structurally opposed to his "light of reason." (74) His quest for wholeness culminates in a dream in which Augustine figures as his anima, his shadow self, a figure "which darkened as if turning into a shadow again." (129) This structural concept and the emphasis on his quest continually define Augustine only relationally, and the Jungian interpretation of androgyny that emerges revolves around the male psyche.71 In the end, another dream tells Bryant's protagonist to return to the present. Leaving Utopia is neither an awakening from a pleasant dream, a dream that would remain Utopian in the common usage of the term, nor an expulsion from paradise as in most Utopian novels, like Herland. In the logic of The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, his journey into the unconscious is only completed when he chooses to transform dream into action, thus creating an interdependence of dream and "reality" where each influences the other. The decision he faces at the end of the novel, after he has returned to "real" life, is whether to reject his experience as a hallucination (that is, naturalize it as a pathological psychic phenomenon) or accept it as a "real dream" (216) of a society for which he would be willing to fight. In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, written 1968 as a protest against the US war in Vietnam and its "ethic of exploitation,"72 the natives of the New Tahiti Colony of the far future value dream-reality as much as "world reality," and they do not understand why the human colonizers distinguish in "real" time and "unreal" dream-time. (34) "Reality" for these colonizers, as developed in the novel, means the acceptance of brutality and inequality, and is perceived in opposition to Utopia; reality is thus the absence of Utopian desire. For them, dreams of a better world are "unreal,"73 and men who indulge in them are stigmatized as effeminate. In The Kin ofAta Are Waiting for You and The Wordfor World Is Forest, the portrayal of extremes in the present and future philosophies serves to highlight the difference between cultures founded on the reality principle (and thus repression and domination) and those founded on a creative balance between reality and pleasure principle that Marcuse envisioned. The Wordfor World Is Forest describes this as the ability "to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream" (99). The absence of that balance in the colonizers' society distorts sexuality and sensuality, since an "eroticism which, forced to concentrate itself exclusively on sex and then repressed and frustrated, invades and poisons every sensual pleasure, every human response." (95) The natives, on the other hand, do not channel and limit their sensuality;

163 their culture is permeated by the erotic and, with its emphasis on touch as communication, suggests a broader sensuality. The forest-society is Utopian in overcoming alienation by giving dreams and the pleasure-principle a central place in their culture; Darko Suvin observes that it achieves "both vertical (relation of consciousnessunconsciousness) and horizontal (relation of self and society) dealienation."74 The stress in the Utopian worldview is principally on balance, on synthesis, made visible in the literalized unconscious of the "the shadowy, the complex" (25) forest that is not nature as an object to be conquered and dominated (as for the colonizers), but a subject.75 In this world, a god is somebody who bridges gaps between realities, the gaps between reason and dream, unconscious and consciousness. The "primitive race," although without the technology that the humans worship as civilization, have built the better society: they are non-violent, maintain a delicate ecological balance in the forest that is literally their world (there exists, as the title of the novel states, only one word for both), women and men are equals. As in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and The Memoirs of a Survivor, the usual connotations of "civilization" and "barbarianism" are reversed: what is commonly interpreted as a relapse into primitivity/barbarianism like war and mass murder, is seen as intrinsic to Western civilization, as an excess of rationality and technology, an interpretation that again reminds of minority women's literatures. Barbarianism, on the other hand, is not seen as the antithesis of civilization, but a return to roots (in Le Guin's novel identical with dream, since again there exists only one signifier for both signifieds). In her earlier The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin had already insisted that a construction of civilization and primitiveness as opposites is misleading, that they are "degrees of the same thing" (74), the opposite of civilization being war. Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of A Survivor and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time also contrast a familiar oppressive society (the present) with dream-like Utopian images. Although the two texts differ widely in many respects - where Piercy develops a detailed description of the sociopolitical organization of the future society, Lessing, much like Rhys, only vaguely outlines the realm of fantasy, desire, and dream -, they share the structural emphasis on an increasing gap between dystopian present and Utopian future and on the access to the future through receptive states of mind; both blame the psychological conditioning in the nuclear family as producing adjusted, repressed, and desperate individuals. The Memoirs of A Survivor (1974) marks the transition from Lessing's realistic novels like The Golden Notebook to her science fiction works; in an

164 interview in 1969, Lessing had already argued that "science fiction writers have captured our culture's sense of the future."76 Lessing's approach is in the tradition of the "inner space" orientation of science fiction's "New Wave" writers who "explore happenings taking place in the human mind" rather than those in outer space and who try to break down the barriers between science fiction and mainstream literature.77 Mixing Utopian and dystopian strands and exploring the implications of her contention that "[m]adness can be a form of rebellion,"78 Lessing's scenario concentrates on "madness" and visionary powers amidst the breakdown of Western civilization. This collapse and the return of more "primitive" forms of social organization are rendered in strictly realistic details reminiscent of familiar inner-city wastelands; in their seriousness and realism, these descriptions are a far cry from Angela Carter's treatment of the same subject in her earlier satire Heroes and Villains (1969).79 The verisimilitude is echoed in the narrator's intention of providing a report: "This is a history, after all, and I hope a truthful one." (110)80 As the dystopian strain develops along predictable gendered plot-lines,81 reflected in Lessing's general references to the influence of the ideology of love on women,82 one part of the dream-world behind the narrator's living-room walls moves along the equally predictable plots of psychoanalysis, in what Lessing summarizes as "an earthquake of fevers, energies, desires, angers, needs" (92) and Betsy Draine criticizes as "clichés of depth psychology that [...] could be packaged for educational television and labeled: Sibling Rivalry; Oral-Anal Regression; Sexual Tension between Father and Daughter."83 Yet these clichés serve to underline that the neuroses and complexes bred in and by the nuclear family determine life as much as material conditions, both leaving no choice and no escape for the individual; even the collapse of a civilization does not open up possibilities of fundamental change in the "real" world, since the psychological conditioning explored in the clichéd scenes produces rigid personality structures that resist change. The scenes of material deprivation are thus complemented by psychological deprivation, in a move from Marx to Freud, as Draine observes. Psychological deprivation is mostly interpreted as a result of the domination of the reality-principle; after all, the family is the "germ-cell of civilization," a civilization based on the repression of the pleasure-principle and opposed to the "freedom of fantasy" (61). Juxtaposed with the material and emotional scarcity of the "real" world and the clichéd unconscious is the promise of plentitude held by the second dreamlike world behind the walls: "endless - the plenty of it, the richness, the generosity" (161). Here, the social relapse into barbarianism corresponds to

165 an individual level of liberation from sublimation. Thus, the "unconscious" dream-life bifurcates into scenes revealing how the now was established (the reality-principle) and how the now might be changed radically into a Utopia (the pleasure-principle). Where the two other plots develop with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, threatening that "everything had its place and its time, that nothing could change or move out of order," the Utopian vision is a "realm of anarchy, of change, of impermanence." (67) Its promise, above all, is "the possibility of alternative action." (42)84 In contrast to the other two plots that are spelled out in realistic detail, Lessing refrains from arresting her visionary alternative conclusion in precise outlines. This reluctance mirrors the novel's increasing suspicion of the power of language to represent either reality or dream-like Utopia adequately;85 words are framed in quotation marks to indicate this failure, until, in the final scene, the narrator admits: "[...] it is hard to say exactly what happened. [...] all I can say is ... nothing at all." (216) In this final scene, the wall dissolves, symbolizing the break-down of barriers and signaling the fantastic, and the nameless narrator is able to step into a mystical Utopian state (of mind). While the recurrent images of a giant egg and the appearance of a goddess connect the vision to wholeness, rebirth and religion, the narrator again concedes that it is impossible "to talk of that place in terms of our ordinary living." (66) As in the sketchy Utopian outlooks discussed in the chapter on "Alien(N)ation," Utopia is just "somewhere else." (11) That it is beyond the grasp of reason, defies it, is actually opposed to it - this concept of Utopia relates to Lessing's skeptical evalution of reason, of what the novel calls "our intellectual apparatus, our rationalisms and our logics and our deductions," blaming all these approaches for having led to a life "among the ruins of this variety of intelligence." (82) In the future Utopian place, the narrator cautions, reason "will have to find its place: I believe a pretty low place, at that." (82)86 Like Le Guin and Bryant, Lessing is interested in dreams, how "[t]he hidden domain of our mind communicates with us through dreams,"87 and she, too, compares Western civilization's tendency to make "an enemy of the unconscious" with "other cultures [that] have accepted the unconscious as a helpful force".88 Where Lessing uses the individualistic discourse of psychoanalysis and lets her protagonist escape from the real, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is dedicated to social practice: psychiatry and the intervention of her protagonist in the real to fight for Utopia. The novel follows four

narratives: a social realist strain portraying Connie's present (mostly spent in a psychiatric ward), and two alternative strains in which she visits Utopia

166 (frequently) and dystopia (once). Critics exclusively focus on these narratives, but there is a forth that provides the novel's closure: the discourse of psychiatry, excerpts from Connie's records in various mental institutions. This discourse rounds off the books exploration of "madness," giving us after Connie's history and her "symptoms" (visions of Utopia) the official "Diagnosis: Schizophrenia." (378) By the time her state of mind is scientifically denounced from the outside, the book has both redefined madness as Utopian vision and extensively discredited psychiatry as discourse and an institution dedicated to produce adjusted individuals, in the interests of the status quo and hegemonic forces. The "Excerpts from the Official History of Consuelo Camacho Ramos" are unabashed about this function, calling her "socially disorganized" (read: rebellious) and choosing to interpret her complaints as "paranoia." While her perspective is discredited, the psychiatrists trust her brother, "Mr Camacho [...] a welldressed man (gray business suit)[...] a reliable informant." (381) In this brief but paradigmatic assessment, Piercy sketches the intersections of ethnicity, class, and gender. While both Connie and her brother as Mexican Americans are members of a marginalized ethnic group, the brother can escape by virtue of privileged gender and class; Connie, as a poor Chicana, does not stand a chance. In a descending line, various categories of oppression are personalized, revealing complex mechanisms of conflicting interests: the psychiatrists represent the hegemony of class, race, and gender; the female welfare-worker the hegemony of race and class that results in divisions among women; the male family members finally the hegemony of gender that splits the ethnic group. Like Lessing, Piercy attacks the patriarchal family: all her life, Connie has been at the mercy of male relatives who abuse her, psychologically and physically. Not surprisingly, Piercy's Utopian society abandons the institution of the nuclear family. The official records reiterate in the closure that the novel, in spite of its socio-political specificity, is less a blueprint of Utopia than an exploration of a state of mind. Utopian dreams are stigmatized here by medical science as "madness." Contrasted with this stigmatization of dreams is the interpretation of madness in the Utopian Mattapoisett where it is regarded with admiration as "getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind," and where only people who have bouts of madness themselves can be healers.89 The novel starts with Connie's identification with and acceptance of her own marginalization, her conviction of "her sickness. She had come humbly, rotten with self-hatred and weary of her life." (17) Both her Utopian vision and the friendship with Sybil, a witch-like co-patient who defies the system and becomes Connie's model, lead her to question and reject these defini-

167 tions from the outside, finally prompting her to fight (and even kill) for the realization of her Utopian dreams. The "official notes," although having the last word in the novel and pointing to the mechanics of containing and recuperating Utopian visions as madness also testify to the profound inadequacy of psychiatry as therapy and to the cynicism of the psychiatric discourse. Like the protagonists in minority women's fiction, Connie figures in "official" history only in her contacts with power, in records that are superficial, false, and blatant in their interest toward maintenance of social order.90 Initially suspecting that her contacts with Utopia are drug-induced hallucinations, Connie is convinced of their reality not by her reason, but by sensual impressions like smell, touch, and taste,91 pointing to the fantastic's re-evaluation of the senses.92 Her unusual receptiveness and her sensuality predispose her for a contact with Utopia, as she finds out. Utopia not only values "madness" highly, but also educates the senses, as her guide tells her: "We teach sharpening of the senses [...] States of consciousness. Types of feeling. We educate the senses, the imagination, the social being [...] as well as memory and the intellect." (140) This synopsis reflects the Utopian attempt to balance different ways of experiencing and relating to the world, ways that do not privilege reason. Like the protagonist in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, Connie does not just return to the present, but has to exercise a choice of important consequences, take responsibility for the future, deny or help create Utopia. For both protagonists, denying Utopia or refusing to fight for Utopia would mean to become implicated in the preservation of the status quo. Neither of these two novels sees Utopia as the inevitable future, as the result of eventual progress or a miraculous gift of nature, but anchors Utopia in the intervention of individuals, thus using Utopian literature as propaganda. The inhabitants of Utopia impress on Connie that their existence depends on Connie, that the inevitability of a revolution is a "myth" and that "[a]ll things interlock." (177) The required interventions in the two novels are differentiated along gender-lines: the male narrator in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, who has a long history of abuse and aggression, must renounce violence and take responsibility for his past and write his autobiography as a tribute to the existence of Utopia. That Utopian narrative is presented as his testament, written before his execution and urging readers in the final sentences: "You have only to want It, to believe in It, and tonight, when you close your eyes, you can begin your journey." Where The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You stresses spiritual openness and the dream, Woman on the Edge of Time urges to oppose structural violence. For Connie, the required change is from

168 passive victim to agency, killing the doctors who represent oppressive social structures in an "act of war," allowing her to triumph: "At least once I fought and won." (375) She has to refuse to be a victim (in Margaret Atwood's famous words in Surfacing), to overcome her passivity that now, after she has known Utopia, might well turn into complicity. Both protagonists have moved from extreme gender-positions to embrace complementary character traits. Their final interventions for Utopia are based on their gendered histories: where the powerful white male in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You has to renounce his privileges and make himself vulnerable, Connie has to assert power against a past of victimization: "Never had she done such a thing, grabbed at power, at a weapon." New States of Mind - Humanity and Androgyny Maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part. Ursula K. LeGuin [sic], The Left Hand of Darkness

(1969)

In an autobiographical article, "Everything but the name is me," Alice Sheldon who published most of her science fiction stories under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., reveals a hope many women writers have shared, a desire to be accepted as "kind of generalized human rather than specifically female."93 Yet science fiction readers and critics alike were never content to consider her just human, or, as Tiptree also phrased it, "ambisexual;"94 they obsessively speculated for years about Tiptree's gender, a debate that culminated in Robert Silverberg's private answer to his question "Who is Tiptree, What is He?" His speculations, published before Tiptree's "coming out" as a woman, illustrate the pit-falls of gender-stereotypes: It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.95

In her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin similarly sought to find what would be "simply human,"96 trying to depict an androgynous culture that would privilege "the likenesses, the links, the whole" (168) over differences. In the search for what is human, what is shared by women and

169 men alike, women writers like Virginia Woolf and Le Guin have developed visions of androgyny, a concept that from Plato's symposium on has engaged the human imagination. Its fascination lies in the promise of wholeness, of restoring a unity that was lost in the split into self and other, creating desire (and sexuality) and marking the transition from mythical to historical time. With the "new" women's movement of the 1970s, some feminists like Carolyn Heilbrun recognized a liberating potential in this "Dionysian" concept (which they connected to the pleasure-principle and the destruction of gender-boundaries97) as "an explosive release of energy as we move outside of the socially accepted rigidities, forms, and definitions."98 In an issue of Women's Studies on androgyny in 1974, androgyny emerges as controversial, though. Among the numerous objections, four are of particular interest in the context of fantastic literature: that androgyny re-inscribes gender because it can only be perceived in the polarities of masculine and feminine; that it is self-defeating, "simply from a linguistic point of view;"99 that it is devoid of social context; and, curiously one of the strongest reservations, that it is "Utopian" and "fantastic" - in Cynthia Secor's words, "rarer than unicorns" and a poor choice vis-à-vis "images of female reality taken from women's history,"100 and, in Daniel Harris's words, "a purely imaginative construct, unusually malleable because it corresponds to nothing we commonly observe in our experience."101 While the dilemma of having to express Utopian concepts in exactly the terms of the same social order that they are meant to subvert touches on a central problem in the representation of androgyny (or feminist ideas in general), the objection to the fantastic nature of androgyny is puzzling, to say the least, since feminism itself is Utopian and thus fantastic. Furthermore, the orientation toward "female reality," reflecting dominant trends in US-American feminist criticism of the time, fails to see the problematic nature of "reality" and how representations of that socially constructed "reality" can easily be recuperated, more easily, certainly, than a concept that transcends the parameters of that reality. Finally, the same orientation towards realism that favors the representation of "reality," fails to see that fantastic literature is able to provide scenarios of "social context" for the concept of androgyny.102 Psychoanalytic theories of the construction of gender, on the other hand, do not all dismiss androgyny as an impossibility. In her "Afterword" (1979) to The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), Nancy Chodorow is optimistic about the potential of alternative models of child-rearing to overcome gender-polarity. Encouraged by studies of collectively "mothered" children who show "less individualism and competitiveness"103 than other children, Chodorow speculates that, if "primary parenting activités" were no longer

170 the sole responsibility of women, gender-identity might be significantly impacted. Not only would women's and men's senses of self no longer differ dramatically with regard to individuation and relationality, but the change would "leave people of both genders with the positive capacities each has."'04 In contrast, in Francette Pacteau's Lacanian interpretation, androgyny has to remain an elusive ideal. The androgyne symbolizes the '"ideal', because complete, other, [...] oscillating between the feminine and masculine."105 Pacteau calls androgyny "the impossible referent," "an ever evasive concept which takes us to the limits of language," a concept which "cannot exist outside myth."106 The only place where she finds androgyny in the individual's history is in the pre-verbal realm outside the systems of signification, the imaginary, before gender-identity is established. With the entry into the symbolic order and language,107 androgyny survives only in fantasy, having no place in the real; it is accessible only as a symptom of repressed desire (which predestines it for representation in the fantastic, we might add), namely the desire for a return to "the objectless state at the dawn of consciousness."108 Since the imaginary cannot be represented in the language of the symbolic, representations of androgyny, although threatening to transgress and annihilate gender-boundaries, are "safely contained within the frame of the feminine and masculine."109 How then to represent androgyny and humanity and escape the "conceptual prison"? After Le Guin's instructive problems in The Left Hand of Darkness that reflect masculinist biases in traditional concepts of androgyny, other writers adopted various strategies: Marge Piercy invents a gender-free pronoun and tries to develop an androgynous aesthetics, that, although integrating "femininity" and "masculinity," values "femininity" higher; Joanna Russ devotes large portions of The Female Man to an articulation of the problems of representation and contains androgyny within femininity, although integrating traditionally masculine traits like aggression. Other writers, like Sally Gearhart and Rochelle Singer in their separatist visions of all-female societies, resort to innate feminine characteristics, rejecting anything masculine. All these approaches have to deal with the problem of necessarily invoking traditional definitions of gender while attempting to describe androgyny/humanity which traps them in exactly the gendered discourse they are trying to subvert. When Le Guin published The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), her "thought experiment" about hermaphrodite androgynes on the Planet Winter,110 androgyny was not a popular concept, having fallen into disregard after its fame in the wake of C. G. Jung's animus/anima theories. The novel,

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an early paradigmatic text for the deconstruction of gender, exposes the limitations of language in describing non-referential concepts. Drawing on Taoism in her description of the people of Winter, Le Guin again, as in The Word for World is Forest, creates a world of subtle gradings and shadows rather than contrasts, complementation rather than hierarchy, thus providing a philosophical context for her emphasis on likenesses rather than "gaps." (167) Taking gender as the primary duality and androgyny as its deconstruction, Le Guin shows the consequences of these different interpretations of gender for such vast areas like technology, individuality, and concepts of time; where the binary opposition of male-female is nonexistent, thinking is not structured around opposing, hierarchical poles: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact, the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter. (68)

This does not mean that duality does not exist on Winter; it is not a duality of hierarchy, however, but of creative tension. Enough has already been written about the erosion of Le Guin's androgynous vision on a structural and linguistic level,112 due to the choice of the male pronoun and the portrayal of the androgyne in roles we associate with masculinity. In addition, Le Guin's first reference to androgyny does not appear until four pages into the novel, too late and not followed by enough other examples to displace our first gendered reading of the protagonists as male." 3 It is certainly true that the use of the generic "he" represents a major obstacle in recognizing androgyny in the protagonists, although single sentences like "The king was pregnant" (72) prove to be tremendously effective in provoking "cognitive estrangement," much like Joanna Russ's title The Female Man. The novel, far from being oblivious to these problems, places exceptional emphasis on the problematic character of representation in general and that of androgyny especially. Filtered through the mind of a man, Ai, from a bisexed society, the narrative necessarily struggles with his limitations and prejudices (that coincide with ours), "seeing 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." (9) Ai is unable to react to the shifting image of the androgyne without succumbing to the urge to fixate it in one gender, a perceptual challenge mirrored in the structure of the book with its shifting perspectives that refuse to fixate one meaning, instead insisting in the opening paragraph that "truth is a matter of the imagination." The

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impossibility to transcend gender-dualism in perception is not confined to men in The Left Hand of Darkness-, the anthropological "field notes" on "The Question of Sex" (that are only quoted after the novel has given voice to one of the androgynes) are written by a woman who concedes: "One is respected only as a human being. It is an appalling experience." (69) That fundamental defamiliarizing experience of being "only a human being" has long-term effects on Ai, though; from his early tendency to repudiate any signs of femininity in the androgynes as "effeminate"114 or "less manly,""5 the novel traces his inner journey to his acceptance of androgyny and his doubts about the "essential nature" of gender. For the first time consciously examining his internalization of gendered behavior, the "standards of manliness, of virility" (157), he slowly realizes that he is "locked in [his] virility," that in his culture, gender divides humanity, making "women [...] more alien" to him than the androgynes with whom he shares "one sex, anyhow." (169) That growth from alienation to a shared humanity leaves him estranged from his own gendered culture: "But they all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species: great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut [...]" (212) In Le Guin's thought experiment, the fantastic has worked to make the unfamiliar familiar, and the familiar "strange," it opens his and our eyes to the limits of his and our culture. The novel succeeds in transmitting that effect of "culture-shock" to the reader by integrating the voice of the "other," by complementing the human's narrative with the "alien's," Estraven. In the dialogue between the two voices, Ai's gradual acceptance of traditionally feminine qualities in himself is conflated with the gradual acceptance of the androgyne. Thus, the novel mirrors the concept of androgyny as "the alien in the self," of a fundamental dualism of self (I or "Ai") and other, subject and object, that Le Guin dramatizes in the myths of Winter where such a dualism is held in creative balance rather than opposition. When Connie, the protagonist in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, is first confronted with a representative from Utopia, her automatic urge to classify the stranger by gender is frustrated; she, like Ai, learns that the shifting image of the androgyne is impossible to arrest in gendered certainty. Luciente lacks the "macho presence" Connie associates with maleness, "his/her" voice is "effeminate," the hands "warm and gentle." (36) Although irritated by the visitor's "girlishness" (40), Connie finally decides that "he" is a man since "his" self-assurance, attitude of authority, and muscular body deviate from traditional concepts of femininity. Rather than

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working within the linguistic constraints of gendered pronouns or framing gendered pronouns questioningly in quotation marks, Piercy invents the androgynous "per," a device that after several pages ceases to sound peculiar and that constrains our urge to perceive gendered personalities. Her Utopian society, although biologically bi-sexed, has eliminated sex-roles and gender, along with the nuclear family and motherhood as we know it. Women no longer bear the children, embryos grow in brooders instead, and, after their birth, are "mothered" by three people who may or may not be female. This radical change, first resented by Connie, was deemed necessary to overcome gender-inequality: "as long as we were biologicall enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers." (105) Separating biological mothering from social mothering and providing mothering by three people, Piercy destroys any semblance to the nuclear family that produces gendered personalities. The recourse to biology, however, reveals that Piercy does not believe in the potential of social change to achieve gender-equality;"6 it is a firm rejection of the "separate but equal" argument in feminism that postulates that a re-evaluation of "feminine" qualities could lead to gender-equality. Although Woman on the Edge of Time addresses the impact of fundamental institutions like the nuclear family that reproduce hegemony, questions of power are ultimately linked to biology. Piercy's theory clearly owes much to Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970), while the similarities to Alduous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) are only superficial - where Huxlex recoils in horror, neglecting to explore the social and psychological implications of biological change, Piercy, in a "feminist response to Alduous Huxley,"117 celebrates a potential for liberation. Whereas the inhabitants of Winter ultimately appear male to us, Piercy's representation of androgyny is more persuasive. Avoiding the automatic associations triggered by gender-pronouns and showing women and men in diverse social roles, she also develops a more convincing androgynous aesthetics in which "feminine" elements prevail. In contrast to the vast and cold homes on Winter with their "masculine" emphasis on official functions and neglect of comfort, the houses in Piercy's Utopia, with their emphasis on play and their elaborate color-schemes, strike us as more androgynous designs. Throughout the novel, Piercy tries to create a new sensuality that embraces sexuality without confining it in heterosexuality and repressing it in the reality-principle; touching, hearing, smelling, seeing, and tasting are expressions of this liberated erotics that does not privilege one sense. The richness of sensuous delight in the Utopian Mattapoisett is effectively

174 contrasted with the sensual deprivation of the psychiatric ward where Connie is imprisoned and where the colors are dull, the odors foul, and the food is tasteless. On Connie's arrival in the future, a blend of sensory impressions signals a Utopian liberation of the senses: "Then she smelled the salt in the air. [...] A breeze ruffled the loose rag of dress, chilling her calves. Under her feet she felt stone. A gull mewed." (68) Striking in this description is its deviation from standard first impressions of Utopian visits that privilege the sense of vision and that depend on reason for immediate evaluations of Utopia; instead, Piercy tries to approximate a sensual impression of how Utopia would feel like. Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) suggests a different androgyny, definitely not, as the ironic title may lead us to believe, the assimilation of women to a male norm. Russ has called her novel a "gynandrous vision,"118 a term that reverses the established sequence of masculine-feminine in "androgyny," suspecting it of pointing to an underlying gender-hierarchy in the concept. Russ's title ridicules the claim that "mankind" and "man" are generic terms that also represent women; the combination of "female" and "man" strikes us as oxymoronic, forcing us into cognitive estrangement.119 The novel returns periodically to the theme set in its title, following the confessions of the female man. Lest we mistake her for an example of biological metamorphosis, we are told: "I mean a female man, of course; my body and my soul were exactly the same." (5) The appropriation of "man" by a female is triggered by the woman's desire to be included in categories like "Western Man and existential Man": If we are all Mankind, it follows [...] that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman, for honestly now, whoever heard of Java Woman [...] you will think of me as a Man and treat me as a Man until it enters your [...] head that I am a man. (And you are a woman.) (140)

Finally, she realizes that "[y]ou can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter." (151) Human, in our present culture, is a concept occupied by man; and man/Man is defined in exclusionary opposition to woman; inclusion in that category would mean assimilation to masculinity for women. Conversely, on the Utopian Whileaway, human is Woman, and Janet from Whileaway "didn't believe [men] to be fully human." (68)120 The "gynandrous" orientation or woman-oriented androgyny of the female Utopia is captured in Russ's reference to the Aristophanes-myth about the two-faced spherical beings that are woman-woman, man-man, and woman-man. While most theories of androgyny concentrate on the split into and reunion of feminine and masculine, privileging heterosexuality, Russ

175 chooses those beings that are two women, exemplified in the image of Vittoria and Janet embracing, who "stood very still, as Aristophanes describes." (89) The main strategy of The Female Man is to address questions of representation head-on and dismantle masculinist biases in language and plots. In analogy to Russ's theoretical writings about exclusionary male plots, revealed in the absurdity of gender-reversal in myths like "Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West,"121 the novel lists numerous literary and "real-life" plots closed to women vis-a-vis "feminine" plots that trap them in the "lap of the possible" and the "unspeakableness of [their] own wishes" (125) against the "might-be of our dreams." (213) In pointing to the gap between the possible and wishes/dreams, the novel develops an argument for the fantastic. Russ not only draws attention to representation, but also to the readers' perception, our gender-biases in constructing meaning. The text lures us into deceptively familiar scenes that have to be re-interpreted when we are finally confronted with the gender-identity of the protagonists. In the opening scene of "When It Changed," Russ's award winning story on which the later novel is based, typically "masculine" references imply a male first-person narrator: "The funny thing, about my wife, though: she will not handle guns [...] For someone who has fought three duels, I am afraid of far, far too much."122 Our reading of this familiar picture of gendered responses to violence and aggression is rendered invalid, though, when the story reveals the narrator's female gender; the scene becomes defamiliarized when we realize that Russ's use of "wife" is one of her many ironic hints at a language ill-equipped to deal with the realities of the all-female society where this narrator lives. The Female Man abounds with irony and satire;123 Russ prefers the power of laughter to morality in unveiling misogyny, the stereotypical portrayal of women in men's science fiction, and evasive conventions in feminist science fiction. Russ's concept of androgyny embraces aggression, and her depiction of women's aggressiveness uncovers the denials of other feminist Utopias. In all-women Utopias like Gilman's Herland, the tendency is to explain the exclusion of men, obviously an aggressive act, by some deus-(or rather dea-)-ex-machina event like a mysterious disease or a war that killed the men but spared the women. In Russ's Whileaway, a similar explanation exists, namely that the disastrous effects of a plague caused the extinction of men, but a visitor from an alternative future revises Whileaway's historiography by revealing that a war among the sexes eliminated the men. Russ's inclusion of aggression into the shaping of Utopia stands in marked contrast to the idealized images of peaceful and tranquil

176 women in the Utopias of writers who try to convince us of the "natural" moral superiority of women; instead, it joins fictions like The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for Us and Woman on the Edge of Time in linking Utopia to agency, rather than taking it for granted as a gift of nature.124 Also in contrast to essentialist visions, Russ emphasizes the social construction of femininity, dismantles it as ideology. Her four protagonists, all variations of one person in different alternative realities (who share the initial "J" and bear a rough physical resemblance) turn out to be four entirely different personalities in the contexts of their cultures. The strategy of alternate universes denaturalizes the present along with the future, demonstrating that a social theory and practice of femininity, of what women are and should be, is self-fulfilling, producing exactly the types of women it prescribes: "Who'd think it was the same women? [...] Yet we started out the same [...] Even I can hardly believe that I am looking at three other myselves." (162; see 209) The all-female future in The Female Man, as one of several possible alternative realities, should be understood as a metaphor, an answer to the present definition of humanity in male terms, and not as a blueprint for a feminist society.125 Reversing present cultural practices to define humanity by excluding or subsuming one gender and privileging the other, Russ exposes the mechanisms that produce the cultural "invisibility" of the marginalized gender. James Tiptree Jr.'s "Your Faces, Oh My Sisters, Are Filled with Light!" (1976) pursues a similar strategy of containing androgyny within femininity and exploring invisibility. The protagonist, a mad "courier" whose future seems to be populated only by women, persistently classifies men in the realistic present as "sisters," only excluding violent men from that category as "dogs." This linguistic practice, in turn, makes us question whether her future is indeed all-female, or whether the exclusive use of "sister" and feminine pronouns indicates that the future has established the feminine as norm, using a generic "she" where our present would use a generic "he." Like the societies in The Female Man and "Your Faces, Oh My Sisters, Are Filled with Light!," Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground(1979) is an allwoman Utopia that excludes men, a feature that critics have interpreted alternately as an expression of anger and a literalization of women's marginality.126 Since men are absent in these societies, women are the norm and define humanity; yet where Russ stresses the social construction of femininity, Gearhart expresses essentialist notions of innate differences between the sexes, with women as morally superior. Femininity is monolithic in this society where a protagonist states that "every woman is myself' (123),

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denying difference except in superficial categories like "temperament" (139). Gearhart has later critically commented on the failure - her own and others' of feminist Utopias to deal convincingly with race.127 Femininity is also a fixed characteristic, defined at the core as women's closeness to nature, set against a masculinity defined by violence and technology. Men are removed from the category human (the women have lost the "hope of their ever being truly human or life-loving," 140), because they are removed from nature; since women are identified with nature, misogyny parallels the exploitation of the earth, metaphorical rape of "Mother Earth" is linked to the rape of women. Both manifestations of violence break down outside the cities where neither technology nor erections work. Since the chain of argument connects men with city, technology, and rape, the only acceptable males are the gentles who have renounced all this and assimilated to the norms set by the women as much as possible, although at a physical distance. A closer contact between the genders is seen as impossible by the gentles as well, since "women and men can do nothing but violence to one another." (187) Consequently, the women live in all-female, the gentles in all-male rural enclaves in the larger context of a dystopian male-dominated society that is confined to urban areas. The equation of male sexuality (that in The Wanderground is always violent sexuality) with technology versus the equation of women with nature leads to a firm and indiscriminate rejection of technology in the women's enclaves; the women have moved, as one critic puts it, from "bad culture to good nature."128 Natural phenomena like telepathy render communication-technology obsolete; instead of the parcelled-off cubicles where people are crowded in the cities, the women live in nests. Historically, the equation of women with nature has been used to justify their exclusion from the public sphere and to argue for their more tenuous hold on civilization; all contemporary feminist Utopias in the US share a re-evaluation of nature and technology on the background of ecological "gaia"-concepts. While Utopias like Woman on the Edge of Time aim at a carefully maintained balance and use technology in the context of reproduction and heavy or tedious work, separatist fictions like The Wanderground attempt to establish the equation of woman with nature as a source of power against the association of culture and technology as male;129 they see "all vestiges of contemporary culture as male-dominated and therefore unacceptable."130 This identification of nature as women's place only works in separatist Utopias, as Jane Marcus has observed, since the ideal is essentially "a flight into the pre-patriarchal magical world of trees and transformations, animals and plants, and proud inviolateness."131 Although

178 Marcus's observation refers to fantasy novels of the 1920, it holds for contemporary Utopias as well where a state of wholeness in the wilderness is only possible in those future societies without men; where men are included, as in Piercy's novel, women do not totally identify with nature and welcome a controlled technology instead. These bi-sexed Utopias are wary of a reinforcement of the patriarchal equation of woman with nature, especially where the use of reproductive technologies points to the fear of the loss of control over the reproductive body, a fear that is central to the dystopian novels. Ethnicity and Utopia In identifying the central features of contemporary feminist Utopias, it becomes clear that these visions are trying to get to a place where the traditional American minority cultures already are. The high value placed on community, the rejection of an objectifying relationship to nature, and the integration of "dream" in these Utopias remind us of the communities portrayed in minority women's literatures. It is no coincidence that the models for many Utopias come from traditional ethnic cultures, as far as the Senoi and as close as Native American cultures. Critics like Elaine Baruch have speculated why women of color have not used the Utopian genre in their literatures: "Could it be that one of the reasons that Black women do not generally write Utopias is that Utopian fiction is a privileged genre that requires a certain material condition, and that, confronted with the oppression of the moment, these women of color have no passion left to confront the future?" 132 That theory assumes that literary expressions would be the same for white and minority women writers, based on a norm set by white writers. Yet one could equally ask, looking at minority women's literature as the norm, what the reason is that white women do not generally write fictions that re-discover a cultural tradition that could provide a context for their desires. The answer, as will become obvious in the next chapter, is that white women writers do not find a communal cultural past that could serve as a model; rather, looking back into history, they find material for dystopias. It also will become apparent that it is dystopian rather than Utopian writing that "requires a certain material condition" in the present, a status quo that is at least experienced as so minimally satisfactory that a worse future (modeled on the past in women's dystopian writing) becomes imaginable. Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) is a case in point: looking back from the present, slavery is dystopia for the time-traveling black heroine.

179 Notes 1

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland. with an introduction by Ann J. Lane (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), p. 29; see p. 44: there are "no signs of them [men] in the books they gave us, or the pictures."- Quotes from the fictions discussed in this chapter are from the subsequent editions and will be given in the text: Dorothy Bryant, The Kin of Ala Are Waiting for You (New York/Berkeley: Moon Books, 1986); Sally Miller Gearhart, The Wanderground (London: The Women's Press, 1985); Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Walker and Company, 1969); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wordfor World is Forest (New York: Berkley, 1982); Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of A Survivor (New York et al.: Bantam, 1976); Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Fawcett, 1976); Joanna Russ, The Female Man (New York et al.: Bantam, 1978); James Tiptree, Jr. [Alice Sheldon], "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" and Raccoona Sheldon [Alice Sheldon], "Your Faces, Oh My Sisters, Are Filled with Light" in Aurora Beyond Equality, eds. Vonda Mclntyre and Susan Janice Andersen (Greenwich CT: Fawcett Gold Medal Book, 1976). The choice of male pseudonym by Alice Sheldon will be discussed below.

2

Utopia has been defined as the depiction of "a radically different and historically alternative sociopolitical condition; an alternative locus; an imaginary community in which relations are organized more perfectly than in the author's community; the fictional, or, more clearly 'verbal construction'of any such condition, location, or community. [...] Utopia is the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author's community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis." Darko Suvin, "Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia," Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 37-63; p. 49. See also his Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1988), p. 35. For a definition of feminist Utopias, see Sally Gearhart, "Future Visions: Today's Politics: Feminist Utopias in Review" in Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia. Mavericks and Mythmakers (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), p. 296, who, in addition to general characteristics, gives the following specifics: "sees men or male institutions as the major cause of present social ills, and [...] presents women not only as at least the equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions." For the replacement of Utopian by dystopian writing in twentieth century (male) literature see Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible. Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York/London: Methuen, 1986), p. 8/9, who points out the resurgence of the Utopia in the 1960s, and Alexandra Aldridge, The Scientific World View in Dystopia (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984, 1978), p. 17.

3 4

For the concept of "concrete Utopia," see Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hqffhung (1959). See for example Joanna Russ, "Recent Feminist Utopias," in Future Females. A Critical Anthology, ed. Marleen S. Barr (Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981), p. 71-85, and Hoda M. Zaki, "Utopia and ideology in Daughters of the Coral Dawn and contemporary feminist Utopias," Women's Studies, Vol. 14 (1987): 119-133; p. 120. - Jane Marcus is an exception; in "A Wilderness of One's Own: Feminist Fantasy Novels of the Twenties: Rebecca West and Sylvia

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5 6

7

8

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Townsend Warner," she states that the feminist fantasy novels of the 1920s and 1970s are a result of "similar frustrations with the political process. The feminist fantasy novel of the twenties is a response to realism's failure to make permanent female space in the citadels of male power." in Women Writers and the City. Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Susan Merril Squier (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 134-160; p. 140-141. - The ecology movement also spawned Utopias, like Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975). As should become obvious from this list, the feminist Utopia is largely a US-American phenomenon. In Germany, though, mainstream literary criticism still manages to ignore feminist Utopias. With a breathtaking indifference to women's writing, a three-volume critical anthology, Utopieforschung, published 1982, manages to skip questions of gender altogether; not even Perkins Gilman is ever mentioned (while Morris, for example, is mentioned 8 times, sometimes extensively discussed). Frankenstein is the only work by a woman writer given some attention. That indifference is reflected in the list of contributors: 53 men and only one woman. See Wilhelm Voßkamp, ed., Utopieforschung. Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985,1982 1 ). There are two exceptions: Katharine Burdekin's The End of This Day's Business (written 1935, first published New York: The Feminist Press, 1989) and Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Ruins of Isis (Norfolk: Downing, 1978) both depict matriarchies, but at precisely the point when female domination is beginning to be questioned by both men and women. Both authors obviously disapprove of matriarchal rule. See Carol Farley Kessler, "Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel 'To Be of Use'," Extrapolation, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Winter 1987): 310-318; p. 313; Kessler defines the three main features as "the communitarian, the ecological, and the spiritual." - See Anne K. Mellor, "On Feminist Utopias," Women's Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1982): 241262; Carol Pearson,"Beyond Governance: Anarchist Feminism in the Utopian Novels of Dorothy Bryant, Mary Staton, and Marge Piercy," Heresies, 13,4/1 (1981): 84-87; Marleen S. Barr, Alien to Femininity. Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (New York et al.: Greenwood, 1987); Nancy A. Walker, Feminist Alternatives (Jackson/London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990); the articles by Valerie Broege ("Women and Technology in Science Fiction") and Kathleen Cioffi ("Types of Feminist Fantasy and Science Fiction") in Women Worldwalkers, ed. Jane B. Weedman (Lubbock TX: Texas Tech Press, 1985); Annette Keinhorst, "Emancipatory Projection: an introduction to women's critical Utopias," Women's Studies, Vol. 14 (1987): 91-99. See Elaine Baruch, "Women in Men's Utopias," in Women in Search of Utopia, p. 209-218, and Giovanna Pezzuoli, "Prisoner in Utopia" in Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft, eds., Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism (Ypsilanti: Bilingual Press, 1982), p. 36-43; Theresia Sauter-Bailliet, "Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)" in Hartmut Heuermann and Bernd-Peter Lange, eds., Die Utopie in der angloamerikanischen Literatur (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1984), p. 349-370; p. 358, for a discussion of how the literary structures of the traditional Utopia reflect masculinist biases.

