From Darwin to the Beatles
Narratives of Evolution and Revolution
2012
Conference Proceedings
Edited by
Dr Jessica Riddell
Kristy Benz
R. Zöe Costanzo
Editorial Board
Bethan Chalke
Alexis Chouan
Denise St. Pierre
Bishop’s University Press
Sherbrooke, Quebec
© Bishop’s University Press 2012
QUEUC acknowledges the financial support of the office of the Vice-Principal Academic at Bishop’s University,
the Foundation of Bishop’s University, and the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bishop’s University.
The authors graciously acknowledge the students and faculty at Concordia University, McGill University, McMaster
University, University of British Columbia, Université Laval, and York University for their generous support of this
project.
From Darwin to the Beatles: Narratives of Evolution and Revolution/ edited by Jessica Riddell, Kristy Benz, and R.
Zöe Costanzo. Sherbrooke: Bishop’s University Press, 2012.
This is for those who bring the evolution and start the revolution
and for these new scholars
who share their work with us for the first time.
Contents
Foreword
Dr Jessica Riddell iv
Preface
Kristy Benz vi
I. Rethinking the Status Quo: Experiments in Language and Hybrid Genres
Retroviral Retro-Quoting in Pontypool Changes Everything
Veronica Belafi 2
Novelistic Hybrids: Re-conceptualizing 19th Century Realism in George Eliot’s Silas
Marner and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Gillian Massel 9
A Morality Story Founded on Aesthetics of Fairy Tales: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness
Jason Michael Beland 14
i
II. Crossing Borders: Exploring the Postcolonial World
A Cunning Approach to the Style and Pattern of Plantation Literature: Charles Chesnutt’s
Subversion of Plantation Stereotypes in The Marrow of Tradition
Jessika Deschenes 21
Ex Pede Dolorem: Cross-Cultural Exchange and Representation in V.S. Naipaul’s “One out
of Many”
Delan Hamasoor 27
Spaces of Resistance: Xuela as the Third Space in The Autobiography of my Mother
Kristy Benz 33
Natives, Interlopers, and the Rightful Inheritors: Colonial and Postcolonial
Tensions in Stargate: Atlantis
Laurel Rogers 39
III. The Question of Self: Identity, Perception, and Expression
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage: Texts of Multiplicity
Kathleen MacDougall 46
Fragmentation of the Human Psyche in King Lear
Alexei Fraser 51
A Bird of Paradise and a Steely Arctic Thing: Incompatibility Between Gerald Crich and
Gudrun Brangwen in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love
Alexandra Pope 57
From Aqaba to 'The Voice of the Guns': Musical Symbolism and the Evolution of Identity
in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia
Denise St. Pierre 63
IV. Flouting Femininity: Exploring Agencies and Revisiting Gendered Spaces
I Am Not An Emotional Creature: A Critique of Eve Ensler’s Latest Work
Emily St-Aubin 70
Fleeting Femininities: Allegories of Female Independence in Alice Munro’s Runaway
Emily LeDuc 76
ii
“I won’t live without her”: the (Re)Writing of Kinship and Female-Centric Spaces in
Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Collins’ The Woman in White
Danielle Bird 83
Windows to the Soul: Duessa’s Gaze in Edmund Spencer’s “The Faerie Queen”
Bethan Chalke 92
Exceeding the Mark: The Masculine Gaze and Ekphrastic Rebellion in Robert Browning’s
“My Last Duchess”
Drew Simpson 98
Contributors 103
Editors & Editorial Board 106
iii
Foreword
Dr Jessica Riddell
QUEUC (Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference), founded in 2009, brings
together faculty and students from English Departments across Canada. Our third annual
conference, QUEUC 2012, had representation from every English department in Quebec and 16
universities from across Canada (we were truly “coast to coast,” with delegates from University
of Victoria to Dalhousie University).
Our objectives are five-fold:
• To showcase undergraduate research
• To provide students with early opportunities for academic professionalization
• To extend learning outside the classroom in a stimulating, collaborative milieu
• To foster a sense of academic community on our campus
• To forge strong collaborative ties across provincial and national boundaries
Our 2012 conference proceedings, From Darwin to the Beatles: Narratives of Evolution and
Revolution, is a peer-reviewed publication that provides student with the unique opportunity to
edit, revise, and publish research papers in a process that mirrors the peer review process in
academia. This early professionalization introduces undergraduate students to the collaborative
process of publication, and it has been a pleasure to see students refine their essays from initial
submission to presentation to publication.
iv
QUEUC has been one of the most rewarding undertakings of my academic career: presenters,
participants, and contributors have demonstrated intelligence, enthusiasm, professionalism, and a
desire for collaboration that, for me, encapsulates the heart of life-long learning. When I founded
QUEUC in 2009, I did not realize the potential for community building this initiative would
provide for students not only at Bishop’s, but across Canada. The “QUEUC effect” on our
department has been palpable: in the past four years there has been a surge in student
engagement and collaboration inside and outside the classroom, an effect – I believe – of a
strong sense of community forged through integrative learning projects like QUEUC. However,
the more startling – and exciting – effect has been on the undergraduate community more
generally. I have had countless emails from former students who recount their experiences of
running into former QUEUC delegates in their graduate programs, at graduate conferences, and
in other academic milieus. Conceivably, in a few years QUEUC delegates may become
colleagues, collaborators, and create their own initiatives to foster undergraduate research.
v
Preface
Kristy Benz
At the end of every academic year, as we savour the summer months and collect our thoughts, it
is always befitting to reflect upon what has passed. The 2011-2012 year saw the third annual
Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference (QUEUC), an event that spanned two
days, brought together students from across the country, and spread its warmth to stave off the
February snowstorm. It was the third time that we had gathered in the Eastern Townships to
share our research and revel in our passions, the third time that we had stood at the podium
despite our fears, and the third time that we raised our glasses to toast Dr Jessica Riddell and her
vision of a nationwide conference. And it was the first year that QUEUC was given a theme. Our
conference was growing and changing, and as such we thought our first theme to be an
appropriate one: From Darwin to the Beatles: Narratives of Evolution and Revolution.
Now, as we publish our second conference proceedings, we seek to bridge past and future, to
take the research conducted, the efforts made, and the lessons learned during the past year and to
publish them in a collection so that they may always be available to the students of the future.
We also seek to overcome the physical distances between ourselves; this year’s publication will
appear online, a reminder that no expanse is too great to be spanned by the shared passion of
learning. So, from King Lear to Stargate:Atlantis, Edmund Spenser to Eve Ensler, we invite you
to take a journey with us, and to experience these narratives of evolution and revolution.
vi
Rethinking the Status Quo
Experiments in Language and Hybrid Genres
Rethinking the Status Quo
Retroviral Retro-Quoting in Pontypool Changes Everything
Veronica Belafi
Concordia University
He’s young, eighteen or so, with an anachronistic blond pompadour, tight rockabilly pants, and
pointy boots. Grant has asked himself whether this look, the way the kid features it, the way it
precedes everything else about him, is trendy or disdainful of trends, or trendily disdainful of
trends. Is he ultra-hip and ironically retro-quoting another ultra-hip that had hotly retro-quoted
another ultra-hip that once, long ago, railed against, what? What?
— Tony Burgess (Pontypool Changes Everything 183)
Language is always, at once, retroactive and retrospective. It can do whatever it is made to do,
say anything it is made to say. This sentence is because I made it so. In all its adaptability,
exceptions arise when language is turned onto itself proper, forcing speakers, writers—even
thinkers—to ask, Can we ever truly comment on that which is being used? A certain say-all
capacity is never wholly accessible, but Christopher Dewdney proposes that poets operate on a
different frequency.1 His monograph illustrates the neurochemical processes that spawn poetry,
of which “there are certain ‘special’ sequences [that the poet] chooses to record” (Dewdney AS
75). He employs a “parasitic symbiosis” analogy for language, in which “the poet hosts a
parasite” (76-7), a concept akin to the “word virus” of William S. Burroughs’s mid-century
fiction (Lydenberg 55). Similarly, Tony Burgess’s Pontypool Changes Everything casts language
in the role of virus, or, as I would like to consider, in the role of retrovirus.2 Burgess is the
contagious author-host, whose lyricism cultivates language within the petri dishes of his
chapters, eventually propagating into the media of Bruce McDonald’s film adaptation, Pontypool
2
Rethinking the Status Quo
(2008).3 Quite literally, communication risks resound within Pontypool’s retroviral language
and, as Joost Van Loon writes, “discussions over ‘emergent viruses’ intersect with the spreading
of a more general apocalyptic ethos in popular culture” (123). Such is the strain of Pontypool’s
pop-culture—an apocalyptic horror narrative that transmits discourses of risk and fear onto
systems of communication. It is with these notions in hand that I weigh the implications of
Burgess’s metaphor and propose that language, while it composes and comprises all forms of
cultural expression, may exist in a rather literal, retroviral state, with a “retro-quoting” agency of
its own. Language becomes an insufficient, even unreliable, tool in the discourse of discourse—a
communicative problem that might be best explored through alternate avenues of expression. Art
is one such avenue that, rather than toil in the explication of the language problem, demonstrates
that very problem, and further demonstrates how originality might be produced.
“Retro” describes elements of culture and the “imitation or revival of a style from the past”
(OED). As the epigraph demonstrates, this is true of fashion; trends cycle and recycle. A
retrovirus, however, is not a made-over virus. Unlike the simple virus that enters the host as a
template to be copied, the retrovirus is itself a copy; it enters, hijacks cellular machinery, and
permanently splices its newly made sequence into the host genome (Campbell 388). Essentially,
a copy is turned into a template, and that template undergoes copying anew. This is the sequence
Burgess traces in the second stage of his virus, as the residents of small-town Pontypool, Ontario
are plagued by the very language they use: “Once infected, the victim produces4 the virus in the
language he or she struggles with. The mature virus is a sort of hard copy of this production”
(158). While Burgess’s virus takes on a literal “retro” production, non-viral language might be
said to follow this “recombinant” sequence (LF 71), as Dewdney writes. Language, too, enters
the individual as a copy, takes hold in the form of a linguistic template, and is re-copied and
revived thereafter in moments of expression. Like Steve’s eclectic look that “precedes everything
else about him” (Burgess 183), language always already exists in some former version, and hops
from individual to individual, first through the ear, and then, as Doctor Mendez charts, it “copies
itself in our understanding” (McDonald).
Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene considers retro-quoting cultural trends, such as
language (190). Drawing his analogy from Neo-Darwinist gene replication, Dawkins coins his
new replicators “memes,” units of cultural transmission that pass “from brain to brain via a
process … [of] imitation” (192). One method for talking about language recurs as an imitative,
retro-copying trend: a meme about memes5 (196), or the language virus metameme. From
Burroughs’s word virus, to Dewdney’s parasite, to Burgess’s language virus—and now, to inject
my own retrovirus—there exists a long, involuted discourse about pathogenic communication.
Ultimately, the only tool that can describe language is language, in its inherently contagious,
metaphoric nature. Dawkins suggests a wariness of meme transmission: “Memes should be
regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile
meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s
propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell”
(Dawkins 192). This is Dawkins’ own analogue in the discourse I have come to describe, but the
3
Rethinking the Status Quo
word I would like to draw upon is “technically,” for “as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, most
technology comes from language, and language itself was one of our first technologies”
(Dewdney LF 71). Language is a “powerful, abstract, cognitive amplification system” that acts in
the dissemination of ideas (71), and this “systematic scheme of ideas” is ideology (OED). PierreEtienne Du Ponceau calls ideology the study of the “constructions of languages, by which we are
taught to analyze and distinguish the different shapes in which ideas combine … to fix
perceptions in our minds, and transmit them to those of others” (OED). The terms of technology
and ideology align with the copy/template retrovirus. Language enables us to “distinguish” and
“combine” ideas, and further fixes “perceptions in our minds,” which are then contracted by the
minds of others.
Not unlike the risks of Dawkins’ memetic communication, language can be passive or
possessive; ultimately, individuals are used by that same linguistic system, and “we don’t notice
the hold language has on us because of its ubiquity”—its “insidious and total domination”
(Dewdney LF 73, 75). Despite its capacity to order perception, Dewdney suggests that language,
like “every new technology, … brings with it contradictory social effects—the potential to
empower or subjugate those touched by it” (5). But if language is subjugating, are not writers
language “technicians,” capable of mediating its insidious nature? Dewdney’s “special condition
of intelligence” designates poets as having the ability to manipulate the “animated language” that
“restrict[s] the limits of conceptualization” (Dewdney AS 75).
Burgess stretches these very limits. He prods ideological boundaries in his attempt to cultivate
a new relationship to language, and further, to understanding. In a promotional interview for the
Pontypool film, Burgess calls his book a “fractured document,” a combination of “pieces, slivers
and fragments” with “multiple perspectives, and multiple beginnings, and multiple frames of
reference” in which continuity is laboured. Reading the novel and watching the film are
conceptual exercises in working through Pontypool’s particular language system; it is through
his fractured style that Burgess succeeds in challenging the very language in which his ideas are
expressed. Pontypool’s retrovirus imports its own combinations into Burgess’s host characters,
imposes new ideologies, and overhauls the subject’s (and the audience’s) existing language
templates, loosening conceptualization’s hold on the limits of understanding, as language victims
fall into a cascade of failed communication (McDonald).
The film is set as a one-room play in which Pontypool’s radio station staff of professional
public communicators is left to ward off the mob of “crude radio signals” who mindlessly invade
their sound booth safe haven (McDonald). An escape from the prevailing linguistic ideology is
best demonstrated in the climactic scene when Sydney Briar, Beacon Radio’s producer, contracts
the infected word, “kill,” and “produces the virus in the language … she struggles with”
(Burgess 158). “Kill” fixes itself firmly in Sydney’s understanding when she is gripped by the
word’s action, having recently taken a young disease-victim’s life out of self-defense. In his role
as the film’s narrative voice and radio disc jockey, Grant Mazzy recognizes Sydney’s affliction
and encourages her to “move things around” in her own understanding (McDonald), to assert her
4
Rethinking the Status Quo
autonomy over the virus in the same way a disc jockey might manipulate a record, sliding or
scratching the sounds he transmits.
Together, the team is forced to “de-semanticiz[e] the meaning of words” through a kind of
metonymy cascade, as they create a conscious slide in the speech they use (Christiansen 7). As
linguist John Lyons puts it, “every linguistic item has its ‘place’ in a system and its function, or
value, derives from the relations which it contracts with other units in the system” (OED).
Sydney must disjoin “kill” from its signification, devaluing the word’s linguistic hold on her
understanding. Lacan and Derrida both speak to this notion exemplified by “kill’s” metonymic
slide; Lacan’s “signifying chain” refers to an endless cascade of reference (Evans 114), in which
every signified stands for another signifier6. Burgess’s retrovirus finds opportunity to cultivate
and retro-produce itself in the spaces that make up Pontypool’s endless chain of reference.
Counter to this, Mazzy frantically forces “kill” into disparate signifying molds in his effort to
inoculate Sydney’s contracted word: “‘Kill’ isn’t ‘kill’—‘kill’ is ‘blue,’ ‘kill’ is ‘wonderful,’
‘kill’ is ‘loving,’ ‘kill’ is ‘baby,’ ‘kill’ is ‘Monet’s Garden,’ ‘kill’ is ‘beautiful morning,’ ‘kill’ is
‘everything you ever wanted,’ ‘kill’ is ‘kiss’—‘kill’ is kiss!’ Is that it?” (McDonald). “Kill”
ceases to mean “kill” as the word takes on new signification in Sydney’s mind: to “kiss.” In a
moment of revelation and understanding, she orders Mazzy to “kill [her]” (McDonald), rather,
asking that he kiss her instead. The two immediately embrace, as the subject (kiss) and its
signifier (kill) become locked into a new relationship, one exclusively shared within this couple’s
linguistic community. Grant and Sydney break language’s ubiquitous, ideological hold, thus
carrying out Mazzy’s proud radio bit for “taking no prisoners” (McDonald). Mazzy rails against
the language retrovirus in his final on-air monologue, realizing that they “were never making
sense” (McDonald): sense was making them.
Mazzy’s onscreen recognition untethers retroviral ideology, and “[sets] … prisoners free”
(McDonald); he exposes communicative risks, and in so doing, relays Burroughs’s sentiment that
“[c]ommunication must become total and conscious before we can stop it” (TTE 50-1).
Relatedly, Robin Lydenberg writes, “If there is an ultimate literary goal envisioned by
Burroughs, it is to escape both the body and language, to travel in bodiless space and silence”
(55), a goal likewise envisioned by Pontypool. Burgess’s fiction addresses these same risks,
“effectively creating a language of silence (in the way that a language which does not
communicate anything might as well be silent) which kills the infection” (Christiansen 7).
Mazzy’s character achieves just this; he comes to understand the arbitrariness of words, and in
his total consciousness of this fact, is able to set himself free through a newly fixed perspective
on circumstance. Dewdney, too, recognizes that achieving an independent state of
“namelessness” from language might exist only as “the product of a phenomenal labour of
consciousness” (LF 76). But any discipline “which purports to attain such a condition,” he
writes, “will become increasingly palliative as long as language continues its influence over
human perception” (76). As Pontypool demonstrates, change must be brought about within the
very language system in order to break its influence over perception. This is the ideology of
language at work: insofar as language is subjugating, it must be utilized for communication. It
5
Rethinking the Status Quo
only remains that language’s ubiquity be made apparent. Dewdney suggests that “the intact
survival of [language’s] intelligence is threatened by one thing only, and that is the discovery and
subsequent exploration of its plane of existence by ourselves, its human hosts” (AS 83), with—as
I suggest—the help of our language technicians.
In addition to being a “systematic treatment of grammar,” technology is also defined as “a
discourse or treatise on an art”7 (OED). But mitigating a treatise on art seems counterintuitive, as
art need not do the work of theory and analysis. Art must simply show itself as work. Burgess’s
use of the English language in Pontypool shows his audience the changes he makes within
language convention. He works against the fixed ideological “perceptions in our minds” (Du
Ponceau), and so, the transmission from mind to mind is unconventional, and the failure of
transmission is itself read as a kind of message. Burgess’s technology is not a “discourse or
treatise on an art” which attempts to explicate the problem of language; it simply is art to be
interpreted by his audience, that they may recognize the limitations of using language.
Understanding language can only ever be partial, and this is the very problem with ideology:
there is no non-ideological place from which to have an argument, and any act of communication
is also an act of miscommunication.
Through a laboured, conscious reconsideration, one might loosen language’s ability to so
easily retro-produce itself in the host’s understanding. But despite a fully conscious
communication such as Burgess encourages, an inevitable retro-quoting is required because
every cultural unit must already exist in some prior version; templates will always exist, and
language will continue to be copied and recopied. Nonetheless, units of originality can emerge in
language and in the pathogenic discourse about language. According to Van Loon, “the history
of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases … which become
important through human technologies” (qtd. in Garrett 123). Burgess’s particular eruption—or
outbreak—is one of human technology, and even though it is “newly discovered” on the page,
and newly re-discovered on the screen, it is a recurrent attempt to display the difficulties of using
and being used by language.
Burgess takes part in this longstanding meta-discourse, but, above all, he says something
genuinely original, paradoxical as it may seem. In a Dawkinsian vein, originality can only ever
emerge out of a homogeneous cultural pool. In the “ultra-hip, hotly retro-quoting” sense,
originality must both “precede everything about” itself (Burgess 183), while recombining
familiar elements into new ensembles. Pontypool repositions the understanding of existing
copies and templates, and reveals conscious retro-quoting to be a cure to the pathogen that is
produced in moments of déjà vu. Originality, such as Mazzy’s “kill isn’t kill” epiphany,
exemplifies immunity against “the plague [that] first manifested itself in the infected person as a
type of déjà vu,” where “everything that happened presented itself as already happened”
(Burgess 148). Repetition without difference is deadly to the Pontypool victims, and further, in
the contributors to the language virus discussion. The need is created for a perpetual “retro” that
surpasses sheer mechanism, and achieves a state of constant perception-fixing and re-fixing.
6
Rethinking the Status Quo
What, then, might be said to emerge out of the confluence of circulating copies that already
exist in culture? A new kind of relationship to knowledge and language emerges, one that
“teaches us to face the unknown, to acknowledge its unintelligibility, and forces us to seek
means to converse with it” (Van Loon 141-2). Along with Burroughs, Dewdney, and Dawkins,
Pontypool raises untrusting questions about the retroviral nature of communication. Burgess’s art
does not presume to explain these failures; instead, he demonstrates how language and metaphor
are inescapable. Nonetheless, art can act rhetorically, and this rhetoric is brought about through a
conscious questioning. The novel, for instance ends on the question, “Now what?” (279).
Burgess’s final question voices-over the film’s credits, as he identifies with the disc jockey, as
well as his listening audience: “I knew Grant Mazzy … And I think he would want us to ask
questions. He would want us to find out what is really happening. What’s real?” (McDonald).
These questions do not beg answers; rather, the question is the message.8 Burgess is like his
young, anachronistic teen. He draws on his predecessors’ ideas to create a new ensemble, while
encouraging his audience to question language. He is “ultra-hip and ironically retro-quoting
another ultra-hip that had hotly retro-quoted another ultra-hip that once, long ago, railed against,
what? What?”
Notes
1
Marshall McLuhan says that poets are best attuned to the frequencies of the world, and that
they act as antennae. This analogy is based on Ezra Pound’s “poets are the antennae of the race”
(E. McLuhan 32).
2
For the purposes of my argument, parasites, viruses, and retroviruses are discussed as
“pathogens,” a general term for “infectious agents that cause disease” (Campbell 930).
3
I will continue to use the shortened “Pontypool” to refer to the novel, and will cite the film
when appropriate.
4
This is Burgess’s emphasis.
5
In the thirty years since The Selfish Gene’s publication, Dawkins remarks on the reception and
propagation of his own idea of the meme in the endnotes to his reissue (Dawkins 322).
6
Derrida sees this process as endless, but for Lacan there is a master signifier that holds the
others in place. Different as they may be, both views speak to the same point of cascading
reference seen in Pontypool.
7
This definition stems from the word’s Greek root, “techné” (OED).
8
An interpolation of McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message.”
Works Cited
Beck, Ulrich. Foreword. Environmental Risks and the Media. Trans. Kathleen Cross. New York:
Routledge, 2000. Xxi-iv. Print.
Burgess, Tony. Pontypool Changes Everything. Toronto: ECW, 2009. Print.
---. “Tony Burgess Talks about Pontypool.” Interview. YouTube. Open Book Toronto, 12
February 2009. Web. 8 December 2011.
Campbell, Neil A., and Jane B. Reece. Biology. 9th ed. San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin
Cummings, 2009. Print.
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Rethinking the Status Quo
Christiansen, Steen. “Speaking the Undead: Uncanny Aurality in Pontypool.” Cinephile 6.2 (Fall
2010): 4-8. Web. 29 November 2011.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.
Dewdney, Christopher. Alter Sublime. Toronto: Coach House, 1980. Print.
---. Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1998. Print.
“ecosystem, n.”. OED Online. September 2011. Oxford UP. 11 December 2011.
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge,
1996. Print.
“ideology, n.”. OED Online. December 2011. Oxford UP. 19 December 2011.
“structuralism, n.”. OED Online. December 2011. Oxford UP. 2 February 2012.
Lydenberg, Robin. “Notes from the Orifice: Language and the Body in William Burroughs.”
Contemporary Literature 26.1 (1985): 55-73. Web. 29 November 2011.
McLuhan, Eric. “Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg.” Global Media
Journal—Canadian Edition 1.1 (2008): 25-43. Web. 09 December 2011.
Pontypool. Dir. Bruce McDonald. Perf. Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle. 2008. IFC Films. 2009.
DVD.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1934. Print.
“retro, adj.”. OED Online. September 2011. Oxford UP. 29 November 2011.
“technology, n.”. OED Online. December 2011. Oxford UP. 20 December 2011
Van Loon, Joost. Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence. New York:
Routledge, 2002. Print.
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Novelistic Hybrids: Re-conceptualizing 19th Century Realism in George
Eliot’s Silas Marner and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Gillian Massel
McGill University
Until the advent of modernism at the turn of the twentieth century, the generic principles of
realism predominantly governed the aesthetics of the nineteenth century novel. Characterized by
an astute “accuracy in representation of things as they are” (Levine 7) with the intention of
mimetically reproducing “ordinary life and the social world as it appears to the common reader”
(Abrams 26) and perfected by “master novelists” such as Honoré de Balzac, William Dean
Howells, and Leo Tolstoy (192), realism came to represent the highest form of literary
achievement in the nineteenth century. Yet despite realism’s commitment to “represent the
ordinary honestly” (Levine 7) by excluding anything that was more fantastic, heroic, or
monstrous than actuality, novelists George Eliot and Thomas Hardy reveal in Silas Marner and
Tess of the d’Urbervilles that the realist novel actually necessitated a heterogeneous solution of
both the real and the unreal, the ordinary and the fantastic, the quotidian and the supernatural, in
order to fulfil the conventions of the genre. Consequently, despite the fact that Tess of the
d’Urbervilles and Silas Marner were proclaimed – or in Hardy’s case self-proclaimed – as realist
novels, both are in fact hybrids of two genres: where Eliot’s Silas Marner strategically foils the
realist characters and world of Raveloe against its romantic doppelganger, the town of Lantern
Yard, and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a calculated combination of realism and sensation
fiction. As a result, the successful “realist” novelist, as Thomas Hardy himself suggests, is not a
“writer whose efforts never carry him above the mild walks of everyday life,” but a writer that
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Rethinking the Status Quo
can present both the believable and the unbelievable “to the highest degree” (Literary Notebooks
163-164).
Although championed as a quintessential realist for her unfailing “attentiveness to the
external details of the world her characters inhabit” and her dedication to representing the
“ordinary honestly” (Levine 9), George Eliot divides her novel Silas Marner into two distinct
genres, realism and romance fiction. As George Levine observes, “realism is a mode that
depends heavily on reaction against what the writer takes to have been misrepresentation” (7)
and in Eliot’s case, this mode was the “falsification … sentimentality … pomposity” (5) of
romance fiction, scathingly criticized by Eliot in her essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.”
According to Abrams, romance “presents life as we would have it be … more fantastic … than
actuality” (260), or as Eliot suggests, “false light that emanates from plush and powder” (“Silly
Novels” 526). Realism, by contrast, “represents life as it really is” (Abrams 260). For Eliot,
realism was a “humble and faithful study of nature” (Levine 8) that eschewed the substitution of
“vague forms bred by imagination on the myths of feeling, in place of definite, substantial,
reality” (8), which, in Eliot’s opinion, was the aesthetic crime that singled out a “silly lady
novelist.”
Nevertheless, despite Eliot’s ardent distaste for the “want of verisimilitude” (“Silly Novels”
519) in romance fiction, Silas Marner, which in all outward appearances reflects a realist
programme, actually incorporates qualities from both genres into its narrative framework. In
Silas Marner, Eliot juxtaposes the quotidian world of Raveloe against the more mythic and
fantastic realm of Lantern Yard. As a result, Eliot creates a hybrid of the romance fiction that
Eliot eschews, and the realist novel that she pursues. In Silas Marner, the towns of Lantern Yard
and Raveloe are distinguished from each other in terms of narrative location, temporality, and the
characters that inhabit them, or, as Eliot’s own narrator observes, “what could be more unlike
that Lantern Yard world than the world in Raveloe?” (27). The narrative action that takes place
in Lantern Yard is geographically and temporally marginalized to the edges of the novel,
beginning with an episode from Silas’s past in Lantern Yard and ending with Silas’s brief return
to his former home. As a result, the action that takes place in Raveloe is centralized, and thus
occupies a significant amount of narrative mass that grants the town a characteristic presence,
solidity, and substantiality that is markedly different from the “vagueness and mystery” (13)
surrounding the spectre of Lantern Yard hovering at the fringes of the text.
Indeed, “spectre” is an adequate description not only of the town, but also the people that
inhabit it, and most importantly, the titular character himself: Silas Marner. Until Eliot records
Silas speaking directly, for the first time since he leaves Lantern Yard, to the citizens at the
Rainbow Tavern (73), Silas appears as a kind of “ghost,” living at the edges of the town, almost
“mythologized” as it were, by country superstitions that whispered of his uncanny cures for
“rheumatism” and practices of “old devil worship” (15). Silas’s medical condition further
emphasizes his insubstantiality; unpredictably slipping in and out of consciousness, he appears
disconnected from the present moment and his own reality – a condition that is gradually cured
as Silas attaches himself to the “real” life of the village and of course to another tangible human
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Rethinking the Status Quo
being – the golden haired orphan named Eppie. Thus Silas’ transition from “myth” to “man,”
from the town of Lantern Yard to the town of Raveloe, marks the transition Eliot’s novel makes
from the genre of romance fiction to a “realist” narrative firmly rooted in the present and rich
with detail and dialogue that indulges the reader in the ordinary, the commonplace, and the
simple. Nevertheless, Silas Marner is still a novel torn between two aesthetic preoccupations,
and as a result, Eliot’s “realist” masterpiece is, in actuality, a masterful crossbreed of two distinct
traditions.
Just as Eliot’s novel negotiates both a realist agenda and the traditions of romance fiction,
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is likewise a hybrid of genres, where Hardy grafts
sensation fiction to a realist bulb. As Richard Nemesvari notes in Thomas Hardy: Sensationalism
and the Melodramatic Mode, Hardy’s “General Preface to Novels and Poems” reveals that Hardy
retroactively divided his fiction into three categories, where Tess of the d’Urbervilles and other
“Novels of Character and the Environment” have, according to Hardy, “a verisimilitude in
general treatment and detail” (Nemesvari 20). Like the town of Raveloe in Eliot’s Silas Marner,
Hardy’s Wessex novels are set in a fictional but otherwise believable rural community where
Hardy asserts, “the description of these backgrounds has been done from the real” (20). His
characters are farmers and countrymen instead of grand dukes and duchesses, and like Eliot,
Hardy skilfully recreates their rural dialects. Most importantly however, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
demonstrates Hardy’s careful “realist” attention to externalities. The picturesque vale of
Blackmore, the enigmatic forests of the Chase, even the bleak fields of Flintcomb-Ash, are all
described with great depth and detail characteristic of the realist genre. Even Tess is subject to
Hardy’s atomically precise scrutiny when he observes that her “pouted-up deep red mouth…was
hardly yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of
her top one upward” (Tess 10) and her face had “nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality,
real warmth, real incarnation” (132). Hardy was, as Nemesvari suggests, well aware of the
“canonical and critical acceptance” (20) attributed to practiced writers of realism, and as a result,
he deliberately sought to “reinforce his place as chronicler of truthful human experienced based
in an actual location” (20) by writing Tess of the d’Urbervilles and other Wessex novels.
