Predicate Issue 2 by GeorgetownEGSA

Predicate

An English Studies Journal

Issue 2, 2012

Imperative 1

Cover image: John Larkander http://www.flickr.com/photos/larkander/

2012 Editorial Board John Robert Ladd, Editor Josie Torres Barth, Co-Editor Maeg Keane, Co-Editor Shelby Sleevi, Co-Editor Ryan Walter, Co-Editor Annalisa Adams, Assistant Editor Dr. John Pfordresher, Advisor

2012 Readers Josie Torres Barth Gina Dominick Aubrey Guthrie Courtney Hoffman Paula Hopkins Maeg Keane Shelby Sleevi Ryan Walter

Contents

Editor's Note.................................................................................................................. iv SUSANNAH NADLER The Non-Consenting Witness in The Importance of Being Earnest ......................... 1 COLIN DWYER “Who and What Art Thou?”: The Question of the Child in Peter Pan ...................13 JANE BARLOW FUNK Partial Passage: Fidelity and Motivation in David Lean's Adaptation of A Passage to India ............................................................................................26 ANNALISA ADAMS From the Perverse Father to the 'Miserable Monster': Tracking the Deployment of Sexuality in M.G. Lewis's The Monk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ......................................................................................................37 THEODORA DANYLEVICH SIC(K) CHIC(K): An Investigation of Thwarted Pedagogy and Critical Corporeality in the Anorexic/Bulimic Body and Ionesco's La Leçon ..................50 CATALINA LUPU Representations of the Exoticized Subaltern: Wide Sargasso Sea in Film ...........67

iii

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

M+"5$D+:#6-$L.11 B1(-+6

Predicate An English Studies Journal

Issue 2, 2012 Imperative

An English Studies Journal

The Non-Consenting Witness in The Importance of Being Earnest SUSANNAH NADLER The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it is in his soul who wrote it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends the beautiful thing its myriad meanings. - Oscar Wilde In the quotation above from “The Critic As Artist,” Oscar Wilde declares that the meaning of a work of art lies in the interpretive power of its beholder. Witnesses participate in the act of creation by lending an artwork an unlimited number of meanings. It is important that, for Wilde, the witness of an artwork creates meanings that other beholders might not see or that the artist might never have intended. Wilde thus endows audiences with the potentially dissident power to read against normative interpretations; the power to see in an artwork meanings that elude others. In this paper, I will argue that The Importance of Being Earnest highlights the dissident interpretive power of the witness. In doing so, Earnest provides a model for its audience to question the play’s performance of the traditional comedic trope of marriage. In making this argument, I hope to intervene productively in a critical disagreement about whether Earnest in fact depicts homosexuality,

NADLER / THE NON-CONSENTING WITNESS

and, if it does, whether a late-nineteenth-century audience would have recognized those depictions. I argue that Ernest is in many ways about a small subset of witnesses with subversive insight who have the potential to give the game away, but do not. Within the play, Algernon, Jack, Cecily, and Gwendolen are all aware at different times that other characters are performing multiple identities. This knowledge has the potential to subvert the play’s marriage plot. While the marriage plot ultimately survives, I argue that the knowing witnesses within the play present a dissident potential for members of the external audience to imitate. In this way, Earnest makes a space for a small number of nineteenth-century audience members to be skeptical of the heterosexual marriage scenario with which the play ends. My argument builds upon the work of Kerry Powell, who argues in Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde that The Importance of Being Earnest is fundamentally about the performance of identity. Powell writes that as the play evolves, “Earnest focused more and more intently upon personal identity as a matter of performance and textuality rather than natural fact” (101). In Powell’s argument, Jack’s performances of the identities “Jack” and “Ernest” allow Wilde to call into question the existence of any natural selfhood at all. Wilde instead depicts personal identity as a performance (Powell 101). If Earnest is indeed not only about Jack’s fluctuating identity but also about the performativity of all identity, then as Powell notes we can see Wilde as the originator of postmodern performance theory (117). Powell argues compellingly that Jack struggles to shape an identity that is in turn shaped by language, texts and historicized social norms. In order to understand a play about performance, however, it is essential to address theories of audience, a central preoccupation of postmodern performance theory that Powell overlooks. If Jack’s character represents various performances of selfhood, who is the addressee of his performance, and who witnesses it? In the introduction to Performativity and Performance, Andrew Parker and Eve Kasofsky Sedgwick argue that as performance theorists we must deconstruct not only the performer but

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

also the complex space in which a performance is enacted. Speech acts derive much of their power from the consent of the addressees and implied witnesses of a performance. For example, they write, “while ‘I dare you’ ostensibly involves only a singular first and a singular second person, it effectually depends as well on the tacit requisition of a third person plural, a ‘they’ of witness—whether or not literally present” (171-172). That is, when I dare you to perform some act or otherwise be considered a “wuss” (Parker and Sedgwick’s term), I am implicitly invoking witnesses who agree with my view that wussiness is not acceptable. It is in the eyes of these consenting witnesses that you, the addressee, risk seeming “wussy” if you do not perform the act that I have dared you to perform (Parker and Sedgwick 172). The witnesses may or may not agree with sanctioning against wussiness; thus for Parker and Sedgwick, “‘I dare you’ invokes the presumption, but only the presumption, of a consensus between speaker and witnesses, and to some extent between all of them and the addressee” (Parker and Sedgwick 172). Thus Parker and Sedgwick open up a space for subversion in the potential for the witnesses or even the addressee of a speech act to refuse to consent to a particular performance. It is essential, then, to examine the role of addressees and witnesses within the play. When Jack performs the identity of Ernest, the play depicts Algernon and Gwendolen as his addressees, with London society as witness. When Algernon finds Jack’s cigarette case inscribed to “Uncle Jack,” and Jack informs Algernon “Jack” is his name, Algernon replies with a long list of evidence that Jack’s name is in fact Ernest: You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to everyone as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn’t Ernest. It’s on your cards. Here is one of them. (Taking it from case.) ‘Mr. Ernest Worthing, B.4, The Albany, W.’ I’ll keep this as proof that your