181 10 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (New York: Beacon Press, 1974, 19721) In his introductory clarification of terms (when talking about feminism and Marxism), Marcuse warns that he can only discuss these issues in terms that reflect the contemporary status of women in our civilization, that is that femininity is a social construct. Lest anybody misunderstood his use of "feminine" (tenderness, nonviolence) and "masculine" characteristic as essentialist, Marcuse reminds us of female concentration camp guards, a historical fact that has always prevented me (especially as a German) to succumb to a belief in the moral superiority of women. See also Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Beacon Press, 1974, 19551). One criticism of Marcuse of course is that he wants to instrumentalize feminism, a tendency that sometimes becomes obvious. 11 Paul Coates, The Realist Fantasy. Fiction and Reality since Clarissa (New York: St Martin's Press, 1983), p. 100; see Patrocinio Schweickart, "What If... Science Fiction and Technology in Feminist Utopias," in Joan Rothschild, ed., Machina ex Dea (New York et al., 1983), p. 198-211; p. 198. 12 See Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 31; and Suvin's two books. 13 See e.g. Aldridge, Scientific World View, p. 17; see Lance Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty. An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy (New York et al.: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 18, who describes Utopia as "a narrative that believes in the Truth of itself, a text that is sure of itself, with a godlike omniscience" and supported by a "coherent ideology." 14 See Olaf Hansen, "Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888)" Die Utopie in der angloamerikanischen Literatur, p. 103-119, for a critique of the traditional Utopia and the evaluation of the dream as an access to Utopia. 15 Actually, Aldridge, Scientific World View, also sees male dystopian writing reacting against "the rigidity and over-ratiocination of the Utopian concept." p. 65 16 See the subtitle of Samuel Delany's Triton (1976): "An Ambiguous Heterotopia." On heterotopia, see Teresa de Lauretis, "Signs of Waonder" in de Lauretis et al., eds., The Technological Imagination (Madison: Coda Press, 1980), p. 162. 17 I strongly disagree here with Jean Pfaelzer, "The Changing of the Avant-Garde: The Feminist Utopia," Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 15, Part 3 (November 1988): 282294; who claims that "because the modem feminist Utopia resides in the future, it is an historical inevitability rather than a symbolic displacement." (p. 283) I think it is obvious that e.g. in Woman on the Edge of Time, the coexistence of a dystopian and Utopian future in parallel universes that depend on the protagonist's intervention contradicts Pfaelzer's statement. Another result of the ambiguity is a problem of classification that makes the discussion of fictions like The Memoirs of A Survivor in the chapter on Utopias rather than on dystopias partly arbitrary, since the novel contains both elements. In such cases, my decisions were based on similarities between fictions that would contribute to an understanding of dominant features. 18 See Nancy Bowman Albinski, Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 7: "The political realist strain of the past is increasingly submerged as women writers turn increasingly to allegory or ambiguity of setting, character and narrative." See p. 130. - See Carol S. Pearson, "Towards A New Language, Consciousness and Political Theory: The Utopian Novels of Dorothy Bryant, Mary Staton and Marge Piercy", Heresies, 13 (1981): 84-87; p. 85: "The major focus in Bryant's and Staton's novels is the journey from a primitive, linear

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mode of consciousness, marked by internal repression and external oppression, to a more complex, multiple mode of thinking that results rom the integration of thought and feeling, ratiocination and intuition, conscious and unconscious minds." Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 26/27, defines the critical Utopia as "an oppositional Utopian text" that does not "foreclose the agenda for the future in terms of a homogeneious revolutionary plan but rather to hold open the act of negating the present and to imagine any of several possible modes of adaptation to society and nature based generally upon principles of autonomy, mutual aid, and equality." Suvin, Positions, p. 40/41, states that "though formally closed, significant Utopia is thematically open: its pointings reflect back upon the readers' 'topia.'" Examples are The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, The Memoirs of A Survivor, The Word for World is Forest. See Annette Keinhorst, Utopien von Frauen in der zeitgenössischen Literatur der USA (Frankfurt et al.: Peter Lang, 1985), p. 117. - One of the most innovative techniques is Tiptree's repesentation of the feminist Utopia as male nightmare, discussed below in this chapter under "Herland Revis(it)ed." Misreading the contemporary Utopia as an "ontologically real country" is a mistake many critics make. See Suvin, Positions, p. 42, who insists on its quality as an „epistemological model." See Joanna Russ with a similar critique in "Reflections on Science Fiction. An interview with Joanna Russ," Quest, Vol. II, No. 1, p. 41ff.; as an example of that kind of misreading, see Mona Knapp on Lessing's The Memoirs of A Survivor, p. 127. Nancy A. Walker's obvervation in Feminist Alternatives that the choice of first-person narrator in most Utopias implies that Utopia is the protagonist's vision is an interesting approach here; it prompts the question of how much the choice of Shevek as the mainprotagonist limits Le Guin's exploration of a Utopian society to a basically male definition of Utopia. See below for a discussion of how Le Guin's choice of a male narrator (among other things) in The Left Hand of Darkness undermined her intention of presenting an androgynous society. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 105. For a radically different interpretation of the role of scarcity in The Dispossessed see Fredric Jameson, "World-Reduction and the Emergence of Utopian Narrative" in Harold Bloom, ed., Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (New York et al.: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), p. 23-38, who stresses the "sociopolitical hypothesis about the inseparability of Utopia and scarcity." (p. 35) Utopia has generally been connected with the pleasure principle in psychoanalysis. See Northrop Frye, quoted in Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 31, that romance is "the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it fron the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality." Utopia is free "from that reality principle to which a now oppressive representation is hostage." Catherine McClenahan, "Textual Politics: The Uses of the Imagination in Jcanna Russ's The Female Man," Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, Vol. 70 (1982), p. 114-125. See Bloch in Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 24, and my discussion of androgyny below. See Anne Koenen and Gisela Welz, "The Pregnant King: Inquiries into the Mealing of Androgyny in Feminine Utopias," Journal of Popular Literature, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 1991): 39-59, for an overview.

183 28 Janice Raymond, "The Illusion of Androgyny," Quest, Vol. II, No. 1 (Summer 1975): 57-66, is an early example of feminist skepticism toward the masculine orientation of the concept. 29 Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, And Psychoanalytic Discourse," in Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 328. 30 Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 23. 31 See Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias, p. 41. Gilbert and Gubar e.g. explain that "Gilman gives us women with no sexual desire at all" in order to reject the traditional association of women with eroticism, reflecting "tensions of turn-of-the-century feminism." No Man's Land. The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven/London, 1989), p. 74. 32 Cora Kaplan, "Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism," Sea Changes (London: Verso, 1986), p. 31-56; p. 34; an example of this approach that Kaplan criticizes is Lucy Freibert, "World Views in Utopian Novels by Women" in Marleen S. Barr and Nicholas D. Smith, eds., Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations (Lanham MD/London: University of America, 1983), p. 67-84, who confines her objections to Herland to a footnote on p. 70/71. 33 Herland, p. 67 and 71. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. (1930) Newly Translated from the German and edited by James Strachey (New York/London: Norton, 1961), p. 78 (he includes termites as well). 34 See Glenna Matthews, "Just A Housewife". The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Chapter 5 provides an excellent analysis of these aspects of Darwinian thought and its influence on Gilman's theoretical writings. 35 Wright quoted in Matthews, "Just A Housewife", p. 27. 36 For an analysis of nineteenth century feminist interpretations of asexuality see Kaplan, "Wild Nights," p. 34-50. - The separation of reproduction and (hetero)sexuality does not lead Gilman to transcend this nineteenth century idea and to reinstate female desire, but paradoxically to dedicate her Utopia to reproduction. - And the women whom the three men marry, have not been mothers yet. I suspect behind this thematic feature a covert and perhaps unconscious connection the novel re-establishes between motherhood and sexuality; not having been pregnant yet makes the women technically virgins in the men's worldview. 37 Matthews, "Just A Housewife", p. 141. Gilman's personal problems with maternity are well-documented; less widely known is her own mother's unnurturing attitude, her coldness. See Matthews, p. 135. 38 Gilbert/Gubar, No Man's Land, p. 82, 81. See Pfaelzer, "The Changing of the AvantGarde," p. 291: "Yet in presenting the female 'other' as the negation of patriarchy, these early feminist utopists reproduced the repressions they sought to transcend." 39 Ann J. Lane, "Introduction," p. xi. 40 Herland, p. 128 and 129. 41 For a critique of Gilman's rejection of lesbianism, see Joanna Russ, "When We Were Everybody. A Lost Feminist Utopia," New Women's Times Feminist Review, July 619,1979: 10-11. 42 Herland,?. ttO.

184 43 A similar problem with the choice of a male narrator arises in Katharine Burdekin's dystopian Swastika Night (1935), discussed in the chapter on dystopias. 44 Lucy Freibert, "World Views," p. 51, only states that the women act "[o]n the possibility that a heterosexual society might have something to offer to improve the quality of life [...]". 45 See Joanne Blum, Transcending Gender. The Male/Female Double in Women's Fiction (Ann Arbor/London: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 62, who interprets the choice of a male narrator in The Kin of Ata as a strategy of mediating the novel's social critique; I see another factor in The Kin of Ata as well, a reason Toni Morrison describes for her choice in Song of Solomon as men having the most to leam. Anne Koenen, '"Women out of Sequence': An Interview with Toni Morrison," in Gttnter H. Lenz, ed., History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1984), p. 207-221. 46 There is a further confusion here: how, if sexuality is psychological, can it manifest itself as atavism and be bred out? 47 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 319. 48 Lane, "Introduction," p. xi. See Matthews, "Just A Housewife," p. 140. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Land, contend that Herlanders "define the human as female." (75) Since they never address the question of why the women are so enthusiastic to include men into their Utopia, I do not find their argument entirely convincing, except where it refers to parts of Gilman's rhetorical strategy. 49 Herland, p. 37; emphasis added. Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," in Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 243-270. 50 Herland, p. 59: "This led me very promptly to the conviction that these 'feminine charms' we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity." See Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Land, who see a weakness in the novel it its revolving around "precisely the terms set up by the misogyny it would repudiate." p. 81. 51 I want to specify, though, that that zone, except in Utopian visions, is not totally exempt from male hegemony which Showalter seems to assume. 52 Baruch, "Introduction" in Women in Search of Utopia, p. 205. 53 See for example Lillian M. Heldreth, "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death1: The Feminism and Fatalism of James Tiptree, Jr.," Extrapolation, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 1982): 22-30. The exceptions are Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, "The Case of the Haploid Heart: Psychological Patterns in the Fiction of Alice Sheldon ("James Tiptree, Jr.')," Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 17, Part 2 (1990): 188-220; p. 205, and Veronica Hollinger, '"The Most Grisly Truth1: Responses to the Human Condition in the Works of James Tiptree, Jr.," Extrapolation, Vol. 17, Part 2 (July 1990): 129-135; who see Tiptree's ironic distance. 54 Hostile male reactions to the Nebula Award for Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" (1982), a forerunner of The Female Man, and violently hostile reviews of The Female Man certainly indicate that some men do indeed perceive women's Utopias as threats. For examples of uneasy male reactions to Russ's fictions, see Samuel R. Delany's analysis in "Orders of Chaos: The Science Fiction of Joanna Russ" in Women Worldwalkers, p. 97ff. Some reviews are quoted in Sarah Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 176.

185 55 See the chapter" Alien(N)ation" for a discussion of "The Women Men Don't See". 56 See feminist revisions of psychoanalysis that argue the same, like Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering. Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1978) 57 The correct term is Escondida. 58 Joanna Russ, "Amor Vincit Foeminam [sic]: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" in Judith Spector, ed., Gender Studies. New Directions in Feminist Criticism (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986), p. 234-249; p. 235. 59 Julie Luedtke Seal, "James Tiptree, Jr.: Fostering the Future, Not Condemning It," Extrapolation, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 1990): 73-82, sees that "he has a much greater chance of being able to adapt to a new environment," although his protective attitudes imply a feeling of superiority.(p. 77) I want to suggest that Tiptree is much more critical of him. 60 The relationship between individual and society in the feminist utopia has been discussed in many of the critical texts listed under footnotes 4 and 6; I will discuss that relationship in greater detail in the chapter on dystopias. 61 Russ, "Amor Vincit Foeminam," p. 238, calls societies "modeled on bees and termites" "a common pattern for matriarchies in SF." 62 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 115. 63 Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction, p. 53. 64 Pfaelzer, "The Changing of the Avant-Garde," p. 289. 65 See below for a similar approach in Doris Lessing's work. 66 Conversation Anne Koenen with Dorothy Bryant at Bryant's home, Berkeley, California, on December 30,1987. 67 Bryant owns her own publishing company, Ata Books; when The Kin of Ata was later published by Random House they insisted that the original title reminded of a quilt rather than of the Bible. Conversation Anne Koenen with Dorothy Bryant at Bryant's home, Berkeley, California, on December 30, 1987. - Bryant also considered publishing the novel under the ambivalent pseudonym "D. M. Bryant". 68 Conversation Anne Koenen with Dorothy Bryant at Bryant's home, Berkeley, California, on December 30, 1987. 69 The Kin of Ata, p. 17: "I had nothing but the slighest curiosity about them." See p. 19, 20,47. 70 See the previous chapter on Toni Morrison's Beloved, where Beloved's story is also located in shifts of perspectives and echoes of words. 71 See Natalie Rosinsky, Feminist Futures. Contemporary Women's Speculative Fiction (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), p. 39, who criticizes the masculinist, but not the racist bias. - See below under "New States of Mind - Androgyny," for a detailed discussion of androgyny. 72 The novel makes references to the use of napalm and deforestation, although the characterization of the forest-people is obviously not meant as a portrayal of the Vietcong or the Vietnamese. - Le Guin wrote: "The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it was disastrous." quoted in Barbara Bucknall, Ursula K. LeGuin (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), p. 100. See Jameson, "World Reduction," p. 31. 73 Wordfor World, p. 6, p. 147.

186 74 Suvin, Positions, p. 137. 75 See Peter S. Altermann, "Ursula K. Le Guin: Damsel with a Dulcimer" in Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds., Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1979), p. 64-77; pp. 66 and 69; see Sneja Gunew, "Mythic Reversals: The Evolution of the Shadow Motif' in Olander/Greenberg, eds., Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 178-199, on the symbolism of shadows in Le Guin's fictions. 76 "Doris Lessing at Stony Brook: An Interview" in Doris Lessing, A Small Personal Voice. Essays, Reviews, Interviews (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 70. That evaluation of fantastic literature comes twelve years after Lessing praises "the realist novel, the realist story" as "the highest form of prose writing." "The Small Personal Voice" in A Small Personal Voice, p. 4. 77 Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London et al.: Granada, 1981), p. 308; see p. 424 on "New Wave". 78 Lessing, "Doris Lessing at Stony Brook," p. 69. 79 See the chapter on dystopias for a discussion of Carter's novel. 80 That claim is mirrored in the form of the "memoir"; Lessing had stated that the novel was "an attempt at autobiography"(quoted in Victoria Glendinning, "The Return of She," Times Literary Supplement, December 13, 1974, p. 1405) - all these generic categories trying to invoke a concept of the text as document rather than fiction. 81 See Mona Knapp's excellent criticism in Doris Lessing (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), for a detailed analysis, p. 124/5. 82 Memoirs, p. 109; Lessing's analysis here, though, is not very convincing. 83 Betsy Draine, quoted in Knapp, Doris Lessing, p. 123. - In the "family rooms," where these primal scenes of psychology unfold, it is always stifling hot, the little girl is always sweating. The rooms, held in red and white, are reminiscent of Jane's childhood scenes in Jane Eyre. 84 Roberta Rubenstein, in her Jungian interpretation of the novel that also considers Lessing's growing interest in Sufism, notes that "[s]ymbolically, the unconscious is no longer so deeply hidden 'below' consciouness, [...] The dual schema remains, but with horizontal rather than vertical coordinates." The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing. Breaking the Form of Consciousness (Urbana et al.: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 222. 85 Memoirs, p. 46, 153. 86 See Memoirs, p. 64/5. For similar evaluations, see Walker, Feminist Alternatives, p. 169, and Sandra Lott who interprets the end as an approach to God, reached only after overcoming the "overemphasizing [of] the rational." Lott, "The Evolving Consciousness of Feminine Identity in Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of A Survivor and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass" in Women Worldwalkers, p. 178. 87 Lessing, "Doris Lessing at Stony Brook," p. 66/67. 88 Lessing, "Doris Lessing at Stony Brook," p. 67/68. 89 Woman on the Edge, p. 65, 66, 101. 90 See the chapter on minority women's literature and re-creating history for similar approaches to the failure of psychiatry and the biases of offical historiography. 91 Woman on the Edge, p. 33,36, 37,40. 92 Vision is generally a problematic sense in fantastic literature; see the chapter on the Gothic and Jackson, Fantasy, p. 45.

187 93 James Tiptree, Jr., "Everything but the Name Is Me," Starship, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Fall 1979), p. 33. 94 See Alice Sheldon, "A Woman Writing SF and Fantasy" in Denise DuPont, ed., Women of Vision. Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction (New York: St Martin's Press, 1988), p. 52. 95 Robert Silverberg, "Introduction: Who Is Tiptree, What Is He?" in James Tiptree, Jr., Warm Worlds and Otherwise (New York: Ballantine, 1975): ix-xviii; Silverberg cites as supporting evidence for his theory that Tiptree has a "keen knowledge of the world of hunters and fishermen." He also observes about "The Women Men Don't See" [discussed in the chapter on "Alien(N)ation"]: "It is a profoundly feminist story told in entirely masculine manner, [...]," p. xiv. Ursula Le Guin ironically uses Silverberg's arguments (quoting but not naming him) to warn of the pitfalls "of all the stuff that has been written about 'feminine style,' about its inferiority or superiority to the 'masculine style,' about the necessary, obligatory difference of the two." Ursula K. Le Guin,"Introduction," in James Tiptree, Jr., Star Songs of An Old Primate (New York: Ballantine, 1978), p. x. - See also Michael Bishop's reflections on his own gender-bias in "Introduction" in James Tiptree, Jr., Byte Beautiful (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1985). - In "Everything but the Name Is Me," Tiptree relates that in 1975, Samuel Delany attacked her contributions to a panel as "typical 'male' nonsense." 96 Ursula K. Le Guin, "Is Gender Necessary?" in Vonda Mclntyre and Susan Janice Anderson, eds., Aurora: Beyond Equality (Greenwich CT: Fawcett, 1976), p. 130139; see her "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1976) in Dancing at the Edge of the World {New York: Grove Press, 1989), p. 7-16. 97 See Koenen/Welz, "The Pregnant King: Inquiries into the Meaning of Androgyny in Feminine Utopias"; Pamela J. Annas, "New Worlds, New Words: Androgyny in Feminist Science Fiction," Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 5/2, No. 15 (July 1978); Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward A Recognition of Androgyny (New York et al.: Harper Colophon Books: 1974, 19731); Cynthia Secor, "Androgyny: An Early Reappraisal," Women's Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1974): 161-170; Catharine Stimpson, "The Androgyne and the Homosexual," Women's Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1974): 237-248; Barbara C. Gelpi, "The Politics of Androgyny," Women's Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1974), p. 151. 98 Secor's summary of Heilbrun in Women's Studies 99 Daniel A. Harris, "Androgyny: The sexist myth in disguise," Women's Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1974): 171-184; p. 171/2; Harris does not pursue his observation that in the hands of a woman writer - Virginia Woolf, Orlando - the subject achieves different connotations, namely "excitement and self-discovery." 100 Cynthia Secor, "Androgyny," p. 163. Later in the essay, after having stated her unease that androgyny does not provide a blueprint for implementation, she suspects that androgyny, "when all is said and done, can probably be institutionalized without familiar institutions and practices being much changed." (165) The contradiction here - inherently fantastic concept versus easy implementation that would not disturb the social order - is not recognized by Secor. 101 Harris, "Androgyny," p. 173. 102 Bonnie Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women. Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), regrets that a strain of "socialist realism" with an expectation of

188 providing role-models inhibits "the lesbian writers from exploiting the possibilities of the androgyne." (p. 71) 103 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 217. 104 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 218. 105 Francette Pacteau, "The Impossible Referent," in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, eds., Formations of Fantasy (London/New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 68. 106 Pacteau, "The Impossible Referent," p. 63 and 70. 107 The imaginary and symbolic in Lacanian psychology are not only seen as diachronic, but also synchronic, as the subsequent references to the repressed suggest. 108 Pacteau, "The Impossible Referent," p. 68. 109 Pacteau, "The Impossible Referent," p. 79; see Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse," in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 324-340; Barbara Bucknall, "Androgynes in Outer Space," in Dick Riley, ed., Critical Encounters. Writers and Themes in Science Fiction (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), p. 56-70; p. 67, presents a similar argument in discussing The Left Hand of Darkness. Pacteau argues that the fantasy of androgyny is more accessible to women since it is laden with the threat of castration for men (p. 70). Object Relations theory would agree, although for different reasons, mainly that women's ego-boundaries are more permeable than men's and thus their resistance to incorporate the other less strong. See the chapter on metamorphosis. 110 Androgyny is the Utopian element in the novel that is otherwise not meant to represent a Utopia. - Interestingly, Jameson, "World Reduction," identifies the "attempt to reimagine history" as another Utopian project of Le Guin's novel (p. 33); that feature, of course, links it to minority women's literature and women's ghost stories. 111 See N. B. Hayles, "Androgyny, Ambivalence, and Assimilation in The Left Hand of Darkness" in Olander/Greenberg, eds., Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 97-115; p. lOlf. 112 One of the earliest critiques of the use of generic pronouns and male plots is by Joanna Russ, "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" in Susan Koppelman Cornillon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction. Feminist Perspectives (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), p. 90; see Anne K. Mellor, "On Feminist Utopias," p. 253. Ursula Le Guin, in "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" discusses her novel under these aspects and "rewrites" passages to "ungender" them and suggest a more androgynous version. In Dancing at the Edge, p. 7-16. - Rosinsky, Feminist Futures, unfavorably compares Le Guin's use of the generic "he" to Dorothy Bryant's creation of a gender-free pronoun in The Kin of Ata. She neglects to mention, however, that Bryant only refers to the existence of such a pronoun in Utopia, but does not use it throughout her description of the inhabitants of Utopia. 113 Blum, Transcending Gender, asks the same question of "[h]ow much responsibility of this 'flaw1 rests with Le Guin's narration and how much with the reader's perception" (p. 63) - For an example where references to androgyny can displace an initial gendered reading because these references are strong enough to counteract the first impression, see the discussion of Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" below. 114 Left Hand, p. 6,10,125. 115 Left Hand, p. 23; see pp. 35, 38, 42, 152 for further examples of trying to fixate the masculine and feminine in the androgyne.

189 116 See Susan H. Lees, "Motherhood in Feminist Utopias" in Women in Search of Utopia, p. 219-232, who sees this as a general feature of feminist utopias where "biological intervention is necessary" (p. 229), manifested either in the death of the male population or the change of biological motherhood in order to achieve equality for women. See Russ in "Reflections on Science Fiction," who does not believe in the possibility of a two-sexed egalitarian society at this point in time, either. 117 Susan Kress, "In and Out of Time: The Form of Marge Piercy's Novels" in Marlene S. Barr, ed., Future Female. A Critical Anthology (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981), p. 109-124; p. 118; see also Piercy's direct comments on Huxley in her novel Small Changes (1972). 118 Russ, "Reflections on Science Fiction," 40-49. 1191 have taught the novel several times to undergraduate students and always asked them to remember their first interpretation of the title. The students invariably recalled being reminded of ideas like transvestism, sex-change operations etc.; they always perceived the "female" in opposition to "man." 120 See p. 66. 121 Russ, "What Can A Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write," p. 3. 122 Joanna Russ, "When It Changed," in Pamela Sargent, ed., New Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 227f. 123 For an excellent discussion of these strategies, see Natalie Rosinsky, "A Female Man? The 'Medusan' Humor of Joanna Russ," Extrapolation, Vol. 23, No. 1: 31-36. 124 Carol Farley Kessler, "Introduction," in Kessler, ed., Daring to Dream. Utopian Stories by United States Women: 1836-1919 (Boston et al.: Pandora Press, 1984), sees the function of excluding men as communication rather than polarization, as an attempt to articulate feminist "wild zones" - Showalter's term - in separatist utopias which "then have the possible function of moving the 'wild zone' within the realm of shared, rather than gender-specific, reality." (p. 18). Although I agree with this observation, I also see aggression as a major part of the motivation to exclude men, whether conscious or not. 125 Russ herself has emphasized that point; see her "Reflections on Science Fiction". 126 See Koenen/Welz, "The Pregnant King" and Pfaelzer, "The Changing of the AvantGarde" on marginality. 127 Sally Gearhart, "Future Visions: Today's Politics: Feminist Utopias in Review," in Women in Search of Utopia, p. 296-309. Rosinsky, Feminist Futures, claims that differences in The Wanderground are treated as "positive, rather than negative traits." I cannot agree since no real differences are admitted. 128 Cora Kaplan, "Wild Nights," p. 54. 129 The association with nature and the identification of the city with alienation in contemporary utopias is largely a US-phenomenon. See Albinski, Women's Utopias, p. 133: "British women identify the city, however decayed, as the source of civilisation: the natural world is the preserve of wandering tribes of barbarians, either composed of, or dominated by, men." Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of A Survivor and Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains are examples that illustrate that observation. — This difference between US and British women's literature is not necessarily true for other than Utopian literature; in her introduction to Women Writers and the City, Susan Merrill Squier observes that in the works of American women writers, "the city at

190 least holds out the possibility of intellectual and social growth to those who inhabit it [...]," P. 8. 130 Albinski, Women's Utopias, p. 8. 131 Jane Marcus, "A Wilderness of One's Own: Feminist Fantasy Novels of the Twenties: Rebecca West and Sylvia Townsend Warner," p. 136. 132 Baruch, "Introduction," p. 203f.

THE PAST AS NIGHTMARE - DYSTOPIA AS A STATE OF BODY

Context is all. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) When the next real crisis upsets them [men], our socalled rights will vanish - like [...] smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. [...] It'll never change unless you change the whole world. James Tiptree, Jr., "The Women Men Don't See" (1973)

The "next real crisis" that the narrator in James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See" anxiously anticipates,1 may be a nuclear holocaust, global war, or the breakdown of ecology; but neither the Utopian nor the dystopian2 visions of women expect men to exhibit introspective regret about the disastrous results of patriarchal rule. Yet where the Utopian novels identify a chance for women to take over and make the world a better place, the dystopian novels anticipate a male effort to make the world an even worse place for women. Political, economic, or ecological problems trigger a male backlash without delay, and women become the helpless victims of a patriarchal reaction that reverses any reforms achieved by feminism. In explaining the ideology behind such a backlash, the authors resort to familiar misogynist positions that are just given another turn of the screw. Science, especially sociobiological claims of the "natural inferiority" of women, and religion, especially catholicism and fundamentalist protestantism, provide the ideological justifications for women's oppression, on the background of traditional associations of the female with darkness, chaos, and irrationality. If there has been an increase in Utopian fiction by women over the last decades, the same is true for dystopian fictions where an unprecedented interest in the genre by women writers is demonstrated in such works as Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969), Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of A Survivor (1974), Phyllis Eisenstein's Shadow of Earth (1974), Suzie McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World (1974), James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Screwfly Solution" (1977), Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1982), and Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984).3 While most of the Utopian novels had been published by the mid-seventies, with the three

192 Utopias written later by Singer, Gearhart, and Charnas all being separatist visions, the bulk of dystopian novels was published around or after this date.4 It has been argued that the Utopian novels owe much to the optim sm that accompanied the social and cultural changes initiated by the women's movement;5 the dystopian novels, on the other hand, reveal a profound skepticism as to how effective these changes really are, doubting whether the reforms affected the basis of women's oppression, fearing that their superficiality makes them susceptible to reversion and recuperation. When critics agree that in the twentieth century Utopian novels have bien replaced by dystopian novels,6 this observation can only be reachec if focused exclusively on male literature. As we have seen, the Utopian genre has powerfully attracted the female imagination in the twentieth century, but prior to the nineteen-seventies, there are virtually no dystopian novels by women focusing on gender issues; the one exception being Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night (1937). Dystopian novels by women prior to the 1970s were concerned with anti-communism, anti-fascism, and the loss of individualism like those written by men; Ayn Rand's Anthem is one example of these novels. Only with the women's movement has a gender-specific interest entered dystopian literature. These contributions are still neglected by criticism; while an abundance of criticism has focused on the feminist Utopian novel, there is virtually no criticism of the dystopian genre.7 Swastika Night - "Nothing she is and nothing she must become" That the dystopian novel Swastika Night, published 1937 under the irale pseudonym "Murray Constantine," had been written by a woman, Katharine Burdekin, was only revealed in the early 1980s, and the novel itself was unavailable until a reprint in 1985.8 Anticipating a whole subgenre in science fiction that would later deal with the fantastic vision of an alternative world in which the German fascists have won World War II, Burdekin describes a far future in which Hitler-worship is state-religion, the Jews have been murdered, Christians are persecuted, and historiography, dominated by the fascists, has erased any traces of pre-Hitlerian culture.9 Although one might question Burdekin's depiction of the fascist empire as feudal and agrarian, an approach that takes fascist ideology at face-value and overlooks the vital role of German industrialists in promoting Hitler's rise to power, her perceptive analysis of the fascist genocide of the Jews and the pervasive "cult of masculinity" - Burdekin's own term - are stunning. Especially her analysis of gender-ideology and sexual politics in a fascist state distinguishes the novel

193 which is, as Carlo Pagetti has observed, a critique of "the fundamentally male character of Utopian (including dystopian) discourse."10 Extrapolating from the fascist cult of manhood and its disgust with the feminine - except in the female role of providing male children for the state -, Burdekin arrives at a chilling scenario: women live in segregated purdah, apart from men, in fenced-in enclosures which they are only allowed to leave once a month for communal rituals that celebrate male domination. Ideology constructs an abyss that separates the genders and equates women with animals; they are bitches breeding puppies (160) and "no more conscious of boredom or imprisonment or humiliation than cows in the field." (158) The de-humanization of political enemies or victims is of course a ubiquitous part of totalitarian ideologies, used to legitimatize oppression and murder. In Swastika Night's fascist reality, any idea suggesting the possibility of women as equals and human beings seems truly "fantastic,"11 a violation of the "natural" order of things. Naturalizing the ideology of male dominance is one of the aims of the fascists' complete and thorough revision of history; their book-burnings and brain-washings have erased any memories of women as human beings, thus constructing their subordination as eternal and as reflecting a natural law of biology and a religious order. Even the Christians who constitute a pariah class in the fascist empire and provide the only alternative ideology share the fascists' misogynist views, quoting notorious St. Paul and stating that "[njothing she is and nothing she must become." (175) Alfred, the rebel in Swastika Night who gets initiated into critical thought and a sense of history by a member of the fascist elite (the parallels of the later Nineteen Eighty-Four are obvious12), identifies as the source of misogyny man's fear of women's sexuality and his outrage at her freedom of choice (read: freedom to reject his sexual advances). In the fascist empire, no such freedom exists, rape is institutionalized as the only form of sexual encounter: "as rape implies will and choice and a spirit of rejection on the part of women, there could be no such crime." (13) Women not only lack any control over their bodies and are subjugated to rape and beatings, they also have no control over their children - male children are separated from their mothers at eighteen months of age to remove them from the contageous influence of women and their bodies. Rape has become the paradigm of heterosexuality where power plus procreation and not desire are the issues, and where love is only possible between men. Yet in spite of the penetrating analysis of male dominance, Swastika Night eventually complies with the silencing of women. Just as fascism and fascist historiography in the dystopian future have completely silenced the

194 female point of view, Burdekin has written women out of the text. Men are the protagonists and subjects, women the victims and mere objects. Except for a mass-scene and a short appearance of the protagonist's current "breeder" (both filtered through male observers), we never see nor hear a woman. Disturbing as this silencing is, Burdekin also withholds any Utopian hope for women, except as mediated by men. The novel not only denies women's subjectivity, but their very existence: "There are no feminine values because there are no women." (108) This is not to argue with Burdekin's exploration of women's complicity in their own oppression and her critique of Huxley that argues that human beings do get influenced by their environments;13 one wonders, though, at the extent of her determinism and at the reason why there is not one intelligent or rebellious woman in the whole empire. Daphne Patai explains that Burdekin, criticizing Brave New World "for its assumptions that human beings would be the same even under totally different conditions,"14 avoids this mistake by showing how being treated as animals actually turns women into ignorant and fearful creatures; nonetheless, it is troubling that the women are represented as unable to establish a female community from which they could profit, as incapable of developing even rudimentary strategies of survival. Burdekin seems to believe that the initiative for resistance must come from the outside, from renegade men among the oppressors like Aldred - an unlikely premise for any kind of revolution. And Alfred and his mentor demonstrate, of course, that some men do transcend their conditioning through fascist ideology, in contrast to the women who are totally deformed by their environment. The only hint at any resistance on the part of women is a decline in the birth-rate of male children, an approach that displaces resistance from the mind to the body. Thus, for women, changing the society in Swastika Night is as hopeless as for the protagonists in Nineteen Eighty-Four, since they have not even begun to fantasize about a better life, and are actually declared incapable to fantasize and dream by the author. Patai argues that by "adopting the dominant masculine narrative strategy of focusing on males, Burdekin is able to analyse their beliefs,"15 but I see this choice as more problematic. By deciding not to subvert dominant narrative strategies, Burdekin inadvertently - ends up paralleling the fascists' strategy of making women invisible and excluding them from official discourse. Burdekin demonstrates that no invention of "double-think" is necessary to establish the reality of her dystopia, since language and ideology already provide the equation of male with the norm and the female with inferiority, but she neglects to see how narrative patterns transport that ideology.

195 Unlike Burdekin, the contemporary writers dramatize the silencing of women in society, in historiography, and literary patterns and place that dramatization at the center of their visions of dystopia, but they follow Burdekin in defining women's loss of control over reproduction and their offspring as the constitutive factor of a female dystopia that in all these fictions is a state of body rather than mind. This thematic similarity between Burdekin and contemporary writers is all the more remarkable since present writers could not consciously relate to the "female tradition" established by Burdekin that was buried under a male pseudonym. Contemporary literature often also shares the form of the secret diary with Swastika Night - in Burdekin's case, of course, written by a man. That form is popular in dystopian literature in general,16 but particularly powerful and effective in women's writing which has historically been situated in these "intimate" forms often considered "sub-literary."17 Addressing a literary tradition that is predominantly male, writers like Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood re-write the dystopian visions in Brave New World by Alduous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the two dystopias that have been most influential. If, as feminist critics claim, "one man's Utopia may be one woman's dystopia,"18 this inversion draws our attention to profound gender-specific differences in the perception of the present and visions of the future. We have seen how Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time interprets as potentially liberating the very features Huxley deplores as constitutive factors of dystopia; accordingly, dystopian features in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are redefined as glimpses of Utopian hope in women's dystopia, namely the relationship between individualism and group-identification. Alexandra Aldridge, in her analysis of dystopian literature, claims that dystopias are "always" a critique of a world view characterized by an "elevation of functional and collective ends over the humanistic and individual."19 This generalization does not apply to women writers of dystopian novels,20 although it certainly applies to male authors. In their novels, the individual protagonist (male, of course) faces an overwhelming authoritarian state that threatens to control thoughts and emotions as in both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. These dystopias accuse the loss of individualism, the emphasis on the collective, the alienating effects of science and technology, and "the massive centralized state and the use of technology to control and pervert rather than to liberate."21 For the male authors, gender is not an issue; Orwell does not question the gender-specific background of the male protagonists' hunger for power,22 Huxley never pauses to reflect on the impact of the radical reproductive changes and the destruction of the nuclear

196 family on women and their role in society. On the contrary, both novels disparage women as conformist, unwilling and unable to rebel like the men, inferior in intellect and critical judgment; they both are nostalgic for conservative gender-relations, with Orwell modeling the lovers, Winston Smith and Julia, on the traditional bourgeois couple.23 Male sexuality constitutes part of the rebellion in both novels' protagonists, with the women being mere objects of that sexuality.24 Orwell and Huxley mourn the erosion of patriarchal institutions like home, the family and traditional mothering.25 Sexual permissiveness in Brave New World is thus unquestioningly denounced as promiscuity, and the promiscuous sex lives of the characters is Huxley's prime expression of the group identity that he so despises.26 Women's dystopias of the seventies and eighties share important features that set them apart from male dystopias: they define patriarchal control over women's bodies as the constituting factor of a dystopian society; they reject the individualism espoused by Orwell and Huxley and stress the necessity of a group-consciousness and collective action; they see the model for the dystopian society not in the future, but in the past, and, consequently, arrive at a re-evaluation of technology and medical science; and, finally, they problematize the silencing of women in a dystopian society that Burdekin takes as a given (and that never even becomes a subject in male dystopias), using their stories to reflect critically on history, writing, and women's problematical relationship to language and narrative. They do not have to develop visions of an all-powerful government as the enemy - the enemy has been "the Man," and the controlling gaze, one of the central metaphors in Nineteen Eighty-Four, has been a reality for women for a long time as a gender-specific gaze.27 Female dystopias do not perceive dystopia as final as male authors do, a finality critics identify as a constituting factor of dystopias, but incorporate Utopian outlooks, show fissures in the hegemonies they describe. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale expresses the transgressive longing for Utopia on the first page: "We yearned for the future." It is important and emblematic here that the handmaid talks of "we" instead of "I," with "we" of course being women. Individual and Community - Isolation and the Need for Female Solidarity Women, like other marginalized groups, have never been allowed the (bourgeois) individuality that Orwell and Huxley fear is endangered. Male hegemony has forced women "to experience themselves generically,"28 they

197 have always been exposed to patriarchal control over mind and body as a group. Critics have identified the crucial connection between identity formation and concepts of community as a pervasive feature in women's literature, where "[t]he individual subject is viewed in relation to and as a representative of a gendered collective which self-consciously defines itself against society as a whole."29 This difference in men's and women's dystopian writing becomes most apparent in the historical orientation of women's novels which find nightmare visions in the past rather than in the future, and in the exploration of individuality versus collectivism. Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, women's dystopias do not hold the individual as the supreme measure of freedom or oppression. Rather, they aim at a balance between individualism and groupidentification. Elaine Baruch speculates that because women "have been allowed so little individuation, women do not see the individual as a threat to society."30 Tiptree, Elgin, and Atwood add yet another twist by implying that individualism for women may be a mixed blessing that would prevent the identification or communication with other women and thus, in isolating women in the nuclear family, impede political consciousness. For these authors, the act of saying "we" is as important as saying "I" - the fact that women did not have a strong group-consciousness in the past is interpreted as one of the reasons why women have been victimized, why feminism does not reach more women and has changed so little. Atwood's Gileadean society, based on historical examples ranging from fundamentalist Protestantism to Islam, is extremely perceptive of the inherent dangers of a collective consciousness and tries to prevent communication and solidarity among women. By categorizing women according to biological functions, by having the "Aunts" control the handmaids, and by exploiting the classconflict between working women and the handmaids, the ruling male elite follows an elaborate strategy of divide et impera. In James Tiptree's "The Screwfly Solution," the collective consciousness develops too late to stop the slaughtering of women; the narrator regrets: "Do you know I never said 'we' meaning women before. 'We' was always me and Alan, and Amy of course. Being killed selectively encourages group identification." (181) In Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See," women are called a "toothless world" (205), powerless and easily victimized because they do not develop group identification. In Elgin's Native Tongue, though, the triumph of solidarity is evident: the movement in the novel is from women's isolation in families to women living together in all-female households where they give up their "rooms of their own" to be able to live with other women; one of the women admonishes another: "think what I would miss, if I were given a room of my

198

own." The final celebration of the women's collective consciousness is Elgin's move to credit the authorship of "Native Tongue" to this collective of women. Virginia Woolfs prerequisite for female writing in A Room of One's Own is thus interpreted as a demand to screen out male interference, but not necessarily female companionship. The juxtaposition of individualism as loneliness and victimization and of collectivism as support and means of resistance is again and again symbolized in locality - the isolation of the handmaid in her own room versus her communication with her friends in the dormitories in Atwood's novel; the suffering of the women in family-cells versus the laughter in the communal "barren" house in Native Tongue. Female friendship is essential to survival in the feminist Utopias; only collectively can women begin to develop effective strategies of survival in which the emotional support of other women is central. Margaret Homans points out that there is no language available to the woman writer who wants to write the story of female friendship;31 Elgin's linguist women obviously feel the same lack, because they create a woman-centered language with terms to express such concepts.32 Elgin's Native Tongue is paradigmatic in envisioning a community of women across the generations; her main protagonist is a woman who, after decades of exploitation and humiliation, only finds peace and protection in a community of older women at the "Barren House," women who are no longer of reproductive value for the Linguists and thus separated from their social life. Younger women, especially those who rebel against the system of oppression, are sometimes banned to Barren House as a punitive measure. The women of Barren House, though, offer other women a value that the dystopian misogynist society is unable to recognize: their mothering. It is no coincidence that the female protagonists in women's dystopian fictions, like the heroines in ghost stories, are motherless: Marianne's mother in Carter's Heroes and Villains is dead, the women in McKee Charnas's Walk to The End of the World never know their mothers,33 the handmaid in Atwood's novel loses her mother, Dana and Celia, the heroines in Butler's and Eisenstein's time-travel narratives, are alone, and the mothers in Native Tongue, if still alive, are powerless. Motherlessness increases the dystopian pressure on the female protagonists, especially where the misogynist societies have re-structured social life to minimize the influence of mothers. While the Utopian and dystopian novels equally attack the nuclear family, the dystopias envision an even more alienating formation: the male-bonding organizations that rule several dystopian societies and destroy the traditional family affect the life of daughters disastrously, since they are utterly unpro-

199 tected from male violence. Thus, living in a community of women comes to signify a recapturing of the lost mother-daughter bond in dystopian novels. The Utopian glimpses in these dystopian novels strive for a reconciliation between individualism and group identification rather than an extreme individualism. Feminist psychologists have speculated that women, in addition to being forced into "generic" experience continually, also grow up learning to sub- and co-ordinate their needs to those of others, and thus do not resent a reconciliation between individual and group as much as men. This different relationship to individualism is also sensed, without ever being explored consciously, in the numerous examples of matriarchal societies envisioned by male science fiction writers; they overwhelmingly portray matriarchal societies in analogies of social insects like bees, termites, and ants, as mentioned in the last chapter; these analogies are always meant as a devastating and self-explanatory critique of collective life.34 Writing the "I" and History - Dystopian Discourses and Silencing Margaret Atwood and Suzette Haden Elgin present their dystopian societies in the form of historically significant documents, as reports from eyewitnesses. Usually, framing devices in Utopian and dystopian literature fulfill a double function as "distancing" devices that mediate the Utopian or dystopian reality through a guide whose perspective we share,35 and that mitigate the defamiliarization of our reality by invoking the authentic character of journalism, science, or reports from participant observers.36 Piercy's medical excerpts at the end of her Utopian novel and Le Guin's scientific notes at the opening of The Left Hand of Darkness establish a link between us and the defamiliarized society, anchor the future in the present and provide authenticity. Elgin and Atwood innovate this device by not placing the framing narrative in our present, but in the far future (which becomes our reading present), after the collapse of the dystopian society, a gesture that immediately puts their novels in opposition to classic dystopias like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four where the finality of the dystopian state is one of its constitutive features. Elgin's frame actually envisions a Utopian future after the dystopia, while Atwood's stance is more ambivalent, qualifying the end of dystopia:37 the excesses of the fundamentalist Gilead have certainly disappeared, yet the misogynist ideology that culminated in Gileadean terror and exists in our present society persists in the postdystopian culture.