However, despite Hardy’s categorization of his “Novels of Character and the Environment”
as proponents of realism, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is also largely styled according to the
aesthetics of the sensation fiction genre. Although Tess appears “to almost everybody … a fine
and picturesque country girl, and no more” (Tess 11) she is frequently transformed into a heroine
of mythic proportions, described as a “Cyprian image” (268), “a virtual Faustina in the literal
Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia in a corporeal Phyrne” (325) and even “Artemis and Demeter”
(115) by her lover Angel Clare. Like Hardy’s novel that wavers between the sensational and the
real, Tess’s character likewise flits between two polarities – at times she is a simple country
milkmaid who would otherwise go unnoticed, and at others she is a towering tragic heroine, a
“divine personage” (84), her “d’Urberville descent a fact of great dimensions…a most useful
ingredient to the dreamer, the moralizer on declines and falls” (30). She is both rustic and
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Rethinking the Status Quo
aristocratic, commonplace and extraordinary: a dichotomy captured in the novel’s title itself,
where the unexceptional name “Tess” is paired with the ornate flourish, “of the d’Urbervilles.”
Furthermore, in centring his novel on a female protagonist, Hardy foreground’s Tess’s
pervasive feminine sensuality, giving Tess of the d’Urbervilles a characteristic eroticism that
Nemesvari observes “evokes a key aspect of sensationalism whatever else he [Hardy] may be
doing or attempting” (12). Following an observation made by Ann Cvetkovich, Nemesvari
asserts that the “naturalness of sensational responses is closely tied to the apparent natural
capacity of women’s bodies to produce sensations” (11) and Tess’s “bouncing handsome
womanliness” (Hardy Tess 11) certainly seems to have this effect not only on male characters
throughout the novel, but also on the narrator and arguably even the reader. Angel Clare, while
studying Tess’s face, notes how “the curves of those lips…sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze
through his nerves” (132) and Alec D’Urberville’s adopted priestly “fire” (268) is easily
capitulates to his passion for Tess after he catches sight of her through the barn doors where he is
giving his sermon. Thus Tess’s eyes, cheeks, lips, her “arched brows” (132), her “thin and
shapely throat” (132), and, of course, her “bouncing womanliness” (11), haunts Hardy’s prose,
invoking the sensuality and eroticism characteristic of the sensation genre.
Most importantly however, Tess of the d’Urbervilles typifies one of the paramount features of
the sensation fiction genre: secrecy. As Kathleen Tilloston asserts, “the purest type of sensation
novel is the novel-with-a-secret” (qtd. in Nemesvari 13). As a plot device, secrecy builds
suspense and mystery, heightening the reader’s visceral experience of the narrative. In addition,
secrecy allows the author to surprise his reader with plot twists and unprecedented turn of events,
much like Alec D’Urbervilles’ reincarnation as a priest in chapter 45, or Tess’s murder of Alec at
the novel’s conclusion. Most importantly however, the use of narrative secrecy in Tess of the
d’Urbervilles foregrounds that “things are not as they seem” (Nemesvari 13), an idea that
deliberately undermines the “truth” realism attempts to extract from what Hardy calls the
“superficial” (“The Science of Fiction” 137). As Nemesvari suggests, “the sensationalism debate
therefore often took the form of arguing about who was “looking” in the proper places and
“seeing” society correctly” (13), an idea dramaticized by Angel Clare’s gradual
acknowledgement of Tess’s true virtue. Like Hardy’s narrator who appears as an objective and
removed observer of the novel’s characters and its events, Clare can only perceive the “more
ethereal characteristics” (Hardy “The Science of Fiction” 137) of Tess’s humanity from far away
in Brazil. Up close, Tess’s faults are fore grounded, but “from a far” she is “honoured, in that
distance makes artistic virtues of strains” (Tess 232). Such “shifting subjectivities” (Nemesvari
13) question the certainty of “truthfulness” in reality, and perhaps even of the realist genre itself.
As a result, Tess of the d’Urbervilles interweaves both realism and sensation fiction, allowing
Hardy to explore the limitations of the realist genre.
In conclusion, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and George Elliot’s Silas Marner
strategically combine the genre of realism with sensation fiction and romance fiction respectively
in order to reveal the limitations and the strengths of the realist genre as a whole. As George
Levine observes, “the truest realism, as George Eliot develops in her work, is one that truthfully
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Rethinking the Status Quo
confronts its own limitations” (16) or as Hardy suggests in “The Science of Fiction,” “to advance
realism as complete copyism … is the hyperbolic flight of an admirable enthusiasm…in which
the truth has been impetuously approached and overleapt in fault of lighted on” (136). As a
result, the nineteenth century realist novel is not necessarily a purely mimetic portraiture of
reality, but a form that attempts to express the complexities and ambiguities of human experience
by being equally equivocal and ambiguous itself.
Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Orlando: Harcourt & Brace College,
1981. Print.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner –The Weaver of Raveloe. Ed. Mary Bousted. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.
---. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Anthology of British Women Writers. Ed. Dale
Spender and Janet Todd. London: Pandora, 1989. 518-35. Print.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2000. Print.
---. “The Science of Fiction.” Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings. Ed. Harold Orel. New
York: St. Martin’s, 1990. 134-138. Print.
---. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Lennart A. Bjork. New York: New
York UP, 1885. Print.
Levine, George. “Introduction: George Eliot and the art of realism.” The Cambridge
Companion to George Eliot. Ed. George Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
1-19. Print.
Nemesvari, Richard. Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode. New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Print.
13
Rethinking the Status Quo
A Morality Story Founded on Aesthetics of Fairy Tales: Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
Jason Michael Beland
Université Laval
The approach to this Kurtz grubbing for ivory in the wretched bush was beset by as many angers
as though he had been an enchanted princess sleeping in a fabulous castle.
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness (38)
When discussing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the themes of morality and ethics
regarding Imperialism, greed, justice, power and race permeate not only the literary work but
also the criticism it has received. But there is a sense of familiarity regarding the themes and
morals experienced by the reader that causes Heart of Darkness to become a highly stylized
morality text. Conrad’s complex novella is considered to be a frame narrative. Yet Heart of
Darkness is also structured according to the traditional aesthetics of fairy tales. These aesthetics
often include settings that are symbolic (castles, forests, huts, towers), quests or adventures that
deal with magical realms, stock characters that lack depth, evil characters that have high social
status, distinctive story patterns and narrative structures using repetition of refrains and of the
numbers three or seven, golden elements and, most importantly, the morality aspect that pits
good versus evil. Ann Martin’s study named Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed:
Modernism’s Fairy Tales demonstrates that three authors of the modernist period, namely James
Joyce (Ulysses), Virginia Woolf (Orlando) and Djuna Barnes (Nightwood) used the meanings of
fairy tales as frameworks for reference in their own texts. Fairy tales were only written down
starting in the late seventeenth century (Norton 176) by people such as Charles Perrault and the
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Rethinking the Status Quo
Brothers Grimm, the latter being whom Martin considers of the greatest significance. However,
before that period, fairy tales were passed down through the oral tradition. These tales
incorporated “pagan beliefs and superstitions” whilst “recounting the adventures of banished
heroes and heroines … impoverished and abused characters, and people who had been cursed”
(Norton 175). They also ranged from being cautionary to pedagogical and moralistic,
traditionally pitting good versus evil. However, it “was through listening to the tales that one
gained a sense of values and of one’s place within society” (176). When looking into fairy tales,
one notices that they all share specific aesthetics that grant them the association to this particular
literary genre. Conrad’s use of stock characters, the number three, symbolic settings, as well as
the golden elements in Heart of Darkness conforms to the aesthetics of fairy tales. However, his
critique of Imperialism comes in the form of the subversion of the traditional happy ending.
The first common element Heart of Darkness shares with fairy tales is the unnamed stock
characters. In Cinderella, the stock characters are referred to as ‘the father’, ‘the King’, ‘the
King’s son’, ‘the prince’, ‘the woman’ (in reference to the evil step mother) and ‘the sisters.’
This mirrors the treatment Conrad employs for his characters whose identity is limited by their
function in Heart of Darkness. The only three characters that are given names are Fresleven,
Kurtz and Marlow. The remaining characters are described according to their role in the novella:
the Director of Companies, the General manager, the Brickmaker, the Accountant, and so on.
There are five men aboard the Nellie. Four are listening to Marlow tell his cautionary tale about
Kurtz. They are the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, the Accountant, and the narrator.
Conrad’s choice of these characters’ professions underlines the central theme and moral issues
he is critiquing. The Director of Companies is the embodiment of Imperialism, owing to the fact
that he is captain of the yacht and therefore loosely tied to a sort of emperorship. The Lawyer is
the embodiment of the lack of justice an Imperialist society offers the colonizer as well as the
colonized, and the Accountant symbolizes the greed of unjustly obtained capital. Conrad’s
choice of these characters’ professions foreshadows that which destroys Kurtz morally and
psychologically. Therefore, at the outset of the story, Conrad presents his tale by having Marlow
recite his account to four individuals, three of whom underline the main themes he will discuss
and one who recounts it to the reader. Conrad’s use of a narrator that is not Marlow mirrors the
origin of fairy tales stemming from oral tradition.
Another characteristic commonly used in fairy tales, repeated in Heart of Darkness, is the use
of the number three. The number three was meant to invoke a sense of completion, as shown by
the connecting points of a triangle, the beginning the middle and the end of a story and the Holy
Trinity. In the Cat and Mouse in Partnership, the cat lies to the mouse three times. In Our Lady’s
Child the girl is asked three times to tell the truth. The Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland tells
the story of three young girls who live in a treacle well. The genie grants three wishes, the Three
Little Pigs, and the list goes on. In Heart of Darkness, there are twenty-seven instances of the
number three. The men on the ship die at a rate of three per day (11), Marlow recalls three
barrack-like structures on his way down the river (12). Also, in reference to time or distance,
Marlow mentions “three miles” (17) and “three hundred miles” (28), the manager had served
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Rethinking the Status Quo
three terms of three years” (18), “three months” (19), “three weeks” (26). On Kurtz’s hut there
are “three little square window-holes” (52), and at Kurtz’s Intended’s residence there are “three
long windows from floor to ceiling” (68). Most of these references are in relation to the amount
of time that has passed or the amount of miles Marlow has traveled. Conrad invokes the
symbolic triangle of completion of Marlow’s journey, from the unnamed port city, to Kurtz and
then to Kurtz’s Intended. But Marlow has also grown spiritually, which is why he is described as
having “the pose of a meditating Buddha” on the last page of the book. The triangle is the
symbol of the Buddhist Sri Yantra. The Sri Yantra consists of nine interlacing triangles that
encapsulate Man’s spiritual journey towards his center. Having journeyed into himself and
gathered the moral strength to continue his pilgrimage, leaving Kurtz in the uncivilized heart of
darkness helps Marlow understand the corruption of the soul inflicted by the greed of
Imperialism. Conrad denies Kurtz this spiritual enlightenment and therefore his incomplete
journey symbolizes an end of civilized, moral, and spiritual evolution or progress when man
seeks only to gain material wealth.
Other characteristics that are found in Heart of Darkness that are common in fairy tales are
cannibalism, animals or monsters. Cannibalism in fairy tales is frequent, as demonstrated by the
Queen wanting to eat Little Snow White’s heart; the witch who will eat Hansel and Gretel if they
do not escape; and even the stepmother who makes black pudding from the dead boy and feeds
him to his father in The Juniper Tree. Marlow refers to the Cannibals, in the text, as “fine fellows
… in their place” (31). Here, Conrad is playing on the notion that, in wilderness, men will
devour themselves not only physically but also psychologically, the latter shown by Kurtz’s
inability to realize that his hunt for ivory is the cause of his madness. Furthermore, the use of
monsters or supernatural creatures is prevalent in fairy tales. Conrad includes these elements by
detailing Kurtz as being an “atrocious phantom” (54) resembling the “image of death” (55). In
Barbot de Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast the servants inhabiting the castle in the forest are
described as being invisible and ghost-like, therefore taking the shape of that which they are
serving Belle, namely platters or utensils of some sort. This lack of acute physical description
mirrors Conrad’s depictions of Kurtz’s servants, the pilgrims in Heart of Darkness being referred
to as ‘phantoms’ (14, 54, 63, 68, 71), ‘apparitions’ (54, 55), ‘shapes’ (14, 55, 59, 68), ‘forms’
(41, 48) and ‘shadows’ (14, 55, 56, 59, 60) that disappear, “vanishing without any perceptible
movement of retreat” (55) and thus initiating the contention that the forest contains elements
related to the supernatural, which will be discussed with regards to setting.
According to Joyce Thomas, “the four most common settings in traditional fairy tales are the
woods, the castle, the tower, and the hut in the woods” (127). Heart of Darkness contains all four
settings. The castle and the tower are the less obvious of the settings in the novella. However,
specific mentions to the Thames aiding “Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled
and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea” as well as “the GOLDEN HIND returning with
her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness” (Conrad 2) establish the
presence of a nearby kingdom. The more symbolic ‘woods’ or ‘forest,’ in fairy tales, are “the
threshold of the supernatural meaning its edge constitutes a literal threshold between man and
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Rethinking the Status Quo
nature, the cultivated and uncultivated, the tame and wild, the known and unknown” (Thomas
127). The forest, in Heart of Darkness, is pitted against the industrialized city. This delineation
between the apparent civilized (city) and the barbaric wild (forest) is attributed the classic ‘good
versus evil’ standard approach in Heart of Darkness. However, Conrad uses it on many different
levels. The confronting of Man with Nature is depicted by Kurtz and the jungle; tame versus
wild, Marlow versus Kurtz and the savages; and known versus unknown, Marlow and the voyage
into the jungle.
Conjointly, the hut in the woods is the other setting that is a common to fairy tales, and in
Heart of Darkness there are many along the river leading to Kurtz. Thomas stipulates that the hut
is a microcosm of the castle. It is the crude representation of man’s life in nature, thus creating
communion between man and the supernatural (131). In fairy tales, people who live in the woods
are usually regarded as being reclusive and strange. In Hansel and Gretel, a witch lives in a
candy house in the forest; the dwarves in Little Snow-White and the grandmother in Little Red
Riding Hood both inhabit a hut in the forest. Kurtz’s “heads on stakes … turned to the house”
(52) might warrant enough attention to be attributed the label of strange or grotesque. In
addition, Kurtz is considered a king, or maybe even a deity, in the region where he lives. As
such, his residence becomes that microcosmic representation of the castle. The wilderness has
gotten the better of Kurtz and he is not necessarily regarded as a recluse amongst the people
surrounding him; however, he has deserted the ‘civilized’ in favour of the ‘uncivilized’ and
therefore is considered reclusive for not returning to society.
The setting provided for Kurtz’s Intended symbolically represents the tale of the damsel who
is locked in the tower. Bachelard claims that the tower in fairy tales is “akin to the attic in its
association with the past, in the solitude it suggests” (qtd. in Thomas 129). Briar Rose,
Cinderella and Rapunzel are all confined to a type of tower. Briar Rose is asleep in the tower for
one hundred years, confined to the past and never aging. Cinderella is locked in the attic where
she reminisces about the past and is denied the possibility of a future. Rapunzel is trapped in a
tower in the woods that has no steps which symbolizes the witch’s “desire to hold time to the
past” (Thomas 128), denying Rapunzel the possibility of aging past adolescence. In Heart of
Darkness, Marlow claims that Kurtz’s Intended is “not of the playthings of Time” (69) and that
for her Kurtz had “died only yesterday – nay the very minute” (69) he had met her,
demonstrating that she is confined to the past image of Kurtz. Moreover, her residence is on the
first floor, which mirrors Rapunzel’s tower lacking steps highlighting “this denial of forwardmoving time and outside influences” (Thomas 128).
In relation to Kurtz’s Intended, the last common characteristic is the use of golden elements.
In fairy tales, golden elements usually symbolize virtue, intelligence, superiority, heaven,
worldly wealth, idolatry, and sometimes greed. Briar Rose, Cinderella and Rapunzel all have
golden hair, the bird that hints at the boy’s murder in The Juniper Tree does so perched on a
goldsmith’s domicile, the princess sits on a golden stool in Andersen’s The Leap Frog.
Excluding the reference to the Golden Hind, Conrad mentions gold three times in Heart of
Darkness. The first reference, “hunters for gold or pursuers of fame” (2), operates as ‘worldly
17
Rethinking the Status Quo
wealth’ but can also be used to critique man’s idolatry of gold as demonstrating the eminent lack
of virtue. The second reference, “a clean shaved man, with an official manner wearing goldrimmed spectacles” (66), is one related to greed and superiority because the gentleman, labeled
as having an ‘official manner,’ works for the Company and claims that they are entitled to all
Kurtz’s affairs (66). The most important reference to gold in Heart of Darkness is Kurtz’s
Intended’s “fair hair that seemed to catch all the remaining light in a glimmer of gold” (70).
Kurtz’s Intended can be associated to a princess with golden hair locked in a tower waiting for
her prince to deliver her. Her golden hair in this instant symbolizes Heaven, a place of salvation
where the streets are paved in gold (Revelation 21:21). This stance owes to the fact that Kurtz’s
salvation depends on what Marlow tells his Intended. Kurtz mentions to Marlow that he wants
justice with regards to the ivory he had collected “at great personal risk” (68). When he tells
Marlow that he wants justice, he is begging Marlow to let him keep the ivory, namely the only
part of his identity that he has left. By sending him up the river into the heart of darkness, not
only has the Company taken his life away from him, they have robbed him of his sanity and as a
result he has suffered the loss of his identity. Marlow questions himself in the end with regards to
the justice Kurtz wants, believing that said justice would be in fact to tell the truth about Kurtz’s
moral degeneration to his Intended and set her free. However, Marlow chooses not to do so.
Whilst in the jungle, Marlow had overheard Kurtz begging and battling himself exclaiming:
“Save me!—save the ivory, you mean. Don’t tell me. Save ME!” (56). The part of Kurtz that
wants salvation is the part that remembers a time before the ivory, and subsequently the same
part the Intended remembers. The lie Marlow tells the woman is the justice that Kurtz wanted.
Marlow’s lie permits Kurtz to reclaim the identity he had before he was commissioned to go
down the river. Therefore, Marlow’s lie condemns the Intended to the past, meaning the princess
is kept locked in the tower, thus subverting the traditional happy ending in fairy tales.
Heart of Darkness’ theme of morality is still as relevant today as when Conrad first had his
book published. The way by which he chose to communicate his social critique is, as
demonstrated, structured according to the traditional aesthetics of fairy tales, namely symbolic
settings, the use of distinctive story patterns such the repetition of the number three, stock
characters, cannibalism, animal or monster type creatures and golden elements. Martin claims
that “fairy tales are integral facets of revolutionary views of the history and psychology of
modern ‘man’” (35) and because Conrad is considered an early precursor to Modernism, Heart
of Darkness can be linked to Ann Martin’s study of Modernism’s Fairy Tales as another author
who used the meanings of fairy tales’ as a structure for reference in his own text.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, Dover Thrift Study Edition. Dover. New York, 2009. Print.
Martin, Ann. Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. U of Toronto P,
2006. Print.
Revelation 21:21, New International Version. (Colorado Springs): Biblica, 2011.
BibleGateway.com. Web. 23 August 2011.
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Thomas, Joyce. “Woods and Castles, Towers and Huts: Aspects of Setting in the Fairy Tale.”
Children’s Literature in Education, 17.2. 1986. pp. 126-134. Print.
Zipes, Jack, Lissa Paul, Lynne Vallone, Peter Hunt, Gillian Avery. eds. “Fairy Tales.” The
Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: the Traditions in English. W.W. Norton &
Company. New York, 2005. pp. 175-185. Print.
19
Crossing Borders
Exploring the Postcolonial World
Crossing Borders
A Cunning Approach to the Style and Pattern of Plantation Literature:
Charles Chesnutt’s Subversion of Plantation Stereotypes in The Marrow of
Tradition
Jessika Deschenes
Université Laval
The literary market place of late nineteenth century America offered African American
writers such as Charles Chesnutt a restricted choice in terms of their writing: “On one side lay
the plantation fictions and on the other the rabid, and racist fiction” (McDowell 157). As such,
Chesnutt chose to work in the style of the plantation novel, but re-appropriated the genre. Using
Sterling A. Brown’s article “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors” as a starting point, I
will argue that Chesnutt subverts the various literary plantation novel stereotypes in The Marrow
of Tradition. Drawing upon Brown’s model of racial type-characters including “the contented
slave, the exotic primitive, the Black brute, and the tragic mulatto” (Brown 56), this essay will
argue that Chesnutt uses all of these stereotypes to challenge the misinterpretation of Black
characters by White plantation novelists. I will analyze how the characters of Mammy Jane, Tom
Delamere, Josh Green, Captain McBane, and Dr. William Miller defy the hegemony of Black
stereotypes. First, through the character of Mammy Jane, Chesnutt undermines the stereotype of
the happy servant with a Black feminine counter-discourse, voiced by Dodie’s young nurse.
Furthermore, Chesnutt exchanges the character of the Black exotic primitive for a White
character: Tom Delamere. He challenges the validity of such a label to be appointed just to the
Black race. Chesnutt also creates the character of Josh Green, who goes beyond the stereotypical
dimension of the Black brute portrayed by plantation novelists, as he is a representative of the
Black badman lore. Within Black culture, the badman stands as a powerful symbol of leadership
and rejection of White domination. This figure is a positive one for the Black community and
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Crossing Borders
also represents a starting point in Black Nationalism. Yet, in order to subvert the literary
stereotype, Chesnutt uses a White character instead, Captain McBane, who epitomizes violence
and viciousness. Finally, Chesnutt’s Dr. Miller defies the stereotype of the tragic mulatto figure,
a person of both African American and Caucasian descent. He is a strong character who is not
torn between the two races. His tragic ending is not related to the idea that he is the result of
miscegenation, the mating of people considered of different racial types, and he does not accept
the predicament placed on his race by segregation laws. Chesnutt’s debasement of racial
stereotypes is a literary call for a shared revolution in Black and White consciousness.
The stereotype of the contented slave was introduced in novels such as Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In response to this typecast, which was addressed in Brown’s
article, Chesnutt creates Mammy Jane in The Marrow of Tradition. This character is the utmost
representative of the loyal and happy servant. She constantly expresses her love for her old
mistress, and, like Aunt Dinah in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “she realizes that her greater loyalty is due
to her mistress” (60). Moreover, she abides by this type of characterization since she has “the
mutual affections of the races, the slave’s happiness with [her] status, and a refusal to accept
freedom” (59). Although she is a free woman, she does not believe that Blacks truly need an
education but rather, that they should remain in their places, out of the White man’s way. She
says:
Dey ‘lows dey knows mo’ d’n I does, ‘ca’se dey be’n l’arnt ter look in a
book. I ’s fetch’ my gran’son Jerry up ter be ‘umble, an’ keep in ‘is
place. An I tells dese other blacks dat ef dey ‘d do the same, an’ not
crowd de w’ite folks, dey ‘d git ernuff ter eat, an’ live out deir days in
peace an’ comfo’t. [Sic.] (Chesnutt 502)
As Brown mentions, this type of discourse is “a convenient argument for those wishing to keep
‘the Black man in his place’ — out of great love for him, naturally — believing that he will be
happier so” (64). Mammy Jane does not transcend the image of the contented slave. As a weak
character, she serves as a warning for the passive Black population who is happy and blind to an
unjust fate.
Still, Mammy Jane has a counter figure in The Marrow of Tradition; Chesnutt uses the young
nurse of the Carteret’s home as a response challenging the hegemony of the contented slave
discourse. She says “these old-time Blacks made her sick with their slavering over the White
folks, who favoured them and made much of them because they had once belong to them, —
much the same reason why they fondled cats and dogs” (Chesnutt 501). However, for her “it was
purely a matter of business. There was no question of love involved” (501). She also believes
that Mammy Jane symbolizes a “relic of ante-bellum times” (501). Moreover, the fact that the
young nurse remains nameless throughout the novel brings her to be a larger representative, and
speaker, for a whole new generation of African Americans who reject their ancestors’ acceptance
for the prevailing White assertion of superiority over Blacks. This response to the contented
slave’s discourse is a way for Chesnutt to overthrow its effect. Even though Mammy Jane
remains a weak character, who dies fighting for her mistress and Dodie instead of herself and her
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people, she serves as a warning for Blacks who accept the stereotypes that an oppressor forced
upon them.
Another of Brown’s stereotypes that Chesnutt uses is the Black exotic primitive. In order to
subvert this misrepresentation, Chesnutt transposes it onto a White character. Instead of
depicting a Black man as “living the life of ecstasy” (Brown 80), Chesnutt uses Tom Delamere
to represent “the eternal playboy of the Western hemisphere” (82). Tom is a gambler and a
drinker; he is the one “who should be looked for in the most sophisticated environments” (83).
Indeed, young Tom Delamere’s actions are that of the exotic primitive character White
plantation novelists imagined. Chesnutt says:
two young men, members of the fast and set at the Clarendon Club, were
playing cards at a small table, near which stood another, decorated with
an array of empty bottles and glasses. Sprawling on a lounge, with
flushed face and disheveled hair, his collar unfastened, his vest
unbuttoned awry, lay Tom Delamere, breathing stertorously, in what
seemed a drunken sleep. (Chesnutt 591)
By transposing the stereotype of the Black exotic primitive onto a White
man, Chesnutt questions the validity and need for such blatant racial
profiling.
Plantation novels also invented the stereotype of the Black brute. Chesnutt depicts this
type of the vicious criminal and the bestial figure (Brown) by using the character of Josh Green.
As noted by Joyce Pettis, “Chesnutt is credited for introducing the first Black militant into the
literary arena in the character of Josh Green, whose defiance during the riot distinguishes him”
(40). Green defies the brute-like representation of his race by embodying the badman character
instead. This shift is significant, since the badman is a positive figure for the Black community.
Robert G. O’Meally contends that “like his counterpart and sometimes his adversary, the
trickster, the badman violates social conventions and spaces, virtually as will, and thereby
represents not just Black disdain for American oppression, but the ability to face hardship and to
win” (44). He symbolizes a leader who fights White domination and is a strong figure of Black
expression. Josh Green knows that Black people are being misrepresented by White
supremacists, especially in the setting of Wellington, through Carteret, the owner of the town’s
newspaper, and his use of an old editorial that undermined Blacks. Green says, “Ef a Black man
wants ter git down on his-marrow bones, an ‘eat dirt, an’ call ‘em ‘masters’,’ he’s a good Black,
dere’s room fer him. But I ain’t no w’ite folks’ nigger, I ain’. I don’ call no man ‘marster’.”
[Sic.] (563). As a result, and in order to avenge his parents, he becomes actively involved during
the riot. He fights against supremacists who are driving his people out of town based on false and
unjust prejudices. He says, “we read de newspapers, - an’ we ‘re tired er bein shot down like
dogs, widout jedge er jury. We’d ruther die fightin’ dan be stuck like pigs in a pen!” [Sic.] (719).
Josh then becomes a positive figure who transcends the violence attributed to the Black brute,
and who seeks equality and dignity for Black people. As O’Meally remarks, “it is the Black
stereotype in reverse” (45), and for the Afro-American folklore, Black badmen represent not so
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much fearful as exemplary figures of resistance. Chesnutt successfully subverts the effect of the
stereotype of the ‘brute’ character by creating a heroic figure. Like he does with Tom, Chesnutt
transfers the brutality and violence usually ascribed to Blacks in plantation novels onto a White
character, Captain McBane.
The root for Josh Green’s fervent anger is a childhood episode in which he witnessed
McBane, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, lynching his father and raping his mother. Thus,
McBane wears “the identity of the rapist and of the vicious criminal who represents the wild
passions of lascivious desire,” (Brown 71-73) a stereotypical Black trait. Not only did McBane
commit lynching and rape in the past, but he also holds a brutal racist discourse. He repeatedly
says, “burn the nigger” (Chesnutt), and states that “a dead Black man is no loss to any white
man” (Chesnutt 622). Chesnutt also portrays him as “lacking in human feeling” (624), for
instance, at the end of the novel when he is fighting during the riot and tells Green and other
Blacks that “if [they] resist, [they’ll] be shot like dogs” (724). Such behaviour and rhetoric
recalls the role of the brute. McBane, who is eventually killed by Green, is a metonymy for the
brutality of White supremacists. By fashioning such a character, Chesnutt anticipates Lerone
Bennett’s idea that “until it calls for nothing but rigorous condemnation, those who commit
crime should bear the odium. It is not a pleasing spectacle to see the robbed applaud the robber”
(Bennet 265). McBane is a character who seeks to rob Black people of their rights, believing
them to be inferior. He receives the White population’s approval, causing a violent racial
conflict, as Chesnutt demonstrates; there is a need for Green to avenge his family and for him to
become the leader of people who are unable to stand for themselves during the riot. With
McBane’s characterization, Chesnutt reverses the dynamics of the racial tags, challenging the
legitimacy of Black stereotypes
Chesnutt creates a strong and powerful version of the mulatto figure in the character of Dr.
William Miller. In fact, the latter does not resemble the stereotype described by Sterling Brown:
he does not “inherit the vices of both races and none of the virtues” (Brown 76). His
achievements as a Black man are not “attributed to the White blood in his veins” (76), he is not
“the victim of a divided inheritance” (77), and therefore, is not miserable. In fact, Miller is a
brilliant and admirable doctor, who founded his own hospital and who embodies an emerging
Black Bourgeoisie. Critic John M. Reilly states that “Dr. Miller believes that White middle-class
society is worthy of his emulation” (34). He is also devoted to his friends, Black or White, when
they are in need. In order to demonstrate that Miller is not ashamed of his blackness, like other
fictional mulatto figures might be, Chesnutt shows that his character is actually proud of his
Black roots. Once again, Reilly supports this idea as he argues, “Dr. Miller has not forgotten his
origins. His social conscience has brought him back to his home town of Wellington to open a
hospital and a nurses’ training school for Black people” (33). He does not consider his Black
origins as a social disadvantage. Chesnutt writes that Miller “showed nowhere any signs of that
degeneration which pessimists so sadly maintains is the inevitable heritage of a mixed race”
(Chesnutt 507). Even though Miller is highly respected by his White colleagues such as Dr.
Burns, he still has to follow state segregation laws and sits in a Jim Crow car when he returns to
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the South. As Lerone Bennett mentions in his book, Before The Mayflower. A History of Black
America, these laws were “fragile props” (260) which made “a wall, a system, a way of
separating people from people” (256). As a strong mulatto character, Miller neither accepts nor
believes in the asperity placed on his race through these laws. For him, “these people were just as
offensive to him as to the Whites in the other end of the train” (Chesnutt 517). Hence, Dr. Miller
cannot fit a stereotypical mulatto whose fate is supposed to be tragic. He helps to defend his
fellow Black man, and is not ashamed of being the result of miscegenation. He knows that he is a
worthy man who deserves respect. He even demonstrates great courage and humanity when,
convinced by his wife, he decides to treat the son of a White man whom he holds responsible for
the death of his own child. The act is not only humane, but transcends segregation. Dr. Miller is
a bridge between both sides, symbolized by his mixed heritage. He sublimates the mulatto
instead of following a tragic pattern of previous mulatto characters in plantation literature. As a
positive figure, Miller makes an important step towards eradicating racial barriers.
