Feminist
Alternatives
Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary
Novel by Women
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Media
America,
Inc.
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Publication Information: Book Title: Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women. Contributors:
Nancy A. Walker - author. Publisher: University Press of Mississippi. Place of Publication: Jackson. Publication Year: 1990. Page
Number: i.
CHAPTER
Narrative and Transition
ONE
As a writer, I feel that the very source of my inspiration lies in my never forgetting how much I
have in common with other women, how many ways in which we are all--successful or not-similarly shackled. I do not write about superwomen who have transcended all conflict; I write
about women who are torn, as most of us are torn, between the past and the future, between our
mothers' frustrations and the extravagant hopes we have for our daughters. I do not know what a
woman would write about if all her characters were superwomen, cleansed of conflict. Conflict is
the soul of literature. 1
These comments by Erica Jong, published in 1980, identify several crucial elements of the
contemporary novel by women writers. It is true, as Jong says, that all literature requires conflict,
but the particular conflicts, for women, of the period between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s
arose from dramatic alterations in their roles, their relationships, and their involvement in political
activity on a scale unprecedented in Western culture. The women's movement aroused anger, raised
hopes, and disrupted traditional life patterns in ways that quickly found expression in women's
poetry and prose. Jong also refers to the uncertainty
of women poised between past and future, between mothers and daughters, frustration and hope.
This sense of transition is reflected in the titles of Jong's own Isadora Wing trilogy-- Fear of Flying
( 1973), How to save your own life ( 1977), and Parachutes and Kisses ( 1984)--as well in the titles
and substance of dozens of novels by women published during the same period. Finally, and most
significantly, Jong speaks of the bond she feels with other women, all "similarly shackled" by sexist
mythologies--a sharing of experience that provides her with both solidarity and inspiration. In
contrast to her college years (she graduated from Barnard in 1963, the year Betty Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique), when she was told that women could not be writers, the events of the
1960s and 1970s created a climate in which women wrote copiously, using the novel in particular to
speak to each other of their anger and their fear and their triumphs, and at the same time bending
narrative structures and strategies to their own purposes.
As feminist literary criticism has made abundantly clear, women have not only written and
published novels for several centuries, they have been some of the most innovative and imaginative
practitioners of the form. Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, and many
other writers are beginning finally to be viewed not merely as anomalies or accidents but as major
figures in the tradition of the novel in English. Yet not until the 1970s and 1980s can it be said that
the female novelist--in England, Canada, and the United States--claimed significant contemporary
attention, as opposed to posthumous re-evaluation. Many of the writers commonly agreed to be
"major"--such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Drabble--are women, and,
increasingly, they are women of color: Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston. That
they are being regarded with such seriousness owes much to the development of feminist criticism,
which in turn grew out of the women's movement itself--a movement that, as many of these writers
have testified, provided them with the courage and motivation first to be writers, and then to break
out of traditional patriarchal forms and tell the stories of women in their own voices. The relation
between art and reality has been debated for centuries, but that relation has taken on new resonances
since the 1970s, when feminist critics began to posit that women as writers and readers participate
in the creative process more directly than do men. Rachel Brownstein, in Becoming a Heroine,
argues that young women in particular discover in fictional heroines the possibilities--and more
importantly the limitations--of their own lives. Female readers, Brownstein says, have relied on
fiction for "structures they use to organize and interpret their feelings and prospects":
Girls have rushed right from novels, headlong and hopeful, into what they took to be happy
endings: the advice they have given their friends, their gossip about their enemies, their suspicions
and interpretations of the actions of others, and their notions about themselves have run along lines
derived from fiction. Women who read have been inclined since the eighteenth century to
understand one another, and men, and themselves, as characters in novels. 2
Brownstein refers primarily to the traditional novel, written by both men and women, which
features the "marriage plot": "finding validation of one's uniqueness and importance by being
singled out among all other women by a man" (xv). It is failure in the marriage plot that makes
Edith Wharton's Lily Bart a tragic figure, and it is deviation from that plot that dooms Kate
Chopin's Edna Pontellier; both The House of Mirth and The Awakening can be read as cautionary
tales.
Contemporary women novelists, aware of the effect of fictions (both literary and cultural) on
themselves and their readers, also write cautionary tales, but they subvert the marriage plot. Their
characters leave marriages or refuse them altogether; they have affairs and do not drown themselves
or turn on the gas; they seek identity in work, their friends, and themselves rather than primarily in
men. Margaret Drabble's Jane Gray, in The Waterfall, is conscious of both the inevitability of her
emotions and her freedom to write the ending of her own story: "There isn't any conclusion. A death
would have been the answer, but nobody died. Perhaps I should have killed James [her lover] in the
car, and that would have made a neat, a possible ending. A feminine ending?" 3 For James to die-better, for both of them to die--would be to echo or recapitulate the plots of earlier novels by
women, such as The Mill on the Floss, and thus to submit to the moralism of the marriage plot, in
which women were punished for infidelity by the loss of lover or life. But Jane Gray lives in an era
of choice, and therefore can choose to avoid the "feminine ending."
By thinking of herself as a character in a novel, Jane Gray, like many other characters in the
contemporary novel by women, exemplifies Brownstein's thesis. She is aware of the power of the
traditional plot, and moves tentatively beyond it, testing the ways in which life may be plotted
outside of traditional fiction, seeking, as Heilbrun says, to "write her own life." Both Beth and
Miriam, central characters in Marge Piercy Small Changes ( 1973), grow up depending on stories to
tell them what is possible for their lives. Beth reads indiscriminately, out of a vague sense of
dissatisfaction. She reads Frank Yerby and Galsworthy, Huxley and Iris Murdoch: "On such books
she formed her notions of what was out there, past Syracuse." 4 Miriam reads for the same reason-"She was never as happy as when she saw a new movie or read a book or saw a story on television
that she recognized as usable: a hero, a situation, a motif she could borrow"--but she is conscious
that these stories have better roles for men than for women:
Most plots consisted of a hero going through adventures. Once in a while there was a heroine
instead, but her adventures then were men she met and got involved with. Everybody said it was
bad for a woman to have affairs with a series of men. Therefore women were supposed to be dull
and good. Miriam decided that she would rather be bad and exciting, but she was not sure she
would ever get the chance. ( 97 )
Both Beth and Miriam have the chance to be "bad" in Piercy's novel by becoming involved with the
1960s counterculture, including the embryonic women's movement.
Margaret Drabble has written that the novel is the ideal place for women to deal with the issues
raised by the women's movement, and she echoes Brownstein when she says that "many people
read novels to find patterns or images for a possible fu- ture--to know how to behave, what to hope
to be like." But Drabble, like Jong, emphasizes the uncertainty of women in a period of transition:
We do not want to resemble the women of the past, but what is our future? This is precisely the
question that many novels written by women are trying to answer: some in comic terms, some in
tragic, some in speculative. We live in an unchartered world, as far as manners and morals are
concerned, we are having to make up our own morality as we go. . . . There is no point in sneering
at women writers for writing of problems of sexual behavior, of maternity, of gynaecology--those
who feel the need to do it are actively engaged in creating a new pattern, a new blueprint. This area
of personal relationships verges constantly on the political: it is not a narrow backwater of
introversion, it is the main current which is changing the daily quality of our lives. 5
By emphasizing that the contemporary novel by women fuses the personal and the political,
Drabble evokes a central rallying cry of the early years of the women's movement: that the personal
lives of women are political issues.
Like consciousness-raising groups, a central goal of which was to help women see the connection
between the personal and the political, the contemporary novel by women has become a forum for
issues of deep relevance to women's lives. This is not to suggest that women writers have
abandoned art for politics, or that the novel has become merely a soapbox, 6 but rather that for the
lay reader (as opposed to the scholar or critic), the most crucial aspect of the novel is on the level of
characterization and plot: what kind of person is the central character? What choices does she have/
make? What are the consequences of those choices? As novelist Nora Johnson wrote in an essay in
the 20 March 1988 New York Times Book Review, "my response to this feminist fiction was primal
and only half-critical; I listened for cries that matched mine, novelty and hope (however illusory) in
the dark night." 7 The novelists themselves have often written with a sense of mission that
corresponds to this "primal response." Fay Weldon, for example, began writing her witty, irreverent
fictions before there was a recognized women's movement in England, and only later saw that her
themes "could actually be organized into an ideology, a movement":
And yet, you see, the sources of my indignation are for me the same as they are for other women in
the Women's Movement who are better fitted to analyse and to see how things can be changed.
I want to lead people to consider and explore ideas that aren't very popular, which many people
would rather not think about. But if anybody's to get anywhere, they had better think about it. One
can transcend one's body: whether it's good to do so is another matter. 8
Weldon's insistence on exposing painful issues that have caused her "indignation" can be said to
characterize the contemporary novel by women, as women embody in fiction the personal and
political issues that have affected their lives as well as those of their characters. 9
It is important to keep in mind, of course, that the embodiment of issues specifically relevant to
women's lives in fiction written by women is not a new phenomenon. Jane Austen in the eighteenth
century, George Eliot, "Fanny Fern," and Sarah Orne Jewett in the nineteenth, and many others
detailed the myriad complexities of female experience in fiction that has had particular resonance
for female readers. Indeed, as Annette Kolodny has pointed out, women writers have commonly
written within the context of other women's texts. Although Kolodny finds merit in assertions such
as those of Harold Bloom that readers and writers alike perceive the meaning of a specific text in
light of their experience with other texts, so that, in Bloom's terms, "meaning is always wandering
around between texts," she argues convincingly that these texts have been different for women than
for men. Kolodny points to the fact that from the 1850s on in American literature, women writers
"perceived themselves as excluded from the dominant literary tradition and as writing for an
audience of readers similarly excluded." 10 Further, Kolodny extends Brownstein's cultural analysis
of the effect of reading on women into the realm of reader-response criticism when she asserts that
"women taught one another how to read and write about and out of their own unique (and
sometimes isolated) contexts" (465). What distin- guishes the women's novel of the contemporary
period from earlier fictions, however, is its focus on the inevitability of change and its
representation of the variety of women's socio-economic, ethnic, and sexual orientations and
experiences.
Logically enough, in fiction that constitutes at least in part a sharing of values and experience
during turbulent times, the line between fiction and autobiography has tended to blur. Lily Bart and
Edna Pontellier live lives removed from their creators' personal experience, and are distanced from
them also by the use of a third-person narrative. But the frequent use of first-person narration in the
contemporary novel provides an impression of autobiographical narrative even when this is not
actually the case. In addition, as Joanna Frye points out in Living Stories, Telling Lives, the use of a
female "I" in control of the novel is a way of escaping from the cultural expectations of the
marriage plot: "By virtue of speaking as a woman, any female narrator-protagonist evokes some
awareness of the disjunction between internal and external definitions and some recognition of her
agency in self-narration. To speak directly in a personal voice is to deny the exclusive right of male
author-ity implicit in a public voice and to escape the expression of dominant ideologies upon
which an omniscient narrator depends." 11 The first-person perspective of Drabble's Jane Gray, Gail
Godwin's Violet Clay, Atwood's Offred, and other narrators draws the reader into the realm of the
personal, the "real," and even when the author selects a more objective narrative perspective, a
sense of intimate confession nonetheless permeates these novels.
Elizabeth Janeway, writing of women's literature since 1945, finds the blurred distinction between
fiction and autobiography the most compelling innovation of the period, and she, like many others,
ties this narrative tendency to changes in ideology: "The need for women to exchange information
about their lives and thus to arrive at shared judgments and conclusions gives such reportage a
particular interest in this period of growing awareness." 12 Weldon 1977 novel Words of Advice
provides an ironic gloss on such a sharing. Gemma, who was once a naive, impressionable
secretary, tells the story of her life to Elsa, who seems to be drifting romantically through life as
Gemma once did. "If only," Gemma says plaintively, "we women could learn from each other." 13
Another reason for the frequent use of pseudo-autobiography is to again underscore the link
between the personal and the political. As Judi Roller puts it in The Politics of the Feminist Novel,
"the use of autobiography seems to mirror the tension which exists in these novels between
individualism and modern mass collectivism and between public and private experience." 14 The
narrators or characters in these novels frequently attempt to define themselves as women against a
backdrop of political upheaval. Martha Quest Hesse, in Lessing The Four-Gated City, seeks a
direction for her life in the midst of post-World War IILondon, and Atwood's Offred struggles to
find meaning in the post-apocalypse Republic of Gilead. Both women are at odds with the political
and social structures that surround them, and self-definition is in part a direct response to cultural
chaos. To write, or appear to write, of direct personal experience is to emphasize isolation while at
the same time seeking connection.
For minority women, the problems of selthood and isolation have been compounded by cultural as
well as gender barriers. The women's movement, despite its close ties with the civil rights
movement of the 1960s, has been largely a white, middle-class movement. Women of this group
could identify closely with the experiences of central characters in works by Drabble, Atwood, or
Godwin; but black, Chicana, and Chinese-American women have commonly lacked the advantages
of race and class that would make such identification possible. It is no accident, then, that a central
issue in the apparently autobiographical narratives of minority women is the struggle to find a voice
with which to communicate. Maxine Hong Kingston Woman Warrior opens with the narrator's
mother warning her, "You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you," thus adding the burden
of family secrets to the language barrier of the immigrant family. 15 Similarly, Celie, in Walker The
Color Purple, writes, haltingly at first, to a God who fails to answer and a sister whose answers are
hidden from her. The need for fantasy in these works--the desire to fash- ion an alternative space in
which to speak as one's self--is fed by the silencing of racial and cultural oppression.
There would seem to be a paradoxical relationship between the autobiographical mode, with its
grounding in the realistic detail of everyday life, and fantasy, and between the grim struggle to
achieve selfhood and the superior, often humorous stance of the ironist. Yet the detailing of
uncomfortable experience leads easily to the imagining of an alternative way of life, whether better,
such as being a warrior-heroine, or far worse, as in the ritualized subjugation of The Handmaid's
Tale. Further, the very perception that alternate worlds can exist, if only in the imagination,
contributes to the double vision implicit in irony. Elizabeth Janeway speaks in part to the first of
these issues when she notes that "the drive to create a new world of symbols does not separate itself
from dailyness":
Instead, it works within everyday experience, looking there for clues to a new interpretive paradigm
that is already taking shape. Its first manifestation may be felt merely as disturbances in orthodox
theory; but as they increase, they point to the existence of an alternative world view that will in time
stand forth in its own essential identity. 16
Just as fantasy may be a way of constructing an unreal world from the specifics of the real, so irony
is a way of negating the truth or validity of a received tradition and pointing to its incongruity or
absurdity. Both devices, as used by the contemporary woman novelist, allow transcendence of
immediate experience even as the main characters tell their lives to the reader.
To stress the uses of irony and fantasy in contemporary fiction by women is not, of course, to argue
that these narrative strategies are the sole province of the woman writer. Indeed, both have been
staples of the novel since its earliest days as a form, and their power to suggest transcendence of
immediate reality has in fact made them natural tools of members of the dominant culture, for
whom the superior stance of the ironist and the dreams of the fantasist have come more naturally
than they have to members of oppressed groups. For all that we speak of the novel as an essentially
realistic mode, authors as disparate as Hawthorne, Melville, and Joyce have written elaborate
fantasies, a tendency that has continued in the work of John Barth and Lawrence Durrell; and irony
of different kinds permeates the fiction of Twain, James, and many others. Nor can it be claimed
that irony and fantasy have only in recent years been employed by women writers; the examples of
Jane Austen and Charlotte Perkins Gilman would alone belie such an assertion.
What is striking, however, is the widespread appropriation of these devices by contemporary
women writers in fiction that overtly explores the conditions of women's lives, so that traditional
narrative techniques become natural and effective modes of expressing the flux and uncertainty of
those who envision a new but indefinite social order. What these novels, taken together, convey
most clearly is a gender-specific resistance to the status quo of oppression, and within this thematic
scheme, fantasy-even when embodied in madness--explores alternative ways of being, while irony
questions the fixity of conventional reality. Lilian Furst, in Fictions of Romantic Irony, insists on
the relativity conveyed by irony. Distinguishing between irony and satire, she asserts that the latter
is grounded in a fixed moral vision, whereas irony is characterized by ambivalence:
The less immediately abrasive art of irony may ultimately be the more disturbing because its upshot
is a series of open ends and contradictions. It is an inquiring mode that exploits discrepancies,
challenges assumptions and reflects equivocations, but that does not presume to hold out answers. 17
Neither irony nor fantasy is governed by rules of right and wrong, truth and falsity, and the
combined use of them in contemporary women's fiction testifies to a shared consciousness of
necessary though unsettling change in women's relation to cultural expectations.
Irony, as the term is used in this study, is intended with its full range of possibilities, including
verbal irony, ironies of circumstance, and double narrative perspectives that challenge the immutability of perceived reality. Drabble The Waterfall exemplifies all three types of irony. When
Jane Gray comments, "But love is nothing new. Even women have suffered from it, in history," the
irony of the word "even" is both apparent to the reader, who may mentally substitute the word
"especially," and a comment upon the narrator's obsession with her lover, James, an obsession that
can send her into a "total panic" about the extent of her "subjugation" ( 161 ). This comment is
made by the first-person narrator who, more detached than her self in the third-person narration,
assesses that other self, challenging her own and the reader's sense of reality, beginning one chapter
by saying of her narrative, "Lies, lies, it's all lies. A pack of lies. I've even told lies of fact, which I
had meant not to do" ( 89 ). Drabble's use of irony thus allows her to present and challenge reality
simultaneously.
D. C. Muecke, in Irony, suggests that irony may have a subversive and potentially revolutionary
function when he stresses its rarity as a mode of thought: "The ordinary business of the world in
which most of us are engaged most of the time could not be carried on in a spirit of irony. . . . [A]
sense of irony depends for its material upon a lack of a sense of irony in others, much as scepticism
depends upon credulity." 18 The ironist, such as Drabble's firstperson narrator, thus stands apart
from both herself and most of her culture; irony becomes a method of questioning and of at least an
imaginative escape. Fay Weldon's Chloe, in Female Friends ( 1974), uses irony to question a
number of the myths that women are raised to believe, from principles of female biology to the
existence of God. A central myth is the efficacy of the marriage plot; taught to believe in "happily
ever after," Chloe comments wryly, "I remember love's enchantments. Of course I do. . . . the whole
self trembles again in the memory of that elation, which so transfigured our poor obsessed bodies,
our poor possessed minds. It did us no good." 19 The mere knowledge that love has been a trap does
not free Chloe entirely from it, but it constitutes a step toward such freedom because it engages the
intellect rather than the emotions.
Situational irony has particular relevance to detachment. As Muecke puts it, "the ironic observer is
in a special relationship to what he observes; he is detached from what he observes and this ironic
spectacle has . . . an aesthetic quality which, so to speak, objectifies it" ( 63 - 64 ). Thus Chloe
presents to the reader of Female Friends the ironic spectacle of her mother being in love with her
employer for years without reciprocation, so that "her life . . . has settled into a tolerable pattern of
exploitation and excitement united" ( 107 ). Thus objectified, her life becomes a cautionary tale to
the reader as well as to Chloe, who unfortunately cannot heed its message in her own life. A more
comically presented ironic situation opens Jong Fear of Flying. Isadora, on her way with her
husband to an international meeting of psychiatrists, objectifies her situation:
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six
of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks' ineptitude or my
own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began
my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier. 20
Jong uses irony here not only to challenge the authority of psychiatry, but also to suggest that
autonomy arises from the self rather than being conferred by an outside agency-especially an
agency derived from patriarchal systems of thought. Isadora's "parachute" in the final novel of
Jong's trilogy is her own self-esteem.
Just as women were re-evaluating their lives during the years of the women's movement, so irony as
a linguistic device forces a reevaluation of the meaning of a text. Classically, verbal irony has been
viewed as a kind of negation in which the reader participates. That is, the writer makes a statement
that the reader perceives, because of context or tone, to be untrue, and the reader then substitutes his
or her own version of the statement the author intended. This is the process that Wayne Booth
explains in A Rhetoric of Irony. Thus when Jong refers to her "glorious unanalyzability," the reader
is unwilling to take this at face value and moves back to the "shrinks' ineptitude" of the preceding
phrase. Booth maintains that irony gains force from the fact that the reader, having been compelled
to replace one meaning with another, be- comes committed to that meaning because it is his or her
own: "I make the new position mine with all the force that is conferred by my sense of having
judged independently." 21
However, Bertrice Bartlett has suggested a different way of reading irony that is more relevant to
the transitional phase that the contemporary women's novel describes. Rather than reject or negate
the author's initial statement, Bartlett says, we are invited to observe the contrast between that
statement and the one we perceive to be "true": "If we say she has the grace of a swan about
someone who has just stumbled and fallen downstairs, we invite contrast between her behavior and
the ideal of gracefulness (perhaps especially in women)" 22 . The contrast that the reader perceives
when rejecting Jong's phrase "my own glorious unanalyzability" points to a shfit in the locus of
responsibility for her continued fear. The traditional thinking of the patriarchal culture would blame
the woman for failing to overcome her fear, whereas Jong's irony forces us to see that the fault may
be that of an inept male authority instead. The irony is compounded by the word "glorious," which
seems to erect a self-congratulatory barrier between Isadora and the process of psychoanalysis.
By involving the reader in the construction of meaning, irony reinforces the bond between writer
and reader that these novels seek to create. Bartlett notes that irony "redirect[s] the focus of
discourse from new information about the world to a kind of shared game between speaker and
listener: I point the contrast, you draw the evaluative inference" ( 5 ). Fay Weldon, like other
authors, frequently makes this process overt by combining ironic statement with a direct address to
the reader. In Female Friends, Chloe speaks of the power of children to keep women in emotional
bondage, and then admonishes the reader: "Oh my friends, my female friends, how wise you are to
have no children or to throw them off. . . . Give birth, and you give others the power to destroy
you." The irony deepens when she continues, "And never have parents, either" ( 204 ). Caught
between children and parents, women in traditional roles may become the victims of both, and
Weldon's irony invites the reader to observe the contrast between these emotional ties and their
complete (and impossible) absence, suggesting that since generations are inevitable, the only
solution is the avoidance of their emotional traps. A few sentences later, Weldon interjects one of
several ironic parodies of Biblical language: "Blessed are the orphans, and the barren of body and
mind" ( 205 ). Such statements, which anticipate a similar use of Biblical language in Atwood
Handmaid's Tale, attack the role of Christianity in perpetuating patriarchal structures and attitudes.
It is precisely the role of the ironist to subvert such forms of authority. The term "irony" originates
in the Greek eiron, whom Aristotle defined as the "mock-modest man"--the person who pretends to
be or to know less than he actually is or does. The eiron is the child who dares in feigned innocence
to point out that the Emperor has no clothes; it is Mark Twain using the mask of Huck Finn
deciding to go to hell for helping a slave escape from bondage. Irony is a mask that the reader is
invited to see as a mask in order to view simultaneously the reality underneath it. It becomes the
means of complicity between writer and reader. Offred, in The Handmaid's Tale, delivers flat
statements that invite us to look beyond them for complexity. When she says of her narrative "this
is a reconstruction," she not only echoes Drabble's Jane Gray struggling for a conclusion to her
story; she also challenges us to consider what she really means--for surely all narratives are
reconstructions.
By pointing out that irony is the exceptional rather than the normal mode by which we conduct our
lives, Muecke suggests that both the use and the perception of irony require exceptional abilities;
and in fact the ironist, while pretending innocence, actually adopts a stance of superiority to his or
her immediate reality, holding two possible truths in balance at the same time. The relativity
implicit in irony--the ability to stand apart from the authority of conventional values and systems-requires an unsentimental intelligence and a courageous wit, qualities not easily compatible with the
traditional expectations of women. It is for this reason that the frequent use of irony in the
contemporary novel by women is particularly significant: it represents a challenge to traditional
values, recognition that the structures that cause and perpetuate women's oppression are arbitrary
and therefore subject to change. The ironic stance, which insists upon the contrast between two
alternative realities, forces a revision of the self that is objectified in the double narrative employed
in so many of these novels.
The fact that irony challenges our notions of reality means that it may be misunderstood. This is
what Umberto Eco calls "the quality (the risk) of irony. There is always someone who takes ironic
discourse seriously." 23 By inviting the reader to mistrust what is said, the ironic writer causes us to
question all reality. Offred calls her story a "reconstruction," and the "Historical Notes" that
conclude The Handmaid's Tale give the term renewed force by revealing that the story has been
reconstructed from cassette tapes by scholars. When Gemma, in Weldon Words of Advice, tells her
friend Alice that she is telling Elsa the story of her days as a secretary, Alice responds, "Which
version?" Gemma invites Alice to "listen and you'll find out" ( 130 ). Jane Gray, in The Waterfall,
presents side-by-side versions of the story of her relationship with James. The risk that the authors
of these novels take is that readers may be impatient at not knowing the "true" story; but the reward
is that they present the possibility of change and alternative realities.
Nancy K. Miller has written that "to read women's literature is to see and hear repeatedly a chafing
against the 'unsatisfactory reality' contained in the maxim . . . that grants men the world and women
love." 24 One major form in which this "chafing" manifests itself is fantasy, as Miller emphasizes.
Countering Freud, who posited that whereas men's fantasies chiefly embody "ambitious wishes,"
women's fantasies are primarily erotic, Miller writes:
Women writers . . . are writers . . . for whom the "ambitious wish" . . . manifests itself as fantasy
within another economy. In this economy, egoistic desires would assert themselves paratactically
alongside erotic ones. The repressed content, I think, would be, not erotic impulses, but an impulse
to power: a fantasy of power that would revise the social grammar in which women are never
defined as subjects; a fantasy of power that disdains a sexual exchange in which women can
participate only as objects of circulation. ( 41 ) Fantasy--in the forms of dreams and daydreams,
madness and utopian vision--is a way of fashioning an alternative reality, of subverting the social
order of the marriage plot and imagining power outside of it. The contemporary women's novel
employs fantasy in a number of ways to accomplish this subversion while at the same time
maintaining an atmosphere of reality that speaks to women's actual lives.
Fantasy and irony, as narrative devices, have several elements in common. Both point to a contrast
between different truths or realities, irony by causing a revision of ostensible statements or events,
and fantasy by imagining alternative patterns or scripts by which life may be conducted. Also,
although both irony and fantasy are ancient literary devices, the combination of the two is closely
related to some definitions of the post-modern spirit or temperament. Umberto Eco suggests this in
"Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable" when he speaks of the "lost innocence" of postmodernism.
He imagines the "postmodern attitude" as that of a man who cannot say to a woman "I love you
madly," because "he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words
have already been written by Barbara Cartland." The words he wishes to say have been preempted
by romantic fantasies of which both people are aware, and the solution, Eco says, is to incorporate
the fantasy into the utterance by saying, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." And
"both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony" ( 67 - 68 ). As a primarily
intellectual mode, irony works with the more emotional, intuitive mode of fantasy to acknowledge
contrast and change.
Indeed, the writer who uses irony is necessarily involved in some type of imaginative leap that is
akin to--even when it does not embody--fantasy. A. E. Dyson, pointing to the complexity of most
literary irony, notes that the ironist's real meaning "may exist somewhere between the literal
meaning and its logical opposite, in a no-man's-land where we feel our way very delicately and
sensitively, among many puzzling nuances of mood and tone." 25 It is such a "no-man's-land" that
the reader must traverse, for example, in The Color Purple, in which a semi-literate black woman
and her missionary sister recreate the epistolary novel in a series of letters that for the most part do
not reach each other, so that communication between the two is conjured from their--and the
reader's--fervent desire for reconciliation. In more overtly speculative fictions, such as The
Handmaid's Tale, fantasy is part of the design of irony. As Dyson says about other dystopian
novels, such as Brave New World and 1984, "a fantasy world is constructed to carry ironic
implications beyond purely verbal manipulation, into the plot and structure of the whole" (xiii).
Thus in Atwood's novel the multiple ironies of a society based on a fundamentalist interpretation of
Christian doctrine are demonstrated in the imaginative creation of that society.
Whereas many theories of literary fantasy emphasize its negation of actuality and possibility,
Rosemary Jackson has proposed that fantasy is heavily dependent upon a social context:
26
Fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is
a literature of desire, which seeks that which is perceived as absence and loss. . . . The fantastic
traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered
over and made "absent." 27
Jackson is speaking here of works of literature that are wholly fantasies rather than those of which
fantasy is an element or strategy, but her remarks about the role of fantasy in revealing the
"silenced" and "invisible" parts of culture have particular relevance to women's literature. It is
through such imagining that women have attempted to break their silence and to become visible,
and the contemporary women's novel is both a record of that imagining and a space in which
women writers have experimented with narrative structures and devices that embody the
relationship between fantasy and selfhood.
Fantasy, like irony, is used in this study in its broadest possible sense. All fiction is in some sense a
fantasy, in that it is an imaginative construction, but the pervasive use of fantasy as a plot element, a
narrative strategy, or a controlling form in the recent novel by women suggests an overwhelming
need for imaginative release from objective reality. On the simplest level, fantasy may be used a
part of the realistic narrative context. In Godwin Violet Clay, for example, the central character is an
aspiring artist who earns her living by designing covers for popular gothic romances-themselves
fantasies to provide fleeting glamor and excitement to women's lives. But Violet Clay is herself
living a fantasy by waiting for some magic to transform her into a "real" artist, a fact that she
recognizes in retrospect: "On the morning on which I invite you to enter my life, I was an
illustrator, not an artist. I was still spending my skills on other people's visions." 28 The heroines
who flee from castles in the cover illustrations that Violet paints have more in common with her
than she likes to think; like them, she cannot envision what comes after "happily ever after"; until
her uncle's suicide confronts her with his failure and the possibility of her own, she resists the risks
she must take in order to prove her gift. Even when Violet takes the first step toward independence
by leaving her husband to go to New York, she realizes that the marriage plot offers a security to
which part of her wishes to return, and sees herself with "one foot in the door of the Unknown, the
other still holding open its place in the Book of Old Plots" ( 57 ).
The need to free oneself from the "Book of Old Plots" informs another use of fantasy in these
novels: the re-telling or revision of traditional stories, including fairy tales, literary works, and even
history itself. In the final section of The Four-Gated City, Francis Coldridge, trying to preserve a
record of the destruction of western civilization, comments that history is an often erroneous
substitute for human memory:
The mass of the human race has never had a memory. History, the activities of historians, has
always been a sort of substitute memory, an approximation to actual events. In some epochs this
false memory has been nearer to events; in others very far--sometimes by design. 29
Francis's concern is that historians may, deliberately or not, distort the truth and thus falsify human
experience. Contemporary women writers have a different but related concern, which is that the
stories or scripts not only describe what is assumed to be women's experience, but also attempt to
prescribe appropriate roles and responses. By re-telling these stories, women question their
authority precisely by showing them to be stories, or fantasies. In Weldon Words of Advice, Gemma
begins telling the story of her life to Elsa by describing it as a fairy tale: "Princes, toads, princesses,
beggar girls--we all have to place ourselves as best we can" ( 20 ). Ironically, Gemma distorts her
own history to make it more like a fairy tale than it really was, because in a sense she has married
the toad rather than the prince and feels that she must explain why she is a victim; but Elsa realizes
that Gemma is trying to manipulate her as she has manipulated her own story, and manages to use
this knowledge to escape from her own romantic fantasies.
The most radical re-telling of history is the utopian or dystopian novel: the former posits, as did
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland, a future that has repudiated many of the values and conventions
of the past; the latter extends the worst features of contemporary social reality into a grim design. It
is significant as a measure of the failure of the socio-political movements of the 1960s and 1970s
that the contemporary women's novel tends to the dystopian mode. The disintegration and anarchy
that Lessing describes at the end of The Four-Gated City and in Memoirs of a Survivor stand at one
extreme of this dark vision; at the other extreme is the rigid moralism of the Republic of Gilead in
Atwood Handmaid's Tale. Both Lessing and Atwood (like Gilman and Orwell before them)
extrapolate from the conditions of their respective cultures--postwar Britain and post-feminist
America--to write cautionary tales of crumbling cultures that have abandoned the humane values of
a Herland. But Atwood is also re-writing a classic text: Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. In addition
to all of the obvious superficial correspondences, such as the color red, the location in
Massachusetts, and the identity between religion and government, Offred's story is in many ways
the ironic inversion of Hester's: whereas Hester is punished for adultery, Offred is forced into it,
both cultures using the same Bible as authority for their laws. Further, the "Historical Notes"
section of The Handmaid's Tale, like the "Appendix" to The Four-Gated City, makes clear that both
books are meant as "reconstructions" of reality. Martha Quest writes without knowing whether there
is a recipient of her letter--"Is it you I am writing to, Francis?"--just as Offred has recorded her
thoughts on cassette tapes, not knowing whether anyone would hear her story.
Another type of revision of history is the revision of one's personal history. One of the most
pervasive devices in the contemporary women's novel is the dual narrative voice that represents a
duality of consciousness--the second, usually first-person voice interprets, adjusts, revises the initial
story. The effect is to reinforce the fact that we invent our own stories, trying to find a coherent
pattern, and such an effort reflects the search for identity that many women experienced between
the mid-1960s and the mid1980s. Jane Gray, in The Waterfall, continually revises her own story in
an attempt to find a coherent morality and set of motivations:
I will take it all to pieces, I will resolve it to its parts, and then I will put it together again, I will
reconstitute it in a form that I can accept, a fictitious form: adding a little here, abstracting a little
there, moving this arm half an inch that way, gently altering the dead angle of the head upon its
neck. If I need a morality, I will create one: a new ladder, a new virtue. If I need to understand what
I am doing, if I cannot act without my own approbation--and I must act, I have changed, I am no
longer capable of inaction--then I will invent a morality that condones me. ( 53 - 54 )
No longer tied to the marriage plot, Jane must invent her own rules to accord with the necessities of
her life, and in the process she also revises the traditional English novel, such as The Mill on the
Floss, in which the heroine accepts the prevailing morality and dies of it. Godwin Violet Clay also
features alternating first- and third-person narratives as Violet tries to understand her own past. She
is conscious of being a character in a story, and says at one point, "In someone else's story, the
heroine would have embraced her setback, welcomed it as a prod to catapult her out of her slough" (
73 ). But Violet is a character in her own, not someone else's story, and therefore must make sense
of what she has actually (in Godwin's fiction) done. Revision and interpretation are also the method
in Weldon Female Friends. Late in the novel, Grace announces this as the purpose when she says to
the nar-rator, Chloe, "There has to be a kind of truth about one's life, doesn't there?" (269), and in
the last chapter Chloe speaks of her desire to make coherent the experiences of the novel's central
characters:
What can we tell you to help you, we three sisters, walking wounded that we are? What can we tell
you of living and dying, beginning and ending, patching and throwing away; of the patterns that our
lives make, which seem to have some kind of order, if only we could perceive it more clearly. (309)
The division of the self into multiple selves to question and revise reality is common in fantasy
fiction. As Jackson points out in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, "the narrator is no clearer
than the protagonist about what is going on, nor about interpretation; the status of what is being
seen and recorded as 'real' is constantly in question" ( 34 ). By questioning the "real," the novel
subverts patriarchal authority as women invent selves that they can accept. Nowhere is the division
into selves more compelling than in Joanna Russ The Female Man, a work of speculative fiction
embodying both utopian and dystopian visions and inhabited by four facets of a single woman.
Russ takes the concept of a woman having more than one "self" several steps further than do
Drabble, Weldon, and Godwin by creating four parallel universes, each of which is inhabited by a
different aspect of the same female consciousness, and each of which represents a different relation
to feminism. The unifying consciousness is that of Janet, who comes from an all-female utopia
named Whileaway that is similar in some respects to Gilman Herland. Through the experiences of
all four selves, Russ parodies sexist and misogynist cultures in ways familiar to feminist thinkers,
and Janet provides the ultimate challenge to the culturally determined "self" when she rejects the
concept of gender difference altogether and declares herself to be a man:
For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate
me, Support me. Now I say Move over. If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and
righteous and rightnow very bright and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a
Woman. 30 Through such ostensibly outrageous statements, Russ keeps the reader off balance with
regard to objective reality, yet the instances of sexism that the protagonists' selves endure are easily
recognizable to the contemporary feminist: sexual harassment, job discrimination, assumptions of
intellectual and biological inferiority.
The four aspects of one woman in The Female Man converse as separate individuals, but they also
intuit each other as different parts of the same personality. Similarly, Martha in The Four-Gated
City is able to hear the thoughts of others--especially Mark's wife Lynda, whose madness she begins
to understand almost as though they, too, exist in parallel universes. As Martha and Lynda explore
paranormal phenomena, "they used their dreams, their slips of the tongue, their fantasies . . . as
maps or signposts for a country which lay just beyond or alongside, or within the landscape they
could see and touch" (355). Martha's search for an alternate reality takes the form of voices, dreams,
memories, and even madness itself--all forms of fantasy. In Kingston The Woman Warrior, the
narrator is empowered by her mother's "talk-story" about the female warrior Fa Mu Lan to recreate
imaginatively the experience of the warrior and thus to rise above the anticipated fate of a Chinese
woman: "She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior
woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman." 31 The narrator's search for
identity as a Chinese-American woman requires her to enter the myths of her heritage, just as the
narrator in Atwood Surfacing must undergo a mythological rebirth in order to come to terms with
her past.
The line between dreams and fantasies, on the one hand, and madness on the other may be almost
indistinguishable in the contemporary women's novel. What can be termed madness may be
temporary and fleeting, such as Violet Clay's pantomime of her uncle's suicide or the Surfacing
narrator's abandonment of reality during her quest; or it may be a continual, inescapable condition,
such as Lynda's recurrent bouts of what she terms "acting silly" in The Four-Gated City. At times,
an entire culture is presented as being "mad": Atwood's Gilead, for example, and the brutality of
racial and sexual oppression in The Color Purple. The ultimate evocation of an alternative reality is
the overturning of what is con- ventionally considered rational thought, and madness may itself be
"divinest sense" or a stage on the journey to self-realization. In Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time,
Consuelo, who is repeatedly committed to mental institutions because of behavior that arises from
fear or despair, is able to make contact with Luciente, from the year 2137, and thus to observe a
culture that creates a positive space for what our culture terms madness--"getting in touch with the
buried self and the inner mind." 32
Barbara Rigney, in Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel, points out that a double or
divided self is common in the feminist novel because a central theme of these works is the forging
of a new identity and the concomitant abandoning of a socially approved identity:
Each novelist [ Brontë, Woolf, Lessing, Atwood] indicates that women in particular suffer from
more or less obvious forms of schizophrenia, being constantly torn between male society's
prescriptions for female behavior, their own tendencies toward the internalization of these roles, and
a nostalgia for some lost, more authentic sell. 33
Even when there is little or no suggestion of actual madness, the divided self appears as a common
narrative device--the ironic revision of reality that Weldon, Drabble, and others use to structure
their fictions. In either case, the central message is change: the need for social change and the
recognition that social change begins with individual change--the personal is political, but the
reverse is also true. If--to cite deliberately two vastly different novels--Isadora Wing can overcome
her fear of flying, and Alice Walker's Celie can emerge as a woman with dignity and selfesteem,
these characters become larger and more significant than their individual triumphs, and serve as
mirrors and models for readers who have their own fantasies.
The most widely read novels involving fantasy are the popular romances such as the gothic
romances that Violet Clay illustrates in Godwin's novel. But these fantasies are diametrically
opposed to the elements of fantasy in the novels considered in this study. The popular romance
reinforces and validates the marriage plot rather than proposing alternative realities for women. As
Kay Mussell writes in Fantasy and Reconciliation, "the romance fantasy
is retrogressive; it does not promote genuine change or individual growth. Instead, it works as a
conservative force, palliating and ameliorating the effects of chaos and change by portraying
traditional modes of being and aspiration as more fulfilling and exciting than they may seem in
reality." 34 Rather than challenging the status quo, popular romance novels "reduce the need to
redefine oneself or to experiment with one's own life" ( 188 ). Further, such fiction has no trace of
irony. Instead of questioning a received tradition of "truth," as does the ironist, the romance
reformulates the fairy tale in which the woman's struggle to "become" is presumed to end when her
identity is conferred by the man who selects her. Yet the overwhelming popularity of contemporary
romance fiction may in its own way be a response to the women's movement of recent years, as
Mussell suggests when she notes that whereas for many women the movement has opened new
possibilities, for many others it poses a threat, "for it promises to call into question the very basis of
decisions made years ago that are difficult to revoke" (xv).
The pervasive use of irony and fantasy as narrative devices in the contemporary novel by women,
on the other hand, does call into question assumptions about identity, gender, relationships, and
women's potential and achievements. Both devices propose alternatives--irony by pointing to a
contrast between conventional surface reality and the possibility of another set of truths, and fantasy
by promoting an imaginative recreation of experience. Both devices also suggest and reflect change
in fundamental aspects of women's lives during a turbulent period of social and political upheaval.
That this change has not been as broad or deep as feminists would want is a cultural truism in the
late 1980s, but the fictions that women have written should also have prepared us for this fact. The
barriers to women's power and autonomy that the authors portray--barriers that irony and fantasy
attempt to surmount or negate--are sufficiently strong and entrenched that, as The Handmaid's Tale
frighteningly reminds us, they are capable of reversing the trends that the women's movement has
set in motion. Yet successive generations of readers will find in these novels women who rebel
against oppression in a new kind of cautionary tale.
CHAPTER
Fantasy
TWO
Language,
Irony,
and
In Marge Piercy Small Changes, Beth, one of the two central characters, dissolves in angry tears
after an argument with Phil: "Oh, I wish I was better with words!" Beth views words as weapons in
the battle for selfhood--a battle in which she, as a woman, is disadvantaged. She has difficulty
arguing because "it's crossing taboos. You know, asserting myself, contradicting somebody. . . . I
only want to use words as weapons because I'm tired of being beaten with them. Tired of being
pushed around because I don't know how to push back." 1 In the Republic of Gilead in The
Handmaid's Tale, language is all but forbidden because the ruling class recognizes the power of
words as weapons that can free people from bondage. Piercy 1973 novel is set in the 1960s, the
turbulent decade in which Offred's mother was an active feminist; Atwood 1986 novel is set in the
late twentieth century after a fundamentalist revolution has repressed not just the women's
movement but all expression of freedom and equality. In different ways these two novels suggest
the centrality of language to the process of self-realization and the struggle for equality. In fact
language--the ability to speak, to tell one's own story--is at the heart of the contemporary novel by
women.
Both irony and fantasy, as narrative devices, are interdependent with language in specific, complex
ways. Whereas on the simplest level irony is a verbal construction--the reader is invited to question
the surface validity of a statement that an author or a character makes--deeper irony, of
circumstance or attitude, requires that the author create a context in which ambiguity is tolerable, a
linguistic fabric that signals a stance from which she (or he) will approach whatever reality is being
depicted. When Atwood opens The Handmaid's Tale with the line, "We slept in what had once been
the gymnasium," she plunges the reader at once into a world of uncertainty in which everything-including language--will be, as Offred says repeatedly, a "reconstruction": the essential method of
irony.
Fantasy is tied to language in several ways, which I will suggest here and explore in more detail
later. When authors or narrators in the contemporary women's novel revise the mythologies of their
lives, they are in a very direct way addressing the language of those mythologies. When, for
example, Gemma, in Words of Advice, says of the fairy tale that is her life story, "Princes, toads,
princesses, beggar girls--we all have to place ourselves as best we can," she is commenting on the
use of language to dichotomize people into the favored and the unfavored. 2 Alternatively, words
and stories may free a woman to engage in fantasy that helps to empower her. In The Woman
Warrior, the story the narrator's mother tells her of Fa Mu Lan allows her to dream of being a
woman warrior rather than a wife or a slave. Fantasy may even be a way of avoiding the language
of dominant discourse. Lesje, in Atwood Life Before Man ( 1979), has fantasies in which she is
"wandering in prehistory," able to "violate whatever official version of paleontological reality she
chooses," 3 in order to escape from the male museum world she normally inhabits. As Margaret
Homans points out, Lesje has failed to appropriate the male language of science: "it is clearly
because she is a woman that she is denied access to the legitimate professional and intellectual
satisfactions its native speakers should enjoy." 4The issue of women's language is the subject of
much contemporary debate, and it is an issue that has several dimensions. On the most basic level is
the silencing and suppression of women's expression--terms taken from the titles of Tillie Olsen
Silences ( 1978) and Joanna Russ How to Suppress Women's Writing ( 1983). Both Olsen and Russ
describe the multiple barriers to women's writing over time: the conflicting demands of domestic
responsibilities, the refusal of the literary establishment to take women's writing seriously, the
consequent lack of models for young female writers--and so on in a vicious circle, causing women
to feel insecure about their own voices. Such insecurity, as Olsen points out, has often kept women
from writing honestly out of their own experience:
These pressures toward censorship, self-censorship; toward accepting, abiding by entrenched
attitudes, thus falsifying one's own reality, range, vision, truth, voice, are extreme for women
writers (indeed have much to do with the fear, the sense of powerlessness that pervades certain of
our books, the "above all, amuse" tone of others). Not to be able to come to one's truth or not to use
it in one's writing, even in telling the truth to have to "tell it slant," robs one of drive, of conviction;
limits potential stature; results in loss to literature and the comprehensions we seek in it. 5
This uncertainty about one's own "truth" is reflected in the dual narratives of Jane Gray in Drabble
The Waterfall and Chloe in Weldon Female Friends as they revise their lives, seeking an honest,
coherent version.
Another, more complex aspect of women's use of language is the extent to which they can or should
forge or reclaim a language of their own, free from the influence of male conceptualizing. Once,
like Beth, having found the courage to speak up, what language do women use? How is their
expression their own, as women? Alicia Ostriker, writing of American women poets in Stealing the
Language, asks the same question: "Does there exist, as a subterranean current below the surface
structure of maleoriented language, a specifically female language, a 'mother tongue'?" The answer
to this question, in Ostriker's view, awaits
further research, but she argues that women have indeed been "thieves of language":
What distinguishes these poets, I propose, is not the shared, exclusive langage des femmes desired
by some but a vigorous and varied invasion of the sanctuaries of existing language, the treasuries
where our meanings for "male" and "female" are themselves preserved. Where women write
strongly as women, it is clear that their intention is to subvert and transform the life and literature
they inherit. 6
One of the ways that Ostriker believes women have transformed the literature they have inherited is
by revising cultural mythologies, and this has been true in the novel as well as in poetry, in ways to
which I have previously pointed: Violet Clay, the title character in Gail Godwin's novel, seeks to
escape from the "Book of Old Plots" that would have her give up a potential career in art to be a
homemaker. Gemma, in Words of Advice, sees her life as a constantly revised fairy tale. And The
Handmaid's Tale is in some measure a rewriting of Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter: fundamentalist
morality can mean that women are forced to be adulteresses just as it can punish them for adultery.
For some critics, such as Hélène Cixous, the langage des femmes not only exists, it is necessary for
women's emancipation. Cixous maintains that women have been driven away from language just as
they have been forced to deny their bodies, and she encourages full expression of the female
experience as a powerful subversive force. Masculine language, Cixous believes, has been used for
the oppression of women:
in a manner that's frightening since it's often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of
fiction; that this locus has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (and not sexual
difference), where woman has never her turn to speak--this being all the more serious and
unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a
springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and
cultural structures. 7
For Cixous, as for many other feminist critics, language is tied intimately to gender: "Woman must
write woman. And man, man" (877). Female writing is bound up in female biology, she maintains,
because women have been taught to feel guilty about both, and the courage to claim and proclaim
both language and biology is the first step toward "transformation."
For many French feminist critics, language is seen as being in the control of men, with women left
out, silenced. In Cixous' terms, language is a decisive and oppositional mechanism:
For as soon as we exist, we are born into language and language speaks (to) us, dictates its law, a
law of death; it lays down its familial model, lays down its conjugal model, and even at the moment
of uttering a sentence, admitting a notion of "being," a question of being, an ontology, we are
already seized by a kind of masculine desire, the desire that mobilizes philosophical discourse. 8
For Cixous, the "desire" to enter into philosophical discourse is futile for women, because the
discourse is conducted in a language that effectively silences them.
Linguist Deborah Cameron, however, comes to different conclusions about the power of male
language. In Feminism and Linguistic Theory, Cameron argues against linguistic determinism-the
concept that one group has the ability to fix meaning and thus deprive another group of access to the
power of language: "Since language is a flexible and renewable resource, and since girls must come
to grips with it as their socialisation proceeds, there is no reason in principle why language cannot
express the experience of women to the same extent that it expresses the experience of men." 9
However, Cameron recognizes that language is closely tied to the power structures of a society, and
that "the institutions that regulate language use in our own society, and indeed those of most
societies, are deliberately oppressive to women" ( 145 ). When women themselves believe that their
own use of language--their own talk--is important rather than trivial, Cameron believes that it will
thereby become important, and can be a source of autonomy.
The differences between French and American feminist scholars' beliefs about the relationship
between women and language-the former seeing women denied a language in which to express their
experience, and the latter believing that women are capable
of appropriating the dominant discourse for their own purposes-are summarized by Margaret
Homans in a 1983 article that attempts to mediate between them. One way in which Homans
bridges the philosophical gap is by pointing out that American women novelists themselves address
women's exclusion from language as a theme in their fiction, thus providing thematic evidence of
the French critics' position:
A woman novelist's ability to represent verbally her response to exclusion from the dominant
discourse does not at all disprove the thesis that women's silence serves as the basis for the
operation of language: Such an ability is constantly undermining itself: in the very act of asserting
through capacious representation the adequacy of language, these novelists betray their anxieties
about its sufficiency. 10
Thus, even as American critics take the pragmatic and optimistic stance that women are able to take
possession of language, as Cameron asserts, the texts of those who write in English proclaim that
language is a central problem for women who seek to use it to overcome their oppression.
Yet a belief in the potential power of women's use of language is closely tied to the methods and
goals of the women's movement. In both formal and informal ways, the movement has encouraged
women to communicate, especially with each other, to understand their commonalities, to overcome
isolation and silence. It is not surprising, then, that women's fiction of the period from the mid1960s to the mid-1980s demonstrates a central concern with language: the ability to use language,
tell stories, describe experience, and revise mythologies. Language may be a weapon against male
authority, as it is for Beth in Small Changes; it may be a way of ordering and giving meaning to
experience, as it is in Female Friends and The Waterfall; it is above all a means of communication
with other women.
At the same time, however, language is viewed in these novels and others as untrustworthy, and this
is the central irony of its significance: even as women writers and their characters feel compelled to
describe their experience, they are aware that language can be used to manipulate, that it can lie, as
women themselves have been manipulated and lied to. Thus, in the midst of telling their stories,
women express their awareness that the truth they seek to tell of is illusory, and that a fantasy could
be as "real" as the observable facts of their lives. Indeed, the perception that language is arbitrary
and mutable can be the first step toward liberation. When Beth, in Small Changes, overcomes her
timidity about language, it is through her participation in a women's theater group in which the
members learn together to use their voices as well as their bodies: "They were still learning how
they felt and how to express it and create with it" (477).
As a significant issue in the contemporary novel by women, language is addressed in a number of
ways that can be grouped in two general categories. One group includes challenges to
maledominated language, either by appropriating male discourse for women's purposes or by
altering or subverting it. The second group of approaches is composed of those that emphasize
women's exclusion from language--their silence. Writers who challenge the dominant discourse
typically do so by employing some form of irony, whereas those who stress women's position
outside that discourse are more apt to use fantasy as a concomitant narrative strategy. Both of these
approaches and strategies may be combined in a single work, as they are, for example, in the three
novels considered in the final part of this chapter: The Handmaid's Tale, The Woman Warrior, and
The Color Purple. In each of these three novels, language is initially a silencing but ultimately a
liberating phenomenon.
The initial step in negating the hegemony of oppressive language is to question its authority by
making fun of it. Pointing to the absurdity of the official language of a culture is a method used
commonly by members of oppressed groups; humor negates the power of hegemonic discourse
quite simply by refusing to take that power seriously. Joanna Russ The Female Man provides the
clearest and most overt examples of this undercutting of male language and power, and at the same
time makes explicit men's attempt to silence women. In fact, The Female Man extends into
speculative fiction the attempts at silencing that Russ also describes in How to Suppress Women's
Writing, but in her novel, the (fictional) women fight back effectively. An exchange late in the
novel serves as a paradigm of both silencing and the subversion of that attempt. A man in Manland,
in one of the four parallel universes in the novel, says to Jael, from the opposing camp of
Womanland, "You're on my turf, you'll Goddam well talk about what I Goddamn well talk about,"
and Jael thinks to herself: "Let it pass. Control yourself. Hand them the victory in the Domination
Sweepstakes and they usually forget whatever it is they were going to do anyway." 11
Throughout The Female Man the various narrators parody the language--especially the clichés--of
male discourse. In the chapter titled "The Great Happiness Contest," Russ records a paradigmatic
exchange between wife and husband in which the latter reveals his need for domination:
HE: Darling, why must you work part-time as a rug salesman?
SHE: Because I want to enter the marketplace and prove that in spite of my sex I can take a fruitful
part in the life of the community and earn what our culture proposes as the sign and symbol of adult
independence--namely money.
HE: But darling, by the time we deduct the cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax
bracket, and your box lunches from your pay, it actually costs us money for you to work. So you
see, you aren't making money at all. You can't make money. Only I can make money. Stop working.
SHE: I won't. And I hate you.
HE: But darling, why be irrational? It doesn't matter that you can't make money because I can make
money. And after I've made it, I give it to you, because I love you. So you don't have to make
money. Aren't you glad?
SHE: No. Why can't you stay home and take care of the baby? Why can't we deduct all those things
from your pay? Why should I be glad because I can't earn a living? Why-HE (with dignity): This argument is becoming degraded and ridiculous. I will leave you alone until
loneliness, dependence, and a consciousness that I am very much displeased once again turn you
into the sweet girl I married. There is no use in arguing with a woman. ( 117 -18)
The very stiltedness of the dialogue, especially the man's final comments, makes it seem absurd, but
the reality of the exchange lies in the man's stereotypical assumption that women are dependent and
irrational. Russ's technique is to allow the man's words to make overt his normally unspoken
attitudes, and thus to make clear his sense of dominance--and finally to render that dominance itself
as absurd and powerless as the strutting of a small bully.
In Russ's novel it is Janet, from the all-female planet Whileaway, who strikes at the heart of sexist
language when she asserts that if the term "Mankind" is meant to include women (as it so clearly
does not), then she will insist on being called a man rather than a woman. "For," she says, "whoever
heard of Java Woman and existential Woman and the values of Western Woman . . .? . . . Stop
hugging Moses' tablets to your chest, nitwit; you'll cave in" ( 140 ). Thus emerges the "female man"
of the title. As Natalie Rosinsky says, "Shocking us into recognition of the absurdity of patriarchal
law and so-called truth, Russ's humor enables the reader to distance herself from unexamined
experience or belief, to become a healthy renegade." 12
In most other novels of this period, patriarchal language is attacked more subtly, using irony rather
than parody. In both Female Friends and The Handmaid's Tale, Biblical language is mocked,
altered, and called into question as a means of authority. Weldon's narrator comments on women's
susceptibility to words: "reading significance into casual words, seeing love in calculated lust,
seeing lust in innocent words." 13 Yet the young Chloe, growing up in the pub where her mother
works, reads the Bible at night and instinctively questions its validity: "'Remember now thy Creator
in the days of thy youth, when the evil days come not--' But supposing they do?" ( 72 ). Atwood's
Offred, who refers to the Bible as an "incendiary device" 14 because, like other weapons, it is
available only to the ruling-class men in Gilead, similarly questions Biblical statements or finds
them inadequate. As part of the handmaids' training, they are required to recite Biblical passages
that reinforce their submissiveness. After reciting a passage from the Beatitudes--" Blessed be those
that mourn for they shall be comforted"--Offred undercuts the power of the utterance by thinking,
Nobody said when" ( 89 ). Writing of the emotional bondage of women with children, Weldon's
Chloe herself rewrites the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the orphans, and the barren of body and mind" (
205 ).
Weldon and Atwood also question the authority of patriarchal language by demonstrating that
whatever its stated intention, it all comes from the same reservoir of male discourse. Religious and
political dogma blend and become indistinguishable. Speaking of the enforced domesticity for
women in the period following World War II--"women have to leave their jobs and return to the
domestic dedication expected of all good women in peacetime"-Chloe says, " Hitler is not coming,
and neither is God; there is to be neither punishment or salvation. There is, instead, a flurry of
sexual activity which will land the schools between 1950 and 1960 with what is known as 'The
Bulge'" ( 114 ). In Atwood's Republic of Gilead, the birth-rate is dangerously low, which leads to
the establishment of the class of handmaids, whose "domestic" duties are a degraded, obscene
version of the "flurry of sexual activity" of which Chloe speaks. Biblical and Marxist teachings are
blended and distorted in the effort to brainwash the handmaids: "From each, says the slogan,
according to her ability; to each according to his needs. We recited that, three times, after dessert.
It was from the Bible, or so they said. St. Paul again, in Acts" ( 117 ). Offred's ironic comment "or
so they said" casts doubt on the authority of the statement, and forces the reader to note also the use
of the pronouns "her" and "his" as yet another evidence of the oppression of women in Gilead.
Both suspicion of and domination by male discourse are consistent threads in Piercy Small
Changes. Beth, who begins the novel as a young woman wanting and living in the marriage plot, is
nonetheless initially and increasingly resistant to received linguistic tradition. Even in the midst of
her wedding, she listens to the jingle of an ice-cream truck rather than hearing the "magic words" of
the ceremony: "Magic words that made things happen or go away, recipes like I Love You, and I'm
Sorry, and I Pledge Allegiance, and God Bless Mommy and Daddy, and Will You Marry Me, and
Fine, Thank You, and I Do" ( 21 ). Beth's perception that
words are agents rather than merely symbols is what causes her to fear their use as weapons against
her later in the novel, but this perception also frees her, for she is able to view the language of the
dominant culture ironically, and ultimately to reject it altogether. Even very early in the novel, in
the chapter ironically titled "The Happiest Day of a Woman's Life," Beth recasts her sister Nancy's
description of her wedding dress, "The train comes away," in terms that suggest marriage as a
potentially detachable burden: "That meant the thing that dragged could be taken off, with a little
timely help" ( 12 ). Later, having escaped her marriage, Beth confronts Dorine's statement, "I feel
sometimes as if I'll go through life and never belong to anyone," with, "But you aren't a dog, why
do you want to be owned?" ( 88 ). Beth's sense of freedom and selfhood is expressed late in the
novel in a poem she writes:
Everything
Everybody
Only
I
have
like
with
Yes,
Beth!
Yes! (313)
says
no
to
tells
me
I
to
say
say
again
it
and
a
only
one
Yes,
Beth!
Yes,
me.
no.
yes.
again
singer
song.
Beth!
Elaine Tuttle Hansen identifies Piercy's approach to language in Small Changes when she states that
"Piercy expresses her mistrust of language but does not advocate or sentimentalize silence on the
part of women. While women need to seek alternatives and to reject language and literature when
they are used to keep women in their place, they cannot allow themselves to be muted;
inarticulateness is not a useful weapon." 15
Kate Brown, in Doris Lessing The Summer Before the Dark ( 1973), is, like Beth, conscious that
conventional phrases are just that--conventions--and not prescriptions for how one must think or
feel. At the beginning of the novel she is "trying on" words and phrases "like so many dresses off a
rack"--phrases "as worn as nursery rhymes." And indeed they are nursery rhymes for women:
"Growing up is bound to be painful! . . . Marriage is a com- promise. . . . I am not as young as I
once was." Kate perceives that such phrases rarely reflect actual feelings, yet have become the
common currency of habit:
Such power do these phrases have, all issued for use as it might be by a particularly efficient
advertising campaign, that it is probable many people go on repeating Youth is the best time of your
life or Love is a woman's whole existence until they actually catch sight of themselves in a mirror
while they are saying something of the kind, or are quick enough to catch the reaction on a friend's
face. 16
Kate's acknowledgment at this point that people--women--are capable of recognizing the insincerity
of their own formulaic utterances is magnified later in the novel when she and her friend Mary are
driven to helpless laughter by the jargon referent to homemaking. Each has been patronizingly
advised by a child's teacher about the child's "normal" adjustment: "The phrases followed each
other: well-adjusted, typical, normal, integrated, secure, normative" ( 149 ); subsequently, even the
words "wife, husband, man, woman" begin to seem to the two women hilarious clichés, and Lessing
notes that "it was a ritual, like the stag parties of suburban men in which everything their normal
lives are dedicated to upholding is spat upon, insulted, belittled" ( 150 ).
A second way in which women writers deal with male discourse is to appropriate it--to use, as
authors and narrators, the language of the dominant culture in order to demonstrate an altered
relationship with it. Joanne Frye has identified the novel as "peculiarly susceptible to feminist
concern for cultural change": "its capacity to 'represent' the shared experience of women's lives-'differenced' as women experience it, whatever its explanation or cause--while simultaneously
resisting external definitions of those lives as they have been encoded within male-dominated
expectations." 17 Appropriation of male discourse is the most problematic of the ways in which
women deal with it. Lesje, in Life Before Man, is an example of one caught in the paradox of
maledefined female roles and her own professional life in the maledominated field of paleontology.
As Homans points out, Lesje uses the language of science without being a part of its creation; her
creative participation in prehistory exists in fantasies, not in reality. Even her pregnancy is an act of
vengeance and desperation--a way to solidify her relationship with Nate and remain in the
"marriage plot." Miriam, in Small Changes, does appropriate successfully the language of male
professional discourse as a computer scientist, but she gives up her professional aspirations in order
to remain, like Lesje, in the marriage plot. Beth, in the same novel, does not fail to appropriate male
discourse, as she initially wishes to do, but chooses instead to express herself specifically as a
woman in her women's theater group.
Other female characters, however, do use words as weapons. In Walker The Color Purple, the
turning point in Celie's struggle for self-esteem comes when she is finally able to talk back to Mr.----, the husband who has degraded her and hidden the letters her sister Nettie has written to her over
the years. With the support of Shug Avery, Celie finds her voice when Mr.----- says that she will go
to Memphis with Shug "over my dead body." The log jam of Celie's resentment breaks at that
moment: "You a lowdown dog is what's wrong, I say. It's time to leave you and enter into the
Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need." Shocked at Celie's freely spoken
resolve, Mr.----- is effectively silenced, reversing the pattern of male dominance that he has enjoyed
for so long: "Mr.----- start to sputter. ButButButButBut. Sound like some kind of motor." 18 The
image of Mr.----- as a piece of machinery emphasizes Celie's human transcendence over him.
Perhaps the most common and effective method by which women writers have addressed male
discourse is by revising the mythologies it has promulgated. The various myths and stories that
have been used as paradigms for success, heroism, and malefemale relationships are perceived with
skeptical irony by these authors. The efficacy of romantic love is a staple of the traditional fairy tale
that is frequently deconstructed in these works. For example, shortly after Celie has confronted Mr.---- on his own terms, he asks her about her rejection of him and her preference for Shug Avery: He
say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don't like me cause I'm a man? I blow my nose. Take off they
pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern, frogs
is what they stay. ( 224 )
By refusing to accept the role of princess, who can turn the frog into a prince, Celie refuses to
identify herself as the nurturer and savior of men. Fairy tales and their revision permeate Weldon
Words of Advice. Not only is the story of her life that Gemma tells Elsa a constantly revised fairy
tale, but Elsa's naive romantic view of herself--fed by fairy tales--is finally replaced by a more
mature view at the end of the novel. Gemma, having lost a finger, married the frog rather than the
prince, and developed a psychosomatic inability to walk, needs to recreate her life as a different
fairy tale. When at the end of the novel Gemma's husband, Hamish, tells Elsa that Gemma's story
has been a fabrication, Gemma responds in a passage that posits the human need for illusion:
"One story or another, Hamish," she says. "What's the difference? It is all the same. It's the one-way
journey we all make from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience. We must all
make it; there is no escape. It's just that love and romance and illusion and hope are etched so
deeply into all our hearts that they can never quite be wiped away. They stay around to torment us
with thoughts of what might have been." (231)
Gemma recasts her life as a fairy tale in order to lessen the power that romance and illusion have
over her; at the same time, she suggests that all our stories are fictitious--"One story or another . . .
what's the difference?" By the end of Words of Advice, Gemma has taken the trip from "ignorance
to knowledge" and is able to walk; and Elsa is home having cocoa with her brothers and sisters,
ready to embark anew upon her adult life.
Moving from ignorance to knowledge frequently involves disentangling oneself from one or more
mythologies. Jane Gray, in The Waterfall, has to come to terms with the fact that her life is not a
novel by Thomas Hardy or George Eliot, and must write her own text. The earliest mythology that
Jane must free herself from is her family's concept of respectability, composed of beliefs "in the
God of the Church of England, . . . in monogamy, in marrying for love, in free will, in the
possibility of moderation of the passions, in the virtues of reason and civilization." 19 When she
marries Malcolm, she is still in the clutches of these myths; a "doomed romantic" (91), she believes
it is love at first sight when she hears Malcolm sing Thomas Campion's lyrics. Like Gemma a
believer in the power of "romance and illusion and hope," Jane later places the blame for her
mistake on the literature that perpetuates such ideas: "I blame Campion, I blame the poets, I blame
Shakespeare for that farcical moment in Romeo and Juliet when he sees her at the dance, from far
off, and says, I'll have her, because she is the one that will kill me" ( 92 ). A central irony of The
Waterfall is that Jane does not, in fact, die of love the way that Juliet, Sue Bridehead, and Maggie
Tulliver do. In the automobile accident the couple has when stealing away for an illicit weekend,
her lover, James, is injured, but Jane walks away with only scratches. Indeed, Jane's guilt and
wonder at her escape from both respectability and the old plots cause her to narrate and revise her
story. At the end of the novel she revises a twentieth-century mythology--that birthcontrol pills are
liberating and safe--by reporting that use of the pills has caused a blood clot in her leg. The Jane
who feels guilty about her happiness with James is glad to have this small price to pay for it--"I
prefer to suffer, I think" (256)--yet as she has so ironically shown the reader, her suffering is
scarcely equal to her happiness.
However haunted Jane Gray may be by the old mythologies, she sees clearly the dangerous illusions
they can foster in women's minds, and by writing of her own fulfillment outside these mythologies,
she writes a truly female text in which the sensual pleasures of the female body--childbirth, orgasm-are celebrated as not only natural but also the wellsprings of female creativity. The character Jane
is a poet; in The Waterfall she is the first-person reviser and shaper of her own story, so that woman
and writer are finally identical. As Ellen Cronan Rose has written, "Jane's task as woman and as
artist is the same: to acknowledge the existence
within her self of the Other and not simply to reconcile but to encompass that division." 20 The
woman artist, especially in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, rejects a belief in stability and
certainty--in the creation of art as well as in the middle-class respectability of Jane's parents. As
Joanne Creighton comments, "Jane has discovered intuitively what post-structuralists have
postulated, that reality is necessarily mediated through language and that different 'codes' create
different discourses." 21 Creighton points to one of the passages in which Jane questions the
"accuracy" of her own text:
the ways of regarding an event, so different, don't add up to a whole; they are mutually exclusive:
the social view, the sexual view, the circumstantial view, the moral view, these visions contradict
each other; they do not supplement one another, they cancel each other out, they destroy one
another. ( 47 )
This passage is remarkably similar to one in The Handmaid's Tale in which Offred is reminding us
once again that what she is telling us is a "reconstruction":
It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you
always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too
many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described,
too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, halfcolors, too many. ( 134 )
Rose points to the postscript of The Waterfall as "a triumph of feminine form," because of both its
irony and its refusal to make a "final formulation": "The last dramatic, heroic, 'masculine'
statement--'I prefer to suffer'--is followed by the feminine ending, 'I think'" ( 66 ). But more than
this, Drabble undercuts the suffering of the romantic, mythological heroine with the revisionist
stance of the ironist.
As Jane Gray uses her skills as a writer to bring her life into clearer focus and free herself from the
old mythologies, so Violet Clay, title character in Godwin's novel, must learn to take herself
seriously as an artist and disentangle herself from the myths and stories she has both inherited and
created. Violet, like Jane, is able to see herself ironically, revising her own history as she inhabits
the present. Violet's grandmother, who had hoped to be a pianist, instead became trapped in the
marriage plot and gave up her career. As she tells Violet, she was seduced away from Carnegie Hall
by "a subversive, tempting picture":
The picture was of that lady so feted in our day--her praises were sung in every women's magazine-the accomplished wife and mother who turns her gifts to the enhancement of Home. I saw myself,
safe and rich and beautiful, seated at a nine-foot grand in Charles's ancestral home, playing the G
Minor Ballade by Chopin, followed by Mozart's sonata with the Turkish Rondo, to a select cultural
gathering, after which my two beautiful children would be led in by the servants to say good night.
22
Such a romantic vision did not materialize, and Violet's grandmother tells Violet her story as a
cautionary tale; but Violet insists that she will not make the same mistake: "Don't worry. I have my
own plans" ( 38 ). However, Violet not only marries rather than going to New York to pursue her
career; when she finally leaves her marriage and makes the move, she remains caught in a
romanticized image of herself as a victim of circumstance until her uncle's suicide forces her to
begin to disengage from the fantasies she has so carefully constructed. As an illustrator of Gothic
romances, Violet assumes that she is superior to her material, but like the Gothic heroine, she is
waiting to be rescued rather than creating her own future. In order to free herself from the myth of
"The Young Woman as Artist" ( 26 ), she has to confront her uncle Ambrose's failure as a novelist
and hence the potential of her own. Violet's first successful painting is titled "Suspended Woman,"
which aptly characterizes Violet's situation at the end of the novel: having rejected the "Book of Old
Plots," she is poised to begin life on her own terms. 23
In mocking, appropriating, and revising the language and the stories of a culture that has at the very
least discouraged women's participation in its dominant discourse, the contemporary woman
novelist creates fiction that is fundamentally ironic in its intent. That is, by questioning the
formulations of self and experience that are imposed on women rather than arising from their own
perceptions, the writer creates what Lilian Furst calls "an inquiring mode that exploits
discrepancies, challenges assumptions and reflects equivocations, but that does not presume to hold
out answers." 24 The absence of clear answers both mirrors the historical period during which these
novels were written and creates fictions that are not conclusive, because conclusions, like traditional
mythologies, do not allow growth and evolution. When these novelists focus on ways in which
women are silenced and excluded, the possibility of change takes the form of fantasy. Some forms
of fantasy are positive and enabling, such as Kingston's dream of the "woman warrior"; others, like
the dystopian vision of The Handmaid's Tale, are horrific; all, however, arise from a need for
alternative realities. Fantasy theorists frequently note the function of fantasy as a critique of existing
norms and structures, challenging not merely facts, but also assumptions. William Irvin, for
example, states that "conventions as to factual possibility and impossibility are not the only kind
that fantasies deny. There are also beliefs, interpretations, and understandings seemingly based on
facts and widely enough accepted to have the status of convention." 25 The use of fantasy in
women's fiction is a way of exploring and challenging assumptions about women's lives.
Metaphoric of the silencing of women is the fact that characters in these novels frequently lack
names, or have more than one name for more than one identity. The power of names to define
women's status and role came into sharp focus during the 1960s and 1970s as feminists sought not
only to rid English of sexist and exclusionary terminology (Janet's diatribe against the word
"mankind" in The Female Man reflects this concern), but also to make clear that such terms as
"girl" and "little woman" are demeaning. The fact that women traditionally assume first the names
of their fathers and then the names of their husbands means that they go through life without named
identities of their own, but instead with names that indicate their status as objects: daughter, wife. 26
The most extreme example of relational naming is "Offred" in The Handmaid's Tale: not even a
name, this is a tag that the narrator wears to signify that she is the handmaid "of Fred." 27
Significantly, the researchers who report in the "Historical Notes" section of the novel can attempt
to discover Offred's identity only by determining which "Fred" her Commander was, and their
efforts are inconclusive.
Margaret Atwood's narrator in Surfacing is not only nameless, but also obsessed by language and a
search for identity--a search that allows her to cast off the fantasies she has constructed about her
own life and enter into a primitive world of the imagination in which language is secondary to
feeling. By limiting the narrative perspective to that of the unnamed narrator, Atwood allows us
only gradually to understand--as the narrator herself confronts it--that she has imaginatively
transformed an affair with a married man and the abortion of a child into marriage, childbirth, and
divorce. The narrator clearly feels the power of language, and regards naming as a limiting,
restrictive act. Of the child she pretends to have borne, she says early in the novel, "I never
identified it as mine; I didn't name it before it was born even, the way you're supposed to." 28 The
act of getting married, she thinks, ruined the relationship with her "husband": "We committed that
paper act. I still don't see why signing a name should make any difference but he began to expect
things, he wanted to be pleased" ( 47 ). Language is "everything you do" ( 153 ), and it "divides us
into fragments" ( 172 ). The major obstacle the narrator confronts in trying to come to terms with
her life and her fantasies is the split between mind and body, between the rational and the intuitive.
Midway through the novel she comments that "the trouble is all in the knob at the top of our
bodies": "I'm not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that
they are separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn't have different words for them" ( 91 ). At the
end of the novel, on the verge of accepting Joe because he is "only half formed," she still distrusts
language: "For us it's necessary, the intercession of words; and we will probably fail, sooner or
later, more or less painfully" ( 224 ).
Atwood's narrator resists naming, but the narrator's aunt in TheWoman Warrior Woman Warrior
has, in the eyes of her Chinese family, lost the right to her name because she has become pregnant
and committed suicide. The "no name woman" has been effectively expunged from family history,
so that the narrator must flesh out her mother's sparse, confidential story with her own imaginings
as she tries to come to terms with the Chinese heritage that silences her. The narrator's Chinese and
American identities are at war as she matures; nor can she reconcile her mother's life as a doctor in
China and her timid, unadventurous manner in America. The reconciliation between mother and
daughter takes place when the narrator's mother calls her by her childhood nickname, "Little Dog":
"a name to fool the gods. I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years."
29
Just as Kingston's narrator, having heard the stories of Fa Mu Lan, has her fantasy of being the
woman warrior, so the adolescent Miriam, in Small Changes, creates a fantasy self. Having
discovered that the best parts in most plots are reserved for men, Miriam makes up stories in which
she is Tamar De Luria, an anthropologist who has defended a primitive tribe from white colonialists
and in return has been taught their secrets. Like Kingston's woman warrior, Tamar has both male
and female characteristics: "Tamar could track people and walk so silently she never broke a twig
and climb trees like a cat and scamper over buildings and fight as well as a man" ( 97 - 98 ). Yet
"when Tamar danced, men fell in love with her" (9 8 ). As the woman warrior sends her infant son
home with her husband while she finishes her conquest, so Tamar remains dedicated to the tribe
that has taught her its secrets: "Because she never knew when a message would come from her
island saying that her people were in danger again and she must return to save them, she could
never marry" ( 98 ). In these fantasies, triggered by other stories, the female characters take on an
autonomy that, as they are aware, is normally reserved for men, and escape, imaginatively and
temporarily, the scripts that have been written for them as women. Similarly, Lesje, in Life Before
Man, uses her fantasies of prehistory to take control as she cannot do in her professional life. She is
a scribe, a copyist of the language of paleontology, not a researcher who creates the language that she copies onto tags in the museum. In her daydreams, however, Lesje "allows herself to
violate shamelessly whatever official version of paleontological reality she chooses":
She mixes eras, adds colors: why not a metallic blue stegosaurus with red and yellow dots instead of
the dull greys and browns postulated by the experts? Of which she, in a minor way, is one. Across
the flanks of the camptosaurs pastel flushes of color come and go, reddish pink, purple, light pink,
reflecting emotions like the contracting and expanding chromatophores in the skins of octopuses. (
13 )
Fitting neither into the world of her male profession--except as a "minor" expert--nor into the world
of women, Lesje wants to merge the two by bringing the colors of emotion into the dry world of her
science.
Those women who, like Kingston's narrator, are not part of mainstream culture by virtue of their
racial or ethnic backgrounds are more easily and effectively silenced. Kingston's narrator describes
at length her refusal to speak during kindergarten and grade school, and links it to the fact that she is
Chinese and female: "The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do
with being a Chinese girl" ( 193 ). Another form that her silence takes is her habit during these
years of covering her school paintings with a layer of black paint. Neither her teachers nor her
parents understand that in the child's imagination the black paint represents stage curtains behind
which her painting waits to be gloriously unveiled. At home, the girl "spread them out (so black and
full of possibilities) and pretended the curtains were swinging open, flying up, one after another,
sunlight underneath, mighty operas" ( 192 ). Celie, in The Color Purple, is, like Kingston's narrator,
abjured to be silent at the very start of the novel: "You better not never tell nobody but God" ( 11 ).
Taking this warning literally, she begins, at the age of fourteen, writing letters to God, telling her
story to the only one she believes can understand it. In Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time,
Consuelo, as a Mexican-American woman living in New York, is at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, a fact that makes it easy for those in control to interpret her despair and rage as
madness, and to silence her with drugs. When Geraldo commits her to Bellevue, no one asks to hear
her side of the story: "So far no one had heard a word she said, which of course was not unusual." 30
Yet it is Consuelo who is selected for contact by Luciente, from a utopian culture in 2137, who tells
her that she is "an unusual person. Your mind is unusual. You're what we call a catcher, a receptive"
( 41 ). Considered merely a dangerous psychotic by those who would keep her locked up and
drugged, Connie is a sensitive woman who is capable of entering into an alternate reality. 31
In Lessing The Four-Gated City, the authority of the psychiatric establishment is also challenged,
this time by Martha Quest's rejection of it to pursue her own self-examination through empathic
union with Lynda. Using both fantasy and irony, Lessing suggests that women's silence is alleviated
not by remote institutions but by intimate and intuitive fantasy. The ironically named Dr. Lamb,
Lynda's psychiatrist, represents the power of hegemonic culture to label, categorize, and therefore
silence those who do not conform to preconceived standards of "normality." Lynda mocks this
practice when she tells Martha the joke among psychiatric hospital patients of the "nothing-but":
You know, it's that point when they get all pleased because they can say: you're nothing but-whatever it is. They've taken weeks and weeks to get to that point, you know, and it's, You're
nothing but Electra. You know, that girl who killed her mother? . . . It's nothing but you want to
sleep with your father. Nothing-but your brother. . . . I'm nothing-but a depression. 32
By recognizing the dehumanizing effect of the "nothing-but" labeling, Lynda and Martha can
prepare for the joint exploration of "their dreams, their slips of the tongue, their fantasies" (372) that
leads Martha to self-realization. As Elizabeth Abel has pointed out, the contrast between Martha's
relationships with Dr. Lamb and Mark, and the one with Lynda, points up the sharp difference
between scientific objectivity and hierarchy on the one hand, and fluidity and openness on the other.
When Martha enters imagina- tively into Lynda's world of madness, she "takes the risk of throwing
off her rational guard, thereby uncovering a portion of herself":
The union achieved by Martha and Lynda becomes an emblem of the breakthrough essential to
human survival, the transformation of the brain from "a machine which works in division" to the
unified and unifying organism invoked by the Sufi tale that forms the dedication of the novel. 33
In the midst of hers and Lynda's explorations of madness and sanity, Martha articulates the
connection between madness and expression, the breaking of silence, when she speaks of their not
having words to describe the process they are going through:
Perhaps it was because if society is so organized, or rather has so grown, that it will not admit what
one knows to be true, will not admit it, that is, except as it comes out perverted, through madness,
then it is through madness and its variants it must be sought after. (375)
Madness and its "variants"--dreams, daydreams, and fantasies-become subversive ways of
overcoming exclusion and silence. "What one knows to be true" but cannot express because it will
not be understood or accepted in light of one's marginal position in society emerges in fantasy.
Contemporary women novelists use various forms of fantasy to show women attempting to take
control of circumstances from which they are excluded, to express what would otherwise be
inexpressible. Violet Clay and the Surfacing narrator must extricate themselves from fantasies they
have devised to avoid confronting painful realities, but to do so they must dream other selves and
relations. Kingston's "woman warrior" fantasy, like Martha Quest's approach to madness, is in itself
enabling, allowing the woman access to an alternate reality that permits a more complete identity.
In The Color Purple, The Woman Warrior, and The Handmaid's Tale, the central characters are
initially silenced by their cultures, but each eventually works her way to freedom through language.
The central irony in all three texts is that the very thing that is denied these women--the freedom to
speak up, speak out, be heard--becomes the medium through which they define them- selves. Celie's
letters to God and Nettie, the woman warrior's memoirs, and Offred's voice on cassette tapes all
serve as records of an emergence from silence, both in terms of the way in which they relate to
others and in the fact of the written record itself. Forms of fantasy work in various ways in these
novels: Celie dreams of an eventual reconciliation with Nettie, the Woman Warrior narrator
imagines herself as a powerful avenger, and Offred dreams of a past in which she had choices while
inhabiting a speculative future that is itself the fantasy of the author. Each is aware that her present
reality is oppressive, denying her individuality and her autonomy.
In Alice Walker 1976 novel Meridian, she tells the story of the slave woman Louvinie, whose
master cuts out her tongue because one of her frightening stories is presumed to have killed his
weakhearted son. Louvinie had been raised in a family of storytellers in West Africa; the loss of her
tongue is equivalent to the loss of her spirit: "Without one's tongue in one's mouth or in a special
spot of one's choosing, the singer in one's soul was lost forever to grunt and snort through eternity
like a pig." 34 Celie, in The Color Purple, is silenced by both physical brutality and admonition.
Raped by the man she assumes to be her father and warned by him, "You better not never tell
nobody but God" ( 11 ), Celie keeps her silence in the face of those who oppress her until
emboldened by her relationship with Shug Avery. But all the while, in her letters to God and Nettie,
she develops her own voice as her own storyteller.
The issue of names, here as in other novels, is a crucial narrative element. Names are closely tied to
identity, and the claiming or conferring of a name is an indication of selthood. Celie's letters to God
are unsigned; during the period before she begins writing to Nettie, she feels that she is no one, has
no particular identity. Shug effectively returns Celie's name to her when she names a song for her:
Then
I
hear
Shug saying Celie. Miss Celie. And I look up where she at.
my
name.
She say my name again. She say this song I'm bout to sing is call Miss Celie's song. . . .
First time somebody made something and name it after me. ( 75 )
Late in the novel, having achieved a measure of emotional and economic independence, Celie signs
a letter to Nettie in a manner that shows she has both a name and a place:
Your
Folkspants,
Sugar
Memphis, Tennessee ( 192 )
Sister,
Avery
Celie
Unlimited.
Drive
Similarly, Mary Agnes attempts to and finally succeeds in emerging from her nickname, "Squeak."
Her real name is a badge of her personhood and dignity. When her uncle, with whom she tries to
intercede on behalf of Sofia, rapes her, Harpo is sympathetic and tells "Squeak" that he loves her;
but she refuses to be demeaned by both the rape and her nickname: "She stand up. My name Mary
Agnes, she say" ( 95 ). Later, in the same scene in which Celie finds her voice to talk back to Mr.----, Mary Agnes wins this battle for her own name and identity. When she announces that she, too,
wants to go to Memphis to pursue a singing career, Harpo initially reacts as had Mr.----- to Celie:
"Listen Squeak, say Harpo. You can't go to Memphis. That's all there is to it":
Mary Agnes, say Squeak. Squeak, Mary Agnes, what difference do it make? It make a lot, say
Squeak. When I was Mary Agnes I could sing in public. ( 183 )
Harpo has not recognized until now the power of names; but the next time he addresses her, it is as
Mary Agnes.
One of the most subtle and ironic instances of naming in The Color Purple involves the relationship
between Celie and her husband. Having been forced to marry him, Celie seldom thinks of him with
any affection or intimacy, as reflected in the fact that she always refers to him as "Mr.-----," without
even a last name. The distance between them is magnified when he brings the ill Shug Avery, who
has been his mistress, home for Celie to care for.
Shug addresses him as Albert, and Celie writes, "Who Albert, I wonder. Then I remember Albert
Mr.----- first name" ( 51 ). Yet it is Shug, loved by both Celie and Albert, who fosters whatever
tender feelings the couple are able to have for one another. When Albert's father visits and taunts
Celie--"Not many women let they husband whore lay up in they house"--they are united in their
defense of Shug: "Mr.----- look up at me, our eyes meet. This the closest us ever felt" ( 59 ). Near
the end of the novel, Celie and Albert are drawn together by Shug's departure, and he puts his arms
around her with tenderness. As they sew together, Celie thinks, "He not such a bad looking man,
you know, when you come right down to it. And now it do begin to look like he got a lot of feeling
hind his face" (239). In her last letter to God, Celie refers to him as Albert, a fact that marks not
only her sense of confidence, but also Albert's new understanding of love that allows her to grant
him an identity.
Celie's initial silence is a continual reference point in her letters to God. When Albert's sister urges
her to fight for a decent way of life, she writes, "I don't say nothing" ( 29 ). When Albert comes
home from seeing Shug, Celie has "a million question," but she does not ask them: "I pray for
strength, bite the insides of my jaws" ( 34 ). When rumors begin to circulate about Shug's illness, "I
want to ast, but don't" ( 48 ). First meeting Shug, Celie wants desperately to welcome her to the
house, but "I don't say nothing. It not my house" ( 50 ). Yet in her letters to God and later to Nettie,
Celie not only breaks her silence, but creates a vivid tapestry of her life that shows her to be a
sensitive, perceptive woman who sees the ironies of her own experience. By using the epistolary
form, Walker allows Celie the freedom to shape her existence in vivid, expressive prose. The
changes in Celie's style during the course of the novel reflect her growing sense of worth. In the
earliest letters her writing is inhibited and cryptic, but as writing increasingly becomes a mode of
ordering her experience, her style becomes more fluid and scenic; in short, Celie becomes the
novelist of her own life. One evidence of this is that she guards her dialectical speech. In Memphis,
Darlene attempts to correct Celie's grammar, but Celie resists: "Pretty soon it feel like I can't think
My mind run up on a thought, git confuse, run back and sort of lay down" ( 193 ). Her resistance to
changing her language is essentially rooted in her common-sense integrity: "Look like to me only a
fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind" ( 194 ). As Elizabeth Fifer
puts it, "By using dialect, the only language she knows, when all public communication is
forbidden, she discovers and exploits a powerful tool in her development of awareness through selfexpression." 35
Significantly, Celie gains strength and confidence from a community of women: the resilient Sofia,
the loving Shug Avery, and her sister Nettie with whom she dreams of being reunited. Shug is the
agent by which Celie's dreams are realized. She awakens Celie to her own sexuality, finds the
letters from Nettie that Albert has hidden, and makes possible the pants-making business that gives
Celie economic independence. Yet it is ultimately Celie's taking control of language that allows her
to put her life together. When she refuses to let Albert stop her from going to Memphis with Shug,
she effectively reverses the balance of power in their relationship, becoming the one who teaches
him--about sewing, about the larger world, and about love. Having dealt with the sexual oppression
in her life, she ultimately addresses racism by using what she has learned from Nettie's letters.
Revising the Genesis story according to the Olinka tribe's beliefs, Celie proposes to Albert that the
first human beings were black, and that they considered the occasional white child that was born an
aberration. "So really Adam wasn't even the first white man. He was just the first one the people
didn't kill" (239). When she has achieved her own identity, Celie is in harmony with the natural
world, and language seems to be supplied by agencies outside herself. Cursing Albert for his history
of meanness, Celie muses, "Look like when I open my mouth the air rush in and shape words" ( 187
).
By questioning the authority of received tradition and her own oppressor, Celie demonstrates her
freedom from arbitrary justification for sexual and racial oppression. In significant ways, her life
begins anew. Her last letter is addressed not merely to God, but to the entire "Creation" she has told
Albert she wishes to enter: "Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything" 249).
Celie and Nettie, reunited, appropriately, on Independence Day, "totter toward one nother like us
use to do when us was babies" (250), and this last letter ends with a declaration of youth and hope:
"I think this the youngest us ever felt" (251).
Kingston's novel, like Walker's, opens with an admonition to silence: "'You must not tell anyone,'
my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you'" ( 3 ). This highly autobiographical work also shares
with The Color Purple a focus on cultural marginality: both Celie and Kingston's narrator--the latter
a first-generation Chinese-American woman--are excluded from the language of the dominant
culture by their racial and ethnic origins. King-Kok Cheung wisely cautions against readers or
critics taking these two texts as representative of the authors' respective cultures, pointing out that
Walker and Kingston are imaginative writers rather than cultural historians. Further, Cheung
reminds us that the sources of sexism and silence are quite different in the cultures from which their
authors come:
[B]lack silences, deepened by the history of slavery, are not the same as Chinese American silences,
which were reinforced by anti-Asian immigration laws. Celie's repression is much more violent and
brutal than Maxine's, and her resources are at the beginning much more limited. Celie expresses
herself tentatively at first because she lacks schooling; it is in school that Maxine becomes totally
incommunicative (because she has to learn a second language).
But Cheung agrees that language becomes for both characters an empowering force, and that
"gender and ethnicity--inhibitive forces when these texts open--eventually become the sources of
personal and stylistic strengths." 36
Celie's husband Albert, angered by her defiance of him, attempts to reduce her to nothingness: "You
black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all" ( 187 ). Kingston's
narrator experiences a similar humiliation when her parents reflect the traditional Chinese belief
that girls are worthless: "Better to raise geese than girls" ( 54 ). Both Walker and Kingston also
avoid traditional linear narrative. Celie's and Nettie's letters to each other are hidden and
misdirected, so that they do not follow a pattern of response and exchange, and Walker leaves it to
the reader to fill in the gaps between the episodes Celie narrates. The five sections of The Woman
Warrior are free-standing narratives that overlap and enrich each other rather than following a clear
narrative continuum.
Yet Celie's progress toward freedom from oppression unfolds as a steady, gradual process, mirrored
in the increasingly confident style in which she writes and in the actions and attitudes she records.
Kingston's work, on the other hand, is what Suzanne Juhasz has called "circumstantial, complex,
and contextual": "In their form, women's lives tend to be like the stories they tell: they show less a
pattern of linear development toward some clear goal than one of repetitious, cumulative, cyclical
structure," which is similar to Hélène Cixous's description of a "feminine text" as one that "is
always endless, without ending: there's no closure, it doesn't stop. . . . [A] feminine text goes on and
on and, at a certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues." 37 As part of
this unfinished circularity, Kingston constantly alters the form of her narrative, which makes it
difficult to classify as fiction or autobiography. 38 Roberta Rubenstein has identified the five major
sections of the book as follows:
The first three of the five major divisions of The Woman Warrior might be viewed respectively as a
morality tale, a fairy-tale epic, and a series of "ghost stories" and adventures completed by the
reconciliation between mother and daughter. The fourth section, "At the Western Palace," is a
tragedy, and the final one, "Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," is a combination of confession and
legend. 39
While such identifications should be viewed as suggestive rather than fixed, Rubenstein's comments
indicate the complexity of The Woman Warrior's formal characteristics.
Language, irony, and fantasy are interdependent in The Woman Warrior, for it is the multiple
ironies of her life that the narrator must resolve, and it is through fantasy that she finds the language
to do so. Two sets of related ironic circumstances affect the narrator's life. Juhasz identifies one set
of ironies when she states that The Woman Warrior "is about trying to be an American, when you
are the child of Chinese emigrants; trying to be a woman, when
you have been taught that men are all that matters; trying to be a writer, when you have been afraid
to speak out loud at all." 40 All of these paradoxes serve initially to silence the narrator. As her aunt,
the "no name woman," "gave silent birth" ( 13 ), so the young narrator is silent in school--a Chinese
girl among Americans. "It was when I found out I had to talk in school that school became a misery,
that the silence became a misery" ( 193 ). Because she is uncertain of either her Chinese or her
American identity, she retreats into silence in the face of "Chinese communication," which is "loud,
public" ( 13 ). Even as an adult, though she is "getting better," the narrator notes that "a telephone
call makes my throat bleed and takes up that day's courage" ( 191 ).
Speaking of the work of Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Margaret Homans
has noted that these writers "differentiate between the linguistic exile they experience as minorities
and that which they experience as women," 41 and so does Kingston. In the public, "American"
world of school, her ethnic identity, not her gender, silences her; but at home in the immigrant
community, girls are by tradition considered useless: "When one of my parents or the emigrant
villagers said, 'feeding girls is like feeding cowbirds,' I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard
I couldn't talk" ( 54 ). Her inarticulate rage brings the response that she is a "bad girl," which the
narrator suggests might be an advantage: "Isn't a bad girl almost a boy?" ( 56 ). 42 Since she cannot
transform herself into a boy, she fantasizes being a woman warrior, and through relating such
fantasies, emerges from her silence.
The second set of ironies--and the one that eventually gives Kingston's narrator her language-consists of multiple versions of "truth" that relate to her history, her identity as a Chinese-American
woman, and her role as a writer. Confronted at every turn by contradictions, the narrator must, like
the reader of an ironic text, formulate her own version of reality. When the narrator reaches puberty,
her mother tells her the story of her aunt in China, who disgraced the family not only by bearing an
illegitimate child, but also by drowning herself in the family well. The story is, as Rubenstein says,
a "morality tale," meant to warn the young girl about sexuality and family honor; yet she is
simultaneously ad- monished never to tell it to anyone else--to deny, in fact, the existence of the
aunt:
"Don't tell anyone you had an aunt. Your father does not want to hear her name. She has never been
born." I have believed that sex was unspeakable and words so strong and fathers so frail that "aunt"
would do my father mysterious harm. ( 18 )
The story of the "No Name Woman," who both existed and did not exist, introduces Kingston's
narrator to the power of both language and silence.
As she must revise and recreate the story of her aunt, so the narrator must reconcile the story of her
mother's heroic actions as a woman doctor in China with her docile, hard-working American
presence. Brave Orchid, who rid her medical school of ghosts and delivered babies in pigpens, is in
America a woman surrounded by ghosts, who tells her daughters that they are not worth feeding.
The confusion of her mother's two selves mirrors the split between a Chinese identity and an
American identity: "Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the
invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America" ( 6 ). Yet it is the
stories of this "invisible world"--her mother's "talk-story"--that ultimately allows the narrator to
create herself by telling her own story. As Rubenstein puts it, "Rejecting her mother's entrapment in
a culture that devalues females, yet identifying with Brave Orchid's talent--and in tribute to herKingston became a storyteller, committed to giving expression to the muted females of her culture"
( 179 -80).
However, it is not only members of Chinese-American culture for whom Kingston's narrator speaks
up. As difficult as speech remains for her, she tells her employer at an art supply store that she does
not like his calling a color "nigger yellow"; her voice is a "bad, small-person's voice that makes no
impact," but she nonetheless says the words ( 57 ). Later, she loses a job when she confronts an
employer with the fact that the restaurant he has chosen for a banquet is being picketed by members
of NAACP and CORE: "'I refuse to type these invitations,' I whispered, voice unreliable" ( 58 ). As
unreliable and ineffectual as her spoken voice may be,
however, Kingston's written language uses myth, fantasy, and memory to penetrate the ironies of
identity and avoid the madness that overtakes Moon Orchid when she arrives from China to find her
husband remarried and thoroughly Americanized. In the final section of The Woman Warrior, "A
Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," the narrator says, "I thought talking and not talking made the
difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain
themselves" ( 216 ). The closest the narrator comes to madness is the eighteen-month "mysterious
illness" she suffers after physically and emotionally abusing a young Chinese girl who refuses to
speak. Having gone to the extreme of castigating someone so like her younger self, she retreats
from life to stay in bed: "It was the best year and a half of my life" ( 212 ).
By returning to the narrator's childhood, the final section of The Woman Warrior underscores the
circularity of the search for truth in the midst of ironic paradox and contradiction. Fittingly, the
book ends with a "talk-story" begun by the mother and finished by the daughter. The mother tells of
her own mother outwitting bandits by having the family take everything they owned with them
when they went to the theater. The narrator completes the story by imagining that at the theater her
grandmother has heard the songs of Ts'ai Yen, a female second-century poet who brought songs to
China from her barbarian captivity. Both parts of the story speak to the transforming power of
fantasy and language. The narrator's grandmother decides that "our family was immune to harm as
long as they went to plays" (241); and the narrator reports that Ts'ai Yen "Eighteen Stanzas for a
Barbarian Reed Pipe" was adopted by the Chinese because "it translated well" (243), the statement
that concludes the book and testifies to the narrator's translation of her own experience into a
meaningful whole.
If The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior show women emerging from silence into language as
part of their authors' feminist desire for women to claim autonomy, Atwood The Handmaid's Tale
posits a future culture in which such feminist dreams have been replaced by a fundamentalist
patriarchy that divides women into rigid categories based on function: Wives, Marthas (servants),
Econowives, Handmaids (surrogate mothers for the children of Commanders and their Wives),
Aunts (who train the Handmaids), and Unwomen--those from whom language has removed gender
because they are unfitted for any other category. Atwood's dystopian novel--which has been called a
"futuristic feminist nightmare" and a "science-fiction fable" 43 --is in significant ways a cautionary
tale: a message from the future to those of us in the present who may be able to prevent the
Republic of Gilead from coming to pass. 44 Six years before The Handmaid's Tale was published,
Atwood commented on the writing of fiction in a way that seems to anticipate the novel:
What kind of world shall you describe for your readers? The one you can see around you, or the
better one you can imagine? If only the latter, you'll be unrealistic; if only the former, despairing.
But it is by the better world we can imagine that we judge the world we have. If we cease to judge
this world, we may find ourselves, very quickly, in one which is infinitely worse. 45
The element of contrast between one reality and another that Atwood suggests here is the method of
irony.
Indeed, in addition to being a fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale is essentially an ironic text in a more
fundamental way than are most other works considered here. At every point Atwood invites the
reader to question the validity of the narrative. Not only is Offred an unreliable narrator, in the
sense that she is enmeshed in the experience she describes and has an imperfect understanding of
the culture that controls her, but she constantly reminds the reader that her story is a
"reconstruction." Early in the novel, remembering the horror of having her five-year-old daughter
taken from her, Offred speaks of the "truth" of her story:
I would like to believe that this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those
who believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance.
If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the
story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
It isn't a story I'm telling. It's also a story I'm telling in my head, as I go along.
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden.
But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to
yourself. There's always someone else.
Even when there is no one. . . . I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you
can't. ( 39 - 40 )
In this deceptively simple passage, Offred addresses the relative "truths" of our actual experiences
and the stories we tell ourselves about them, the prohibition of language in Gilead, and the
storyteller's need for an audience.
Later, Offred announces, "This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction." If she ever escapes
to tell her story, she realizes that will be a reconstruction also, "at yet another remove." And, as the
author of her own story, she understands the limitations of language in conveying experience: "It's
impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact . . ." (
134 ). Having announced that language cannot tell the whole truth, Offred begins to alter her story
deliberately. When her Commander asks her to kiss him, she imagines stabbing him while she does
so: "I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands." But she
immediately corrects herself:
In fact I don't think about anything of the kind. I put it in only afterwards. Maybe I should have
thought about that, at the time, but I didn't. As I said, this is a reconstruction. . . . He was so sad.
That is a reconstruction, too. ( 140 )
Later, after three paragraphs describing her first sexual encounter with Nick, the Commander's
chauffeur, Offred begins again: "I made that up. It didn't happen that way. Here is what happened"
(261). By constantly inviting the reader to question what she says, Offred compels the reader to
participate in the process of irony by questioning and revising the language of the text.
Atwood creates the ironic framework in other ways, as well. Offred tells most of her story in the
present tense, giving it the im- mediacy of direct experience; she speaks as one imprisoned,
remembering the past but knowing no future beyond the present moment. Yet the reader learns in
the "Historical Notes" coda that Offred's "manuscript" was itself reconstructed from voice
recordings on cassette tapes found in an Army surplus footlocker in what had been Bangor, Maine.
The "soi-disant manuscript" was thus recorded after Offred's escape on the "Underground
Femaleroad," rather than at the time of her life as a handmaid. To further cast doubt on the
authenticity of Offred's story, Atwood has Professor Pieixoto note that the tapes were in no
particular order, so that he and his associate have guessed at their proper sequence: "all such
arrangements are based on some guesswork and are to be regarded as approximate" (302). Not only
the order, but also the language of Offred's narrative is made dubious by Pieixoto's comment about
"the difficulties posed by accent, obscure referents, and archaisms" (302). Atwood thus not only
deepens the irony of Offred's text, but also comments on the nature of "truth."