200 In my view, though, the main function of the framing devices in Native Tongue and The Handmaid's Tale is less the intent to bridge the gap between present and future, but the introduction of the dominant subject of women and literature, of women and speaking. Elgin opens Native Tongue with a statement by a fictional editor of "Native Tongue," an editor who celebrates the book as "the only work of fiction ever written by a member of the Lines," as a novel that "gives us a sense of participation [...] that we cannot gain from any history of the time." (5) Thus, the fictional editor establishes a contrast between public, male-dominated records and a literature that may represent a female point of view. And Margaret Atwood closes The Handmaid's Tale with the lecture of a scholar during a future congress of the "Gileadean society" which discusses the autobiographical statements of the handmaid and their shortcomings as historical documents. Both these framing devices function as comments on women's literature and literary history. The anonymity of the fictional authors of "Native Tongue" and of the handmaid remains an insurmountable obstacle to identify authorship in either case. While Elgin presents "Native Tongue" as the collective endeavor of "the women of Chornyak Barren House," "written in scraps of time, at odd stolen moments" (6), Atwood makes the handmaid's tale an oral document, a life-history recorded on tapes, thus referring to the accessibility of oral culture for suppressed groups who have no access to the written word and linking her dystopian novel to a long line of life-histories presented as ethnographies.38 Elgin equally emphasizes the importance of oral culture in times of extreme expression; it is the last resort to ensure that important information cannot be discovered by spies from the dominant group and that prevents that important information gets lost.39 Suzie McKee Charnas in turn explores the potential of oral culture to establish a sense of history, to pass on information, and to express subversive ideas in a coded language that only the initiated can decipher. These functions bring to mind the importance of African American folk tales and music, for example the work-songs, that were also vehicles of social protest. Taken together, anonymous or collective authorship and the centrality of oral history present aspects of women's literary history that differ radically from white male literature.40 Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker, among others, have pointed out the significance and meaning of these characteristics in understanding the exclusion of women's writing from the canon.41 Anonymous authorship in The Handmaid's Tale is intrinsically linked to patriarchal naming; the dystopian habit to name women after the man in whose household they live - Ofglen and Offred - withholds individual identity and enforces identification with male authority. Several times, the

201

narrator refers to her "real" name, and, in the dystopian society, revealing that name has become an act more intimate than sexual relations. Although the handmaid manages to say "I," an act crucial to establishing a female voice in literature, she never tells us her name. The document of her life thus stands as a document of representative experience, never transcending the anonymity into which patriarchy forced the handmaid like so many women before her. In the postscript of the novel, the historians link the impossibility to find out her name to the general problem of writing women's history, since the scholars are unable to establish the handmaid's identity and thus unable to arrive at a precise reconstruction of her personal life in relation to public history. Atwood's point here not only applies to the dystopian society, but reflects back on our present. Naming in The Handmaid's Tales only exaggerates the social convention of using a woman's last name as a disposable element that situates her in a relation to a man (either a father or, after marriage, a husband) and which establishes an uncertain and changeable social identity dependent on men;42 Atwood takes this very real social custom to its fantastic extremes by erasing first names altogether and thus having women totally disappear behind men. One of the characteristics of women writing history is their different perspective that results from their exclusion from the public arena. The scholars of the Gileadean society complain about the triviality of the handmaid's tale: "She could have told us much about the workings of the Gileadean empire" is a remark that alerts us to the focus of traditional historiography on the public, politics, institutions, and the economy. The handmaid, in contrast, writes from a limited, "private" point of view that her female role forces on her; the limitation of her view is literalized in the novel by the head-dress she has to wear and that blocks her peripheral vision. Confined in a house, only allowed to leave for guarded shopping-excursions, she has no access to "important" information, a fact of which she is well aware and that she laments at several points in her story. But in spite of her restraint and "confinement," she gives us all the information we need about the intimate "workings of the Gileadean empire" by revealing the ideology behind the "workings of the empire," a point the scholars of the framenarrative, oblivious to gender-aspects in their focus on history as public event, overlook. The Handmaid's Tale problematizes women's relationship to language and exposes the ideological content of narrative structure. Like the black slaves in US-America, the women in Gilead are forbidden by law to read and write; pervasive pictorial symbols in public life that have replaced letters are intended to reinforce their illiteracy. In Atwood's dystopia, the ultimate illicit

202 pleasure is not sexual, but textual - when the handmaid's owner begins to meet her secretly, they guiltily play scrabble together - certainly a sardonic comment on the "pleasure of the text." In an ironic twist, the sexual act, functionalized as purely in the service of procreation, has lost much of its attraction, while the genders suddenly discover the eroticism of intellectual exchange. Women who read and write transgress and violate Gilead's patriarchal order. The laws that restrict them aim to prevent, among other things, that women give testimony of their own lives - they literally have no access to pen and paper. One of the handmaid's obsessions is her desire to uncover the silence about her predecessor's fate: "It pleases me to think I'm communing with her, this unknown woman. For she is unknown; or if known, she has never been mentioned." (49) The only legacy this "unknown woman" left is a pig-Latin phrase scratched in wood; otherwise, she vanished without a trace. Her message is less important than her meta-message: that she did actually succeed in leaving one sentence that testifies to her life, that she had to use a coded phrase (and not her native language), and that she could not use pen and paper. The handmaid's desire to disrupt the silence over the woman before her is also motivated by an anticipation of her own fate which the Gileadean society will try to cover in silence as well. After all, the two women are officially identical, bearing the same name, "Offred". The ruling men in Gilead do not limit their attempts to control discourse to prohibitions; they strive to change language itself. Taboo words in Gilead revolve around reproduction - for example, "sterile" is a word not to be used or thought of in connection with men, only with women who are thereby constructed as solely responsible for the declining birth-rate. In many aspects, language reveals the hegemonic interests behind this culture's efforts to naturalize male domination and the construction of gender: "woman" can become "unwoman" at any point. In a review, Mary McCarthy criticizes that Atwood's feminist "newsspeak" in The Handmaid's Tale does not stand up to Orwell's penetrating analysis of the ideological deformation of language.43 Yet, as we have seen, women's dystopias raise forceful questions about discourse and the writing of history, questions that touch the basis of dominance and language. Like Orwell, they address the problem of who controls historiography (and thus the past), although the women's answers differ in insisting that the official distortion of history is not a dystopian invention and has anteceded the dystopian society. In the exploration of "Newsspeak," other major differences arise. Orwell, although providing a lexicon of thought-limiting terms, obviously sees nothing wrong with traditional narrative plots like the romance between Winston and Julia, while the women writers are suspicious of these structures. Finally, the women's

203 suspicion extends far back into the past. Although they also describe the appropriations and re-definitions of words that define Orwell's Newsspeak, women writers recognize the same ideological bias in existing language. Their analysis covers the fundamental power of naming and redefining and extends to those concepts that language perpetuates. "Women" in Gilead are linguistic constructions - confined within male terms, or arbitrarily constructed according to patriarchal ideology; in Gilead, a rebellious woman ceases to be "woman" and becomes "unwoman." These attempts to naturalize the dystopia's ideological construction of "woman" only alert the handmaid to questions of language and reality, and to the construction of subjectivity through language: "My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composing a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born." (62) This allusion to Simone de Beauvoir's famous observation that woman is made, not born, anchors subjectivity in textuality. Inventing herself as she narrates her story, the handmaid gains a sense of self and control: "If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending." (37) Yet both her story and the frame of the novel deny closure; thus, the handmaid has to end her story in uncertainty: "Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing." (276) If her end coincides with the end of the story, then dystopia prevails; a new beginning, in contrast, would mean a Utopian outlook. Yet the frame, the "Historical Notes," do not enlighten us about her fate and the end of her story, either, ending with a question: "Are there any questions?" (293) Although there are many open question about the individual fate of the handmaid, there is strong evidence that Atwood suggests a circular vision of history, rejecting the handmaid's anticipation of an either-or end in a more ambivalent scenario. Obviously, by the time of the "Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies" in 2195, Gilead is a phenomenon of the past (Atwood thus also interpreting the past as dystopia), and the existence of a chairwoman demonstrates that women's extreme oppression in Gilead and their exclusion from the public is history, too. But the tenor of the keynote speaker's address reveals a subtle androcentrism not unlike the sexist bias of our contemporary societies in refusing to pass judgment on Gilead and in failing to understand the central issues of women's history - their silencing and their identification with the private and domestic; instead, as we have seen, he becomes irritated with the handmaid's restricted point of view. Thus, Atwood's ambivalent closure forces us to confront a comparison of the future with our present. Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue finds the English language an inadequate instrument to express a female perspective, since it is infused with male concepts. Nowhere is the failure of language to communicate

204 women's experience more apparent than in Elgin's juxtaposition of a world communicating easily with aliens as opposed to the gender-division of the same world that blocks the articulation of women's perspectives.44 Native Tongue whose main protagonists are all linguists and inter-galactic interpreters is devoted to the intricate interplay between language and "reality." In her novel, Elgin, herself a linguist by training, gives a gendered interpretation of the cultural implications of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis "in its weak form"43 that sees language as an instrument of social change: I had come across the hypothesis that existing human languages are not adequate to express the perceptions of women [...] I then proposed that perhaps for any language there are certain perceptions that it cannot express because they would result in its self-destruction. [...] you might say that the mainstream culture of the United States could not use L&idan, or any other woman's language, any language that did express the perceptions of women accurately, because that would result in the culture's selfdestruction." 46

What cannot be expressed by women in a male-dominated language does not exist in patriarchy and thus does not disturb the silencing of women. Correspondingly, if a culture is based on the suppression of certain concepts, the articulation of these concepts will undermine and change its reality. Thus, women's rebellion in Elgin's dystopia in centered on language and consists of creating "their own native tongue" (159), that encodes feminine concepts and thus creates a new reality. The relationship between language and "reality" (and, by implication, power) becomes apparent in an example of the new lexicon, an example that also touches on the connection between language, power, "reality" and magic/fantasy: Then consider this, please: to make something "appear" is called magic, is it not? Well, [...] when you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, a face, an assortment of parts. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of the body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the bend of the elbow. Everyone has that surface; in fact, everyone has two of them. I will name that the "athad" of the person. Imagine the athad, please. [...] Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now. [...] Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerers. [...] magic is quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language. (242)

The Past as Nightmare - The Body and Control Women's dystopian novels suspect that cultures which marginalize women as the ultimate "other" are susceptible to misogynist reactions that do not shy

205 away from extremes like femicide and self-destructive excesses.47 The texts are generally less interested in exploring the male psychology behind that misogyny than in the traumatic effects on women's lives and sense of self. Only James Tiptree, Jr., provides a devastating analysis of male sexuality as socially deformed by violence, and Suzie McK.ee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World gives us glimpses of a male psyche dominated by a powerful fear of women's bodies. The female body is at the center of women's dystopian discourses, the symbolic space of their nightmare visions of control and domination, where women are defined by sexual difference alone and where biology is their only destiny. With the female body as the symbolic space of domination, male control in dystopian novels manifests itself in two ways: institutionalized rape and enforced motherhood, adding up to reproductive slavery. Typically, the misogynist interest in reproduction is linked with an utterly cynical functionalization of children as well. While espousing the "natural" role of women as childbearers, sometimes even glorifying motherhood as in Atwood's Gilead, and criminalizing abortion, the societies' protective interest is limited to the unborn child. In the dystopian futures of Atwood, Elgin, and Charnas, infanticide is a practice that society either tolerates for material gains or institutionalizes in eugencics; while abortion is persecuted as murder, the male-controlled societies sanction infanticide and war as socially necessary. The patriarchal rhetoric of the sanctity of motherhood and of the natural role of women as child-raisers is further rendered absurd by the novels; they all describe the practice of deliberately separating mothers from their children if this should serve male hegemonic interests better. Being deprived of control over their (reproductive) bodies, women are also denied any rights to their children who are the legal property of their fathers. It becomes apparent that the actual issue in these dystopian societies is not a "natural" feminine role, but power: the power to enforce social practices. In these societies where anatomy is destiny, women are not even identified with the body, but with its reproductive fragments; they are reproductive commodities. In Atwood's Gilead, a woman is a "two-legged womb" (128), and the representatives of power state bluntly: "For our purposes your feet and your hands are not essential." (87) Neither, as becomes all too obvious, is the brain. Fragmentation of the self acquires a whole new meaning in this context where "woman" is no longer a person, but a uterus. Severe beatings and mutilation are customary punishments for rebellious women in the dystopian societies. The female body as the site of desire is the object of the dystopian societies' destructive forces - the emphasis on the reproductive role of women coincides with the stigmatization of female desire. Elaine Scarry

206 has pointed out how torture victims come to hate their bodies as traitors because they are experienced as the source of pain.48 This psychological mechanism is described in Elgin's and Atwood's novels; the handmaid comes to resent her body as the source of her humiliation and oppression: "I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. [...] Now the flesh arranges itself differently." (69) The shift in grammatical subject from the self, "I," to the body, "the flesh," this syntactical subordination reflects the total identification of women with their bodies in Gilead, accusing Gilead's alienating reproductive ethics. In the context of absolute patriarchal control, male sexuality manifests itself as violence, defining women's consent to sexuality as unnecessary and rape as the normative sexual act. Here again, as in the dystopian societies' cynical treatment of maternity, the central issue is power, and, in a direct correlation, women's rights to self-determination decrease as men's power increases. Rape may occur in marriage, sanctified by laws, as in The Handmaid's Tale, or as in Phyllis Eisenstein's Shadow of Earth: "Her mind called this rape and screamed silent hatred of its perpetrator. Rape. Not a violent act at the point of a knife, [...] but a loveless, lustless coupling, [...] where the only threats hung unspoken in the air." (105) All authors interpret rape as an act of violence and domination, not a sexual act, as misogynist stereotypes would have it; and rape, of course, as the above examples demonstrate, can either be the result of tacit cultural assumptions of women's roles or it can occur in a more explicit context of violence, as in Charnas's Walk to the End of the World, where a ferocious beating turns into a "sexual" assault without transition, both acts of violence being intended as disciplining measures: "There was nothing like a swift good fuck to set firmly in her mind her relation to the masters again: the simplest relation of all, that of an object to the force of those stronger than she." (162) Sexuality in Charnas's post-holocaust society equals violence against women. Charnas links the aggression against the female body (and women) to male fears of the female body and female power. In stressing difference and negating commonality, these misogynist societies cannot allow heterosexuality as a meeting of equals; often, their ideologies take the equation of women with the body and their identification as total "other" one step further and dehumanize women by categorizing them as animals, calling female children "cubs" as in Walk to the End of the World and using cattle prods to control women as in The Handmaid's Tale. History has demonstrated that dehumanizing the other often precedes murder, is used to legitimize murder. James Tiptree's "The Screwfly

207 Solution" (1977), published under her pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon, explores that disastrous line of reasoning on the background of women's equation with the body/animalism and men's with the mind/transcendence. In Tiptree's not-so distant dystopian future, St Paul's misogynist views that have entered Catholicism are the spin-off for a religious movement that maintains that "the Scriptures define woman as merely a temporary companion and instrument of Man. Women [...] are nowhere defined as human, but merely as a transitional expedient of state." (174) The extreme split into mind and body and the definition of the body as inferior are mixed with fear and hatred of the body which in turn are projected onto women who are identified with the body. Tiptree takes this familiar series of cultural prejudices as the basis for a nightmarish view of a society where men go berserk and slaughter women like animals; it is the horror vision of a world where men no longer bother to control women's bodies, but destroy them. In the men's killing frenzy, sexual drive and aggression merge - rape and murder constitute the paradigm of men's relation to women in this dystopian world. Where the social sciences and feminism have recognized rape as a crime born of violence rather than sexuality, Tiptree's story argues that such a distinction misses the point - for the men in the dystopian future, sexuality is violence. The men in the equally misogynist societies described in Swastika Night and Walk to the End of the World are disgusted by female sexuality and the female body, and only reluctantly fulfill their duty to the state by sleeping with women to provide the survival of the (male) race; the men in "The Screwfly Solution" act out their disgust and commit worldwide femicide, without pausing to realize that femicide means suicide for the human race in the not so long run.49 Hatred of the body and women, it becomes clear, are stronger than "reason." In Tiptree's fantasy of entropy, society completely breaks down, hurtling towards self-annihilation.50 Quoting several official reactions to the world-wide femicide, Tiptree ironically comments on our societies' oblivious reactions to rape and the disproportionate murder of women by men. Referring to the brutal persecutions and killings during the witch hunts, a government report in "The Screwfly Solution" flatly states that femicide is "not uncommon in world history in times of psychic stress," identifying as the root of the contemporary stress "the speed of social and technological change, augmented by population pressure." (174) This reaction exposes the extent to which femicide is a familiar, though neglected and even tolerated, phenomenon in human history, extending into the present where, according to annual U.N. reports, "millions of women have died [each year] because they're women," victims of misogynist practices that include withholding

208 food and medical care from girls and women.51 Tiptree's story thus reflects the nonchalance patriarchal society manages to maintain vis-à-vis violence against women. Identifying violence as the root of male attitudes toward women, the fantastic element in "The Screwfly Solution" is less the femicide per se - the slaughter of women on a global scale is not essentially different from the slaughter in the Middle Ages when whole villages were left without a female population as a result of the witch hunts; it is different from the practices described in the U.N. reports only by degree, not in essence. What is fantastic in Tiptree's story is the explanation given for the femicide - alien visitors, it turns out, are exploiting an already existing link between male sexuality and violence to vacate the planet Earth.52 Using the "scientific" approach of the Government report as a negative foil, Tiptree thus declines to discuss social and psychological reasons for the male paranoia, ignoring social context and concentrating on a dubious biological explanation instead. As in Tiptree's story, the constitutive factors of women's dystopias are, of course, not futuristic; rather, they remind us of the historical oppression of women or the male supremacy in contemporary societies, as in fundamentalist religious states that oppress women. Unlike male dystopias, women's dystopian visions do not project the threat to freedom into the future by extrapolating from contemporary ideologies or destructive developments like surveillance (in Nineteen Eighty-Four) and genetics/the mass media (in Brave New World). Rather, they look back into history and find dystopia as close as the nineteenth century where slavery serves as the ultimate dystopian society in Octavia Butler's Kindred. In an interview, Margaret Atwood (whose The Handmaid's Tale bears an epigraph on American Puritanism by Perry Miller) contends: "It's not science fiction [...] there is nothing [...] that has not happened at some point in history [...] I transposed it to a different time and place, but the motifs are all historical motifs."53 Women thus appear traumatized by a collective history of extreme oppression, and the "point in history" that their dystopian novels exploit is alternately ancient Greek society, Puritanism in colonial America, and Islamic fundamentalism.54 Nowhere is the concept of the past as dystopia more apparent than in the authors' treatment of reproductive terror and coercive reproduction where the technological dimension is treated as insignificant. The last decades with their scientific "progress" in biological and reproductive engineering have provided a multitude of horror scenarios that were still impossible twenty years ago and were at the heart of Brave New World. Yet women's dystopian fictions do not join the critical feminist debate centering on reproductive technologies, but insist that social context rather than technology per se is

209 decisive, looking back into history for models of nightmarish visions instead. This approach is all the more stunning and thought-provoking in times when the dangers of reproductive engineering have alerted the public and in a genre that has favored descriptions of technological progress and horror.55 There are no nightmares of futuristic high-tech management of gestation and parturition, only of familiar aspects of dominance - men withhold contraception, criminalize abortion, force numerous pregnancies on women, in dystopia as well as in the contemporary real. The writers' restraint amounts to a philosophical statement: at stake (and potentially dangerous for women) is not technology per se, but a social system and its reproductive ethics. In Atwood's Gilead, for example, no fancy equipment is needed to enforce reproductive enslavement - on the contrary, Atwood explicitly alludes to Biblical methods to make her point. Charnas's apocalyptic society regresses to an even less technologically developed state where women are treated as (non-human) animals who are literally milked for food and who conceive and give birth in "breeding rooms," without the intervention of any technology or science; Octavia Butler uses slavery and black women's exploitation and status as cattle and breeders as model. Even the idea of substitute motherhood does not need the technological context of transplantations of fertilized eggs, as The Handmaid's Tale's recourse to more ancient approaches demonstrates. This central feature points to a significant difference in the evalution of technology between women's Utopian and dystopian novels. While the Utopian novels often reject technology as male-dominated and destructive to nature and emphasize women's closeness to nature, the dystopian novels dramatize the enslaving effects of women's equation with (and thus dependence on) nature, resulting in a more positive view of technology. This does not mean that the writers share Shulamith Firestone's and Marge Piercy's evaluations of reproductive technologies, but they insist that, as the handmaid puts it, "Context is all." (180) Only in a Utopian context where women have achieved equality (or, as in the separatist Utopias, where only women live) can an attempt to re-evaluate women's traditional equation with nature be made without disastrous results; in the context of patriarchal control, the dystopian novels caution, such an equation will be exploited to oppress women. The Handmaid's Tale warns openly of contemporary feminism's tendency to see women as closer to nature; the handmaid bitterly reflects that the Gileadean society incorporates many features formerly yearned for by her feminist mother; yet in the power-context of Gilead, they have contributed to build a nightmare.

210 Phyllis Eisenstein's Shadow of Earth addresses this re-evaluation of technology by explicitly contrasting the highly developed contemporary US with a technologically backward society. The novel fantasizes that in 1587, the war between England and Spain ended with the victory of the Spanish armada, and that, consequently, Spain colonized North America. In Pavane (1968), Keith Roberts had used this scenario set in England, concentrating on the technological implications, yet without any interest in gender issues. Visions of worlds that are "alternative to our reality" (21), as Eisenstein writes, constitute a sub-genre in science fiction; due to imagined different outcomes of crucial crises in history, the writers develop alternate societies.56 Unlike the male writers, Eisenstein predominantly focuses on what such a historical change would have meant for women and their place in society. In Shadow of Earth, the "Holy Mother Church, stifler of innovation, persecutor of Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo," dominates a world of "limited horizons and scant technological progress" (34), producing illiteracy, backward technology, and poverty. Using the contrast between the contemporary time-traveling heroine's consciousness and the strict Catholic atmosphere of the alternative universe, Eisenstein concentrates on life in a society that sharply antagonizes genderroles and is hostile to science. The heroine, used to control the fertility of her body with contraceptives, finds out that her reproductive potential defines her role in the dystopian society - since she can bear children, motherhood is the only possible future for her, a fate naturalized by religion. In a society with little medical knowledge, the female role also includes the threat of death in pregnancy, childbirth, or childbed. It is telling that Eisenstein focuses almost exclusively on impressions of what it means for the body to live in this society - sensual impressions like foul smells, clinging dirt, irritating vermin, and the taste of rotten food permeate the depiction of the dystopian alternative world, and diseases like "anthrax, cholera, diphteria, typhoid fever, plague" (238) plus a multitude of "female disorders" like "fever, diarrhea, and a malodrous vaginal discharge" (237) and septic fever threaten to destroy the body.57 Eisenstein does mention intellectual impoverishment and the lack of intellectual freedom, but these deprivations pale before the assaults on the heroine's body. Also, women's lack of freedom is directly linked to the body, caused by their identification with bodily function. And in a world where her body is subjected to dangerous pregnancies in a generally precarious condition of "health," where death is a constant possibility, intellectual freedom is no longer the primary goal; survival is.

211 The heroine's reaction to the dystopian society is to reject the reproductive body, only to discover that reproduction defines the female body in dystopia - the body as the site and source of desire is completely dominated by reproduction. Catholicism means the absence of contraceptives and that lack implies unwanted and enforced pregnancies. Celia finally refuses to have sexual relations since, as she realizes, "My fear is stronger than my desire." (275) "The baby mill" (241) and the "breeding machine" (189) constitute the horror visions of her only possible future as a woman in this society. When, after a marital rape, she becomes pregnant, that pregnancy is experienced as extreme alienation - the foetus as a "creature within [that] sapped more and Clia's energy" (227), as a "lousy parasite" (154).58 Unwilling to resign herself to a life of "knitting, sewing, pregnancy, and purdah until she shriveled up and died" (191), she finally considers murdering her body that so totally defines her: "her body would fall within the courtyard and undoubtedly be buried in the Castle cemetery, but she, Celia, would have made her escape." (169; emphasis added) As in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Shadow of Earth thus probes the disastrous effects of the patriarchal equation of women with the reproductive body, resulting in women's extreme hatred of and alienation from their bodies. Contrasting the quasi-medieval society with contemporary USAmerican society, Eisenstein definitely favors technological and scientific progress, interpreting dependency on the body rather than technology as alienating for women. Traveling to the Past - Slavery as Dystopia Octavia Butler, the only prominent African American woman writer in science fiction, a winner of the prestigious Nebula and Hugo awards, addresses issues similar to Eisenstein's in Kindred (1979).59 As in Shadow of Earth and The Handmaid's Tale, the past serves as the dystopian model. Kindred is the one novel by Butler that least adheres to science fiction conventions, while her "Xenogenesis series" confronts the typical genreissues of the impact of a contact with extraterrestial cultures on human psyche, family, and society,60 albeit with much more sophistication than most other writers. As in Shadow of Earth, the fantastic device is the - unwanted ability of the heroine Dana, a black woman, to travel back in time, back and forth between 1976 and the beginning of the nineteenth century. While Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is ambiguous about the reality-status of Connie's travels, the dystopian novels state unequivocally that the protagonist actually do visit the alternative universe or past. In Kindred, other people

212 witness the disappearance of Dana's body, and her (white) husband accidentally accompanies her on one of her travels. Dana's time-travels back to slavery provide a temporal rather than spatial interpretation of the Middle Passage. Critics have wondered why science fiction has not attracted a larger black audience or more African American writers, speculating that this disinterest might be the result of the racist tendencies of the genre where aliens from outer space often seem more welcome than blacks. AfroAmerican literature has been mainly (mis)understood as realistic - in an article titled "Why Blacks Don't Read Science Fiction," Charles Saunders contends that African Americans "tend to be more interested in political and sociological works along with the fictions of writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. To them, science fiction and fantasy may well seem irrelevant to their main concerns."61 Accordingly, black women's literature is judged by some critics to be "necessarily linked to issues of representation."62 In this generality, the observation is of course not true, as the prominent place of fantasy in the fiction of writers like Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor proves. Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, the two most successful African American writers of science fiction, both praise the genre as "potentially the freest genre in existence where the limits are the imagination of the writer."63 Delany argues that for women and blacks, "it's always easier to appropriate the margin," that is marginal genres like science fiction, instead of the mainstream.64 Butler turned to science fiction as a means of "writing about power [...] because I had so little," realizing she could more easily express this desire with the fantastic.65 Certainly, realism does not allow African Americans to identify with power, as Butler's statement suggests and numerous novels like Richard Wrights's Native Son or autobiographies like Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (where power exists only in fantasy as well) demonstrate. Fantasy, on the other hand, whether expressed in separate genres like science fiction or, as we have seen, as an integral element of folk culture, allows fantasies of power. And that incorporation of the fantastic in their folk culture may well be the reason why not more African Americans choose to write science fiction, that is to contain the fantastic in a separate genre. Following patterns of the slave narrative, Kindred explores what slavery means in a trajectory from oppression to freedom. Butler mentions that she was inspired to write the story by the contempt some black radicals showed for their ancestors, radicals who denounced black slaves for not having had enough courage in resisting the slave system; immersing her contemporary

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heroine in the everyday-life of the slaves, Butler focuses on survival rather than resistance.66 By choosing her time-traveling protagonist as first-person narrator, she probes the effect of slavery on somebody with the "enlightened mind" of the twentieth century, and demonstrates that escape from slavery and resistance are next to impossible, even for a person with the added advantage of a university education and historical knowledge. The experience of facing the past, of being "trapped in the past,"67 literally mutilates Dana - she looses her left arm in the final escape from the slave society (an escape that is achieved by the fantastic), surviving with scars that will forever remind her of slavery. As in Beloved, the black woman's body abused and mutilated - becomes the text of the slaves' experience. Scars on her back from two violent beatings, a scar on her face from a vicious kick with a boot, and an amputated arm bear permanent witness to Dana's suffering. Coming back from the past to the present, Dana is unable to write down her memories of slavery, but her body does not let her forget. As in other black women's literature, we find a heroine whose access to historiography is precarious. The epilogue explicitly addresses the question of historiography. Traveling South after her final return to the present, Dana tries to find out what happened to the other slaves, "to try to understand. To touch solid evidence that those people existed" (264), and to reassure herself of her sanity. But evidence is scarce, not surprisingly since the Historical Society is located in "a converted early mansion" (264), its very site an indication of racist bias. Dana finds only scant public sources like sales-papers about the fate of some of the slaves, and no evidence at all about the lives of the others; white misinterpretations of historical events distort the few other records she does find. These factors complicate writing the history of slavery from the slaves' point of view - having no access to the public and to the written word, their lives and suffering reduced to statistical figures, the story of slavery from a black perspective has to be re-invented. Of course, the slave narratives survive as written documents, but they tell only the stories of the few blacks who managed to escape slavery, while the history of the masses who suffered and died in slavery remains sketchy.68 The failure of historiography to record the slaves' everyday-life is exemplified in the inability of history books to provide any help for Dana the books gloss over those details she finds essential for survival. Thus, as in Beloved, fantasy serves to re-write the history of slavery from a black perspective, to fill the gaps, and to fill statistical figures with individual lives.

214 Dana is brutally whipped once for violating the law that forbids slaves to learn to read and write, then again later for trying to escape. Both her acts ultimately defy the system of slavery by expressing her desire for freedom. Like Frederick Douglass's slave narrative of 1845, Kindred equates literacy with the yearning for freedom; Kindred provides several examples of the slaveholders' attempts to prevent literacy since it might challenge the institution of slavery: keeping slaves ignorant of those parts of the Bible that oppose slavery; preventing the slaves from learning to write and thus from forging "passes," which would allow them freedom of movement; isolating them so that their knowledge of the surrounding world (and possibility of escape) is extremely limited. Ultimately, the enforcement of illiteracy serves to keep the spirit of slavery alive by ensuring that blacks cannot officially state their version of slavery in history. Kindred is especially dedicated to capture the meaning of slavery for black women. The essential elements of dystopian societies in women's literature - absence of control over the body, institutionalized rape, enforced reproduction, absence of rights over their own children - are vital and constitutive components of slavery as well where they were taken to extremes. Rape provides beginning and end of Kindreds plot - the heroine, as she comes to learn, is the descendent of a slave woman who was raped by her white master; and finally, Dana kills this white master during one of her visits in the past when he tries to rape her; her resistance to that act finally allows her to leave dystopia for good and return to the present. Rape is the ultimate violation that Dana cannot bear, after she has been brutally beaten, been abused, humiliated, and betrayed. The confrontation with rape makes her realize: "A slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her." (260) This statement, reminiscent of John Berger's observation that women in a patriarchal society are defined by "what can and cannot be done" to them,69 captures how the system of slavery strives to deny agency to blacks; the power of the slave-owner lies exactly in the negation of any boundaries of his power over the slaves. Killing her white master (who is also her ancestor), Dana finally moves beyond reacting to slavery, reclaiming agency. Kindred does not suggest an easy way out of slavery; as Alice Walker observes, this was not an age of choice for black women (and men).70 Witnessing the fate of her female ancestor, Dana realizes that Alice's choices have narrowed down to fast or slow death. After being nearly killed as punishment for an escape attempt, Alice shies away from further risk and the danger of brutal retribution; but resigning herself to her fate (which is continued rape, and bearing her rapist's children), "she seemed to die a little." (169)

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Butler is as interested in the effects of slavery on whites as on blacks. Her protagonist's husband in the present is white, and Dana is pulled back into the past by the needs of her white ancestor and slave owner, Rufus, with whom she develops a complex relationship. Rufus grows from a trusting and dependent child into a man brutalized by racism and power, a man who destroys the life of the black woman he "loves," who mistreats Dana although she repeatedly saves his life. Like Eisenstein's heroine, Dana discovers that she is unable to interfere as an oppressed individual in powerful social mechanisms; unlike Mark Twain's time-traveler in The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the women are in no position to change the course of the past.71 Dana's efforts to influence the young boy and teach him human solidarity fail to counteract the indoctrinations by a society based on the ideological dehumanizations of African Americans; it is the slaveholders, though, who actually become dehumanized. Yet the novel's attempts to probe the mind and psyche of the masters also cause problems for the novel, since they move the heroine close to the white mansion and away from the slave quarters. The most obvious effect is that Kindred does not develop an interest in black culture; the life of slaves when they are not under the supervision from whites remains unexplored, except for material aspects like growing vegetables. The impression of the slave community that emerges is unrelentingly apocalyptic: families broken up, children sold down the river, vicious beatings. This image is undoubtedly true, but it is one-sided - strategies for survival included more than escaping punishment. The African American slaves had a nourishing culture of their own, music and story-telling, for example; they had institutions like the church. In Kindred, we do not get glimpses of this culture, and a reference to traditional medical knowledge is dismissed by the heroine in favor of the benefits of aspirin. In Kindred, the past as dystopian model is slavery, a dystopia unmitigated by Utopian outlooks; Dana's final escape from slavery is not achieved in "reality," but in the fantastic - traveling in time, not across space like the slaves who fled North. Barbarians, Heroes, and Villains - The World as Text Looking back in history, women writers do not see idylls of women's affinity to nature, but women's dependence on biology, and cautiously celebrate the scientific advances of biology and medicine. This juxtaposition of primitive past and advanced present recalls the Gothic "dialectic of civilisation and barbarism,"72 a dialectic most pronounced in Angela Carter's Heroes and

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Villains (1969). While the fantastic elements in other texts are often situated in accessing the past from the present (time travel for example) and not in the portrayal of the dystopian society that is, after all, a recreation of the past, Carter radically reminds us that, in the endless chain of signifiers that never refer to anything outside the text, even the so-called realistic text is a fantasy. Carter, like many science fiction writers in the fifties and sixties, imagines a world devastated by nuclear war, and a subsequent relapse into barbarism; in Carter's wilderness, only enclaves of "Professors" try to maintain civilization.73 Unlike the Noble-Savage- or noble-rescuers-ofcivilization-stories of other authors, Huxley's Brave New World for example, Carter never succumbs to the danger of romanticizing either barbarism or civilization. Instead, she further de-familiarizes an already fantastic subject by the use of irony and self-reflexivity. Where Brave New World laments the loss of "authentic" emotions, Heroes and Villains sets out to destroy the idea of authenticity. The heroine Marianne who grew up among the Professors willingly joins the barbarians, only to discover that she feels equally estranged among them. Neither surrendering to the Professors' "goddess Reason" (68) nor to the barbarians' revival of archaic ritual, Marianne mirrors Carter's skepticism toward myth and myth-making. Heroes and Villains is a self-conscious novel with self-conscious characters that refuses to participate in the creation of ideologies, denying the glorification of either science or myth by drawing our attention to their ideological functions. Revealing the barbarians' eagerness to structure their emerging society around a "phallic cult," Jewel, their leader, insinuates that a return to myth in a post-nuclear society is deliberate, arbitrary, and artificial; describing the Doctor's approach, Jewel observes: "He hasn't decided, [...] Sometimes it's phallic and sometimes it isn't, depending on his mood." (29) The Doctor is a renegade Professor who now plays the role of shaman among the barbarians and, far from being subtle, proceeds to implement ideology quite consciously: religion, he contends, is "a social necessity" (29), since it frightens people into submission (51); furthermore, it is a "device for instituting the sense of a privileged group." (63) "The world becomes a dream, and the dream, a world" (95) accurately describes Carter's novel if "dream" is substituted by either nightmare or the fantastic. A dream is a manifestation of the fantastic, and Carter's statement signals that the world of these heroes and villains is fantastic, that is, purely textual, an artefact using plot, character, and setting. Repeatedly, the characters draw attention to the fictionality of their world, situating it "nowhere" in a "hypothetical landscape" (93) and in "no-man's land." (103)

217 "Nowhere" is of course the location and one of the literal meanings of "utopia," which, as the Doctor paraphrases the fantastic, is a "creation from the void." (94) Sentences like "He had become the sign of an idea of a hero" (72) and "You'd be an icon of otherness" (12) continually disrupt the narrative, alert us to its textuality, its quality as representation rather than reality, and effectively prevent any identification with the characters. We are frequently reminded that these characters are only fantastic and literary creations, produced by dreams or projections, as in a dialogue between Jewel and Marianne: 'Well [...] when I was a little girl, I used to dream about the Barbarians and that used to disturb me, but never to the point of sweating and moaning. At least, not often. And then it was never out of fear.' 'Sometimes I dream I am an invention of the Professors; they project their fears outside on us so they won't stay in the villages, infecting them, and so, you understand, they can try to live peacefully there. On the nights I have these dreams, I have been known to wake the entire camp with my dreams.' (82)74

It becomes obvious that for Marianne, unlike the Professors, the projection is not out of fear, but sexual. Thus, Carter contends, fantastic manifestations that appear to be the same, are gender-specific in their functions, an observation that holds for fantastic motifs like metamorphosis, as we will see in the next chapter. Carter specifically alludes to the exclusively textual character of fantastic text especially where signs do not have a referent; the twist in Heroes and Villains is that this pure textuality is not based on a projection of the future, of the not-yet, but on a future retrospective to referents that no longer exist: "the dictionaries contained innumerable words she could only define through their use in his other books, for these words had ceased to describe facts and now stood only for ideas or memories." (7) In the apocalyptic dystopian culture, words refer only to other words, not to "facts" - "city" no longer denotes anything tangible, after the nuclear holocaust has created a wasteland. Character is reduced to mask and role; Jewel, cast by the Doctor in "some kind of mythopoeic role" (93), announces that he will "play the conquering hero." (126) Plot as well is self-consciously revealed as literary pattern and construction. The characters act "according to the prescribed ritual" (80), "as if trapped in a vignette of Barbarian life" (117) and as if they "had been forced to impersonate the sign of a memory of a bride." (72) Or they refuse to act, like Marianne as a child who is "not playing." (2) Constantly, the foregrounded textuality of Heroes and Villains is emphasized and prevents any illusion of mimesis; numerous allusions to literary texts by authors like Shakespeare, Rousseau, Huxley, and H. G. Wells punctuate the novel when

218 Carter's characters compare themselves to other literary creations, and their speeches are saturated with literary terms, producing the effect of writing criticism about themselves. Heroes and Villains is structured by the play with binary oppositions, setting heroes versus villains, civilization versus barbarism; the domination inherent in these structures triggers the return of the repressed, the fantastic. Out of the Gothic twilight that diffuses borders, Carter, in several scenes, teases out the opposite poles of the emerging tribes, to show that each side can only exist in relation to the other, is, in fact, a projection of the other,75 as when Marianne confesses her sexual fantasies of the Barbarians. Thus, Carter comments on the whole genre of Utopias and dystopias which are always a reflection or projection of the desires and repressions of the status quo.76 Just as the Professors (and, presumably, Carter, her literary predecessors, and the readers) externalize their fears in the Barbarians, so the novel's men project their dread of sexuality on women. The Barbarians believe that Professor women "sprout sharp teeth in their private parts, to bite off the genitalia of young men." (49) The threat of the vagina-dentata-myth that operates as an expression of castration-anxiety is intended to be dispelled by patriarchal control over women's sexuality, that is in marriage, that "secularizes" (87) women in Carter's fiction, in Heroes and Villains as well as in the vampire story "The Lady of the House of Love." Marriage and the family mean familiarity, and, the Doctor observes, "Familiarity breeds contempt" (50), that is de-mythologizes women and robs them of their power. In marriage, women can be controlled; Jewel follows the Doctor's advice to marry and impregnate Marianne to "domesticate" her, triumphing over her: "Swallow you up and incorporate you, see. [...] Social psychology. I've nailed you on necessity, you poor bitch." (56) Jewel articulates the Barbarians' motivation for re-introducing marriage into tribal life: it is "dynastically" important in a "patriarchal system" (90) to establish male control over procreation. For Carter and her heroine Marianne, the institution of marriage, rediscovered by the tribe in its efforts to guarantee phallic rule, embodies all that is wrong with civilization. The metonymic equation of marriage with Marianne's wedding dress and the Gothic manor where the tribe has set up camp paints a picture of decay and doom that reflects on marriage as well. The wedding dress which gives the heroine "sensations of slime and ice" (69) is "as old as their misfortunes" (71), an "image of terror" (68) that recalls a civilization based on (women's) repression and ending in selfdestruction. The bridal veil that "caught in her mouth and gagged her" (73)

219 refers to the silencing of women in marriage. The Gothic manor, emblem of the patriarchal family and site of women's persecution in Gothic literature,77 is crumbling, its decay signaling the breakdown of the family and exposing the barbarians' efforts to reintroduce it as futile. In Carter's distancing play with textuality and self-reflexivity, moments of seriousness where the text is "not playing" stand out. One such moment links Carter's novel to the other texts discussed in this chapter: Marianne, like Eisenstein's and Atwood's protagonists, internalizes the rejection of the female body as the site of desire, interprets the conjunction of heterosexuality and reproduction as threatening: Marianne, till then a willing player in the vignettes of Barbarian life, experiences "the spurt of seed [as] as terrible violation of her privacy" (90) which extinguishes her desire: "The idea of pleasure died now she realized pleasure was ancillary to procreation." (91) That conflation and Marianne's reaction destroy the initially Utopian interpretation of sexuality. Sexuality, paradoxically (since it is usually linked to the fantastic), is a place of the "real" for Carter, deconstructing - like the night with which it is associated - binary oppositions, a Utopian moment in the dystopian scheme of life. Only in the moments of sexual passion, when self-consciousness ceases to exist and vanishes, when identities merge and Marianne and Jewel become a "dual being" (88), when she is "courting her own extinction as well as his" (87), only then is a reality established that is not derived from projection or repression. Daylight signals a return to the unreal, to repression, to "two dimensions, flat and effectless" (89) and to "colour illustrations in an ingeniuos book" (90), and Marianne's lover vanishes "like a phantom at daybreak." (89) The Utopian reality of oneness, of the annihilation of difference, threatens Jewel's sense of the order of things, since oneness excludes the possibility of superiority and dominance of binary oppositions. Accordingly, one of the reasons why he is intent on impregnating her is that he then would have "some status in relation to myself." (90) Both players understand that linking marriage and procreation equals patriarchal control over women's sexuality; Marianne realizes that "there's no choice in being a wife." (114)78 Marriage and motherhood seem to evolve as the prescribed plots of Marianne's life, yet Marianne manages to keep a safe distance to both maledominated societies and their respective ideologies, thus escaping the danger of becoming a victim. In the professors' enclave, her desire cannot be contained, leading her to violate one of the ground-rules, the solidarity against the Barbarians. In the barbarian tribe, her gender seems to cancel out any advantage and privilege that her greater knowledge might provide.79

220 However, her knowledge does help her to distance herself from the tribe's misogynist positions, and, instead of being terrified by magic and ritual like the rest of the tribe, she gets increasingly angry, her anger also an expression of her marginalization as a woman: "Her ruling passion was always anger rather than fear." (69)80 In the end, her detachment allows her to disengage herself from the romantic plot,81 and instead re-write her life in terms of power: "I'll be the tiger lady and rule them with a rod of iron." (150) Male Dreams, Women's Nightmares While male dystopias warn against future evils, women's dystopias warn against historical amnesia and emphasize that remembering history is essential to prevent a dystopian society, a point Atwood stresses in the framing story of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood cautions that history will repeat itself if the oppression of the past is allowed to be forgotten or to be trivialized. The importance of historical consciousness in turn necessitates an interest in historiography and in the silencing of women. The concept of history as dystopia may explain the absence of dystopian writing prior to the seventies: only with the changes accomplished by the women's movement did women feel that they had something to lose as a social group. One of the implicit effects of these dystopias that look back in history is a reconciliation with the present and contemporary society - not denying that misogyny still exists, the writers nonetheless claim that important progress has been achieved.82 At the heart of this progress, the authors see the right of women (in some Western industrialized nations like the US and Canada) to control their reproductivity. The nightmare of the past is invariably linked to patriarchal control over women's bodies and women's powerlessness. Such partial recognition of the benefits of the status quo combined with a profound skepticism of how profound and lasting these changes are, might be labeled "post-feminist," an adjective that has been used to describe The Handmaid's Tale." Another feature that is more actively engaged in a dialogue with feminism is the skepticism displayed towards certain feminist ideas, especially those associated with radical or separatist feminism. While Carter, implicitly in Heroes and Villains and explicitly in The Passion of New Eve, expresses her mistrust of a yearning for feminine myth, Atwood confronts issues like the clash between free speech and the anti-pornography movement, the glorification of motherhood, and the denial of differences among women. Her protagonist, a post-feminist by any standards, regrets that she had taken feminist achievements for granted; yet she also cannot help wondering how some features of the dystopian society correspond with

221 feminist concepts and seem to fulfill feminist demands, although substantially changed in their effect on women's lives in a society where men have absolute control. Here again, as The Handmaid's Tale states several times, "Context is all." Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7 8

James Tiptree Jr. shares the pessimistic evaluation of her heroine in "The Women Men Don't See"; in an interview shortly before her death, she wams: "And things will not grow better. If trouble comes to our system, as come I fear it will, it will be the liberation of women that is blamed for it. Our 'rights' will vanish like snow in summer as the stronger, aggressive animals we live among vent their frustration." Alice Sheldon, "A Woman Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy" in Denise DuPont, ed., Women of Vision. Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction (New York: St Martin's Press, 1988), p. 45. - Section of this chapter dealing were published in Dieter Petzold, ed., Fantasy in Film und Literatur (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996) and Elmar Schenkel et al., eds., Die magische Schreibmaschine (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1998) The term "dystopia," often used interchangeably with "anti-utopia," has become the accepted term; other terms are reverse Utopia, negative Utopia, inverted Utopia, regressive Utopia, caoutopia, non-utopia, satiric Utopia. See Alexandra Aldridge, The Scientific Worldview in Dystopia (UMI Research Press: Ann Arbor, MI, 1984,1978 1 ), p. 5 and 8. - The term can be traced back to an article by J. S. Mill in 1868. Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night (1937; Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1985); Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985; Toronto: Seal Books, 1986); Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979; Boston: Beacon Press, 1988); Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (1969; London: Penguin, 1988); Suzy McKee Chamas, Walk to the End of the World {New York: Ballantine, 1974); Phyllis Eisenstein, Shadow of Earth (New York: Dell, 1974); Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue (New York: Daw Books, 1984); Raccoona Sheldon (pseudonym of Alice Sheldon alias James Tiptree Jr.), "The Screwfly Solution" (1977) in Samuel R. Delany, ed., Nebula Winners Thirteen (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). - Subsequent references given in the text are to these editions. - Alice Sheldon used two pseudonyms, James Tiptree Jr. and Raccoona Sheldon, the latter name, under which she published "The Screwfly Solution," for those stories with "violently pro-women ideas". Sheldon, "A Woman Writing SF and Fantasy," p. 51. Dystopian novels are much more prevalent in the USA than in Great Britain; see Nan Bowman Albinski, Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 137 See Aldridge, Scientific Worldview in Dystopia, p. 17 and ix. For example Aldridge, Scientific Worldview in Dystopia, p. 17. Sarah Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), confines her analysis of dystopias to plot summaries. Swastika Night is considered to be the best pre-Orwell dystopia dealing with fascism; see Daphne Patai's introduction in Swastika Night.