When he wrote The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt “would not bow to any reader expecting
his work to conform the nostalgic formulae of ‘plantation’ fiction” (McDowell 157). The novel’s
characterization of Blacks transcends the hegemony of numerous racial misrepresentations in
literature. Chesnutt not only borrows Brown’s categorization of Black typecasts from “Negro
Characters as Seen by White Authors,” but replaces it with a set of empowered Black characters,
such as Josh Green and Dr. Miller, challenging biased, racist portrayals of Blacks. Chesnutt also
shows the problematic effects of the fallacy of such portrayals as “the Black man had become a
target at which anyone might try a shot” (Chesnutt 669). Finally, through his positive Black
characters, Chesnutt brings to light the need to thwart stereotypes and to raise a united Black and
White consciousness beyond racial segregation.
Works Cited
Bennett, Lerone Jr. “The Life and Times of Jim Crow”. Before The Mayflower. A History of
Black America. New York: Penguin. 6th Ed. 1993. 255-96. Print.
Brown, Sterling A. “Negro Characters As Seen By Whites.” Callaloo. No. 14/15 (1982) 55-89.
Web. 10 October 2011.
Chesnutt, Charles. “The Marrow of Tradition” Three Classic African-American Novels. Ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1990. 465-747. Print.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed. Three Classic African-American Novels. Toronto: Random
House of Canada, 1990. Print.
McDowell, Deborah E. “Telling Slavery in Freedom’s Time.” The Cambridge Companion to the
African American Slave Narrative. Ed. Audrey Fisch. NewYork: Cambridge UP, 2007.
201-17. Print.
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O’Meally, Robert G. “Game to the Heart’: Sterling Brown and the Badman.” Callaloo, No.
14/15 (1982): 43-54. Web. 2 December 2011.
Pettis, Joyce. “The Literary Imagination and the Historic Event: Chesnutt’s Use of History in
‘The Marrow of Tradition.” South Atlantic Review. 55.4 (1990): 43-54. Web. 6 December
2011.
Reilly, John M. “The Dilemma in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition.” Phylon. 32.1 (1971):
31-38. Web. 18 November 2011.
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Crossing Borders
Ex Pede Dolorem: Cross-Cultural Exchange and Representation in V.S.
Naipaul’s “One out of Many”
Delan Hamasoor
York University
In 2011, Middle Eastern people began to rebel en masse against corrupt regimes to demand
governments representing themselves and their desires, ensuring democracies that govern in their
interests. The situation is ongoing: the speed and relative peacefulness with which Egypt toppled
their government differs from the globally assisted civil war in Libya, both of which contrast the
continued bloodshed in Syria. But as these struggles persist in their various forms, and as the
revolutions that topple old governments must engage the prosaic task of constructing new,
humane governments in their place, postcolonial theory with its old insistence on identity and
différance must strive to engage these new developments as they relate to globalization and
capitalism. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observes that
“there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself” (2202). Her
critique poses a simple question: how can truly marginalized subjects positioned outside
mainstream discourse, so distanced from controlling centres of economy and government that
they are beyond representation, represent themselves in terms of realpolitik? The answer is
predictably knotty: the subaltern’s entry into the centred, dominant discourse hinges on
representation, but representation is a transformative act whereupon this entry ties the subaltern
to the language of the centre. This is problematic for the representation of new subjectivities in a
protracted postcolonial context, in diaspora, migration, and emigration experiences, where one
given subject must represent an amalgam of past experiences and histories bleeding into the
present. As is noted in its title, V.S. Naipaul’s “One out of Many” presumes to tell a common
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story: lowly Santosh emigrates from Bombay to Washington as a cook for his employer, a
government representative of India. Santosh’s arc illustrates his evolution from a marginalized
domestic worker in Bombay to an American citizen, but Santosh goes from being happily
voiceless in the margins to apprehending what he calls “the knowledge that I have a face and
have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then
it will be over” (Naipaul 53). Though he catches the distortion inherent to representation, he is
not cognizant of its political dimension, so he is only able to self-identify in terms of superficial,
material processes—the body he must feed and clothe and the face that precedes it—after which
all else is negligible. In a world growing less postcolonial and more cosmopolitan, new realities
of cultural exchange beckon examination: is postmodern cross-cultural exchange meaningful
cultural dialogue or is it the material trade of distortions? Santosh’s story, his alienation and
dissolution, implies the latter. His immigration to the West culminates in a hollow embrace of
liberal materialism, his hollowness a result of the inherent distortion of commodification.
Most immediately, Santosh’s movement from serene life in the Bombay margins to his
miserable life as an American citizen reveals the rotten core of assimilation: his mimicry of the
centre, of the West, merely upholds the authority of the imperial centre. Santosh waxes nostalgic
for Bombay, when he works “for an important man” as a member of a class of “domestics” who
live “on the street”—“respectable people,” he says, who do not “encourage riff-raff” (15). This
position of voiceless wage-labour, where he “was content, sleeping on the Bombay pavement
with [his] friends, to hear the talk of [his] employer and his guests upstairs” (31), is in Stuart
Hall’s terms one of being “not fortuitously occurring at the margins, but placed, positioned at the
margins, as the consequence of a set of quite specific political and cultural practices” (441).
Santosh happily lives through his employer, in loyal subservience enacted through his culturally
condoned sahib-domestic (i.e. master-slave) relationship, and his shift in location portends his
miserable end. On his journey to America, Santosh dresses amiably, considering his position in
Bombay, but “no one among the Indians or the foreigners,” he says, “looked like a domestic.
Worse, they were all dressed as though they were going to a wedding and, brother, I soon saw it
wasn’t they who were conspicuous” (Naipaul 18). From here, Santosh becomes not just selfconscious about his representation but cognizant of how the “proper” representation is an
“American” one.
Despite the ostensible syncretism of a globalized world, the humanist assumption that all
national borders are open and cultures are intermixed in a grand global celebration, Indian
immigrants are depicted as mimicking Americans, because “American” means civilized, thereby
re-establishing colonial power relationships. Santosh sees the pitfalls of this in others while these
attitudes seep into him. At first, Santosh vicariously lives through this unnamed employer,
prostrates himself before him “as dirt” (31), and addresses him by sahib, Master. His sahib is
what Frantz Fanon refers to as “the national bourgeoisie,” who “identifies itself with the Western
bourgeoisie, from whom it has learnt its lessons” (1580). Sahib studiously appropriates Western
appearances for himself in his immigration to Washington, and he encourages Santosh to
assimilate alongside him. However, as Santosh develops an eye for representations, he begins to
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see his sahib as “frequently anxious,” fretting over his work, despite office colleagues who
ridicule him to his face in his own house (32). Santosh so loses respect for his sahib that he
leaves his employ without even notifying him. His new employer, the charismatic and smooth
restaurant owner and entrepreneur Priya, is the more successful embracer of American
capitalism. The mechanics of Santosh’s mimicry and subversion of his sahib then subverts only
the authority of the sahib, leaving the dominance of the imperial centre unquestioned; he only
throws off the vestments of the old country for the garb of the new. Homi K. Bhabha writes of
mimicry that the colonial power “is dependent for its representation upon some strategic
limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself” (123) and that this authority is
“a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge within an interdictory discourse, and
therefore necessarily raises the question of authorization of colonial representations” (129).
Mimicry ambiguously wavers between subjugating colonial authority through the partial
appropriation of the authority’s image or knowledge and reaffirming that authority’s dominance
in its tacit honouring of its virtues. The mimicries of the sahib, who grooms himself according to
standards of civility, and Priya, who styles himself as a smart businessman, vie to inhabit fully
Americanness for financial success, a change batting its eyes at capital through cultural capital:
the fancy apartment, the nice suit, and the business acumen. Santosh’s story, his marriage and
subsequent citizenship, relates his submission to the authority of the West; his subversion of the
sahib subjugates only his sahib, while he justifies American superiority by moving rapidly into
its discourses. Where once Santosh served an honoured sahib/slave relationship, in which he was
happy, Santosh’s marriage for better stature in the institutional system and conversion to liberal
materialism, his acknowledgement of the body he must feed that will one day die, relegates him
to anhedonia and the anticipation of death rather than any elation of freedom. In this the old
colonial binary remains: unable to inhabit the Western soul, he loses his own by submitting to
Western empiricism. Priya elaborates this process with a bitter play on a Western aphorism: “If
you can’t beat them, join them. I joined them. They are still beating me” (37).
This process is predicated on an economic level, a dynamic where cultural avatars from the
“East” are specifically catered towards Western tastes for profit and consumption, eliminating
whatever optimistic notions of positive cultural exchange there may be. In Santosh’s arc, cultural
interaction is chiefly economic. From the beginning, on a macroscopic level, “One out of Many”
references the inflation of the Indian rupee, and the immigrants moving to the United States are
either well-to-do businessmen interested in business or, in Santosh’s case, wage-labourers,
animating Marx and Engels’ (haphazardly worded) observation that economic centres of
capitalism, through cheap commodity items and technology, draw “all, even the most barbarian,
nations into civilization” (772). But here capital assumes vital importance as the means whereby
characters earn and delimit respect: Santosh defines his relationship with Priya in monetary
terms, earning Priya’s respect by steadfastly demanding a larger salary, just as Priya, the “big
man in Government,” commands Santosh’s respect through his appearance and monetary tip
(Naipaul 44). The language they are forced to learn, then, is one of business, where selfrepresentation becomes advertising. In sahib’s terms, “in Bombay it didn’t matter what you did.
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Over here you represent your country” (20), and this representation of Indian culture debases
itself before the altar of the lowest common denominator, the consumer. The customer is always
right, so each of Priya’s restaurant menus has “a drawing of a fat man with a moustache and a
plumed turban, something like the man in the airline advertisements” on them (39), with mostly
Mexican waiters because “when we put turbans on them they could pass” (41). This is not India
or Indian culture; these are distortions for sale of an ostensibly real, Orientalised culture, and the
commoditization of cultures culminates with each party appropriating the other as fetish object.
An American pays two dollars to a tour guide to hack the head off a statue in a sacred Indian
temple; conversely, Santosh in his desire to dress for respect purchases a green suit too large for
him that he never wears.
The result is that all culture dialogue mediated by capital flow is the dialogue of simulacra.
Tourism is a form of simulated cultural interaction, and between the souvenir statue-head and
Santosh’s useless green suit, subjects possess cultural items from the others that are in Jean
Baudrillard’s terms “never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an
uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (1736). The caricatures in the menu
and Mexican waiters offering an exotic dining experience to bovine America are India’s
simulacra, Baudrillard’s “signs which dissimulate that there is nothing” (1736). In America
Santosh finds only a feedback loop of empty representations masquerading as realities, a futile
simulation of productive cultural dialogue with the “East”: he encounters vagrant musicians and
dancers, whose song and dance seems to Santosh “like a Red Indian dance in a cowboy movie”
with “Sanskrit words in praise of Lord Krishna,” albeit with strong American accents and “bad
Sanskrit pronunciation” (Naipaul 24-25). American subjects adopt mannerisms from simulacra
spanning the cultural gamut, believing them authentic, and reflect them back at Santosh in a
nonsensical pastiche, Fredrick Jameson’s “late consumer or multinational capitalism” (20,
emphasis added). The dialogue of cultural capital as the exchange of simulacra is mutual,
refracting how the West appears to Santosh, as he learns about Americans and improves in the
English language through television, which he liked because “in these commercials [he] saw the
Americans whom in real life [he] so seldom saw” (Naipaul 27-28). Moreover, that sahib’s Indian
decor in his apartment looks to Santosh “like something in a magazine,” and that Santosh “never
felt that the apartment was real, like the shabby old Bombay chambers” (26-27), indicates how
universally pervasive the simulacra is: it moves to mediate and alienate subalterns from
themselves, their history, and culture as the simulacra becomes the only means whereby to them
the “East” appears. The superficiality of these capital/cultural exchanges alienates Santosh to
cultural exchange as a fruitful enterprise. He seems himself the internalization of the self-asother, and in his dour conclusion says, “I have closed my mind and heart to the English language.
. . . I do not want to understand or learn any more” (52).
Even if the only real moment of non-hierarchical social rapport Santosh has in Washington
occurs during the Washington riots, he remains alienated from what motivates his despair due to
this distortion. This rapport Santosh has with the rioters implies that the viable alternative to
Santosh’s fruitless assimilation is collective power and demonstration: violence and protest, what
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Fanon terms the “struggle” that “in its development and in its internal progression” acquaints
existing culture with new phenomena and in doing so traces out new forms for it (1592). In the
struggle and critique one finds oneself culturally, and Washington’s black population, wagelabourers like Santosh, find in their violent opposition and determinate negation an affirmation
their identities in terms distinguished from the white American identity. Hall terms this a
“struggle to come into representation”: where formerly “blacks have typically been the objects,
but rarely the subject, of the practices of representation,” these new strategies give them agency
(442). If Santosh and the black people both internalize themselves as other, then their shared
ennui is what causes their exchange of smiles following the riot. Santosh shares their excitement
in realizing that “they could do so much, that so much lay in their power” (Naipaul 35).
However, ironically, Santosh otherwise regards the black people from a suspicious distance as
hubshi, a pejorative term for black people and a completely different sign for black people here
transposed into a culture, geography, and collective subjective experience that bears no relation
to the hubshi of home beyond skin colour. Santosh’s derisive use of the word is an Indian
cultural unit, a relic of the caste system: a racist impulse, a negation, based on perceived
uncleanliness and lowliness. It appears as “a metonym of the Indian cultural experience, which
lies beyond the word, but of which it is a part” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 65). Once again,
capital attempts and fails to raise a bridge between the two, as Santosh’s reproach at the abject
hubshi remains even after his selling cannabis to the hubshi girl at the supermarket, and the
actualization occurs through struggle of the rioting black people to the same degree that it does
not in the politically indolent Santosh. Even during the riot, which he could see outside his
window, Santosh merely watches television, pacified. Even in his marriage, hubshi complex is
merely sublated into his thoroughgoing internalization of self-as-other, his misery his
apprehension of this perceived abjection rather than a realization of something else. That he
marries a black maid, an archetype of the subaltern, is a bitter irony: in assimilation, Santosh
occupies a figurative space as voiceless as that from which he begins. Rather than a triumph of
overcoming racism, this is a continuation, and Santosh is narcotized in his American life, the end
of which he anticipates.
Santosh’s alienation from America in “One out of Many,” by V.S. Naipaul, results from
capital exchange, the dominant language in the postcolonial world, prostrating all cultures before
itself and degrading them in corrupted, marketable simulacra; Santosh cannot cope with the
American image any more than he can recognize his own. But Spivak is still right to malign
“preserving subalternity” as “romantic” and “a contradiction in terms” (2207). She argues from a
position of extreme self-awareness of this process, where the realization that how one
understands their migration, their experiences, their travels, and their histories dictates their
understanding of their destination, their conclusion, and their present selves. Should the pitterpatter of literal feet, the shipment of human cargo like any other objects, define the voyage, then
the trajectory will signify so much emptiness. That many immigrants construe their voyages this
way informs the play in the title “One out of Many,” and its implications extend to a
technologically globalized world. While hypertext communication seems obsessed with novelty
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and breadth rather than depth, the Arab Spring is a rush of the subaltern into the centre that offers
the hope of a radical rupture and redefinition of self-perception and self-determination of Middle
Eastern subjects. The political issues, the corrupt governments and inequalities, are primary
objectives, but a happy accident, in effect, is how extremely marginalized figures in Tunisia,
Egypt, Libya, and Syria were and are able to represent themselves to the world at large
unfettered from the distorting mechanics of commodity capitalism, and this world largely
identified and sympathized with them. “No one today is purely one thing,” writes Edward Said
(336), and for the present Santosh provides a warning from the opposite perspective, a desolate
reality of ideological, racial difference and smug superiority, that now Naipaul himself
unfortunately dutifully inhabits.
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge,
2002. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. “From The Precession of the Simulacra.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch, et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 1732-41. Print.
Bhabha, Homi K.. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge Classics, 2004. Print.
Fanon, Frantz. “From The Wretched of the Earth.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch, et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 1578-87. Print.
---. “From On National Culture.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent
Leitch, et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 1587-93. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. KuanHsing Chen & David Morley. New York: Routledge, 2001. 441-49. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Cultural Turn: Selected
Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. New York: Verso, 2009. 1-20. Print.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “From Capital, Vol. 1: From Chapter 1. Commodities. Section
4. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch, et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 783-87.
Print.
---. “From The Communist Manifesto.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed.
Vincent Leitch, et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 769. Print.
Naipaul, V.S. “One out of Many.” In a Free State. New York: Vintage International, 2002. 1553. Print.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “From A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.” The Norton Anthology
of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch, et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 2197208. Print.
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Spaces of Resistance: Xuela as the Third Space in The Autobiography
of my Mother
Kristy Benz
Bishop’s University
The logocentric method of creating and interpreting meaning is often present in imperialistic
discourses, in which the colonizer exists in the privileged space while forcing the colonial
“Other” into the subordinate position. Postcolonial literature often challenges and attempts to
deconstruct these binaries, demonstrating the fluidity of meaning. In this essay I will consider
Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother using Homi Bhabha’s theory of the
Third Space in order to demonstrate Xuela’s resistance of the binaries of colonial power. In The
Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid often represents the binary powers of imperialism through
relationships; the narrator, Xuela, finds herself in several triadic relationships which she, as a
hybrid subject, comes to mediate. I plan to investigate in particular Xuela’s triadic relationship
between Jacques and Lise LaBatte. By standing apart from this relationship Xuela not only
refuses to submit to imperial power, but also interprets it and thereby disrupts it, creating an
important space for herself apart from it. Xuela’s body is a text of its own and, in her effort to
maintain possession of her body and thus herself, she refuses to bear children, and accordingly
disrupts cultural notions of change.
Like her father, Xuela is a child of the conqueror and conquered: a hybrid product of the
meeting of two cultures. Hybrids occupy a unique position that allows them to step outside of
these discourses and evaluate the construction of meaning. In The Location of Culture, Homi
Bhabha states that “[h]ybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity” (112).
However, this ability to reconsider meaning and identity is not granted automatically to any
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hybrid subject; because of their close connection to both colonizer and colonized, hybrids are
also potential victims to the semiotics of power that are inherent in imperial discourses. Xuela
hints that this meeting of two cultures in one person provides the opportunity for allegiance to
one or the other: “as in my father there existed at once victor and vanquished, perpetrator and
victim, he chose, not at all surprisingly, the mantle of the former” (Kincaid 192). Xuela’s father
chooses to ally himself with the more powerful of the binary oppositions. He has the opportunity
to exist as a hybrid but rejects it, and in doing so becomes a victim of imperialistic discourses.
Xuela also could have chosen to identify with either colonizer or colonized but instead she
removes herself from both, refusing to associate herself with her father’s world of the victor, but
also refusing to be a victim. In doing so, she reinforces Bhabha’s statement that “[h]ybridity … is
the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal” (112). Xuela
demonstrates this disavowal and thereby her position as a hybrid from very early on in her life.
The first time she speaks, Xuela does not speak in her “mother” tongue, even though she has
heard nothing else since her birth. Researcher and literary professor Giselle Anatol suggests that
“[Xuela’s] alienation from her biological mother results in her rejection of, or alienation from,
her ‘true’ mother tongue. Kincaid allows her character the choice of accepting (or denying) a
mother tongue that parallels the acceptance (or denial) of a mother” (942). Yet Xuela not only
rejects a mother tongue and a mother; she rejects what the mother stands for: the vanquished.
Xuela’s first words are in English, the language her father speaks, the language of the conqueror.
Anatol believes that “Xuela's inquiry after her father, which appears to leave her desire for her
mother momentarily quelled, is in fact a struggle to maintain a connection to the man who
represents her only living tie to her deceased birth mother” (942). I would like to suggest a
different interpretation of Xuela’s first words: By asking where her father is Xuela states that he
is not present; she uses the language of the colonizer to state that she is apart from them. She is
neither her mother, the conquered, whose language she rejects, nor is she her father, the
conqueror, whose absence is a source of alienation. She creates herself by removing her identity
from the implications of these binaries.
Because of her choice to abstain from the binary powers of colonialism, Xuela often finds
herself acting as a mediator between two signifiers: the colonizer and the colonized. Without her
intervention, the two sides cannot produce meaning: “The pact of interpretation is never simply
an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production
of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space”
(Bhabha 36). Xuela’s position as a hybrid who disavows the processes of domination allows her
to occupy the Third Space and thus grant meaning to the very processes from which she departs.
This is demonstrated in the relationship between Jacques and Lise LaBatte, a married couple
with whom Xuela lives for a brief period of time.
Xuela never states the ancestry of either Jacques or Lise; as readers we do not know for sure
whether they are of the colonizers or the colonized. However, Xuela does not need to tell us
explicitly: Jacques’ alliance with Xuela’s father, his riches, and his power place him amongst the
colonizers, while Lise’s submission and her physical insignificance align her with the colonized.
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Lise’s one power was her ability to make Jacques fall in love with her: she created a love potion
for Jacques out of her own menstrual blood, and they were married. However “[i]n time this spell
wore off and could not be made to work again. He turned on her … with the strength of that
weapon … between his legs, and he wore her out” (Kincaid 65). Lise has no power left; she has
become frail through the course of the marriage (64), much like the vanquished inhabitants of
Dominica. Xuela recognizes the binaries of power at play and works to remain outside of them,
both during her stay with the LaBattes and at other times in her life, thus maintaining her
autonomy as a woman and as an individual.
Not only does Lise lose her power of agency because of her submission to her husband, but
she also is degraded due to her inability to bear children. This inability to produce heirs calls to
mind Xuela’s mother, who is of the disappearing Carib people. Lise wants Xuela “to regard her
as if she were [Xuela’s] own mother” (66). However, this cannot happen. Xuela has become her
own mother, has learned to define herself through her estrangement from her mother and from
those like her mother. Anatol discusses this potential mother/daughter relationship between Lise
and Xuela. She recognizes that Xuela does not want Lise as a mother. Yet she attributes this to
the notion that “[u]nable to accept the idea of a mother other than the woman who gave birth to
her, she dissolves the relationship. … Xuela suffers in part because she refuses to let go of her
biological mother and becomes obsessively invested in the notion of the ‘authentic’ mother”
(Anatol 948). However, I believe that Xuela sees the connection between Lise and her mother,
and it is for that that she does not want to consider herself as Lise’s daughter. When imagining
what her father saw the first time he looked at her mother, Xuela says: “no doubt to him her
beauty would have lain … in her sadness, her weakness, her long-lost-ness, … her dejectedness,
the false humility that was really defeat” (Kincaid 200). These qualities could also be attributed
to Lise; thus, it seems that Xuela rejects Lise as a mother figure not because Lise is something
other than her biological mother, but rather because she represents something that is too similar.
Both women are downtrodden and repressed: the vanquished. Thus Xuela will form a friendship
with Lise but cannot accept Lise as her mother.
Lise and Xuela speak French patois when they are together, and once again, patois comes to
be connected with motherhood. Anatol interprets Lise and Xuela’s use of patois as a
“specifically female resistance to social propriety” (946), going on to claim that “language
becomes the means by which Xuela and Lise bond beneath the yoke of oppression” (947).
However, I believe that Xuela implies the opposite in the text. The two women do not use patois
to speak of their issues, rather, Xuela says, “we spoke of the things in front of us and then we
were silent” (Kincaid 74). Lise uses patois to teach Xuela how to make coffee for Jacques, and
then bathes her and dresses her, presumably in a way that will please Jacques. Thus patois serves
as a means for Lise to play mother to Xuela and to pass on the terms of her subjugation.
The category of speech and silence serves as another example of binary logic, in which
speech is privileged over silence, as it is speech that gives meaning to our existence and allows
us to create these binaries. Indeed, language is one of the most important agents of colonization.
Gayatri Spivak, in her famous essay Can the Subaltern Speak? claims that: “If, in the context of
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colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is
even more deeply in shadow” (82-3). This statement seems to doom Xuela and Lise as female
subjects in a colonial world, and certainly complicates my reading of Xuela. However, I have
already demonstrated the way in which Xuela uses language to attempt to remain outside of
power binaries. I would also like to suggest that Xuela upsets this binary of speech and silence
by demonstrating that speech does not have to be spoken out loud. She often communicates in
silence, and as such she demonstrates that silence can be meaningful, transcending yet another
binary.
One of the only true expressions of intimacy that we see in this novel is between Lise and
Xuela. At many points in their time together, the two women seem to communicate without
words. The first time that this occurs, Xuela is unsympathetic towards Lise. The two share an
unspoken conversation as Lise is giving Xuela a dress that was once hers. When Lise wordlessly
communicates the wishes she had had as a youth, Xuela thinks back to her: “You were foolish;
you should not have let this happen to you” (Kincaid 68). The women tell each other their
opinions in silence, Lise essentially telling of her adherence to the codes of submission, and
Xuela stating her removal from those codes.
However, Xuela eventually mediates Lise’s story rather than condemning Lise’s position. In
this intimate moment, Lise and Xuela sit, not looking at one another, and hold a conversation
with their thoughts (75). It is during this conversation that Lise tells Xuela “of the time she went
swimming; it was a Sunday, she had been to church and she went swimming and almost
drowned, and never did that again, to this day, many years after” (75). This near-drowning
incident makes an implicit connection to the story of the Siren from earlier on in the novel. The
Siren represents the false beauty and false promise of the island, luring the inhabitants out to
their deaths. The fact that Lise’s story takes place on a Sunday emphasizes the connection
between imperialism and religion; the colonizers offer a beautiful story of hope that, much like
the Siren, is nothing more than a false promise. Having been nearly killed by the Siren,
representative of the lies told by imperialism, Lise “never goes into the water of the sea, she only
looks at it” (75). Imperialism has made Lise into a shadow of what she could have been.
The story of the near-drowning leads directly to a description of Lise’s initial desire for
Jacques to posses her, connecting imperialist oppression with the oppression she experiences in
her marriage. Earlier on it had been said of Lise that “[s]he was not a frail woman when they first
met, she became frail only afterward; he wore her out” (64). Having been worn out by the man
she loved, she can no longer exist as anything but a shadow of her former self, who instead sends
other girls into her husband’s arms. She has been crushed by the lies of both imperialism and
romance, and communicates this to Xuela through silence. Xuela interprets this silence, and
because of her position as an outsider, is able to understand and deconstruct the forces at work in
Lise and Jacques’s relationship. By stepping away from Lise, by refusing to associate with her
on the terms of the oppressed, Xuela is able to mediate Lise’s story in reference to Jacques.
However, Xuela faces yet another burden and must come to terms with another alternate
means of communication: that of her body. Xuela’s pregnancy complicates her sense of
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Crossing Borders
selfhood. She can no longer maintain the distance that she has worked to create between her life
and Lise’s. When Lise informs Xuela that the latter is pregnant she says it in English (81), in the
language of the conqueror. Anatol suggests that here “[t]he use of English, the so-called ‘fathertongue,’ marks [Lise’s] complicity with patriarchal dictates for the oppression of women” (946).
Lise attempts to draw Xuela into the same state of submission that Lise occupies. If Xuela allows
the baby to be born it would implicate both her and the child in the binaries of power from which
she has struggled to remain apart. Xuela recognizes this, saying that: “because I no longer had a
future I began to want one very much. But what such a thing could be for me I did not know, for
I was standing in a black hole. The other alternative was another black hole, this other black hole
was one I did not know; I chose the one I did not know” (Kincaid 82). The first future mentioned
is in the place that Lise attempts to carve out for Xuela, a place in which Xuela would become a
part of the downtrodden and the colonized. Like the land of her island home, her body would
have been used to produce a commodity for the enterprise of imperialism. The second future, the
one that Xuela chooses, makes use of the Third Space, a space that is Xuela’s own.
Xuela not only occupies the Third Space in her rejection of the ideological codes of power,
her consideration of her body as her own and no one else’s is a way for her to embody the Third
Space. The body is outside of language and therefore exists outside of the binary codes so often
seen in imperialistic discourses. At the moment in which Xuela realizes that she never wants to
be like Lise, “the clothes I was wearing became too small, my bosoms grew out and pressed
against my blouse, my hair touched my shoulders in a caress that caused me to shiver inside, my
legs were hot and between them was a moisture, a sweet smelly stickiness” (65-6). Unlike Lise,
who no longer takes interest in her body, Xuela fully occupies her body. She stands apart from
Lise’s submission to Jacques, and as such from all such relationships, by realizing her own
feminine power. She revels in her body and feels no shame. As such, Xuela claims her body for
herself and for no one else; she will not bear Jacques’s child. She goes to a woman to have her
baby aborted, and says that afterwards: “I was a new person […]. I had carried my own life in
my hands” (83). This can be considered in terms of Bhabha’s statement that “by exploring this
Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves”
(Bhabha 38). By aborting her child and denying Lise and Jacques that commodity, Xuela evades
the politics of polarity, choosing instead to be in charge of her own fate.
Thus Xuela escapes from the binaries of an imperial world and exists as her own person. In
doing so she challenges many of the common beliefs that are often unquestioned society. One
belief that Xuela implicitly challenges is the cultural construct of children as agents of change.
Xuela’s adherence to her own Third Space may be seen as slightly ironic; the “others of our
selves” to which Bhabha refers in his consideration of the Third Space implicitly suggests
positive change, and many consider children to be symbolic of this. However, in order for Xuela
to fully occupy her own Third Space, she must claim her body for her own and thus abort her
child. As such, Xuela not only resists colonial binaries, but she forces us to reconsider the
essence of change.
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Works Cited
Anatol, Giselle Liza. “Speaking in (M)Other Tongues: The Role of Language in Jamaica
Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother.” Callaloo 25.3 (Summer, 2002): 938-953.
Web. 9 November 2011.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? <http://www.mcgill.ca/files/crclawdiscourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf> 10 November 2011. Web.
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Natives, Interlopers, and the Rightful Inheritors: Colonial and Postcolonial
Tensions in Stargate: Atlantis
Laurel Rogers
University of British Columbia
Stargate: Atlantis, a popular American science fiction television show that ran from 20042009 and a sister series of the longer-running Stargate SG-1 (1997-2007), is in many ways a
traditionally colonial science fiction story. As a mass-market series arising from the American
Western genre and produced for a specifically American audience, the show employs many
colonial stereotypes in the propagation of a neocolonial American agenda. Yet, upon closer
examination, Stargate: Atlantis does not always fully support the so-called “American Dream”
of expansionism into space, occasionally subverting the neocolonial discourse expected of it.
These incidents of destabilization are not necessarily overt, and are not necessarily viewed by the
audience as such, but they nevertheless create a space in this popular science fiction work where
the dissonance between colonial discourse and postcolonial challenges to that discourse can be
explored. By examining two such instances in the first three seasons, I hope to illustrate the
subtle ways in which a neocolonial discourse is articulated, but also disputed, in Stargate:
Atlantis.