NADLER / THE NON-CONSENTING WITNESS

name is Ernest if ever you attempt to deny it to me, or to Gwendolen, or to any one else. (Wilde 361) In putting forth evidence that Jack is Ernest, Algernon invokes his own role as an addressee of Jack’s performance of the role of Ernest. Algernon’s assertions that “You have always told me it was Ernest,” “You answer to the name of Ernest,” and even “you are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life,” which introduces the central pun of the play, all insist on Jack’s performance of Ernest/earnest to Algernon. We have not yet met Gwendolen, but Algernon also mentions her as a recipient of Jack’s performance who will be betrayed if Ernest is in fact Jack. In order to bolster his argument, Algernon also invokes “everyone” (that is, London society) as witness to Jack’s performance of the role of Ernest: “I have introduced you to everyone as Ernest.” The card that Algernon keeps as “proof” also invokes society as witness; a calling card is an important marker of social identity. Thus Algernon’s response to the idea that Jack might not be Ernest is an insistence upon his own role as the addressee of Jack’s performance of the role of Ernest, and an invocation of society as witness to that performance. Jack himself reveals that he cultivates society as witness. He tells Algernon that he cannot dine at the Savoy because he owes the hotel !700, and Algernon replies, “Why on earth don’t you pay them? You have got heaps of money.” Jack replies, “Yes, but Ernest hasn’t, and I must keep up Ernest’s reputation” (Wilde 362), marking his awareness that London society witnesses his performance of “Ernest.” Ernest is only one of Jack’s roles; as he explains, “my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country” (Wilde 361). The addressee of Jack’s performance of “Jack” is his ward, Cecily. Jack tells Algernon, “When one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects” (Wilde 360). Jack thus performs the role of Jack for the benefit of Cecily. We see Cecily’s reaction to Jack’s performance in the very next scene, when she exclaims, “Dear Uncle Jack is so very serious! Sometimes he is so serious that I think he cannot be quite well” (Wilde 375). In this conversation, Miss Prism shows that she is a consenting witness to Jack’s performance.

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

She replies, “Cecily! I am surprised at you. Mr. Worthing has many troubles in his life. Idle merriment and triviality would be out of place in his conversation” (Wilde 375). This defense of Jack is amusing, because the audience of the play has already witnessed both idle merriment and trivial conversation when Jack is performing as Ernest. Thus while Algernon tries to prove Jack’s identity as “Ernest,” and Miss Prism defends Jack’s performance of “Jack,” the audience, witnesses of the play as a whole, is aware of both roles as performances. It is the normal stuff of comedy for the audience to be aware of an identity mix-up while the characters in the play are oblivious. In this play, however, there are internal witnesses who are also aware of the performance of multiple identities. Jack tries to avoid confessing to Algernon that he performs a different identity in the country, but he is finally forced into an explanation. Thus Algernon, the addressee of Jack’s performance of Ernest in London, becomes a witness to Jack’s performance of Jack in the country. Algernon shows up in Hertfordshire, presenting “Ernest’s” card to gain admission to the house in the guise of Jack’s prodigal younger brother. Thus when Jack appears in mourning for Ernest, he finds Algernon being Ernest. At this juncture Jack and Algernon witness one another’s performances, and they are not happy about what they see. When Jack berates Algernon for pretending to be Ernest, Algernon berates Jack for pretending to be Jack in mourning: “It is perfectly childish to be in deep mourning for a man who is actually staying for a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque” (Wilde 388). While in the city Algernon was a consenting addressee of Jack’s performance as Ernest, in the country Algernon is in danger of being a non-consenting witness to Jack’s performance of Jack. Jack wants Algernon to leave, because, in addition to wooing Cecily, Algernon could tell Cecily and Miss Prism that “Jack” is one of multiple performed identities. Though Algernon holds the dissident potential of a nonconsenting witness, he has an incentive to play along with Jack’s performance in order to support his own performance as Ernest. Algernon performing as Ernest is eager to woo Cecily and to avoid

NADLER / THE NON-CONSENTING WITNESS

Jack as a witness to his performance. When Cecily informs her “wicked cousin Ernest” that Jack will not be back until Monday afternoon, Algernon replies, “That is a great disappointment. I am obliged to go up by the first train on Monday morning” (Wilde 379). When Jack shows up early and in mourning for Ernest, there is a moment when Jack almost gives the game away. Cecily tells Jack that his brother Ernest has arrived, and Jack replies, “What nonsense! I haven’t got a brother.” Cecily says, “Oh, don’t say that. However badly he may have behaved to you in the past he is still your brother” (Wilde 383). Here we see that Jack’s non-consent as a witness has the potential to ruin Algernon’s performance of Ernest. Cecily misinterprets Jack’s assertion that he has no brother, but just as the audience is aware of Algernon’s potential to undermine Jack’s performance as Jack, the audience knows that Jack has the potential to undermine Algernon’s performance as Ernest. Just as the witness to the performative statement “I dare you” could debunk the whole performance by saying, “don’t do it on any account” (Parker and Sedgwick172), Jack and Algernon have the dissident potential to undermine one another’s performances of identity. So far we have examined the dissident possibilities when a man can withhold consent to another man’s performance of identity. For a romantic comedy such as Earnest, the stakes of non-consent increase when the play addresses romantic consent. The women are addressees of the men’s performances of romantic interest, and their consent to this performance is necessary for the heterosexual marriage plot and the maintenance of patriarchal authority within the play. As the play continues, both Cecily and Gwendolen emphasize the possibility that they might withhold consent to their lovers’ performances. Gwendolen arrives on the scene and announces that she is engaged to “Ernest.” This causes a misunderstanding that, once explained, gives the lie to both Jack and Algernon’s performances of the role of Ernest. This revelation causes Cecily and Gwendolen to consider repudiating their lovers, who in turn try to convince them that their performances stem from affection. Algernon tells Cecily that he pretended to be Ernest “In order that I might have the opportunity of meeting you.” When Gwendolen questions whether