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23 24

25

In her Utopia, The End of This Day's Business, written 1935, but published more than fifty-years later (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989), Burdekin reverses her textual movements and presents fascism as the starting point of a revolt of women that ends in a matriarchy. Carlo Pagetti, "In the Year of Our Lord Hitler 720: Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night," Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 17, Part 3 (November 1990), p. 361. Swastika Night, p. 108 and 183. Patai comments (in her introduction to Swastika Night) on other structural similarities between Swastika Night and Nineteen Eighty-Four. See Patai, "Introduction," p. vii. Daphne Patai, "Orwell's Despair, Burdekin's Hope: gender and power in dystopia," Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1984), p. 87. Patai, "Orwell's Despair, p. 89/90. Albinski, Women's Utopias, p. 119. See the chapter on theory, especially on the politics of genre. - For an extensive analysis, see Judy Nolte Lensink, "Expanding the boundaries of criticism: the diary as female autograph," Women's Studies, Vol. 14 (1987): 39-53; Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, eds., Theorizing Women's Autobiography (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1988); The Personal Narratives Group, ed., Interpreting Women's Lives. Feminist Theory and Personal Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Leonore Hoffman and Margo Culley, eds., Women's Personal Narratives. Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy (New York: MLS Association of America, 1985). Susan Gubar, "She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy" in George E. Slusser et al., eds., Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 140; Elaine Baruch makes the same statement in "Women in Men's Utopias" in Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), p. 215 Aldridge, Scientific Worldview in Dystopia, p. ix. Whom Aldridge does not include in her analysis in Scientific Worldview in Dystopia. Baruch, "Introduction," Women in Search of Utopia, p. xiv See Daphne Patai, "Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's 1984," PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 5 (October 1982): 856-870, on Orwell's androcentric vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Patai argues that Orwell confuses culture with nature by identifying the urge to dominate as an innate human characteristic rather than a male-gender specific acquired trait. Of course, Orwell identifies the male as the norm. See Elaine Hoffman Baruch, '"The Golden Country': Sex and Love in 1984" in 1984 Revisited, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Harper and Row, 1983) See Willi Erzgräber, Utopie und Antiutopie in der englischen Literatur (München, 1980), p. 191, who describes Julia as a woman content with being "a rebel from the waist downwards" who leaves the hero alone in his intellectual rebellion. Erzgräber does not question the gender-bias reflected in this characterization. For a summary of these points, see William Matter, "On 'Brave New World'", p. 94110, and William Steinhoff, "Utopia Reconsidered: Comments on '1984"', p. 147-160, in Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, eds., No Place Else. Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983)

223 26 See Aldridge, Scientific Worldview in Dystopia, p. 56. 27 See for example Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale with the "Eyes" as spies and the centrality of mirrors. 28 Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, "Introduction," Cultural Critique, No. 7 (Fall 1987; Special Issue: "The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse"), p. 10. 29 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 155. 30 Baruch, "Introduction," p. xii. 31 Margaret Homans, "Her Very Own Howl. The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction," Signs, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter 1983): 186-205. 32 See Elgin, Native Tongue, p. 267; in trying to describe the closeness of female friends, one of the protagonists, failing to find an adequate expression in English, resorts to the woman-created language Laadan: "'They are heenahal.' And she sighed. 'Such a relief, to have a language with the right words in it!'" 33 Neither do the men know their fathers. 34 See Joanna Russ, "The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" in Judith Spector, ed., Gender Studies. New Directions in Feminist Criticism (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986), p. 238. 35 See Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible. Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York/London: Methuen), p. 63ff. 36 See Patrick D. Murphy, "Reducing the Utopian Distance: Pseudo-Documentary Framing in Near-Future-Fiction," Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 17, No. 50 (March 1990), p. 25ff. 37 I agree with Murphy that Atwood is critical of both future societies, or, counting our present, of all three societies; Ketterer sees the frame mainly as a satire on academic discourse - which it is, of course, too - and dismisses Atwood's critique of patriarchal attitudes in the "less dystopian" societies. David Ketterer, "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: A Contextual Dystopia," Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (July 1989): 209-217. 38 See Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as one example of such a fictionalized life-story. 39 See p. 244 in Native Tongue. 40 The same is true for minority literatures. 41 See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, and Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," Ms., May 1974: 64-70,105. 42 In Russian, there is the added patronymic. 43 Mary McCarthy, "Breeders, Wives, and Unwomen," New York Times Book Review, Feb. 9,1986: 1,35. 44 Native Tongue, p. 236. 45 Suzette Haden Elgin, "Women's language and near future science fiction: a replay," Women's Studies, Vol. 14, p. 175-181; p. 178: "the novel would take up the hypothesis thet the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true in its weak form, which means that language does become a mechanism for social change." 46 Elgin, "Women's language", p. 177; Elgin expresses this thought verbatim in the novel: "For any culture, there are languages which it cannot use because they would result in its direct self-destruction." (p. 145)

224 47 See Nicholas D. Kristof, "Stark Statistics on Women," San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 11, 1991, p. A 14. 48 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 49 See Tiptree's "The Haploid Heart" (1969) for the interpretation of a similar blindness to realize that genocide is suicide. 50 See Mary Shelley's The Last Man for a similar story where men and women die of the plague; the last survivor, "another inversion of Adam", is a man, not a woman. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London/New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 103. 51 See for example Kristof, "Stark Statistics on Women", p. A 14. 52 On Eros and Thanatos in Tiptree's work, see Veronica Hollinger, '"The Most Grisly Truth': Responses to the Human Condition in the Works of James Tiptree, Jr.," Extrapolation, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Summer 1989): 117-132. 53 Margaret Atwood in Cathy N. Davidson, "A Feminist 1984: Margaret Atwood Talks about Her Exciting New Novel," Ms., Febr. 1986, p. 24. 54 The references to Puritanism and Protestant and Islamic fundamentalism are obvious; the link between homoerotic love and contempt for women in some ancient Greek societies is a feature of Walk to the End of the World (as well as in Burdekin's Swastika Night). 55 See David Punter, The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London/New York: Longman, 1980), p. 394. 56 One such turning point is World War II - novels like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Vladimir Nabokov's Ada explore what the US would be like if the Axis powers had won the second World War. 57 The palace smells of sweat (p. 131) and feces (p. 141), chamber pots are mentioned frequently. "A thousand odors enveloped them - odors of baking bread, roasting meat, frying grease, and manure." (p. 91) is one of the numerous other references to smell. — Equally frequent are references to dirt: "her braided hair was soaked and filthy" (p. 47); "Her pubic hair was still disgustingly matted with dried blood..." (p. 49). — Vermin like lice are mentioned on pp. 46 and 131. 58 Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild" (1985) which won the Nebula and the Hugo awards as best short story in science fiction, also interprets pregnancy as a parasitic process. The story is discussed in the chapter on metamorphosis. 59 Octavia Butler's Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1986), Imago (1989) are examples of her other science fictions. 60 The novels in the Xenogenesis series explore aspects like changed family structures, concepts of sexuality, and racism/ethnocentrism. 61 Charles Saunders, "Why Blacks Don't Read Science Fiction" in Tom Henighan, ed., Brave New Universe. Testing the Values of Science in Society (Ottawa: The Tecumseh Press, 1980), p. 167; only if "fantasy" here were meant to refer to the genre would his inclusion of Morrison's works make sense. 62 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 6; see note 8 on p. 198. Felski's observation, although accurate for much of African American women's literature, is too generalizing, as the fictions of Morrison and Butler - among others - demonstrate.

225 63 Octavia Butler, "Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre/Interview with Octavia Butler," Blick Scholar, Vol. 17, No. 2 (March/April, 1986), pp. 14 and 16. 64 "A Dialogue: Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ," Callaloo, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Fall 1984): 27-35; p. 29. 65 Octavia Butler quoted in Sandra Govan, "Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler's Science Fiction," Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer 1984): 82-87. 66 Octavia Butler in "Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre/ Interview with Octavia Butler," Black Scholar, Vol. 17, No. 2 (March/April 1986): 14-18; p. 15. 67 Quoted in Govan, "Connections, Links, and Extended Networks," p. 86. 68 See James Horton, "The Life and Times of Edward Ambush: Social History Methodology" in Günter H. Lenz, ed., History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture (Frankfurt/New York: Campus 1984), for a case-example of the difficulties involved in trying to reconstruct the life of an average black person. 69 John Berger's quote from Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1985, 19721), p. 46, serves as epigraph of Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, discussed in the chapter on Alien(N)ations. 70 Alice Walker in Mary Helen Washington, "Teaching Black-Eyed Susans," Black American Literature Forum, Spring 1977, p. 22, where she develops a model of the development of black women protagonists. 71 For an analysis of time-travel in different fantastic fictions by women writers, see Beverley Friend, "Time Travel as a Feminist Didactic in Works by Phyllis Eisenstein, Marlys Millhiser, and Octavia Butler," Extrapolation, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 1982): 50-55. 72 Punter, The Literature of Terror, p. 394. 73 Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of A Survivor is another example of the exploration of civilization's break-down. 74 See Punter, The Literature of Terror, p. 398: "Carter ironically suggests that the Gothic vision is in fact an accurate account of life, of the ways we project our fantasies onto the world and then stand back in horror when we see them come to life." 75 See p. 16: "all was obscured by the dusk. ... Then they turned on arc lamps and the battle was suffused with white, hysterical light; but this only made confusion visible..." — and p. 22: "At first, outlines but no colours appeared in the forest and all was blank form of uniform and phantom grey but, after the sun penetrated the branches, the trees acquired flesh from the darkness..." as examples. 76 Seep. 16,22,127. 77 See the chapters on literary history and Alien(N)ations for examples of women's relationship to houses and domestic spaces. 78 While I see Carter's use of postmodern strategies as highly effective in questioning social constructions of gender, Robert Clark, "Angela Carter's desire machine," Women's Studies, Vol. 14 (1987): 147-161, rejects her "postmodern aesthetics": "Only in patriarchal eyes is femininity an empty category, the negation of masculinity. Beyond patriarchal definitions of women there are female definitions..." (p. 158). That statement again leads us back to Ruth Bleier's "conceptual prison;" also, Carter makes sufficiently clear that masculinity is also only defined as opposition to femininity.

226 79 See Paulina Palmer, "From 'Coded Mannequin' to Bird Woman: Angela Carter's Magic Flight" in Sue Roe, ed., Women Reading Women's Writing (Brighton: Harverster Press, 1987), p. 179-208; p. 187. 80 See p. 94, 92, 49, 5, 142, where anger as her leading emotion is stressed again and again. 81 See p. 52 where Carter explicitly rejects romanticism associated with the idea of barbarian life. 82 This is a general criticism of dystopian literature; see Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 9: "commentators cite the dystopia as a sign of the very failure of Utopia and consequently urge readers to settle for what is and cease their frustrating dreams of a better life." 83 So for example Linda Kaufmann, MLA session on post-feminism, 1987 in San Francisco.

SEA-CHANGES - METAMORPHOSES AS PLOTS OF POWER

Her self seemed to come and go in her body, fretful, wilfull, she a visitor in her own flesh. Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (1976) There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928) A she-devil is supremely happy: she is inoculated against the pain of memory. At the moment of her transfiguration, from woman to non-woman, she performs the act herself. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983)

Standing alone and naked before the bathroom mirror, Ruth in Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil wants "to be changed" because she desires a different plot for her life: "I want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return." To her surprise, she discovers that change is easy: "Peel away the wife, the mother, find the woman, and there the she-devil is."1 (44) Ruth's transformation is typical of women's fictions of metamorphosis by having its root in the desire for power and control, by rejecting romantic love, and by describing metamorphosis as a self-willed act. In texts like Virginia Woolfs Orlando (1928), Leonora Carrington's "The Debutante" (1939), James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973), Lois Gould's A Sea-Change (1976), Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle (1976) and Bodily Harm (1982), Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977), Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild" (1984), Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog (1990), as well as in vampire stories like Nancy A. Collins's Sunglasses After Dark (1989), Anne Rice's The Queen of the Damned (1988) as well as Interview with the Vampire (1976), Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991), and Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love" (1979), the fantastic plot of metamorphosis provides a scenario where women gain power - power over their own lives, power over men, the power not to live erotic plots.2 Metamorphosis has been one of the essential subjects of fantastic literature - from Ovid to Franz Kafka to contemporary writers like Angela Carter and Julio Cortázar.3 Situated in a space where the natural laws are

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suspended,4 metamorphosis violates the boundaries between humanity and nature, the spiritual and the natural,5 a transformation that occurs at times of crisis.6 While classic literature like Ovid's Metamorphoses shows metamorphosis as either punishment or elevation,7 the trend in (post)modern men's literature is unambivalent: as in Kafka's "Die Verwandlung" (1916), metamorphosis signifies alienation, the loss of identity and control,8 and induces horror by revealing the world to be a place of arbitrarily changing identities, a universe devoid of meaning.9 Metamorphosis is imposed by external forces10 and experienced as "an ordeal," as "physical catastrophe," and as "offensive suffering."11 In Julio Cortàzar's "Axolotl" (1967), the narrator laments the time of change when the "horror began [...] of believing myself prisoner in the body of an axolotl, metamorphosed into him with my human mind intact, buried alive in an axolotl, condemned to move lucidly among unconscious creatures."12 In contemporary women's literature, usually not included in these theoretical studies,13 the implications are dramatically different: the heroines are not victims of metamorphosis, they choose it deliberately. Unlike the classical metamorphoses where a transforming power - God or the superhuman - controls the process, and unlike the (post)modern men's metamorphoses that are signs of an arbitrary world, transformation is initiated and controlled by the female protagonists. The exuberant, playful tone of Virginia Woolf s Orlando and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle is an exception, but all the narratives share the concept of women as the agents of their "sea-changes." This control distinguishes them from male fantasies like Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Franz Kafka's "Die Verwandlung," Philip Roth's The Breast (1972),14 and Julio Cortàzar's "Axolotl," where the metamorphosis is either beyond control from the beginning or gets out of control as the metamorphosis progresses; theories of the fantastic (based on male literature that is tacitly taken as normative) observe that changes are "progressively without the will or desire of the subject."15 Correspondingly, in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve and Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild" where male protagonists experience metamorphosis across gender-boundaries, the feminization of their bodies is associated with loss of control and vulnerability. Women's fiction with female protagonists tends to relate to those myths presented by Ovid where women change into laurel trees, reeds, birds, and rivers either to escape rape or to find immunity after rape, as in the stories of Daphne and Thetis; and the story of Caenis who is granted her wish to be changed into a man to escape further rape by Neptune might be the paradigm for Lois Gould's A Sea-Change,16

229 We find a variety of approaches and a progression of fantastic elements of metamorphosis in women's literature. While novels like Atwood's Lady Oracle, that satirize female role-playing, remain largely within realistic parameters, fictions like Virginia Woolfs Orlando, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, and Lois Gould's A Sea-Change violate elemental boundaries. Significantly, these boundaries in women's fictions of metamorphosis are gender-lines - nearly all the radical narratives choose the change of gender as their subject. Obsession with gender-boundaries is not to my knowledge - a theme that has been explored in men's literature of metamorphosis.17 Rather, metamorphosis in men's literature is concerned with the boundaries between man and animal, man and inanimate nature, or the duality of human nature; men are transformed into beetles and women into trees, and Dr Jekyll creates a fantastic double. In "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming" (1908), Sigmund Freud claims that women's fantasies are "almost exclusively" confined to erotic longing; men's, although focused on power, may comprise both. In "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1930), Freud, when talking about the dissolution of ego-boundaries, restricts the experience to "being in love" (for non-pathological people). Following Freud, we would expect women to write metamorphosis as revolving around an experience of erotic love where the boundaries between self and object disappear. This is obviously not the case: on the contrary, women's stories of metamorphosis are fantasies of power and control. Nancy K. Miller, in "Emphasis Added," points out that fantasies of power as the "repressed content" struggle with the erotic content, and that the coexistence of these hidden stories of power distinguish - in George Eliot's words - women writers from "lady writers."18 The subversive potential of the fantasy of power is to "revise the social grammar in which women are never defined as subjects." Miller is careful to add that these inscriptions of power are not only difficult to decipher, but that, since female plots of power violate the rules of verisimilitude, they are dismissed as "implausibilities."19 Although Miller limits her discussion to realistic literature, it is apparent that, by using the fantastic, women writers can create plots of power openly and radically, without having to comply with rules of plausibility. The difference in tone between male and female fantasies of metamorphosis stems from a different sense of self. Psychologically, women may be less threatened by metamorphosis since their fantasy life is characterized by "fluidity" in the feminist interpretation of the Lacanian model20 and since their boundaries of self are more fluid than men's, as Object Relations theory has convincingly argued.21 As a result of women's

230 exclusive mothering in our culture, Nancy Chodorow claims, girls "come to experience themselves as less separate than boys, as having more permeable ego boundaries."22 After the first months of life, when the infant lacks the distinction between subject and self, object and other, the child goes through a period of oscillating between "perceptions of its mother as separate and not separate" in a development toward increasing differentiation that coincides with the intrusion of the reality-principle.23 This "preoedipal" period is different for boys and girls since girls share the same gender with their mothers who "tend not to experience these infant daughters as separate from them in the same way as do mothers of infant sons."24 Thus, the mothers enforce differentiation less than with sons. Jessica Benjamin sees as a consequence that "one posture, traditionally male, overemphasizes self boundaries, and the other posture, traditionally female, the relinquishing of self."25 Accordingly, in women's novels of metamorphosis, permeable egoboundaries are interpreted less as a threat to establishing a separate identity than as a source of power. Lacanian psychoanalysis, too, explains why women are not afraid of becoming the other, of metamorphosis. In Lacanian terms, the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic establishes difference and object, distance and desire. All humans share the desire for a return to the "objectless state at the dawn of consciousness," the desire to abolish distance and the other "who constantly evokes the difference, the loss."26 This psychological fantasy is complicated for men by the threat of castration. For women, on the other hand, the fantasy of a return to oneness is not obstructed; they thus have a "greater ability, literally and metaphorically, to change costumes."27 That openness to "becoming the other" is ambiguous, since the regressive longing for the less differentiated imaginary encapsulates a tendency towards the annihilation of the self as it opens up subversive fantasies of ungendered oneness.28 On the social level as well, women's sense of identity is characterized by the need to adjust to often contradictory roles (the need to change costumes), and by confrontations with an ideology that alienates women from their bodies and their histories. In recent theoretical writings, feminists stress the fluidity and multiplicity of selves, while others insist that women never had notions of a "unified self," notions that were reserved for a male elite. While "every modern subject [has] a fragmented or multiple identity," this holds especially true for women and minorities.29 Change of roles is traditionally identified with the female; one of its manifestations is women's linguistic metamorphosis through marriage (from the name of the father to the name of the husband), a metamorphosis that has been so naturalized that it goes

231 virtually unnoticed; and in the prejudice that acting is somehow not really a masculine occupation.30 For women, metamorphosis is a strategy of survival, their idenfication with the other a fact of their lives; in the fantastic texts, these features are magnified into becoming the other. What triggers the fantasies of metamorphosis in contemporary women's texts is the realization that women are powerless, a realization coupled with the desire for power. Crises serve as the catalysts for a formerly suppressed dissatisfaction with the female role. These catalysts cover a wide range of violations: in Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, a mysterious burglary and breast cancer force the heroine to re-examine her life; in Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, the husband's contempt for her looks prompts Ruth to confront the dead-ends of her roles as wife and mother; in Lois Gould's A Sea-Change, a brutal rape destroys Jessie's illusion that being the perfect woman makes her invulnerable. The texts invariably link the subject of women's powerlessness to the female body - they either investigate the violations of the psyche when the body does not conform to ideals of femininity as in Atwood's, Weldon's, and Tiptree's fictions, or they focus on physical and psychological violations, as in Gould's novel. The dawning realization that traditional roles are traps does not lead the heroines to search for an "authentic" identity; instead, they usurp other established roles and expose their arbitrariness; or, in the most radical step, they incorporate the male role. All these fictions see "femininity" and "woman" as social constructs - where the boundaries between the sexes can be violated at will, exclusive definitions of gender no longer make sense. While the Utopian novels offer a collective vision of a better future and provide solutions to crucial problems, the stories of metamorphosis constitute an individualistic answer to these questions, revealing general distrust of the potentials for social change. For the heroines, metamorphosis opens up channels to acquire individual power - that power, though, does not change fundamental hegemonic structures. Consequently, the protagonists often place themselves outside of society as "lone adventurers" who are willing to abandon society and friends, sometimes family and children, to find control over their lives in self-willed isolation.31 Metamorphosis in all these stories is a way - the only way - to cope with the realities of women's lives. The fantastic process of transformation gives women a control which they formerly lacked - the real world forces women to realize their powerlessness, their status as objects of male desire and violence, while fantasy provides the means to gain control over their lives and especially their bodies; ultimately, it even gives the means to manipulate the lives of men. Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle connects this theme with

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the subject of narrative control over writing women's lives, showing that only fantastic literature like the Gothic or science fiction offers plots that escape restricting limitations. Vampires - Women Who Make Him Shudder Vampires, a staple motif in folklore all over the world, have enjoyed unchanged popularity in nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, with Bram Stoker's classic Dracula (1897) as a "culmination of nineteenth-century English Gothic;"32 criticism, though, has lagged behind and only in the early nineteen-seventies begun to take the vampire seriously.33 The stories are situated at the intersection of the ghost story and the story of metamorphosis, as they combine the violation of the boundary between life and death with that of the boundaries between humans and animals by the transformation from human to bat, between conventional masculinity and femininity by "demonstrating the existence of female passion."34 Hovering in a "no-man's land between life and death,"35 these living dead have no fixed form, can change at will into rats or bats, defy social conventions, as symbolized in their aversion to crucifixes, and rebel against norms, most notably in their marked sexual aggressiveness, expressed in the violent acts of the kiss and the sucking of blood. The lack of a mirror image is a constant reminder of their lack of representability in hegemonic discourse. The characterization of the female vampire (who becomes more prevalent than her male counterpart in the middle of the nineteenth century) responds to changes in women's social status.36 Thus, it is not surprising that the vampire as "the highest symbolic representation of eroticism"37 gained special prominence in Victorian literature, breaking through its extreme repression and critiquing the bourgeois family structure. Against the background of Victorian ideology that confines women to a sheltering home as a refuge from the dangerous male world outside, female vampires prowl the streets at night, they conquer public space. The female vampire in women's fiction has become a means to explore women's powerlessness and the appropriation of traditionally masculine power and privilege; the fantasy of power revolves around the reversal of traditional positions of victim and agent of terror when the vampires instill terror in men. The vampire also allows women writers to dramatize sexually aggressive women, whose sexual power is fantastically enlarged to render the male and female victims helpless. With few exceptions (that mark the vampire's sexuality as innately masculine, a "symbol of phallic penetration"38), this appropriation has been interpreted as transgressive.

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Although the projection of female desire onto the vampire can be used to expel and proscribe that desire by stigmatizing the vampire, the vampire's desire is always socially disruptive because it is "the passion which never dies, the endless desire of the unconscious for gratification, which has to be repressed [...] in order to maintain stable ideology."39 In female vampires, that sexuality is all the more transgressive for not being linked to reproduction - vampires do not reproduce by getting pregnant, but by sucking blood; reproduction is irrespective of sex and gender, both men and women "impregnate."40 This position outside of "generational production" violates the "Platonic parameters of Being - the borders of life and death;" Sue-Ellen Case takes that mode of being as the starting point for her celebration of the vampire as a queer/lesbian emblem that subverts the natural orders, defining both the vampire and the lesbian as "unnatural" and "uncanny."41 For Linda Williams, the vampire is equally a figure whose sexual power poses a threat to phallic norm.4 A telling use of the vampire motif to suggest sexually agressive women occurs in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre where Bertha is likened to "this German specter, the vampire." Jean Rhys's reference to zombies in Wide Sargasso Sea testifies to the cross-cultural existence of the folklore of the living dead; yet while Bronte uses the vampire-figure as a literary motif, cut off from its relevance in folklore, Rhys portrays the vital folk belief in zombies in the Caribbean. A further difference lies in the cultural evaluation of the vampire: while in Jane Eyre, the vampire is a dangerous, destructive force, the West Indian folk culture perceives the zombie in terms of power without ultimately assigning a value-judgment. In contemporary literature, the vampire is often a sympathetic figure, and the novels tend to identify with the vampire's perspective.43 Yet these strategies can backfire and work to contain the subversive potential of the fantastic when the novels "humanize" the vampire, a tendency that paradoxically has been met with approval by some feminist critics. Joan Gordon notes that the vampire in women's literature is less violent and more sympathetic than in men's, that women writers "tend to avoid the genre even when using its typical characters."44 To favor, however, as Gordon does, those vampires that are not interested in power, are morally superior, and have a "natural existence" rather than a supernatural one, negates the fact that vampires are per se fantastic creatures; that stance, by extension, denies the potential and function of the fantastic. If vampires cease to exert power and violate taboos, then the stories disallow their very essence as vampires and place them next to the feminine heroine in a realistic text, and Gordon indeed - approvingly - notes that "benign vampires are more realistic." This

234 results, as she also notes, in less terrifying and less threatening vampires, but the potential to terrify and to subvert social norms, to express social (and sexual) anxieties or fantasies of power, is exactly the point of vampire stories. The creation of vampires that conform to notions of "humanness" saturated with misogynist loathings of the other, is a strategy that domesticates the fantastic; that strategy rejects and ultimately destroys the vampires' otherness, as Angela Carter in "The Lady of the House of Love" demonstrates.45 A comparison of two contemporary vampire novels, Nancy A. Collins's Sunglasses After Dark (1989) and Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned (1988) corroborates this finding. Both novels reveal crucial similarities with the general concerns of the novels of metamorphosis: namely transformation as the reaction to a trauma connected with the female body; the use of the fantastic to write a plot of female power; and allusions to the Gothic tradition. Collins's heroine, not always successful in suppressing the vampire, the "Other" in herself,46 acts out fantasies of power: prowling the streets at night; fighting off aggressive men; following a sense of mission, fueled by hate rather than love. Her transformation - triggered by a brutal rape - is described as a rebirth: after her "conception" (the novel's term for the infectuous bite) she wakes up exactly nine months later as a vampire, discovering new strengths of body and mind. Vampire stories differ from other fictions of metamorphosis in that the transformation is not induced and controlled by the heroines, but by an ouside force. The heroine in Sunglasses After Dark, though, does not despair of her fate, instead slowly comes to accept her new identity and to feel superior to mere humans - "little beasts intent on destroying their world" (139) whose myopic dependence on a narrow rationality blinds them to the supernatural. The contempt for humans in Sunglasses After Dark is changed into admiration in Queen of the Damned, the third volume of Anne Rice's popular vampire trilogy. Although these novels center mostly on male vampires, they identify women as the original vampires, one of them being the malicious title heroine of Queen of the Damned, Akasha. The novel chronicles her ambitions to rule the world which are frustrated by twin-sisters who are the "good" vampires. Contrasting these ancient vampires' visions of a better life, Rice addresses separatist feminist visions when the queen imagines that mankind would be better off without men, an idea that the twins oppose. Like much popular literature, Rice's novel gives voice to important social problems and discontent, only to build up a mushy reconciliation in the end that glosses over the problems. In an impassioned speech, Akasha points out a long history of human destructiveness in general and the oppression of

235 women in particular, reasoning that murdering all men will end "[a]ll forms of random violence." (400)47 Although her opponents strongly disagree, their arguments convince neither the queen nor this reader. Instead of pointing out the weaknesses in the argument that negates race and class oppression and differences among women, the benign vampires blabber about the essential goodness of humans, referring to "revolutions in thought and philosophy," convinced that the human race is "moving towards [...] the age of peace." (402) The weakness of that argument reflects the novel's "humanization" of the vampires: in their longing for humanness and their loathing of their own vampire-nature, the "good" vampires identify closely with humanity and have to get quite sentimental about the humans' superiority to make the novel's central move at least partially plausible. That move of idealizing humanity and rejecting vampires, though, abandons any critical distance to social norms that the vampire-motif might provide. Tellingly, not even the novel believes in its feeble pro-human arguments: instead, it resorts to physical force in resolving the conflict, staging a violent dea-ex-machina finale. Rice's earlier Interview with the Vampire (1976) is equally conservative in rejecting the otherness of the vampire. Rice uses the vampire-motif to create homosexual love stories that violate a wide range of taboos: for example, Louis's life-story begins with memories of his brother whom he adored and desired, a love that violates at least three taboos in being incestuous, in being homosexual, and in subverting celibacy, since his brother was destined to become a priest. The most obvious difference that Rice's novel addresses is sexual orientation, and on the surface, the text seems to delight in violating norms, seems to plead for accepting otherness and difference. However, on a deeper level, the novel cancels out these moves and finally rejects them, since otherness is interpreted as a dangerous void, a source of existential anxiety. There are two reasons for this conservative turn of the novel: Ultimately, both gay relationships prove to be unsatisfactory for Louis, who is yearning for a family; and Louis longs to be human. The novel's confusing obsession with the nuclear family is acted out in the episodes where Louis and his lover Lestat adopt Claudia and thus duplicate a „normal" family. That move might have had interesting implications in questioning gender-roles, as Claudia has - biologically speaking - two fathers who care for her in - culturally speaking - maternal ways. But the novel chooses to ignore these implications of a nuclear family that does not sharply distinguish between father and mother, focusing instead on a sense of incompleteness.

236 That first conservative decision of the novel is complemented in an even more far-reaching conservative move. Centering on Louis's identity, the text has him constantly ask: „What am I?" He is desperately searching for a positive identity, since society identitifies vampires as „killers" and „lone predators." Instead of rejecting these values, Louis comes to identify with them and thus begins to reject his own nature, longing to be human instead, since „my very nature [is] that of the devil." (73) This extremely irritating textual maneuver reverts the earlier celebration of otherness by implying that otherness is a destructive burden. Otherness is exclusively seen in a context of morality (vampires are evil), never in a context of power (who defines what is evil). The novel's curious reluctance to deal with the issue of power is also evident in the cavalier treatment of slavery - Louis's wealth is based on the enslavement of black people, but that is just taken for granted by Rice's novel. In contrast, Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love" (1979) and Jewelle Gomez's „Louisiana: 1850" (1991, later that year published as the first chapter of her novel The Gilda Stories) take radically different approaches to the questions of evil and the outsider status. In these stories, the question of the supposedly evil nature of the vampires is seen in a context of power, specifically in the context of racism/slavery and sexism/rape. Gomez, an African-American writer, introduces the vampire motif through the association between penetration and blood when the young protagonist - still nameless at this point - is raped by a white slaveholder and stabs him to death. The young girl, sexual object for white men and without rights as a slave - is then rescued from a white mob by Gilda, who, as it turns out, is a vampire. Gilda takes the girl to her (whore)house and adopts her as a daughter. Only later does she reveal her vampire nature, confronting the girl with the offer of making her into a vampire as well. Becoming a vampire is thus a matter of choice in the story, and the author does not need to mention that turning into a vampire might have a particular attraction for a black girl at that point in history - the transformation will be one from victim-status to a position of power, and a position of power over exactly those men who victimized her. It is, the story suggests, a tempting alternative for the black girl, and one that she gladly accepts. Additionally, the girl is not too frightened by the supernatural nature of the vampire, because, unlike white culture, black culture acknowledges phenomena like conjure women who are real for the protagonist. Another character in the story, Bird, is a Native American and a vampire, and her cultural context as well facilitated the transition. Interestingly, the story suggests a parallel between the lack of the vampire's mirror-image and the

237 absence of black women in literature and historiography - that is, both vampires and black women are not represented. When Gilda and the black girl read the bible and later the newspapers, the story observes: „Bird wondered what creatures, as invisible as she and the girl were, did with her past. [...] Neither of them could see themselves reflected there." (21) Vampires and black women thus share the fate of being excluded from official discourse - they are the other that is not represented. Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love", like Rice's later novel, is about a queen of vampires, is a cautionary tale of what humanizing the female vampire means, namely surrendering to the patriarchal order. The sexual connotations of the vampire motif are apparent in this story about "a girl who is both death and the maiden" (93), a narrative interwoven with echoes of the Sleeping-Beauty fairy tale and E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann." The Queen of the Vampires, Eros and Thanatos incarnate48 with a "whore's mouth" (101), is set against a young Englishman whose main features are virginity, innocence, and rationality, a constellation that plays with and reverses features of Stoker's Dracula. The ironic implications of the man's enlightened resistance to Eros-Thanatos unravel as it becomes clear that the story is set on the eve of World War I and that he is headed for the terror of death in the "enlightened" age: "This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero. He will learn to shudder in the trenches. But this girl cannot make him shudder." (104) Repelled by the sexually charged atmosphere - the suggestive mass of rose buds, the blood-stained bridal dress, "her extraordinarily fleshy mouth" (101) -, his rationality reduces her to an object of pity, denying her magical power. Suggesting that the vampire is perceived through a rationalistic man's consciousness (the implied author addresses the implied reader directly and in complicity), the story shifts from the aggressive plot of the Queen of Vampires looking for victims to the fairy tale plot of Sleeping Beauty passively waiting for sexual initiation by the male. The transition from a fantasy of female power to the conventional plot of erotic yearning is facilitated by the vampire's desire to relinquish her "own weird authority": "In her dream, she would like to be human." (95) The "ghastliness of her condition" is symbolized in her sexual power over men, a power associated with her virginity. When she lures the Englishman to her bedroom, eager for his blood, yet hoping that she can prevent the deadly outcome, he is the potential victim. When she accidentally cuts her finger and her blood flows, however, power begins to be transferred to him. Her bleeding suggests both menstruation and the loss of virginity: "She has never seen her own blood before." (106)

238 The humanization of her sexuality demystifies her. The signs of her dangerous otherness - like her aversion to light - can now be re-interpreted and domesticated as defects, weaknesses; he pities her as "the disordered girl" (105), plans for her to consult doctors to reduce her to a normal young girl, to use medical science to diminish her. The positions of aggressor and victim are thus reversed: from being her "proie" and the one who bleeds on the "inverted marriage bed" (105), he casts himself into the role of potential sexual aggressor, musing about taking "sexual advantage" of her and making her bleed through defloration. This reversal from awe-inspiring vampire into pathetic girl renounces her magic power and turns out to be ultimately fatal for her. When he awakes in the morning, she looks "for the first time, fully human." As the next sentence reveals, she looks human because she is dead: "The end of exile is the end of being." (106)49 Her otherness has been destroyed, there is no existence for her except on the margins: The humanization of the vampire is the death of otherness. In Carter's story, the way to kill a vampire is not - as in the traditional stories - to drive a stake through her heart, but to impale her with phallic penetration, to place her in the patriarchal order. The sexual act irreversibly passes on her power (symbolized in the rose) to the Englishman who literally and symbolically deflowers her: "I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs." (107, emphasis added) Now he is the fanged aggressor, but, having denied the power of magic and women, he is doomed: "Next day, his regiment embarked for France" is the closure of the story. The terror of the vampires pales before the implied mass-slaughter of the new order. The story depicts the decline of one age (characterized by vampires, aristocracy, myth, sexuality, and the magic of Tarot) and the dawn of a new age (characterized by soldiers, middle-class reason, repression, and the bicycle).50 These opposing structural principles that we also find in traditional vampire stories are usually associated with Dracula versus humans; Carter gives an unexpected twist by gendering the structural elements and linking the decline of female power to a rationalistic interpretation of the world. Surfaces - Masks and Clothes In the texts of metamorphosis, the self is a constructed self; femininity is "a performance and not a natural mode of being."51 This orientation becomes apparent in the emphasis on costume, from Virginia Woolfs Orlando to Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and Lois Gould's A Sea-Change. Clothes

239 function socially to express the boundaries between the genders, they establish gender-identity. If "woman" exists only as representation, then the representation of femininity by clothes constitutes femininity. An even cursory familiarity with the history of fashion convinces us how much indeed clothes have served this social function, from the outrage at women wearing pants or men wearing dresses to fashions that exaggerate sex characteristics. Crossdressing or transvestism question and violate gender boundaries and the concept of gender, much as passing for white violates and questions the category "race." (Gender)Identity in the novels of metamorphosis is a matter of appearance, costume, surface. Virginia Woolfs Orlando (1928) establishes the connection of costume and identity. Woolf skips any descriptions of bodily change in her protagonist Orlando, concentrating on costume instead. When Orlando becomes a woman, he "remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex [...] did nothing whatever to alter their identity." (87) Critics maintain that "costume creates identity" in Orlando,52 and that it "displaces identity from the body to the costume. We are what we wear/were."53 These observations refer to a passage where Woolf writes that "some philosophers" link a change in personality to a "change of clothes": They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. [...] Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; [...] The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same. (117)

But immediately afterwards, Woolf disclaims this notion54 and attributes "the difference between the sexes" to a cause "of great profundity." (118) Woolf acknowledges that "we come to a dilemma" between gender as costume and gender as "something hid deep beneath" and resolves that dilemma in the concept of androgyny (118); although she insists on a difference between the sexes, she perceives the boundary as fluid, a "vacillation,"55 and does not equate femininity and masculinity with biological sex: "often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above." (118) Thus, clothes deny the essential androgynous nature of men and women and, counteracting the similarities between the sexes, stress difference, artificially creating gender boundaries. Referring to the myth of Tiresias who is supposed to settle Zeus's and Hera's fight over which gender enjoys "the greater ecstasy," Woolf suggests: "And are they not perhaps the same?" (97) That sameness is counteracted by costume and social pressure; conventional femininity defined by obedience and chastity is not dictated "by nature," but culturally constructed, the result