American science fiction television is typically classified as stemming from the Western
genre, as literalized in Star Trek’s labelling of space as “the final frontier” (Johnson-Smith, 1).
The largest and most popular examples of the genre generally manifest as what Uppinder Mehan
categorizes as colonial (as opposed to postcolonial) science fiction. The Western relies on
expansionist underpinnings, constantly attempting to “conquer” and domesticate the “Wild
West”; critic Jan Johnson-Smith contends that science fiction retains that basic relationship,
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Crossing Borders
simply replacing “the West” with the universe (46-48). “Modern American sf television,”
Johnson-Smith says, “... is individualistic, progressive, technically and aesthetically innovative,
scientifically secular, potent, humanist, democratic—even egalitarian: it is the quintessential
American Dream” (2). Yet when the universe is not conceived of as empty, the drive to conquer
or domesticate extends to the literal alien other, thereby imposing the “American Dream” on the
aliens—an act which places it within the realm of colonial literature. With its focus on “rescue”
and “salvation” from an oppressor already in place (an alien species known as the Wraith),
Stargate: Atlantis seems to occupy a particularly neocolonial, rather than traditionally colonial,
position.1 As the film and television industries have been recognized as important vehicles of
ideological dissemination, however, especially in reference to American cultural neocolonialism
(De La Garza), this seems an appropriate emphasis. Produced by an American corporation for an
American audience with conspicuously American protagonists, leaders and agendas, Stargate:
Atlantis does appear to conform to this neocolonial ideology, especially in the main characters’
intersections with less-technologically advanced societies (which are by far the vast majority,
apparently, in the Pegasus galaxy).
This categorization of Stargate: Atlantis as colonial, however, is not as clear-cut as it may
first appear. Firstly, the classification of the show as fundamentally and entirely “American” is
challenged by Gaile McGregor and Stan Beeler, who each explore the Canadian production
influence on Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis (the series are both filmed in Vancouver,
British Columbia, with Canadian writers, directors, producers, and actors). As well, the show’s
narrative alternately utilizes and undermines colonial and neocolonial tropes. Many times the
members of the Atlantis expedition do “rescue” vulnerable Pegasus galaxy societies from each
other and from the series’ main antagonist group, the Wraith, invoking a colonial “rhetoric of
protection” (Spurr 34); their attempt to liberate a planet of children and young adults from a
“barbaric” custom of ritual suicide at the age of 24, however, paradoxically exposes this planet to
the Wraith (episode 1.6, “Childhood’s End”). The Wraith themselves, vaguely humanoid in
appearance, are eventually revealed to be genetically half-human and half-parasitic insect. Not
only does this complicate the complementary binaries of good/bad and human/other (alien)
typically present in colonial discourse, but it leads to an exploration of individual and group
identity, the meaning of “being human,” and the ethics of scientific research and experimentation
as well as its practical deployment through a series of experiments performed on unwilling
Wraith over the second and third seasons of Stargate: Atlantis. Atlantis expedition doctors and
scientists attempt to develop a “retrovirus” that will suppress the insect half of Wraith DNA, thus
effectively turning Wraith into humans. The retrovirus is created with good intentions—by
turning the Wraith, whose vampiric feeding on the “life force” of humans is required in order to
survive, into humans themselves, they would eliminate the threat facing humankind as a whole,
as well as the uncomfortable feeling that arises in both the characters and the audience from
finding the members of the Atlantis expedition in the position of the colonised rather than—as
expected—the coloniser. But this exposes a distinctly human and imperial bias; it presupposes a
hierarchical placement of the human species above the Wraith species, and ignores any instances
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(literal or metaphorical) of similar activity in human history. The stance essentializes the entire
human race (a feature of David Spurr’s colonial discourse trope of appropriation, discussed in
more detail below), and it draws attention to the hypocritical colonial assumptions from which
the urge to “fix” the Wraith arises. With all the moral and ethical questions raised in their
execution, the experiments of course do not go as planned, and the technology is both violently
opposed by the Wraith and then eventually seized by them for use on each other in the
facilitation of their civil wars. The ramifications of the experiments are never fully resolved;
their spectre hovers uncomfortably in the background of the Atlantis expedition’s subsequent
interactions with the Wraith. The show’s presentation of—but inability or refusal to solve—such
moral, ethical, and colonial dilemmas for the viewer locates the show in a liminal space in
between colonial and postcolonial literature, in which these postcolonial musings can be subtly
expressed to a public perhaps unfamiliar and uncomfortable with them.
In its treatment of the various alien and/or non-Earth-based human cultures, Stargate: Atlantis
often employs specific tropes that Spurr identifies as elements of colonial discourse. For
example, it often presents various Pegasus galaxy “natives” (a term used by the show) as
primitive, backwards, and unable to develop due to periodic Wraith cullings, thereby implicitly
ranking their societies below Earth’s (“classification”) and glossing over their histories prior to
contact with the Atlantis expedition (“negation”).2 Yet, as it does with Wraith-human relations,
the show often subtly problematizes the colonial tropes and attitudes it portrays.
Episode 16 of the first season, called “The Brotherhood,” simultaneously uses and repudiates
what Spurr calls the trope of appropriation, or the colonizer’s assumed right to the physical and
cultural space they enter. Rhetoric of appropriation, according to Spurr, “implicitly claims the
territory surveyed as the colonizer’s own”; the colonizer, rather than the “native,” therefore
becomes the rightful “inheritor” (28). The planets of the Pegasus galaxy are widely populated by
humans, who are nonetheless portrayed and referred to as culturally “backwards” in comparison
to and technologically “inferior” to humans from Earth. Members of the Atlantis expedition see
themselves—and by extension the entire Earth-based human race—as the rightful inheritors of
the Atlantean technology and legacy. No real justification is presented for this assumption: their
superiority seems self-evident in their moral positioning as “the good guys” and in the
supremacy of their knowledge and technology (after all, they, not any other group of humans,
were able to discover the secrets of and operate the Ancients’ technology). Every subsequent
achievement of the show’s protagonists therefore serves to legitimize their self-proclaimed
position as the Ancients’ successors.
In “The Brotherhood,” however, this assumption of due inheritance is contested by the human
inhabitants of the planet Dagan. The episode centers around the search for a powerful ZPM, a
kind of battery, the protection and keeping of which had at one time assumed a religious
importance to a group of Daganians called “the Brotherhood,” who were charged with its
protection until the Ancients came to reclaim it. The episode’s plot follows Atlantis’ first contact
team’s Indiana Jones-esque treasure hunt to discover the ZPM’s hiding place, and their attempt
to prevent an enemy society, the Genii (more technologically advanced than most Pegasus
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Crossing Borders
societies, on the verge of developing atomic weapons, and strongly visually identified with a
Nazi stereotype3), from stealing it. Eventually they manage to obtain the ZPM and escape the
Genii, only to discover that the Daganian anthropologists working with them to recover the ZPM
are actually the current manifestation of the Brotherhood. Having realized over the course of the
episode that the current occupants of Atlantis are not returned Ancients and regarding them
therefore merely as human squatters, the Daganian Brotherhood forcibly recover and remove the
ZPM from the team, presumably hiding it in a new location for further safeguarding.
The Daganians’ denial of the Atlantis expedition’s inheritor status can of course be
interpreted in myriad ways and on myriad levels. From the perspective of the series-long
narrative—the most obvious and obviously intended reading—this episode comes in a long line
of frustrated attempts to locate desperately needed power sources, this one placed on Dagan
specifically for the use of the Atlantis expedition thanks to the time-traveling efforts of the
expedition’s leader, Dr. Weir. The series also, as Michael Young notes, expressly associates
members of the Atlantis expedition, especially Dr. Weir and John Sheppard (military commander
and team leader) with the Ancients (108-109). In this sense the audience is meant to perceive that
the Brotherhood’s denial is unjustifiable, and it shows the Daganian’s lack of true perception and
judgement, ultimately reinforcing their implicitly lower status. “Sadly” for the Daganians, Young
comments, “they have not recognised that Weir and Sheppard and their team are the second
coming of Atlantis” (109).
But the Daganians’ response begs the question: how sad—and how incorrect—is this
judgement really? How worthy of the Ancients’ legacy are the members of the Atlantis
expedition? To what extent does their ability to decipher the language and technology of the
Ancients before any other groups empower them to claim inheritor status, and does the very act
of appropriation support the expedition’s right to appropriate the Ancients’ resources and
knowledge? In general, the ideology of Stargate: Atlantis operates under the colonial assumption
that the expedition is worthy of heirship, righteous and superior to any civilization already extant
in the Pegasus galaxy. As many examples throughout the series and the few mentioned above
prove, however, the members of the Atlantis expedition are not infallible; in fact, they often
behave rashly, highly prejudicially, and with a sense of colonial entitlement. The series’ early
opening to ambiguity around and interrogation of the prevailing colonial myths prepares for
eventual moments of their outright refutation: rather than being accepted as the rightful heir of
the Ancients, for example, the members of the Atlantis expedition are actually unceremoniously
kicked out of the city when a lost group of Ancients suddenly appear and reclaim their city. Of
course the balance is restored within two episodes: firstly, for the practical reason that the show
cannot continue if the protagonists are not in Atlantis and have no hope of returning there soon,
and secondly because the show as a whole tends towards gentle questioning and partial
destabilization of, rather than categorical negation of, colonial myths. In the end, the members of
the Atlantis expedition usually do win; the costs and long-term ramifications, however, are not
always entirely self-congratulatory.
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Not all science fiction produced from a dominating or neocolonialist context such as the
United States is necessarily a colonial work. Mehan terms such “writers from within the centre”
who “offer important critiques of the process and effects of colonization” dissidents (169). I
would not go so far as to situate Stargate: Atlantis as dissident; it does, however, hover on the
edge of dissidence every time it recognizes and questions its colonial underpinnings. I also do
not want to overemphasize the show’s tension between colonial and postcolonial discourse—in
the majority of episodes and to most viewers, watching the show purely for the pleasure and
fascination of an enjoyable science fiction experience, the tension may not consciously register
(except in its narrative manifestations). Furthermore, the show’s refusal to outright address these
issues can lead to an impression of their default acceptance. But to a critical viewer, the dissident
moments in Stargate: Atlantis indicate a slight shifting of its popular discourse away from the
dominant neocolonial form.
Notes
1
In classifying Stargate: Atlantis as “neocolonial” I mean to invoke an ideological distinction
regarding the justification of intervention between colonial discourse, which involves the sense
of liberating the “primitive” from their primitiveness (i.e. civilizing them), and American
neocolonial discourse, which involves the liberation of a victimized group from an oppressive,
abusive Other (see, for example, discourse around America’s invasion of Iraq).
2
Similarly, I believe that an examination of the tropes inherent in the presentation of Teyla and
Ronon, the series’ two main Pegasus native characters, would be quite fruitful, especially with
regards to the characters’ aestheticization, idealization, naturalization, and eroticization.
3
Science fiction television shows have a long-standing history of associating alien races and
cultures with contemporary political entities. In the original Star Trek series, for instance, the
Klingons are identified with the Soviet Union, and the Romulans with the People’s Republic of
China and/or North Korea (Sarantakes 78).
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Works Cited
Beeler, Stan. “‘It’s a Zed PM’: Stargate SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis and Canadian Production of
American Television.” Beeler and Dickson 154-66. Print.
Beeler, Stan and Lisa Dickson, eds. Reading Stargate SG-1. London: I. B. Taurus, 2006. Web.
16 November 2011.
De La Garza, Sarah Amira. “Neocolonialism.” Encyclopedia of Communication Theory. 2009.
Web. 24 November 2011.
Hipple, Dave. “Stargate SG-1: Self-possessed science fiction.” Beeler and Dickson 27-47. Print.
Johnson-Smith, Jan. Introduction. American Science Fiction TV: Star Trek, Stargate and Beyond.
By Johnson-Smith. London: I. B. Taurus, 2004. 1-11. Web. 16 November 2011.
Mehan, Uppinder. “Teaching Postcolonial Science Fiction.” Teaching Science Fiction. Eds.
Andy Sawyer and Peter Wright. Houndmills, GB: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 162-78.
Web. 22 November 2011.
McGregor, Gaile. “Stargate as Cancult? Ideological Coding as a Function of Location.” Beeler
and Dickson 131-53. Print.
Sarantakes, Nicholas Evans. “Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of U.S. Foreign Policy: The
Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series.” Journal of Cold War Studies 7.4 (2005):
74-103. Web. 24 November 2011.
Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and
Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Print.
Stargate Atlantis: The Complete Series Collection. MGM, 2009. DVD.
Young, Michael W. “Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis: The Gods of Technology Versus the Wizards
of Justice.” Beeler and Dickson 95-110. Print.
44
The Question of Self
Identity, Perception, and Expression
The Question of Self
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage: Texts of
Multiplicity
Kathleen MacDougall
Concordia University
Mirroring and reflection are key to the structure of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, as evidenced
by the numerous references to mirrors and reflections throughout the text. These images,
together with Humbert Humbert’s diction and the structure of the novel itself, attempt to create a
cohesive textual experience, yet ultimately work to fragment the text. The un-fixedness of the
text created through these media can be viewed through the lens of the instability of identity as
revealed in Lacan’s mirror stage. By investigating these examples from Lolita using Lacanian
methods, the reader is able to explore the fragmented nature of the text. In fact, each mirroring
technique in Lolita reminds the reader that there is no definite text just as there can be no definite
signified when the symbolic relationship between language and what it represents is inherently
multiplicitous. This essay will explore the instability of the novel through images of mirroring
and reflection, Humbert Humbert’s use of alliteration, as well as the diary sections of the text.
Ultimately, the reader will learn that coherence for Nabokov’s text, like the fragmented Lacanian
subject, is rendered an impossible dream.
In 1977 Jacques Lacan first published his seminal theory concerning the mirror stage of
identity development. The mirror stage, as Lacan states, is “the transformation that takes place in
the subject when he assumes . . . an image” (94). The first moment that an infant recognizes his
reflection occurs “before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and
before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (94). The subject, at the
core of its being, enters into a relationship with the symbolic and enters subjectivity, based on a
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The Question of Self
misrecognition of self as an image. After initial recognition, the infant sees the connection
between his actions and his intentions and thus enters into a relationship with the imaginary.
Moreover, by the end of the mirror stage, the “specular I” develops into the “social I” based on
its relationship to the self as Other (99). This process constitutes the “fragmented body” that will
forever be at the power of the “primordial Discord” of the relationship between the Innenwelt
and the Umwelt (97). The act of mirroring attempts to bind two distinct parts into a whole -- the
object and the reflection of the object should function as one entity. As the mirror image of the
self, like any signifier, cannot have a binary symbolic relationship with the object it reflects or
signifies, the reflection of the subject that language creates fragments the subject rather than
assimilates it. This sense of fragmentation dominates the subject’s relationships with language
and the self indefinitely.
In Lolita, the description of setting is often extremely detailed and frequently includes
reference to reflections and mirrors in a manner that highlights the function of mirroring in the
text as a whole. One of the most prominent instances of mirror images in the novel is in the
initial description of Humbert and Lolita’s room in the Enchanted Hunters’ motel. Humbert, as
narrator, recounts the setting and says, “There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the
mirror, a closet door with a mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a reflected bed
there, the same in the closet mirror, two chairs, a glass topped table, two bedtables, a double
bed…” (Nabakov 119). This description pays particular attention to the reflecting surfaces of the
various mirrors, the window, and the glass-topped table. Although the reflecting surfaces are
highlighted, the object they reflect is of greater importance. The central reflected object, the
double bed, is a significant site in the novel. Humbert and Lolita consummate their relationship
in this bed, so the bed may be said to be the central location of Humbert’s denouement. In effect,
each reflection of this object offers the potentiality of variant meanings. For instance, the bed
reflected in the “closet mirror” may represent the dark and concealed nature of the couple’s
relationship, while the “bathroom door” reflection may represent the unclean nature of Humbert
and Lolita’s encounter. In other words, the various possible meanings of the bed’s reflected
image, like the reflected image of the Lacanian subject, preclude a fixed signified and thereby
fragment the text. As a signifier with no clear identity, the bed cannot exist in merely in the
realm of the imaginary, a space of fixed meaning.
When Humbert first arrives at the Haze household, his description of the scene employs
similar reflective imagery. When Humbert describes his descent with Charlotte into the garden
he says, “my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water” (40). Significantly, this
quotation appears immediately after the character sees Lolita for the first time. Humbert’s
encounter with the nymphet makes him acutely aware of his own identity and so-called
“nympholepsy” (129). In a scene that recalls the unstable subject of Lacanian discourse,
Humbert becomes so removed from his experience that his knees are not part of his body, but
rather a reflection of his body. When the character initially meets Lolita, he encounters the object
of his desire: the object that will determine the action of the rest of the novel. As Lacan’s work
suggests, when the subject becomes the “social I,” he can no longer have a definite role or
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The Question of Self
purpose, and the subject, along with language, becomes fragmented. Thus, Humbert’s reference
to reflection pinpoints his reaction to a crucial moment in both the plot and in the formation of
his identity in the novel. Humbert’s desire for Lolita, the main driving force behind the novel,
fragments the text, as well as Humbert’s identity.
In Lacan’s view, desire creates the split in language that disallows a binary relationship
between the signifier and the signified. The subject realizes that he fulfills a role for the Other;
the subject becomes a site through which the Other attempts to fulfill the demands of his own
lack. In effect, the desire for the Other severs the imaginary wholeness of the Other. In the
novel, this splitting of the self and Other by desire is reflected in Humbert’s ambivalent
characterization of Lolita. On the one hand, Lolita is described as “dynamic” and full of “violent
significance” upon arrival at the Enchanted Hunters (119). On the other hand, she is “dull and
silent” during her road trip with Humbert (239). In the same way, when Humbert recalls
encounters with strangers on the road trip, he refers to Lolita as his “sweet fool” (190).
Conversely, Humbert refers to Lolita’s “nasty” nature as they discuss the planned route for their
travel (139). The character’s view of Lolita is split by his desire for her. In the text these two
mirror images are never resolved. Even at the end of the novel, when Lolita is no longer the
young girl that initially incited his desire, Humbert still refers to her with admiration. Although
Humbert describes Lolita upon their last meeting as “hopelessly worn at seventeen,” he still
refers to her as his “Lolita!” (278). Despite her physical changes, Humbert still clings to Lolita as
his “faint violent whiff and dead leaf echo of the . . . past” (278). He is unable to negotiate the
ambivalence that surrounds his desire for Lolita.
At the same time that Humbert’s desire splits his view of Lolita’s identity, it also splits
Lolita’s identity in her relation to Humbert. Through their incestuous relationship, Humbert fills
two very distinct roles for Lolita: both lover and father. As a so-called adult at seventeen, Lolita
repeatedly refers to him as “Dad” (273). In fact, Lolita’s letter requesting money from Humbert
even addresses the character as such (266). Although Lolita does refer to Humbert as “Dad” most
often as an adult, she also uses the same epithet earlier in the narration. When Humbert fears a
“cop” is following them on their trip, Lolita addresses him as “Dad” emphatically (219). Lolita
also addresses the character as “Dad” immediately after she asks him if “[they] are lovers” when
he picks her up from camp after Dolores’ death (114). The split that Humbert’s desire creates
not only exists in his language and identity, but also in his view of Lolita and in Lolita’s view of
her relationship with Humbert.
Throughout his narration of Lolita, Humbert’s diction also creates a mirroring effect that
works to fragment the narrative. Through his repetition of phrases and words, as well as
alliteration, Humbert attempts to create a unified image of himself and the events he describes,
but instead creates a fragmented character. In its traditional poetic use, alliteration aims to draw
attention to similarities in qualities or objects. Alliteration brings both consistency and
predictability to a text. As narrator, Humbert employs alliterative descriptions in his attempt to
convey a sense of consistency and stability surrounding identity. His alliterative epithets and
descriptions show the many images he presents throughout the narration. Although the epithets
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The Question of Self
attempt to portray an essential truth about Humbert’s identity, they fail to do so and in fact
highlight fragmentation. Humbert, like all subjects, does not have a single, unchanging identity,
but rather has an identity of multiplicity. The first description Humbert gives the reader of his
childhood self is “happy [and] healthy” (10). The Humbert of childhood is simplified and
idealized in Humbert’s view. Although the image he conveys changes, the character continues to
use these alliterative descriptions when he refers to his own “gloomy good looks” before he and
Lolita begin their first road trip (104). Although Humbert’s self-absorption is clear in this
quotation, he views himself in a tragic way. By the end of the novel, he refers to his final poem
as a “maniac’s masterpiece” (257). Humbert tries to present a unified vision of himself as a man
cursed with nympholepsy. Humbert uses alliteration to make his phrases and descriptions sound
whole and consistent, but over the course of the novel, the tool of alliteration breaks down and
gives a different viewpoint. Just as the infant is unable to maintain a binary relationship with its
image, once it has developed the “ambiguous” relationship with the symbolic of the “social I,”
Humbert is unable to maintain a binary relationship between himself and the image he presents
(95). In Lolita, the tool of alliteration, the tool with which the narrator attempts to bring stability
to the text, proves as inherently unstable as any signification.
Not only do the language and the symbolism of Lolita create a mirroring effect, so does the
structure of the novel. Although Humbert directly narrates the majority of
Lolita’s plot through first-person narration after the events, the novel includes two other sections
of narration. The book includes a foreword, as well as rewritings of Humbert’s diary entries
written at the time of his stay with the Haze family. Traditionally, the foreword of a novel
provides the reader with an opportunity to gain perspective on the events of the novel that differs
from the narrator’s own. This structure, then, suggests that there is an unalterable truth of the
novel/text that can be revealed by the addition of multiple perspectives. However, the foreword
of Lolita challenges this idea by showing that an image of the signified that is not fragmented is
impossible. The foreword does not provide the reader with a voice that differs from Humbert’s;
although the fictional writer of Lolita’s foreword is John Ray, Jr., his voice is indistinguishable
from Humbert’s. For instance, John Ray, Jr. refers to Humbert as a “paradoxical prude” (4), a
phrase that is strikingly similar to the alliterative epithets Humbert himself provides throughout
the narration (4). It is also interesting to note, given the brevity of the foreword, that not only is
John Ray, Jr.’s diction similar to Humbert’s, but, like Humbert, he also includes minute details in
his writing. For instance, John Ray, Jr. mentions Mona Dahl, Rita, and other characters that
played little part in the action of the plot (4). The aforementioned traits, which are key to the
narration style of both John Ray, Jr. and Humbert Humbert, mirror and attempt to create a
unified text, but draw attention to the innately fragmented nature of the text.
Another aspect of the novel’s reliance on mirroring as a structural element is the section
devoted to Humbert’s diary. A diary reflects events, records a narrator’s reactions to an event, or
relays a narrator’s thoughts, often immediately after the events happen. The personal nature of a
diary implies an honest and timely recounting. Humbert claims his diary entries were written at
the time that the discussed events occurred, yet his style in the diary section is very similar to his
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The Question of Self
voice in the rest of the narration. Although it contains purely factual and unfinished sentences
like “Very warm day,” the diary section also includes elaborate phrasing that is typical of
Humbert’s voice (41). For instance, Humbert says, “every movement [Lolita] made in the
dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body” (41). Humbert
describes Lolita with the same finessed language he uses once they become lovers. Humbert’s
“abject body” reminds the reader of the descriptions he gives of himself as dirty, like in his
“polluted rags and miserable convulsions” (284). Although the diary section aims to establish a
candid and therefore more truthful depiction of the signified, the subject, and the text, it produces
a text that relates to an elusive and unidentifiable object of signification.
Mirroring is present throughout Lolita in various ways. The images, diction, and structural
elements that include mirroring make key points in the novel appear more bizarre, rather than
simplify them. The prominent references to mirrors and reflections, along with Humbert
Humbert’s use of alliteration and obscure details, as well as the diary section of the novel all
attempt and fail to create stability. These contradictions and conflicting images show the
instability of the subject as well as the text. Much like in Lacan’s Mirror Stage of identity
development, mirroring shows that Humbert’s narration, Lolita, and the novel are incapable of a
fixed, stable meaning.
Works Cited
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits: a Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London:
Tavistock, 1977. Print.
Nabakov, Vladimir. Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print
50
The Question of Self
Fragmentation of the Human Psyche in King Lear
Alexei Fraser
University of British Columbia
The dawn of the printing press marked the birth of the typographic man and a new
consciousness. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan investigates the implications and
effects of literacy on society and the individual. McLuhan argues in favor of a cyclical view of
tribal identity, believing that the electronic age has caused a resurgence of tribal traits in
contemporary society (‘nonliterate’ or ‘oral cultures’ will from this point forward replace
McLuhan’s term ‘tribal’). In an effort to define the attributes and differences of societies
dominated by different media, McLuhan juxtaposes the societal fabric of print culture to nonliterate cultures and the contemporary electronic mentality. McLuhan outlines the physiological
and extended effects of these media on human senses; he argues that humans are written as the
embodied extensions of the technology that society creates. Each dominant form of a
communications system leads to an unbalanced focus on a specific sense. While nonliterate
cultures rely on the ear, for a literate, print-based, alphabetic culture the sense of sight dominates
the other senses.
Literacy acts as a colonizer. The move from the ‘hot ear’ to the ‘cool eye’ stems from our
changed methods of learning; in an oral society, the formation of knowledge and community is
solely ear based, while in literate cultures, knowledge is disseminated and acquired through the
eye. Even society’s figurative terms for knowledge and understanding are eye based, “I see that,”
“that shed some light on the problem,” “that lecture was illuminating.” To illustrate the massive
impact that print media has had on the human experience from the Medieval to the Modern
period, McLuhan begins his book with reference to King Lear. These changes in the societal
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The Question of Self
fabric are explicit in Shakespeare’s treatment of sight, space, individuality, and a changing
natural order.
McLuhan chose a play by Shakespeare to showcase the consequences of media evolution on
sensual experience. Shakespeare wrote during a time marked by a revolution in media sparked
by the development and proliferation of print based forms. Though working within an age when
print, a parasitic medium, consumed all, Shakespeare still worked in a predominately oral
medium. At the time in which he wrote, however, plays, an ingrained oral tradition, began to be
published by such playwrights such as Ben Jonson, despite the warnings given by many
playwrights and public figures like the Lord Chamberlain.
Shakespeare never published any of his plays, though many were published during his
lifetime through the printing of pirated prompt books, some famously in multiple versions. Seven
years after Shakespeare’s death a self-proclaimed official edition of his complete works was
printed by Hemings and Candell, now known as “The First Folio,” which, in the introduction,
insists upon the impure characteristics of all other editions and its own validity. The move
towards the printing and remediation of oral content and the necessary redefinition of an oral
trade highlights the climate of media change and perception.
The printing press in Europe was invented in 1440 and, one hundred and twenty years later,
Shakespeare wrote King Lear. According to McLuhan, the dispersal and effects of newly
developed media on sense perception are immediately apparent. However, by the time
Shakespeare began to write, one could directly experience the “fragmentation of the human
psyche by print culture” (McLuhan 33). Although the majority of society in the early modern
period was illiterate, the analytic linear thought processes (made possible by alphabetic seriality)
was taught to the masses by their literate leaders and preachers who had a larger access to
standardized printed knowledge (Deibert 72). Furthermore, as Brian Rotman argues, “One can
always avoid picking up a pen, but one cannot avoid being described, identified, certified and
handled like a text. Even in reaching out to become one’s own ‘self,’ one reaches out for a text”
(94). McLuhan’s use of King Lear is not only applicable due to this change in the climate of
perception, but also due to Shakespeare’s immersion and role in this widespread evolution and
the dramatic impetus these issues play in the tragedy itself.
One clear development of the dominance of print based media is the transformation of the
human understanding of sight and space through “the interiorization of the technology of the
phonetic alphabet translat[ing] man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual
world” (McLuhan 18). While non-literate cultures commonly depict a scene all at once, for
example, a common image may include a fish under the ice and fisherman visible at the same
time, this newly developed visual world led to a three-dimensional understanding of space as
standardized in Newtonian analysis. Although Shakespeare wrote pre-Newton, space had begun
to be viewed as linear and unified in the late sixteenth century due to cartography and recent
world exploration. The introduction of perspective in paintings was a direct result of this learned
interpretation of spatial relations. For McLuhan, perspective in art is a literate interpretation of
the world. Three-dimensional interpretation of space is not a priori, but empirically derived
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The Question of Self
through understanding; this analysis of space demands a visual separation from touch, smell, and
sound. A non-literate person is not taught to observe three-dimensionally, they “have no
detached point of view. They are wholly with the object. They go empathically into it. The eye is
used, not in perspective but tactually as it were” (37). The holistic oral individual breaks a scene
down piece by piece when observing a scene; for instance, a chicken wandering in the
background of a scene has a narrative with the same significance as the human in the foreground.
Shakespeare effectively creates and draws attention to the empirically learned nature of threedimensional space in 4.6 of King Lear in the scene when Edgar attempts to trick the blinded
Gloucester into believing he is truly jumping off a cliff to his death. Edgar creates a scene with
visual perspective for Gloucester using language focused on the sense of sight. Through Edgar’s
tricks of perception, Gloucester, still reliant on his visual sense due to the recent nature of his
blindness, is easily misled into considering the space around him as three-dimensional and
begins to “see” the cliff at his feet. He is easily convinced of this lie because of his trust and
reliance on the simulated eye. Edgar explicitly preys upon Gloucester’s imperfect senses:
Edgar: Hark, do you hear the sea?
Gloucester: No, truly
Edgar: Why, then your other senses grow imperfect by your eyes’ anguish.
(Shakespeare 4.6.5-8)
McLuhan argues that the appearance of space as three-dimensional is illusion alone. Edgar layers
five two-dimensional panels of narrative and description to create and describe this illusionary
quality of three-dimensional space and perspective.
Come on, sir; here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles (1). Halfway down
Hangs one that gathers sampire---dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head (2).
The fishermen that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice (3); and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight (4). The murmuring surge
That on th’ unnumb’red idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high (5). I’ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong. (4.6.11-24)
The more oral and ear-based character of Edgar creates a false perspective using a twodimensional understanding of three-dimensional space. While mourning his broken relationship
with his legitimate son, Gloucester continues to convey his understanding of the world in visual
language, once more insisting on the visual nature of his sensual experience, “Oh dear son
Edgar- The food of thy abused father’s wrath: Might I but live to see thee in my touch, I’d say I
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The Question of Self
had eyes again” (4.1.23-26). The revolution of perception clearly plays out in this scene, which
illustrates the newly fragmented and misled nature of human understanding. The new sense-ratio
apparent in Gloucester’s character mirrors society’s new unbalanced reliance on one sense and,
therefore, its inevitable pitfalls misperceptions.