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Cecily should believe Algernon, Cecily responds, “I don’t, but that does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer” (Wilde 406). A few lines later Cecily says, “I am more than content with what Mr. Moncrieff said. His voice alone inspires one with absolute credulity” (Wilde 406). Here Cecily expresses her consent to Algernon’s professions of love (his voice, his beautiful answer), as a willful choice, invoking the possibility of refusal at the same time that she consents to this performance. Similarly, when Jack asks Gwendolen if she believes that he pretended to be Ernest in order to win her love, she replies, “I have the greatest doubts upon the subject. But I mean to suppress them” (Wilde 406). Just as Algernon and Jack embody the dangerous possibility of refusing consent but never actually debunk one another’s performances, Gwendolen and Cecily invoke the possibility of withholding their consent by calling attention to their suppression of doubt as a willful choice. Thus the marriage plot of the play, which depends on the consent of Cecily and Gwendolen as addressees, is destabilized at the same time that it is upheld. This complex interplay of consent and potential dissent models the possibility of non-consenting addressees and witnesses within the performance as well as within the play. Just as Jack and Algernon hold the potential to withhold consent for one another’s performances of identity and Cecily and Gwendolen hold the potential to withhold consent for their lovers’ performances of romantic interest, the external audience of the play holds the potential to refuse consent to the play’s heterosexual marriage plot. The plot of the play models the performative relationship between the play and its audience. The idea that the play opens up a space for a non-consenting audience is important because the audience is a site of much tension in scholarship about Earnest. At the center of this tension is the question of whether this is a play that depicts homosexuality, and whether late-nineteenth-century audiences would have understood it as such. On one side of this question is Christopher Craft, who argues that the play’s hidden depictions of homosexuality are the key to its

NADLER / THE NON-CONSENTING WITNESS

subversiveness.1 Craft reads Earnest as a covert derision of heterosexual representation (111), and presents as evidence multiple depictions of homosexual subculture hidden within the text. For example, when Jack informs Lady Bracknell that he lets his house to Lady Bloxham, Craft “outs” this detail as an allusion to John Francis Bloxham, an Oxford undergraduate who wrote a story depicting pederastic love between a priest and a young boy (123). On the other side of this divide are scholars such as Alan Sinfield, who argues against the meaningfulness of arguments such as Craft’s: “Many commentators assume that queerness, like murder, will out, so there must be a gay scenario lurking somewhere in the depths of The Importance of being Earnest. But it doesn’t really work” (vi; emphasis Sinfield’s). The reason it doesn’t work, according to Sinfield, is that homosexuality as a modern identity came into being largely through Wilde’s trials, and therefore did not fully exist at the time that Wilde wrote Earnest (Sinfield 3-4). According to Sinfield, readings like Craft’s find elements that modern readers recognize as queer, but which the audience of the time would never have seen that way (vii). Sinfield’s claim that Wilde’s trials caused perceptions of homosexual identity to cohere around Wilde’s self-performance is extremely compelling, and makes it seem unlikely that most audience members would have “read” Earnest as a queer play before the trials. Powell points out that if the homosexual allusions in the play were widely understood, “the play, like Salome, would not have been licensed for performance” (Powell 111). If, as Powell and Sinfield claim, most audience members would have experienced Earnest as a “straight” play, what are we to do with Craft’s detailed unearthing of references to same-sex desire in the text? While some “queer” aspects of the play might be visible only through the lens of our modern construction of homosexual identity, allusions like the one to “Lady Bloxham” are undoubtedly there. As Powell points out, in the 1890’s !"For

other scholarship like that of Craft, see Joel Fineman’s “The Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Earnest.” Craft cites this essay and acknowledges his indebtedness to Fineman’s argument. "

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

there was a homosexual subculture in London that included gay bars, “Molly houses,” and a niche publishing industry (112-113). Audience members familiar with this subculture might in fact have caught references like the one to “Lady Bloxham.” This interpretation of the play as opening up a space for the audience to withhold its consent helps explain why Wilde would include references to same-sex desire that only a small, select group of the audience would understand. This play, in many ways, is about the small group of witnesses who “get it” but do not say anything. Just as Algernon holds the possibility of refusing consent to Jack’s performance but never actually “outs” him, audience members who participated in the London homosexual subculture held the dissident potential to refuse to see this as simply a “straight” comic play leading toward heterosexual marriage. Because this potential for nonconsent is depicted within the play, we can even imagine that some audience members who missed the play’s references to same-sex desire might have felt an ambiance of dissident possibilities that the play opened up to the audience. The biggest opportunity for the audience to refuse consent occurs in the final scene of the play, which appears to be a generic comic reintegration of society through heterosexual marriage. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye summarizes the generic conventions of comedy: “At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings the hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero” (163). For Frye, this formation of a new society through marriage necessarily includes the audience. He writes, “As the final society reached by comedy is the one that the audience has recognized all along to be the proper and desirable state of affairs, an act of communion with the audience is in order” (164). For example, Roman comedies end with the word “plaudite,” “the invitation to the audience to form part of the comic society” (Frye 164). Rather than straightforwardly inviting its audience into the comic society, however, the final scene of Earnest turns the generic conventions of comedy on their head by inviting the audience to refuse to consent to the play’s generically appropriate ending.

NADLER / THE NON-CONSENTING WITNESS

As Craft points out, Jack’s marriage at the end of the play depends on the coincidence that Jack’s “natural” name is Earnest John (Craft 114). Jack discovers that his father’s name (and thus his name) is a combination of Earnest and Jack, his two performed identities. He reads from the army lists, “Christian names, Ernest John. (Puts book quietly down and speaks quite calmly). I always told you Gwendolyn, my name was Ernest, didn’t I? Well, it is Ernest after all. I mean it naturally is Ernest” (Wilde 418). In the quest for his father’s name in the army lists, Jack frantically gives the other characters texts to search: “The army lists for the last forty years are here (rushes to the bookcase and tears the books out. Distributes them rapidly” (Wilde 417). Rather than the army lists, however, most characters receive farcically inappropriate books; for instance, Jack hands Lady Bracknell a copy of The Green Carnation, Robert Hitchens’ novel satirizing Wilde.2 For Craft this farcical search shows that Jack’s “natural” identity, ostensibly based on the authority of the army lists, is still oscillating (Craft 114). More concretely, however, Jack’s handing out of the wrong texts offers the audience the possibility of doubting the truth of Jack’s discovery that his name is Earnest John. Gwendolen tries to look at the army lists, but according to the stage directions, Jack “rushes through them himself, taking each one as she tries to examine it” (Wilde 418). The only person who actually sees the name in the army lists is Jack. Jack’s discovery of his name, the critical anagnorisis on which the final marriage plot rests, might be a lie.3 This possibility of a lie creates a space for skepticism at the center of an otherwise generic comic ending. Earnest invites the audience to applaud and join a new society formed through heterosexual marriage, and at the same moment the play makes room for the audience to doubt the basis for that marriage. This creation of a space for dissidence within a generically conventional plot line !"For