The exclusion from language that Celie and Kingston's narrator suffer is, in The Handmaid's Tale,
magnified and made part of the repressive culture of Gilead. Women--even the Aunts--are denied
books, paper, pens; only the Commanders may read even the Bible, and the shops are identified by
pictures rather than by names: "they decided that even the names of shops were too much
temptation for us" ( 25 ). In a society governed by The Word, words are themselves forbidden.
Because biblical language is used for oppression rather than for redemption, hymns with the word
"free" in them are banned, as are popular songs, and biblical language is altered and mixed with
political slogans. Like Celie in The Color Purple deciding that God "must be sleep" ( 163 ), Offred
attempts her own version of the Lord's Prayer, but finally concludes, "I feel as if I'm talking to a
wall" (195).
Yet perhaps because of the prohibition of language, Offred, who had previously worked in a library,
is fascinated by words, by puns and word-play. Waiting for the household to assemble for the
evening Bible-reading, Offred thinks: "The Commander is the head of the household. The house is
what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a ship. Hollow" ( 81 ). By
such word associations, she exposes the hollowness of the concepts of home and family in Gilead.
When Offred plays with word associations while remembering the past, she points up the contrast
between freedom and oppression for women. Passing what was once a movie theater that had
Humphrey Bogart festivals, she thinks of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, "women on their
own, making up their minds": "They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the
possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to
choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then" ( 25 ). Later, remembering how she had loved
books, Offred thinks of her job in the library:
It's strange, now, to think of having a job. Job. It's a funny word. It's a job for a man. Do a jobbie,
they'd say to children when they were being toilet trained. Or of dogs: he did a job on the carpet.
You were supposed to hit them with rolled-up newspapers, my mother said. I can remember when
there were newspapers, though I never had a dog, only cats.
The Book of Job. ( 173 )
The word "job" leads Offred inevitably back to newspapers and books, and the Book of Job is a
fitting metaphor for the suffering she endures in Gilead.
The story of Job, however, is a story of survival, and language enables Offred to survive. Telling
her story is, in Rubenstein's words, "the self-generated act that opposes the obligations of
procreation" ( 103 ). By creating an ironic fantasy, Atwood doubly compels the reader to participate
in the creation of meaning. It is, finally, in the interaction between writer and reader, between reader
and narrator, that the meaning of The Handmaid's Tale exists and that Offred triumphs as the author
of her own story. Linda Hutcheons, writing about the shift from the lyrical to the narrative mode in
Atwood's fiction, has suggested that although writing "can only employ the static counters of
language, [it] is capable of being resurrected in the equally dynamic process of reading, the bringing
to life of the dead black marks on the white page." 46 Atwood herself feels strongly about the
interaction among writer, text, and reader, and has described the writer as one who says, "There is a
story I have to tell you, there is something you need to know":
All writers play Ancient Mariner at times to the reader's Wedding Guest, hoping that they are
holding the reader with their glittering eye, at least long enough so he'll turn the next page. The tale
the Mariner tells is partly about himself, true, but it's partly about the universe and partly about
something the Wedding Guest needs to know; or at least, that's what the story tells us. 47
Officially denied language in Gilead, Offred escapes to tell her story, however "reconstructed," and
tells us something we need to know about the human capacity for survival
CHAPTER THREE
Multiple Narrative: Revising the Self
In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood creates a situation in which Offred's story must perforce be a
reconstruction on several levels: from imperfect memory to cassette tapes to transcription and
translation many years later. In the process, Offred's precise identity--her real name, her history-becomes lost, so that there is an ironic tension between the candid, even confessional revelation that is
Offred's narrative on the page, and the "real" Offred that the experts in Gileadean Studies attempt in vain
to identify. In its presentation of such an extreme discontinuity between selves or identities, Atwood's
novel serves as a paradigm of the difficult search for identity in the contemporary novel by women.
Indeed, contemporary women's narratives reveal a deep awareness of the "self" as fluid rather than
fixed, and this awareness leads in turn to the revision of narrative as a revision of self: a socially created
identity becomes replaced by or juxtaposed to an alternative identity that views the socially created self
ironically. The emphasis on fluidity--on "becoming" rather than "being"--both mirrors the social and
ideological upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s and con-75tributes to a feminist critique of social constructions of female identity.
It can be argued, of course, that the novel as a form in Western culture arises from and belongs to an
ideology that individuates human beings--a post-Enlightenment view that the person is as valuable and
interesting for his (and occasionally her) uniqueness as an individual as for his representation of common
experiences and values. The realistic novel in particular, by emphasizing the growth and development of
the individual character, brings the concepts of "self" and "identity" to the foreground, as the unique
qualities of the individual are etched against the backdrop of the larger culture. The classic novel of selfdevelopment, the bildungsroman, is traditionally the story of a young man achieving maturity by testing
himself against the values of his society and emerging as a distinct individual. This pattern of
individuation may be seen even more clearly in the autobiography, at least as autobiography has been
traditionally defined. George Gusdorf, for example, writes that "autobiography . . . requires a man to take
a distance with regard to himself in order to reconstitute himself in the focus of his special unity and
identity across time." I The concept that the author of an autobiography consciously stands apart from his
life in order to "reconstitute" a self to present to the reader is remarkably similar to the novelist's creation
of character in fiction.
However, the presentation of a "self," whether in fiction or in autobiography, is a somewhat different
matter for women than for men. When Gusdorf says that "autobiography is not possible in a cultural
landscape where consciousness of self does not, properly speaking, exist" ( 30 ), he could be speaking as
well of the traditional realist novel, a pre-condition of which is the assumption that each individual is set
apart from all others by possession of unique consciousness and characteristics. Yet conventional notions
of the self are postulated on the experience of the dominant--male--culture, and fail to take into account
the circumstances in which women and members of other non-dominant groups encounter the concept.
Because women and other minorities are systematically discouraged from thinking of themselves as
-76unique and autonomous, their relationship to selfhood must be approached in a different way. Indeed,
Judith Kegan Gardiner calls into question the use and validity of the terms "self" and "identity" when
applied to women:
"Identity" is a central concept for much contemporary cultural and literary criticism,
which, along with its even vaguer terminological twin, the "self," has become a cliché
without becoming clear. The word "identity" is paradoxical in itself, meaning both
sameness and distinctiveness, and its contradictions proliferate when it is applied to
women. . . . [T]he quest for female identity seems to be a soap opera, endless and never
advancing, that plays the matinees of women's souls. A central question of feminist
literary criticism is, who is there when a woman says, "I am"? 2
The fact that feminist literary criticism does concern itself so frequently with questions of self and identity
suggests that women writers raise these questions in provocative ways in their work; and yet the very
terminology available to the critic derives from a concept of selfhood that is at least oblique to women's
experience.
Gardiner suggests that feminist psychology offers a means of describing women's relationship to concepts
of the self that in turn has implications for women's narrative strategies. By applying Nancy Chodorow's
theories of female personality to identity theory, Gardiner proposes that "for every aspect of identity as
men define it, female experience varies from the male model." Most fundamentally, Gardiner concludes
that female identity is a "process" (349), and that "primary identity for women is more flexible and
relational than for men" (354). One result of this less fixed, more fluid concept of identity is women's
"manipulation of identifications between narrator, author, and reader" (349); another is a blurring of the
distinctions between genres, particularly between fiction and autobiography. Two of Gardiner's examples
are Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Mary McCarthy Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, and others come
readily to mind: Erica Jong's Isadora Wing trilogy, Nora Ephron Heartburn, Maya Angelou I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings. Such fluidity of genre and of the relationship among author, narrator, and reader
suggests that
-77identity, for the woman writer, is constantly in the process of being evaluated and revised.
What characterizes the contemporary novel by women, however, is not merely a fluidity of identity, but a
consciousness of the ironic distance between the self as formulated externally, by cultural heritage, and
the self as an internal process of redefinition and discovery. Perhaps the most striking instance of this
distance and the attempt to address it imaginatively is Kingston Woman Warrior, in which the conflict
between Chinese and American cultures underscores the difficulty of developing a concept of self with
which the narrator can live comfortably. As Margaret Miller points out in "Threads of Identity in Maxine
Hong Kingston Woman Warrior," the very concept of individuality that permeates Western thought and
gives rise to the novel is alien to traditional Chinese culture, in which the "process of maturation is not
one of differentiation from other members of the group," but rather is intended to "ensure group
continuity, to embody group norms." 3 The individual person--particularly the individual woman--is a link
between past and future generations, between ancestors and descendants, and thus is bound by tradition
in ways more cogent and imperative than in Western culture. The struggle to derive a sense of selfhood
while mediating between the Western emphasis on personal uniqueness and the Oriental emphasis on
connectedness is responsible, Miller suggests, for the structure of The Woman Warrior, in that rather
than using the chronological narrative of the traditional autobiography, Kingston "reflects the Chinese
emphasis on kinship rather than on individual identity by defining herself in terms of her place in a
kinship line" ( 17 ). But even more significantly, Kingston's narrator re-tells and revises her ancestral
history, recreating the stories of her aunt, the "no name woman," and her mother, Brave Orchid--the first
a victim and the second a heroine, poles between which Kingston's narrator must steer in order to find
her own identity and worth as a Chinese-American woman.
Despite cultural differences, however, in creating the series of five narratives that comprise The Woman
Warrior, Kingston is very much in consonance with other contemporary female novelists,
-78who deal with the process of finding or creating an identity in the context of contemporary Western
culture. The revision of self and history, the emergence of the ironic voice, and the fantasy of an
alternative reality are common narrative elements. One concrete, easily observable evidence of the
multiple identities that characterize these novels is the multiplicity of names by which central characters
are known. Kingston's narrator is called both "Biggest Daughter" and "Little Dog" by her family. As Miller
points out, Chinese seldom refer to each other by real names, even within the family: "instead each
person is known by a name which marks the important thing, his or her position within the family" ( 16 ).
Significantly, the narrator's actual first name is never used; instead, she imagines the identity of the
"woman warrior"; and she knows that "Little Dog" is a subterfuge to fool the gods, because she was
actually born, as was her mother, in the year of the Dragon.
Like Kingston's narrator, Atwood's narrator in Surfacing is nameless; each lacks a clearly defined "self"
that can be named. And as Kingston's narrator imaginatively transforms herself into the woman warrior,
so Miriam, in Piercy Small Changes, tries to escape the restrictions of her life as a young woman by
imagining herself to be "Tamar De Luria," an anthropologist who has learned witchcraft and hypnotism-powers that give the young Miriam the illusion of dominance in a world in which women are powerless.
Martha Quest Hesse, in The Four-Gated City, disengages herself from both the mask of "Matty"--the selfmocking identity that she had developed as a defense--and her married name Hesse, both of which
represent assumed selves that she must shed on her way to self-discovery. Early in the novel, in
response to a stranger's question, she names herself Phyllis Jones, "with an imaginary history of wartime
work in Bristol," and realizes that individual identity can be both assumed and bestowed: "People filled in
for you, out of what they wanted, needed, from--not you, not you at all, but from their own needs." 4 The
name Hesse is easy to discard, because she can see it objectively: "it was a name acquired like a bracelet
from a man who had it in his possession to be given to a woman in front of lawyers at the time of the
signing
-79of the marriage contract" ( 38 ). The first step toward achieving a true "self" is Martha's realization that
she is essentially a "soft dark receptive intelligence" that has "nothing to do with Martha, or any other
name she might have had attached to her" ( 38 ).
If, as Gardiner suggests, female identity is a continual process rather than achievement of stasis,
represented on the most superficial level by the assuming and shedding of names, then the constant
revision of one's personal history is a logical thematic and narrative element of these novels. Not only
does fiction blend into autobiography, but the fluidity of the individual self requires constant revision of
the "truth" about one's life story. Two dramatically different novels illustrate the possibilities of such
revision: Surfacing and Russ The Female Man. Atwood's novel presents two personal histories for the
narrator: one a set of fabrications and distortions that the narrator has developed as a socially acceptable
story, and the other the "real" story that emerges as the layers of the first are peeled away.
The namelessness of the Surfacing narrator is deeply significant. Not only is she on a quest to understand
her past and thereby to develop a sense of her own present and future; she also lies to the reader and-more importantly--to herself about the central facts of her life as an adult woman: marriage and
motherhood. So deeply has she buried her experiences with adultery and abortion that even her private
thoughts and memories are for much of the novel permeated by the fictitious husband and child that she
has invented to hide these experiences even from herself. Caught between the prevailing morality of the
1950s and the greater personal freedom of the 1970s, she is very much a character of the 1960s, unable
to reconcile the values of her upbringing with the imperatives of love and necessity. The narrator's friend
Anna wears a mask of make-up without which she is never seen--"her artificial face is the natural one" 5 -but the narrator's mask is a psychic one that must be removed gradually as she becomes able to
confront the truth.
So solid is the structure of lies that the narrator of Surfacing has developed that the reader initially has
no reason to doubt that she has been married and divorced, and has decided to let her former
-80husband keep the child she has borne. Early in the novel, the narrator even allows the French Canadian
friends of her parents to believe she is still married:
I'm safe, I'm wearing my ring, I never threw it out, it's useful for landladies. I sent my
parents a postcard after the wedding, they must have mentioned it to Paul; that, but not
the divorce. It isn't part of the vocabulary here, there's no reason to upset them.
I'm waiting for Madame to ask about the baby, I'm prepared, alerted; I'll tell her I left
him in the city; that would be perfectly true, only it was a different city, he's better off
with my husband, former husband. ( 27 )
In order not to disturb her parents' friends, the narrator is prepared to tell lies even about her own lies.
Later, she has a brief, unbidden memory of her husband carving his initials into a fence, teaching her to
carve her own and suggesting a permanence about their relationship that the ensuing time has negated.
She maintains that it was she who ended the relationship: "I was what's known as the offending party,
the one who left, he didn't do anything to me. He wanted a child, that's normal, he wanted us to be
married" ( 55 ). Not until later in the novel does the narrator acknowledge to herself that the reverse of
this has been true: her married lover wanted neither her nor the child. Unable to live with the pain of the
truth, she has invented her own: "I needed a different version. I pieced it together the best way I could"
( 69 ).
Yet in retrospect, the narrator provides clues throughout Surfacing that the personal history she initially
presents is a fabrication. In the third chapter, she refers to "my husband and child, my attractive fullcolor magazine illustrations, suitable for framing" ( 34 ), which suggests that they are a fantasy. Later,
she notes that her current lover, Joe, does not know about her child, and will not find out by stumbling
across photographs of it, because none exist. She further acknowledges that she did not select a name
for her child before it was born: "I never identified it as mine" ( 39 ). The truth of the abortion is
prefigured in the language Atwood uses in the third chapter: "I have to behave as though it doesn't exist,
because for me it can't, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced
off from me like
-81a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled" ( 56 ). By thus hinting at the reality of her narrator's past,
Atwood maintains the tension between her two selves as the narrator gradually revises her invented
version, replacing it with another truth as she can bear to acknowledge it.
The image of the Siamese twins is representative of the concept of duality that pervades Atwood's
writing, a concept that is frequently rendered imagistically by twins. Even her titles, such as Double
Persephone and Two-Headed Poems, suggest duality of identity. Early in Surfacing, the narrator reports
that Anna, an amateur palm-reader, has asked her whether she were a twin. When the narrator says she
is not, Anna persists: "Are you positive . . . because some of your lines are double" (10). Later in the
novel, she thinks, "I'd allowed myself to be cut in two. . . . The other half, the one locked away, was the
only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal" ( 129 ). The self that is "locked away"
is the one in touch with her own reality, the one the narrator must re-discover in order to be whole. In
her book Violent Duality, Sherrill Grace argues that Atwood consistently embraces the notion of duality:
The speaker in her poems, or the protagonist in her novels, swings back and forth
between a solipsistic extreme, withdrawal into the self, and an absorption or
submergence in objective reality, the false perceptions of others or the natural world. . . .
Freedom, Atwood implies, does not come from denying or transcending the
subject/object duality of life; it is not duality but polarity that is destructive. Freedom
comes from accepting the duality or, to use the more precise scientific term, duplicity
which we share with all living things. . . . Atwood explores the concept of duplicity
thematically and formally, always with an ironic eye to its common meaning of deceit. 6
Freedom, for the narrator of Surfacing, comes when she accepts the duality of her biological and
intellectual selves. For most of the novel, she is dominated by her intellect, which has created the fabric
of lies with which she has shielded herself from her own past. She is unable to feel, because love has
betrayed her, and it is in recognition of the split between mind and body that, at the beginning of the
second section of the novel, the narrator comments
-82on the assumed polarity of mind and body: "The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I'm
not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate"
( 91 ) It is only when Atwood's narrator retreats almost entirely into an animalistic state near the end of
the novel that she can leave the ironic detachment of her intellect behind, and begin again to trust her
emotions.
The Surfacing narrator's emotions are closely tied to her creativity, and another dimension of her divided
self occurs in her professional life. Like the title character in Godwin Violet Clay, the narrator has studied
to be an artist, but works as an illustrator, fashioning images to order rather than creating them to meet
her own artistic needs. As she describes herself:
I'm what they call a commercial artist or, when the job is more pretentious, an illustrator.
I do posters, covers, a little advertising and magazine work and the occasional
commissioned book. . . . I can imitate anything: fake Walt Disney, Victorian etchings in
sepia, Bavarian cookies, ersatz Eskimo for the home market. ( 60 - 61 )
As the reader gradually learns, her married lover was one of her art teachers, and it was he who
discouraged her from pursuing a career as an artist:
For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he
said I should study something I could use because there has [sic] never been any
important women artists. . . . [S]o I went into Design and did fabric patterns. ( 60 )
The art teacher's sexism effectively hides from the narrator a tradition of women artists, and without
knowledge to the contrary, she is forced to agree with him: "But he was right, there never have been
any" ( 60 ).
By the end of the novel, however, the narrator's process of selfrevision has caused her to shed the
"civilized" world and its intellectual structures--what she calls "the word games, the winning and losing
games" ( 223 ). She burns the illustrations she has been working on, and destroys her paints and
brushes: "this is no longer my future" ( 206 ). The narrator's fantasy of regressing on the evolutionary
scale, which occupies the last few chapters of the
-83novel, is an imaginative analogue to her rejection of the world that has victimized her, and the
proclamation that begins the final chapter--"This above all, to refuse to be a victim" ( 222 )--is a signal
that she is prepared to be a creator rather than being created to meet the needs of others. Having finally
acknowledged to herself the earlier abortion, she now believes herself to be pregnant again-"shape of a
goldfish now in my belly" ( 223 )--and even a relationship with her lover Joe may be possible because he
seems not to have hardened into a mold: "he is only half formed, and for that reason I can trust him" (
224 ). If Atwood's narrator is not to be a victim, she must create her own reality.
Despite the visionary qualities of Surfacing, it is a novel clearly grounded in its time period. The
homemade "art" film that Joe and David are making, the counterculture resistance to capitalism, the
narrator's guilt-producing back-room abortion, and the denial of her professional aspirations all tie it to
the 1960s. In contrast, The Female Man ranges over time and space to challenge social constructions of
women, using both ironic and speculative modes. Whereas Surfacing details the painful progress of a
single woman toward freedom from the culture that would create and thus constrict her, The Female Man
holds up to ridicule the fundamental concept of social prescription of women's behavior. Russ achieves
the freedom to launch this critique by using the methods of speculative fiction: parallel universes, travel
in time and space, and multiple consciousness. As Tom Staicar has noted, science fiction as a genre has
increasingly attracted feminist authors precisely because of that freedom:
Only science fiction allows the freedom to create a "laboratory" world where one can
experiment with matriarchal societies that dominate entire nations, group marriages,
radical approaches to child rearing, and other feminist speculations about alternatives to
existing sex roles and living arrangements. 7
It is such a "Laboratory world" that Charlotte Perkins Gilman created in Herland in the early part of the
century, transferring her concept of female nurturance to an all-female culture of the future. But Russ
exploits more fully the possibilities of the genre, creating four characters that are actually four different
manifesta-84tions of the same consciousness in order to expose the arbitrary nature of values and attitudes. Further,
as Thomas F. Dillingham has pointed out, a critical central concept of The Female Man is that "'gender' is
not biologically or psychologically determined, but rather is an ideological product of the dominant forces
of society." 8
The four female "characters" in Russ's novel illustrate the force of social ideology in the construction of
female identity, and simultaneously undermine that force by underscoring its absurdity. Joanna, who
lives in the late 1960s, most closely resembles the Surfacing narrator, precisely because of the period in
which she lives; her feminist consciousness exists in tension with the conditioning of her upbringing:
There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the
deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training,
the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my
human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my
fearful, fearful ambition? 9
Jeannine is equally a product of her era--the 1930s. Intelligent but directionless, she looks to marriage as
the panacea for her life that she knows it will not be. Unlike Joanna, she is unable to identify the source
of her unease: "I have everything and yet I'm not happy. Sometimes I want to die" ( 150 ). The other
two avatars of the central consciousness are from other, vastly different worlds. Janet, who, with her allfemale planet Whileaway, was introduced in Russ's earlier story "When It Changed" ( 1972), is outspoken
and assertive, unafraid to confront sexism when she encounters it, as when she breaks the arm of a man
who makes persistent sexual--and sexist--advances to her at a party. Jael, the fourth character, comes
from a future world in which the "war between the sexes" has become an actual war between Manland
and Womanland. Jael's contempt for men is expressed in her inversion of the concept of woman as
sexual plaything: in her house in Vermont lives Davy, a beautiful young man more pet than companion,
whose actions are controlled by the household computer.
It is Jael, who works for the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology and whose specialty, appropriately
enough, is disguises, who has
-85brought the four women together, and who makes it clear that each one is an aspect of the same
woman. Having decided to search for her other "selves," Jael confronts Jeannine, Joanna, and Janet with
their similarities: "What you see is the same genotype, modified by age, by circumstance, by education,
by diet, by learning, by God knows what" ( 161 ). It is tempting to regard these four incarnations of the
same woman as representing a historical progression of consciousness of a sort, with Jeannine and
Joanna standing for two stages of pre-feminist awareness and Janet and Jael predicting alternative
futures--one peaceful and one warlike. But Jael--and through her, Russ--emphasizes not historical
development but rather identity beneath a facade of differences:
We ought to think alike and feel alike and act alike, but of course we don't. So plastic is
humankind! Do you remember the story of the Doppelganger? This is the double you
recognize instantly, with whom you feel a mysterious kinship. An instant sympathy, that
informs you at once that the other is really your very own self. The truth is that people
don't recognize themselves except in mirrors, and sometimes not even then. ( 162 )
The plasticity of human beings--their tendency to adopt the attitudes and behaviors of the society in
which they live--conceals their sameness, and hides them even from themselves.
The central thematic focus of The Female Man is thus the ironic disparity between surfaces and essences,
and this theme is approached not only in the merged identities of the four "J's," but also in the novel's
attack on stereotypes of women--its exposure of both the absurdity and the power of these superficial
images by the use of hyperbole and oversimplification. The latter device, for example, is used to point up
the dangers of Freudian constructions of women when the character Laura says matter-of-factly, "I'm a
victim of penis envy so I can't ever be happy or lead a normal life" ( 65 ). More commonly, Russ uses
exaggeration to make her point. At the party where Janet ultimately breaks the host's arm after her
verbal rejections of his advances have failed, a group of women epitomizes in their names as well as their
behavior the force of cultural stereotyping:
-86Sposissa, three times divorced; Eglantissa, who thinks only of clothes; Aphrodissa, who
cannot keep her eyes open because of her false eyelashes; Clarissa, who will commit
suicide; Lucrissa, whose strained forehead shows that she's making more money than her
husband; Wailissa, engaged in a game of ain't-it-awful with Lamentissa. ( 34 )
Using what Natalie M. Rosinsky calls the "literalization of metaphor," 10 Russ addresses the language of
social intercourse, exaggerating it to the point of absurdity to make clear its subtext. In a disembodied
piece of text, for example, an unidentified male voice addresses a woman who has evidently announced
herself a feminist:
Burned any bras lately har har twinkle twinkle A pretty girl like you doesn't need to be
liberated twinkle har Don't listen to those hysterical bitches twinkle twinkle twinkle I
never take a woman's advice about two things: love and automobiles twinkle twinkle har.
( 49 )
Janet, in particular, is bothered by the pervasive insistence that the term "man" includes women, and
thus it is she who contributes the book's title when she decides that to be included in human experience
she will have to become a "female man" ( 140 ).
Despite their vast differences in tone and narrative technique, Surfacing and The Female Man share a
central thematic concern with the disparity between appearance and reality. Atwood's narrator must
experience depths--figuratively and literally--before she can "surface" as an emerging self. Russ, by using
the techniques of speculative fiction, calls into question conventional notions of identity in order to force a
recognition of the social construction of women's identities. Both novels, in being visionary, order revisions of women's selfhood and suggest the possibility of change.
In an essay titled "Towards a Fully Human Heroine: Some Worknotes," published in 1973, Gail Godwin
expresses her dissatisfaction with depictions of women in fiction: "One day I mean to write a novel with a
heroine I would like to meet, a heroine I can be proud of, the kind of heroine I look for--usually in vain-in
-87other people's novels."
11
Godwin describes the sort of heroine she has in mind:
She would be the subject of her own destiny, not the object of "Blind Destiny" nor a
character in somebody else's destiny.
She would have an inner life that was wide and deep and complex--one that would tempt
the novelist to explore it at the risk of getting lost, rather than editing it or shutting part
of it behind doors.
She would live anywhere on this planet (or another), but always within her moral center,
carefully furnished by herself, consisting of items she needed and liked to see around.
She would refurbish it and springclean it and throw away or replace items when they
wore out. ( 28 )
Godwin's ideal heroine, who furnishes and maintains her own "moral center" rather than being created by
someone else, directs her own life story instead of being a character in someone else's story. Yet the
central character of Godwin The Odd Woman, published the following year, cannot develop a life outside
the literature she teaches. A college professor, Jane Clifford is presented as a woman who "liked to be in
control," 12 but she is actually controlled by stories written by other people. Jane's family, most
fundamentally, expects her to play a certain role in their drama; going home for a funeral, Jane sees
them waiting at the airport for her, "never doubting she had any choice but to fall back from the sky into
their nets of family and region and social standing and--most compelling weave of all--their image of her,
Jane, their Jane" ( 89 ).
Jane's immersion in the literature of her professional life causes her to see herself as a character rather
than a creator. On her bad days, she plays the game of wondering, "If Jane Austen were putting me in a
novel, how would she define me?" ( 27 ). A specialist in nineteenth-century literature, Jane frequently
yearns for the solid identity of nineteenth-century characters, as opposed to the more ambiguous
personalities of contemporary literature, but wonders about the validity of the old-fashioned hero:
Was there, then--had there ever been--such a thing as a basic personality, or was that
only a bygone literary convention? Could there exist a true, pure "character" who was
nobody but himself--subject, of
-88-
course, to the usual accidents of existence--but capable of subordination of his (her)
terrain as he progressed through time and space, cutting a swath of chapters that would
be meaningful in retrospect? ( 27 )
Even Jane's relationship with her lover, Gabriel Weeks, takes on the character of fiction rather than being
the space in which she has a "real" life. Gabriel, whose relationship with his wife Ann remains a mystery
to Jane, is as much a fantasy as he is an actual lover with whom she spends an occasional weekend. She
rehearses the conversations she will have with him before they meet; she constantly uses the word
"mysterious" when referring to him. More in love with the idea of an affair than with Gabriel himself, Jane
is unable to enjoy full sexuality with him. Susan E. Lorsch refers to Jane's "prefabricated fantasy affair"
with Gabriel, 13 and indeed her whole life has the slightly unreal quality of a character in a literary text.
Four years later, in Violet Clay, Godwin created a heroine more nearly like her ideal conception: Violet
Clay, like so many other characters in contemporary women's fiction, is finally able to escape from what
she terms the "Book of Old Plots" and become the creator of her own life.
A common motif in the contemporary novel by women is the story that must be revised or rejected: the
fairy tale, myth, romance, plot, even history that defines and limits women's lives and choices. Rachel
Blau DuPlessis, in Writing Beyond the Ending, sees this revisionary critique as a major thread in the work
of twentieth-century women writers:
There is a consistent project that unites some twentieth-century women writers across
the century, writers who examine how social practices surrounding gender have entered
narrative, and who consequently use narrative to make critical statements about the
psychosexual and sociocultural construction of women. . . . Writing beyond the ending
means the transgressive invention of narrative strategies, strategies that express critical
dissent from dominant narrative. 14
Writing "beyond the ending" of the enclosed plot of traditional fiction--especially in the contemporary
novel--necessitates an ironic vision and an ability to imagine beyond the limits of the standard narrative.
Such standard narratives may be the family
-89histories that one seems doomed to repeat; they may be the mythologies of a particular culture; or they
may be generalized stereotypes and expectations for women's nature and behavior.
Godwin's Violet Clay, for example, has to free herself from her family pattern of woman-as-victim. Her
grandmother, beguiled by cultural prescriptions for domesticity, gave up her career as a musician; her
mother, more dramatically, drowned herself after her husband's death, leaving Violet an orphan. When
Violet loses her job as illustrator for Gothic romances--a job which itself represents a selling-out of her
own artistic talent--she initially feels stuck in the family role: "The grooves of my mind were more
accustomed to the concept of Violet Clay as victim than as victress." 15 Yet Godwin's narrator is capable
at the same moment of stepping aside from her own narrative and addressing the reader from the
perspective of her later awareness:
As any of you know who have been there, there is a certain point on the road downward
from your homes where you find yourself deriving more comfort from imagining the worst
than imagining what steps you would have to take to make things better.
I was near this point. ( 78 )
Godwin's double narrative perspective--the alternation between the chronology of Violet Clay and Violet's
ironic commentary on her past self--reinforces the concept of revision: Violet is both in and apart from
her own story. The fact that the character Violet paints covers for popular romances underscores aptly
the danger of her being stuck in the "Book of Old Plots." This element of the novel also has its origins in
Godwin's own life: for several years when she was a child, her mother wrote love stories for pulp
magazines as a means of supporting herself and her daughter. As Godwin describes it, the basic plot of
these stories never varied: "1. Girl meets man. 2. They fall in love. 3. Complications arise. 4. But are
overcome. 5. Proposal or marriage." 16 Early in Violet Clay, Violet fantasizes beyond the end of the
romance she is currently illustrating, trying to imagine what comes after the word "always." In Violet's
vision of her romantic heroine's future, the marriage becomes routine and stale and the heroine
dissatisfied,
-90wondering, "Why oh why had nobody prepared her for what came after the last page?" ( 19 ). By the end
of her own story, Violet's painting "Suspended Woman" has become a metaphor for her own sense of
possibilities outside the standard plot.
The metaphor of the popular romance as a possible life story that must be rejected is explored most fully
in Atwood Lady Oracle, in which the narrator actually has two identities: she is both Joan Foster and
Louisa K. Delacourt, "two people at once, with two sets of identification papers, two bank accounts, two
different sets of people who believed I existed." 17 Under the name Louisa K. Delacourt, Joan writes
Gothic romances, a profession hidden from her husband, and one which is an analogue for her constant
revision of her own life. Joan revises her life in several different ways in the course of Atwood's novel.
Like Miriam, in Piercy Small Changes, she is overweight as a child and adolescent; when, at nineteen, she
loses weight in order to claim an inheritance from her Aunt Lou and leave home, it is "like being born
fully grown at the age of nineteen: I was the right shape, but I had the wrong past. I'd have to get rid of
it entirely and construct a different one for myself " ( 157 ). Joan's initiation into writing popular fiction
happens through the agency of a Polish emigré whom she meets after she moves to London; in order to
send money to his relatives in Poland, Paul writes romances with hospital settings under the name "Mavis
Quilp," 18 and he encourages Joan to begin her career as Louisa. Lady Oracle has three narrative threads:
the narrator's account of her present life in Italy, her retrospective account of her past, and passages
from the romances she writes. In some senses, each of these is a fiction. Joan's identity as Louisa K.
Delacourt is an overt though understandable lie; it is common for authors of popular romances to use
pseudonyms. Her life in Italy, too, is invented: having staged her own death in Canada in order to escape
her life there, she is in hiding from the very past that she has in some ways invented. Truth is, for Joan,
a poor substitute for illusion: "This was the reason I fabricated my life, time after time: the truth was not
convincing" ( 167 ).
Godwin's Violet Clay is tempted by old plots, but Joan Foster is unable to live her life apart from some
fictional construction. "All
-91my life I'd been hooked on plots," she says near the end of the novel (342); she considers writing a
realistic novel, but rejects the idea: "I longed for happy endings" (352). Joan is haunted by her mother,
whom she could never please, and by her former fat self, the latter the recurring image of the Fat Lady.
It is not until the romance novel she is writing and her own life come together that the Fat Lady is
exorcised. In her story, the heroine has been drowned, as Joan has pretended to do, but reappears to the
hero as the Fat Lady, representing Joan's fear that her husband, Arthur, would reject her if he knew of
her real past. It is only when she sees her actual fear embodied in her fiction that Joan is able to let go of
the Fat Lady image: "The woman began to fade, like mist, like invisible ink, like melting snow" (355).
With this ghost of her past gone, Joan is able to free herself of her mother as well: "I would never be able
to make her happy. . . . Maybe it was time to stop trying" (363). At the end of Lady Oracle, Joan is
preparing to confront the reality of her past and present:
I won't write anymore Costume Gothics. . . . I think they were bad for me. But maybe I'll try some
science fiction. The future doesn't appeal to me as much as the past, but I'm sure it's better for you. I
keep thinking I should learn some lesson from all of this, as my mother would have said. (379)
By acknowledging that the future is a better place to live than the past, Joan announces her readiness to
attempt life without illusion.
The "Book of Old Plots" that Violet Clay manages to escape in Godwin's novel includes, for a number of
women writers, both the myths and fairy tales that are passed from generation to generation and the
less overt but equally powerful life patterns adumbrated in the traditional novel of which Rachel
Brownstein and Rachel Blau DuPlessis speak--life patterns resolved by marriage or death, and from which
real and fictional women depart at peril of isolation and depression. The plots of contemporary women's
fiction frequently subvert these patterns by refusing to adhere to or resolve them. In Small Changes, the
stories of Beth and Miriam intersect at the point that each woman is on the verge of departing from the
pattern that has seemed scripted for her in early life, and
-92in a sense they revise each others' stories. By dividing the novel into three sections--The Book of Beth,
The Book of Miriam, and Both in Turn--Piercy causes the two narrative threads to counterpoint each
other, and forces the reader to observe the irony inherent in the contrast between the characters' life
patterns.
Beth, whose story begins the novel, comes from a highly traditional middle-class background. Growing up
in the 1950s and early 1960s, she sees no realistic future beyond marriage to her high-school boyfriend,
even though she instinctively distrusts this plan for her life. The marriage is, predictably, a disaster; Beth
soon finds herself "tired of the whole mythology of love and marriage," 19 and escapes to Boston, where
she is quickly drawn into the late 1960s world of university radicalism. Eventually Beth acknowledges and
accepts the fact that she is a lesbian, and leaves her conventional background far behind by living happily
with another woman and her children. Miriam, in contrast, goes to college and enters the maledominated field of computer science. Her involvement with the counterculture begins early, yet
effectively ends when she marries the highly conventional Neil and settles into conventional marriage and
motherhood. The trajectory of each woman's life thus apparently departs radically from its early patterns,
and whereas Beth is self-confident and fulfilled at the end of the novel, Miriam feels dissatisfied and
trapped in a marriage to a man who has begun to be unfaithful to her.
Elaine Tuttle Hansen has suggested that in Small Changes Piercy has tried to appropriate the dominant
discourse in two ways: by using and revising the traditional bildungsroman in Beth's story, and
legitimizing the female soap opera in Miriam's story. Beth's escape from a constricting marriage parallels
the male hero's escape from the constraints of his culture; by the end of the novel Beth has essentially
reversed the life plot dictated for her by creating a non-traditional family and a new identity. As Hansen
observes, Beth's story "is clearly presented as a romantic journey from darkness to light, a narrative of
revolution and rebirth into a new and higher state." 20 Miriam, on the other hand, vacillates between her
need to take risks for change and growth and her equally compelling desire for conventional stability; like
the typi-
-93cal soap opera, her story is never resolved, but merely repeats the same set of conflicts: "the soap-opera
heroine is caught in predetermined circumstances, unable to choose or act on her own" ( 217 ). The final
chapter reinforces this sense of repetition and lack of conclusion. Narrated by a new character, Helen,
who is having an affair with Miriam's husband, this final chapter ends with the dreams of the romantic
heroine that we know will not be fulfilled, as Helen thinks, "He was beginning to love her, he was wanting
her, and soon she would not be alone any more" (542). The irony of the ending reverses the conclusion
of the popular romance: instead of the secure promise of "happily ever after," we have Helen's selfdeluding fantasy.
Yet in spite of Piercy's appropriation of the male story of individuation and the soap opera's ceaseless
spiraling to no conclusion, neither Beth nor Miriam undergoes essential, radical change in the novel. From
early life, Beth has resisted conformity while Miriam has yearned for it. The ironic chapter titles that begin
"The Book of Beth" and "The Book of Miriam" are only the first indication of the plots they will fulfill. The
first chapter of Beth's story is titled "The Happiest Day of a Woman's Life," a title ironically at odds with
Beth's response to her wedding day. She feels "like a dress wearing a girl" ( 12 ), and is aware that the
trappings of wedding dress and makeup cause her "to appear as little like Beth as could be arranged" (
15 ). In this same chapter we learn that Beth has always wanted to go to college--has aspirations to be a
lawyer--but that these aspirations have not been taken seriously by her family and friends. Her
commitment to the marriage she is about to embark on is as false as the social conventions she is forced
to endure. The initial chapter of Miriam's story similarly foreshadows her later behavior and decisions.
Titled "You Ain't Pretty So You Might as Well Be Smart," the chapter establishes Miriam's fervent desire to
please others: to be pretty like her sister Allegra instead of overweight, to play the piano in a manner
that would satisfy her music-teacher father. She lives her most satisfactory life in a fantasy world; even
when she first meets Phil, Piercy notes, "It was exactly like a daydream. It was a fantasy, so she knew
just how to behave" ( 100 ). The skeptical realist Beth and
-94the dreaming Miriam are thus presaged in the reader's initial acquaintance with them, and the ultimate
message of Small Changes has less to do with the revision of standard plots than with the imperatives of
individual destinies.
Isadora Wing, in Erica Jong Fear of Flying, also struggles to free herself of cultural mythologies, and her
story, like that of Miriam, ends in process, with no clear plot resolution, but in Jong's novel the ending
suggests possibilities for positive change rather than continuation on a treadmill. In a dialogue with
herself toward the end of Fear of Flying, Isadora attempts to talk herself out of the clichés that restrict
her independence:
ME: Why is being alone so terrible?
ME: Because if no man loves me I have no identity.
ME: But obviously that isn't true. You write, people read your work and it matters to them. You teach and
your students need you and care about you. . . .
ME: None of that makes a dent in my loneliness. I have no man. I have no child.
ME: But you know that children are no antidote to loneliness.
ME: I know.
21
As the dialogue between Isadora's two selves proceeds, her more objective self presents models of
authors that she might emulate:
ME: Think of Simone de Beauvoir!
ME: I love her endurance, but her books are full of Sartre, Sartre, Sartre.
ME: Think of Doris Lessing!
ME: Anna Wulf can't come unless she's in love . . . what more is there to say?
ME: Think of Sylvia Plath!
ME: Dead. Who wants a life or death like hers even if you become a saint? (278)
The tension between Isadora's ironic intellect and her emotional need for love and security pervades Fear
of Flying. At the same time that her liaison with Adrian Goodlove is the culmination of the fantasy of the
ideal man she has had since she was sixteen, she is drawn to the ordinariness of life with her methodical
husband,
-95Bennett. In France with Adrian, she yearns for the stability of the cultural stereotype:
To be that good little housewife, that glorified American mother, that mascot from
Mademoiselle, that matron from McCall's, that cutie from Cosmo, that girl with the Good
Housekeeping Seal tatooed on her ass and advertising jingles programmed in her brain.
(253)
But Isadora recognizes this as "a fantasy straight out of an adman's little brain" (253), just as her
adventure with Adrian is a different sort of fantasy--and one with its own imperfections. Adrian is not
Isadora's salvation, either; as he remarks at one point, "I told you I'm an anti-hero. I'm not here to
rescue you-and carry you away on a white horse" ( 122 ).
Vacillating between two kinds of fantasies, Isadora imagines herself as two contrasting fictional
characters: Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Beatrice in Dante Inferno. As Joan Reardon
has written, "illustrating the progress of Isadora Wing's 'growing up female,' Erica Jong uses the journey
of Alice and Dante through fantasy and dream into a 'wonderland' and an 'inferno' from which her heroine
eventually emerges with a clearer perception of herself." 22 The objective, rational "me" that is Isadora
understands that to be defined as either a little girl or the idealized lover--as either Alice or Beatrice--is
to remain a character in someone else's story. Her journey through Europe with Adrian partakes of both
the absurd strangeness of Alice's adventures and the horror of the inferno. "My conversations with
Adrian," she says at one point, "always seemed like quotes from Through the Looking Glass" (83). Adrian
reminds her of the Cheshire cat, his smile becomes a "beautiful smirk" (249); like the cat, he disappears,
to meet his wife and children in Cherbourg, whereupon she realizes that she is "nobody's baby now"
(271). References to the Inferno appear in conjunction with several of Isadora's relationships. When her
first husband, Brian, is hospitalized for mental illness, he accuses her of betraying him: "How could I
have locked him up? Didn't I know that I would go to the Seventh Circle--the circle of the traitors? Didn't
I know that mine was the lowest crime in Dante's book?" ( 205 ). When she is in the stage of fantasizing
-96about Adrian Goodlove before their journey together, she recites to herself a list of famous lovers that
begins with Dante and Beatrice and ends with "Me and Adrian?" ( 166 ). But Isadora and Adrian are not
destined to be great lovers, and as she leaves Paris to try to find Bennett, Isadora realizes that "People
don't complete us. We complete ourselves" (299).
The final chapter of Fear of Flying is titled "A 19th-Century Ending," and indeed it takes place in a
Victorian hotel in London with a concierge that reminds Isadora of Bob Cratchit. But Jong's title is ironic,
for the novel does not have the neat resolution of the nineteenth-century novel; instead, it ends as
Bennett enters the hotel room to find Isadora washing her hair, having returned from her sojourn with
Adrian Goodlove. "Life has no plot," Isadora thinks (311). And yet as Reardon suggests, Fear of Flying is
governed by a structure that is female rather than male: the length of the menstrual cycle. Although a
good deal of the novel involves flashbacks to Isadora's earlier life, the actual time span of the novel is
twentyeight days. "The twenty-eight days of the novel chart the various biochemical changes, the
physical experiences of ovulation and flow as well as the psychological movements of relaxation and
tension which explain, at least in part, Isadora Wing's actions" (315). During the last part of her trip with
Adrian, Isadora fears-for no particular reason--that she may be pregnant, but as soon as he leaves her in
Paris, her menstrual flow begins, freeing her from that worry as she is now free from him. The novel is
thus built on the rhythms of female biology rather than on the actual mythologies from which Isadora has
begun to extricate herself.
Jong's use of women's biological rhythms as a controlling metaphor in her Isadora Wing trilogy
represents a deeply feminist response to cultural mythologies that idealize women as children or lovers,
virgin or temptress or muse. To rejoice not just in sexuality, but also in pregnancy, childbirth, and
motherhood, as Isadora does in the trilogy, is to posit a model of female selfhood that is natural rather
than stereotypically imposed. Writing about sexuality in novels by women between 1969 and 1979, Ann
Barr Snitow suggests that one reason why earlier women writers seldom addressed female sexual
experience in any direct way was
-97their awareness that women were so often defined solely as sexual beings. "They tried to break the
equation that linked them to private domestic and sexual experience. They wanted to be visionary artists,
not limited women." 23 For women to write freely about sexuality, this suggests, they required the sense
that addressing the topic would not limit and stereotype them. Part of this assurance came from birthcontrol methods that removed the necessary link between sex and pregnancy; and Snitow further
suggests that an increasing community of female writers and readers by the late 1960s needed to share
experiences--including sexuality--with one another. The freedom--and the need--to write openly about
sexuality was an initial stage during the period that Snitow considers; the more recent stage goes beyond
mere sharing of experiences as sexual beings to an embracing of all that it means to be female. Ursula
LeGuin has recently written of the relationship between motherhood and artistry, refuting the notion that
women can either have babies or write books by pointing to many instances in which women's artistic
production has been enhanced by their engagement with children:
To push mothers back into "private life," a mythological space invented by the patriarchy,
on the theory that their acceptance of the "role" of mother invalidates them for public,
political, artistic responsibility, is to play Old Nobodaddy's game, by his rules, on his side.
24
It is precisely this celebration of female gender that French feminist critic Hélène Cixous argued for in the
1970s. In "The Laugh of the Medusa," Cixous urges, "Write your self. Your body must be heard."25 In
"Castration or Decapitation?" she similarly calls for distinctively feminine texts. "Women who write,"
Cixous notes, "have for the most part until now considered themselves to be writing not as women but as
writers. Such women may declare that sexual difference means nothing, that there's no attributable
difference between masculine and feminine writing." 26 But Cixous sees signs of an emerging literature
that affirms women's unique selfhood:
In particular we ought to be prepared for what I call the "affirmation of difference," not a
kind of wake for the corpse of the mummified woman, nor a fantasy of woman's
decapitation, but something differ-98ent: a step forward, an adventure, an exploration of woman's powers: of her power, her
potency, her ever-dreaded strength, of the regions of femininity. . . . There is work to be
done on female sexual pleasure and on the production of an unconscious that would no
longer be the classic unconscious. ( 52 )
For Cixous, the "classic unconscious" is cultural, and "when it talks it tells you your old stories, it tells you
the old stories you've heard before because it consists of the repressed of culture" ( 52 ). But the
unconscious--and hence its stories--can also be shaped by "what is outside culture, by a language which
is a savage tongue that can make itself understood quite well," when women "set out into the unknown
to look for themselves" ( 52 ). Setting out into the unknown is the Surfacing narrator's quest, just as it is
Isadora Wing's fantasy of the "zipless fuck"; in both cases, the women search for men and end up finding
themselves in quite physical ways, attuned to their own rhythms.
It is important to observe that Cixous' insistence that women write as women does not imply an
endorsement of woman as "other" in a culturally negative sense; indeed, she is emphatic about the
power and strength of the feminine text. In this sense, and in her suggestion that women attend to an
unconscious different from the "classic unconscious," her thinking is consonant with that of feminist
archetypal critics, who urge a re-evaluation that would allow women to find that which is valid for them in
such a heritage. Such thinking marks a stage beyond the severe dichotomizing of the early stages of the
contemporary women's movement, in which whatever could be ascribed to the patriarchy was allpowerfully destructive to women, and women were assumed to have no common store of experience and
knowledge that could operate as a generative force. Annis Pratt describes the dangers of such an
oversimplified approach:
In their rejection of women's otherness. . . . feminist scholars tend to take not only
norms prescribing subordination for women but all descriptions of femininity as myth, or
untruth. Because some stories and symbols describing feminine experience have proven
sexist, they dismiss all of them and thus they throw out the crucial archetypes along with
the sterotypical images. This tendency to consider as tainted by patriarchy everything
found in cultural repositories leads, paradox-99ically, to assumptions like [Simone] de Beauvoir's that women are to be defined wholly in
terms of their otherness and not in terms of their intrinsic being. 27
Searching more than three hundred novels written by women between 1700 and 1978 for recurring
elements of plot, characterization, and theme, Pratt was struck by two opposing tendencies-one in which
"women characters showed a kind of mindless, tacit accommodation to gender norms," and another in
which the texts contained "strands of a more fully human potential self that contradicted gender norms."
The tension between these two tendencies, Pratt observes, "produced an ambivalence of tone, irony in
characterization, and strange disjunction in plotting" ( 95 ).
In the women's novel from the mid- 1960s through the mid1980s, these three elements--the ambivalent
tone, irony, and disjunctive plotting--are intimately related. Distrustful of the self constructed as "other,"
the author or narrator vacillates between or among more than one view of self embodied in the central
character(s), as Isadora Wing vacillates between Alice and Beatrice and ends as neither. This multiple
perspective, in its function as revisionary mode, requires irony, as culturally constructed images are
tested against a deeper reality in women's experience. And both revision and this multiple narrative
perspective cause the novel to be organized in circles or spirals rather than in straightforward chronology,
and often to end without resolution but with a sense of starting all over again. Another narrative element
common in these novels, exemplified most forcefully by The Female Man, is a whole or partial setting in
another time, as I shall discuss in more detail in a later chapter. Atwood The Handmaid's Tale and
Lessing Memoirs of a Survivor are set in future, post-apocalyptic worlds, as are parts of Lessing The
Four-Gated City and Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time; Jong Serenissima involves travel in the past.
This narrative device is another means of underscoring distrust of contemporary observable reality,
especially its fixity, and forces the reader to realize the arbitrary nature of codes and conventions.
Three novels will serve to illustrate some of the possibilities offered by multiple narrative perspective in
revising the self and
-100the mythologies that inform its construction. Fay Weldon Words of Advice deals directly with fairy tales,
and the same author's Female Friends addresses history and cultural mythologies. Margaret Drabble's
The Waterfall details a woman's attempt to reconcile her intellectual and biological selves and move
toward wholeness.
The fairy-tale motif enters Weldon Words of Advice on several levels, as Weldon suggests that women
tend to view their lives in terms of the stories they are told as children. Victor, a forty-fouryear-old
antique dealer, and his nineteen-year-old mistress, Elsa, are invited to spend a weekend with Hamish and
Gemma, a millionaire couple who want Victor's advice about the disposition of some family heirlooms. For
Elsa, the weekend promises access to a dazzling world of wealth and the opportunity to sleep with Victor
in a real bed rather than the couch in back of the antique shop; she also has vague plans to "forget" to
take her birth-control pills so that she can become pregnant as a means of snaring the married Victor.
Some of her expectations are dashed immediately when, instead of sharing a room with Victor, Elsa is
consigned to a tower, like Rapunzel, and expected to do Gemma's typing. A poor typist, Elsa thinks of the
peasant girl in the story of Rumpelstiltskin who, having boasted of her weaving skills, is locked in the
castle to weave straw into gold, promising her first-born child to Rumpelstiltskin, who can accomplish this
miracle. Elsa's sense of being doomed to some such fate strikes her early in the novel:
Elsa has the sensation that some fixed pattern of events has moved into place and is now
firmly locked, and that whatever she says or does now in this household will be according
to destiny, and not in the least according to her own desire. 28
And in fact Hamish becomes her Rumpelstiltskin, doing the typing that she is supposed to do, and trying
to impregnate Elsa so that he and Gemma, who are childless, can keep the baby. We are never certain
whether Elsa is in fact pregnant, but at the end of the novel she has escaped from Hamish and Gemma,
and is at home drinking cocoa with her brothers and sisters, Victor having been reunited with his wife.
-101Elsa's strand of the narrative is told in the third person. Gemma's story, which she tells to Elsa as "words
of advice," is narrated in the same way, but as a recollection of the past--or, rather, as one version of her
past. Gemma begins by announcing to Elsa that she will tell her a fairy tale, and as she reaches the end,
in response to Hamish's comment "I hope it's true," Gemma says merely, "It will do" ( 224 ). Gemma's
story, Weldon notes, is "like any tale told in retrospect, heightened in the telling, purified of pain, reduced
to anecdote and entertainment" ( 62 ); yet this comment must be seen as part of Weldon's pervasive
irony, because Gemma's story partakes of the violence and pain common to the fairy tale, including
having her ring finger cut off with an ax, and marrying the frog instead of the prince. Elsa's and Gemma's
stories are similar in several ways: both women are from poor families, and as young women earn their
living in London by working as clerktypists; Elsa's current gullibility mirrors that of the young Gemma;
and both have loved, unwisely, the wrong man: Victor and Mr. Fox, respectively. Indeed, Gemma is as
much as the princess imprisoned in the tower as Elsa imagines herself to be: she has lost the use of her
legs and is confined to a wheelchair, and in fact it was her physical helplessness that caused her to
accept Hamish's marriage proposal. Yet the "frog" turned out to be quite wealthy, and Gemma now takes
an ironic view of her own life, able to see it in the context of self-fabrication: "Princes, toads, princesses,
beggar girls--we all have to place ourselves as best we can" ( 20 ).
The third story in Words of Advice is that of Janice, Victor's estranged wife. In contrast to Gemma's ironic
self-awareness, Janice has spent the years of her marriage unwittingly playing a role in order to meet
Victor's expectations of her. Victor had expected to marry a virgin, "someone as pure and helpful as his
own mother"; thus Janice, after a sexually promiscuous youth, "silently and instinctively made herself as
rigid, plain, clean, orderly and respectable as possible" ( 154 ), and has, in Weldon's view, become a type
rather than an individual:
Behold wild Janice, married! What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is no woman, but a housewife.
And what a housewife! Note her rigid, mousy curls, kept stiff by spray; her quick eyes, which search for
-102dust and burning toast, and not the appraisal or enquiry of the opposite sex; the sharp voice, growing
sharper, louder, year by year. ( 154 -55)
But after Victor has left her, tired of the person he has created in a sort of reversal of the Pygmalion
story, Janice reverts to her former behavior by having an affair with a Polish carpenter who comes to fix
her wardrobe. She seems content to have Victor gone, so that she can shed the mask she has been
wearing. She imagines saying to Victor, "Go to Elsa, then, while I, Janice, remember who I am. While
there's still time: before my hair is iron grey, like my heart, and there is no turning back" ( 155 ). Yet
when Victor and Janice meet at Hamish and Gemma's house, their respective naughtiness attracts them
once again to each other, and they leave together in Victor's Volvo, presumably to take up their life
together in a somewhat altered form.
By the end of the novel, all three women have escaped from the stories that have shaped their lives. Elsa
has been awakened from her dream of Victor and is at home in the world of her childhood, awaiting the
next stage of her progress to maturity. Janice has abandoned her false identity as a rigid, self-denying
housewife. Gemma's emergence into the world of reality is the most painful, perhaps because she has
constructed her own fairy tale rather than fitting herself into someone else's story, as have Janice and
Elsa. When Gemma says spitefully to Elsa late in the novel, "You're just a two-bit player in other people's
dreams" (231), there is an ironic truth to her statement. But in spite of Gemma's ability to acknowledge
that she has invented several versions of her past, she is shaken when Hamish insists upon telling Elsa
the unglamorous truth about her past and thereby removes the possibility of illusion from her. In her
anguish, Gemma enunciates the central truth of Weldon's novel: "It's just that love and romance and
illusion and hope are etched so deeply into all our hearts that they can never quite be wiped away. They
stay around to torment us with thoughts of what might have been" (231). Yet the truth has freed Gemma
from self-delusion, and she is able to overcome the psychosomatic paralysis of her legs and leave her
wheelchair.
A pervasive underlying theme in Words of Advice is the need for
-103women to help each other. The story of her life that Gemma tells to Elsa, however falsified, is intended as
a cautionary tale against innocence and ignorance. "If only," Gemma says, "we women could learn from
one another" ( 183 ). The wife of the Polish carpenter with whom Janice has an affair echoes the same
sentiment after she discovers her husband in Janice's bedroom. Angry not at Janice but at her husband,
she says, "I only wish women would stick together a bit" ( 160 ). Ultimately, it is Gemma who frees Elsa
from being the princess in the tower and owing her terrible debt to Hamish/ Rumpelstiltskin; free at last
from her own fairy tale, "herself transcended," Gemma urges Elsa to escape: "Run, Elsa! Run for all
you're worth. Don't fall. Please don't fall the way I did. You can do it; go so far and then draw back. I
know you can. You must! You must run for me and all of us" (233). As Elsa runs, she looks back to see
Gemma taking her first steps out of the wheelchair where her own fantasy had confined her.
The title of Weldon's novel Female Friends similarly suggests female closeness and support, but the title
is revealed to be heavily ironic and women's ability to help each other in meaningful ways a fantasy.
Caught not in fairy tales but in actualities, the three central characters in Female Friends are unable to
heed each others' advice about their lives; nor does Chloe, the narrator, believe that their stories can
serve as cautionary tales for readers: "If there are lessons to be learned by others, I would be glad, but
also surprised. For who bothers to learn by another's experience?" 29 The only worthwhile lesson, Chloe
asserts wryly, is not to expect too much from life:
Pretty little sister, on your feather cushion, combing out your silken hair, don't discredit
what your elder sister says. Much less your grandmama. Listen carefully now to what she
says, and you may not end as tired and worn as she. . . . The good times come, and no
sooner here than gone. . . . So treasure your moments of beauty, your glimpses of truth,
your nights of love. They are all you have. (309-10)
As she does in Words of Advice, Weldon here warns against fantasy, the happily-ever-after ending, and
suggests that life is more coincidental than plotted.
-104Chloe's mother, Gwyneth, is presented in Female Friends as the major source of misleading mythologies,
including platitudes, truisms, and old wives' tales. A widow, raising her daughter alone during World War
II, Gwyneth imparts to Chloe her small store of wisdom, accumulated from "dubious sources, magazines,
preachers and sentimental drinkers." Although Gwyneth's "words of advice" come from her ignorance
rather than from malice, they are in many ways similar to the maxims that the Aunts use to coach the
Handmaids in Atwood The Handmaid's Tale, "false and occasionally dangerous." So Chloe grows up being
told that red flannel is warmer than white flannel, and that "marriages are made in heaven," but also,
"marry in haste, repent in leisure." Such contradictions do not bother Gwyneth, who "retreats from the
truth into ignorance, and finds that the false beliefs and half-truths, interweaving, make a fine supportive
pillow for a gentle person against whom God has taken an irrational dislike" ( 45 ). Gwyneth lives in a
fantasy of love for her employer, Mr. Leacock, and her willful imagination translates an occasional stolen
kiss into a mutual grand passion. Preferring fantasy to truth, Gwyneth never declares her love:
Gwyneth believes she has only to speak the words and Mr. Leacock will be hers; and
forever procrastinates, and never quite speaks them. Thus, lonely women do live, making
the best of what they cannot help: reading significance into casual words: seeing love in
calculated lust: seeing lust in innocent words: hoping where there is no hope. ( 108 )
The perspective in this passage is that of the mature Chloe, whose ironic narrative provides the dominant
tone of the novel as she alternately reassesses the past lives of herself and her "female friends" Grace
and Marjorie, and describes their situations during a two-day period in the 1960s.
Of the three central female characters, Chloe is the ideal ironic narrator. In both her childhood and her
present, she is an outsider, positioned to see that things are not what they seem. When the three meet
as children during the relocation of children to rural areas outside London during the war, Grace and
Marjorie
-105are from middle-class backgrounds, but Chloe's mother, widow of a miner, works as a barmaid at the
Rose and Crown pub; Majorie lives with Grace and her family, local gentry, while Chloe and her mother
inhabit a small room behind the pub. In the present of the novel, Chloe lives outside London with her
husband, while Grace and Marjorie live in the city. Chloe is at once mother-figure and oracle. Of the five
children who live in her house, only two are her own; one is Grace's and two are the offspring of Patrick
Bates, who has been the lover of all three women and is the father of one of Chloe's children. She serves
as confidante and adviser to Marjorie and Grace, and in her first-person narratives frequently exhorts
readers to beware the traps that life may set for them--traps that she and Grace and Marjorie have fallen
into.
By juxtaposing first- and third-person narratives in rapid succession, Weldon contrasts the complex and
often painful events of Chloe's life with her stoic, cautionary pronouncements. Despite, for example,
Chloe's tendency to accumulate other people's children, she advises the reader to avoid children
altogether: "Oh my friends, my female friends, how wise you are to have no children or to throw them
off" ( 204 ). Chloe's husband, Oliver, openly seduces their French maid, Françoise; when he presents
Chloe with the age-old excuse that his sexual urges are stronger than he is, she responds coolly, "It must
be dreadful to be a man, and be so helpless in the face of one's own nature" (266). It is Chloe's ability to
adopt the ironic stance of her first-person narrative within the alternate reality of the third-person
narrative that finally frees her from Oliver and her fantasy of the perfect marriage. Female Friends ends
at the point of transition, in the present tense: "As for me, Chloe, I no longer wait to die. I put my house,
Majorie's house, in order, and not before time. The children help. Oliver says 'But you can't leave me with
Françoise,' and I reply, I can, I can, and I do" (311). The "I do," echoing the marriage vows, signals the
ending of the marriage and the beginning of Chloe's new life.
Agate Nesaule Krouse finds the relationships among women in Female Friends a strongly positive theme
in the novel: "Men come and go, but the relationships between women endure." 30 It is true that Chloe,
Marjorie, and Grace stay in touch with one another,
-106and that Marjorie gives her house to Chloe so that she can leave Oliver at the end of the novel, but
Weldon makes it clear that much of the time these "female friends" merely tolerate each other. They are
thrown together by accident and shared adversity more than by affection. As children, Marjorie and Chloe
arrive in Ulden, where Grace lives, by mistake: the train was supposed to stop in Egden. At the end of
the novel they are brought together by Majorie's mother's death. In between these two occasions, they
lie to each other, criticize each other, and fail to follow each others' advice. Further, the influence of
mothers on daughters seems to be primarily negative because it encourages endurance and conformity
rather than independence. As Chloe muses toward the end of the novel, "What progress can there be,
from generation to generation, if daughters do as mothers do?" (306). So great is the weight of received
traditions and mythologies that it requires enormous struggle to break free, and one can only wish,
Weldon suggests, that friends will help. Late in the novel, Marjorie says, "We were none of us all that
much help to each other. . . . We should interfere more in each other's lives, and not just pick up pieces"
(288). In Female Friends, as in Words of Advice, Weldon enunciates clearly the need for women to care
for and learn from each other, but at the same time posits that female selfhood must be arrived at
individually, despite yearnings for sisterhood.
The multiple narrative perspective that in Weldon's novels demonstrates her characters' ability to view
themselves and the stories that would control them ironically is used in Margaret Drabble The Waterfall to
question the validity of identity itself and to explore the relationships between truth and fiction, reality
and fantasy. It is this exploration that has led Michael Harper to call The Waterfall a postmodern novel, in
which "there are no 'individuals' at all in the sense of independent, solid 'selves' like the characters of
old-fashioned 'realistic' fiction but instead mere collections of inconsistent behaviors and interpretations
determined finally by language and social practice." 31 The Waterfall consists of a thirdperson narrative
that is continually revised by a first-person narrative as Jane Gray attempts to find a story that will
represent accurately her experience and emotions. The reader is left to mediate
-107imaginatively among the multiple "truths" about Jane Gray; as author of her own story, Jane claims the
freedom to tell and re-tell the narrative as a means of metaphorically claiming control of her life. In a
1972 interview with Nancy S. Hardin, Drabble explained how she came to let her character seem to
control her own narrative:
I'd been wanting to write the first section of that book for a long time and I wrote it and I
was intending to turn it into a novel. When I'd written it, I couldn't go on because it
seemed to me that I'd set up this very forceful image of romantic, almost thirteenth-
century love. Having had the experience [of] describing the experience, one had to say
what is this about? I thought the only way to do it was to make Jane say it. 32
Drabble's consciousness that one must, in the twentieth century, ask questions about "romantic, almost
thirteenth-century love" caused her to write The Waterfall as, on one level, an inquiry into fictional
modes. Jane, as a writer, is acutely aware of literary history--particularly the tradition of the women's
novel, in which women paid a steep price for passion, especially adulterous passion such as that which
Jane shares with her cousin Lucy's husband, James. Jane makes specific reference to Sue Bridehead in
Hardy Jude the Obscure and Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot The Mill on the Floss, and wonders whether
she will go mad, like Sue, or drown herself, like Maggie: "Those fictitious heroines, how they haunt me."
33 The endings of these earlier novels will not do in a post-Freudian era, when we "guess dimly at our
own passions"; "In this age, what is to be done?" ( 162 ). Freed from the endings of old novels, Jane has
the dilemma of creating a story that will fit the realities of twentieth-century experience, and the
structure of The Waterfall, with its constant revising and beginning again, is Drabble's resolution of that
dilemma.
Caryn Fuoroli has proposed that The Waterfall is flawed because Drabble is unable to control her own
narrative. By using the alternative first-person narrative, Fuoroli argues, " Drabble fails to maintain the
authorial distance and control that would allow us as readers to evaluate Jane." 34 Fuoroli seems to want
The Waterfall to conform to the pattern of the bildungsroman, in which the cen-108tral issue is the growth and development of the main character as measured against a standard
established by the author and reflecting social norms; what she finds missing in the novel is "some
authorial direction which gives a sense of a developing character against which to measure Jane's own
narration" ( 112 ). But this misses Drabble's point: Jane's life cannot be enclosed by either social
convention or the structure of the conventional novel. Instead, her story is what Cixous describes as a
"feminine text," which "starts on all sides at once, starts twenty times, thirty times, over." 35 Not only
does Jane's story begin many times, as the thirdperson narration is revised by the first-person narrator,
but Jane is also concerned about endings. After the automobile accident in which James is injured as they
are leaving on an illicit vacation together, Jane comments as author on this part of her story:
There isn't any conclusion. A death would have been the answer, but nobody died.
Perhaps I should have killed James in the car, and that would have made a neat, a
possible ending.
A feminine ending?
Or, I could have maimed James so badly, in this narrative, that I would have been
allowed to have him, as Jane Eyre had her blinded Rochester. But I hadn't the heart to do
it, I loved him too much, and anyway it wouldn't have been the truth because the truth is
that he recovered. (248)
Although she is drawn to the "neat" conclusion of the traditional novel, with its accompanying
punishment or reward, Jane's fidelity to the "truth" wins out. Yet she continues to be haunted by this lack
of closure: "We should have died, I suppose, James and I. It isn't artistic to linger on like this. It isn't
moral either. One can't have art without morality, anyway, as I've always maintained" (249). In view of
the story Jane tells us, the irony of this statement is obvious, and is made more so by Jane's explanation
a few paragraphs later of why she is concluding her story by telling of a trip that she and James took to
Yorkshire, even though the story is "irrelevant"--"and it must be irrelevant because the only moral of it
could be that one can get away with anything, that one can survive anything, a moral that I in no way
believe" (252).
But the trip to Yorkshire to see the waterfall of the title is not, in
-109fact, the ending of the novel; Jane is compelled to offer a postscript in which she marks the distance
between her story and the traditional woman's plot. She notes that because of a blood clot she has
ceased taking birth-control pills. The clot is "the price that modern woman must pay for love":
In the past, in old novels, the price of love was death, a price which virtuous women paid
in childbirth, and the wicked, like Nana, with the pox. Nowadays it is paid in thrombosis
or neurosis: one can take one's pick. I stopped taking those pills, as James lay there
unconscious and motionless, but one does not escape decision so easily. I am glad of
this. I am glad I cannot swallow pills with immunity. I prefer to suffer, I think. (256).
Ellen Cronan Rose has pointed out that this postscript "successfully resists its own impulse to make a
final formulation. The last dramatic, heroic, 'masculine' statement--'I prefer to suffer'--is followed by the
feminine ending, 'I think.'" 36 By refusing to conclude her narrative with a "neat" ending, Jane Gray
reinforces the concept that life is a continuing process of new beginnings and equivocal endings.
The development of Jane's ironic voice is a measure of her detachment from more than the plot of the
traditional novel; she has also achieved distance from many of the myths and conventions that had
prevented her from being the author of her own life. It is the consciousness of the first-person narrator
that assesses and revises not just the story she tells, but the stories she has been told. Jane's parents
have raised her with a rigid sense of respectability:
They believed, or so they said, in the God of the Church of England, and in a whole host
of other irreconcilable propositions: in monogamy, in marrying for love, in free will, in the
possibility of moderation of the passions, in the virtues of reason and civilization. ( 51 )
As a child, Jane is distrustful of these pieties, but dares not voice her distrust: "I felt all the time afraid
that any word of mine, any movement, my mere existence, might shatter them all into fragments" ( 51 52 ). Only with James does she feel that she is herself, and not someone's construction of her, but at first
she is not sure whether what she terms his "recognition" of her represents "sal-110vation or damnation," and it is this uncertainty that leads to the announcement that she will reconstruct
her story--an announcement that dictates the narrative structure of the book:
I must make an effort to comprehend it. I will take it all to pieces, I will resolve it to its
parts, and then I will put it together again, I will reconstitute it in a form that I can
accept, a fictitious form: adding a little here, abstracting a little there, moving this arm
half an inch that way, gently altering the dead angle of the head upon its neck. If I need
a morality I will create one: a new ladder, a new virtue. If I need to understand what I
am doing, if I cannot act without my own approbation--and I must act, I have changed, I
am no longer capable of inaction--then I will invent a morality that condones me. Though
by doing so, I risk condemning all that I have been. ( 53 - 54 )
This passage, occurring barely a fifth of the way into the novel, proposes Jane's position as creator rather
than created. The story she ultimately tells may be "fictitious," but it will be a story that she can live with
and in; and because the moral structures she has inherited from her parents and from the traditional plot
are not sufficient to allow her to "condone" herself, she will create new ones.
It is "that most disastrous concept, the concept of free will" ( 51 ) which gives Jane the most difficulty,
because she recognizes that it can be deceptive. When she has assumed she was acting out of free will,
she realizes, she was instead being compelled by stories. When she fell in love with her husband,
Malcolm, for example, she succumbed to the romance of the Thomas Campion lyrics he was singing and
not to the person he was. She blames the poets for devising stories of love and tragedy: "I blame
Shakespeare for that farcical moment in Romeo and Juliet where he sees her at the dance, from far off,
and says, I'll have her, because she is the one that will kill me" ( 92 ). Instead of free will, Jane chooses
to believe in fate, or what she terms "Necessity"--operating on an instinct that derives from one's most
basic needs, as she does in her relationship with James. It is this instinctual, rather than culturally
determined, need for James that has led one critic to state that she and James "live out an obsessive
fairy tale in which she is the imprisoned maiden," and that the narrative "locates itself within the
-111constrained world of the fairytale." 37 But it is precisely in removing herself from the world of fairy tales
that Jane is able to move toward self-knowledge.
Perhaps the most important single sentence in The Waterfall is Jane's comment about her story that
"There isn't any conclusion." Having always felt that "people could not change, that they were
predetermined, unalterable, helpless in the hands of destiny" (243), she now knows that it is her power
to revise her own story--not merely the story of her life with James, but any story in which she may find
herself enmeshed. Her ironic consciousness of the relativity of truth is embodied in the last phrase of the
novel--"I think"--which is at once a statement of that relativity and an assertion of intellectual control.
-112-
CHAPTER FOUR
Acceptable Fantasies
The frequent use of a multiple narrative perspective by contemporary women novelists is closely related
to the sense of divided self that affects contemporary women so directly, as they deal with the
simultaneous demands of home and career, family and employment, past and future, myth and reality.
Such division is at best disorienting, and at worst calls into question the reality of the self. Fay Weldon, in
whose fiction multiple narrative is a standard device, has written amusingly and perceptively about the
self-division of the woman writer. In "Me and My Shadows," she interviews herself, declaring that to split
herself in two is "a simple task," and describes to her "interviewer" the parts of herself:
A lives in a kind of parody of an NW [ London] lady writer's life. Telephones ringing,
washing machine overflowing, children coming and going, and so on. B does the writing.
B is very stern, male (I think), hard working, puritanical, obsessive and unsmiling. C is
depressive, and will sit for days staring into space, inactive, eating too much bread and
butter, called into action only by the needs of the children. A knows about C but very little
about B. B knows about A and C and in fact controls them, sending them out into the
world but otherwise despising them. C is ignorant of A and B--and although A and B leave
-113her notes, advising her at least to tidy the drawers or sort the files so as not to waste too
much of the lifespan, C has not the heart or spirit to act on them. 1
The splitting of the self into several parts, here described by Weldon as even a duality of gender,
suggests conditions of multiple personalities and schizophrenia--mental states in which the psyche
constructs alternate realities. Virginia Woolf "Angel in the House," like Weldon "A," is an imaginative
rendering of an alternative self that is feminine in the traditional sense, at odds with the task of writing.
At its extreme, such division of the self into parts results in neurosis or psychosis; more commonly, it is
expressed in dreams and fantasies.
If the sense of the divided self is one reason for the frequent use of dreams, fantasies, and madness in
these novels, another is the concept of boundaries to be transgressed, lines to be crossed, if only in the
imagination. It is no accident that Woolf's angel is in the house, or that Weldon "A" brings the writing self
"B" cups of coffee: both inhabit the enclosed spaces of domesticity, rather than ranging over the wide
spaces of human possibility. As a number of critics have noted, women's fiction tends to be enclosed,
bounded by rooms, walls, gender restrictions--even the body itself. Roberta Rubenstein, for example,
asserts that "the body is . . . the template for figurative expressions of boundary conceived as enclosure
(or its opposite) in temporal as well as spatial terms. Thus, rooms, walls, houses--including the more
emotionally saturated meanings associated with 'home'--are tropes for inner experience, as are
imprisonment, escape, flight, and homelessness." 2 Similarly, Mickey Pearlman writes that authors from
Edith Wharton to Sue Miller write "of the usually imprisoning psychological and actual spaces of American
women, of being trapped, submerged, ovewhelmed." 3 Dreams, fantasy, and madness become ways of
transcending boundaries, either temporarily or as part of a journey to autonomy and wholeness.
Patricia Meyer Spacks makes much the same point in The Female Imagination when she argues that
female fantasy should be seen as a positive rather than a negative force:
-114The idea that women may find their most significant freedom through fantasy or
imagination need not imply any commitment to madness. Saner visions of the
imagination as salvation, which underlie many pre-twentieth-century novels about and by
women and at least a few autobiographies, substantiate the possibility that the liberated
inner life may create new freedoms of actual experience.
The difficulties of feminine freedom . . . inhere in the actualities of feminine experience.
To arrive at freedom . . . through direct selfpresentation or fictional creation, is to
triumph over actuality. 4
Miriam's adolescent fantasy of being the invincible "Tamar deLuria" in Small Changes, like the fantasy of
the "woman warrior" in Kingston's book, are at least temporarily empowering because they allow the
characters to escape imaginatively the boundaries of their lives as young women--they permit images of
freedom and power denied by the characters' immediate social context. Atwood's narrator in Surfacing
and Martha in Lessing's The FourGated City go through periods of self-willed detachment from reality in
order to emerge whole and sane.
Mira, in Marilyn French The Women's Room ( 1977), is an ideal example of Spacks's contention that
women seek in books acceptable patterns for their own lives. As an adolescent, Mira gives up on the
sugary neatness of "girls' books" and turns to "Jane Austen and Fanny Burney and George Eliot and
Gothic novels of all sorts, Daphne du Maurier and Somerset Maugham and Frank Yerby and John O'Hara.
. . . she drowned in words that could not teach her to swim." 5 All of this reading "felt like a kind of
insanity to her, something she couldn't help, but something that was not good" ( 30 ). Nonetheless, it
provides an escape: "Sometimes she felt she was reading to escape from life, for the escape, at least,
occurred" ( 29 ). When French enters The Women's Room as the first-person author of Mira's story, she
addresses the issue of the fantasy as an alternate reality:
I was on my way to saying that Mira had lived all her life in fairy-tale land and when she
went through the doorway, her head was still full of fairyland images, she had no notion
of reality. But obviously she did, fairyland was her reality. So if you want to stand in
judgement on
-115her you have to determine whether her reality was the same as other people's, i.e., was
she crazy? ( 13 )
As the novel unfolds, the reader, thus invited to judge Mira, concludes that she is not crazy, but merely
desperate to transcend the boundaries of her life. But Mira is not as certain: at the end, the first-person
narrator reports that "the story has no ending," or boundary, but neither has Mira found an alternate
world in which to live, and is wondering whether she is going mad. (683)
The fact that dreams and fantasies are so commonly a part of the stories that contemporary women
novelists tell suggests that women's fantasies, like their reliance on stories for acceptable life patterns,
are widely shared experiences. Such a supposition is supported by Erica Jong's comments on her sense of
identity with her readers' fantasies:
From the courage the women's movement gave and from the reinforcement I received from grateful and
passionate readers, I learned the daring to assume that my thoughts, nightmares, and daydreams were
the same as my readers'. I discovered that whenever I wrote about a fantasy I thought was wholly
private, bizarre, kinky--(the fantasy of the Zipless Fuck in Fear of Flying is perhaps the best example of
this)--I invariably discovered that thousands of other people had experienced the same private, bizarre,
kinky fantasy. 6
Inherent in exposing what Carolyn Heilbrun calls women's "unacceptable fantasies" to the world is the
danger of being considered insane, and many characters in these novels, like Mira, came to doubt their
own sanity because their imaginations depart so far from the boundaries of socially constructed reality.
Jane Gray in The Waterfall is so immersed in her fantasy-come-true relationship with James that she
imagines he might be killed while on holiday with his family. After detailing her attempts to discover the
precise moment at which he will return to England, Jane comments, "I recount these things as proof of
my madness." 7 Her affair with James exists outside the boundaries of respectability--an illicit dream
from which she continually expects to be awakened by disaster. Isadora Wing's fear of loneliness, which
causes her to create
-116-
and live out fantasies of relationships with men, leads her to doubt her own sanity and has driven her to
one psychiatrist after another. Near the end of the novel, she pulls herself out of self-pity: "I was dimly
aware that being able to get up and wash was at least a sign of life. Real lunatics just lie there in their
own piss and shit." 8 The ability of Jane and Isadora to see themselves with ironic detachment saves
them from actual madness.
Dreams and fantasies can enclose as well as liberate the female character. Jane Clifford, in Godwin The
Odd Woman, remains in her world of literature and wonders whether she has dreamed up her lover,
Gabriel. Even at the end of the novel, fearing that an intruder is trying to enter her house, she imagines
talking to him as she would to one of her students, believing that "he was not yet beyond words." 9 The
irony of Jane's statement is that she herself cannot get beyond the words of the stories she teaches. In
Atwood's Lady Oracle, Joan Foster's life is patterned on the Gothic romances she writes as Louisa K.
Delacourt. Having faked her own death by drowning in the manner of a romantic heroine, Joan has still
not come to terms with the direction of her life. She does not have "any definite plans," and stays on in
Rome to visit in the hospital the reporter who has found her hiding place and whom she has wounded
with a Cinzano bottle; he has become in a sense her wounded hero: "there is something about a man in
a bandage," she thinks. 10 And Gemma, in Weldon Words of Advice, is trapped physically as well as
emotionally by the fairy tale she makes of her life.
More commonly, however, dreams and fantasies represent the possibility of change rather than stasis
and entrapment, and demonstrate the characters' need to project lives beyond immediate reality.
Adolescent fantasies of power, such as those in The Woman Warrior and Small Changes; Celie's dreams
of Nettie in The Color Purple; Lesje's fantasies of her own version of prehistory in Life Before Man--all
embody urgent desires to revise objective reality into a form consonant with autonomy. The revelation of
their characters' dreams and fantasies reflects the novelists' consciousness that the parts of life normally
hidden from public view may
-117be significant keys to identity and aspiration. Margaret Atwood has commented on the revelatory nature
of the contemporary women's novel as a source of its energy:
In recent years, much of the energy of women novelsits--and they have been energetic--has come from
the sense that they were opening forbidden doors, saying the hitherto unsayable, raising to the level of
art, or at least the written word, material that was considered either too dirty or too abnormal or just too
trivial to merit inclusion. 11
The most obvious and paradigmatic example of Atwood's point is Isadora Wing's fantasy of the "zipless
fuck," a sexual encounter of pure eroticism, having no reference to relationship or commitment. Isadora
is certain that her husband Bennett, a psychiatrist, would cast aspersions on such a fantasy from a purely
professional point of view: "A fantasy is only a fantasy, and everyone has fantasies. Only psychopaths
actually act out all their fantasies; normal people don't." But Isadora understands the power of fantasy in
her own life: "I have more respect for fantasy than that. You are what you dream. You are what you
daydream" ( 34 ).
As Isadora dreams of a future of sexual freedom, Offred, in The Handmaid's Tale, must dream of
previous autonomy from her position as sexual slave in the Republic of Gilead. Dream and memory are
structural elements in the novel: alternating chapters are titled "Night" (and in one case "Nap"), as
Offred's memories of her mother, her husband, and her child are counterpointed to her present
existence. She remembers her feminist mother and her friends burning pornographic books and
magazines, "their faces . . . happy, ecstatic almost." 12 In the chapter titled "Nap," she dreams of the
command she once had of her own body:
I used to think of my body as an instrument of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or
an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of
one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was
nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. ( 73 )
Offred's dream turns into an nightmare about the loss of her husband and daughter, and in the next
"Night" chapter she dreams of
-118-
making love to Luke during her pregnancy and then of the possible fates he might have suffered since
they have been separated. By the time of the fifth "Night" section, midway through the novel, having relived in dreams her earlier life, Offred attempts to come to terms with the present: "I must forget about
my secret name and all ways back. My name is Offred now, and here is where I live. Live in the present,
make the most of it, it's all you've got" ( 143 ). By the time of the next "Night" chapter, she has difficulty
remembering the faces of her family: "they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak" ( 193 ). Part of
confronting the present is acquiescing to Serena Joy's plan to have Nick, the chauffeur, impregnate her
as the Commander seems unable to do, and their first, forced sexual encounter occurs in the next-to-last
"Night" section, which prepares for the ambiguity of Offred's removal from the Commander's house in the
"black van" that could mean either salvation by the underground Mayday resistance group, as Nick
assures her it is, or a different kind of imprisonment--or death--as a traitor. The ambiguity of the ending
signals another dreamlike state as Offred steps into the van, "into the darkness within; or else the light"
(295).
Offred's imprisonment in Gilead is continually contrasted to the relative freedom women enjoyed before
the fundamentalist takeover that has relegated them to choiceless categories--Handmaids, Aunts,
Marthas, Unwomen. During a shopping trip, Offred remembers that one of the shops was once a movie
theater that featured Humphrey Bogart film festivals. She recalls Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn,
"women on their own, making up their minds." In these films the women wore "blouses with buttons
down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or
not. They seemed to be able to choose" ( 25 ). Films, like books, are the sources of adolescent fantasies
in many of these novels, providing potential life scripts that reinforce traditional female roles. For the
young Joan, in Lady Oracle, the ideal is the woman who suffers for love, and her favorite film is The Red
Shoes, in which the heroine is torn between marriage and career:
-119I adored her: not only did she have red hair and an entrancing pair of red satin slippers
to match, she also had beautiful costumes, and she suffered more than anyone. . . . I
wanted those things too, I wanted to dance and be married to a handsome orchestra
conductor, both at once--and when she finally threw herself in front of a train I let out a
bellowing snort that made people three rows ahead turn around indignantly. ( 87 )
Joan's life becomes a sort of parody of the plot of The Red Shoes as she remains caught in the world of
fantasy: her career as Louisa K. Delacourt remains hidden from her husband, and instead of a romantic
suicide, her "death" is a fraud--part of her unsuccessful attempt to write the script for her own life. In
contrast to Joan's immersion in fantasy, the title character in Alice Walker Meridian views such fantasies
ironically. At seventeen, Meridian is a mother, a deserted wife, and a high-school dropout. Harsh reality
has replaced fantasy for Meridian, and the resultant distance she feels from other young girls allows her
to see clearly their own reliance on fantasy: "They simply did not know they were living their own lives-between twelve and fifteen--but assumed they lived someone else's. They tried to live the lives of their
movie idols; and those lives were fantasy." The "movie idols" are further removed from the lives of these
young black girls because they are white: Rory Calhoun, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, Slim Pickens. At
seventeen, Meridian has already moved by necessity past the world of such fantasies; she considers the
gender-role stereotyping in such film fantasies: "So they moved, did the young girls outside her window,
in the dream of happy endings: of women who had everything, of men who ran the world. So had she."
13
Perhaps the most devastating account of youthful fantasy in contemporary fiction is Toni Morrison The
Bluest Eye. Pecola Breedlove, having absorbed her family's sense of inferiority, longs for the blue eyes of
Shirley Temple until the longing, coupled with a still-birth after she is raped by her father, ends in
madness. Morrison juxtaposes the desirable blue-eyed image of the dominant culture to Pecola's
undesirable ugliness--a lack of physical attractiveness acknowledged even by her friends, Claudia and
Frieda McTeer. But this is only one of many ironic juxtapositions in a
-120novel that addresses both the power and the danger of fantasy. The bland "Dick and Jane" litany that
opens the novel becomes obscene when it is connected with the house where Pecola's mother, Pauline,
works for a white family, preferring the white child to her own daughter. Pauline's own youthful fantasies
of a "Presence, an all embracing tenderness with strength and a promise of rest" 14 have resulted in a
destructive marriage to Cholly, whose own humiliation by whites has caused him to hate women. Before
her first child is born, Pauline attempts to escape the loneliness of her marriage by going to the movies,
where "her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams." In addition to the
romance in films starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, Pauline is introduced to the standards of physical
beauty that will later affect her daughter Pecola. Morrison refers to the concepts of romantic love and
physical beauty as "probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated
in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion" ( 97 ). Pauline is vaguely aware of the distinction
between fantasy and her own reality--"Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming
home hard" ( 97 )--but it is Pecola's tragedy to become so enmeshed in the fantasy of the blue eyes that
she never achieves this kind of adult perception.
Pecola learns of Shirley Temple not from films, but from her image on Frieda's milk cup when she lives
briefly with the McTeer family as a foster child. Claudia, unlike Frieda and Pecola, sees the irony and
injustice of the black Bojangles dancing with the blond Shirley Temple. To Claudia, Bojangles was "my
friend, my uncle, my daddy, who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me. Instead he
was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those little white girls whose socks never
slid down under their heels" ( 19 ). It is while staying with the McTeers that Pecola begins menstruating,
and this event is immediately linked to her ability to bear children. When Pecola asks how this is
accomplished, Frieda replies that "somebody has to love you" ( 29 ), with a childlike simplicity that
cannot anticipate the mixture of hatred and guilt that provokes Cholly to rape and impregnate Pecola.
Following the stillbirth, Pecola, having prayed incessantly
-121for blue eyes, seeks the assistance of Soaphead Church, who out of his own powerlessness assures her
that a magic spell will give her the blue eyes she seeks. Touched by her simple, straightforward request,
this molester of little girls gives her what he believes to be faith in her own beauty. As he writes to God
immediately afterward, "No one else will see her blue eyes. But she will. And she will live happily ever
after" ( 143 ). But the only happiness Pecola finds is in removal from reality in madness, talking to an
imaginary friend who assures her that hers are indeed the bluest eyes. Near the end of The Bluest Eye,
Claudia comments on the destruction that fantasy has caused:
The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up
and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she
could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an
eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent
on the blue void it could not reach--could not even see--but which filled the valleys of the
mind. ( 158 )
Adolescent fantasies often gain their power from the absence of real information about life, love, and
sexuality. Coming of age in the 1960s, the female characters in these novels frequently have mothers
who are reticent about sexuality in particular. Meridian's mother "never even used the word. . . . Having
told [Meridian] absolutely nothing, she had expected her to do nothing," with the result that Meridian's
teenage pregnancy "came as a total shock" ( 60 - 61 ). Isadora's mother, in Fear of Flying, despite her
championing of certain "bohemian" ideas, merely cautions Isadora to "play hard to get," and Isadora
suspects that "she disapproved of sex, that it was basically unmentionable" ( 153 ). So Isadora derives
her ideas of female sexuality from books: "I learned about women from men. I saw them through the
eyes of male writers. Of course, I didn't think of them as male writers. I thought of them as writers, as
authorities, as gods who knew and were to be trusted completely" ( 154 ). From D. H. Lawrence, Isadora
learns what an orgasm is, and that women worship the "Phallos." Shaw teaches her that "women never
can be artists"; Dostoevsky, that women
-122have no religious feeling, and Swift and Pope that they have too much religious feeling--"and therefore
can never be quite rational." She learns from Faulkner that women are earth mothers, and from Freud
that they suffer penis envy. But even as an adolescent, Isadora sees the ironic conflict between the
lessons of these "authorities" and the reality of her own life:
What did all this have to do with me--who went to school and got better marks than the
boys and painted and wrote and spent Saturdays doing still lifes at the Art Students
League and my weekday afternoons editing the high-school paper . . .? What did the
moon and tides and earth-mothering and the worship of the Laurentian "phallos" have to
do with me or with my life? ( 154 )
By the end of Fear of Flying Isadora has long since discovered her own sexuality, and is writing her own
books, but she still has doubts about who she really is, repeating to herself a litany of identity: " Isadora
White Stollerman Wing . . . Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing . . . B.A., M.A., Phi Beta Kappa" (252).
Adolescence is no easier for Kingston's narrator, caught between her Chinese ancestry and her American
life, but her fantasy is fed not by the films and books of American popular culture, but instead by
tarditional Chinese "talk-story," which gives her an empowering sense of female possibilities within a
cultural heritage of heroism. The narrator's mother tells the children stories as they fall asleep, so that
they cannot tell "where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of heroines in my
sleep." 15 The story of Fa Mu Lan, a young girl who takes her father's place in battle, convinces her that
she "would have to grow up a woman warrior" ( 24 ), a destiny that she fulfills by writing her own story
to dispel the childhood ghosts. The narrator's fantasy includes a fifteen-year period of rigorous training
and apprenticeship, during which she grows from child to adult. In contrast to the narrator's mother's
reaction to her first menstruation--which is to tell her the story of her aunt, the "no name woman" whose
illicit pregnancy caused family disgrace, and to warn her, "don't humiliate us" ( 5 )--in her fantasy, the
onset of menstruation is regarded as a positive event by the old couple who
-123conduct her training. The woman merely tells her, "You're now an adult. . . . You can have children," and
the narrator is not deflected by female biology from the rigors of her warrior schooling: "Menstrual days
did not interrupt my training; I was as strong as on any other day" ( 36 ). Indeed, the fantasy of the
woman warrior allows the narrator to remain essentially female even while adopting the traditionally
masculine role of warrior, rather than suffering a division of self. After marrying her childhood
sweetheart, she gives birth to a son in a moment stolen from battle, and her husband takes the child to
live with his parents while she completes the task of liberating her people from tyranny before returning
home in glory.
Joanne Frye has pointed out that the woman warrior fantasy begins and ends in the subjunctive: "The
call would come from a bird," Kingston begins, and the fantasy concludes with the narrator imagining
that "the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality" ( 24, 54 ). 16 Whereas most of the
woman warrior fantasy is narrated in the past tense, as though it were the speaker's actual history, the
subjunctive, with its implicit "if," both announces and concludes the story, and is also used within the
narrative to reinforce the concept of fantasy. Immediately after the narrator begins menstruating, she
looks into the old couple's water gourd and sees her family attending a wedding, her mother expressing
delight at her daughter's happiness. This part of the narrative is in the past tense, but Kingston changes
to the subjunctive and then to the future in the next paragraph:
Yes, I would be happy. How full I would be with all their love for me. I would have for a
new husband my own playmate, dear since childhood, who loved me so much he was to
become a spirit bridegroom for my sake. We will be so happy when I come back to the
valley, healthy and strong and not a ghost. ( 37 ) [italics mine]
The change in verb forms moves the narrator from the contingency of "would" to the certainty of "will."
Just as importantly, the narrator's declaration that at some future time she will cease being a ghost is
one of the passages that links the fantasy to her actual life, in which she not only feels surrounded by
ghosts but
-124also senses that she herself--as a girl in a culture that values only boys, as a Chinese in an Englishspeaking country--is insubstantial. Another passage that demonstrates the grounding of the woman
warrior fantasy in the narrator's own reality is that in which she fights her last battle--this one with the
baron who rules her own village and has enslaved her brother. She announces to him that she is a
"female avenger," and then the narrator slips into the vernacular to report the baron's response:
Then--heaven help him--he tried to be charming, to appeal to me man to man. "Oh,
come now. Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to be rid of them.
'Girls are maggots in the rice.' 'It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.'" He
quoted to me the sayings I hated. ( 51 )
The sayings that have so enraged the narrator in her "real" life are brought into her fantasy to be
avenged, as she beheads the baron with her sword.
Kingston's fantasy is thus closely tied to the realities she wishes to surmount, rather than removed from
them. Further, the end of the woman warrior story is followed immediately by the statement, "My
American life has been such a disappointment" ( 54 ), plunging the reader again into the narrator's
difficult childhood. As is the case in other novels, fantasy is not in itself a solution to the young girl's
problems of selfhood, and the juxtaposition of fantasy to uncomfortable reality underscores this fact. Late
in The Woman Warrior, the narrator finds another temporary escape from her struggle in the form of a
"mysterious illness" that lasts a year and a half with "no pain and no symptoms." That the illness is
psychosomatic is suggested by the fact that it follows immediately the narrator's harassment of a
schoolmate who, like the narrator earlier, refuses to speak in school. The irony of her action--as though
she is punishing her younger self--seems not to be lost on the narrator, who says of her illness, "the
world is sometimes just" ( 211 ). She spends the eighteen months of her illness "like the Victorian
recluses I read about," watching soap operas and ringing a bell for assistance ( 211 ). "It was," she says,
"the best year and a half of my life. Nothing happened" ( 212 ). Neither fantasy nor
-125withdrawal is the solution to Kingston's narrator's problems, but the telling of her own story constitutes
the taking of control over the pattern it makes.
The mysterious illness from which Kingston's narrator suffers is similar in some ways to the periodic
spells of disassociation that Alice Walker's Meridian experiences, beginning in her childhood. The first of
these episodes occurs while Meridian is standing in the middle of the Sacred Serpent, a formation atop an
Indian burying ground on her father's farm. As Kingston's woman warrior fantasy is inspired by her
mother's talk-story of Fa Mu Lan, Meridian's reverie seems to be fueled by stories of her greatgrandmother, Feather Mae, who as a young woman experienced a kind of ecstacy while standing in the
pit formed by the serpent's tail. The young Meridian, "seeking to understand her great-grandmother's
ecstasy," stands in the center of the pit and feels as though she is leaving her body and flying: "And in
this movement she saw the faces of her family, the branches of trees, the wings of birds, the corners of
houses, blades of grass and petals of flowers rush toward a central point high above her and she was
drawn with them, as whirling, as bright, as free, as they" ( 58 ). Meridian's sense of freedom and
oneness with the universe is repeated when she visits an ancient altar on a mountain in Mexico, where
she feels like "a speck in the grand movement of time" ( 59 ). While a student at Saxon, having given her
son away, Meridian has a recurring dream: "She dreamed she was a character in a novel and that her
existence presented an insoluble problem, one that would be solved only by her death at the end" ( 117
). Shortly thereafter, she begins to have the strange feeling that "a small landslide had begun behind her
brows, as if things there had started to slip" ( 117 ), and this sensation is followed by a period of
temporary blindness and paralysis which, instead of being frightening--the "worry part of her brain had
been the landslide behind her brows and . . . no longer functioned"--is as pleasurable as the inexplicable
moments of ecstasy: "She felt as if a warm, strong light bore her up and that she was a beloved part of
the universe; that she was innocent even as the rocks are innocent, and unpolluted as the first waters" (
119 ).
-126Such moments contribute strength to Meridian's activism for social change on behalf of southern blacks;
her mystical sense of the interrelationship of all life makes her work inevitable. It is this aspect of
Meridian that Truman Held cannot understand. Finding Meridian living in poverty in Chicokema early in
the novel (though late in its narrative chronology), Truman comments that he has never understood her
intermittent paralysis: "I always think of you as so strong, but look at you!" Meridian replies, Walker
writes, "cockily,""I am strong, actually, . . . I'm just not Superwoman" ( 32 ). Meridian's refusal to be
"Superwoman" marks her mature understanding and acceptance of the limits of her energy and power.
She is at peace with her work and her way of life, including its poverty and periodic paralysis. She is
dependent upon no one except herself, and when Truman says to her, "I hate to think of you always
alone," Meridian replies, "But that is my value" ( 220 ). Her youthful vision of being "a speck in the grand
movement of time" has led her to intense connectedness even in her self-imposed isolation.
It is characteristic of children and adolescents to have dreams and fantasies of adult power and
autonomy. Both boys and girls attempt to transcend the relative powerlessness of youth and its
restrictions by constructing imaginary adult selves with freedoms typically denied to the young. Yet
fantasies of this sort are informed in turn by reality in the sense that they are derived from the options
presented to the imagination by actual life experience. Without her mother's talk-story, Kingston could
not have her "woman warrior" fantasy, for example; in contrast, Celie, in The Color Purple, leads a life so
restricted as to preclude empowering visions of an alternate reality until Shug Avery becomes a presence
in her life. Men as well as women base their imaginative futures on the available possibilities for their
lives, so that the boy growing up in a ghetto may not be able to imagine any adult future other than gang
membership, whereas a middle-class boy observes from the adult models presented to him that there are
other, wider possibilities for power and influence. Yet the socially
-127acceptable roles for females--presented by way of both actual adult women and the images of them in
books and films--are far narrower and more restricted than those for males. The female characters in the
contemporary novel by women demonstrate again and again the ways in which even the possibilities for
adolescent female fantasies are limited by the social construction of the woman. For Joan Foster in Lady
Oracle, films teach female sacrifice for love; the young black girls that Meridian observes exist in
impossible fantasies based on roles played by white actresses; Isadora Wing derives conflicting--but
unanimously dogmatic-definitions of what it means to be a woman from male writers. Even Offred's
memories of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn playing characters who could choose whether or not to
be "undone" are of women whose major definition is ultimately their relationships with men.
Given the persistence of traditional female roles in books and films, even into the 1980s, it is not
surprising that the romance as a form, with its female heroine seeking rather than avoiding the position
of "angel in the house" or Weldon's "A," is so persistent. In the afterword to Becoming a Heroine, Rachel
Brownstein comments on the difficulty of overcoming this plot. Although, Brownstein notes, "a woman's
struggle to define herself against stereotypical images is a theme of current feminist novels and of fiction
affected by feminism," the romance "continues to lap seductively at the edges of realism, and even
feminism." This persistence suggests "how hard it is to alter formative fictions":
The fiction of the heroine encourages aspiration and imposes limits. Paradox is at its
core: probably that accounts for its power. The beautiful personal integrity the novel
heroine imagines and stands for and seeks for herself is a version of the romantic view of
woman as a desired object; as the image of the integral self, she is the inverted image of
half of a couple. The literary associations that halo the heroine keep her in a traditional
woman's place. That self-awareness which distinguishes her from the simple heroine of
romance ends by implicating her further in fictions of the feminine. 17
Characters who, despite their awareness of the need for change, are ultimately caught in "fictions of the
feminine" come readily to
-128mind: Mira in The Women's Room, Jane Clifford in The Odd Woman, Joan Foster in Lady Oracle. Despite
extraordinary efforts to dream of and act upon alternatives to the traditional life script, such characters
find themselves ironically trapped between it and some unimaginable future. Suzanne Juhasz has more
recently concurred with Brownstein's point about the persistence of the traditional romance plot, noting
that most twentieth-century women writers "have gone on telling love stories, whether or not the heroine
has a good career or is striving to get one." 18 In order to free themselves from the "love story," some
writers, such as Doris Lessing and Joanna Russ, have used the mode of speculative fiction to propose fullblown alternate worlds--whether utopian or dystopian--as I will discuss in the next chapter. Russ, who
like so many contemporary women writers was a student in the 1950s and 1960s, embraced fantasy
because of the absence of women's experience in the literature she was taught:
When I became aware (in college) of my "wrong" experience, I chose fantasy. Convinced
that I had no real experience of life, since my own obviously wasn't part of Great
Literature, I decided consciously that I'd write of things nobody knew anything about,
dammit. So I wrote realism disguised as fantasy, that is, science fiction. 19
Just as science fiction, so clearly not "real," became an acceptable form for Russ's feminist vision, so
adolescent women's fantasies are acceptable fantasies--first because they are secret, and second
because they are dreams that young women are supposed to "grow out of," whether they are fantasies of
power, such as those of Kingston and of Miriam in Small Changes, or of acquiescence to male superiority,
such as those of Joan in Lady Oracle or of Gemma in Words of Advice. Adult fantasies, on the other hand,
are essentially unacceptable: they threaten the social order. Isadora Wing's "zipless fuck," like Jane
Gray's affair with James in The Waterfall, is threatening not only because of its implicit sexual freedom,
but also because it moves the character away from conventional means of fulfillment to a situation in
which there is no retribution for female autonomy. Because of their awareness that their fantasies are
somehow unacceptable, the central characters in these novels respond with guilt and isolation to the
fulfillment
-129of their dreams: at the end of Fear of Flying Isadora does not know how Bennett will react to her
presence in his London hotel room after her trip with Adrian Goodlove; and Jane Gray continually marvels
that she has not been punished for her "sins." Despite their ability to view themselves and their
experiences ironically, they remain aware of the "old plots" that would have doomed them.