The fragmentation of human systems due to the infiltration of print media led to a new
understanding of self in the context of community interactions. In oral societies, as well as in the
future of electronic media, there exists a unity of consciousness. However, “in our long striving
to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no
more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the
fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture” (McLuhan 32). With the change in sense
ratios, moving away from the more community-based and passionate ear, to the cold eye, the oral
system of community and group identity fragmented into a newborn individualism.
Individualism is defined as the “the independent, autonomous and thus (essentially) nonsocial moral being, as found primarily in our modern… ideology of man and society” (Deibert
95). While oral societies learned in groups and held a shared narrative, literate individuals
learned on their own and, facilitated by writing, had access to their individual narratives and
histories. Hamlet is the prime example of a literate, self-aware individual, attached to the word
and self-reflexive. The origin of individualism in literate societies can also be attributed to the
introduction of the standardization of knowledge and society born out of the printing press. The
individual and the person were standardized along with the word, creating the possibility for
idiosyncrasies in character (Eisenstein 62). The social necessity of fulfilling roles for the benefit
of the community broke down into a system of individuals considering themselves as
independent of the other. In contemporary studies of the effects of literacy amongst non-literate
societies, there shows a strong movement away from the group identity towards a self-identity
upon the introduction of phonetic literacy. Though McLuhan’s study should be questioned
ethically and anthropologically, other scholars, such as Ong, have described similar studies. “For
the educated African… the sense of interest has been aroused through the new variety of life and
monotony has become a trial to him as it is to the normal European. It takes greater will-power
for him to be faithful to uninteresting work, and lack of interest brings fatigue” (McLuhan
33). Through a newly developed sensual hierarchy and knowledge acquisition, these once oral
individuals have become individualized, separating their own interests from the group’s
wellbeing. Before the introduction of phonetic script, the subjects were “good workers, cheerful,
uncomplaining, unaffected by monotony or discomforts, honest and usually remarkably truthful”
(33). These persons developed a self-conscious and self-interest which translated the group’s
interests into individual actions characterized as much more selfish. The alphabet created a
psychic interiority; the seriality of the alphabet “favors the monad, its movement always swerves
into the self-contained whole- the isolated, independent unit or organism, the irreducible thing in
itself” (Rotman 31). In other words, the technology of writing forced the person to turn towards
the self, explore one’s own identity, and create the unity of apperception. The effects of phonetic
script and literacy on previously non-literate societies are mirrored in the visually consumed
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characters of King Lear.
Evoking the ghosts of previously dominating media forms, McLuhan interprets the tension
between the characters of King Lear as stemming from a sensually created dichotomy of
existence. While some of the characters have evolved into individualistic beings, fulfilling a job
rather than a role, others still consider themselves as only a part of the communal
consciousness. In terms of St. Augustine, the role is “the view of the self as the arrangement of
equal and unequal beings, appointing to each, the place fitting for him” (Deibert 96). With the
power of print media came a centralization and standardization of knowledge and the creation of
personal narrative and memory, which inevitably lead into a strongly individualistic culture. The
character of King Lear, through the use of the print facilitated map, visually realizes his power as
a tangible concept. This self-creation and embodied mirroring inevitably leads to his destruction.
As monarch, the royal is the physical embodiment of his land. Lear’s literate nature leads to the
fragmentation of the literal land and the psychic self. The tangible quality of his power gives him
the ability to physically separate three-dimensional space, while his self-consciousness leads him
to selfish acts and self-alienation.
Other characters, when called upon to verbalize and make palpable their affection for the
king, show their own fragmentation from the group identity. Goneril and Regan expose
themselves as visual creatures who are affected by print culture with their use of literate and
sensual language. With such phrases as, “Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; /
dearer than eye-sight, space and liberty” (Shakespeare 1.1.57-58), the sisters’ own personal
values are elucidated. Their most valued features and constructs (eyesight, space, and liberty) are
those indicative of a visually dominated individual. After professing their affections for King
Lear, both daughters turn to self-interest, a trait previously discussed as being a symptom of print
based cultures. The most analytic minded character in King Lear, Edmund, is the “the prime
agent in the fragmentation of human institutions” (McLuhan 12). Using print, specifically a
letter forged in his brother’s name, Edmund begins the events that lead to the blinding of his
father, Gloucester. Consequently, Edmund’s actions ultimately upset the natural familial order.
Shakespeare focuses on the unnatural existence of the print-based characters throughout the
play. The unnatural acts by the literate characters are sometimes explicitly foregrounded and
paralleled in scenes, for instance, the marking of the daughters’ first true betrayal with a tempest.
While the literate women hide from the sounds of the storm in Gloucester’s residence, Lear
begins to accept his own sensual weakness when faced with the awe-inspiring storm and begins
to revert back to the natural oral self, “And thou, all-shaking thunder, / strike flat the think
rotundity o’ th’ world! / Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once / that makes ingrateful
man” (Shakespeare 3.2.6-9). The tempest mirrors the unnatural state of power created by the
individual desires and selfish actions of the typographic agents. While the rest of the family and
royalty stumble into the literate, autonomous world, the youngest daughter continues to inhabit
the realm of the nonliterate subject.
Cordelia, the youngest sister, exhibits the traits of a non-literate individual in her fulfillment
of her intended role and her inability to make tangible or describe her affections at her father’s
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The Question of Self
request, “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. / I love your Majesty according to my bond; no
more nor less” (1.1.94-95). Despite her ostracization, Cordelia inhabits the naturally given role
of daughter and subject through her actions and continued loyalties. Kent and Edgar, the two
other characters who exist as subjects rather than as individuals, also remain loyal to their natural
position despite the many hardships they encounter; their strength seems to be birthed through
their suredness of the natural order. Edgar continues to be a loyal son to Gloucester and, through
his disguise as Tom o’ Bedlam, continues to exist in his natural community with the hopes of
redemption. The character of Kent is also exiled for fulfilling his natural role as the advisor to
King Lear. Though exiled, Kent continues as a lowly servant to continue his service, putting his
self aside for the benefit of his king. As seen in McLuhan’s study of phonetic learning in nonliterate cultures, the characters fulfillment of the more tribal characteristics value the community
and their natural born roles rather than individual successes and desires. Once more, King Lear
proves to illuminate the effects of the fragmentation of human experience created by an
unbalanced reliance on visual sense and the new and still undigested print-based culture.
McLuhan’s treatment of King Lear clearly communicates the implications for social change
when non-literate societies are faced with alphabetic systems or print-based media. However, in
the Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan also prophesizes our contemporary revolution of media and
sense-experience. While Shakespeare experienced the sharp shift towards individuality and other
literate phenomena, contemporary society is once more moving towards a global community
dynamic. In many ways, the postliterate is closer to the nonliterate in its societal fabric. Due to
developing technologies, our fragmented society of individuals evolves closer to a global
consciousness. Society hesitantly moves towards a once-more communal consciousness in our
postmodern dismissal of the individual in favor of the subject. The tensions between group
identity and individual identity, as seen in King Lear, can be observed today in the general
resistance and academic confusion in this post-individual age. King Lear’s tragic arch should be
considered as a warning for these tensions, pushing for a more compromising application of the
media determined sense perceptions.
Works Cited
Deibert, Ronald. Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order
Transformation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth Lewison. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy; the Making of Typographic Man. Toronto:
University of Toronto, 1962. Print.
Rotman, Brian. Becoming beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human
Being. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Ed. Joseph
Laurence Black. Peterborough: Broadview, 2006. Print.
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The Question of Self
A Bird of Paradise and a Steely Arctic Thing: Incompatibility between Gerald
Crich and Gudrun Brangwen in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love
Alexandra Pope
Bishop’s University
In D.H Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, three factors extinguish the voltaic connection
between Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen. Firstly, and most importantly, the former’s latent
homoerotic longing for comrade Rupert Birkin speaks for his complete emotional unavailability.
Secondly, the couple are incapable of harnessing, subordinating or dominating one another. Try
as they might, they are locked in an inconquerable power struggle. Lastly, Gerald is Gudrun’s
“polar” binary, for he is by nature a steely, frigid, “arctic thing” (9), and she is a hot, green,
living “bird of paradise,” (87). Gerald’s sexual orientation, the constant, electric feud over
dominion the duo engage in, and their fundamentally opposed dispositions destine their union for
failure.
In the early 1900s the word “queer” came to be employed as a pejorative synonym for
“homosexual,” in addition to its earlier definition, “eccentric” (OED). It is plausible, then, as
Women in Love was published in 1920, that the frequent use of the adjective to refer to Gerald is
a deliberate authorial strategy meant to suggest that Gerald is in fact a closeted gay man. Birkin
observes that Gerald “always seemed to be at bay against everybody, in spite of his queer,
genial, social manner when roused” (46, emphasis added). Further on, his face is animated by a
“queer little smile in [his] eyes” (47, emphasis added) and “Gerald’s eyes narrowed with a queer
dangerous smile as he watched [Birkin]” (50, emphasis added). The word appears again and
again: “a queer look came over Gerald’s face” (61, emphasis added); Gerald speaks in a “queer,
quiet, real voice” (90, emphasis added); “a queer, smiling look tightened Gerald’s face” (260,
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The Question of Self
emphasis added). Mrs Crich warns Gerald to take care of himself, lest he end up on “Queer
Street” (404, emphasis added), and while away on their snowy retreat, a “queer, indefinable
hostility” (427, emphasis added) pervades Gerald’s friendship with Birkin. The repetition of the
term emphasizes that Gerald’s orientation, his authentic self, is questionable - arguably, “queer.”
His homosexuality is decidedly an insurmountable impasse to a fulfilling partnership with
Gudrun.
The biblical allusions to Sodom work in conjunction with the repetition of the word “queer”
to illuminate Gerald’s sexual identity. In conversation with Gerald on the train, Birkin wonders
about the destruction of the human race “like Sodom” (52). With Ursula, also, Birkin refers to
men and women as the “apples of Sodom” (146). Birkin could have elected to allude to another
biblical, historical or even fictitious example of human annihilation but opts instead for
“Sodom,” the city in ancient Palestine where village men called on Lot to let them “sodomize”
his angel guests (Gen.19: 15-29). The homosexual parallels are undeniable. If Gerald is actually
homosexual, how can he aspire to have a successful, healthy relationship with Gudrun? The
former could never be fully satisfied by her, despite arguments posited by his friend Birkin in the
closeted man’s favour that simultaneous, mutually exclusive love between women and men can
co-exist. I argue that Gerald’s secret homosexuality is the primary reason for the bungled
engagement with Gudrun.
In addition to the iterance of the word “queer” and references to Sodom as the more explicit
hints at homosexuality, there are admissions, confessions and narratorial observations of tacit,
same-sex attraction between Gerald and Birkin, as in the following passage:
There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very
near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk
brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous
intimacy which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with
apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial occurrence. Yet
the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other,
inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their
relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be
so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them.
They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and
men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but
suppressed friendliness (28).
Gerald and Birkin are in love with one another and cognizant of the homoerotic magnetism, but
they share a complete lack of intention, however ungratifying it may be, of acting on the desire,
believing it to be “unmanly and unnatural,” that is, effeminizing and abberrant. In the 1920s
homosexuality was largely taboo; understandably, the men opted to cloak their yearnings from
the public and deny even themselves the satisfaction that acting upon impulse would allow. The
secret nature of their love necessarily prescribes a self-imposed distance between the men: “They
always kept a gap, a distance between them, they wanted to be free each of the other. Yet there
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was a curious heart-straining towards each other” (91). Despite their avoidance of one another,
repressed sentiments burgeon unchecked within the friends.
Chapters “Man To Man” and “Gladitorial” are the most laden examples of homoerotic lust
between Birkin and Gerald. When Birkin is bed-bound due to illness and Gerald comes to
comfort him, “the two men had a deep, uneasy feeling for each other” (193). Birkin even
“ejaculates” a guttural little sound in response to Gerald’s banter (195). The latter admits that he
was “attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction, that he was mistrustful, resenting the
bondage, hating the attraction” (199). Gerald accepts that he is beyond platonically interested in
Birkin, but refrains from consummating his homosexual lust for him. In “Gladitorial,” the
repressed energy from their neglected sexual urges culminates and climaxes in a nude,
copulatory wrestling match punctured rhythmically with phallic verbs: “Gerald had a rich,
frictional kind of strength” (262), “[h]e impinged invisibly upon the other man … and then
suddenly piercing in a tense fine grip that seemed to penetrate into the very quick of Gerald’s
being” (262, emphasis added), “[t]hey seemed to drive their white flesh deeper and deeper
against each other, as if they would break into a oneness” (262, emphasis added). They finish
their tussling one on top of the other, exhaling from the strenuous exertion, in a sort of postcoital bliss or rapture: “Gerald’s hand closed warm and sudden over Birkin’s, they remained
exhausted and breathless, the one hand clasped closely over the other” (264). Gerald ends the
chapter by attempting to verbalize his gay love for Birkin, confiding candidly, “I’ve gone after
women – and been keen enough over some of them. But I’ve never felt love. I don’t believe I’ve
ever felt as much love for a woman as I have for you – not love. You understand what I mean?”
(268). By Gerald’s own admittance (and by this point he has met Gudrun), he has never felt
“love” for anyone but Birkin. This love is doomed to remain unrequited, as the consequences of
vocalizing their lust would mean social ruin for each. In fact, not only does Gerald find love
impossible to feel with a member of the opposite sex, but even keeping up carnal interest in them
is a challenge: “After a debauch with some desperate woman, he went on quite easy and
forgetful. The devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women nowadays. He
didn’t care about them anymore. A Pussum was all right in her way, but she was an exceptional
case, and even she mattered extremely little. No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any
more” (225). How, then, can the affair between Gudrun and Gerald end in matrimony if he is
incapable of heterosexual affection – love – for her? Gudrun is a woman. Given Gerald’s
difficulty sustaining interest in women, Gudrun naturally is subject to the same fate. She is as
expendable and valueless as any other. The principal reason for the failure of Gudrun and
Gerald’s coupledom is that he prefers men, specifically, Rupert Birkin.
Gerald’s secret sexual inclination is not the only obstacle in the way of a mutually satisfying
and harmonious relationship with Gudrun. Gudrun and Gerald are involved in a fight for
supremacy in their union. Gerald strives to assume the “top” in the dalliance, which frustrates
Gudrun. She too wants the superior position in the partnership. Each refuse to capitulate.
Gudrun’s refusal to submit to Gerald’s domination contributes to the demise of their partnership.
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According to Carolyn Tilghman in her article “Unruly Desire, Domestic Authority and Odd
Coupling in D.H Lawrence’s Women in Love:”
the maternal authority and phallic sexuality characteristic of heterosexual
coupling encroach upon Gerald’s and Gudrun’s separate individualities
and their personal freedoms by means of reciprocal dominations and
exploitations that culminate in a distasteful and destructive fusion of the
self and inimical other. Both Gudrun and Gerald sense that the other’s
perverse will to dominate and exploit mirrors his or her own will to
exploit and dominate. Consequently, more because of than in spite of
their antagonistic roles, they merge in the ugly pleasure each gets from
degradation and the desire for power (98).
Gudrun and Gerald are locked in a battle where one continually attempts to subjugate the
other. There is no equality, but a constant tug-of-war between the two parties that ultimately
results in their separation. In “Beastly Desire: Human/Animal Interactions in Lawrence’s Women
in Love,” Andrew Howe echoes Tilghman’s argument:
the central thesis of Women In Love is that in order to maintain
equilibrium in a relationship, both parties need to fight to establish their
own individuality and power. This struggle, if both sides retain equal
power and control, will lend to an equality with no semblance of
ownership. If one of the parties in the relationship grows to control the
other, however, a state of ownership will occur, corrupting the union.
This is the case with Gerald’s relationships; he exerts dominance over
Gudrun, thus objectifying her as part of his property (439).
From the onset of the novel, Gerald is dominant and in complete control over everything: his
inherited mining operation, which he whittles down into a finely-tuned, well-oiled machine, his
cattle, whom he herds away while Gudrun and Ursula dance the Dalcroze, Bismarck the rabbit,
whom he violently thumps on the head to sedate, his red Arab mare, whom he breaks by stabbing
her flanks, and lastly, his courtships with women. Needless to say, if he is to remain consistent,
he will attempt to govern Gudrun absolutely as well. With Minette Darrington, for instance,
Gerald felt “an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty.
For she was a victim. He felt that she was in his power. He would be able to destroy her utterly
in the strength of his discharge” (58). Gerald is aroused and intoxicated by the prospect of
dominating Minette. Later, he repeats, “she must relinquish herself into his hands, and be subject
to him. She was so profane, slave-like …” (59). When Gerald wakes after intercourse with her,
he observes that “There was something small and curled up and defenceless about [Minette], that
roused an unsatisfied flame of passion in the young man’s blood” (69). Gerald is stimulated by
her defeat. Minette awakens later, and “her inchoate look of a violated slave, whose fulfillment
lies in her further and further violation, made [Gerald’s] nerves quiver with acutely desirable
sensation. After all, his was the only will, she was the passive substance of his will” (72,
emphasis added). Gerald’s treatment of Minette speaks volumes about his yearning for an object
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he can own, like a slave, or subject to his control. Gerald is titillated by the prospect of debasing
Gudrun. However, in her he meets his match: “How should Gerald hope to satisfy a woman of
Gudrun’s calibre? Did he think that pride or masterful will or physical strength would help him?”
(442). Gudrun is not to be dominated. The fact that unlike his horse, his bunny, Minette, his
cattle and the colliery he cannot bully or subdue Gudrun makes her an incompatible partner. She
will never yield.
Gudrun will not be objectified, infantilized, owned, or bridled. She spurns Gerald’s attempts
to control her: “She knew she could outwit him. But it was a fight to the death, she knew it now”
(454). She prophesizes that her affair with Gerald is doomed to fail while she watches him sleep
after their nocturnal rendez-vous: “They would never be together. Ah, this awful, inhuman
distance which would always be interposed between her and the other being!” (339). The gap
between the couple is palpable and their end, inevitable. She realizes while vacationing abroad
that there is an unavoidable flaw that will prevent her from ever capturing Gerald’s heart for
herself. While she watches him dance with the German girl, she concludes that “[Gerald] should
have all the women he can – it is his nature. It is absurd to call him monogamous – he is
naturally promiscuous. That is his nature” (403). It would be an exercise in futility to attempt to
harness Gerald, as it is his “nature” to be licentious, to have an unquenchable sexual thirst. Yet
despite this moment of introspective clarity, she forms a “deep resolve to combat him. One of
them must triumph over the other” (403). She also foreshadows, after slapping his cheek while
he is herding his long-horned Scottish bullocks, that she will have the first strike and the last
(162). She “[feels] in her soul an unconquerable desire for deep violence against him” (162).The
competitiveness in her, the aggressive impulses, the resistance she demonstrates when it comes
to accepting Gerald’s superiority over her leads to their dissolution. Her defiance ultimately
destroys their relationship – he cannot even succeed in strangling her. Gerald cannot handle a
partner, much less a woman, who does not submit to his will.
The third and final reason for the calamitous end to Gudrun and Gerald is that they are in
essence binary. She is an artist; he is a mercantilist. There are a profusion of associations made
between Gerald and bleak, cold, barren and white landscapes. Contrarily, Gudrun is constantly
wearing green, the colour of fertility, fecundity, and life. She wears “emerald-green
stockings”(2), “grass-green stockings [and] a large grass-green velour hat” (6), a dress of “green
poplin,” a “loose coat of broad, dark-green,” a hat of “pale, greenish straw” and stockings of
“dark green” (75), and a “daring gown of vivid green silk with green velvet bodice” (385). She is
described as “emerald green” (82), and outfitted in “her hat … brilliant green, like the sheen on
an insect, but the brim was soft dark green, her coat was dark green” (376). The colour is
incontestably pertinent in painting Gudrun as alive, ripe and earthly. Gerald, in contrast, has
“something northern about him … In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like
sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic
thing” (9). He has “blue eyes [that] burned with a keen, yet cold light” (53) and “[h]is hair was
fair almost to whiteness, sharp like splinters of light … his body seemed full of northern energy”
(193), and “[h]e was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the
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The Question of Self
destructive frost mystery” (246). As opposed to Gudrun, who is burning and vital, Gerald is
likened to frost, or an ice crystal. Gudrun’s “heat” melts Gerald’s “ice,” or, vice versa, Gerald’s
“ice” paralyzes Gudrun. They annul one another. Note, for instance, the clash in the following
passage: “[Gudrun’s] hot, exposed eyes rested on [Gerald]. [H]e writhed under the
imprisonment” (272). Furthermore, “[Gerald’s] heart went up like a flame of ice, he closed over
[Gudrun] like steel. He would destroy her rather than be denied” (392). Gudrun’s “heart grew
hot” (279), and Gerald has an “icy vapour round his heart” (391). They are innately contrary, two
primordially opposite beings in an inappropriate and unhealthy liaison which ultimately becomes
fatal for Gerald.
Gerald’s homosexual attraction to his mate Rupert Birkin, his foiled effort to bring Gudrun
under his control and the radical disparities in constitution between he and Gudrun make the two
an ill-fated couple. Gerald is incapable of articulating his love for Rupert, preferring instead to
contain his attraction and pursue Gudrun as his significant other. Gudrun’s vigour, passion and
determined character make her an ill-suited match for Gerald, who is domineering, icy and
incapable of offering her the love natural between men and women.
Works Cited
Howe, Andrew. “Beastly Desire: Human/Animal Interactions In Lawrence’s Women In Love.”
Papers On Language And Literature. 38 (2002): 429-441. Web. 27 October 2011.
Lawrence, D.H. Women In Love. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Web. 27 October 2011.
“queer.” OED Online. Oxford UP. Web. 27 October 2011.
Tilghman, Carolyn. “Unruly Desire, Domestic Authority And Odd Coupling In D.H Lawrence’s
Women In Love.” Women’s Studies. 37 (2008): 89-109. Web. 27 October 2011.
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The Question of Self
From Aqaba to 'The Voice of the Guns': Musical Symbolism and the
Evolution of Identity in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia
Denise St. Pierre
Bishop’s University
In undertaking the scoring of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Maurice Jarre was
charged with matching the expanses of the desert with equally expansive music, eliciting an
auditory experience equal to the film’s visual scope. While it seems a task of Herculean
proportions, Jarre was able to fashion (in a mere four weeks, no less) a riveting score with as
many facets as the titular Lawrence himself. Tony Bremner, conductor of the 1989 rerelease of
the Lawrence of Arabia soundtrack states that other than “Kenneth Alford’s “Voice of the
Guns”, the Lawrence score comprises three elements: the famous “Lawrence” theme itself; a
great group of “Arabian” melodies; and various pieces of an atmospheric nature” (8). In this
essay, I will employ these three identified themes to posit that T.E. Lawrence’s (Peter O’Toole)
identity shifts perceptibly with Jarre’s shifts in the score. The interpretation of the music cues us
to how we are to interpret Lawrence’s situation, be it his internalized conflicts or a musical
reflection of his unforgiving surroundings. I will juxtapose the “Lawrence” and “Arabian”
themes to note their interconnectedness and explore the “Home” theme (the theme that plays
over the film’s main titles), which is not directly addressed by Bremner but whose reoccurrence
marks vital moments in Lawrence’s process of identification. Finally, I will identify how Jarre’s
atmospheric music encapsulates the aforementioned themes. In doing so, I intend to prove that
Lawrence’s identity is in a constant state of remediation and revaluation. Each musical cue, each
distortion of a melody is indicative of a greater ramification in the context of Lawrence’s psyche.
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The Question of Self
For the sake of continuity, I will progress through the film chronologically. In doing so,
Lawrence’s progression (and at times, regression) will be more accurately represented.
The score’s ubiquitous Lawrence theme is introduced to the audience even before the film’s
visual component. Within the film’s overture, which plays on a blank screen as per Lean’s
request, Lawrence’s theme is the most prevailing of the three present. However, there is still
cohesiveness to the overture. The themes, from the percussion-based introduction, to Lawrence’s
theme, to the Arabian melodies, flow seamlessly. This allows Lawrence’s theme to take on a new
meaning by amalgamating his experiences into one identifier. Bremner states that “the first
[theme] is used not only for Lawrence the man, as hero-in-isolation, but for the East as perceived
by him (and through him, by us)” (8). The juxtaposition of these themes, then, allows a viewer to
glean details about Lawrence’s future transformation before the opening credits roll. In
Bremner’s article, Jarre acknowledges that in fact, Lawrence’s theme could be seen as Arabian in
and of itself. He claims that
the theme for Lawrence is Arabic in that it is totally in unison with no
harmony but with embellishments on the same melodic line. The film
was told from Lawrence’s British, unavoidably Western viewpoint, so
there is the additional ‘home’ theme in the “Main Titles” (14).
The third theme present in the Overture is “The Voice of the Guns”, composed by Kenneth
Alford. This piece, quintessentially British with its regimented, percussive fanfare, represents
Lawrence’s militaristic duty. It serves as a reminder of the fact that he is never truly alone in his
pursuits; the British army is always a few paces behind. It is the persistence of all these
conflicting emotions and identities that drives Lawrence forward.
The “Main Titles” of the film begin with the Lawrence theme, which enters in a strange and
dissonant manner. Playing over an overhead shot of Lawrence preparing for a motorcycle ride,
the music is almost unsettling until it cuts dramatically into a more jovial tune, which Jarre uses
to identify England as “home” for Lawrence. Lawrence’s theme weaves in and out of this
melody, hinting at the dualities that have existed within him during his life. Even before we have
witnessed any action, save for Lawrence walking in and out of the frame, we can deduce that
Lawrence has two matrices of identity upon which he projects his self. We are not entirely aware
that what we are seeing is occurring in the present, and that Lawrence’s adventures will unfold as
an enormous flashback. However, the music does hint at ominous things to come in the film’s
narrative progression. As the main titles end, the Lawrence theme reasserts itself, initially in full
force, but gradually fading into a more sinister sounding cue, which lends to the scene an eerie
feeling, as if to warn us of Lawrence’s impending death. Following this meticulous preparation
scene, Jarre’s score disappears until Lawrence is at army headquarters to be sent on his mission.
Following Lean’s legendary “match” cut, the flame from the match becomes the sun, which
subsequently takes Lawrence’s place. The music seems to pick up where the “Main Titles”
music left off; the sounds are dissonant and hazy. A scale progresses and crescendos with the
rising of the sun. The rising sun is an image that often coincides with Lawrence, a man whose
career is on the rise. By establishing that connection, we can therefore assume that this ascension
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The Question of Self
is leading to a musical climax: Lawrence’s theme. Sure enough, as Lawrence and his guide,
Tafas (Zia Mohyeddin), appear over the majestic dunes, his theme is played in earnest. The sheer
scale of Lean’s landscape, and the filling of that landscape with Jarre’s score, seems to cast the
two men as miniatures in an oversized world. While the Lawrence theme is generally faithful to
its most complete incarnation, Jarre does use the music to emphasize certain behaviours that
Lawrence picks up. When Tafas tells Lawrence to drink, but then refuses to drink himself,
Lawrence pours his drink back into the canteen. In the span of these frames, Lawrence’s theme is
transposed into the high brass, generally used for the British army marches. Jarre often uses
specific instruments to denote specific national or cultural themes. For example, many of the
Arabian melodies throughout the film are performed on the cithara, a zither-like instrument that
lends an exotic appeal to scenes in which it is used, yet also signifies certain trepidation, due to
the eerie resonance of its plucked notes. Jarre also employs a very rare and unique instrument,
the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument that produces a peculiar, oscillating sound, often
used to represent Lawrence, both in its eccentricity and its mystery. Therefore, the calculated
choice to transpose Lawrence’s theme into trumpets and other high brass signifies the overlap of
his two sensibilities; even now, Lawrence’s British identity is merging into the landscape, and
the landscape is becoming part of him. A fragment of Lawrence’s “home” theme is heard, which
again signifies a latent attachment to his home and the values it represents.
The pairing of specific sequences with specific musical cues inevitably reveals some hidden
significance in both objects and individuals. A crucial resurgence of Lawrence’s “home” theme
comes when he offers his pistol to Tafas, and the scenes that ensue from this exchange. As the
exchange occurs, a handful of notes from Lawrence’s “home” theme are whispered on a flute.
Home, essentially the only safe environment for Lawrence, is evoked as Lawrence hands off the
one precautionary measure he could guarantee himself. The inclusion of this small melody also
loads the gun with further significance. The gun itself is home; the gun and the violence it
guarantees are marked as directly British. The theme also weaves into the ambient music as
Tafas offers Lawrence some Bedouin food. As Lawrence hesitantly accepts it, the yearning for
home and its comforts that the music represents is evident in Lawrence’s expression of strained
civility. The theme appears once more when Lawrence is trying to master camel-riding with
Tafas. As he urges the camel forward with a crack of his whip, his “home” theme is announced
once again in high brass, in a manner of a mock-British cavalry. The home theme is employed as
a kind of musical punctuation. It appears at the end of conversations as a method for Lawrence to
reassert his British authority, despite his immersion in the Arab culture. For example, when
Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) asserts that their group will rest in order to safely traverse the desert,
Lawrence, whose suggestion of leaving immediately was shot down, sarcastically quips that he
will wake Ali when it is time to leave. Ali dismisses Lawrence with petulant resentment, and a
hint of Lawrence’s “home” theme is heard, as if to tell Ali that despite appearances and actions,
the core of Lawrence’s identity is firmly rooted in the authorial practices of the English. As
Lawrence leaves Prince Feisal’s (Alec Guinness) camp to lead the mission to Aqaba, his theme
reappears, though due to the circumstance, it has lost much of its lush, melodiousness. By once
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again using high brass such as trumpets, Jarre infuses this march towards Aqaba with a distinctly
British feeling, regardless of Lawrence’s stated loyalties. In fact, immediately prior to this
cavalry scene, Prince Feisal inquires: “In whose name do you ride?”, a retaliatory remark to
Lawrence saying that he can “claim” to ride in Feisal’s name.
The traversal of the Nefud desert is fraught with symbolism, not only in the scope of
identification, but with Jarre’s use of atmospheric music to reflect the temperament of the
cavalry in regards to their surroundings. The initial penetration of the desert is accompanied with
fast-paced music, as the camels charge across the plains. As the journey becomes more
laborious, dissonant notes punctuate the long, drawn out phrases. Visually, we witness the
camels as pinpricks in an infinite abyss. Jarre is able to effectively capture the endlessness in the
desert by having these atmospheric musical phrases circulate back upon themselves in a
monotonous whirlwind. This evokes not only the meteorological whirlwinds that trace across the
desert, but the whirlwind symbolism within Lawrence himself, whose constantly circulating
ideas of identity mirror this trajectory. Jarre even seems able to capture the scintillating
confusion of mirage and the immense power of the sun simply by using particular musical
effects. Jarre’s use of atmospheric music has a distinctly ominous sense to it. Its apparent
circularity and repetitiveness make us as viewers feel as though we will be caught in this journey
for eternity. With the perversion of previous, optimistic themes, coupled with the ominous
marching of the camels, the music can seem to delve into the realm of the dirge. In particular,
Jarre effectively captures the deadly power of the sun during Lawrence’s rescue of Gasim (I.S.