240 of "the most tedious discipline;" women subscribe to that discipline because otherwise "they may enjoy none of the delights of life." (98) Woolfs Orlando, instead of succumbing to this social pressure towards genderdifferentiation, moves freely between femininity and masculinity, expressing multiple selves: she has "a great variety of selves to call upon," of which a person "may well have as many [as a] thousand." (193)56 And since Orlando is androgynous, the gendered costume always corresponds to at least a part of the self. The change of self required by role-playing is a subject in many fantastic stories, especially if set in a class- or gender-context. "The Debutante" (1939) by Leonora Carrington is the story of an unwilling refined debutante who persuades a hyena to stand in for her at a formal dinner. Clothes in this story not only create gender, but also humanity: when the hyena puts on the debutante's clothes, she appears human. The human/feminine costume is fantastically completed with the maid's face that the hyena "removes" by devouring the maid: "I will wear her face this evening in place of my own." (203) By taking a metaphor literally - "to put on one's face" -, a feature that J. Hillis Miller identifies as the heart of stories of metamorphosis,57 Carrington exposes the establishing of "woman" through costume. The hyena is first perfectly credible as a woman till her body-odor finally gives her away.58 The story thus suggests that the refined exterior of the debutante, possible only at the expense of working-class women (the maid), hides the "animal" nature, the female sexuality that has to be repressed in the market-situation of the debut. The sexual implications of this female rite of passage that signifies the readiness to be married, is reinforced in the debutante's phobia towards a bat that enters her bedroom, a scene that plays with the sexual dimension of the vampire/bat motif.59 Carrington's story is typical in linking metamorphosis to questions of female sexuality and identity, to rapid change of roles, to transgression of boundaries, and to the importance of costume. In Margaret Atwood's novels, costumes are central as well: from the dystopian use of costume for easy discrimination in The Handmaid's Tale to the writer of costume romances in Lady Oracle and the fashion journalist in Bodily Harm. Although the transformation in Bodily Harm stays within the boundaries of realism, the novel is paradigmatic for women's fictions of metamorphosis since it addresses the issue of women's powerlessness and connects that issue to the development of a fantastic plot. Most of the protagonists in Bodily Harm are obsessed with costumes and surfaces: Rennie's friend Jocasta runs a trendy boutique, her lover Jake is obsessed with packaging things (both professionally and privately when he packages Rennie), and Rennie herself is a journalist who writes "surface articles" on

241 fashion, trivia and trends, a woman who can deduce the identity of "the customers from their clothes." (141) For her, feminism is yet another passing fashion like chain jewelry, with "its media potential burnt out." (93)60 Rennie's attitude allows her to treat her lover's interest in pornography, daring lingerie, and bondage as games, as surface phenomena unrelated to the social exploitation of women. The first crack in her belief in her power and her invulnerability appears when Rennie's discovers that her own body is being violated - she has breast cancer. That crack widens when she watches a police collection of hard-core pornographic movies (intending to write an article on pornography as an art) and when a rat forces its way out of the vagina of a (black) woman. Rennie experiences a fantastic fissure that reverses standards of normalcy and questions the very nature of the reality she has constructed so far: "Rennie felt that a large gap had appeared in what she'd been used to thinking of reality. What if this is normal..." (210, emphasis added)61 That scene destroys her equanimity by demonstrating that costume is a treacherous surface that covers an extremely dangerous reality. Under the surface, beneath the costume, there is the violated, mutilated female body.62 The hidden truth that Rennie has been fighting to face is stated in the novel's epigraph by John Berger: "A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence [...] defines what can and cannot be done to her." Rennie's realization in the prison cell of "her own lack of power, for instance, what could be done to her" (273)63 that echoes Berger's observation ends a long series of denial that revolves around issues of power. While the surface misleads her into an illusion of control, an illusion maintaining the status quo, the discovery of the brutal abuse under the surface forces her to face her own powerlessness. Confronting fundamental issues of the distribution of power, in turn, leads her to rebel, to search for more control. The novel locates that control in the fantastic, in Rennie's control over the closure of the story. While we suspect that the closure in "reality" is fatal for Rennie, that she dies like her friend Lora, her fantasy allows her to use her voice to testify against power. In the prison cell, Rennie "wants an end" (283), and the end of the novel, the fantastic closure that we read, is entirely her creation. In her ending, the fantastic and reality have changed places: "She feels as if she's returning after a space trip, a trip into the future; it's her that's been changed, but it will seem as if everyone else has, there's been a warp. They've been living in a different time." (300) Like other stories of metamorphosis, Bodily Harm dismisses a social solution to women's oppression in "reality" as improbable. Rennie's friend

242 Jocasta imagines a truly fantastic collective metamorphosis where "all the men were turned into women and all the women were turned into men" (156). Both women agree that transformation on such a scale might ensure better understanding between men and women, but that it is an utterly implausible plot. Shifting Identities - Beauty, Power, and the Gothic Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle (1976) and Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) both critically invoice the Gothic tradition as a foil for their heroines' search for power. Weldon's heroine Ruth, connecting to a tradition of doubles, transforms into her rival Mary, thus subverting Mary's fictions of contemporary Gothic romance with her own life-story that follows a plot of power. In Atwood's Lady Oracle as well, we find a writer of contemporary Gothic romances. "Lady Oracle" is both Atwood's novel and the volume of poetry with which Joan, the heroine, achieves literary fame. The double existence of a fiction called "Lady Oracle" functions as a comment on literature, as well as mirroring the Gothic theme of doubles and confused identities. The female Gothic constitutes a foil for Atwood's novel and establishes a text within the text - Joan writes costume novels in the Gothic tradition that are quoted extensively and enter into a dialogue with the main text. The volume of poems, "Lady Oracle," another text within the text, constitutes a "Gothic gone wrong" (259), an inversion of Gothic formulae. These different references to the Gothic, both thematically and structurally in the mirroring of identities, create a maze of meanings paralleling the maze in Gothic fictions; that maze also turns up as a major motif in the heroine's Gothic novels and in her automatic writing when she creates the poems. These multiple allusions amount to "an anatomy of both the Female Gothic and the Gothic sensibility."64 Lady Oracle acknowledges the female desire for escape that finds an outlet in the Gothic, but cannot fail to register the cultural disdain for the "cheap" modern Gothic. The novel subverts the underlying dichotomy between "high" and "low" literature by attributing the poems which establish Joan's literary fame to her exploration of the supernatural Gothic sensibility. As a writer, Joan is faced with a dilemma: she deplores the restricted roles of women, registers women's hunger to escape their confined lives, but has a hard time finding a literary expression of that desire. In realist fiction, women's confined lives are mirrored in a reduction of available plots, a limitation that makes social realism an uninteresting option because it prevents the heroine from exploring new plots. Consequently, Joan dismisses

243 writing mimetic fiction "about someone who worked in an office and had tawdry, unsatisfying affairs" (352), but, discovering the Gothic, finds herself confined to plots where "all wives were eventually either mad or dead, or both." (352) As in Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood addresses the question why women's fantasies are not more daring, why they are so tame, channeled into fantasies of normalcy, as in The Handmaid's Tale and Bodily Harm, and of domestic bliss, as in the Gothic romances quoted in Lady Oracle. While the other novels claim that a dystopian presence makes the "normal" appear Utopian, Lady Oracle argues along narrative lines, suggesting that even fantastic genres like the Gothic may limit female plots.65 In the end, Joan (like her author Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale) discovers another fantastic genre, science fiction. Relating to the Gothic theme of multiple selves, Joan's frantic and often hilarious changes of roles and identities suggest that the search for an authentic self must be futile in a society that fragments women's lives. Unlike the Gothic heroines, Joan neither dies nor goes mad; rather, she stages her own death to start a new life dedicated to investigate the meaning of female subjectivity. The novel does not answer whether she succeeds; it makes clear, however, that her former rapid metamorphoses failed to help her cope with misogynist notions of womanhood. Joan's multiple selves are associated with changing and different names; changed names, as Lady Oracle points out, usually signal patriarchal domination of women, their linguistic metamorphosis from daughter to wife: "men who changed their names were likely to be common criminals, undercover agents or magicians, whereas women who changed their names were probably just married." (226) The heroine thus is the fat child Joan; she is Louisa Delacorte, a writer of modern Gothics; she is the adult, slim Joan who denies her childhood self and is torn between her role as the faithful wife and the sexual adventuress; and finally, she is the successful writer of poetry, Lady Oracle: "I was more than double. I was triple, multiple." (274) In one of the childhood episodes, Atwood links Joan's personalitychanges to metamorphosis in nature: the fat child performs in a children's ballet as a moth, her desire to be a butterfly having been frustrated by the teacher's reaction to her obesity. The allusion to the emergence of winged butterflies and moths from larvae suggests that metamorphosis is not only natural, but also not terrifying, and thus prepares us for Joan's repeated celebrations of the death of her former selves - they are simply larvae that are left behind. These changes of self are linked to Joan's body; they are first triggered when she hurts from the realization that her "giant caterpillar" body (48) does not conform to notions of femininity. Being fat, Joan learns, equals

244 being de-sexed, falling outside gender-boundaries; as a consequence, for example, she never developed "the usual female fears" (155) and, when she finally emerges as a slim butterfly from the giant caterpillar, has to learn the female role and re-invent it. Her creativity soon extends to new personae and into the past: convinced that a revelation of her "real" self with its de-sexed history of obesity would disillusion men, Joan invents personalities that are designed to elicit more enthusiasm, like a past as a cheerleader. Woman, for Joan, is a construct: Although being female, Joan is not "woman" because her body has the wrong shape, is too fat; on the other hand, social skills like typing are "regarded as female secondary sex characteristics, like breasts." (33) The concept of woman revolves around dichotomies - the good and the bad woman, the wife and the mistress. In trying to cope with different notions of femininity, Joan almost inevitably has to change identities; since sexual desire and respectability are mutually exclusive, Joan looks for respectability in marriage, for sexuality in an affair.66 Acquainted with the genre-conventions that rule her own novels, Joan is well aware that female desire is usually punished in literature: her sensuous heroines who resemble Joan physically with their red hair, green eyes and small teeth (and who all resemble Atwood as well), suffer a terrible fate. In her own life, Joan first parallels the Gothic plot by splitting her desires onto different personalities, just as the Gothic projects the good and the bad woman onto different women. Yet where the conventional Gothic demands death for the bad women, Joan subverts the closure: she controls the ending because she stages her (Active) death, writes the script for it, redefining it as the starting point of a new life.67 Like Lady Oracle, Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil features a writer of romance fiction whose narratives serve as an ironic traditional background. Unlike the heroines of these novels, Ruth rebels against the erotic plot as the script for her life, choosing a plot of power instead. Weldon's protagonist, a homely woman, mother of two children, wife of an unfaithful accountant, housewife in the suburbs, wills two transformations: into she-devil and into the ideal woman. They are prompted by her husband's insulting her as a she-devil and by his contempt for her looks - attitudes that come back to haunt him. At the core of Ruth's metamorphoses is her desire to have control - over her life and over her body. Ruth has learned that her body decides her fate not so much, as in other fantastic literature, by confining her to a biological role, but by failing to conform to ideals of beauty. Ruth is assigned to the undesirable category of "ugly woman" and relegated to the margins of society, either treated as invisible or as a mere convenience for men. Unlike

245 novels that protest the treatment of women as sexual objects, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil follows the life of a woman who is not even considered worthy to belong to that category. One of the first things Ruth reveals about herself is that she is "trapped in [her] body." (7) As in Atwood's novel, the body is seen as a traitor; Ruth's body drastically deviates from ideals of femininity which are personified in her rival Mary. Weldon's novel is one of the few texts that has an ugly heroine and explores how appearance forms a woman's sense of self; it is also one of the few texts that acknowledge appearance as a source of difference and conflict among women. Weldon's novels generally never deny differences among women - conflicts center on physical beauty, class, ideology, and race. In most of her realistic novels like Praxis and Down Among the Women, class is a central issue, and in The Shrapnel Academy, race and class oppression intersect with sexism. In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Weldon stresses the relativity of marginality; Ruth's statement "I know how central I am in this centreless place" (8) reflects her admission that a London suburb "is a better place to live than a street in downtown Bombay." (8)68 Mistrusting biologistic and natural explanations of oppression, Ruth becomes aware of social power: "somehow it is not a matter of male or female, after all; it never was, merely of power." (240) Although power in the novel is defined by traditionally male characteristics, it is not essentially or naturally male; thus, a social explanation opens up the possibility of change. Since Ruth's appropriation of power opposes expectations of femininity, it disrupts the order of the story, becomes fantastic. One of the preconditions to transcend powerlessness is to renounce love: Ruth hates Mary Fisher not only because she envies her beauty and because Mary is her husband's mistress, but mainly because Mary Fisher subscribes to the ideology of romantic love: she seeks transcendence in love, loses herself in passionate love-affairs and writes romance fiction. Ruth, on the other hand, comes to identify love as the source of her powerlessness and discovers hate as a means to power: "I sing in praise of hate, and all its attendant energy. I sing a hymn to the death of love." (7) Not only romantic love, but love per se, including mother-love, is the reason why women do not gain power.69 The renunciation of love empowers the re-writing of the plots of romantic love and of the betrayed wife, both plots now driven by Ruth's desire for power. Thus, her ultimate aim is neither the triumph over her husband's mistress nor the recapture of her husband's love, but the destruction of their lives. The relentless pursuit of power takes the plot to ex-

246

tremes, and, in counteracting the earlier chapters' invitation to identification, estranges the reader, creates a critical distance. Significantly, the plot also refuses to conform to the feminist narrative of female autonomy - Weldon's heroine does not follow the lines of the typical feminist bildungsroman. In an interview, Weldon considers the idea of providing role models in her fiction "an unfair demand to make of a writer;"70 rather, she is interested in complexities and in the complicity of women in their oppression. Since they consciously frustrate expectations of social solutions, the thrust of the stories of metamorphosis is not towards providing role models, anyway; the heroines acquire personal power, but do not subvert hegemonic structures. She-Devil is explicit about offering an individual solution to a social problem in having Ruth say: "I have no place, so I must make my own, and since I can not change the world, I will change myself." (56) Ruth, "no revolutionary" as she admits, develops a strategy of "if you can't beat them, join them": "Since I cannot change them, I will change myself." (203) The fantastic metamorphosis allows her to escape - in Weldon's realistic novels like Praxis and Down Among the Women, on the other hand, the female protagonists remain helpless victims.71 Ruth's metamorphosis is one of body and mind; while the bodily transformation is more openly fantastic in its references to the Frankensteinmyth, the corresponding change in mind that transforms Ruth into a shedevil is more radical: the bodily change constructs an image in perfect compliance with traditional femininity, while the mental change subverts these norms. After numerous extreme surgical procedures, Ruth looks exactly like her rival Mary Fisher who incorporates the ideal of femininity; yet that perfect body hides the she-devil, who, unlike Mary Fisher and the ideal woman, scorns love and is dedicated to hate. Under the surface of dazzling femininity, Ruth (and the plot of her life) have nothing traditionally feminine whatsoever. Thus, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil satirizes notions of perfect femininity and the transformation into the perfect woman, among them Ovid's Pygmalion-myth. Probably the most famous of the stories in the Metamorphoses, Pygmalion's creation has occupied the Western imagination and inspired stories like E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann," musicals like My Fair Lady, science fiction like "Helen of Troy," feminist literature and movies like the recent blockbuster Pretty Woman. The myth of the king who, disappointed with "real" women, creates an ivory statue after his ideal, a statue that then comes to life, represents a male fantasy of absolute domination - Pygmalion shapes the woman's body as well as her mind, appropriating the female power of giving birth and life.72

247 In the male version, the man is the creator, the woman a creature destined to love her creator. Weldon's interpretation is well aware of the myth, but far from the self-congratulatory fantasies of the men. The she-devil, agent of her own transformation, renounces love completely; although she conforms in looks and costume to an ideal concept of "woman," is "an impossible male fantasy made flesh" (224), the she-devil inside is definitely not woman, having rejected any conventional femininity as oppressive: "those qualities traditionally associated with women - such as sweetness, forgiveness, forbearance, and gentleness - were [...] quite obliterated." (116) The Life and Loves of a She-Devil thus points to a central naivite and shallowness in the myth: that inside a perfect female body lives a perfect woman, that "woman" is the female body, a natural category. Not so, says the she-devil: the body in Weldon's novel is yet another costume that can be changed at will. Ruth mistrusts any biological interpretations, since "[n]ature gets away with far too much. It needs controlling." (240)73 Sea-Changes - Of Cyborgs, Female Men, and Male Women Ruth controls nature by changing her faulty body into an image of perfect femininity; the women in other fictions, discovering that perfect femininity does not solve their problems, still find their bodies at fault - they are female, and so the women decide to change into men. Although a sex-change appears more radical than changes in appearance, these metamorphoses are also mainly described in terms of costume, thus following the approach created by Woolfs Orlando, and rejecting a biologistic interpretation of gender. Orlando collapses the difference between "self 1 and costume, denying any notion of an authentic self hiding beneath the costume; we find the same interpretation in the novels of sex-change that are therefore actually more stories of transvestism where women change gendered costume to acquire male privilege. If metamorphoses provoke different gendered reactions in men's and women's writing - anxiety in men's, power-fantasies in women's -, the same holds true for transvestism. Sandra Gilbert discusses the uneasiness of modern male writers like Joyce, Yeats and D. H. Lawrence with "false costumes" that hide "true selves": "they see false costumes as unsexed or wrongly sexed, transvestite travesties, while true costumes are properly sexed."74 Gilbert attributes their anxiety to the comforting security of gender difference and male power, and contrasts their belief in "the 'cybernetic' patterns of dominance/submission associated with paradigms of gender" with the "visionary multiplicity of costumes" in women's literature.75

248 The process of metamorphosis forces and complicates the already problematic issue of a "true self': Who, after all, is the "I" after the fusion of machine and human in James Tiptree, Jr.'s, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"? Who is the "I" after the heroine in Lois Gould's A Sea-Change transforms into a man? Is Jessie a woman in a man's body, or is she completely a man? And if she is a man, does (or can) she maintain her memory of a female past? Or does she, like Angela Carter's protagonist in The Passion of New Eve, slowly forget her past life as the opposite sex? These metamorphoses raise forceful questions about the relationship of mind and body, of gender and sexual identity, using the resulting conceptual distress to challenge and undermine exclusive concepts of gender.76 The initial scenario in James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) reminds us of Weldon's constellation in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil: again, the heroine's ugliness is the dominant factor in her life, preventing her from living the typical female roles. Tiptree's protagonist P. Burke, living in an unspecified, yet not so far future, is approached by a marketing agency that offers her a new life; she does not hesitate to accept, although the offer entails being transformed into a being that is part human (herself) and part machine (other). She is used to operate and animate an artificial organism that is the product of a laboratory; P. Burke supplies soul and mind to that creature. P. Burke becomes a cyborg, a synthesis of animate and inanimate matter, "meldings of flesh and metal." (84) The artificial organism is modeled on an infantalized version of the perfect woman - "the darlingest girl child" (85). Where the tyranny of the beauty-myth forces the women in other fictions into costumes and cosmetic surgery, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" goes one fantastic step further: the artificial organism is the ultimate mask of a woman alienated by the beauty-myth, a mask she needs to secure love, to gain respect and to escape poverty in Tiptree's story. In her famous essay on postmodernism, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Donna Haraway selects the cyborg as the central metaphor for the postmodern condition;77 in the context of feminism, she uses the figure to warn against a regressive essentialist and totalizing feminism that constructs "women's experience" at the expense of differences among women and that yields to seductive visions of "organic wholeness," "of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense."78 Haraway's article is an appeal for "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries" for which the cyborg is the perfect example, constituting a "fiction mapping our social and bodily reality."79 The cyborg violates established categories; its "fractured identity" and its position outside the symbolic order (no Oedipus-conflict here80) are exemplary for

249 women who should construct "a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness and difference."81 That "kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self' contradicts any notions of authenticity and truth.82 Tiptree uses the cyborg to deconstruct - like Weldon - the concept that "femininity" is based on biology. The cyborg is a far more powerful image of femininity than the actual woman who, in her uglyness, is "as far as you can get from the concept girl." (93)83 C. Burke has always regarded her ugly body as her prison, a distorted shell that negated the romantic woman within and that de-sexed her like her fat body de-sexed Atwood's Joan. In contrast to men's fictions where the "other" body becomes a prison of the human soul - "solitary confinement by one's own body"84 - and where the captive mind struggles for expression through speech and gestures,85 Tiptree's protagonist welcomes her new cyborg-body as far superior for communication. Like Andersen's mermaid, P. Burke pays a price for her transformation; where the mermaid accepts muteness and continual pain to get legs - and, as Weldon's Ruth sardonically remarks, "by inference the gap where they join at the top" (148) -, P. Burke pays with a muted sensuality and the loss of sexuality,86 nothing she regrets, since her former ugly self had been ignored or sexually abused. Unlike Weldon's heroine, P. Burke never questions her dreams of a perfect conventional life that fulfills the erotic plot; instead, now that she has finally found a medium to live, she totally subscribes to social myths, surrendering to her yearnings for romantic love. Far from gaining a critical distance to her society and its cultural norms, P. Burke identifies with the artificial creation to the point where her human body, hooked to complex machines and confined to a night-existence, is neglected dangerously. That "unwomanly" body is at odds with her psyche that is conditioned by traditional notions of femininity and love; the men in the story are repelled by her physique, never bothering to look further. Inhabiting the perfect feminine body of Delphi, however, P. Burke's conditioned psyche creates a Pygmalion-like male fantasy of the perfect woman. That synthesis, though, is unstable: the perfect woman disintegrates under the horrified gaze of the men, revealing the "real" woman as physically repulsive to them, and exposing the perfect body as a brain-dead vegetable. Typically, in their rescue-efforts to stop the disintegration, the men concentrate on the artificial Delphi. The neglect of the "real" woman proves to be fatal: since it is P. Burke who gave Delphi life, the men's ultimate preference of body over mind kills both "women." Tiptree's interpretation deconstructs the Pygmalion-

250 myth, seeing the cyborg, like Weldon the she-devil, as "an impossible male fantasy made flesh." Lois Gould's A Sea-Change (1976), a radical fantasy of a woman metamorphosizing into a man after she was raped, has been misunderstood as subscribing to essentialist generalizations on "the very nature of male and female."87 And especially feminist critics have rejected the books alleged belief in female masochism.88 What nearly all critics89 fail to mention is the novel's troubling undercurrent of racism; there is no conceivable narrative reason why the rapist of the white middle-class woman has to be an African American. The critics arrive at their evaluations of essentialism by equating the main character's view with the author's/novel's and by overlooking the contradictions that Gould builds up in the sub-plots and her unfavorable characterization of the heroine. Only Rosinsky locates an authorial invitation to doubt in the "'undocumented' facts"90 of sea-creatures that Gould quotes in an epigraph. Yet exactly these sex-changes in nature are factual91 in Gould's fantastic setting, and they point to the novel's interpretation of gender: the epigraph quotes the transformation of female fish into male fish as a consequence of power struggles: "The male in each harem suppresses the tendency of the female to change sex, by actively dominating them. Death of the male releases this repression and the dominant female of the harem changes sex immediately." Gender here emerges as a category of power - masculinity as possession of power, femininity as lack of power. In a potentially endless chain-reaction of domination, the strongest female achieves male gender and power simultaneously, only to suppress the other females in turn, thus contradicting any notion of "solidarity." A Sea-Change underlines this interpretation both in the dominant plot where Jessie Waterman, after having changed into a man, immediately proceeds to subjugate her best friend Kate, and in the subplot of Jessie's daughter who plays with an extensive dollcollection. These dolls do not represent, as a critic suggests, "women heroes who suffered mutilation or deformity of some kind," but again the concept of gender as a category of power. The novel almost immediately disparages Jessie Waterman, the main protagonist, as "the kind of woman you hate to be with in a restaurant" (17); she is a grotesque version of the passive, compliant woman, "afraid of both cars and menstrual tampons." (17) A successful model, she participates in her own victimization and is not "a new woman, but an 'old' woman in a new time." (22) After having been traumatized by the rape (and, at the same time, fascinated by the idea of power), Jessie starts espousing essentialist views that sound like a caricature of radical feminism. In a register of crude sexual

251 symbols, she talks at length about a hurricane as a "female" weapon, a sucking vortex named Minerva after the Goddess of wisdom and art, while a gun, in the simplistic logic of such an approach, is of course "phallic" and "male." Instead of questioning the gender-concepts that have traumatized her, Jessie ends up reinforcing stereotypes of innate male and female characteristics which are then further naturalized by linking them to natural forces. The experience of rape forces her to confront questions of gender in the context of hegemony and opens up her own transgressive hunger for power, but she contains that desire in biologistic versions of gender. Her approach does not allow her to see social solutions to her problems, but implies that a biological change - her metamorphosis into a man - will provide power naturally. In that move already, Gould's critics should have identified the novel's distance from Jessie's position: if sex and gender can be changed at will, any essentialism is rendered absurd. The equation of men with violence and of women with passivity and masochism is also undermined in the subplot of the daughter, Robin. In her games with dolls, she moves from a strong interest in classification (the detached scientific approach that is oblivious to the dimension of social power) to the removal of all male dolls and finally to the discarding of historically important individuals in favor of "an elite corps of militant leaders" (73), a development that betrays Robin's discovery of social ramifications of power. The "herstory" that emerges from the doll-games is not, as Jessie's biologistic version would imply, one of passivity, victimization, and peacefiilness. Instead, the historical figures of women like Catherine the Great and Elizabeth I deny the claim that women are "naturally" the less violent sex; on the contrary, they demonstrate that women, once they achieve authority, display traditionally masculine traits like aggressiveness as well. Again, as in the epigraph about the sex-change of fish, the association of gender with positions of power questions the essentialism characterized in Jessie. Two years after A Sea-Change, Gould published "X: A Fabulous Child's story," which further dispels suspicions that A Sea-Change wants to affirm the main protagonist's essentialism. The - highly didactic - story describes the project of raising an ungendered child by hiding its biological sex from everybody. Although the lack of that crucial information initially provokes irritated reactions, the experiment turns out to be extremely successful when the child becomes a role-model for other children. Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977) is a truly postmodern fantasy where everything is parody, satire, reflection, impersonation, and irony, "the victim's only weapon." (28) Carter intended the novel as a

252 comment on "the cultural production of femininity," a "discussion of femininity as a commodity."92 Gender-identity as a chimera is at the heart of the novel: "Enigma. Illusion. Woman?" (6) Later, Evelyn marvels at "the very enigma [...] - the dark room, the mirror, the woman." (39) In a culture characterized by entropy, simulacra, and self-reflexive and arbitrary signs, gender is elusive and, like other concepts, emerges only mirrored by its negative; the binary oppositions of man and woman, day and night, black and white structure the novel. Accordingly, the novel claims that there "is no ontological status, only an iconographic one." (129) The (gendered) self is a fractured construction, subject to change in a world in flux. The main protagonist, the Englishman Evelyn, turns into a woman, Eve; his/her movie idol Tristessa de St. Ange93 who incorporates the essence of "woman" for the mass media, turns out to be a man. The novel is set in a dystopian United States that is a composite of urban decay and violence, fanatic sectarianism, and the domination of "reality" by Hollywood and the mass-media; we are never sure about the reality-status of anything since we suspect that scenarios like the anarchic ghetto and the subterranean commune may just be projections of Eve/lyn's disturbed mind. The first part of the book, recounting Evelyn's love-hate-affair with Leylah94 in an apocalyptic New York, a place of "Gothic darkness" (10), establishes the theme of woman as a reflection, inversion, and a negative, thus parodying cultural notions of woman as the negative or complementation of man. Leilah, a black woman, embodies the image of woman as whore/flesh. Yet the agent of this representation is not Leylah herself, but Evelyn, whom we suspect of projecting his desires and creating an illusion that is the foil for his adored movie-star Tristessa, the prototypical woman as sufferer and victim. "Leylah" is entirely his construct and does not exist on her own; she is the negative to his "tender pallor" (31), a black woman who represents the antithesis of his whiteness, intellectualism, and sexual sadism.95 His perception of her, distorted and doubly reflected (a cracked mirror dominates their intimate scenes), is overshadowed by cultural images of femininity like Tristessa, mermaids, and the Lorelei. Hidden behind cultural myths, Leylah, "this formal other" who is at the same time for him "the nearest thing to myself I had ever met" (37), exists only as "her own reflection": so she, too, seemed to abandon her self in the mirror, to abandon her self to the mirror, and allowed herself to function only as a fiction of the erotic dream into which the mirror cast me.

253 So, together, we entered the same reverie, the self-created, self-perpetuating, solipsistic world of the woman watching herself being watched in a mirror that seemed to have split apart under the strain of supporting her world. (30)

The multiple reflection of a "woman watching herself being watched in a mirror" deconstructs any notion of femininity as an essential equality. If Leylah is "unnatural" (27), a sign without a referent established by other signs, so is everything else, including the narrator Evelyn whose self exists only in relation to her. In The Passion of New Eve, there are no fixed or authentic identities - the protagonists change names and biological sex as when later in the novel Lilith emerges as another version of Leylah and when Evelyn turns into a woman. Beulah,96 the feminist commune where Evelyn becomes Eve, shares the arbitrary ontological status of Evelyn and Leylah: while it constitutes a Utopian dream for the women, it is a nightmare for Evelyn; "its blueprint is a state of mind" (49) that oscillates depending on the viewer's perspective. As Evelyn's projection, it is situated "down in the lowest room at the root of [his] brain." (58) Beulah is a satire on feminist essentialism, on separatist parts of the women's movement, and on the longing for a matriarchal myth. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter has rejected the search for female goddesses and myths as regressive and detrimental to a "real" (her choice of words) subversion of male hegemony.97 Beulah, the matriarchal commune, espouses simplistic solutions to complex problems and venerates Mother, a black goddess; in the end, however, it turns out to be as much caught in the web of representations like Evelyn - Mother is entirely self-made, "her own, selfconstructed theology." (58) Carter's comparisons ironically cite other secular myths of Western culture98 like Marxism and ancient myths like the Amazons to suggest that the feminists' search for truth does not lead to anything authentic, but has only revealed yet another version of reality. The myth of a matriarchy is not the rediscovery of a lost heritage, but artificial and a construct like everything else: "In Beulah, myth is a made thing, not a found thing." (56) The episode where the feminists kidnap Evelyn to perform a sex-change operation on him is a superb parody of the Gothic; the scene casts the male in the role of the trembling virgin who is led through an underground maze to unimaginable horrors. At the center of the maze, Evelyn finds "the heart of darkness," a womb that - again like everything else - has "a curiously artificial quality." (49) The scene with the goddess as the omnipotent Mother, determined to castrate her male victim, echoes the Gothic themes of "the conflict with the all-powerful, devouring mother" and "the dread of

254 female physiology and female sexuality."99 These traditional themes are given an unexpected twist by the gender-reversal in the role of the victim. Carter contrasts two sex-changes in The Passion of New Eve: Tristessa's transsexuality, a gender-identity established by costume and perfect impersonation, with Evelyn's sex-change operation that relates genderidentity to biology. Tristessa's example serves to demonstrate the truth of Mother's conviction that "a change in appearance will restructure the essence" (68), while at the same time exposing her concept of gender as unnecessarily biologistic. As it turns out, appearance is less a question of the body underneath the clothes, but of costume. The repelling surgical details of Evelyn's sex-change convey male horror at the feminization of the body, a feminization equated with vulnerability and loss of power. Unlike the female protagonists in women's fiction of metamorphosis, Evelyn does not initiate his transformation, but is a helpless victim; and his transformation does not lead to more control, but casts him in the role of the victimized sex (a role into which he had cast Leylah earlier in the novel). To complement his biological change, he is to undergo extensive "psycho-surgery" in order to become the "Tiresias of Southern California." (71) Ironically, this procedure is performed by making him watch movies starring Tristessa - and she, as will be revealed later in the novel, is a he. Thus the New Eve, intended to become the essence of woman, is modeled again on cultural projections of the idea of an ideal woman. As it turns out, Mother who is aware of Tristessa's secret fully intends this multi-fractured identity for Evelyn: that mirrored self is the essence of woman. After Evelyn has turned into Eve, her/his first glimpse of the new self - seen in a mirror, of course - is an experience of alienation and of the split self characteristic of women's experience, of a "woman watching herself being watched": "I was the object of all the unfocused desires that had ever existed in my own head. I had become my own masturbatory fantasy. And - how can I put it - the cock in my head, still, twitched at the sight of myself." (75)100 The male gaze internalized, "the cock in the head," demonstrates why Evelyn was consciously modeled on a female impersonator: to experience oneself as reflected and as a construct of male desires is the female condition; there is no authentic female subjectivity. Eve thus is the prototype of woman, unlike Beulah's new-world Amazons who have never seen a mirror. Slowly, Evelyn begins to fade, and Eve, a creature without individual memory, but indoctrinated with collective memories of cultural representations of womanhood, emerges; only basic techniques - "the right way to perform one or two other biologically determined acts" (80) - have still to be learned.

255 The gender-confusion culminates in a scene where Eve/lyn and Tristessa marry and "both were the bride, both the groom in this ceremony." (135) The novel celebrates their marriage as the only possible meeting between the sexes not distorted by rape and violence. It is possible exactly because nobody knows between what sexes this meeting is established: it precludes the illusion of false authenticity. Thus, the roles of self and other, agent and victim, subject and projection, are continually interchangeable, forcing the protagonists to confront their existential dilemma: "You and I, who inhabited false shapes, who appeared to one another doubly masked, like an ultimate mystification, were unknown even to ourselves." (136) Their union represents "the great Platonic hermaphrodite" (148) where Eve/lyn's "bride will become [her/his] child's father" (136) - a union where biology (Eve/lyn can never become a child's biological mother) is reduced to a supporting role. "Bloodchild" (1984) by Octavia Butler is another metamorphosis-story that, like Carter's novel, represents a nightmare scene from a male point of view. Again, gender-reversal is at the core: The first-person narrator, a young man, is about to be impregnated by a female alien. Set in the future on an unspecified alien planet where humans have taken refuge (the text hints at a flight from racist persecution), "Bloodchild" shows the clashing of alien with human biology, of human and alien attitudes towards reproductive roles. The female aliens prefer to impregnate the human males so that the human women are "free to bear their own young" (75). The reproductive process is described in gory detail: the eggs, deposited in the man's abdomen, feed on human blood till they reach a larval stage, when large worms eat their way out of the eggs. If not taken out of the body at this point, the "grubs" will feed off the human flesh, and the man will die in agony. What "Bloodchild" portrays in disgusting intensity, is scientifically a parasitic process - exactly like human pregnancy. Butler uses the fantastic scenario and the gender-reversal to explore the threatening aspects of pregnancy; the alien context de-familiarizes pregnancy and tears away the veil of ideological glorifications. Exaggerating biological facts of human pregnancy - the embryo's parasitical relationship to the maternal body, its "host" -, Butler investigates the ambivalent emotional reactions that this biological process might provoke. The male narrator is indeed repelled by the physical aspects, that is the pain, the loss of control, the reduction to being a host. The pregnant men are no longer judged as persons, but as "hosts" - in the case of complications, the aliens value the life of the "grubs" higher than the life of the man. As with Carter's Evelyn, the narrator's horror stems from a feminization of his body which is equated with loss of control

256 and a deeply felt ambivalence about his value as a person. Yet he is also gratified by the intimacy with the female alien and his sense that he is performing a necessary function for her.101 In addition, the alien provides a powerful drug that establishes a relationship of individual physical and emotional dependence; that "addiction" is one-sided, exists only for the human man. This exploration of the individual and social ramifications of pregnancy is of course intended as a comment on women's pregnancies in our culture; the "addiction" that Butler describes can easily be realized as women's dependence on romantic love that, together with the idealization of maternity, culturally prevents any unsentimental evaluation of pregnancy. Butler's story suggests that the threatening aspects of pregnancy, felt sharply by the man, also exist for women, but are repressed; the narrator describes his mother as a "tiny woman" who "often wondered aloud how she had produced, as she said, such 'huge' children." (71) That threatening aspect, however, has to be repressed by the women because they have been culturally conditioned to accept pregnancy as inevitable, have been, as Adrienne Rich observes, "socialized to expect suffering;"102 the aliens realize this when they concede that impregnating a woman would involve less psychological complications, since "[s]he has always expected to carry other lives inside her." (78) It is remarkable that, with the exception of Butler's story, pregnancy is not a subject in women's fantastic fiction, that women writers do not use pregnancy to explore the dissolution of boundaries between self and other or to investigate the implications of this transformation. Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, observes as a common condition in pregnancy "the fear of change, of transformation, of the unfamiliar. Pregnancy may be experienced as the extinguishing of an earlier self."103 The lack of pregnancy as a subject in stories of metamorphosis is all the more remarkable since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), as Ellen Moers has demonstrated, is a birth-myth and founds a tradition of dealing with birth "not as realism but as Gothic fantasy."104 The "Female Gothic" displays a horror of female physiology because "entrapment in the female body means neither power, nor glory, but only mutilation and death."105 Especially the subject of pregnancy is interpreted as "constriction, not freedom, madness, not sanity, and monsters (check), not symmetry."106

257

Metamorphosis as Naturalized and Supernatural Phenomenon Women turn into animals and animals into women in Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog (1990), an exuberant novel of metamorphosis that differs markedly from the other texts discussed in this chapter and, in that difference, underlines the findings. The metamorphoses in Carmen Dog have Utopian tendencies, since Emshwiller widens the transformation from an individual decision to a world-wide, inexplicable "natural" phenomenon. While Emshwiller thus avoids the individualistic approach of the other novels and develops a vision of social solutions to misogyny, the replacement of a conscious decision by a natural process obscures questions of power. In Carmen Dog, the collapse of the boundaries between (female) human and (female) animal is not described as a switch of form and mind, but seen as a fluid process, arrested at the moment when most females are somewhere "heading upward or downward on the evolutionary scale." (106) Mothering is the focal point of the novel's individual and collective strands: the heroine Pooch (somewhere between dog and woman) mothers a baby that has been abandoned by its mother (now a turtle), and, on the social level, motherhood becomes the central issue in the females' vision of a new society. While the human men, also called to action by the "crisis" of the universal transformation, visualize a future of strict male control over mothering and would rather, if given a choice and scientific feasibility, render it obsolete, the women employ mothering and nurturing to convince the men of the advantages of their Utopian vision.107 One of the central questions of fictions of metamorphosis - the aspect of identity as the body changes - is addressed in Pooch's character. Instead of suggesting a sharp break in the transition between animal and human consciousness, the novel stresses similarity and continuity, for example by implying that Pooch's conditioning to loyalty as a dog very much resembles the conditioning of women. While the females thus acknowledge a common bond between humans and animals, the human men refuse to recognize any shared characteristics with animals; since they are exempt from the metamorphoses, they explain the transformations of women with their "animal nature," extensively discussing the old question whether women have a soul: "Does the female have a soul?" is discussed from many a pulpit these days. Sermons are preached to an almost-all-male congregation, for the females seem to have lost interest in everything but the quality of the earth under their feet and their fascinating bodies, or so the men say. (81)

258 In contrast to this male view, the novel sees humanity largely as a mask for a shared animal nature, as becomes evident in a scene where the beast-women wear human masks to fool the male establishment, much like the hyena in Carrington's "The Debutante." In spite of the potential of Emshwiller's fantastic scenario, the novel disappoints by a curiously detached approach that refuses to explore social problems. That detachment derives from the naturalization of metamorphosis, that is not a matter of choice for the women and female animals; accordingly, the novel does not need to deal with either the causes of metamorphosis or the advantages of changing one's form, at least not for the human women who transform into animals. The advantages for Pooch lie on a strictly aesthetic level - she can pursue her artistic potential as a singer and poet -, advantages that do not explore women's role in society. Although, for example, violence against women and animals is dramatized, these incidents appear off-stage and are only hinted at; there is no attempt to explain abuse in a social context, and, most importantly, there are no consequences: the torturer and the sadist are integrated into the new society without reservations. In comparison, the naturalization of metamorphosis emerges as a domestication of the fantastic that powerfully counteracts Carmen Dogs social potential. Although the metamorphoses in the other texts are confined to individuals and lack an obvious social dimension, the interpretation of metamorphosis as a self-willed act forces the texts to explore the reasons for such a dramatic step. And in investigating these reasons, the texts acquire a social dimension - in the cultural domination of the beauty myth, in (sexual) violence against women, in conflicting female roles. All these aspects finally lead to the central issue of women's fictions of metamorphosis - the realization of women's powerlessness in the "real" and the use of the fantastic to write plots of power. Notes 1

2

Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) (London: Coronet, 1984), p. 45 and 44. - A section of this chapter was published in Ilse Nagelschmidt, ed., Frauenforscherinnen stellen sich vor (Leipzig: Leipziger UniversitStsverlag, 1995) References given in the text are to the following editions: Margaret Atwood, Bodily Harm (Toronto et al.: Bantam, 1983) and Lady Oracle (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1990); Octavia Butler, "Bloodchild" in Gardner Dozois, ed., The Year's Best Science Fiction, Second Annual Collection (New York: Bluejay Books, 1985); Leonora Carrington, "The Debutante" in Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ed., What Did Miss

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Carrington See? Art Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989); Angela Carter, "The Lady of the House of Love" in The Bloody Chamber (London: Penguin, 1979) and The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1986); Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark (New York: New American Library, 1989); Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1990); Lois Gould, A Sea-Change (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988); Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1992); Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (New York: Ballantine, 1988); Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned (New York: Knopf, 1988); James Tiptree, Jr., "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" in Warm Worlds and Otherwise (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975); Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (London: Coronet Books, 1984); Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London et al.: Granada, 1979). Metamorphosis is usually mentioned prominently among fantastic motifs; see Lance Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty. An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy (New York et al.: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 23, who calls it "one of the most common techniques of fantasy literature." Olsen does not discuss women writers in this context. See Clemens Heselhaus, "Metamorphose-Dichtungen und MetamorphoseAnschauungen," Euphorion, Dritte Folge (Heidelberg, 1953): 121-146; p. 123: "in einem Raum, der nicht den gewöhnlichen Naturgesetzen unterliegt." Heselhaus refers to Hegel's position that metamorphosis implies a degradation of spiritual existences in the natural. See Irving Massey, The Gaping Pig. Literature and Metamorphosis (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1976), p. 2. See Heselhaus, "Metamorphose-Dichtungen," who refers to these positive metamorphoses of "Verstirnung oder Vergottung". See Massey, Gaping Pig, p. 2: "Even when it expresses a positive choice, it is a choice between difficult alternatives: usually a desperate choice." Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London/New York: Methuen, 1981), observes that "changes are without meaning", (p. 81). See Jackson, Fantasy, p. 160. See Jackson, Fantasy, p. 58. Jackson also talks about the change in the function of metamorphosis as a fantastic subject; see p. 81. See Harold Skulsky, Metamorphosis. The Mind in Exile (Cambridge et al.: Harvard University Press, 1981). His chapter titles alone, like "Metamorphosis as Alienation without Grace", suggest the horror of transformation; the exception in his analysis is his chapter on Woolfs Orlando, "Metamorphosis as the Quest for Freedom," one of the two texts by women he deals with, although neither going into gender-differences in the treatment of metamorphosis nor revising his general theory of transformation as alienation. - Skulsky alternately calls metamorphosis in Ovid and Homer a "catastrophic and arbitrary transformation of the self' (p. 39), "the hopeless entrapment of mind" (p. 46/7), and "deformity and alienation driven to the limit of the imaginable" (p. 29). Julio Cortázar, "Axolotl" in Franz Rottensteiner, ed., The Slaying of the Dragon. Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination (San Diego et al.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 26. Natalie Rosinsky, Feminist Futures. Contemporary Women's Speculative Fiction (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), has a chapter on "Metamorphosis" which

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she sees as "a multi-valenced metaphor for the search for female identity" (p. 2), but she does not make a comparison with the function of the motif in men's literature. In Roth's description of his intentions in The Breast, one of the central terms is "horror": "I want the fantastic situation to be accepted as taking place in what we call the real world, at the same time that I hope to make the reality of the horror one of the issues of the story." quoted in Frederick R. Karl, American Fictions 1940-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 497. Jackson, Fantasy, p. 81. The stories of Syrinx, Lotis, Medusa, Arethusa, and the daughter of Coroneus and Erysichthon are further examples. See Ovid, Metamorphoses. Ovid briefly mentions Tiresias's seven years spent as a woman, an experience meant to confirm Jupiter's suspicion that women enjoy love more than men. - Philip Roth's adolescent fantasy The Breast shows only the transformation of a man into an anatomical part of a woman. Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Jan. 1981), p. 41. Miller, "Emphasis Added," p. 42. - As the reason for this, Miller, quoting Watson, suggests that "the most essential form of accomodation for the weak is to conceal what power they do have." Francette Pacteau, "The Impossible Referent: Representations of the Androgyne" in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds.), Formations of Fantasy (London/New York: Methuen, 1986). See Nancy Chodorow, "Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective" in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds., The Future of Difference (Boston MA: G. K Hall, 1980), p. 3-19; see also her Reproduction of Mothering. Pychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 93. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 62, 61,69. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 109. Jessica Benjamin, "The Bonds of Love" in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds., The Future of Difference (Boston MA: G. K Hall, 1980), p. 43; see Evelyn Fox Keller, "Gender and Science," Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1978): 409-443. Pacteau, "The Impossible Referent," p. 68. Pacteau, "The Impossible Referent," p. 82. See Toni Morrison's Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping for fictional interpretations of this ambivalence. The two novels are discussed in the chapters on minority women's literatures and "Alien(N)ation". Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, "Introduction," Cultural Critique, No. 7 (Fall 1987), p. 15/16. That stereotype is referred to in an article on Marlon Brando that mentions that acting is often not seen as a "fit occupation for a grown man [...] as if there were something feminizing about the process of making yourself over into something else." Peter Rainer, "Reluctant Superstar Marlon Brando - America's greatest actor in spite of himself," The San Francisco Chronicle, Aug., 4,1990, p. C5.