One way of making the adult female fantasy acceptable, as Jong suggests, is to share it and discover its
commonality. That contemporary women novelists have accomplished this sharing is evident; but it
constitutes a partial solution only for the author, and not necessarily for her characters. A case in point is
Kingston, whose Woman Warrior rests on the line between fiction and autobiography, and for whom the
very telling of the story seems to represent a power and control that her narrator does not overtly
demonstrate. Even in works more clearly fictional, such as The Color Purple, the ability to use the
language to shape one's own story constitutes a subtle though powerful form of autonomy, in part
because the storyteller is forced to see herself with an ironic distance that separates self from experience.
It is the lack of such a distancing element in such works as The Women's Room and Judith Rossner's
Looking for Mr. Goodbar ( 1975) that dooms the central characters to failure--and in the latter case
death--in their search for freedom and self-fulfillment. So strong are the constraints of society, these
authors propose, that only by removing oneself from them completely, by spiritual self-exploration or
madness, can the adult female not merely dream of but possess freedom. In an essay written in 1980,
Margaret Atwood comments on the persistence of traditional stereotypes of women even during a period
of enormous outward change:
After 10 years of the Women's Movement we like to think that some of the old
stereotypes are fading, but 10 years is not a very long time in the history of the world,
and I can tell you from experience that the old familiar images, the old icons, have
merely gone underground, and not far at that. We still think of a powerful woman as an
anomaly, a potentially dangerous anomaly; there is something subversive about such
women, even when they take care to be good role models. They cannot have come by
their power naturally, it is felt. They must have got it from somewhere. 20
-130What Atwood suggests here is that the author of realistic fiction is to some extent constrained by the
social matrix in which her characters and readers exist, and that to be believed, she cannot claim for her
characters greater autonomy than actual women can reasonably claim.
The constraints posed by social reality deepen the need for dreams and fantasies; if actual freedom is
difficult to attain, it can still be imagined, and from imagination can come either movement out of the
socially constructed self or deeper entrapment within it. Nancy K. Miller's comment that "to read women's
literature is to see and hear repeatedly a chafing against . . . 'unsatisfactory reality'" 21 rings true in these
novels: the "chafing," Miller argues, frequently takes the form of dream and fantasy. But for these to be
elements of positive movement, the woman must know the difference between fantasy and reality--must,
in other words, have a sense of irony: a double perspective that pits the emerging self against the
socially constructed self in creative tension. Two novels in which sexual freedom is a metaphor for a
deeper autonomy--Fear of Flying and Looking for Mr. Goodbar-illustrate this distinction from positions on
opposite ends of a continuum of self-knowledge and possibility.
For both Isadora Wing and Theresa Dunn, sexuality is part of both maturity and belonging, and both have
adolescent fantasies of perfect men with whom they will share these pleasures. Isadora's fantasy is quite
specific: "He had a face like Paul Newman and a voice like Dylan Thomas. He had a body like
Michelangelo David. . . [and] a mind like George Bernard Shaw" ( 94 ). Theresa's fantasy is of a more
generalized Prince Charming who, "if she lost fifteen pounds and turned beautiful, would swoop down and
carry her off to his kingdom." 22 Both women, as young adults, have relationships with men that end up
making them feel like victims: Isadora's first husband, Brian Stollerman, goes mad and blames Isadora
for having him hospitalized; Theresa's college professor, Martin Engle, uses her sexually with no intention
of a permanent commitment, despite Theresa's fantasies that he will divorce his wife. Both women are
influenced by the notion that acceptance by a man is the key to female self-esteem; as Isadora so bluntly
puts it, "if no man loves me I have no identity" (277).
-131Further, both Isadora and Theresa have more than one "self" with which to perceive reality. But it is
precisely at the point of multiple selves that the two women differ dramatically. Isadora has both a
fearful, dependent self and an ironic, self-mocking self that sees clearly the artificiality of socially
constructed female dependence. These two aspects of Isadora battle for ascendancy throughout Fear of
Flying, with the ironic self gradually winning control. Theresa's division of self, in contrast, is pathological.
Rather than debating with each other in a struggle for integrated selfhood, Theresa's three selves exist in
isolation from each other, as evidence of her psychic disintegration. "Theresa" is flanked by "Terry," on
the one hand, who carries Isadora's idea of the "zipless fuck" to self-destructive lengths, and on the other
hand by "Miss Dunn," the gifted and committed elementary school teacher.
Ironically, Theresa's various selves are socially acceptable, whereas Isadora's are not. As Judi Roller
points out, even Theresa's "madness" fits with social expectations for women:
If Theresa Dunn is mad, she is only mad in a way very acceptable to society. She accepts
everything society tells her and incorporates it into her personality. The part of her that is
capable of enjoying sex cannot be part of the same person who is a teacher or who is
loved by James Morrisey. . . . She is not permitted to have women friends. She is not
allowed to live, and she must be punished. So she obediently separates herself into all
her different parts. 23
Looking for Mr. Goodbar provides a paradigm of traditional prescriptions for women's social behavior.
School teachers, like "Miss Dunn," are asexual; love and sexual pleasure do not coexist; and promiscuous
women like "Terry" deserve whatever happens to them. Gary White, who murders Theresa after meeting
her in a singles bar, "had a very clear sense of himself as the victim of the woman he had murdered" (1),
and in a very real way Theresa's murder can be considered a suicide: as he is about to hit her with a
lamp, she thinks, "do it do it do it and get it over w-----" (280). With the death of "Terry," Theresa and
Miss Dunn also die. Isadora, in contrast, flaunts social norms, both by being a poet and by being sexually
adventurous. Her first psychiatrist--when she is
-132fourteen--urges her to "ackzept being a vohman," but Isadora sees that being the women she is creates
conflict between two selves: "If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you
turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for
domesticity in all your art" ( 157 ). But instead of dividing herself into parts, as does Theresa, Isadora
manages integration by giving full rein to both the woman and the artist, and allowing each to accept the
other.
These two novels also illustrate different approaches to boundaries. Though afraid of flying, Isadora does
so; indeed, the novel is filled with her movement and travel: to Vienna with Bennett and the other
psychiatrists, around Europe with Adrian, and finally to London to rejoin Bennett. The trip with Adrian is
not a solution, but she travels toward experience, not to escape it. When, toward the end of Fear of
Flying, Isadora attempts to make sense of her life, she does it by going to herself--specifically, to the
notebooks she has kept for the past four years: "journal jottings, shopping lists, lists of letters to be
answered, drafts of irate letters never sent, pasted-in newspaper clippings, ideas for stories, first drafts
of poems" (287). As she reads the pages, which come to seem like a novel about her life, she realizes
that there is no need to blame herself for the apparent chaos of her life: "You did not have to apologize
for wanting to own your own soul. Your soul belonged to you, for better or worse" (288). The point at
which Isadora claims the freedom to determine her own life is encapsulated in the statement "I knew I
did not want to be trapped in my own book" (288). And the structure of the novel, ending as it does
without any resolution except the certainty of change, underscores the fact that Isadora is not, in fact,
trapped in her own book. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, on the other hand, has the enclosed ending of death,
which, along with marriage, is one of the two approved fates for women in the traditional novel. What for
Isadora is movement toward change is for Theresa merely restlessness. She moves--or considers
moving--from one apartment to another in New York, as though a change in location might constitute a
change in herself. Her dreams are of being closed in,
-133and trapped. She dreams of being locked in a "tiny closet" with Martin Engle ( 46 ). Late in the novel she
has a series of dreams in which she is first "on her knees in a cold, dark place" and then crawling home
through what turns out to be a tunnel (258); in the third dream she is telling these dreams to a
psychiatrist who has her strapped to his couch and keeps saying, "We're going to straighten you out,
Theresa. We're going to have to straighten you out" (259). But Theresa cannot bring herself to seek help
from either psychiatry or a women's consciousness-raising group; and writing, which is for Isadora a
process of clarification, results for Theresa only in a blank page:
She brought the pen to the first page of the notebook and again wrote the date, but then
she was paralyzed; where should she begin? How could you begin a diary not long before
your twenty-seventh birthday without ever saying anything about what happened before?
And what could she say about what happened before? What was there to say about her
life? (268-69)
Theresa's inability to find anything to say about her life is emblematic of the emptiness at its core: having
parceled herself out into Terry and Miss Dunn, there is nothing left of Theresa.
The positive form of the remaking of one's self in the contemporary women's novel is typically seeking
and finding a career that represents autonomy outside the boundaries of domesticity. Most often, the
central character becomes an artist of some sort, the profession serving as both a metaphor for selfcreation and the tangible embodiment of dreams and fantasies. Isadora Wing is a poet, as is Jane Gray in
The Waterfall; Godwin's Violet Clay and Elaine Risley, in Atwood Cat's Eye ( 1988), are painters;
Anastasia Carpenter, in Marilyn French Her Mother's Daughter ( 1987), is a photographer. In The Color
Purple, Celie's sewing, like Shug's singing, is an art form that represents command over her life. Patricia
Meyer Spacks has compared the artist to the adolescent in terms of the need that both have for
transcendental visions:
Like the adolescent, the artist is a dreamer and a revolutionary; like the adolescent he
often finds his accomplishment inadequate to his imaginings. But his dream, setting him
apart, helps him to escape the burden of the real. ( 205 )
-134Adolescence is inevitable, whereas one chooses to be an artist; nonetheless, Spacks asserts, in both
situations the individual is "trying to transform reality by refusing to accept the given conditions of life as
definitive" ( 205 ). When the artist is a woman, she continues:
Both the function of aspiration and the nature of frustration assume characteristic forms.
In many ways woman artists' self-depictions corroborate the more indirect testimony
offered by fictional accounts of female adolescence. ( 205 )
In the contemporary novel, becoming an artist may be fraught with initial frustrations, but achievement
as a professional normally represents not only the fruition of youthful dreams, but more importantly the
crossing of restrictive boundaries to claim a mature, autonomous self.
Conversely, when a woman is unable to develop her artistic potential, the circumstance embodies a
personal limitation that is far more important than the failure to reach professional goals. The women
depicted in these novels as having unfulfilled artistic ambitions are commonly members of generations
before that of the central character. In Violet Clay, the narrator's grandmother, a pianist, gives up a
Carnegie Hall audition to get married, and exchanges her artistic dream for the alternative promoted by
the women's magazines of the day: "the accomplished wife and mother who turns her gifts to the
enhancement of Home." 24 Her decision is prompted in part by her "secret fears that [she] might not
succeed" in the audition ( 39 ), and similar fears provide nightmares for Violet when she imagines going
to New York to become a painter. Violet's nightmares involve a taxi she attempts to take to visit art
galleries with her portfolio; either the taxi goes on and on without a driver, or the charge is exorbitant, or
she is forced to submit to the driver's sexual advances. Violet is able to identify the source of these
nightmares as her own failure to pursue her youthful aspirations--"I had snatched my security before I'd
made a real try for my dream" ( 26 )--and eventually finds the courage to develop herself as a painter.
Violet Clay is given a second chance, but Pauline Breedlove, in The Bluest Eye, is prevented by poverty
and race from having a first one. Morrison describes the young
-135Pauline as having artistic instincts and impulses; she is enchanted by colors, and she loves to "arrange
things":
To line things up in rows--jars on shelves at canning, peach pits on the step, sticks,
stones, leaves. . . . Whatever portable plurality she found, she organized into neat lines,
according to their size, shape, or gradations of color. Just as she would never align a pine
needle with the leaf of a cottonwood tree, she would never put the jars of tomatoes next
to the green beans. ( 88 - 89 )
But there is no recognition nor encouragement of Pauline's talents: "She missed--without knowing what
she missed--paints and crayons" ( 89 ). Because of the circumstances of her life. Pauline is able to
exercise her artistry only in keeping the home of the white family for whom she works meticulously clean,
her halfformed dream made subservient to the needs of others.
The women who succeed as artists, in acting upon their dreams, create not only art, but also spaces for
themselves as adult women. Violet Clay moves to her uncle's cabin in the Adirondacks to come to terms
with her past idealism and to confront her future as a painter. Just before she leaves New York, her friend
Milo comments on her work in terms that suggest her personal as well as artistic potential: "It's the way
you leave light in and around things so they have room to breathe. Perhaps even to change, or move. . .
. there's the suggestion of stretch, of going somewhere" (257). In The Waterfall, Jane Gray's dream-like
relationship with James frees her from her marriage to Malcolm and enables her to recognize the
necessity of her poetry:
I would write, because writing is the thing that one can do anywhere, in a hotel bedroom,
in solitary confinement, in a prison cell, a defense more final, less destructible, than the
company of love. I could feel it stirring in me. Descending. I could see the changes in the
color of the air, the faintly approaching presences of words. (233)
Poetry, Jane realizes, is a part of her: it exists wherever she is, and is under her control, as relationships
are not. In Her Mother's Daughter, French chronicles the several attempts that Anastasia makes to define
a self apart from the heritage of her self-sacrificing mother. Her first major effort is to become "Stacey"
when she
-136goes to college: "too classy and too smart to be considered a tramp, and thus requiring some new
category--bohemian, rebel, free spirit." 25 Anastasia's rejection of her mother's punishing selflessness
includes a rejection of her gender: "I was not going to be a woman, I had decided that. Since I clearly
was not a man, my only alternative was to be beyond sex, or at least gender. I deluded myself that was
how others saw me too" (355). "Stacey" is a delusion, not a solution: "She became a finished product, in
the full sense of that phrase: polished, and complete" (355). The artificiality of Stacey as an identity is
made clear when Anastasia speaks of living "in a dark little room behind the store that sells her replicas"
(356). It is her career as a photographer that allows Anastasia to take risks, to identify with feminism,
and ultimately to sustain a relationship with Clara, who loves her for what she is rather than what she
pretends or tries to be.
Art leads similarly to feminism and freedom in Atwood Cat's Eye. Returning to Toronto, the scene of her
childhood, for a retrospective show of her work, Elaine Risley re-enters imaginatively the nightmarish
feeling of that childhood, plagued by three friends: Carol, Grace, and especially Cordelia. The ghost of
Cordelia, who set herself up as the disapproving judge of Elaine's behavior and appearance, hovers in the
air of Toronto, forcing Elaine to re-live a childhood in which misery led her to self-mutilation and silence.
Thinking back, Elaine wonders what her mother thought about the obvious signs of her unhappiness:
She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward
the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my
lips where I'd pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my
own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer options, and a great deal less
was said. 26
Despite her mother's inattention, Elaine manages to survive her internalization of Cordelia's taunting
without significant scars; indeed, by the time they are teenagers, she has shifted the balance of power,
and Cordelia's own emotional problems manifest themselves in poor academic performance, while Elaine,
like her brother Stephen, is an excellent student. The last time Elaine sees Cor-137delia, she is in a rest home--"a discreet, private loony bin" (373)-after a suicide attempt. Following a
painful meeting in which the heavily sedated Cordelia tries to enlist Elaine's aid in escaping from the rest
home, Elaine leaves her, but the ghost of Cordelia haunts Elaine: "The last time I saw Cordelia, she was
going through the door of the rest home. That was the last time I talked to her. Although it wasn't the
last time she talked to me" (384). Elaine dreams about Cordelia, and during the visit to Toronto
continually believes that she sees her and hears her voice.
It is in her art that Elaine exorcises the ghosts of her past: Cordelia, Carol's mother Mrs. Smeath, and her
own mother. While taking her Grade Thirteen exams, Elaine realizes that she will be an artist rather than
a biologist:
In the middle of the Botany examination it comes to me, like a sudden epileptic fit, that
I'm not going to be a biologist, as I have thought. I am going to be a painter. I look at
the page, where the life cycle of the mushroom from spore to fruiting body is taking
shape, and I know this with absolute certainty. My life has been changed, soundlessly,
instantaneously. (270)
Instead of the precise diagrams of botanical illustration, Elaine the artist creates surrealistic paintings
inspired by dream and memory. She memorializes her unconventional mother wearing an apron; in her
self-portrait, three little girls--Carol, Grace, and Cordelia-are in the background; the stern Mrs. Smeath is
pictured in her underwear, "her one large breast sectioned to show her heart. Her heart is the heart of a
dying turtle, reptilian, dark-red, diseased" (369).
The fact that Elaine paints women, and her early involvement with a feminist art show, lead critics to call
her a feminist painter, a label she resists. Her childhood experiences have taught her how cruel women
can be to each other; "Sisterhood is a difficult concept for me, I tell myself, because I never had a sister.
Brotherhood is not" (361). When the young reporter in Toronto asks her about feminism, she replies
acerbically, "I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway, I'm too old to have invented it and you're too
young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all?" ( 94 ). 27
-138Yet Elaine feels keenly the absence in her own life of the female friendships she sees around her--the
kind of relationship that she and Carol, Grace, and Cordelia should have had as children. On the plane
leaving Toronto, she watches with envy the two elderly women beside her, friends taking a trip together,
enjoying themselves like children:
They're rambunctious, they're full of beans; they're tough as thirteen, they're innocent
and dirty, they don't give a hoot. Responsibilities have fallen away from them,
obligations, old hates and grievances; now for a short while they can play again like
children, but this time without the pain. (446)
And Elaine silently addresses Cordelia: "This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but
something that will never happen" (446). Through dreams and memories of her childhood, Elaine has
both created her paintings and come to terms with the ghost of Cordelia, who, ironically, has turned out
to be more tormented than tormentor.
Dreams and fantasies come unbidden, as responses to the human need to resolve and order both past
and future reality. Madness, too, is a method of coping with experience by an unwilled act of
disassociation from what most people consider reality. Yet there is a fine line between what are called
"normal" and "abnormal" behavior and perceptions. When, in Cat's Eye, Elaine visits Cordelia at the
Dorothy Lyndwich Rest Home, she says, "How did you end up in the nuthatch anyway? You aren't any
crazier than I am" (376). On one level Elaine is merely trying to comfort Cordelia, but she also articulates
the truth that sanity and normality are matters of perception and degree. In Gilman "The Yellow
Wallpaper," the narrator's husband's prescriptions for her "cure" in fact intensify her disorientation, yet
the reader, guided by her narrative voice, is led to perceive that a culture that denies her autonomy and
expression cannot be considered truly sane. In both Surfacing and The Four-Gated City, the central
characters willingly and deliberately disassociate themselves from what their respective so-139cieties consider rational behavior, and call into ironic question the concept of normalcy. Atwood's
nameless narrator and Martha Quest make their fantasies acceptable by using them deliberately as
stages on the way to autonomy.
Both Surfacing and The Four-Gated City take place against the backdrop of societies in chaos. The United
States that the Surfacing narrator leaves for her native Canada is in the throes of the Vietnam War; the
London to which Martha Quest goes from Africa is filled with craters left by the bombs of World War II
and frantic efforts to return to lives that people can regard as normal. The atrocity of war is evidence of
society gone insane, against which individual madness becomes a kind of sanity. Atwood's narrator and
Martha are embarking on the quest that Martha's last name represents, but unlike the traditional male
quest, they must go into themselves rather than outward to experience, and the journey is a solitary one
despite the sympathetic presences of Joe and Lynda, respectively. Finally, both novels embody a critique
of the rational as opposed to the intuitive, the artificial as opposed to the natural, the institutional as
opposed to the individual--with fantasy and madness as metaphors for individual growth and integration.
Atwood's narrator moves from one kind of fantasy to another in Surfacing. The first fantasy is the fabric
of lies about marriage, motherhood, and divorce that she has adopted as a socially acceptable past--a
fabric so tightly woven that she herself believes it to be true. Not until she dives to look for evidence of
her missing father does her mind admit the reality of the abortion, and she realizes that she has been
living in "a paper house." 28 The fact that she is able finally to visualize the circumstances of her abortion
and remember the indifference of her married lover frees her to enter into the fantasy of rebirth. Having
constructed a rational though unreal past, she now understands the "failure of logic" ( 171 ). She
becomes increasingly alienated from Anna, Davis, and Joe, and section 2 of the novel ends with her
realization that "everything is waiting to become alive" ( 186 ). In the final section of the novel, the
narrator's disassociation from the "real" world is mirrored in her language, which is at once increasingly
less refer-140ential to this world, and more assured. Annis Pratt, writing of the rebirth journey in women's novels,
speaks of the character working through "inauthentic role behaviours" to a "world of the unconscious" in
which the narratives are "puzzling, bizarre, even 'crazy.'" 29 The more "crazy" Atwood's narrator becomes
in this final section, the more she exerts control over herself and her environment.
For the narrator to become psychically reborn, she requires the possibility of the actual birth of a child as
symbolic negation of her abortion; and this possibility in turn requires that Joe become an acceptable
lover. As the narrator becomes increasingly less human and more animal, so too does Joe. The last night
in the cabin, Joe "unzips his human skin" ( 189 ), and when she takes him outdoors to make love, she
perceives him as "thick, undefined, outline but no features, hair and beard a mane." He is less human
than part of nature: "his beard and hair fall over me like ferns, mouth as soft as water" ( 190 ). But
before the narrator can fully accept him or herself, she must retreat further into herself and away from
the structures of civilization. Nameless to the reader throughout the novel, she does not respond when
Anna calls her name: "I no longer have a name. I tried for all those years to be civilized but I'm not and
I'm through pretending" ( 198 ). Finally left alone, she comments on the irony of her situation: "From any
rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view" ( 199 ). What to
others would appear to be insane behavior is for the narrator necessity, with its own logic. Just before
the vision of her mother feeding the birds, the narrator abandons the logic of speech, refusing to end her
sentences:
The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word I lean against a
tree, I am a tree leaning I break out into the bright sun and crumple, head against the
ground I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move
and grow, I am a place ( 212 -13)
Finally, having envisioned her father as well as her mother, she is prepared to emerge from the selfimposed madness in which she
-141
has conjured their images: "they have gone finally, back into the earth, the air, the water, wherever they
were when I summoned them" ( 219 ). She has a "rational" view of herself and how her "irrational"
behavior would be perceived by others:
That is the real danger now, the hospital or the zoo, where we are put, species or
individual, when we can no longer cope. They would never believe it's only a natural
woman, a state of nature, they think of that as a tanned body on a beach with washed
hair waving like scarves; not this, face dirt-caked and streaked, skin grimed and scabby,
hair like a frayed bathmat stuck with leaves and twigs. A new kind of centerfold. ( 222 )
With this vision of herself, the narrator is able to laugh, and to move intuitively toward a life that the rest
of the world would regard as sane, but always with the awareness that she need not be a victim of
others' construction of her reality.
Like the narrator in Surfacing, Martha Quest in The Four-Gated City must shed assumed selves before
undertaking the journey into herself that results in her ability to survive personal and political chaos. One
of these selves is the flippant, self-righteous "Matty" that she has adopted as a defensive persona and
whom she now regards as "an intolerably tedious personage." 30 The other is the name of her second
husband, Hesse, "a name acquired like a bracelet" ( 38 ). By the time she enters the Coldridge
household, Martha has a keen sense of her need to remain alert to what she will become, aware that
complacency would blunt her perceptions. At lunch with the capable Phoebe, Martha the "traveller" thinks
to herself:
If I eat, if I start this routine of meals, sleep, order, the fine edge on which I'm living now
is going to be dulled and lost. For the insight of knowledge she now held, of the nature of
separation, of division . . . was clear and keen--she understood . . . understood really
(but in a new way, was in the grip of a vision), how human beings could be separated so
absolutely by a slight difference in the texture of their living that they could not talk to
each other, must be wary, or enemies. ( 82 )
At first in Mark Coldridge's house, Martha is wary of his wife Lynda, who is in and out of mental
institutions. Martha has been hired to be capable; Lynda is clearly incapable of normal life. But
-142as Martha begins gradually to realize, Lynda's madness is merely an intensification of the more intuitive
aspects of her own mind. As Elizabeth Abel puts it, "By discovering in Lynda an aspect of her own
identity, Martha enters a relationship which differs from that of the novel's adult male characters, who
react to Lynda with a mixture of compassion and detachment, clearly distinguishing her 'madness' from
their 'sanity.'" 31 Lessing targets in particular the male psychiatric establishment, with its sharp lines
between the sane and the insane, and its rigid categorizing of types of insanity. Shortly before her
mother's visit to London, when Martha feels that she is coming apart emotionally, she considers seeking
psychiatric help, and asks Lynda about her own doctor, Dr. Lamb:
She said: "What is Dr. Lamb like as a person?"
"Oh, they are all the same!"
"They can't be."
"Well, that's one of their points, you see: it shouldn't matter what they are like as
people."
"But that's ridiculous."
Lynda understands how ridiculous is the objective, scientific pose of anyone dealing with the human
mind, and cautions Martha against psychiatry: "I shouldn't if I were you" ( 223 ).
This and other, similar conversations with Lynda are the beginning of what Catharine Stimpson has
termed "a friendship beyond friendliness" between the two women, 32 as Martha turns her mind to
Lynda's way of viewing the world. When Martha becomes conscious of her ability to overhear the
thoughts of other people, and mentions this to Lynda, it is as if Lynda has been waiting for a long time to
welcome Martha into her own reality: "'Oh,' she exclaimed, 'you do? I was waiting for you to . . .'" (371).
And so Martha and Lynda begin to work together to find reasons for their perceptions of reality-perceptions considered "mad" by the rest of the world. The two read, talk, share fantasies--and arrive at
no conclusions. But the experience of searching is finally more important than the finding of answers:
It was as if the far-off sweetness experienced in a dream, that unearthly impossible
sweetness, less the thing itself than the need or hunger for it, a question and answer
coming together on the same fine
-143
high note--as if that sweetness known all one's life, tantalisingly intangible, had come
closer, a little closer, so that one continually sharply turned one's head after something
just glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, or tried to sharpen one's senses to catch
something just beyond them. (374)
The elusiveness of any "truth" about their private visions provides a beauty in sharp distinction to the
fixed diagnoses of the doctors; Martha reaches empathetic understanding with Lynda, and in the process
takes on a nurturing role that she has not been able to have with either her daughter or her mother . As
Stimpson says, "Though she does not go mad, Martha must experience the sensations of insanity in her
rites of passage toward a greater comprehension of the mind" ( 203 ); but Martha also gains a more
thorough comprehension of the heart.
The Surfacing narrator's perception that set against the madness of the world, hers is a great sanity, is
held as well by Martha and Lynda, who possess some truths not commonly shared or acknowledged by
society. Ironically, according to a letter written by Francis Coldridge's son following the "Catastrophe"-that unidentified disaster that has destroyed much of Britain--Martha and Lynda were able to predict this
event; Lynda has said to Francis, "Well, yes, for one thing, it looks as if this country is going to have
some kind of accident--probably fairly soon, but we don't know when" (626). Francis, like others, cannot
make himself take this pronouncement seriously--cannot accept the existence of the powers of the mind
that would make such foreknowledge possible. The nurturance that Martha and Lynda have developed for
each other they attempt to extend to a society that will not listen. But Martha survives the Catastrophe to
shepherd a group of people to an island off the coast of Scotland, where until she dies she takes care of
the children of this group of refugees from societal madness.
Surfacing is concerned with individual regeneration; The FourGated City, with social destruction and
rebirth. But Atwood and Lessing share the conviction that what the dominant culture considers madness
may in fact be the obverse; an acceptable fantasy that reveals a transcendent reality. In contrast to the
limiting or
-144misleading fantasies fostered by mass culture, which have the potential to trap women in socially
constructed selves, the violence of metaphoric madness, like the sword of the woman warrior, may
provide the dislocation necessary for the ultimate empowering vision to emerge.
-145
CHAPTER FIVE
Alternate Realities
Science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in her acceptance speech for the National Book
Award in 1972, comments on the necessity for non-realistic fiction in the late twentieth century:
Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world
is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps
the least adequate means of understanding the incredible realities of our existence. . . .
The fantasist, whether he uses the ancient archetypes of myth and legend or the younger
ones of science and technology, may be talking as seriously as any sociologist--and a
good deal more directly--about human life as it is lived, and as it might be lived, and as it
ought to be lived. For after all, as great scientists have said and as all children know, it is
above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope. 1
Le Guin's perception that periods of disturbance in the social order, when society appears to have
abandoned logic in favor of chaos and absurdity, are best reflected in non-realistic fiction, is a familiar
one. When accustomed order and values seem threatened
-146by rapid social change, the fiction writer has essentially two alternatives: to recapture imaginatively-even nostalgically--the values and patterns of a previous era now seen as static and idyllic, or to project
a future (or, indeed, another world altogether) that is clearly different from the present: either a utopia in
which order has been restored along the lines of values and priorities that represent ideality for the
author, or a dystopia--a cautionary tale warning of even more threatening and disruptive social patterns
if radical changes are not made in the present. Edward Bellamy Looking Backward (1888) and Charlotte
Perkins Gilman Herland (1915) are familiar examples of the utopian response, whereas George Orwell
1984 ( 1949) and Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale (1986) are dystopian visions of futures readily
extrapolated from the realities of the authors' social contexts.
The frequent use of fantasy--including the utopia and the dystopia--in the contemporary novel by women
constitutes both a response to the perceived absurdity of contemporary patriarchy and an impulse to
envision an alternate reality that either corrects or intensifies the ills of the present. Jong Serenissima
and Weldon's The Rules of Life are essentially playful fantasies that depict women achieving a measure of
ascendance over the circumstances of their lives. Jessica Pruitt, the actress who is the central character
in Serenissima, is transported by Jong's fantasy to the sixteenth century and the company of William
Shakespeare for a sensuous experience that restores both her personal and her professional creativity. In
The Rules of Life, set in the year 2002, 2 Weldon allows Gabriella Sumpter to speak from her grave to a
priest of the Great New Fictional Religion about the rules to which she has adhered in her sixty-one years
of life, and those she has not, claiming for herself a quirky, eccentric independence. The frequently ironic
tone of both novels challenges the concept of socially determined "rules" for women's behavior as both
characters defy even the rules of time and mortality. Time is defied also--though in a far bleaker way--in
the dystopian futures of The Handmaid's Tale and Lessing The Memoirs of a Survivor. The "Catastrophe"
that concludes The Four-Gated City--a socio-political disruption that has caused the central characters to
become refugees from England--147is played out slowly in The Memoirs of a Survivor, as social order is gradually replaced by chaos and
barbarity. In The Handmaid's Tale, the apocalyptic moment has already occurred, establishing a
totalitarian regime in which rigorous adherence to selected Biblical precepts makes women the slaves of
biological function. Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time and Russ The Female Man each offer glimpses of
both utopian and dystopian futures. In Piercy's novel, Consuelo is able to travel telepathically to the
beneficent world of 2137, where Luciente shows her an egalitarian culture that, with its emphasis on
nurturance, is reminiscent of Gilman Herland; but Consuelo also discovers a possible dystopian future in
which, as in The Handmaid's Tale, the most threatening features of contemporary society have gained
ascendance and women have become objects. In The Female Man, Russ juxtaposes Janet's allfemale
world of Whileaway, which also resembles Herland, to Alice-Jael's world of armed warfare between men
and women.
By offering alternative visions of possible human futures--with particular significance for women's lives-Piercy and Russ underscore the fact that these contemporary fantasies by women pose essential
challenges to tradition and to what Weldon calls "the rules of life." Even in dystopian fictions, the authors
describe, by implication, life as it might and ought to be lived, which Le Guin proposes as the task of the
fantasist. Such challenges to the status quo make these texts inherently ironic. Because the essence of
irony is contrast between one meaning or reality and another, speculative fictions, insofar as they are
referential to what Le Guin calls "the incredible realities of our existence," force us to consider the validity
of the world posited by the fantasist as set against that which we perceive to be "true" about our own
world. Both sets of realities necessarily coexist, superimposed upon one another, accomplishing the
doubled effect of ironic meaning. Sometimes the writer makes this superimposition of meanings or
realities overt. In The Handmaid's Tale, for example, Atwood announces in the first sentence that the
experiences her narrator is about to describe exist in tension with another, prior set of experiences: "We
slept in what had once been the gymnasium." 3 As this first chapter proceeds, Atwood continues to
suggest the imposition of present upon past in a manner that simultaneously builds suspense about
-148the narrator's current circumstances and plays upon the reader's own memories of the past:
The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that
were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though
the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I
could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the
sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew
from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked
hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard
sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of dreams, a forlorn wail, garlands made of
tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers
with a snow of light. (3)
In a similar manner, Lessing begins The Memoirs of a Survivor by superimposing the present upon the
past: "We all remember that time." 4 Lessing, like Atwood, is on the verge of plunging the reader into a
dystopian future by first referring to what she assumes to be a commonly shared past.
The fact that irony is achieved through implicit juxtaposition of more than one time or reality is most
overt in fictions wholly constructed as fantasies, but it can be observed as well in novels in which fantasy
is part of a realistic plot structure. The contrast between Pecola Breedlove's fantasy of blue eyes and the
narrator's perception of her terrible isolation at the end of The Bluest Eye, for example, forces the reader
to observe the ironic distance between dream and reality, the models of white culture and the severe
limitations of Pecola's life. Similarly, the narrator's imaginative reversals of the processes of civilization in
Surfacing call into question the values of contemporary society, especially as those values impose upon
women masks of artificiality. The writer who declares independence from the rules of realism for most or
all of a novel, however, is free to insist more directly on the ironic distance between life as it might or
could be lived and life as it is lived. To highlight this point, it is useful to return briefly to a consideration
of the most widely read kind of contemporary women's fantasy: the popular, formulaic romance novel.
-149As a number of scholars have pointed out, the popular romance is essentially a conservative document,
reinforcing gender-role stereotypes and leaving its heroine inside the marriage plot. Yet as Janice Radway
has proposed, these fantasies of love and acceptance may be viewed superficially as feminist because the
heroines possess qualities of assertiveness and independence not commonly associated with traditional
female behavior. In particular, the heroine frequently expresses dissatisfaction with the system of male
dominance, so that she appears to resist the roles established for her. However, the heroine of the
popular romance ultimately finds her satisfaction within traditional patriarchal structures; what Radway
terms the "fairy-tale fantasy concluding the narrative" negates the quasi-feminist impulses expressed
earlier in the narrative. These novels, Radway concludes, are:
reactionary in their assertion that the feminist goals of individual fulfillment and
independence can be achieved through the maintenance of traditional male-female
relations. We simply cannot overlook the fact that the feminist protest is not sustained.
The novel may temporarily express a subconscious desire for a re-ordering of relations
between men and women, but that subversive desire is always turned aside in the end in
a way that shows it to have been unnecessary at the outset. 5
The popular romance thus reinforces the rules rather than challenging them in any fundamental way, so
that the narrative ultimately denies the possibility of ironic duality.
The feminist fantasy, in contrast, commonly demonstrates the opposite pattern, in which the female
heroine begins in the realm of traditional culture and moves away from its rules and restrictions.
Contemporary reality continues to exist as a palimpsest on which an alternative reality is superimposed,
and the central character is aware, as is the reader, of the contrast between them. Such patterns of
superimposition can be observed also in fictions that are essentially realistic--in which fantasy is an
element of the plot rather than its controlling principle. In Surfacing, for example, even as the narrator
abandons all of the trappings of civilization and prepares for her own rebirth by living like an animal in
the woods, she is aware of the ironic contrast between her dirt-caked
-150body and the culturally preferred female body, "a tanned body on a beach with washed hair waving like
scarves." Instead of adhering to this stereotype, she is "a natural woman . . . a new kind of centerfold." 6
At the end of Surfacing, the narrator re-enters her "own time" (223), but she has been irrevocably
altered by her fantasy, just as Martha Quest, in The Four-Gated City, emerges from her explorations with
Lynda of the mind's untapped powers an essentially different person, but living in a culture that has,
itself, not changed. The author who begins with the premise of an alternate reality for her characters to
inhabit, thus departing from the rules imposed by realism, claims an even greater freedom from the
enclosed plot of the popular romance in which the heroine finally capitulates to traditional values and
expectations. Whether the vision is utopian or dystopian--or both in the same novel--the fiction is
fundamentally radical rather than conservative.
The very use of such terms as "radical" and "conservative" raises again the issue of the extent to which
these novels should be considered political documents, or to be arising from political ideologies. This
question is not as much beside the point as it might first appear, because utopian and dystopian fictions
in particular have a long tradition in being closely allied with their authors' ideological stances. Gilman
Herland, for example, describes a culture in which Gilman's own social beliefs--in the values of female
nurturance and the repressive nature of traditional religion-are played out in the dialogues between the
residents of Herland and their three male visitors. B. F. Skinner Walden Two (1948) is based on Skinner's
theories of behavioral psychology, and Orwell 1984 had its origin in the author's fears of a totalitarian
government. Indeed, to describe the best or the worst society that one can imagine is necessarily to
involve oneself in the political structures as well as the values that would govern such a society. Yet the
situation is clearly more complex than this. First, a novel of whatever sort is a work of art, and reading it
with an eye to the ideology it appears to reflect or espouse is merely one way in which an art form may
be approached. More importantly, few authors are eager to be regarded as using the novel solely or even
largely to promote an ideological stance, for this reduces them from artists to propogandists. Both
Margaret Atwood and Doris
-151Lessing have rejected even the label of feminist, even though Atwood's Surfacing and The Handmaid's
Tale and Lessing The Golden Notebook and her Children of Violence series are widely regarded-even
canonized--as feminist texts. Lessing's resistance to labeling has been even more intense than that of
Atwood. Elizabeth Dipple has recently discussed Lessing's "demurrals against the current directions of
feminism" and her "abandonment of party or ideological politics as a subject worthy of serious
commitment," and has pointed out that in such recent novels as The Good Terrorist (1985) Lessing takes
a position that is "heavily satirical and dismissive of women or men who gives their lives to the falsity of
political rhetoric when there are other things to preoccupy a forwardlooking mind." 7
Yet it is impossible to ignore the socio-political implications of contemporary dystopian fantasies in
particular. The gradual disintegration of services and commodities in the London of the future that
Lessing describes in The Memoirs of a Survivor are reminders of the fragility of a standard of living taken
for granted by citizens of industrialized nations, and Lessing's grim depictions of polluted air and bands of
homeless young people are similar to the alternate future that Consuelo msitakenly enters in Woman on
the Edge of Time, in which the air is so polluted that even on the one hundred and twenty-sixth floor of a
New York apartment building there is no point in having windows. The realistic as well as the
utopian/dystopian parts of Piercy's novel embody serious social commentary as well: as a poor Chicana
woman, Connie is labeled insane when the conditions of her life lead her to self-defensive violence. The
Handmaid's Tale, set in the 1990s and drawing upon social and technological realities of the 1980s, has
seemed to most readers chillingly possible despite its bizarre and futuristic elements. Linda Kauffman has
argued that a novel like The Handmaid's Tale must be approached through feminist analysis because it is
"less about the 'fearsome future' than about the 'fearsome present.'" Atwood, Kauffman notes:
dismantles received ideas and unquestioned assumptions about religion, sex, politics,
women's cultures--and feminism itself. Atwood au-152daciously creates a heroine who is in a very real sense responsible for the Gileadean
coup: she is apathetic politically, complacent about women's struggle for equal rights,
absorbed solely in her individual existence. All around her she sees racial hatred, religious
intolerance, and sexual repression intensifying daily. If The Handmaid's Tale were solely a
tragic tale of one woman's suffering, it would merely reinforce the emphasis bourgeois
ideology places on the individual, but [it] focus[es] equally on the decimation of a culture
and a race. 8
The fact that these novels depict eventualities that can be readily extrapolated from observable social
and environmental realities decreases the space between fantasy and realism, which in turn makes the
irony of contrast more palpable.
Russ The Female Man, more closely allied to science fiction by its use of time travel and parallel
universes, seems on the surface less referential to contemporary reality. By concatenating past and
future, and dividing the narrative perspective among four separate female consciousness, Russ constructs
an apparently disjointed narrative that strikes the reader initially as bizarre. But The Female Man
addresses and exposes as absurd a number of the myths and clichés regarding woman's nature and role
by combining straightforward narrative with satire and parody. Jeannine, like a character from a blackand-white movie, alternately believes in and is frustrated by the notion that marriage is a woman's sole
source of fulfillment. The women in "The Great Happiness Contest" brag about their contentment as
homemakers or "superwomen" in ways that recall the debates about the necessity for feminist activism,
while random male voices enunciate the clichés of chauvinism. Russ's novel is thus a compendium of
references to contemporary feminist issues, which are thrown into relief by the perspectives of Janet
Evason and Alice-Jael Reasoner, who represent alternate futures that are themselves possible outgrowths
of current tensions between the genders.
Weldon The Rules of Life and Jong Serenissima also violate conventional notions of time and space,
though in quite different ways, and both novels have central characters who break the "rules" in order to
live on their own terms. Weldon's and Jong's visions are essentially utopian in that they show women
freeing
-153themselves from social restraints--particularly those regarding aging and sexuality--to find fulfillment.
When Gabriella Sumpter , in The Rules of Life, speaks from her grave in the year 2002 of the satisfaction
she has gained from determining on her own which rules to abide by and which to break, her chatty,
meticulous advice about such mundane matters as how to remove stains from various fabrics ties her to
the world of feminine reality, while the circumstances under which she narrates her story are metaphoric
of her freedom from this reality. Jong's Jessica Pruitt, in Serenissima, travels to the past for her great
erotic adventure and then returns to a recognizable present in 1985 with an infant boy as the sole
evidence that her journey has been real rather than imaginary.
The use of fantasy as a dominant mode in all of these novels suggests that the re-visioning of
contemporary reality requires the radical and even violent use of the imagination. By creating alternative
pasts, presents, and futures for their central characters to inhabit, the authors launch a fundamental
critique of the values and assumptions of the culture they inhabit, even when the alternative reality they
create is a bleak dystopian vision. These novels further underscore the fact that the mind constructs its
own reality: with the single exception of Woman on the Edge of Time, the central characters narrate their
own stories, suggesting that the alternate realities they inhabit for part or all of the novel are to be
understood as their own visions. Offred's continual reminders that her story is a "reconstruction," for
example, indicates that the version we read of her experiences in the Republic of Gilead is partial,
incomplete--perhaps even inaccurate, depending as it does on the words of a single observer. In The
Rules of Life, Gabriella announces that there are no rules in fiction, thus implicitly claiming the freedom
to tell of her life in any manner she chooses; and in Serenissima, Jessica acknowledges the impossibility
of knowing what is "true": "How can I tell any longer what is real and what is not, what is life and what is
death, or even what century or what place I shall be buried alive in--if burial is to be my fate." 9 By
acknowledging the elusive nature of truth or reality, these narrators refuse to be bound by a version of it
that is controlled by
-154someone else, and insist, as women, on the validity of their own visions, however equivocal.
It is a common observation that utopian fictions, in particular, have little narrative tension, or dramatic
action, precisely because the ideality of the culture envisioned in the novel precludes the kind of conflict
that normally gives rise to dramatic suspense. James W. Bittner, for example, has written that "except
for the drama of ironic clashes between a reader's actual world and an imagined utopian world, drama is
otherwise missing from many utopian narratives because their static societies often make little room for
the extraordinary individual." 10 It is true that such works as Walden Two are little more than exposition,
with little real dramatic action, but in the feminist utopia, the drama of what Bittner calls "ironic clashes"
replaces the ordinary drama of ideological or personal conflict precisely because of the author's feminist
intent. Ironic drama, that is, deliberately supplants other sorts of dramatic action because the author's
intent is to delineate a culture in which such active conflict can be seen as the product of patriarchy and
oppression. In Herland, for example, the ironic difference between the Herland inhabitants' calm,
reasoned self-possession and the bewildered agitation of their three male visitors poses not merely an
alternative social order but also a concept of relationships that is devoid of competition and jealousy.
Janet Evason's Whileaway, in The Female Man, is a similar place, as is the Mattapoisett, Massachusetts,
of 2137 in Woman on the Edge of Time; in both societies, there is more conflict than in Gilman's pacific
Herland, but most of the inhabitants' energy is devoted to preventing or solving conflict rather than
perpetuating its origins in "we-they" dichotomies. The drama of irony is dominant also in the dystopian
Handmaid's Tale. The stasis in Atwood's novel results not from the calm of ideality, as in the utopia, but
rather from the imposition of strict rules by those who govern in the Republic of Gilead. There is little
overt action in Offred's account of her life; as Linda Kauffman notes, "her entire existence as a handmaid
consists of waiting: waiting for the monthly 'ceremony' during which the Commander tries to impregnate
her; waiting for the results; and, if they are positive, waiting to deliver the baby" (236). Offred's enforced
idleness--
-155which is reinforced by the fact that alternating chapters take place at night, when she is alone with her
thoughts--is sharply at variance with both her past life and the reader's busy imagination, as it compares
past, present, and future realities and possibilities.
The drama of ironic contrast is further achieved in some of these novels by the appending of a final
section that pulls the reader out of the lives of the characters and forces her or him to view them from
the perspective of an institutionalized bureaucracy that dehumanizes them. The "Historical Notes" section
at the end of The Handmaid's Tale functions in this way, presenting Offred as a problem in historical
verification rather than an actual person; as Professor Pieixoto remarks, she was "one of many, and must
be seen within the broad outlines of the moment in history of which she was a part" (305). The contrast
between the personal, individual voice in which Offred has seemed to speak for nearly three hundred
pages and the distanced, even jocular tone of the academic conference at which she is merely a curious
case study--an artifact--jolts the reader into questions about the nature of individual identity and worth.
11 Similarly, Piercy concludes Woman on the Edge of Time with "Excerpts from the Official History of
Consuelo Camacho Ramos," a sampling from more than a hundred pages of documents from various
psychiatric facilities that present Connie as consisting of a set of clinically diagnosable disorders. As does
Atwood, Piercy forces us to observe the contrast between two kinds of perceptions: though Connie's is
not a first-person narrative, the narrative perspective has consistently been hers throughout the novel,
convincing us that she is a victim of poverty and ethnic discrimination, but the reports of the authorities
depict her as a schizophrenic of "unidff. type 295.90." 12 Most pointed of all the comments in these
reports is the statement that Connie's brother is "a reliable informant who expresses genuine concern for
his sister" (381), whereas Luis Camacho has been presented throughout the novel as an insensitive man
who is primarily concerned that Connie not disturb his upper-middle-class life; he has rejected his ethnic
heritage to the point of insisting that his name be pronounced "Lewis," and he shuns Connie as a
reminder of his origins.
-156The documents and letters in the "Appendix" to The Four-Gated City similarly serve an ironic purpose,
but in this case the attached ending of the novel vindicates rather than calling into question the
personhood of the central character. Dating from the years between 1995 and 2000, the letters and
fragments of letters provide a partial accounting of the unspecified "catastrophe" that has turned Great
Britain into "Destroyed Area II," and the two longest letters--from Francis Coldridge to his stepdaughter
Amanda, and from Martha to Francis--focus on the psychic powers that Martha and Lynda have
developed by the end of the novel. Whereas in Woman on the Edge of Time the closing documents assert
the authority of the mental-health establishment over the individual, in Lessing's novel Martha and Lynda
are presented as ascendant over the authorities; society has gone mad, not the two women. Francis
reports to Amanda that shortly before the catastrophe he spend several days with Martha and Lynda,
during which they gradually persuaded him that they, like others, had gifts of foresight and telepathy,
and knew of the approaching cataclysm. Although at the time Francis resisted this information, his latetwentiethcentury letter makes clear that by the time he is writing it such powers are understood to be
commonplace. Having reminded Amanda of the various forms of espionage in existence after the Second
World War, he speaks somewhat apologetically of the ignorance of his own time regarding the human
mind:
Imagine, then, the possible dent in this structure [of spies, counterspies, wiretapping]
made by a group of people with ordinary telepathic powers--very well, such thoughts are
familiar to you, but I'm writing down, for the benefit of researchers, the reactions of
someone only twenty-five years ago, on first considering these very obvious--to you-facts. To imagine the possibilities of ordinary telepathy--I remember it entertained us
during dinner. . . . [W]e sat laughing, imagining how in human beings themselves were
growing . . . powers which could make all this machinery useless, out of date, obsolete. 13
Martha's letter to Francis, written in the summer of 1997, reports on the evolution that Francis's letter
merely predicts. From her island retreat near Scotland, sensing her impending death, Martha
-157writes of the extraordinary children born on the island in the years since the catastrophe--children who
are not only by nature peaceful, but who also have capacities to "see" and "hear" beyond normal sensory
abilities. These clearly superior children have become the "guardians" of their elders, and assure them
that the entire human race is on the verge of improvement. Martha writes of one particular child:
Joseph, the black child, will come to your settlement near Nairobi, and you will look after
him. So he says. He says more like them are being born now in the hidden places in the
world, and one day all the human race will be like them. People like you and me are a
sort of experimental model and Nature has had enough of us. (648)
The fact that two later letters from relocation bureaucrats speak of Joseph as subnormal rather than
advanced does not detract from Martha's final triumph; Lessing has provided a glimpse of a possible
utopia in which the human being has evolved past conflict and the need for it--a fitting conclusion to a
five-novel series with the overarching title Children of Violence.
Rachel Blau Du Plessis has proposed that glimpsing or exploring the future is one way of "writing beyond
the ending" of the traditional novel, citing The Four-Gated City, Woman on the Edge of Time, and The
Female Man as recent examples of the use of this narrative strategy. Du Plessis suggests that by
foregoing what she terms the "pleasurable illusion of stasis" that characterizes the ending of the
traditional plot, the author enters into a new relationship with the reader in two ways. First, by proposing
a future that could be that of the reader as well, the narrative engages the reader in a way that the tidy,
historical narrative does not:
Most novels begin in the past and end just at, or just before, the present, with a highly
choreographed, controlled glance at the future. The present (where the reader sits
reading) and the future (outside of both book and reader) are felt to be unsullied,
untouchable, and in about the same political and moral key as today. But if a novel
travels through the present into the future, then social or character development can no
longer be felt as complete, or our space as readers perceived as untrammeled. 14
-158Secondly, because such narratives normally carry a freight of ideology, they challenge assumptions and
force revisions in thinking:
In line with the general use of the narrative as a teaching story, elements like character
and plot function mainly as the bearers of propositions or moral arguments, whose
function is to persuade. . . . The fiction establishes a dialogue with habitual structures of
satisfaction, ranges of feeling, and response. ( 179 )
The concept of such a "dialogue" is similar to what I have earlier identified as the essential irony of such
texts: the contrast between a future (or occasionally a past) reality and that inhabited by the reader
setting up a tension that can be resolved only outside of the text itself--or not resolved at all.
Such a dialogue or ironic tension is not, of course, limited to novels that explore times or societies unlike
our own. The continually revised narrative in novels such as Drabble The Waterfall and Godwin Violet
Clay, and the gradual revision of personal history in Surfacing and Weldon Words of Advice set up similar
tensions and refuse to conclude with a "pleasurable illusion of stasis," as the central characters are still,
at the end, questioning and becoming. In speculative fictions, however, the possibilities for change and
difference are potentially limitless, which is one of the reasons why these forms are increasingly
attractive to women writers. Writing of the literary utopia generally, Peter Ruppert makes the point that
these fictions are "open" in two ways. Not only do they invite varying interpretations, but they also, and
more importantly, propose that social reality is not fixed, but instead subject to alteration:
This kind of "openness" aims at producing a heightened sense of awareness in the reader,
an awareness that allows her to see all forms of organization--social, political, aesthetic-as contingent and provisional. The effect of this critical distancing is to remind us that
whatever "is"--whether it be the social arrangements exposed in the text or our own
present moment in history--is historical, provisional, and therefore changeable. 15
It is not only utopian visions that insist upon the potential for change in a set of social arrangements; the
bleak dystopias de-159scribed in Woman on the Edge of Time, The Female Man, Memoirs of a Survivor, and The Handmaid's
Tale similarly provide readers with the sense that alternative realities are possible. Indeed, the grim
futures depicted in these novels may be even more immediately believable and persuasive than those of
utopias because the ills they portray spring from those we can identify in our own "moment in history":
destruction of the environment, dangerous advancements in technology, and repressive governments
justifying their actions on the basis of religious zeal.
The aspect of human experience that the contemporary woman writer of either utopian or dystopian
fiction is most concerned to explore--and to propose as mutable--is gender relationships. From Gabriella
Sumpter in The Rules of Life, who dictates the terms of her own relationships, to Offred in The
Handmaid's Tale, for whom precisely the reverse is true, the heroines of these novels either participate in
or observe relationships between genders that do not adhere to traditional patterns or expectations.
Whether the arrangements of these relationships are positive or negative for the characters, it is
significant that gender issues are somehow central to each of these novels, because this suggests that for
the woman writer such issues are fundamental to any social order rather than peripheral to it. This has
been true of women's speculative fiction at least since Herland, in which, despite the numerous benefits
Gilman ascribes to the all-female society of Herland, it is only by the introduction of men that she is able
to provide her narrative with the sort of drama she wanted. As Du Plessis puts it, "although the work
talks about changes in narrative, it still offers unwitting proof that 'Love, Combat, or Danger' (all, in
Gilman's view, requiring men) might well remain necessary for interesting literature" ( 181 ). While few
contemporary women writers would argue that "Combat or Danger" are essential to literature, love, with
its attendant questions about gender, is central to their works. The alternatives to traditional male-female
relationships these authors explore range widely: androgyny, lesbianism, adultery, even outright gender
warfare--all suggest that in a society in which one gender dominates the other, any vision of a better or a
worse
-160world must address and work through intimate relationships as a foundation for issues of more public
concern.
Fay Weldon short novel The Rules of Life is an appropriate beginning point for a more detailed discussion
of the novels considered in this chapter, because it is, in a sense, a metafiction. Just as Atwood , in The
Handmaid's Tale, investigates the nature of truth and fiction in the many-layered "reconstruction" of
Offred's tale, so Weldon explores the concept that people invent or create the stories of their own lives,
so that "fact" is transmuted into "fiction" that masquerades in turn as "fact." Gabriella Sumpter quite
literally speaks to us from her grave; or rather, she speaks to the central narrator, whose task it is to
transcribe and report on the tapes made of the reminiscences of the recently deceased, or "rewinds," as
they have come to be called, by the "pinner priests" of the Great New Fictional Religion. The narrator,
who is of the order of "pulp priests" of the GNFR, works in the Temple, once the British Museum, in the
year 2002, listening to tapes of Gabriella's voice made shortly after her death, and moves emotionally
from initial disapproval of her "selfish and morally frail" life to the point of falling in love with her. The
voice of the narrator alternates with that of Gabriella as he tells the reader the story of telling her story.
Weldon calls into question the existence of any fixed "truth," including the ultimate authority of religious
belief. The "God" whom the priests serve is known as the Great Screen Writer in the Sky--abbreviated
GSWITS--and the priests do not serve this deity with blind faith. Indeed, as the narrator says, "we do
acknowledge that the GSWITS has had many a bad idea in his time. Virtue lies in trying to make the best
of His mistakes." 16 In his initial disapproval of Gabriella, the narrator resents the fact that the GNFR
regards her as something of a saint because "she went where the script dictated," and he considers
beginning the Revised Great New Fictional Religion, which would have higher standards:
-161Let us simply accept that the GSWITS allocated to us mortals is a mere B-feature writer,
with the unhappy tendency of his kind to introduce disasters--cyclones, volcanic
eruptions, earthquakes or man-made explosions--to get himself out of plot difficulties.
The effort of his creation must therefore be to see that He takes his task seriously, and
improves his standards. ( 21 - 22 )
The narrator-priest thus inverts the traditional relationship between man and God by proposing that it is
man's responsibility to raise the standards by which God operates--to improve upon his plot. In contrast
to the narrator's concern for upholding rules and standards (he is, appropriately, married to a woman
named Honor), Gabriella is intent upon breaking rules--or rather on selecting those that she considers
"Valid Rules":
She had observed in life that the mass of ordinarily accepted rules--for example, that too
many cooks spoil the broth, or if you can't stand the heat you should get out of the
kitchen, or that a woman needs a man as a fish needs a bicycle, were simply not true:
mere patterns of words, cement grouting for the shaky construction of our existence,
cosmetic rather than structural. ( 13 )
Gabriella's perception that most rules are "mere patterns of words" is matched by her view that there are
no rules in fiction, so that "if she wished to start with her death and end with her birth, she would" ( 12 ).
By acknowledging that her life, at least in the telling of it, is a fiction, Gabriella tacitly recognizes the
Great New Fictional Religion, in which people live out parts of the plot devised by the Great Screen Writer
in the Sky.
Gabriella believes that her life has been successful because she has not married nor had children. "The
best one can do," she says, "while living, is not, by marrying, to burden others with our existence, and
not, irresponsibly, by having children, to pass life on" ( 15 ). Believing that erotic love is "the only thing
that makes life worth living at all" ( 15 ), Gabriella has had a series of affairs with married men, always
being careful to keep the upper hand in such relationships. One of Gabriella's Valid Rules--"the greatest
and most reliable of them all"--is that "Nothing is fair" ( 15 ), and she has seen little point in being fair to
others. Shortly before she dies,
-162she has the arthritic seamstress Frieda Martock make a white silk shift for her burial, even though the
process is quite painful for Miss Martock: "If there is no sacrifice, the God does not descend. He likes
blood" ( 17 ). The narrator, observing the enormous disparity between rich and poor in the year 2002,
tends to agree with Gabriella about the general unfairness of life: "Notions of socialism and a fair society
faded along with Christianity: the eighties finally saw them off. The GSWITS, I fear, is a great admirer of
Dickens" ( 75 ).
The rules that Gabriella is most firm about are those governing the proper care of fabrics, and throughout
The Rules of Life Weldon uses this appropriately feminine metaphor to represent the fabric of life, which,
when stained, can sometimes be made pure again and sometimes not. Gabriella constantly dispenses
advice about how to clean scorched linen, how to remove grass stains from fur, and how to clean a lace
bedspread. Despite her sexual indiscretions, she believes her life to be without moral stain; yet at the
same time she recalls, as a child, reacting to a priest's admonition to remain pure by going home and
pouring ink on her white dress: "I wanted to be stained" ( 24 ). What Gabriella wants is indulgence
without blame or guilt, and when her life ends at the age of sixty-one she believes she has achieved this-or so her selfassured voice suggests to the narrator until the final segment of the tape. Her longestlasting affair has been with Timothy Tovey, a career diplomat who, according to Gabriella, has married
someone else for money while continuing to love her. Yet Gabriella's story, to use Weldon's metaphor,
begins to unravel at the end, first when she pulls from her imagination the thread that is Timothy Tovey
and finds that his "fabric" has not been treated with the proper care:
Someone has washed him badly, made the water too hot. The colours have run. It need
never have happened. Any person can be washed, if proper care and attention is paid,
even those which say "Dry Clean Only"--which is mostly only a manufacturer's
convenience--oh, my poor head! What is a word, and what is a label, and what is a
principle, and who can we trust? ( 72 )
-163With these fundamental questions, the tape ends, and the narrator later visits Timothy Tovey, who tells
him that it was impossible for him to marry Gabriella because she had proven that she was "badly
brought up" when she complained to his mother about the manner in which her nightgown had been
washed.
The "truth" of Gabriella's story is further called into question, as is Offred's story, by the fact that it is a
transcription of tapes by a man who is far from objective about her. The narrator suspects at one point
that the pinner priests have "misrecorded her on purpose" because of their own cynicism ( 38 );
alternatively, he wonders whether his own mastery of the equipment may be faulty, or whether his own
attitudes may have altered what she says: "Perhaps in some way my own personality plays into the text?
I may be a more cynical person than I suppose. Nothing, they say, can ever truly be known" ( 38 - 39 ).
When Gabriella uses the word "sub-text," the narrator wonders whether the pinner priests have put
words in her mouth, because "concepts such as 'sub-text' must be strange to her" ( 67 ).
Weldon's amusing fantasy, which begins and ends with the phrase "strange days, indeed," is far less
comprehensive in its investigations of cultural mores and malaise than is The Handmaid's Tale, but it
similarly questions our ability to know the "truth," even about ourselves, and certainly about the "rules of
life." Gabriella Sumpter, however, seems to have triumphed, at least during her own lifetime, in the
sense that she believed her own story and lived life on her own terms. In a way, she has written her own
script, even to the point of dying painlessly while she was still physically attractive.
Serenissima shares with The Rules of Life the central character's concern with aging and sexuality, and
Jong, like Weldon, creates a fantasy that questions the nature of truth--including fictional truth. Jessica
Pruitt, as an actress, is well aware of the roles that people play in life, not merely on the stage, and she
narrates the story of writing the script for her own life with the consciousness of being a storyteller who,
like Offred in The Handmaid's Tale, can convey only a partial truth. Early in the novel Jessica announces
the precariousness of her task: "What storyteller is adequate to
-164her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret message and the fervent
hope that it does not turn out to be blank." 17 By asserting the primacy of the story over the storyteller,
Jong claims a measure of authenticity for her tale of time travel, but at the same time the first-person
narrative provides Jessica with the illusion of control over her own story. By moving from actress to
participant in the drama she will then re-enact for the screen, Jessica is empowered to accept herself
rather than assuming the identity of a character in order to have an identity. "I," she says, "was always
fleeing myself--the very opposite of the writer's craft." On the stage, the actress is "insulated from past
and future," seeking in the role she plays "home, mother, completion, peace" ( 5 - 6 ). It is by immersion
in the past--her own past history and the Venice of 1592--that Jessica is able to come to terms with her
future.
At the age of forty-three, though professing to be thirty-four-"simply reversing the digits like a dyslexic" (
10 )--Jessica has come to Venice to judge a film festival and then to star in a "filmic fantasy" of
Shakespeare Merchant of Venice to be titled Serenissima, the nickname given the city of Venice by its
inhabitants. The film will mark the end of one phase of her career--that in which she can play younger
women: "It was my last chance to play the lover before I entered that desperate no woman's land
between innamorata and grandma, that terrifying no woman's land from forty to sixty that all actresses
wander into sooner or later" ( 7 ). In Serenissima, Jessica is to play her namesake from Shakespeare's
play: "It was ironic that I had been named for Shylock's daughter, named for her by a WASP mother who
also loved Shakespeare" ( 6 ). Jessica is not new to Venice: her "WASP mother," before her suicide at the
age of fifty, had married a Venetian, and Jessica and her brother had spent summers there. The trip to
Venice is therefore a return for Jessica, and it becomes a quest for her lost mother and her own lost
child. Through Jessica Pruitt's words, Jong presents Venice as the ideal location for experience that
erases the line between reality and fantasy. Venice, Jessica remarks, is itself a "chimera": "that city of
illusions where reality becomes fantasy and fantasy becomes reality. Perhaps it is because Venice is both
-165
liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our
imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities" ( 8 ). By emphasizing this mystical quality of Venice,
Jong prepares the reader to accept as real what seems to be Jessica's fantasy, and sets up the ironic
tension governing the events of the novel.
Venice also suggests to Jessica the concept of multiple selves, a concept that is amplified as the novel
proceeds:
Each time one comes to Venice, it reflects back another self, another dream, as if it were
partly your own mirror. The air is full of the spirits of all those who have lived here,
worked here, loved here. The stones themselves are thick with history. They whisper to
you as you walk the deserted streets at night. ( 8 )
Into this city with its layers of history comes the actress accustomed to having two selves: living a life
and playing a part, and as the film festival ends and she remains in Venice with a fever, awaiting the
script of Serenissima, she becomes another Jessica, in 1592, the companion and lover of William
Shakespeare. Rather than submerging Jessica completely in the Venice of 1592, Jong allows her a dual
consciousness: as Jessica Shalach, daughter of a Jewish merchant, she is aware of also being Jessica
Pruitt, a film star in the 1980s:
How to describe living two lives at once? It is, after all, my sullen craft, my soaring art, to
live one life in the quotidian (buying food, cleaning house, caring for kin) while I lead a
more heroic life on the stagespeaking the lines of queens and courtesans, lovers and
heroines. To hold two characters in mind at once, one's self and one's not-self, this is my
art. . . . I remember the life of Jessica Pruitt as in a dream. Jessica Shalach is my
present. But human beings are so made as to wake and dream all in one day and think
nothing of it. ( 149 )
By reminding us that both dreaming and waking are part of normal lives, Jong draws more closely
together the two Jessicas, allowing both to exist simultaneously. Somewhat later in the novel Jessica
Shalach dreams of her other life as Jessica Pruitt and wonders how it is that both realities can co-exist:
"[D]o New York and
-166L.A. really exist if I am here in 1592? Can both times exist simultaneously--parallel universes, time
flowing forward in one and backward in another, and I the only wanderer, the only vagabond who can
pass between them?" ( 193 ). The implicit answer to Jessica's question must be affirmative, not only
because by the end of the novel Jessica Pruitt is once again in the Venice of the 1980s with the baby that
she and Will Shakespeare have saved from its dying mother, but also because in her time as Jessica
Shalach, Jessica Pruitt has been released from her mother's death, and has saved a child to atone for the
daughter she has lost in a custody battle with her former husband.
As a further level of fantasy, Jessica's dreams of her mother and daughter while she is in the world of
1592 serve as an imaginative healing, and, together with her restorative love for Will, provide her with
the resolve to change her life. In one dream, her mother and her daughter are dancing together, reciting
Shakespeare's sonnet 19: "All is well, I say to myself in the dream. All is well" ( 195 ). Finally, her
mother appears to her to release her from the burden of her death that Jessica has borne since she was
fifteen, "a ghostly companion" ( 5 ). Ultimately, Jessica's fantasy escapade with Will Shakespeare, a life
stripped to the essentials of love and survival, allows her to determine that she will, as Jessica Pruitt,
take command of her own life. Like the narrator in Surfacing, who removes layers of civilization and its
weight of female role-playing, Jessica requires removal from her accustomed world in order to see it
clearly and re-enter it on her own terms. In a statement that encapsulates Jong's narrative method in the
novel, Jessica thinks, "Sometimes freedom is just a matter of changing perspective" ( 199 ). Empowered
by this change in perspective, she determines to return to New York and fight for her daughter: "Antonia
deserved better than a mother who gave up a fight" ( 199 ).
The concept that life is a script to be played out and rewritten when necessary--which Weldon treats
playfully in The Rules of Life--exists on several levels in Serenissima, and is the source of much ironic
doubling. The film script of Serenissima that Jessica Pruitt awaits in Venice turns out to be the story that
she has lived with Shakespeare in 1592, so that life has preceded art. Bjorn
-167Perrson, the director, has a policy of never giving actors the script in advance of shooting the film, so
Jong precludes the possibility that Jessica has dreamed a story that she has previously read. Further,
Jessica Shalach knows the scripts of plays that Shakespeare has not, in 1592, yet written, and in a sense
Jong has written part of the script of Shakespeare's life, placing him in Venice during a period in which
scholars are uncertain of his whereabouts. In addition to these overarching uses of the concept of
scripting, Jessica foretells her own eventual command of her life's script in a comic scene during the film
festival. Pursued by a Russian film star who is bent on seducing her, Jessica must finally use physical
force to extricate herself:
He drags me to [the bed] and begins clawing at me in what seems like a rape pantomime
drawn from a B movie. I have played this scene before myself. And I know it has only
three possible scenarios: the girl gets raped, the girl gets killed, the girl gets killed and
raped. Rewrite the script! I command myself. That is your whole life's task, after all, to
rewrite these hackneyed scripts and make them real, true, authentically heroic. ( 66 )
By the end of Serenissima, Jessica has ceased merely mouthing the words of heroines, and has resolved
to become "authentically heroic" in her own script. She has been both metaphorically and literally reborn:
Jessica Shalach succumbs to the plague in 1592, and her coffin washes up on a beach in Venice in 1985,
where she emerges as Jessica Pruitt, ready to play a role for the cameras in a drama she has already
experienced, and thus to turn her life into art.
If Atwood and Jong view a return to elemental survival, unencumbered by the artifices of society, as a
cleansing preparation for rebirth into that society, Lessing, in Memoirs of a Survivor, turns that
proposition on its head. In this essentially dystopian novel, the goods, services, and bureaucratic
structures of London disintegrate gradually, revealing a barbarism that is finally more threatening in its
implications about human nature than is the virtual absence of a social order. In contrast to the
"catastrophe" that has occurred by the end of The Four-Gated City, the breakdown in
-168Memoirs occurs so slowly that one merely keeps readjusting the definition of normality to absorb the
changes. Indeed, Lessing's central theme in the novel is the human capacity to create an acceptable
reality even out of objectively unacceptable components. As the unnamed narrator states near the
beginning of the novel:
There is nothing that people won't try to accommodate into "ordinary life." It was
precisely this which gave that time its peculiar flavour; the combination of the bizarre,
the hectic, the frightening, the threatening--an atmosphere of siege or war--with what
was customary, ordinary, even decent.( 19 )
Only occasionally does "the game we were all agreeing to play" give way to reality, and people recoil
from these glimpses into the lives they have fabricated, even as food grows scarce and bands of
homeless people roam the streets. Such a dystopian vision, like that of The Handmaid's Tale, is derived
so carefully from contemporary reality as to seem almost a depiction of actual life.
Yet alongside this bleak, decaying London is a parallel world into which the narrator is able to step
through the wall of her flat. It is a set of high-ceilinged rooms that represent a kind of salvation that the
narrator has longed for: "this place held what I needed, knew was there, had been waiting for--oh, yes,
all my life, all my life" ( 13 ). It is into this parallel universe that the narrator and her "family" ultimately
escape from the inexorable collapse of a society, led by a shadowy female deity whom the narrator
describes as "the one person I had been looking for all this time" ( 216 ). The existence of this world, and
the narrator's final entrance into it, suggest that social disintegration is not answerable by a rational
solution, but that fantasy is the only response. 18 Indeed, it is possible to read this parallel world as
existing only in the narrator's own imagination, and her final entrance into it as the ultimate abandoning
of conscious, rational thought in favor of the psychological realm. Betsy Draine has suggested that the
movement into the parallel world behind the wall is a movement "from Marx to Jung"--from a belief in
human historical evolution to a belief in psychological evolution. 19 Such a reading is consonant with
Martha's and Lyndas' psychological explorations in The Four-GatedCity
-169City, and with Martha's description of an evolving race of psychologically superior people in the closing
section of that novel.
The focal point of Memoirs of a Survivor, however, is the development of Emily, the "half-grown girl" who
is mysteriously delivered to the narrator's flat and left for her to care for. The man who brings Emily says
merely, "She's your responsibility" ( 15 ), a statement that takes on more than its superficial meaning as
the story unfolds and Emily grows into a parody of socially constructed womanhood. The narrator,
Lessing suggests, about whom we know very little, may not be personally responsible for Emily's ready
capitulation to traditional female roles, but the culture she represents has formulated these norms. Emily
is twelve when she is delivered to the narrator, and fourteen when the novel ends, but she effectively
develops from a child to a mature woman in these two years, acting out several traditional female
stereotypes as she grows older.
At first, Emily appears to be a well-behaved child, announcing her full name as "Emily May Cartright" ( 16
) and promising to be "ever so tidy": "I'm really very good, you know, I won't make a mess, I never do" (
17 ). Accompanied by her dog-cat Hugo, a pet of uncertain species, Emily has an "invincible obedience" (
23 ) that causes the narrator to think of her as younger than twelve; she offers to cook and to clean, and
is "ever so handy and capable" ( 26 ). Yet the narrator senses that this childish obedience is a facade:
"Her taste in reading was adult: seeing her there, with what she had chosen, made her bright child's
manner even more impossible, almost as if she were deliberately insulting me" ( 27 ). Emily's
observations of other people have an adult sharpness and perception that startles the narrator; their
accuracy makes her realize how automatically people subject one another to "the defensive inspection,
the rapid, sharp, cold analysis" ( 31 ).
Rather abruptly, this child-woman becomes involved with successive gangs of youths who camp on the
streets near the flat during their movements out of the city. She becomes flippant about her escapades to
the narrator, who makes no attempt to discipline her even when she returns one evening drunk and
disheveled, announcing defiantly that she has not lost her virginity, "though it
-170
was a close thing, I grant you" ( 39 ). Emily's adolescent rebellion continues with a refusal to buy and
wear new clothes, a compulsion to eat and daydream, until the need to be accepted by a gang of boys as
an attractive female plunges her into dieting, "preparing her to take her place as a woman among other
women" ( 55 ). Lessing's narrator sees Emily's rehearsal of adult female images as an inevitable if
frightening process:
The way this child, this little girl, had found the materials for her dreams in the rubbish
heaps of our old civilisation, had found them, worked on them, and in spite of everything
had made her images of herself come to life . . . but such old images, so indestructible,
and so irrelevant-- ( 58 )
The ironic juxtaposition of Emily's need to prepare herself rapidly for mating rituals and the irrelevance of
those rituals in a society struggling with bare survival reveals Lessing's insistence that such behaviors are
changeless despite alterations in the social order. Female gender roles that in Atwood's Republic of Gilead
are maintained by edict are in Memoirs of a Survivor perpetuated by instinct. At the age of thirteen,
Emily appears to be seventeen or eighteen, and "had mated herself in imagination with romantic heroes
and chief executives and harem tyrants" ( 60 ).Of the novel's structure, Mona Knapp has remarked that it
hinges on the stages in Emily's relationship with Gerald, the young leader of one of the roaming bands of
youths, with whom she experiences love, jealousy, separation, and reconciliation. Knapp outlines the
stages as sections of the narrative:
1. Emily alone (to p. 84 )
2. Emily and Gerald ( 84 ff.)
3. Emily and June ( 102 ff.)
4. June and Gerald ( 142 ff.)
5. Emily alone once more ( 169 ff.)
6. Emily and Gerald reunited ( 213 ff.)
Knapp remarks of this scheme that it is "dangerously similar to the classic girl-meets-boy novel," and
that "the archetype of feminine behavior acted out by [Emily] is woefully traditional and un-171dynamic." 20 But Lessing has in fact encapsulated the traditional romance plot within her dystopian novel
in order to demonstrate how enduring this plot actually is--how, in the midst of social upheaval and
decay, a woman may not only adhere to the traditional script for her life, but may experience it in
accelerated form if time is short: between the ages of twelve and fourteen Emily seems to pass from
childhood to womanhood and even on to middle age. Lessing describes her as "the eternal woman" ( 171
) and "the jaded woman of our dead civilization," knowing that love was "an illness to be endured, a trap
which might lead her to betray her own nature, her good sense, and her real purposes" ( 201 ). So Emily
plays out the role of the subordinate "wife" in Gerald's communal family, enduring his unfaithfulness,
taking him back--a parody that is rendered grotesque because of her age, even though, at fourteen, she
has "the eyes of a mature woman of about thirty-five, or forty" ( 201 ).
The parallel world that the narrator enters a number of times during the novel seems at first a personal
refuge for her, but sometimes it is in fact inhabited--haunted might be a better term--by Emily's parents
and by Emily herself as a product of their terrifyingly conventional marriage and parenting. If this
alternate world represents the recesses of the narrator's own psyche, these scenes may be viewed as her
attempt to establish an understandable origin for Emily; within the paradigm of the traditional life script
that Lessing plays out in the novel these scenes deepen the sense that Emily's is a life chosen for her
rather than one of her own choosing. The narrator witnesses in these rooms behind the wall of her own
living room several scenes from Emily's childhood, first when she is four years old and already realizes
that she has little power over her life:
Her face was old and weary. She seemed to understand it all, to have foreseen it, to be
living through it because she had to, feeling it as a thick heaviness all around her--Time,
through which she must push herself till she could be free of it. For none of them could
help themselves--not the mother, that feared and powerful woman; not the nurse, badtempered because of her life. ( 45 )
-172Another scene, glimpsed when Emily is five or six, reveals the mother bemoaning to a visitor the
entrapment of her life as a homemaker: the lack of time for herself, the repetitions of housekeeping, the
demands of the children--especially Emily, "who knew she was the chief culprit, the one being
complained of" ( 68 ). Lessing's description of Emily's mother's malaise could have been quoted directly
from The Feminine Mystique:
She was trapped, but did not know why she felt this, for her marriage and her children
were what she personally had wanted and had aimed for--what society had chosen for
her. Nothing in her education or experience had prepared her for what she did in fact
feel, and she was isolated in her distress and her bafflement, sometimes even believing
that she might perhaps be ill in some way. ( 70 )
Ultimately, the narrator traces Emily's mother's rejection of her to the mother's own emotionally deprived
childhood as she discovers the woman, as a small child, weeping from loneliness: "up went the little
arms, desperate for comfort, but they would be one day those great arms that had never been taught
tenderness" ( 151 ). The scene is, as Lorna Sage puts it, one of "infinite regress": "Each generation has
stamped its own discipline, its own wretchedly acquired boundaries, on the next. The 'personal' is not the
unique: its claustrophobia derives precisely from its repetitions." 21
The most grotesque image of Emily that the narrator sees in the world beyond the wall--and one that
unites the concept of Emily as a child-woman with Lessing's emphasis on women's cultural conditioning-is the image of Emily at fourteen, against the pristine whiteness of a schoolgirl's room, wearing the
vulgar scarlet evening dress of an adult woman. Not only does the scene solidify the contrast between
virginity and blatant sexuality; it also underscores the notion of woman-as-object:
It was a dress of blatant vulgarity. It was also, in a perverted way, nonsexual, for all its
advertisement of the body, and embodied the fantasies of a certain kind of man who,
dressing a woman thus, made her a doll, ridiculous, both provocative and helpless;
disarmed her, made her something to hate, to pity, to fear--a grotesque. ( 187 )
-173The dress and its implications are similar to the section of The Handmaid's Tale in which Offred's
Commander gives her a pink and purple evening dress to wear on their clandestine trip to the
nightclub/whorehouse. The Commander articulates the point that Lessing's narrator has made when he
says to Offred, "Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it's part of the procreational
strategy." Offred, freed for the night from her red Handmaid's uniform, responds mockingly, "So now that
we don't have different clothes, . . . you merely have different women" (237). No such sense of irony is
available to Emily, however; faced with the disapproving figure of her mother, who dislikes her as much
in her adult garb as she had in diapers, Emily disappears in a puff of red smoke, "like a morality tale of
flesh and the devil" ( 188 ).
The disintegration of this bizarre image of Emily is followed by the final disintegration of the society
surrounding the narrator, Emily, and Hugo, the strange pet whose loyalty comes to seem the only
humane pulse in the increasing barbarity of life. When the narrator finally senses that the moment is
right for an escape to one of the worlds behind the wall, "into another order of world altogether" ( 217 ),
she signals a repudiation of contemporary civilization and the Edenic beginning of a new order. If, as
Claire Sprague has proposed, the communal life that Emily and Gerald have attempted to establish with
the roving bands of children on the streets of London makes them "a new Adam and Eve,"' and the novel
itself "a failed creation myth," 22 it is ironic that the narrator ushers into the new world behind the wall a
version of the traditional nuclear family: Emily, the disillusioned woman; Gerald, the ineffectual father
figure; and several rebellious children. Only Hugo seems transformed--"a splendid animal, handsome, all
kindly dignity and command" ( 217 )--as if to suggest that human beings alone are incapable of reordering the world.
In fictions that are not overtly speculative--that remain tied to a recognizable reality, however skewed or
exaggerated--the utopian or dystopian fantasies they contain are frequently hinted to be dreams or
hallucinations of the central characters. In Serenissima, for example, except for the presence of the
infant in Jessica's room at the end, her adventure with Will Shakespeare can be in-174terpreted as feverish dreams brought on by her illness. The parallel universe beyond the wall in Memoirs
of a Survivor may be viewed as a mental sanctuary for an elderly woman enduring the stress of social
disintegration. By creating such ambiguity, Jong and Lessing heighten the drama of ironic juxtaposition.
Early reviewers of Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time were quick to see, mistakenly, the utopian and
dystopian visions that are part of the novel as drug-induced hallucinations or products of Consuelo
Ramos' mental condition as diagnosed by the various mental institutions in which she is confined. But
such readings ignore the fact that Woman on the Edge of Time is a successful blending of realistic and
speculative modes; the story of Consuelo's life as a poor MexicanAmerican woman in New York and in its
institutions for social misfits is, as Margaret Atwood has put it, "rendered in excruciating, grotty,
Zolaesque detail, pill by deadening pill, meal by cardboard meal, ordeal by ordeal, and as a rendition of
what life in a New York bin is like for those without money or influence it is totally convincing and
depressing." 23 Just as convincing, though in a different way, are the utopian and dystopian segments of
the novel--visions of alternate futures between which those in the present of the novel seem able to
choose, if only they are made aware of the necessity of choice.
On the surface, Connie Ramos would seem to be an unlikely guide or medium to a utopian future. She is
a thirty-seven-yearold welfare recipient who has been deserted by her husband and rejected by her
successful brother. When her relationship with a black, blind pickpocket ends with his death, her
depression and consequent drinking cause her to accidentally break her daughter's wrist, whereupon her
daughter is removed from her care and Connie is judged to be mentally ill and is committed to a mental
institution--caught in the double bind of being found guilty of child abuse and at the same time judged
incapable of rational thought or action. As Piercy's novel opens, Connie is institutionalized once more for
having injured her niece's pimp while defending her from his attack. Yet Piercy makes it clear that Connie
is a victim of the social system; her only crimes are poverty and her Mexican heritage. Moreover, Connie
is well aware of the ab-175surdity of her dilemma. Early in the novel, for example, longing for Mexican food, Connie notes that the
Mexican restaurants in New York are too expensive for her: "Ridiculous to live in a place where the taste
of your own soul food was priced beyond you. She got to eat Chinese oftener than Mexican" ( 29 ). Part
of the ironic fabric of the novel is Piercy's choice of a woman in Connie's circumstances to be visionary
and time traveler.
This irony is deepened by the fact that Luciente, Connie's guide to the utopia of 2137, finds her gifted
and attractive. At their first meeting, Luciente tells her, "You're an unusual person. Your mind is unusual.
You're what we call a catcher, a receptive" ( 41 ). Moreover, Luciente immediately comprehends the
difference between the way he regards her and the way she is regarded by her own culture: "Believe me,
Connie, I have respect for you. We've been trying to get through for three months before I chanced on
your mind. You're an extraordinary top catcher. In our culture you would be much admired, which I take
it isn't true in this one?" ( 42 ). Connie has been vaguely aware of having powers of mental prescience
before this, but their only value has been to enable her to predict when her husband was going to hit her.
This woman who is so poor that she is thrilled to find an abandoned ballpoint pen on the subway is
welcomed by the community of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, in the year 2137, where wealth and ethnic
origins are not issues.
Sheila Delany, in Writing Woman, makes a useful distinction between two kinds of utopias: the
programmatic and the ideological. She places Woman on the Edge of Time in the former group, which
she describes as follows:
[The programmatic utopia] stresses a comprehensive social critique and serious social
planning, attempts to demonstrate what should change and what might realistically
replace present arrangements; it tends to propose social reforms that give scope to
human variability. 24
Though certainly utopian, the culture of Mattapoisett is dynamic rather than static; there is conflict, and
there are problems to work through as the community evolves. The utopia that Piercy imagines can be
seen as growing out of the period in which the novel was written; as Delany puts it, it is "a heady blend
of late 1960s
-176and early 1970s countercultures: R. D. Laing, group therapy, natural health foods, marijuana, ecology,
anarchism, socialism, New Left and Yippie politics, and the radical wing of the women's liberation
movement" ( 175 ). Mattapoisett, and by implication the rest of North America, embodies an ideology
long a part of the "American dream" in that it is pastoral and communal. Education is accomplished by an
apprenticeship system, government is decentralized, and there are few hierarchies. Yet the culture has
not abandoned technology: much communication is electronic, human embryos are grown in vitro, and
various machines take the drudgery out of life. Of great interest to Connie, who "visits" Mattapoisett
while in a mental institution, the society of 2137 has its "madhouses," too, but they are places that one
enters voluntarily, "to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive
infancy--getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind" ( 66 ). In short, it is a culture that
values mental states other than those we consider "normal."
As in most feminist utopias, the nuclear family does not exist, because it is associated with patriarchal
concepts of power and ownership. Parenting is by choice, not necessity, and men may choose to take
hormones that allow them to nurse infants. In fact, the utopia that Piercy envisions is powerfully
androgynous, even linguistically: the pronoun "per," from "person," refers to both male and female.
Connie initially assumes Luciente to be a man rather than a woman, and one may have lovers--called
"pillow friends"--of either gender. Connie, who in New York in 1976 considers herself an aging woman at
thirty-seven, is welcomed into the easy sexuality of Mattapoisett by Bee, a pillow friend of Luciente, and
it is clear that through Bee the whole community is making love to her: "We all care for you. But you're
of a society with many taboos. It's easier for me to hold you for all of us" ( 189 ). In the absence of
exclusive, power-based relationships, jealousy cannot exist. The juxtaposition of this world with the one
of 1976 throws into sharp relief the ills of contemporary society, especially as they affect women.
Much of the dynamism of Piercy's utopia is its precariousness: it is a possible future, not necessarily the
future, and it can, as Luciente puts it, "wink out" if those in Connie's present fail to make
-177the proper choices about politics, the environment, and human development. One chapter in Woman on
the Edge of Time is devoted to an alternate future in which Connie lands by mistake, and it is
characteristic of Piercy's purpose that much of the horror of this dystopia is related to gender
relationships. In contrast to the environmentally pure Mattapoisett, the New York of the future is an
urban nightmare of pollution and high-rise compartmentalization. Everything in this culture is artificial: a
window is actually a changeable picture; food is made from coal, algae, and wood byproducts, artificially
flavored; and wealthy people achieve longevity through repeated organ transplants. Gildina 547-92145822-KBJ, the woman whose apartment Connie has inadvertently entered, has through plastic surgery,
implants, and shots been made into a "cartoon of femininity" (288), and participates in a form of socially
sanctioned prostitution in which women are under contarct to men for specified periods of time: "Contract
sex," Gildina explains. "It means you agree to put out for so long for so much" (289).
Piercy's dystopian vision has certain parallels with that of At- wood's The Handmaid's Tale. Both feature
an enforced prostitution, though the object of it in Woman on the Edge of Time is not procreation but
sexual pleasure. Piercy's New York of the future and the Republic of Gilead are highly stratified societies,
with extremes of wealth and poverty. Connie learns from Gildina about the "richies"--"the Rockmellons,
the Morganfords, the DukePonts" (297)--who may live two hundred years, and the "duds," who are
farmed for organ transplants. Women in both societies are closely guarded and monitored to be sure that
they do nothing except the function they are assigned, and even their emotions are artificially induced:
the Handmaids are supposed to feel ritualized joy at birthings and anger at Salvagings; Gildina takes
pills: "risers, soothers, sleepers, wakers, euphors, passion pills, the whole works" (292). Like Atwood ten
years later, Piercy extrapolates from the technological and ideological possibilities of her own time to
project a world in which women are truly objects.
While a visitor to this alternate future, Connie realizes that she is witnessing the eventuality that Luciente
and her friends are fighting to prevent: "So that was the other world that might come
-178to be. That was Luciente's war, and she was enlisted in it" (301). Connie's resolve is strengthened by the
advice of Bee, her Mattapoisett lover: "There's always a thing you can deny an oppressor, if only your
allegiance. Your belief. Your co-oping. Often even with vastly unequal power, you can find or force an
opening to fight back. In your time many without power found ways to fight. Till that became a power"
(328). Connie's only arena for rebellion is the hospital to which she is confined, but her resistance is
overt rather than passive, and her targets are appropriate for one enlisted in Luciente's war: the doctors
who have placed an experimental implant in her brain as a means of controlling her behavior--an
experiment they intend to repeat on other patients. The poison that Connie puts in the coffee in the
doctors' lounge kills four of them, and the act insures that Connie will never be released from institutions,
but she has found a channel for her anger, and has regained some of her self-esteem: "I'm a dead
woman now too. I know it. But I did fight them. I'm not ashamed. I tried. . . . to you who will be born
from my best hopes, to you I dedicate my act of war. At least once I fought and won" (375). Connie
Ramos has won a small battle in the large war to achieve Luciente's future, and Woman on the Edge of
Time, in its presentation of alternate future societies, reminds the reader that the future depends on the
present.
The Female Man also presents utopian and dystopian alternatives, and Russ, like Piercy, proposes that
present actions create future probabilities, but she does so in a far more complex manner by insisting on
parallelism and relativity instead of direct historical progression:
The Past one visits is never one's own Past but always somebody else's; or rather, one's
visit to the Past instantly creates another Present (one in which the visit has already
happened) and what you visit is the Past belonging to that Present--an entirely different
matter than your own Past. And with each decision you make (back there in the Past)
that new probable universe itself branches, creating simultaneously a new Past and a
New Present, or to put it plainly, a new universe. 25
Universes, in Russ's terms, are personal and individual rather than objective historical realities; they are
states of mind. And because
-179the four central "characters" in The Female Man are aspects of a single central consciousness, Russ
suggests that each of us may contain more than one world. Whileaway, from which Janet Evason comes,
and the world of Alice-Jael, which consists of Manland and Womanland, are societies of the future, but
not necessarily outgrowths of the reader's present. Whileaway, Russ notes, is "a name for the Earth ten
centuries from now, but not our Earth, if you follow me. . . . Whileaway, you may gather, is in the future.
But not our future" ( 7 ). The Female Man, like Woman on the Edge of Time, is a cautionary tale, but
what Piercy achieves by stark realism, Russ achieves by parody and hyperbole, using these devices to
undescore the power of language and the imagination to create alternate realities.
The paradox of the title The Female Man has several ironic manifestations in the novel. Jeannine, who
inhabits the 1930s, is, as Rachel DuPlessis notes, a female man "because she is maleidentified. She
'turns into a man' by subsuming herself in male demands, by identifying with her oppression and
oppressor. Thus she is a 'man'--seeing herself completely through male eyes." 26 Joanna, who bears the
given name of the author, "is closest to ourselves":
the woman who stands in a puddle of water, grasping two alternating electrical currents,
trying to fuse them. She lives in an oscillating contradiction: between woman and man,
feminist and phallocrat, joy and rage. . . . Joanna did not turn into a member of the male
gender or sex, but she did turn into a generic man--or, as one might translate the term,
a human, a person. ( 183 )
Janet is to some extent able to circumvent the gender issue because Whileaway is an all-female society
like Herland. When she lands on our Earth and is confronted with blatant sexism, she responds with
decisive force born, it seems, of simple disbelief. Jael, the fourth component of this multiple
consciousness, adopts a "male" role in two ways. Bearing the name of a Biblical warrior (but with the
paradoxical last name of Reasoner), she is an assassin, engaged in on-going physical warfare between
Manland and Womanland. She also reserves stereotypical sexual-aggressive
-180roles by keeping a beautiful young man as a sexual plaything, completely subjugated to her whims.
Whileaway, more like Piercy's Mattapoisett than like Gilman's Herland, is not a static, pacific society.
Janet Evason ("son" of Eva) is a Safety and Peace officer who has fought four duels--"I've killed four
times" ( 2 )--and the author comments that "Whileawayans are not nearly as peaceful as they sound" (
49 ). Yet in the nine centuries following the plague that killed all the men on Whileaway, the women have
developed a technologically sophisticated yet still pastoral culture that is characterized primarily by its
energy:
the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the
cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of
wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries,
mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies
and circular mathematical proofs (over which afficionados are moved to tears), and the
best graffiti in this or any other world. ( 54 )
Russ is less concerned than Piercy or Gilman to provide a complete picture of her utopia; Whileaway is
closer to what Delany calls the "ideological" utopia, which concentrates on "a few key areas of social
concern" ( Writing Woman, 158). As in other feminist utopias, a central issue is family structure and
child-rearing. The women of Whileaway marry, but are not sexually monogamous. A Whileawayan woman
bears a single child (sometimes twins) at the age of thirty, and enjoys an extended period of maternity
leave from her job, spending the next five years in a common nursery with other mothers and children of
the same age. Parenting effectively ends at this point, because at the age of five, children are sent away
to district schools, where until puberty they are instructed in the practical skills needed by the society.
Russ notes that Whileawayans have a saying: "When the mother and child are separated they both howl,
the child because it is separated from the mother, the mother because she has to go back to work" ( 49
). Russ's utopia thus provides for both intense maternal nurturance and the woman's commitment to her
career, and she
-181simultaneously humanizes Whileaway by acknowledging the pain of separation.
Apart from the enforced schooling of childhood, social organization in Whileaway is relatively loose and
non-bureaucratic. From puberty until the age of seventeen, at which time they become part of the labor
force, young people roam the world, following their own curiosity; at twenty-two they achieve "Full
Dignity" and are allowed to join families and participate in the adult world, part of which involves
developing a "network of informal associations of the like-minded which is Whileaway's substitute for
everything else but family" ( 51 ). Old age is respected: the old are free to dream, to create, to enjoy "a
freedom they haven't had since adolescence" ( 53 ), so aging is eagerly anticipated rather than feared.
Part of the charm of Whileaway is that, even though Russ offers alternatives to some of the problems
that women face in contemporary society, the people are neither perfect nor perfectly happy. Ideality
creates stasis, and Russ envisions a dynamic culture. The very patterns of life seem designed to prevent
contentment:
Whileawayan psychology locates the basis of Whileawayan character in the early
indulgence, pleasure, and flowering which is drastically curtailed by the separation from
the mothers. This (it says) gives Whileawayan life its characteristic independence, its
dissatisfaction, its suspicion, and its tendency toward a rather irritable solipcism. ( 52 )
The same pattern of indulgence and withdrawal is seen as the source of Whileaway's lack of sexual
monogamy: "the reluctance to form a tie that will engage every level of emotion, all the person, all the
time" ( 53 ). Russ cites statements by a venerated Whileawayan philosopher, Dunyasha Bernadetteson,
as warnings against an ideal happiness. Without irritations and dissatisfactions, she has said, "we would
all become contented slobs" ( 52 ); "we would become so happy we would sit down on our fat, pretty
behinds and soon we would start starving, nyet?" ( 53 - 54 ). The casual, flippant tone of the
philosopher's remarks is characteristic of the humorous approach to life in Whileaway, where little is
forbidden and there is only a handful of taboos: "sexual relations with any-182body considerably older or younger than oneself, waste, ignorance, offending others without intending to"
( 53 ).
In stark contrast to the easy high spirits of Whileaway is the world of deliberate, grim conflict represented
by Alice-Jael Reasoner, whose code name "Sweet Alice" is ironic in light of her hard-edged, high-tech
deadliness. As in Woman on the Edge of Time, the essential difference between utopian and dystopian
visions is expressed in terms of the natural versus the artificial, and the readers's first encounter with
Jael is in a New York apartment with a window that is actually a series of changeable pictures. Alice-Jael
is herself presented as unnatural: her head and hands move "like puppets controlled by separate
strings"; her teeth seem to be "one fused ribbon of steel"; and her laugh is "the worst human sound I
have ever heard": "a hard screeching yell that ends in gasps and rusty sobbing, as if some mechanical
vulture on a gigantic garbage heap on the surface of the moon were giving one forced shriek for the
death of all organic life" ( 158 -59). DuPlessis observes that Alice-Jael is the embodiment of the
ruthlessness of our own time: "However revolting Jael is--and she is not pleasant--she is the mirror
image of the glib, patronizing, and equally murderous patterns of the socially acceptable relations
between the sexes" ( 184 ). Manland and Womanland are armed camps, complete with guards and
military code names, and Jael embodies the essence of women's anger at men for centuries of
subjugation. Jael's culture is founded on perpetual warfare; when "The War Between the Nations" was
over, "people began shopping for a new war," and found that "there was only one war left" ( 164 ).
Child-rearing in Manland is the obverse of the nurturance, freedom, and practical training that
characterizes Whileaway. Except for a wealthy few, who have their own children, Manlanders purchase
infants from Womanland and set them, at the age of five, on a course of training that determines which
can be "real-men." Those who fail early undergo sex-change operations and become known as "the
changed"; those who fail later on forego surgery and become "the half-changed": "impressionists of
femininity who keep their genitalia but who grow slim, grow languid, grow emotional and feminine" ( 167
). In this all-male society the
-183changed" and the "half-changed" are the sexual objects of the "real-men," who shun real women. The
goal of Manland is Total Masculinity, and Jael muses about what might happen if that goal were ever
reached:
I suspect we real women still figure, however grotesquely, in Manland's deepest dreams;
perhaps on that morning of Total Masculinity they will all invade Womanland, rape
everyone in sight (if they still remember how) and then kill them, and after that commit
suicide on a pyramid of their victims' panties. ( 170 -71)
Sexuality, in Jael's world, is still the major power play, as is demonstrated in her conversation with one of
the leaders of Manland, whose underlying hatred of women surfaces in his attempt to rape her during
what is supposed to be a negotiating conference. Jael, the warrior, unsheathes the claws on the ends of
her fingers and kills him, not so much in self-defense as in exultant anger. At the end of the novel Jael
tries to convince Janet that the war she is fighting has made possible Janet's world of Whileaway, but
Janet refuses to believe this, thereby rejecting the concept of historical continuity and refusing to bring
the utopia and the dystopia together in the same universe.
As these five quite different novels demonstrate, both the utopian and the dystopian visions of women's
speculative fiction have common elements that point to critiques of our own time. Whether in positive or
negative terms, these authors address the nature and structure of the family, the natural as opposed to
the artificial-especially the arbitrary imposition of gender roles--women's sexual freedom, ways of
resolving conflict, and the importance of the imagination. Rather than maps for social change, these
fictions represent transcendence over the status quo, and even the bleaker visions urge the possibility-even the inevitability--of change. Marge Piercy has noted that one of the reasons she admires Joanna
Russ's work is that she "demand[s] that you read [her] work actively." 27 The central activity of reading
speculative fiction is constant comparison between two sets of realities, and feminist fantasies, by
refusing to be confined to the reader's observable world, force a re-vision of that world through the
medium of ironic drama.
-184-
Conclusion
In 1972, near the beginning of the period that this study covers, and before many of the novels
considered here were written or published, Joanna Russ wrote a curiously prophetic passage in
concluding her essay "What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write." Anticipating some of
the concerns she would express in How To Suppress Women's Writing and the themes she would
explore in The Female Man, Russ ends her essay by expressing her sense of the dangers and
promises of a period of transition:
When things are changing, those who know least about them--in the usual terms--may make the
best job of them. There is so much to be written about, and here we are with nothing but the rags
and tatters of what used to mean something. One thing I think we must know-that our traditional
gender roles will not be part of the future, as long as the future is not a second Stone Age. Our
traditions, our books, our morals, our manners, our films, our speech, our economic organization,
everything we have inherited, tells us that to be a Man one must bend Nature to one's will--or other
men. This means ecological catastrophe in the first instance and war in the second. To be a Woman,
one must be first and foremost a mother and after that a server of Men; this means overpopulation
and the perpetuation of the first two disasters. The roles are deadly. The myths that serve them are
fatal.
Women cannot write--using the old myths. But using new ones--? 1
Russ assumes in these remarks a close relationship between literature and the social order,
understanding that literature perpetuates the myths and values by which we live, and she calls upon
women writers to devise new mythologies adequate to reverse the destructive patterns of the past.
With the exception of a few utopian visions, such as Piercy's Mattapoisett and Russ's own
Whileaway, women's fiction of the past twenty years cannot be said to have created systematic new
mythologies to replace those of the past. However, women writers have taken the step that
necessarily precedes such formulations, which is to undermine the old mythologies of gender
relationships by questioning and revising them: challenging the stereotypes, fairy tales, traditions,
and histories that have prescribed the plots of women's lives and estimates of their power and
authority. By doing so, they have insisted on the relativity and mutability of truth and reality.