Johar). The shrillness of shrieking violins and sustained woodwinds captures a physical sensation
in an auditory expression. When Gasim is rescued, Lawrence’s theme makes its triumphant
return. As Daud (John Dimech) peers off into the horizon, the theme is cautious, with Jarre
bringing back the cithara to capture the uncertainty. As the figure of Lawrence is made clearer,
the mad rush of the camels towards each other marks his return in earnest.
The siege of Aqaba posits two very different variations of Lawrence’s theme. As Lawrence
and his men descend upon the city, the theme is distinctly militaristic. We witness the cold and
calculating Lawrence, the man who is unwaveringly dedicated to his pursuit until it has been
fully realized. Once Aqaba has been taken, and Lawrence witnesses Auda (Anthony Quinn) and
the other men looting and destroying the remainder of the town, Lawrence’s musical
representation invariably shifts. As he rides contemplatively down the beach, his theme plays in
a soothing, almost melancholy manner, with lush strings and harps. The harps evoke a distinctly
aquatic sound, and Lawrence’s contemplation of the water, and how he was able to conquer
Aqaba by land rather than sea, is reflected in the calm detachment of his theme. He then makes a
journey across the Sinai Desert back to Cairo, which is essentially devoid of any score, despite
several catastrophic events occurring, including the death of Daud.
Lawrence’s return to Cairo marks the resurgence of Alford’s “Voice of the Guns”, the
quintessential British march that conclusively shows that his loyalties are divided, despite his
commitment to the Arab people. As he is squired about the military headquarters by General
Allenby (Jack Hawkins) he marches along to this tune, dressed in his full Arab robe and fully
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aware of the implications of behaving in such a way. This marching continues through the
remainder of the scenes at Headquarters, denoting the persistence of militaristic authority, which
Lawrence has actively loathed in the past. However, the first act ends tellingly with the reemergence of Lawrence’s theme in an almost jovial tone. He is being hailed a hero, and is given
an appropriate fanfare as a result. However, Lawrence’s reluctance is clear, and as his theme
continues to play over the black screen of the intermission, the lack of image is given all the
more significance. The re-emergence of the Overture at this time is also an interesting choice, as
it has taken on a brand new significance now that we have actually witnessed this integration of
national and cultural traditions in the context of the film, and have noted how these changes have
affected Lawrence’s demeanour.
The most crucial scene in the film’s second act in terms of the theme of Lawrence’s
development is the ransacking of the Turkish train. It would appear that this is Lawrence at his
most self-assured, his most confident. However, his theme is distinctly dissonant; the perversion
of his mind is transposed directly into his musical representation. As Lawrence struts across the
train cars, an ironic fanfare, entirely distinct from the fanfare he received back in Cairo,
accompanies him. Jarre intentionally undermines the original melody in order to externalize
Lawrence’s masochism and corruption. From this point, the score is essentially silenced as
Lawrence attempts to infiltrate Daraa and is taken to the Turkish Bey (José Ferrer). The
subsequent scene, wherein the Turkish Bey and his men subject Lawrence to physical, mental
and sexual abuse, is entirely devoid of music.
After Lawrence has been thrown out by the Turkish Bey, his theme returns for the first time
since before he and Ali attempted to infiltrate Daraa. However, Jarre employs the cithara once
again, to denote insecurity—a marked difference from the loud, although dissonant fanfare of
Lawrence’s “victory” over the Turkish railway. The instrument is played with a degree of
uncertainty, and Lawrence is undoubtedly uncertain about his own identity in the aftermath of
his abuse. His theme does not return after this, notably because of the slaughter of the Turkish
column. At this point, Lawrence’s heroic identity or persona has been almost entirely decimated.
Even after he and his men take Damascus, his leadership has been undercut and he wields no real
authority. His theme cannot follow him for there is no one left to follow. This is shown as
Lawrence, the newly appointed colonel, is driven away in a staff car. As he distances himself
from his life as an Arab, his theme hesitantly creeps back in. There is no vigour left in it as we
contemplate Lawrence’s wearied face. His theme, like he himself, has been used up. It is not
until the credits begin to roll that the regimented strains of Alford’s theme return.
Lawrence of Arabia can undoubtedly be posited as a film wherein the score serves to
elucidate essential truths about its characters by subtly manipulating the musical themes
associated with them. By analyzing the score, we as viewers are able to sense and predict the
feelings and actions of characters based solely on the nuances of their musical themes. Maurice
Jarre does this extremely effectively by employing distinct themes such as the “Lawrence” and
“Arabian” themes, the “home” theme, as well as utilizing atmospheric music to both play into
these themes and provide a larger context wherein we can see a reflection of the character’s
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The Question of Self
psyches in their environment. By tracking the progression of Lawrence’s musical theme and its
relation to the other themes, we can trace the progression of his personality, as well as the
progression of his feelings for his environment. Through music, we are able to detect the
disconnect between the two, or sense a perversion of normalcy. The nuances of the musical
language can incite an entirely new dialogue of film criticism, and effectively externalize that
which may have seemed deeply internal.
Works Cited
Bremner, Tony. “Lawrence of Arabia—The Music” in accompanying booklet, Lawrence of
Arabia performed by The Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Tony Bremner. Silva
Screen Records America, Inc. 1989. Compact disc.
Lawrence of Arabia. Dir. David Lean. Perf. Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Alec Guinness.
Columbia Pictures, 1962. DVD.
68
Flouting Femininity
Exploring Agencies and Revisiting Gendered Spaces
Flouting Femininity
I Am Not An Emotional Creature: A Critique of Eve Ensler’s Latest Work
Emily St-Aubin
Bishop’s University
Eve Ensler’s V-Day movement, and the show that started it all, The Vagina Monologues have
done a lot to raise awareness about issues related to violence against women. Ensler’s most
recent work, I Am An Emotional Creature and the V-Girls movement associated with it are
already, and will continue to do, much like their predecessors, a number of great things for girls
and young women. However, I Am An Emotional Creature, like its predecessors in the V-Day
movement is far from perfect. Ensler’s I Am An Emotional Creature is clearly written from a
place of power, and in turn cannot truly represent the minoritized populations it addresses. In this
essay, I will investigate the ways in which I Am an Emotional Creature perpetuates the silencing
of girls, cissexism in I Am An Emotional Creature, Ensler’s reliance on hegemonic
heteronormative modes of femininity in her construction of girlhood, Ensler’s essentialism and
Ensler’s colonialist constructions of “non-Western” girls. I will argue that Ensler’s I Am An
Emotional Creature is written from a place of power, and in turn cannot truly represent the
minoritized populations it addresses.
I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World was published as a
collection of fictional monologues in 2011. According to the V-Girls website, a subdivision of
the V-Day movement, I Am An Emotional Creature is “a collection of original monologues
about and for girls” that “aims to inspire girls to take agency over their minds, bodies, hearts and
curiosities” (“About”). V-Girls is “inspired by Eve Ensler’s I Am an Emotional Creature” and is
“a global network of girl activists and advocates empowering themselves and one another to
create the change they imagine for the world” and “a platform for girls to amplify their voices
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and ignite their activism.”(“About”). According to the V-Girls Facebook Page, “V-Girls engages
young women in V-Day's "empowerment philanthropy" model, igniting their activism and giving
them a voice.” (“Info”). As a piece of theatre, Emotional Creature was workshopped in Summer
2011 at The Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg, South Africa under the direction of Jo
Bonney (“V-Day Produces”). In September 2011, the production moved to Paris and was
performed at the Ciné 13 Théâtre (“V-Day Produces”). Emotional Creature “will receive its
world premiere in June 2012 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre” (“V-Day Produces”).
Activist theatre is meant to incite responses from audiences, and as Scott notes, in the essay
“Been There, Done That: Paving The Way For The Vagina Monologues”, performances of
Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues do, with responses ranging from “standing ovations” and
“whistles and yells” to “cringing from embarrassment” (404, 409). From personal experience
with the V-Day movement, I can attest to A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer,
another V-Day performance that differs in that it includes male identified performers, producing
equally varied reactions. A challenge facing V-Day performances, and realistically, most activist
theatre, is that it is incredibly difficult to speak in a way that does not silence someone in a mere
two hours. There is no way to ensure that everyone’s voices will be heard. In light of this, it is
not surprising that Ensler’s works have been subject to a variety of criticisms.1
Ensler is an activist, and uses her work as a platform though which marginalized voices can
be heard. Scott quotes Ensler in reference to The Vagina Monologues “‘how crucial it is for
women to tell their stories, to share them with other people, how our survival as women depends
on this dialogue’” (420). Despite being written by a single person, Ensler, The Vagina
Monologues arguably allow for the stories of many women to be heard as they are based on over
two hundred interviews Ensler conducted with women (Scott 405). A Memory, a Monologue, a
Rant, and a Prayer, inherently includes a multiplicity of voices and stories as it is a collection of
monologues written by over forty authors. In discussions surrounding I Am An Emotional
Creature and V-Girls, there is a clear discourse that the voices of girls need to be heard. In a
press release from V-Day about the workshop productions of Emotional Creature, V-Day states
that by “placing their [girls’]stories squarely center stage, Emotional Creature explores the issues
that preoccupy girls worldwide” (“V-Day Produces”). As previously noted, on the V-Girls
website, V-Girls is positioned as “a platform for girls to amplify their voices and ignite their
activism.”(“About”). In the “Foreword” to I Am An Emotional Creature, Carol Gilligan states
that “as a woman, she [Ensler] knows the pressures on girls to silence themselves ....” (xiii).
Gilligan also states that “the simple statement, ‘I am an emotional creature’ becomes a challenge
to the myriad ways in which girls are looked at but not seen, talked about but not listened to...”
(xiii). In Ensler’s introduction to I Am An Emotional Creature, written as a letter to Emotional
Creatures, Ensler states that “I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you
were temporarily deranged. We have become accustomed to muting you, judging you,
discounting you, asking you - sometimes even forcing you - to betray what you see and know
and feel” (xxiii). On the surface, this discourse of girls’ voices being heard can be seen as
positive and empowering however, upon closer investigation, this discourse becomes
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problematic.
How can a discourse of marginalized voices being heard and recognized be problematic? In
the case of I Am An Emotional Creature, this discourse becomes problematic in that I Am An
Emotional Creature perpetuates the silencing it claims to be working against. In Ensler’s
“Author’s Note,” Ensler states that “these monologues are not interviews. Each monologue is a
literary text inspired by traveling the world, by witnessing events, by listening to real and
imagined conversations. On occasion a monologue was inspired by an article, an experience, a
memory, a dream, a wish, an image, or a moment of grief or rage” (xii). This author’s note can
be read as a confession of sorts. A confession that in writing a book about the voices of girls
being heard, Ensler did not consult with any girls. A confession that really, I Am An Emotional
Creature is about the voice of one middle aged woman speaking for and about the same girls she
claims need to speak for themselves. By speaking for and about girls, Ensler perpetuates the “...
myriad ways in which girls are looked at but not seen, talked about but not listened to...” that
Gilligan, another adult woman, claims I Am An Emotional Creature challenges (Gilligan xiii).
Another area of critique concerning I Am An Emotional Creature relates to the ways in which
Ensler espouses a cissexist notion of girlhood by neglecting to explicitly include the experiences
of transgender girls. I am not the first to question the ways in which Ensler consciously, or not,
constructs femininity and womanhood, or in the case of I Am An Emotional Creature, girlhood,
along cissexist lines. Scott notes that “... The Vagina Monologues are about the experience of
being a woman, which is represented, literally and figuratively, by the image of a vagina, a true
if potentially reductive way of viewing things” (410). While I Am An Emotional Creature does
not rely as heavily or as explicitly, on images and definitions of girlhood routed in anatomy as
The Vagina Monologues, it does at times make use of anatomical aspects of female identity in its
construction of girlhood. In “What Don’t You Like About Being a Girl”, Ensler discusses
breasts, menstruation, and the ability to “get pregnant” (16). While these are all aspects of
girlhood that speak to a number of girls, they may not speak to girls who do not have breast, do
not menstruate and/ or do not have the anatomy necessary to become pregnant. While Ensler
never explicitly espouses any cissexist notions of girlhood, she implicitly implies that part of
being a girl is being cisgender by making use of anatomical notions of girlhood without ever
explicitly including the experiences of transgender girls in her piece.
Closely related to discourses of cissexism in I Am An Emotional Creature are discourses
surrounding the hegemonic, heteronormative modes of femininity Ensler uses in her construction
of girlhood throughout the piece. While discourses of heteronormative forms of femininity are
found throughout the piece, they are at their most obvious in “What Do You Like About Being a
Girl”. In “What Do You Like About Being a Girl”, Ensler positions some of the positive aspects
of girlhood as getting “to be glamorous”, being able to “wear makeup”, wearing “pretty clothes”,
being “shy”, “tender” and “soft”, “ballet”, and “wearing dresses” (114). The closest readers or
audiences get to a love of less hegemonic modes of girlhood in “What Do You Like About Being
a Girl” is found in the second last line of the piece which reads “being different” (Ensler 114).
But where are the statements from girls who like “being different” (Ensler 114). Why are there
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Flouting Femininity
no statements in “What Do You Like About Being a Girl” that celebrate less conventional modes
of femininity? Where are the statements like “girls are strong”, “girls are loud” or “girls are
smart”? As with discussions of cissexism, there is nothing inherently wrong with Ensler’s use of
traits that can be associated with hegemonic, heteronormative forms of femininity in “What Do
You Like About Being a Girl” and more broadly, I Am An Emotional Creature. These aspects of
femininity and girlhood do ring true for some girls. They become problematic however, when
they are not balanced with depictions of less hegemonic and heteronormative forms of girlhood
and female identity.
Discourses of cissexism and hegemonic, heteronormative modes of femininity in Ensler’s I
Am An Emotional Creature are part of a broader essentialist discourse found throughout the
piece. Scott discusses essentialism in The Vagina Monologues, noting how “there is great
diversity in the type of women represented in the monologues, as well as in most of the casts I
have watched” and states that “by gathering all these different kinds of women under one
umbrella, by claiming that, because they all share a body part, they all have similar needs,
desires, and problems [Ensler] takes a risky step toward essentialism” (418). Like its
predecessor, I Am An Emotional Creature is essentialist in that it attempts to unify a range of
experiences under one category, girlhood. I Am An Emotional Creature attempts to claim that
there is a universal experience of girlhood that all girls and women can relate to that is somehow
rooted in an emotional intelligence that all girls possess. This emotional intelligence allows all
girls to relate to each other, regardless of the intricacies of their identities and lived experiences,
purely because they share one trait, that of being a girl. This idea of a universal experience is
expressed throughout the piece and is highlighted the following excerpts from the titular piece, “I
Am An Emotional Creature”:
I love being a girl.
I can feel what you’re feeling
as you’re feeling it inside
the feeling
before.
I am an emotional creature.
........................................
I am an emotional creature.
I am connected to everything and everyone.
..............................
This is not extreme.
It’s a girl thing.
What we would all be
if the big door inside us flew open. (Ensler 134-136).
Lines in this piece such as “I can feel what you’re feeling” imply that girls have an innate
understanding of each other and their concerns (134). Ensler uses lines like “I am an emotional
creature./ I am connected to everything and everyone.” to reinforce the idea that all girls are
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Flouting Femininity
somehow interconnected and that girls possess an emotional intelligence that ties them to
everyone and everything, regardless of their lived experiences (135). The lines at the end of the
piece, “It’s a girl thing” highlight the notion that there are some universal experiences and
feelings associated with girlhood (136). Ensler’s statement “What we would all be/ if the big
door inside us flew open” implies that liberation, freedom and self-confidence all mean the same
thing and all lead to the same feelings among girls (136).
The final area of critique to be discussed in this paper lies in Ensler’s colonialist constructions
of “non-Western” girls. In her critique of The Vagina Monlogues, "'One Vagina To Go': Eve
Ensler's Universal Vagina And Its Implications For African Women.", Njambi discusses how
Ensler constructs “American [or Western] women’s vaginas” through “various empowering
roles” and how the vaginas of African women are constructed solely with regards to female
genital mutilation and “how they have to be rescued from such ‘dangers’” (168). Through a
postcolonial reading, readers and audiences can begin to see how this can result in discourses of
how Western women need to be the saviors of their “non-Western” sisters or as Njambi states,
“African women ... become the example of the ‘problem/practice’ and the Western women the
‘solution/theory’ (169). Similar colonial discourses are at play throughout I Am An Emotional
Creature. While Ensler presents Western girls and their problems in a myriad of ways, Ensler
only depicts non-Western girls as survivors of various forms of abuse or oppressive regimes. The
monologues set in non-Western parts of the world all highlight the challenges girls face outside
of the West in a way that lends them to colonial readings implying that Western girls need to
speak out and work towards saving their non-Western sisters. The only exception to this is the
monologue “The Joke About My Nose” in which a girl from Tehran talks about how her parents
essentially forced her to get rhinoplasty (Ensler 64-67). I call this piece an exception as unlike its
counterparts, this monologue addresses an experience that could have just as easily been that of a
Western girl.
On the surface, Eve Ensler’s I Am An Emotional Creature and the V-Girls movement it is
associated with can be read as empowering odes to girl power and a call for girls everywhere to
reclaim their voices. While I Am An Emotional Creature and V-Girls have, and will likely
continue to contribute to and create empowering experiences for girls, they are not free from
criticism. It is important to remember that I Am An Emotional Creature comes from only one
voice, that of an adult woman and in turn, perpetuates some of the silencing of girls it aims to act
against. Hopefully, the V-Girls movement will encourage girls to use their voices, and in doing
so start a dialogue around girlhood that is less cissexist, less hegemonic and heteronormative and
less colonial than that in I Am An Emotional Creature in its current state.
Notes
1
See, for example, Scott (2003) and Njambi (2009).
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Flouting Femininity
Works Cited
“About”. v-girls.org. V-Day. Web. 29 November 2011
Ensler, Eve. I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World. New
York: Villard Books, 2011. Print.
Gilligan, Carol. Foreword. I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the
World. By Eve Ensler. 2010. New York: Villard Books, 2011. xiii-xvii. Print.
“Info”. facebook.com/vgirls. V-Girls. Web. 29 November 2011
Njambi, Wairimũ Ngarũiya. "'One Vagina To Go': Eve Ensler's Universal Vagina And Its
Implications For African Women." Australian Feminist Studies 24.60 (2009): 167 180.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 November 2011.
Scott, Shelly. "Been There, Done That: Paving The Way For The Vagina Monologues." Modern
Drama 46.3 (2003): 404-423. Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 November 2011.
“V-Day Produces Workshop Productions of Founder Eve Ensler's Newest Work "Emotional
Creature" in Johannesburg & Paris”. vday.org. V-Day. Web. 29 November 2011.
75
Flouting Femininity
Fleeting Femininities: Allegories of Female Independence in Alice
Munro’s Runaway
Emily LeDuc
McMaster University
As a construct, issues of gender are embedded in the subtext of most every work of fiction.
However, some authors work to explicitly unravel complex gender issues directly through their
writing. Alice Munro is one such author. Published in 2004, Runaway highlights the problems
with the oppression of female agency. This paper will provide a close reading of several sections
within Runaway in order to consider certain gender performances. In doing so, it will be evident
that Munro uses the character relations in Runaway to make the argument that even in a
‘modern’ western world, Canadian women continue to face domestic pressure or are oppressed
by a larger patriarchal society. Munro accomplishes this by illustrating situations of independent
female agency as often fleeting, unsuccessful or ‘stamped out’ by a stronger patriarchy.
In order to map Munro’s concerns about the containment of femininity, a close analysis of the
four major sections of the text are provided and focus is given to the major thematic allegories
woven through the narrative. The master signifier for femininity comes in the form of a little
white goat named Flora. Flora, the botany term, is often used in literature to mark or describe
feminine subjects. In Runaway, the reader is given not only several references to plant life, but
also a pet of the same name owned by the protagonist Carla. Flora the goat is the physical
embodiment of the potential for female freedom or independence. In fact, the entire narrative is
structured around where Flora is in the text, and as such, I will be analyzing the text in four parts:
before Flora, after her arrival and subsequent escape, her return, and after her death.
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Before Flora: The Allure of Patriarchy
The first section of the narrative describes the life of protagonist Carla before Flora comes to
live with her and her husband Clark on their farm. Carla’s youth is described as stable and
encouraging and it is revealed that she had the opportunity to attend college (27). Carla has her
own aspirations that include an independent and professional lifestyle. However, at 18, Carla
meets and falls in love with Clark, a brusque, masculine “gypsy-rover” type (28). Later in her
life, Carla reflects on running away with Clark, remembering her adoration for his “competent
forearms” and the “disorder of his past life” (32). When describing that moment, the narrator
recalls: “She saw him as the architect of the life ahead of them, herself as captive - her
submission both proper and exquisite” (32). Munro’s choice of diction underscores Carla’s lost
desire for independence with the strength of Clark’s influence. It is interesting that Carla is
described as “captive” and yet this recognized submission is what is appropriate. This
juxtaposition suggests that while modern women may feel personally imprisoned by a larger
patriarchal society, they remain mostly compliant out of a perceived sense of responsibility
imposed by hegemonic norms.
This acquiesced submission is repeated in a letter Carla writes to her mother. Vastly changed,
Carla writes that she must go with Clark if she has any hope of an “authentic kind of life” (33).
Munro uses this stark shift in Carla’s aspirations to confirm the aforementioned responsibility
and demonstrate the allure and the strength of patriarchy over feminine freedom. Before meeting
Clark, Carla demonstrates a determination to become a woman of independent means and spirit.
However, the moment Munro introduces a masculine figure as strong, mysterious and
competent, Carla abandons her own agency in favour of serving Clark’s aggressive needs. Carla
convinces herself that she is destined to be a subservient subject to Clark’s commanding attitude.
This is demonstrated in Munro’s use of the word “authentic.” This shifting determination
represents the persistent hold that heteronormative and separate sphere behaviours have on
society. In suggesting that her life with Clark will be an authentic one, Carla is claiming that the
only authentic or valid life choices are the ones that subscribe to patriarchal norms.
Sylvia Jamieson, a neighbour of Clark and Carla, is similarly repressed by heteropatriarchy.
After her husband Leon’s death, Sylvia, a botanist, is given the opportunity to reflect on their
relationship and her happiness. From the outset, it is clear that while Sylvia felt compelled to
lead a heteronormative life with Leon, she was far from content with her situation. The narrator
tells us that Sylvia spent “a good deal of her time on the road” and that Leon was too “occupied
with other things” to develop a meaningful relationship with her (12). The text makes it clear that
Sylvia and Leon’s relationship was for aesthetic purposes at best, as neither character developed
real affection for the other.
Similar to Clark, Leon is portrayed as a masculine and rough individual who grows to resent
Sylvia for her free spirit (12). Moreover, Leon rejects all physical examples of flora, the
established signifier for femininity. For example, when landscaping, he is described as “tearing”
“clearing” and “cutting” the natural elements around their property (12). Moreover, when Sylvia
brings home a bouquet of flowers she picked for Leon, he “looked at them – as he sometimes
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Flouting Femininity
looked at her – with mere exhaustion, disavowal” (29). There is little opacity in Leon’s
sentiments for Sylvia; his exhausted frustration with her forced conformity is increasingly clear
in this section of the narrative. The dysfunction caused by patriarchal pressures in Sylvia and
Leon’s relationship is visible regardless of the aesthetic façade attempted by both characters.
For the most part, however, Leon’s character is shaded by absence. Both in life and in death,
Leon’s absence from the text marks the pain that Sylvia experienced in conforming to a
patriarchal marriage. When sorting through Leon’s personal belongings, Sylvia wishes she could
burn everything, frustrated by the fact that he died with no regrets (17). This is the first of many
suggestions that heteropatriarchy does not flatter Sylvia because she is in fact, a homosexual.
Filled with regret for her submission to patriarchy, Sylvia is angry with herself and with Leon for
the choices she made under patriarchal pressures. In denying herself her desired identity,
Sylvia’s despair can be read as indicative of Carla’s future: Carla is so compelled to assume a
heteronormative lifestyle that she forgets her own aspirations in the process.
Flora: Arrival and Escape – Femininity Re-Awakened
The next section of the text is marked with the arrival of Flora, a farm goat. Flora comes into
Carla’s life several years after her marriage to Clark. When Flora is first brought home to the
farm, Munro immediately draws strong parallels between the goat and Carla. The narrator
describes Flora as “Clark’s pet entirely [at first], following him everywhere and dancing for his
attention” (9). This phrasing is almost exactly how Carla describes herself when she reflects on
her early years with Clark. However, the narrator continues “as [Flora] grew older, she seemed to
attach herself to Carla […] she was suddenly much wiser, less skittish – capable instead of a
subdued and ironic sort of humor” (9). Again, Flora is paralleling Carla, who has grown wary
and tired of Clark’s aggressive and hyper-masculine behaviour (6).
In attaching herself to Carla, Flora presents the opportunity for female agency or
independence. Munro confirms this by constructing a dream sequence, which is often used in
short story fiction to highlight an unconscious desire. In the dream, Flora tempts Carla with a red
apple in her mouth and is injured but able to “slither [through a fence] like a white eel and
disappear”, thus showing Carla the allegorical path to freedom (7). Both the apple and the
serpent-like eel recall similarities to the biblical story of Adam and Eve.
As Christian accounts detail, Eve was created by God as a companion for Adam in the Garden
of Eden. Eve disobeys God and Adam by eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge after a
serpent tempts her to do so. Returning to Runaway, Munro’s choice of allegories makes it clear
that Flora is to be read as a potential for female independence in the pairing of Flora and Eve.
Just as the Serpent tempts Eve to seek knowledge via the apple, Flora tempts Carla with a
potential freedom from Clark. Initially it seems unusual that Munro would use “slither” to
describe the movement of a goat. However, when one considers the allusions to biblical imagery,
it is undeniable that both Carla and the reader are meant to see Flora not only as a temptress, but
also as a guide towards a forbidden but equally desirable freedom.
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As Carla’s personality is brightened by her relationship with Flora, Sylvia begins to see Carla
as an attractive and pleasing woman. Again, the reader is presented with consistent allusions to
Sylvia’s homosexuality. To this point, the reader is aware that Sylvia sees herself as different, yet
it is not until Flora is present that Sylvia’s feelings surface. Sylvia describes a friendly kiss
between herself and Carla as a “bright blossom - its petals spreading inside her with tumultuous
heat” (18). Again, Munro uses floral images to alert the reader that Sylvia is able to explore these
feelings because of Flora’s presence. However, the strength of patriarchy is noted here, too, as
Sylvia still struggles to recognize her desire as sexual feelings. She routinely rationalizes them as
maternal instincts or as a result of her teaching career.
At this point in the text Flora disappears from the farm. Carla believes she slipped through the
fence and is “on an adventure” (23). As Flora, the symbol for feminine freedom, has taken flight,
Carla and Sylvia are able to come together to plan Carla’s escape from Clark. In the wake of
Flora’s disappearance Carla is able to voice her dissatisfaction in her marriage for the first time.
Similarly, Sylvia is able to rebel against the heteronormativity that has confined her by helping
Carla escape (23). Quickly, the women devise a plan to send Carla to Toronto and away from
Clark (24). There, Carla can begin exercising her own agency, building a new life of her own
choosing.
There are several important things to note in this plot point. First, it is significant that the
women must help each other in order to escape their own unhappiness. Perhaps Munro is
suggesting that women must unite in order to overthrow patriarchal repression and that simply
wanting independence is not enough. Second, the choice of Toronto as Carla’s destination is of
crucial importance. Carla is planning to move from a rural, traditional life to living in a busy,
modern city (34). Later, this stark contrast in setting will be key in why Carla abandons the plan.
Flora’s positive influence tempts the women with freedom of oppression and allows them to
fight back against the constraints that have kept them unhappy.
Killing Flora: The Stronghold of Patriarchy Dominates
However, this revolutionary moment is brief, if explored at all. Although Carla experiences a
fleeting independence inspired by Flora’s presence and escape, the reality of starting over and
being alone quickly sets in once she leaves town. On the bus to Toronto, Carla visualizes her
new life in the city and it becomes clear to the reader that actually living with modernity and
being modernly feminine is an entirely new concept for her. At this moment, the strength of
Clark’s dominance begins to filter into Carla’s thoughts. In reference to Carla’s new life, the
narrator muses:
But what would she care about? How would she know that she was
alive? While she was running away from him – now – Clark still kept a
place in her life. But when she was finished running away, when she just
went on, what would she put in his place? What else – who else – could
ever be so vivid a challenge. (34)
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In these telling sentences Carla, and Munro, realize that the potential for feminine freedom is not
enough. Flora’s presence, though compelling and a start, is not enough to frame a new identity
for Carla. When physically removed from her patriarchal home, Carla becomes terrified at the
thought of her own independence and building a relationship with herself. What is key here is
that Clark does not need to physically retrieve Carla; his dominance in her life was enough to
ensure that she would plead to return to him on her own. In begging Clark to save her from
herself, Carla is pulled back under the strong tides of the gender divide.
Unaware of Carla’s fate, Sylvia experiences the death of her independent freedom through
Clark’s midnight visit to her home. Munro carefully constructs a well-worded argument that is as
much about sexuality and power structures as it is about Carla, of whom they are actually
speaking. Munro structures the argument to be read as a battle for female freedom as well as
sexual independence. Clark, the heterosexual male, is reasserting his power over Carla by
challenging, threatening and patronizing Sylvia, the homosexual female. Thus, in claiming Carla
is “back where she belongs,” Clark is re-establishing the proper gender hierarchy by situating
himself at the top, Carla below him and Sylvia, the most dangerous challenge to
heteronormativity, at the bottom (37). Sylvia recognizes this, becomes fearful of Clark’s
aggression, and quickly concedes in the argument. In doing so, Sylvia is rejecting her claim to
female independence or agency in the same way Carla was forcibly compelled to return to
patriarchy.
These symbolic deaths are confirmed in the climax of the text with the presentation of a false
specter of Flora outside Sylvia’s door following her argument with Clark. The apparition
“explodes,” and out of the fog the real Flora returns as a “little dancing white goat” (39).
Reading carefully, the potential for an escape from patriarchy is exploded and from its ashes, a
renewed compliance from women is reborn. This moment marks the point at which Sylvia and
Carla return to their subservient, heterosexual places in a patriarchal society.
However, Flora’s renewed “white” innocence is not enough for Clark, the master signifier for
patriarchal control. When responding to Sylvia’s question about Flora’s size and age, Clark
responds: “She is as big as she is ever going to get” (40). At that point he leads Flora into the
night and it is implied by Munro that he kills her; effectively slaying the notion of female
independence. While some question why Munro took the narrative to this barbaric end, the effect
is obvious: Clark could not return to his chiefly position without removing the potential for
another deviation from the charted course of patriarchy. In killing Flora, Clark silenced the
potential for women to be free.