261 31 See the chapter "Alien(N)ation" for a similiar theme that is not linked, though, to "bodily harm," but to a critique of the family. - The place of isolation is more often than not near the sea or on an island, as in A Sea-Change, places privileged in Utopian writing as well. Shakespeare's The Tempest, also situated on an island, is often evoked in fantastic literature, as in the titles of Ingalls's and Gould's novels, Mrs. Caliban and A Sea-Change. 32 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 118. 33 See David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London/New York: Longman, 1980), p. 256, and Margaret L. Carter, "Introduction" in Margaret L. Carter, ed., Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor/London: UMI Research Press, 1988). 34 Punter, Literature, p. 262f. 35 Angela Carter, "The Lady of the House of Love," p. 103. 36 See Carol Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press: 1988) 37 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 120. 38 Sarah Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 83; for opposing views, see Punter, Literature, p. 261: "Stoker appears from the text to be almost traumatised by a specific sexual fear, a fear of the so-called "New Woman' and the reversal of sex roles which her emergence implies." See also Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks" in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, eds., Re-Vision. Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 89, and Sue-Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire," Differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3.2 (1991): 3-20. 39 Punter, Literature, p. 260. 40 Jackson interprets the sequence of penetration (with the teeth) and sucking (the blood) as a reversal of the Oedipal stage: "The first re-enacts the subject's insertion into the order of the phallus (father), through reversal; the second implies that through such negation, a return has been established to the pre-Oedipal stage" p. 120; it is an attempt to "negate cultural order" (p. 122) that, even when that attempt is defeated by the text, points to repression. 41 Case, "Tracking the Vampire," p. 3. 42 William, "When the Woman Looks," p. 89. 43 See Joan Gordon, "Rehabilitating Revenants, or Sympathetic Vampires in Recent Fiction," Extrapolation, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Fall 1988): 227-234. 44 Gordon, "Rehabilitating," p. 230. 45 See Veronica Hollinger, "The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider," Science Fiction Studies, 16 (July 1989), on otherness and vampires. 46 See Collins, Sunglasses, p. 28f, 61, 11, 140, for the treatment of the other within the self. 47 Rice mentions, among other things, the practice of clitorectomy in some African societies as an example, (p. 405). 48 The interplay between Eros and Thanatos is an important feature of Gothic literature; see Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination (London/Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 31. 49 See the chapter "Alien(N)ation" on exile as the beginning of being in women's fantastic literature, an interpretation that parallels Carter's approach.

262 50 See Punter, Literature, p. 259, for the structural oppositions in the original Dracula: "Dracula stands for lineage, the principle group of characters for family; Dracula for unintelligible and bitter passion, they for the sweet and reasonable emotions; Dracula for the physical and erotic, they for the repressed and etherealised love." 51 Myra Jehlen,"Gender" in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 269; Jehlen discusses the cross-dressing in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 52 Sandra Gilbert, "Costumes of the Mind" in Judith Spector, ed., Gender Studies (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1986), p. 70. 53 Pacteau, "Impossible," p. 81/2. 54 Gilbert, "Costumes of the Mind," in her discussion of Orlando, overlooks these reservations. 55 See p. 99: "for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman". 56 Woolf not only transgresses gender-boundaries in Orlando, but also dislocates the unity of time by juxtaposing Orlando's subjective time with scientific time. See Skulsky, Metamorphosis, p. 195. - Orlando, like Vita Sackville-West's Seducers in Ecuador (1924), generally questions constructions of reality. Both fictions are linked by the history of their origin: Woolf and Sackville-West, close friends, had promised to write a piece of fiction for each other; both came up with fantastic fictions. 57 J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 1: "Each metamorphosis is a change of shape that in its most general form can be defined as the literalization of metaphor. [...] in the cruel justice of the gods we see the terrible performative power that figures of speech may have." — Massey, The Gaping Pig, p. 1, also interprets metamorphosis as self-referential, namely an escape from public language: "Although it is a critique of language [...] it is a critique from beyond the point where language has been forced on one. It is set up on the other side of language - after one has gone mad through preoccupation with language, taking it so seriously that it has become a physical thing again." 58 For a further example of the connection between body odor and sexuality, see Lillian Hellman, Maybe (1980). 59 Another example of "putting on face" and the fantastic is Helen R. Hull, "ClayShuttered Doors" (1926) in Salmonson, ed., What Did Miss Carrington See?, p. 227. 60 Rennie also "didn't want to be known as a manhater." (p. 40). 61 That initial gap immediately changes her perception; later, she "had trouble dismissing it [her lover's game of sexual domination] as a game." 62 The latent existence of the mutilated female body underneath the surface is hinted at already in the opening scene when Rennie partly uncovers her body in front of a policeman to show the scar from her partial mastectomy. - That both scenes feature policemen exposes the complicity of the law and law-enforcement in the victimization of women. 63 See p. 114, where Lora states: "He hit me because he could get away with it and nobody could stop him. That's mostly why people do stuff like that, because they can get away with it." 64 Sybil Korff Vincent, "The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood's Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle" in Juliann E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (Montreal/ London: Eden Press, 1983), p. 153.

263 65 Many feminist critics do not share this negative evaluation of the Gothic; see the chapter on literary history for approaches that identify the Gothic's potential of gendersubversion. For a more positive evaluation of the contemporary Gothic romances, see Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance (New York/London: Methuen, 1982) and Janice Radway, Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 66 See p. 190: "One could not, apparently, be both respected female savant and a scullery maid." The dichotomy between "good" and "bad" woman is referred to in Bodily Harm, p. 167. 67 Vincent, "The Mirror and the Cameo," p. 159, sees this use of fantasy to control the world as a general characteristic of women's Gothic literature. 68 Her husband Bobo is, of course, a part of the "centre of the city." (13) 69 Ruth's mother-in-law, Brenda, escapes victimization because she loves neither her husband nor her son. See p. 16. 70 In John Haffenden, ed., Novelists in Interview (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 308; in Olga Kenyon, Women Novelists Today. A Survey of English Writers in the Seventies and Eighties (New York: St Martin's Press, 1988), p. 123, Weldon is quoted as calling Ruth an "anti-heroine": "She does things which one half of you applaud, the other not. Next she gets herself turned into a sex-object, and lives happily ever after." 71 While some feminist critics prefer the realistic novels, finding She-Devil "too farfetched" (Kenyon, Women Novelists, p. 124), David Lodge praises Weldon's "conscious and expressive flouting of conventional realism". Quoted in Kenyon, p. 126. 72 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an early feminist answer to the Pygmalion-myth. Some critics argue that the monster Frankenstein creates has an arbitrary sexual identity. - J. Hillis Miller calls the myth "a male fantasy whereby a woman cannot be the object of sexual desire and cannot desire in return unless she has been made so by male effort." He reads the myth as an avoidance of "the painful encounter with the otherness of other persons in ordinary human relations." (Versions, p. 7 and 11) 73 A similar sentiment is expressed in Weldon's realistic novel Praxis: "Nature does not know best, or if it does, it is on the man's side [...] we must fight nature tooth and claw." 74 Gilbert, "Costumes," p. 71. 75 Gilbert, "Costumes," p. 90,89. 76 Skulsky, Metamorphosis, p. 7, mentions this general function of the fantastic for fictions of metamorphosis. 77 Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review, 80 (March/April 1985): 65-107. The article has been reprinted several times, most recently in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. and with an introduction by Linda J. Nicholson (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 190-233. - For a discussion of Haraway's theory, see the articles by Christina Crosby, Mary Ann Doane, and Joan W. Scott in Elizabeth Weed, ed., Coming to Terms. Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York/London: Routledge, 1989). 78 Haraway, "Manifesto," p. 65,67. 79 Haraway, "Manifesto," p. 66. 80 Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, "The Case of the Haploid Heart: Psychological Patterns in the Science Fiction of Alice Sheldon ('James Tiptree, Jr.')," Science Fiction Studies, Vol.

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17 (1990), p. 203, interprets "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" as "a cross-dressed version of Freud's Oedipus plot - or, rather, a wry and bitter comment on it." Haraway, "Manifesto," p. 73. Haraway, "Manifesto," p. 82. - Haraway mentions science fiction writers like Joanna Russ, Vonda Mclntyre, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm, and James Tiptree Jr. as examples. Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, discussed below, makes the same point that female impersonators may create far more powerful images of femininity than women. - Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, "The Case of the Haploid Heart," p. 202, reminds of various literary traditions like the golem, Frankenstein's monster, and Pygmalion that influenced Tiptree's story. Skulsky, Metamorphosis, p. 29. The struggle for expression and communication is apparent in Kafka's "Die Verwandlung" and Cortizar's "Axolotl." Hans Christian Andersen's interpretation where the loss of speech is the price to be paid by a woman for becoming a gendered, sexed human being, is a bitter comment on gender-politics. Anne Tyler, "A Sea-Change," New York Times Book Review, Sept. 19,1976, p. 4. See Anne Mickelson, Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women (Metuchen/New York: Scarecrow Press, 1979), who condemns the novel as "an abstract plot teetering on a collection of shaky symbols and metaphors;" Josephine Hendin, Vulnerable People. A View of American Fiction since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 187, classifies A Sea-Change as a "female literature of disgust" and questions the book's exploration of "an S-M bond of mythic proportions." With the exception of Rosinsky, Feminist Futures, in a footnote. Rosinsky, Feminist Futures, p. 7. See "Wrasses" in The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life (New York: Larousse & Co., 1980), p. 261: "Many wrasses and parrotfishes change sex with age, usually from active female to male". In Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 86. The name "de St Ange" is an obvious reference to de Sade. "Leilah" or "Leylah" (the spelling of the name changes in the novel) means gift of God, pearl, and, most significantly in this context, darkness; Leilah is the woman in the Arabic "Romeo and Juliet," that is Layla and Maynum, a famous love poem (collected for example in a version by Nizami). See p. 31, where he calls her "dressed meat." References to her lack of language, her muteness appear on pp. 18, 20, 21, 26. Just as Leylah is the negative of Evelyn (who sets himself as the subject), so the desert, Evelyn's next place, is a negative of the decaying city. While Leylah is a body without a voice, the desert is "peopled only with echoes" (p. 41), that is refers to women without bodies, with only voices. "Beulah" is a reference to the Biblical "Land of Beulah" and to its interpretations in William Blake's work and in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, where the "daughters of Beulah" exist only in relation to men. - Beulah, like Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (discussed in the chapter on Utopias) is the projection of male anxieties, a male nightmare. — Nan Bowman Albinski, Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), identifies the

265 social and cultural background of US-American and British writers as decisive in their portrayal of matriarchal societies: "The difference between the two national groups is the absence of the spiritual matriarchal associations so appealing to American separatist writers whose women celebrate female rituals, and joyfully claim the pastoral world." (p. 134) 97 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman (London: Virago, 1979), p. 5. 98 The face of the goddess reminds Evelyn of "the stem, democratic beauty of a figure on pediment in the provincial square of a people's republic." (p. 59) 99 Fleenor, "Introduction" in The Female Gothic, p. 12,14,16. 100 The internalized mental censor is also a subject in African American fiction; see the chapter on minority women's literature. 101 The relationship is implicitly sexual, with a hint at incest, since the female alien was born of "his father's flesh." (p. 81) 102 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 163. 103 Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 167. 104 Ellen Moers, Literary Women, p. 141; Alice Walker's work, especially her first two novels, The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian, are examples of realistic approaches to pregnancy that deal with women's dread. The novels are replete with references that link pregnancy to loss of self and death, culminating in a sentence in The Third Life of Grange Copeland 22 (1970): "Her big belly her own tomb." Also, Alice Walker has described pregnancy as threatening metamorphosis in autobiographical essays and her fictions. She writes about her own pregnancy: "The last three [months] I was so big I looked like someone else, which did not please me." ("One Child of One's Own", Ms., August 1979: 47-50, 72ff.; p. 48) And in Meridian (New York/London: Pocket Books, 1977, 19761), she observes:" [...] in her first pregnancy she became distracted from who she was. As divided in her mind as her body was divided, between what part was herself and what part was not." (p. 50). 105 Fleenor, "Introduction," p. 14 and 18. 106 Fleenor, "Introduction," p. 16. 107 The easiness with which the women succeed in convincing the men of the superiority of mothering as a structuring social model contrasts sharply with the problematization of motherhood as an institution in contemporary feminist Utopias. Only Gilman's Herland shares a similar optimism.

ALIEN(N)ATIONS - HOME, DISPLACEMENT, AND ALIENS

The conception of the alien within the self is more than a metaphor, however; it is a model of the feminine psyche. Virginia Allen and Terri Paul, "Science and Fiction" (1986) Housework itself [...] can come to haunt the unwary. Introduction, The Virago Book of Ghost Stories (1989) The Horror that ruled that uncanny kitchen. Margery Lawrence, "The Haunted Saucepan," (1926)

"How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say goodbye to her home, her world?" wonders the male narrator in James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See." He is stunned - middle-aged Ruth Parsons, a US government employee with a security clearance, and her daughter Althea have just left home and the earth for good, joined aliens (monsters to him) to go to alien planets, and the answer to his question is, "Easily." Mrs. Parsons, it turns out, has been dreaming of going "really far away" for quite some time, a dream shared by Margaret Atwood's heroine Rennie in Bodily Harm who wants to go "very far away." Under the surface of domesticity and ordinariness, the heroines in Lolly Willowes (Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1926), "The Heat Death of the Universe" (Pamela Zoline, 1967), "With Delicate Mad Hands" (James Tiptree, Jr., 1981), "The Women Men Don't See" (James Tiptree, Jr., 1973), "Mrs. Bagley Goes to Mars" (Kate Wilhelm, 1978), Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson, 1981), Bodily Harm (Margaret Atwood, 1982), and Mrs. Caliban (Rachel Ingalls, 1983) are profoundly alienated from patriarchal culture;1 the pervasive metaphors of alienation in these fictions are being invisible, being a transient, and being on the outside looking in. The search for radical alternatives does not lead the protagonists to look for collective solutions (as in Utopian novels) or individual change (as in stories of metamorphosis). Rather, they choose to leave home and civilization and return to nature; or leave home in the wider sense of patriarchal society altogether for alien planets. Their highly individualistic choices2 are not surprising in stories that focus on housewives - the home is a place of isolation of women from each other, housework a work without colleagues.

268 Consequently, no female solidarity and mutual support can develop; the Lysistrata-idea of collective resistance strikes the protagonist in "The Women Men Don't See" as "fantasy" because women "live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine." (205) Flight rather than fight is these women's option. They just simply do not have the patience or the optimism for a long-term approach; they have led their lives in quiet desperation and grab the first opportunity to escape, an opportunity provided by the fantastic. Their ready desertions point to the fact that women's lives provide an abundance of motives that might build up to create such a decision, points to immense resources of subterranean anger that can no longer be contained by social forces. The implications of their individual choices are unsettling and even subversive; in the background of these stories lurks the threat of a mass desertion, an idea nourished by the very ordinariness of the protagonists. Precisely that ordinariness which refuses the easy spotting of potential female rebels unnerves the male narrator in "The Women Men Don't See" who suspects far-reaching consequences: "Two human women [...] have departed for, I guess, the stars; and the fabric of society will never show a ripple. I brood: do all Mrs. Parsons' friends hold themselves in readiness for any eventuality, including leaving the Earth?" (217) Exactly the unpredictability of the women's individual decisions makes them subversive; their spontaneous desertion and their apparent assimilation denies any easy classification into "good" and "bad" women - if Mrs. Parsons and Mrs. Bagley are capable of desertion, any woman potentially could be. Although these women do not subvert patriarchy by change because they cannot find socially accepted channels to express their rage, they do so by removing themselves; and without any objects of domination, domination becomes meaningless, implodes. The absence of women would mean the end of patriarchal hegemony. Although defined as the "other" (and thus as alien, the Latin word for other), women are expected to show allegiance to the very society and culture that marginalizes and stigmatizes them, solidarity with the very forces that oppress them; they are supposed to do reproductive work and raise children in patriarchal ideology. Marginality and otherness, conditions of being for women, are literalized in these fictions as the writers dramatize women's alienation from male society and culture. The stories show women taking advantage of their invisibility on the margins of society; they react to marginalization by accepting their status as "aliens" and by identifying with the other, using alienation as a weapon against society.3 Alienation from the dominant world-view precipitates a crisis which is resolved by total withdrawal. Withdrawal in turn may mean bodily absence (the flight into the

269 wilderness or to the stars) or mental absence (commonly called daydreaming or madness), as in Mrs Caliban where in the description of an alienated sales-girl these two levels are mixed: the girl looks "as if she had temporarily absented herself from the Earth" and lived on "another planet." (15) A feature of all these stories is that they stress the deceptive surface ordinariness of women's lives, their disappearance behind routine and monotony which are used as covers to undermine the principles of culture, especially the equation of women with the home and family. Nothing in the ordinary lives and quite ordinary personalities of these women prepares us for the dramatic steps they take without warning: Mrs. Caliban, a suburban housewife, commits adultery with an alien; Lolly Willowes, an upper-class spinster, becomes a witch; Ruth Parsons and Mrs. Bagley, middle-aged mothers, leave earth on alien-spaceships. Rather than feel threatened, the Mrs. Parsons, Bagley, and Caliban discover their commonality with the aliens and join forces with them, taking off to alien nations with visitors from outer space or sleeping with the enemy.4 The nonchalance and equanimity with which the women accept the aliens betray their sense of displacement in the "real" world, a point made even more powerful by the protagonists' superficial adjustment to reality. Yet their compliance is only a veneer and immediately crumbles in the case of an option out of the maledefined world. On the surface, each woman seems to have arrived at an arrangement with the compromises and conflicts of her daily life; beneath that surface, though, not visible to their families, suppressed rage and frustration have built up. Outside of society becomes the women's personal Utopia, their "inside;" they believe in the possibility of a place "somewhere" outside of patriarchy of which Mrs. Bagley constantly dreams. All these individual Utopias, with the exception of Tiptree's "With Delicate Mad Hands," remain sketchy and hazy - the point is less the attractiveness of the other place than the complete loathing for the familiar, an approach that reminds us that Utopia is a relative concept, anchored in historical specificity and always reflective of the social conditions to which it reacts. Ruth Parsons' appeal to the aliens is representative in the conviction that virtually anything will be better than home, a place under heavy attack in these fictions: "Please take us. We don't mind what your planet is like; we'll learn - we'll do anything." (214)5 The process of appropriating misogynist definitions for their own ends leads some of the women to reject civilization and exploit the problematic equation of women with nature to create a mythological refuge in nature that is Edenic in its freedom from domination. Although critics have noted that the identification of women with nature is more prevalent in US-American

270 women's literature, some British works like Lolly Willowes use this equation as well.6 In the majority of the stories, nature is the sea or a lake as in Housekeeping, Mrs. Caliban, and "The Women Men Don't See," and the movement is from the family, the "germ-cell of civilization" in Freud's terms, to nature; from domestic spaces, the house, to fantastic landscapes that are wild and open, and that offer freedom and promise wholeness: either mythical natural spaces or outer space.7 As in other feminist literature, overcoming alienation "requires some form of refusal of modern civilization, which is realized on a subjective level in an attempt to transcend the bifurcated nature of modern consciousness." 8 In men's realistic literature, the male quest to define himself apart from society is a common motif; in women's literature, where gender "invokes limits of an individual autonomy,"9 this quest has to be placed in the fantastic. The fantastic in these stories lies in the anti-social nature of the women's solution; of course, in "reality," women do not mass-desert their families and homes. The stories threaten with a fantastic "what if," and, in the reactions of men like Tiptree's narrator, anticipate male fear. Thus, these fictions, although starting from women's powerless position in society, are also fantasies of power - of the power to make men see, to make them fear women, and of the power, ultimately, to make visible "a ripple in the fabric of society." The Uncanny Kitchen - Domestic Routines and Invisibility Home is where the heart is, according to the cliché that Paul in Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm quotes disparagingly. There's truth to the cliché: Home, although most often equated with a place (a house), stands also for a state of mind: in the ideologies of industrial societies, home has come to represent safety and privacy, family and intimacy as a refuge from the hostile world outside; and, of course, women are associated with home, are supposed to tend home, their presence transforms a house into a home. 10 The ability to feel at home and experience oneself as an active agent in a relationship to private and public spaces constitutes an important source of (social) identity in an increasingly alienating society where loneliness, anonymity and a sense of impotence vis-à-vis uncontrollable forces threaten the sense of self." If a sense of control, security, and freedom establish the identification of a place as home, as social scientists claim,12 then the failure of the women to feel at home indicates that they lack contol, feel threatened, and are oppressed.

271 But home is also, as Freud's famous essay on "The 'Uncanny"' (1919)13 suggests, a place where the fantastic lurks. The German title, "Das 'Unheimliche'," is ambiguous: encapsulating "Heim" (home), it negates "heimlich" which denotes both secretly and homely, thus pointing in its denial ("un") to the repression of home. In Freud's definition, as we have seen, the uncanny is "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar" which becomes uncanny "only through the process of repression," something that "ought to have remained hidden but has come to light." Here the fantastic is linked to home via the familiar, the family. For our purposes, Freud's etymological references allow us to see women both as the sources of the "heimliche" and of the "unheimliche." Since it is women who are tending the house ("Heim und Herd" in German), transforming a house into a home and making it "heimlich," and since women are oppressed in the home, the etymological conflation of "heimlich" and "unheimlich" points to the uncanny in these stories of home as the repression on which the family is based, that is the social repression of women. Those women who still believe in domesticity when the stories open experience the surfacing of the repressed as uncanny. In fiction, home is often a place of sentimentality and nostalgia, especially in American women's realistic novels of the nineteenth century in the thralls of the "cult of domesticity."14 Yet for women, home is not only a haven from a dangerous (work) world outside and a refuge for recreation, but also the workplace of their first or second shift. Heavily repetitious and solitary work without any tangible products, it is nonetheless essential for the maintenance of society. That work has been largely unrepresented; the details of housekeeping have not been deemed suitable material for literature. The domestic novels of the nineteenth century either sentimentalize certain select aspects of housework as a symbol of religious or family love; or, reflecting a middle-class ideal of housekeeping that relies heavily on the work of female servants, reject it as "antithetical to spiritual values."15 They depict "housework of a ceremonial nature" and aesthetically more gratifying work like cooking and needle-work.16 The housekeeping aspect of domesticity is largely an "unstoried condition," belonging to the realm of the tacit, that which a culture takes for granted as a basic.17 But these unstoried conditions of a culture definitely reflect a genderbias, and housework is emblematic of the exclusion of women's experience from representation, situated in the "wilderness," that Elaine Showalter maps in her "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." The essay proceeds from the anthropological model of Shirley and Edwin Ardener where women constitute a muted group whose experience is mostly, but not totally covered

272 by the dominant (male) group and discourse. That part which is not comprised within the dominant discourse is treated as "deviant or simply ignored."18 The unrepresented part is "wild," the wilderness standing spatially for no-man's-land and "experientially for the aspects of female lifestyle which are outside of and unlike those of men."19 Although Showalter's implied belief in a female culture "outside" of patriarchal ideology is problematic,20 the concept of the "wild zone" opens a critical perspective on gender-specific areas and questions of power. The exclusively female experience, to which housework traditionally belongs, is usually not represented in literature, although Showalter points to the "revolutionary" potential of a "double-voiced discourse" that would explore these areas of "liberated desire and female authenticity."21 Showalter's model lets us realize the hegemonic implications of literary decorum where detailed descriptions of whaling are judged to represent universal experience, while ironing (as in the first sentence and title of Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing") is considered trivial. Ursula K. Le Guin calls this space "the wildness that is utterly other - that is in fact, to Man, unnatural. That is what civilization has left out, what culture excludes, [...] what has not been spoken, and, when spoken, has not been heard - what we are just beginning to find words for, our words not their words: the experience of women."22 Thus, the literary silence on housekeeping is representative of the silencing of female experience in general, just as housekeeping is symbolic of social order generally as a symbol of culture against the forces of nature. In Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Sylvie destroys this function of housekeeping by violating the boundary between culture and nature, opening the house for "wasps and bats and barn swallows" so that the house becomes "attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie's housekeeping." (85) That transgression of a boundary transforms the house into "a place of distinctly domestic disorder" (113), serving as a symbol of the women's subversion of social order. Like Housekeeping, the other fictions discussed in this chapter avoid a sentimental and nostalgic approach to home and the house. Where the Gothic and ghost stories interpret the home as a place of terror, male violence, and women's dispossession, the contemporary fantastic stories focus on the disruption of order instead. If women, as in these stories, reject home, routines become upset, the familiar becomes strange and de"familiar"ized, and foundations of social order begin to crumble. Tacit assumptions, especially about women's identification with home and the family (two terms that have become virtually synonymous23) are questioned. The unlikely places of female rebellion are at the very heart of conservatism: a home in

273 rural Middle America in Housekeeping, a house in the suburbs in Mrs. Caliban, kitchens where families are fed in "Mrs. Bagley Goes to Mars" and "The Heat Death of the Universe." The actors are mostly middle-aged housewives, shown to perform their routine tasks of housekeeping when the stories open: they prepare breakfast for their families, fetch forgotten items for the departing husband. References are made to the ordinariness and repetetiveness of housework; ritual is all that holds these fundamentally disturbed scenarios together against the forces of chaos and subversion: for Mrs. Bagley, each day "was a day like all others" (91), the couple in Mrs. Caliban functions according to "the set words of this ritual" (7), and the women in Housekeeping are initially "performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith." (16) The female actors are rendered invisible by their very ordinariness, by association with the "normal": they are, in Tiptree's metaphor, "the women men don't see": Mr. Bagley never even glances at his wife, Fred in Mrs. Caliban "didn't look back" (8) and "didn't even look up" (27), talking with her "automatically, without ever turning his head." (40) The authors identify the extreme estrangement between the sexes as the reason for the women's eventual exile. The silences between husband and wife in Mrs. Caliban develop a dynamic of their: "Sweep everything under the rug for long enough, and you have to move right out of the house." (12) Home and the nuclear family equal repression and taboo against which the fantastic eventually triumphs by luring the women away from home. Ruth in "The Women Men Don't See" points out to the male narrator that communication between men and women has long since broken down. In these stories, the relationship between the sexes is a far cry from sentimentalism. There are no plots of erotic desire, because the women's emotions are anything but love for men, there are only plots that define desire as the desire for freedom, escape, Utopia. The women's attitudes towards men are instead characterized by survival techniques: "What women do is survive," says Ruth in Tiptree's story; trying to survive, women take advantage of their invisibility, they lie and cheat, they are secretive. They go through the motions of conventional femininity - serving food to the husband's business associates, being polite and compliant, feeding the children, masking their alienation. Under that cover, Mrs. Caliban exploits the estrangement from her husband to hide an alien in the guest room; Mrs. Bagley, without comment, just takes off to Mars, leaving husband and children behind. If the fantastic is a rupture in the accepted rules of our lives, then the very ordinariness of housekeeping24 provides an ideal background, and the resulting "cognitive estrangement" strikes at the very core of the "taken-forgranted-level." Kitchens, traditionally places and symbols of female

274 nurturing, are transformed into places of the fantastic and female rebellion. Housekeeping is either demonized as a tenuous seam between the ordinary and the supernatural or (predominantly) mythologized as Sisyphus-like chores imposed by supernatural forces, source of frustration and alienation rather than identity. Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, an example of the first approach, has numerous passages where detailed descriptions of housework almost imperceptibly shift into the demonic: I make puff pastry for the chicken vol-au-vents, and when I have finished circling out the dough with the brim of a wine glass, making wafer-rounds, I take the thin curved strips the cutter left behind and mould them into a shape much like the shape of Mary Fisher, and turn the oven high, high, and crisp the figure in it until such a stench fills the kitchen that even the extractor cannot remove it. Good. (13/14)

In the easy transition from elaborately described cooking-technique to voodoo-practice, the housewife is transformed from nurturing mother into vengeful "she-devil." In Weldon's "Breakages" (1975)25 as well, a housewife's suppressed rage finds an outlet in domesticity, manifesting itself in supernatural damages to expensive china, destruction that "leapt from the scale of ordinary domestic carelessness to something less explicable and more sinister." (298) In Margeiy Lawrence's "The Haunted Saucepan" (1926),26 the male narrator finds to his dismay that the "actual homeliness" of home seems to hide "a sort of sinister meaning - and the purr of a boiling kettle is such a jolly thing as a rule" (84). Instead of familiarity, it is "the Horror that ruled that uncanny kitchen." Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1956)27 is an example of the second approach; while in Weldon's stories, the supernatural is clearly in the service of the female protagonists, wreaking destruction as an expression of their anger, the supernatural in The Fountain Overflows is in the service of male order, restricting women's lives. The otherwise strictly realistic novel contains only one fantastic scene that remains unique and is never commented on as outstanding in its fantastic nature; that scene features a poltergeist as a personification of the drudgery of housework. The spirits that "break things and spoil things" (108) force the women to "spend [their] lives mending and washing," "washing what's made dirty as soon as it's clean." (108/9) This, of course, is the very nature of housework; by ascribing it to the influence of a poltergeist who is welcomed by the husband, West defines housework as "uncanny," a work critics have called something that can "come to haunt the unwary."28 In both approaches, the invention of the supernatural forces women to confront their powerless positions in the family and prompts them to leave home.

275 Burning Down the House or The Heat Death of the Universe In Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe" (1967),29 which chronicles one day in the life of the housewife Sarah Boyle, housework is a Sisyphus-like enterprise against the forces of nature; nature, as the law of entropy maintains, tends toward chaos. Housework is another "desperate/ heroic attempt to index, bluff, invoke, order, and placate" (104), along with naming, defining, and measuring, intended to fend off the intrusion of chaos. These cultural forces break down in the course of the story, moving towards entropy: Sarah messes up the kitchen and delights in dust; words reveal the arbitrariness of reference; Sarah no longer recalls how many children she has. Consequently, chaos and death, the heat death of the universe, invade home: the pet-turtle dies, and there is talk of cancer. In psychoanalysis, entropy is a term related to death. Freud uses "entropy" to suggest a state of undifferentiation where all tensions are reduced, a radical form of the pleasure principle; it is a conflict in which the "entropic pull" or death wish opposes the erotic, aggressive drives.30 At first reading, "The Heat Death of the Universe," which has been anthologized as science fiction, seems to be a rather straightforward account of Sarah's increasing madness. The fantastic elements lurk in the disintegration of tacit cultural assumptions about maternity, language, and order, lurk in the translation of the laws of entropy into everyday-life. Sarah's loss of a grasp on reality is less an individual break-down than a general reflection of the complexity of science and technology that contradicts our daily "empirical" experience. Theorists of the fantastic frequently comment on the increasingly fantastic nature of technology and natural science; Doris Lessing, for example, observes in her introduction to Shikasta that it is "by now commonplace to say that novelists everywhere are breaking the bonds of the realistic novel because what we all see around us becomes daily wilder, more fantastic, incredible."31 And Fay Weldon claims that "it's much easier to believe in magic than it is to believe in current cosmology or particle physics."32 The basic definition of the fantastic as opposition to empirical reality provides a background for our reading of entropy in Zoline's story as fantastic, since the concept of entropy denies our perception of and longing for order in a stable universe. "The Heat Death of the Universe" opens by offering a definition of "ontology" as "problems of the nature of existence or being" and ends up invoking the law of gravity. The story negotiates between philosophy (what is life, what is "the nature of being") and natural law (entropy), culminating in the fundamental question: what is life like in the face of a natural law that predicts the unavoidable movement towards chaos and death? Sarah

276 Boyle/"Boil" realizes how feeble her attempts at order are in the face of the "heat death of the universe;" images of death and disorder disrupt the story. Sarah first clings to ordering principles: cleaning; numbering and lettering "the things in a room" (104); consulting dictionaries with their "simulacra of a complete listing and ordering" (104). Accordingly, her story is divided into fifty-four numbered paragraphs, interspersed with quotes from dictionary-entries like "entropy," "light," "Dada," "turtles," and "love." All these concepts have disturbing effects on her life: the turtle, emblem of longevity, dies; love is an absence, a gap (the husband never appears; she forgets how many children she has); Dada and entropy subvert the ordering effects of housework: "The thought of ordering a household on Dada principles balloons again. " (108) Labeling her hand-cream "CAT," she destroys the comfortable illusion of safety in language, exposing the arbitrariness of reference. In the last numbered scene, the story parallels observations on the heat death of the universe with Sarah's unraveling - she breaks down, crying and smashing eggs. The story ends with the picture of the eggs rising in the air and then falling back to the ground, a scene that is "seen" in slow motion by the previous sentence's mentioning of the sand "falling, very quietly, in the egg timer." (119) That image of retarded motion, reminiscent of a scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) where mankind discovers tools and natural laws, arrests the closure in an affirmation of scientific laws - gravity and, as the title suggests, the inevitable heat death of the universe. In "The Heat Death of the Universe" as well as in "Breakages" and Mrs. Caliban, the woman's rebellion is centered on home. Other protagonists go even further: they burn down the house like Ruth in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, or they leave the house as in "Mrs. Bagley" and Housekeeping. In a travesty of excessive housekeeping, Ruth in Weldon's She-Devil sets her suburban home on fire: Ruth went through the house as a good housewife should in such weather, and opened all the windows. She went into the kitchen and poured a whole bottle of oil into the chip-frier, so that it brimmed, and lit a low gas flame beneath it. [...] She plugged in all the electrical appliances in the house. [...] the kitchen exploded. (58,61)

Like the madwomen in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Ruth destroys a house that has become a symbol of her oppression. In a conventional sense, these women become homeless. Homelessness usually signifies - in both "real life" and literature - "anomie and alienation," a nightmare condition that reminds us how precarious our safety is.33 In Housekeeping, the homeless are initially likened to ghosts, homelessness to

277 hell, when "the transients wandered through Fingerbone like ghosts," ghosts "who cannot pay their way across the Styx." (178, 179) Yet the women, agents of the disorder around them, delight in chaos and disruption of order; for them, homelessness is redefined as a chance to start a quest for Utopia which they find either in nature as in Housekeeping and Mrs. Caliban, or with alien nations on alien planets as in "Mrs. Bagley" and Tiptree's stories. In Housekeeping where the overall movement is a reversed evolution, the transient life is thus ultimately re-interpreted as the opposite of hell, as "a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve" (192). That these women choose exile over home, civilization, earth and human community should not blind us to the fact, though, that they have in effect been marginalized and banished by patriarchal society.34 Leaving home and living in exile implies the loss of family and means solitude for most of the women. None of them lives with a human male; Mrs. Caliban, after a brief relationship with the sea-creature, is finally alone as well; only the women in Housekeeping and "The Women Men Don't See" have (female) companions. The women rejoice in their solitude that is not loneliness, welcoming solitude as a pleasant alternative to the false intimacy of family and home. Sleeping with the Enemy - Identifying with the Alien

In James Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See" (1973), "With Delicate Mad Hands" (1981) and Kate Wilhelm's "Mrs. Bagley Goes to Mars" (1978), home in the wider sense of Earth and human community is rejected as well. These stories, along with Mrs. Caliban, dramatize the subversion of misogynist ideology in the decision of women who choose "aliens" over human men, alien nations over human, that is male-defined, society. In her dystopia Heroes and Villains, Angela Carter has charactized the underlying motive of her heroine as "a simple desire to fraternize with the enemy because she felt so little attached to her alleged friends." (17) What might well be a nightmare vision of patriarchy - women and minorities joining forces - is celebrated by the authors as gleeful rebellion. Tiptree and Ingalls use the equation of women with nature to reject domesticity - Mrs. Caliban contrasts the domestic interior, a traditional "civilized" female space, with the natural space of the space, a wild female space. Tiptree stages "The Women Men Don't See" following the breakdown of sophisticated technology, after a plane-crash plunges the survivors in a jungle, cut off from civilization.

278 The alien is a standard presence in fantastic literature like the Gothic and science fiction. The extreme reactionary potential of the traditional approach to the alien is revealed in the racist tendencies of fictions like King Kong (1933), the anti-Communist paranoia of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), and the misogynist implications of "Helen O'Loy" (1938).35 In most literature, the alien is a monster; the aliens are "the Other, feared, loathed, longed for."36 In the fictions of male writers, the relationship between aliens/monsters and human women tend to be antagonistic, although often sexualized as well;37 fictions about aliens molesting or abducting women constitute virtually a sub-genre in science fiction.38 In contrast, we find surprisingly few monsters in women's fantastic fiction - since the women identify with the status of the outsider and other, the aliens are not perceived as monstrous;39 rather, the insistence on sexual hierarchy alienates women to the extent that "the only acceptable males are aliens."40 Critics link women's ready identification with the alien in science fiction to the female sense of self where the "conception of the alien within the self is more than a metaphor [...] is a model of the feminine psyche."41 If the alien is "difference personified,"42 then women whose marginalization is based on gendered difference have good reason to feel a common bond with the alien. And in women's science fiction, the female protagonists are not the objects of the aliens' sexual aggressions, but, agents of their own fate, act out their psychological and physical attraction to the aliens who share their marginality.43 What is stunning in these stories is the willingness of the women to change alliances, how little it finally takes to leave everything behind. The cool determination of the women to betray "man"kind and join the aliens suggests an immense amount of long-buried anger under the camouflage of an ordinary surface. The fantastic - in the guise of aliens that are not monsters - offers an escape from an ordinariness and normalcy that means oppression, and allows a re-definition of alienating identifications. "The Women Men Don't See" (1973) is one of the most powerful of Tiptree's short stories, published under her male pseudonym and featuring a male narrator. It is a fantasy of the power of women to reduce patriarchal complacency to a shocked glimpse of the dynamics of oppression. The ironic title alludes to the metaphorical invisibility of women44 - an invisibility that the female protagonist Ruth likens to the secret existence of opossums in cities -, while threatening with women's literalized invisibility of the text: after Ruth and her daughter Althea have left earth for an alien planet, they are indeed no longer visible on earth, they have disappeared.