Fictions as disparate as Fay Weldon's witty parodies and the tragedy of Morrison The Bluest Eye are
equally relentless in deconstructing the received wisdom of a culture by revealing the terrible ironic
distance between official cultural images and pronouncements and actual human realities.
It is in fact this questioning of received tradition that is the hallmark of women's fiction during the
past twenty years. Conventional gender relationships, cultural maxims and truisms, and even the
nature of identity itself--all have become the objects of the ironic eye of the novelist. To accomplish
the task of revision, women writers of this period have questioned and revised the form of the novel
itself. They have appropriated and altered traditional fictional genres--the epistolary novel, the tale,
the fairy tale, utopias, and dystopias--and have written narratives in which the validity of the
author's or narrator's own perceptions is called into question and revised or reconstructed. What
Godwin refers to in Violet Clay as "The Book of Old Plots" is revealed for what it is: a collection of
outworn stories once used to dictate the scripts of women's lives, a fiction that must be transcended
so that a woman may, in Carolyn Heilbrun's words, "write her own life in advance of living it."
Yet it has been equally important for these writers to show the continuing power of the old plots,
and to acknowledge the weight of tradition and habit. Joan Foster is caught in the plots of popular
romances in Lady Oracle; in The Odd Woman Jane Clifford lives in the world of the classic English
novels she teaches; and Jane Gray remains distrustful of her freedom from the enclosed plots of the
novels that haunt her in The Waterfall. More tragically, Theresa Dunn , in Looking for Mr.
Goodbar, mistakes promiscuity for freedom and dies as merely another female stereotype. Dreams
and fantasies may empower, but they may also be false or misleading, as they are for Pecola
Breedlove in The Bluest Eye and Mira in The Women's Room. The fact that these characters are
unable to fully script their own lives testifies to the difficulty of altering entrenched mythologies,
and one reason why The Handmaid's Tale is so compelling is that Atwood demonstrates how
precariously balanced is the feminist agenda over the waters of regressive tradition.
The struggle to imagine lives, selves, ways of being that transcend tradition, however, permeates
these novels just as it does those in which an individual character in some measure breaks free of
inhibiting forces. To acknowledge the power of old texts, old scripts, is simultaneously to claim
power for the text one is writing, and when, as is the case in these novels, the old texts are viewed
ironically, the power they lose in the process is transferred to the new texts, as the ironist claims
superiority over the subject of her irony. To demonstrate the destructive influence of female images
promulgated by literature, film, and other media is at the same time to demystify those images by
showing them to be culturally defined constructs, products of historical moments, which can be
rendered absurd. The very fascination with language itself that figures in all of these novels
demonstrates the authors' distrust of the power of words to define and confine women's experience.
Moving, frequently, from silence to language, the central characters approach language as the
cultural artifact it in fact is, measuring and weighing words, clichés, and maxims--what Weldon
terms "the rules of life"--rather than accepting them as valid. Along with this careful examination of
the artifacts of received tradition goes imagining beyond that tradition--the dreams and fantasies of
alternate worlds, alternate lives, different values. Such imagining is the task of feminist critics as
well as the works they study; in Subject to Change, for example, Nancy K. Miller writes, "the hope
I express for a female future is a desire for all that we don't know about what it might mean to be
women beyond the always already provided identity of Women with which we can only struggle." 2
Part of the struggle that feminist scholarship has had during the past twenty years--and a good part
of its richness as well--stems from its own attempts at self-definition while at the same time trying
to avoid the trap of adopting the authoritarian model that would belie the values of feminism itself.
Like the central character in one of these novels, feminist scholars seek a new order that will not
merely replicate the systems of authority they seek to overturn--freedom without anarchy, order
without oppression. 3
Given the enormous differences in setting, style, and thematic emphasis among the novels
considered in this study, what, if any, general outlines for alternate lives for women emerge from
them? Are there common impulses, hopes, or designs that could begin to outline what Miller calls
"a female future"? Obviously, each of the imagined utopias sets forth a version of ideality, but what
do these visions share with the implications of dystopian visions and realistic accounts of
contemporary women? Most obvious, it seems to me, is a common plea for recognition that the
emotional, intuitive powers of women neither negate nor contradict their intellectual abilities. The
very fact that the insistence on dreaming and imagining so frequently co-exists with the cool
rationality of the ironic stance suggests that the capacities of feeling and thinking are to be equally
valued. In Russ's Whileaway, women very capably run a complex culture, but at the same time
afford themselves ample opportunity for creativity and nurturance. This same theme is conveyed
negatively, in the splitting into separate selves of characters such as Theresa Dunn and Jane Gray,
and the identification with the intellect that precludes emotional commitment for Jane Clifford in
The Odd Woman. Wholeness, these authors suggestwould necessitate abandoning the stereotypes of
women as primarily emotional beings who deny their essential selves when they move into the
intellectual realm.
Another common element is a celebration of women's sexuality and the desire for sexual freedom-not the self-destructive promiscuity of Terry Dunn, but an ability to engage in sexual activity
without regard to gender, as in Piercy's utopian Mattapoisett and Walker The Color Purple, and
without the guilt that afflicts Jane Gray and that numerous mothers in these novels attempt to instill
in their daughters. The joy of sexual pleasure, as presented, for example, in Serenissima and The
Female Man, is contrasted to sexual degradation in The Handmaid's Tale, The Memoirs of a
Survivor, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. But sexuality is conceived more broadly in these novels; it
includes childbirth, especially in The Waterfall; nurturance, in the utopian sections of The Female
Man and Woman on the Edge of Time; and a general acceptance of biological femaleness, seen most
clearly in Surfacing and Fear of Flying.
Concomitant with the desire for acceptance of women's intellectual and biological nature--as norms
rather than aberrations-is a reformulation of the concept of power. The questioning and rejection of
culturally defined formulations of womanhood that are so pervasive in these novels are essentially
attempts to deny the authority of the patriarchy. Through ironic revisions of cultural history and
mythology, these authors present traditional systems of power as destructive and finally ineffective,
and propose instead various versions of non-hierarchal cultures based in the values of nurturance
and individual fulfillment. With the exception of Whileaway and Mattapoisett, these novels do not
contain fully realized alternative social systems, but the dystopian visions in The Handmaid's Tale,
Woman on the Edge of Time, and Memoirs of a Survivor imply their opposites by pointing up the
failure of societies organized, as Russ puts it, so that men "must bend Nature to one's will--or other
men," resulting in ecological disaster and war. The novels that do not have such visionary
components nonetheless make strikingly similar suggestions about the nature of power and
authority. In the alternate reality implied in these works, poverty and the color of one's skin would
not be invita- tions to coercive power, as they are in The Bluest Eye, The Color Purple, and Woman
on the Edge of Time. The psychiatric establishment, in Woman on the Edge of Time as well as in
The Four-Gated City and Fear of Flying, is presented as cold and unfeeling, and also serves as a
metaphor for other institutions that deny autonomy and individuality.
The most fundamental and pervasive characteristic of a new social order suggested by the
contemporary novel by women, however, is a re-ordering of the relationship to language itself.
Recognizing the power of language to confine and define, to claim power, to coerce and subjugate,
these novelists suggest not merely the need for a non-sexist language, but more importantly
women's full participation in the determination of meaning. And it is here that the devices of irony
and fantasy come into full play, for it is the purpose of irony to cast doubt on assumed meaning and
of fantasy to reformulate meaning in accordance with a new reality--an alternate world which, once
imagined, becomes a possible, a potential place to live.
writing on the body
A GENDER AND CULTURE READER
-i-
Questia
Media
America,
Inc.
www.questia.com
Publication Information: Book Title: Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Contributors: Katie Conboy editor, Nadia Medina - editor, Sarah Stanbury - editor. Publisher: Columbia University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication
Year: 1997. Page Number: i.
1
Medical Metaphors of Women's Bodies MENSTRUATION
AND MENOPAUSE
Emily Martin
Lavoisier
makes
experiments with
substances in his
laboratory and now
he concluded that
this and that takes
It is difficult to see how our current scientific ideas are infused by cultural
place when there is
assumptions; it is easier to see how scientific ideas from the past, ideas that
burning. He does
now seem wrong or too simple, might have been affected by cultural ideas of
not say that it
an earlier time. To lay the groundwork for a look at contemporary scientific
might
happen
views of menstruation and menopause, I begin with the past.
otherwise another
time. He has got
hold of a definite
worldpicture--not
of course one that
he invented: he
learned it as a
child. I say worldpicture and not
hypothesis, because
it is the matter-ofcourse foundation
for his research
and as such also
goes unmentioned.
--Ludwig
Wittgenstein, On
Certainty
It was an accepted notion in medical literature from the ancient Greeks until the late eighteenth
century that male and female bodies were structurally similar. As Nemesius, bishop of Emesa,
Syria, in the fourth century, put it, "women have the same genitals as men, except that theirs are
inside the body and not outside it." Although increasingly detailed anatomical understanding (such
as the discovery of the nature of the ovaries in the last half of the seventeenth century) changed the
details, medical
____________________
x
Emily Martin, "Medical Metaphors of Women's Bodies: Menstruation and Menopause." From
The Woman in the Body by Emily Martin. Copyright © 1987, 1992 by Emily Martin. Reprinted
by permission of Beacon press.
scholars from Galen in second-century Greece to Harvey in seventeenthcentury Britain all assumed
that women's internal organs were structurally analogous to men's external ones. 1
Although the genders were structurally similar, they were not equal. For one thing, what could be
seen of men's bodies was assumed as the pattern for what could not be seen of women's. For
another, just as humans as a species possessed more "heat" than other animals, and hence were
considered more perfect, so men possessed more "heat" than women and hence were considered
more perfect. The relative coolness of the female prevented her reproductive organs from extruding
outside the body but, happily for the species, kept them inside where they provided a protected
place for conception and gestation. 2
During the centuries when male and female bodies were seen as composed of analogous structures,
a connected set of metaphors was used to convey how the parts of male and female bodies
functioned. These metaphors were dominant in classical medicine and continued to operate through
the nineteenth century:
The body was seen, metaphorically, as a system of dynamic interactions with its environment.
Health or disease resulted from a cumulative interaction between constitutional endowment and
environmental circumstance. One could not well live without food and air and water; one had to
live in a particular climate, subject one's body to a particular style of life and work. Each of these
factors implied a necessary and continuing physiological adjustment. The body was always in a
state of becoming--and thus always in jeopardy. 3
Two subsidiary assumptions governed this interaction: first, that "every part of the body was related
inevitably and inextricably with every other" and, second, that "the body was seen as a system of
intake and outgo--a system which had, necessarily, to remain in balance if the individual were to
remain healthy." 4
Given these assumptions, changes in the relationship of body functions occurred constantly
throughout life, though more acutely at some times than at others. In Edward Tilt's influential midnineteenth-century account, for example, after the menopause blood that once flowed out of the
body as menstruation was then turned into fat:
Fat accumulates in women after the change of life, as it accumulates in animals from whom the
ovaries have been removed. The withdrawal of the sexual stimulus from the ganglionic nervous
system, enables it to turn into fat and self-aggrandisement that blood which might otherwise have
perpetuated the race. 5
During the transition to menopause, or the "dodging time," the blood could not be turned into fat, so
it was either discharged as hemorrhage or through other compensating mechanisms, the most
important of which was "the flush":
As for thirty-two years it had been habitual for women to lose about 3 oz. of blood every month, so
it would have been indeed singular, if there did not exist some well-continued compensating
discharges acting as wastegates to protect the system, until/health could be permanently reestablished by striking new balances in the allotment of blood to the various parts . . . The flushes
determine the perspirations. Both evidence a strong effect of conservative power, and as they
constitute the most important and habitual safety-valve of the system at the change of life, it is
worth while studying them. 6
In this account, compensating mechanisms like the "flush" are seen as having the positive function
of keeping intake and outgo in balance.
These balancing acts had exact analogues in men. In Hippocrates' view of purification, one that was
still current in the seventeenth century,
women were of colder and less active disposition than men, so that while men could sweat in order
to remove the impurities from their blood, the colder dispositions of women did not allow them to
be purified in that way. Females menstruated to rid their bodies of impurities. 7
Or in another view, expounded by Galen in the second century and still accepted into the eighteenth
century, menstruation was the shedding of an excess of blood, a plethora. 8 But what women did
through menstruation men could do in other ways, such as by having blood let. 9 In either view of
the mechanism of menstruation, the process itself not only had analogues in men, it was seen as
inherently health-maintaining. Menstrual blood, to be sure, was often seen as foul and unclean, 10
but the process of excreting it was not intrinsically pathological. In fact, failure to excrete was taken
as a sign of disease, and a great variety of remedies existed even into the nineteenth century
specifically to reestablish menstrual flow if it stopped. 11 By 1800, according to Laqueur's important
recent study, this long-established tradition that saw male and female bodies as similar both in
structure and in function began to come "under devastating attack. Writers of all sorts were
determined to base what they insisted were fundamental differences between male and female
sexuality, and thus between man and woman, on discoverable biological distinctions." 12 Laqueur
argues that this attempt to ground differences between the genders in biology grew out of the
crumbling of old ideas about the existing order of politics and society as laid down by the order of
nature. In the old ideas, men dominated the public world and the world of morality and order by
virtue of their greater perfection, a result of their excess heat. Men and women were arranged in a
hierarchy in which they differed by degree of heat. They were not different in kind. 13
The new liberal claims of Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century and the French Revolution
were factors that led to a loss of certainty that the social order could be grounded in the natural
order. If the social order were merely convention, it could not provide a secure enough basis to hold
women and men in their places. But after 1800 the social and biological sciences were brought to
the rescue of male superiority. "Scientists in areas as diverse as zoology, embryology, physiology,
heredity, anthropology, and psychology had little difficulty in proving that the pattern of malefemale relations that characterized the English middle classes was natural, inevitable, and
progressive." 14
The assertion was that men's and women's social roles themselves were grounded in nature, by
virtue of the dictates of their bodies. In the words of one nineteenth-century theorist, "the attempt to
alter the present relations of the sexes is not a rebellion against some arbitrary law instituted by a
despot or a majority--not an attempt to break the yoke of a mere convention; it is a struggle against
Nature; a war undertaken to reverse the very conditions under which not man alone, but all
mammalian species have reached their present development." 15 The doctrine of the two spheres-men as workers in the public, wage-earning sphere outside the home and women (except for the
lower classes) as wives and mothers in the private, domestic sphere of kinship and morality inside
the home--replaced the old hierarchy based on body heat.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, new metaphors that posited fundamental differences
between the sexes began to appear. One nineteenth-century biologist, Patrick Geddes, perceived
two opposite kinds of processes at the level of the cell: "upbuilding, constructive, synthetic
processes," summed up as anabolism, and a "disruptive, descending series of chemical changes,"
summed up as katabolism. 16 The relationship between the two processes was described in frankly
economic terms:
The processes of income and expenditure must balance, but only to the usual extent, that
expenditure must not altogether outrun income, else the cell's capital of living matter will be lost,--a
fate which is often not successfully avoided . . . Just as our expenditure and income should balance
at the year's end, but may vastly outstrip each other at particular times, so it is with the cell of the
body. Income too may continuously preponderate, and we increase in wealth, or similarly, in
weight, or in anabolism. Conversely, expenditure may predominate, but business may be prosecuted
at a loss; and similarly, we may live on for a while with loss of weight, or in katabolism. This losing
game of life is what we call a katabolic habit. 17
Geddes saw these processes not only at the level of the cell, but also at the level of entire organisms.
In the human species, as well as in almost all higher animals, females were predominantly anabolic,
males katabolic. Although in the terms of his saving-spending metaphor it is not at all clear whether
katabolism would be an asset, when Geddes presents male-female differences, there is no doubt
which he thought preferable:
It is generally true that the males are more active, energetic, eager, passionate, and variable; the
females more passive, conservative, sluggish, and stable . . . The more active males, with a
consequently wider range of experience, may have bigger brains and more intelligence; but the
females, especially as mothers, have indubitably a larger and more habitual share of the altruistic
emotions. The males being usually stronger, have greater independence and courage; the females
excel in constancy of affection and in sympathy. 18
In Geddes, the doctrine of separate spheres was laid on a foundation of separate and fundamentally
different biology in men and women, at the level of the cell. One of the striking contradictions in his
account is that he did not carry over the implications of his economic metaphors to his discussion of
male-female differences. If he had, females might have come off as wisely conserving their energy
and never spending beyond their means, males as in the "losing game of life," letting expenditures
outrun income.
Geddes may have failed to draw the logical conclusions from his meta- phor, but we have to
acknowledge that metaphors were never meant to be logical. Other nineteenth-century writers
developed metaphors in exactly opposite directions: women spent and men saved. The Rev. John
Todd saw women as voracious spenders in the marketplace, and so consumers of all that a man
could earn. If unchecked, a woman would ruin a man, by her own extravagant spending, by her
demands on him to spend, or, in another realm, by her excessive demands on him for sex. Losing
too much sperm meant losing that which sperm was believed to manufacture: a man's lifeblood. 19
Todd and Geddes were not alone in the nineteenth century in using images of business loss and gain
to describe physiological processes. Susan Sontag has suggested that nineteenth-century fantasies
about disease, especially tuberculosis, "echo the attitudes of early capitalist accumulation. One has a
limited amount of energy, which must be properly spent . . . Energy, like savings, can be depleted,
can run out or be used up, through reckless expenditure. The body will start 'consuming' itself, the
patient will 'waste away.'" 20
Despite the variety of ways that spending-saving metaphors could be related to gender, the radical
difference between these metaphors and the earlier intake-outgo metaphor is key. Whereas in the
earlier model, male and female ways of secreting were not only analogous but desirable, now the
way became open to denigrate, as Geddes overtly did, functions that for the first time were seen as
uniquely female, without analogue in males. For our purposes, what happened to accounts of
menstruation is most interesting: by the nineteenth century, the process itself was seen as soundly
pathological. In Geddes's terms,
it yet evidently lies on the borders of pathological change, as is evidenced not only by the pain
which so frequently accompanies it, and the local and constitutional disorders which so frequently
arise in this connection, but by the general systemic disturbance and local histological changes of
which the discharge is merely the outward expression and result. 21
Whereas in earlier accounts the blood itself may have been considered impure, now the process
itself is seen as a disorder.
Nineteenth-century writers were extremely prone to stress the debilitating nature of menstruation
and its adverse impact on the lives and activities of women. 22 Medical images of menstruation as
pathological were remarkably vivid by the end of the century. For Walter Heape, the militant
antisuffragist and Cambridge zoologist, in menstruation the entire epithelium was torn awayleaving
behind a ragged wreck of tissue, torn glands, ruptured vessels, jagged edges of stroma, and masses
of blood corpuscles, which it would seem hardly possible to heal satisfactorily without the aid of
surgical treatment. 23
A few years later, Havelock Ellis could see women as being "periodically wounded" in their most
sensitive spot and "emphasize the fact that even in the healthiest woman, a worm however harmless
and unperceived, gnaws periodically at the roots of life." 24
If menstruation was consistently seen as pathological, menopause, another function which by this
time was regarded as without analogue in men, often was too: many nineteenth-century medical
accounts of menopause saw it as a crisis likely to bring on an increase of disease. 25 Sometimes the
metaphor of the body as a small business that is either winning or losing was applied to menopause
too. A late-nineteenth-century account specifically argued against Tilt's earlier adjustment model:
"When the period of fruitfulness is ended the activity of the tissues has reached its culmination, the
secreting power of the glandular organs begins to diminish, the epithelium becomes less sensitive
and less susceptible to infectious influences, and atrophy and degeneration take the place of the
active up-building processes." 26 But there were other sides to the picture. Most practitioners felt the
"climacteric disease," a more general disease of old age, was far worse for men than for women 27
And some regarded the period after menopause far more positively than it is being seen medically
in our century, as the "Indian summer' of a woman's life--a period of increased vigor, optimism, and
even of physical beauty.'" 28
Perhaps the nineteenth century's concern with conserving energy and limiting expenditure can help
account for the seeming anomaly of at least some positive medical views of menopause and the
climacteric. As an earlytwentieth-century popular health account put it,
[Menopause] is merely a conservative process of nature to provide for a higher and more stable
phase of existence, an economic lopping off of a function no longer needed, preparing the
individual for different forms of activity, but is in no sense pathologic. It is not sexual or physical
decrepitude, but belongs to the age of invigoration, marking the fullness of the bodily and mental
powers. 29
Those few writers who saw menopause as an "economic" physiological function might have drawn
very positive conclusions from Geddes's description of females as anabolic, stressing their
"thriftiness" instead of their passivity, their "growing bank accounts" instead of their sluggishness.
If the shift from the body as an intake-outgo system to the body as a small business trying to spend,
save, or balance its accounts is a radical one, with deep importance for medical models of female
bodies, so too is another shift that began in the twentieth century with the development of scientific
medicine. One of the early-twentieth-century engineers of our system of scientific medicine,
Frederick T. Gates, who advised John D. Rockefeller on how to use his philanthropies to aid
scientific medicine, developed a series of interrelated metaphors to explain the scientific view of
how the body works:
It is interesting to note the striking comparisons between the human body and the safety and
hygienic appliances of a great city. Just as in the streets of a great city we have "white angels"
posted everywhere to gather up poisonous materials from the streets, so in the great streets and
avenues of the body, namely the arteries and the blood vessels, there are brigades of corpuscles,
white in color like the "white angels," whose function it is to gather up into sacks, formed by their
own bodies, and disinfect or eliminate all poisonous substances found in the blood. The body has a
network of insulated nerves, like telephone wires, which transmit instantaneous alarms at every
point of danger. The body is furnished with the most elaborate police system, with hundreds of
police stations to which the criminal elements are carried by the police and jailed. I refer to the great
numbers of sanitary glands, skilfully placed at points where vicious germs find entrance, especially
about the mouth and throat. The body has a most complete and elaborate sewer system. There are
wonderful laboratories placed at convenient points for a subtle brewing of skillful medicines . . .
The fact is that the human body is made up of an infinite number of microscopic cells. Each one of
these cells is a small chemical laboratory, into which its own appropriate raw material is constantly
being introduced, the processes of chemical separation and combination are constantly taking place
automatically, and its own appropriate finished product being necessary for the life and health of the
body. Not only is this so, but the great organs of the body like the liver, stomach, pancreas, kidneys,
gall bladder are great local manufacturing centers, formed of groups of cells in infinite numbers,
manufacturing the same sorts of products, just as industries of the same kind are often grouped in
specific districts. 30 Although such a full-blown description of the body as a model of an industrial
society is not often found in contemporary accounts of physiology, elements of the images that
occurred to Gates are commonplace. In recent years, the "imagery of the biochemistry of the cell
[has] been that of the factory, where functions [are] specialized for the conversion of energy into
particular products and which [has] its own part to play in the economy of the organism as a
whole." 31 There is no doubt that the basic image of cells as factories is carried into popular
imagination, and not only through college textbooks: an illustration from the April 30, 1984, copy
of Time magazine depicts cells explicitly as factories (and AIDS virus cells as manufacturing
armored tanks! [p. 67]).
Still more recently, economic functions of greater complexity have been added: ATP is seen as the
body's "energy currency": "Produced in particular cellular regions, it [is] placed in an 'energy bank'
in which it [is] maintained in two forms, those of 'current account' and 'deposit account.' Ultimately,
the cell's and the body's energy books must balance by an appropriate mix of monetary and fiscal
policies." 32 Here we have not just the simpler nineteenth-century saving and spending, but two
distinct forms of money in the bank, presumably invested at different levels of profit.
Development of the new molecular biology brought additional metaphors based on information
science, management, and control. In this model, flow of information between DNA and RNA leads
to the production of protein. 33 Molecular biologists conceive of the cell as "an assembly line
factory in which the DNA blueprints are interpreted and raw materials fabricated to produce the
protein end products in response to a series of regulated requirements." 34 The cell is still seen as a
factory, but, compared to Gates's description, there is enormous elaboration of the flow of
information from one "department" of the body to another and exaggeration of the amount of
control exerted by the center. For example, from a college physiology text:
All the systems of the body, if they are to function effectively, must be subjected to some form of
control . . . The precise control of body function is brought about by means of the operation of the
nervous system and of the hormonal or endocrine system . . . The most important thing to note
about any control system is that before it can control anything it must be supplied with information .
. . Therefore the first essential in any control system is an adequate system of collecting information
about the state of the body . . . Once the CNS [central nervous system] knows what is happening, it
must then have a means for rectifying the situation if something is going wrong. There are two
available methods for doing this, by using nerve fibres and by using hormones. The motor nerve
fibres . . . carry instructions from the CNS to the muscles and glands throughout the body . . . As far
as hormones are concerned the brain acts via the pituitary gland . . . the pituitary secretes a large
number of hormones . . . the rate of secretion of each one of these is under the direct control of the
brain. 35
Although there is increasing attention to describing physiological processes as positive and negative
feedback loops so that like a thermostat system no single element has preeminent control over any
other, most descriptions of specific processes give preeminent control to the brain, as we will see
below.
Metaphors in Descriptions of Female Reproduction
In overall descriptions of female reproduction, the dominant image is that of a signaling system.
Lein, in a textbook designed for junior colleges, spells it out in detail:
Hormones are chemical signals to which distant tissues or organs are able to respond. Whereas the
nervous system has characteristics in common with a telephone network, the endocrine glands
perform in a manner somewhat analogous to radio transmission. A radio transmitter may blanket an
entire region with its signal, but a response occurs only if a radio receiver is turned on and tuned to
the proper frequency . . . the radio receiver in biological systems is a tissue whose cells possess
active receptor sites for a particular hormone or hormones. 36
The signal-response metaphor is found almost universally in current texts for premedical and
medical students (emphasis in the following quotes is added):
The hypothalamus receives signals from almost all possible sources in the nervous system. 37
The endometrium responds directly to stimulation or withdrawal of estrogen and progesterone. In
turn, regulation of the secretion of these steroids involves a well-integrated, highly structured series
of activities by the hypothalamus and the anterior lobe of the pituitary. Although the ovaries do not
function autonomously, they influence, through feedback mechanisms, the level of performance
programmed by the hypothalamicpituitary axis. 38
As a result of strong stimulation of FSH, a number of follicles respond with growth. 39
And the same idea is found, more obviously, in popular health books:
Each month from menarche on, [the hypothalamus] acts as elegant interpreter of the body's
rhythms, transmitting messages to the pituitary gland that set the menstrual cycle in motion. 40
Each month, in response to a message from the pituitary gland, one of the unripe egg cells develops
inside a tiny microscopic ring of cells, which gradually increases to form a little balloon or cyst
called the Graafian follicle. 41
Although most accounts stress signals or stimuli traveling in a "loop" from hypothalamus to
pituitary to ovary and back again, carrying positive or negative feedback, one element in the loop,
the hypothalamus, a part of the brain, is often seen as predominant. The female brain-hormoneovary system is usually described not as a feedback loop like a thermostat system but as a hierarchy,
in which the "directions" or "orders" of one element dominate (emphasis in the following quotes
from medical texts is added):
Both positive and negative feedback control must be invoked, together with superimposition of
control by the CNS through neurotransmitters released into the hypophyseal portal circulation. 42
Almost all secretion by the pituitary is controlled by either hormonal or nervous signals from the
hypothalamus. 43
The hypothalamus is a collecting center for information concerned with the internal well-being of
the body, and in turn much of this information is used to control secretions of the many globally
important pituitary hormones. 44
As Lein puts it into ordinary language, "The cerebrum, that part of the brain that provides
awareness and mood, can play a significant role in the control of the menstrual cycle. As explained
before, it seems evident that these higher regions of the brain exert their influence by modifying the
actions of the hypothalamus. So even though the hypothalamus is a kind of master gland
dominating the anterior pituitary, and through it the ovaries also, it does not act with complete
independence or without influence from outside itself . . . there are also pathways of control from
the higher centers of the brain." 45
So this is a communication system organized hierarchically, not a committee reaching decisions by
mutual influence. 46 The hierarchical nature of the organization is reflected in some popular
literature meant to explain the nature of menstruation simply: "From first menstrual cycle to
menopause, the hypothalamus acts as the conductor of a highly trained orchestra. Once its baton
signals the downbeat to the pituitary, the hypothalamus-pituitaryovarian axis is united in purpose
and begins to play its symphonic message, preparing a woman's body for conception and childbearing." Carrying the metaphor further, the follicles vie with each other for the role of producing
the egg like violinists trying for the position of concertmaster; a burst of estrogen is emitted from
the follicle like a "clap of tympani." 47
The basic images chosen here--an information-transmitting system with a hierarchical structure-have an obvious relation to the dominant form of organization in our society. 48 What I want to
show is how this set of metaphors, once chosen as the basis for the description of physiological
events, has profound implications for the way in which a change in the basic organization of the
system will be perceived. In terms of female reproduction, this basic change is of course
menopause. Many criticisms have been made of the medical propensity to see menopause as a
pathological state. 49 I would like to suggest that the tenacity of this view comes not only from the
negative stereotypes associated with aging women in our society, but as a logical outgrowth of
seeing the body as a hierarchical information-processing system in the first place. (Another part of
the reason menopause is seen so negatively is related to metaphors of production, which I discuss
later in this essay.)
What is the language in which menopause is described? In menopause, according to a college text,
the ovaries become "unresponsive" to stimulation from the gonadotropins, to which they used to
respond. As a result the ovaries "regress." On the other end of the cycle, the hypothalamus has
gotten estrogen "addiction" from all those years of menstruating. As a result of the "withdrawal" of
estrogen at menopause, the hypothalamus begins to give "inappropriate orders." 50 In a more
popular account, "the pituitary gland during the change of life becomes disturbed when the ovaries
fail to respond to its secretions, which tends to affect its control over other glands. This results in a
temporary imbalance existing among all the endocrine glands of the body, which could very well
lead to disturbances that may involve a person's nervous system." 51
In both medical texts and popular books, what is being described is the breakdown of a system of
authority. The cause of ovarian "decline" is the "decreasing ability of the aging ovaries to respond
to pituitary gonadotropins." 52 At every point in this system, functions "fail" and falter. Follicles
"fail to muster the strength" to reach ovulation. 53 As functions fail, so do the members of the
system decline: "breasts and genital organs gradually atrophy," 54 "wither," 55 and become "senile."
56
Diminished, atrophied relics of their former vigorous, functioning selves, the "senile ovaries" are
an example of the vivid imagery brought to this process. A text whose detailed illustrations make it
a primary resource for medical students despite its early date describes the ovaries this way:
the senile ovary is a shrunken and puckered organ, containing few if any follicles, and made up for
the most part of old corpora albincantia and corpora atretica, the bleached and functionless
remainders of corpora lutia and follicles embedded in a dense connective tissue stroma. 57
Ovaries cease to respond and fail to produce. Everywhere else there is regression, decline, atrophy,
shrinkage, and disturbance.
The key to the problem connoted by these descriptions is functionlessness. Susan Sontag has
written of our obsessive fear of cancer, a disease that we see as entailing a nightmare of excessive
growth and rampant production. These images frighten us in part because in our stage of advanced
capitalism, they are close to a reality we find difficult to see clearly: broken-down hierarchy and
organization members who no longer play their designated parts represent nightmare images for us.
One woman I have talked to said her doctor gave her two choices for treatment of her menopause:
she could take estrogen and get cancer or she could not take it and have her bones dissolve. Like
this woman, our imagery of the body as a hierarchical organization gives us no good choice when
the basis of the organization seems to us to have changed drastically. We are left with breakdown,
decay, and atrophy. Bad as they are, these might be preferable to continued activity, which because
it is not properly hierarchically controlled, leads to chaos, unmanaged growth, and disaster.
But let us return to the metaphor of the factory producing substances, which dominates the imagery
used to describe cells. At the cellular level DNA communicates with RNA, all for the purpose of the
cell's production of pro- teins. In a similar way, the system of communication involving female
reproduction is thought to be geared toward production of various things. My discussion in this
essay is confined to the normal process of the menstrual cycle. It is clear that the system is thought
to produce many good things: the ovaries produce estrogen, the pituitary produces FSH and LH,
and so on. Follicles also produce eggs in a sense, although this is usually described as "maturing"
them since the entire set of eggs a woman has for her lifetime is known to be present at birth.
Beyond all this the system is seen as organized for a single preeminent purpose: "transport" of the
egg along its journey from the ovary to the uterus 58 and preparation of an appropriate place for the
egg to grow if it is fertilized. In a chapter titled "Prepregnancy Reproductive Functions of the
Female, and the Female Hormones," Guyton puts it all together: "Female reproductive functions
can be divided into two major phases: first, preparation of the female body for conception and
gestation, and second, the period of gestation itself." 59 This view may seem commonsensical and
entirely justified by the evolutionary development of the species, with its need for reproduction to
ensure survival.
Yet I suggest that assuming this view of the purpose for the process slants our description and
understanding of the female cycle unnecessarily. Let us look at how medical textbooks describe
menstruation. They see the action of progesterone and estrogen on the lining of the uterus as
"ideally suited to provide a hospitable environment for implantation and survival of the embryo" 60
or as intended to lead to "the monthly renewal of the tissue that will cradle [the ovum]." 61 As
Guyton summarizes, "The whole purpose of all these endometrial changes is to produce a highly
secretory endometrium containing large amounts of stored nutrients that can provide appropriate
conditions for implantation of a fertilized ovum during the latter half of the monthly cycle." 62
Given this teleological interpretation of the purpose of the increased amount of endometrial tissue,
it should be no surprise that when a fertilized egg does not implant, these texts describe the next
event in very negative terms. The fall in blood progesterone and estrogen "deprives" the "highly
developed endometrial lining of its hormonal support," "constriction" of blood vessels leads to a
"diminished" supply of oxygen and nutrients, and finally "disintegration starts, the entire lining
begins to slough, and the menstrual flow begins." Blood vessels in the endometrium "hemorrhage"
and the menstrual flow "consists of this blood mixed with endometrial debris." 63 The "loss" of
hormonal stimulation causes "necrosis" (death of tissue). 64
The construction of these events in terms of a purpose that has failed is beautifully captured in a
standard text for medical students (a text otherwise noteworthy for its extremely objective, factual
descriptions) in which a discussion of the events covered in the last paragraph (sloughing,
hemorrhaging) ends with the statement "When fertilization fails to occur, the endometrium is shed,
and a new cycle starts. This is why it used to be taught that 'menstruation is the uterus crying for
lack of a baby.'" 65
I am arguing that just as seeing menopause as a kind of failure of the authority structure in the body
contributes to our negative view of it, so does seeing menstruation as failed production contribute to
our negative view of it. We have seen how Sontag describes our horror of production gone out of
control. But another kind of horror for us is lack of production: the disused factory, the failed
business, the idle machine. In his analysis of industrial civilization, Winner terms the stopping and
breakdown of technological systems in modern society "apraxia" and describes it as "the ultimate
horror, a condition to be avoided at all costs." 66 This horror of idle workers or machines seems to
have been present even at earlier stages of industrialization. A nineteenth-century inventor, Thomas
Ewbank, elaborated his view that the whole world "was designed for a Factory." 67 "It is only as a
Factory, a General Factory, that the whole materials and influences of the earth are to be brought
into play."
none." 69
68
In this great workshop, humans' role is to produce: "God employs no idlers--creates
Like artificial motors, we are created for the work we can do--for the useful and productive ideas
we can stamp upon matter. Engines running daily without doing any work resemble men who live
without labor; both are spendthrifts dissipating means that would be productive if given to others. 70
Menstruation not only carries with it the connotation of a productive system that has failed to
produce, it also carries the idea of production gone awry, making products of no use, not to
specification, unsalable, wasted, scrap. However disgusting it may be, menstrual blood will come
out. Production gone awry is also an image that fills us with dismay and horror. Amid the
glorification of machinery common in the nineteenth century were also fears of what machines
could do if they went out of control. Capturing this fear, one satirist wrote of a steam-operated
shaving machine that "sliced the noses off too many customers." 71 This image is close to the one
Melville created in "The Bell-Tower," in which an inventor, who can be seen as an allegory of
America, is killed by his mechanical slave, 72 as well as to Mumford's sorcerer's apprentice applied
to modern machinery: 73
Our civilization has cleverly found a magic formula for setting both industrial and academic brooms
and pails of water to work by themselves, in ever-increasing quantities at an ever-increasing speed.
But we have lost the Master Magician's spell for altering the tempo of this process, or halting it
when it ceases to serve human functions and purposes. 74
Of course, how much one is gripped by the need to produce goods efficiently and properly depends
on one's relationship to those goods. While packing pickles on an assembly line, I remember the
foreman often holding up improperly packed bottles to us workers and trying to elicit shame at the
bad job we were doing. But his job depended on efficient production, which meant many bottles
filled right the first time. This factory did not yet have any effective method of quality control, and
as soon as our supervisor was out of sight, our efforts went toward filling as few bottles as we could
while still concealing who had filled which bottle. In other factories, workers seem to express a
certain grim pleasure when they can register objections to company policy by enacting imagery of
machinery out of control. Noble reports an incident in which workers resented a supervisor's order
to "shut down their machines, pick up brooms, and get to work cleaning the area. But he forgot to
tell them to stop. So, like the sorcerer's apprentice, diligently and obediently working to rule, they
continued sweeping up all day long." 75
Perhaps one reason the negative image of failed production is attached to menstruation is precisely
that women are in some sinister sense out of control when they menstruate. They are not
reproducing, not continuing the species, not preparing to stay at home with the baby, not providing
a safe, warm womb to nurture a man's sperm. I think it is plain that the negative power behind the
image of failure to produce can be considerable when applied metaphorically to women's bodies.
Vern Bullough comments optimistically that "no reputable scientist today would regard
menstruation as pathological," 76 but this paragraph from a recent college text belies his hope:
If fertilization and pregnancy do not occur, the corpus luteum degenerates and the levels of
estrogens and progesterone decline. As the levels of these hormones decrease and their stimulatory
effects are withdrawn, blood vessels of the endometrium undergo prolonged spasms (contractions)
that reduce the bloodflow to the area of the endometrium supplied by the vessels. The resulting lack
of blood causes the tissues of the affected region to degenerate. After some time, the vessels relax,
which allows blood to flow through them again. However, capillaries in the area have become so
weakened that blood leaks through them. This blood and the deteriorating endometrial tissue are
discharged from the uterus as the menstrual flow.
As a new ovarian cycle begins and the level of estrogens rises, the functional layer of the
endometrium undergoes repair and once again begins to proliferate. 77
In rapid succession the reader is confronted with "degenerate," "decline," "withdrawn," "spasms,"
"lack," "degenerate," "weakened," "leak," "deteriorate "discharge," and, after all that, "repair."
In another standard text, we read:
The sudden lack of these two hormones [estrogen and progesterone] causes the blood vessels of the
endometrium to become spastic so that blood flow to the surface layers of the endometrium almost
ceases. As a result, much of the endometrial tissue dies and sloughs into the uterine cavity. Then,
small amounts of blood ooze from the denuded endometrial wall, causing a blood loss of about 50
ml during the next few days. The sloughed endometrial tissue plus the blood and much serous
exudate from the denuded uterine surface, all together called the menstrum, is gradually expelled by
intermittent contractions of the uterine muscle for about 3 to 5 days. This process is called
menstruation. 78
The illustration that accompanies this text captures very well the imagery of catastrophic
disintegration: "ceasing," "dying," "losing," "denuding," and "expelling."
These are not neutral terms; rather, they convey failure and dissolution. Of course, not all texts
contain such a plethora of negative terms in their descriptions of menstruation. But unacknowledged
cultural attitudes can seep into scientific writing through evaluative words. Coming at this point
from a slightly different angle, consider this extract from a text that describes male reproductive
physiology. "The mechanisms which guide the remarkable cellular transformation from spermatid
to mature sperm remain uncertain . . . Perhaps the most amazing characteristic of spermatogenesis is
its sheer magnitude: the normal human male may manufacture several hundred million sperm per
day (emphasis added)." 79 As we will see, this text has no parallel appreciation of female processes
such as menstruation or ovulation, and it is surely no accident that this "remarkable" process
involves precisely what menstruation does not in the medical view: production of something
deemed valuable. Although this text sees such massive sperm production as unabashedly positive,
in fact, only about one out of every 100 billion sperm ever makes it to fertilize an egg: from the
very
same point of view that sees menstruation as a waste product, surely here is something really worth
crying about!
When this text turns to female reproduction, it describes menstruation in the same terms of failed
production we saw earlier.
The fall in blood progesterone and estrogen, which results from regression of the corpus luteum,
deprives the highly developed endometrial lining of its hormonal support; the immediate result is
profound constriction of the uterine blood vessels due to production of vasoconstrictor
prostaglandins, which leads to diminished supply of oxygen and nutrients. Disintegration starts, and
the entire lining (except for a thin, deep layer which will regenerate the endometrium in the next
cycle) begins to slough . . . The endometrial arterioles dilate, resulting in hemorrhage through the
weakened capillary walls; the menstrual flow consists of this blood mixed with endometrial debris .
. . The menstrual flow ceases as the endometrium repairs itself and then grows under the influence
of rising blood estrogen concentration. [Emphasis added.] 80
And ovulation fares no better. In fact part of the reason ovulation does not merit the enthusiasm that
spermatogenesis does may be that all the ovarian follicles containing ova are already present at
birth. Far from being produced as sperm is, they seem to merely sit on the shelf, as it were, slowly
degenerating and aging like overstocked inventory.
At birth, normal human ovaries contain an estimated one million follicles, and no new ones appear
after birth. Thus, in marked contrast to the male, the newborn female already has all the germ cells
she will ever have. Only a few, perhaps four hundred, are destined to reach full maturity during her
active productive life. All the others degenerate at some point in their development so that few, if
any, remain by the time she reaches menopause at approximately fifty years of age. One result of
this is that the ova which are released (ovulated) near menopause are thirty to thirty-five years older
than those ovulated just after puberty; it has been suggested that certain congenital defects, much
commoner among children of older women, are the result of aging changes in the ovum. 81
How different it would sound if texts like this one stressed the vast excess of follicles produced in a
female fetus, compared to the number she will actually need. In addition, males are also born with a
complement of germ cells (spermatogonia) that divide from time to time, and most of which will
eventually differentiate into sperm. This text could easily discuss the fact that these male germ cells
and their progeny are also subject to aging, much as female germ cells are. Although we would still
be operating within the terms of the production metaphor, at least it would be applied in an
evenhanded way to both males and females.
One response to my argument would be that menstruation just is in some objective sense a process
of breakdown and deterioration. The particular words are chosen to describe it because they best fit
the reality of what is happening. My counterargument is to look at other processes in the body that
are fundamentally analogous to menstruation in that they involve the shedding of a lining to see
whether they also are described in terms of breakdown and deterioration. The lining of the stomach,
for example, is shed and replaced regularly, and seminal fluid picks up shedded cellular material as
it goes through the various male ducts.
The lining of the stomach must protect itself against being digested by the hydrochloric acid
produced in digestion. In the several texts quoted above, emphasis is on the secretion of mucus, 82
the barrier that mucous cells present to stomach acid, 83 and--in a phrase that gives the story away-the periodic renewal of the lining of the stomach. 84 There is no reference to degenerating,
weakening, deteriorating, or repair, or even the more neutral shedding, sloughing, or replacement.
The primary function of the gastric secretions is to begin the digestion of proteins. Unfortunately,
though, the wall of the stomach is itself constructed mainly of smooth muscle, which itself is
mainly protein. Therefore, the surface of the stomach must be exceptionally well protected at all
times against its own digestion. This function is performed mainly by mucus that is secreted in great
abundance in all parts of the stomach. The entire surface of the stomach is covered by a layer of
very small mucous cells, which themselves are composed almost entirely of mucus; this mucus
prevents gastric secretions from ever touching the deeper layers of the stomach wall. 85
In this account from an introductory physiology text, the emphasis is on production of mucus and
protection of the stomach wall. It is not even mentioned, although it is analogous to menstruation,
that the mucous cell layers must be continually sloughed off (and digested). Although all the
general physiology texts I consulted describe menstruation as a process of disinte- gration needing
repair, only specialized texts for medical students describe the stomach lining in the more neutral
terms of "sloughing" and "renewal." 86 One can choose to look at what happens to the lining of
stomachs and uteruses negatively as breakdown and decay needing repair or positively as continual
production and replenishment. Of these two sides of the same coin, stomachs, which women and
men have, fall on the positive side; uteruses, which only women have, fall on the negative.
One other analogous process is not handled negatively in the general physiology texts. Although it
is well known to those researchers who work with male ejaculates that a very large proportion of
the ejaculate is composed of shedded cellular material, the texts make no mention of a shedding
process let alone processes of deterioration and repair in the male reproductive tract. 87
What applies to menstruation once a month applies to menopause once in every lifetime. As we
have seen, part of the current imagery attached to menopause is that of a breakdown of central
control. Inextricably connected to this imagery is another aspect of failed production. Recall the
metaphors of balanced intake and outgo that were applied to menopause up to the midnineteenth
century, later to be replaced by metaphors of degeneration. In the early 1960s new research on the
role of estrogens in heart disease led to arguments that failure of female reproductive organs to
produce much estrogen after menopause was debilitating to health.
This change is marked unmistakably in successive editions of a major gynecology text. In the 1940s
and 1950s menopause was described as usually not entailing "any very profound alteration in the
woman's life current." 88 By the 1965 edition dramatic changes had occurred: "in the past few years
there has been a radical change in viewpoint and some would regard the menopause as a possible
pathological state rather than a physiological one and discuss therapeutic prevention rather than the
amelioration of symptoms." 89
In many current accounts menopause is described as a state in which ovaries fail to produce
estrogen. 90 The 1981 World Health Organization report defines menopause as an estrogendeficiency disease. 91 Failure to produce estrogen is the leitmotif of another current text: "This
period during which the cycles cease and the female sex hormones diminish rapidly to almost none
at all is called the menopause. The cause of the menopause is the 'burning out' of the ovaries . . .
Estrogens are produced in subcritical quantities for a short time after the menopause, but over a few
years, as the final remaining primordial follicles become atretic, the production of estrogens by the
ovaries falls almost to zero." Loss of ability to produce estrogen is seen as central to a woman's life:
"At the time of the menopause a woman must
readjust her life from one that has been physiologically stimulated by estrogen and progesterone
production to one devoid of those hormones." 92
Of course, I am not implying that the ovaries do not indeed produce much less estrogen than before.
I am pointing to the choice of these textbook authors to emphasize above all else the negative
aspects of ovaries failing to produce female hormones. By contrast, one current text shows us a
positive view of the decline in estrogen production: "It would seem that although menopausal
women do have an estrogen milieu which is lower than that necessary for reproductive function, it
is not negligible or absent but is perhaps satisfactory for maintenance of support tissues. The
menopause could then be regarded as a physiologic phenomenon which is protective in nature-protective from undesirable reproduction and the associated growth stimuli." 93
I have presented the underlying metaphors contained in medical descriptions of menopause and
menstruation to show that these ways of describing events are but one method of fitting an
interpretation to the facts. Yet seeing that female organs are imagined to function within a
hierarchical order whose members signal each other to produce various substances, all for the
purpose of transporting eggs to a place where they can be fertilized and then grown, may not
provide us with enough of a jolt to begin to see the contingent nature of these descriptions. Even
seeing that the metaphors we choose fit very well with traditional roles assigned to women may still
not be enough to make us question whether there might be another way to represent the same
biological phenomena. In my other writings I examine women's ordinary experience of
menstruation and menopause looking for alternative visions. 94 Here I suggest some other ways that
these physiological events could be described.
First, consider the teleological nature of the system, its assumed goal of implanting a fertilized egg.
What if a woman has done everything in her power to avoid having an egg implant in her uterus,
such as birth control or abstinence from heterosexual sex. Is it still appropriate to speak of the single
purpose of her menstrual cycle as dedicated to implantation? From the woman's vantage point, it
might capture the sense of events better to say the purpose of the cycle is the production of
menstrual flow. Think for a moment how that might change the description in medical texts: "A
drop in the formerly high levels of progesterone and estrogen creates the appropriate environment
for reducing the excess layers of endometrial tissue. Constriction of capillary blood vessels causes a
lower level of oxygen and nutrients and paves the way for a vigorous production of menstrual
fluids. As a part of the renewal of the remaining endometrium, the capillaries begin to reopen,
contributing some blood and serous fluid to the volume of endometrial material already beginning to flow." I can see no reason why the menstrual blood itself could not be seen
as the desired "product" of the female cycle, except when the woman intends to become pregnant.
Would it be similarly possible to change the nature of the relationships assumed among the
members of the organization--the hypothalamus, pituitary, ovaries, and so on? Why not, instead of
an organization with a controller, a team playing a game? When a woman wants to get pregnant, it
would be appropriate to describe her pituitary, ovaries, and so on as combining together,
communicating with each other, to get the ball, so to speak, into the basket. The image of
hierarchical control could give way to specialized function, the way a basketball team needs a
center as well as a defense. When she did not want to become pregnant, the purpose of this activity
could be considered the production of menstrual flow.
Eliminating the hierarchical organization and the idea of a single purpose to the menstrual cycle
also greatly enlarges the ways we could think of menopause. A team which in its youth played
vigorous soccer might, in advancing years, decide to enjoy a quieter "new game" where players still
interact with each other in satisfying ways but where gentle interaction itself is the point of the
game, not getting the ball into the basket--or the flow into the vagina.
NOTES
1.
Thomas Laqueur, "Female Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology."
Representations 14 ( Spring 1986): 1-82.
2.
Ibid., p. 10.
3.
Charles E. Rosenberg, "The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change
in Nineteenth-Century America." In Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg , ed., The
Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine, p. 5 (
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979).
4.
Ibid., pp. 5-6.
5.
Edward John Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease ( London: John Churchill, 1857),
p. 54.
6.
Ibid., pp. 54, 57.
7.
Patricia Crawford, "Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England." Past and
Present 91 ( 1981): 50.
8.
Ibid., p. 50.
9.
William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 45-49.
Crawford, Attitudes to Menstruation, p. 63.
11.
See Kristen Luker,
Abortion and the
Politics
of
Motherhood
(
Berkeley:
University
of
California
Press,
1984),
p.
18;
Crawford, Attitudes
to
Menstruation,
pp. 53-54; and
Vieda
Skultans,
"The
Symbolic
Significance
of
Menstruation and
the
Menopause,"
Man 5, no. 4 (
1970): 639-51.
12.
Laqueur, "Female
Orgasm," p. 4.
13.
Ibid., p. 8.
14.
Elizabeth
Fee,
"Science and the
Woman Problem:
Historical
Perspectives".
In
Michael
S.
Teitelbaum,
ed.,
Sex
Difference:
Social
and
Biological
Perspectives, ( New
York: Doubleday,
1976), p. 190.
15.
Walter
Bagehot,
quoted in Fee,
Science, p. 190.
16.
Patrick Geddes and
J.
Arthur
Thompson,
The
Evolution of Sex (
New
York:
Scribner
and
Wilford, 1890). p.
122.
17.
Ibid., p. 123.
18.
Ibid., pp. 270-71.
19.
G.
J.
BarkerBenfield,
The
Horrors of the
Half-Known Life:
Male
Attitudes
Toward
Women
and Sexuality in
Nineteenth-Century
America ( New
York: Harper and
Row, 1976), pp.
195-96.
20.
Susan
Sontag,
Illness as Metaphor
(
New
York:
Vintage, 1979), pp.
61-62.
21.
Geddes
and
Thompson,
Evolution of Sex, p.
244;
see
also
Carroll
SmithRosenberg
,
"Puberty
to
Menopause:
The
Cycle of Femininity
in
NineteenthCentury
America." In Mary
Hartman and Lois
W. Bonner, ed.,
Clio's
Consciousness
Raised ( New York:
Harper and Row,
1974), pp. 28-29.
22.
Smith-Rosenberg,
"Puberty
to
Menopause,"
pp.
25-27.
23.
Quoted in Laqueur,
"Female Orgasm,"
p. 32.
24.
Havelock
Ellis,
Men and Women (
London:
Walter
Scott, 1904), pp.
284, 293, quoted in
Laqueur, "Female
Orgasm," p. 32.
25.
Smith-Rosenberg,
"Puberty
to
Menopause,"
pp.
30-31;
Joel
Wilbush, "What's in
a Name? Some
Linguistic Aspects
of the Climacteric."
Maturitas
3
(
1981): 5.
26.
Andrew F. Currier,
The Menopause (
New
York:
Appleton,
1897),
pp. 25-26.
27.
Carole
Haber,
Beyond Sixty-Five:
The Dilemma of
Old
Age
in
America's Past (
Cambridge:
Cambridge
University Press,
1983), p. 69. See
John Mason Good,
The
Study
of
Medicine, vol. 2 (
New York: Harper
and Row, 1843),
pp. 23-25 for an
explanation of why
the
climacteric
affects men more
severely
than
women.
28.
Smith-Rosenberg,
"Puberty
to
Menopause," p. 30.
29.
J. Madison Taylor,
"The Conservation
of Energy in Those
of
Advancing
Years,"
Popular
Science Monthly 64
( 1904), p. 413.
30.
Quoted in Howard
Berliner, "Medical
Modes
of
Production."
In
Peter Wright and
Andrew Treacher,
ed., The Problem of
Medical
Knowledge:
Examining
theSocial
Construction
of
Medicine
3 Mothers, Monsters, and Machines
Rosi Braidotti
Figuring Out
I would like to approach the sequence "mothers, monsters, and machines" both thematically and
methodologically, so as to work out possible connections between these terms. Because women, the
biological sciences, and technology are conceptually interrelated, there can not be only one correct
connection but, rather, many, heterogeneous and potentially contradictory ones.
The quest for multiple connections--or conjunctions--can also be rendered methodologically in
terms of Donna Haraway's "figurations." 1 The term refers to ways of expressing feminist forms of
knowledge that are not caught in a mimetic relationship to dominant scientific discourse. This is a
way of marking my own difference: as an intellectual woman who
Rosi Braidotti, "Mothers, Monsters, and Machines." From Nomadic Subjects by Rosi Braidotti.
Copyright © 1994 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
has acquired and earned the right to speak publicly in an academic context, I have also inherited a
tradition of female silence. Centuries of exclusion of women from the exercise of discursive power
are ringing through my words. In speaking the language of man, I also intend to let the silence of
woman echo gently but firmly; I shall not conform to the phallogocentric mode. 2 I want to question
the status of feminist theory in terms not only of the conceptual tools and the gender-specific
perceptions that govern the production of feminist research but also of the form our perceptions
take.
The "nomadic" style is the best suited to the quest for feminist rigurations, in the sense of adequate
representations of female experience as that which cannot easily be fitted within the parameters of
phallogocentric language.
The configuration of ideas I am trying to set up: mothers, monsters, machines, is therefore a case
study--not only in terms of its propositional content but also in defining my place of enunciation
and, therefore, my relationship to the readers who are my partners in this discursive game. It is a
new figuration of feminist subjectivity.
Quoting Deleuze, 3 I would like to define this relationship as "rhizomatic"; that is to say not only
cerebral, but related to experience, which implies a strengthened connection between thought and
life, a renewed proximity of the thinking process to existential reality. 4 In my thinking,
"rhizomatic" thinking leads to what I call a "nomadic" style.
Moreover, a "nomadic" connection is not a dualistic or oppositional way of thinking 5 but rather one
that views discourse as a positive, multilayered network of power relations. 6
Let me develop the terms of my nomadic network by reference to Foucauldian critiques of the
power of discourse: he argues that the production of scientific knowledge works as a complex,
interrelated network of truth, power, and desire, centered on the subject as a bodily entity. In a
double movement that I find most politically useful, Foucault highlights both the normative
foundations of theoretical reason and also the rational model of power. "Power" thus becomes the
name for a complex set of interconnections, between the spaces where truth and knowledge are
produced and the systems of control and domination. I shall unwrap my three interrelated notions in
the light of this definition of power.
Last, but not least, this style implies the simultaneous dislocation not only of my place of
enunciation as a feminist intellectual but also accordingly of the position of my readers. As my
interlocutors I am constructing those readers to be "not just" traditional intellectuals and academics
but also active, interested, and concerned participants in a project of research and experi- mentation
for new ways of thinking about human subjectivity in general and female subjectivity in particular. I
mean to appeal therefore not only to a requirement for passionless truth but also to a passionate
engagement in the recognition of the theoretical and discursive implications of sexual difference. In
this choice of a theoretical style that leaves ample room for the exploration of subjectivity, I am
following the lead of Donna Haraway, whose plea for "passionate detachment" in theory making I
fully share. 7
Let us now turn to the thematic or propositional content of my constellation of ideas: mothers,
monsters and machines.
For the sake of clarity, let me define them: "mothers" refers to the maternal function of women. By
WOMEN I mean not only the biocultural entities thus represented, as the empirical subjects of
sociopolitical realities, but also a discursive field: feminist theory. The kind of feminism I want to
defend rests on the presence and the experience of real-life women whose political consciousness is
bent on changing the institution of power in our society.
Feminist theory is a two-layered project involving the critique of existing definitions,
representations as well as the elaboration of alternative theories about women. Feminism is the
movement that brings into practice the dimension of sexual difference through the critique of
gender as a power institution. Feminism is the question; the affirmation of sexual difference is the
answer.
This point is particularly important in the light of modernity's imperative to think differently about
our historical condition. The central question seems to be here: how can we affirm the positivity of
female subjectivity at a time in history when our acquired perceptions of "the subject" are being
radically questioned? How can we reconcile the recognition of the problematic nature of the notion
and the construction of the subject with the political necessity to posit female subjectivity?
By MACHINES I mean the scientific, political, and discursive field of technology in the broadest
sense of the term. Ever since Heidegger the philosophy of modernity has been trying to come to
terms with technological reason. The Frankfurt School refers to it as "instrumental reason": one that
places the end of its endeavors well above the means and suspends all judgment on its inner logic.
In my work, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, I approach the technology issue from within the
French tradition, following the materialism of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault.
By MONSTERS I mean a third kind of discourse: the history and philosophy of the biological
sciences, and their relation to difference and to differ ent bodies. Monsters are human beings who
are born with congenital mal- formations of their bodily organism. They also represent the in
between, the mixed, the ambivalent as implied in the ancient Greek root of the word "monsters,"
teras, which means both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration. Since the
nineteenth century, following the classification system of monstrosity by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,
bodily malformations have been defined in terms of "excess," "lack," or "displacement of organs. 8
Before any such scientific classification was reached, however, natural philosophy had struggled to
come to terms with these objects of abjection. The constitution of teratology as a science offers a
paradigmatic example of the ways in which scientific rationality dealt with differences of the bodily
kind.
The discourse on monsters as a case study highlights a question that seems to me very important for
feminist theory: the status of difference within rational thought. Following the analysis of the
philosophical ratio suggested by Derrida 9 and other contemporary French philosophers, it can be
argued that Western thought has a logic of binary oppositions that treats difference as that which is
other-than the accepted norm. The question then becomes: can we free difference from these
normative connotations? Can we learn to think differently about difference? 10
The monster is the bodily incarnation of difference from the basic human norm; it is a deviant, an anomaly; it is abnormal. As Georges Canguilhem points out, the very notion of the human body rests
upon an image that is intrinsically prescriptive: a normally formed human being is the zero-degree
of monstrosity. Given the special status of the monster, what light does he throw on the structures of
scientific discourse? How was the difference of/in the monster perceived within this discourse?
When set alongside each other, mothers/monsters/machines may seem puzzling. There is no
apparent connection among these three terms and yet the link soon becomes obvious if I add that
recent developments in the field of biotechnology, particularly artificial procreation, have extended
the power of science over the maternal body of women. The possibility of mechanizing the maternal
function is by now well within our reach; the manipulation of life through different combinations of
genetic engineering has allowed for the creation of new artificial monsters in the high-tech labs of
our biochemists. There is therefore a political urgency about the future of women in the new
reproductive technology debate, which gives a polemical force to my constellation of ideas-mothers, monsters, and machines.
The legal, economic, and political repercussions of the new reproductive technologies are farreaching. The recent stand taken by the Roman Catholic church and by innumerable "bioethics
committees" all across Western Europe against experimentation and genetic manipulations may
appear fair enough. They all invariably shift the debate, however, far from the power of science
over the women's body in favor of placing increasing emphasis on the rights of the fetus or of
embryos. This emphasis is played against the rights of the mother--and therefore of the woman--and
we have been witnessing systematic slippages between the discourse against genetic manipulations
and the rhetoric of the antiabortion campaigners. No area of contemporary technological
development is more crucial to the construction of gender than the new reproductive technologies.
The central thematic link I want to explore between mothers, monsters, and machines is therefore
my argument that contemporary biotechnology displaces women by making procreation a high-tech
affair.
Conjunction 1: Woman Mother as Monster
As part of the discursive game of nomadic networking I am attempting here, let us start by
associating two of these terms: let us superimpose the image of the woman/mother onto that of the
monstrous body. In other words, let us take the case study of monsters, deviants, or anomalous
entities as being paradigmatic of how differences are dealt with within scientific rationality. Why
this association of femininity with monstrosity?
The association of women with monsters goes as far back as Aristotle who, in The Generation of
Animals, posits the human norm in terms of bodily organization based on a male model. Thus, in
reproduction, when everything goes according to the norm a boy is produced; the female only
happens when something goes wrong or fails to occur in the reproductive process. The female is
therefore an anomaly, a variation on the main theme of man-kind. The emphasis Aristotle places on
the masculinity of the human norm is also reflected in his theory of conception: he argues that the
principle of life is carried exclusively by the sperm, the female genital apparatus providing only the
passive receptacle for human life. The sperm-centered nature of this early theory of procreation is
thus connected to a massive masculine bias in the general Aristotelian theory of subjectivity. For
Aristotle, not surprisingly, women are not endowed with a rational soul. 11
The topos of women as a sign of abnormality, and therefore of difference as a mark of inferiority,
remained a constant in Western scientific discourse. This association has produced, among other
things, a style of misogynist literature with which anyone who has read Gulliver's Travels must be
familiar: the horror of the female body. The interconnection of women as monsters with the literary
text is particularly significant and rich in the genre of satire. In a sense, the satirical text is implicitly
monstrous, it is a deviant, an aberration in itself. Eminently transgressive, it can afford to express a
degree of misogyny that might shock in other literary genres.
Outside the literary tradition, however, the association of femininity with monstrosity points to a
system of pejoration that is implicit in the binary logic of oppositions that characterizes the
phallogocentric discursive order. The monstrous as the negative pole, the pole of pejoration, is
structurally analogous to the feminine as that which is other-than the established norm, whatever the
norm may be. The actual propositional content of the terms of opposition is less significant for me
than its logic. Within this dualistic system, monsters are, just like bodily female subjects, a figure of
devalued difference; as such, it provides the fuel for the production of normative discourse. If the
position of women and monsters as logical operators in discursive production is comparable within
the dualistic logic, it follows that the misogyny of discourse is not an irrational exception but rather
a tightly constructed system that requires difference as pejoration in order to erect the positivity of
the norm. In this respect, misogyny is not a hazard but rather the structural necessity of a system
that can only represent "otherness" as negativity.
The theme of woman as devalued difference remained a constant in Western thought; in philosophy
especially, "she" is forever associated to unholy, disorderly, subhuman, and unsightly phenomena.
It is as if "she" carried within herself something that makes her prone to being an enemy of
mankind, an outsider in her civilization, an "other." It is important to stress the light that
psychoanalytic theory has cast upon this hatred for the feminine and the traditional patriarchal
association of women with monstrosity.
The woman's body can change shape in pregnancy and childbearing; it is therefore capable of
defeating the notion of fixed bodily form, of visible, recognizable, clear, and distinct shapes as that
which marks the contour of the body. She is morphologically dubious. The fact that the female body
can change shape so drastically is troublesome in the eyes of the logocentric economy within which
to see is the primary act of knowledge and the gaze the basis of all epistemic awareness. 12 The fact
that the male sexual organ does, of course, change shape in the limited time span of the erection and
that this operation--however precarious--is not exactly unrelated to the changes of shape undergone
by the female body during pregnancy constitutes, in psychoanalytic theory, one of the fundamental
axes of fantasy about sexual difference. The appearance of symmetry in the way the two sexes work
in reproduction merely brings out, however, the separateness and the specificity of each sexual
organization. What looks to the naked eye like a comparable pattern: erection/ pregnancy, betrays
the ineluctable difference. As psychoanalysis successfully demonstrates, reproduction does not
encompass the whole of human sexuality and for this reason alone anatomy is not destiny.
Moreover, this partial analogy also leads to a sense of (false) anatomical complementarity between
the sexes that contrasts with the complexity of the psychic representations of sexual difference. This
double recognition of both proximity and separation is the breeding ground for the rich and varied
network of misunderstandings, identifications, interconnections, and mutual demands that is what
sexual human relationships are all about.
Precisely this paradoxical mixture of "the same and yet other" between the sexes generates a drive
to denigrate woman in so far as she is "other-than" the male norm. In this respect hatred for the
feminine constitutes the phallogocentric economy by inducing in both sexes the desire to achieve
order, by means of a one-way pattern for both. As long as the law of the One is operative, so will be
the denigration of the feminine, and of women with it. 13
Woman as a sign of difference is monstrous. If we define the monster as a bodily entity that is
anomalous and deviant vis-à-vis the norm, then we can argue that the female body shares with the
monster the privilege of bringing out a unique blend of fascination and horror. This logic of
attraction and repulsion is extremely significant; psychoanalytic theory takes it as the fundamental
structure of the mechanism of desire and, as such, of the constitution of the neurotic symptom: the
spasm of the hysteric turns to nausea, displacing itself from its object.
Julia Kristeva, drawing extensively on the research of Mary Douglas, connects this mixture 14 to the
maternal body as the site of the origin of life and consequently also of the insertion into mortality
and death. We are all of woman born, and the mother's body as the threshold of existence is both
sacred and soiled, holy and hellish; it is attractive and repulsive, all-powerful and therefore
impossible to live with. Kristeva speaks of it in terms of "abjection"; the abject arises in that gray, in
between area of the mixed, the ambiguous. The monstrous or deviant is a figure of abjection in so
far as it trespasses and transgresses the barriers between recognizable norms or definitions.
Significantly, the abject approximates the sacred because it appears to contain within itself a
constitutive ambivalence where life and death are reconciled. Kristeva emphasizes the dual function
of the maternal site as both life- and death-giver, as object of worship and of terror. The notion of
the sacred is generated precisely by this blend of fascination and horror, which prompts an intense
play of the imaginary, of fantasies and often nightmares about the ever-shifting boundaries between
life and death, night and day, masculine and feminine, active and passive, and so forth.
In a remarkable essay about the head of the Medusa, Freud connected this logic of attraction and
repulsion to the sight of female genitalia; because there is nothing to see in that dark and mysterious
region, the imagination goes haywire. Short of losing his head, the male gazer is certainly struck by
castration anxiety. For fear of losing the thread of his thought, Freud then turns his distress into the
most overdetermined of all questions: "what does woman want?"
A post-Freudian reading of this text permits us to see how the question about female desire emerges
out of male anxiety about the representation of sexual difference. In a more Lacanian vein, Kristeva
adds an important insight: the female sex as the site of origin also inspires awe because of the
psychic and cultural imperative to separate from the mother and accept the Law of the Father. The
incest taboo, the fundamental law of our social system, builds on the mixture of fascination and
horror that characterizes the feminine/maternal object of abjection. As the site of primary
repression, and therefore that which escapes from representation, the mother's body becomes a
turbulent area of psychic life.
Obviously, this analysis merely describes the mechanisms at work in our cultural system; no
absolute necessity surrounds the symbolic absence of Woman. On the contrary, feminists have been
working precisely to put into images that which escapes phallogocentric modes of representation.
Thus, in her critique of psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray points out that the dark continent of all dark
continents is the mother-daughter relationship. She also suggests that, instead of this logic of
attraction and repulsion, sexual difference may be thought out in terms of recognition and wonder.
The latter is one of the fundamental passions in Descartes' treatise about human affectivity: he
values it as the foremost of human passions, that which makes everything else possible. Why
Western culture did not adopt this way of conceptualizing and experiencing difference and opted
instead for difference as a sign of negativity remains a critical question for me.
It is because of this phallogocentric perversion that femininity and monstrosity can be seen as
isomorphic. Woman/mother is monstrous by excess; she transcends established norms and
transgresses boundaries. She is monstrous by lack: woman/mother does not possess the substantive
unity of the masculine subject. Most important, through her identification with the fem- inine she is
monstrous by displacement: as sign of the in between areas, of the indefinite, the ambiguous, the
mixed, woman/mother is subjected to a constant process of metaphorization as "other-than."
In the binary structure of the logocentric system, "woman," as the eternal pole of opposition, the
"other," can be assigned to the most varied and often contradictory terms. The only constant
remains her "becoming-metaphor," whether of the sacred or the profane, of heaven or hell, of life or
death. "Woman" is that which is assigned and has no power of self-definition. "Woman" is the
anomaly that confirms the positivity of the norm.
Conjunction 2: Teratology and the Feminine
The history of teratology, or the science of monsters, demonstrates clearly the ways in which the
body in general and the female body in particular have been conceptualized in Western scientific
discourse, progressing from the fantastic dimension of the bodily organism to a more rationalistic
construction of the body-machine. The monster as a human being born with congenital
malformations undergoes a series of successive representations historically, before it gives rise, in
the latter part of the eighteenth century, to an acceptable, scientific discourse.
The work of French epistemologist and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem and of his
disciple Michel Foucault is extremely useful in studying the modes of interaction of the normal and
the pathological, the normative and the transgressive in Western philosophy. For Canguilhem, the
stakes in theory of monstrosity are the questions of reproduction, of origins: "how can such
monstrous creatures be conceived?" The conception of monsters is what really haunts the scientific
imagination. Whereas psychoanalysts like Lacan and Irigaray argue that the epistem(ophil)ic
question of the origin lies at the heart of all scientific investigation, Canguilhem is interested in
providing the historical perspective on how the scientific discourse about monsters emerged. He
argues that teratology became constituted as a discipline when it required the conceptual and
technological means of mastering the pro/reproduction of monsters. In other words, the scientific
and technological know-how necessary for the artificial reproduction of human anomalies is the
precondition for the establishment of a scientific discipline concerned with abnormal beings.
This means that on the discursive level, the monster points out the major epistemological function
played by anomalies, abnormalities, and pathology in the constitution of biological sciences.
Historically, biologists have privileged phenomena that deviate from the norm, in order to
exemplify the normal structure of development. In this respect the study of monstrous births is a
forerunner of modern embryology. Biologists have set up abnormal cases in order to elucidate
normal behavior; psychoanalysis will follow exactly the same logic for mental disorders. The
proximity of the normal and the pathological demonstrates the point Foucault made in relation to
madness and reason: scientific rationality is implicitly normative, it functions by exclusion and
disqualification according to a dualistic logic.
The history of discourse about monsters conventionally falls into three chronological periods. In the
first, the Greeks and Romans maintained a notion of a "race" of monsters, an ethnic entity
possessing specific characteristics. They also relied on the notion of "abjection," seeing the monster
not only as the sign of marvel but also of disorder and divine wrath. The practice of exposing
monstrous children as unnatural creatures was inaugurated by the Greeks. Thus Oedipus himself-"swollen foot"--was not "normal," and his destruction should have been in the order of things.
More generally, classical mythology represents no founding hero, no main divine creature or
demigod as being of woman born. In fact, one of the constant themes in the making of a god is his
"unnatural" birth: his ability, through subterfuges such as immaculate conceptions and other tricks,
to short-circuit the orifice through which most humans beings pop into the spatio-temporal realm of
existence. The fantastic dimension of classical mythological discourse about monsters illustrates the
paradox of aberration and adoration that I mentioned earlier, and it therefore inscribes an
antimaternal dimension at the very heart of the matter.
We can make a further distinction between the baroque and enlightened or "scientific" discourses
on monsters. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the monster still possesses the classical
sense of something wonderful, fantastic, rare, and precious. Just like the madman, the dwarf and
other marvels, it participates in the life of his/her town and enjoys certain privileges. For instance,
dwarves as court jesters and fools can transgress social conventions, can say and do things that
"normal" human beings cannot afford to say or do.
The imagination of the times runs wild as to the origins of monsters as objects of horror and
fascination, as something both exceptional and ominous. The question of the origins of monsters
accompanies the development of the medical sciences in the prescientific imagination; it conveys an
interesting mixture of traditional superstitions and elements of reflection that will lead to a more
scientific method of enquiry. Out of the mass of documentary evidence on this point, I will
concentrate on one aspect that throws light on my question about the connection between
monstrosity and the feminine. Ambroise Paré's treatise 15 on wondrous beings lists among the
causes for their conception various forms of unnatural copulation ranging from bestiality to
everyday forms of immorality, such as having sexual intercourse too often, or on a Sunday night
(sic), or on the night of any major religious holiday. As a matter of fact, all sexual practices other
than those leading to healthy reproduction are suspected to be conducive to monstrous events. Food
can also play a major role; the regulation of diet is extremely important and implicitly connected to
religious regulations concerning time, season and cycles of life. 16
Bad weather can adversely affect procreation, as can an excess or a lack of semen; the devil also
plays an important role, and he definitely interferes with normal human reproduction. Well may we
laugh at such beliefs; many still circulate in rural areas of Western Europe. Besides, the whole
fantastic discourse about the origins of monsters becomes considerably less amusing when we
consider that women paid a heavy price for these wild notions. The history of women's relationship
to "the devil" in Western Europe is a history too full of horrors for us to take these notions lightly.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the baroque mind gave a major role to the maternal imagination
in procreation generally and in the conception of monsters particularly. 17 The mother was said to
have the actual power of producing a monstrous baby simply by: (a) thinking about awful things
during intercourse (it's the close-your-eyes-and-think-of-England principle); (b) dreaming very
intensely about something or somebody; or (c) looking at animals or evil-looking creatures (this is
the Xerox-machine complex: if a woman looked at a dog, for instance, with a certain look in her
eyes, then she would have the power of transmitting that image to the fetus and reproducing it
exactly, thus creating a dog-faced baby).
I let you imagine the intense emotion that struck a village in Northern France in the seventeenth
century when a baby was born who looked remarkably like the local bishop. The woman defended
herself by claiming gazing rights: she argued that she had stared at the male character in church
with such intense devotion that . . . she xeroxed him away! She saved her life and proved the
feminist theory that female gaze as the expression of female desire is always perceived as a
dangerous, if not deadly, thing.
In other words, the mother's imagination is as strong as the force of nature; in order to assess this,
one needs to appreciate the special role that the imagination plays in the seventeenth century
theories of knowledge. It is a fundamental element in the classical worldview, and yet it is caught in
great ambivalence: the imagination is the capacity to draw connections and consequently to
construct ideas and yet it is potentially antirational.
The Cartesian Meditations are the clearest example of this ambivalence, which we find projected
massively onto the power of the mother. She can direct the fetus to normal development or she can
de-form it, un-do it, dehumanize it.
It is as if the mother, as a desiring agent, has the power to undo the work of legitimate procreation
through the sheer force of her imagination. By deforming the product of the father, she cancels what
psychoanalytic theory calls "the Name-of-the-Father." The female "signature" of the reproductive
pact is unholy, inhuman, illegitimate, and it remains the mere pre-text to horrors to come. Isn't the
product of woman's creativity always so?
This belief is astonishing however, when it is contextualized historically: consider that the debate
between the Aristotelian theory of conception, with its sperm-centered view of things, and mothercentered notions of procreation, has a long history. The seventeenth century seems to have reached
a paroxysm of hatred for the feminine; it inaugurated a flight from the female body in a desire to
master the woman's generative powers.
Very often feminist scholars have taken this point as a criticism of classical rationalism, especially
in the Cartesian 18 form, far too provocatively. The feminist line has been "I think therefore he is,"
thus emphasizing the malecentered view of human nature that is at work in this discourse. Whatever
Descartes' responsibility for the flight from womanhood may be--and I maintain that it should be
carefully assessed--for the purpose of my research what matters is the particular form that this flight
took in the seventeenth century.
Conjunction 3: The Fantasy of Male-Born Children
The flight from and rejection of the feminine can also be analyzed from a different angle: the
history of the biological sciences in the prescientific era, especially the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. I argue that the flight from the feminine, and particularly from the monstrous power of
the maternal imagination and desire, lies at the heart of the recurring fantasy of a child born from
man alone.
We find, for instance, alchemists busy at work to try to produce the philosopher's son--the
homunculus, a man-made tiny man popping out of the alchemists' laboratories, fully formed and
endowed with language. The alchemists' imagination pushes the premises of the Aristotelian view
of procreation to an extreme, stressing the male role in reproduction and minimizing the female
function to the role of a mere carrier. Alchemy is a reductio ad absurdum of the male fantasy of
self-reproduction.
How can a child be of man born? In a recent article, S. G. Allen and J. Hubbs 19 argue that
alchemical symbolism rests on a simple process--the appropriation of the womb by male "art," that
is to say the artifact of male techniques. Paracelsus, the master theoretician of alchemy, is certain
that a man should and could be born outside a woman's body. Womb envy, alias the envy for the
matrix or the uterus, reaches paradoxical dimensions in these texts--art being more powerful than
nature itself.
The recipe is quite simple, as any reader of Tristram Shandy will know. It consists of a mixture of
sperm and something to replace the uterus, such as the alchemist's jars and other containers so
efficiently described in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. At other times the matrix is replaced by an oxhide, or by a mere heap of compost or manure. The basic assumption is that the alchemists can not
only imitate the work of woman, they can also do it much better because the artifact, the artificial
process of science and technique, perfects the imperfection of the natural course of events and thus
avoids mistakes. Once reproduction becomes the pure result of mental efforts, the appropriation of
the feminine is complete.
On the imaginary level, therefore, the test-tube babies of today mark the long-term triumph of the
alchemists' dream of dominating nature through their self-inseminating, masturbatory practices.
What is happening with the new reproductive technologies today is the final chapter in a long
history of fantasy of self-generation by and for the men themselves--men of science, but men of the
male kind, capable of producing new monsters and fascinated by their power.
Ever since the mid nineteenth century, the abnormal monstrous beings, which had been objects of
wonder, have fallen prey to the massive medicalization of scientific discourse. The marvelous,
imaginary dimension of the monster is forgotten in the light of the new technologies of the body.
Michel Foucault's analysis of modern rationality describes the fundamental shift that has taken
place in scientific discourse of the modern era.
By the late eighteenth century, the monster has been transferred to hospital or rather, to the newly
established institution of the anatomy clinic, where it could be analyzed in the context of the newly
evolved practice of
comparative anatomy and experimental biomedicine. Thus is born the science of teratology.
Founded by G. Saint-Hilaire, by the end of the century it had become an experimental science. Its
aim was to study malformations of the embryo so as to understand in the light of evolutionary
theory the genesis of monstrous beings. Notice that the initial curiosity as to the origin of such
horrendous creatures remains, but it is expressed differently.
The experimental study of the conditions that would lead to the production of anomalous or
monstrous beings provides the basic epistemological structure of modern embryology. Foucault's
analysis of modernity emphasizes the epistemological shifts between the normal and the
pathological, reason and madness, in terms of the understanding of the body, the bodily roots of
human subjectivity. The biomedical sciences occupy a very significant place in the discursive
context of modernity.
Two institutions of learning appear in the modern era--the clinic and the hospital. The appearance of
these structures is in turn related to a major theoretical breakthrough--the medical practice of
anatomy. In Foucault's archaeological mode, for comparative clinical anatomy to come into being
as a scientific discourse, a century-old taboo had to be lifted, the one that forbade the dissection of
corpses for the purpose of scientific investigation.
Western culture had respected a fundamental taboo of the body up until then--the medical gaze
could not explore the inside of the human body because the bodily container was considered as a
metaphysical entity, marked by the secrets of life and death that pertain to the divine being. The
anatomical study of the body was therefore forbidden until the fifteenth century and after then was
strictly controlled. The nineteenth century sprang open the doors of bodily perception; clinical
anatomy thus implies a radical transformation in the epistemological status of the body. It is a
practice that consists in deciphering the body, transforming the organism into a text to be read and
interpreted by a knowledgeable medical gaze.
Anatomy as a theoretical representation of the body implies that the latter is a clear and distinct
configuration, a visible and intelligible structure. The dead body, the corpse, becomes the measure
of the living being, and death thus becomes one of the factors epistemologically integrated into
scientific knowledge.
Today, the right to scrutinize the inside of the body for scientific purposes is taken for granted,
although dissections and the transferal of organs as a practice are strictly regulated by law. As a
matter of fact, contemporary molecular biology is making visible the most intimate and minute fires
of life.
Where has the Cartesian passion of wonder gone? When compared to the earlier tradition, the
medicalization of the body in the age of modernity and its corollary, the perfectibility of the living
organism and the gradual abolition of anomalies, can also be seen--though not exclusively--as a
form of denial of the sense of wonder, of the fantastic, of that mixture of fascination and horror I
have already mentioned. It marks the loss of fascination about the living organism, its mysteries and
functions.
Psychoanalytic theory has explained this loss of fascination as the necessary toll that rational theory
takes on human understanding. In the psychoanalytic perspective, of Freudian and Lacanian
inspiration, the initial curiosity that prompts the drive and the will to know is first and foremost
desire, which takes knowledge as its object.
The desire to know is, like all desires, related to the problem of representing one's origin, of
answering the most childish and consequently fundamental of questions: "where did I come from?"
This curiosity, as I stated in the previous chapter, is the matrix for all forms of thinking and
conceptualization. Knowledge is always the desire to know about desire, that is to say about things
of the body as a sexual entity.
Scientific knowledge becomes, in this perspective, an extremely perverted version of that original
question. The desire to go and see how things work is related to primitive sadistic drives, so that,
somewhere along the line, the scientist is like the anxious little child who pulls apart his favorite toy
to see how it's made inside. Knowing in this mode is the result of the scopophilic drive--to go and
see, and the sadistic one--to rip it apart physically so as to master it intellectually. All this is related
to the incestuous drive, to the web of curiosity and taboos surrounding the one site of certain origin-the mother's body.
From a psychoanalytic perspective the establishment of clinical comparative anatomy in the modern
era is very significant because it points out the rationalistic obsession with visibility, which I have
analyzed earlier. Seeing is the prototype of knowing. By elaborating a scientific technique for
analyzing the bodily organs, Western sciences put forward the assumption that a body is precisely
that which can be seen and looked at, no more than the sum of its parts. Modern scientific
rationality slipped from the emphasis on visibility to the mirage of absolute transparence of the
living organism, as I have argued previously.
Contemporary biological sciences, particularly molecular biology, have pushed to the extreme these
assumptions that were implicit in the discourse of Western sciences. When compared to the clinical
anatomy of the nineteenth century, contemporary biomedical sciences have acquired the right and the know-how
necessary to act on the very structure of the living matter, on an infinitely small scale.
Foucault defined the modern era as that of biopower; power over life and death in a worldwide
extension of man's control of outer space, of the bottom of the oceans as well as of the depths of the
maternal body. There are no limits today for what can be shown, photographed, reproduced--even a
technique such as echography perpetuates this pornographic re-presentation of bodily parts,
externalizing the interior of the womb and its content.
The proliferation of images is such that the very notion of the body, of its boundaries and its inner
structure is being split open in an everregressing vision. We seem to be hell bent on xeroxing even
the invisible particles of matter.
Philosophers of science, such as Kuhn and Fayarabend, have stressed the modern predicament in
scientific discourse. Kuhn points out the paradoxical coincidence of extreme rationalism of the
scientific and technological kind, with a persisting subtext of wild fantastic concoctions. In the
discourse of monstrosity, rational enquiries about their origin and structure continue to coexist with
superstitious beliefs and fictional representations of "creeps." The two registers of the rational and
the totally nonrational seem to run alongside each other, never quite joined together.
The question nevertheless remains--where has the wonder gone? What has happened to the fantastic
dimension, to the horror and the fascination of difference? What images were created of the bodily
marks of difference, after they became locked up in the electronic laboratories of the modern
alchemists?
Was there another way, other than the phallogocentric incompetence with, and antipathy to,
differences--its willful reduction of otherness, to negativity? Is there another way out, still?
Conjunction 4: The Age of Freaks
As the Latin etymology of the term monstrum points out, malformed human beings have always
been the object of display, subjected to the public gaze. In his classic study, Freaks, Leslie Fiedler 20
analyses the exploitation of monsters for purposes of entertainment. From the county fairs, right
across rural Europe to the Coney Island sideshows, freaks have always been entertaining.
Both Fiedler and Bogdan 21 stress two interrelated aspects of the display of freaks since the turn of
the century. The first is that their exhibition displays racist and orientalist undertones: abnormally
formed people were exhibited alongside tribal people of normal stature and bodily configuration, as
well as exotic animals.
Second, the medical profession benefited considerably by examining these human exhibits.
Although the freak is presented as belonging to the realm of zoology or anthropology, doctors and
physicians examined them regularly and wrote scientific reports about them.
Significantly, totalitarian regimes such as Hitler's Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union prohibited
the exhibition of freaks as being degenerate specimens of the human species. They also dealt with
them in their campaigns for eugenics and race or ethnic hygiene, by preventing them from breeding.
Fiedler sees a connection between the twentieth-century medicalization of monsters, the scientific
appropriation of their generative secrets, and an increased commodification of the monster as freak,
that is, the object of display.
Contemporary culture deals with anomalies by a fascination for the freaky. The film Freaks by Tod
Browning ( 1932) warns us that monsters are an endangered species. Since the sixties a whole youth
culture has developed around freaks, with special emphasis on genetic mutation as a sign of
nonconformism and social rebellion. Whole popular culture genres such as science fiction, horror,
rock'n'roll comics, and cyberpunk are about mutants.
Today, the freaks are science fiction androids, cyborgs, bionic women and men, comparable to the
grotesque of former times; the whole rock'n'roll scene is a huge theater of the grotesque, combining
freaks, androgynes, satanies, ugliness, and insanity, as well as violence.
In other words, in the early part of our century we watch the simultaneous formalization of a
scientific discourse about monsters and their elimination as a problem. This process, which falls
under the rationalist aggression of scientific discourse, also operates a shift at the level of
representation, and of the cultural imaginary. The dimension of the "fantastic," that mixture of
aberration and adoration, loathing and attraction, which for centuries has escorted the existence of
strange and difficult bodies, is now displaced. The "becoming freaks" of monsters both deflates the
fantastic projections that have surrounded them and expands them to a wider cultural field. The
whole of contemporary popular culture is about freaks, just as the last of the physical freaks have
disappeared. The last metaphorical shift in the status of monsters--their becoming freaks--coincides
with their elimination.
In order not to be too pessimistic about this aspect of the problem, how- ever, I wish to point out
that the age of the commodification of freaks is also the period that has resulted in another
significant shift: abnormally formed people have organized themselves in the handicapped political
movement, thereby claiming not only a renewed sense of dignity but also wider social and political
rights. 22
In Transit; or, for Nomadism
Mothers, monsters, and machines. What is the connection, then? What con/dis-junctions can we
make in telling the tale of feminism, science, and technology? How do feminist fabulations or
figurations help in figuring out alternative paradigms? To what extent do they speak the language of
sexual difference? Where do we situate ourselves in order to create links, construct theories,
elaborate hypotheses? Which way do we look to try and see the possible impact modern science
will have on the status of women? How do we assess the status of difference as an ontological
category at the end of the twentieth century? How do we think about all this?
The term "trandisciplinary" can describe one position taken by feminists. Passing in between
different discursive fields, and through diverse spheres of intellectual discourse. The feminist
theoretician today can only be "in transit," moving on, passing through, creating connections where
things were previously dis-connected or seemed un-related, where there seemed to be "nothing to
see." In transit, moving, dis-placing--this is the grain of hysteria without which there is no
theorization at all. 23 In a feminist context it also implies the effort to move on to the invention of
new ways of relating, of building footbridges between notions. The epistemic nomadism I am
advocating can only work, in fact, if it is properly situated, securely anchored in the "in between"
zones.
I am assuming here a definition of "rigor" away from the linear Aristotelian logic that dominated it
for so long. It seems to me that the rigor feminists are after is of a different kind--it is the rigor of a
project that emphasizes the necessary interconnection-connections between the theoretical and the
political, which insists on putting real-life experience first and foremost as a criterion for the
validation of truth. It is the rigor of passionate investment in a project and in the quest of the
discursive means to realize it.
In this respect feminism acts as a reminder that in the postmodern predicament, rationality in its
classical mode can no longer be taken as rep- resenting the totality of human reason or even of the
all-too-human activity of thinking.
By criticizing the single-mindedness and the masculine bias of rationality I do not intend to fall into
the opposite and plead for easy ready-made irrationalism. Patriarchal thought has for too long
confined women in the irrational for me to claim such a non-quality. What we need instead is a
redefinition of what we have learned to recognize as being the structure and the aims of human
subjectivity in its relationship to difference, to the "other."
In claiming that feminists are attempting to redefine the very meaning of thought, I am also
suggesting that in time the rules of the discursive game will have to change. Academics will have to
agree that thinking adequately about our historical condition implies the transcendence of
disciplinary boundaries and intellectual categories.
More important, for feminist epistemologists, the task of thinking adequately about the historical
conditions that affect the medicalization of the maternal function forces upon us the need to
reconsider the inextricable interconnection of the bodily with the technological. The shifts that have
taken place in the perception and the representation of the embodied subject, in fact, make it
imperative to think the unity of body and machine, flesh and metal. Although many factors point to
the danger of commodification of the body that such a mixture makes possible, and although this
process of commodification conceals racist and sexist dangers that must not be underestimated, this
is not the whole story. There is also a positive side to the new interconnection of mothers, monsters,
and machines, and this has to do with the loss of any essentialized definition of womanhood-or
indeed even of motherhood. In the age of biotechnological power motherhood is split open into a
variety of possible physiological, cultural, and social functions. If this were the best of all possible
worlds, one could celebrate the decline of one consensual way of experiencing motherhood as a
sign of increased freedom for women. Our world being as male-dominated as it is, however, the
best option is to construct a nomadic style of feminism that will allow women to rethink their
position in a postindustrial, postmetaphysical world, without nostalgia, paranoia, or false
sentimentalism. The relevance and political urgency of the configuration "mothers, monsters and
machines" makes it all the more urgent for the feminist nomadic thinkers of the world to connect
and to negotiate new boundaries for female identity in a world where power over the body has
reached an implosive peak. NOTES
I wish to thank Margaret R. Higonnet, of the Center for European Studies at Harvard, and Sissel
Lie, of the Women's Research Center at Tronheim, Norway, for their helpful comments on an
earlier draft of this paper.
1.
Donna Haraway, "'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word," in
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 127-48 ( London: Free Association Books, 1991).
2.
For an enlightening and strategic usage of the notion of "mimesis," see Luce Irigaray , Ce sexe
qui n'en est pas un ( Paris: Minuit, 1977).
3.
To refer to the concept elaborated by the French philosopher of difference, see Gilles Deleuze
in collaboration with Felix Guattari, Rhizome ( Paris: Minuit, 1976).
4.
The notion of "experience" has been the object of intense debates in feminist theory. See for
example, Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984);
Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism ( London: Open University, 1986), and
Feminism and Methodology ( London: Open University, 1987); Joan Scott, "Experience," in
Joan Scott and Judith Butler, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political ( London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), pp. 22-40.
5.
Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason ( London: Methuen, 1985).
6.
Cf. Michel Foucault, L'ordre du discours ( Paris: Gallimard, 1971); Surveiller et punir ( Paris:
Gallimard, 1975); "Les intellectuels et le pouvoir," L'Arc, no. 49 ( 1972).
7.
This expression, originally coined by Laura Mulvey in film criticism, has been taken up and
developed by Donna Haraway in a stunning exploration of this intellectual mode; see "Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," and
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 183-202 and 127-48.
8.
I explored this notion of monstrosity at some length in a seminar held jointly with Marie-Jo
Dhavernas at the College international de Philosophie in Paris in 1984-1985. The report of the
sessions was published in Cahier du College International de Philosophie, no. 1 ( 1985): 4245.
9.
See Jacques Derrida, L'écriture et al différence ( Paris: Seuil, 1967); Marges de la philosophie
( Paris: Minuit, 1972); La carte postale ( Paris: Flammarion, 1980).
10. On this point, see Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman in Modernity, ( Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1984).
11. For a feminist critique of Aristotle, see Sandra Harding and Maryl Hintikka, eds., Discovering
Reality ( Boston: Reidel, 1983).
The most enlightening philosophical analysis of the scopophilic mode of scientific
knowledge is Michel Foucault Naissance de la clinique ( Paris: Gallimard, 1963).
13.
This
is
the
fundamental
starting point for
the work of
feminist
philosopher of
sexual difference
Luce Irigaray;
see, for instance
Eithique de la
différence
sexuelle ( Paris:
Minuit, 1984).
14.
Julia Kristeva,
Pouvoirs
de
l'horreur ( Paris:
Seuil, 1980).
15.
Ambroise Paré,
Des monstres et
prodiges ( 1573;
Geneva: Droz,
1971).
16.
The second and
third volume of
Foucault History
of Sexuality (
New
York:
Pantheon, 19871988)
outline
quite clearly all
these regulations
in the art of
existence.
17.
Pierre Darmon,
Le mythe de la
procreation
à
l'âge baroque, (
Paris:
Seuil,
1981).
18.
See for instance
Susan
Bordo,
"The Cartesian
Masculinization
of
Thought,"
Signs 11, no. 3 (
1986); Evelyn
Fox
Keller,
Reflections on
Gender
and
Science ( New
Haven:
Yale
University Press,
1985).
19.
S. G. Allen and
J.
Hubbs,
"Outrunning
Atlanta: Destiny
in
Alchemical
Transmutation,"
Signs 6, no. 2
(Winter 1980):
210-29.
20.
Leslie Fiedler,
Freaks ( New
York: Simon &
Schuster, 1978).
21.
Robert Bogdan,
Freak Show (
Chicago
and
London:
University
of
Chicago Press
1988).
22.
David
Hevey,
ed.,
The
Creatures Time
Forgot:
Photography
and Disability
Imagery
(
London
and
New
York:
Routledge,
1992).
23.
As
Monique
David-Menard
argues
in
L'Hystérique
entre Freud et
Lacan ( Paris:
Ed.
Universitaire,
1983).
4
Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic
Moira Gatens
The rather awkward title of this paper is intended to draw attention to an ambiguity in the term
"representation" as it is used in political theory. First, I want to focus on the construction of the
image of the modern body politic. This involves examining the claim that the body politic is
constituted by a creative act, by a work of art or artifice, that uses the human body as its model or
metaphor. The background to this claim is provided by certain seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
social contract theorists who argued in favor of the conventionality or artificiality of monarchical
political authority. 1 If such authority is neither natural nor Godgiven but rather based on agreement
and convention then it is mutable. The way the metaphor of the body functions here is by analogy.
Just as man can be understood as a representation of God's creative power, so the political
____________________
Moira Gatens, "Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic." Originally appeared in
Cartographics: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, edited by Rosalyn
Disprose and Robyn Ferrel, 1991. Reprinted with permission from Allen and Unwin Press.
body can be understood as a representation of man's creative power, that is, as art(ifice).
The second sense of "representation" surfaces when considering whose body it is that is entitled to
be represented by this political corporation. This involves understanding "representation" in the
sense where one body or agent is taken to stand for a group of diverse bodies. Here we are
considering the metonymical representation of a complex body by a privileged part of that body.
The metaphor here slides into metonymy. The relevant background literature to this question is
provided by various texts, from the seventeenth century on, concerning the natural authority of men
over women and the propriety of taking the male head of households as representative of the
concerns of the entire household. 2
The first use of "representation"--what I have called the metaphorical-concerns the way in which
this image effects who is represented by the body politic. To address the first strand--the
metaphorical--I will begin with a quotation from a mid-seventeenth-century text that posits, in a
manner typical of the period, a detailed correspondence between the parts and functions of the
human body and the parts and functions of the political body. The text is the Leviathan, the author
is Thomas Hobbes. He writes:
by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, in Latin
CIVITAS, which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for
whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as
giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates, and other officers of judicature and
execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment, by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty
every joint and member is moved to perform his duty, are the nerves, that do the same in the body
natural; and wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi, the
people's safety, its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested
unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition,
sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic
were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the let us make man, pronounced
by God in the creation. 3
I want to draw attention to two important aspects of the view Hobbes offers. First, Hobbes claims
that the motivation behind the creation of the artificial man is the "protection" or "defence" of
natural man. We may well wonder from whom or what natural man requires protection. Hobbes's
answer is that he requires protection from other men and from nature. Man, in a state of nature, he
tells us, is in "continual fear" and in "danger of violent death" and the quality of his life is summed
up with the words "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." 4 The second thing I want to highlight
is the fiat, the Godlike pronouncement, that breathes life into the political body. For Hobbes this fiat
refers to the pacts and covenants made by men between men. These demigods, whose speech has
such awesome creative power, do not go on, in Godlike fashion, to create an artificial Eve. Perhaps
the sons can learn from the father's mistakes, after all.
The artificial man, a creation of "the word" of men united, thus renders itself free from the
necessary but difficult dealings with both women and nature. This masculine image of unity and
independence from women and nature has strong resonances in psychoanalytic accounts of infantile
anxieties and the fantasies created to cope with them. 5 The image of artificial man, the body politic,
perfectly mirrors the infantile wish for independence from the maternal body. It is a fantasy that can
be found in mythology too. Classical Athens, often considered to be the first true body politic, is
named after Athena who was born not "of woman" but "of man": she sprang from the head of Zeus.
Athens is named after Athena as a tribute to her for ridding that city of its "uncivilized" divinities.
When she relegates the feminine Furies to the subterranean regions of Athens, she confirms the
masculinity of the Athenian political body. Like Hobbes's artificial man, she is the product of man's
reason; she has no mother. Or has she? An often neglected part of this myth is that Zeus "gave
birth" to Athena only after he had swallowed whole the body of his pregnant wife.
In the absence of a female leviathan, natural woman is left unprotected, undefended, and so is easy
prey for the monstrous masculine leviathan. Like the hapless Jonah, she dwells in the belly of the
artificial man, swallowed whole, made part of the corporation not by pact, nor by covenant, but by
incorporation. The modern body politic has "lived off" its consumption of women's bodies. Women
have serviced the internal organs and needs of this artificial body, preserving its viability, its unity
and integrity, without ever being seen to do so.
The metaphor of the unified body functions, in political theory, to achieve two important effects.
First, the artificial man incorporates and so controls and regulates women's bodies in a manner
which does not undermine his claim to autonomy, since her contributions are neither visible nor
acknowledged. Second, insofar as he can maintain this apparent unity through incor- poration, he is
not required to acknowledge difference. The metaphor functions to restrict our political vocabulary
to one voice only: a voice that can speak of only one body, one reason, and one ethic.
Perhaps the metaphor of the human body is an obvious way of describing political life; so obvious
that the metaphor passes into common usage, no longer mindful of its origins. If this is the case then
perhaps it seems farfetched to argue that the conception of the body politic is anthropomorphic. Yet,
there is a sense in which the image of the polity is anthropomorphic if we limit this claim to a
literal, or etymological, understanding of "anthropos," which means "man." This leads me into the
second strand of the use of "representation" in modern political theory--the metonymical.
Here we need to consider who is represented by this image of bodily unity. Certainly not any human
form, by virtue of its humanity, is entitled to consider itself author of or actor in the body politic.
From its classical articulation in Greek philosophy, only a body deemed capable of reason and
sacrifice can be admitted into the political body as an active member. Such admission always
involves forfeit. From the original covenant between God and Abrahamwhich involved the forfeit of
his very flesh, his foreskin--corporeal sacrifice has been a constant feature of the compact. Even the
Amazons, the only female body politic that we "know" of, practiced ritual mastectomy.