a description of the novel The Green Carnation and a discussion of the association of Wilde with the flower, see Karl Beckson’s “Oscar Wilde and the Green Carnation.”" #"I am indebted for this idea to Professor Dana Luciano of Georgetown University, who suggested it during an English Department oral examination. "

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

accords with Jonathan Dollimore’s observations about Wilde’s writing. In his book “Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault,” Dollimore argues that Wilde’s work is dissident not because it overtly depicts same-sex desire, but because it inverts the Victorians’ “wholesome, manly simple ideals of English life” (68). For Dollimore, the aesthetics rather than the content of Wilde’s writing challenged the epistemological basis of Victorian ideology: “Wilde’s transgressive aesthetic…subverted the essentialist categories of identity which kept morality in place” (Dollimore 68). For Dollimore, Wilde’s depiction of identity as a performance challenges the Victorian belief in essential selfhood. Dollimore theorizes about Wilde’s writings in general; my reading of The Importance of Being Earnest amplifies Dollimore’s argument by scrutinizing the specific ways that Wilde’s aesthetic works to subvert Victorian cultural norms. The dissident potential of witnesses and addressees within Earnest models for the external audience the possibility of dissent to the play’s performance of Victorian social ideals. In modeling nonconsent and providing a heterosexual marriage plot that invites skepticism, Earnest encouraged a few nineteenth-century audience members to refuse consent to the play’s traditional ending of comic integration through marriage. Works Cited Craft, Christopher. Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Print. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Print. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Introduction to Performativity and Performance.” The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 167-174. Print.

NADLER / THE NON-CONSENTING WITNESS

Powell, Kerry. Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print. Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print. Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Merlin Holland. London: Collins, 2007. Print.

“Who and What Art Thou?” The Question of the Child in Peter Pan COLIN DWYER How do you begin to paint a landscape that you have not seen for decades? Each tree, each boulder, each blade of grass – how can you be sure that everything was exactly where you remember it being? Some colors may have faded in your memory since you last saw them, others may have brightened, and it is likely that more than a few features have gone missing since you last refreshed your memory of the image. Most importantly, it is undeniable that the scene that you put to canvas will be more reflective of the landscape as it exists in your memory than the landscape as it appears to the person who is gazing directly at it. Why, then, should you paint the picture – especially if you are doing so for the benefit of this direct observer? A similar question has been posed by several recent critiques of children’s literature, a question whose resolution is imperative for the legitimacy of the genre: how can adults, years removed from their own youth, hope to write an accurate account of childhood for an audience composed of children – and why? Critics like Jacqueline Rose and others posit that, in the absence of a meaningful connection between the adult author and his child-reader, the act of writing fiction for children is at best a difficult task and at worst an impossible one. Authors of the genre, the argument goes, write

DWYER / “WHO AND WHAT ART THOU?”

simply to seek reclamation of their own nostalgic past and in the process, further the ideal, artificial conception of the child by imprinting it on the real child who reads it. In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, however, one discovers a work that transcends the genre of children’s literature, accomplishing this by both accepting its limitations and undermining them. The characters in the novel can be read as actors in a tension not unlike the one which exists between author and reader. Captain Hook wields his stories like weapons, self-fragmented and desirous of the promise that Peter Pan presents – the idealized child: an elusive web of contradictions that somehow remains whole. Hook’s pursuit mirrors the one undertaken by the adult author of children’s literature, but its failure does not spell Barrie’s own. In fact, Barrie embraces the contradiction inherent in the genre, using it as permission for bathing his work in further contradictions in character and narration, which provide ample textual support for the child-reader’s innate deconstructionist tendencies. Barrie’s admission that the author’s connection to the child-reader is impossible actually allows him the freedom to undermine the form of the genre, in order to entice the child to forge the connection instead. In any critical assessment of children’s literature, a fundamental quandary arises – just who exactly is the reader? Every work of literature, of course, necessarily requires two actors: not only the author but the reader as well. Peter Hunt, in his study of the genre of children’s literature, notes that “reading is an interaction” between author and reader (100). In other words, “texts do not, in themselves, teach anything” (89). The author’s text offers potential meanings, coded in linguistic structures, and the reader accesses those meanings by decoding them with culturally instilled meanings of his own. In order for a text to contain meaning, the reader must possess a substantial perspective of his own with which to define it. Without this mutual exchange, literature loses its value and “the whole business of making books (and, especially, talking about them) becomes a nonsense” (89). It is precisely the necessity of this exchange that appears to place the genre on precarious footing. The child-reader – to whom the genre’s writers would seem to speak – is incapable of deriving the