Post-Flora: Tradition Reclaimed and Patriarchy Renewed
After Flora’s death, the narrative takes a sharp and disturbing turn. The rapport between Clark
and Carla is described as newly glowing and Carla is once again drawn in by Clark’s strict, and
potentially violent, masculinity. In fact, Carla is so entrenched in a patriarchal hold after being
traumatized by her escape that she is sexually excited by Clark’s oppressive abuse. Carla relishes
in the thought of Clark “tanning her hide if she is bad again” (43). Furthermore, Carla is so
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frightened by her feminist moment that when she reads Sylvia’s letter mentioning Flora, whose
return Clark hid from Carla, she immediately rejects and denies Sylvia’s words and burns the
letter (45). In essence, Carla is burning the only female bond or tie to independence she had left.
Carla also refuses to visit the site of Flora’s body. Even though she recognizes what has
happened, she cannot bring herself to “go near that place” and that she must “hold out against the
temptation” (47). In referencing temptation, Carla is recalling the Eve imagery she flirted with
earlier in the dream sequence. She now rejects Flora as both a temptress and a guide, believing
that the path to reach Flora is no longer the same path to freedom she once believed it to be.
Thus, Carla reaffirms Clark’s dominance by responding to the slaughtered goat in exactly the
manner he had intended. Combined, her fear and grief over Clark’s brutal actions ensure that
Carla will remain obedient.
The last point that needs to be made in relation to a post-Flora reality surrounds what happens
to Sylvia Jamieson. In her letter to Carla, Sylvia apologizes for intruding on the couple’s
personal affairs and her language indicates that she too is withdrawing from their relationship.
The letter describes how Sylvia felt as though she had “involved herself too closely in Carla’s
life” (44). Also, Sylvia believes herself mistaken in “believing Carla’s happiness and freedom
were the same thing” (44). Like Carla, Sylvia was bullied back into a submissive place. In
removing herself from Carla’s life, Sylvia allows the figurative fences to be built back up around
Carla, containing her safely within a patriarchal life.
However, the most important lines of Sylvia’s letter come later. While speaking of Flora’s
reappearance, she writes:
There has to be something special about [Flora’s journey]. I know of
course that Flora is an ordinary little animal and that she probably spent
her time away in getting herself pregnant. In a sense her return has no
connection at all with our human lives. Yet her appearance at that
moment did have a profound effect [on me] (45).
It is in these short sentences that the intended function of Flora the goat is fully realized. Munro
uses Sylvia’s letter to clarify Flora’s purpose. Sylvia recognizes that Flora as a goat is an
“ordinary little animal” and yet her journey of escape and return is what ultimately impacts
Sylvia and Clark (45). It could be argued that Munro is suggesting that all women are ordinary
little animals in reality but that this should not render them incapable of extraordinary journeys
and independent identities. Regardless, what is undeniably clear is Sylvia’s acceptance of the
reinstated hierarchy. In the end, Sylvia moves to a college town, at last accepting her prescribed
role as an elderly widow – relevant to society only through her continued identity in relation to
her deceased husband Leon.
A Hope for a New Future?: Some Concluding Thoughts
While the earlier remarks about gender norms in texts being inescapable are true, it is crucial
to realize that this is because these texts are reflections of a deeply gendered reality. Whether
they are embedded or overt, gender norms are engrained into every aspect of contemporary
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living. It makes sense then, that these norms become the central focus of works like that of Alice
Munro. Munro uses her craft as a medium to discuss the problems of a gendered society and
offer her perspective on what, if anything can be done about it. In presenting Flora the goat as a
potential for change, Munro has her characters interact with Flora in telling and ultimately tragic
ways in order to demonstrate that even in a ‘modern’ western world, Canadian women still face
domestic pressures or are, worse, oppressed by a larger patriarchal society. Reading works like
that of Munro this closely, then, are of crucial importance. Munro’s allegories push us to develop
the skills to read between difficult lines allowing identification and interaction with complex
issues. Learning to read both text and reality carefully and with purpose could potentially push us
towards the change that Munro tempts us with. As Runaway reminds us: “She might be free”
(47).
Works Cited
Munro, Alice. “Runaway.” Runaway. Toronto: Penguin, 2004. 3-47. Print
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“I won’t live without her”: the (Re)Writing of Kinship and Female-Centric
Spaces in Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Collins’ The Woman in White
Danielle Bird
Concordia University
Both Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market” (1862) and Wilkie Collins’ sensation novel
The Woman in White (1860) present uncomfortable moments of potentially incestuous behavior
between sisters in isolated settings. While critics have long interpreted these sisters’ relationships
as bordering on lesbianism, what has been discounted is how these intense female alliances serve
as a means by which the sisters may find stable and healthy relationships with men; furthermore,
their familial ties are not lost after their respective heterosexual marriages. It is my intent to
closely examine the different representations of secluded sisterly bonds in both texts in order to
determine how these 1860s sisters participated in a rewriting of kinship systems based on a mode
of strictly female exchange.
In “Goblin Market” Rossetti seems to focus on these bonds as a means of satiating
(destructive) sexual desire, which in turn allows for a new (productive) model of kinship to arise;
Collins, in The Woman in White, is more interested in women’s manipulation of pre-existing
kinship models, and how sisterly love creates a mode of external strength necessary for the
facilitation of heterosexual marriage. This paper seeks to eschew critical claims that the sisters’
physical interaction must necessarily be named as anything rather than a fundamental source of
strength required for the confrontation and subsequent jettisoning of patriarchal values. I intend
to question the tendencies to interpret these sisterly bonds as sexual rather than developmental
and recuperative. Similarly, I will propose to disrupt the scholarly penchant to contain sisterhood
within the family. I will first examine, using the framework of theorists Gayle Rubin and Kathy
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A. Psomiades, the importance of a rural setting for these sets of sisterly bonds. This first
argument will use the deconstruction of Marxist idealism to contest how the countryside may be
thought of as a utopic space in which sisterhood may flourish. The second part of my paper will
be a close reading of the representations of bonds between sisters in both “Goblin Market” and
The Woman in White. Through an investigation of the sisters’ interactions with men, as well as
notions of physical and emotional exchange, I will reveal the means by which they reconfigure
their female-specific kinship systems. My conclusion will extend theory supplied by Sharon
Marcus to show how female bonds can complement (rather than resist or act as binary to) the
heterosexual marriage plot. Therefore, I intend to position Laura and Lizzie, and Marian and
Laura respectively within a larger system of heterosexual economy, using their intense sisterly
friendship as the vehicle through which this may be executed.
1. Imagining Kinship in Pre-Patriarchal Space: Marxism and the Countryside
Restrictive systems such as patriarchy must be considered in order to understand the origins
of women’s loss of sexual agency and self-possession. Patriarchy, as understood by Rubin and
for the purposes of this paper, refers to a kinship structure wherein women’s bodies are subject to
men’s sexual pleasures and reproduction of male bloodlines. Marxist interpretations of narratives
dealing with women have often obfuscated the long history of patriarchal ‘traffic’ in female
bodies – an idea that both Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” and Psomiades’ “Heterosexual
Exchange” beg us to revisit. Rubin challenges classical Marxism, owing to its emphasis on social
‘economies’ for its “failure… to fully express or conceptualize sex oppression” (107). Instead,
Rubin encourages that one must turn to social systems, specifically kinship, in order to examine
the origins of women’s sexual oppression. “The exchange of women,” Rubin elaborates, is “a
seductive and powerful concept,” one that “places the oppression of women within social
systems, rather than biology” (118). Patriarchy denies women the necessary rights to a
possession of their bodies that would allow for any kind of sexual exchange between equals.
Psomiades extends Rubin’s argument in order to imagine matriarchy as something that might
have existed prior to patriarchy and the subsequent fall of women/traffic in female bodies:
primitive “matrilineal kinship makes new kinds of female sexual agency and relations between
women conceivable … Under [this type of] matrilineage, who a woman’s mother is defines who
her child is” (107).
When examined through these critics’ anthropological framework, the history of the sisterly
bonds runs even deeper; just as Collins’ and Rossetti’s narratives draw on such structures of precapital and mercantile centers as the city, so too do they attempt to imagine a pre-patriarchal
space in which these bonds permit a female-centered transmission of education and
social/intellectual knowledge. We see in both texts examples of a ‘safe’ space in which to nurture
the sisters’ bonds. For Lizzie and Laura, the home becomes a place to re-orient themselves in a
female-specific community after exposure to the dangers of the male-dominated public
marketplace.1 For instance, Lizzie’s adventure into the goblin men’s domain disposes her to
physical brutality: the goblins elbow and jostle her, clawing and tearing at her hair and clothes,
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they stomp on her feet, and even vocally intimidate her by “barking, mewing, hissing” and
“mocking” (Rossetti 400-07). The violence Lizzie encounters in the market, which is owned and
operated by these merchantmen, suggests a deep-rooted resentment of women consumers.
Furthermore, their absolute savagery points to a hyperbolic example of Victorian resistance to
women as participants in the emerging capitalist system; so, Lizzie, bruised and damaged from
this endeavor into the male public space, reconvenes with her sister in the safety of their home. It
is a seemingly intuitive force which has “urged her home” towards her sister, “quite out of breath
with haste / And inward laughter” (462-63). Here, in the sanctuary of the female-run domestic
realm, a joyful reunion occurs, and the healing process for the two girls may begin.
Comparatively, for Collins, the appropriation of power begins with the strength of the sisterly
friendship in the domestic sphere, and subsequently extends into the public; at a particularly
thrilling point in the novel, Collins administers an account of Marian penetrating into men’s
conversations while scaling the roof of Blackwater Park. Here Marian’s womanly strength and
acumen, gained from her entanglement in “Laura’s honour, Laura’s happiness, Laura’s life
itself” (Collins 334-35), allow her to “creep along [the roof] noiselessly, till [she] reached that
part of it which was immediately over the library window; and to crouch down between the
flower-pots, with [her] ear against the outer railing” in order to listen to the men’s scheming
(335). Yet Marian’s masculine fortitude is ultimately coded in feminine notions of vulnerability;
further in the passage, Marian qualifies her determination by divulging, “[m]y courage was only
a woman’s courage, after all” (335). Marian here subscribes to the language of the gender and
recognizes her ‘weakness’ as a woman. Such references drive home the idea that Marian’s
transgression does not unsex her; rather, it reminds us that she is indeed still feminine – albeit, a
different kind of woman. But the idea of permeating the metaphorical barrier between men and
women’s private conversations evidences courage in Marian’s actions – a strength which she
draws from her sister. Upon her return from this adventure, Marian (in typical Victorian female
custom) falls ill, and the only word which she is able to repeatedly write is “Laura” (315), and
thereby demonstrates her deeply embedded concern over her sister’s well-being. Because protofeminism is still operating within the established parameters of a patriarchal space, what
becomes necessary then for the sisters is to maintain the stability of their bond within the
domestic sphere – thus fashioning it as female-governed – so as to enable the required stability
for these moments of penetration into male-dictated places.
2. Kinship and/as Female Exchange: “Goblin Market” and The Woman in White’s Utopic
Visions of Female Communities
“Goblin Market” can in some ways be seen as a precursor to late-Victorian anxieties about
aestheticism and indulgence turning towards dangerous decadence.2 However, in this case work
and pleasure are not conceived as a binary;3 rather, a collaborative female union in the instance
of Lizzie and Laura balances these two typically diametrically opposed activities. The sisters
experience mutual pleasure in their intertwined physical support system, which must then be
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tempered by labour in order to exact productivity. Indeed, their closeness is a heavily cited and
important passage from the poem, and is worth citing at some length:
They lay down in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow …
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest. (Rossetti 186-198)
Helen Michie suggests that this scene is particularly “erotic” (416), while Janet Casey notes that
critics often reference this scene “in asserting that the two girls represent two halves of one
personality” (67). Casey’s observation lends to my reading of economic indulgence; that is, the
sisters here draw a kind of physical sustenance from an intertwined community, lying “[f]olded
in each other’s wings” (Rossetti 184) and, importantly, “[c]heek to cheek and breast to breast,”
so that they may in turn participate together in a successive fruitful day of labour. The next
stanza presents a scene of collaborative work, wherein the sisters rise together and perform a
meticulous list of chores (199-208). Their joint efforts in the morning’s endeavors establish an
equal footing through which the women may safely exchange in a moderate and satiated kind of
pleasure: this, of course, is not allowed to become actualized. The introduction of the Goblin
men’s cries of “Come buy, come buy,” (232, 255, 273) to Lizzie and Laura’s utopic and
contained work-pleasure offsets this balance, and the sisters’ work can no longer remain
productive; Laura ‘falls’ partly as consequence of the men’s imposition of an unequal power
balance. The Goblins engage in seductive tactics to bait Laura into eating the fruit, in a crucial
moment of separation from Lizzie (97-115). With the equilibrium in the female community
having been distracted by the threat of infiltration from the outside world, Laura can no longer
engage in the abovementioned chore list, instead conceding to sit “down listless in the chimneynook / And [will] not eat” (297-8).
The sensuality of the sisterly bond also creates a special brand of empowerment through
which the sisters may (re)claim their sexual desire. As previously noted, the goblin men use
force to dominate both Lizzie and Laura when outside of the safety of their female-specific
domesticity. When Lizzie ventures into the market to procure an antidote for her sister, she
sustains a “metaphorical rape” (Casey 69). The physicality of this rape – or the domination of
women by men – has previously been detrimental to those who lacked the stability of a sisterly
community; looking to the apologue of Jeannie (the classic “fallen woman”4) who “for joys
brides hope to have / Fell sick and died / In her gay prime” (Rossetti 313-15), Lizzie draws
strength from her deep-rooted care for her sister to sustain the “smart, ache, tingle” administered
by the Goblin men (447). Though disoriented by the men’s forcible “hustling,” “clawing,” and
“tearing” (398-403), Lizzie’s love for her sister propels her “up the bank … through the furze”
toward Laura (450). Upon reuniting, Lizzie recognizes that her discombobulation and
‘patriarchal’ wounds can be rectified or healed through the touch of her sister:
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
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Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you. (466-469)
Laura and Lizzie then engage in a physical female exchange of healing. Laura, who
had “[s]eemed knocking at Death’s door” (321), is rejuvenated and, more importantly, satiated
by the “feast” of a now female-bestowed form of knowledge/power (495). It is this sisterly
sensuality which finally allows for a cathartic purging of toxic power structures, and the
relationship between sisters proves much more fulfilling, productive, and rejuvenating than
engagement with men. The morning after the transmittal of the antidote from Lizzie to Laura,
Rossetti catalogues Laura’s renewed, youthful joy:
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laughed in the innocent old way
Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice
Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey,
Her breath was as sweet as May,
And light danced in her eyes. (537-42)
Here, Laura’s body is fully healed; a regression has occurred, but towards the better, “innocent”
days. Her hair, which had previously been thinned and grayed by the fright from the Goblin
men’s calls (277), now “gleams.” The mention of the regenerative, proliferate month of May
signals to the reader that Laura will continue to flourish with the bodily communication of Lizzie
– which Laura herself recognizes immediately, engaging Laura “but not twice or thrice” in
physical embrace.
The poem’s end presents a cheerful vision of the sisters as adults, with an assertion of the
proper, productive family unit. Lizzie and Laura are happily bound in normative heterosexual
marriages, with children as evidence of their respective fertility within nuptials. Curiously
though, this final stanza depicts a distinctly matrilineal picture of inheritance; while both Lizzie
and Laura are “wives,” their respective devotion to their husbands – as a typical Victorian text
would often purport – is here omitted. Instead, Laura “would call the little ones / And tell them
of her early prime” (548-49), thereby demonstrating the importance of women’s education by
and for women. This motherly passing down of knowledge rewrites or redefines kinship as both
pedagogical and sensual modes of female exchange; for the sisters, it is imperative to teach their
children while “joining hands to little hands” and bidding “them cling together” (560-61). Not
only does Laura instruct orally, but also passes down her internalized knowledge that through
corporeal connectedness strength can be gained, and rooting one’s passions in women can
control desire. The final lines of the poem are significantly spoken in the once-fallen voice of
Laura rather than narrated by Rossetti, and stand out as a noteworthy tribute to the unifying,
compensative force of sisterhood: “‘For there is no friend like a sister … To strengthen whilst
one stands’” (562-67). The poem’s purported moral here surfaces as a vision of potential bliss
within tightly knit female communities.
Leila Silvana May points out that, like those in “Goblin Market,” the sisters of The Woman in
White share “a relationship of closeness, intensity, self-sacrifice, mutual dependence, and
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physical demonstrativeness” (91); rather than a generation of female-centered kinship rules in an
isolated setting (as in Rossetti’s poem), Collins’ sisters must together overcome existing laws of
patriarchal kinship stipulation, and re-mold this unwritten code for themselves. Upon their first
meeting at Limmeridge House, Marian declares to Walter of her sister, “I won’t live without her,
and she can’t live without me … You must please both of us, Mr. Hartright, or please neither of
us” (Collins 76). Her relationship with Laura has been executed (up until Walter’s arrival) and
allowed to develop in perfect isolation – for the death of their parents, as well as a childhood at a
country estate, has permitted Marian to be “mother and sister both” to Laura (173). Indeed, they
occupy a physical space (the house and estate) which is caught up in a very long tradition of
patriarchal descent and which they have presided over until now. So, Marian’s dual ties to Laura
inculcate a kind of love which she puts above even her own life (111) and lays the foundation for
a relationship that is only shaken by severe patriarchal threat. Indeed, while Marian and Laura
enjoy private friendship, a promise to her late father hurls Laura into issues of possession by men
and possession of Limmeridge House. As the legitimate heiress to the estate, Laura becomes
something which Marian must (re)claim.5 It then becomes Marian’s sisterly duty to burst through
these male-dictated laws so as to maintain her bond with Laura. The pending marriage to Sir
Percival indeed brings out a passionate Marian; in a heated conversation with Laura concerning
the subject of her fixed wedding date, Marian exclaims: “Men! They are the enemies of our
innocence and our peace – they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship –
they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up
a dog to his kennel” (Collins 208). Marian’s opposition to men here is bound up in her potential
loss of kin; her “sorrow” threatens to overtake her trademark faculty to reason6 further in the
passage, indicating the deep-rooted devotion to her sister. Though Laura makes her “twice repeat
the promise to live with her once … married” (208), Marian recognizes the true threat to her role
as guardian-sister which Sir Percival poses.
With the death of Sir Percival having been proclaimed an accident (538), Laura is essentially
resurrected from the dead;7 upon hearing of her husband’s passing, Laura learns that this had
“released her, and that the error and calamity of her life lay buried in his tomb” (547). Though
her “fortune is gone” momentarily (556), Laura and Walter are legally allowed to marry – but
not without Marian’s permission. Marian’s role of sister/protector is interwoven from the very
onset into the fabric of Laura and Walter’s life together. By the novel’s end, May notes that the
only question which remains unanswered is “whether Marian, who has sacrificed her entire life
for her sister, can be expected to continue to do so” (99). Yet, Walter falters when broaching the
subject of Marian’s future; “Was it not our duty,” he thinks, “to forget ourselves, and to think
only of her? I tried to say this … [but Marian] took my hand, and silenced me at the first words”
(Collins 612). Marian disallows Walter’s protestation and proclaims herself as guardian of Laura
and Walter’s future offspring: “I will teach them to speak for me, in their language; and the first
lesson they say to their father and mother shall be – We can’t spare our aunt!” (612). The
importance of matrilineal pedagogy, as in “Goblin Market,” prevails in The Woman in White;
female-oriented modes of education dominate as the prime model.
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And so we reach the final scene, when “little Walter” is six months old; here, interestingly, it
is Marian (rather than Walter) who declares the heir to Limmeridge:
“Child!” [Marian] exclaimed, with all her easy gaiety of old times. “Do
you talk in that familiar manner of one of the landed gentry of England?
Are you aware, when I present this august baby to your notice, in whose
presence you stand? Evidently not! Let me make two eminent personages
known to one another: Mr. Walter Hartright – the Heir of Limmeridge.”
(616-17, Collins’ emphasis)
The narrative ends in Walter’s pen – but it is Marian who gets the last words. She scoffs at
Walter’s attempt to identify his “own child,” and asserts her earned position within this new
model of kinship by naming the next generation – “the Heir of Limmeridge.” To be sure, Marian,
Laura, and Walter all play important parts in the continuation of the familial line within the
revised system; while Walter and Laura remain biological parents to little Walter, Marian’s bond
with Laura is essential in determining the health of their heterosexual marriage.
3. Conclusion
Rossetti and Collins are notorious for ideas that are beyond their contemporary issues,
especially concerning the ideologies surrounding women in the mid-Victorian era; I see these
texts also as being written in response to an ignorance surrounding issues of sisterhood – either
literal or metaphorical8 – in the 1860s. Marcus notes that in Victorian literature, “a woman’s
emotional and sensual connection to another woman helped unite her to a beloved husband”
(Marcus 15). This holds true for sisters Laura and Marian, and Laura and Lizzie; not only was
their physicality vital for the purposes of gaining strength from one another, but also the
production of a new kind of progressive union with men – one wherein women may lay claim to
both property and their reproductive rights. The relations between the sets of sisters maintain an
array of parallels: both are cultivated in the countryside, both observe similar protector/protected
roles, both develop at least in part due to the absence of parental figures, and both rely on deeply
physical and emotional ties, to name a few. However, they diverge in at least one major way;
while Lizzie and Laura seek to originate a new mode of kinship, Laura and Marian work to
manipulate and re-write the existing models. This stated, the project of obviating female-specific
exchange as a primary contributor to a heterosexual, productive conclusion was obviously
important to both Rossetti and Collins. Indeed, patriarchal structures are labeled as detrimental to
the sisters’ respective bonds, and the production of new kinship systems allow them to write the
bond into the material of these structures. At a time when it was still frowned upon for women to
circulate in a public, urban space without a chaperone,9 Rossetti and Collins execute their
narrative developments in a place where women do possess some amount of power: the domestic
sphere. Significantly, both authors push their sisters into liminally public spaces. It may then be
concluded that in the 1860s, women’s power must be first propagated by and for women in a
women-dominated space – and only then may it be passed down through the generations by
means of healthy, heterosexual lineage.
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Notes
1
Elizabeth Campbell’s “Of Mothers and Merchants” (Victorian Poetry 33.3 (1990): 393-410)
also recognizes the goblin men’s market as a “male-dominated” public space (402).
2
For example, the German physician Max Nordau’s (1949-1923) Degeneration (London:
Heinemann, 1896) was translated into English in the mid 1890s, and indeed encouraged the idea
of degeneration as a close relative of genius within the ‘decadent’ arts of the fin de siècle.
3
As Michel Foucault’s introduction to The History of Sexuality, Volume One (entitled “We
‘Other Victorians’”; Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Print.) asserts,
nineteenth century “sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home” (3) – thus
suggesting a segregation from the public place of productive labour.
4
The theme of prostitution and the ‘fallen woman’ became a predominant trope and certainly
held an amount of ideological weight in mid-Victorian literature and politics; the pervasive
understanding seems to be that of fallen women as social casualties of disastrous spatial
developments, or particularly the lack of sex-based segregation in factories. See, for example,
William Acton’s landmark study, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social, & Sanitary
Aspects, in London and Other Large Cities (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968) for a
contemporaneous exposure of prostitution – one of the many socially unacceptable deeds that
could ostensibly lead to a woman’s ‘fallenness.’
5
See Philip O’Neill’s Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety (London: Macmillan,
1988. Print.) for further clarification of “the situation of wedlock” (7) in The Woman in White as
it pertains to patriarchy.
6
The famous first encounter between Walter and Marian has been widely commented on by
critics; here, Marian’s “easy elegance” is juxtaposed with a “complexion [that is] almost swarthy
… [and a] large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw” and her perhaps most notable feature – “the
dark down on her upper lip” – is described at length (Collins 74). Indeed, both May and Laurel
Erickson comment on the “masculinity” of her appearance (90; 98-9) – a quality which places
Marian squarely in the ‘masculine’ tradition of reason and logic.
7
This is a reference to the sensation plot, which is not of immediate concern to my argument.
For reference, however, this portion of the novel involves the faking of Laura’s death, which
occurs when her half-sister Anne Catherick dies of a heart condition and is buried in Cumberland
as Laura.
8
I use the term “metaphorical” here to denote that women in the Victorian era “often compared
friends to parents and siblings,” and the two relationships could thus “approximate one another
under the right conditions” (Marcus 68-9).
9
The Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 was designed to regulate prostitution in Victorian
England, and allowed for the forcible registration and regular internal examination of women
suspected of being prostitutes – namely, those who were seen in public alone after curfew.
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Works Cited
Bachman, Maria K. and Don Richard Cox. Introduction. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K.
Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Peterborough: Broadview, 2006. 9-37. Print.
Casey, Janet Galligani. “The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market.’”
Victorian Poetry 29.1 (1991): 63-78. Web.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox.
Peterborough: Broadview, 2006. Print.
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desires, and Marriage in Victorian England.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.
May, Leila Silvana. “Sensational Sisters: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.” Pacific Coast
Philology 30.1 (1995): 82-102. Web.
Michie, Helena. “‘There is no Friend Like a Sister’: Sisterhood as Sexual Difference.” ELH 56.2
(1989): 401-421. Print.
Psomiades, Kathy. “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace
Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology.” Novel 33.1 (1999): 93-118. Web.
Rossetti, Christina. “Goblin Market.” Christina Rossetti: Complete Poems. Ed. R.W. Crump.
New York: Penguin, 2001. 5-19. Print.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy of Sex.’” Feminism &
History. Ed. Joan Wallace Scott. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 105-151. Print.
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Windows to the Soul: Duessa’s Gaze in Edmund Spencer’s “The
Faerie Queen”
Bethan Chalke
Bishop’s University
In The Use of Pleasure, Michel Foucault wrote, “There are times in life when the question of
knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is
absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (8). Self-knowledge is a
central theme in Edmund Spenser’s Book One of “The Faerie Queene” and the Redcrosse Knight
must be educated before he can achieve a state of ideal chivalry. The notion of chivalry is
comprised of three main components: courtly love, Christian faith, and loyalty to a king. The
Redcrosse Knight’s motives begin in Book One as anti-chivalric; this is best illustrated in his
duel with Sans-Joy in canto five when he forsakes the chivalric code in favour of Duessa, the
Whore of Babylon. I will study this scene’s visual matrix in order to illustrate Duessa’s influence
on the Redcrosse Knight. Spenser establishes a specular economy that encourages readers to
track the gazes of the characters and, in doing so, creates a three-dimensional visual experience
in textual representation. In the duel with the Saracen, the Redcrosse Knight’s gaze is passive in
contrast with Duessa’s powerful and active gaze. Her gaze directly contributes to the Redcrosse
Knight’s victory. Moreover, her dual role as an active participant and a passive trophy is starkly
contrasted to a more typical model of femininity, represented by Lucifera. Within the courtly
love tradition, typical femininity is defined as silent, idealized, and unattainable. Furthermore,
the power of Duessa’s gaze appropriates a masculine position that challenges the patriarchal
model. In this essay, I will argue that Spenser uses Duessa’s gaze to reflect a systemic anxiety in
sixteenth-century England, elicited by Petrarchan politics in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The crisis
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of masculinity the Red Cross Knight experiences in the Faerie Queen mirrors the crisis of
masculinity in Elizabethan men.
It is fruitful to examine Laura Mulvey’s understanding of the male gaze and its connotations
in Visual and Other Pleasures as a theoretical entry point into understanding Duessa’s role in
“The Faerie Queene.” Spenser constructs a specular economy whereby a three-dimensional space
is textualized as a space to explore how gendered power relationships are constructed. The
trajectories of their gazes (that is to say, where specific characters are looking and who they are
looking at) create a dynamic, intricate space. There are many ways to derive pleasure from
looking. Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” says that, “There are circumstances
in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure
in being looked at” (16, emphasis added). In this case, pleasure is synonymous with power;
Duessa and the Redcrosse Knight acquire different types of power through their interaction.
Muvley builds on Freud’s theories of visual and sexual pleasure in his Three Essays on
Sexuality: she states, “[Freud] associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects,
subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze”(16). Duessa is very scopophilic (that is to say,
she derives pleasure from looking); however, I will argue that Spenser’s specular economy
resists easy application of Mulvey’s theory because he creates a tournament space where a
woman wields the gaze in a specular economy where men are coded as objects.
Another way to gain pleasure from looking is through voyeurism, where a subject derives
pleasure through looking (like scopophilia); however, in this scenario the person looking is
invisible to those who he (or she in this case) is subjecting. In “The Faerie Queene,” Lucifera is
voyeuristic. All voyeurs are scopophilic, but not all those who are scopophilic are voyeuristic.
For instance, Lucifera is hidden while she observes the duel between the Redcrosse Knight and
Sans-Joy. She derives pleasure while remaining invisible to those she is objectifying, making her
profoundly voyeuristic. In contrast with Lucifera, Duessa is openly gazing at the men and clearly
receiving pleasure from the experience. However, her vulnerability to the gaze of others makes
her scopophilic rather than voyeuristic.
In “The Faerie Queene,” gender stereotypes are subverted. Duessa and the Redcrosse Knight
both occupy female and male gender roles. Suzanne Moore, in “Here’s Looking at You, Kid,”
argues that “the idea of sexuality is socially constructed rather than god-given and immutable.
Hence femininity and masculinity are processes in a state of constant negotiation, not static
categories from which there is no escape” (45). Therefore, the gender stereotypes that portray
males as dominant and females as submissive, is too limiting. She goes on to say that a
vulnerable man, in this case the Redcrosse Knight, “[appeals] to women precisely because they
offer the possibility of an active female gaze” (45). Vulnerable men can excite women because
this model of masculinity allows them a space to explore predatory desires. However, in the case
of Duessa and the Redcrosse Knight, it is not only his vulnerability that excites Duessa, but also
her ability to manipulate him, even after he has reestablished his confidence after defeating SansJoy.
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A man’s perceived dominance over a woman is often attributed to the power his gaze
connotes. Mulvey argues that, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has
been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its
fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (19). While Mulvey is justified in
arguing that men are active and women are passive participants in the three dimensional space of
film, her theory is limiting because it does not allow for a space where women occupy a female
gaze. This binary opposition between male agency and female passivity also appears in Lorraine
Gamman and Margaret Marshment’s The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture:
they argue that “men are shown to be in control of the gaze, women are controlled by it. Men act;
women are acted upon” (1). However, I will argue that these binaries are much too reductive; in
“The Faerie Queene,” Duessa is a character that inhabits both active and passive roles in the
specular economy, hence the duality in her name.