At different times, different kinds of beings have been excluded from the pact, often simply by
virtue of their corporeal specificity. Slaves, foreigners, women, the conquered, children, the
working classes, have all been excluded from political participation, at one time or another, by their
bodily specificity. Could the common denominator of these exclusions be "those incapable of
fulfilling the appropriate forfeit"? That is, those whose corporeal specificity marks them as
inappropriate analogs to the political body. Constructing women as incapable of performing
military service and so incapable of defending the political body from attack could serve as an
example here. This incapacity, constructed or not, is sufficient to exclude her from active
citizenship. At this level the metonymical aspects of the metaphor of the body function to exclude.
Those who are not capable of the appropriate political forfeit are excluded from political and ethical
relations. They are defined by mere nature, mere corporeality and they have no place in the
semidivine political body except to serve it at its most basic and material level. To explain how the
metonymical aspects of the image of the body politic function to exclude it is necessary to examine
this image of bodily unity in greater detail.
Discourses which employ the image of the unified political body assume that the metaphor of the
human body is a coherent one, and of course it's not. At least I have never encountered an image of
a human body. Images of human bodies are images of either men's bodies or women's bodies. A
glance at any standard anatomical text offers graphic evidence of the problem with this phrase: "the
human body." Representations of the human body are most often of the male body and, perhaps,
around the borders, one will find insets of representations of the female reproductive system: a
lactating breast, a vagina, ovaries; bits of bodies, body-fragments. They appear there in a way that
reminds one of specialized pornographic magazines which show pictures of isolated, fragmented,
disjointed bits: breasts, vaginas, behinds. Femalebits, fragments to be consumed, devoured a bit at a
time.
This imaging has its correlate in political theory. Recent feminist work has shown that the neutral
body, assumed by the liberal state, is implicitly a masculine body. 6 Our legal and political
arrangements have man as the model, the centerpiece, with the occasional surrounding legislative
insets concerning abortion, rape, maternity allowance, and so on. None of these insets, however,
take female embodiment seriously. It is still the exception, the deviation, confined literally to the
margins of man's representations. It is still anthropos" who is taken to be capable of representing the
universal type, the universal body. Man is the model and it is his body which is taken for the human
body; his reason which is taken for Reason; his morality which is formalized into a system of
ethics.
In our relatively recent history, the strategies for silencing those who have dared to speak in another
voice, of another reason and another ethic, are instructive. Here I will mention two strategies that
seem to be dominant in the history of feminist interventions. The first is to "animalize" the speaker,
the second, to reduce her to her "sex." Women who step outside their allotted place in the body
politic are frequently abused with terms like: harpy, virago, vixen, bitch, shrew; terms that make it
clear that if she attempts to speak from the political body, about the political body, her speech is not
recognized as human speech. When Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, had the audacity to address
the issue of women's political rights, 7 Walpole called her a "hyena in petticoats." The strategy of
reducing woman to her "sex" involves treating her speech and her behavior as hysterical. The root
of "hysteria" is the Greek "hystera," meaning uterus. Disorder created by women, in the political
body, is thus retranslated into a physical disorder thought to be inherent in the female sex.
Both these strategies insist on the difference between the image of the political body and the image
of woman's body. However, it is a difference which is interpreted as evidence of woman's
inadequacy in the political sphere. But, perhaps this difference no longer exists. After all, women
are now admitted to the public sphere, they participate in politics, and sometimes, they even become
Prime Ministers. However, to say this would be to miss the point. It is true that if women want to
escape from the dreary cycles of repetition in the private sphere, then often they can. If they want to
escape from the hysteria and mutism of domestic confinement, then often they can. But at what
cost? We can be "cured" of mere animal existence by "becoming men"; "cured" of hysteria by
"hysterectomy."
I am willing to concede that the metaphor of the body politic is quite anachronistic and precariously
anchored in present political and social practices. This body has been fragmented and weakened by
successive invasions from the excluded: the slaves, the foreigners, the women, the working class;
but this does not imply that we presently have a polymorphous body politic. Certainly, the last two
to three hundred years have witnessed the removal of many formal barriers and formal methods of
exclusion, but there is a lot more to be said about methods of exclusion than formalized principles
of equity can address. If woman, for example, speaks from this body, she is limited in what she can
say. If she lives by this reason and this ethic, she lives still from the body of another: an actress, still
a body-bit, a mouthpiece.
It is not clear to me, taking into account the history of the constitution of this body politic, that it
can accommodate anything but the same. I have suggested that the modern body politic is based on
an image of a masculine body which reflects fantasies about the value and capacities of that body.
The effects of this image shows its contemporary influence in our social and political behavior,
which continues to implicitly accord privilege to particular bodies and their concerns as they are
reflected in our ways of speaking and in what we speak about. It refuses to admit anyone who is not
capable of miming its reason and its ethics, in its voice. Its political language has no vocabulary and
no space for the articulation of certain questions. Our political body continues to assume that its
active members are free from the tasks of reproduction, free from domestic work, free from any
desires other than those "whispered" to it by one of its Hobbesian "counsellors" or "willed" in it by
one of its laws. All this body can address is questions of access to "predefined" positions and
"preconstituted" points of power or authority. It cannot address the question of how or in what
manner one occupies these points or positions. Nor can it address the limiting conditions, dictated
by the corporeal specificity of the occupant, on the possible actions open to that occupant. What it
cannot address is how different bodies "fill" the same "empty" social or political space. I wonder, in
this context, whether the withdrawal of Pat Schroeder from the U.S. Presidential candidacy was
related to this problem. She said, in her speech, that she was withdrawing because she could not
"figure out" how to occupy the political sphere without turning over her desires, behavior, and plans
to predetermined meanings which were at odds with her own intentions.
I would suggest that this problem is, at least partly, related to the continuing fascination that we
have for the image of the one body. It is an image that belongs to a dream of equity, based on
corporeal interchangeability, that was developed to the full in nineteenth-century liberalism. And it
is a "dream of men." Women, and others, were not copartners in this dream and to attempt to join it
at this late stage is as futile as trying to share someone's psychosis. The socially shared psychosis of
egalitarianism was constructed to deal with a specific problem: to diffuse the power structure of
seventeenth-and eighteenth-century politics. This fantasy of the modern body politic, constituted by
"the word" of men united, is not appropriate to women, and others, who were specifically excluded
from it. For these "others," who have never experienced the satisfaction of having their image
reflected back to themselves "whole" or "complete," the fascination with this dream is not so
binding. The cultural ego-ideal was never something that they could live up to without a massive
act of bad faith. But what are the alternatives?
If what one is fascinated by is the image of one body, one voice, one reason, any deviation takes the
form of gibberish. If woman speaks from her body, with her voice, who can hear? Who can
decipher the language of an hysteric, the wails of a hyena, the jabbering of a savage--apart from
other hysterics, hyenas, and savages? Our political vocabulary is so limited that it is not possible,
within its parameters, to raise the kinds of questions that would allow the articulation of bodily
difference: it will not tolerate an embodied speech.
The impotence of our political vocabulary leads me to suggest that the more appropriate sphere for
a consideration of these questions may be the ethical. And here I am using "ethical" in a sense
perhaps long forgotten, where ethics is crucially concerned with the specificity of one's
embodiment. It is certainly a pre-Kantian notion. 8 It is prior to the ever-narrowing political
organization of ethics and prior to the conceptualization of ethics as reducible to a set of universal
principles, dictated by reason (whose reason?). It is opposed to any system of ethics which elevates
itself from a contingent form of life to the pretension of being the one necessary form of life. The
most a universal ethic will permit is the expansion of the one body. Under pressure from its own
insistence on equity, it may be forced to admit women, slaves, and others. It will not, however,
tolerate the positing of a second, or a third, or a fourth body. Prime Minister Hawke's courting of
the Aboriginal land rights movement prior to the Australian Bicentennial celebrations in 1988,
could provide an example of my point here. He wanted to take the body politic off to the beauty
parlor so it would look its best for its big birthday party. An important component of this beauty
treatment involved attending to the blemishes on this body caused by the history of its abuse of
Aboriginal bodies. It is instructive that Hawke wanted to "make up" by calling for a compact, a
term that is more at home in seventeenth-century political texts. The term carries connotations of an
agreement between equals, between like beings, to join as a single body. Some Aborigines, on the
other hand, called for a treaty, a term that carries connotations of an agreement between unlike
beings to respect each other's differences. It also implies a demand for the recognition of two
bodies. Hawke resisted a treaty because this would be to recognize another voice, another body, and
this raises the deepest fears. To recognize another body is to be open to dialog, debate and
engagement with the other's law and the other's ethics.
It seems important, if the possibility of dialog and engagement is to be opened up, that feminist
politics recognize the futility of continuing to ask to be fully admitted into this fantasy of unity.
This would be to stop asking of that body that it be "host," since for women this would be to ask
how can I live off myself--how can I engage in self-cannibalism? I would rather want to raise the
question: whose body is this? How many metamorphoses has it undergone? and what possible
forms could it take? And in responding to these questions it seems crucial to resist the temptation,
noticeable in some feminist writing, to replace one body with two, one ethic with two, one reason
with two. For this would be merely to repeat, in dual fashion, the same old narcissistic fascination
involved in the contemplation of one's own image. The most this will achieve is that we would
succeed in throwing off the persona of Echo, who speaks but is not heard, only to join Narcissus at
the pool.
Since this paper opened with a quotation that I take to be typical of a certain kind of male fantasy, I
will also close with one. It comes from Italo Calvino's book, Invisible Cities, which is constructed
as a dialog of sorts between Kublai Khan--the demigod State-builder, and Marco Polo--the
inquisitive explorer who entertains Kublai Khan with accounts of the many cities he has seen. It is
from a section entitled "Cities and Desire."
From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the White City, well exposed to
the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this story of its foundation:
men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an
unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair and she was naked. They dreamed of
pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in
search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like
the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the place
where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream,
so she would be unable to escape again.
This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night.
None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The City's streets were streets where
they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter,
had long been forgotten.
The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly City, this trap.
9
I take this dream to be rather atypical, for it tells of the failure of the desire to "capture" and to
"contain" difference in a monument to unity. It also speaks of masculine impotence in the face of a
loss suffered but not remembered. There is an interesting point of overlap between these dreams and
fantasies of cities and states. The women of Zobeide are walled into that city just as surely as the
Furies are contained in Athens. The possibility of hearing the speech of women and others is
crucially tied to the remembrance and "working through" of this initial dream.
NOTES
I would like to acknowledge the assistance given me by Rosalyn Disprose, Reta Gear, and Paul
Patton in preparing this paper for publication. An earlier version was presented to the Politics of the
Body Conference, Performance Space, Sydney, 1987, and was published in Speaator Burns 2 (
1987).
1.
For example, John Locke Two Treatises of Government ( London: Cambridge University
Press, 1967); Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract, ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
Both Locke and Rousseau held this view. See Locke, Two Treatises of
Government, book 2, section 82; and Rousseau, Emile ( London: Dent and Sons,
1972), pp. 370, 412, 442.
3.
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
(
Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968),
pp. 81-2.
4.
Ibid., p. 186.
5.
See Jane Flax,
"Mother-Daughter
Relationships:
Psychodynamics,
Politics,
and
Philosophy," in H.
Eisenstein and A.
Jardine, eds., The
Future
of
Difference
(
Boston: G. K.
Hall,
1980),
especially p. 29f.
6.
See C. Pateman,
The
Sexual
Contract
(
Cambridge: Polity
Press,
1988),
especially chapter
4.
7.
Mary
Wollstonecraft A
Vindication of the
Rights of Woman,
1792
(
Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1975)
8.
The notion of
ethics which I
have in mind is
one that takes the
body,
its
pleasures, powers,
and
capacities
into account. A
good example is
B. Spinoza Ethics.
For an account of
what
Spinoza's
ethical theory can
offer us today, see
Gilles
Deleuze
Spinoza:
Practical
Philosophy ( San
Francisco:
City
Lights
Books,
1988), especially
chapters 2 and 6.
9.
Italo
Calvino
Invisible Cities (
London: Picador,
1979), p. 39
5
The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity
Susan Bordo
Reconstructing Feminist Discourse on the Body
The body--what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body--is a
medium of culture. The body, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, is a powerful symbolic
form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a
culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body. 1 The body may
also operate as a metaphor for culture. From quarters as diverse as Plato and Hobbes to French
feminist Luce Irigaray, an imagination of body morphology has provided a blueprint for diagnosis
and/or vision of social and political life.
The body is not only a text of culture. It is also, as anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu and
____________________
Susan Bordo, "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity." From Unbearable Weight:
Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body." © 1993 The Regents of the University of California.
Reprinted with the permission of The University of California Press.
philosopher Michel Foucault (among others) have argued, a practical, direct locus of social control.
Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, through seemingly trivial routines, rules, and
practices, culture is "made body," as Bourdieu puts it--converted into automatic, habitual activity.
As such it is put "beyond the grasp of consciousness . . . [untouchable] by voluntary, deliberate
transformations." 2 Our conscious politics, social commitments, strivings for change may be
undermined and betrayed by the life of our bodies-not the craving, instinctual body imagined by
Plato, Augustine, and Freud, but what Foucault calls the "docile body," regulated by the norms of
cultural life. 3
Throughout his later "genealogical" works ( Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality),
Foucault constantly reminds us of the primacy of practice over belief. Not chiefly through ideology,
but through the organization and regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives,
our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of
selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininity. Such an emphasis casts a dark and disquieting shadow
across the contemporary scene. For women, as study after study shows, are spending more time on
the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time. In a decade marked
by a reopening of the public arena to women, the intensification of such regimens appears
diversionary and subverting. Through the pursuit of an everchanging, homogenizing, elusive ideal
of femininity--a pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and
often whimsical changes in fashion--female bodies become docile bodies--bodies whose forces and
energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, "improvement." Through
the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress--central organizing principles of
time and space in the day of many women--we are rendered less socially oriented and more
centripetally focused on self-modification. Through these disciplines, we continue to memorize on
our bodies the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough. At the
farthest extremes, the practices of femininity may lead us to utter demoralization, debilitation, and
death.
Viewed historically, the discipline and normalization of the female body--perhaps the only gender
oppression that exercises itself, although to different degrees and in different forms, across age,
race, class, and sexual orientation--has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible
strategy of social control. In our own era, it is difficult to avoid the recognition that the
contemporary preoccupation with appearance, which still affects women far more powerfully than
men, even in our narcissistic and visually oriented culture, may function as a backlash phenomenon,
reasserting existing gender configurations against any attempts to shift or transform power relations.
4
Surely we are in the throes of this backlash today. In newspapers and magazines we daily
encounter stories that promote traditional gender relations and prey on anxieties about change:
stories about latchkey children, abuse in day-care centers, the "new woman's" troubles with men,
her lack of marriageability, and so on. A dominant visual theme in teenage magazines involves
women hiding in the shadows of men, seeking solace in their arms, willingly contracting the space
they occupy. The last, of course, also describes our contemporary aesthetic ideal for women, an
ideal whose obsessive pursuit has become the central torment of many women's lives. In such an era
we desperately need an effective political discourse about the female body, a discourse adequate to
an analysis of the insidious, and often paradoxical, pathways of modern social control.
Developing such a discourse requires reconstructing the feminist paradigm of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, with its political categories of oppressors and oppressed, villains and victims. Here I
believe that a feminist appropriation of some of Foucault's later concepts can prove useful.
Following Foucault, we must first abandon the idea of power as something possessed by one group
and leveled against another; we must instead think of the network of practices, institutions, and
technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain.
Second, we need an analytics adequate to describe a power whose central mechanisms are not
repressive, but constitutive: "a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering
them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them."
Particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance
of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power "from below," as Foucault puts it; for
example, of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate--rather than repress--desire, generate and
focus our energies, construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance. 5
And, third, we need a discourse that will enable us to account for the subversion of potential
rebellion, a discourse that, while insisting on the necessity of objective analysis of power relations,
social hierarchy, political backlash, and so forth, will nonetheless allow us to confront the
mechanisms by which the subject at times becomes enmeshed in collusion with forces that sustain
her own oppression.
This essay will not attempt to produce a general theory along these lines. Rather, my focus will be
the analysis of one particular arena where the inter- play of these dynamics is striking and perhaps
exemplary. It is a limited and unusual arena, that of a group of gender-related and historically
localized disorders: hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia nervosa. 6 I recognize that these disorders
have also historically been class- and race-biased, largely (although not exclusively) occurring
among white middle- and upper-middle-class women. Nonetheless, anorexia, hysteria, and
agoraphobia may provide a paradigm of one way in which potential resistance is not merely
undercut but utilized in the maintenance and reproduction of existing power relations. 7
The central mechanism I will describe involves a transformation (or, if you wish, duality) of
meaning, through which conditions that are objectively (and, on one level, experientially)
constraining, enslaving, and even murderous, come to be experienced as liberating, transforming,
and life-giving. I offer this analysis, although limited to a specific domain, as an example of how
various contemporary critical discourses may be joined to yield an understanding of the subtle and
often unwitting role played by our bodies in the symbolization and reproduction of gender.
The Body as a Text of Femininity
The continuum between female disorder and "normal" feminine practice is sharply revealed through
a close reading of those disorders to which women have been particularly vulnerable. These, of
course, have varied historically: neurasthenia and hysteria in the second half of the nineteenth
century; agoraphobia and, most dramatically, anorexia nervosa and bulimia in the second half of the
twentieth century. This is not to say that anorectics did not exist in the nineteenth century--many
cases were described, usually in the context of diagnoses of hysteria 8 --or that women no longer
suffer from classical hysterical symptoms in the twentieth century. But the taking up of eating
disorders on a mass scale is as unique to the culture of the 1980s as the epidemic of hysteria was to
the Victorian era. 9
The symptomatology of these disorders reveals itself as textuality. Loss of mobility, loss of voice,
inability to leave the home, feeding others while starving oneself, taking up space, and whittling
down the space one's body takes up--all have symbolic meaning, all have political meaning under
the varying rules governing the historical construction of gender. Working within this framework,
we see that whether we look at hysteria, agoraphobia, or anorexia, we find the body of the sufferer
deeply inscribed with an ideological construction of femininity emblematic of the period in
question. The construction, of course, is always homogenizing and normalizing, erasing racial,
class, and other differences and insisting that all women aspire to a coercive, standardized ideal.
Strikingly, in these disorders the construction of femininity is written in disturbingly concrete,
hyperbolic terms: exaggerated, extremely literal, at times virtually caricatured presentations of the
ruling feminine mystique. The bodies of disordered women in this way offer themselves as an
aggressively graphic text for the interpreter--a text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a
cultural statement, a statement about gender.
Both nineteenth-century male physicians and twentieth-century feminist critics have seen, in the
symptoms of neurasthenia and hysteria (syndromes that became increasingly less differentiated as
the century wore on), an exaggeration of stereotypically feminine traits. The nineteenth-century
"lady" was idealized in terms of delicacy and dreaminess, sexual passivity, and a charmingly labile
and capricious emotionality. 10 Such notions were formalized and scientized in the work of male
theorists from Acton and Krafft-Ebing to Freud, who described "normal," mature femininity in such
terms. 11 In this context, the dissociations, the drifting and fogging of perception, the nervous
tremors and faints, the anesthesias, and the extreme mutability of symptomatology associated with
nineteenth-century female disorders can be seen to be concretizations of the feminine mystique of
the period, produced according to rules that governed the prevailing construction of femininity.
Doctors described what came to be known as the hysterical personality as "impressionable,
suggestible, and narcissistic; highly labile, their moods changing suddenly, dramatically, and
seemingly for inconsequential reasons . . . egocentric in the extreme . . . essentially asexual and not
uncommonly frigid" 12 --all characteristics normative of femininity in this era. As Elaine Showalter
points out, the term "hysterical" itself became almost interchangeable with the term "feminine" in
the literature of the period. 13
The hysteric's embodiment of the feminine mystique of her era, however, seems subtle and
ineffable compared to the ingenious literalism of agoraphobia and anorexia. In the context of our
culture this literalism makes sense. With the advent of movies and television, the rules for
femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through standardized visual
images. As a result, femininity itself has come to be largely a matter of constructing, in the manner
described by Erving Goffman, the appropriate surface presentation of the self. 14 We are no longer
given verbal descriptions or exemplars of what a lady is or of what femininity consists. Rather, we
learn the rules directly through bodily discourse: through images that tell us what clothes, body
shape, facial expression, movements, and behavior are required.
In agoraphobia and, even more dramatically, in anorexia, the disorder presents itself as a virtual,
though tragic, parody of twentieth-century constructions of femininity. The 1950s and early 1960s,
when agoraphobia first began to escalate among women, was a period of reassertion of domesticity
and dependency as the feminine ideal. "Career woman" became a dirty word, much more so than it
had been during the war, when the economy depended on women's willingness to do "men's work."
The reigning ideology of femininity, so well described by Betty Friedan and perfectly captured in
the movies and television shows of the era, was childlike, nonassertive, helpless without a man,
"content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies and home." 15 The housebound agoraphobic
lives this construction of femininity literally. "You want me in this home? You'll have me in this
home--with a vengeance!" The point, upon which many therapists have commented, does not need
belaboring. Agoraphobia, as I. G. Fodor has put it, seems "the logical--albeit extreme--extension of
the cultural sex-role stereotype for women" in this era. 16
The emaciated body of the anorectic, of course, immediately presents itself as a caricature of the
contemporary ideal of hyperslenderness for women, an ideal that, despite the game resistance of
racial and ethnic difference, has become the norm for women today. But slenderness is only the tip
of the iceberg, for slenderness itself requires interpretation. "C'est le sens qui fait vendre," said
Barthes, speaking of clothing styles--it is meaning that makes the sale. 17 So, too, it is meaning that
makes the body admirable. To the degree that anorexia may be said to be "about" slenderness, it is
about slenderness as a citadel of contemporary and historical meaning, not as an empty fashion
ideal. As such, the interpretation of slenderness yields multiple readings, some related to gender,
some not. For the purposes of this essay I will offer an abbreviated, gender-focused reading. But I
must stress that this reading illuminates only partially, and that many other currents not discussed
here--economic, psychosocial, and historical, as well as ethnic and class dimensions--figure
prominently. 18
We begin with the painfully literal inscription, on the anorectic's body, of the rules governing the
construction of contemporary femininity. That construction is a double bind that legislates
contradictory ideals and directives. On the one hand, our culture still widely advertises domestic
conceptions of femininity, the ideological moorings for a rigorously dualistic sexual division of
labor that casts woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer. The rules for this construction of
femininity (and I speak here in a language both symbolic and literal) require that women learn to
feed others, not the self, and to construe any desires for self-nurturance and self-feeding as greedy
and excessive. 19 Thus, women must develop a totally other-oriented emotional economy. In this
economy, the control of female appetite for food is merely the most concrete expression of the
general rule governing the construction of femininity: that female hunger--for public power, for
independence, for sexual gratification--be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to
take up be circumscribed, limited. Women's magazine fashion spreads dramatically illustrate the
degree to which slenderness, set off against the resurgent muscularity and bulk of the current male
body-ideal, carries connotations of fragility and lack of power in the face of a decisive male
occupation of social space. On the body of the anorexic woman such rules are grimly and deeply
etched.
On the other hand, even as young women today continue to be taught traditionally "feminine"
virtues, to the degree that the professional arena is open to them they must also learn to embody the
"masculine" language and values of that arena--self-control, determination, cool, emotional
discipline, mastery, and so on. Female bodies now speak symbolically of this necessity in their
slender spare shape and the currently fashionable men's-wear look. Our bodies, too, as we trudge to
the gym every day and fiercely resist both our hungers and our desire to soothe ourselves, are
becoming more and more practiced at the "male" virtues of control and self-mastery. The anorectic
pursues these virtues with single-minded, unswerving dedication. "Energy, discipline, my own
power will keep me going," says ex-anorectic Aimee Liu, recreating her anorexic days. "I need
nothing and no one else. . . . I will be master of my own body, if nothing else, I vow." 20
The ideal of slenderness, then, and the diet and exercise regimens that have become inseparable
from it offer the illusion of meeting, through the body, the contradictory demands of the
contemporary ideology of femininity. Popular images reflect this dual demand. In a single issue of
Complete Woman magazine, two articles appear, one on "Feminine Intuition," the other asking,
"Are you the New Macho Woman?" In Vision Quest, the young male hero falls in love with the
heroine, as he says, because "she has all the best things I like in girls and all the best things I like in
guys," that is, she's tough and cool, but warm and alluring. In the enormously popular Aliens, the
heroine's personality has been deliberately constructed, with near-comic book explicitness, to
embody traditional nurturant femininity alongside breathtaking macho prowess and control;
Sigourney Weaver, the actress who portrays her, has called the character "Rambolina."
In the pursuit of slenderness and the denial of appetite the traditional con- struction of femininity
intersects with the new requirement for women to embody the "masculine" values of the public
arena. The anorectic, as I have argued, embodies this intersection, this double bind, in a particularly
painful and graphic way. 21 I mean "double bind" quite literally here. "Masculinity" and
"femininity," at least since the nineteenth century and arguably before, have been constructed
through a process of mutual exclusion. One cannot simply add the historically feminine virtues to
the historically masculine ones to yield a New Woman, a New Man, a new ethics, or a new culture.
Even on the screen or on television, embodied in created characters like the Aliens heroine, the
result is a parody. Unfortunately, in this image-bedazzled culture, we find it increasingly difficult to
discriminate between parodies and possibilities for the self. Explored as a possibility for the self, the
"androgynous" ideal ultimately exposes its internal contradiction and becomes a war that tears the
subject in two--a war explicitly thematized, by many anorectics, as a battle between male and
female sides of the self. 22
Protest and Retreat in the Same Gesture
In hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia, then, the woman's body may be viewed as a surface on
which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view, through their
inscription in extreme or hyperliteral form. They are written, of course, in languages of horrible
suffering. It is as though these bodies are speaking to us of the pathology and violence that lurks
just around the corner, waiting at the horizon of "normal" femininity. It is no wonder that a steady
motif in the feminist literature on female disorder is that of pathology as embodied protest-unconscious, inchoate, and counterproductive protest without an effective language, voice, or
politics, but protest nonetheless.
American and French feminists alike have heard the hysteric speaking a language of protest, even or
perhaps especially when she was mute. Dianne Hunter interprets Anna O.'s aphasia, which
manifested itself in an inability to speak her native German, as a rebellion against the linguistic and
cultural rules of the father and a return to the "mother-tongue": the semiotic babble of infancy, the
language of the body. For Hunter, and for a number of other feminists working with Lacanian
categories, the return to the semiotic level is both regressive and, as Hunter puts it, an "expressive"
communication "addressed to patriarchal thought," "a self-repudiating form of feminine discourse in
which the body signifies what social conditions make it impossible to state linguistically." 23 "The
hysterics are accusing; they are pointing," writes Catherine Clément in The Newly Born Woman;
they make a "mockery of culture." 24 In the same volume, Hélène Cixous speaks of "those
wonderful hysterics, who subjected Freud to so many voluptuous moments too shameful to
mention, bombarding his mosaic statute/law of Moses with their carnal, passionate body-words,
haunting him with their inaudible thundering denunciations." For Cixous, Dora, who so frustrated
Freud, is "the core example of the protesting force in women." 25
The literature of protest includes functional as well as symbolic approaches. Robert Seidenberg and
Karen DeCrow, for example, describe agoraphobia as a "strike" against "the renunciations usually
demanded of women" and the expectations of housewifely functions such as shopping, driving the
children to school, accompanying their husband to social events. 26 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
presents a similar analysis of hysteria, arguing that by preventing the woman from functioning in
the wifely role of caretaker of others, of "ministering angel" to husband and children, hysteria
"became one way in which conventional women could express--in most cases unconsciously-dissatisfaction with one or several aspects of their lives." 27 A number of feminist writers, among
whom Susie Orbach is the most articulate and forceful, have interpreted anorexia as a species of
unconscious feminist protest. The anorectic is engaged in a "hunger strike," as Orbach calls it,
stressing that this is a political discourse, in which the action of food refusal and dramatic
transformation of body size "expresses with [the] body what [the anorectic] is unable to tell us with
words"--her indictment of a culture that disdains and suppresses female hunger, makes women
ashamed of their appetites and needs, and demands that women constantly work on the
transformation of their body. 28
The anorectic, of course, is unaware that she is making a political statement. She may, indeed, be
hostile to feminism and any other critical perspectives that she views as disputing her own
autonomy and control or questioning the cultural ideals around which her life is organized. Through
embodied rather than deliberate demonstration she exposes and indicts those ideals, precisely by
pursuing them to the point at which their destructive potential is revealed for all to see.
The same gesture that expresses protest, moreover, can also signal retreat; this, indeed, may be part
of the symptom's attraction. Kim Chernin, for example, argues that the debilitating anorexic
fixation, by halting or mitigating personal development, assuages this generation's guilt and
separation anxiety over the prospect of surpassing our mothers, of living less circumscribed, freer
lives. 29 Agoraphobia, too, which often develops shortly after marriage, clearly functions in many
cases as a way to cement dependency and attachment in the face of unacceptable stirrings of
dissatisfaction and restlessness.
Although we may talk meaningfully of protest, then, I want to emphasize the counterproductive,
tragically self-defeating (indeed, self-deconstructing) nature of that protest. Functionally, the
symptoms of these disorders isolate, weaken, and undermine the sufferers; at the same time they
turn the life of the body into an all-absorbing fetish, beside which all other objects of attention pale
into unreality. On the symbolic level, too, the protest collapses into its opposite and proclaims the
utter capitulation of the subject to the contracted female world. The muteness of hysterics and their
return to the level of pure, primary bodily expressivity have been interpreted, as we have seen, as
rejecting the symbolic order of the patriarchy and recovering a lost world of semiotic, maternal
value. But at the same time, of course, muteness is the condition of the silent, uncomplaining
woman--an ideal of patriarchal culture. Protesting the stifling of the female voice through one's own
voicelessness--that is, employing the language of femininity to protest the conditions of the female
world--will always involve ambiguities of this sort. Perhaps this is why symptoms crystallized from
the language of femininity are so perfectly suited to express the dilemmas of middle-class and
uppermiddle-class women living in periods poised on the edge of gender change, women who have
the social and material resources to carry the traditional construction of femininity to symbolic
excess but who also confront the anxieties of new possibilities. The late nineteenth century, the
post-World War II period, and the late twentieth century are all periods in which gender becomes an
issue to be discussed and in which discourse proliferates about "the Woman Question," "the New
Woman," "What Women Want," "What Femininity Is."
Collusion, Resistance, and the Body
The pathologies of female protest function, paradoxically, as if in collusion with the cultural
conditions that produce them, reproducing rather than transforming precisely that which is being
protested. In this connection, the fact that hysteria and anorexia have peaked during historical
periods of cultural backlash against attempts at reorganization and redefinition of male and female
roles is significant. Female pathology reveals itself here as an extremely interesting social formation
through which one source of poten- tial for resistance and rebellion is pressed into the service of
maintaining the established order.
In our attempt to explain this formation, objective accounts of power relations fail us. For whatever
the objective social conditions are that create a pathology, the symptoms themselves must still be
produced (however unconsciously or inadvertently) by the subject. That is, the individual must
invest the body with meanings of various sorts. Only by examining this productive process on the
part of the subject can we, as Mark Poster has put it, "illuminate the mechanisms of domination in
the processes through which meaning is produced in everyday life"; that is, only then can we see
how the desires and dreams of the subject become implicated in the matrix of power relations. 30
Here, examining the context in which the anorexic syndrome is produced may be illuminating.
Anorexia will erupt, typically, in the course of what begins as a fairly moderate diet regime,
undertaken because someone, often the father, has made a casual critical remark. Anorexia begins
in, emerges out of, what is, in our time, conventional feminine practice. In the course of that
practice, for any number of individual reasons, the practice is pushed a little beyond the parameters
of moderate dieting. The young woman discovers what it feels like to crave and want and need and
yet, through the exercise of her own will, to triumph over that need. In the process, a new realm of
meanings is discovered, a range of values and possibilities that Western culture has traditionally
coded as "male" and rarely made available to women: an ethic and aesthetic of self-mastery and
self-transcendence, expertise, and power over others through the example of superior will and
control. The experience is intoxicating, habit-forming.
At school the anorectic discovers that her steadily shrinking body is admired, not so much as an
aesthetic or sexual object, but for the strength of will and self-control it projects. At home she
discovers, in the inevitable battles her parents fight to get her to eat, that her actions have enormous
power over the lives of those around her. As her body begins to lose its traditional feminine curves,
its breasts and hips and rounded stomach, begins to feel and look more like a spare, lanky male
body, she begins to feel untouchable, out of reach of hurt, "invulnerable, clean and hard as the
bones etched into my silhouette," as one student described it in her journal. She despises, in
particular, all those parts of her body that continue to mark her as female. "If only I could eliminate
[my breasts]," says Liu, "cut them off if need be." 31 For her, as for many anorectics, the breasts
represent a bovine, unconscious, vulnerable side of the self. Liu's body symbolism is thoroughly
continuous with dominant cultural associations. Brett Silverstein studies on the "Possible Causes of
the Thin Standard of Bodily Attractiveness for Women" 32 testify empirically to what is obvious
from every comedy routine involving a dramatically shapely woman: namely, our cultural
association of curvaceousness with incompetence. The anorectic is also quite aware, of course, of
the social and sexual vulnerability involved in having a female body; many, in fact, were sexually
abused as children.
Through her anorexia, by contrast, she has unexpectedly discovered an entry into the privileged
male world, a way to become what is valued in our culture, a way to become safe, to rise above it
all--for her, they are the same thing. She has discovered this, paradoxically, by pursuing
conventional feminine behavior--in this case, the discipline of perfecting the body as an object--to
excess. At this point of excess, the conventionally feminine deconstructs, we might say, into its
opposite and opens onto those values our culture has coded as male. No wonder the anorexia is
experienced as liberating and that she will fight family, friends, and therapists in an effort to hold
onto it--fight them to the death, if need be. The anorectic's experience of power is, of course, deeply
and dangerously illusory. To reshape one's body into a male body is not to put on male power and
privilege. To feel autonomous and free while harnessing body and soul to an obsessive bodypractice
is to serve, not transform, a social order that limits female possibilities. And, of course, for the
female to become male is only for her to locate herself on the other side of a disfiguring opposition.
The new "power look" of female body-building, which encourages women to develop the same
hulklike, triangular shape that has been the norm for male body-builders, is no less determined by a
hierarchical, dualistic construction of gender than was the conventionally "feminine" norm that
tyrannized female bodybuilders such as Bev Francis for years.
Although the specific cultural practices and meanings are different, similar mechanisms, I suspect,
are at work in hysteria and agoraphobia. In these cases too, the language of femininity, when
pushed to excess--when shouted and asserted, when disruptive and demanding--deconstructs into its
opposite and makes available to the woman an illusory experience of power previously forbidden to
her by virtue of her gender. In the case of nineteenthcentury femininity, the forbidden experience
may have been the bursting of fetters--particularly moral and emotional fetters. John Conolly, the
asylum reformer, recommended institutionalization for women who "want that restraint over the
passions without which the female character is lost." 33 Hysterics often infuriated male doctors by
their lack of precisely this quality.
S. Weir Mitchell described these patients as "the despair of physicians," whose "despotic selfishness
wrecks the constitution of nurses and devoted relatives, and in unconscious or half-conscious selfindulgence destroys the comfort of everyone around them." 34 It must have given the Victorian
patient some illicit pleasure to be viewed as capable of such disruption of the staid
nineteenthcentury household. A similar form of power, I believe, is part of the experience of
agoraphobia.
This does not mean that the primary reality of these disorders is not one of pain and entrapment.
Anorexia, too, clearly contains a dimension of physical addiction to the biochemical effects of
starvation. But whatever the physiology involved, the ways in which the subject understands and
thematizes her experience cannot be reduced to a mechanical process. The anorectic's ability to live
with minimal food intake allows her to feel powerful and worthy of admiration in a "world," as
Susie Orbach describes it, "from which at the most profound level [she] feels excluded" and
unvalued. 35 The literature on both anorexia and hysteria is strewn with battles of will between the
sufferer and those trying to "cure" her; the latter, as Orbach points out, very rarely understand that
the psychic values she is fighting for are often more important to the woman than life itself.
Textuality, Praxis, and the Body
The "solutions" offered by anorexia, hysteria, and agoraphobia, I have suggested, develop out of the
practice of femininity itself, the pursuit of which is still presented as the chief route to acceptance
and success for women in our culture. Too aggressively pursued, that practice leads to its own
undoing, in one sense. For if femininity is, as Susan Brownmiller has said, at its core a "tradition of
imposed limitations," 36 then an unwillingness to limit oneself, even in the pursuit of femininity,
breaks the rules. But, of course, in another sense the rules remain fully in place. The sufferer
becomes wedded to an obsessive practice, unable to make any effective change in her life. She
remains, as Toril Moi has put it, "gagged and chained to [the] feminine role," a reproducer of the
docile body of femininity. 37
This tension between the psychological meaning of a disorder, which may enact fantasies of
rebellion and embody a language of protest, and the practical life of the disordered body, which
may utterly defeat rebellion and subvert protest, may be obscured by too exclusive a focus on the
symbolic dimension and insufficient attention to praxis. As we have seen in the case of some
Lacanian feminist readings of hysteria, the result of this can be a onesided interpretation that
romanticizes the hysteric's symbolic subversion of the phallocentric order while confined to her
bed. This is not to say that confinement in bed has a transparent, univocal meaning--in
powerlessness, debilitation, dependency, and so forth. The "practical" body is no brute biological or
material entity. It, too, is a culturally mediated form; its activities are subject to interpretation and
description. The shift to the practical dimension is not a turn to biology or nature, but to another
"register," as Foucault puts it, of the cultural body, the register of the "useful body" rather than the
"intelligible body." 38 The distinction can prove useful, I believe, to feminist discourse.
The intelligible body includes our scientific, philosophic, and aesthetic representations of the body-our cultural conceptions of the body, norms of beauty, models of health, and so forth. But the same
representations may also be seen as forming a set of practical rules and regulations through which
the living body is "trained, shaped, obeys, responds," becoming, in short, a socially adapted and
"useful body." 39 Consider this particularly clear and appropriate example: the nineteenth-century
hourglass figure, emphasizing breasts and hips against a wasp waist, was an intelligible symbolic
form, representing a domestic, sexualized ideal of femininity. The sharp cultural contrast between
the female and the male form, made possible by the use of corsets and bustles, reflected, in
symbolic terms, the dualistic division of social and economic life into clearly defined male and
female spheres. At the same time, to achieve the specified look, a particular feminine praxis was
required--straitlacing, minimal eating, reduced mobility--rendering the female body unfit to perform
activities outside its designated sphere. This, in Foucauldian terms, would be the "useful body"
corresponding to the aesthetic norm.
The intelligible body and the useful body are two arenas of the same discourse; they often mirror
and support each other, as in the above illustration. Another example can be found in the
seventeenth-century philosophic conception of the body as a machine, mirroring an increasingly
more automated productive machinery of labor. But the two bodies may also contradict and mock
each other. A range of contemporary representations and images, as noted earlier, have coded the
transcendence of female appetite and its public display in the slenderness ideal in terms of power,
will, mastery, the possibilities of success in the professional arena. These associations are carried
visually by the slender superwomen of prime-time television and popular movies and promoted
explicitly in advertisements and articles appearing routinely in women's fashion magazines, diet
books, and weight-training publications. Yet the thousands of slender girls and women who strive
to embody these images and who in that service suffer from eating disorders, exercise compulsions,
and continual self-scrutiny and self-castigation are anything but the "masters" of their lives.
Exposure and productive cultural analysis of such contradictory and mystifying relations between
image and practice are possible only if the analysis includes attention to and interpretation of the
"useful" or, as I prefer to call it, the practical body. Such attention, although often in inchoate and
theoretically unsophisticated form, was central to the beginnings of the contemporary feminist
movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the objectification of the female body was a serious
political issue. All the cultural paraphernalia of femininity, of learning to please visually and
sexually through the practices of the body--media imagery, beauty pageants, high heels, girdles,
makeup, simulated orgasm--were seen as crucial in maintaining gender domination.
Disquietingly, for the feminists of the present decade, such focus on the politics of feminine praxis,
although still maintained in the work of individual feminists, is no longer a centerpiece of feminist
cultural critique. 40 On the popular front, we find Ms. magazine presenting issues on fitness and
"style," the rhetoric reconstructed for the 1980s to pitch "self-expression" and "power." Although
feminist theory surely has the tools, it has not provided a critical discourse to dismantle and
demystify this rhetoric. The work of French feminists has provided a powerful framework for
understanding the inscription of phallocentric, dualistic culture on gendered bodies, but it has
offered very little in the way of concrete analyses of the female body as a locus of practical cultural
control. Among feminist theorists in this country, the study of cultural representations of the female
body has flourished, and it has often been brilliantly illuminating and instrumental to a feminist
rereading of culture. 41 But the study of cultural representations alone, divorced from consideration
of their relation to the practical lives of bodies, can obscure and mislead.
Here, Helena Michie's significantly titled The Flesh Made Word offers a striking example.
Examining nineteenth-century representations of women, appetite, and eating, Michie draws
fascinating and astute metaphorical connections between female eating and female sexuality.
Female hunger, she argues, and I agree, "figures unspeakable desires for sexuality and power." 42
The Victorian novel's "representational taboo" against depicting women eating (an activity,
apparently, that only "happens offstage," as Michie puts it) thus functions as a "code" for the
suppression of female sexuality, as does the general cultural requirement, exhibited in etiquette and
sex manuals of the day, that the well-bred woman eat little and delicately. The same coding is
drawn on, Michie argues, in contemporary feminist "inversions" of Victorian values, inversions that
celebrate female sexuality and power through images exulting in female eating and female hunger,
depicting it explicitly, lushly, and joyfully.
Despite the fact that Michie's analysis centers on issues concerning women's hunger, food, and
eating practices, she makes no mention of the grave eating disorders that surfaced in the late
nineteenth century and that are ravaging the lives of young women today. The practical arena of
women dieting, fasting, straitlacing, and so forth is, to a certain extent, implicit in her examination
of Victorian gender ideology. But when Michie turns, at the end of her study, to consider
contemporary feminist literature celebrating female eating and female hunger, the absence of even a
passing glance at how women are actually managing their hungers today leaves her analysis adrift,
lacking any concrete social moorings. Michie's sole focus is on the inevitable failure of feminist
literature to escape "phallic representational codes." 43 But the feminist celebration of the female
body did not merely deconstruct on the written page or canvas. Largely located in the feminist
counterculture of the 1970s, it has been culturally displaced by a very different contemporary
reality. Its celebration of female flesh now presents itself in jarring dissonance with the fact that
women, feminists included, are starving themselves to death in our culture.
This is not to deny the benefits of diet, exercise, and other forms of body management. Rather, I
view our bodies as a site of struggle, where we must work to keep our daily practices in the service
of resistance to gender domination, not in the service of docility and gender normalization. This
work requires, I believe, a determinedly skeptical attitude toward the routes of seeming liberation
and pleasure offered by our culture. It also demands an awareness of the often contradictory
relations between image and practice, between rhetoric and reality. Popular representations, as we
have seen, may forcefully employ the rhetoric and symbolism of empowerment, personal freedom,
"having it all." Yet female bodies, pursuing these ideals, may find themselves as distracted,
depressed, and physically ill as female bodies in the nineteenth century were made when pursuing a
feminine ideal of dependency, domesticity, and delicacy. The recognition and analysis of such
contradictions, and of all the other collusions, subversions, and enticements through which culture
enjoins the aid of our bodies in the reproduction of gender, require that we restore a concern for
female praxis to its formerly central place in feminist politics.
NOTES
Early versions of this essay, under various titles, were delivered at the philosophy department of the
State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Massachusetts conference on
Histories of Sexuality, and the twenty-first annual conference for the Society of Phenomenology
and Existential Philosophy. I thank all those who commented and provided encouragement on those
occasions. The essay was revised and originally published in Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds.,
Gender / Body / Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing ( New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1989).
1.
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols ( New York: Pantheon, 1982), and Purity and Danger (
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
2.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977), p. 94 (emphasis in original).
3.
On docility, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish ( New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 13569. For a Foucauldian analysis of feminine practice, see Sandra Bartky , "Foucault, Femininity,
and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," in her Femininity and Domination ( New York:
Routledge, 1990); see also Susan Brownmiller, Femininity ( New York: Ballantine, 1984).
4.
During the late 1970s and 1980s, male concern over appearance undeniably increased. Study
after study confirms, however, that there is still a large gender gap in this area. Research
conducted at the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 found men to be generally satisfied with
their appearance, often, in fact, "distorting their perceptions [of themselves] in a positive, selfaggrandizing way" ( "Dislike of Own Bodies Found Common Among Women," New York
Times, March 19, 1985, p. C1). Women, however, were found to exhibit extreme negative
assessments and distortions of body perception. Other studies have suggested that women are
judged more harshly than men when they deviate from dominant social standards of
attractiveness. Thomas Cash et al., in "The Great American Shape-Up," Psychology Today (
April 1986), p. 34, report that although the situation for men has changed, the situation for
women has more than proportionally worsened. Citing results from 30,000 responses to a 1985
survey of perceptions of body image and comparing similar responses to a 1972 questionnaire,
they report that the 1985 respondents were considerably more dissatisfied with their bodies
than the 1972 respondents, and they note a marked intensification of concern among men.
Among the 1985 group, the group most dissatisfied of all with their appearance, however, were
teenage women. Women today constitute by far the largest number of consumers of diet
products,
attenders of spas and diet centers, and subjects of intestinal by-pass and other
fatreduction operations.
5.
Michel Foucault,
The History of
Sexuality. Vol. 1:
An Introduction (
New
York:
Vintage,
1980),
pp. 136, 94.
6.
On the gendered
and
historical
nature of these
disorders:
the
number of female
to male hysterics
has
been
estimated
at
anywhere
from
2:1 to 4:1, and as
many
as
80
percent of all
agoraphobics are
female ( Annette
Brodsky
and
Rachel
HareMustin , Women
and
Psychotherapy [
New
York:
Guilford
Press,
1980, pp. 116,
122).
Although
more cases of
male
eating
disorders
have
been reported in
the late eighties
and early nineties,
it is estimated that
close to 90 percent
of all anorectics
are female ( Paul
Garfinkel
and
David
Garner,
Anorexia
Nervosa:
A
Multidimensional
Perspective [ New
York: Brunner /
Mazel, 1982], pp.
112-13). For a
sophisticated
account of female
psychopathology,
with
particular
attention
to
nineteenth-century
disorders
but,
unfortunately,
little mention of
agoraphobia
or
eating disorders,
see
Elaine
Showalter,
The
Female
Malady:Women,
Madness,
and
English Culture,
1830-1980 ( New
York: Pantheon,
1985).
For
a
discussion
of
social and gender
issues
in
agoraphobia, see
Robert Seidenberg
and
Karen
DeCrow, Women
Who
Marry
Houses:
Panic
and Protest in
Agoraphobia
(
New
York:
McGraw-Hill,
1983). On the
history
of
anorexia nervosa,
see Joan Jacobs
Brumberg,
Fasting Girls: The
Emergence
of
Anorexia Nervosa
as
a Modern
Disease
(
Cambridge:
Harvard
University Press,
1988).
7.
In
constructing
such a paradigm I
do not pretend to
do justice to any
of these disorders
in its individual
complexity. My
aim is to chart
some points of
intersection,
to
describe
some
similar patterns, as
they
emerge
through
a
particular reading
of
the
phenomenon--a
political reading,
if you will.
8.
Showalter,
The
Female Malady,
pp. 128-29.
9.
On the epidemic
of hysteria and
neurasthenia, see
Showalter,
The
Female Maladay,
Carroll
SmithRosenberg, "The
Hysterical
Woman:
Sex
Roles and Role
Conflict
in
NineteenthCentury
America," in her
Disorderly
Conduct:Visions
of
Gender
in
Victorian America
( Oxford: Oxford
University Press,
1985).
10.
Martha Vicinus,
"Introduction: The
Perfect Victorian
Lady," in Martha
Vicinus , Suffer
and
Be
Still:Women in the
Victorian Age (
Bloomington:
Indiana University
Press, 1972). pp.
x-xi.
11.
See
Carol
Nadelson
and
Malkah Notman,
The
Female
Patient ( New
York:
Plenum,
1982), p. 5; E. M.
Sigsworth and T.
J. Wyke, "A Study
of
Victorian
Prostitution and
Venereal
Disease,"
in
Vicinus,
Suffer
and Be Still, p. 82.
For more general
discussions, see
Peter Gay, The
Bourgeois
Experience:
Victoria to Freud.
Vol. 1: Education
of the Senses (
New
York:
Oxford University
Press, 1984), esp.
pp.
109-68;
Showalter,
The
Female Malady,
esp. pp. 121-44.
The delicate lady,
an ideal that had
very strong class
connotations (as
does slenderness
today), is not the
only conception of femininity to be found in Victorian cultures. But it was arguably the single
most powerful ideological representation of femininity in that era, affecting
women of all classes, including those without the material means to realize the
ideal fully. See Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word ( New York: Oxford,
1987), for discussions of the control of female appetite and Victorian
constructions of femininity.
12.
SmithRosenberg,
Disorderly
Conduct, p. 203.
13.
Showalter, The
Female Malady,
p. 129.
14.
Erving Goffman,
The Presentation
of the Self in
Everyday Life (
Garden City, N.
J.:
Anchor
Doubleday,
1959).
15.
Betty
Friedan,
The
Feminine
Mystique ( New
York:
Dell,
1962), p. 36. The
theme song of
one such show
ran, in part, "I
married Joan . . .
What a girl . . .
what a whirl . . .
what a life! I
married Joan . . .
What a mind . . .
love is blind . . .
what a wife!"
16.
See I. G. Fodor,
"The
Phobic
Syndrome
in
Women," in V.
Franks and V.
Burtle,
eds:,
Women
in
Therapy ( New
York: Brunner /
Mazel, 1974), p.
119; see also
Kathleen
Brehony
,
"Women
and
Agoraphobia," in
Violet
Franks
and
Esther
Rothblum, eds.,
The Stereotyping
of Women ( New
York: Springer,
1983).
17.
In
Jonathan
Culler, Roland
Barthes ( New
York:
Oxford
University Press,
1983), p. 74.
18.
For
other
interpretive
perspectives on
the slenderness
ideal, see Kim
Chernin , The
Obsession:
Reflections
on
the Tyranny of
Slenderness
(
New
York:
Harper and Row,
1981);
Susie
Orbach, Hunger
Strike:
The
Anorectic's
Struggle as a
Metaphor
for
Our Age ( New
York: W. W.
Norton, 1985).
19.
See Susan Bordo,
"Hunger
as
Ideology,"
in
Susan
Bordo,
Unbearable
Weight:
Feminism,
Western Culture,
and the Body (
Berkeley:
University
of
California Press,
1993), pp. 99134
for
a
discussion
of
how
this
construction of
femininity
is
reproduced
in
contemporary
commercials and
advertisements
concerning food,
eating,
and
cooking.
20.
Aimee
Liu,
Solitaire ( New
York: Harper and
Row, 1979), p.
123.
21.
Striking,
in
connection with
this, is Catherine
Steiner-Adair
1984 study of
high-school
women, which
reveals
a
dramatic
association
between
problems
with
food and body
image
and
emulation of the
cool,
professionally
"together"
and
gorgeous
superwoman. On
the basis of a
series
of
interviews, the
high
schoolers
were classified
into two groups:
one
expressed
skepticism over
the superwoman
ideal, the other
thoroughly
aspired to it.
Later
administrations
of
diagnostic
tests
revealed
that 94 percent of
the
prosuperwoman
group fell into
the
eatingdisordered range
of the scale. Of
the other group,
100 percent fell
into
the
noneatingdisordered range.
Media
images
notwithstanding,
young
women
today appear to
sense,
either
consciously
or
through
their
bodies,
the
impossibility of
simultaneously
meeting the
demands of two spheres whose values have been historically defined in utter
opposition to each other.
22.
See Susan Bordo,
"Anorexia
Nervosa"
in
Bordo,
Unbearable
Weight, pp. 13964.
23.
Dianne Hunter,
"Hysteria,
Psychoanalysis,
and Feminism,"
in
Shirley
Garner,
Claire
Kahane,
and
Madelon
Sprengnether,
eds.,
The
(M)Other Tongue
( Ithaca: Cornell
University Press,
1985), p. 114.
24.
Catherine
Clément
and
Hélène Cixous,
The Newly Born
Woman,
trans.
Betsy Wing (
Minneapolis:
University
of
Minnesota Press,
1986), p. 42.
25.
Clément
and
Cixous,
The
Newly
Born
Woman, p. 95.
26.
Seidenberg and
DeCrow, Women
Who
Marry
Houses, p. 31.
27.
SmithRosenberg,
Disorderly
Conduct, p. 208.
28.
Orbach, Hunger
Strike, p. 102.
When we look
into the many
autobiographies
and case studies
of
hysterics,
anorectics, and
agoraphobics, we
find that these are
indeed the sorts
of women one
might expect to
be frustrated by
the constraints of
a
specified
female
role.
Sigmund Freud
and
Joseph
Breuer, in Studies
on Hysteria (
New
York:
Avon, 1966), and
Freud, in the later
Dora:An
Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria
( New York:
Macmillan,
1963), constantly
remark on the
ambitiousness,
independence,
intellectual
ability,
and
creative strivings
of their patients.
We
know,
moreover,
that
many
women
who later became
leading
social
activists
and
feminists of the
nineteenth
century
were
among those who
fell
ill
with
hysteria
and
neurasthenia. It
has become a
virtual cliché that
the
typical
anorectic is a
perfectionist,
driven to excel in
all areas of her
life. Though less
prominently,
a
similar
theme
runs throughout
the literature on
agoraphobia.
One must keep in
mind that in
drawing on case
studies, one is
relying on the
perceptions
of
other
acculturated
individuals. One
suspects,
for
example, that the
popular portrait
of the anorectic
as a relentless
overachiever may
be colored by the
lingering
or
perhaps resurgent
Victorianism of
our
culture's
attitudes toward
ambitious
women.
One
does not escape
this hermeneutic
problem
by
turning
to
autobiography.
But
in
autobiography
one is at least
dealing
with
social
constructions and
attitudes
that
animate
the
subject's
own
psychic reality.
In this regard the
autobiographical
literature
on
anorexia, drawn
on in a variety of
places in this
volume,
is
strikingly full of
anxiety about the
domestic world
and other themes
that suggest deep
rebellion against
traditional
notions
of
femininity.
29.
Kim
Chernin,
The
Hungry
Self:Women,
Eating,
and
Identity ( New
York: Harper and
Row, 1985), esp.
pp. 41-93.
30.
Mark
Poster,
Foucault,
Marxism,
and
History
(
Cambridge:
Polity
Press,
1984), p. 28.
31.
Liu, Solitaire, p.
99.
Brett Silverstein, "Possible Causes of the Thin Standard of Bodily Attractiveness
for Women," International Journal of Eating Disorders 5 ( 1986): 907-16.
33.
Showalter, The
Female Malady,
p. 48.
34.
SmithRosenberg,
Disorderly
Conduct, p. 207.
35.
Orbach, Hunger
Strike, p. 103.
36.
Brownmiller,
Femininity, p. 14.
37.
Toril
Moi,
"Representations
of Patriarchy: Sex
and
Epistemology in
Freud's Dora," in
Charles
Bernheimer and
Claire Kahane,
eds., In Dora's
Case:
Freud
Hysteria-Feminism ( New
York: Columbia
University Press,
1985), p. 192.
38.
Foucault,
Discipline
and
Punish, p. 136.
39.
Foucault,
Discipline
and
Punish, p. 136.
40.
A focus on the
politics
of
sexualization and
objectification
remains central to
the
antipornography
movement (e.g.,
in the work of
Andrea Dworkin,
Catherine
MacKinnon
).
Feminists
exploring
the
politics
of
appearance
include Sandra
Bartky,
Susan
Brownmiller,
Wendy Chapkis,
Kim Chernin, and
Susie
Orbach.
And a developing
feminist interest
in the work of
Michel Foucault
has begun to
produce
a
poststructuralist
feminism
oriented toward
practice; see, for
example,
Irene
Diamond and Lee
Quinby,
Feminism
and
Foucault:
Reflections
on
Resistance
(
Boston:
Northeastern
University Press,
1988).
41.
See, for example,
Susan Suleiman,
ed., The Female
Body in Western
Culture
(
Cambridge:
Harvard
University Press,
1986).
42.
Michie,
The
Flesh
Made
Word, p. 13.
43.
Michie,
The
Flesh
Made
Word, p. 149.
7
Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal
Power
Sandra Lee Bartky
I
In a striking critique of modern society, Michel Foucault has argued that the rise of parliamentary
institutions and of new conceptions of political liberty was accompanied by a darker
countermovement, by the emergence of a new and unprecedented discipline directed against the
body. More is required of the body now than mere political allegiance or the appropriation of the
products of its labor: The new discipline invades the body and seeks to regulate its very forces and
operations, the economy and efficiency of its movements.
The disciplinary practices Foucault describes are tied to peculiarly modern forms of the army, the
school, the hospital, the prison, and the manufactory; the aim of these disciplines is to increase the
utility of the body, to augment its forces:
____________________
x
Sandra Lee Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power." From
Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby.
Copyright 1988 by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Reprinted with the permission of
Northeastern University Press, Boston.
What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated
manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery
of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A "political anatomy," which was also a
"mechanics of power," was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not
only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the
techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus, discipline produces subjected
and practiced bodies, "docile" bodies. 1
The production of "docile bodies" requires that an uninterrupted coercion be directed to the very
processes of bodily activity, not just their result; this "microphysics of power" fragments and
partitions the body's time, its space, and its movements. 2
The student, then, is enclosed within a classroom and assigned to a desk he cannot leave; his
ranking in the class can be read off the position of his desk in the serially ordered and segmented
space of the classroom itself. Foucault tells us that "Jean-Baptiste de la Salle dreamt of a classroom
in which the spatial distribution might provide a whole series of distinctions at once, according to
the pupil's progress, worth, character, application, cleanliness, and parents' fortune." 3 The student
must sit upright, feet upon the floor, head erect; he may not slouch or fidget; his animate body is
brought into a fixed correlation with the inanimate desk.
The minute breakdown of gestures and movements required of soldiers at drill is far more
relentless:
Bring the weapon forward. In three stages. Raise the rifle with the right hand, bringing it close to
the body so as to hold it perpendicular with the right knee, the end of the barrel at eye level,
grasping it by striking it with the right hand, the arm held close to the body at waist height. At the
second stage, bring the rifle in front of you with the left hand, the barrel in the middle between the
two eyes, vertical, the right hand grasping it at the small of the butt, the arm outstretched, the
triggerguard resting on the first finger, the left hand at the height of the notch, the thumb lying along
the barrel against the moulding. At the third stage. . . . 4
These "body-object articulations" of the soldier and his weapon, the student and his desk, effect a
"coercive link with the apparatus of production." We are far indeed from older forms of control that
"demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of labor." 5
The body's time, in these regimes of power, is as rigidly controlled as its space: The factory whistle
and the school bell mark a division of time into discrete and segmented units that regulate the
various activities of the day. The following timetable, similar in spirit to the ordering of my
grammar school classroom, was suggested for French "coles mutuelles" of the early nineteenth
century:
8:45 entrance of the monitor, 8:52 the monitor's summons, 8:56 entrance of the children and prayer,
9:00 the children go to their benches, 9:04 first slate, 9:08 end of dictation, 9:12 second slate, etc. 6
Control this rigid and precise cannot be maintained without a minute and relentless surveillance.
Jeremy Bentham's design for the Panopticon, a model prison, captures for Foucault the essence of
the disciplinary society. At the periphery of the Panopticon, a circular structure; at the center, a
tower with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring. The structure on the periphery is
divided into cells, each with two windows, one facing the windows of the tower, the other facing
the outside, allowing an effect of backlighting to make any figure visible within the cell. "All that is
needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a
patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy." 7 Each inmate is alone, shut off from effective
communication with his fellows, but constantly visible from the tower. The effect of this is "to
induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power"; each becomes to himself his own jailer. 8 This "state of conscious and
permanent visibility" is a sign that the tight, disciplinary control of the body has gotten a hold on the
mind as well. In the perpetual self-surveillance of the inmate lies the genesis of the celebrated
"individualism" and heightened self-consciousness which are hallmarks of modern times. For
Foucault, the structure and effects of the Panopticon resonate throughout society: Is it surprising
that "prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" 9
Foucault account in Discipline and Punish of the disciplinary practices that produce the "docile
bodies" of modernity is a genuine tour de force, incorporating a rich theoretical account of the ways
in which instrumental reason takes hold of the body with a mass of historical detail. But Foucault
treats the body throughout as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not
differ and as if men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of
modern life. Where is the account of the disciplinary practices that engender the "docile bodies" of
women, bodies more docile than the bodies of men? Women, like men, are subject to many of the
same disciplinary practices Foucault describes. But he is blind to those disciplines that produce a
modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine. To overlook the forms of subjection that
engender the feminine body is to perpetuate the silence and powerlessness of those upon whom
these disciplines have been imposed. Hence, even though a liberatory note is sounded in Foucault's
critique of power, his analysis as a whole reproduces that sexism which is endemic throughout
Western political theory.
We are born male or female, but not masculine or feminine. Femininity is an artifice, an
achievement, "a mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so many
styles of the flesh." 10 In what follows, I shall examine those disciplinary practices that produce a
body which in gesture and appearance is recognizably feminine. I consider three categories of such
practices: those that aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration; those that
bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements; and those
directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface. I shall examine the nature of
these disciplines, how they are imposed, and by whom. I shall probe the effects of the imposition of
such discipline on female identity and subjectivity. In the final section I shall argue that these
disciplinary practices must be understood in the light of the modernization of patriarchal
domination, a modernization that unfolds historically according to the general pattern described by
Foucault.
II
Styles of the female figure vary over time and across cultures: they reflect cultural obsessions and
preoccupations in ways that are still poorly understood. Today, massiveness, power, or abundance
in a woman's body is met with distaste. The current body of fashion is taut, small-breasted,
narrowhipped, and of a slimness bordering on emaciation; it is a silhouette that seems more
appropriate to an adolescent boy or a newly pubescent girl than to an adult woman. Since ordinary
women have normally quite different dimensions, they must of course diet. Mass-circulation
women's magazines run articles on dieting in virtually every issue. The Ladies' Home Journal of
February 1986 carries a "Fat-Burning Exercise Guide," while Mademoiselle offers to "Help Stamp
Out Cellulite" with "Six Sleek-Down Strategies." After the diet-busting Christmas holidays and
later, before summer bikini season, the titles of these features become shriller and more arresting.
The reader is now addressed in the imperative mode: Jump into shape for summer! Shed ugly
winter fat with the all-new Grapefruit Diet! More women than men visit diet doctors, while women
greatly outnumber men in self-help groups such as Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous-in the case of the latter, by well over 90 percent. 11
Dieting disciplines the body's hungers: Appetite must be monitored at all times and governed by an
iron will. Since the innocent need of the organism for food will not be denied, the body becomes
one's enemy, an alien being bent on thwarting the disciplinary project. Anorexia nervosa, which has
now assumed epidemic proportions, is to women of the late twentieth century what hysteria was to
women of an earlier day: the crystallization in a pathological mode of a widespread cultural
obsession. 12 A survey taken recently at UCLA is astounding: Of 260 students interviewed, 27.3
percent of the women but only 5.8 percent of men said they were "terrified" of getting fat: 28.7
percent of women and only 7.5 percent of men said they were obsessed or "totally preoccupied"
with food. The body images of women and men are strikingly different as well: 35 percent of
women but only 12.5 percent of men said they felt fat though other people told them they were thin.
Women in the survey wanted to weigh ten pounds less than their average weight; men felt they
were within a pound of their ideal weight. A total of 5.9 percent of women and no men met the
psychiatric criteria for anorexia or bulimia. 13
Dieting is one discipline imposed upon a body subject to the "tyranny of slenderness"; exercise is
another. 14 Since men as well as women exercise, it is not always easy in the case of women to
distinguish what is done for the sake of physical fitness from what is done in obedience to the
requirements of femininity. Men as well as women lift weights, do yoga, calisthenics, and aerobics,
though "jazzercise" is a largely female pursuit. Men and women alike engage themselves with a
variety of machines, each designed to call forth from the body a different exertion: There are
Nautilus machines, rowing machines, ordinary and motorized exercycles, portable hip and leg
cycles, belt massagers, trampolines; treadmills, arm and leg pulleys. However, given the widespread
female obsession with weight, one suspects that many women are working out with these
apparatuses in the health club or at the gym with a different aim in mind and in quite a different
spirit than the menBut there are classes of exercises meant for women alone, these designed not to
firm or to reduce the body's size overall, but to resculpture its various parts on the current model. M.
J. Saffon, "international beauty expert," assures us that his twelve basic facial exercises can erase
frown lines, smooth the forehead, raise hollow checks, banish crow's feet, and tighten the muscles
under the chin. 15 There are exercises to build the breasts and exercises to banish "cellulite," said by
"figure consultants" to be a special type of female fat. There is "spot-reducing," an umbrella term
that covers dozens of punishing exercises designed to reduce "problem areas" like thick ankles or
"saddlebag" thighs. The very idea of "spot-reducing" is both scientifically unsound and cruel, for it
raises expectations in women that can never be realized: The pattern in which fat is deposited or
removed is known to be genetically determined.
It is not only her natural appetite or unreconstructed contours that pose a danger to women: The
very expressions of her face can subvert the disciplinary project of bodily perfection. An expressive
face lines and creases more readily than an inexpressive one. Hence, if women are unable to
suppress strong emotions, they can at least learn to inhibit the tendency of the face to register them.
Sophia Loren recommends a unique solution to this problem: A piece of tape applied to the
forehead or between the brows will tug at the skin when one frowns and act as a reminder to relax
the face. 16 The tape is to be worn whenever a woman is home alone.
III
There are significant gender differences in gesture, posture, movement, and general bodily
comportment: Women are far more restricted than men in their manner of movement and in their
lived spatiality. In her classic paper on the subject, Iris Young observes that a space seems to
surround women in imagination which they are hesitant to move beyond: This manifests itself both
in a reluctance to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion--as in
sport or in the performance of physical tasks--and in a typically constricted posture and general
style of movement. Woman's space is not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely
realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined. 17 The
"loose woman" violates these norms: Her looseness is manifest not only in her morals, but in her
manner of speech, and quite literally in the free and easy way she moves. In an extraordinary series
of over two thousand photographs, many candid shots taken in the street, the German photographer
Marianne Wex has documented differences in typical masculine and feminine body posture.
Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands folded together in their laps, toes
pointing straight ahead or turned inward, and legs pressed together. 18 The women in these
photographs make themselves small and narrow, harmless; they seem tense; they take up little
space. Men, on the other hand, expand into the available space; they sit with legs far apart and arms
flung out at some distance from the body. Most common in these sitting male figures is what Wex
calls the "proferring position": the men sit with legs thrown wide apart, crotch visible, feet pointing
outward, often with an arm and casually dangling hand resting comfortably on an open, spread
thigh.
In proportion to total body size, a man's stride is longer than a woman's. The man has more spring
and rhythm to his step; he walks with toes pointed outward, holds his arms at a greater distance
from his body, and swings them farther; he tends to point the whole hand in the direction he is
moving. The woman holds her arms closer to her body, palms against her sides; her walk is
circumspect. If she has subjected herself to the additional constraint of high-heeled shoes, her body
is thrown forward and off-balance: The struggle to walk under these conditions shortens her stride
still more. 19
But women's movement is subjected to a still finer discipline. Feminine faces, as well as bodies, are
trained to the expression of deference. Under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast
them downward; the female gaze is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer. The
"nice" girl learns to avoid the bold and unfettered staring of the "loose" woman who looks at
whatever and whomever she pleases. Women are trained to smile more than men, too. In the
economy of smiles, as elsewhere, there is evidence that women are exploited, for they give more
than they receive in return; in a smile elicitation study, one researcher found that the rate of smile
return by women was 93 percent, by men only 67 percent. 20 In many typical women's jobs,
graciousness, deference, and the readiness to serve are part of the work; this requires the worker to
fix a smile on her face for a good part of the working day, whatever her inner state. 21 The economy
of touching is out of balance, too: men touch women more often and on more parts of the body than
women touch men: female secretaries, factory workers, and waitresses report that such liberties are
taken routinely with their bodies. 22
Feminine movement, gesture, and posture must exhibit not only constriction, but grace as well, and
a certain eroticism restrained by modesty: all three. Here is field for the operation for a whole new
training: A woman must stand with stomach pulled in, shoulders thrown slightly back, and chest
out, this to display her bosom to maximum advantage. While she must walk in the confined fashion
appropriate to women, her movements must, at the same time, be combined with a subtle but
provocative hip-roll. But too much display is taboo: Women in short, low-cut dresses are told to
avoid bending over at all, but if they must, great care must be taken to avoid an unseemly display of
breast or rump. From time to time, fashion magazines offer quite precise instructions on the proper
way of getting in and out of cars. These instructions combine all three imperatives of women's
movement: A woman must not allow her arms and legs to flail about in all directions; she must try
to manage her movements with the appearance of grace--no small accomplishment when one is
climbing out of the back seat of a Fiat--and she is well advised to use the opportunity for a certain
display of leg.
All the movements we have described so far are self-movements; they arise from within the
woman's own body. But in a way that normally goes unnoticed, males in couples may literally steer
a woman everywhere she goes: down the street, around corners, into elevators, through doorways,
into her chair at the dinner table, around the dance-floor. The man's movement "is not necessarily
heavy and pushy or physical in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm in the way of the most
confident equestrians with the best trained horses." 23
IV
We have examined some of the disciplinary practices a woman must master in pursuit of a body of
the right size and shape that also displays the proper styles of feminine motility. But woman's body
is an ornamented surface too, and there is much discipline involved in this production as well. Here,
especially in the application of make-up and the selection of clothes, art and discipline converge,
though, as I shall argue, there is less art involved than one might suppose.
A woman's skin must be soft, supple, hairless, and smooth; ideally, it should betray no sign of wear,
experience, age, or deep thought. Hair must be removed not only from the face but from large
surfaces of the body as well, from legs and thighs, an operation accomplished by shaving, buffing
with fine sandpaper, or foul-smelling depilatories. With the new high-leg bathing suits and leotards,
a substantial amount of pubic hair must be removed too. 24 The removal of facial hair can be more
specialized. Eyebrows are plucked out by the roots with a tweezer. Hot wax is sometimes poured
onto the mustache and cheeks and then ripped away when it cools. The woman who wants a more
permanent result may try electrolysis: This involves the killing of a hair root by the passage of an
electric current down a needle which has been inserted into its base. The procedure is painful and
expensive.
The development of what one "beauty expert" calls "good skin-care habits" requires not only
attention to health, the avoidance of strong facial expressions, and the performance of facial
exercises, but the regular use of skin-care preparations, many to be applied oftener than once a day:
cleansing lotions (ordinary soap and water "upsets the skin's acid and alkaline balance"), washoff
cleansers (milder than cleansing lotions), astringents, toners, make-up removers, night creams,
nourishing creams, eye creams, moisturizers, skin balancers, body lotions, hand creams, lip
pomades, suntan lotions, sun screens, facial masks. Provision of the proper facial mask is complex:
There are sulfur masks for pimples; hot or oil masks for dry areas; also cold masks for dry areas;
tightening masks; conditioning masks; peeling masks; cleansing masks made of herbs, cornmeal, or
almonds; mud packs. Black women may wish to use "fade creams" to "even skin tone." Skin-care
preparations are never just sloshed onto the skin, but applied according to precise rules: Eye cream
is dabbed on gently in movements toward, never away from, the nose; cleansing cream is applied in
outward directions only, straight across the forehead, the upper lip, and the chin, never up but
straight down the nose and up and out on the cheeks. 25
The normalizing discourse of modern medicine is enlisted by the cosmetics industry to gain
credibility for its claims. Dr. Christiaan Barnard lends his enormous prestige to the Glycel line of
"cellular treatment activators"; these contain "glycosphingolipids" that can "make older skin behave
and look like younger skin." The Clinique computer at any Clinique counter will select a
combination of preparations just right for you. Ultima II contains "procollagen" in its anti-aging eye
cream that "provides hydration" to "demoralizing lines." "Biotherm" eye cream dramatically
improves the "biomechanical properties of the skin." 26 The Park Avenue clinic of Dr. Zizmor,
"chief of dermatology at one of New York's leading hospitals," offers not only medical treatment
such as dermabrasion and chemical peeling but "total deep skin cleansing" as well. 27
Really good skin-care habits require the use of a variety of aids and devices: facial steamers; faucet
filters to collect impurities in the water; borax to soften it; a humidifier for the bedroom; electric
massagers; backbrushes; complexion brushes; loofahs; pumice stones; blackhead removers. I will
not detail the implements or techniques involved in the manicure or pedicure.
The ordinary circumstances of life as well as a wide variety of activities cause a crisis in skin-care
and require a stepping up of the regimen as well as an additional laying on of preparations. Skincare discipline requires a specialized knowledge: A woman must know what to do if she has been
skiing, taking medication, doing vigorous exercise, boating, or swimming in chlorinated pools; if
she has been exposed to pollution, heated rooms, cold, sun, harsh weather, the pressurized cabins on
airplanes, saunas or steam rooms, fatigue or stress. Like the schoolchild or prisoner, the woman
mastering good skin-care habits is put on a timetable: Georgette Klinger requires that a shorter or
longer period of attention be paid to the complexion at least four times a day. 28 Hair-care, like skincare, requires a similar investment of time, the use of a wide variety of preparations, the mastery of
a set of techniques and again, the acquisition of a specialized knowledge.
The crown and pinnacle of good hair care and skin care is, of course, the arrangement of the hair
and the application of cosmetics. Here the regimen of hair care, skin care, manicure, and pedicure is
recapitulated in another mode. A woman must learn the proper manipulation of a large number of
devices--the blow dryer, styling brush, curling iron, hot curlers, wire curlers, eye-liner, lipliner,
lipstick brush, eyelash curler, mascara brush-and the correct manner of application of a wide variety
of products--foundation, toner, covering stick, mascara, eye shadow, eye gloss, blusher, lipstick,
rouge, lip gloss, hair dye, hair rinse, hair lightener, hair "relaxer," etc.
In the language of fashion magazines and cosmetic ads, making up is typically portrayed as an
aesthetic activity in which a woman can express her individuality. In reality, while cosmetic styles
change every decade or so and while some variation in make-up is permitted depending on the
occasion, making up the face is, in fact, a highly stylized activity that gives little rein to selfexpression. Painting the face is not like painting a picture; at best, it might be described as painting
the same picture over and over again with minor variations. Little latitude is permitted in what is
considered appropriate make-up for the office and for most social occasions; indeed, the woman
who uses cosmetics in a genuinely novel and imaginative way is liable to be seen not as an artist but
as an eccentric. Furthermore, since a properly-madeup face is, if not a card of entrée, at least a
badge of acceptability in most social and professional contexts, the woman who chooses not to wear
cos-metics at all faces sanctions of a sort which will never be applied to someone who chooses not
to paint a watercolor.
V
Are we dealing in all this merely with sexual difference? Scarcely. The disciplinary practices I have
described are part of the process by which the ideal body of femininity--and hence the feminine
body-subject--is constructed; in doing this, they produce a "practiced and subjected" body, i.e., a
body on which an inferior status has been inscribed. A woman's face must be made up, that is to
say, made over, and so must her body: she is ten pounds overweight; her lips must be made more
kissable; her complexion dewier; her eyes more mysterious. The "art" of make-up is the art of
disguise, but this presupposes that a woman's face, unpainted, is defective. Soap and water, a shave,
and routine attention to hygiene may be enough for him; for her they are not. The strategy of much
beauty-related advertising is to suggest to women that their bodies are deficient, but even without
such more or less explicit teaching, the media images of perfect female beauty which bombard us
daily leave no doubt in the minds of most women that they fail to measure up. The technologies of
femininity are taken up and practiced by women against the background of a pervasive sense of
bodily deficiency: This accounts for what is often their compulsive or even ritualistic character.
The disciplinary project of femininity is a "set-up": It requires such radical and extensive measures
of bodily transformation that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some
degree to fail. Thus, a measure of shame is added to a woman's sense that the body she inhabits is
deficient: she ought to take better care of herself; she might after all have jogged that last mile.
Many women are without the time or resources to provide themselves with even the minimum of
what such a regimen requires, e.g., a decent diet. Here is an additional source of shame for poor
women who must bear what our society regards as the more general shame of poverty. The burdens
poor women bear in this regard are not merely psychological, since conformity to the prevailing
standards of bodily acceptability is a known factor in economic mobility.
The larger disciplines that construct a "feminine" body out of a female one are by no means race- or
class-specific. There is little evidence that women of color or working-class women are in general
less committed to the incarnation of an ideal femininity than their more privileged sisters. This is
not to deny the many ways in which factors of race, class, locality, ethnicity, or personal taste can
be expressed within the kinds of practices I have described. The rising young corporate executive
may buy her cosmetics at BergdorfGoodman while the counter-server at McDonald's gets hers at
the K-Mart; the one may join an expensive "upscale" health club, while the other may have to make
do with the $9.49 GFX Body-Flex II Home-Gym advertised in the National Enquirer: Both are
aiming at the same general result. 29
In the regime of institutionalized heterosexuality woman must make herself "object and prey" for
the man: It is for him that these eyes are limpid pools, this cheek baby-smooth. 30 In contemporary
patriarchal culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women:
They stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgment. Woman lives her body as seen by
another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other. We are often told that "women dress for other
women." There is some truth in this: Who but someone engaged in a project similar to my own can
appreciate the panache with which I bring it off? But women know for whom this game is played:
They know that a pretty young woman is likelier to become a flight attendant than a plain one and
that a well-preserved older woman has a better chance of holding onto her husband than one who
has "let herself go."
Here it might be objected that performance for another in no way signals the inferiority of the
performer to the one for whom the performance is intended: The actor, for example, depends on his
audience but is in no way inferior to it; he is not demeaned by his dependency. While femininity is
surely something enacted, the analogy to theater breaks down in a number of ways. First, as I
argued earlier, the self-determination we think of as requisite to an artistic career is lacking here:
Femininity as spectacle is something in which virtually every woman is required to participate.
Second, the precise nature of the criteria by which women are judged, not only the inescapability of
judgment itself, reflects gross imbalances in the social power of the sexes that do not mark the
relationship of artists and their audiences. An aesthetic of femininity, for example, that mandates
fragility and a lack of muscular strength produces female bodies that can offer little resistance to
physical abuse, and the physical abuse of women by men, as we know, is widespread. It is true that
the current fitness movement has permitted women to develop more muscular strength and
endurance than was heretofore allowed; indeed, images of women have begun to appear in the mass
media that seem to eroticize this new muscularity. But a woman may by no means develop more
muscular strength than her partner; the bride who would tenderly carry her groom across the
threshold is a figure of comedy, not romance. 31
Under the current "tyranny of slenderness" women are forbidden to become large or massive; they
must take up as little space as possible. The very contours a woman's body takes on as she matures-the fuller breasts and rounded hips--have become distasteful. The body by which a woman feels
herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early
adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours
the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and
hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her
infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally
feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so
admire in men.
To succeed in the provision of a beautiful or sexy body gains a woman attention and some
admiration but little real respect and rarely any social power. A woman's effort to master feminine
body discipline will lack importance just because she does it: Her activity partakes of the general
depreciation of everything female. In spite of unrelenting pressure to "make the most of what they
have," women are ridiculed and dismissed for the triviality of their interest in such "trivial" things
as clothes and make-up. Further, the narrow identification of woman with sexuality and the body in
a society that has for centuries displayed profound suspicion toward both does little to raise her
status. Even the most adored female bodies complain routinely of their situation in ways that reveal
an implicit understanding that there is something demeaning in the kind of attention they receive.
Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Farrah Fawcett have all wanted passionately to become
actressesartists and not just "sex objects."
But it is perhaps in their more restricted motility and comportment that the inferiorization of
women's bodies is most evident: Women's typical body language, a language of relative tension and
constriction, is understood to be a language of subordination when it is enacted by men in male
status hierarchies. In groups of men, those with higher status typically assume looser and more
relaxed postures: The boss lounges comfortably behind the desk while the applicant sits tense and
rigid on the edge of his seat. Higher-status individuals may touch their subordinates more than they
themselves get touched; they initiate more eye contact and are smiled at by their inferiors more than
they are observed to smile in return. 32 What is announced in the comportment of superiors is
confidence and ease, especially ease of access to the Other. Female constraint in posture and
movement is no doubt overdetermined: The fact that women tend to sit and stand with legs, feet,
and knees close or touching may well be a coded declaration of sexual circumspection in a society
that still maintains a double standard, or an effort, albeit unconscious, to guard the genital area. In
the latter case, a woman's tight and constricted posture must be seen as the expression of her need to
ward off real or symbolic sexual attack. Whatever proportions must be assigned in the final display
to fear or deference, one thing is clear: Woman's body language speaks eloquently, though silently,
of her subordinate status in a hierarchy of gender.
VI
If what we have described is a genuine discipline--a "system of micropower that is essentially nonegalitarian and asymmetrical"--who then are the disciplinarians? 33 Who is the top sergeant in the
disciplinary regime of femininity? Historically, the law has had some responsibility for
enforcement: In times gone by, for example, individuals who appeared in public in the clothes of
the other sex could be arrested. While cross-dressers are still liable to some harassment, the kind of
discipline we are considering is not the business of the police or the courts. Parents and teachers, of
course, have extensive influence, admonishing girls to be demure and ladylike, to "smile pretty," to
sit with their legs together. The influence of the media is pervasive, too, constructing as it does an
image of the female body as spectacle, nor can we ignore the role played by "beauty experts" or by
emblematic public personages such as Jane Fonda and Lynn Redgrave.
But none of these individuals--the skin-care consultant, the parent, the policeman--does in fact
wield the kind of authority that is typically invested in those who manage more straightforward
disciplinary institutions. The disciplinary power that inscribes femininity in the female body is
everywhere and it is nowhere; the disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular. Women
regarded as overweight, for example, report that they are regularly admonished to diet, sometimes
by people they scarcely know. These intrusions are often softened by reference to the natural
prettiness just waiting to emerge: "People have always said that I had a beautiful face and 'if you'd
only lose weight you'd be really beautiful."' 34 Here, "people"--friends and casual acquaintances
alike--act to enforce prevailing standards of body size.
Foucault tends to identify the imposition of discipline upon the body with the operation of specific
institutions, e.g., the school, the factory, the prison. To do this, however, however, is to overlook
the extent to which discipline can be institutionally unbound as well as institutionally bound. 35 The
anonymity of disciplinary power and its wide dispersion have consequences which are crucial to a
proper understanding of the subordination of women. The absence of a formal institutional structure
and of authorities invested with the power to carry out institutional directives creates the impression
that the production of femininity is either entirely voluntary or natural. The several senses of
"discipline" are instructive here. On the one hand, discipline is something imposed on subjects of an
"essentially inegalitarian and asymmetrical" system of authority. Schoolchildren, convicts, and
draftees are subject to discipline in this sense. But discipline can be sought voluntarily as well, as,
for example, when an individual seeks initiation into the spiritual discipline of Zen Buddhism.
Discipline can, of course, be both at once: The volunteer may seek the physical and occupational
training offered by the army without the army's ceasing in any way to be the instrument by which
he and other members of his class are kept in disciplined subjection. Feminine bodily discipline has
this dual character: On the one hand, no one is marched off for electrolysis at the end of a rifle, nor
can we fail to appreciate the initiative and ingenuity displayed by countless women in an attempt to
master the rituals of beauty. Nevertheless, insofar as the disciplinary practices of femininity produce
a "subjected and practiced," an inferiorized, body, they must be understood as aspects of a far larger
discipline, an oppressive and inegalitarian system of sexual subordination. This system aims at
turning women into the docile and compliant companions of men just as surely as the army aims to
turn its raw recruits into soldiers.
Now the transformation of oneself into a properly feminine body may be any or all of the following:
a rite of passage into adulthood; the adoption and celebration of a particular aesthetic; a way of
announcing one's economic level and social status; a way to triumph over other women in the
competition for men or jobs; or an opportunity for massive narcissistic indulgence. 36 The social
construction of the feminine body is all these things, but it is at base discipline, too, and discipline
of the inegalitarian sort. The absence of formally identifiable disciplinarians and of a public
schedule of sanctions serves only to disguise the extent to which the imperative to be "feminine"
serves the interest of domination. This is a lie in which all concur: Making up is merely artful play;
one's first pair of high-heeled shoes is an innocent part of growing up and not the modern equivalent
of foot-binding.
Why aren't all women feminists? In modern industrial societies, women are not kept in line by fear
of retaliatory male violence; their victimization is not that of the South African black. Nor will it
suffice to say that a false consciousness engendered in women by patriarchal ideology is at the basis
of female subordination. This is not to deny the fact that women are often subject to gross male
violence or that women and men alike are ideologically mystified by the dominant gender
arrangements. What I wish to suggest instead is that an adequate understanding of women's
oppression will require an appreciation of the extent to which not only women's lives but their very
subjectivities are structured within an ensemble of systematically duplicitous practices. The
feminine discipline of the body is a case in point: The practices which construct this body have an
overt aim and character far removed, indeed radically distinct, from their covert function. In this
regard, the system of gender subordination, like the wage-bargain under capitalism, illustrates in its
own way the ancient tension, between what is and what appears: The phenomenal forms in which it
is manifested are often quite different from the real relations which form its deeper structure.
VII
The lack of formal public sanctions does not mean that a woman who is unable or unwilling to
submit herself to the appropriate body discipline will face no sanctions at all. On the contrary, she
faces a very severe sanction indeed in a world dominated by men: the refusal of male patronage. For
the heterosexual woman, this may mean the loss of a badly needed intimacy; for both heterosexual
women and lesbians, it may well mean the refusal of a decent livelihood.
As noted earlier, women punish themselves too for the failure to conform. The growing literature on
women's body size is filled with wrenching confessions of shame from the overweight:
I felt clumsy and huge. I felt that I would knock over furniture, bump into things, tip over chairs,
not fit into vw's, especially when people were trying to crowd into the back seat. I felt like I was
taking over the whole room. . . . I felt disgusting and like a slob. In the summer I felt hot and sweaty
and I knew people saw my sweat as evidence that I was too fat.
I feel so terrible about the way I look that I cut off connection with my body. I operate from the
neck up. I do not look in mirrors. I do not want to spend time buying clothes. I do not want to spend
time with make-up because it's painful for me to look at myself. 37 I can no longer bear to look at
myself. Whenever I have to stand in front of a mirror to comb my hair I tie a large towel around my
neck. Even at night I slip my nightgown on before I take off my blouse and pants. But all this has
only made it worse and worse. It's been so long since I've really looked at my body. 38
The depth of these women's shame is a measure of the extent to which all women have internalized
patriarchal standards of bodily acceptability. A fuller examination of what is meant here by
"internalization" may shed light on a question posed earlier: Why isn't every woman a feminist?
Something is "internalized" when it gets incorporated into the structure of the self. By "structure of
the self" I refer to those modes of perception and of self-perception which allow a self to distinguish
itself both from other selves and from things which are not selves. I have described elsewhere how a
generalized male witness comes to structure woman's consciousness of herself as a bodily being. 39
This, then, is one meaning of "internalization." The sense of oneself as a distinct and valuable
individual is tied not only to the sense of how one is perceived, but also to what one knows,
especially to what one knows how to do; this is a second sense of "internalization."Whatever its
ultimate effect, discipline can provide the individual upon whom it is imposed with a sense of
mastery as well as a secure sense of identity. There is a certain contradiction here: While its
imposition may promote a larger disempowerment, discipline may bring with it a certain
development of a person's powers. Women, then, like other skilled individuals, have a stake in the
perpetuation of their skills, whatever it may have cost to acquire them and quite apart from the
question whether, as a gender, they would have been better off had they never had to acquire them
in the first place. Hence, feminism, especially a genuinely radical feminism that questions the
patriarchal construction of the female body, threatens women with a certain deskilling, something
people normally resist: Beyond this, it calls into question that aspect of personal identity which is
tied to the development of a sense of competence.
Resistance from this source may be joined by a reluctance to part with the rewards of compliance;
further, many women will resist the abandonment of an aesthetic that defines what they take to be
beautiful. But there is still another source of resistance, one more subtle perhaps, but tied once again
to questions of identity and internalization. To have a body felt to be "feminine"--a body socially
constructed through the appropriate practices--is in most cases crucial to a woman's sense of herself
as female and, since persons currently can be only as male or female, to her sense of herself as an
existing individual. To possess such a body may also be essential to her sense of herself as a
sexually desiring and desirable subject. Hence, any political project which aims to dismantle the
machinery that turns a female body into a feminine one may well be apprehended by a woman as
something that threatens her with desexualization, if not outright annihilation.
The categories of masculinity and femininity do more than assist in the construction of personal
identities; they are critical elements in our informal social ontology. This may account to some
degree for the otherwise puzzling phenomenon of homophobia and for the revulsion felt by many at
the sight of female bodybuilders; neither the homosexual nor the muscular woman can be
assimilated easily into the categories that structure everyday life. The radical feminist critique of
femininity, then, may pose a threat not only to a woman's sense of her own identity and desirability
but to the very structure of her social universe.
Of course, many women are feminists, favoring a program of political and economic reform in the
struggle to gain equality with men. 40 But many "reform" or liberal feminists, indeed, many
orthodox Marxists, are committed to the idea that the preservation of a woman's femininity is quite
compatible with her struggle for liberation. 41 These thinkers have rejected a normative femininity
based upon the notion of "separate spheres" and the traditional sexual division of labor while
accepting at the same time conventional standards of feminine body display. If my analysis is
correct, such a feminism is incoherent. Foucault has argued that modern bourgeois democracy is
deeply flawed in that it seeks political rights for individuals constituted as unfree by a variety of
disciplinary micropowers that lie beyond the realm of what is ordinarily defined as the
"political.""The man described for us whom we are invited to free," he says, "is already in himself
the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself." 42 If, as I have argued, female
subjectivity is constituted in any significant measure in and through the disciplinary practices that
construct the feminine body, what Foucault says here of "man" is perhaps even truer of "woman."
Marxists have maintained from the first the inadequacy of a purely liberal feminism: We have
reached the same conclusion through a different route, casting doubt at the same time on the
adequacy of traditional Marxist prescriptions for women's liberation as well. Liberals call for equal
rights for women, traditional Marxists for the entry of women into production on an equal footing
with men, the socialization of housework and proletarian revolution: neither calls for the
deconstruction of the categories of masculinity and femininity. 43 Femininity as a certain "style of
the flesh" will have to be surpassed in the direction of something quite different, not masculinity,
which is in many ways only its mirror opposite, but a radical and as yet unimagined transformation
of the female body.
VIII
Foucault has argued that the transition from traditional to modern societies has been characterized
by a profound transformation in the exercise of power, by what he calls "a reversal of the political
axis of individualization." 44 In older authoritarian systems, power was embodied in the person of
the monarch and exercised upon a largely anonymous body of subjects; violation of the law was
seen as an insult to the royal individual. While the methods employed to enforce compliance in the
past were often quite brutal, involving gross assaults against the body, power in such a system
operated in a haphazard and discontinuous fashion; much in the social totality lay beyond its reach.
By contrast, modern society has seen the emergence of increasingly invasive apparatuses of power:
These exercise a far more restrictive social and psychological control than was heretofore possible.
In modern societies, effects of power "circulate through progressively finer channels, gaining access
to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions." 45 Power now
seeks to transform the minds of those individuals who might be tempted to resist it, not merely to
punish or imprison their bodies. This requires two things: a finer control of the body's time and its
movements--a control that cannot be achieved without ceaseless surveillance and a better
understanding of the specific person, of the genesis and nature of his "case." The power these new
apparatuses seek to exercise requires a new knowledge of the individual: Modern psychology and
sociology are born. Whether the new modes of control have charge of correction, production,
education, or the provision of welfare, they resemble one another; they exercise power in a
bureaucratic mode--faceless, centralized, and pervasive. A reversal has occurred: Power has now
become anonymous, while the project of control has brought into being a new individuality. In fact,
Foucault believes that the operation of power constitutes the very subjectivity of the subject. Here,
the image of the Panopticon returns: Knowing that he may be observed from the tower at any time,
the inmate takes over the job of policing himself. The gaze which is inscribed in the very structure
of the disciplinary institution is internalized by the inmate: Modern tech-
nologies of behavior are thus oriented toward the production of isolated and self-policing subjects.
46
Women have their own experience of the modernization of power, one which begins later but
follows in many respects the course outlined by Foucault. In important ways, a woman's behavior is
less regulated now than it was in the past. She has more mobility and is less confined to domestic
space. She enjoys what to previous generations would have been an unimaginable sexual liberty.
Divorce, access to paid work outside the home, and the increasing secularization of modern life
have loosened the hold over her of the traditional family and, in spite of the current fundamentalist
revival, of the church. Power in these institutions was wielded by individuals known to her.
Husbands and fathers enforced patriarchal authority in the family. As in the ancien régime a
woman's body was subject to sanctions if she disobeyed. Not Foucault's royal individual but the
Divine Individual decreed that her desire be always "unto her husband," while the person of the
priest made known to her God's more specific intentions concerning her place and duties. In the
days when civil and ecclesiastical authority were still conjoined, individuals formally invested with
power were charged with the correction of recalcitrant women whom the family had somehow
failed to constrain.
By contrast, the disciplinary power that is increasingly charged with the production of a properly
embodied femininity is dispersed and anonymous; there are no individuals formally empowered to
wield it; it is, as we have seen, invested in everyone and in no one in particular. This disciplinary
power is peculiarly modern: It does not rely upon violent or public sanctions, nor does it seek to
restrain the freedom of the female body to move from place to place. For all that, its invasion of the
body is well-nigh total: The female body enters "a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it
down and rearranges it." The disciplinary techniques through which the "docile bodies" of women
are constructed aim at a regulation which is perpetual and exhaustive--a regulation of the body's
size and contours, its appetite, posture, gestures, and general comportment in space and the
appearance of each of its visible parts.
As modern industrial societies change and as women themselves offer resistance to patriarchy, older
forms of domination are eroded. But new forms arise, spread, and become consolidated. Women are
no longer required to be chaste or modest, to restrict their sphere of activity to the home, or even to
realize their properly feminine destiny in maternity: Normative femininity is coming more and more
to be centered on woman's body--not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children,
but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and its appearance. There is, of
course, nothing new in women's preoccupation with youth and beauty. What is new is the growing
power of the image in a society increasingly oriented toward the visual media. Images of normative
femininity, it might be ventured, have replaced the religiously oriented tracts of the past. New too is
the spread of this discipline to all classes of women and its deployment throughout the life cycle.
What was formerly the speciality of the aristocrat or courtesan is now the routine obligation of
every woman, be she a grandmother or a barely pubescent girl.
To subject oneself to the new disciplinary power is to be up-to-date, to be "with-it"; as I have
argued, it is presented to us in ways that are regularly disguised. It is fully compatible with the
current need for women's wage labor, the cult of youth and fitness, and the need of advanced
capitalism to maintain high levels of consumption. Further, it represents a saving in the economy of
enforcement: Since it is women themselves who practice this discipline on and against their own
bodies, men get off scot-free.
The woman who checks her make-up half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or
her mascara run, who worries that the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to
see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has
become, just as surely as the inmate of Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a
relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the
reflection in woman's consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not,
that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite. There
has been induced in many women, then, in Foucault's words, "a state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power." 48 Since the standards of female bodily
acceptability are impossible fully to realize, requiring as they do a virtual transcendence of nature, a
woman may live much of her life with a pervasive feeling of bodily deficiency. Hence, a tighter
control of the body has gained a new kind of hold over the mind.
Foucault often writes as if power constitutes the very individuals upon whom it operates:
The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple
and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike. . . . In fact,
it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain
discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. 49
Nevertheless, if individuals were wholly constituted by the power/knowledge regime Foucault
describes, it would make no sense to speak of resistance to discipline at all. Foucault seems
sometimes on the verge of depriving us of a vocabulary in which to conceptualize the nature and
meaning of those periodic refusals of control which, just as much as the imposition of control, mark
the course of human history.
Peter Dews accuses Foucault of lacking a theory of the "libidinal body," i.e., the body upon which
discipline is imposed and whose bedrock impulse toward spontaneity and pleasure might perhaps
become the locus of resistance. 50 Do women's "libidinal" bodies, then, not rebel against the pain,
constriction, tedium, semistarvation, and constant self-surveillance to which they are currently
condemned? Certainly they do, but the rebellion is put down every time a woman picks up her
eyebrow tweezers or embarks upon a new diet. The harshness of a regimen alone does not
guarantee its rejection, for hardships can be endured if they are thought to be necessary or
inevitable.
While "nature," in the form of a "libidinal" body, may not be the origin of a revolt against "culture,"
domination and the discipline it requires are never imposed without some cost. Historically, the
forms and occasions of resistance are manifold. Sometimes, instances of resistance appear to spring
from the introduction of new and conflicting factors into the lives of the dominated: The
juxtaposition of old and new and the resulting incoherence or "contradiction" may make submission
to the old ways seem increasingly unnecessary. In the present instance, what may be a major factor
in the relentless and escalating objectification of women's bodies--namely, women's growing
independence--produces in many women a sense of incoherence that calls into question the
meaning and necessity of the current discipline. As women (albeit a small minority of women)
begin to realize an unprecedented political, economic, and sexual self-determination, they fall ever
more completely under the dominating gaze of patriarchy. It is this paradox, not the "libidinal
body," that produces, here and there, pockets of resistance.
In the current political climate, there is no reason to anticipate either widespread resistance to
currently fashionable modes of feminine embodiment or joyous experimentation with new "styles
of the flesh"; moreover, such novelties would face profound opposition from material and
psychological sources identified earlier in this essay (see section VII). In spite of this,
a number of oppositional discourses and practices have appeared in recent years. An increasing
number of women are "pumping iron," a few with little concern for the limits of body development
imposed by current canons of femininity. Women in radical lesbian communities have also rejected
hegemonic images of femininity and are struggling to develop a new female aesthetic. A striking
feature of such communities is the extent to which they have overcome the oppressive identification
of female beauty and desirability with youth: Here, the physical features of aging--"character" lines
and graying hair--not only do not diminish a woman's attractiveness, they may even enhance it. A
popular literature of resistance is growing, some of it analytical and reflective, like Kim Chernin
The Obsession, some oriented toward practical self-help, like Marcia Hutchinson recent
Transforming Body Image: Learning to Love the Body You Have. This literature reflects a mood
akin in some ways to that other and earlier mood of quiet desperation to which Betty Friedan gave
voice in The Feminine Mystique. Nor should we forget that a massbased women's movement is in
place in this country, which has begun a critical questioning of the meaning of femininity, if not yet
in this, then in other domains of life. We women cannot begin the re-vision of our own bodies until
we learn to read the cultural messages we inscribe upon them daily and until we come to see that
even when the mastery of the disciplines of femininity produce a triumphant result, we are still only
women.
NOTES
1.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish ( New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 138.
2.
Ibid., p. 28.
3.
Ibid., p. 147.
4.
Ibid., p. 153. Foucault is citing an eighteenth-century military manual, "Ordonnance du ler
janvier1766 . . ., titre XI, article 2."
5.
Ibid., p. 153.
6.
Ibid., p. 150.
7.
Ibid., p. 200.
8.
Ibid., p. 201.
9.
Ibid., p. 228.
10. Judith Butler, "Embodied Identity in De Beauvoir's The Second Sex," unpublished manuscript,
p. 11, presented to American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, March 22, 1985. See
also Butler recent monograph Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( New
York: Routledge, 1990).
Marcia Millman, Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ( New York:
Norton, 1980), p. 46.
12.
Susan
Bordo,
"Anorexia Nervosa:
Psychopathology as
the Crystallization of
Culture,"
Philosophical Forum
17, no. 2 ( Winter
1985-86): 73-104. See
also
Bordo
Unbearable Weight:
Feminism,
Western
Culture, and the Body
( Berkeley: University
of California Press,
1993).