279 The male narrator hardly perceives Ruth and her daughter at first, he sees them as "a double female blur" (176/7), a phrase that re-literalizes myopia.45 Since she is a middle-aged woman and he does not find her sexually attractive, she might as well be invisible for him. He is in for an unpleasant surprise, though, that shakes his perception of reality. When confronted with Ruth's bitter analysis of women's lives, his attitude undergoes a dramatic change: after being indifferent and condescending, he now rapidly becomes alarmed by her ideas that to him are bred by "alienation," are "paranoid," "mad," "crazy," and "insane." Or, he finally wonders - should he be mad: "Am I insane?" (207) Obviously, their versions of reality are mutually exclusive.46 What makes him uncomfortable is Ruth's subtle game of definition: if a misogynist society insists that woman is "other" and "alien," then Ruth, convinced of the futility to fight that definition, identifies with the images and with other "aliens," extraterrestials from an unknown planet, rather than with men. "Alien"ation determines Ruth's attitude toward men and society, and the narrator realizes with horror that a definition of otherness and identification with that definition open up an abyss of estrangement. Across this abyss which defines the relationship of the genders and which neither gender can cross, men appear more threatening and more destructive to women than aliens. With a shock, the narrator begins to suspect the fatal consequences: his assurance that "men and women aren't different species" (205) fails to convince Ruth since it contradicts her experience of alienation; and only moments later, as he observes that "she's as alien as they [the extraterrestials]" (221), he seems to understand intuitively the extent to which she is alienated. His self-imploring thought, "How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say goodbye to her home, her world?" (217), misses the point: Ruth has made it perfectly clear that they never shared the same reality, and that the male world was never "home" nor "her." Women, in her perspective, constitute a "toothless world" (205), caught in men's "world-machinery." And the narrator's reaction - "Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn't even living in the same world with me" (206) - anticipates on a metaphorical level the end of the story when the metaphor is literalized and they indeed live in different worlds, Ruth having chosen to leave for alien planets, actually forcing the indifferent aliens to take her along. Some feminist critics have argued that the alien in fantastic fiction like Tiptree's is the human male;47 in Tiptree's case, this is only true, however, for her stories set in a Utopian future, as discussed in a previous chapter.48 But none of the texts discussed here develops the Utopian move of appropriating the power of definition and reversing the identification of subject and

280 object/alien. Rather, the female protagonists, in their powerless position, identify with patriarchal definitions of women as the other and alien, and the authors explore the subversive potential of this alienation that leads women to reject society.49 James Tiptree's "With Delicate Mad Hands" (1981) is one of the few texts that actually show us exile/personal utopia/home/alien nation. The protagonist, C. P. (short for Carol Page), has always been marginalized in human society; a physical deformity - a snout-like nose - ruins her chances for love and acceptance, a fate similar to those of the heroines in Weldon's She-Devil, Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Tiptree's earlier "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" who also suffer under the Beauty Myth. On the surface, C. P., literally and symbolically a space-cadet, is superbly adjusted, an overachiever and eager learner, compliant and submissive. The male protagonists never suspect that she might harbor any resentment against the cruel treatment at their hands - again a hint at the extent to which the abuse of women is considered normal. Under the cover of her perfect functioning, though, C. P. carefully plans an escape. In what she comes to categorize as mad daydreams, she has re-defined the perimeters of her life, weaving elaborate stories of an "Empire of the Pigs" from which she is in "temporary exile among Yumans." (17) Thus, thinking of herself as truly alien and exiled, she achieves a tenuous identity "outside": "Out was all she craved. Outward, outward forever, [...] Never to be pursued, touched, known of by man or humanity." (16) The setting of the male gender as the norm mankind as men - defines her as an outsider, and suggests the equation of women and alien to which the story finally moves. And, like the other women in this chapter, C. P. uses that equation to her advantage.50 Her map of desire does not include the earth; "home" becomes an imaginary empire beyond the explored parts of the universe, in uncharted territory, "Nowhere" (20), that is, Utopian. While the rational part of her fully expects to find nothing but emptiness in space, she nonetheless insists on defining that void as "home" because she associates it with freedom. Later, when she unexpectedly finds an alien planet, the material conditions seem to prohibit the idea of a radioactive planet as home, yet the story again values immaterial conditions higher. For the first time, among (other) aliens, C. P. feels accepted and loved, an insider, at home, even if home ultimately means physical death. The equation of the alien planet with being inside and at home is reinforced in the last paragraphs of the story by the switch of perspective from human to alien. Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest, "not honou'd with/A Human Shape," is "half a fish and half a monster." Born of a "witch; and one so

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strong/That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs," he represents magic, "a thing of darkness." Called by critics the "archetype of animalian monsters," "a monster from the Id," Caliban stands for raw, uncivilized, unredeemable nature; in recent discussions, he has become the epitome of the colonized subject and the rebellious native.51 Mrs. Caliban is the programmatic title of Rachel Ingalls's novel of 1983; the monster's real name we never know, the name given to him by humans is Larry, and Caliban is never mentioned in the novel. In her version of the figure's symbolic status, Ingalls focuses less on the monster itself than on a redefinition of the relationship between alien and human woman Dorothy, a suburban housewife, rather prefers him to her executive husband, and Larry, far from desiring to rape the human woman, turns out to be a gentle lover.52 When Larry or Caliban first appears on the scene (typically the kitchen), Mrs. Caliban (then still Dorothy) notices a paring knife, and the reader fully expects her to stab the sea-creature with "her favorite sharp knife, which would cut through anything just like a razor." (25) Instead, in a startlingly swift change of alliances, Dorothy reaches beyond the potential weapon and grabs a stalk of celery, offering nourishment instead of death and siding with the monster against male-defined civilization. If, as some critics suggest, Caliban is the "bad native," "rude and unconquerable," and a colonialist's nightmare,53 then Dorothy's choice indicates her readiness to be a bad native as well. Like Ruth in Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See," the surface conditions of Dorothy's life make her an unlikely candidate for rebellion, living as she does with her husband in an affluent suburban neighborhood, spending her days performing household chores and listening to the radio. Only her "compulsive restless walks" (40) betray her yearning for escape, for space, for leaving home. The "monster" comes to represent Dorothy's personal Utopia, embodying her desire for communication, love, and equality. Profoundly alienated from husband and a home that reminds her only of death and the repression of memory, she hides the sea-creature in the guest-room; her love for and bond with Caliban re-define the guest-room, a space intended for outsiders and visitors who do not stay at the house permanently, as the only place where she, an outsider as well, can feel at home.54 Prior to the appearance of Caliban/Larry, Dorothy hears voices and doubts her sanity, thus still relating to standards of "normalcy." Larry's sudden presence in the kitchen equals the departure from that reality and her passage into the fantastic. Dorothy's inability to decide whether she experiences a "flash of heat or ice" signifies the breakdown of familiar binary oppositions, preparing us for her radical change. Her look at the

282 monster immediately establishes her as a subject; in cinematic theories of the gaze, looking is equated with desire, typically a male privilege. Distance between observer and observed is essential to establish the voyeur as subject and agent; traditional accounts of the meeting between women and monsters collapse that distance when "the woman's look of horror paralyzes her in such a way that distance is overcome."55 In contrast, Mrs. Caliban stresses distance and thus agency: "She stopped before she knew she had stopped, and looked [...] There was a space between him and the place where she was standing; it was like a gap in time." (25) By comparing the distance, a marker of her power of looking, to a "gap in time," a shorthand definition of the fantastic, Ingalls effectively situates this power in the fantastic. While the effect of the woman's look in classic horror movies is ambivalent, oscillating between a "narcissistic fascination" and a "recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality,"56 Dorothy, in Ingalls's rendering of the gaze, is prompted to identify with the misogynist distorted image of herself that is represented in the monster. That complete identification charges the image of the monster with new meaning that transforms him and thus, by implication, herself from other as monster to other as alien. As a result, the monster becomes more sympathetic and "human" than the normative human male, in a fantastic space beyond the reaches of patriarchal civilization. The identification between Dorothy and Larry is based on sameness, since Larry is feminized in the narrative - he is symbolically castrated,57 has a history of sexual abuse at the hands of human males, and is powerless like Dorothy. In questioning the opposition between human and other and asking for a more cogent definition of "the nature of the term 'human being"1 (48), Dorothy is not only referring to the monster's exclusion from that category, but to her own - both exclusions are based on physical difference, species and gender respectively. That shared marginality becomes explicit in Dorothy's doubts whether she and Larry are really "separate species. [...] For centuries people [...] kept saying women didn't have souls." (67) Like Tiptree's stories, Mrs. Caliban finds that a cultural tradition that has embraced misogyny breeds estrangement in women. Unlike fairy tales where the frog or beast are transformed into human males, preferably princes, the structure of Ingalls's argument demands that Larry's difference be maintained; the sea-creature that looks like a giant frog signifies neither fertility nor the unconscious as in fairy tales,58 but the attraction of sameness and an alternative sexuality.59 In Ingalls's Binstead's Safari, also published in 1983, the trajectory of the fairy tale is even reversed when the heroine Millie's human lover turns into a lion.60 Sexuality, with its affinity to the fantastic,61 is at the core of Dorothy's and Millie's relationship

283 with the monsters who are indeed fantastic lovers by offering sexuality outside the confines of patriarchal order. In marked contrast to male fantasies of women mating with non-humans that tend to exhibit "disgust for the alien physical structure"62 and that mirror the male dread of sexual difference as castration, 63 Ingalls's versions undermine this interpretation of biological difference as lack. Like Ruth and Dorothy, Mrs. Bagley (whose first name we never learn) in Kate Wilhelm's "Mrs. Bagley Goes to Mars" is introduced in the context of perfect normalcy, in a domestic setting on "a day exactly like all others." (92) The familiar, as in the other stories in this chapter, is perceived as alienating routines that exclude the potential for change. Between her domestic chores and a boring job, Mrs. Bagley is looking for her personal Utopia. Her Utopia is not "nowhere," but "somewhere" - the story repeatedly contrasts the scenes of domestic drudgery with vague visions of "somewhere" else. Rejecting intimacy and the familiar, Mrs. Bagley's desires map Utopia and home as the opposite and negative of the known; her fantastic journey bypasses Mars as "too close, too like Earth" and ends on Ganymede where "they spoke another language so they could not jabber at her." (99) Mainstream and Outsiders - Bodily Harm Going "somewhere else" in these stories is only made possible by the fantastic, in fantasies of outer space or an escape with aliens, in unfamiliar territory. Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm (1982) devolops this argument by insisting on the impossibility of an escape in the "real." The heroine's conviction that a clear distinction between outside and inside (a distinction that is an integral part of the concept of home) exists, is profoundly shattered in the course of the novel, and, in the end, it is the fantastic that has to provide a way out of intolerable misery. Like the other heroines in this chapter, Rennie flees home and the familiar. Leaving Canada after her body has been invaded by cancer and her apartment by a threatening stranger - thus destroying the illusion that playing by the rules and being "inside" will protect her -, Rennie, a journalist, visits a small Caribbean nation, situated on an island like the prototypical Utopian society. On that island, "she's truly no longer at home. She is away, she is out, which is what she wanted [...] nobody knows her. In a way she's invisible. In a way she's safe." (39) Here again, homelessness, invisibility, the desire to be "outside" function as liberating and subversive; later in the novel, Rennie, feels "as if she's stepped across a line and found herself on

284 Mars." (74) These totally unfamiliar surroundings, her being away from home and being an outsider are repeatedly equated with safety, as when Paul, her lover, declares that she is a tourist and thus "exempt."64 Yet this idea of being safe on the "outside," of being exempt as a transient or tourist (that is, emotionally uninvolved and without roots), proves to be wrong as well when the story destroys the boundaries between inside and outside: "She has been turned inside out, there's no longer a here and a there [...] She is not exempt. Nobody is exempt from anything." (290) Both detachment and involvement fail as strategies to cope with alienation and victimization; Dr. Minnow, a local politician, explicitly warns against the dangers of involvement65 and recommends being an alien because "the love of your own country is a terrible curse. [...] It is much easier to live in someone else's country. Then you are not tempted [...] to change things." (133) And changing things, the novel shows over and over again, for example in Dr. Minnow's death, is doomed to failure. In contrast to being homeless, a transient and an alien, the idea of home is the subject of derision, as when Paul refers sarcastically to the cliché that home is "where the heart is." (45) Home, on the contrary, is a place fraught with danger, as in women's ghost stories. Rennie and her friend Lora, when sharing stories of their childhoods, concentrate on cellars, places associated with darkness, coldness, and terror.66 Rennie recalls being "shut in the cellar by myself' (53), and Lora mentions that she "lived in cellars." (110) The story brings both women full circle to the scenes of their childhood nightmares - to yet another cellar, the prison-cell where they are again "shut in." Home as a dangerous place excludes the possibility of safety, is open to invasion from the outside: In the opening scene, Rennie returns to her apartment - never called her home - to find that it has been burglarized by a man who left behind a rope on her bed.67 This incident marks the end of her illusion that she could be "inside a charmed circle"68 in a male-dominated society, as she felt with her ex-lover Jake; interpreting John Berger's theories which are quoted in the epigraph of the novel, Atwood has Rennie realize that she is under constant surveillance: "She began to see herself from the outside." (40)69 The ambiguity of this statement - both referring to the internalized objectifying male gaze and to Rennie positioning herself inside and outside at the same time - serves as a transition to her illusion that, if there is no safe inside, there might be a safe outside, as in the Caribbean where she is "on the outside looking in." (284) The ultimate conflation of inside and outside in Bodily Harm disallows the existence of any critical distance that could be safe from either corruption or retaliation.

285 Fantasy in the early parts of the novel serves to trap the protagonists still further in the hegemonic system like rats in a maze; fantasy here means prefabricated cultural fantasies like the glamorous vacation on a dream-island, the amorous doctor-patient relationship, and the male-lone-adventurer outside of society. They are so ordinary and clichéd that Rennie identifies them as "a fantasy about the lack of fantasy, a fantasy of the normal." (237) "A fantasy of the normal" (which is of course a contradiction in terms, since the fantastic is a violation of the norm) could serve as a motto for Bodily Harm, and also for Atwood's later novel The Handmaid's Tale: In moments of crisis, the heroines escape via fantasies that display a stunning absence of transgresssoin or a desire for the impossible. Rennie's "fantasies about the lack of fantasy" both reveal her hunger to believe in them as possible and plausible scenarios in spite of the appalling nature of "reality,"70 and they suggest an unsettling curbing of the imagination: Where a dystopian reality makes brushing one's teeth (or playing scrabble) a transgressive, unobtainable goal and where the "normal" becomes a Utopian construct, obviously this reality necessarily affects the imagination. Contentment with small gains rather than rebellion is the result, as when Rennie admits: "It is something, and something is better than nothing at all." (222) However, the novel dismantles these pre-fabricated fantasies, strips them of their ideological content, exposes their affirmative function, and destroys the safe and critical distance that Rennie maintains towards the fantastic: The fantastic, she learns, cannot be controlled. In an unexpected turn at the end of the novel, Atwood shows what the fantastic is all about - the gap that splits the world open for Rennie. The fantastic elements in Bodily Harm are so inconspicuous that critics have called the novel a work of social and political realism. Only the last chapter departs from mimesis, and the change in tone and mode halfway through that chapter is nearly imperceptible, noticeable only by a change of tense: "This is what will happen." It is remarkable that even at this stage in Rennie's life - imprisoned, having witnessed the torture and death of another woman -, her fantasies are first marked by a lack of extravagance, smack of the ordinary: they are fantasies of the status quo ante. Only at the very end do her fantasies take a turn from the normal when they express her determination to be "subversive," as she now describes herself. The novel situates that fantastic in a gap, namely in the gap between reality and desire: "There was such a gap between what she wanted and where she was that she could hardly stand it." (196) The future tense of the last chapter represents a projection of the not-yet, of that which does not exist, and may never exist.

286 The movement towards this gap is gradual, and attempts to regress to the normal surface repeatedly. Confined in the prison-cell, Rennie longs for an everyday routine that appears Utopian in retrospect, prompting her to realize that "she's had enough reality for the time being." (296) That reality must be denied: "She knows that there are some things she must avoid thinking about." Later she is daydreaming of a rescue through fantasy: "If she can only keep believing it, then it will happen." (280) Thus, Atwood has given numerous hints how to read the novel's closure - the unbearable present both re-interprets an originally uneventful past as Utopian and it inspires a need for fantasy. This, of course, is the structural principle of Atwood's later dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. The next stage in Rennie's increasing confusion about reality is marked by doubts about what is real: both the past and the present begin to appear unreal. "There's no proof' (283) that her lover Jake ever existed, that her doctor-lover Daniel wasn't just "a necessary illusion" (284) to keep her sane during her cancer-treatment. Even the present achieves an ambiguous status: "Pretend you're really here" (284), she tells herself. Having introduced the concept of necessary illusion, Atwood has us well prepared for the ending which is necessarily located in the future and in the fantastic gap. When the narrative, after recording Lora's brutal beating, switches to Rennie's rescue, it is easy to identify that rescue as a necessary illusion. At the moment when the present becomes intolerable, fantasy is the only way to keep sane. It is also the only real "outside" of the existing repressive order that transcends the frustrated and defeated moves of the earlier chapters and permits a rebellion without immediate recuperation: "In any case, she is a subversive." (300/1) Rennie's subversion, defined by her determination to bear witness, is her Utopian belief in her ultimate victory, in her power to defeat the system. Retreat from Civilization and Home - Lolly Willowes and Housekeeping All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1981)

In Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes (1926) and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1981), women leave their home and civilization to make nature their home. The yearning to be "outside" of patriarchal society is translated into the desire for unity with nature; the outsiders or aliens are the devil, witches, and transients. In the two novels, separated by

287 half a century, the female protagonists shed layer and layer of civilization to seek this mythical unity. In Housekeeping, the house represents male-defined civilization; in Lolly Willowes, the city functions as a symbol of women's alienation. Jane Marcus has argued that the treatment of the city in women's literature differs radically in realistic and fantastic texts. While the realistic texts try to claim the city as a woman's space and to appropriate this public space, the fantastic texts reject the city as a place of male domination and advocate a return to nature to reproduce "the magical lost woman's wilderness."71 Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes explicitly addresses the restricted plots of women's lives in an impassioned speech by the titleheroine who deplores that "[w]omen have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives," lives confined by "child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion [...] listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen." (126/7) Within these limits, Lolly captures her own previous existence as a Victorian "spinster" in the city, where life centers on the bourgeois family and the authority of the father, and where the spinster Lolly is a marginal figure. The novel renders this part of Lolly's life straightforwardly realistic, but has to change to fantasy in dealing with her return to nature and a celebration of the solitary life of a single older woman.72 Lolly's summary of the "dull lives" of women provides the reason why the fantastic becomes imperative - only fantastic figures like witches offer an alternative to the drabness of realistic limitation: "But for the others, for so many, what can there be but witchcraft? That strikes them real." (128) In her brother's household in the city, Lolly feels displaced, in "exile," an "outcast." (28) She is an "inmate of the tall house" (4), and finds herself "part of the mechanism, and, interworking with the other wheels, [going] round as busily as they." (26) These metaphors that liken the city and the house to prison, and thus social control, and technology, and thus civilization, are structurally opposed in the novel to freedom and nature. Lolly's role in the home is "some passive female part" (10), subject to alienating routines that remain unchanged for decades and that are beyond her control. Only her vivid interest in werewolves and her yearning for nature (that completely frighten away a prospective suitor) intimate her alienation: "she was subject to a particular kind of daydreaming, so vivid as to be almost a hallucination: that she was in the country, at dusk, and alone, and strangely at peace." (42) Having turned her back on the city and civilization, Lolly's rebirth as a witch exactly after nine months of living in the country and her subsequent pact with the devil signify her complete repudiation of realism and what it

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represents. Lolly reveals that women have good reason to identify with a figure like satan, the definitive outcast and destructive force in religion and society. What the other texts of this chapter imply by their plots, Lolly explicitly describes as an immense discontent under the surface of women's respectability, contrasting society's conviction of female harmlessness and adjustment with women's dangerous defiance: "Even if other people still find them quite safe and usual, and go on poking with them, they know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are." (128) The only way to "escape all that - to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others" (129)73 is to side with the devil and the fantastic and to completely break with the "props of civilization," forces that try to domesticate women, namely "Society, the Law, The Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament" (81/2). One of the preconditions of Lolly's happiness in the wilderness is the absence of men, and thus, implicitly, the absence of heterosexuality;74 it is also, of course, based on her financial independence and her class-position.75 In her new-found personal Utopia, even benevolent men like her favorite nephew are just intruders because he "loved the countryside as though it were a body" with a "possessive and masculine love." (87) The masculine objectification of nature prevents the unity that is essential for Lolly's life. The models for her life are therefore female and associated with the fantastic - the wise women who were often persecuted as witches in the Dark Ages. Marilynne Robinson characterizes her first novel Housekeeping (1981) as based on an "idea of Eden" that promises "a wholeness and composure and completeness in a way that is not compatible with the existence of time or experience in time."76 In effect, she thus, by placing it outside of time, defines her novel as fantastic. Housekeeping moves to recapture the same mythical unity as Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a unity defined as beyond the boundaries of time in the fantastic, and a unity associated with mothering, as in Morrison's Beloved;77 unlike Beloved, though, Housekeeping does not return to the real. Directly alluding to the expulsion from paradise, Robinson unravels the disturbing effects of the mother's suicide on her daughter Ruthie - being abandoned leaves Ruth yearning to recapture the mother-daughter bond and wholeness: "the world will be made whole." (152) While Rhys's novel records the destruction of (matriarchal) paradise by patriarchy, Housekeeping, in a reverse movement, records the destruction of civilization and patriarchy. The house and housekeeping signify the border between nature and civilization, light and dark, inside and outside, between human order and the "ruinous" energies of nature. Again like Wide Sargasso Sea, Robinson's novel undermines these oppositions, most notably in the

289 image of the lake invading the house. Under the cover of ordinariness housekeeping standing for the banal routines of women's lives the "order of the world" (162) that rests on women's domestication, is subverted by Ruth, the first-person narrator, and her aunt Sylvie, a transient who arrives to mother Ruth and her sister Lucille. Like Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents," Housekeeping parallels psychological exploration to archaeology; in a late essay, Freud explicitly mentions the pre-Oedipal period, the mother-child dyad, as analogous to buried archaeological treasures.78 The novel frequently refers to ruins and archaeology, constant reminders of the fragility of human civilization and, implictly, the reality-principle. From the rough stone slabs that the children pretend to be "the ruins of an ancient civilization" (97) and "an elephant graveyard" (112), the novel moves to Carthage, a fallen house, decaying clothes, and "petrified pies and the fossils of casseroles,"79 all these - with the exception of Carthage - victims and reminders of "the ruinous energies of the world" (163), natural forces like floods and eruptions of volcanoes that subvert the ordering efforts of housekeeping. The drive of these forces that are opposed to civilization leads Ruth back to nature and to the pre-Oedipal period, to a re-enactment of the mother-daughter-symbiosis. The fantastic that allows the articulation of the mother-daughter-utopia intrudes in various shapes: in the destruction of boundaries; in the merging of identities; in the gradual suspension of time; in the animation of nature; and finally in Ruth's identification with the outsider-status, her invisibility on the margins: "I would be lost to ordinary society. I would be a ghost." (183) In the final scene, when Ruth and Sylvie are not only outsiders, but officially dead after having crossed the bridge (a symbolic transition), Ruth runs into trouble during her temporary jobs because she neither speaks nor eats, that is, behaves like a ghost.80 Like Wide Sargasso Sea, Housekeeping structurally identifies with this ghostly perspective of the outsider and the fantastic, thereby denying social efforts to stigmatize Ruth and Sylvie as mentally disturbed or deviant.81 That identification of the women as outsiders is extended in frequent images of being outside in the dark looking into well-lit rooms and the refusal to sit in a well-lit room and look out. Increasingly, Ruth and Sylvie neglect to light the house at night, preferring to let the darkness - and nature in the form of water and animals - enter the house, blurring the boundaries that housekeeping establishes. Housekeeping divides the world into "within" and "without," the walls of the house representing the boundaries between the female private space and the male public space, between nature and culture. As the women open their house to nature, these boundaries collapse.

290 Lighting a room or house is associated with civilized order (as when Sylvie wants to impress the sheriff by lighting all the rooms of the house), with "smugness as much as [...] comfort and safety" and with family: "Having a sister as a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them." (154) The outsider's perspective is more perceptive than that of the insider whose "deception is obvious" (158), while the invisible ghosts are "privileged to watch it [the world] unawares." (106)82 After referring several times to watching people on a lighted train,83 the book closes with Sylvie and Ruth permanently placed on the outside looking in: "If Lucille is there, Sylvie and I have stood outside her window a thousand times" (218). In what Joan Kirkby identifies as a "reverse evolutionary process, from patriarchal to matriarchal rule, then to a state of nature,"84 Housekeeping opens with a litany of women, from which Ruth's mother, Helen, is notably absent: "My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sistersin-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher." As in Wide Sargasso Sea, the (only) male person is immediately linked to death: "her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it." While the women's relation to Ruth centers on mothering and nurturing, the man's is having provided the house, a stronghold of civilization. His early death both in life and in the novel - removes the only male from the scene and allows a story of matriarchal bliss to unfold; by expelling the patriarch, the novel eliminates the foundations of the family's function as creator of gendered subjectivity and individuation, and, consequently, identities and inviduality collapse. (Grand)Mother and daughters relive an ecstasy of symbiosis beyond and before the symbolic, unaware of linear time, and unbound by logos: they are "almost relieved [...] of the need for speech" and time "grew still again." (15) They are attuned instead to the rhythms of cyclical time: "Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time." (13) This concept of time, rather than perceiving life and death as opposite ends of a linear journey, submits to nature's cycles: "In a month all dormant life and arrested decay would begin again." (16) Like Rhys, Robinson associates men with linear time: "With him gone they were cut free from the troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement. They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret." (13) In this period of "world and life restored to their proper natures," the (grand-) mother indulges in memories of breastfeeding, and her happiness

291 seduces her into "forgetting what she should never have forgotten." (13) That repressed memory is of separation, of the loss of her three daughters; like the bereft Demeter, she looks forward to the changes in season: "In a month she would not mourn, because in that season it had never seemed to her that they were married." (17) Yet, unlike Demeter, she is never reunited with her daughters; although Helen leaves her two daughters on her mother's porch before committing suicide, the trauma of separation prevents both grandmother and granddaughters from recreating the period of matriarchal bliss. Separation is shown to be indispensable for procreation - the generational configurations in Housekeeping, as they move towards merger, decrease the numbers of children from the grandmother's three children to Helen's two to Sylvie's and Ruth's merger that implies stasis rather than the continuation of the generational line.85 The trajectory of Ruth's and Sylvie's quest is as much a search for the lost mother as the return for nature, a parallel that works to equate mothering with wilderness, nurture with nature, and relocates mothering outside of society. In the definition of homelessness and transience as a "garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve" (192), these two themes come together, defying the conventional association of the mother with home. Like nature, Helen, the mother, is remote and untouched by Ruth's demands; her attitude towards her children is marked by "a gentle indifference" (109) that the daughters interpret as a desire to be alone: "she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned." (109) The sisters register a sharp loss and blame the mother for withdrawing her mothering, for ending the mother-daughter unity. Accordingly, their feelings towards their mother is ambivalent: although yearning for her, they resent her desertion. In the narrow valley with the abandoned house, Ruth fantasizes making a snowsculpture, a woman who would be surrounded by children and who clearly represents her mother in death: they would forgive her, eagerly and lavishly, for turning away, though she never asked to be forgiven. Though her hands were ice and did not touch them, she would be more than mother to them, she so calm, so still, and they such wild and orphan things. (153)

Thus, the sisters' quest seeks to reclaim both unity with nature and with the mother, and the loss of paradise for Ruth, as for Antoinette, is the loss of the mother. Mothering, like the fantastic, opens up a gap, a sharp sense of absence, making "any present moment most significant for what it does not contain." (214) This "common experience" (215) leaves Sylvie with a strong desire to re-experience merger, to reclaim symbiosis, a desire that the book defines as a female condition: the boundaries of female selves in

292 Housekeeping are fluid. The two sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, merge, are "almost [...] a single consciousness." (98) In their eyes, the aunt becomes one with the mother: "Sylvie's head falls to the side and we see the blades of my mother's shoulders" (133). Ruthie becomes "more the image of Sylvie with every day that passed" (133), until they are joined in their ghost-like existence as transients and drifters; and, in one sweep, Ruthie, in talking about Sylvie, merges three identities: "We are the same. She could as well be my mother." (145) That female condition is not experienced without ambivalence and resentment; Ruthie who yearns for mothering suffers from remote, cold and unnurturing mothers in the real, mothers like the snow-statue and the townswomen whose "food would not answer my hunger" (183). Her sister Lucille clearly perceives merger as a threat to identity and finally leaves her sister. In her nightmares, mothers are stifling in their nurturing, pressing blankets over her face: "it was sort of nice, but I could tell she was trying to smother me." (120) Lucille adjusts to separation by entering a distant maternal relationship with Miss Royce, the Home Economics Teacher (who will presumably teach her good housekeeping), a relationship firmly anchored in society and the real. Ruthie, on the other hand, strives to reexperience merger with her aunt Sylvie, a desire that places her outside the real and society and in the wilderness and the fantastic. Corresponding to the conflicting emotions of the daughters, women are ambivalent about mothering: a deep need to nurture is at odds with fears of being engulfed by nurturing, of losing the self, and being finally abandoned by the daughter. The grandmother who takes care of the deserted Ruthie and Sylvie dreams of rescuing children who fall out of airplanes, and tells the story of a woman who "saw the ghosts of children crying by the road [...] These children [...], furious with hunger, consumed much of the woman's substance and most of her thoughts." (25/6)86 While being a mother is being devoured, being a child means being abandoned: Sylvie and Ruthie are left by their mother, their grandmother, and their two great-aunts in turn. The ending of the novel, juxtaposing Ruth as a waitress and Lucille as a customer in a scene of potential nurturing, emphasizes Lucille's loss of nurturing. Lucille represents what Rochester stands for in Wide Sargasso Sea - rationality, civilization, and surrender to the reality-principle. Like Rochester, Lucille is haunted by absence and loss. Or at least Ruth knows that this is how Lucille must feel: "her thoughts are thronged by our absence, [...] she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie." (210) The "always" contradicts the gaps, the denial of loss and female community in Lucille's thoughts and establishes

293 and exposes her longing against her repressions, an affirmation of female bonding against conscious negation. In Housekeeping, it is the ultimate triumph of the fantastic over the reality of separation. Ubi Non Bene, Ibi Non Patria "Ubi bene, ibi patria" encapsulates the necessity of a sense of well-being for the concept of home, while at the same time, by referring to the father, signals the patriarchal definition of home. The fictions in this chapter locate a conflict here: patriarchal definition of home and well-being are mutually exclusive for women. Profoundly alienated from home and society, the protagonists subvert the equation of women and home/patria; by extension, questioning the home implies challenging patriarchal authority and hegemony, since the home is the locus and focus of women's estrangement and gendered subjectivity. Instead, they look for alternatives in the fantastic. Rejecting the familiar - family and the home -, the places of their exile from misogynist rule range from mythical wilderness to outer space. Even if we consider that the women's solutions are reflections of the status quo ante, the individual Utopias may seem bleak and expressions of resignation, defined as they are by homelessness, loneliness, death, and exile. Yet not only do these choices concede a heroism to the protagonists only rarely granted to women, they also shift their meaning through the association with the fantastic. Homelessness is transformed into freedom, loneliness into welcomed solitude, and death, as in Wide Sargasso Sea, is not the ultimate defeat since the fantastic ruptures the line between life and death. Sylvie and Ruth, like Antoinette, may be dead to society, they may be ghosts; yet their refusal to comply with patriarchy, their insistence on freedom and their desire for the maternal beyond patriarchal boundaries haunts the texts. The social consequences - or subversiveness - of the women's choices may not be immediately visible, either; the narrator in Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See" anticipates that "the fabric of society will never show a ripple." (217) Yet beneath the surface, he finds reason for alarm: "do all Mrs. Parsons' friends hold themselves in readiness for any eventuality, including leaving the earth?" The readiness to leave, although superficially an escapist reaction, ultimately forewarns of a Utopian impulse that is not controllable since it is directed towards the "outside" of home and society, offering no inside territory that could be recuperated. Thus, these personal Utopias of blank spaces may escape the fate of more concrete feminist blueprints that can easily be coopted and transformed in an endless game of repressive

294 tolerance - Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale warns o f such a Pyrrhus-victory o f feminist politics. Theorists like Julia Kristeva postulate that the place o f women's desire is in the "nowhere" - that is, in the fantastic void and that "women's practice can only be negative, in opposition to that which exists, to say that 'this is not it' and 'it is not yet'." 87 W e can add as a place o f desire "this is not any more," when w e consider Robinson's Utopian outlook which is a vision o f the recreation o f the mother-daughter-dyad, a place o f the past. B y not only making the familiar in its most intimate and literal manifestation - the family - strange, but by finally rejecting the familiar altogether, the fantastic opens up a literal and metaphorical space outside, beyond the reaches o f patriarchy. In "The Lady o f the House o f Love," Angela Carter draws our attention to the necessary marginal condition o f otherness (and the fantastic) in the real and in the existing order where moving to the center and assimilation equal death: "The end o f exile is the end o f being."

Notes 1

2

3

The fictions discussed in this chapter are from the following editions: Margaret Atwood, Bodily Harm (Toronto et al.: Bantam, 1983); Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban (1983; New York: Laurel Trade, 1988); Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Toronto et al.: Bantam, 1984); James Tiptree, Jr., "The Women Men Don't See" (1973) in Pamela Sargent, ed., New Women of Wonder. Recent Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); James Tiptree, Jr., "With Delicate Mad Hands" (1981) in James Tiptree, Jr., Byte Beautiful. Eight Science Fiction Stories (Garden City/New York: Doubleday, 1985); Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes in Four in Hand. A Quartet of Novels, with an introduction by William Maxwell (New York: Norton, 1986); Kate Wilhelm, "Mrs. Bagley Goes to Mars" (1978) in Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions (New York et al.: Harper and Row, 1979); Pamela Zoline, "The Heat Death of the Universe" (1967) in Pamela Sargent, ed., New Women of Wonder. Recent Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), observes a contrast between this individualism in "novels of self-discovery" she discusses and "the celebration of spirituality in contemporary Afro-American writing [that] often contains a strongly collective and activist dimension", (p. 150) See Sue-Ellen Case who mentions the same principles in narratives about vampires with lesbian orientations; "Tracking the Vampire," Differences, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1991): 1-20; "the identification with the insult" is her description of that strategy, (p. 2) - See also Ursula K. Le Guin, "A Left-Handed Commencement Address" in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989), p. 116: "we're already foreigners. Women as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of

295

4

5

6 7

8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15

16 17

this society, where human beings are called Man [...] So, that's their country; let's explore our own." — Tania Modleski makes the distinction between a "celebratory" context that allows redefinition from a "derogatory" one. "Feminism and the Power of Interpretation: Some Critical Readings" in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). — Annis Pratt calls the strategy "irony" and identifies it in Wide Sargasso Sea and "The Yellow Wallpaper." Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982). See Daphne Patai, "Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's 1984," PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 5 (October 1982): 856-870, for examples of grouping women and other marginalized groups as "others" in fantastic fictions. A similar sentiment is expressed by Ursula K. Le Guin in "The Space Crone" (1976) in Dancing at the Edge of the World, p. 5; she speaks of young women wanting to leave the Earth "out of a profound conviction that Altair couldn't possibly be any worse for a woman than Earth is." See Nan Bowman Albinski, Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 164. See Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" in Showalter, ed., Feminist Criticism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 243-270, and Ursula K. Le Guin, "Woman/Wilderness" in Dancing at the Edge of the World, p. 162/3. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, p. 146. Myra Jehlen, "Gender" in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 266. See Ann Oakley, Woman's Work (1976). Glenna Matthews quotes a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables as saying that a "wild hut of underbrush ... would acquire the home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman." "Just A Housewife". The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 40. See Ina-Maria Greverus, Auf der Suche nach Heimat (MOnchen: C. H. Beck, 1979); Graham Allan and Graham Crow, eds., Creating the Domestic Sphere (London: Macmillan, 1989), especially the introduction by the editors and the articles by Joan Higgins ("Homes and Institutions"), Pauline Hunt ("Gender and the Construction of Home Life") and Graham Allen ("Insiders and Outsiders: Boundaries around the Home"). Greverus, Auf der Suche nach Heimat, p. 31, 161; Allan and Crow, eds., Creating the Domestic Sphere, p. 172. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 24 vols, ed. and trans, by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), vol. 17. As discussed in the chapter on literary history, home in women's fantastic fiction is a place of violence. Joanne Dobson, '"Read the Bible and sew more': Domesticity and the Woman's Novel in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America," Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1991): 25-30. Matthews, Just a Housewife, p. 96; see pp. 17,25,33. See Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, The Sacred and the Feminine. Toward a Theology of Housework (New York: The Seabury Press, 1982), p. 2 and 3.

296 18 Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," p. 261. 19 Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," p. 262; "no-man's-land" of course also means Utopia. As I mentioned earlier, I do not interpret the wild zone as a place outside of patriarchal reality, but as a Utopian concept. 20 For a more detailed critique of Showalter's concept in the context of Utopian writing, see Jean Pfaelzer, "The Changing of the Avant-Garde: The Feminist Utopia," ScienceFiction Studies, Vol. 15, Part 3 (November 1988): 282-294; p. 287 and 288. Pfaelzer objects that "[i]deology has no 'outside'," but concedes that marginalization allows for a "privileged vantage point." (p. 287). 21 Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," p. 263. 22 Le Guin, "Woman/Wilderness," p. 163. 23 On the equation of family and home see Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework. 24 See Rabuzzi, The Sacred and the Feminine, p. 75, on the ordinariness of housework. 25 Fay Weldon, "Breakages" in Richard Dalby, ed., The Virago Book of Ghost Stories (New York et al.: McGraw Hill, 1989) 26 Margery Lawrence, "The Haunted Saucepan" in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories. 27 Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (1956; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). 28 Jennifer Uglow, "Introduction," The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, p. xiv. 29 That short story has been influential beyond the science fiction community; Sarah Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), mentions its "small cult status" (p. 97) and that it has been anthologized widely. 30 Entropy is a term used by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to denote "the most radical form of the pleasure principle, a longing for Nirvana, where all tensions are reduced." He calls this desire "an entropic pull, opposing entropy to energy, to the erotic, aggressive drives of any organism." quoted in Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London/New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 73. 31 Doris Lessing, "Some Remarks," Shikasta (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. ix . 32 Fay Weldon in John Haffenden, ed., Novelists in Interview (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 317; see Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 3: "In the twentieth century, our preconceptions of the impossible are assaulted every day." 33 For this traditional, "realistic" interpretation see Rabuzzi, The Sacred and The Feminine, p. 75 and 77. 34 The Latin word "exile" means banished person or being banished. 35 The first of several King Kong-mo\'\ts was released in 1933, the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers-movie in 1955, "Helen O'Loy" (1938) by Lester del Rey depicts a society where women are replaced by robots who are more perfect than human women, fulfilling any male wish. 36 Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction, p. 127. 37 One should remember here that Caliban in The Tempest is also characterized as having rapist fantasies. 38 See Leonard C. Heldreth, "Close Encounters of the Carnal Kind: Sex with Aliens in Science Fiction" in Donald Palumbo, ed., Erotic Universe. Sexuality and Fantastic Literature (New York et al.: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 131-136. 39 See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1984, 19797), on the identification of women

297 with monstrosity: "women have seen themselves (because they have been seen) as monstrous" (p. 240). They refer to numerous instances of women identifying with monstrosity in women's literature. 40 Albinski, Women's Utopias, p. 164. 41 Virginia Allen and Terri Paul, "Science and Fiction: Ways of Theorizing about Women" in Palumbo, ed., p. 179. Critics don't agree about the frequency of monsters in women's literary history, as in ghost stories and the Gothic. While Alan Ryan states in his introduction to Haunting Women (New York: Avon Books, 1988) that there "are some ghosts and apparitions in these stories, but there are not monsters. Monsters seem to find a more congenial habitat in the writing of male authors" (p. 3), Stein declares: "Monsters are particularly prominent in the work of women writers, because for women the roles of rebel, outcast, seeker of truth, are monstrous in themselves. For a man to rebel, to leave a comfortable home and to search for truth are noble acts. Thus, this pattern of behavior is expressed in the heroic epic. For women, however, such assertions of questing self-hood have been deemed bizarre and crazy; consequently the Gothic mode - and in particular the concept of self as monster is associated with narratives of female experience." Karen F. Stein, "Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic" in Juliann Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (Montreal/London: Eden Press, 1983), p. 123. - The gap in critical approaches can be bridged by making a distinction between "monsters" (aliens that are demonized) and "aliens" (others with whom the women identify). 42 Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction, p. 127. 43 See Heldreth, "Close Encounters," who identifies movies in which women are abducted by aliens as "virtually a subgenre in science fictions films." p. 136. 44 Invisibility is also a powerful motif in minority literatures, especially in African American literature; see Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as paradigmatic title. 45 Veronica Hollinger, '"The Most Grisly Truth': Responses to the Human Condition in the Works of James Tiptree, Jr.," Extrapolation, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Summer 1989), p. 125, interprets "The Women Men Don't See" as a story about the "price to be paid for such a rejection of the real," noting that "the aliens in this story are particularly featureless and 'other' which is unususal in a body of work notable for its detailed and colorful alien creations." - I rather think that the "rejection of the real" (that is the male-dominated) is celebrated by Tiptree; and the aliens are featureless so that Tiptree can make her point about the male narrator's myopia who is unable to perceive otherness; he also sees the two human women only as a "double female blur." 46 One way he tries to dismiss Ruth's statements is to stigmatize her as full of hate, that is irrational. Ruth calmly counters: "I don't hate men. That would be as silly as - as hating the weather." - That statement is one of the most ironic points in the story - the weather has been appalling and threatening throughout the story. 47 Catherine Podojil, "Sisters, Daughters, and Aliens" in Dick Riley, ed., Critical Encounters. Writers and Themes in Science Fiction (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), p. 70-86; see also Barbara Hayler, "The Feminist Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr.: Women and Men as Aliens" in Donald Palumbo, ed., Spectrum of the Fantastic (New York et al.: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 127-132, and Adam J. Frisch, "Toward New Sexual Identities: James Tiptree, Jr." in Tom Staicar, ed., The Feminine Eye. Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), p. 48-59; p. 51, and Lowiy Pei, "Poor Singletons: Definitions of Humanity in the Stories of James

298

48

49

50 51

52 53

54

Tiptree, Jr.," Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (November 1979): 271-280; p. 275. Tiptree answers the "interesting question about whether it is man or woman who can be seen as the alien, the Other" ambivalently: although she maintains that it is "obvious" that "it is the male who is the alien," she qualifies that observation by adding later that this applies to "the normal human," a condition that in her work emerges as Utopian, and concedes: "It is understandable that women could view themselves as alien to male society - a viewpoint of despair, I think." [emphasis added] Alice Sheldon, "A Woman Writing SF And Fantasy" in Denise DuPont, ed., Women of Vision. Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction (New York: St Martin's Press, 1988), p. 49. James Tiptree's "The Screwfly Solution" (1977) makes the same point about men and women being different species. Here, too, the aliens are less dangerous for women than for men: it is the human males who kill women, not the aliens. In Samuel R. Delany, ed., Nebula Winners Thirteen (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). That story is discussed in more detail in the chapter on dystopias. Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction, mentions this mechanism as well. See p. 127 and 128. See Gary K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown. The Iconography of Science Fiction (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1979), p. 199; Houston A. Baker, Jr., "Caliban's Triple Play" in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 389, who discusses the dualism "suggested by the venerable Western trope of Prospero and Caliban - figures portrayed in terms of self-and-other, the West and the Rest of Us, the rationalist and the debunker, the colonizer and the indigenous people." - Philomena Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions. The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), Section II: "'Caliban Speaks to Prospero': Cultural Identity and the Crisis of Representation"; and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, "Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America" in Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); and Stephen Greenblatt, "Culture" in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 232. - See also Josaphat B. Kubayanda, "Minority Discourse and the African Collective: Some Examples from Latin American and Caribbean Literature," Cultural Critique, No. 6 (Spring 1987), p. 117: "Shakespeare's Caliban is admittedly the supreme example in the Western literature of the minority subject crushed by the language of the majority." And he is a vegetarian to boot, thus also counteracting the connotations of the name; "Caliban" is thought to be derived from Caribe or cannibal. See Sandra Clark, "The Tempest as Recapitulation" in Penguin Critical Studies. The Tempest (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 56 and 52; and the contributions listed under footnote 48. See Graham Allan, "Insiders and Outsiders: Boundaries around the Home" in Allan and Crow, eds., Creating the Domestic Sphere, for a discussion of the relationship between guests and permanent residents.