On one level of Spenser’s text, Duessa is passive. She occupies the role of the prize; she
remains a trophy and is objectified by the male gaze. For instance, “On th’ other side in all mens
open vew/Duessa placèd is” (5, 5, 42-43); Duessa is placed opposite from Lucifera in open view
of the Redcrosse Knight and Sans-Joy. Therefore she becomes a prize to be objectified and won
by the victorious knight. Duessa understands her material value as an object whose purpose is to
be traded among men; she knows and exploits her worth in the masculine economy. She
purposefully objectifies herself for her own protection and benefit. Duessa, nonetheless, retains
her autonomy by deciding what master she will follow. For instance, when the Redcrosse Knight
encounters the giant, Orgoglio, Duessa realizes she will profit more in her relationship with him
than with the Redcrosse Knight, so she proffers herself as Orgoglio’s prize. Duessa says, “O
great Orgoglio, greatest under skye, … vanquisht thine enternall bondslave make,/And me thy
worthy meed unto thy Leman take” (7, 14, 122-126). Realizing that Orgoglio is the most
powerful masculine option, Duessa presents herself as his “bondslave” and trophy. Duessa
recognizes that, to survive, she must be a trophy for men, because there is no opportunity for an
independent woman without masculine protection in the patriarchal chivalric economy. As
Gamman and Marshment argue, “Aspects of female autonomy and control … have
conventionally featured male protagonists without falling into a simple reversal of gender roles”
(4). In the case of the Faerie Queene, although Duessa performs passivity, she is actively
determining her own fate.
During the tournament in Canto five, Duessa is placed in open view of the men in the
tournament setting and they gaze upon her; however, she also has an unobstructed view of the
duel and its participants. She gazes upon them as much, if not more, than they gaze upon her. For
instance, the Redcrosse Knight and Sans-Joy are looking at each other, locked in battle, whereas
Duessa is entirely focused on the two men. Duessa is subjecting the Redcrosse Knight to her
“controlling and curious gaze” (16), manipulating him, rather than being objectified by the men
and remaining inactive. It is Duessa’s gaze, and her interference by shouting, “Thine the shield,
and I, and all” (5, 11, 99), that causes the Redcrosse Knight to “[move] with wrath, and shame,
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and Ladies sake” (5, 12, 104) and conquer Sans-Joy. Therefore, Duessa is a profoundly active
participant in the duel: without her interference, the Saracen would likely have been victorious.
During the duel, Duessa is juxtaposed with Lucifera. As aforementioned, Duessa is placed in
an open, visible space, while Lucifera is veiled and hidden “under stately canapee” (5, 5, 40).
This position makes her exceedingly voyeuristic, whereas Duessa occupies a much more
masculine role by controlling the outcome of the duel with her gaze and interference. Duessa has
much more influence over the men in the duel than Lucifera and the rest of the spectators
because she orchestrated the entire event: she encouraged Sans-Joy to avenge his brother’s (and
her former lover’s) death. The Saracen and the Redcrosse Knight are reduced to Duessa’s pawns
for her own revenge. Marshment argues in “Substantial Women” that in actions concerning
revenge, “[have] a woman at its centre, refusing the role of victim, initiating and executing her
own revenge. In this she uses the masculine tools of power” (42).
On one hand, Lucifera’s passivity is aligned with Muvley’s views of a passive female. On the
other hand, Duessa’s agency resists simple categorization. Mulvey in “Fears, Fantasies and the
Male Unconscious” says that “[Women] are being turned all the time into objects of display, to
be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet, in a real sense, women are not there at all.
The parade has nothing to do with woman, everything to do with man” (13). In context of “The
Faerie Queene,” the “parade” is the tournament setting. This is, in a sense, true. The duel has
nothing to do with Lucifera, but it has everything to do with Duessa. So, for typical femininity,
Mulvey is accurate, but her sexist assumption that all women must fit neatly into the “typical
feminine” category ignores that possibility for exceptions like Duessa, who is openly
objectifying men. Duessa’s gaze matters to Sans-Joy and the Redcrosse Knight because she is
the prize, but also she is reflecting their ideal identities back to them and therefore she defines
them.
Jacques Lacan posited that a child cannot understand the world until he or she can recognize
him or herself in a mirror and grasp the concept that they are their own entity with which they
can identify. However, there will always be misrecognition because the reflection represents the
ego ideal, the perfect self and therefore something that is impossible to attain. In the case of the
Redcrosse Knight, he seeks someone who can reflect back his identity; however, there is
misrecognition because he is concerned with how he appears to Duessa, and fearful because he
can never attain his ego ideal. Duessa, in order to manipulate him, reflects back a false identity.
The Knight adopts this false reflection because he cannot achieve his previously construed,
perfect identity. Duessa, then, defines him; it is only because of her that he is victorious and has
a coherent identity. As Mulvey rightfully argues, “The presence of a woman is an indispensable
element of spectacle” (19); however, the woman to whom she refers is passive, like Lucifera. In
this case, Duessa purposely reflects a false identity for her own benefit, connoting a sense of
ownership. Just has Duessa is the Redcrosse Knight’s prize for defeating Sans-Joy, the
Redcrosse Knight is dependent on her to continue reflecting his new identity. As a result, when
she forsakes him for Orgoglio, the Knight suffers a severe identity crisis and must go to the
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House of Holinesse to be rehabilitated. Therefore, Duessa is hardly a passive participant in the
tournament setting.
Recalling Mulvey’s statement about there being pleasure in looking as well as being looked
at, pleasure is synonymous with power. Two different kinds of power are derived from Duessa
and the Redcrosse Knight’s interaction during the duel: immediate power and prolonged power.
On one hand, the Redcrosse Knight gains immediate power because, due to Duessa’s
interjection, he “Out of his swowning dreame he gan awake” (5, 12, 101). That is to say, he
seemingly awoke from a reverie and began to furiously fight anew and is almost immediately
victorious. He draws physical power from Duessa’s gaze. On the other hand, Duessa acquires
prolonged power over the Redcrosse Knight because she is now aware of her ability to
manipulate him. She understands that he is defined by her and dependent on her for maintaining
a consistent identity. Duessa gains psychological power and influence over the Redcrosse
Knight, despite him thinking that she is merely his trophy. Spenser equates power with pleasure
as well. Duessa evidently derives pleasure through her manipulation of the Knight and his
dependency on her for a coherent identity. Duessa’s ability to abandon the Redcrosse Knight for
her own benefit (and pleasure) is a direct result of her masterful manipulation of him during the
duel with the Saracen.
Duessa inhabits the masculine role of looker and, in this specular economy, can act as a
symbol of masculine anxiety around female power present in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Courtiers
in Elizabeth’s court were subjected to Petrarchan politics, whereby men devote themselves to an
indifferent, unattainable woman who is idealized and put on a pedestal. Elizabeth, as the
anomalous apex of political power, occupies a masculine role and threatens to subvert the
patriarchal model. Duessa can be interpreted as a symbol for Elizabeth I. Elizabeth’s style of rule
– as a prince and queen, king and woman, courtly beloved and virgin – is defined through binary
opposition, just as I have argued, defines Duessa. In “The Faerie Queene,” Spenser resists female
dominance in the resolution of Book One: in the final battle with the dragon in canto eleven, the
Redcrosse Knight reorganizes his chivalric beliefs and follows divine guidance, rather than the
guidance of women (which he has followed for the entire journey). Spenser argues, therefore,
that to be truly masculine and chivalric, a man must forsake women and follow only God. In a
socio-historical context, men should be loyal to England and St. George, over their loyalties to
Queen Elizabeth. Duessa and Queen Elizabeth are both dominant figures who emasculate men,
occupy male and female roles simultaneously, and, therefore, retain their autonomy and control
over their male subjects whilst performing passivity.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure. Penguin Books. 1992.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality. Perseus Books. 2000.
Gamman, Lorraine and Marshment, Margaret. The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular
Culture. The Real Comet Press, Seattle. 1989.
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Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. “Volume B: The Sixteenth
Century and The Early Seventeenth Century”. Eight Edition. W.W. Norton & Company
2006.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Originally published in French by Éditions de Seuil in 1966.
Later published in English by Tavistock Publications Routledge. 1989.
Marshment, Margaret. “Substantial Women” in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of
Popular Culture. The Real Comet Press, Seattle. 1989.
Merritt, Juliette. Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators. University of Toronto
Press. 2004.
Moore, Suzanne. “Here’s Looking at You, Kid!” in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of
Popular Culture. The Real Comet Press, Seattle. 1989.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasure: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, “Changes:
Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience” and “Fears, Fantasies and the Male
Unconscious”. Indiana University Press. 1989.
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Exceeding the Mark: The Masculine Gaze and Ekphrastic Rebellion in
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”
Drew Simpson
Concordia University
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” was published in 1842, one hundred and thirty three
years before Laura Mulvey published her seminal feminist article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema.” That this dramatic monologue can be so fruitfully considered using the analytical
framework which Mulvey’s theory of the Masculine Gaze provides is a testament to the scope of
Mulvey’s theory, as well as the insightful nature of Browning’s vision. In his attempts to master
the Duchess, the Duke of Ferrara utilizes the techniques of sadistic voyeurism and scopophilic
fetishism outlined by Mulvey in her analysis of misogynist Hollywood films. Through the
Duke’s retrospective narrative, Browning illustrates these techniques in use, but also suggests
their limits. As will be demonstrated, the Duke’s power over the Duchess may be significantly
more limited than he purports it to be. Finally, and fittingly, Browning’s most famous poem also
works as a strong proto-feminist critique of a culture which often reduces women to mere sites
for the forging of homosocial allegiances, and the cyclical abuse of women which such a culture
allows.
When the reader, looking over the envoy’s shoulder, is introduced to the Duchess, she has
already fallen prey to patriarchal abuse, and her metamorphosis from a vivacious,
communicative young lady into a beautiful but definitively static painting seems to be complete.
She has literally been objectified for her inability – or perhaps unwillingness – to conform to the
Duke’s restrictive, demeaning expectations. Thus, it would seem, in her reduced and incorporeal
form she finally fits the expectations he demanded but could not successfully impose on her in
her previous living state.
What the Duke had demanded was for her to become an “Angel in the House,”1 a woman
who would hold him as the centre of her universe and act as a quietly legitimizing commodity to
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underscore his social status as an aristocrat with an ancient lineage. The fact that she did not
consider the Duke or his nine hundred year old name to be more worthy of her smile than
anything else challenged his sense of self-importance and inflamed his jealousy. She smiled and
amiably chatted with low class servants, and blushed when Frà Pandolf complimented her. As
Haug notes,
what causes the Duke’s anxiety is the fact that, for the Duchess, looking
is a reciprocal, democratic activity. Her gaze is not a strategy to gain
control over others’ bodies but an artless, creative way of participating in
processes of visual communication that are liberating rather than
confining ... With her ‘smile,’ the Duchess opens up avenues of
interpersonal exchange (267).
Thus, when Duke states that “her looks went everywhere” (Browning l. 24), we can apprehend
that what was likely genuine friendliness on the part of the Duchess is, to the Duke, a form of
infidelity: The Duchess’s “desire to give herself indiscriminately to all her world’s pleasures [is]
misread as sexual promiscuity [by the Duke], threatening loss” (Ingersoll 156). The Duke saw
his life as devolving into a Fabliau, with his role being that of the cuckold. The ridiculous extent
of the Duke’s castration anxiety is illustrated by the fact that his feelings of jealousy are extended
even to the mule she rides – which is, notably, a cross-bred animal, and therefore born infertile.
This jealousy may stem from the fact that this mule granted the Duchess movement (Browning l.
29), and is therefore a part of her active relationship with the world – a relationship that
contravened the limitations which the Duke had demarcated for her: “The [male] character in the
story can make things happen and control events ... In contrast to woman as icon, the active male
figure ... demands a three-dimensional space ... He is a figure in a landscape ... he articulates the
look and creates the action” (Mulvey 21). Due to his wife’s violation of his narcissistic need to
be the absolute center of her world, and what he perceived to be her usurpation of his active role,
the Duke was fully consumed by his castration anxiety at this point, and so sought to relieve his
anxiety through the means outlined by Mulvey in her article.
Mulvey posits that the male unconscious provides two routes to evade castration anxiety:
escape through a sadistic form of voyeurism, or escape through fetishistic scopophilia (22). The
Duke first attempts to control his wife through means which quite strongly evoke Mulvey’s
definition of sadistic voyeurism, which involves
ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting
control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or
forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism
demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change
in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all
occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end (22)
As mentioned above, the Duke finds it easy to ascertain his young wife’s guilt, but when he
attempts to obtain an admission of guilt through asserting his will, she demonstrates her own,
and “plainly set[s] her wits to [his]” (Browning ll. 40-41). In so doing, the Duchess actively
refutes the Duke’s possessive male gaze. The Duchess’s rebellious feminine gaze is perceived by
the Duke as an attack on his masculinity, a further attempt to reduce him to an object,
exacerbating the castration anxiety he’d hoped to evade. As such, to the Duke it would seem that
forgiveness is not in order.
It is not unusual for the male to resort to violence when confronted by the returned gaze of the
female other. Of course the Duke, being the stately gentleman that he is, would never stoop to
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such acts. Why would he, when he can simply order others to do so for him? Thus, “[he] gave
commands; / Then all smiles stopped together” (Browning ll. 45-46). Furthermore, the Duke
makes a fascinating attempt to “have his cake and eat it” (Mulvey 25): following the sadistic
punishment of his “guilty” Duchess, the Duke attempts to create a situation where even in her
bodily absence he can enjoy his wife through scopophilic fetishism, which “builds up the
physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” (22). At first
glance it would seem that he has succeeded. The Duchess is certainly not a “figure in a
landscape” (21); she is tightly ensconced in her two-dimensional prison cell. Moreover, as U.C.
Knoepflmacher points out, “the Duchess [has] lost more than a freedom of motion. Imprisoned
as [she is] within a male’s rhetoric of justification [she has] also become bereft of a voice” (104),
and “the ‘approving speech’ with which [the Duchess] received all who greeted her has been
extinguished, like her original ‘blush’ [Browning l. 31]” (114). It would seem that in her silent
and immobile state the Duchess has lost her ability to subvert the Duke’s objectifying gaze and
has finally been reduced to the “bearer, not maker, of meaning”, which can be easily integrated
into the Duke’s carefully manipulated autobiography “through linguistic command” (Mulvey
15). However, this reading is far from definite, as Catherine Maxwell points out. In “Not the
whole picture: Browning’s ‘unconquerable shade,’” Maxwell argues that such a reading renders
“the poem as portrayal of the Duke’s character, a portrayal that accommodates all too easily the
apparent claims of mastery advanced by the speaker”, and furthermore, that though “the Duke
tries to fix his lady... [this] does not necessarily mean that his attempt at reduction and control is
successful” (emphasis mine, 323). Maxwell’s argument is an important one, and one which gains
credibility through the examination of another famous ekphrastic encounter in Victorian poetry:
that orchestrated by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh between the titular character
and the portrait of her mother.
There are more than a few similarities between the women/portraits described in Browning’s
dramatic monologue and that presented in the first book of his wife’s epic poem. Aurora Leigh’s
memories of her mother suggest that, like the Duchess, she had a rather vivacious and
spontaneous personality. The description given evokes a woman difficult to pin down, with
contradicting but coexisting personalities: “my mother at her post/ Beside the nursery door, with
her finger up,/ ‘Hush, hush – here’s too much noise!’ while her sweet/ eyes/ Leap forward,
taking part against her word” (emphasis mine, Barrett Browning ll. 14-18)2. In both cases the
painting is of a woman who is no longer present in bodily form. Aurora Leigh’s mother is dead,
and while Browning ensures that it cannot be ultimately verified, it is quite plausible that the
Duke has had his last Duchess killed. Whether this is the case, or she has instead been
incarcerated in a convent, she is segmented off from the world she had enjoyed so much. The
result is the same in both poems: a silent, motionless piece of art has replaced the talkative,
dynamic woman which it portrays. A second aspect that links the two portraits is that they both
seem to appear “alive”, as suggestively noted by the Duke (Browning ll. 2, 47), and
acknowledged by Aurora and Assunta (Barrett ll. 26). Thirdly, both the Duchess and Aurora’s
mother in their present state seem to absorb the wayward gazes of those nearby: They are eyecatching, and there is something about them that draws a strong response. (Barrett Browning
ll.137, 143-145; Browning l. 12-13). Or, perhaps more appropriately, there is something about
these portraits/women which draws strong responses. Maxwell notes that “a painting, in its
ability to arouse the strong emotions of its viewers, can out-manœuvre the desire and wishes of
its artist or owner” (323). This is certainly the case in Aurora Leigh: through Aurora’s aspectral
gaze, the portrait of her mother, though unmoving, is far from static. She takes on myriad forms,
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including some which the artist would have been unable to foresee, including that of Medusa
(Barrett Browning ll. 157-159). This startling image is a notable one when considering this
portrait’s relation to that in “My Last Duchess”, since Sigmund Freud interwove the story of
Medusa with his theory of the castration complex: “The terror of Medusa is ... a terror of
castration that is linked to the sight of something ... The sight of Medusa’s head makes the
spectator stiff with terror” (emphasis mine, quoted in Leicester 473). Reflecting upon the static
yet mercurial portrait provided in Aurora Leigh might thus make us reconsider the fixity of the
Duchess in her painted form.
Catherine Maxwell has certainly reflected upon the supposed fixity which many readers have
felt safe in attributing to the Duchess, and argues that like the polyvalent portrait of Aurora’s
mother, “the portrait of the Duchess doesn’t remain fixed or immobile in the way the Duke
would like; the Duchess still moves, and delights, and demands attention and the ‘depth of
passion’ of her depicted glance still has to be owned by the Duke as springing from a source
other than himself” (323). Starzyk and Haug also come to this conclusion, claiming that the
Duke has failed in his attempt to control his wife through the masculine gaze, and that, in fact,
the duke cuckolds himself:
he commissions Frà Pandolf to paint the [D]uchess and thus to render her
mute, but he apparently does so without warning the painter against
calling for the lady’s spot of joy ... Pandolf has unwittingly undermined
the [D]uke’s command that all smiles cease by artistically rendering that
smile for eternity (Starzyk 698).
Ultimately, despite all of the constraints that the Duke has used in his attempt to constrain his
Duchess, she still retains some form of her agency, and “even as a portrait... resists being
objectified by the Duke’s manic possessiveness” (Haug 266). The Duke has successfully quieted
the Duchess’s voice, but he has been unable to fully prevent her from projecting an irrepressible
female gaze that undermines his project. The Duchess’s rebellious gaze also alters how we might
read the curtain to which the Duke has brought so much attention. What seemed before a method
of keeping supposedly unworthy gazes from gaining access to the Duke’s property may instead
be an attempt to “create the saving illusion that [he] cannot be fully seen,” of “being sheltered
from the continuing threat that the Duchess’s eternal gaze poses to his own subjectivity” (Starzyk
699). The curtain that initially seems to affirm the Duke’s ultimate mastery over his Duchess
instead reveals the severe limits of his power.
Whether we read the Duke as having succeeded or as having failed in his attempts to
completely dominate his wife through sadistic voyeurism and scopophilic fetishism, he has not
been punished for the very real abuse he visited upon her, and moreover, it seems quite possible
that the cycle of abuse may continue indefinitely. Indeed, while it is tempting for readers to
suppose that when the Duke insists that he and the envoy “go down together” (Browning l. 54),
the envoy is trying to “escape” in order to dissuade the Count below from giving his daughter
away to such an unscrupulous “collector,” such a reading is far from certain. It is equally
conceivable that the envoy is simply bowing and offering to let the Duke descend the staircase
before him, as courtesy demands servants must do. Arrangements have been set in motion, and
the homosocially beneficial marriage will likely proceed. Since the Duke’s “Power is backed by
a certainty of legal right” (Mulvey 24) as an enfranchised member of his patriarchal society, it is
quite conceivable that he will receive his ample dowry, and the Count will receive the social
benefits of having the distinguished Duke of Ferrara as a son-in-law. Donald S. Hair suggests
that “if the Count’s ‘fair daughter’ does not behave as the Duke wishes, she too will end up as a
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Flouting Femininity
painting” (102). The envoy will inform the blushing bride-to-be that she should curtail that
“disgusting” habit, and if she does not conform to the Duke’s strict will, the whole grisly (and
profitable) scenario may play itself out again. Perhaps it already has; among other definitions
offered in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word “last” is “following all the others in a
series, succession, order, or enumeration; subsequent to all others in occurrence”. Even the
envoy may not know how many veiled frames line the walls of the Duke’s estate.
Notes
1
One doubts whether the Duke will ever achieve this satisfaction with his next Duchess: Haug
notes that the “figure of the ‘Angel in the House’ variety is largely and conspicuously absent
from Browning’s works” (211).
2
Beyond illustrating the multiplicity of her living mother’s personality, these lines demonstrate
the way that a gaze can destabilize and perhaps even override the meaning of the spoken word.
Works Cited
Hair, Donald S. Robert Browning’s Language. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Print
Haug, Jochen. Passions without a Tongue: Dramatisations of the Body in Robert Browning’s
Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Print.
Ingersoll, Earl G. “Lacan, Browning, and the Murderous Voyeur: ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My
Last Duchess’.” Victorian Poetry 28.2 (1990): 151-57. Web. 10 December 2011.
Knoepflmacher, U.C. “Projection and the Female Other: Romanticism, Browning, and the
Victorian Dramatic Monologue.” Critical Essays on Robert Browning. Ed. Mary Ellis Gibson.
Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1992. 100-19. Print.
Leicester, H. Marshall, Jr. “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Difference ‘It’
Makes: Gender and Desire in the ‘Miller’s Tale.’” ELH 61.3 (1994): 473-99. Web. 24
October 2011.
Maxwell, Catherine. “Not the whole picture: Browning’s ‘unconquerable shade’.” Word and
Image 8.4 (1992): 322-32. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. 2nd ed. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Print.
“last.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Web. 12 December 2011.
Starzyk, Lawrence J. “Browning and the Ekphrastic Encounter.” Studies in English Literature,
1500-1900 38.4, 1998. Web. 11 December 2011.
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Contributors
Veronica Belafi recently graduated from Concordia University in Honours English Literature,
with a minor in Biology. Her interests stem from the relationship between Science and
Literature, including ecocriticism, neo- and social Darwinism, representations of the humoral
body on the Early Modern stage, and more recently, the symbiosis between bio-sciences,
contemporary literature, and communication theory. She aims to peruse graduate studies in this
interdisciplinary vein of Literature.
Jason Michael Beland is currently in the final year of a Bachelor's degree in English Studies at
Laval University in Quebec City. He will move on to the Graduate program during the 2013 Fall
semester. He hopes to continue teaching English, painting and working in film in the years to
come. He has produced and directed short films as well as sold paintings in the Quebec area for
the past 5 years.
Kristy Benz has just completed her fourth year at Bishop’s University. She is undertaking a
combined major in English Literature and Liberal Arts, with an Honours degree in Drama. Kristy
was honoured to hold the position of Tomlinson Intern during the 2011-2012 academic year. Her
involvement with QUEUC has been one of the highlights of her time at Bishop’s University.
103
Danielle Bird is a recent graduate of Concordia University's Honours English Literature
program. Hailing from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Danielle now lives in Toronto and is
attending York University to obtain her MA in Literature. She is primarily interested in
exploring the intersection between anthropology and Victorian proto-feminist literature, and
focusing on how representations of bonds between women in this era contribute to this dialogue.
After this year's intensive MA program, Danielle plans to take some well-deserved time off
before exploring these ideas in a PhD setting.
Bethan Chalke is from North Vancouver, BC and is going into her fourth year at Bishop's. She
is currently studying towards a Honours degree in English with a Literature concentration in the
Medieval and Early Modern period. While she is greatly interested in Chaucer and Shakespeare
(not to mention the Classics), Bethan also has an incredible obsession with Harry Potter. In the
upcoming year she plans on writing her Honours thesis surrounding gender roles and their role in
wielding the gaze. Once finishing her thesis and graduating, Bethan wishes to go to graduate
school to complete a Masters in the field to hopefully one day become a professor. Nonacademically, Bethan loves to wakeboard and snowboard, as well as spend time with her friends
and family. She loved the experience of QUEUC and can't wait for next year to do it all over
again! Stay golden.
Jessika Deschenes is from Quebec City and is completing a major in English at the
undergraduate level at Laval University. She has a particular interest for lively debates and active
group work with a wide variety of personal interpretations, as well as seminar types of class
when doing literary analysis. Jessika will spend the winter semester of 2013 at Simon Fraser
University in British Columbia, remaining within the field of English studies.
Alexei Fraser graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of
British Columbia in May 2012. Her areas of specialization include rhetoric, media and postmarxist feminist theory. She has studied astrophysics at the University of Waterloo and political
science at Queen’s University, through the International Study Centre in England. Alexei plans
on pursuing a PhD in intellectual history.
Delan Hamasoor is a Kurdish-Canadian currently living in Jeollabuk-do, South Korea. He is the
former Executive Editor of Existere: Journal of Arts and Literature, and he graduated magna
cum laude from York University with a BA in English and Professional Writing, Institutional
Communications stream, Specialized Honours in 2012.
Emily LeDuc graduated with an Honours Bachelor of Arts from McMaster University in June
2011. Majoring in English and History, Emily enjoys melding her fields of study by investigating
the symbiotic relationships formed between popular media and historical narrative, especially
those that focus on intersections of gender, race and class. She recently completed an
undergraduate thesis that explores the history of the Disney Heroine and advocates for
responsible and informed media consumption. In the fall, Emily will begin her graduate career in
History at Queen’s University. Upon completion of her Master’s degree she plans to begin work
on a doctorate.
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Kathleen MacDougall is in her third year of studies at Concordia University. Formerly enrolled
in the Studio Arts program, Kathleen is now pursuing Honours in English Literature. She is
particularly interested in the writings of both Psychoanalytic and Feminist theorists.
Gillian Massel is a fourth year English Literature Student with Honours at McGill University.
She is the current President of the McGill Department of English Students' Association (DESA),
the editor-in-chief of the VEG Literary Magazine, and a senior editor for The Channel
Undergraduate Academic review. Gillian's interests include Shakespeare, 20th British
Modernism, and Canadian poetry - but her favourite part of being an English Major is the fact
that she receives academic credit for reading dirty and racy literature.
Alexandra Pope is a Sherbrooke native completing her Honours in English Literature at
Bishop's University. She expects to graduate in May 2013 and plans to pursue an MA in English
Literature at McGill University in September 2013. Although "A Bird Of Prey And An Arctic,
Steely Thing: Incompatibility Between Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen in D.H Lawrence's
Women In Love" is about a modern British novel, Alexandra is especially interested in Gothic
and Victorian era literature. Alexandra won the Honorary Chair Of The Board Of Governors'
Award in English in her second year at Bishop's. She is also a member of the Golden Key
International Honor Society.
Laurel Rogers in going into her fourth and final year of an English Honours degree at the
University of British Colombia. She is particularly interested in science fiction's ability to
articulate and explore the conflicts and tensions present in contemporary society, and plans to
expand on these issues in relation to Stargate: Atlantis in her Honours thesis in the fall.
Drew Simpson was born in Banff, Alberta, and currently lives in Montreal with his girlfriend
Paige and his son Everett. He is currently working towards achieving honours in English
Literature and minoring in Anthropology at Concordia University. He would like to study
literature in a university setting forever. His plans for the fall include dressing Everett up as
David Foster Wallace for Halloween and working doing lots of bartending so he can afford to go
to school next year.
Emily St-Aubin is a fourth year student at Bishop's University. Having recently graduated from
Bishop's with an Honours in Drama and a minor in Gender, Diversity, and Equity Studies, Emily
is excited to continue her studies in the fall as she pursues an MA in Drama at the University of
Alberta. Emily is particularly interested in how minoritized groups represent themselves, and are
represented in theatre and enjoys taking an interdisciplinary approach to her research as she
combines her backgrounds in drama and performance studies, gender, diversity, and equity
studies, and education.
Denise St. Pierre is a fourth year student at Bishop's University working towards a degree in
Honours Film, Cultural, and Media Studies with a Minor in Creative Writing and Journalism.
Her academic interests include film theory and film music, and she was ecstatic to marry them in
her research for QUEUC. After graduation in May 2013, Denise is considering a post-secondary
program in Book and Magazine Publishing, and someday hopes to work for the Canadian comic
publishing company Drawn+Quarterly.
105
Editors & Editorial Board
Dr. Jessica Riddell is a professor of English literature at
Bishop’s University. Her research focuses on late medieval and
early modern performance and the intersections between gender
and political authority in courtly and civic drama. Dr. Riddell
teaches courses on medieval and early modern literature and
drama. When she is not teaching and researching, she can
usually be found in the garden at her farmhouse with Marlowe,
her dog
Kristy Benz has just completed her fourth year at Bishop’s
University. She is undertaking a combined major in English
Literature and Liberal Arts, with an Honours degree in Drama.
Kristy was honoured to hold the position of Tomlinson Intern
during the 2011-2012 academic year. Her involvement with
QUEUC has been one of the highlights of her time at Bishop’s
University.
106
R. Zöe Costanzo is going into her fourth and penultimate year
at Bishop’s University with an Honours BA in English
Literature, and a Sociology minor in Gender, Diversity, and
Equity Studies. Zöe’s interests lie in gender studies in both the
Medieval and Contemporary periods. Her undergraduate thesis
examines the conflicts engendered when women assume roles of
authority in patriarchal institutions. In her spare time, Zöe can
usually be found playing with her dog, Patsy, and trying to
memorize the second declension. What did Roman pirates say?
Sunt!
Bethan Chalke is from North Vancouver, BC and is going into
her fourth year at Bishop's. She is currently studying towards a
Honours degree in English with a Literature concentration in the
Medieval and Early Modern period. While she is greatly
interested in Chaucer and Shakespeare (not to mention the
Classics), Bethan also has an incredible obsession with Harry
Potter. In the upcoming year she plans on writing her Honours
thesis surrounding gender roles and their role in wielding the
gaze. Once finishing her thesis and graduating, Bethan wishes to
go to graduate school to complete a Masters in the field to
hopefully one day become a professor. Non-academically,
Bethan loves to wakeboard and snowboard, as well as spend
time with her friends and family. She loved the experience of
QUEUC and can't wait for next year to do it all over again! Stay
golden.
Alexis Chouan is a third-year student in Film, Media and
Cultural Studies at Bishop’s University. Alexis comes from
France and chose to study at Bishop’s University for the small
campus atmosphere and the experience of an Anglophone
education. His hobbies include writing and graphics design. He
is an avid world traveler, currently teaching English in Thailand,
as part of an Eastern Townships Mae Sot Education Project for
Burmese refugees. He intends to return to Bishop's University in
January 2013 to complete his undergraduate degree.
107
Denise St. Pierre is a fourth year student at Bishop's University
working towards a degree in Honours Film, Cultural, and Media
Studies with a Minor in Creative Writing and Journalism. Her
academic interests include film theory and film music, and she
was ecstatic to marry them in her research for QUEUC. After
graduation in May 2013, Denise is considering a post-secondary
program in Book and Magazine Publishing, and someday hopes
to work for the Canadian comic publishing company
Drawn+Quarterly.
108