13.
USA Today, May 30,
1985.
14.
Phrase taken from the
title of Kim Chernin
The
Obsession:
Reflections on the
Tyranny
of
Slenderness ( New
York: Harper and
Row,
1981),
an
examination from a
feminist perspective
of women's eating
disorders and of the
current
female
preoccupation
with
body size.
15.
M. J. Saffon, The 15Minute-a-Day
Natural Face Life (
New York: Warner
Books, 1981).
16.
Sophia Loren, Women
and Beauty ( New
York:
William
Morrow, 1984), p. 57.
17.
Iris
Young,
"Throwing Like a
Girl:
A
Phenomenology
of
Feminine
Body
Comportment,
Motility,
and
Spatiality,"
Human
Studies 3, ( 1980):
137-56.
18.
Marianne Wex, Let's
Take
Back
Our
Space: "Female" and
"Male"
Body
Language as a Result
of
Patriarchal
Structures ( Berlin:
Frauenliteraturverlag
Hermine Fees, 1979).
Wex claims that
Japanese women are
still taught to position
their feet so that the
toes point inward, a
traditional sign of
submissiveness
(p.
23).
19.
In heels, the "female
foot and leg are
turned
into
ornamental
objects
and the impractical
shoe, which offers
little
protection
against dust, rain and
snow,
induces
helplessness
and
dependence. . . . The
extra wiggle in the
hips, exaggerating a
slight
natural
tendency, is seen as
sexually
flirtatious
while the smaller
steps and tentative,
insecure tread suggest
daintiness, modesty
and
refinement.
Finally, the overall
hobbling effect with
its sadomasochistic
tinge is suggestive of
the restraining leg
irons and ankle chains
endured by captive
animals, prisoners and
slaves who were also
festooned
with
decorative symbols of
their bondage." Susan
Brownmiller,
Femininity ( New
York: Simon and
Schuster, 1984), p.
184.
20.
Nancy Henley, Body
Politics ( Englewood
Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeHall, 1977), p. 176.
21.
For an account of the
sometimes
devastating effects on
workers, like flight
attendants,
whose
conditions
of
employment require
the display of a
perpetual friendliness,
see Arlie Hochschild,
The Managed Heart:
The
Commercialization of
Human Feeling (
Berkeley: University
of California Press,
1983).
22.
Henley,
Body
Politics, p. 108.
23.
Ibid., p. 149.
24.
Clairol
has
just
introduced a small
electric shaver, the
"Bikini," apparently
intended for just such
use.
Georgette Klinger and Barbara Rowes, Georgette Klinger's Skincare ( New York:
William Morrow, 1978), pp. 102, 105, 151, 188, and passim.
26.
Chicago
Magazine,
March 1986, pp.
43, 10, 18, and
62.
27.
Essence, April
1986, p. 25. I am
indebted
to
Laurie
Shrage
for calling this to
my attention and
for
providing
most of these
examples.
28.
Klinger,
Skincare,
137-40.
pp.
29.
In light of this,
one is surprised
to see a twoounce jar of
"Skin
Regeneration
Formula,"
a
"Proteolytic
Enzyme Cream
with Bromelain
and
Papain,"
selling
for
$23.95 in the
tabloid Globe (
April 8, 1986, p.
29)
and
an
unidentified
amount of Tova
Borgnine's
"amazing
new
formula
from
Beverly Hills"
(otherwise
unnamed) going
for $41.75 in the
National
Enquirer ( April
8, 1986, p. 15).
30.
"It is required of
woman that in
order to realize
her
femininity
she must make
herself
object
and prey, which
is to say that she
must renounce
her claims as
sovereign
subject." Simone
De
Beauvoir,
The Second Sex (
New
York:
Bantam Books,
1968), p. 642.
31.
The
film
Pumping Iron II
portrays
very
clearly
the
tension
for
female
bodybuilders (a
tension
that
enters
into
formal judging
in the sport)
between
muscular
development and
a
properly
feminine
appearance.
32.
Henley,
Body
Politics, p. 101,
153, and passim.
33.
Foucault,
Discipline and
Punish, p. 222.
34.
Millman, Such a
Pretty Face, p.
80. These sorts
of remarks are
made
so
commonly
to
heavy
women
that sociologist
Millman takes
the most cliched
as title of her
study of the lives
of
the
overweight.
35.
I am indebted to
Nancy Fraser for
the formulation
of this point.
36.
See Femininity
and Domination:
Studies in the
Phenomenology
of Oppression (
New
York:
Routledge,
1990), chap. 3.
37.
Millman, Such a
Pretty Face, pp.
80 and 195.
38.
Chernin,
The
Obsession, p. 53.
39.
See Femininity
and Domination,
chap. 3.
40.
For a claim that
the project of
liberal
or
"mainstream"
feminism
is
covertly racist,
see bell hooks,
Ain't I Woman:
Black
Women
and Feminism (
Boston:
South
End
Press,
1981), chap. 4.
For
an
authoritative
general critique
of
liberal
feminism,
see
Alison Jaggar,
Feminist Politics
and
Human
Nature ( Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman
and Allanheld,
1983), chaps. 3
and 7.
41.
See,
for
example,
Mihailo
Markovic,
"Women's
Liberation and
Human
Emancipation,"
in Women and
Philosophy, ed.
Carol C. Gould
and Marx W.
Wartofsky ( New
York: Putnam,
1976), pp. 16566.
42.
Foucault,
Discipline and
Punish, p. 30.
43.
Some
radical
feminists have
called for just
such
a
deconstruction.
See especially Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body ( New York: Avon, 1976), and Butler,
Gender Trouble.
44.
Foucault,
Discipline
and
Punish, p. 44.
45.
Foucault,
Colin
Gordon,
ed.,
Power/Knowledge (
New
York:
Pantheon, 1980), p.
151. Quoted in
Peter
Dews,
"Power
and
Subjectivity
in
Foucault," New Left
Review
144
(
March- April1984):
17.
46.
Dews, "Power and
Subjectivity," p. 77.
47.
Foucault,
Discipline
and
Punish, p. 138.
48.
Ibid., p. 201.
49.
Foucault,
Power
Knowledge, p. 98.
In fact, Foucault is
not
entirely
consistent on this
point.
For
an
excellent
discussion
of
contending
Foucault
interpretations and
for the difficulty of
deriving
a
consistent set of
claims
from
Foucault's
work
generally,
see
Nancy
Fraser,
"Michel Foucault:
A
'Young
Conservative'?"
Ethics 96, no. 9 (
October
1985):
165-84.
50.
Dews, "Power and
Subjectivity," p. 92.
51.
See
Marcia
Hutchinson,
Transforming Body
Image: Learning to
Love the Body You
Have
(Trumansburg,
N.Y.:
Crossing
Press, 1985). See
also
Bordo,
"Anorexia Nervosa:
Psychopathology as
the Crystallization
of Culture."
part
The Body Speaks
3
Your body must be heard.
Hélène Cixous
-229-
Questia
Media
America,
Inc.
www.questia.com
Publication Information: Book Title: Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Contributors: Katie Conboy editor, Nadia Medina - editor, Sarah Stanbury - editor. Publisher: Columbia University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication
Year: 1997. Page Number: 229.
14
This Sex Which Is Not One
Luce Irigaray
Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. Thus the
opposition between "masculine" clitoral activity and "feminine" vaginal passivity, an opposition
which Freud--and many others-saw as stages, or alternatives, in the development of a sexually
"normal" woman, seems rather too clearly required by the practice of male sexuality. For the clitoris
is conceived as a little penis pleasant to masturbate so long as castration anxiety does not exist (for
the boy child), and the vagina is valued for the "lodging" it offers the male organ when the
forbidden hand has to find a replacement for pleasure-giving.
In these terms, woman's erogenous zones never amount to anything but a clitoris-sex that is not
comparable to the noble phallic organ, or a hole-envelope that serves to sheathe and mas____________________
Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," was originally published as Ce Sexe que n'en est
pas un, copyright 1977 by Editions de Minuit. An English translation by Claudia Reeder
appeared in New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivon, 1981: 99-106.
Reprinted by permission of Editions de Minuit.
sage the penis in intercourse: a non-sex, or a masculine organ turned back upon itself, selfembracing.
About woman and her pleasure, this view of the sexual relation has nothing to say. Her lot is that of
"lack," "atrophy" (of the sexual organ), and "penis envy," the penis being the only sexual organ of
recognized value. Thus she attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself:
through her somewhat servile love of the father-husband capable of giving her one, through her
desire for a child-penis, preferably a boy, through access to the cultural values still reserved by right
to males alone and therefore always masculine, and so on. Woman lives her own desire only as the
expectation that she may at last come to possess an equivalent of the male organ.
Yet all this appears quite foreign to her own pleasure, unless it remains within the dominant phallic
economy. Thus, for example, woman's autoeroticism is very different from man's. In order to touch
himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman's body, language . . . And this selfcaressing
requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without
any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman
"touches herself" all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are
formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two--but not divisible
into one(s)--that caress each other.
This autoeroticism is disrupted by a violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a
violating penis, an intrusion that distracts and deflects the woman from this "self-caressing" she
needs if she is not to incur the disappearance of her own pleasure in sexual relations. If the vagina is
to serve also, but not only, to take over for the little boy's hand in order to assure an articulation
between autoeroticism and heteroeroticism in intercourse (the encounter with the totally other
always signifying death), how, in the classic representation of sexuality, can the perpetuation of
autoeroticism for woman be managed? Will woman not be left with the impossible alternative
between a defensive virginity, fiercely turned in upon itself, and a body open to penetration that no
longer knows, in this "hole" that constitutes its sex, the pleasure of its own touch? The more or less
exclusive--and highly anxious--attention paid to erection in Western sexuality proves to what extent
the imaginary that governs it is foreign to the feminine. For the most part, this sexuality offers
nothing but imperatives dictated by male rivalry: the strongest" being the one who has the best
"hard-on," the longest, the biggest, the stiffest penis, or even the one who "pees the farthest" (as in
little boys' contests). Or else one finds imperatives dictated by the enactment of sadomasochistic
fantasies, these in turn governed by man's relation to his mother: the desire to force entry, to
penetrate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of this womb where he has been conceived, the
secret of his begetting, of his "origin." Desire/need, also to make blood flow again in order to revive
a very old relationship--intrauterine, to be sure, but also prehistoric--to the maternal.
Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's
fantasies. That she may find pleasure there in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such
pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it
leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man. Not knowing what she wants, ready for
anything, even asking for more, so long as he will "take" her as his "object" when he seeks his own
pleasure. Thus she will not say what she herself wants; moreover, she does not know, or no longer
knows, what she wants. As Freud admits, the beginnings of the sexual life of a girl child are so
"obscure," so "faded with time," that one would have to dig down very deep indeed to discover
beneath the traces of this civilization, of this history, the vestiges of a more archaic civilization that
might give some clue to woman's sexuality. That extremely ancient civilization would undoubtedly
have a different alphabet, a different language . . . Woman's desire would not be expected to speak
the same language as man's; woman's desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has
dominated the West since the time of the Greeks.
Within this logic, the predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of
form, is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than
from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to
passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation. While her body finds itself thus
eroticized, and called to a double movement of exhibition and of chaste retreat in order to stimulate
the drives of the "subject," her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see. A defect in this
systematics of representation and desire. A "hole" in its scoptophilic lens. It is already evident in
Greek statuary that this nothing-to-see has to be excluded, rejected, from such a scene of
representation. Woman's genitals are simply absent, masked, sewn back up inside their "crack."
This organ which has nothing to show for itself also lacks a form of its own. And if woman takes
pleasure precisely from this incompleteness of form which allows her organ to touch itself over and
over again, indefinitely, by itself, that pleasure is denied by a civilization that privileges
phallomorphism. The value granted to the only definable form excludes the one that is in play in
female autoeroticism. The one of form, of the individual, of the (male) sexual organ, of the proper
name, of the proper meaning . . . supplants, while separating and dividing, that contact of at least
two (lips) which keeps woman in touch with herself, but without any possibility of distinguishing
what is touching from what is touched.
Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number
everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two.
Rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. She resists all
adequate definition. Further, she has no "proper" name. And her sexual organ, which is not one
organ, is counted as none. The negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and
morphologically designatable organ (even if the passage from erection to detumescence does pose
some problems): the penis.
But the "thickness" of that "form," the layering of its volume, its expansions and contractions and
even the spacing of the moments in which it produces itself as form--all this the feminine keeps
secret. Without knowing it. And if woman is asked to sustain, to revive, man's desire, the request
neglects to spell out what it implies as to the value of her own desire. A desire of which she is not
aware, moreover, at least not explicitly. But one whose force and continuity are capable of nurturing
repeatedly and at length all the masquerades of "feminity" that are expected of her.
It is true that she still has the child, in relation to whom her appetite for touch, for contact, has free
rein, unless it is already lost, alienated by the taboo against touching of a highly obsessive
civilization. Otherwise her pleasure will find, in the child, compensations for and diversions from
the frustrations that she too often encounters in sexual relations per se. Thus maternity fills the gaps
in a repressed female sexuality. Perhaps man and woman no longer caress each other except
through that mediation between them that the child--preferably a boy--represents? Man, identified
with his sonrediscovers the pleasure of maternal fondling; woman touches herself again by
caressing that part of her body: her baby-penis-clitoris.
What this entails for the amorous trio is well known. But the Oedipal interdiction seems to be a
somewhat categorical and factitious law-although it does provide the means for perpetuating the
authoritarian discourse of fathers--when it is promulgated in a culture in which sexual relations are
impracticable because man's desire and woman's are strangers to each other. And in which the two
desires have to try to meet through indirect means, whether the archaic one of a sense-relation to the
mother's body, or the present one of active or passive extension of the law of the father. These are
regressive emotional behaviors, exchanges of words too detached from the sexual arena not to
constitute an exile with respect to it: "mother" and "father" dominate the interactions of the couple,
but as social roles. The division of labor prevents them from making love. They produce or
reproduce. Without quite knowing how to use their leisure. Such little as they have, such little
indeed as they wish to have. For what are they to do with leisure? What substitute for amorous
resource are they to invent? Still . . .
Perhaps it is time to return to that repressed entity, the female imaginary. So woman does not have a
sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many
more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural. Is this the way culture is
seeking to characterize itself now? Is this the way texts write themselves/are written now? Without
quite knowing what censorship they are evading? Indeed, woman's pleasure does not have to choose
between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for example. The pleasure of the vaginal caress does
not have to be substituted for that of the clitoral caress. They each contribute, irreplaceably, to
woman's pleasure. Among other caresses . . . Fondling the breasts, touching the vulva, spreading the
lips, stroking the posterior wall of the vagina, brushing against the mouth of the uterus, and so on.
To evoke only a few of the most specifically female pleasures. Pleasures which are somewhat
misunderstood in sexual difference as it is imagined--or not imagined, the other sex being only the
indispensable complement to the only sex.
But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere. Even if
we refrain from invoking the hystericization of her entire body, the geography of her pleasure is far
more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly
imagined-in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness.
"She" is indefinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical,
incomprehensible, agitated, capricious . . . not to mention her language, in which "she" sets off in
all directions leaving "him" unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory
words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with
ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. For in what she says, too, at least when she
dares, woman is constantly touching herself. She steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a
murmur, an exclamation, a whisper, a sentence left unfinished . . . When she returns, it is to set off
again from elsewhere. From another point of pleasure, or of pain. One would have to listen with
another ear, as if hearing an "other meaning" always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing
itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them.
For if "she" says something, it is not, it is already no longer, identical with what she means. What
she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon). And
when it strays too far from that proximity, she breaks off and starts over at "zero": her body-sex.
It is useless, then, to trap women in the exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat
(themselves) so that it will be clear; they are already elsewhere in that discursive machinery where
you expected to surprise them. They have returned within themselves. Which must not be
understood in the same way as within yourself. They do not have the interiority that you have, the
one you perhaps suppose they have. Within themselves means within the intimacy of that silent,
multiple, diffuse touch. And if you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only
reply: Nothing. Everything.
Thus what they desire is precisely nothing, and at the same time everything. Always something
more and something else besides that one--sexual organ, for example--that you give them, attribute
to them. Their desire is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that
will swallow you whole. Whereas it really involves a different economy more than anything else,
one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the
polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse . . .
Must this multiplicity of female desire and female language be understood as shards, scattered
remnants of a violated sexuality? A sexuality denied? The question has no simple answer. The
rejection, the exclusion of a female imaginary certainly puts woman in the position of experiencing
herself only fragmentarily, in the little-structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or
excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) "subject" to reflect himself, to copy
himself. Moreover, the role of "femininity" is prescribed by this masculine specula(riza)tion and
corresponds scarcely at all to woman's desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding,
with anxiety and guilt.
But if the female imaginary were to deploy itself, if it could bring itself into play otherwise than as
scraps, uncollected debris, would it represent itself, even so, in the form of one universe? Would it
even be volume instead of surface? No. Not unless it were understood, yet again, as a privileging of
the maternal over the feminine. Of a phallic maternal, at that. Closed in upon the jealous possession
of its valued product. Rivaling man in his esteem for productive excess. In such a race for power,
woman loses the uniqueness of her pleasure. By closing herself off as volume, she renounces the
pleasure that she gets from the nonsuture of her lips: she is undoubtedly a mother, but a virgin
mother; the role was assigned to her by mythologies long ago. Granting her a certain social power
to the extent that she is reduced, with her own complicity, to sexual impotence.
(Re-)discovering herself, for a woman, thus could only signify the possibility of sacrificing no one
of her pleasures to another, of identifying herself with none of them in particular, of never being
simply one. A sort of expanding universe to which no limits could be fixed and which would not be
incoherence nonetheless--nor that polymorphous perversion of the child in which the erogenous
zones would lie waiting to be regrouped under the primacy of the phallus.
Woman always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is already within
her and is autoerotically familiar to her. Which is not to say that she appropriates the other for
herself, that she reduces it to her own property. Ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign
to the feminine. At least sexually. But not nearness. Nearness so pronounced that it makes all
discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible. Woman derives pleasure from
what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless
exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either. This puts into
question all prevailing economics: their calculations are irremediably stymied by woman's pleasure,
as it increases indefinitely from its passage in and through the other.
However, in order for woman to reach the place where she takes pleasure as woman, a long detour
by way of the analysis of the various systems of oppression brought to bear upon her is assuredly
necessary. And claiming to fall back on the single solution of pleasure risks making her miss the
process of going back through a social practice that her enjoyment requires.
For woman is traditionally a use-value for man, an exchange value among men; in other words, a
commodity. As such, she remains the guardian of material substance, whose price will be
established, in terms of the standard of their work and of their need/desire, by "subjects": workers,
merchants, consumers. Women are marked phallicly by their fathers, husbands, procurers. And this
branding determines their value in sexual commerce. Woman is never anything but the locus of a
more or less competitive exchange between two men, including the competition for the possession
of mother earth.
How can this object of transaction claim a right to pleasure without removing her/itself from
established commerce? With respect to other merchandise in the marketplace, how could this
commodity maintain a relationship other than one of aggressive jealousy? How could material
substance enjoy her/itself without provoking the consumer's anxiety over the disappearance of his
nurturing ground? How could that exchange--which can in no way be defined in terms "proper" to
woman's desire--appear as anything but a pure mirage, mere foolishness, all too readily obscured by
a more sensible discourse and by a system of apparently more tangible values?
A woman's development, however radical it may seek to be, would thus not suffice to liberate
woman's desire. And to date no political theory or political practice has resolved, or sufficiently
taken into consideration, this historical problem, even though Marxism has proclaimed its
importance. But women do not constitute, strictly speaking, a class, and their dispersion among
several classes makes their political struggle complex, their demands sometimes contradictory.
There remains, however, the condition of underdevelopment arising from women's submission by
and to a culture that oppresses them, uses them, makes of them a medium of exchange, with very
little profit to them. Except in the quasi monopolies of masochistic pleasure, the domestic labor
force, and reproduction. The powers of slaves? Which are not negligible powers, moreover. For
where pleasure is concerned, the master is not necessarily
well served. Thus to reverse the relation, especially in the economy of sexuality, does not seem a
desirable objective.
But if women are to preserve and expand their autoeroticism, their homo-sexuality, might not the
renunciation of heterosexual pleasure correspond once again to that disconnection from power that
is traditionally theirs? Would it not involve a new prison, a new cloister, built of their own accord?
For women to undertake tactical strikes, to keep themselves apart from men long enough to learn to
defend their desire, especially through speech, to discover the love of other women while sheltered
from men's imperious choices that put them in the position of rival commodities, to forge for
themselves a social status that compels recognition, to earn their living in order to escape from the
condition of prostitute . . . these are certainly indispensable stages in the escape from their
proletarization on the exchange market. But if their aim were simply to reverse the order of things,
even supposing this to be possible, history would repeat itself in the long run, would revert to
sameness: to phallocratism. It would leave room neither for women's sexuality, nor for women's
imaginary, nor for women's language to take (their) place.
16
Uses
of
THE EROTIC AS POWER
Audre Lorde
the
Erotic
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a
resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the
power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression
must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can
provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered
source of power and information within our lives.
We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society.
On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the
other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of
its existence.
It is a short step from there to the false belief
____________________
x
Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic." From Sister Outsider, © 1984 by Audre Lorde, The Crossing
Press, Freedom, California, and reprinted by permission of the publisher.
that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly
strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.
As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational
knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth
of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which
fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are
maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain
colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.
But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear
its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the
confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned
away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information,
confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of
the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation
without feeling.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest
feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we
can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in
honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage
excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of
feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional
are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.
This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be
misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand
incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a
question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we
are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our
various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.
The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and
more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a
conscious decision--a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand
from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and
satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how
often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?
The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of
human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional
components of that need--the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic
value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of
necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is
tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of
painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.
As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking
here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and
of how we move toward and through them.
The very word "erotic" comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its
aspects--born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic,
then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the
knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our
loving, our work, our lives.
There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of
the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic
and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. "What do you mean, a
poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?" In the same way, we have attempted to separate the
spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the
ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is
one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the
ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation. The dichotomy between
the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic
knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic--the sensual--those
physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within
each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.
Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, "it feels right to me," acknowledges the strength of
the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light
toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or
clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest
knowledge.
The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes
from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical,
emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for
understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining
of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening
to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying
experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a
reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for
joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction
is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it
is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to
demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which
we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through
which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in
terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from
within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the
merely safe.
During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny,
intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would
leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it
inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it
carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the
color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.
I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet,
it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and
strengthens all my experience.
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized,
those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires
keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength
beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within
ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many
facets of our oppression as women.
When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our
internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves,
then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure
that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live from within
outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform
and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in
the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of
necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often
seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with
self, motivated and empowered from within.
In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied
states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression,
self-denial.
And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a
poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem
and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love. This brings me to the last
consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other's feelings is different from using
another's feelings as we would use a kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience,
erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the
experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.
In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a
human need. But within the European-American tradition, this need is satisfied by certain
proscribed erotic comingstogether. These occasions are almost always characterized by a
simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob
violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that
distortion which results in pornography and obscenity--the abuse of feeling.
When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our
power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others,
we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than
make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are
feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience,
and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.
The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling,
knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even
fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible
before.
But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively
European-American male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my
consciousness to this mode of living and sensation.
Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic's
electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and
creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us
the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of
characters in the same weary drama.
For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and
self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and antierotic society.
23
Tracking the Vampire
Sue-Ellen Case
In my teens, when I experienced the beginnings of fierce desire and embracing love for other
women, the only word I knew to describe my desire and my feelings was "queer"-a painful term
hurled as an insult against developing adolescents who were, somehow, found to be unable to ante
up in the heterosexist economy of sexual and emotional trade. "Queer" was the site in the discourse
at which I felt both immediate identification and shame-a contradiction that both established my
social identity and required me to render it somehow invisible. At the same time, I discovered a
book on the life of Arthur Rimbaud. I was astounded to find someone who, at approximately my
same age, embraced such an identity and even made it the root of his poetic language. Thus, while
brimming with a desire and longing that forced me to remain socially silent, I found in Rimbaud an
exquisite language--a new way
____________________
Sue-Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire." Appeared in Differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 3:2 ( 1991): 1-20. Reprinted with permission of the publisher
for language to mean, based on reveling in an illegitimate, homosexual state of desire.
This adolescent phase in the construction of my social identity is still marked in the word "queer"
for me, with its plenitude and pain, its silence and poetry, and its cross-gender identification. For I
became queer through my readerly identification with a male homosexual author. The collusion of
the patriarchy and the canon made Rimbaud more available to me than the few lesbian authors who
had managed to make it into print. Later, a multitude of other experiences and discourses continued
to enhance my queer thinking. Most prominent among them was the subcultural discourse of camp
which I learned primarily from old dykes and gay male friends I knew in San Francisco, when I
lived in the ghetto of bars--before the rise of feminism. Then there was feminism, both the social
movement and the critique, which became my social and theoretical milieu--after the bars. And
finally, my young lesbian students and friends who have taught me how, in many ways, my life and
my writing reflect a lesbian "of a certain age." My construction of the following queer theory, then,
is historically and materially specific to my personal, social, and educational experience, and
hopefully to others who have likewise suffered the scourge of dominant discourse and enjoyed these
same strategies of resistance. It is in no way offered as a general truth or a generative model.
My adolescent experience still resonates through the following discursive strategies: the pain I felt
upon encountering heterosexist discourse here becomes a critique of heterosexism within feminist
theory--a way of deconstructing my own milieu to ease the pain of exclusion as well as to confront
what we have long, on the street, called "the recreational use of the lesbian"; the identification with
the insult, the taking on of the transgressive, and the consequent flight into invisibility are inscribed
in the figure of the vampire; the discovery of Rimbaud and camp enables a theory that reaches
across lines of gender oppression to gay men and, along with feminist theory, prompts the writing
itself--ironically distanced and flaunting through metaphor. By imploding this particular confluence
of strategies, this queer theory strikes the blissful wound into ontology itself, to bleed the fast line
between living and dead.
But I am rushing headlong into the pleasure of this wound, an acceleration instigated by the figure
that haunts this introduction, the figure that appears and disappears--the vampire. Like the actor
peeking out at the audience from the wings before the curtain rises, she rustles plodding, descriptive
prose into metaphors whose veiled nature prompts her entrance. Her discursive retinue whets my
desire to flaunt, to camp it up a bit, to trans-invest the tropes. But first, the necessary warm-up act of
exposition.
The Relationship Between Queer Theory and Lesbian Theory: or, "Breaking Up's
So Very Hard To Do"
Queer theory, unlike lesbian theory or gay male theory, is not gender specific. In fact, like the term
"homosexual," queer foregrounds same-sex desire without designating which sex is desiring. As a
feminist, I am aware of the problems that congregate at this site. These problems are both historical
and theoretical. Gay male theory is inscribed with patriarchal privilege, which it sometimes
deconstructs and sometimes does not. Lesbian theory is often more narrowly lesbian feminist
theory, or lesbian theory arising, historically, from various alignments with feminist theory.
Through its alliance with feminism, lesbian theory often proceeds from theories inscribed with
heterosexism. I will deal at length with this problem later. But for now, I would contend that both
gay male and lesbian theory reinscribe sexual difference, to some extent, in their gender-specific
construction. In her article "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," Teresa de Lauretis
has already elucidated some of the problematic ways that sexual difference is marked within lesbian
representation. For, while gender is an important site of struggle for women, the very notion
reinscribes sexual difference in a way that makes it problematic for the lesbian, as de Lauretis
configures it, "to be seen." This gender base also leads to problems for lesbians when a certain
feminist theory defines the gaze itself, as will be illustrated later.
In contrast to the gender-based construction of the lesbian in representation, queer theory, as I will
construct it here, works not at the site of gender, but at the site of ontology, to shift the ground of
being itself, thus challenging the Platonic parameters of Being--the borders of life and death. Queer
desire is constituted as a transgression of these boundaries and of the organicism which defines the
living as the good. The Platonic construction of a life/death binary opposition at the base, with its
attendant gender opposition above, is subverted by a queer desire which seeks the living dead,
producing a slippage at the ontological base and seducing through a gender inversion above.
Rephrasing that well-known exchange between Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein at Gertrude's
death bed, Alice might here ask: "Now that you're dying, tell me Gertrude, what's the answer?" And
Gertrude might reply: "What's the queery?" Gertrude, the lesbian on the border of life/death, locked
in language with her lover, exits through a campy inversion.
The lethal offshoot of Plato's organicism has been its association with the natural. Life/death
becomes the binary of the "natural" limits of Being: the organic is the natural. In contrast, the queer
has been historically constituted as unnatural. Queer desire, as unnatural, breaks with this life/death
binary of Being through same-sex desire. The articulation of queer desire also breaks with the
discourse that claims mimetically to represent that "natural" world, by subverting its tropes. In
queer discourse, as Oscar Wilde illustrated, "the importance of being earnest" is a comedy.
Employing the subversive power of the unnatural to unseat the Platonic world view, the queer,
unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels in the discourse of the loathsome, the
outcast, the idiomatically proscribed position of same-sex desire. Unlike petitions for civil rights,
queer revels constitute a kind of activism that attacks the dominant notion of the natural. The queer
is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny. Like the Phantom of the Opera, the queer dwells
underground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to look at, desiring, as it
plays its own organ, producing its own music.
This un-natural sense of the queer was, of course, first constituted as a negative category by
dominant social practices, which homosexuals later embraced as a form of activism. Historically,
the category of the unnatural was one of an aggregate of notions aimed at securing the right to life
for a small minority of the world's population. This right to life was formulated through a legal,
literary, and scientistic discourse on blood, which stabilized privilege by affirming the right to life
for those who could claim blood and further, pure blood, and the consequent death sentence, either
metaphorically or literally, for those who could not. Against the homosexual, this right was
formulated as the seeming contradiction between sterile homosexual sex and fertile heterosexual
practice; that is, before recent technological "advances," heterosexuals may have babies because of
their sexual practice and queers may not. From the heterosexist perspective, the sexual practice that
produced babies was associated with giving life, or practicing a life-giving sexuality, and the living
was established as the category of the natural. Thus, the right to life was a slogan not only for the
unborn, but for those whose sexual practices could produce them. In contrast, homosexual sex was
mandated as sterile--an unlive practice that was consequently unnatural, or queer, and, as that which
was unlive, without the right to lifeQueer sexual practice, then, impels one out of the generational
production of what has been called "life" and history, and ultimately out of the category of the
living. The equation of hetero = sex = life and homo = sex = unlife generated a queer discourse that
reveled in proscribed desiring by imagining sexual objects and sexual practices within the realm of
the other-than-natural, and the consequent other-than-living. In this discourse, new forms of being,
or beings, are imagined through desire. And desire is that which wounds--a desire that breaks
through the sheath of being as it has been imagined within a heterosexist society. Striking at its very
core, queer desire punctures the life/death and generative/destructive bipolarities that enclose the
heterosexist notion of being.
"Was It the Taste of Blood? Nay . . . the Taste of Love"
Although, as a queer theorist, I eschew generational models of history, I would like to perform the
reading of certain texts, not as precursors, fathers, or mothers of a youthful time, but as traces of
she-who-would-not-be-seen, whose movement is discernible within certain discursive equations.
The compound of wounding desire, gender inversion, and ontological shift is early configured in
mystic writings. The mystic women authors, such as Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim, Teresa of Avila,
or Hildegard von Bingen write of reveling in the wounding, ontological desire. Yet their precision
in marking the social oppression in the feminine position of such desire makes the gendering of that
desire mimetic--stable in its historical resonances. Gender slippage, performed through the
ontological break, may be found in the writings of an early male mystic--marking both oppression
in the feminine and liberation in the adoption of it.
The works of John of the Cross, although not literally queer, begin a tradition that will be taken up
later as literal by Rimbaud, Wilde, and more recently Alexis DeVeaux. John's wounding desire is
articulated in several ways, but often as a fire, as in his treatise, the Living Flame of Love: "had not
God granted a favor to [the] flesh, and covered it with his right hand . . . it would have died at each
touch of this flame, and its natural being would have been corrupted" (49); or, "the healing of love
is to hurt and wound once more that which has been hurt and wounded already, until the soul comes
to be wholly dissolved in the wound of love" (61). The flame of this desire not only corrupts natural
beings, but sears into a world where being is reconfigured. John, the mystic lover, desires a being of
a different order--one who
does not live or die as we know it. In order to "know" this being, the senses and thus epistemology
must be reconfigured. In his poem "The Dark Night of the Soul," John lyricizes this reconfiguring of
the senses necessary for his tryst ( Poems). Then, in "The Spiritual Canticle," where his love finds
full expression in the trope of marriage, John inverts his gender, writing his desire as if he were the
bride with the other being as the bridegroom. John, the bride, languishes for her lover, seeks him
everywhere, finally reaching him: "Our bed: in roses laid/patrols of lions ranging all around. . . .
There I gave all of me; put chariness aside: there I promised to become his bride" ( Poems7-9). And
the bridegroom says to John: "I took you tenderly hurt virgin, made you well (13)."The wound of
love liberates the lover from the boundaries of being--the living, dying envelope of the organic.
Ontology shifts through gender inversion and is expressed as same-sex desire. This is queer, indeed.
Historically, John's queer break-through from "life" also signaled a break with a dominant discourse
that legislated the right to life through pure blood. His works were written in Spain during the socalled Golden Age, with its literature and social practice of honor and pure blood: the dominant
discourse was spattered with the blood of women and their illicit lovers, but ultimately aimed, in the
subtext, against the impure blood of Jews and Moors (the figure for illicit lovers a cover for
conversos). The Golden Age tragedies set the scene of desire in the context of the generational
model, the family and the potential family, in a verse that conflates racial purity with sexual honor,
and spilt blood with the protection of pure blood. 1 Writing his poems in a cramped prison cell
designed to torture, John defied the generational, heterosexual mandate by a counterdiscourse that
set desire in gender inversion: he countered the conflation of race/love/life in a discourse that
imagined and orgiastically embraced the un-dead. 2 Blood, in the dominant discourse which was
writing racial laws along with such tragedies, is genealogy, the blood right to money; and
blood/money is the realm of racial purity and pure heterosexuality. Looking forward several
centuries, one can see the actual tragic performance of this dominant equation in Hitler's death
camps, where, among others, both Jews and homosexuals were put to death. More recently, one can
see such tropes operating in the anti-AIDS discourse that conflates male homosexual desire with the
contamination of blood.
I would like to read from this dominant discourse of blood, death, purity, and heterosexual
generation in its most obscene form: Hitler Mein Kampf. I apologize for quoting such a text, for, on
the one hand, I can understand the necessity of censoring it as they do in Germany; but, on the other
hand, this text sets out the compound I am here addressing in its most succinct form-the horror story
of the obscene notion of the right to life for racially pure heterosexuals and death for the others.
The Jew . . . like the pernicious bacillus, spreads over wider and wider areas. . . . Wherever he
establishes himself the people who grant him hospitality are bound to be bled to death sooner or
later. . . . He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated. . . . The blackhaired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring and spying on the
inconspicuous girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the
bosom of her own people. . . . The Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland,
with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race. (quoted in Poliakov1)
Such discourse invented the vampiric position--the one who waits, strikes, and soils the living, pure
blood; and it is against this bloody discourse that the queer vampire strikes, with her evacuating kiss
that drains the blood out, transforming it into a food for the un-dead.
The dominant image of the vampire began to appear in Western Europe in the eighteenth century
through tales and reports from small villages in the East. In literature, Mario Praz observes in The
Romantic Agony, the vampire appears in the nineteenth century as the Byronic hero who destroys
not only himself but his lovers. Praz finds "the love crime" to be essential to the figure, who early in
the century was a man, but in the second half-what Praz calls "the time of Decadence" (75-77)--was
a woman. For the purposes of queer theory, the most important work in the dominant tradition is
"Carmilla" by Sheridan Le Fanu, the first lesbian vampire story, in which the lesbian, desiring and
desired by her victim, slowly brings her closer through the killing kiss of blood. In the dominant
discourse, this kiss of blood is a weakening device that played into male myths of menstruation,
where women's monthly loss of blood was associated with their pale, weak image. 3
In the counterdiscourse, Rimbaud builds on the elements in John, writing those revels into a more
literally queer poetry. To the gender inversion Rimbaud adds a moral and metaphysical one. The
ontological break remains, but heaven becomes hell, and the saint becomes the criminal. In his
Season in Hell such desire once again makes the male lover into the
bride, but Rimbaud's lover is now the "infernal bridegroom." His wounding love is more literally
painful, and this pain, this love, this ontological shift, as in John, creates a new epistemology--a
reorganization of the senses. Along with these inversions, Rimbaud also revels in the mythical
impurities of blood and race. One example from A Season in Hell: "It's very obvious to me I've
always belonged to an inferior race. I can't figure out revolt. My race never rose up except to loot:
like wolves after beasts they haven't killed" (3-4). His sepulchral, racially inferior, dangerous queer
rises up to walk in Illuminations:
Your cheeks are hollow. Your fangs gleam. Your breast is like a lyre, tinklings circulate through
your pale arms. Your heart beats in that belly where sleeps the double sex. Walk through the night,
gently moving that thigh, that second thigh, and that left leg. ( "Antique"25)
This is a fanged creature, who promises the wound of love that pierces the ontological/societal sac.
But it is Oscar Wilde who wrote the queer kiss in Salome. At the end of the play, Salome stands
with the severed head of Iokanaan in her hand. Herod, who looks on in horror, commands that the
moon and the stars, God's natural creation, go dark. They shall not illuminate the transgressive,
unnatural kiss. Wilde has the moon and stars actually disappear, and in the vacuum, outside of
natural creation, Salome says:
Ah, I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips.
Was it the taste of blood? . . . Nay, but perchance it was the taste of love. . . . They say that love
hath a bitter taste. . . . But what matter? What matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have
kissed thy mouth. (66-67)
Wilde wrote these lines in 1892--when they were first uttered on stage, after issues of censorship,
Wilde was in prison. The immorality, or the taboo status of this desire, socially expressed in Wilde's
incarceration, becomes a life/death break in his writing--the wound that decapitates the natural and
delivers it into the hands of the queer who desires it.
Now, in the nineteenth century, this queer compound led by inverted brides and Oscar Wilde in
drag as a dancing girl, the feminized gender that shifts ontologies, was also represented as lesbian
desire. Baudelaire's lesbians in "Femmes Damnées Delphine et Hippolyte" lay in their chamber:
Reclining at her feet, elated yet calm,/Delphine stared up at her with shining eyes/the way a lioness
watches her prey/once her fangs marked it for her own" (304). After their love-making, Baudelaire
sends them down to hell, out of this life, desiccated by their dry desire, as he called it, the "stérilité
de votre jouissance (307)." At least, in Baudelaire, jouissance belongs to the lesbian couple.
Nevertheless, once again the fangs, the death, the other world of the living dead. But what was the
metaphorical bride of inverted gender is represented here as lesbian desire--the gender trope of the
double-feminized.
I read lesbian here, the two "she's" together, as a trope. The term does not mimetically refer to a
gender in the world. In queer discourse, "she" is the wounding, desiring, transgressive position that
weds, through sex, an unnatural being. "She" is that bride. "She" is the fanged lover who breaks the
ontological sac--the pronominal Gomorrah of the queer. When two "she's" are constructed, it is a
double trope--a double masquerade. To read that desire as lesbian is not to reinscribe it with
dominant, heterosexist categories of gender, for lesbian, in queer theory, is a particular dynamic in
the system of representation: the doubled trope of "she's," constructed in the dominant discourse as
the doubly inferior, the doubly impure, and recast in the queer as Wrigley chewing gum celebrates
it: "double your pleasure, double your fun."
I realize that this seems to be a move away from the material, historical condition of lesbians. Yet
the entry point of this theory rests upon my entrance, as an adolescent, into the speaking and
hearing, reading and writing about my sexuality. Insofar as I am queer, or lesbian, this identity is in
consonance with the discursive strategies that those words represent historically: my desire and my
sexual practice are inscribed in these words and, conversely, these words--the historical practice of
a discourse--are inscribed in my sexual practice. Take, for instance, my years of furtive pleasure
between the sheets, or my years of promiscuous tweeking and twaddling. Both eras were
performances of the double trope of the "she," either as the doubly inferior, marked by oppression,
or as double pleasure, reveling in transgression. To ask "will the real lesbian please stand up," when
she is embedded in the dominant discursive mandate to disappear, or in the subcultural subversion
to flaunt her distance from the "real," is like asking the vampire to appear in the mirror. (She made
me write that. For now is the time of her entrance on screen.) The double "she," in combination
with the queer fanged creature, produces the vampire. The vampire is the queer in its lesbian mode.
The En-tranced Take: The Lesbian and the Vampire
So finally, now, the vampire can make her appearance. But how does she appear? How can she
appear, when the visible is not in the domain of the queer, when the apparatus of representation still
belongs to the un-queer? Thus far, we've had the fun, fun, fun of imagining the liberating, creative
powers of the queer in representation. Unfortunately, daddy always takes the T-Bird away and the
vampire, those two "she's" in the driver's seat, is left standing at the cross-roads of queer theory and
dominant discourse. Although the "she" is not mimetic of gender, "she" is shaped, in part, by her
pronominal history--that is, how "she" is constructed elsewhere and previously in language. Along
the metaphorical axis, "she" is somehow the queer relative of the other girls. What this "she"
vampire flaunts is the cross--the crossing out of her seductive pleasure, the plenitude of proximity
and the break. Thus, the dominant gaze constructs a vampire that serves only as a proscription--is
perceived only as a transgression: interpolated between the viewer and the vampire is the cross--the
crossing out of her image. Dominant representation has made of the vampire a horror story.
But this site/sight of proscription lingers in the theoretical construction of the gaze in feminist
theory as well--specifically in theories of the gaze proceeding from psychoanalytic presumptions.
There, the vampire is subjected to the familiar mode of "seduced and abandoned," or "the
recreational use of the lesbian for while such heterosexist feminist discourse flirts with her, it
ultimately double-crosses her with the hegemonic notion of "woman," reinscribing "her" in the
generational model and making horrible what must not be seductive. The vampire as the site or
sight of the undead leads such feminist discourse back to the mother's right to life, where fruition
becomes the counterdiscourse of exclusion. For example, taking Kristeva's cue that the birthing
mother is transgressive, flowing with the milk of semiosis, the cover photo on Jane Gallop Thinking
Through the Body fixes the gaze at the birthing vaginal canal of the author, suggesting that her head
may be found inside the book. 4 In other words, Mother Gallop's site of fruition counters discursive
exclusion. But does not the feminist political privileging of this sight, designed to empower
"women," re-enliven, as the shadowy "other" of this fertile, feminist mother, the earlier categories
of the "unnatural" and "sterile" queer, transposed here from dominant discourse to feminist troping
on the body? 5 Further, the melding of mother and desire into the hegemonic category of "woman's"
plenitude also masks the transgression at the very site of fruition by both the "racially inferior" and
the sexually sterile." Because my desire is for the vampire to appear/disappear, guided by the pain
of exclusion, I must now critically read the feminist theory of the gaze and of "woman" in order to
reclaim her (the vampire's) role in representation.
Popular lore tells us that if we look at the vampire without the proscriptions that expel her, our gaze
will be hypnotically locked into hers and we will become her victims. The feminist theorists, aware
of the seductive quality of the vampire's look, excavate the proscription to discover the desire
below. For example, Linda Williams's ground-breaking article "When the Woman Looks"
constructs a certain dynamic of women looking at monsters. Williams notes that when the woman
sees the monster, she falls into a trancelike fascination that "fails to maintain the distance between
observer and observed so essential to the 'pleasure' of the voyeur." As the woman looks at the
monster, her "look of horror paralyzes her in such a way that distance is overcome (86)." Hers is an
en-tranced look, and the fascination in it could be read as a response to lesbian desire.
However, Williams's notion of proximity in the look proceeds from the hegemonic notion of
"woman." As Mary Ann Doane phrases it, woman is "[t]oo close to herself, entangled in her own
enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the necessary distance of a second look (75-76).
Thus, Williams's reading of woman's trance-like lock into the gaze with the monster is an extension
of "woman's" condition in the gaze. How this "woman" is locked in the gaze, or what constitutes
her pleasurable proximity, figures Williams, is her identification with the monster--a shared
identification between monster and woman in representation: since they both share the status of
object, they have a special empathy between them. In other words, this entranced seeing and
proximity in the vision, consonant with psychoanalytic theory, rests upon the special status of
"woman" as object of the viewer's scopophilia--and hence the shared identification of woman and
monster. I want to come back to this premise later, but let us continue for a moment to see how
Williams situates sexuality within this monstrous looking.
Within the horror genre, she observes, it is in the monster's body that the sexual interest resides, and
not in the bland hero's. The monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male; thus,
the monster functions like woman in representing the threat of castration. So, as Williams would
have it, when the woman looks at the monster and when the cross is removed from before her gaze,
they are totally proximate and contiguous, alike in sexual difference from the male and transfixed,
outside of scopophilia, in the pleasures of shared sexual transgression. Desire is aroused in this
gaze, but Williams quickly defers it to identification. In relegating the proximity and desire in the
trance between woman and monster to (female) identification, Williams has securely locked any
promise of lesbian sexuality into an Oedipal, heterosexual context.
This "woman," then, in Doane, Williams, and others, is really heterosexual woman. Though her
desire is aroused vis-à-vis another woman (a monstrous occasion), and they are totally proximate,
they identify with rather than desire one another. Their desire is still locked in the phallocratic
order, and the same-sex taboo is still safely in place. What melds monster to woman is not lesbian
desire--trance is not entranced--but finally daughter emulating mother in the Oedipal triangle with
the absent male still at the apex. By inscribing in this configuration of looking a sexuality that is
shared and not male, Williams both raises the possibility of the site of lesbian looking and
simultaneously cancels it out. Like the image of the vampire in the currency of dominant discourse,
this heterosexist configuration of the gaze seems to derive some power for its formulation by
careening dangerously close to the abyss of same-sex desire, both invoking and revoking it. The
critical pleasure resides in configuring the look by what it refuses to see. Thus, the revels of
transgression enjoyed by the queer remain outside the boundaries of heterosexist proscription. You
can hear the music, but you can't go to the party. Nevertheless, the site/sight of the monstrous is
invoked and, though horrible, is sometimes negatively accurate and often quite seductive.
The hegemonic spread of the psychoanalytic does not allow for an imaginary of the queer. It simply
reconfigures queer desire back into the heterosexual by deploying sexual difference through
metaphors. For example, Kaja Silverman's "Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze,
Look, and Image" reconstructs the Lacanian "gaze/look" formation through the homosexual films
of Fassbinder. For some of us queers, Fassbinder has pioneered a same-sex desiring cinematic
apparatus--not only in his narratives, but in his camera. The queer spectator's pleasure in the films is
constructed partially through the subcultural signs upon which the camera lovingly lingers (and/or
ironizes), partially through the sense of camp and its distance from the real, which he employs for
his political critique, and partially through the way he situates homosexual desire within national
narratives. In fact, it is the dense overlay of these techniques that makes the films so homosexual in
their signification.
For example, in Querelle ( 1982), the remake of Genet's novel, Fassbinder uses painted backdrops
for the outdoor scenery. The two-dimensional, highly-saturated-color, painterly drops of the seaport
mark the distance of this sexual site from "real" water and "real" boats. Fassbinder visually refers to
the camp discourse of sailors, rather than to the reality of the sea. In the foreground, the camera
lovingly follows the ass of the muscular seaman, who will later be seen, pants down, bent over the
table. The relation of the camera to the ass certainly refigures forms of desire untouched by the
Lacanian preoccupation with the penis. The anus is not itself a signifier of lack, and only comes to
represent lack when tropes of sexual difference are reinserted into the discourse, feminizing it,
while the penis is retained as signifier of the "masculine." 6 This is the move Silverman makes in
deploying the heterosexist psychoanalytic model to read a homosexual text:
Whereas classic cinema equates the exemplary male subject with the gaze, and locates the male eye
on the side of authority and the law even when it is also a carrier of desire, Beware a HolyWhore[
1970] not only extends desire and the look which expresses it to the female subject, but makes the
male desiring look synonymous with loss of control. . . . It might be said doubly to "feminize" erotic
spectatorship. (62)
Even though Silverman has placed "feminize" within quotation marks, she must retain the category
and the bipolar stability of the phallic male to configure the gaze. At worst, this is the kind of
thinking that, in street discourse, produces the male homosexual as effeminate.
This model, if one can read the subcultural signs, is also disrupted by Fassbinder's Petra von Kant, a
truly queer creature who flickers somewhere between haute couture butch lesbian and male drag
queen, making sexual difference a double drag. In amazonian strength (camped up through her
gown with metal Walkyrie-like breastplates) and bondage before the young femme (camped up by
the roped fall of the same gown, which forces her to walk, on the make, with bounded steps), Petra
performs melodramatic tirades before yet another painted backdrop. The drag show, so
emphatically marked, and the lesbian designs of Petra, in sex and fashion, delight the homosexual
with codes that seem incongruous with the Lacanian conclusions Silverman draws: "Fassbinder's
films refuse simply to resituate the terms of phallic reference. Instead, [they] seek to induce in the
viewer a recognition of him or herself as ,annihilated in the form . . . of castration'"79. It seems to
me, instead, that Petra's embellished, elegant discourse, flowing before volumetrically rendered,
corpulent, half-clothed bodies on the backdrop, suggests a surfeit of subcultural signs of queer
desire, glimmering with the ghetto and distanced from both the real and the law of the traditional
phallic world. My point here is not to disallow the heterosexual feminist perspective in theories of
representation, but to point out that, when it creates the unmarked category of "woman" as a general
one that includes queers, or when it displaces queer desire by retaining, in the gaze/look compound,
sexual difference and its phallus/lack polarity, that perspective remains caught in a heterosexist
reading of queer discourse. Moreover, I suggest, the pleasure in theorizing the look that such a
perspective affords appears dependent on disavowing or displacing what should not be seen. 7
But now I must once again register the vampire's perturbations in this discourse. She is perturbed by
this lengthy encounter with heterosexism and is agitating for her return to the discourse. As far as
she is concerned, the heterosexual overlay of the queer is just another version of Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner. So allow me to return to the site where the vampire appears/ disappears, that is,
in the configuration of proximity. In vampire lore, proximity is a central organizing principle--not
only in the look, but also in the mise en scène.
In his work on the supernatural, TzvetanTodorov maintains that the central diegetic force in these
tales is their atmosphere--an atmosphere of proximity. Settings in fog and gloom connect the
disparate elements of the structure through a palpable, atmospheric "touching." Judith Mayne,
writing on Nosferatu ( 1922), agrees, describing the twilight as a "dangerous territory where
opposing terms are not so easily distinguishable" (27). From the entranced look, through the mise en
scène, to the narrative structure, proximity pervades the vampire lore. But why is this proximate
potential represented as horror by the dominant culture? There is a supernatural tale that unlocks the
code of the prohibition against this proximity--Freud's paper on the Uncanny. Freud's entry, so to
speak, into the uncanny is through the notion of the double and of doubling processes, such as the
feeling that we have been somewhere before. Thus, the uncanny for Freud is a kind of haunting
proximity. In fact, Freud's endpoint is in a haunted house.
To many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing
of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying fantasy originally had nothing
terrifying about it at all, but was filled with a certain lustful pleasure--the fantasy, I mean, of
intrauterine existence. (397)
For in German unheimlich (uncanny) implies, on one level, un-homely. So, Freud continues, "this
unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the for- mer Heim [home] of all human beings [and]
the prefix 'un' is the token of repression" (399).
So this proscribed proximity, the very world of vampires and of the "entranced" women who view
them, is the desire for what Freud calls intrauterine existence. More than the fog, the gloom, the
cobwebs, and the twilight, Freud's article serves as an exact description of the vampire's sleep in her
coffin: toward the end of every night, she races back there, to her native soil, and enjoys the lustful
pleasure of being buried alive and dead-her intrauterine recreation. However, while Freud unlocks
one repressive code to liberate a certain pleasure, his notion of intrauterine pleasure further defers
the actual pleasure proscribed here. And the feminist psychoanalytic theorists carry on his tradition:
his intrauterine pleasure, this jouissance, can only be enjoyed as a pre-Oedipal jouissance with the
mother.
If, for Lacan, sexuality is dominated by the phallus in a trench coat, for Kristeva and her ilk, it is the
masked mother. The feminist allocation of this lascivious pleasure of proximity with the mother is
simply a bad hangover from too much Freud--it shares his anxieties and proclivities. When Freud
imagined this lustful recreation, he imagined the mise en scène as dirty and musty, with the sense of
an old vampire who's about to exhibit her true wrinkled self. That's Freud's sexist anxiety about the
wrinkled, musty vagina displaced onto an ageist fantasy of the old mother. Moreover, the idea of
this pre-Oedipal jouissance with the mother reinscribes Freud's patriarchal obsession with
genealogy and sexuality as generative--part of the nineteenth-century proscription against
homosexuality. Locating jouissance in a mother keeps heterosexuality at the center of the picture-the son can insert himself into the site of jouissance . As Hamlet gleefully puts it in Müller "Ham
letmaschine," "the mother's womb is not a one-way street." 8
Yet the history of anti-Semitism is also marked in Freud's preoccupation with "home" here; the
founder of what the Nazis termed the "Jewish science" locates a so-called primal desire in returning
to the home--a desire that became painfully identificatory for the Jews in the following years, forced
into exile, as even Freud himself. 9 Similarly, the vampires, often from Eastern Europe as well, who
sought their lustful sleep in dirt from their Heimat are marked as the wandering tribe and the
despised. Thus, Freud's is both a dominant discourse and a counterdiscourse: while interpolating the
heterosexual into the lesbian vampiric, it is also haunted by the outsider position of a myth of "race"
that violently denied the pleasure of "home." This intersection of racism and notions of Heim or
more dangerously Heimat seems crucial once again, as the term and the danger reappear in this
time of Germany's reunification
On the brighter (or the darker) side of things, in tracking the vampire, we can here re-imagine her
various strengths: celebrating the fact that she cannot see herself in the mirror and remains outside
that door into the symbolic, her proximate vanishing appears as a political strategy; her bite pierces
platonic metaphysics and subject/object positions; and her fanged kiss brings her the chosen one,
trembling with ontological, orgasmic shifts, into the state of the undead. What the dominant
discourse represents as an emptying out, a draining away, in contrast to the impregnating kiss of the
heterosexual, becomes an activism in representation.
Now, if you watch some recent vampire films, it may seem that things are getting better. Surely,
you offer, the confining nineteenth-century codes are liberalized in the late twentieth century. For
example, if you watch some recent vampire films, you may note that the vampire is actually
portrayed as a lesbian. But this move only reflects a kind of post-Watergate strategy of
representation; that is, don't keep any secrets because they can be revealed, just reveal the
repression and that will serve to confirm it. So the vampire is portrayed as lesbian, but costumed in
all the same conventions, simply making the proscription literal. The strategic shift here is in
revelation, not representation. Whether she is the upper-class, decadent, cruel Baroness in
Daughters of Darkness ( 1971; played by the late Delphine Seyrig, who was marked in the
subculture as a lesbian actor), whose coercive lesbian sex act is practiced behind closed doors and
whose languorous body proscribes the lesbian as an oozing, French dessert cheese; or whether she
is the rough-trade, breast-biting Austrian lesbian vampire in Vampire Lovers ( 1970), or even the
late-capitalist, media-assimilated lesbian vampire in the independent film Because the Dawn (
1988), her attraction is (in) her proscription. Only the proscription of the lesbian is literally
portrayed--the occult becomes cult in the repression.
While the lesbian has become literalized in contemporary vampire films, the proscription against
same-sex desire has also been reconfigured in a trope more consonant with late-twentieth century
conditions. For one thing, nature isn't what it used to be, and likewise, the undead have altered with
it. In the nineteenth century, the stable notion of nature as natural and of the natural as good made it
possible to configure same-sex desire as unnatural--thus monster--thus vampire. Beginning with
horror films in the fifties, the binarism of natural/ unnatural gives way. Nature is contaminated--it is
a site of the unnatural. Metaphors of Romantic organicism fail where technology has transformed.
The agrarian dream gives way to the nuclear nightmare. The representation of nature, contaminated
by nuclear testing in the desert, is a site for the production of monsters that transgress what was
considered natural.
Hollywood produced Them ( 1954), Tarantula ( 1955), Crab Monsters ( 1956), Giant Grasshoppers
( 1957), and Killer Shrews ( 1959). The urban replaces the agrarian as a haven. The humanist
scientist, such as van Helsing, warring against the perverse isolated vampire gives way to the
military-industrial complex warring against its own creations. The giant tarantula created by nuclear
reaction is destroyed by napalm; another monster is killed by a shift in the ozone layer.
After the 50s, the lone vampire, or the family of vampires that threatened the human community, is
replaced by a proliferation of the undead. Romero's trilogy illustrates the progression: in Night of
the Living Dead ( 1968), a score of the undead threatens a family-unit-type group in a house; in the
second film, Dawn of the Dead ( 1977), thousands of undead threaten a smaller, less-affiliated
group in a shopping mall, one of the few places remaining; and in Day of the Dead ( 1985), the
undead have successfully taken over the continent, finally threatening what dwindles down to the
basic heterosexual-couple-unit in a military-industrial complex. 10 Successively, the undead have
eliminated the family unit, claimed commodity reification for their own in the shopping mall, and
defeated the military-industrial complex. One hope remains in a kind of Adam and Eve ending of
the final film, although it seems unlikely. The undead overrun things, proliferate wildly, are like
contamination, pollution, a virus, disease--AIDS. Not AIDS as just any disease, but AIDS as it is
used socially as a metaphor for same-sex desire among men, AIDS as a construction that signifies
the plague of their sexuality. But why is the taboo now lodged in proliferation? This is Freud's
double gone wild, the square root of proximity. The continual displacements in the system have
become like a cancer, spreading, devouring, and reproducing themselves. The oppressive politics of
representation have cathected to displacement, settling their sites/sights there again and again and
again. The taboo against same sex becomes like the Stepford wives when they break down, pouring
coffee over and over and over again.
These neo-undead doubly configure away the lesbian position, since same-sex desire appears as gay
male. The lesbian position is only the motor for multiple displacements. Where does this all leave
the lesbian vampire, then? Outside of the mirror, collapsing subject/object relations into the
proximate, double occupancy of the sign, abandoning the category of woman as heterosexist, and
entering representation only in a guise that proscribes her. You still can only see her, in horror and
fear, when you don't.
Finally, in tracking the vampire in representation in order to perceive how she counters blood myths
of race and proper sexuality, I would like to turn to a text through which she moves--a lesbian
choreopoem. This form particularly suits the vampire for several reasons, but specifically in its
performance structures. The choreopoem is a theatrical form created by Chicanas and black women.
These are performance pieces composed of loosely related poems and performed by ensembles. In
this collection of poems, the performer is not a character, though she may, for a short time, suggest
one. As the lyric voice moves among the several performers in the ensemble, they collectively enact
the agency, or the lyric dynamic. Sometimes the performer inhabits the subjective "I" of the poet,
sometimes she is the story itself, sometimes the storyteller.
In the choreopoem "No" by Alexis DeVeaux, the subject position is that of the desiring lesbian who
is also active in black revolutionary politics. The title "No" itself functions to proscribe what the
dominant discourse can articulate, while at the same time tracing a counterdiscourse. "No" consists
of thirty poems: several are lesbian love poems to other black women, one is about a revolutionary
woman who breaks away from the sexism of her male partner in the black movement, one is about
the murder of children in Selma. The ground, then, the mise en scène is the historical, social,
economic, and emotional field of the black lesbian revolutionary subject. The agency, or subject
position, is the itineration of that field through a collective of women, with its possibilities and
impossibilities made dynamic by the lyric. In other words, the lesbian subject position is composed
of this movement among performers and through the lyric "I" of the poet herself, whose desire
flows through their mouths and their gestures and whose playing space is the historical and social
borders of the possible and impossible for such a subject. She is both visible and invisible--visible
in her lyric, collective movement and in the proximity of her politics and homosexual desire, and
invisible as character or content. The poem celebrates the ethnic fashion of dreadlocks (the
vampire's dread-lock) as seductive while also specifically coded as revolutionary, in proximity to a
celebration of clitoral love-making between two women within their antiracist struggle;
proximity/distance is marked as one. DeVeaux closes the space between women's economic and
political struggles and lesbian desire. Finally, here, the vampire can enter.
And
this
between
one
another
do
after
separate
like
spilled
in
do
you
love
me,
flight
of
train
station
you:
going
ways:
love
your
in
poems
&
home
dinner
me
this:
hand
an
underground
movement
of
sentences
a
calypso
of
rivers
the
marrow
of
fear
And
if
the
Russians
do
it
and
the
Cubans
and
the
Americans
do
it
if
the
Chinese
do
it
too
if
the
women
go
baby
how
do
we
name
the
war
And
this
love
I
need
you:
I
say
trade
in
these
train
tracks
for
a
howl
at
the
moon
this
poem
is
not
progressive
but
long
distance
and
close
between
the
archives
of
your
dreams
between
the
hip
of
Montego
Bay
your
shameless
step
I
measure:
how
you
do
these
things:
and
each
dread
is the revolution of another. 11
NOTES
1.
I am indebted to Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano for this analysis of sexual/racial honor, which
appears in Feminism and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega ( West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue
University Press, 1994).
For a fuller discussion of this point, see the chapter on Spain in Aryan by
Poliakov and the chapter on "Mystic Speech" in Heterologies by de Certeau,
especially pp. 81-86.
3.
The
prejudice
was
so
convincing that a
fashion
arose
among middleclass women to
visit
the
slaughterhouse
and drink the
blood of an ox to
strengthen
themselves. See
Dijkstra,
"Metamorphoses
of the Vampire:
Dracula and His
Daughters,"
in
Idols, particularly
pp. 337-38.
4.
Gallop suggested
this
in
a
discussion of the
cover photo at the
University
of
California,
Riverside,
on
January 18, 1991.
5.
Gallop, however,
is one of the few
authors
to
articulate issues
between lesbians
and heterosexual
feminists within
this
kind
of
debate (107-108).
Her
discussion
here,
clearly
written
in
solidarity
with
lesbians,
is
important
and
could be pursued
at length.
6.
I am indebted for
this point to the
work in progress
of my colleagues
George Haggerty
and
Gregory
Bredbeck;
to
Bredbeck for his
work on sodomy
and the anus, and
to Haggerty for
his
reconfiguration
of the effeminate
in the eighteenth
century. See also
Miller's reading
of Hitchcock in
"Anal Rope."
7.
Both Silverman's
and my positions
are too complex
to work out in
this
reduced
form. A more
complete
development of
them will appear
in my book, The
Domain-Matrix:
Performing
Lesbian at the
End of Print
Culture
(
Bloomington:
Indiana
University Press,
1996), of which
this essay is a
fragment.
8.
"Der
Mutterschoss ist
keine Einbahnstrasse"
(
Müller91);
translation mine.
9.
Marjorie Garber
suggested this in
conversation at
the 1990 Queer
Theory
conference
in
Santa
Cruz,
California.
10.
I am indebted to
Steve Shaviro for
our discussions
of the trilogy.
11.
From
an
unpublished
manuscript of the
choreopoem
"No," provided to
me by Glenda
Dickerson--the
only director to
bring this piece
onto the stage.
This paper should
have ended with
a discussion of
Gomez
Gilda
Stories,
which
has just appeared
in print as my
manuscript goes
to press. But I
discuss it in the
longer version of
this
paper,
included in my
Domain-Matrix.
WORKS CITED
Baudelaire, Charles. "Femmes Damnées Delphine et Hippolyte." Les Fleurs du Mal. Trans. Richard
Howard. Boston: Godine, 1983.
de Michel Certeau. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
de Teresa Lauretis. "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation." PerformingFeminisms:
Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre
GENDER,
CULTURE,
AND
POWER
Toward a Feminist Postmodern Critical Theory
BEN AGGER
PRAEGER
Westport, Connecticut London
-iii-
Questia
Media
America,
Inc.
www.questia.com
Publication Information: Book Title: Gender, Culture, and Power: Toward a Feminist Postmodern Critical Theory. Contributors: Ben
Agger - author. Publisher: Praeger Publishers. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1993. Page Number: iii.
Chapter
Critical Theory and Postmodernity
One
THIRD-GENERATION CRITICAL THEORY
My aim in this book is to develop a third-generation critical theory, surpassing but learning from the
first-generation critical theory of Horkheimer, Adomo, and Marcuse and the second-generation
critical theory of Habermas. The next generation of critical theorists needs to confront challenges
from feminism and postmodernism in order to address postmodern capitalism adequately (see
Jameson 1991). Although Frankfurt critical theory, postmodernism, and feminism are often viewed
as divergent, I will develop an argument for synthesis, outlining what I call the logic of feminist
postmodern critical theory (Chapter 4). I then apply this logic to particular social, political, sexual,
textual, and cultural problems of today (Chapters 5 and 6). I develop this logic of a new critical
theory through readings of postmodernism (Chapter 2) and feminism (Chapter 3), preceded by this
opening stage setting (Chapter 1), in which I lay out the relationship between critical theory and
postmodernity and argue for the priority of critical theory's totality theory over the antitotality
perspectives of postmodernism and feminism, albeit learning from them.
I suggest a version of critical theory incorporating the most politically acute insights of
postmodernism and feminism. In this project, I risk hierarchizing nouns like critical theory over the
adjectives (e.g., postmodern and feminist ) qualifying them. All such exercises in naming are
political in their implication of priority and must be recognized as such. I am interested in
combining the best insights of theories that embrace total social explanation (e.g., Marxism) and
that refuse total explanation (e.g., postmodernism and feminism). Some readers may accuse me of
reconciling the irreconcilable--Lyotard with Adorno, Kristeva with Marcuse, Foucault
with Habermas, Derrida with Horkheimer, Baudrillard with Jameson. Exercises in synthesis
typically fail because they integrate incommensurables, or they are exercises in what Jameson (
1991) calls named theory, putting new labels on yesterday's theoretical vintages. By acknowledging
these risks I hope to avoid them, especially where my aim is to develop a critical theory of society
that serves distinctive purposes.
From feminism I draw the very powerful insights that the personal is political and the political
personal. Social change must involve the minds, bodies, and intimate lives of people lest the
product of change sacrifice the process of changing to various authoritarian expedients. There are
no legitimate excuses for oppressing people in the name of distant future liberation. Indeed, as
Marcuse ( 1969) crucially shows, changes in our daily lives prefigure as well as reflect larger
structural changes; thus they must be conducted with the attitude of what he calls the "new
sensibility" in order to ensure that the choices we make today emerge in qualitatively new
institutions. Once we separate the personal from political, everyday life from overarching
institutions, we defuse the dialectic bridging present and future and hence subvert democracy.
Feminism has understood this much better than Marxism. There are certain remarkable parallels
between critical theory and feminism in this regard. Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas
both anticipate and overlap the feminist understanding of the politics of everyday life, albeit without
theorizing sexuality and the household as important political venues in their own right. One may ask
how the Frankfurt theorists could miss the politics of sexuality when they understood the politics of
subjectivity so clearly. Sadly, they were male supremacist, defending paternal authority as the
source of childhood ego autonomy. But I contend that the Frankfurt School's sexism can be negated
within the basic framework of their critical theory, extending it both empirically and politically.
This effort to refurbish totality theory from within the Marxist perspective of the Frankfurt School
will immediately put feminists and postmodernists on the defensive. Most efforts at totality have
ignored women, people of color, all sorts of "others." But I believe that a new totality theory can
avoid male supremacy by carefully rethinking its own critique of domination in such a way that
feminism is no longer considered an appendage but informs and transforms the very logic of critical
theory. Nancy Fraser ( 1989) has begun this effort in her sympathetic critique of Habermas's
system/lifeworld theory. She argues that Habermas does not theorize the lifeworld (everyday life) as
a contested terrain and thus he does not produce a critical theory that adequately addresses male
supremacy.
Feminism's challenge to male critical theory is considerable. To meet this challenge requires more
than simply acknowledging it or adding a "feminism" chapter to critical theory books. The feminist
critique of patriarchy as a world-historical logic of domination must be integrated into critical
theory from the beginning. Indeed, as I hope to demonstrate in this book, feminism's understanding
of the devaluation of reproduction, notably domestic labor, is central to my version of feminist
postmodern critical theory. The issue of the hierarchy of nouns and adjectives ultimately determines
how people react to what I call a feminist postmodern critical theory (as opposed to a postmodern
critical feminism). I modify critical theory with the words feminist and postmodern because I
contend that the Frankfurt School's critical theory is the most totalizing in intent. This does not deny
that feminism and postmodernism can generate readings of totality in their own right. That they can
is precisely why I am writing this book. But to make critical theory a noun and feminist and
postmodern adjectives is politically contentious precisely because critical theory--indeed, Marxism
generally--has been a male modernist discourse, missing crucial issues of oppression made thematic
by radical and socialist feminists and by postmodern theorists like Foucault.
My theoretical synthesis intends deconstructively to reverse the tendency of nouns to take priority
over adjectives, thus preventing the subordination of feminism and postmodernism to male critical
theory. I address squarely what it means for men to write feminism. That will be a discussion in
which I argue not only that men can and should write feminism but that what it means to write
feminism is an unresolved issue. I not only claim feminism; I argue that my version of critical
theory so fully integrates feminism as well as certain radical postmodern insights that these
adjectives and nouns blur to the point of indistinguishability. Why, then, retain nominal
differentiations that, as Derrida understands, tend to become hierarchies? My answer is that
differentiations are useful and inevitable, highlighting areas of divergence as well as convergence.
They cannot be avoided where we recognize that language is a prison house, imposing its own
meanings on us.
Someone is going to be rendered adjectival in any theoretical synthesis, which raises the risk of
subordination. We must do our best to prevent adjectival status from becoming a mark of political
inequality. The first will be last only if we are disingenuous in our attempts to forge an integrated
social theory that blends the analytical logics of feminism, postmodernism, and critical theory. My
argument for the priority of critical theory is that the Frankfurt theorists develop an interdisciplinary
materialism that seeks to comprehend the whole sweep of world history. Whether it has been
successful in achieving this panoramic perspective is debatable. But the Frankfurt School theorists
urged the reconstruction of original Marxism in a way that addressed the civilizational logic of
Western and world society and not simply the particular features of nineteenth- or twentieth-century
European capitalism. In deepening Marxism in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer
and Adorno ( 1972) opened the way for further deepenings and broadenings of critical theory,
making this study possible.
As critical theory enters its third generation, it needs to reground itself in a reading of history and
society that stresses the politics of everyday life, the possibility of postmodern progressivism, and
cultural studies as critique of ideology. These are the respective contributions of feminism,
postmodernism, and nonmandarin cultural studies inspired by the Frankfurt School; I combine these
influences into a feminist postmodern critical theory. This rearticulation of Horkheimer and
Adorno's critical theory confronts the feminist and postmodern challenges in a way that strengthens
their own critique of the dialectic of enlightenment. In Chapter 4, I reformulate their original
dialectic-of-enlightenment argument in my analysis of the dialectic of production and reproduction
which, appropriately interpreted, allows itself to be applied locally by feminists, postmodernists,
and culturally oriented critical theorists. Thus, a feminist postrnodern critical theory that rests on a
critique of the primacy of production as an axial critique of all hierarchy leads to particular regional
applications of critical theory in the sites of contestation heretofore associated with feminism,
postmodernism, and critical theory as differentiated theoretical practices.
The integration of feminism, postrnodernism, and critical theory allows me to theorize the
possibilities of the liberations of women and household labor, the imagination, and the popular, the
respective aims of these three social theories. A feminist postmodern critical theory integrates these
perspectives without effacing their different nuances and intellectual priorities. My version of
critical theory suggests that women and household labor, the imagination, and the popular have
been equivalently devalued by male supremacy, a modernist philosophy of history, and cultural
mandarinism, respectively. I argue that these three "causes" of domination are, in fact, one,
requiring us to rethink theoretical separability and territoriality in creative ways--the aim of this
book. Feminism politicizes the household and sexuality; postmodernism interrogates the modernist
philosophy of history; and the Frankfurt School theorizes the culture industry politically. Within
these three venues of politics and power people actively resist their own domination, working
imaginatively and courageously to create vital spaces of what Gramsci called counterhegemony.
This interpretation of the logic of civilization calls into question critical theory's relationship to
Marx. The original Frankfurt theorists and then Habermas have attempted to show that Marx's
particular critique of the alienation of labor can be extended into a critique of domination. In this
book, I make explicit their implicit critique of all hierarchies that devalue activity regarded merely
as reproductive. Whereas Marx theorized the alienation of labor and the Frankfurt theorists
theorized domination, I theorize productivism--a logic involving but going beyond alienation and
domination that produces the fateful hierarchies of men over women, capital over labor, white over
colored, straight over gay, First World over Third World, and society over nature. A critical theory
appropriate to postmodernity can elaborate this critique of productivist hierarchies by valuing
people and activities heretofore viewed as reproductive, demon- strating that women, labor, people
of color, and nature are secretly productive in their own rights.
This revaluation was begun by Marx where he argued that the uncompensated surplus labor of
workers is the source of capitalist profit. He showed that the seemingly valueless, labor power,
produces value and should be compensated adequately. Feminists extend his particular critique of
what I am calling productivism by valorizing the realm of household labor (including sexuality)
buttressing patriarchal capitalism. Feminists draw attention to Marx's male supremacy, arguing that
he missed the contribution of women's unpaid household labor to the formation of value. They
extend his critique of the market to the nonmarket, hence broadening his critique of civilization.
This exercise has paralleled the Frankfurt School's effort to reformulate Marx's critique of economic
exploitation as a critique of all domination.
My version of critical theory integrates the Frankfurt critique of domination with the feminist
critique of male-supremacist assumptions about productivity. Productivism is conceptualized as the
underlying source of economic exploitation, domination and male supremacy, which are seen as
interstitial moments of value's generic hierarchy over the allegedly valueless. Interestingly, the
critique of productivism that I am developing in order to ground my feminist-postmodern
reformulation of critical theory was already foreshadowed in the Frankfurt School's own critique of
instrumental rationality, which they derived from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weber, and Lukacs. This
connection is rarely made inasmuch as the Frankfurt theorists, like Weber and virtually all Marxists
before them, were simply not interested in sexism as a meaningful social phenomenon. But they
could well have applied their immanent critique of productivism and instrumental rationality to the
various manifestations of male supremacy.
A feminist critical theory is eminently possible, as this book will demonstrate (also see Benjamin
1988). Postmodernism further informs this version of feminist critical theory by developing a
critique of modernity that salvages the emancipatory project of modernity while jettisoning the
more ideological aspects of modernism, which even Marx uncritically accepted. It is important to
theorize postmodernity as a stage beyond "late" capitalism (see Mandel 1975)--a horizon of
possibilities not adequately charted on the eschatological tableau of modernity theory, both
capitalist and socialist. Habermas ( 1984, 1987b) attempt to retheorize domination in terms of
system/lifeworld dynamics belongs to this effort to theorize postmodernity in politically relevant
terms. Although his communicationtheoretic reformulation of critical theory fails to develop a
notion of intermediate or interstitial critical theory connecting system and lifeworld, he valuably
moves the dialectic-of-enlightenment argument a crucial stage beyond the original Frankfurt
theorists' critique of modernity, which was phrased in overly fatalistic terms. A radical conception
of postmodernity holds open the door of possible social change but does not derive this dynamic
from the teleology of modernity theory, plotted originally by the philosophes, Comte, and even
Marx. But neither does it renounce the project of modernity which, in its best sense, embodies the
telos of rationality. We need to theorize the possibility of social rationality outside of the
deterministic coordinates of both evolutionary and revolutionary modernity theory. In other words
(see Huyssen 1986), we need to theorize postmodernism itself as a radical moment of modernism
that points beyond the present toward new modernities--postmodernities--embodying reason and
justice. It is dear that Horkheimer and Adomo ( 1972) supported generic enlightenment, with a
small e, if not the particular Enlightenment of early-bourgeois Europe, which, they argued, betrayed
enlightenment by conflating it with scientism. It is transparent that the Marx of Capital was a
modernist, recognizing that capitalism broke with premodernity and thus inaugurated the era of the
modern.
We need a critical philosophy of history that somehow distinguishes between the possibility of
social rationality, on the one hand, and the particular projects of capitalist and state-socialist
modernization, on the other. Postmodernity can be viewed as the possible next stage of social
history in which we relinquish modernist eschatologies, which reinforce fatalism ideologically
("social laws"), and yet retain a modernist social activism--modernist in the sense that this activism
aims to bring about a better world governed by reason. It is difficult to conceive of this dialectical
philosophy of history within the framework of postmodernism because postmodernism is so often
read as antirationalist. But postmodernism can be radicalized so that it rearticulates the most
emancipatory features of modernism, which ambivalently contains both reason and unreason,
enlightenment and myth.
I contend that postmodernism can best be radicalized through critical theory itself, which in many
respects (e.g., see Jay 1984a) is remarkably similar to various postmodern social theories such as
those of Foucault ( 1977) and Baudrillard ( 1975, 1981, 1983, 1985). Postmodernism becomes a
critical theory where it advances the notion of a reconstructed history, not only the antifoundational
sense of historicity. Foucault (see Fraser 1989) and Baudrillard (see Kellner 1989b) do not have
room for social change, even though their writings are amply, even thickly, historical. They lack a
philosophy of history, which in its Marxist version they dismiss as naively modernist. But it is
crucial to disentangle bourgeois and Marxist modernisms in a way that fulfills the project of
modernity within a noncapitalist framework. The dismal failure of state socialism only underscores
the need for this sort of philosophy of history. In its absence, a quiescent, ironic postmodernism
obliterates critique, replacing explicit ideology with the cynical world weariness of Western
cosmopolitanism and consumerismA feminist postmodern critical theory fights certain enemies
within, notably the left's right. This left authoritarianism surfaces among Marxists, critical theorists,
feminists, and postmodernists. The left's right gives up on the emancipatory project of modernity,
instead endorsing various species of irrationalism and authoritarianism. The contemporary furor
over so-called political correctness reflects liberal and conservative anxieties about the authoritarian
left, which fights a rear-guard action in the university. Although claims about the leftist domination
of the academy are hysterically inflated, affiliation subverts independent thought on the left, where
smallmindedness prevails as never before. This is why in claiming critical theory, feminism, and
postmodernism I must be careful to put distance between their authentic versions and secretly
neoliberal imposter versions. Habermas (e.g., 1981a, 1987a) has indefatigably defended the
emancipatory project of modernity against both antimodernist and postmodernist critics. He shows
the way for those of us who value reason, enlightenment, and social justice as the central values of
critical social theory, even if he has not sufficiently appreciated feminism and postmodernism as
possible companion versions of critical theory in their own right (see Fraser 1989; Poster 1989).
TRANSITIONS IN POSTMODERN CAPITALISM
Jameson 1984 New Left Review article on postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism
(expanded into a 1991 book) suggests the direction of my analysis. He periodizes capitalism in very
useful ways, even if he has not adequately developed a systematic version of critical social theory,
something that he may be unable to do from within the framework of literary theory. I agree with
him that we can usefully talk about postmodern capitalism as a stage somehow beyond and
continuous with what the Frankfurt School and Mandel ( 1975) had earlier called "late" capitalism. I
am less concerned with taxonomic refinements than with framing a thirdgeneration critical theory in
historically appropriate terms.
Whereas Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse developed the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research's
critical theory in the 1930s to address phenomena somehow unanticipated by Marx in Capital,
especially regarding state intervention in the economy and the rise of the culture industry,
Habermas ( 1984, 1987b) deepened their deepening of Marx's original critique of bourgeois
political economy in his two-volume Theory of Communicative Action. In particular, he argued that
the "paradigm of consciousness" retained by Horkheimer and Adorno ( 1972) in Dialectic of
Enlightenment needs to be abandoned in favor of a "paradigm of communication," outlined in his
universal pragmatics of discourse. Habermas's attempt to develop critical theory as a
communication theory allowed him to reformulate Marx's capital/labor motif in system/lifeworld
terms, thus enabling him to theorize "new social movements" that spring creatively from the
lifeworld and thus can be further mobilized.
Athough Habermas's reconstruction of Marxian historical materialism has been ambitious and
instructive, it falls short, notably in its lack of attention to a postmodern philosophy of history, a
critical cultural studies, and feminist concerns. His new social movements theory, however
suggestive in its generous heterodoxy, does not adequately integrate the concerns of feminist
theory, which, as I argue here, go significantly beyond the women's movement as a social
movement. I put feminism to work as a critique of the domination of reproduction, which, I argue,
should be the foundation of critical theory today. So what I am calling third-generation critical
theory needs to move beyond Habermas's reconstruction of the original Frankfurt School's own
reconstruction of Marx's critique of political economy. Integrating influences like postmodernism
and feminism, this theoretical move would allow us to develop an interstitial critical theory that
moves back and forth between system and lifeworld and thus produces a politicallyrelevant
philosophy of history, a critical cultural studies and a politics of sexuality and gender.
A contemporary critical theory needs to learn from feminism and postmodernism without exhibiting
defensive male-modernist territoriality. In the process, critical theory will be transformed, perhaps
appearing barely recognizable to its first and second generations. This is necessary where critical
theory, like Marxism generally, has been abandoned by feminists and postmodernists convinced
that it has little to offer apart from a certain antiquarian interest. Clinging devotedly to their dogeared copies of Capital, orthodox Marxists do little to serve the cause of theoretical revision and
political consolidation. But even the Frankfurt School theorists and their followers fall into similar
orthodoxies based on hallowed texts like Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics, which
become objects of interpretive cultivation and not theoretical elaboration.
Critical theorists have been remarkably slow to apply critical theory to contemporary social
problems (for exceptions, see Forester 1985; Luke 1989). They lack the interstitial theory necessary
to bridge the sweeping but important abstractions of negative dialectics and the lifeworlds identified
as politically relevant by proponents and theorists of new social movements. I develop a lifeworldgrounded critical theory here that mediates between large-scale social structures and everyday life
by conceptualizing and mobilizing socially and politically reconstructive activities (or, in an older
language, bridging theory and practice). I contend that the most relevant cultural, political,
economic, and sexual resistances occur at the interstitial level somehow interposed between deep
structure, on the one hand, and quotidian existence, on the other. Critical theory can best connect
system/structure and lifeworld/experience by delving intermediately into culture, politics,
economics, and sexuality. That is to say, critical theory needs to conceptualize ways in which
everyday resistances can blossom into, and be informed by, large-scale social movements.
Feminism and postmodernism make this intermediate theorizing possible, affording per- spectives
on the politics of sexuality, cultural studies, and the philosophy of history, three theoretical topics
explored further in Chapters 5 and 6, where I suggest concrete applications of feminist postmodern
critical theory in these three interstitial regions.
Postmodern capitalism is characterized by an implosion of centrifugal forces unleashed with
unprecedented power in the late capitalism of the "authoritarian state" ( Horkheimer 1973)
identified by the original Frankfurt School. This is not to deny that we should attempt to theorize
totality but rather to suggest that totality cannot be reduced to singular principles that manifest
themselves equivalently in spheres of existence already defined as separate--think of the class, race,
gender trinity. Having said that, I will promptly go ahead and propose a new principle of
totalization in postmodern capitalism!--what I am calling the domination of reproduction (Chapter
4). But this theoretical logic, as I will demonstrate later, has the advantage of flexibility and thus
preserves what postmodernists call difference and Adorno called nonidentity. A feminist
postmodern critical theory addresses a postmodern capitalism characterized by a self-differentiating
principle of totality that conceals the underlying sameness of difference in order to simulate
plurality and democracy--thus totalizing domination ever more effectively. This postmodern logic
of totality that masquerades as difference is captured best by an encompassing critical theory that
traces the domination of reproduction to its multiple manifestations (which often appear to be
contradictory in their own right, such as the class/gender relationship).
In postmodern capitalism domination, as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse call it, is regionalized,
differentiated, and deconstructed inasmuch as system, in Habermas's terms, colonizes the everyday
lives of people everywhere. Upon casual inspection, these differential instances of domination
appear to stem from separable sources--capitalism, patriarchy, racism. But once we understand their
common source in the hierarchies of production over reproduction, as I conceptualize them in this
book, then we can theorize a complexly integrated postmodern capitalism that only appears to
proliferate healthy difference at every turn. Difference, like plurality, is marshalled ideologically in
order to demonstrate the system's openness and fairness.
This is not to ignore that the system is always open, precisely Foucault's point where he argues that
power is ubiquitous, encoded in various protean discourse/practices that resist co-optation. Such
openness is the essential possibility of radical social change. But openness--historicity--can only be
exploited through a theory and practice that address the complexly interrelated hierarchies that, on
the surface at least, seem irreducible to each other. Only by deconstructing the appearance of
political and social difference as fraudulent can we create real difference--autonomy via social
freedom. What is unique about postmodern capitalism is the way in which differentiation
reproduces homogeneity and hegemony, hence blocking world-his- torical transformation. Whereas
the original Frankfurt School correctly understood domination to be a totalizing logic of
bureaucratic-capitalist administration that erases all difference--Weber's rationalization--today, in a
postmodern stage of capitalism, administrative domination has been differentially regionalized in
order to conceal and extend its even deeper colonization of people's everyday lives.
In its affirmative version (e.g., Lyotard 1984), postmodernism updates the earlier pluralist
affirmation of capitalism (e.g., Bell 1973). Postmodern theory valorizes difference as a way of
arguing for the existence of difference--democracy--today. But as Best and Kellner ( 1991) have
convincingly shown, this version of postmodernism abets late capitalism where it deflects attention
from the self-same logic of capital that, now as before, is colonizing, dominating, and reifying. The
challenge for me in this book is to reconceptualize what Marxists have traditionally called the logic
of capital in a way that empirically addresses its contemporary manifestations, plumbs them for
possible resistance, and theorizes their connection to other moments and forces of resistance. To do
this, I need to distinguish carefully between the project of modernity as it has been postured by
modernists who favor the colonizing logic of capital and the project of modernity as it has been
conceived by radicals who favor reason, freedom, and justice.
Postmodern capitalism is a quantitative and qualitative extrapolation of an earlier "late" capitalism,
which emerged since the Depression and World War II. (As I discuss later, people periodize the
dawning of postmodern society in different ways; e.g., see Harvey 1989, for whom postmodernity
began with the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis.) Postmodern capitalism
regionalizes domination in order to conceal its emanation from the common axis of what I am
calling the generic hierarchy of production over reproduction or value over valuelessness. A
disaffirmative postmodernism functions as critical theory where it resists the notion that some
activities (people, groups, etc.) are more valuable than others, building on Marx's classic analysis of
the sources of value hidden in workers' labor power. Postmodernism distinctively theorizes
"otherness's" subordination by a superordinate term, subject, group.
In this sense, Marx's analysis of the exploitation of labor power outlined in volume 1 of Capital is
the first postmodern address to the hierarchy of production over reproduction, even if Marx failed to
theorize unpaid household labor, service work, and caregiving, which remain crucial in explaining
the domination of houseworkers and people employed in the informal sector of the economy.
Although Marx clearly supported the emancipatory project of modernity, including science, his
formulation of the hierarchay of value over apparent valuelessness as a civilizational logic was
importantly postmodern. This is another way of understanding how fluid is the boundary between
the modern and postmodern--how, indeed,
the postmodern is merely the most recent stage of a modernity that has yet to be completed in
Marxist and feminist terms.
Postmodern capitalism needs to be "mapped" ( Jameson 1984, 1991) as a world in which we
suspend our timeworn assumptions about the separability of regions. In fact, the map of
postmodernity would reveal not only the interconnection of places but their virtual identity.
Everybody has been colonized, hence marginalized--the Third World, proletarians, gays,
houseworkers. There are no worlds apart in postmodern capitalism, if there ever were in earlier
capitalism. But this is difficult for the left to swallow at a time when the assertion of difference-specially "multiculturalism," the new slogan of academic neoliberals--is echoed frequently. It is
assumed that the world is a plural place and that we can no longer piece together the large stories in
which the parts are somehow smaller than the whole. Postmodernity produces precisely this illusion
as ideology, trying to thwart cartographic exercises that would reveal difference to be a sham, when
in fact people are hierarchized everywhere, and for the same reasons.
FAST CAPITALISM: TOWARD A NEW THEORY OF
IDEOLOGY
What I ( 1989a) have called fast capitalism and Baudrillard ( 1983) has called hyperreality are other
terms for postmodern capitalism, which I periodized above. Postmodernism functions as ideology
where it promulgates the notion of a plural, decentered world impervious to totalizing mappings. It
checks efforts to tell the large stories in which the particular players are all connected by their
participation in the global logic of capitalist modernity, which is not postmodern at all in the sense
of being beyond modernity. This is fast capitalism in which the deceptive images traditionally used
to conceal or invert reality are now dispersed into the world itself, preventing their careful scrutiny
and facilitating their thoughtless enactment. Money, science, edifice, and figure have become the
new ideologies, supplementing older ideological treatises like religion and bourgeois economic
theory.
These new postmodern forms of ideology are nearly impossible to refute counterfactually; after all,
they make no apparent claims. Advertising has sunk so deep into the commodity that we no longer
treat it propositionally but consume it as commodity itself. Whereas Pepsi formerly purported that it
was better than Coke (e.g., that more people liked it), today Pepsi ads make few claims about the
product but transform its acquisition into sheer experience--what sociologists call lifestyle. Michael
Jackson dances for Pepsi and Paula Abdul dances for Coke; the "message" is that by drinking these
beverages we will dance, if not literally like Jackson and Abdul then in the sense of becoming stars
of our own lives--and all this from drinking the beverage of choice!
Baudrillard calls these images simulations, capturing the ways in which they formulate reality and
hence become real. I characterize dispersed ideologies as endemic to fast capitalism because I stress
the speed with which the economic and cultural reproduction process hums along, further
preventing mediating, meditating readings, rebuttals, and rejoinders. Postmodern capitalism creates
capital out of images and images out of commodities, utterly blurring the boundaries between the
real and imaginary. Indeed, the notion of a solid "reality" is anathema to postmodernists who have
capitulated to the phantasmagoric conflation of the real and imaginary and indeed celebrate it (e.g.,
see Kroker and Cook 1986).
A "fast" postmodern capitalism requires demarcating activities that pry apart the real and imaginary
in order to subject simulations to the test of validity. This must not be done in a positivist vein lest
concepts only seek to reproduce the reality to which they are nonidentical (see Adorno 1973a).
There can be nonpositivist cognitions, as the Frankfurt theorists (e.g., Marcuse 1969; Agger 1976)
have argued from the beginning. These "new sciences" would retain the traditional epistemic
differentiation between the real, on the one hand, and images and concepts, on the other. This would
empower thought, speech, and writing to take issue with the political imaginary of postmodern
capitalism, refusing the ideologizing claims made about the rationality of reality.
Above all, this deconstructive strategy would translate the imaginary into discrete discursive claims,
thus allowing it to be falsified. The CocaCola company's implication that lives will be transformed
by Coke needs to be narrated, put into words, so that it can be rebutted by counterfactual claims.
We need to be able to show that stars are created by the culture industry, that commodity
consumption does not set us free, and that Coke is not good for our health. The Michael Jacksons
and Paula Abduls are themselves simulations, as gossipy fan-magazines clearly show. Jackson
faded from black to white. Abdul was assembled by the technical wizards of rock video, having
been "discovered" as a professional basketball cheerleader. There are so many levels of deception
here that we barely know where to begin with the deconstructive work of cultural studies, which I
regard as one of the three central activities of a postmodern feminist critical theory, as I outline in
Chapter 6.
Above all, we need to turn the imaginary back into a text, which it has long since ceased to be.
Advertising agencies begin with discourse and figure where they plot the campaigns that turn
commodities into heroic, fantastic existences. We must be able to read the simulation of
commodities as the texts they really are, disgorging the claims encoded in them and then dispersed
into the sentient world as pieces of postmodern civic furniture. This is largely, but not entirely, a
story about the media. It is equally important to deconstruct science as a persuasive text (e.g., see
Agger 1989b) that is mystified in the figural discourse of quantitative analysis, a central feature of
positivism in the social sciences. By deconstructing figure and
number as rhetorical devices that drive the implication of ironclad social lawfulness, we challenge
their hold on people's everyday experiences.
This is politically radicalizing where it is no longer easy to challenge ideologies in postmodern
capitalism. Books--textual interventions--are found everywhere but in bookstores and libraries. Oldfashioned textuality has been nearly eclipsed, except in the rarefied university world, in which
struggling assistant professors attempt to publish their arcane dissertations and thus earn the
sinecure of tenure. Even university presses, formerly outlets for specialized scholarly monographs,
are feeling the pressure to publish trade books for general audiences, causing discourse to decline
still further. Jacoby ( 1987) has demonstrated that the critique of the decline of intellectuality in this
"age of academe" is not the monopoly of conservatives like Bloom ( 1987). Arguments for basic
and cultural literacy are radicalizing in the sense that they position themselves in a discussion of the
role of textuality in postmodern capitalism.
In traditional Marxist terms, the critique of ideology is politically important inasmuch as Marx
understood that human relations are thoroughly mystified under the regime of wage labor.
Commodity fetishism was discussed in Capital as the tendency for alienated human relationships to
appear naturelike in their inevitability. In the hyperreality of fast postmodern capitalism, the degree
of commodities' fetishism has expanded exponentially, as Lukacs ( 1971) and the Frankfurt School
initially argued through their analyses of reification and domination. Today, the eclipse of reason (
Horkheimer 1974) proceeds via the dispersal of sense into sentience, texts dispersing into social
nature as simulations. The critique of ideology now needs to be deconstructive, burrowing from
within images, figures, and discourses to show the hidden authorship and arguments underlying
naturelike reflections of a fixed cosmos. This ideology critique subjects the commodifications of
culture to rigorous readings that narrativize the value claims they conceal in the encodings of
cultural expression today.
Old-fashioned Marxists double over with hilarity at the notion that ideology critics today need to
deconstruct videos, shopping malls, sociology textbooks. Surely, this is dilettantish epiphenomenal
work, inferior to union organizing. But orthodox male Marxists are equally skeptical about the
women's movement and environmentalism as valid political projects, thus only revealing their
obsolescence as well as gender defensiveness. Whether or not we deem our age to be distinctively
postmodern, it is clear that pre-World War II Marxism is hopelessly out of date. I share with
traditional Marxists significant skepticism about postmodernity theory especially where it is
suggested that postmodernity is somehow postcapitalist. This is still capitalism, now as before,
albeit on an unprecedented global and psychic scale. But our capitalism is postmodern in the sense
that it utilizes new modes of interconnection and infiltration simply unknown in earlier stages of
development. The internationalized state intervenes in the economy as never before. Similarly, the
culture industry is crucial in establishing taste, coercing conformity, and diverting attention.
Although Horkheimer ( 1972) recognized these interconnections in his agenda-setting 1937
"Traditional and Critical Theory," many Marxists have been slow to revise original Marxism.
Instead, Marxology has been stalled (e.g., Althusser 1970) in scholastic disputation about Marxian
economic determinism, an issue that had been settled by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.
Since the revisionist projects of Lukacs, Korsch, and the Frankfurt theorists, little has happened in
traditional Marxism to help us better comprehend contemporary capitalism. Indeed, traditional
Marxists have dug themselves into insular defensive positions from which to fend off nonMarxist
and post-Marxist attackers, notably including feminists. Admittedly, concerted attacks on Marxism
have become stronger, not weaker. We in the United States are in the midst of a new McCarthyism
targeted by neoconservatives on people of color, women, entitlement programs, leftist academics,
gays, and many others who threaten the dominant American ideology. In this context, it is perhaps
understandable that Marxists reaffirm the faith, protecting it against feminist and postmodernist
detractors. But I would argue that this posture has tended further to fracture the left, making it
doubly difficult to resist the hegemony of neoconservatism.
I retain the notion that the global social totality is above all capitalist, thus grounding my version of
critical theory squarely in Marxism, albeit vastly different in inflection from Marx's Marxism.
Marxism cannot be bypassed because capitalism cannot be bypassed. No amount of theoretical
casuistry will efface the fact that capitalism remains an extraordinarily powerful structuring force in
all of our lives. Feminists respond by suggesting that patriarchy is an equally powerful structuring
force, and of course I agree. But patriarchy, like capitalism, is a moment of a larger hierarchizing
system that manifests itself in the realms of both market and nonmarket activities, the respective
domains of traditional Marxism and feminism. I am not suggesting that we bypass feminism, either;
indeed, Marxism needs feminism as much as the other way around. An overarching critical theory
can embrace both Marxism and feminism if we translate Marxism into feminism and feminism into
Marxism via a unifying theoretical logic, a mutual translation that is very far from being
accomplished given the intense territoriality on both sides.
Fast capitalism is a better term for the postmodern/ capitalist/ male-supremacist conjuncture than is
Baudrillard's hyperreality, which threatens to unravel into idealism. My notion of the domination of
reproduction (Chapter 4) does more work than Baudrillard's "simulations" inasmuch as it connects
the realms of productive (market) and reproductive (domestic) activity, thus embracing the
traditionally bifurcated concerns of Marxists and feminists while also theorizing postmodernity in
useful ways. Postmodernists like Baudrillard and Foucault are absolutely correct that traditional
Marxism lacks a viable theory of ideology that can be applied to the
deconstructive reading of dispersed ideologies in postmodern capitalism. But both Baudrillard and
Foucault tend to conflate the ideal and material in such a way that we can no longer reliably
distinguish between the two, hence losing epistemological criteria with which to sift true from falseever the aim of the Marxist critique of ideology.
The Baudrillard of simulation theory might respond that we no longer enjoy the luxury of having
clear criteria of validity in hyperreality, or what I call fast capitalism. Yet hyperreality and reality
are still separable inasmuch as capitalism, however "late" or "postmodern" it may be, now as before
requires systematic deceptions--Gramsci's hegemony--in order to function. If Baudrillard point in
Simulations ( 1983) is simply that it is increasingly difficult to separate true from false, I would
agree. But his concept of hyperreality loses the historical specificity of the Marxist critique of
ideology by essentially abandoning the totalizing aim of critical social theory (see Kellner 1989a).
"Reality" is still real--it is grounded in historical structures of domination that can be unpacked, to
use a popular deconstructive phrase, around the axial principles of their structure and function.
Thus, we can comprehend the deliberate way in which false consciousness or hegemony both
reproduces and is reproduced by the systemic requirements of sustained deception.
Simulation theory denies people the ability to separate true from false or real from hyperreal.
Postmodernists position themselves against Marxist Archimedeanism because they want to avoid
the Bolshevist outcomes of theoretical, hence political, vanguardism (a theme I take up below). I
believe that the Frankfurt theorists have shown convincingly that one can develop comprehensive
social theory, along with a standard of ideology critique, without losing a sense of ironic reflexivity
about the problematic grounds of one's own truth claims. This is precisely the point of productive
contact that I see between critical theory and postmodernism: The latter provides the former with a
sense of the deconstructibility of all discourse, while the former grounds postmodern deconstruction
squarely in comprehensive social theory that maps the world in a nuanced and differential way. One
can make epistemic and evaluative judgments without pretending a positivist worldlessness and
stancelessness.
The Frankfurt theorists have done important work by broadening traditional Marxism into a generic
critical theory of domination. I extend Dialectic of Enlightenment and One-Dimensional Man in a
feminist and postmodern direction via my theory of fast capitalism ( Agger 1989a), which emerges
in this book as a critique of all hierarchies of value over valuelessness. Whereas the Frankfurt
theorists broadened Marx's concepts of exploitation and the alienation of labor into the category of
domination, hence explaining aspects of structured social inhumanity unanticipated by Marx, I
enrich their notion of domination with insights into its discursive and male-supremacist
components. In formulating domination's generic tendency to hierarchize superior and inferior
persons, groups and practices as productivism, I open the way for a critique of ideology that
valorizes activities heretofore regarded as useless and articulates their interstitial potential for social
transformation. The rearticulation of domination as hierarchy helps capture the ongoing struggles
by people to lay claim to value, an enduring feature of class society in its many varieties.