299 55 Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks" in Maiy Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, eds., Re-Vision. Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick MD: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 83-99; p. 86. 56 Williams, "When the Woman looks," p. 87. 57 Like the monster Linda Williams discusses in "When the Woman Looks" (p. 86); Mrs. Caliban describes his nose as "almost not there", p. 26. 58 Eric Rabkin argues that "because water is a universal symbol of fecundity, the frog, which bridges the elements of water and land, is itself a symbol of fecundity." The Fantastic in Literature, p. 34. - Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis. Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York/London: Methuen, 1984), p. 187, sees the sea monster as "ultimately another manifestation of the unconscious." 59 See Williams, "When the Woman Looks," p. 90. 60 Rachel Ingalls, Binstead's Safari (1983; London/Melbourne: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1984). 61 See Palumbo, ed., Erotic Universe, especially Palumbo's essay "Sexuality and the Allure of the Fantastic in Literature," p. 3-24. 62 Heldreth, "Close Encounters," p. 135. These fantasies come in a variety of male versions from Europa mating with the bull/Zeus to contemporary science fictions like John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) in which the entire female population of a village is raped and impregnated by aliens. 63 See Williams, "When the Woman Looks," p. 87: "Clearly the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male. In this difference he is remarkably like the woman in the eyes of the traumatized male: a biological freak..." 64 Bodily Harm, p. 78; see p. 203. 65 One of the central metaphors of the novel is "massive involvement," a hint at cancer. 66 Marx for example chooses cellar apartments as symbols for the alienating living conditions of the working class. See Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-Philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844. in Marx, Engels Werke, Ergänzungsband: Schriften bis 1844. Erster Teil (Berlin, 1968), p. 554. 67 See p. 157f. where Rennie's hotel room as well is burglarized: "Everything, especially this room, is not safe." 68 p. 72; emphasis added. 69 The male gaze in Bodily Harm is pervasively threatening; see Rennie's discovery of the telescope in Paul's house. 70 See the same curtailing of the imagination as a result of the extreme oppressiveness of the status quo in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. 71 Jane Marcus, "A Wilderness of One's Own: Feminist Fantasy Novels of the Twenties: Rebecca West and Sylvia Townsend Warner" in Susan Merrill Squier, ed., Women Writers and the City. Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 141,139, and 136. 72 Marcus stresses the singularity of such a portrait, p. 148: "There is no more exquisitely powerful evocation of the joys of spinsterhood in print [...] Feminists have complained that Jane Austen never left us a portrait of the joys of her own happy spinster's life." 73 That statement has echoes of Virginia Woolfs A Room of One's Own and Sula's determination in Morrison's novel to lead her own life. 74 See Marcus, "A Wilderness of One's Own," p. 136.

300 75 The novel mentions an inheritance. Warner does not discuss the issue of class, although in her lectures, as Marcus mentions, she was very aware of these questions; she also was a "long-time member of the Communist party." Jane Marcus, "Still Practice, A/Wrested Alphabet" in Shari Benstock, ed., Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 9If. 76 See the chapters on Wide Sargasso Sea and on theory for a discussion of time and the fantastic. 77 See Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, who observes these equations as a pervasive feature of "narratives of femininity" which interpret the dichotomy of nature and culture as "a fall from grace, exemplified in the nostalgic vision of a matriarchy of the distant past as a lost golden age." (p. 147) The difference between the "utopias" she describes and Morrison's and Robinson's novel is that these two authors develop their recreation of matriarchy on an individual psychological level. 78 See Judith Kegan Gardiner, "Mind mother: pyschoanalysis and feminism" in Gayle Greene and Coppllia Kahn, eds., Making A Difference. Feminist Literary Criticism (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 133. 79 pp. 152, 158; 173; 183. 80 Kay Bonetti, "Belles Lettres Interview: Marilynne Robinson," Belles Lettres, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 1990), p. 37, where Robinson comments on the book's closure as well, resenting readers' demands "to explain that ending", since "the ending means itself." The concept of a ghostlike existence in Housekeeping is comparable to Angela Carter's description in Heroes and Villains, p. 8, who describes people as "ghosts [...] in the sense that they had forfeited their social personalities." 81 The sheriff, representative of patriarchal law, tries to mark them as socially deviant. 82 See also pp. 162-3. 83 See p. 54: "Sometimes we used to watch trains passing the dark afternoon, creeping through the blue snow with their windows all alight, and full of people eating and arguing and reading newspapers. They could not see us watching [...] and they would have seen their own depthless images on the black glasses, if they had looked, and not the black trees and the black houses". 84 Joan Kirkby, "Is There Life After Art? The Metaphysics of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1986): 91109; p. 98. 85 Francette Pacteau argues that stasis is also a threat in the merger of feminine and masculine in the androgyne; "The Impossible Referent" in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, eds., Formations of Fantasy (London/New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 82. - In my interpretation of Housekeeping, I draw on the concepts of Object Relations theory which are discussed in more detail in the chapters on theory, minority women's literature and metamorphosis. 86 A comparable interpretation of mothering as sapping the vital strength of women is the basis of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's ghost story of 1903, "The Lost Ghost", anthologized in Alfred Bendixen, ed., Haunting Women. The Best Supernatural Tales by American Women Writers (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985). A maternal woman (with no children of her own) dies as a consequence of a child-ghosts persistent demands on her nuturing, a child who - in the real - had been starved to death as a result of maternal neglect.

301 87 Julia Kristeva, "Interview - 1974: Julia Kristeva and Psychoanalyse et Politique", quoted in Teresa de Lauretis, "Now and Nowhere," in Re-Vision, p. 168.

CONCLUSION

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985)

The analysis of a "feminine fantastic" not only bears relevance to theories of the fantastic, but also to the current feminist literary debates and their dialogue with postmodernism. This study unveils the prevalent assessment of contemporary women's literature as overwhelmingly realistic to be an undue overgeneralization; arguing for an interpretation of the fantastic as a discourse of the repressed and marginalized, with a specific focus on gender as an influential category, it fills a gap in critical discourse with a detailed analysis of fantasy as a mode and a close reading of texts. That conspicuous gap exists in the discussion over literary expressions of feminism: between "Anglo-American" reflectionist criticism' that privileges the realist text,2 and French poststructuralist criticism and its adherents in the US that celebrate the experimental and self-reflexive text, a curious silence covers fantastic texts. Relegated either to footnotes or completely ignored, fantastic texts are, with few exceptions, left out of the "feminist canon;"3 only their existence in marginal genres like science fiction is sometimes acknowledged, as when Rita Felski adds as an afterthought that "a large and distinctive body of feminist science fiction and fantasy" exists, "a phenomenon which raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of feminist Utopias."4 Occasionally, we find general evaluations of merits of the fantastic, for example in Teresa de Lauretis's work, but that abstract recognition has triggered surprisingly few detailed and systematic readings of women's fantastic texts. Instead, in an unfortunate duplication of the canon's dismissal of popular literature, feminist criticism has tended to focus on established women writers, a tendency that has recently provoked increasing skepticism.3 In contrast, feminist social scientists like Donna Haraway have praised fantastic texts along with the literatures of women of color as articulating a critique of the present and providing alternative visions. In conclusion, I want to comment on some aspects of the feminine fantastic - its emphasis on the constructedness of subjectivity and familyformations - in the context of current feminist debates about a politics of

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difference and location, and in the context of a revision of the canon of fantastic texts. The Fantastic, Feminism, Postmodernism, and A Politics of Location The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one stoiy. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

The protagonist in Joanna Russ's The Female Man is four versions of one woman, different, but coming together in the shared initial "J," that is in a fractured "je;" the inhabitants of the all-female future in James Tiptree, Jr.'s, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" are clones, multiple versions of several women, all created without gendered reproduction; the shifting identities and metamorphoses in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve subvert gendercategories so profoundly that a rendition of the narrative collapses onto itself, in a confusion of gendered pronouns. In women's fantastic fictions, women turn into men, into animals, into machines, into ghosts. These short plot summaries of texts discussed in this study demonstrate the fantastic's arsenal of strategies that build characters, but refuse any notion of an authentic self. Postmodern theories have increasingly penetrated and influenced feminist theory; one of the most debated and anxiety-producing consequences revolves around the deconstruction of subjectivity and identification. Feminists not only (suspiciously) wonder at the coincidence of postmodernism's deconstruction of the subject with a historical moment when marginalized and previously silenced groups like women have just begun to "engage in the historical and political and theoretical process of constituting ourselves as subjects,"6 but also worry about the political implications. What can feminist politics look like if "woman" has disintegrated into "women" with contradictory locations, if the "non-innocence of the category 'woman'" exacts a critical revision of a politics of identification?7 Or, as Linda Nicholson, the editor of Feminism/Postmodernism, asks: does not the adoption of postmodernism generally entail the destruction of feminism, since does not feminism itself depend on a relatively unified notion of the social subject 'women,' a notion postmodernism would attack?8

305 The other side of the dilemma is how feminism (as "a social and political as well as cultural criticism that makes clear the oppressive/repressive practices of patriarchal phallocentrism"9) can continue to use "the female experience" as a basis of its theories and politics "without reifying thereby one single definition of femaleness as the paradigmatic one,"10 that is without reverting to essentialism. One suggested solution has been to base feminist theory and practice on an "operational essentialism" or the understanding of "the category woman as a political tool without attributing ontological integrity to the term."11 The controversy has important implications for literary strategies and criticism; it has been most fruitful so far in the field of cultural criticism that "integrates a revisionist postmodernist discourse with feminist social and political theory."12 In the recent past, the "mainstream" of Anglo-American feminist criticism has been criticized as being based on universalizing and essentialist notions of female subjectivity and as disregarding conflicts of position among women; women of color have thoroughly challenged the monolithic concept of woman (based mostly on the experience of white middle-class women) as oppressive and deflecting from the racism in the women's movement.13 This strand of (white) feminist theory represents a model of literature that embraces concepts of authenticity and authority of experience14 and, in subscribing to reflectionist beliefs, neglects the mediation of "reality" through language; "reality" is treated as an unproblematic category,15 aspects of ideology reflected in representation, narrative structures for example, remain unaccounted for. The "images of women"-approach in feminist criticism16 that prevailed in the US in the seventies, firmly grounded in "'reality' and 'experience' [...] as the highest goals of literature,"17 came up against intrinsic limitations when desiring to go beyond the "reclamation of suffering" and the "scenarios of compromise, madness, and death."18 The overriding insistence on authenticity19 implied having to defer the demand for more "positive" images of women as agents rather than victims since "reality" could provide only few models of this kind; realist literary representations, bound by the rules of plausibility, do not offer a vehicle for such a critique.20 While early Anglo-American criticism thus tended to focus on manifest content, French deconstructionist theory as represented by Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray emphasizes questions of representation and representability and concentrates on discursive, male-centered constructions of "woman" that have to be deconstructed. The experimental style and self-reflexivity of these texts "foreground their own conventional status and thus by implication the constructed nature of reality."21 The

306 dimension of social critique expressed in content (not that those poststructuralists who have a concept of the world as text would acknowledge such a division) becomes irrelevant next to the emphasis on the transgressive and liberating potential of style (with plot suspected of transporting ideological baggage). Apart from general theoretical assessments, French theorists have been particularly reluctant to discuss their concept of "l'écriture féminine"22 on specific examples of women's literature, often recognizing it in stylistic features of male texts as well.23 The category "féminine" is neither anchored in bioîogy nor in dynamics of socio-political power and thus arbitrary, only bound to the writer's expression of his/her body and the imaginary/semiotic. Consequently, the construction of stylistic features as "féminine" remains a dubious project, especially frustrating for a feminist engaged in critical practice rather than theory, since "l'écriture féminine" is either declared to be Utopian24 or regresses to an understanding of writing as speaking the female body, coming dangerously close to ahistorical and essentialist prescriptions.25 The totalizing tendency to celebrate a "female body" unmarked by social practice runs counter to a "politics of location" that recognizes differences and contradictions among women; the refusal to acknowledge a material reality outside of purely intratextual meaning has been frustrating for critics like Teresa de Lauretis who claims that, although women as "real historical beings [...] cannot as yet be defined outside of discursive formations," their "material existence is nonetheless certain."26 In its ultimately elitist insistence on form over social commitment and on the preference for the written over the spoken word, the concept marginalizes minority women's concepts of literature. The influence of French theories has, however, stimulated a preoccupation with narrative structures and genre, and diminished the pronounced rejection of (post)modernist forms of representation, in contrast to the earlier orientation toward images in Anglo-American criticism. Thus, under the influence of postmodernism, French poststructuralism, and the contributions of women of color, feminist literary criticism has begun to pursue the question of how women's literature can express feminist political concerns while avoiding universalizing and essentialist tendencies, how the deconstruction of subjectivity and the category "woman" affects women's writing. Since feminist theory started out with a strong political commitment against a bifurcation into criticism and practice and out of a self-understanding as a "criticism aimed at intervention,"27 an exclusive dedication to formalist experiment would not only duplicate modernism's contempt for popular and "mass" literature, but also question the very foundations of feminism. Yet one critical issue is whether women's literature

307 still has a basis for a social criticism that goes beyond formal experiment without relapsing into the illusion of a totalizing "authority of experience" that would repress social practices like class and race and negate hierarchies and power-conflicts among women. The fantastic mode allows the articulation of social critique without "naturalizing" the existing order and, like the "avant-garde" style privileged by French theorists, draws attention to the "constructed nature of reality" (it should be noted, though, that this potential is a possibility, not an inevitable characteristic of fantasy, as the fantastic can also be used to articulate and ultimately repress desire). In its function of defamiliarization28 and estrangement,29 the fantastic constantly unveils the supposedly natural order of things as only one privileged version, revealing the problematic ontological status of "reality" and the ideological implications of both the private and the political. Since that function is independent of style and form (although often, as discussed, combined with postmodern strategies like multiple perspectives, multivocality, and self-reflexivity), fantasy as a mode can avoid the limitations of both Anglo-American feminist criticsm and French theory. Unlike the realist belief in "a more or less faithful reproduction of an external reality"30 that neglects the mediation through language and unlike the exclusive focus on experimental form that neglects questions of gender-conflict and hegemony on the level of content, the fantastic can articulate a social critique without substituting one totalizing interpretation with another. The de-familiarizing effect of the fantastic rests on its opposition to "consensus-reality" and its dedication to disruptive desire rather than on style; the introduction of a different, fantastic "reality" and frame of reference, however, always points to the repressions, arbitrary character and constructedness of the "real;" the pervasive emphasis on perspective invites the articulation of different locations and refuses a homogenizing, totalizing vision of the world. Additionally, women's fantastic literature provides alternative scenarios and (re)creates female models beyond conventions of plausibility that are encodings of misogynist hegemony; traditional plots that deconstructionists would suspect as inscriptions of cultural hegemony are defamiliarized by gendered difference. Fantastic literature does of course not occupy an Archimedean place outside of (patriarchal) ideology; what it does, though, is expose the limits of hegemony and suggest the possibility of alternative modes of being. If one "central paradox" of feminism is the question that "given there is no space outside patriarchy from which women can speak, how do we explain the existence of a feminist, anti-patriarchal discourse at all,"31 the fantastic points to the gaps and fissures in hegemonic discourse as locations from

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which the marginalized can speak; gaps and fissures offer uncolonized spaces that can be filled and occupied, can be transformed into Utopian territory. Ana Castillo observes that in Gloria Anzaldua's influential Borderlands/La Frontera, "vision originates in marginalization; this marginality shapes her vision of the future."32 Concluding that marginalization and "difference" allow and empower a critical perspective, Castillo implicitly suggests the centrality of fantasy in that discourse on the margins when stressing the "responsibility of reimagining" women's history.33 Similarly, bell hooks celebrates marginality as a location of counter-hegemonic resistance, as "the site of radical possibility."34 Resistance for her entails the search for a "space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible," a space "where one is able to redeem and reclaim the past, legacies of pain, suffering, and triumph in ways that transform present reality."35 That search for a space of desire and a "different mode of articulation" and the preference for a marginal perspective seem to me to point the fantastic as a locus for the articulation of radical resistance. We have seen how the fantastic in women's literature, in insisting both on alternative modes of being/reality and on the shifting and relational character of the uncanny, structurally emphasizes questions of perspective; indeed, it privileges the perspective of the individually repressed and socially oppressed. The fantastic as a mode can articulate Utopian and subversive plots, and can combine a textual criticism with a criticism of the material condition of women outside the text, can negotiate "between experiental and material domains."36 In Donna Haraway's essay "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" that calls for a feminist theory and politics based on location, difference, and affinity rather than "natural identification," a chart of "transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new" opposes, in one line, the past and realism to science fiction and postmodernism (understood as a culturalpolitical period rather than a purely aesthetic phenomenon). Besides the literatures of women of color, science fiction not only emerges as the visionary genre in women's literature, but also as an inspiration for feminist politics, because it is not entangled in a reflection of the boundaries of the present, and, like minority women's literatures, allows the recognition of difference as a category in feminism. Ultimately, the project for contemporary feminism, in Michelle Wallace's formulation, is to develop "new knowledges" based on "equality, difference,and the deconstruction and démystification of the dichotomizing of equality and difference."37

309 Haraway is one of those who understand postmodernism "as a general question of culture and consciousness, as cultural change that does not only affect aesthetic production and perception, but presupposes and demands a change in society and politics as well."38 Other critics have pointed out that "a feminist text, but also any ethnic, minority, or Third world text, can be nothing but postmodern,"39 since these literatures challenge totalizing ethnocentric and androcentric "master narratives;" postmodernism is thus understood as a radical cultural critique, for example in contemporary revisions of anthropological, historical, and literary narratives. Women's fantastic literature does not reduce postmodernism to the aspect of aesthetics where "anything goes,"40 but connects to postmodernism as a social and political phenomenon in which marginalized groups question the hegemony of white male supremacy, while at the same time pointing to strategies of resistance and subversion and exposing the limits and mechanizations of hegemony. In that political interest, the feminine fantastic qualifies general assessments of "contemporary fantasy [...] as the literary equivalent of deconstructionism"41 that identify fantasy with textual strategies like "degree zero writing" or "a maximalism of plurisignification," as "verbal anarchy."42 One of the strategies of resistance of the fantastic mode in women's literature is the portrayal of not necessarily Utopian, but alternative spaces that are brought into a dialogue with our own culture, resulting in a radical cultural critique. That particular form of fantastic literature has of course a correspondent in the social sciences, in anthropology and ethnology. Like postmodern ethnography that uses "a projection and practical application of multiple, experimental forms of cultural critique of other cultures as well as of our own"43 and "confronts our society and culture with alternative ways of life,"44 the fantastic often achieves a defamiliarizing effect by "cross-cultural juxtaposition."45 The epigraph from the opening paragraphs of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), encapsulates Ursula K. Le Guin's strategy to defamiliarize a reading of our culture by questioning it from the perspective of another without striving for a fixed meaning. That "other" perspective, significantly, is situated on the margins: it is a "marginal people" on "a marginal world, on the edge."46 Le Guin (whose father, A. L. Kroeber, was an eminent anthropologist) uses the inherently "Janus-faced perspective"47 of the fantastic, based on its juxtaposition of the real and the implausible, to develop a radical cultural critique in which two systems question the respective tacit assumptions on which their cultures rest. That dual perspective and refusal to establish a stable "truth" corresponds with the novel's fragmented and multi-vocal structure that mixes genres freely: diaryentries from a human and an alien whose different cultural matrixes inform

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their perspectives and interpretations, anthropological "field-notes," myths, and an appendix with "The Gethenian Calendar and Clock" prevent any notion of the first-person narrator's linear chronological report as a representation of "reality." The novel adheres to the insight pronounced in its first sentence that "Truth is a matter of the imagination," and that the "soundest fact" depends on "the style of its telling." The marginal perspective on our culture defamiliarizes the normal and known: the narrator, confronted with his familiar world again, is overpowered by how "strange" and "alien" everything and everybody is. The effect of the "crisis of representation" in Le Guin's novel is highly political, and it testifies to the fantastic's critical potential: in 1969, when the "new" women's movement was just beginning to emerge and the influence of poststructuralism still a trend of the future, The Left Hand of Darkness profoundly deconstructs gender, cultural taboos, psychoanalytical models, and the family.48 The Personal Is Political - A Family Thriller "A whole family of nuclear weapons" Barbara Bush in an interview with Larry King on CNN, 10-24-1992,2:00 a.m. MET

If the cyborg demonstrates the constructed and fragmented subjectivity of the (postmodern) individual, Barbara Bush's "whole family of nuclear weapons," I feel, provides an adquate familial context for that individual. That image coalesces a politics of cynical military politics and an interest in the idealization of the patriarchal family as natural order in an unintentionally revealing reshuffling of "nuclear family" into a ' f a m i l y of nuclear weapons." The fantastic constantly points to these fissures in hegemonic discourse and deconstructs the naturalization of social practices; its tendency towards literalization has already provided us not only with cyborgs, as in James Tiptree, Jr.'s, stories, but also with scenarios of cyborgs as weapons, as in the vastly successful Schwarzenegger movies. There is no telling when we will first be confronted with a literalized family of weapons in print or on the screen. Theories of the fantastic have emphasized its subversive relationship to the familar;49 they have stressed its "de-familiarizing" effect that is grounded in the repression of the familiar, without anticipating that in women's literature, that metaphorical location would be taken literally: in many of women's fantastic fictions, the family is a source of the uncanny, a battlefield of gendered power-conflicts. The familiar that the fantastic makes strange

311 and de-familiarizes, the "heimliche" that turns uncanny - these processes also invoke the family as the dominant social institution in our experience of the real. Feminist theory has always critically challenged the bifurcation into the private and public sphere and insisted that our most intimate practices are constructed in discursive fields and social practices imbued with (patriarchal) ideology. Poststructuralism's insistence on the constructedness of experience is thus not an alien or entirely new concept for feminists who had analysed how "love" reflects ideological (mainly gendered) interests and who have always put special emphasis on the family as the agent of oppression. In their introduction to Feminism as Critique, the editors point out a pervasive blind spot in male analyses of the public-private dichotomy: their blindness to the fact that the family is not ideologically innocent, but the site of "usually exploitative exchanges of service, labor, cash and sex, not to mention sites, frequently, of coercion and violence."50 The construction of the family as as sphere of "intimacy, sexuality, and affection"51 (or, one should add, the lack thereof) with an emphasis on supposedly "private" and "natural" emotions and individual relationships fails to recognize the family as a social organization that in its structure reflects hegemonic interests.52 The family - culturally associated with a place, the home, and a person, a woman - recurringly figures as the source of the uncanny and fantastic in women's fictions. Where in men's fantastic literature, the family is mostly either left untouched as an anchor of safety and "reality" in a world of chaos and entropy or is the subject of nostalgia,53 women "de-familiarize" the family and, paralleling a central move of the "new" women's movement, insist that the "private is political," collapsing the dichotomy between public and private.54 The family and home, far from being innocent of the social ramifications "outside" and far from being exempt from the political and ideological struggles in the public sphere, are neither a safe haven nor untainted by hegemony, but condense social power-struggles in a microcosm.55 The home is pervasively defined as a place where male hegemony blatantly manifests itself; in women's fantastic fiction, the repudiation of "erotic plots" rejects a sentimental interpretation of familial relations, instead insisting on "plots of power;" thus, the family emerges as an institution where women are powerless and, in many fictions, motherless as well; home is a place of persecution in the Gothic novels, a place of imprisonment in ghost stories, or a place of extreme alienation in contemporary literature; white fathers and husbands are either explicitly demonic figures or willing accomplices in maintaining misogynist structures, while in the fictions of women of color, fathers and husbands are marginalized and

312 replaced by monstrous white masters. Consequently, feminist Utopias relinquish the patriarchal family and substitute it with alternative models of female or androgynous communities;56 the dystopian novels exaggerate familial power-structures or, like minority women's literatures, expose hegemonic interventions into the family meant to stabilize or increase ethnocentric and androcentric supremacy;57 the narratives of metamorphosis insists on the futility of changing power structures in the "real," if not the whole social and ideological matrix is radically altered; the texts of alienation reject the family as the "germ-cell of civilization" and project a mythical reunification with nature and the maternal. Gender and the Fantastic "Man" includes "woman." Thus: 1. The Eternal Feminine leads us ever upward and on. (Guess who "us" is) [...] 3. We all have the impulse, at times, to get rid of our wives. (Irving Howe, introduction to Hardy, talking about my wife.) Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975) What future is there for a female child who aspires to being Humphrey Bogart? Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975) The dream is the truth. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Fantasy as a mode, the discourse of the repressed, articulates and illuminates the "underside" of a culture, challenging and correcting hegemonic constructions of gender and gender-relations. Where in realism, female desire can be articulated, but has to be curtailed to the real and possible, fantasy opens a textual space for transgressive desire. Where realist literary conventions demand plots that revolve around the family and that confine women to relational and private roles as mothers, daughters, wives and lovers, fantasy offers a wide spectrum of alternative plots that destabilize the equation of women with home and the family; where historiography relegates women to the margins or silences narratives of women's rebellion, fantasy recreates the past, "discovering" maternal traditions and heroic myths; where Freudian psychoanalysis suspects women of being dedicated to

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erotic plots, fantasy traces plots of power or pre-Oedipal mother-daughter bonding. The pervasive dedication to questions of power negates any tendency to naturalize either gender-hierarchies or "woman;" instead, femininity and masculinity are perceived in terms of power, as "costumes" and masquerade, as an interplay between cultural forces and social practices like gender, race, and class. Women's fantastic literature is mostly aware of the differences among women,58 and, although focusing on gender, does not overgeneralize all oppression as gender-related. The individualism of subversive solutions like metamorphosis denies any universalizing tendencies, and even the Utopian novels that traditionally project broad social solutions increasingly strive to consider categories like ethnicity in their visions of the better society or refrain from spelling out the Utopian dream as a rational blueprint. Women's interpretations of staple motifs of the fantastic implies the conclusion that theories of the fantastic must consider gender as an influential category in the construction of the fantastic. Women's texts demonstrate that there are traditions of the feminine fantastic (in the literatures of white women and women of color) that set their own standards and differ markedly from the "male" fantastic, a fantastic that has been taken as the normative concept. While the femininine fantastic emerges as a mode of writing female plots of power in general, its specific manifestations point to an often antagonistic relation to the dominant fantastic: women welcome metamorphosis as liberating, where men dread it as alienating; where men project their anxieties into the future and develop dystopias that warn against the repression of individualism and intellectual liberty, women build their horror regimes on historical models of the past and on the abuse of the female body, cautioning that individualism has a different meaning for men and women, stressing that women need to establish a female community and a politics of solidarity. The contrasting assessments of the relative virtues of community and individualism in turn are mirrored in Utopian visions; here, women writers aim to counteract the oppressive character of the traditional Utopian blueprints by writing Utopia as a state of mind rather than a sociopolitical body or organization, a state of mind that reflects an emphasis on dream and the pleasure principle; this conceptualization, by refraining from spelling out the details and rules and regulations of Utopia, leaves room for fantasy. Finally, the texts about women leaving their home and civilization, driven by "alienation" from a male-defined culture, create a new motif in the catalogues of the fantastic, pointing to the dynamics between social configurations, textual plausibility, gender, and the fantastic. While male quests for an identity beyond confining social structures encode traditional masculinity

314 and are myriad in realistic literature, female quests have to be written in the fantastic mode since they blatantly violate social practices and norms, turning implausible in the process, demanding a fantastic context. The literatures of women of color are paradigmatic for many of these tendencies in the re-evaluation of community, the unveiling of hegemonic interests reflected in family-structures, and especially the re-integration of the fantastic into a rationalistic worldview. The feminine fantastic is indeed, it turns out, a mode of the socially repressed - in making visible tacit cultural assumptions about women's identification with the family and the home, about women's status as the other, the object, the victim, about women's dedication to plots of love instead of power. Once visible, these repressions threaten to destabilize, subvert and restructure dominant constructions of reality, exposing the mechanisms of ideology on which hegemony rests. The emergence and articulation of the repressed in turn include the visualization of the process of repression as well, of how otherness is constructed and repressed, leading to a constant articulation of the problematic nature of language, literary form, and speaking versus silencing in general. Perspective from a location on the margins, it turns out, privileges a critique of the center of power. Theories of the fantastic so far have largely ignored social categories; while very tentative evalutions have been made with regard to race, gender has been totally neglected. My intention in revising and qualifying dominant definitions and analyses of the fantastic's function by focusing on gender is not to replace one "truth" with another, but to challenge the prevailing ethnocentric and androcentric tendencies expressed in the setting of one unreflected and tacit norm. Demonstrating the dangers of universalizing tendencies on the one hand (we cannot speak without reservations of "one" female fantastic, either, since its manifestations in minority women's literatures have their own dynamics), I also want to suggest that we enrich our reading and understanding of fantastic texts by admitting social categories like gender and race. Notes 1 2

Toril Moi's label. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London/New York: Methuen, 1987,1985 1 ). Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 47: "the deep realist bias of Anglo-American feminist criticism"; see pp. 5/6, 67: "a certain feminist preference for realism over modernism"; p. 7: "politics is a matter of the right content represented in the correct realist form." p. 45: literature "should be measured against 'real' life". See Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge MA:

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3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11

12 13

Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 155, 86, 51, 50, 15, 6, 2/3. - The preference for the realist text is mirrored in the special emphasis on autobiography in much of earlier feminist criticism; see Florence Howe, "Feminism and Literature" in Susan Coppelman Comillon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction. Feminist Perspectives (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), p. 255, and Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. For the prevalence of autobiographical forms of women's writing see Rosalind Coward, "Are Women's Novels Feminist Novels" in Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 231. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, mentions "other well-known women writers using nonrealist forms" (p. 15), but neither discusses their forms nor draws a distinction between "experimental writing" (p. 15) and fantastic literature. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, briefly discusses the unease of feminist critics with fantastic texts using responses to Monique Wittig's Les guerilleres (p. 79/80), but - except for this one reference - ignores fantastic literature; the index does not even have an entry under "fantastic" nor does it list "science fiction". - In their discussion of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1984, 19791), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar acknowledge the Gothic features of the novel in passing, but never comment on the function of the fantastic in Frankenstein. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, p. 16. See Carolyn J. Allen, "Feminist Criticism and Postmodernism" in Joseph Natoli, ed., Tracing Literary Theory (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 278305; p. 295/296. Nancy Hartsock, "Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories," Cultural Critique 7 (Fall 1987): 187-206; p. 204. See Christine di Stefano, "Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism" in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York/London: Routledge, 1990, 19851), p. 63-82; p. 75. See similarly Allen, "Feminist Criticism," who calls that historical coincidence "ironic." p. 282. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" in Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmoderism, p. 199. Linda Nicholson, "Introduction" in Feminism/Postmodernism, p. 7. Carolyn J. Allen, "Feminist Criticism and Postmodernism," p. 279. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, "Introduction. Beyond the Politics of Gender" in Benhabib and Cornell, eds., Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 13. Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble: Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse" in Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, p. 324-340; p. 325. Butler refers to Gayatri Spivak and Julia Kristeva here. Allen, "Feminist Criticism," p. 279. See especially bell hooks, Ain't IA Woman, black women and feminism (Boston MA: South End Press, 1981); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbuiy: The Feminist Press, 1982); Cherrie Moraga, "From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism" in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 173-190, as examples. Representative of other critics, hooks criticizes that "[i]n most of their

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16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25

writing, the white American woman's experience is made synonymous with the American experience" and that the racism of white feminism manifests itself in "simply ignoring the existence of black women or writing about them using common sexist and racist stereotypes." (p. 137) For occurences of the reflectionist model in African American (women's) criticism, see the chapter on minority women's literatures. See Margaret Homans, "In Her Very Own Howl. The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction," Signs, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter 1983): 186-205; Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics; Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. An example is Comillon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 45. Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics" in Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism, p. 134. See Ellen Morgan, "Humanbecoming: Form & Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel" in Cornillon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction, p. 185. Morgan's essay "Humanbecoming" is instructive for the dismissal of fantastic literature in favor of realist literature exactly because she exposes the shortcomings of realism: "It is next to impossible for a realistic novel to be written which defies the sex-role system" (p. 189/190). After a favorable discussion of two fantastic texts (in which she praises the discovery of an "authentic self," "natural self' and "transcendent, authentic selfhood," p. 192, 194, 197), she nevertheless prefers a realistic (autobiographical) novel: "It is also important because, unlike Orlando, or Applesauce, it is a realistic novel. As such it can stand as a model for other neo-feminist works whose authors wish to portray not only the condition of women and their responses to that condition" (204). Unaware of the discrepancy between her earlier critique of realism and this assessment, Morgan seems to take it for granted that only realism can provide "models." - Mary Anne Ferguson, ed., Images of Women in Literature (Boston et al.: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), mentions utopia when talking about "positive" images. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, p. 156. In its brevity, this summary can only suggest a general outline of these theories and is an oversimplification in glossing over differences and individual developments within the respective positions. See Ann Rosalind Jones, "Writing the Body. Toward an Understanding of l'Écriture féminine" in Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism. Writers like Joyce, Mallarmé, Artaud, and Genet are praised for their "semiotic discourse" and "antiphallocentric texts" (p. 363 and 365), oblivious to misogynist tendencies that may manifest themselves on other levels. See Nancy K. Miller, "The Text's Heroine" in Conflicts in Feminism, p. 115, who is extremely critical of this approach. See Kristeva, "Woman Can Never Be Defined," quoted in Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, p. 62. For such criticism, see for example Ann Rosalind Jones, "Toward an Understanding of l'Écriture féminine" in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism, p. 363ff.; Jones goes into the differences between Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray, while emphasizing the Utopian character of their concepts, their orientation toward male authors, and their exaltation of the female body/female sexuality as the source of writing. Jones is especially irritated by the monolithic vision of "woman" in these

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27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36

37

38

39

40

theories. See also Nina Baym, "The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory" in Shari Benstock, ed., Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 49f. Teresa de Lauretis quoted in Allen, "Feminist Criticism," p. 282. See similarly Kaja Silverman who insists that "very precise historical and economic determinants" are always also influential in the constitution of the subject. Quoted in Allen, "Feminist Criticism," p. 179. Allen notes that feminist film theory has provided the best contributions to a feminist revision of postmodern theory so far. Allen, "Feminist Criticism," p. 296. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, comments that the "defamiliarizing capacity of literary language and form [that the French theorists celebrate] does not in itself bear any necessary relationship to the political and social goals of feminism." (p. 6) She postulates that "a link between literature and feminism can only be established if a text addresses themes in some way relevant to feminist concerns" (p. 7). The defamiliarizing effects of the fantastic operate both on a linguistic level (where "nameless things" can be articulated and "thingless names" appear, Jackson, Fantasy, p. 40) and on the level of content/themes. In that function, fantastic literature is closer to Brecht's critique of Lukacs's concept of realism than to Anglo-American feminists' concepts. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 45. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 81. Ana Castillo, "Massacre of the Dreamers" in Philomena Mariani, ed., Critical Fiction. The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 171. Castillo, "Massacre of the Dreamers," p. 166. She adds that "no 'facts' have been added or altered to make this possible," stressing instead perspective again, but also, in bracketing "fact," arguing for history as narrative and recreation. bell hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness" in Yearning, race, gender, and cultural politics (Boston MA: South End Press, 1990), p. 145-154; p. 149. hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness," p. 145 and 147. Renate Hof, "Writing Women into (Literary) History: Toward a Poetics of Gender?" in Gilnter H. Lenz, Hartmut Keil and Sabine BrOck-Sallah, eds., Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies (Frankfurt/New York: Campus/St. Martin's Press, 1990), p. 211-224; p. 219. Wallace in Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions, p. 141. See the programmatic title of Joan W. Scott's article, "Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism" in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 134-148. GQnter H. Lenz, "Reconstructing American Literary Studies: History, Difference, and Synthesis" in Lenz et al., eds., Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies, p. 21-50; p. 26. Dina Sherzer, "Postmodernism and Feminism" in Edmund J. Smyth, ed., Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London: B.T. Batsford, 1991), p. 156168; p. 156. For such interpretations of postmodernism as a- or anti-political, see for example di Stefano, "Dilemmas of Difference."

318 41 Lance Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty. An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy (New York et al.: Greenwood Press, 1987, p. 3. 42 Olsen, Ellipse of Uncertainty, p. 8 and 9. Olsen does not deal with women's literature. 43 Gttnter H. Lenz, '"Ethnographies': American Culture Studiesand Postmodern Anthropology," Prospects 16 (1991): 1-40; p. 6. 44 Lenz, '"Ethnographies'," p. 7. 45 Lenz, '"Ethnographies'," also uses the term "defamiliarize" to define the strategies of postmodern ethnography, p. 7. 46 Ursula K. LeGuin [sic], The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Walker and Company, 1969), p. 70 and 213. 47 Marcus and Fischer use this term to characterize postmodern anthropology, quoted in Lenz, '"Ethnographies'," p. 8. The term equally applies to fantasy as a mode. 48 For a detailed analysis of the deconstruction of gender see the chapter on Utopias; the marginal planet, Winter, has no incest taboo between siblings, no Oedipus-myth or Oedipal-period, and no concept of the nuclear patriarchal family, of course, since gender does not exist. 49 In this context of the familiar, the family, and the fantastic, I want to remind of the title of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar (1989), her first novel with strong fantastic tendencies. 50 Nancy Fraser quoted in Benhabib/Cornell, "Introduction," p. 7. 51 Benhabib/Cornell, "Introduction," p. 6. 52 See Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," p. 209. 53 For example in Huxley's and Orwell's dystopia; Kafka's "Die Verwandlung" is an exception, although not interested in gender-aspects. 54 Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," p. 192, observes as a feature of postmodern (capitalist) society that it is "[n]o longer structured by the polarity of public and private," but characterized by "a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household." 55 Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," p. 209, argues as well that "specific forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political and cultural concomitants." Finding it obvious that the idea of "natural objects like organism and families" is an illusion (p. 204), Haraway is particularly interested in the increasing number of female-headed household and the "feminization of poverty." 56 See the chapter on Utopian texts; a striking example is Octavia Butler's Dawn in which an alien race's families are composed of three genders (male, female, androgynous); the children are the genetic offspring of all three genders (the female and male often being siblings). Butler explores the reaction of her human heroine to this family constellation. 57 In a comparative reading of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Toni Morrison's Beloved, I argue that the function of the ghost in Morrison's novel (exposing white supremacist interventions into the African American family that culminate in a strategy of "blaming the victim" by pathologizing black family-structures as "unassimilated") makes us aware of the power-interests reflected in the Victorian family in James's texts. In The Turn of the Screw as well, the fantastic (ghosts as in Beloved) unveils multiple processes of repression. Anne Koenen, „The (Black) Lady Vanishes: Postfeminism, Poststructuralism, and Theorizing by Black Women" in

319 Fernando de Toro, ed., Explorations on Post-Theory. Toward a Third Space (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1999), pp. 131-144. 58 That is not true, as we have seen, for ghost stories written in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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Wolfgang F. Schwarz (Hrsg.), Prager Schule: Kontinuität und Wandel. Arbeiten zur Literaturästhetik und Poetik der Narration. Frankfurt/M. 1997. ISBN 3-89354-261-2 Gerd Wotjak, Heide Schmidt (Hrsg.), Modelle der Translation. Models of Translation. Festschrift für Albrecht Neubert. Frankfurt/M. 1997. ISBN 3-89354-262-0 Mechthild Reinhardt, Wolfgang Thiele (eds.), Grammar and Text in Synchrony and Diachrony. In Honour of Gottfried Graustein. Frankfurt/M. / Madrid 1997. ISBN 3-89354-263-9 (Vervuert); 84-88906-70-6 (Iberoamericana) Henning Ahrens, John Cowper Powy's Elementalismus. Eine Lebensphilosophie. Frankfurt/M. 1997. ISBN 3-89354-264-7 Falk Seiler, Sprache, Philologie und Gesellschaft bei Viifredo Pareto. Frankfurt/M. 1998. ISBN 3-89354-265-5 Claudia Wenner, Moments of Being. Zur Psychologie des Augenblicks bei Virginia Woolf. Frankfurt/M. 1998. ISBN 3-89354-266-3 Uwe Junghanns, Gerhild Zybatow (Hrsg.), Formale Slavistik. Frankfurt/M. 1997. ISBN 3-89354-267-1 Elmar Schenkel, Wolfgang F. Schwarz, Ludwig Stockinger, Alfonso de Toro (Hrsg.), Die magische Schreibmaschine. Aufsätze zur Tradition des Phantastischen in der Literatur. Frankfurt/M. 1998. ISBN 3-89354-268-X Alfonso de Toro, Stefan Welz (Hrsg.), Rhetorische Se/i-Relsen. Fallstudien zu Wahmehmungsformen in Literatur, Kunst und Kultur. Frankfurt/M. 1999. ISBN 3-89354-269-8 Anne Koenen, Visions of Doom, Plots of Power. The Fantastic in Anglo-American Women's Literature. Frankfurt/ M. 1999. ISBN 3-89354-270-1 Editorial Iberoamericana

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