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

same meanings from a work of literature as the adult reader, because the child is still developing the skills with which to decode the linguistic structures embedded in the text. The child, then, shares a different relationship with the author than the aforementioned relationship described by Hunt, rendering the meaning of the work volatile. Because they have not yet been wholly sculpted with similar values as the adult author, children are at all times “ready to read ‘against’ texts, to use them as a basis for extravagant readings, free from tiresome constraints of understanding” (Hunt 97). In the hands of the child, literature becomes fluid in its expression: because children understand fewer commonly accepted signifiers, the meaning of the signified is less restrained by the author’s intentions. Jacqueline Rose, however, views the act of writing for children in more pessimistic terms. In her seminal work, The Case of Peter Pan, Rose asserts immediately that “children’s fiction is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot be written, but in that it hangs on an impossibility, one which it rarely ventures to speak. This is the impossible relation between adult and child” (1). Indeed, even the child itself is difficult to define – according to James Kincaid, “What a child is, in other words, changes to fit different situations and different needs. A child is not, in itself, anything” (5). Thus confronted with the lack of a relationship to the developing reader, and even the absence of an easily definable child, the author of children’s literature seeks instead to construct the ideal of a child for the purposes of his fiction. In other words, “there is no child behind the category, ‘children’s fiction,’ other than the one which the category itself sets in place” (10). The child in children’s literature – the child both featured in, and presumed to be reading, the text – is in fact an artificial creation, born out of adult desire to reclaim the past and designed to deny the indefinable complexity of childhood. In this manner, the composition of children’s literature can be considered almost an act of aggression toward the real child it purports to represent and entertain. The real child finds itself subsumed by its ideal conception, swallowed by the same linguistic structures that it does not yet understand. It is both inserted into, and now subjected to, adult theories of how the world is

DWYER / “WHO AND WHAT ART THOU?”

arranged (Fowler). By thrusting upon the child-reader his conceptions of what the child should be, the author helps to shape the child’s perception of the world and what its own childhood is. Kincaid observes, “The chief casualties are the very children we think we are protecting: needing the idea of the child so badly, we find ourselves sacrificing the bodies of children for it” (6). Storytelling, therefore, becomes a means for the adult to assert the idealized memory of childhood over the reality with which it cannot interact. It should come as no surprise, then, that Captain Hook comes to the reader all but clothed in the menace of storytelling. Posed as the aggressive rival to Peter Pan, the embodiment of eternal youth, Hook’s antagonism comes simultaneously accompanied by the tales that he uses both to define himself and to wield like a weapon. When he and his bloodthirsty band of pirates are introduced to the reader, it is telling that they are heard first and not seen. The voices of the pirates define themselves in archetypal terms – nautical slang and references to violence – before the eye of the reader is invited to look upon them and evaluate them for himself. And indeed, they are heard about, as well. The narrator does nothing to define their physical appearances or their personalities – they are instead characterized by the tall tales that surround their respective pasts, many of which involve figures, such as Flint, whom the reader knows to be fictional. In this way, the stories assert prevalence over independent identities. Regarding Hook himself, the narrator remarks, “I have been told that he was a raconteur of repute” (Barrie 52). Barrie structures his sentence so that the captain comes to the reader embroiled in stories: not only is Hook a terrific storyteller, but enough stories have been told about him that they have reached even the narrator. Hook proceeds to wrest from the narrator the story of his own history with Peter Pan, situating it snugly in the “story of his life,” which he tells to Smee (Barrie 55). Hook and his band assert control of their pasts, idealizing them with the help of their own linguistic codes, present in slang in a manner that makes their “relationship with the world [and Peter] simple and manageable” (Fowler 27). Storytelling possesses more uses than simple self-definition and reconstruction of the past; indeed, at several points, it acts as a

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

weapon in present action, threatening to inflict change on the very reality it represents. As Hook’s pirates approach Wendy and the Lost Boys lounging blithely on Marooner’s Rock, the children’s resting place transforms from a comfortable surface not unlike “their great bed” to an ominous execution ground (Barrie 77). The cause for this radical change lies in the pirates’ proximity and their refashioning of Wendy’s reality with simple storytelling: “It was not, she knew, that night had come, but something as dark as night had come. No, worse than that… What was it? There crowded upon her all the stories she had been told of Marooner’s Rock, so called because evil captains put sailors on it and leave them to drown” (Barrie 78). The same manipulative power can be seen preying on Hook’s men. His conception of their identities, which he has thrust upon his men, conscribes the way they have learned to act: “As dogs, this terrible man treated and addressed them, and as dogs they obeyed him,” yet like dogs, as well, “they showed him their fangs, and he knew that if he took his eyes off them now they would leap at him” (Barrie 52, 133). His pirates operate, for better or for worse, within the confines of the simplified characters that he has established for them. Yet this weapon can be self-inflicted as well. In Hook, Barrie presents the figure of the boy grown up, warped by the erosive powers of external expectation. His very physical appearance reflects the fragmentation of an inner personality constructed from without. The narrator observes, “His eyes were of the blue of the forget-me-not,” peering out from a face that “was cadaverous and blackavized” (Barrie 52). Two features set so close together could not appear any more different from one another, Barrie’s diction emphasizing the brilliant weight of memory (“forget-me-not”) within Hook and the manner he has sought to cloak it in the shadow of a constructed persona. And of course, one must not overlook the importance of the replacement appendage for which he is named. The sharpened hook that serves now as his right hand displays for all to see both his greatest loss and the avenging power of the violence on which he depends. In fact, the hook – the fearsome symbol of his violent power – has come to supplant his identity, usurping his birth name and representing him entirely, through Barrie’s employment of

DWYER / “WHO AND WHAT ART THOU?”

synecdoche, when he attacks others. Even Hook himself refers to his weapon-hand as if it were an autonomous actor, capable of thought independent of his own: “My hook thinks you did,” Hook once accuses his crew member, “I wonder if it would not be advisable, Starkey, to humour the hook?” (Barrie 131). The hook merely serves to emphasize the fragmentation physically apparent in a character constructed on a reputation of violence. As Hook is investigated further, this fragmentation reveals itself to be more invasive than simple physical appearance. Ironically, he is plagued by anxiety about social norms, disgusted that members of his crew “were socially so inferior to him” and, above all, obsessive over good form – “good form! However much he may have degenerated, he still knew that this is all that really matters” (Barrie 121). All of Hook’s achievements in piracy are laid low by the lurking doubt – represented by Barrie as an entirely separate voice – that he might fail to satisfy the social “traditions [that] still clung to him like garments” (Barrie 121). But it is the doubt itself that prevents him from alleviating his unease, for “was it not bad form to think about good form?” (Barrie 122). Thus, the root of the problem that plagues him, that fragments his personality with “a claw within him sharper than the iron one,” is not the Lost Boys, nor even Peter Pan (Barrie 122). It is Hook’s self-awareness. Sculpted by stories and held tight by a memory that will not allow him to forget his past, his self-awareness brings into sharp relief the contradictions residing within him – the contradictions between a pirate and a child raised to have good form; between a bloodthirsty criminal and a man disgusted by the sight of his own blood. Because he must always be aware of this fragmentation, Hook can never be whole. Barrie drives this home with his descriptions of Hook in the presence of Peter Pan. The narrator, in depicting Hook as he peers at Peter in the latter’s underground room, asks of the reader, “Did no feeling of compassion stir [Hook’s] sombre breast? The man was not wholly evil” (115). Facing Peter, Hook represents a negation, the question implicitly denied and the sympathy undermined by the lurking, “no;” indeed Hook cannot achieve anything wholly in his state of fragmentation, not even evil. And once more in Peter’s