This rearticulation of critical theory through feminism and postmodernism helps enrich the critique
of domination, which tends to become static and monochromatic in Adorno's phrasing. A more
dynamic perspective on fast capitalism stresses its differential, non-identical nature (leading, for
example, to Habermas's new social movements theory) while preserving Marx's brilliant attempt to
grasp society as an extraordinarily interrelated system that thwarts self-determination at every turn.
This synthesis, which I call feminist postmodern critical theory, avoids idealism and determinism at
once, showing the powerful inertial tendencies of capitalism while also demonstrating the many
ways in which people attempt to remake their lives and the world in the open space between system
and lifeworld.
IS A TOTALITY THEORY POSSIBLE?
It is ambitious to propose a totality theory that preserves Marx's emphasis on structure and at the
same time holds open the possibility of groundup social change. My aim in this book is nothing
less! The postmodern attack on Marxism has been so powerful that many wonder whether critical
theorists can ever again theorize totality and thus act politically in credible ways. I am not among
those skeptics, although I recognize the need to address this skepticism, especially since I want to
recuperate postmodernism for leftist political purposes. This need not be a contradiction in terms if
we can somehow reconcile postmodernism's critique of totality theory with critical theory's
totalizing agenda. I submit that this is possible if we regard totality not as an aprioristic abstraction
but as an empirical reading (e.g., Jameson's cognitive map or Fraser's big empirical story). Indeed,
this is the notion of totality that has animated the Hegelian-Marxist tradition (see Jay 1984b),
especially the work of the Frankfurt School.
Let me anticipate a criticism of my approach here: Agger simply substitutes a new reductionist
theoretical logic--hierarchies of value over valuelessness, also called productivism and
heterotextuality--for prior theoretical logics like alienation of labor, reification and domination.
Thus, his theory is as insensitive to "difference" as all other modernist male totalizations. My aim in
this book is to offer a comprehensive theoretical logic that not only protects difference but relies on
it for its political and intellectual energy. There is nothing about the world that compels us to
explain and criticize different groups' oppressions in necessarily different terms. It is precisely my
contention that postmodern male-supremacist capitalism subordinates difference to the rule and
regime of productivist heterotextual hierarchy--terms that I explicate in the course of this work. At
the risk of offending certain postmodernists and feminists, I defend a unifying theoretical logic on
empirical grounds--as what "really" happens to marginal people and groups today. I do not
apologize for my theoretical unification but celebrate its explanatory sweep (and hence its potential
for political unification and mobilization at a time when many abandon politics as futile).
Lyotard ( 1984) critique of Marxist Archimedeanism is leveled at Marxist economic reductionism.
In itself, this is nothing new, resembling earlier critiques of Marxian economism. Like many of
these critiques, Lyotard's postmodernism suggests a liberal pluralism that decenters Marxist class
analysis and blunts its radical transvaluation of capitalist economic and social relationships.
Lyotard, like other postmodernists (including Foucault), conflates the critique of Marxian
economism, which the Frankfurt theorists share, with a rejection of totality theory. This is
unfortunate because it blocks the development of a comprehensive critical theory that joins the
concerns of Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism--my project here. Lyotard is certainly right to
indict positivist and economistic Archimedeanism, which pretends that the Marxist epistemological
subject can somehow stand outside of history in plotting its preordained developmental course. But
he is wrong to suppose that all Marxisms, all transformational critical theories, require the idealist
postulate of a transcendental theoretical subject. The Frankfurt School's critical theory demonstrates
convincingly that one can fashion a totality theory sensitive to the ironies of the theorist's own
participation in, and hence transformation of, the world. This was very much the theme of
Horkheimer and Adorno ( 1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they argued that positivism
wrongly exempts itself from its own critique of mythology, hence becoming more mythological for
all that. Dialectic of Enlightenment is postmodern avant la lettre, as Ryan ( 1982) and I ( 1989a,
1990, 1991) have argued. Adorno ( 1973a) Negative Dialectics is a sustained deconstruction of
Kantian and Hegelian idealism, paralleling the deconstructive effort of Derrida, as I explore later.
These deconstructive decenterings of idealist and positivist knowledge are important aspects of the
critique of ideology in fast capitalism. They are compatible with a comprehensive critical theory if
they are understood to be critiques of ideology. Unfortunately, Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida's
deconstructive efforts go untheorized; they do not contribute their decenterings of Western
logocentrism to an interrogation and undoing of postmodern capitalism. The theorization of
capitalism, whether early, late, or postmodern, goes the way of all totalizing theory, which is
relegated to the dustbin of modernist narratives. Baudrillard comes closer to a theory of fast
capitalism, especially in his ( 1981) earlier book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign. By the time of Simulations ( 1983), however, he had largely replaced his political economy
with a notion of hyperreality that renounces the project of historical materialism, however flexibly
that project is conceived.
Deconstructive insights into the undecidability, or lack of closure, of theoretical discourse help
sensitize language to its own perspective and pitfalls. But these insights need to be theorized if we
are to deploy deconstructive strategies in the immanent critique of the disguised codes of fast
capitalism, including science and theory themselves. It is one thing for deconstructors to lament the
impossibility of epistemological clairvoyance. It is another thing to use deconstruction in order to
clarify and enlighten-the project of left and feminist deconstructors. The postmodern critique of
theoretical grand narratives rarely leads to new theory; it only disqualifies existing theoretical
statements. This is very much the problem with the antiscience posture of positivism's critics. These
critics inflate their critique of positivism's dogmatic insistence on its own superiority to dogma into
a critique of all knowledge. Although language can be deconstructed to reveal its omissions and
aporias, some language is less arrogantly representational than others. In other words, truth is
always possible, albeit not an incontrovertible version impervious to deconstructive implosion.
For Marxists this "truth" is not the positivist "truth," which freezes the social universe into inert
nature. Indeed, postpositivist philosophers of science recognize that nature itself is not inert,
deconstructing the Vienna Circle's attempt to reduce science to mathematics. I ( 1989c) have argued
that the positivist model of presuppositionless representation produces ideological outcomes when
imported into the social sciences, notably in the way that it emerges discursively in concepts and
hence practices of social lawfulness. I argue that these alleged "laws" describing the invariance of
capitalism and patriarchy are intended to produce conformity with them, hence making them come
true. Marxism is the most important critique of positivism, although Marx problematically gave the
impression, especially in later work, that his critique of political economy was virtually a law unto
itself, thus giving rise to a pernicious theoretical and political tendency within Marxism to
"outpositivist" the positivists. It was not until the advent of Western Marxism (e.g., Lukacs 1971;
Horkheimer and Adorno 1972) that Marxists exorcised the demon of positivist presuppositionless
representation from Marx's own ambiguous legacy, thus producing the basis of an ideology critique
of what Marcuse ( 1964) called one-dimensionality--a stage of capitalism in which positivist fact
fetishism becomes the dominant ideology, disqualifying all attempts at critique, especially from
within everyday life itself.
Ironically, a Marxist positivism reinforces positivism at large, hence distancing Marxist theory from
Marxist practice. Unfortunately, in their desire to undercut Marxist scientism (which helped
legitimate Stalinist terror via the official state ideology of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR),
postmodernists dismiss the original aims of the critique of ideology. The historical project of reason
is rejected, not only its positivist version-- which, as Horkheimer and Adorno ( 1972) knew, was no
version at all. For their part, feminists reject the critical theory of the Frankfurt School because the
Frankfurt theorists defended patriarchal familial authority as the source of ego autonomy. Marxism
in general missed male supremacy as a legitimate social problem, or worse endorsed it, causing
many feminists to reject Marxist social theory in total. Certain left feminists, discussed in Chapter 3,
have laboriously attempted to correct Marxist male supremacy with the feminist project of the
politics of the personal, an effort joined by my project here.
It is remarkable and lamentable that many proponents of the postmodern theory of culture and the
feminist theory of gender, which parallel the Frankfurt School's critical theory in many respects,
have turned against the project of total social theory. In the case of postmodernism, the aversion to
totality is matched by an aversion to Frankfurt mandarinism, which is certainly notorious (see
Agger 1992a). Postmodem cultural studies theorizes the popular in order to identify resistance
points and projects ignored by the Frankfurt School's high-culture theory. People such as
Baudrillard ( 1983) clearly build on the Frankfurt School's culture-industry thesis, while departing
from the Marxist political program of the Frankfurt School. Feminist stress on the relationship
between the personal and political is highly reminiscent of the lifeworld politics of both Marcuse (
1969, 1972) and Habermas ( 1984, 1987b). My own argument for a lifeworld-grounded critical
theory is developed throughout this book. I contend that the Frankfurt School's totalizing
perspective on postmodern capitalism requires buttressing by postmodern cultural theory as well as
by the feminist critique of gendered everyday life in order to address the present adequately.
Without these buttresses, critical theory will remain mired in Horkheimer and Adorno's hopeless
dialectic-of-enlightenment position, Marcuse's ( 1955) Freudianization of Marx, which ushers in the
notion of a "rationality of gratification" and "new sensibility" ( Marcuse 1969), or Habermas (
1981b) new social movements theory. None of these perspectives adequately grasps the
oppositional opportunities available today because all lack a sufficiently totalizing perspective.
They require theoretical resources "from without," notably from postmodern cultural theory and
feminism. I argue emphatically that this integration can be conducted within the frame of reference
of original critical theory. In my opinion, only critical theory attempts, even if it fails to achieve, a
totalizing analysis of the social world; it eschews precisely the pluralist perspectivity that disables
both postmodernism and feminism. The crucial question is whether postmodern cultural theory and
feminism will make themselves available to be integrated--that is, whether critical theory does not
engage in a self-defeating imperialism by integrating postmodernism and feminism in aggrandizing
acts of negation/retrieval/ transcendence. This issue is as much political as theoretical: Can critical
theory learn from postmodernism and feminism without violating their political "space," hence
rebuffing potential allies? I turn to this question in the concluding section of this chapter and return
to it throughout this book.
I am very concerned that this book not be read as a male-critical theoretical attempt to subsume
feminism and postmodernism. I want to be understood as a person who recognizes the need to unify
critical theory, feminism, and postmodernism, advancing beyond counterproductive disputation and
territoriality. Unfortunately, the likelihood that I may not be read this way only demonstrates the
need for a unifying theoretical logic encompassing critical theory, postmodernism, and feminism. In
spite of my claim that I respect difference, some theorists may view my argument here as another
instance of intellectual imperialism. But this misreading is symptomatic of the times: We assume
that class, race, and gender are conceptually and empirically separable "realities," to which different
theories are appropriate. But difference is not an irreducible "fact." It must be theorized and not
assumed. Class, race, and gender are the same things-that is, their inferiorization is produced by the
same theoretical logic. I realize that I am walking on the wild side when I argue for a unifying
theoretical logic! But walk we must, lest we reproduce the fragmentation of the left in these
dangerous times.
Ultimately, the possibility of a totality theory turns on the question of whether one can tell large
empirical stories that have a coherent dramatic tension, narrative, and resolution. I aver that a
"science" of society is possible, even if not the positivist science of the Second and Third
Internationals. The Marxian possibility of a new science must be articulated by a twenty-firstcentury critical theory so that (1) we understand the shifting strata of the world system (and the
fissures that continually open up to emancipatory agents), and (2) we refuse to cede cognitive and
technical functions to a Weberian elite of postmodern technocrats. In renouncing objective
knowledge, Derrideans renounce power, hence only reproducing the prevailing power of the social.
The risk of science's degeneration into scientism is less immediate than the danger of relinquishing
empirical narratives about society that help frame a sober strategic reckoning with "what is to be
done." Although, as I just said, I agree with the original Frankfurt theorists that positivism has
become the dominant mode of ideology today, the critique of positivism must resist Luddism at
every turn. Neither poststructuralism nor postmodernism has a positive epistemological program, a
strategy of systematic cognition. They denounce rationality as a ruse of reason and instead revel in
the pleasure of the text and celebrate the author's death.
I contend that the word instead is misplaced. Science can be playful, passionate, and perspectival-the more so, the more it is done well. Postpositivist philosophers of science have understood this
much better than Marx, who unwittingly licensed the Engelsian "dialectic of nature" argument that
proved so destructive in Stalinist hands. Early Marx could easily
have accommodated a Marcusean-Barthesian notion of playful scientific discourse since he
understood how objective and subjective nature blur dialectically to the point of virtual identity.
Habermas ( 1971) effort to separate the logics of self-reflection and scientific-technical control has
set back the Frankfurt effort to develop the possibility of a nonpositivist cognition, a new science, a
possibility that could be enhanced significantly in a poststructural climate. After all, Derrida's
notion of textual undecidability empowers reading to become a veritable mode of writing, a theme
that clearly converges with the Marcusean and early-Marxian notions of knowledge as self-creative
praxis.
The antiscience tenor of poststructuralism goes hand in hand with its aversion to totality theory. As
I noted earlier, there is some sentiment (e.g., Lyotard 1984) that science leads to political
totalitarianism, reflecting the Enlightenment's conflation of knowledge with power:
Archimedeanism equals Prometheanism. But I would decouple the dimensions of knowledge and
power, giving rise to a more nuanced cognitive map that frames my argument here. There is a
strong tendency for epistemological antitotality postures to become antipolitical (except in the case
of certain species of radical-feminist theory, which retain a totalizing version of politics).
Nevertheless, as radical feminism indicates, there is no necessary connection between these two
perspectives. For their part, Marxist critical theory and liberalism share totalizing perspectives on
knowledge but differ on political questions, with liberalism defined by its aversion to authoritarian
democracy and authoritarian socialism. Epistemology and politics are nonidentical.
THE POLITICS OF TOTALITY
This is not to suggest that political totality is necessarily Stalinist or statist. As this discussion
indicates, the politics of totality are dangerous in these times. Any claim of truth risks excluding
other truths and hence invites tyranny. Archimedeanism appears to lead inevitably to a Promethean
practice of power. This is the sense of Foucault's critique of Marxism, which is central to most
postmodernisms. As usual, though, this confuses Marxism as an emancipatory critical theory with
the MarxismLeninism of the Siberian camps, a confusion that is both empirically and theoretically
unfounded. As I indicated above, Habermas ( 1981a, 1987a) has recognized the discourse of
postmodernity as a thinly veiled theoretical practice of neoconservatives who, on the one hand,
supported Thatcher, Reagan, and Bush while, on the other, endorsing and consuming supposedly
postmodern cultural commodities. I ( 1990) have observed that postmodernism extends Daniel Bell
( 1973) end-of-ideology argument, functioning as what Jameson ( 1984, 1991) calls the cultural
logic of late capitalism. This is not to deny that postmodernism has critical potential--a premise of
this book. Yet the established postmodernism of the culture industry opposes the Marxist penchant
for totality, pretending a prepolitical stancelessness characteristic of this postpolitical age.
Totality issues in tyranny only when (1) science exempts itself from its critique of non-reflexive
intellectual systems and (2) power is marshalled to obliterate all otherness. As Adorno ( 1973a)
recognized, the common theme here is identity and nonidentity. As he and Horkheimer ( 1972)
argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment, science that excludes itself from its critique of myth leads to
political hubris, the result of which is fascism. Thought that tries to identify itself with reality aims
too high. Concepts are imperfect vehicles of comprehension, as are the language games that they
constitute. As Ryan ( 1982) has noted, here Adorno's and Derrida's critiques of Western philosophy
converge, although Derrida does not spell out the implications of deconstruction for political theory.
Adorno depressive Negative Dialectics tries unsuccessfully to elaborate a total political theory
based on the politics of nonidentity or difference. He retreated from social theory to philosophy and
thus failed to theorize new social movements and their transformational potential.
We can move beyond Adorno, while retaining his very important analyses of the logic of
domination, including his critique of identity theory. Perhaps more than anyone else, Adorno knew
what was wrong with modernity. His deft Minima Moralia is an elegant cognitive map of late
capitalism. But his Negative Dialectics, while a powerful critique of idealism, is scanty social
theory. Adorno simply had no conception of what Habermas was later to call new social
movements. His reaction to the New Left typified his and Horkheimer's insensitivity to
transformational social movements that did not spring full-blown from the brow of Capital. This is
not to say that Adorno endorsed or articulated orthodox-Marxist scenarios of class struggle. Far
from it. But Adorno seemed to require that every transformational actor and movement possess
Adorno's own degree of theoretical erudition and cultural elevation.
By now, under the influence of postmodernism and feminist theory, the critique of totality that
Adorno initiated has become second nature. It seems that no one on the left endorses modernity and
its totalizing logic. This is understandable, given the historical horrors of the politics of totality.
And yet Habermas is absolutely correct to insist on a new rationalism that comprehends the sweep
of world history and tries to theorize it anew, rejecting both liberalism and orthodox Marxism.
Habermas appropriately tries to shift the modernist paradigm of consciousness into the paradigm of
communication, thus making way for the possibility of positive political theory. Adorno's
disappointment about the failure of class struggle led him to write pessimistic tomes like Negative
Dialectics, in which he deconstructed the logic of modernity, notably its idealist identity-theory, but
did not turn deconstruction in the direction of positive architecture.
It is not easy to politicize deconstruction as a way of developing a rationalist perspective on
modernity and postmodernity. The road to this repoliticization should not go through Derrida but
through the Frankfurt School (although, as I argue in this book, we can learn the way from Derrida).
Even in his disappointment about the project of modernity, including Marxist modernism, Adorno
was far more a political theorist than Derrida or Foucault. His disaffection was borne of his
modernism, which imagined utopia. Postmodernism prematurely gives up on the promise of the
Enlightenment, as Habermas ( 1987a) has argued. With it, postmodernism abandons the modernist
political goals of democracy, including self-determination and workers' control.
The postmodern philosophy of history errs where it suggests that history has already ended, having
reached the terminus of modernity. At the same time, it liberates the imagination from the very
modernism ontologizing capitalist modernity as historically sufficient. A liberating postmodernism,
grounded in the totalizing intention of the Frankfurt School's critical theory, reinvents history as the
possibility of a postcapitalist postmodernity that interrupts the continuum of domination. But for
postmodernism to project this historical possibility requires it to totalize history, suggesting a
possible world-historical vector along which social change can unfold. It is simply inadequate to
reject politics because politics for the last two hundred years has been inextricably linked with
capitalist and statesocialist modernization.
We are now in an age of decline, which requires us to reimagine history in nonmodernist terms.
Neither capitalism nor state socialism successfully provides everybody with a livelihood and social
freedom. The aversion to the politics of totality too readily leads to an aversion to all politics, which
today only reinforces the political. That is the problem with postmodernism. Critical theory for its
part anticipates certain postmodern themes, but without renouncing the political, as Derrida and
Foucault do. To be sure, Adorno ( 1973a) Negative Dialectics is scarcely a manifesto. But I would
argue that the time for manifestos has passed; indeed, manifestos reflect a modernist agenda of
purposive progressivism that has scorched the earth since World War I. We must be able to
articulate a political agenda in ways that avoid the posturing and pretense of modernism, notably the
idea that we can remake the world through social engineering. But we must retain the modernist
notion that the world can be made different, if only in ways that acknowledge the inchoate limits to
transformation constraining all political interventions.
This balance between the modern and postmodern ought to be formulated from within the discourse
and theoretical apparatus of modernism (as Huyssen 1986 argues). Otherwise, we eviscerate politics
of all transformational possibilities. Too frequently the postmodern agenda is only cultural.
Admittedly, politics have been displaced into the cultural arena, as Horkheimer and Adorno ( 1972)
recognized in their culture-industry thesis (and as I demonstrate in my 1990 critique of literary
political economy). In this book, as elsewhere ( Agger, 1992a), I reformulate critical theory as a
version of cultural studies. But culture does not exhaust politics, even though it is increasingly
political today. The text is a world, although the world is not all text. In forgetting this,
postmodernists inflate cultural style into adequate resistance, when, in fact, style is typically
dictated by what Jameson ( 1984, 1991) calls the cultural logic of late capitalism.
This is a difficult road to walk. On the one hand, political imperatives are now encoded in a
diversity of gestures, forms, and language games-discourses--ordinarily seen as beyond the realm of
traditional politics. On the other hand, in being so dispersed, they can easily trick us into ignoring
political economy, concentrating instead on the political economy of the sign ( Baudrillard 1981).
Although sign value is important in its own right, we must not lose sight of surplus value, which
endures as the fundamental means of exploitation, profit, and domination. Modernism helps bring
us back to politics even while seeking power in surprising venues. Modernism refuses to accept the
prevailing parliamentarian definition of politics, and yet it keeps the political clearly in view as a
problem to be theorized--precisely the topic of this book.
For a postmodernist modernism to theorize power requires us to suspend our canonical relationship
to Marx. That is, we must treat Marx neither as lodestone nor as animus. To be sure, he composed
an important version of critical theory that locates the possibilities of historical imagination in the
dialectical contradictions of the present. But, as Horkheimer and Adorno ( 1972; see Agger 1983)
indicate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marxism is best treated as a version of critical theory and
not the other way around. Both the canonization and demonization of Marx disserve the
emancipatory project today. Although Capital is an important civilizational text, its critique of the
logic of capital does not preclude other versions of critique, notably feminist. Saying this risks postMarxism, one of the most sophisticated versions of neoconservatism (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985;
Block 1990; Dandaneau 1992). I do not so much want to get beyond Marx as to insert Marx's
oeuvre into the deconstructive ebb and flow of hermeneutic work, a project that cannot rest.
Certain Marxists in their positivism maintain that one can read texts, including Marx's, definitively.
This makes possible the establishment of a "Marx" who exhausts the need for revisions,
clarifications, extrapolations. Too much of Marxism, whether it calls itself orthodox or something
else, embodies this version of literary epistemology. For its part, too much of post-Marxism
disqualifies Marx's corpus as antediluvian. By privileging Marx in one direction or another, we lose
sight of the possibility that Marx wrote an important, even exemplary, version of critical theory that
can guide us, but not overdetermine us, in our theoretical and political work today. Orthodox
Marxists and orthodox post-Marxists, especially postmodernists, make it nearly impossible to read
Marx deconstructively, democratically. They forget that Marx's own historicism would have
disqualified such ontological postures toward his texts. If Marx is simply a corrigible literary voice,
the politics of totality become much simpler. To learn from Marx one need not hold onto his
particular version of world-historical change, recognizing that both the Manifesto and Capital do
not adequately capture the complexities of the world today. By the same token, these books have
much of value to say about the illogic of capital, which continues to haunt late capitalism in the
midst of our second great depression. I choose to subsume Marx's analysis of the logic of capital
under a more general critique of the logic of domination, following and extending the lead of the
Frankfurt School. This allows me to hold on to totality, hence the possibility of thoroughgoing
social change, while producing a new cognitive map appropriate to the 1990s and beyond.
This attitude toward Marx has defined the project of critical theory since the 1920s (see, e.g.,
Marcuse 1968). The original members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research embraced
Marx's utopian prophecy while revising his empirical theory of political, economic, and cultural
crisis. This revisionism was dismissed as Hegelian idealism by some (e.g., see Colletti 1973).
Others (e.g., see Slater 1977) rejected it as apolitical. The Frankfurt reading of Marx makes itself
available to be revised, given their apostate view of Marx's oeuvre as necessarily corrigible. The
Frankfurt theorists' flexibility in dealing with Marx enabled them to rethink the modalities of
capitalism in empirically and politically relevant ways, producing a theoretical logic that has proven
remarkably prescient.
Inasmuch as the Frankfurt theorists opposed Stalinism, they were careful to stress the importance of
the "non-identical," as Adorno ( 1973a) called it. They demonstrate that one can produce a total
social theory while avoiding fascist and state-socialist outcomes. To be sure, there has been
precious little to vindicate their political optimism! However, I believe that this unprecedented era
of perestroika and postmodernity, indicating the dual failures of state-socialism and capitalism,
makes possible, indeed requires, all sorts of political, economic, and cultural innovations. A
feminist postmodern critical theory is ideally suited to addressing these new possibilities, given its
stress on liberating the imagination, body, sexuality, domestic labor, and popular culture. In
particular, the original Frankfurt theorists, through their linkage of Freud and Marxism, provide an
excellent example of what I have called an interstitial critical theory capable of mediating between
the levels of what Habermas has termed system and lifeworld, thus accelerating nontraditional
resistances and transformational activities.
Ultimately, answering the question of the politics of totality is a matter of resolving whose notion of
totality is at stake. It is a prior matter to identify the conceptions of totality--of what is and what
ought to be--embedded in every social and cultural theory. Some theories are more explicit than
others about these matters. I would argue emphatically that every version of the social world,
regardless of its avowed investment in totality or antitotality, harbors a conception of the whole
social universe. Positivism secretly recommends a world precisely where it suppresses its
authorship and perspectivity. Liberalism decides for and against competing versions of the world
even where it celebrates the plurality of versions and appears not to adjudicate their differences.
Postmodernism does not avoid a philosophy of history even where it announces that modernism has
failed because the belief in progress has run amok.
Thus, the posture of antitotality is just that--a practiced deception. Value-freedom in science was
revealed to be a ruse by postpositivist philosophers of science dating from Heisenberg and Einstein.
For his part, Derrida unpacks the perspectivity of all language games, making it rather ironic that
postmodernists who write in his name disavow totality. I maintain that conceptions of totality are
unavoidably present in every theoretical, scientific, and cultural version of the world, even if, as
Derrida indicates, these totalizing conceptions are susceptible to their own self-deconstruction given
the aporetic nature of language. That is, Derrida shows that theories purporting to explain
"everything" always fail, just as he demonstrates convincingly that theories which purport to
explain and advocate less than everything necessarily trade on conceptions of "everything."
Ontology--theory of being--inhabits science, theory, language, and culture, making its presence felt
most powerfully where these gestures appear free of ontological constructions.
A deconstructive critique of ideology interrogates all theoretical and cultural practices for their
noisy or silent partisanship. Simply because postmodernism eschews a millennial view of history
does not mean that it avoids a conception of the future for which it quietly agitates. As Horkheimer
and Adorno ( 1972) argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment, theories that appear to avoid advocacy
advocate all the more convincingly. Their version of Marx's ideology critique excavated ontology
out of societal representations and cultural expressions in order to bring their hidden perspectives
into the clear light of day. Critical theory as I conceive it deconstructs the discourses of the social
for the ideological entreaties dispersed into the sense and sentience of everyday life. These
entreaties--consume, conform, capitulate--are all the more enticing for their dispersed nature: They
are difficult to detect and thus resist, to read as texts. Critical theory functions in everyday life as
the activity of critique, sensitizing us to the ways in which what Foucault calls discourse /practices
cast a certain politically immobilizing spell over us and pointing beyond the present toward a future
in which discourse deconstructs itself. This self-deconstructing discourse not only acknowledges its
perspectival authoriality but celebrates it as an occasion of genuine civic discourse, ever the Greek
aim of the polity but now extended to include women, people of color, members of non-Occidental
cultures.
The politics of totality must be transacted on the ground of everyday life. People need to theorize
their own relationship to the global body politic, one of the essential aims of feminism and of
Marcuse ( 1969) critical theory. As such, the politics of totality are very much a personal politics,
too. The personal and public realms are connected interstitially via the practices addressed by
feminism, postmodernism, and critical theory, involving sexuality and household labor, conceptions
of the future, and popular culture, respectively. As I said earlier, politics is found everywhere but in
the traditional political arena, including the orthodox-Marxist venue of political economies of class.
This is not to suggest that Marxism has been surpassed but only to suggest that the logic of capital
is a local instance of a logic of domination that hierarchizes people according to their putative
value, notably including their contribution of what Marx called labor power and also including their
contributions of domestic labor. But it should be patently obvious to the left that traditional
Marxism does not break cleanly enough with earlier capitalist-modernist theories of the political
and social to be adequate in the stage of postmodernity. Left theory needs to retheorize the political,
notably through a feminist postmodern critical theory that relates the personal and public in
imaginative ways.
THEORIZING POSTMODERNITY
In order to map postmodernity chronologically, one must identify the moment at which modernist
millenarianism gave way to a more skeptical, less eschatological philosophy of history. Perhaps
postmodernity began with the Tet offensive in 1968, when the imperial American army, and thus
capitalist modernism as a whole, was put on the defensive by a pajama-clad army in Vietnam.
Perhaps postmodernity began when gas rationing affected American drivers in the early 1970s. Or
perhaps it dawned when Nixon resigned the presidency. This exercise in periodization is an
important component of a critical sociology of popular culture. It helps us come to grips with the
age of decline (see Agger 1991) as it affects people's orientation to politics and the public sphere.
Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Jameson argues. It both reflects and
articulates the eclipse of the belief in progress, just as perestroika reflects and articulates the demise
of state socialism as a utopian political system.
Together, postmodernism and perestroika are the most important political and philosophical
developments of our time. They shatter the modernist faith in progress, which has been inextricably
linked to the development of capitalism. I ( 1990) have argued that one can preserve the possibility
of social progress in modernist fashion while decoupling capitalism from modernism and
modernity. This has been Habermas ( 1984, 1987b) project, which he has tried to accomplish within
the framework of what he calls the paradigm of communication. Although I find Habermas's
provocative communication-theoretic reformulation of critical theory to be limited, his effort to
decouple capitalism and modernism and thus to fulfill the original aims of the Enlightenment--a
regime of reason--needs to be extended by a third-generation critical theory as I understand it. Since
Max Horkheimer ( 1973) wrote "The Authoritarian State," Franz Neumann ( 1942) wrote
Behemoth, and Marcuse ( 1958) wrote Soviet Marxism, Western Marxists have understood Sovietstyle state socialism to be a travesty of early Marx's ideals of workers' control and the disalienation
of labor. It is no surprise to Frankfurt-oriented thinkers that the Soviet Union came tumbling down.
Neither is it a surprise that the logic of global capital has become so irrational (e.g., uneven
economic development, the underclass, homelessness, the permanent war economy) that people in
the West have lost the faith in progress that has always accompanied Western rationalism. I do not
agree with theorists (e.g., Poster 1989, 1990) who argue that postmodernity is somehow "beyond"
or after capitalism. With Jameson ( 1991) and Kellner ( 1989a), I believe that capitalism has
evolved into a disspirited, disappointed, and disruptive postmodern mode in which many of the
traditional assumptions about the inexorability of progress have been suspended or abandoned
altogether. Following Scheler, Denzin ( 1991) argues that postmodernity produces resentment as a
modal emotional orientation on the part of people who are disaffected. Having been led to believe
that the future will provide a cornucopia of consumer goods and spiritual fulfillment, people
respond to deflated expectations not by rethinking the social system but with embitterment and
hostility--what Scheler ( 1961) perceptively called ressentiment.
Depending on one's theoretical perspective, perestroika and postmodernism can lead to further
resentment or they can provide opportunities for dehierarchizing all sorts of societal institutions,
making way for democratic social movements that transcend both traditional state socialism and
capitalism. Postmodernism functions ideologically where it not only acknowledges the failure of
politics but celebrates it. A different, more critical postmodernism, inflected by critical theory and
feminism, treats the age of decline as an occasion for the restructuring of all bureaucratic societies,
both capitalist and state-socialist. This critical postmodernism functions as a philosophy of history
that holds open the possibility of fundamental social change while rejecting the millenarian
modernism of the Enlightenment. In this sense, postmodernism can help us develop a new mode of
imagination about the opportunities and constraints of postmodernity. Martin Jay ( 1973), in writing
about the Frankfurt School, characterized this orientation to the philosophy of history as "dialectical
imagination," to which both critical theory and a left version of postmodernism are signal
contributions. In the course of this book, I will further develop the meaning of a postmodern
philosophy of history as an alternative to both capitalist modernism, which is increasingly hard-
pressed to diagnose our age of decline, and a postmodernism that accepts the supposed end of
politics with ironic, world-weary resignation, even celebration.
This postmodern version of critical theory views the crisis of modernity as an opportunity for
rethinking modernist assumptions about the nature of progress, notably the conflation of modernity
with capitalism and its technological conquest of nature. If modernity is limited to capitalism, then
postmodernism becomes a radical posture. If postmodernity is viewed as an eternal present
characterized by the end of ideology, then postmodernism is only what Jameson calls the cultural
logic of late capitalism. Postmodernism can interrogate modernism and modernity for their fatal
aporias, or it can accept them as inevitable stages in the unfolding of inescapable Western
reason.Again, for reasons explicated earlier, I am wary about identifying my version of postmodern
critical theory as postmodernism. To do so invites misunderstandings about the relationship
between postmodernism and critical theory. By now, the identity postmodernist has acquired an
established cultural and political currency. It means that one is:
post-Marxist or non-Marxist;
generally sympathetic to feminism but not necessarily a feminist;
opposed to quantitative methodologies in the social sciences;
inclined to favor New French Theory over German critical theory.
suspicious of cultural mandarinism and hence the Frankfurt School's theory of the culture
industry.
Postmodernism is neither necessarily opposed to Marxism nor "beyond" it. It needs to be feminist.
It is intellectually narrow where it eschews the text of science as if science cannot be reformulated
deconstructively, according to certain postmodern principles of discourse. One can use the same
critical approaches to address popular and mandarin cultures. Postmodernism in the French tradition
of Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous is not necessarily
opposed to German critical theory, especially where Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse anticipated
many postmodern insights (as Ryan 1982 and Jay 1984a have cogently argued).
Thus, what it means to be postmodern is often decided by a postrnodern culture industry that
banalizes postmodernism as a superficial irony and opposition to politics. One can establish a
different postmodern identity, as I argue we must. That requires a great deal of interpretive and
interpolative work expended in attempting to show that postmodernism and critical theory could
share a common project once postmodernism is appropriately politicized. The problem with
postmodernism is that it too often shuns the political simply because official politics offers no
significant alternatives to the status quo. But the interpretive methodologies associated with New
French Theory afford us tools with which to theorize politics as it has been displaced into
apparently nonpolitical venues, notably into popular culture. It is these tools which enable the
development of a nonmandarin approach to cultural studies conceived within the German/Marxist
framework of the critique of ideology, retained by the Frankfurt School. This is not to privilege the
Frankfurt School's version of critique as if it does not require revisions in its own right. As I said at
the outset, critical theory needs to address postmodernity using theoretical and political insights
from postmodernism and feminism. I do not see another way to overcome the Frankfurt
mandarinism while retaining the School's framework for analyzing the culture industry. If critical
theory functions as a critical cultural studies that can detect politics as it has been increasingly
dispersed into everyday life, both as entertainment and in gendered relationships (see Agger 1992a),
then one could say that it is postmodern and feminist. I return to the nominalist issue raised above.
We must recognize that hierarchies may be inferred in the privileging of certain theories as nouns,
while others remain only adjectival. This is unfortunate, if perhaps unavoidable.
For me, critical theory owes more to Marx than to Foucault or even Beauvoir. For this reason,
Marx's theoretical logic does more work in my version of critical theory than do postmodernism and
feminism, even though postmodernism and feminism are vitally necessary in this stage of
postmodernity. After all, Foucault eschewed totality, while Beauvoir never attempted it. In saying
this I know that I risk further misunderstanding: I am not saying that Marxism takes political
precedence over feminism or postmodernism but only that Marxism attempts a more totalizing
account of power. Of course, neglecting women, it does not achieve this account. A total version of
politics and power is completed, not challenged, by feminism and postmodernism. We need the
political more than ever in light of the depoliticization of public life, especially in its affirmatively
postmodern version. If we cannot locate politics in the interstitial activities bridging subjectivity and
institutions, we will fail to interrogate the present for its dialectical openings to possible social
change, ever the raison d'être of critical theory. Whether one judges my feminist postmodern
critical theory Marxist is beside the point. I argue that Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism are,
at a fundamental level, the same theoretical logic--an identity probably threatening to the male left,
feminists, and postmodernists alike!
Chapter
Three
Postmodernism and the End of Politics 2:
Feminist Theory
LACANIAN FEMINISM
Jacques Lacan ( 1977, 1982) has been an important figure in the development of what is often
called French feminism (see Fraser and Bartky 1992), including theorists like Helene Cixous (
1986, 1988), Luce Irigaray ( 1985) and Julia Kristeva ( 1980). Although I do not explicate Lacan
here, his work is a useful point of departure for discussion of the relationship between
postmodernism and feminism. Jaggar ( 1983) and Donovan ( 1985) offer overviews of the varieties
of feminist theory current today. Here I am primarily interested in postmodern feminism (e.g., see
Flax 1990), especially as this species of feminism blends with postmodernism and at once enriches
critical theory and blocks its political agenda.
Like postmodern theory discussed in the preceding chapter, French postmodern feminism
contributes to the discourse of the end of politics. Like Lyotard, Lacanian feminists reject male
Marxist grand narratives both because they are aggrandizing narratives and because Marxism
ignores women and male supremacy as important theoretical and political topics in their own right.
Just as the postmodern critique of Marxism helps rebuild Marxist critical theory, so the feminist
critique of Marxism adds important depth to critical theory's analysis of the politics of everyday
life. Although I risk a certain territoriality by discussing feminism and postmodernism with
reference to what they add to critical theory, thus potentially effacing their own distinctive
identities, I am convinced that infusing critical theory with postmodernism and feminism creates a
new theoretical synthesis that genuinely integrates and does not subordinate these perspectives.
Lacanian feminism is distinguished by a neobiologism that flies in the face of all political and social
theory, not just the Marxist kinds. This is not to say that all versions of psychoanalysis are
antipolitical. The Frankfurt theorists (e.g., Marcuse 1955) amply demonstrate the possibilities of
Freudian Marxism, unpacking the depth-psychological effects and causes of domination in useful
ways. Indeed, as I argue throughout this book, the feminist stress on the politics of the personal
strengthens critical theory's focus on the relationship between what Habermas calls lifeworld and
system. But Lacanian feminism does not lend itself to the Freud/Marx integration. The French
feminists have adapted Lacan to support a nearly biologistic defense of the ontological, emotional,
political, and literary distinctiveness of women, contributing to what most taxonomists of feminism,
like Jaggar and Donovan, call radical feminism.
Lacan grounds radical feminism where he can be heard to suggest basic depth-psychological
differences between men's and women's modes of imagination. This is rather complicated terrain
because it requires a discussion of the relationship among Lacan, Freud, and French structuralism
and poststructuralism (to which Lacan makes a notable contribution). By now, Lacanian notions
about the relationship between consciousness and language are quite common in poststructural
theory, especially in its French feminist variant. In effect, Lacan retains a significant part of the
Freudian apparatus, adding to it a linguistic twist. He differentiates between the ways in which men
and women think and speak, arguing that men inhabit the realm of the Symbolic (including
discursive language) and women inhabit the realm of the Imaginary (see Moi, 1985: pp. 99-101).
Extending Freud in a poststructural way, Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a
language, thus deploying a poststructural version of discourse theory in the analysis of
psychodynamic processes.
Lacan's modification of psychoanalysis is an interesting but tangential issue for my purposes here.
A great deal has been written about feminist uses of psychoanalysis (e.g., Mitchell 1974; Benjamin
1988). I am interested in the ways in which a Lacanian feminism adds momentum to the project of a
postmodern feminism, which in important respects parallels the male postmodernist project in its
antipolitical stance. Having said this, I will argue that feminist theory is crucial for a contemporary
version of critical theory in its stress on a realm of human activity--allegedly nonproductive
activity--heretofore deemed irrelevant by most male political theorists.
There are many versions of feminist theory, some of which contradict each other on issues that I
deem most relevant. In the first part of this chapter, I examine the more biologistic assumptions of
Lacanian-influenced French feminism. These assumptions hamper the merger of feminism and
critical theory for many of the same reasons that it is difficult to merge postmodernism and critical
theory. Lacanian French feminism shares New French Theory's aversion to politics, opposing
German critical theory in this regard. It is necessary to deal with postmodern feminism before I
propose an integration of feminism and critical theory inasmuch as postmodern feminism has
gathered momentum and advocates in this postmodern era. Although not everyone who professes postmodern-feminist perspectives is explicitly
devoted to Lacan, many of Lacan's differentiations between the psyches, temperaments, and worlds
of men and women surface repeatedly in radical, cultural, and postmodern feminisms. We are
rapidly approaching a time when the neobiologism of French feminism may replace both liberalfeminist and socialist-feminist perspectives on the emancipation of women, especially as the right's
attack on the women's movement gathers force.
The right's assault on women's reproductive rights and other gains made by women in regard to
protection against sex discrimination and sexual harassment forces the women's movement further
to the fringe in the sense that it isolates feminists in radical-feminist, cultural-feminist, postmodernfeminist, and/or separatist postures. The attack on the women's movement belongs to the overall
attack on the organized and theoretical lefts, serving to drive a wedge between radical and more
moderate proponents of these new social movements and societal critiques. I am not saying that
Lacanian French feminism represents the furthest "left" feminism. On the contrary, in its
neobiologistic separation of women's and men's psyches and spheres it remarkably resembles the
very male-supremacist biologism to which it positions itself in counterpoint. It is important to
contextualize postmodern feminism as an inadequate response to the regressive sex-political
tendencies of our time, including attacks on abortion clinics and a growing imperviousness to the
sexual harassment of women in the workplace. Indeed, it is a response that mimics theoretically the
very regression, notably neobiologism, that feminist theory ought to oppose.
French feminists eschew male left theory and socialist feminism on grounds that Marxism and
Marxist feminism androgynize social, cultural, and psychoanalytic theory. Kristeva, Cixous and
Irigaray, following Lacan, embrace the so-called female imaginary as a distinctive preserve of
women who create culture and social institutions that reflect the uniqueness of women's imagination
and expression. The Lacanian notion that women have special access to the realm of nonlinearity is
celebrated by French feminists, who view men as occupants of a technical, purposively rational
domain in which they define themselves with respect to their power positions vis-à-vis other men
(see Moi 1985). Politics is defined and dismissed as male territory, and women are portrayed as
denizens of the postpolitical or prepolitical. The French feminists (e.g., see Cixous 1988; Finke
1992) suggest that women write and create culture differently from men, avoiding the linearity and
scientific mien of men in favor of "round writing" (reflecting, perhaps, the roundness of women's
bodies).
Although French feminists certainly reject Freud's hierarchization of men over women, they
endorse a neobiologism whereby men and women are essentially defined by their access to certain
expressive systems animated by their different unconscious structures. If Lacan is right that the
unconscious is structured like a language, then men and women "speak" their unconsciouses
differently, reflecting their basic male/female differentiation. French feminists and postmodern
feminists regard this differentiation as extraordinarily liberating for women inasmuch as they no
longer have to participate in the male world. Instead, they can poetize and perform beyond the male
territorial imperative and power trips that characterize the "male world" today. Lacanian feminists
view men as deprived of access to the nonlinear imaginary (much the same argument made by nonLacanian feminists like Mary Daly 1978).
The problem with this argument is that it abandons the realm of politics and power to men. Instead,
feminists are to control culture, protecting women's culture against the technophallic imperatives of
men's manipulations of nature and of each other. Feminism becomes a defensive maneuver at a time
when many of the gains of the women's movement are being rolled back. Indeed, a new generation
of "postfeminist" younger women in their teens and twenties treat the feminist generation of their
older sisters and mothers as somewhat archaic, fighting battles that they perceive already to have
been won. Women on college campuses divide into younger "postfeminists" who major in
management and join sororities and older women who congregate in women's studies programs and
cultivate feminist theory. These two cultures are divided generationally above all.
The neobiologism of postmodern feminism converges with a variety of other trends in sociobiology
that emphasize the claims of nature (heredity) over nurture (environment). This new biologism
appeals to neoconservatives, who want to relegate women to nurturant, domestic roles (just as they
relegate blacks to sports). It also appeals to feminists who reject male politics as well as the politics
of the earlier women's movement (largely because women are now losing in this political arena). At
a time when feminism is a suspicious term, postmodern feminists use Lacan to legitimate their
withdrawal from "male" politics and social theorizing into the cultural expressions and spirituality
of a neobiologistic feminism. It is symptomatic that feminist spiritualism has become an
increasingly respectable part of the cultural-feminist and radical-feminist agendas, further
evidencing this retreat from political battles that are being lost.
Feminist neobiologism, dividing men and women in terms of their different heredities, emotional
dispositions, and expressive and technical capabilities, has a counterpart in the German critical
theorists' own retreat from organized politics. For example, Adorno ( 1973a) growing pessimism
occasioned an aesthetic theory ( Adorno 1973b, 1984) that took refuge in the disharmonies of
cultural oeuvres all the way from Schoenberg to Beckett and Kafka. By no stretch of the
imagination is Adorno's post-World War II political disengagement somehow more defensible than
the disengagement of Lacanian feminists, even though Adorno is modernist and the French
feminists postmodernist. There is even a certain parallel in their postures of literary allusion: Each
writes densely in order not to be co-opted.
In borrowing Lacan's notion that women have special access to the realm of the imaginary, French
feminism lays claim to a valuable aspect of difference from men. Indeed, postmodern feminism (see
Weedon 1987) has become a version of what is called difference theory (e.g., see Young 1990),
emphasizing the basic differences between women and men's modes of thought, emotion, and
language. If Derrida can be said to have any political theory, it is a neoliberal pluralism that
valorizes the irreducible differences between people and groups as the basis of a moral philosophy
of mutual respect and toleration. In the American academic setting, this has become the basis of
multiculturalism, an intellectual and political agenda heavily influenced by postmodernism and
French feminism. Multiculturalism becomes a pedagogical agenda where the canonical curriculum
of great Western books and ideas is "deconstructed," replaced with a curriculum comprising courses
resonating with the polyvocal "voices" of minorities, women, and other oppressed groups.
This multicultural pedagogical agenda is often centered in women's studies and African-American
studies programs in which difference theory reigns uncontested (e.g., see hooks 1984; Collins
1991). It is argued, through Lacan, Derrida, and the French feminists as well as traditional
liberalism and neoliberalism, that these plural social, cultural, racial, and gender groups have
distinctive political identities and their own expressive languages or "voices" that are
incommensurable with those of other groups ( Andersen and Collins 1992). Thus, their "stories" are
to be told and heard in the courses addressing each of these groups. There is a strong predilection
for postmodern approaches to ethnography (e.g., Marcus and Fischer 1986) and an aversion to
quantitative methodologies in the social sciences (e.g., Harding 1986; Keller 1985).
The neoliberalism of French feminist difference theory both fuels and reflects growing academic
neoliberalism at large. At first blush this neoliberalism, reflected in the pedagogical agenda of
multiculturalism, seems to contrast with the neoconservatism of the overall political culture. (
Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign against George Bush was stymied in part because Bush
successfully branded Dukakis as a "liberal.") But the neobiologistic roots of Lacanian feminism,
which plays an influential role in difference theory as well as in its multicultural academic agenda,
are confusingly entangled with the roots of neoconservatism, which is increasingly manifested in a
virulent racism, sexism, and homophobia.
In saying this I am not suggesting that postmodern feminist difference theorists agree with the likes
of David Duke and Pat Buchanan that we should reverse gains made by the women's and civil rights
movements, all the way from Roe v. Wade to Title VII. No feminist goes that far! Yet it is
increasingly clear that difference theory is embraced not only by French feminists like Irigaray,
Cixous, and Kristeva and by radical feminists like Daly ( 1978) but also by postfeminists who agree
that feminism has entered its second stage ( Friedan 1981) and should soften its rhetorical postures
industry, losing touch with the social problems that originally moved Marx to develop his critique
of the logic of capital.
The neoconservative critique of leftist political correctness (e.g., Bloom 1987; D'Souza 1991) is
partly a critique of a neoliberal feminism that admonishes those who criticize academic women.
Although I too teach and write feminist theory, I was once accused of saying in class that neither
women nor people of color could do high-quality theorizing. The issue here is not simply the
absurdity of the attribution, which was made by a female senior faculty member, but the effort of a
full professor to ensure my compliance with the neoliberal party line of difference theory-multiculturalism.
In my own university, I find as little genuine appreciation of difference among the campus liberalleft as among diehard conservatives, who have blown the hegemony of political correctness way out
of proportion. Rather, the effort of zealous difference theorists to restructure the undergraduate
curriculum has met with opposition from traditional liberals and conservatives who reject the
thoroughgoing deconstruction of the liberal arts. Although multiculturalism, postmodernism,
deconstruction, and feminism have made headway in a number of humanities disciplines, they are
far from canonical. Increasingly sharp dashes between neoliberals and neoconservatives are staged
on the battleground of undergraduate curriculum. So far, there has been more heat than light.
I have resisted the temptation to take sides in this conflict between neoconservatives and
neoliberals. For someone with my political orientation, the neoconservative agenda is repugnant on
its face, adding momentum to the racism, sexism, and homophobia of society at large. But the
neoliberal fetish of multiculturalism, deriving from difference theories (which, in the case of
postmodern feminism, owes a great deal to Lacan), capitulates to the countercanonical cant of
various gender and minority fractions, each of which has its own "voice," untranslatable into the
voices and versions of others.
This reflects the way in which neoliberalism segues into neoauthoritarianism when certain
neoliberal grounding assumptions are interrogated by people to the left of liberalism. The Frankfurt
theorists have been arguing since the 1930s that liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same
coin, the former leading to the latter under conditions of deprivation and shattered expectations.
There is no reason whatsoever to assume that the deepening crises of American capital and culture
will lead to democratic social movements; these crises could just as well lead to authoritarianism, as
attacks on gays, minorities, and women mount.
Feminists are luckier than Marxists in the sense that they do not live and write under the heavy
aegis of a canonical oeuvre. Capital has a very different status for Marxists than does The Second
Sex for feminists (see Moi 1990). This is in part because feminism began as a political movement
that was not guided or fostered by theory. Feminist theory took shape in the academy over the last
decade. Only in the last five years has feminist theory become a minor academic cottage industry,
representing the evolution of feminists' self-understanding into systematic form. In some ways,
then, feminists have been lucky not to have to account for revisionism with reference to a given
canon of work. Feminist theory has genuinely emerged from the ground of practice.
This is not to deny that Marxists have failed to learn from history but only to indicate that they labor
under the legacy of definitive texts with reference to which revisionism is deemed apostate. This
has stifled innovation and encouraged political intolerance. But Marxist theoreticity has given
Marxists the advantage over feminists of a totalizing perspective on the social world. Certain
feminist theorists in their self-theorization are beginning to catch up to Marxists in achieving
theoreticity and systematicity. And yet there is something about the particularism of the women's
movement that has made it very difficult indeed for feminist theory to achieve the totalizing
ambition of Marxism.
Many feminists would respond that Marxism fails to achieve totality because most Marxists, like
Marx, ignore male supremacy as a distinctive factor in domination. I would argue that Marx's and
Marxists' failure to theorize male supremacy disqualifies their particular versions of totality theory
but does not change the fact that Marxism, unlike postmodernism and postmodern feminism,
intends to be a totalizing social theory. Lacanian feminism eschews totalization on grounds of a
neobiological differentiation between men's and women's orientations to language and discourse.
Although Marx and Engels did not adequately understand the relationship between the logic of
capital and the domination of production over reproduction (one manifestation of which is male
supremacy as well as class struggle), they avoided difference theory by treating men's and women's
life activities as undifferentiable with respect to certain underlying bio(onto)logical issues of
sexuality. The fact that for most of human history relations between men and women have been
hierarchized does not mean that these relations must be explained in terms of men's and women's
supposedly different natures or aptitudes.
Postmodern feminists deny the possibility of totalizing theories both because they are
postmodernists (who reject grand narratives or total explanations) and because they are feminists
(who reject the typical encroachments of "male" theory). I maintain that one can create total social
theory that does not hierarchize men over women conceptually or politically. In this sense, I am
neither postmodern nor a difference theorist, even though I think we can learn a great deal from
postmodern and feminist critiques of mainstream male knowledge and practice, including those of
Marxism. But I insist that this learning can only take place within the framework of total social
theory. Whether we name this theory Marxism, critical theory, or feminism is not the most crucial
question, although, as I
discussed in my opening chapter, what Jameson calls the naming of theory raises important
questions of hierarchy and dominance.
Perhaps my most radical contention here, to be more fully developed later in this book, is that what
it means to be feminist and postmodern is unresolved. For me, feminism and Marxism are not only
linked; they are the same once we reinterpret them in terms of an underlying theoretical logic,
which is their critique of the productivist domination of reproduction. This is not to say that the
women's movement is the same as class struggle, or that they should be merged to the point of
identity. History makes that impossible. I am saying that it is vitally important to formulate
Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism as articulations of an overarching critique of domination or
critical theory. The payoff of this integration is the explanation of a host of interrelated phenomena
in terms of a singular theoretical logic, hence affording new social movements a common selfunderstanding and, just possibly, common political strategies.
These claims about the possibility of theoretical and political integration are very threatening to
feminists, who have always been embattled with respect to male leftists (see Evans 1979 account of
the splitting of the American women's movement from the male-dominated New Left). But the fact
that Marx and many Marxists are sexist and even encode their sexism in their social theories (e.g.,
dismissing domestic labor as nonproductive in Marx's strict sense) does not diminish the possibility
that Marxism and feminism can be written as the same text of critique and liberation once we trace
their apparently different theoretical logics to common roots in the critique of civilization. For
feminism to "become" Marxist critical theory means simultaneously that Marxist critical theory
"becomes" feminist. This is very much a two-way process, which would have significant impact on
the ways that men compose critical theory and formulate oppositional strategies. I am not
overlooking the fact that the Frankfurt theorists idealized the patriarchal family (e.g., see Lasch
1977) by way of their dubious defense of male authority.
For the left to avoid internecine quarrels requires an intellectual openmindedness and generosity of
spirit nearly universally lacking in our society. People on the left are no less "damaged," in Adorno
( 1974a) terms, than anyone else. This is why a defensive territoriality frequently gets the better of
left women and men, who cannot seem to collaborate politically. This is not to '"blame" women for
resenting male territoriality; feminism addresses the ways in which politics become personalized,
fatefully enmeshing all of us in the daily scripts and rituals of domination. But we must nevertheless
interrogate what it means to be feminist and Marxist lest our texts and tenets do our thinking for us.
In opening up the question of feminism, I expand the possibilities presently available to feminist
theory. In particular, I challenge the neobiologism of Lacanian French feminism, which not only
ontologizes but celebrates the notion of separate spheres. Sexual differentiation does not have to
lead to political differentiation, any more on the left than elsewhere. To identify men as the enemy
is already to decide in favor of a certain theory of male supremacy that is fatally flawed by its
inability to theorize the complex relationships among gender, daily life, economics, and politics. I
identify "the enemy" differently: We must oppose all hierarchies of valued over devalued activity,
from paid work over housework to capital over labor and mandarin culture over popular culture. A
feminist postmodern critical theory interrogates these hierarchizations of value, deconstructing the
various discourses and practices through which these hierarchies are ontologized and hence
reproduced.
DIFFERENCE THEORY, THE CELEBRATION OF THE
FEMININE, AND THE END OF POLITICS
The neobiologism of Lacanian feminism, like other radical-feminist perspectives, reduces politics to
male posturing. Politics is displaced by culture--women's fiction, poetry, journalism, and film as
well as cultural and literary criticism. The bio(onto)logizing differentiation of men and women
inevitably leads to antipolitical strategies based on feminist acceptance of the separation of spheres.
In particular, postmodern feminists locate politics, and thus the possibility of social change, in the
"male" domain of symbolic expression, technology, and warfare, assigning to women the emotive
and expressive. Radical-feminist separatisms abandon the realm of politics and power to men,
ironically reproducing male supremacy by leaving it unchallenged. This is equally true of
postmodern feminisms, which endorse difference-theoretic conceptions of the essential separability
of male and female regions of experience and practice (see Fuss 1989).
Although many American and British feminists are neither knowledgeable about nor partisans of
French feminism, postmodern feminist assumptions have permeated feminist consciousness in the
United States and United Kingdom, sharpening the split between traditional liberal feminists and
cultural/ radical feminists, including but not limited to lesbian separatists. This has fired the
neoconservative attack on the women's movement as an increasingly zany, zealous movement of
maladjusted man-haters, an issue I touched on above. Of course, this neoconservative caricature
grossly exaggerates the domination of the women's movement by extremists of one kind or another.
American and British women who work outside the home have metabolized the feminist critique of
male supremacy as a part of their second nature: "Everywoman," viscerally opposes sex
discrimination, sexual harassment, and violence against women.
A certain undercurrent of postmodern difference theory can be increasingly detected among
academic feminists. This has begun to spill over into the culture at large, partly by virtue of the fact
that significant numbers of women have been enrolling in women's studies classes for over a
decadeand partly because feminist cultural producers and critics subscribe to difference-theoretic
constructions of gender. All of this coalesces into the notion that women have a distinctive voice
and experience fundamentally different from those of men. Feminism becomes less a political
movement than a cultural practice devoted to the amplification of this voice in popular culture and
journalism. (Increasingly, this voice is differentiated into African-American feminism, white
feminism, various Hispanic feminisms, all in the name of "difference.")
To be sure, very few of these manifestations of difference theory adopt the explicit identity of
postmodernism, Lacan, or French feminism. Nevertheless, they reflect difference-theoretic
understandings of social, political, racial, and cultural spheres that can be traced back to Lacanian
feminism. For example, the notion that certain movies are "women's movies" or "for women"
because they amplify a distinctively female perspective is grounded in difference theory. I am not
denying that authorial, directorial, and editorial perspectives are necessarily inflected with
gendered, as well as racial and class, interests, leading some women to make and watch movies
differently from some men. But it is quite another thing to argue that culture-for-women is
somehow a feminist project in the sense that women's culture reflects a distinctively female
sensibility, especially where the notion of culture-for-women tends to displace or deflect the
political projects of the women's movement.
These are not disjunctive alternatives. Feminist filmmakers can well participate in the move to
protect women's reproductive rights. But the celebration of the feminine and feminist as a valid
cultural project represents a certain postmodern-feminist agenda, even if it does not theorize itself
with reference to postmodern French feminism (or even if it does not theorize itself at all).
Although certain social movements involve the quest for valid personal and group identities, I
would observe that there has been considerable backsliding from a political to a purely cultural and
personal feminism. This has happened partly because the conservative assault on feminist gains has
been so ferocious, forcing feminists out of politics and into culture. It has happened also because
difference theory has made insidious headway into feminist theory and consciousness, leading
women to celebrate the feminine as a political project in its own right.
This has always been the curricular agenda of women's studies programs (see Lather 1991). These
intellectual activities afford younger women a sense of their own importance and efficacy,
continuing the empowering agenda of the original American women's movement (e.g., see Friedan
1963). There can be no denying the political and existential impacts of this aspect of feminist
consciousness-raising. But postmodern feminism extends the original radical-feminist agenda,
which not only valorizes women's importance but emphasizes their uniqueness, subtly elevating the
feminine over the feminist. It is in this sense that feminist difference theory, largely developed out
of Lacan, eschews politics, which is regarded as a
male domain. That is, women are to be defined in terms of their aversion to the male-political.
Feminist difference theory, like radical feminism before it but with this Lacanian underpinning,
depoliticizes the very consciousness-raising that was supposed to represent the core of a feminist
political agenda. Instead, women are to engage in cultural creation not in order to heighten their
political awareness about the perils of patriarchy but to identify, express, and affiliate themselves,
demonstrating in this respect that the postmodern-feminist project celebrates a feminist self that
contradicts postmodernism's own aversion to the concept of subjectivity, an issue to which I turn in
the following section. As I discuss in the final section of this chapter, women are conceived as texts
needing to be written by themselves. Although I agree that women are important authors of both
books and lives, I prefer to argue that the text is a woman, thus underlining what women and
textuality have in common as degraded subjects and practices today.
Postmoderm feminism does not raise consciousness but rather expresses and externalizes it, in art as
well as in the "round writing" made possible by French feminist concepts of a feminine literary
practice. Here, difference theory emphasizes and celebrates the differences between arguably
"male" and "female" culture creation. This raises an important question about empirical reality
versus ontology: Do women and men engage in different types of cultural creation and expression
because they are bio(onto)logically and/or socio(onto)logically different (see Agger 1989c), or
because they are forced into two separate cultural spheres? Could both be true at once, making it
difficult to adjudicate the issue of the bio(onto)logical nature of Lacanian and radical feminisms?
It is impossible to decide this issue empirically. After all, Derridean readings of science (e.g., Agger
1989b) suggest that "facts" are a text, too, presented rhetorically in order to make a certain
argument about the nature of the world. The openness of history makes social change a permanent
possibility. The "fact" that women write children's books and men do science does not make this an
iron law. Indeed, social texts representing this "fact" as inevitable and universal help reproduce the
present, ironically bringing about the social condition described as immutable by science.
Derrideans understand that there are no such things as facts, no social nature. Instead, data are
frozen pieces of history that can be thawed through deconstructive critique, precisely the effort of a
radical cultural studies directed at science itself. Thus, no text, whether empiricist or Lacanian, can
decide the issue of women's and men's expressive natures inasmuch as culture and cognition belong
to the realm of history, not nature. To celebrate women's difference may only reinforce the
hierarchization of male knowledge over female knowledge.
In celebrating the feminine, postrmodern feminist difference theorists eschew political strategies
designed to pierce the boundary between male and female spheres. Once Lacanians and other
radical feminists accept the notion of separate spheres, they in effect abandon political efforts both
to dedifferentiate and dehierarchize separate spheres. I am not the first to offer this observation; it is
a standard criticism of radical feminism offered by left feminists who reject the celebration of the
feminine as an ontological or bio(onto)logical strategy. Left feminists like me do not reject the
important contribution that the valorization of women's activities makes to feminist consciousnessraising. Indeed, as I explain in the next chapter, the logic of a feminist postmodern critical theory
explicitly valorizes activities conducted by women in their allegedly separate sphere, ranging from
the creation of art and culture to household labor. The valorization of reproduction is perhaps the
single most important project of a feminist postmodern critical theory, stemming from my
contention that the domination of production over reproduction is the axial logic of domination in
civilization (and hence the conceptual basis of a new version of critical theory).
We must be very careful to disentangle the valorization of women and women's activities, which
has clear cultural and political-economic implications, from the bio(onto)logical celebration of
separate spheres. After all, most left feminists do not really expect wages for housework; who
would pay them? Rather, they want men to share the burden of household labor and caregiving so
that we shatter both gender-role differentiation and gender stratification. They also want to
dismantle the sexual division of labor in the sphere of market work. Dedifferentiation and
destratification ought to be the political agenda of left feminism. Unfortunately, postmodern
feminists tend to celebrate women's occupancy of their separate sphere because they reject "male"
political practice out of hand.
The politics of difference theory should not be obscured by the fact that postmodern-feminist
theorists eschew politics as a male practice. The two academic manifestations of difference theory
are multiculturalism, discussed earlier, and feminist theory, to be discussed at greater length here. I
have already debunked the neoliberalism of multiculturalism as yet another version of American
interest-group pluralism. Although this neoliberal agenda appears to shun politics in the name of
respect for the individual, this agenda is political inasmuch as it ignores social structures
overwhelming the individual. The power of these structures (capital, male supremacy, racism etc.)
renders the category of subjectivity extremely problematic, a postmodern insight that confusingly
contradicts the postmodern celebration of subjective differences.
The explosion of interest in feminist theory manifests difference theory in the academy. Although
there is certainly a distinctive corpus of feminist theorizing, "feminist theory" has become a
ubiquitous term to describe virtually any self-referential analytical or expressive activity by women.
Self-described feminist theorists do not so much plumb a distinctive literature as understand
themselves to be theorizing their identity as women (see Lorraine 1990). Women's
feminine/feminist identity is defined largely in terms of its otherness--its difference--with respect to
male identities (see Butler 1990). Hence, a feminist theorist is a literary woman who discursively or
culturally constitutes her identity in terms of its difference from male identities.
This reflexive nature of feminist theorizing makes it extremely difficult for postmodern feminists to
create comprehensive social theory. Instead, this type of feminist theory creates feminist
subjectivity. Although individual feminists build comprehensive social theory (e.g., Fraser 1989),
typically around the analysis and critique of male supremacy, postmodern feminist theory as such is
intended to eschew empirical explanation, which is restricted to the realm of male scientific activity.
Hence, explanatory and critical theories produced by men, for example by Marx, are deemed
"male" not only in the sense that they were fashioned by men but also in the sense that they do not
create feminist identity. This issue is tricky because in no way am I defending male theorists"
frequent blindspots with respect to theorizing household labor, childcare and violence against
women, among other things. These things need to be theorized. But their theorization must advance
the attempt to understand and oppose the total social system in which these things happen. It is
insufficient to view the object of theorizing as the self-construction of the feminist subject, although
that can be a legitimate political byproduct of totalizing social theory.
The assertion that feminist theory is defined by its difference from "male" theory suggests that it is
impossible for men to write feminist theory, a topic I address further in Chapter 6. It also implies
that it is impossible for men to create a feminist identity. Both of these positions are wrong,
reflecting postmodern difference theorists' separation of people into naturelike affinity groups
rooted in certain overt common interests and/or characteristics. It is not obvious that feminist theory
must be done by women, or that feminist theory is even uniquely about women. What it means to
write feminist theory, books, and culture depends entirely on what we mean by feminist, an issue
that has not been adequately resolved and to which I return later.
Feminist theory locates the oppression of women deep at the root of civilization. I develop an
outline of such a theory in the next chapter, where I propose the domination of reproduction as a
unifying theme for Marxist critical theory, postmodernism, and feminism. In this sense, feminist
theory as a theoretical logic makes perhaps its most fundamental contribution to postmodern
feminist critical theory in identifying the domination of reproduction as the distinctive way in which
women are oppressed (see O'Brien 1981, 1989). In the next chapter, I amplify the notion of the
domination of reproduction by extending feminism into Marxism and postmodernism. This move
depends on the politicization of feminist theory, deploying it in venues heretofore unanticipated by
many feminists. In terms I develop later in this book, I transcode feminism into critical theory and
postmodernism, both enriching them and identifying a common theoretical logic among them.
Although feminists who theorize create both themselves as feminists and a feminist culture, theory
also explores an object domain external to it. Theory's topic is not theory itself; that is metatheory.
Nor is it the feminist subject, although theory can theorize the political formation and deformation
of subjectivity as a legitimate topic of analysis. Feminist theorists must theorize the world and not
simply themselves; feminist subjectivity is objective, although all objectivity cannot be reduced to
issues of subjectivity.
Admittedly, work on the self can well be political, especially inasmuch as the personal is political
(see Benhabib 1992). But neither the self nor the transformation of interpersonal relations is the
only political agenda, as both the self-help and feminist movements suggest. A feminist critical
theory needs to focus on the mediations among subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and institutions.
Economic reductionism and postmodern neoliberalism ignore subjectivity and institutions,
respectively. Neither adequately addresses the intermediate linkages between the personal and
political. In fact, they ignore both the personal and political, which have to be understood in terms
of each other. Disavowing politics as male territory does not avoid it: Postmodern neoliberalism
reproduces the status quo by celebrating differences within it, failing to dig deeply underneath
apparent difference to identify common principles of administration and hierarchy that underlie the
production of stratified differences today.
In American political culture the self is elevated above the polity, much as Locke triumphs over
Rousseau. The celebration of the feminist self, defined in terms of its difference from the male
techno-phallogocentric subject, is no different from the celebration of other modalities of
subjectivity--gay, Hispanic, African-American. Although cultural pluralism is to be defended
against occidental ethnocentrism, it is hardly a valid utopian construct when it amounts to lip
service on the part of the dominant group and does not promote real difference. Difference theory is
certainly correct to defend the claims of individuals and groups against the state. But the narrowing
of difference theory into a politics of subjectivity tends to ignore the structural and institutional
nature of politics today, what Macpherson ( 1962) calls the politics of possessive individualism.
Although the ultimate aim of politics is to liberate subjectivity, this is not to be achieved via a
program of self-transformation involving therapies and technologies of adjustment, from twelvestep programs to aerobics.
Feminist consciousness-raising, characteristic of the first stage of the American women's movement
in the 1960s and 1970s, began with subjectivity, liberating women from sexist ideologies relegating
them to subordinate household and economic roles. But this "c-r" work moved beyond subjectivity,
recognizing that the goal of raised consciousness is transformational agency--the formation of
consensus and the mobilization of groups. Although first-stage feminists recognized that false
consciousness is self-imposed as well as imposed, the self was not the endpoint of social change but
only the beginning. Feminist subjectivity struggled to create intersubjectivity, and hence whole
social movements. Today, the women's movement, under sway of postmodernism and blocked by a
misogynist backlash, reverses this priority, subordinating politics to self-change. A postmodern
feminism gives voice to this, although, contradictorily, it also insists that the singular, stable self is
a relic of modernity, an issue I take up shortly.
Feminist theorizing not only constructs feminist/feminine identity, in Lacanian counterpart to
maleness. It also serves as a bridge between feminists, affiliating them to each other. But this is not
the concerted group formation of 1960s feminism, the opening of raised consciousness to activism.
Rather, postmodern feminist theorizing is a semiotic medium for constructing one's value as a
feminist in quotidian (including academic) exchanges with other women. Symbolic value is
attached to the depth and extent of cultivation of one's feminist sensibility, as reflected in the
seriousness of one's feminist-theoretical affiliation. The most serious feminists are those most "into"
feminist theory (although, again, this is not to deny the possibility that feminist theory can be an
exercise in comprehensive social theory, as it is for me here). This is especially true of postmodern
feminists, who stress the contribution of feminist theory to the formation of feminist identity. One's
theoreticity is represented by the degree to which one's feminist identity is an artifact of studied,
self-referential cultivation. These varying degrees of theoreticity position one hierarchically in
feminist community and feminist networks, especially in the university.
Among many academic women feminist theory is a highly valued activity, reflecting erudition and
gender commitment. Academic feminists traffic in feminist-theoretical ideas, texts, and citations,
thus adding value to their stature as feminists. Feminist-theoretical products exist as cultural works
demonstrating one's identity and commitment. In this sense, identity is matched by affiliation,
which in turn redoubles identity. Feminist affiliation as an academic language game takes place
through publication, teaching, and conferencing, the networks traditionally exploited by male
academics to further their careers.
Male theorists, even left-wing ones, build careers and charisma deliberately. But to suppose that the
feminist cultural and intellectual project is somehow unsullied by these contextual concerns misses
important parallels between feminist academic culture and the mainstream male version (sometimes
evocatively called "malestream"). Both cultures are often hierarchical, in spite of feminist lipservice, even sincere political commitment, to "feminist process" and democracy. This is not to
deny that senior feminists can and should actively mentor junior feminists, a necessary nurturing
relationship in any cross-generational endeavor. Indeed, that is the possibility of political education.
But feminist theorizing in its supposed elevation serves semiotically to distinguish those who "can"
from those who "cannot," creating a lopsided feminist community in which certain sisters are more
equal than others. I have said in this section that feminist theorizing both creates feminist identity
and serves as a semiotic medium for creating and distributing feminist cultural capital. Hence,
feminist affiliation is hierarchized into senior and junior feminists through the production and
reception of feminist theorizing--those who theorize and those for whom theorizing takes place as
gender education. To engage in feminist theorizing is largely a didactic activity, although it does not
transmit a canon, as orthodox Marxism does, but rather a certain sense of identity--what it means to
be feminist.
THE PROBLEM OF THE POSTMODERN FEMINIST
SUBJECT
Just here, postmodern feminism contradicts itself. On the one hand, it reduces feminist theorizing to
matters of identity and affiliation while, on the other hand, declaring subjective identity to be a
modernist relic ("death of the subject") and rejecting political community as a phallogocentric ruse.
There can be no postmodern subject, whether feminist or anything else. Barthes has already
declared the subject dead. Derrida deconstructs the stable, singular subject of traditional Western
philosophy. Foucault depositions the subject in order to understand the disciplinary society.
Interestingly, those attracted to postmodernism are frequently the same people who endorse various
versions of the politics of subjectivity. For example, some American symbolic interactionists have
rushed to embrace postmodernism, even though George Herbert Mead's and Herbert Blumer's
symbolic-interactionist social psychologies made ample use of the concept of subjectivity, in
violation of postmodernism's injunction against subjectivity (e.g., see Denzin 1991; Altheide 1985).
This is not to argue against applications of postmodern themes in empirical social analysis. I
strongly endorse those applications inasmuch as they help repoliticize critical theory after Adorno.
Foucault's work is relevant to the critical reorientation of criminology. Barthes and Derrida add
volumes to cultural sociology. Baudrillard contributes to the sociology of advertising. I, too,
plunder postmodern theories and concepts, which I adapt to the agenda of a critical cultural studies.
However, the valorization of subjectivity as a central theoretical and political construct, as in
feminism, directly contradicts the postmodern thesis of the decline of the subject, making
postmodern-feminist borrowings extremely problematic. Postmodernism suggests explicitly that
there is no such thing as a postmodern "self," or any other self for that matter. This is the basis of
Derrida's whole critique of Western philosophy's logocentrism and metaphysic of presence. Derrida
usefully deconstructs the notion of a stable subject capable of making truth claims about an external
world in unambiguous language. The self does not so much use language as get used by language,
which is seen to position the person in various language games unfolding according to their own
rules and internal logics.
As I ( 1992b) and others (e.g., Luke 1989) have argued, postmodernism adds a great deal to the
empirical and theoretical agendas of a critical social science. This book infuses critical theory with
postmodern theory and feminism, producing a useful theory of capitalist postmodernity. But there is
something contradictory about a postmodern politics of subjectivity, whether feminist or otherwise.
In fact, feminists who claim postmodernism do not read deeply enough into the postmodern
theoretical text but simply acquire certain trendy rhetorical flourishes that give their work cachet
and differentiate it from Marxism. There are numerous postmodern cultural commodities available
in the marketplace--television shows, music, haircuts, even theory. In my ( 1992a) Cultural Studies
as Critical Theory I distinguish between the theoretical postmodernism of Baudrillard, Derrida,
Lyotard, and Foucault, on the one hand, and a commodified postmodernism, on the other. This
commodified postmodernism mouths certain words like disintegration, decentering, and
deconstruction, adding a certain sign value ( Baudrillard!) to its theoretical practice ( Althusser!),
but failing to generate a program of postmodern selfhood apart from consumerism.
In my aforementioned cultural studies book, I suggest that postmodernism has become a consumer
movement, losing the valuable theoreticity that allows it to be integrated with German critical
theory. Most devotees of film director David Lynch know nothing of Lyotard. Lynch is considered
postmodern because that is one of the newest slogans used by reviewers and cultural taxonomists to
describe the offbeat and self-referential. This is not to deny that we can classify architecture and art
as genuinely postmodern (e.g., Portoghesi 1983) but to suggest that we must argue these terms,
deriving them from a theoretical system. Although certain postmodern feminists (e.g., Flax 1990)
have considered their postmodern investments carefully, I would observe that a feminist politics of
subjectivity has little to do with the work of Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard and
perhaps not much to do even with the technical apparatus of Lacan apart from an investment in
difference theory.
Feminists often call themselves postmodern in order to differentiate themselves from the projects of
male Marxism and German critical theory. As I said above, I believe that feminism can produce a
useful program of political subjectivity. But the notion of a distinctively postmodern feminist
subject defies postmodern theory's own rejection of any and all subjectivisms as illegitimate.
According to postmodern theory, theory cannot instruct people how to live in the sense of telling
them how to treat themselves and others. Postmodernism refuses the concept of identity and views
political affiliation as a mythic residue of modernist grand narratives. Understandably, feminists do
not concede everyday life to male supremacists. Nor should they. But the postmodernization of
feminism does not advance the project of a politics of subjectivity even if we ground that political
agenda in the development of feminist identity and affiliation. For most feminists, postmodernism
functions as a counter to male Marxism, giving feminism a certain leverage in this age of the "end
of communism." The notion of feminist selfhood implies that the feminist subject creates her
identity through her own choices. On the basis of this identity, she selects her affiliations, joining
feminist community. But postmodernism deemphasizes choice, arguing that the world, notably
language, chooses us, not the other way around. Feminists are of course correct to try to hold onto
agency, thus breaking out of the grids of patriarchal everyday life. Yet I doubt that this
revivification of agency is best achieved through postmodernism. Marxist critical theory is a much
better vehicle for the nurturance of feminist agency. Postmodernism best complements feminism
where it stresses our embeddedness in language and thus makes way for a cultural studies that, in
the case of feminism, becomes feminist film theory, or cinefeminism. For example, Foucault (
1977) analysis of discipline (think of his discussion of Bentham's hypothetical Panopticon) shows
the ways in which social control is accomplished through the various quotidian discourse /practices
comprising the literary institutions of power and discipline. Foucault is long on the demonstration
of social determination and short on the revelation of agency, which is not to deny that he can
inform the feminist project, as Fraser ( 1989) aptly indicates. In fact, Foucault informs feminism
(see Sawicki 1991) in his discussion of the institutions of heterosexuality and heterotextuality in
The History of Sexuality ( 1978).
Postmodernism, in deconstructing the discourse/ practices of the quotidian, debunks them but does
not eliminate them in helping author a new everyday life. It has been remarked often that
deconstruction's antifoundational relativism negates its political possibilities, although I am arguing
here that postmodern discourse theory can valuably flesh out the Frankfurt School's analysis of
mass culture. A postmodern feminism better leads to a feminist cultural studies (e.g., see Walters
1992), which demonstrates sexism at many discursive levels of experience, existence, and
expression, than to a notion of feminist subjectivity that creates its own identity. After Derrida,
there can be little doubt that identity is largely chimerical, just as political affiliation borders on
collectivism. This does not mean that feminists must accept Derrida to be feminist but to observe
that Derridean discourse theory's valuable contribution to feminist critical theory lies in its emphasis
on the encoding, engendering, entrapping power of cultural practices like film (see Mulvey 1988;
Lauretis 1984, 1987).
Postmodernism is thought to best Marxism, leading people who flee politics to do this through
postmodernism, even if postmodernism does not literally authorize the politics of subjectivity,
feminist or otherwise. In my view, this is why radical and cultural feminists gravitate to postmodern
Lacanian feminism. In this postpolitical age, the rejection of politics is conflated with the celebrated
eclipse of Marxism. And for most feminists, Marxism has always been a "male" discourse. One
thing leads to another. Feminists who reject Marxist politics increasingly do so through
postmodernism, which then inflects their own version of the politics of subjectivity and everyday
life. This is fatal where they conduct this move to the postpolitical through Lacanian feminism,
which introduces all sorts of bio(onto)logical constructs like the supposed difference between the
male realm of the symbolic and the female realm of the imaginary.
Although all of these theoretical positionings look extremely byzantine to the uninitiated, there is a
certain logic here. To be fair, most male Marxists have been an appropriately tempting target
because they stubbornly refuse to theorize male supremacy within, or to extend the logic of, Marx's
theory of alienated labor. I ( Shelton and Agger 1992) and other left feminists have maintained that
Marxism can be reinterpreted in a feminist direction, thus salvaging, indeed enriching, the leftist
political program (which, appropriately reconstructed, must include a politics of everyday life). But
feminism becomes increasingly radical and cultural, avoiding "male" politics, including the left
kind, like the plague. This is as much the fault of orthodox male Marxists as of defensive feminists.
By ignoring or denying the importance of the politics of sexuality and gender, Marxists have caused
feminists to decamp from the left--precisely what is happening today, as feminism is being inflected
by antipolitical postmodern themes.
For many people on the left, including feminists, postmodernism is the route they take to avoid
politics in general and Marxism in particular. Ultimately, there is no avoidance of politics, as the
Frankfurt School argued. The denial of politics (e.g., positivism) is perhaps the most potent political
stance of all. Yet it is increasingly clear that the Zeitgeist of the 1980s and 1990s is antipolitical,
occasioning projects like feminist postmodernism, no matter how contradictory such projects may
be in light of the postmodern denial of the subject. A return to subjectivity is occasioned by the
mistrust of politics and politicians, the world-historical enterprise of Marxism notably included.
This is perhaps unavoidable, given the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern-bloc state socialism
as well as the venality of American politics after Nixon and Reagan. To move "beyond" MarxismLeninism seems to require a "post" position of one sort of another-postmodernism,
poststructuralism, post-Marxism. Postmodernism serves this function best inasmuch as theorists
like Lyotard have blamed Marxist grand narratives for the meaninglessness and authoritarianism of
politics today Since its break with the male-dominated American New Left and its earliest grounds
in consciousness-raising groups, feminism has always addressed subjectivity, intersubjectivity,
identity, and affiliation. Friedan, Greer, and Steinem, liberal feminists all, intended the feminist
politics of subjectivity to initiate thoroughgoing social transformations in a way remarkably parallel
to the Frankfurt School's own Freudianized-Marxist politics of everyday life (e.g., Marcuse 1969).
And because these feminists were liberal and not leftist (few were in the 1960s), the recent collapse
of Bolshevist states segues into postmodern theory inasmuch as liberals, like neoconservatives, have
always accepted the conflation of Marx, Marxism, and Marxism-Leninism.
Perhaps postmodernism does not require its own rigorous interrogation inasmuch as it samples the
theoretical text playfully. Postmodemism leads to its own depoliticization because it presents itself
as performance, not as explanatory or critical social theory, an issue I raised in the preceding
chapter. Therefore it is not surprising that difference feminists do not treat postmodernism
theoretically, canonically, analytically, or critically but instead read and write it with a sense of
abandon. Indeed, this playfulness of writing and interpretation is authorized by the New French
Theorists themselves. It remains for those of us outside postmodemism (e.g., Kellner 1989a;
Aronowitz 1990; Luke 1989, 1992; Agger 1990, 1992b) to politicize postmodernism
sympathetically for the purposes of its integration with critical theory. That is to say,
postmodernism contains useful insights, even if it defies its own utilitarian exposition by political
theorists.
Although it is crucial to deconstruct linear positivist notions of the presuppositionlessly
representational text, this does not mean that deconstructively playful texts need to avoid scientific
explanation and political criticism. All texts can be read as undecidable. But some texts interrogate
the world in a systematic and critical way. The main contribution of postmodern discourse theory to
the cultural theory of the Frankfurt School is that it helps unpack cultural discourse /practices as
corrigible, perspectival versions. The codes of these texts can be cracked and then reformulated,
ever the possibility of social change. As I argued in the last chapter, postmodern discourse theory
offers critical theory useful ways of identifying ideological elements in discourse/practices
heretofore regarded as epiphenomenal by orthodox Marxists, especially in the realm of popular
culture. In particular, postmodern discourse theory helps critical theorists offer nuanced readings of
popular culture, hence demonstrating the possibility of the popular's transformation (a possibility
largely precluded by Adorno).
THEORIZING FEMINISM: THE TEXT IS A WOMAN
It is certainly possible to repoliticize a postmodern feminism once one identifies its theoretical logic
as the critique of the hierarchy of value (men) over valuelessness (women), as I do in the following
chapter. It is crucial to decouple feminist theory from feminist politics in the sense that a
comprehensive feminist critical theory should be informed by and inform, but not reduced to, the
strategic exigencies of the women's movement. This may seem like a strange sentiment for a
Marxist. But Western Marxists since Lukacs and the Frankfurt School have been arguing for
exactly the same thing in the parallel sense that they decoupled as well as dialectically joined
critical theory and working-class politics. Although critical theory addresses the alienation of labor,
as Marx did, it develops a much more comprehensive social theory that addresses but is not limited
to the tactical exigencies of class struggle. Western Marxism insists on the nonidentity of theory and
practice in order to retain theory's autonomy at a time when all thought is rendered affirmative.
Liberal feminist theory has been insufficiently disentangled from the official feminist practice of the
mainstream women's movement and from the politics of feminist subjectivity, causing feminist
theory to have a purely tactical function. Although little is more important today than protecting the
right of women to have legal abortions, feminist theory must transcend single issues, whether prochoice politics or the feminist self. Similarly, although it is crucial for women to have healthy selfesteem and bond with other women, identity-formation and affiliation are inadequate political goals.
Feminist theory, like critical theory and postmodernism, must integrate analytical themes heretofore
neglected by it, thus arriving at a comprehensive theoretical logic--the project of this book.
Feminists, critical theorists, and postmodernists approach this theoretical unification from different
directions, although they can arrive at the same destination, recognizing, with incredulity perhaps,
that they were really speaking the same language all along.
The decoupling of feminist theory and practice does not mean that we abandon feminist practice. It
means rather that feminist theory needs to achieve distance from as well as dialectical contact with
the everyday exigencies of personal and political struggle in order to theorize autonomously above,
as well as about, the fray. Feminist theory needs to step back from its role as theoretical practice in
order to comprehend and thus practice. This is not to argue for theoretical purity or value-freedom.
Rather, I suggest that most species of feminist theory are too bound up with the nurturance of
feminist subjectivity and intersubjectivity, thus losing comprehensive perspective.
My critique does not apply to systematic theorists of male supremacy, of whom there are notable
ones (e.g., Firestone 1970; Eisenstein 1979; Hartmann 1979; Delphy 1984; Walby 1990). These
theorists have contributed very important insights to what I am calling a feminist postmodern
critical theory, notably in helping us theorize the relationship between what Marxists call
production and reproduction (also see Brodribb 1992, for a trenchant critique of postmodernism).
Indeed, the theory of reproduction is a central feature of my formulation of feminist postmodern
critical theory, owing much to left-feminist capitalist-patriarchy theory. Nevertheless, leftfeminist
theory is not dominant in American feminism, even in the academy. Radical and cultural feminisms
are being strengthened by Lacanian postmodern feminism, described above in this chapter. Left
feminism is increasingly eclipsed by noneconomic feminisms that utterly reject the attempt to
connect Marxism and feminism.
Theories of patriarchal capitalism attempt to relate male supremacy to capitalism. Orthodox
Marxism resists this integration on the grounds that household labor and childcare do not directly
produce surplus value. But, as I noted above, it is possible to extend Marx's analysis of the logic of
capital to include unwaged domestic labor, as the early theorists (e.g., Dalla Costa and James 1973)
of the Wages for Housework movement tried to do. Indeed, I argue in the next chapter that it is
wrong to assume the initial separability of Marxism and feminism, only to connect them later by
way of elaborate theoretical maneuvers (er, man-euvers)! One can uncover a common logic in the
feminist critique of male supremacy and the Marxist critique of the alienation of labor, a version of
which the Frankfurt School called the critique of domination. This logic combines theories
heretofore regarded as separate, effacing the Marxism/feminism distinction altogether.
These explanatory and critical theories of capitalist patriarchy are increasingly abandoned by
feminist theorists precisely because they consort with Marxism. Indeed, socialist feminists have
been relatively unconcerned with issues of feminist identity-formation and affiliation, preferring to
concentrate on more structural problems of the gender/class relationship. This is not to say that the
theoretical logic of left-feminist capitalist-patriarchy theory precludes a politics of subjectivity.
Virtually all feminist theorists agree that the politics of the personal are somehow related to
structural issues of politics and culture. The extent to which feminist theorists emphasize the
personal is largely a matter of degree. By concentrating on the gender/class relationship, socialist
feminists do not preclude the analysis of the feminist politics of subjectivity, especially as those
"micro" issues relate to the "macro" issues of feminist political economy.
Left feminists like me argue that the appropriate link between the micro and macro occurs at the
level of household labor and childcare (see Shelton and Agger 1992; DeVault 1991), clearly a
venue of feminist subjectivity and intersubjectivity. But whereas Lacanian feminists stress issues of
feminist identity and cultural affiliation, socialist feminists stress the link between women's unpaid
reproduction of the household, men and children and the production of surplus value. The
domination of reproduction takes place through the sexual division of labor, which restricts most
women to unpaid housework and childcare and underpaid market labor.
Although cultural feminists and capitalist-patriarchy feminists seem to be at odds, one can develop
a cultural-feminist analysis of the domination of reproduction that does not require a
bio(onto)logical Lacanian underpinning. My version of feminist literary and cultural theory
endorses the thesis of the male-supremacist/capitalist/modernist domination of reproduction, a
theoretical logic more fully elaborated in the following chapter, where I elaborate my notion that the
text is a woman. Just as women are dominated by structures of capitalist patriarchy in the household
and labor market, so is textuality dominated by labor and science in the realm of culture (precisely
why postmodern feminists must not endorse the French feminist relegation of women to the realm
of the imaginary). The text is seen to belong purely to the realm of reproduction (reflection, representation), where in fact the text helps produce material reality by presenting or representing the
world unalterably. This is the special project of the positivist social sciences, which deceptively
freeze reality, thereby, through the ideologizing postulate of social laws, attempting to bring it
about-hence "proving" the posited laws to be true after all. For example, when sociologists proclaim
the nuclear family to be an essential feature of modernity (while recognizing that people live
productively in many different arrangements of intimacy), they (re)produce a familied world in
which women are subordinate to men and capital. I ( Agger 1989c) have called this feature of
literary reproduction heterotextuality, suggesting the way in which social texts like positivist social
science normalize and normativize various types of social hierarchy, which I characterize as the
domination of production over reproduction in its most generic sense.
Like women, heterotexts do much important, if invisible, work. Culture is not merely
epiphenomenal, as mechanical readings of Marx suggest. Horkheimer ( 1972), in his programmatic
statement "Traditional and Critical Theory," suggested that so-called base and superstructure are
becoming more tightly interlocked in late capitalism, giving lie to casual dismissals of critical
theory as idealist. The text (as a "woman") struggles to liberate itself from heterotextuality, refusing
to reproduce its own subordination to a productivist rule of value by representing/ reproducing the
world as inert, naturelike. This notion of heterotextuality broadens the concept of heterosexuality,
which is now understood not narrowly as sexual orientation but rather as an ensemble of familied
practices that reproduce hierarchy. Women, like texts, participate in a heterosexist political
economy that wants to keep them out of sight, hence perpetuating their subordination to male
productivist value. By the same token, as I ( 1989a) have argued in Fast Capitalism, ideologies
today are dispersed into a postmodern everyday life, eluding deconstructive triangulation. All of the
entreaties for consumption and conformity cluttering our quotidian environment, particularly
purveyed through popular culture, zip by unread (and are thereby uncritically enacted).
This critical cultural theorizing locates a feminist politics of subjectivity and culture within an
encompassing structural theory of domination, or heterotextuality. Whereas postmodern feminism
defines domination in terms of men and maleness, this version of feminism defines domination with
respect to the relational dynamics between the realms and practices of production and reproduction,
including market labor, housework, and cultural creation and reception. This is precisely how a
feminist theoretical logic can attain a universality denied to the antianalytic, antipolitical stances of
Lacanian feminists, who would change the world by way of feminist cultural practice and the study
groups that nurture feminist identity and affiliation. Although, as I said above, consciousnessraising is necessary in any contemporary political strategy, what it means to have feminist
consciousness is very much unresolved, especially given that Lacanians define feminist being
negatively with respect to male being. Lacanian feminists thus acquiesce to the prevailing sexual
division of labor, which relegates women to the realm of reproduction, obscuring the fact that
reproduction produces.
We ought not to define feminism and feminist existence simply with reference to maleness lest
women--w omen--become simply men's other. We should define feminism politically and
personally in terms of women's structural locations in discourse, everyday life, household, and
economy. Instead of defining women in terms of men, we should describe them in terms of
reproduction's relation to production, which is not necessarily the same issue. This develops a
feminist theoretical logic that can double as comprehensive social theory. Once we assume that
feminism is only "about" women, then we deny it all sorts of analytical and political possibilities,
especially when it comes to finding common cause with people (called men) who share similar
theoretical aims. In this book, I define those common aims in terms of an assault on the domination
of production over reproduction, a structural principle of domination that is global in its scope and
variety.
A feminist theoretical logic can provide useful insights into the relationship between production and
reproduction that help formulate a feminist postmodern critical theory in contemporary terms. This
strengthens and preserves feminism. If we conceive every text--every act of reproduction-as a
woman, we universalize feminist concerns about the hierarchy of (male) production over (female)
reproduction, recognizing that this hierarchization plays out in any number of ways, involving class
and race as well as gender. It is crucial to recognize that textuality is a thoroughly productive
practice and not simply an act of cultural reproduction or representation. The dichotomies of
material/ideal, economics /culture, and man/woman are really hierarchies, as a critical Derridean
analysis suggests. It is tempting to accept these dichotomies as both invariant and separable, hence
reproducing them. Lacanian feminism does exactly that, restricting feminist theory to the realm of
culture and ignoring the fact that culture is a thoroughly material practice, just as economics is
thoroughly cultural and personal.
Feminist theory thus addresses all heterotextual hierarchies of production over the "merely"
reproductive. It is in this sense that a feminist theoretical logic identifying production's priority over
reproduction broadens the Marxist critique of domination into a critical theory of civilization.
Without this theoretical logic, albeit extended into domains heretofore regarded as off-limits to
feminists (e.g., class, race, the environment), German critical theory remains at the early stage of
Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of domination in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The problem with
their critique is that they do not fully understand the ways in which domination is a "micro" as well
as "macro" practice. Their critique of domination does not ground itself in discourse and everyday
life, even though Marcuse ( 1955) uses Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the internalization of
domination. Marcuse deploys the Freudian apparatus to show that everyday life can be "erotized,"
fundamentally liberated, offering a critical theory of resistance as well as of surplus repression that
merges nicely with left-feminist theory.
In the next chapter, I further explore the feminist-inspired theory of the domination of production
over reproduction as the central logic of feminist postmodern critical theory. In this chapter, I have
tried to make it clear that a Lacanian postmodern feminism avoids power and history, ever the
pitfall of positivists and liberals. Postmodern feminism fatally capitulates to the hierarchized
dichotomies of civilization in endorsing them as bio(onto)logical sexual differentiations-,difference. Its adherents forget Derrida's point that difference often conceals hierarchy, thus
producing difference theories that relegate women to their "proper" place in the Lacanian realm of
the imaginary.
Feminist theory powerfully adds to critical theory when it is redeveloped as a comprehensive
theoretical logic applying to all sorts of hierarchized activities, not only the activities of women.
Women are a text on which male-supremacist, productivist civilization imprints supposedly
ontological values, inducing women, like culture, to accept their inferiorized lot. This is the role of
heterotextuality, which reproduces production's dominion by appearing only to re-present society as
nature (e.g., the alleged "laws" of positivist-sexist social science). Like all textuality, women
produce when they reproduce (men). For women to recognize this empowers them, like texts, to
become strong agents in history--scientists and theorists as well as children's writers.
Chapter
Four
Producing Reproduction: The Logic
Feminist Postmodern Critical Theory
RETAINING
PRIMACY
THE
CONCEPT
OF
of
STRUCTURAL
The theoretical logic of the feminist postmodern version of critical theory I am proposing turns on
the issue of the alleged primacy of production-paid labor. In broadening the Frankfurt School's
critique of domination, which was itself a broadening of Marx's analysis of the logic of capital, I
seek an axial principle of civilization that has served to oppress people across time, place, culture,
class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Identifying such a principle risks oversimplification. But the
theoretical payoff is immense in the sense that I can make differences similar, thus suggesting
common bases of critique and struggle that unite heretofore differentiated, even divided, groups. It
is in this vein that I have challenged the notion, above, that Marxism and feminism are different
theoretical systems and address different "subjects"--class and gender, for example, or labor and
women. Indeed, the task of this chapter is to show that feminism is Marxism and Marxism
feminism, making way for other theoretical mergers.
A unified critical theory needs to address issues of structural primacy, assuming, with Marx, that the
world system, to use a Wallersteinian turn of phrase, is indeed arranged around certain fundamental
principles of social organization. Modernity has been structured axially so that certain hierarchies
are reproduced through bottom-up as well as top-down social behavior. Marx's analysis of ideology,
Gramsci's analysis of hegemony, and Lukacs's analysis of reification began to address the way in
which hierarchy is self-produced as well as imposed. An interstitial critical theory addresses
principles of mediation between what Habermas ( 1984, 1987b) calls system and lifeworld, thus
articulating strategies of organization and resistance to these mediating principles of domination. It
is simply wrong to suppose, with Althusser, that certain "structures in dominance" are somehow
independent of "subjects," as in his history-without-a-subject argument. It is equally wrong to
suppose, with French feminism and Rorty's pragmatism, that a politics of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity can autonomously transform large-scale systems. I believe it is dear that mass
social movements must arise from and inform lifeworld struggles if the world order is to be
transformed at the levels of both deep structure and surface, a distant prospect at best.
Indeed, the implausibility of concerted global social change occasions Lyotard ( 1984) postmodern
rejection of Marxist grand narratives as misguided stories of transformation that only make the bad
worse. His description of the difficulties often involved in accounts of change is not wrong. I only
dispute his notion that the scale and scope of Marxist narratives (big rather than small) are somehow
problematic. I would argue not that we should abandon grand narratives but that we should refresh
timeworn large stories with new empirical evidence and better theorizing--precisely the project of
critical theory since Marx. Once we abandon classical Marxism as an exhaustive narrative, we are
free to improvise theoretically in ways that need not call into question the very notion of totalizing
structural primacy (e.g., the logic of capital or male supremacy) but only particular versions of it
that may not comport with the world today.
This sort of talk risks positivism. To call for Marxist engagement with empirical data suggests a
positivist Marxism. This need not be the case. If we establish dialectical principles of epistemology
and playful methodology (see my 1989b Reading Science), we can allow empirical evidence to
refresh theoretical arguments. Indeed, we must do so, if we are not to be surprised by events.
Perestroika in the Soviet Union has made a mockery of economistic Marxism, which had already
been abandoned by Western Marxists more than seventy years ago. I am not calling for Marxist
journals or books that contain hypermethodological treatments of survey-research data, although
there is nothing in principle that should disqualify those presentations on either epistemological or
rhetorical grounds. I am calling for rigorous engagements of theory with the world, acknowledging
that theory is already in the world and necessarily transforms it.
It is crucial to disentangle positivism as a socio(onto)logical strategy from all possible versions of
empirical social science. In The Discourse of Domination ( Agger 1992b) I argue for a dialectical
social science that avoids positivism and yet enriches grand-narrative-like theoretical logics with
empirical readings of the social world. Many developments in the postpositivist philosophy of
science, from Kuhn to Feyerabend (see Diesing 1991), suggest that data do not "make or break"
theoretical models but only confirm what scientists think they always knew--knowledge already
framed by dominant paradigms. Of course, paradigms can change, as the shifts from Ptolemy to
Copernicus or Newton to Einstein indicate.
A dialectical social science integrates theory and empirical evidence in a nondeterministic way. For
example, German critical theory retains Marx's theory of the logic of capital but adds a critique of
state intervention and cultural domination to explain that capitalism persists, despite Marx's
expectation of its demise, because of certain unforeseen coping mechanisms like the expansive state
and popular culture. In turn, these theoretical revisions make way for further revisions. As I have
argued in my discussion of feminist theory, the domestic-labor debate within feminism challenges
Marxists to expand the concept of value to include domestic labor and other aspects of caregiving as
well as work in the informal sector of the economy. Theoretical concepts, like the structures they
describe, are elastic, changing in response to historical transformations and in turn allowing those
transformations to be interpreted in intelligible ways. Good science allows its theoretical modeling
of the world to be surprised.
As Kuhn and many others have pointed out, these theoretical revisions do not take place simply
through the accumulation of piecemeal empirical evidence. Rather, theories are paradigms or
general frameworks within which evidence is given a consistent interpretation. Eventually,
scientists confront evidence so troubling that it cannot be conveniently explained within the
particular paradigmatic frame of reference but requires wholesale paradigm shifts, as Kuhn called
them. Marxism is such a paradigm, not a set of lawful propositions produced by hypothesis testing.
As a paradigm, Marxism both responds to circumstances and remakes circumstances through its
own theoretical practice, which involves both knowledge and critique. In postmodern terms,
paradigmatic science is a story whose plot permits embellishments and segues to suit the audience.
Plot changes are to be dictated by the confrontation of history with imagination, not by political
orthodoxy.
This account of the philosophy of science challenges Marxist positivism which, like all versions of
positivism, treats Marxism as verifiable with respect to the representational analysis of an external
world "out there." Marxism is dialectical because, like all social sciences, it participates in the world
it theorizes, notably as a political actor. In this vein, Marx in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach said
that the purpose of theory is to produce a new world, not simply passive representational truth. As
such, truth is historical in the sense that it works toward a world as yet unrealized. Theorizing,
which includes political critique, intends to bring a certain world into being, not an intractable,
ontological Being. What existentialists call being-in-the-world, or existence, cannot be separated
from history, which is forever indeterminate inasmuch as the future does not disclose itself in the
present (thus suggesting parallels between existentialism and Western Marxism, best exploited by
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre). For Marxists, truth is possibility, inspiring action.