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

presence Hook dives to his death, bid adieu by the narrator, who says, “James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell” (Barrie 137). His wholeness again rebuked and his short goodbye riven by commas, Hook departs the narrative still in fragmentation, defeated by the beast that stalked him always – not Peter Pan nor the crocodile that swallowed him, but in fact his self-awareness. It is here, out of his inescapable fragmentation spawned in self-awareness, that Hook’s desire for Peter Pan is born. Peter represents the opposite phenomenon from Hook’s affliction: Peter simply forgets. As the boy who will not grow old, he is the embodiment of all “the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive” (Barrie 100). This heartlessness arises partly as a product of his short memory span – Peter experiences, and then he promptly forgets. The narrator observes of Peter, “He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it…. [Wendy] was never quite sure, you know” (73). In the air, flying to the Neverland, Wendy confronts the same issue. When returning to her and her brothers after some time on his own, Peter “would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star…. Indeed, sometimes when he returned he did not remember them, at least not well” (40). And in fact, by the end of the novel, Peter does forget them: Hook, Tinker Bell, and the Lost Boys – all of the principal characters except Wendy, whom he visits only on the rare years when he happens to remember. Time to Peter is an everrenewing resource, something to be treated indifferently as it begins again with each new lost memory. This appears dramatically different from Hook, who is constantly haunted by the carnivorous specter of time, manifested in the determined, stalking alligator. One should not, however, make the mistake of assuming that Peter and Hook represent two opposite ends of a binary relationship. It would be too difficult to pin Peter down long enough to pronounce this relationship; he is every bit as defined by his variable identity as he is by his forgetfulness. “One of Peter’s peculiarities,” the narrator observes, “was that in the middle of a fight he would suddenly change

DWYER / “WHO AND WHAT ART THOU?”

sides…. When victory [against the redskins] was still in the balance, sometimes leaning this way and sometimes that, he called out, ‘I’m redskin today’” (Barrie 73). His identity as Peter constantly undergoes transformations in order to suit the whims of his latest interests. At points, he even assumes the roles of his two sworn enemies throughout the book. Playing at the aging father figure for his group of “children,” the Lost Boys, Peter laments at the prospect of dance, “My old bones would rattle” (Barrie 94). And shortly after defeating Hook and his band of pirates, Peter becomes a pirate himself, dressed in a suit made for him “out of some of Hook’s wickedest garments” and daring to follow Hook’s suit and treat his crew of Lost Boys like dogs (Barrie 140). Like Hook, Peter occupies multiple constructions of identity at once. The eternal boy who acts as an old father for other children exhibits every bit as many contradictions as the pirate who desires good form above all else. Yet it is Peter’s forgetfulness, coupled with his complete lack of regard for others, that enables Peter to reconcile his fractured parts. Peter resembles Barrie’s description of the fairies who “have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling at a time” (Barrie 48). There is no space in Peter’s perception for the thoughts or feelings of others; it is occupied entirely by his own construction of the reality with which he interacts. In other words, he fulfills Kincaid’s notion of the child: “all is compact within the certainty of the not-knowing, refusing to know. The identity is whole, focused, absolutely assured” (282). One may see this process in action when Peter first meets Wendy, and he confronts – apparently for the first time – affronts to his immaculate conception of reality. When Wendy remarks that Peter’s name is short, “he [feels] for the first time that it was a shortish name;” when she tells him that his address sounds funny, “for the first time he [feels] that perhaps it was a funny address;” and when she catches him crying, the reader sees his memory loss in process – he responds, “I was crying because I can’t get my shadow to stick on. Besides, I wasn’t crying” (Barrie 25). Within minutes, Peter “was already of the opinion that he had never cried in his life” (Barrie 26). Peter is whole, if only because he flits from truth to truth so quickly that each

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

time he rests at one it he possesses it entirely. Every belief that occupies him leaves no room for any other, be it memory or the beliefs of others. This, Barrie states, is the essence of childhood: “No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest” (85). Peter’s world is his own, unwilling to suffer the intrusion of anything it finds offensive. It is this ideal that Hook, and the writers of children’s literature, find so attractive and elusive in the child. They desire the comforting feeling of wholeness that they remember imperfectly from their own childhood and that exists now in opposition to the feeling of fragmentation that memory and external influence have since instilled in them. It is telling that when Hook sets to his pursuit of Peter, Barrie refers to the latter by his last name: “It was Pan he wanted, Pan and Wendy and their band, but chiefly Pan” (Barrie 109). At all other points in the novel, Barrie uses “Peter” to describe the boy. The intention behind Barrie’s distinctive diction in this case seems clear: the word, “pan,” in common usage, is frequently employed as a prefix meaning all, or whole. And of course, “pan” only offers this particular meaning when placed in relation to what comes after it, just as the idealized child can only be defined by the adult author. Hook – whose name in its own right signifies a tool that pulls objects apart – searches not for the boy, but for the ideal that the boy represents: the wholeness promised, in retrospect, by the beginning of life. Incapable of understanding the real child, for they are no longer children themselves, the adult writer seeks to meet it halfway in the mutual interaction of his text. His attempts, though, can only be couched in the linguistic structures that they have had thrust upon them to the exclusion of the initial, deeply personal beliefs of the child. Thus the author’s attempts are inadequate, capable only of engendering an unsatisfactory response from the child-reader. One can see this interaction in Hook’s final, desperate query of his child counterpart. Hook cries, “Pan, who and what art thou?” He seeks to catalogue Peter into neat categories of his own creation, but he finds himself rebuffed again by the unknowable – Peter responds, “I’m youth, I’m joy” (Barrie 135). “This,” Hook dismisses, “was nonsense… proof to

DWYER / “WHO AND WHAT ART THOU?”

the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was” (Barrie 135). Of course, Hook is mistaken: it is instead the captain who does not in the least know who or what Peter is. Hook, like the adult writer of children’s literature, is unable to grasp the boundless, abstract variability inherent in the child using the means of understanding offered to the adult. The writer in the face of this concession resembles the frustrated Hook in the face of Peter Pan, a “tormented man [who] felt that he was a lion in a cage into which a sparrow had come” (109). Remembering with nostalgia the free feeling of their own childhood, the writer is taunted by the elusive child, who both evades his grasp and exists to remind him of that feeling which is now lost. And so the writer must settle for the creation of a misrepresentative ideal. Here, again, Hook ably demonstrates the plight of children’s literature in his interactions with Peter. Prior to the pair’s final confrontation, Hook employs subterfuge to sneak into the Lost Boys’ underground den, but an obstacle stops him just short of reaching Peter. He finds his entrance to the room where Peter lies unaware blocked by a door, and “feeling for the catch, he found to his fury that it was low down, beyond his reach” (Barrie 115). Only a child can open the door. Thus, Hook must look on from above it, permitted to see but not interact with the child on the child’s own terms. In this same way, the closest that the adult author can come to representing childhood is a sort of voyeurism – allowed only to see it from afar, across the distance of age, the author must reconstruct childhood inaccurately, creating more of an ideal than a substantial representation. Of course, it must still be admitted that J.M. Barrie’s novel can be – and indeed, all but universally is – classified as a text of children’s literature. After all, the novel places the child front and center and, if not necessarily directed solely at children, nevertheless perpetuates several of the failures to which the genre is susceptible. First and foremost of these, perhaps, is the strong narrator that Barrie inserts into the story. Frequently, the narrator starts, pauses, or even rewinds the narrative in order to assert his power over the scenes provided. Two separate incidents are notable in this regard. The first occurs early in the novel, when the narrator omits the children’s

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

momentous escape from the nursery in order to skip ahead to the depiction of their parents “night after night recalling that fatal Friday, till every detail of it was stamped on their brains” (Barrie 17). Yet the narrator withholds those very details until the reader understands that this scene shall not happen in real time – it will come to the reader as a story told by the narrator as intermediary. A similar power play occurs before the narrator relates the story of the mermaid’s lagoon. The narrator says, “Which of these adventures shall we choose? The best way will be to toss for it. I have tossed and the lagoon has won” (Barrie 74). Not only does the speaker again ensure that the reader recognizes it is his story to tell, and not an event to be shared, but by asking a question and promptly supplying the answer, the narrator flagrantly demonstrates his power over the course of the narrative. This powerful speaker may be indicative of a reliance on the very form Barrie tends to parody. “The guiding voice,” Hunt states, “has itself become an ominous cliché in a narrative relationship,” a device that overtly encourages the freedom of fantasy while covertly restricting the reader’s experience of the fantasy offered (117). Moreover, by insisting on framing the events in stories, Barrie’s narrator risks associating himself with the same aggression that characterizes Hook and impedes adult authors’ interactions with the child-reader. While it is clear that Barrie’s narrator presents an overbearing influence on the narrative of Peter Pan, what remains unclear is just who Barrie’s narrator actually is. In the opening paragraph Barrie predictably inserts the first-person narrator – after all, the narrator must make his influence known immediately – yet more puzzling is Barrie’s introduction of the second-person voice, ostensibly the childreader. In the final line, he invites the reader to share in the privileged position afforded one who is directly addressed by the reader. By simply stating, “You always know after two,” Barrie does much more than remark on age – he places the child-reader directly in the story, on conversational terms with the narrator (7). The reader continues to be addressed throughout the work, at times asked to look at a scene with the narrator and at others to listen for a character’s footstep. However, this relationship quickly becomes destabilized by Barrie

DWYER / “WHO AND WHAT ART THOU?”

when he introduces the plural “we” into the narrative. In the first instance in which this occurs, the object described is the Neverland, the place of childhood wonder inadmissible to grown-ups: the narrator says, “We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more” (Barrie 12). Abruptly, the child is placed outside of the narrative voice, only to be invited to return to the collective “we” later in the Neverland. The confusion about the narrator merely deepens. At various points the narrator claims foreknowledge of plot points; claims ignorance on others; speaks directly to some characters, placing them within the description of the second-person voice; seeks not to disturb others, for reasons he must kept to himself; with still others, deliberates about how the story should continue; and throughout, the narration consistently offers a sea of contradictions, whether it employs “I,” “you,” “we,” or the third-person. The narrator acts like a child, eager to take part in the story presented and unbeholden to the logical restrictions of narrative voice. In this manner, Barrie manages to achieve in his text the very essence that Peter Pan represents: it is whole, in spite of being comprised of contradictions. Although the narrator of the story asserts an authoritarian grasp on the narrative, it nevertheless invites audience participation, not only by employing use of the secondperson voice but, most importantly, by seeking the reader’s help in untangling just who the narrative voice is and what it is doing. Barrie turns Hook’s final question –“Who and what art thou?” – and directs it at the text rather than the child-reader, turning the text into a playground for the child’s impulse toward deconstruction. Children, whom Hunt calls “deconstructors par excellence,” are thus unleashed to cull meanings of their own, free from the restrictive influence of the author (98). Each contradiction offers the child a new opportunity to exercise his imagination and explore meanings on his own terms, rather than enduring the author’s meanings forced upon them. Though Rose roundly declares the failure inherent in the process of an adult writer composing literature for the child, it is precisely because Barrie admits failure that Peter Pan discovers success. Presenting it to the reader in the form of Hook’s pursuit of