Although new knowledge does not falsify or disprove a theoretical framework in the sense of
disabling it entirely, new knowledge may suggest the need for new frameworks that can account for
it. Data are always constructed by the theoretical language game at hand. Accordingly, they can be
ignored or interpreted perspectivally. Household labor is a good example. Orthodox Marxists
simply deny that household labor is productive labor, with reference to Marx's original notion of
value-producing activity in Capital. This cannot be proven or disproven with evidence but only
challenged from within the framework of a different theoretical system--for instance, feminism.
When Marxists confront the problem of household labor, either they dismiss it as a nonproblem or
they integrate it by modifying their own theoretical logic.
In this sense, data are dialectical. Not outcomes of an inevitable, eternal social nature, they
inherently possess a certain political fluidity inasmuch as they can be transformed, in part by
recognizing their intrinsic historicity. In this sense, theory affects practice, even though theory
cannot be reduced to practice. Indeed," theory is a special type of practice, one that affords a certain
reflexivity or self-understanding. The world instructs theory only if theorists are willing to adapt
their own theoretical logics in ways that account for history's indeterminacy, something that
orthodox Marxists have been reluctant to do, thereby losing nearly all theoretical and political
validity. This is why orthodox Marxism is an embarrassingly easy target for post-Marxists,
postmodernists, and feminists, who can readily point to societal changes unforeseen by Marx.
Little is sacred in the era of postmodern capitalism. Although I am a Marxist in the sense that I
believe Marx provided the best example of a totalizing critical theory, every proposition of Marx is
subject to debate today. Indeed, I conceive of my project here as a broadening of Marxism to
address theoretical logics and topics heretofore deemed off-limits to most Marxists. I retain Marx's
basic analysis of the self-contradictory logic of capital, the epicenter of his theoretical system, but I
reformulate that notion of structural primacy as the principle of reproduction's domination by
production (which augments the Frankfurt School's critique of domination, itself an elaboration of
Marx's analysis of the logic of capital).
Marx was fundamentally correct to recognize capitalism as a totalizing social system that
inexorably colonizes the whole world system, hence creating the conditions of its own demise. That
is what is meant by the logic of capital--a self-propelling structural mechanism that expands ever
outward and inward. I do not think that Marx understood the full implications of his theory of
structural primacy, particularly ignoring the extent to which culture and the human sensibility and
body could be colonized by systemserving imperatives. In Frankfurt School terms, Marx lacked a
theory of the culture industry and of surplus repression. In this book, I synthesize theoretical
developments after Marx, including German critical theory, New French Theory, and feminist
theory, in order to revise and revive Marx's theoretical logic, which remains the original exemplar
of comprehensive social theory that seeks to join theory and practice. I retain Marx's idea that there
is an underlying structural logic to postmodern capitalism that can be expressed theoretically to
explain all domination. In this age of difference, such contentions are subject to ready ridicule. Even
to call oneself Marxist, or to admire Marx's theoretical systematicity, is suspect. Critics point to the
collapse of communism as proof that Marxist prophecy has failed, disqualifying all comprehensive
critical theory as a result. This is precisely the appeal of postmodernism, which not only declares
the death of Marxism but the eclipse of all theoretical systems and political ideologies. These things
are so inextricably linked that it is difficult even to have this sort of discussion about Marxist
revisionism. Postmoderns simply dismiss this project as irrelevant. Feminists, too, reach for their
pens when confronted with supposedly phallogocentric theory ("male Marxism") that wants to
integrate--ingest?--feminist insights.
Can we develop a theory that privileges structural primacy, regardless of how we conceptualize that
primacy? Does the social world still (or did it ever) integrate around various principles of structural
primacy, whether the logic of capital, domination, male supremacy, or, as I argue here, the
domination of reproduction? To say that this question is empirical does not mean one can simply
gather positive data that resolve the question of structural primacy without reference to
paradigmatic argumentation. Who would have guessed that Marx's various writings, from the 1844
manuscripts through the Manifesto to Capital, would have spawned so much internal debate about
the adequacy of concept formation as well as empirical and political applications? The
undecidability of (Marxist) language ensures that a heroic exegesis of Marx cannot resolve all of
these issues. I maintain that one must evaluate theoretical adequacy with reference to the analytical
and political work that theory does and not with reference to sacred texts, however important these
texts may be as theoretical exemplars.
The "work that theory does" is not a simple utilitarian criterion according to which any theory will
suffice as long as it produces testable hypotheses or revolutions. To say that theory must do work
means that it must comport with the contemporary world and not remain blind to lively issues. To
return to the domestic-labor example again, it is clear that the relationship between market and
household labor is a central structural problem for women, particularly American women under age
55, 75 percent of whom do "double duty" as both income earners and homemakers (see Hochschild
1989; Shelton 1992). Marxists cannot comfortably ignore the relationship between the paid-work
force and housework force, denying the productivity of domestic labor on doctrinal grounds.
I am not saying that the precise relationship between market and household labor stares us in the
face. This relationship must be theorized. But a comprehensive critical theory should not ignore the
domestic-labor question inasmuch as it is a real structural problem in contemporary capitalism.
What makes it "real"?--say, "realer" than other social problems like teen-age drug use or gang
crime? Again, this issue must be resolved with reference to theoretical logics, inviting a certain
lamentable, if inescapable, theoretical circularity. The very notion of "domestic labor" is
theoretically constructed. Few houseworkers would recognize their activities as domestic labor
without already understanding the theoretical meanings of these terms, which are produced through
what Althusser calls a theoretical practice.
Therefore, it is to the various theoretical practices of the day that we must turn if we are properly to
adjudicate the question about what matters in the way of social problems, which in turn dictate
ways in which empirical evidence--history--is allowed to transform (deepen, extend, qualify) extant
social theories. There are no easy answers here. One establishes an argument for a particular
principle of structural primacy with reference to data, which are themselves already theoretical
constructs. Positivists seek to escape this vicious circle by establishing epistemological criteria of
presuppositionless representation. But methodology, which is often used to vouchsafe validity, is
nothing but a form of rhetoric--a way of making arguments artfully. Methodology solves no
intellectual problems. Indeed, it only creates them. This is not to abandon method, including
quantitative method, but only to recognize that method is a text like any other, which we can
understand only by approaching it simultaneously from within and without, a process that Sartre (
1963, 1976) called the progressive-regressive method.
BEYOND POSTSTRUCTURALISM
My argument for structural primacy in social analysis challenges Derridean poststructuralism,
which belongs to the overall project of postmodernism. The notion that we have somehow moved
beyond structures and can thus dispense with structural analysis is a popular one, especially among
postmodern theorists who conflate structuralism with Marxist authoritarianism and determinism.
Althusser is a key figure here inasmuch as he is the frequent target of New French Theorists since
Derrida. Althusser ( 1970, 1971; Althusser and Balibar 1970) endorses a structuralist Marxism that
is essentially Bolshevist in its political theory and strategy. Although there is a good deal of affinity
between certain Althusserian phrasings and the work of the Frankfurt School, for example their
analyses of ideology as what Althusser calls a "lived practice," they differ politically in substantial
ways. As I remarked earlier, New French Theory arose out of the 1968 May Movement in France,
pitting a poststructuralist analysis against Althusserian and other structuralisms.
The issue of structure has a peculiarly Gallic flavor. Debates since Durkheim run the length of
recent French thought, including Sartre, MerleauPonty, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault,
and Lyotard. In effect, these debates have involved issues of agency versus determinism. In
Germany, debates about agency have taken a rather different form inasmuch as German critical
theory took its bearings from Marx and thus conducted its disputes about agency and determinism
on a more overtly political plane. For the French these issues have been largely philosophical,
mythological, and linguistic, reflecting the comparatively weaker position of Marxism as a
theoretical practice in France. German critical theorists identified themselves much more clearly as
Marxists than did their French counterparts, thus conducting their own debates about structuralism
in terms of substantive social and political theory. For the French, these social and political issues
were somewhat submerged in disputes about the roles of consciousness and language in social
practice.
The influence of French poststructuralism has been significant in North America, where leftist
politics and social movements are nearly absent. In the United Kingdom and Germany,
philosophical debates about agency and structure have been conducted much closer to political
struggle, reflecting important comparative differences among these political cultures. Neo-Marxian
arguments for what I have been calling structural primacy have been less convincing in France and
the United States, where social and cultural theory is increasingly marked by a poststructural
commitment to difference and pluralism. Again, this is not necessarily consistent with Derrida
himself inasmuch as strict Derrideanism would appear to disqualify the politics of subjectivity and
identity, as I discussed in Chapter 3. Nevertheless, it is apparent that poststructuralism has
flourished in political cultures in which a significant left alternative has been absent (or, as in
France, where the left alternative was equivalent to the neo-Stalinism of the French Communist
Party in the case of Althusser).
The argument for structural primacy turns on one's relationship to the poststructural and postmodern
arguments against what Lyotard calls grand narratives. I have already suggested that this
relationship should be determined by one's empirical reading of history, although I have also
acknowledged that empiricism is necessarily contextualized by pregiven theoretical frameworks
within which empirical data are constructed. Thus, to phrase my earlier argument somewhat
differently, I cannot just appeal to "facts" that reveal or disclose structure's primacy, for example, in
the case of capitalist-patriarchy theory or Marx's analysis of the logic of capital. I must construct
these facts by way of theories of structural primacy, which are supported by facts that I enlist in
their favor. Nevertheless, having said all of this in a Kuhnian vein, I maintain that the argument for
structural primacy hinges on a reading of history animated by certain comprehensive theoretical
logics or narratives. Thus, to tell history's story in modernity requires recourse to structural
arguments in order to proceed with the story both synchronically and diachronicary.
Without structuring narratives, history simply makes no sense. Of course, Nietzschean-influenced
postmodernists would discount any meaning in history! I am not saying a priori that meaning exists;
we give history meaning by historicizing it: writing it, theorizing it, attempting to change it. By
telling history's "story" we suggest both plot and resolution. At the margin, existentialists instruct us
that history has neither plot nor resolution. But it is an act of Sartrean ( 1956) bad faith not to accept
the challenge posed by the indeterminacy of the human condition, which, as Heidegger ( 1962)
remarked in Being and Time, is characterized by our reckoning with our own mortality. This is not
to suggest that poststructuralism is simply nihilism, an argument frequently heard, especially from
the right. Relativism and relativity are values in themselves, even if they conceal their value
orientations underneath the veneer of cosmic disinterest. As for postmodernists, irony is secret
political theory, even if it eschews politics and power, rejecting the polity as a venue of meaning
today. Rather, poststructuralism and postmodernism acquiesce to social fate by denying themselves
access to the sort of world-historical storytelling engaged in by millenarians like Hegel and Marx.
They limit their options to deconstruction, lacking a positive political program.
I will readily concede that all structuring narratives can be deconstructed against themselves,
showing their ample limitations--self-contradictions, false closure, omissions, aporias,
Prometheanism. But this does not mean that the poststructural aversion to totalizing social theory,
with its political agenda, is preferable, especially at a time when the avoidance of politics is perhaps
the most potent form of political advocacy, ceding the public arena to elites. The marginal
deconstructibility of all grand narratives does not decide in favor of small narratives, which are
equally deconstructible. Small politicians can become small tyrants. Multiculturalism, based on
difference theory, does not avoid perspectivity, even though it pretends to avoid totalizing political
agendas. All perspectives are agendas (totalizations, structurations), no matter how much they may
posture as agendaless, representing only the "voices" of those in whose name they speak.
Structuralism has been usefully reformulated by Giddens ( 1984) in his so-called structuration
theory. He well recognizes that one need not choose between agency and determination. In this
sense, he finds a course between the more reductionist structuralism of Althusser and the
poststructuralism of Derrida. Similarly, and much before him, the Frankfurt theorists, believing that
they were following Marx in this, suggested a dialectical social theory that had room for both the
micro and macro, agency and institutions. Derrideans are correct to draw attention to the selflimiting tendencies of all narratives, great and small. But an acknowledgment of these limitations
does not decide in favor of a narrativelessness or small-narrativeness that paints with finer brush
strokes. In the end, all stories misrepresent, even those that pretend to avoid representationality in
favor of more deconstructive postures.
The fad of the poststructural goes hand in hand with the postmodern fad of post-Marxism. At a time
when all political systems seem suspect (postmodernism), it is equally tempting to suppose that all
theoretical systems or narratives are bankrupt (poststructuralism). The aversion to politics is
matched by a resistance to theory (see Man 1986) paralleling the differentiation between
poststructuralism and postmodernism. Here, as elsewhere, we are severely constrained by the
dualisms of bourgeois civilization, forced to choose between structure and agency, even if strict
Derrideans disqualify any talk of agency as logocentric. The Frankfurt theorists, Lukacs, Gramsci,
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, certain feminists, and Giddens suggest the possibility of dialectical social
theories that refuse the duality of agency and structure, hence avoiding the fashions of
poststructuralism and postmodernism. All of the people just listed embrace politics, an alien stance
for Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. For this reason, perhaps, they all seem more characteristic of the
1960s and 1970s, when the young left in universities were plowing through Western Marxism and
feminism in order to find concepts with which to explain their own experiences of alienation and
utopian imagination.
One almost has the sense that the aversion to structural analysis inversely relates to the structuration
of the world system as well as lifeworld. The more structures matter, the less credence they are
given by Derrideans. To be sure, one must strictly separate structuralism as a substantive social
theory from linguistic, philosophical, and mythological structuralism, the difference between
German and French versions of it. Derrida is not necessarily to be slighted for avoiding a
substantive theory of the social, even though his oeuvre encodes a secret theory of social texts.
Nevertheless, there is a striking parallel between poststructural aversions to both substantive and
philosophical varieties of structural analysis. Both varieties of poststructuralism (postmodern postMarxism and Derrideanism) are formulated in response to all sorts of totalizing philosophical,
political, and cultural frameworks since the Enlightenment, including but not limited to Marxism.
I have already discussed the politics of totality in my opening chapter. It is an article of faith among
poststructuralists and postmodernists that totality theories are philosophically inadequate and
politically wrongheaded. Again, I would suggest that the assault on totality inversely relates to the
empirical reality of global totalization, which proceeds under the banner of capitalist modernization.
CNN, McDonald's, and Coke headline this totalization, as do all sorts of corporate and political
interlocks that increasingly integrate the world. The internationalization of capitalist modernity
parallels the homogenization of quotidian experience, ironically read to suggest the end of ideology
and great-power conflict. But what Mandel ( 1975) and Jameson ( 1991) call multinational or
postmodern capitalism should occasion a greater emphasis on totality inasmuch as the cultural and
economic logics of capital are, in Habermas's terms, colonizing.
This (totalizing) analysis of the cultural and economic logics of capital is regarded suspiciously by
non- and post-Marxists, for whom the world is characterized by difference and heterogeneity. As I
suggested earlier, this is not an argument that can be resolved outside of the explanatory
frameworks within which evidence is constructed as meaningful. Non-Marxists will not interpret
the world according to the logic-of-capital argument, instead explaining global capitalist
modernization in terms of healthy postmodernity. This requires us to debate the meaning of terms
like modernity and postmodernity, a taxonomic exercise that is really an exercise in substantive
social theory, allowing one to decide the theoretical significance of the opening of a Russian stock
market or the franchising of American fast-food outlets in the People's Republic of China.
Poststructuralism positions itself with respect to postmodernity, arguing that in the postmodern era
structures of language and society disappear (or never existed)--they decenter, to use the technical
language properly. But I maintain that postmodernity is not characterized by the dissolution of
structures. Structures of discourse and society endure; they are increasingly dispersed into the
quotidian, one of the distinctive characteristics of practice and experience in fast capitalism. The
supposed break between modernity and postmodernity is largely illusory (see Huyssen 1986)
inasmuch as postmodernity is a higher stage of capitalism and not a qualitative break with structures
of domination (at least not yet). There can be a genuine postmodernity (what Marx called the end of
prehistory) in which the continuum of capitalist modernity is ruptured. But that is not the sense of
the term postmodern typically in use (e.g., see Denzin 1991: pp. 26-27).
Domination is always structural. We can simply infer structural primacy from the reality of
domination. As I have said repeatedly, there is no "simply" about this project because "domination"
is a theoretical artifact and not a thing-in-itself available to every representation. Poststructural
theories of society (e.g., Brown 1987) ignore domination because they assume wrongly that the
world is all text. As a materialist, I contend that there is an outside to texts, as well as certain
internal transactions of power within the nucleic societies of texts. Derrideans assume the
dominationlessness of texts because they privilege the literary as a site of playfulness and freedom
of expression. Think of Barthes ( 1975) notion of the pleasure of the text in this regard. Yet a
literary-theoretic version of critical social theory identifies the many ways in which texts, notably
including the dispersed texts of money, science, edifice, and figure, contribute to domination.
Consider advertising (see Williamson 1978; Wernick 1991). Although postmodern advertising
campaigns play on their own artfulness, it is clear that advertising is an artifice of power,
reproducing certain lifestyles, hence discipline and surplus value. Although one can read beer
campaigns (e.g., "Why Ask Why?") with a postmodern sense of irony, there is much more to the
social text of advertising than that, including what the advertising excludes from itself (e.g., labor
relations in the beer factory, alcoholism, automobile fatalities). Through television shows like
"thirtysomething" as well as through popular marketing and communication majors in universities,
advertising has become a fashionable postmodern industry in which yuppies script their own lives
playfully, without ostensible commitment. Where long hairs used to frequent Greenwich Village
(the 1950s) and campus political demonstrations and rock concerts (the 1960s), today they wear ties
and work "on the creative side" in advertising, creating the illusion of their own aesthetic
authenticity when in fact they are shills for a cosmopolite version of postmodern life.
This has been said about advertising before ( Packard 1957). Advertising in postmodern capitalism
is a central source of social control and surplus value as well as a repository of certain postmodern
literary urges, almost a new aesthetic venue. A deconstructive reading of advertising shows
convincingly that textuality transacts power, especially since texts no longer repose between covers
but are now dispersed into public things that defy distancing, mediating readings. It is theoretically
important that advertising in the electronic media as well as in periodical magazines rushes by at an
extraordinary rate of instantaneity, defying readings that could challenge ads' embedded social
ontologies (much the way Marx challenged both religion and bourgeois political economy). There is
no countertext to advertising, no slow reading that can challenge it, except in arcane cultural and
literary journals (e.g., camera politica, Cultural Critique). As such, simulations like advertising
have an ineluctable power over the lives we live, even if we refuse the commodities they purvey.
They stand for commodity itself, making it nearly impossible to conceive of, let alone work toward,
a decommodified social order in which people do not exchange substantive social freedoms for the
ephemera of what Marcuse ( 1955) called repressive desublimation.
My point here is that poststructuralism profits where it demonstrates the playful literariness and
hence openness of the world. Although there is an important emancipatory message in Derrida to
the effect that reading writes, hence modeling all sorts of empowering engagements with dominant
authors and authorities, poststructuralism fails as social theory where it obscures the boundary
between text and world as well as the politics and economics immanent in language games
themselves. Discourse theory buttresses critical theory where it shows the ways in which ideology
is written, read, and lived. But discourse theory oversimplifies where it substitutes the text for labor
and power as paradigmatic metaphors of social activity. In this sense, it occludes the reality of
domination, which is only deepened through the social texts of consumption and conformity
inundating us from morning to night.
Poststructuralism either avoids politics or suggests interesting new ways to locate politics in the
quotidian (e.g., see Luke 1989 Screens of Power). There are many Derridas. Derrida is close to
Adorno in his implication of a politics of discourse and textuality, a project that Foucault turns in a
more sociological direction. I am less against Derrida than I am against Derrideans, who in his
name reduce literary and cultural theory to play and pyrotechnics. Anyone can "read" anything
deconstructively; this quickly becomes method, losing sight of truth and power. Jacoby ( 1987)
does not pay enough attention to the academization of the New Left under the guise of literary and
cultural theory. Neoconservatives, for their part, ridicule deconstructive "litcrit" (e.g., Newman
1985; D'Souza 1991) as the epitome of faddish academic irrelevance. David Lodge (e.g., 1984)
novels capture this culture best, tweaking it from within. Nevertheless, one can rescue New French
Theory from its own fashion, as I do in this book, once one enlists it in the emancipation of
imagination as well as in a discoursetheoretic version of the critique of ideology.
PRODUCTION OVER REPRODUCTION
The preceding section was a digression necessary to consider the issue of poststructuralism's
resistance to the notion of structural primacy. I suggested that the survival of domination, indeed its
textual dispersal in fast, or postmodern, capitalism, suggests the viability of structural analysis. I
contend that we need "more" structural analysis (albeit with the aid of a poststructural critical
theory that decodes disguised, dispersed scripts of power). Power is concealed in postmodern
capitalism, one of Foucault's basic points. It is found everywhere but in the traditional political
arena, which is truly a commodified venue of cynicism. We have trouble accepting the notion of
structural primacy because many of us are beholden to Orwellian and Stalinist images of structureas-subject--total surveillance or the Siberian camps.
Marx, in a sense the first Derridean, identified structure in the otherwise invisible logic of capital,
reading money deconstructively for what it could tell us about the capitalist world and the human
activities of production, consumption, and circulation underpinning it. Structure was not a singular
subject for Marx but rather many subjects--capital, labor power, commodity fetishism, money,
ideology. He initiated a deconstructive critical theory whose central strategy is the identification of
institutions, practices, and discourses sustained by falsely conscious human activity. That is, Marx
was interested in the ways in which people sustain a social order inimical to them, partly through
ideology and partly through participation in exchange relationships.
He assumed, as we cannot, that texts' power could be undone once read carefully enough. Structural
analysis was to lead to, and inform, political practice. Hence, Capital was a thoroughly agitational
document, as Cleaver ( 1979) has rightly noted. But this assumes that people read and write books
like Capital--texts that stand at one remove from the world and consider it critically in terms of
what it lacks and what it could be. I think it is extremely dubious that textuality today enjoys a
certain critical distance from the world in order to convey the critical deconstruction of ideology
and hence mobilize social movements. The autonomy of textuality itself is at stake in fast
capitalism, something that Marx neglected, living at a time when books stood apart from the world
to which they were critical addresses.
This insight, among others, leads me to reformulate the Frankfurt School's critique of domination,
which is itself a reformulation of Marx's critique of the logic of capital, as a critique of the
domination of production over reproduction, including both textuality and unpaid domestic labor
(hence connecting postmodernism and feminism with Marxist critical theory). At stake in this
reformulation of critique are the scope and depth of a comprehensive social theory. Indeed,
Marxism has not ranged far enough sufficiently to comprehend the axial structural logic of
domination, which I am rephrasing as the hierarchy of all value over nonvalue (or production over
reproduction). In this reformulation, I am increasing the adaptability of critical theory in order to
address a whole host of hierarchies heretofore either ignored by Marxism or subsumed somewhere
underneath the general theoretical logic of the critique of capital. The underlying structural principle
of modernist civilization, then, is expressed in a range of hierarchies of production over
reproduction, from capital/labor to men/women, white/colored, science/art, material/ideal,
West/East, North/South, labor/text, exchange value/use value, and many others. What these
hierarchies have in common is the subordination of activities heretofore regarded as nonproductive
or reproductive to a productivist rule of value--for example, in a capitalist society exchange value,
or in a sexist society men's work.
My version of critical theory, addressing the subordination of the inferiorized realm of reproduction
to production, deconstructs the various manifestations of this hierarchy in order to suggest that
reproduction is secret production that production requires for its dominance of reproduction.
Indeed, production requires reproduction in the same way that domination requires positivist
science to bring it about and men require women who take care of them and their children. These
are instances of heterotexuality, including all of the quotidian scripts and practices that reproduce
production's dominion. This is a liberating insight because it shows that "merely" reproductive
activities are productive in their own right and should be valorized, claiming their share of social
and economic power.
The valorization process takes place through ideology critiques that interrogate the supposedly
naturelike character of these productive/reproductive hierarchies. The feminist critique of male
supremacy is a classic example of this interrogation, which actually reverses the priority of
production over reproduction by showing that reproduction was productive all along and that what
passes for male production is actually supported by the secret, silent work of women. Valorization
is thus matched by a systematic debunking: Production is shown to live off the sweat of othersOthers, in postmodern parlance--thus losing its supposedly natural rights.
I submit that all modernist dominations can be traced to this generic hierarchy of the productive
over allegedly unproductive or reproductive, from economics to culture and sexuality. This
formulation of domination is superior to Marx's logic of capital, the Frankfurt School's critique of
domination, and feminism's critique of male supremacy in the sense that it explains more cases,
showing a range of apparently separable moments of domination actually to be instances of the
same structural logic. This common theoretical logic can make way for coordinated political and
social movements that no longer fly the flags of differentiated interest groups (in the name of
postmodern and neoliberal multiculturalism) but now understand their interconnections, indeed
their inseparability.
In this way, one can map Marxism onto feminism and postmodernism such that their theoretical
logics are reduced to a common theory of hierarchy. Critical theory addresses global hierarchies
through this common theoretical logic, refusing to accept the theoretical and political territoriality
of social theories and movements uncritically. We can no longer safely assume that the women's
movement is, or should be, "about" women and the class struggle "about" male proletarians. Once
we establish that reproduction is secret production, we can map one group's apparently
differentiable domination onto those of other groups, demonstrating the universality of otherness
that unites differentiable groups in common cause once they have understood the unified theoretical
logic of their common opponent.
This is above all a political project, grounded in theoretical reformulation of the global logic of
domination. We circumvent the positivist problem of somehow proving that different peoples and
groups "actually" suffer from the same structural malady, as if evidence could resolve this question
representationally, without recourse to theoretical constructs. As I do here, we must argue
theoretically that production's dominion over reproduction is a universal logic, defending the
efficacy of this formulation in terms of the analytical work that it can do. We must risk pragmatism
by assessing theories in terms of their capacity for what Jameson ( 1991) calls transcoding,
translating one domination into others with reference to certain common structural principles
producing them.
For example, we can demonstrate the utility of my reformulation of critical theory in terms of this
transcoding exercise, explaining the sexual division of labor in exactly the same terms we might use
to explain the dominion of mandarin over popular culture. Or we might demonstrate that racism
operates according to the same logic as heterosexism. This transcoding establishes both theoretical
and political commonality, allowing groups to dig beneath their own assumed theory of oppression,
which is simply generated by the dominant discourse/practice in question. Hence, liberal feminism
is borne of the male-supremacist liberalism that defines political discourse in capitalism. Liberal
feminism does little transcoding work because it cannot theorize structural sources of domination
any more than male liberalism can. By contrast, socialist feminism challenges both Marxist and
feminist assumptions about the relationship between so-called produc- tive and reproductive
spheres, defying their more traditional understandings of the relationships between market work and
domestic work.
This collapsing of theoretical categories via transcoding risks oversimplification, endorsing what
Adorno ( 1973a) called identity theory (see Piccone 1976). Totalizing theories tend to efface
nuances. Since I take such a firm stand against postmodern difference theory, this is a real problem.
I hasten to add that I oppose postmodern and neoliberal difference (e.g., multiculturalism) in the
name of what I contend is real difference, which is only made possible on the basis of universal
liberation, as Marx argued in the 1844 manuscripts. I oppose prevailing difference theories because
they do not really nurture difference but simply perpetuate theoretical and political differentiations
that serve to keep the left divided. (One might hesitate to use the term the left in a book about
postmodern theory inasmuch as the term suggests a bygone era of leftism. I use the term
deliberately, especially as it can be qualified by adjectives like New, feminist, and postmodern.)
The differentiations among interest groups, characteristic of pluralism, oppose the theoretical
project of transcoding in the name of postmodern antitotality perspectives. Jameson ( 1991)
staunchly resists this aspect of postmodernism, insisting on the utility of totalizing social theories,
which he formulates by way of certain useful postmodern categories. Jameson's visibility in the
theory community is somewhat surprising given his commitment to Marxist grand narratives.
Perhaps the theoretical reading public is not sophisticated enough to recognize what is going on in
books like The Political Unconscious ( 1981) and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism ( 1991). Jameson is not subverting Marxism through postmodernism but simply
periodizing capitalism in terms of various postmodern cultural and theoretical gestures that have
gained recent ascendance as false alternatives to Marxist critical theory. Jameson fights the end of
politics through an interpretation of postmodernism articulated in Marxist categories, an exercise he
advances with the aid of Ernest Mandel's theoretical apparatus.
Jameson has failed to develop a version of critical theory that can do ample transcoding work. His
book Postmodernism ( 1991) remains a postmodern pastiche, a rhetorical style that he otherwise
eschews as characteristic of postmodern cultural expression. Like Adorno ( 1973a) Negative
Dialectics, which in some respects his book resembles, Postmodernism lacks systematicity if not
heft and scope. I suspect that Jameson appeals to literary and cultural theorists because they are
largely unfamiliar with German critical theory, including Habermas, and thus they do not notice the
relative absence of structure in Jameson. Jameson is not mainly a social theorist but a very
sophisticated literary and cultural critic who phrases his criticism through social-theoretical
categories that greatly enrich his criticism. Jameson's oeuvre, including works like his early ( 1971)
Marxism and Form, has theoretical vitality and a sharp political edge because he is on the outer
fringes of literary theory, proximate to critical social theory. He reads the same people I do. But he
is stopped short of a fully theoretical practice, whether called transcoding or cognitive mapping,
because he does not aim for the explanatory sweep of Marx or Habermas. Like Eagleton, he
impresses students of literary and cultural theory because he is more "social" than Fish ( 1980,
1989) or even Lentricchia ( 1980).
The motif of production-over-reproduction, with which I replace older theoretical motifs like the
logic of capital, reification, domination, and male supremacy, should not be deployed to resolve all
empirical and political problems. It cannot explain "everything," even though it helps explain a
great deal more than traditionally differentiated social theories like classical Marxism and
feminism. My own version of feminist postmodern critical theory must assiduously resist its own
tendency to become a recipe repeated whenever thought cannot do its own work. Theories merely
stimulate creative applications. They run the desperate risk of abuse in the hands of political people
who seek to harness theory to practice, a joining almost always threatening to theory's--thought's-vital autonomy and thus to autonomy in general. I would like to see it impossible for anyone to
become a card-carrying critical theorist, much as it was impossible for students of Adorno to
become practicing Adornoians, given his own antipathy to system as well as to his own cult of
personality.
I would also like to believe it possible for one to combine Adorno's aphoristic acuity and reflexive,
self-deconstructing style with the structuring mien of a Habermas. That is my aim, although it
requires more than a short book to demonstrate its possibility. It may be that no single volume can
contain that much energy and systematicity, given the nature of literary economies today. Rather,
one has to evaluate the complete oeuvres of theoretical writers, which cannot be fully or fairly
appraised until they have gathered sufficient momentum to be recognizable as distinctive bodies of
thought, constantly evolving and changing.
ESSAYING CRITICAL THEORY
I did not intend to produce such an oeuvre when I began to write Socio(onto)logy: A Disciplinary
Reading ( 1989c) in 1985. I was in the midst of engaging recent Continental developments in the
theory of interpretation, from poststructuralism and postmodernism to French feminism, in order to
extend the Frankfurt School's analysis of the culture industry by way of European discourse
theories. I realized that these largely French developments had a great deal to offer German critical
theory. At the time, I did not foresee an oeuvre in the making but only a single book on the
textuality of discipline (hence, a book on my own discipline, sociology). As I moved from project to
project, however, I began to conceive of each new project in terms of the others already done and
those that lay ahead, recognizing the emerging identity of an oeuvre constituting a comprehensive
and yet reflexive critical theory. This book is a reckoning with the results of my unfolding projects,
a stock-taking that is relatively tightly structured into components, or units, which I integrate. This
volume aims more at Habermasian structure and closure than at Adornoian or Jamesonian allusion,
although both are necessary, if not in single volumes than across the grain of an entire oeuvre.
For Anglo-American audiences, this whole issue of the logic of theoretical presentation inevitably
becomes mired in the spurious issue of "clarity." Critics of Adorno and of books like my
Socio(onto)logy complain that they are difficult, even obscurantist. Unself-conscious of their own
cultural conditioning in a positivist environment, these critics are deaf to the dialectical,
deconstructive nature of writing, which is necessarily fraught with what Derrideans call
undecidability. There are different legitimate logics of presentation. Some are more systematic and
taxonomic than others. Compare Habermas's architectonic Theory of Communicative Action with
Adorno's devilish aphorisms in Minima Moralia or Irigaray's lyrical and indefinite This Sex Which
Is Not One. I would like to believe that an oeuvre can contain both allusive, enigmatic phrasings,
attesting to the muddiness and ambiguity of things, and a more discursive style that approaches
theoretical artifice the way engineers approach building bridges.
These are not incidental issues, for they speak to the matter of totality, a leitmotif in this book. The
more a comprehensive theory can double back on itself and open itself up for self-interrogation, the
more convincing its approach to comprehensiveness will be, acknowledging that no story is
complete or without blindspots. Habermas is a fabulous systemizer and a terrible storyteller. Indeed,
one has the impression that Habermas avoids the rhetorical flourishes of Adorno and Horkheimer
precisely in order to legitimate critical theory in the university. Although this is an admirable aim, it
has the consequence of expunging the authorial aura from Habermas's text, as well as agency and
irony.
In other words, one can write totalizing social theory without forgetting that theory is simply one
text among many that do not bear a representational relationship to the world. Too many theorists
allow concepts to do their work for them, reifying them to the point of absurdity (much as their
hated quantitative enemies fetishize methodology). Neither theoretical constructs nor
methodological techniques win arguments; they are merely forms of rhetoric, ways of talking about
the world. Sometimes they are convincing; sometimes they fall flat. In any case, theory can be
composed in a voice that acknowledges its own undecidability, hence acknowledging its finity and
fallibility, both intellectual and political.
With few exceptions, the only critical theorists to have found this voice have been essayists, people
who eschewed both system and encyclopedic tomes. Adorno "essayed," although he also wrote fulllength works, combining these modes better than most. Nevertheless, his full-length works were
essentially long exegeses and immanent critiques, not what one might
call positive social theory after Habermas's fashion. Negative Dialectics and even Aesthetic Theory
do not compare to Habermas Theory of Communicative Action in terms of their degree of
systematicity. Merleau-Ponty essayed, as did Sartre. Walter Benjamin is perhaps the most notorious
example of a dialectical ironist who employed the fragment in order to form postmodern pastiches
before their time. Buck-Morss ( 1989) book on Benjamin Paris works, Dialectics of Seeing,
discusses Benjamin's mode of theoretical presentation as constitutive of his overall theoretical logic,
if one can call it that. But there is nothing about the irony of essaying that cannot be transferred to
the full-length work, thus enabling critical theory to transcend Jamesonian flourishes or Adornoian
aphorisms.
This does not require us to confine ourselves to the essay form--thirty or forty pages of relatively
unstructured prose about a delimited topic. We can essay the totality where we recognize that our
writing is corrigible and indefinite. We should not only acknowledge this corrigibility but celebrate
it, precisely what Barthes might have meant by the pleasure of the text. Finally, we need to write as
if we were begging responses, treating textuality not as a private expressive moment but as
community building, recognizing with Wittgenstein ( 1953) that texts are veritable forms of life or
what Hymes ( 1974) calls speech communities.
To "essay" is to take a literary posture, a textual attitude. It recognizes, with Derrida, that books
write authors as much as authors books. One's topic, format, audience--as well as the very caprice
of textuality itself, in its serendipitous nature--determine "what" one says, as well as how. Although
authors strongly intervene in the sense and sentience of texts, as do readers (who are authors in their
own right), we need to abandon the model of a lonely auteur plucking words out of the sky
according to some deliberate literary plan designed to produce a certain meaning and hence reader
response. For my own part, although I sit down with an outline and proceed from sentence to
sentence, paragraph to paragraph, I am continually surprised by the direction of meaning taken by
my writing. This is not to endorse aimlessness, especially where a comprehensive critical theory
must be analytically rigorous, but simply to recognize that the text quickly takes on a life of its own,
something that must be contained lest it overrun its banks and flood out of its confines or covers.
The rhetoric of critical theory is important intellectually and politically. My production-overreproduction motif totalizes, as do all universal theoretical logics. But I must develop the utility of
this framework in the contingent contexts of usage inevitably confronting any social analyst. That
is, totality is not attained simply by substituting one theoretical logic for another--for example,
production-over-reproduction for Marx's logic of capital. One can approach totality only by
essaying theory--literally, attempting it. These attempts are framed by the times, topics, and
problems confronting the social analyst--violence against women, oil spills, imperialist wars.
Theory is not only a system but discourse, a mode of approach
and intervention. It is a way of being in the world. I develop this point further in my concluding
chapter, where I extend my argument that critical theory is an interstitial activity arising from the
lifeworld and aiming to transform institutions.
As I suggested earlier in my discussion of the political pitfalls of totality, the great challenge for
critical theory is to combine Archimedeanism--objective truth claims--with a sense of fallibility.
Derrida provides this fallibility brilliantly in his notion of literary undecidability, which can be
transcoded into notions of theoretical and political polyvocality. Objectivity needs to be tempered
by a sense of historicity, perspectivity, mortality, and contingency. As I understand it, this was
precisely Merleau-Ponty ( 1964a, 1964b; see O'Neill 1970) argument for an existential version of
Marxism. He recognized that no political order can eliminate the delicate tension between particular
human beings and general humanity. He said that no revolution is worth even one life, although he
meant one life expended needlessly, not lives lost in defending life itself. Merleau-Ponty overcomes
Marxist hubris by showing that politics cannot solve the riddle of existence, which remains tragic.
Derrida overcomes Marxist hubris by showing that all texts unravel deconstructively when read
against their grain.
In this sense, critical theory needs to be essayed, written out of the particular contexts of existence
that require political solutions, and not deduced dogmatically from first principles. Although theory
needs to address the world structurally, in terms of its patterned interrelationships, it must not lose
sight of the fact that systems are only as good as the work they do, or better said, that they are only
as good as the lives they lead. One can live Capital just as one can live One-Dimensional Man if
one reads them as versions of a new political order to which they are themselves contributions.
Derrida shows both that writing matters and that matter is a kind of writing, a circumstantial
textuality. In this sense, books would become lives where people treat them as practices to which,
and beyond which, they can contribute their own versions. Gramsci's notion that the revolution
must overthrow Capital is very important here. He suggests that readers must become writers,
hence authors of their own fate. Like Derrida, he suggests a relationship to textuality that I am here
calling essay.
This returns me to my notion of an oeuvre as an expanding, self-correcting body of work. It is both
a body and a life, the way people record their own circuitous but structured attempt to live the
books they take seriously. It is easy to see how religious people do this. The "born again" return to
the books of faith that they recognize must be rewritten in the conduct of their own lives. Although
born-again Christianity is riddled with deceptions and dogma, it nevertheless provides an example
of how a book (in this case a "good" one) extends into an oeuvre, a life lived according to its
precepts, which must be formulated in particular quotidian contexts. This is not to say that I am
composing born-again critical theory. Religion belongs to the realm of mythology, no matter how
deconstructive its relationship to its own text may be. But, as Horkheimer and Adorno argued in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, science is not far removed from myth where it fails to understand its
own corrigibility. By comparison to positivist versions of science, certain versions of religion are
downright emancipatory (Latin American liberation theology, for instance).
Science is all the more mythic the less it admits this about itself. Theories that pretend to have no
chinks in their armor--blindspots, tensions, lapses, inconsistencies, even contradictions--explain
very little. Theoretical logic gets in the way of persuasive social analysis, which rarely conforms to
the simplifications of our theoretical constructs. This is hardly an argument against theory. How
else are we to understand the world, whose appearances are increasingly illusions, simulations?
When I say that critical theory must be essayed I am only saying that critical theory must embody
deconstructive principles of corrigibility, contextuality, and correction that invite dialogue as a way
of building community. Theory cannot be architectonic, nor can it solve all problems. This is
precisely where the Prometheanism of the Enlightenment went wrong, producing all manner of
calamities in its name.
Habermas demonstrates the tension between ideal speech and a system so airtight, so removed from
the lifeworlds it venerates, that it undermines ideal speech at every turn. Habermas appears deaf to
the tenor of his theorizing. Although I have noted that he rightly wanted to legitimize critical theory
in the university, this does not mean that he had to out-Parsons Parsons in composing a theoretical
system utterly beyond experience. The great truth of phenomenology is that theoretical constructs
can be traced back to their pretheoretical constitution in everyday life, thus demonstrating their
political vitality and relevance. Piccone ( 1971) and Pad ( 1972) stake out a phenomenological
Marxism that tests theoretical concepts against their lifeworld relevancies, as does O'Neill ( 1972)
in another context. I am particularly indebted to O'Neill's formulation of theory's umbilical
relationship to the body politic in Sociology as a Skin Trade ( 1972) and Making Sense Together (
1974), two important statements of phenomenological and ethnomethodological Marxism. O'Neill
goes on to invest the concept of essay with a certain theoretical status in his study of Montaigne,
who developed the essay form as a legitimate mode of philosophical presentation. O'Neill Essaying
Montaigne ( 1982) instructs my exercise in theoretical self-reflection, albeit without my grounding
in European discourse theory.
Habermas takes up the challenge set by Marx to reformulate the whole edifice of historical
materialism. Yet Habermas squeezes all life out of his system. This is not the usual AngloAmerican complaint about Teutonizing writers; of course, I would be convicted of the charge of
obfuscation, too, as certain American sociological reviewers of my books continue to note! But it is
not Habermas's literary style that troubles me; after a few attempts, he can be readily mastered, if
not easily imitated. Rather, his vitiation of his own call for ideal speech reflects an insensitivity to
the requirements of public discourse and thus casts doubt on his political relevance today.
This is decidedly not to endorse plain language, whatever that means. There is nothing inherently
wrong with technical language, especially where it realizes certain literary economies. I do not
object to technical usages except where it is supposed that definition and taxonomy solve
intellectual problems in their own right. Yet elite discourse must continually attempt to publicize
itself in order to build the very body politic it desires. This is not accomplished through
wrongheaded translation exercises whereby difficult words are replaced by simpler ones, although
sometimes that is necessary. It is achieved through a version of writing that empowers readers to
become writers, continually weaving back and forth between technical and public usages in order to
elevate citizens to a higher level of competence as well as edification. Habermas needs not only to
write for specialists but also to create specialists anew, an aim consistent with his commitment to
communicative democracy.
There is no formula for alternating between technical and public usage-call it education. Writers
achieve this differently, depending on their contexts of meaning as well as on their literary abilities.
One must have the capacity for clarifying complicated concepts without relinquishing a conceptual
apparatus altogether. Derrideanism is immensely important in the way it suggests an empowering
engagement between readers and texts. Derrida suggests that readers necessarily write where they
are confronted with texts' ineluctable undecidability, which they have to resolve through contingent
acts of sense making. This is similar to Husserl's notion of intentionality, suggesting that
consciousness is a strong, directive capacity and not a blank slate, giving rise to the aforementioned
phenomenological Marxism (closely resembling a Derridean Marxism, which in some sense is what
I am composing here).
In my Reading Science ( 1989b) I suggested that the text of science could be essayed, hence
democratized. One can retain methodological technique while narrating method, acknowledging
that it is simply one way among many of making an argument. In that book, I also argued that
theoretical writing had become similar to quantitative methodology in its compulsive reliance on a
mystifying, self-elevating technical apparatus. Suffering from science envy, theorists work overtime
to lard their work with parenthetical citation sausages that disrupt reading and authorize the
argument being advanced. Although theorists should be able to cite others' work and to deploy
technical language, just as people should be able to use quantitative methods and their ensemble of
figural strategies, I contend that theory, like science, should be essayed--that is, composed with an
ear open to its own undecidability and inimitability. As such, then, theorists would attempt to
empower readers with a certain literary competence just as they scrupulously edit out compulsive
usages of obscurantist technical language. As an essayed text, theory might aspire to publicity, but
an erudite, edified
publicity in which citizens can engage with complex arguments and not consume civic discourse
reduced to the level of sitcoms and tabloid newspapers.
This is a delicate balance indeed. My oeuvre in its early stages argued for, but did not sufficiently
attain, this balance, instead erring on the side of complexity and allusion. In part this was a
purposeful way to deal with the banalization of theoretical language at the hands of AngloAmerican empiricists, for whom theory has become largely an exercise in hypothesis testing. In part
this was a way to resist the co-optation of renegade discourses like Marxism and feminism. In my
more recent work, like Reading Science and The Decline of Discourse, I have shifted the balance
toward a more public vernacular, albeit, as I just said, not a vernacular that makes many
concessions to the quotidian. I firmly believe that any reasonably well-educated person can read
Bloom ( 1987) Closing of the American Mind, Jacoby ( 1987) Last Intellectuals, and my own (
1990) Decline of Discourse. This book is not an easy read for people unfamiliar with the theoretical
sources under discussion. And yet one can move back and forth between my argument here, relying
in part on my citations, and secondary sources that explain postmodernism, critical theory, and
feminist theory (e.g., Agger 1991: pp. 19-42). It is politically important that theory neither pander
nor reduce itself to pedestrian usage. This is the sense of my call for theory as a challenging public
essay.
TOTALITY,
TRANSFORMATIONALITY
RELATIONALITY,
I defend my notion of production over reproduction as the axial logic of civilization in terms of the
rhetorical work it can do. That is, it is a flexible and wide-ranging literary strategy allowing one to
attack a whole host of problems. In particular, my essay of critical theory embraces totality,
embodies relationality, and suggests transformationality. In these senses, it is superior to, while
incorporating, other theoretical logics such as the logic of capital ( Marx), reification ( Lukacs),
domination ( Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer), distorted communication ( Habermas), and male
supremacy (feminism). Although my notion of the domination of production over reproduction
builds on these traditions, it goes beyond them by stressing totality, relationality, and
transformationality in ways that the other theories do not. This does not mean that this trinity of
terms can solve every problem, nor that this approach can be summarized tersely, in a single
formulation or even whole book. Rather, it means that they are valences, themes, tenors, modalities,
and moments of my oeuvre, which continues to unfold here. One might call them deep structures of
my version of critical theory, although I am also arguing that they have surface importance, too.
The production/reproduction logic is totalizing in the sense that it explains all modernist
dominations, from class to gender and race. It is relational in the sense that it well understands, with
Hegel and Marx, that domination happens relationally, between people and among groups. Those
who dwell within the realm of the merely reproductive, albeit as secret producers, are "other" to
those who occupy the realm of production and produce these dualities as ideology in the first place.
The production/reproduction logic is also transformational in the sense that it suggests a dynamic
process whereby reproducers recognize that they are in fact producers and thus mobilize themselves
to wrest both discourse and material power from those who have heretofore arrogated privilege to
themselves. In other words, the production/reproduction hierarchy always contains the potential for
its deconstruction via coming to consciousness, new public discourse, and organized social
movements.
These are advantages of the production-over-reproduction format. This is not to deny that other
theories of domination are also totalizing, relational, and transformational but only to suggest that
my critique of the hierarchy of value over alleged nonvalue has greater intellectual and political
advantage. Again, this raises the issue of whether utility is equivalent to truth, an issue that needs to
be addressed forthrightly. Many empirical social scientists attempt to assess explanatory validity in
terms of methodological techniques, typically quantitative in nature. Thus, two paradigms, like
Marxism and structural functionalism, might be reduced to operational indicators such that the
theories can be compared in terms of the amount of what methodologists call "variance" each
theory can explain. But this conveniently forgets what I said in the preceding section about the
rhetorical, hence undecidable, nature of methodology. Technical pyrotechnics cannot solve
intellectual disputes; they merely clarify the grounds on which they take place. No amount of data,
nor their statistical manipulation, can objectively demonstrate the superiority of Marxism over
feminism or vice versa. Data are simply a text, a canvas on which the researcher imprints her or his
meaning, which, as Derrida indicates, is undecidable in terms of other systems of meaning.
Even my notion that the production/reproduction motif does more work than other frameworks for
analyzing domination threatens to substitute a productivist vocabulary--more work--for a
methodological one (". . . explains more variance . . ."). More work is simply shorthand for my own
conception of intellectual and political versatility, which of course is framed by what I view as
legitimate work. One can explain lots of things using a neoclassical economic framework, or the
newfangled rational-choice theory. A critical theorist would view these explanations as illegitimate,
or the problems explained as nonproblems. We necessarily frame our notion of validity circularly,
in terms of how we construct the social world theoretically. This is not to endorse or accept
relativism because, with Jameson, I believe that we can and must transcode theoretical logics into
each other, thus enriching our own versions through dialogue.
This notion of dialogue is not premised on Mill's liberal notion of the marketplace of ideas or even
on Habermas's notion of the power of the strongest argument but on the premise that public
discourse is good insofar as it creates community, which in turn humbles as well as nurtures
individuals. Hegel and Marx accepted this Greek notion, albeit in very different ways. This is the
problem with Derrida. The undecidability of texts is taken as license for political relativity, which in
turn is translated into neoliberal pluralism, precisely the framework of what earlier I called
difference theory. But I view undecidability as an occasion for public talk and not the retreat of
people and groups into incommensurable subject positions, from which they talk in their own
"voices." Alternatively, perspectivity can make way for a politics of public discourse that eschews
pluralism without denying the evident plurality of numerous existing language games and subject
positions.
It is very difficult to relinquish the positivist notion that public speech will allow us to arrive at a
singular stable truth. For the Greeks, politics was good in itself, helping us understand our
differences (here, different theoretical logics), learn from each other, and buffer our mortal
aloneness. The notion that politics is good (see Arendt 1958) is so far from contemporary
experience that one must vigorously defend the idea that public discourse is redemptive. After
Watergate, politics is seen by most as venal to the point of postmodern absurdity. Ross Perot was
the quintessential postmodern political candidate in this sense. But a postmodern notion of the
political need not endorse postpolitical assumptions about the failure of public discourse. Indeed,
my oeuvre has tried to demonstrate the possibilities of a postmodern public life that is neither
cynical nor corrupt. This postmodern notion of publicity is distinguished by its celebration of
dialogue and textuality, precisely what Barthes must have meant by the pleasure of the text.
Again, it is important to disentangle questions of validity from positivist strictures about
presuppositionless representation, which require validity to be evaluated without reference to their
theoretical frames, indeed, which disqualify the very notion of theoretical framing. It is equally
important to avoid the anti-Archimedean relativism of postmodernism. Although I endorse the
notion of textual playfulness, this is not a subjective literary attitude as much as a necessary feature
of undecidable texts and oeuvres that necessarily elude interpretive representation, precisely the
connection between the positivist philosophy of science and the objectivist New Criticism (see
Fekete 1978). It is not so much that the author plays as that the text exhibits characteristics that one
might describe as playful, polyvocal, pluralizing, and perspectival. In this, the text does not give up
validity but requires us to evaluate validity in nonpositivist terms, whether these are summarized in
notions such as "the work theories can do" or "the way in which theory changes the world" (viz., the
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach). One might describe textual playfulness as the extent to which the
text acknowledges that its validity is conditioned by its own theoretical logic as well as by readings,
resulting in an intellectual circularity that need not lead to nihilist conclusions. Indeed, critical
theory should not be viewed purely as an occasion for literary self-expression but also as a
contribution to comprehensive social analysis. In no way are these contradictory or incompatible
goals.
Chapter
Six
Critical Theory and Everyday Life 2: Desire,
Discourse, and Domination
DESIRE: CAN MEN BE FEMINISTS (AND WRITE
FEMINIST THEORY)?
In the preceding chapter, I outlined my transcoding of critical theory, postmodernism, and feminist
theory in a way that grounded critical theory directly in everyday life, eschewing a fatalistic
economism. In this sense, I rearticulated the Western-Marxist critique of orthodox Marxism (see
Lichtheim 1961; Agger 1979; Jacoby 1981) by way of postmodernism and feminist theory, which
add vital theoretical resources to Marxism (see Hekman 1990). I also deconstructed the Frankfurt
School's critical theory, suggesting lifeworld-relevant strategies of cultural studies formulated as
critique of ideology in the society of the spectacle (see Agger 1992a). Here, I want to approach
critical theory's grounding in everyday life from a somewhat different perspective, emphasizing that
the abandonment of economism does not require the abandonment of all structural analysis. I deal
with three potential pitfalls of feminist theory, postmodernism, and German critical theory in terms
of the exclusion of men, apolitical obscurantism, and the hidden determinism of negative dialectics,
respectively. In order successfully to transcode these three theories into a useful generic critical
theory, we must theorize the politics of desire, discourse, and domination. This will ensure that a
feminist postmodern critical theory does not remain an aestheticist, pessimistic exercise conducted
only by women.
I formulate the first section of this chapter as a critique of the postmodern-feminist politics of
subjectivity, which tends to ignore the relationship between feminist identity and affiliation, on the
one hand, and structural analysis, on the other. Although I heartily embrace a lifeworld-grounded
politics of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as the central contribution of a transcoded critical
theory that functions as an ideology-critical cultural studies in fast capitalism, informing German
critical theory with feminist and postmodern insights, it is important to disentangle this politics of
subjectivity sufficiently from the feminist project (without abandoning feminism) so that
subjectivity becomes a generic mode of counterhegemony. This is not an act of disentangling but a
transcoding ensuring that all of our lifeworld-transforming activities are feminist in the sense of
challenging production's primacy over reproduction. Men, too, must theorize and engage in
everyday strategies of resistance and reconstruction. My transcoded feminist postmodern critical
theory suggests lifeworld-transforming activities that include, but are not limited to, issues
surrounding the gendered division of labor, which is a paradigmatic form of the hierarchy of
production over reproduction. It is important to conceive of all everyday emancipatory practices as
feminist, but in a way that also suggests linkages with structural issues of political economy.
I have argued that feminism addresses not only women but all hierarchies of value over
valuelessness, making possible this linkage between production and reproduction. To the extent to
which women have been responsible for the realms of reproduction, both in domestic and market
labor, they are obvious topics of feminist theory. But as I have argued above, it is important to
check the bio(onto)logizing tendencies of a postmodern feminism that endorses the notion of
separate spheres and thus relegates women to the realm of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. It is
important to break the link between women and subjectivity, intersubjectivity, domesticity.
Accordingly, I develop the argument that men can be feminists and compose feminist theory-indeed, risking hyperbole, that men are women to the extent to which they, too, are reproducers, as
most men are.
The risk of feminizing feminist theory, allowing it to remain or become an activity pursued only by
women, about women, for women, is that we thus ensure the reproduction of the sexual division of
labor, which, as I just noted, is the paradigmatic form of production's hierarchy over reproduction.
We reproduce the sexual division of labor on the level of social theory, even where feminist critical
theories might profess the desire to destroy male supremacy. We also require that feminist theory
must be "about" women narrowly and not about all instances of the hierarchy of production over
reproduction which, I contend, should be targets of the critique of heterotextuafity. Where feminist
theory is given the more generic formulation by virtue of its transcoding, it not only links up with
other emancipatory interests but is already about those interests--class, race, the domination of
nature.
A feminist theory that stresses the historicity of the sexual division of labor must attend to its own
historicity, notably its academic and intellectual ghettoization. There is no reason why feminists
should want to reproduce the sexual division of theoretical labor, or restrict feminism to women's
issues. Feminist theory must totalize itself, both admitting men as writers and political activists and
addressing issues not ostensibly about women. It is in this sense that I insist on the identification of
feminism with Marxism and a critical version of postmodernism in terms of the universality of its
emancipatory interests. It is imperative for men to be "allowed" to write feminism and to act and
live as feminists, just as they must "allow" themselves these opportunities, in order to give
transcoded feminism a generic, totalizing formulation.
It is sometimes argued that men cannot be feminists because they have a vested interest in
oppressing women (see Di Stefano 1991). This is an empirical question: Do men oppress women?
Better, which men oppress women? (or, which men oppress which women?) Many radical feminists
argue that all men necessarily oppress all women. I can accept this formulation in a general sense,
especially where it draws attention to crucial structural features of the hierarchy of production over
reproduction, although, when applied to the sexual division of labor, it lacks nuance. I would take
the opposite rhetorical approach and argue that men are women, just as I would eliminate the
dichotomous hierarchies littering our civilization. Actually, both things could be said to be true: All
men oppress all women, just as all men are women (and women men) in the sense that they
participate in the dialectic of production and reproduction. There is no necessary contradiction
between these positions if we are clear that the argument that men-oppress-women reflects the
structural arrangement of production over reproduction, while the notion that men-are-women
speaks to the heteronomous situations of nearly everybody on the planet. It is crucial for a feminist
critical theory to join common cause between men and women, especially since we recognize that
we are pitted against each other in order to deflect attention from the large structures enveloping all
of us.
This becomes an epistemological issue when French feminists, following Lacan, argue that men
cannot write feminism because they inhabit a different realm of symbolic expression from women. I
have already criticized this biologism as counterproductive. It is especially so when it becomes the
basis for establishing a gendered theoretical division of labor. The postmodern decentering of big
narrative into plural little narratives tends to assume that women will have their own "story" to tell
(see, e.g., Reinharz 1992). Moreover, they alone should tell this story, just as AfricanAmericans
should tell their story (e.g., see hooks 1984). Lacanian feminism suggests that only women can
know and tell what it means to be a woman. There are two problems with this. First, some men
might understand better than some women what it means to be victimized as a woman, that is, a
reproducer. Second, it is extremely dubious that feminist theory is, or must be, about the experience
of being a woman (as opposed to being a critical theory of all heterotextuality). Postmodern
feminists might respond that it does not matter whether feminist theory tells the story of women's
experience because, even if it does not, only women can write feminism.
This is perhaps the most relevant issue for my transcoding of feminist theory into a generic critical
theory. Can I as a male say anything, let alone do anything, feminist? The answer may be no if,
indeed, feminism must be spoken in a woman's voice, resonating with women's experiences of the
world. But this assumes that all men are somehow denied the experience of womanhood. This
depends on what it means to experience the world as women, and then to write about it from that
vantage. If the experience of womanhood is equivalent to the experience of heteronomy, modeled
on women's relegation to the valueless sphere of reproduction, then some men can be said to be
women in this sense. Or, it could be argued that women have privileged access to the realm of the
literary inasmuch as literary work, like housework, also belongs to the sphere of reproduction-traditionally "women's work."
The argument that men cannot be feminists and write feminism may stem from resistance to male
territoriality as much as from certain Lacanian notions about women's access to the realm of the
imaginary and radicalfeminist notions about men's inability to understand the world as women
experience it. These reasons form a gestalt of sorts: By now, it is conventional wisdom among
radical, cultural, and postmodern feminists that men "cannot" be feminists and write feminism and
should not try, except to lend political and personal support to the women's movement where
appropriate. This follows less from a self-conscious man-hating posture characteristic of certain
radical feminisms (see Dworkin 1974) than from an emerging theoretical consensus about how
feminism is about, for, and by women--off limits to men. Men who "try" to be feminists and write
feminism are rebuffed for their desire to dominate women, even in their own backyard.
To be sure, most men are not feminists--that is, they profit from and defend male supremacy. At the
very least, most men feel extraordinarily threatened by the women's movement, especially in its
more radical formulations. The neoconservative backlash against the women's movement is led by
men and male-identified women who want to turn back the clock to a time when women did not
work outside the home for wages or expect men to participate in egalitarian gender relations in the
household. Men are massing to defeat the women's movement; they have a rising degree of gender
consciousness in these dismal times. Yet there is a real need not only for room to be made for men
politically in the women's movement but for men to write feminist theory as well as to live feminist
lives. This is not a right "granted" to men by women but a reality to be forged by men themselves,
who prove themselves worthy of being called feminists and feminist theorists. Men have to
demonstrate that they are worthy of being called women! This is important because male supremacy
can only be undone through, not around, men. Just as 1960s feminists recognized that women had
to raise their consciousnesses about their participation in their own victimization, so, too, must men
both change themselves and help liberate women. To deny men feminist political, personal, and
literary opportunities simply retards the effort to enlist men in their, and women's, own liberation.
After all, my transcoding of feminist theory suggests a universal perspective on the domination of
production over reproduction, an issue that affects most men as well as most women. Men have an
objective interest in destroying male supremacy (once we reformulate male supremacy as the
hierarchy of value over valuelessness). Feminist theory needs to demonstrate this interest by
transcoding male supremacy into the more generic hierarchy of production (value) over
reproduction (valuelessness).
Men can think, live, and write as feminists if they understand feminism to be a universal theory of
human liberation. By the same token, feminists can become Marxists once they understand that a
transcoded Marxism explains and challenges the subordination of (women's) reproduction to
(men's) production. These transcodings require us to relinquish the simplistic notion that "all men"
are objectively interested in oppressing "all women." Most men are reproducers and, as such,
exploited. And some men do not oppress women, just as some women in fact oppress men by virtue
of their class and race positions. I am not saying that women should "go easy" on men, many of
whom objectify and subordinate women, but only that liberation must universally liberate both men
and women. To accomplish this necessarily involves men and women in their own self-liberation,
as well as in the liberation of others. For men-as-reproducers to be pitted against women-asreproducers, no matter how falsely conscious many of these men are when it comes to issues of
gender equality, only perpetuates the structural logic of domination that underlies all subordinations
and hierarchies, according to my feminist postmodern critical theory.
It is generally accepted among liberal feminists that radical feminists have been "too hard" on men,
who are portrayed as caught between harsh feminist expectations and their own inertia when it
comes to changing their gender roles. I am skeptical about this apologia for men, especially since it
assumes the model of the heterosexual nuclear family, albeit with more companionate/egalitarian
gender roles. Radical feminist theory is especially sharp where it questions heterosexual norms as
part of its overall critique of heterotextuality, which reflects the tendency of discourse/practices to
reproduce certain hierarchies of value over valuelessness--here, men over women. For women to be
overly concerned with the hearts of men (see Ehrenreich 1983) somehow misses the point: It is not
men's hearts that matter but rather their structural positioning in the politics of everyday life. "Men
matter" to feminist theory and the women's movement not because they are necessarily coupled
with heterosexual women but because men-as-reproducers occupy the same structural location as
women-as-reproducers and can thus join common cause with women in fighting the hierarchization of
production/value over reproduction/valuelessness.
To be sure, individual men frequently neglect their own objective interests. Patriarchy leads
individual men to assume and even defend the inviolability of male-supremacist gender relations.
But, as Chodorow ( 1978) and Pleck ( 1981) demonstrate, patriarchy is bad for men inasmuch as it
reproduces heterotextually the domination of production over reproduction, which victimizes men,
too. I am not debating the issue of whether women are "more" exploited than men. It is easy to
demonstrate that most women are more economically disadvantaged than most men. But there is a
larger issue here: Men and women are both victimized, and self-victimized, by reproducing
heterotextually quotidian discourse/practices that reproduce the global hierarchy of value over
valuelessness, albeit in differential ways.
Admittedly, it is very difficult to view men-in-general and women-ingeneral as allies when
individual men objectify and subordinate individual women. This difficulty must be overcome if we
are to make headway in establishing theoretical and political commonality between men-as-
reproducers and women-as-reproducers. I believe that we can overcome this difficulty in large
measure by reconceptualizing patriarchy as an instance of a more generic logic of hierarchy that is
manifested in a host of other, apparently nongender, ways. Although it is extraordinarily difficult to
think of patriarchy, let alone violence against women and pay inequality, as transcending gender,
we must transcode patriarchy into a more generic theory of domination, as I have tried to do in this
book. Only by doing that can we begin to understand that men-as-reproducers and women-asreproducers have common objective interests.
I risk obscuring the specificity of patriarchy or male supremacy by suggesting that men-asreproducers and women-as-reproducers have common interests and should combine to fight their
common opponent. But I am not convinced that patriarchy is specific in the sense that it can be
differentiated out from other versions of the same root cause, namely the hierarchy of value over
nonvalue. The sexual division of labor, which conceals hierarchy underneath naturelike
differentiation, is no different in kind from other divisions/hierarchies of labor. Women are
heteronomous in the sexual division of labor simply because they have been assigned naturelike
roles of subordination on the basis of their capacity for biological reproduction. By the same token,
Jews have been assigned subordinate roles within a Christian society in which Jews are necessarily
viewed as a minority. The notion that male supremacy represents a plot of men-in-general against
women-in-general misses the fact that male supremacy was not conceived by men in a state of
nature and then deliberately foisted upon women.
Indeed, I am convinced that feminism should stress the numerous ways in which men, like women,
fall blindly into male supremacy, accepting the sexual division of labor as second nature on the
basis of what Chodorow ( 1978) calls the reproduction of mothering and fathering. Boys learn
misogyny, according to her, by virtue of their need to individuate themselves with reference to their
primary caretakers, usually their mothers. And our culture reinforces misogyny by objectifying
women, which circularly justifies men's advantage over women with reference to the supposedly
natural inferiority of women. By the end of adolescence, young men have not made conscious
choices to subordinate women but simply learned the norms of their culture as well as grown egos
formed in reference to present mothers and absent fathers. Chodorow's sensible feminist suggestion
that we begin to undo male supremacy by involving fathers in childcare, providing boys male role
models and not pitting them against "suffocating" mothers, liberates both boys and girls, hence
future men and women. She appears convinced that men-in-general and women-in-general suffer
the sexual division of labor, although she does not engage in the scholastic exercise of computing
who suffers "more." Few would deny that women get the short end of the stick in patriarchal
societies, although this is largely a difference in quantity and not quality.
It is very important to stress that men, too, can be feminists and write feminist theory if we are to
forge bonds between men-in-general and women-in-general. These bonds are necessary in order to
challenge the structuring logic of our civilization, which hierarchizes valued over valueless people,
groups, and activities. This by no means requires women and men to adhere to a heterosexual norm,
nor to accept the nuclear family as an ideal. Heterosexism and familism are significant artifacts of
male supremacy and need to be opposed in the interest of universal human liberation. Nor does this
mean that we should ignore the specificity of patriarchy as an epochal form of the hierarchy of
production over reproduction. But we need to recognize that women are not in their nature denizens
of the realm of reproduction, endlessly reproducing everyone but themselves. Women are
reproducers with respect to men and children only because of an accident of nature, which gives
them species-reproducing responsibility. This accident of nature becomes the basis for structured
social inequality, which makes sexual differentiation the basis for social and economic
stratification, ever the ruse of ideology. A universalistic feminist critical theory must oppose
bio(onto)logy just as it opposes every other confusion of nature and history.
DISCOURSE: CRACKING THE CODE
Postmodernism becomes critical theory when we use its discourse theory to unpack ideologies
dispersed as social texts into the sense and sentience of the public environment. It becomes a critical
way to read ideologizing texts against themselves, exhuming their secret authorship and contesting
their facile assumptions, which, as in the case of bio(onto)logy discussed above, confuse history and
nature in the interest of domination. But postmodernism regresses when it is reduced to interpretive
method, accepting with Derrida that the text has no outside. Although he may not have meant what
is often heard by that remark-sheer idealism--Derrida's deconstructive program obscures the
possible political contribution of a postmodern critical theory that uses discoursetheoretic insights in
order to debunk new forms of ideology in fast capitalism.
In rejecting orthodox Marxism, postmodernism threatens to abandon all Marxist historicity,
forgetting that the struggle over the validity of consciousness does not end with the dismantling of
the Soviet Union. Although it was crucial to debunk Stalinist Archimedeanism, we must not give up
truth, reason, or justice as reconstructive ideals. Although Habermas's attempt to revalidate critical
theory with reference to certain universal pragmatics of communicative action is unconvincing,
ignoring both discourse and gender, he is right to salvage Enlightenment notions of rationality in
the face of irrationalists and antirationalists, who thrive in these times. The postmodern assault on
positivism founders where it equates positivism and rationalism, precisely the claim of the Vienna
Circle, which replaced speculative philosophy with mathematics and hence eviscerated reason
altogether. I agree with Derrida that all texts are undecidable, hence puncturing the balloon of
scientists who pretend to represent the world presuppositionlessly. But undecidability does not
mean that we should (or can) avoid decisions about the good life, even where we recognize that
these decisions are subject to deconstructive interrogation or, simply, doubt.
Postmodernism comes so dose to being critical theory, and yet remains so far from having attained
a coherent political program. Either postmodernists celebrate the present as the end of history, or
they busily deconstruct the myriad different texts that litter the landscape and divert attention from
more important problems, namely the abolition of injustice. Against these depoli ticizing
tendencies, I want to put deconstruction to work in the project of the critique of ideology, having
theorized a distinctive new phase of postmodern capitalism. Deconstruction interrogates the flimsy
boundary between textuality and the world, helping draw attention to social texts that are no longer
found between covers, susceptible to a distancing reading. For this version of deconstruction to do
its work in cracking the code of ideology today, we need to decommodify and politicize
postmodernism, an uphill struggle at best given the co-optability of key postmodern insights.
It is easy to see why postmodernism serves the neoconservative project so well, even if Habermas (
1981a) exaggerates the doctrinal conservatism of New French Theory. Although postmodernism
originally positioned itself against the French Communist Party, New French Theory has inflated
into a wholesale attack on all grand narratives. The deconstruction of Marxism has attained
planetary proportions, with the demise of the Soviet empire both fueled by and fueling the
postmodern critique of orthodox leftism. Virtually no one defends Marx against both his former
statist followers and his Lyotardian detractors. Postmodernism inflects a flashy, insubstantial
intellectual culture in which it is customary to view Marxism as a relic from the dustbin of history,
belonging, at best, to the pantheon of moribund intellectual movements interesting only to
archaelogists of our civilization. As Jacoby indicated in Last Intellectuals ( 1987), the
academization of Marxism relates inversely to its political fortunes. One does not need to be
postmodern to recognize the ample political failures of the left.
There is a certain relationship between postmodernism's rejection of Marxist narratives and its
devotion to groundless close readings. Reading exhumes secret authorial perspective and hence
amplifies opportunities for reauthorizing social texts that lead us to reproduce the world out of a
belief in its naturelike permanence. But reading remains simply an academic career move where it
is unhinged from transformational political theory. Jacoby's observation that erstwhile New Leftists
busy themselves in the establishment of academic careers via vita building suggests a certain
causality: The abandonment of leftist political practice is replaced by technical scholarship, which
reproduces itself. Indeed, the humanities crowd resonates with "good" political motives, which are
seldom subjected to scrutiny but simply assumed as universalistic values. The professional
academics who apply Derrida and Foucault in their own interpretive practices proclaim all sorts of
leftish values about curriculum as well as the overall state of the world.
I want postmodernism to become a vehicle for cracking fast-capitalist codes of acquiescence and
adjustment, including those of academic neoliberals. This requires that postmodernists not reject all
Marxist possibilities, especially where Marxism is transcoded into a generic critical theory targeting
hierarchy and heterotextuality and not simply capital. This also requires that postmodernism not
become a code to surpass all codes, even more involuted than the discourses it deciphers. The
obscurity of postmodern interpretive theory frequently gets in the way of public discourse, defeating
the postmodern attempt to read underneath texts for the secret authorship animating them. This is
not to say that we possess one-for-one principles of translation whereby we can replace difficult
words with transparently simple ones. Translations are themselves undecidable and thus must be
translated. But postmodern critical theory needs to create a viable public sphere within which
citizens can carry on intelligible discussions about societal purposes. Postmodern critical theory can
help create this public sphere by decoding ideological claims wherever they may appear, in
advertising as well as in organized religion. It is in this sense that I characterize postmodern critical
theory as code-cracking work, albeit recognizing that decoding itself must be decoded lest we
suggest or imply the possibility of a positivist language to end all languages--e.g., sheer
mathematics.
A technically compulsive postmodernism reads culture without political direction, having
abandoned what it purports are Archimedean criteria with which to assess texts' validity. But, as I
argue in Cultural Studies as Critical Theory ( 1992a), one can retain the distinction between true
and false human needs without endorsing a timeless truth. Marx balanced the historicity of needs
against the notion of truth as reason. That is, with Marcuse ( 1964) in One-Dimensional Man, we
can debunk the falsehood of needs with reference to a criterion of their heteronomy without
stipulating definitive needs--opera over rock and roll, for example. Marcuse avoided mandarinism
without endorsing an utter relativity, which dispenses with the distinction between truth and
falsehood.
Postmodernism takes the undecidability of texts as license for relativism. Although tempting in an
age well acquainted with the corruption of politicians, this relativism does not derive from the
critique of totalitarianism, which people like Lyotard confuse with Marxism. Some narratives are
"grander," that is more impervious to their humbling undecidability, than others. It is very important
to make these distinctions lest we fall into a relativism, with Nietzsche, that abandons all judgment.
I would argue that we need a rationalist standard of truth and value more than ever, when so much
is going wrong. We need to reclaim textuality by gaining distance from the dispersed texts and
codes cluttering the quotidian. This is precisely where a critical discourse theory can do its best
work, first identifying social texts and then authorizing them by disclosing the busy literary artifice
underneath claims that soft drinks and running shoes represent the good life.
Athletic apparel companies proclaim ontology: "Just do it" and "life is short, play hard." These are
the secret political theories of our time. By cracking their codes for what they recommend about the
commodification of experience, we take a halting step away from an enveloping quotidian, which
would have us live our lives through these simulations, as Baudrillard calls them. The various Nike
campaigns vividly suggest shoe and apparel acquisition designed to fill the vacuum of postmodern
meaninglessness. With Beatles music and sophisticated editing, these campaigns insinuate
themselves into our lives, suggesting commodity acquisition as a mode of aestheticist cultivation.
Shopping is almost an afterthought, an automatic response from people convinced by advertising's
simulations to view posturban life as an open road.
It is not enough for postmodern cultural theory simply to produce readings, both playful and
pyrotechnic. Anyone can translate anything into something else. Derrida's influence on literary and
cultural criticism has been positive inasmuch as he liberated us from the myth of positivist close
readings (e.g., the New Criticism), which pretended that works or oeuvres admit of singular
interpretive triangulations. These definitive readings were to be spiritually elevating, on the model
of traditional Leavis-era aesthetic criticism (see Eagleton 1983). Derrida's influence has been
negative to the extent that he has given license to the proliferation of readings unconstrained by
criteria of judgment. This is not to say that snooty critics should find Nike ads wanting according to
certain mandarin aesthetic criteria but that we need to read advertisements in terms of their
embedded truth claims.
These truth claims are brought to light by deconstructive readings that demonstrate the busy literary
artifice underneath glossy print and celluloid performances. Advertisements position consumers in
deliberate ways, enticing them to live their lives in terms of their own reflected representations in
the campaigns. Nike understands that the best way to sell sneakers to yuppies is to represent people
like themselves attempting to deal with life on the road, which is potholed but also pregnant with
the possibility of individual accomplishment, ever the yuppie grail. Just-doing-it inflects the
quotidian with pursuits-of-meaning characteristic of baby boomers now dealing with hair loss and
perfidious bosses.
One of Nike's most distinctive campaigns involves text lifted from a woman's diary. It is about
coming to grips with contemporary womanhood, full of pathos and travail. In the end, of course, the
woman culture hero evidences her newfound self-confidence by becoming athletic, justdoing-it a
decision arrived at through new-age introspection (probably supported by therapy). This youthful
everywoman is a deliberate textual outcome; indeed, the campaign is virtually all narrative,
suggesting its own deconstructibility. We need to attend critically to the way in which this fake
circumspection encodes a theory of self and society, recommending a certain adaptive posture on
the part of yuppie women everywhere. In this case, it is suggested that the best way to deal with the
denigration of women, and particularly the assaults on their self-esteem from adolescence into
working womanhood, is through athleticism as an urban survival strategy. It does not really matter
whether the everywoman in the campaign is a "real" athlete, running a certain number of miles per
week. Her picture suggests a fit body and practiced stride. Nikes signify or simulate a certain way
of dealing with women's experiences of degradation. Only a small fraction of people who buy
athletic shoes actually use them for athletic purposes. It is by now well known how expensive
basketball shoes bear certain cultural significances among young African-Americans, who, lacking
largesse, sometimes commit crimes in order to obtain them. Just as Nike positions its yuppie
everywoman as the protagonist in the social text of the quotidian, so Nike positions Michael Jordan
and Bo Jackson as protagonists in the social text of African-American everyday life. The beauty of
Jordan and Jackson is that they are transracial, selling shoes to whites as well. The Nike
everywoman has a more limited appeal to those who read the texts of ads self-referentially, as a
telling piece of autobiography.
Deconstructive work needs to be done on "what" these social texts are "saying" to people about the
relationship between self and society. Nike and Reebok, like beer companies, depoliticize personal
problems, which are to be remedied through elaborate processes of identification with the
lives scripted in their campaigns. In a sense, this is nothing new: Advertising has always worked
this way (see Ewen 1976, 1988). But now deconstructive interpretive techniques exhume the secret
authorship behind these campaigns, reading advertising as political and social recommendation that
can be challenged. Such readings help us resist these campaigns, interrogating the reasonableness of
lives scripted by the companies dominating airtime, billboards, and the print media.
Advertisements can be read for their validity. We must ask whether it is really true that labeled
shoes and clothes afford meaning and control. But to ask this question requires us to translate
campaigns into the secret claims they are making about our world. Does beer make us sexy? Do
cars enable us to escape workaday alienation? Can cigarettes bring us into harmony with the great
outdoors? Advertising is not the only venue of deconstructive work. We can read buildings, fashion,
science, movies, television, newspapers, and magazines in much the same way. We need to
authorize them, bringing their assumptions to light and then contesting their silent advocacy.
Packard was ahead of his time to understand that advertising is hidden persuasion. He lacked a
methodological apparatus for doing deconstructive readings of these deceptions. Similarly, the
Frankfurt theorists could not closely read movies or music as contentious social texts but only assert
theoretically that popular culture is an industry crucial to late capitalism, both in its commodifying
and reifying aspects.
We can authorize advertisements as discourse/practices secretly advocating a certain world, in the
case of Nike a world in which people solve their problems by running around in circles expensively
attired in labeled outfits. One can contest these versions of the world only if they are recognized as
literary artifices achieved by the copywriters of the quotidian. Although it should be obvious to
cultural theorists that advertising is a literary fiction, the most successful campaigns deploy a kind
of cinema verité in order to simulate realist validity. These campaigns represent the flux and flow of
"life itself"--people wearing Levi's (see Goldman and Papson 1991), drinking Coke and driving
Hondas. Like other simulations, advertising conceals its own artifice in order to simulate a credible
reality-hence reproducing it.
All of these readings identify postmodern textuality, and its advocacy, in surprising places.
Textuality abounds as argument, although this is hard to detect since discourse makes its case by
way of immersion in everyday experience, losing a certain distance from reality that makes critical
reading, and hence evaluation, possible. Few read, except in the university world. Even the
explosion of academic books is not matched by a busy readership. Academic publishers publish
books with print runs of a few hundred. People write to get published, hence ahead. The
postmodernism explosion adds to this busyness, lengthening curriculum vitae but not deepening
social insight. Where the most relevant "texts" are those of concealed and congealed discourse like
advertising, few readers gain enough distance from these texts in order to recognize the worlds they
secretly recommend.
Texts today are everywhere and nowhere. There are many books, few readers, and perhaps even
fewer writers. I have already suggested that books increasingly write authors and not the other way
around in the sense in which the editorial, production, and even drafting processes are out of
authorial control. Trade books are made to order--for the market. And yet textuality is increasingly
important politically, albeit the disguised textuality of postmodern capitalism. Smart young college
students no longer yearn to write the Great American Novel, let alone critical theory, but aspire to
work for advertising agencies and television stations. They are the scribes of the culture industry,
who simulate reality in order to reproduce it. They work in what McLuhan called "hot" media, by
comparison to which the traditional literary and academic industries are stone cold.
Postmodern discourse theory enables us to read these simulations as the authorial acts they are,
disgorging the secret textuality underneath the slick metaprose of advertising, television, movies,
journalism. By metaprose I am referring to a textuality that, in concealing its own deliberate literary
artifice, recommends lives surreptitiously. I am not suggesting that individual cultural producers
purposely conceal the rhetoricity of their own writing. Rather, institutions of textuality determine
literary outcomes through the elaborate scripting and screening processes of mass-market fiction,
textbooks, movies, television, journalism, and even academic books and articles. The death of the
reader is paralleled by a Barthesian death of the author. It is crucial to understand the process of
deauthorization as an institutional outcome of the culture industry and of academia--books writing
authors. In this sense, the postmodern critical agenda is both to translate metaprose into advocacy
that can be rebutted and to empower authors to reclaim textuality as their own, thus rebuilding the
public sphere in late capitalism.
Postmodernism suggests a public intellectuality that refuses literary overdetermination and
specialization as well as the death of reader and writer. Postmodernism suggests a public standard
of discursive accessibility that rests not simply on stylistic simplification but rather on the
democratization of what Habermas calls dialogue chances--opportunities to read and write, hence to
participate publicly. In cracking the code of fast-capitalist dispersed texts, postmodernism suggests
the possibilities of demystifying, deconstructing readings and thus lives. It is ironic that postmodern
discourse theory contributes to the decline of discourse. Alternatively, postmodern theory could
function as a mode of public speech and critique that involves a perpetual questioning humbling all
transformational and textual attempts, which are now viewed merely as essays--strong attempts to
live intelligent lives.
The ironism of postmodernism in face of Archimedean narratives can be coupled to an agenda of
social change, as I have demonstrated above. For this to occur requires us to turn postmodern
interpretive techniques back upon postmodernism itself lest textual-critical efforts bog down in
obscurantism. We should not mystify anew as we demystify, a real risk at a time when discourse
theory is so academized as to have lost touch with the public project of discourse. That is, discourse
theory, owed to people like Derrida, must check its own tendency to become so academic-ponderous, technical, self-referential--that it only contributes to the problem it intends to resolve,
notably the closure of the public sphere. Where modernity is characterized by expert cultures and
language games (see Bernstein 1971), postmodernity in its best sense should be typified by
counterhegemonic, self-deconstructing discourse/practices that subvert the disciplinary society.
Postmodern discourse should be dedisciplining, not the epitome of discipline. Postmodernism can
not only crack the code of dispersed ideology in fast capitalism, but it can suggest a mode of code
cracking that applies to itself, frustrating the efforts of academic postmodernists to transform
deconstructing, decanonizing literary strictures into an unassailable edifice of ritual postures and
dense prose. Only in this way can postmodernism work toward a democratic polity in which people
realize their strength as readers and writers, ever the promise of Marxist political and social theory.
DOMINATION: NEGATING NEGATIVE DIALECTICS
Although this book has been formulated within the frame of reference of the Frankfurt School's
critical theory, we must transcode German critical theory into a nonmandarin cultural studies that
produces emancipatory readings and new cultural practices. Adorno's mandarinism is not a viable
posture, if it ever was. He paints with too broad a brush in declaring administration total. In fact,
oppositional projects and oeuvres fall through the cracks, making a difference. Although his
negative dialectics is a powerful antidote to a cheerful liberalism that empowers subjectivity at a
time when subjectivity is in serious decline, negative dialectics itself must be negated toward a
more positive formulation of critical theory. For me, following but diverging from Habermas, this
reformulated critical theory needs a lifeworld grounding in the contested terrains of gender, culture,
and power.
The Frankfurt theorists set impossibly high standards for political resistance and cultural
expression. They seem to have envisaged a proletariat tutored in Beckett as well as Marx. Thus,
they failed to detect glimmers of resistance that did not conform to their high-modernist conception
of total transformation. The absence of this elevated, edified collective subject led Adorno in
Negative Dialectics to conclude that the opportunity to realize a new world had irrevocably passed.
Although there is a great deal of empirical evidence to suggest that Adorno's pessimism is justified
today, given the globalization of domination coupled with the successful neoconservative blockage
of new social movements, negative dialectics must not be allowed to become ontology, which it
nearly did in Adorno. The major failing of Frankfurt theory was its inability to engage with popular,
populist insurgency in the venues of gender and discourse, preventing them from theorizing the
possibility of new social movements capable of destabilizing administered society.
As I indicated above, Adorno failed not simply because his cultural tastes prevented him from
engaging with the popular as a ground of political contest, contradictorily vitiating the ideologycritical promise of the culture-industry thesis presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno was
so far removed from the quotidian that he could not grasp the significance of the politics of gender
and discourse that marked a variety of new social movements in the 1960s. Indeed, Adorno and
Horkheimer were intensely threatened by the student movement and counterculture, which they
recognized as irrationalist, anti-modernist forces inimical to highmodernist values. In no way am I
suggesting a postmodern Luddism but am rather pointing out that Adorno's negative dialectics went
wrong where it prevented him from developing a differentiating reading of everyday life that
focuses on counterhegemonic developments in the realms of gender, culture, and power. This was
not mainly because he was a pessimist; that was more outcome than cause. It was rather because he
did not theorize gender, culture, and power as politically significant moments in late capitalism,
succumbing to a variety of blindspots and prejudices characteristic of high-modernist critical
theorists.
Had Adorno-generation critical theorists managed to detect the politics of everyday life in the
venues of gender, culture, and power, they could have transcoded their own critique of domination
into the more generic hierarchy of value over valuelessness, applying their critique of civilization to
a host of practices traditionally ignored by Marxists. Inasmuch as Adorno's critique of identity
theory paralleled that of Derrida, it is not unimaginable that Adorno could have become
postmodernist avant la lettre, anticipating discursive themes in postmodernism that reformulate
critical theory in fast capitalism. It is less imaginable that Adorno could have anticipated feminist
themes. This is not because he was male per se, a fatal error of biologism. Rather, his sexual politics
prevented him from recognizing male supremacy as a problem, indeed, the same problem as the
alienation of labor. There is nothing about critical theory that makes it "male" apart from
demonstrably male-supremacist biases (e.g., the Frankfurt work on paternal authority) or blindspots
(e.g., their inattention to the women's movement). I have already declared my opposition to the
grafting of feminism onto critical theory, thus preserving their differentiation. Instead, I transcode
them into each other, producing a generic critical theory that not only has room for the critique of
male supremacy and the alienation of labor but develops these critiques out of common theoretical
resources.
Adorno was far from identifying this common theoretical logic. It was enough for him to debunk
orthodox Marxism as an Enlightenment project, an important theoretical advance at a time when
capitalism, fascism, and Stalinism were combining into impregnable postwar "total administration."
Adorno brilliantly analyzed total administration as a conjuncture of liberal and illiberal forces,
producing an analysis of the Holocaust that was fully continuous with his analysis of
authoritarianism. Adorno understood the depravity of liberalism more deeply than almost anyone
else, debunking liberal strains in Marxism that threaten to turn Marxism into yet another human
disaster. Unfortunately, he did not theorize beyond the consolidated capitalism of the 1950s which,
he correctly understood, integrated the fascist conquest of otherness. Adorno's hesitancy about the
new social movements of the 1960s followed from his premise that it was impossible to undo the
self-reproducing, hence totalizing, tendencies of late-capitalist total administration.
I cannot refute Adorno's apparently metaphysical pessimism metaphysically. The only way to
challenge his negativity is with evidence of positive social movements. There is little evidence of
this kind today. Indeed, Adorno's totalizing negativity makes a good deal of sense on empirical
grounds, even if he did not take a sufficiently close look at everyday life in order to detect the faint
pulse of dissent and reconstruction. Adorno was highly skeptical that microlevel opposition could
resist its integration. This approached an ontological negativity in books like Minima Moralia and
Negative Dialectics. Although Adorno deeply understood capitalist total administration, Adorno
leaves us no method with which to prevent his negativity from hardening into a metaphysical
posture, hence defeating political projects today. Suffice it to say that there is no Adornoism, no
Adornoian program--there was only Adorno, an encyclopedic intellectual who chastened cheerful
liberals for their optimism and reformism. We should learn from him but not duplicate him
(assuming that duplication is even possible).
This presents a real problem for people like me, who drink deeply of German critical theory. I am
saying that we must transcode critical theory into lifeworld-relevant themes, including those of
gender and discourse. Although that project is not inconsistent with Adorno ( 1973a: p. 406)
insistence that we must escape "the objective context of delusion . . . from within," the critical
theorists were nearly allergic to lifeworld resistances, insisting that they were eminently co-optable
by hegemonic interests, discourses, and practices--the theme of Marcuse ( 1964) One-Dimensional
Man. But we must ground critical theory squarely in everyday life in order to foster the new social
movements identified by Habermas. We must build on the politics of the personal, much as
feminists have tried to do, although keeping in mind that simply because projects originate in
everyday life does not somehow mean that they are invulnerable or charmed. Indeed, everyday life
is very much a site of heteronomy, threatening to eclipse subjectivity and intersubjectivity, as the
Frankfurt theorists recognized. But the lifeworld is a contested terrain, never entirely losing the
dynamic dialectical possibilities found everywhere people confront oppression with imagination. In
fact, critical theory, perhaps because of its relentless negativity, stimulates imagination at a time
when most agendas of social change are either neoliberal or postmodern, thus promising no change
at all.
Critical theory can refract domination in quotidian experience and practice. The Frankfurt critique
of domination sheds ample light on the way in which domination is both imposed and self-imposed,
"chosen" in the false needs (see Marcuse 1964) that damage lives and wreck the environment.
People can break their surplus repression, as Marcuse ( 1955) called it in his Freud book, Eros and
Civilization, by adopting counterhegemonic modes of existence (I hesitate to call them lifestyles,
endorsing their self-commodification as modes of happy consumerism). Marcuse recognized the
possibility of these embryonic, prefigurative choices in his 1969 Essay on Liberation, which took
seriously New Left politics and Dionysian youth culture for their transformational impact on the
bourgeois quotidian. The Frankfurt School itself indicated the ways in which these oppositional
modes are quickly commodified and co-opted, Woodstock Nation becoming a movie and album.
Marcuse's sympathy for the politics of the personal constitutes a positive example of the possible
grounding of critical theory in everyday life, both identifying and amplifying ongoing struggle.
On the one hand, the Frankfurt theorists traced domination's invasion of lived experience and the
body. On the other hand--and noncontradictorily--they argued that the overcoming of domination
must proceed from this ground in experience and the body. Self-transformation can lead to fullblown societal transformation via the process of what Marcuse calls prefiguration: The choices we
make today constitute social movements and societies of the future, ensuring that we do not
postpone liberation until a distant future time (and hence justifying all manner of sacrifices, even
atrocities, in the meantime). In demonstrating convincingly that the latecapitalist person is
incredibly manipulated by external and internal imperatives of discipline, the Frankfurt theorists
add sobriety, even skepticism, to millenarian Marxist optimism. But they also suggest reasons for
optimism inasmuch as they ground politics in subjectivity and intersubjectivity, thus rooting
political dynamics in the quotidian choices people make about their lives. This strategy avoids
liberalism precisely where human needs are depicted as social and not private. Marcuse's
conception of needs resembles early Marx's in its stress on their communitarian character. Marcuse
argues that people can choose work and intimate lives embodying nonauthoritarian power dynamics
and thus help bring about optimally nonauthoritarian societies.
My version of critical theory owes a great deal to this Marcusean formulation of a political
subjectivity grounded in the lifeworld. Marcuse plays a central role in my ( 1992b) Discourse of
Domination: From the Frankfurt Schoolto Postmodernism to Postmodernism, in which I retrieve
and revive critical theory for the 1990s, a project extended in this book. I add feminism and
postmodernism to Marcuse where they provide important perspectives on gender and discourse
largely ignored by the Frankfurt theorists. Tellingly--given the times--Marcuse is now largely
ignored (but see Lukes and Bokina 1993). He is dismissed as a period philosopher of the 1960s--a
mistake, given the origins of his Freudian Marxism in the 1950s. Although Marcuse was flexible
enough to adapt the lifeworld grounding of his critical theory to new social movements during the
1960s, this brief affiliation with the New Left was in no way essential for his theory. It is very
important that we avoid sentimentality about the original Frankfurt School's versions of critical
theory, however instructive. It is necessary to adapt their analysis of domination to a postmodern
stage of capitalism, especially with the aid of feminism and postmodernism, which together refocus
critical theory on everyday life, a grounding it lost with Adorno.
The legacy of negative dialectics is important in the sense that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse
explained why late capitalism survives Marx's expectation of its demise (see Buck-Morss 1977).
They acutely dissected domination. But their legacy frustrates attempts to reground critical theory in
oppositional practices and social movements that avoid the fate of total administration. Are there in
fact people and groups who resist their own integration? The nearly metaphysical posture of
negative dialectics is insufficient to answer this question. We need to develop a perspective on the
possibility of new social movements that answers to the lifeworld grounding of critical theory
without appearing romantic or gullible. After all, Adorno was correct that critique tends to be
absorbed by the very system it attacks, perversely strengthening it by suggesting its openness.
Facile optimism about new social movements should be discounted, especially at a time when the
right flourishes and all sorts of neoliberal gains have been reversed. It is extremely difficult to find
evidence of leftist vitality in these grim times. My argument is that feminism and postmodern
discourse theory help us locate this evidence in places that would surprise even the sophisticated
skeptics of the Frankfurt School.
WHO'S LEFT?
My transcoding of German critical theory, New French Theory, and feminist theory into an
overarching theoretical logic appropriate to fast capitalism seeks political purchase at a time when
people everywhere lament and/or celebrate the declared end of politics. Who among us on the left
does not wonder whether the demise of the Soviet Union seals the fate of organized leftism once
and for all? Indeed, the very phrase "on the left" trades on a notion of ideological bipolarity
increasingly rejected by postmodernists, neoconservatives, and neoliberals everywhere. Who's left
on a left that is increasingly off the political map? My book has attempted to answer this question,
providing a new perspective on critical theory that focuses our transformational attention on
everyday life by understanding hegemonic and counterhegemonic pressures in the venues of
gender, culture, and power--the respective foci of feminism, postmodernism, and German critical
theory. By elaborating a generic theoretical logic focusing on the hierarchy of valued over devalued
activities, a feminist postmodern critical theory can identify and then amplify resistances to this
hierarchizing structural tendency at the level of everyday life. These resistances include but are not
limited to the valorization of housework (feminism), the deconstruction of discourse/practices of
quotidian modernity (postmodernism), and the liberation of popular culture from a suffocating
mandarinism (critical cultural studies). All of these activities, and more, reflect people's attempts to
claim value for their lives--a version of Marcuse's Great Refusal. Theory can add momentum to
these lifeworld-grounded struggles, orchestrating them into full-blown social movements. It is
important to insist on the leftishness of these struggles precisely in order to oppose the postmodern,
neoconservative, and neoliberal dismissals of the left-right continuum. All of these voices join the
chorus of the end-of-Marxism, which makes leftist discourse seem archaic today. My transcoded
theoretical logic--the critique of value's hierarchy over alleged valuelessness--has grounds in Marx,
although it pays no canonical debt to Marx. I consider myself and my theoretical logic Marxist,
although, as I said earlier, what it means to be a Marxist is up for grabs. Marxism weighs heavily on
those who revise Marxism in Marx's name, shamelessly adapting Marx's theoretical logic to social,
economic, political, and cultural circumstances that Marx could scarcely have foreseen. The issue of
whether my transcoding of critical theory is "really" Marxist is wrongly posed: I prefer to inquire
whether Marx was a critical theorist--I am convinced that he was--in the sense that he offered a
theoretical framework within which to situate labor's effort to claim value for itself.
The cult of theoretical personality defeats attempts to adapt critical theory to new historical
circumstances. At the same time, we must not abandon the claim to leftishness given the chorus of
post-Marxism in the voices of postmodernism, neoconservatism, and neoliberalism. At a time when
unions, people of color, and the women's movement are fighting for their political lives, it is more
than ever necessary to claim Marxism proudly, acknowledging that we must reinvent it on the
ground of people's everyday lives. To shelve Marxism in a dusty university library neglects the fact
that Marxist theory was always deeply invested in political struggles. Marx's every sentence
reflected the passion and program of radical social change, just as everything critical theorists write
today must resonate with the possibilities of personal and collective liberation. Marx did not
adequately understand the lifeworld ground of his own theory, producing the peculiar lack of
reflexivity noted by Habermas ( 1971) in Knowledge and Human Interests as the occasion for a
reconstruction of Marx's theoretical logic making way for the activity of his own critique (thus
halting the slide of Marxism into economism and determinism).
In this context, we need "more" Marxism--more politics, engagement, theory. Post-Marxism
disguises anti-Marxism, now as before. The postulate of the end of ideology ends ideology selfservingly, as Bell ( 1960) intended. (Of course, Bell wants to disguise his true political intentions:
He recently sent me a note scolding me for unmasking his apparent neoliberalism as
neoconservative. I clearly struck a nerve!) The neoconservatives misunderstand American
academia: Political correctness is liberal, not Marxist. Academic Marxism is dead, or nearly so.
Liberalism takes a postmodern and feminist turn, disqualifying Marxist totality theory. This is no
threat to universities' positioning in the state apparatus: College curricula that have a place for
"difference" help produce human capital capable of dealing with our increasingly diverse cultural
and gender mosaic. These curricula do not produce revolutionaries, especially where academic
neoliberals decry Marxism as a modernist male power trip.
I am not confident that we can invigorate the left, especially under neoconservatism, which thrives
in these times. We should begin, as I have done in this book, by theorizing what it means to be left.
We should then identify and nurture people's attempts to reconstruct their own lives, connecting
these efforts both theoretically and practically. My version of a feminist postmodern critical theory
contributes to a generic critical theory that theorizes apparently heterogeneous resistance
movements attacking the generic hierarchy of valued over valueless activities.
There is no magic in my theoretical transcodings. I have solved few problems, especially practical
ones. At most, I have raised the question of what it means to be left at a time when it is either an
enigma or an embarrassment to be identified with the left project, whatever that might mean. At
times like these, we must insist on our Marxism, as well as on our feminism and postmodernism. I
am Marxist, but I lament the way in which an inflexible Marxism has allowed the right to disqualify
Marxism as dogma. We must interrogate the text of our leftism lest the left classics that inspire us
become our tombstones. We must write leftist texts with an eye toward their inherent ambiguity and
undecidability, recognizing that texts are language games within which we solve all arguments selfreferentially, in terms of the falsely impregnable logics of our own positions. What we cannot do is
compare our logics with those of others in terms of criteria of external validity, assessing the extent
to which different theories mirror a one-true-world out there.
Marxism remains the most compelling emancipatory theory of our time, even if it misses
nonproletarian people and groups. My point in this book is that Marxism does not have to miss
these groups if its theoretical logic is expanded considerably beyond, and beneath, what Marx
intended in the mid-nineteenth century. Feminism and postmodernism enrich Marxism by changing
it perhaps beyond the point of recognizability. Scholastic Marxists
may lament my lack of textual grounding in the canonical literature of Marx and his epigones. So
much the worse for Marxism. By now, it should be dear that Marxism is not a canon to be defended
against the apostate but a way of life, a language game, a mode of social being. To lead a Marxist
life or feminist life or postmodern life requires one to interrogate all canons deconstructively,
seeking out their weak points, inconsistencies, omissions--all in the name of theoretical and political
fidelity to the core logics of those positions. I would argue that it is very much in the nature of
critical theory to engage in rigorous revisionism, continually confronting Marxist theoretical logic
with societal developments that challenge Marxism to reinvent itself.
It is necessary at once to defend Marxism's contemporary relevance and interrogate Marxism's
insufficiencies in light of feminist and postmodern challenges, which I interpret not as attacks but as
sympathetic readings. We must get beyond the either/or of dualist society (see Jacoby 1975),
transcending the notion that one cannot have coexisting theoretical and political identities that are in
fact a singular identity, once understood deeply enough at the level of their common logic. Today,
unfortunately, interestgroup politics holds sway: One cannot simultaneously "be" Marxist, feminist,
and postmodernist. Identities are so narrow that they exclude nearly everything outside the ambit of
one's personal experience, biography, commitments. We are all on the defensive at a time when
selfhood has become minimal ( Lasch 1984) and must jealously defend itself against external
challenges.
This is extremely unfortunate in that it prevents a real catholicity of theoretical, political, and
personal affiliations. The increasingly refined academic division of labor also plays a part in the
balkanization of the left into feminist theory, postmodernism, and Marxism. Academic
specialization dooms the left to fragmentation, which is redoubled by the fragmentation of identity
in postmodern capitalism. It is difficult to separate these two