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Peter, Barrie shows the adult’s quest to represent the child to be hopeless, while implicitly accepting the contradiction in doing so. Unlike a model of children’s literature that would replace the real child with an ideal one born of memory, and unlike Hook, whose impulse to adhere to stories proves the symptom of his aggression and the source of fragmentation, J.M. Barrie seeks to follow the lead of his own eponymous character: he manages to allow contradictions to stand in harmony. In so doing, he lures the child-reader, with the text’s interpretive freedom, to meet him halfway. Within Peter Pan, Barrie produces numerous potential meanings, each supported by the text, and only in the exploration of these meanings does the childreader manage to free himself from the heavy expectations of the author. The landscape introduced at the start of this paper does indeed warrant painting – if only first you understand, as Barrie did, that your painting on the canvas can never grasp the real thing; it can only hope to elicit the imagination of the person viewing both. Works Cited Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005. Print. Fowler, Roger. Linguistic Criticism. London: Oxford, 1986. Print. Hunt, Peter. Criticism, Theory & Children's Literature. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Print. Kincaid, James R. Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, Or, the Impossibility of Children's Fiction. London: MacMillan, 1994. Print.

Partial Passage Fidelity and Motivation in David Lean’s Adaptation of A Passage to India JANE BARLOW FUNK I have always felt that the most interesting thing about A Passage to India is Forster’s using India to represent material that according to the canons of the novel form cannot in fact be represented—vastness, incomprehensible creeds, secret motions, histories, and social forms. - Said, Culture and Imperialism Published in 1924, A Passage to India has often been acknowledged as E. M. Forster’s greatest and most difficult novel#.. As critic Glen Allen notes, it has “enjoyed the somewhat paradoxical status of being valued without being understood” (934). Per this “paradoxical” history, A Passage to India has resisted one canonically accepted interpretation and has instead occasioned a variety of readings, from religious and political to post-colonial and queer interpretations. Director David Lean performed an alternate “reading” of this text when he adapted Forster’s novel for the screen in 1984. Naturally, any adaptation of such a literary critical darling is bound to face stiff opposition. Indeed, the cinematic version has been variously criticized as condescending, patronizing, insulting, painful and melodramatic#. Despite Lean’s earlier successes with films such as Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Passage to India continues to be seen as an underwhelming cinematic endeavor, and one that substantially altered Forster’s text. Of all the diverse readings and interpretations of A Passage to India, this film stands out among them for having garnered such fierce criticism. However, one thing critics have failed to acknowledge in their discussion of the film is that Lean himself felt that a faithful filmic adaption of A Passage to India would be unlikely to succeed. He

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

states: “Forster doesn’t—as you have to do in a film—have a welldefined thread going through it [….] He is a wonderful side-tracker. His side-tracks are the most entertaining reading, but I don’t think they’re necessarily film material” (Sinyard 152). Although Lean seems to recognize the difficulty inherent in adaptation, this cognizance only extends as far as changes to the narrative structure of the text, ignoring the more subtle difficulties of adaptation. Film theorist Dudley Andrew speaks to the problem of transforming text to film when he writes: Generally film is found to work from perception toward signification, from external facts to interior motivations and consequences, from the givenness of a world to the meaning of a story cut out of that world. Literary fiction works oppositely. It begins with signs (graphemes and words) building to propositions which attempt to develop perception. As a product of human language it naturally treats human motivation and values, seeking to throw them out onto the external world, elaborating a world out of a story. (101) The contrasting natures of cinema and literature are, in part, what make the very work of adaptation so difficult. However, in this quote Andrew also hints at how a film adaptation might be judged—through its portrayal of motivations and values. Lean sets his own “boundaries” for criticism, mentioning what he terms Forster’s “sidetracks” and saying that his film should not be judged for cutting these “unessential” parts of the text. Thus, by evaluating the film on only the most basic criteria of adaptive fidelity, critics (and Lean) lose the opportunity to explore a more nuanced interpretation of themes and ideas. As author Julie Sanders notes in her study, Adaptation and Appropriation, “adaptation proves […] to be a far from neutral, indeed highly active, mode of being, far removed from the unimaginative act of imitation, copying, or repetition that it is sometimes presented as being by literature and film critics obsessed with claims to ‘originality’” (24). The very act of adaptation—in this case, translating linguistic

FUNK / PARTIAL PASSAGE

signifiers into the entirely different medium of film—demands fundamental changes be made to any text under consideration. Engaging with adaptation thus demands a new way of exploring these changes from text to film, especially with a text as complicated as A Passage to India. Thus, a more productive reading of the film does not focus on fidelity to narrative structure but instead on translating the motivations and values of Forster’s text, thus establishing a different set of criteria from which to judge the success (or failure) of the adaptation. Having arrived at this point, one might consider Andrew’s assertion that “in the case of those texts explicitly termed ‘adaptations,’ the cultural model which the cinema represents is already treasured as a representation in another sign system” (97). Adaptation at its heart is involved in the semiotics of texts, how they vary, interact, and expand meaning. This layering of signification becomes especially interesting when considered through the theoretical paradigm put forth by Jean Baudrillard. In a world saturated by media discourse, referring to a realworld phenomenon as looking or sounding “just like the movies” is a prevalent practice.. Baudrillard terms these occurrences the “implosion” of reality, or the blurring of any distinction between an actual reality and the reality created by the media (Kellner 63). In turn, this lack of distinction creates a separate space, a new “hyperreality,” where signs operate completely within their own contexts to create a simulation of reality that has no bearing on the world (Jean Baudrillard 167-70). Signs functioning in this hyperreality lose any real meaning, or as critic Garry Leonard explains, “what the sign appears to refer to is, to borrow Derrida’s term, ‘always already’ a reflection of the sign that poses, with a sort of false humility, as representing it” (289). This conflation of realities is significant in the interpretation of A Passage to India, as it sheds light on the British attitudes towards India. Any signifier in this hyperreality, according to Baudrillard, must necessarily lack a signified; in other words, any sign that purports to represent India, whether verbally, emotionally, or visually, must be incapable of conveying the “real” India to the perceiver. This

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

difficulty is clearly perceived by Forster in the novel. During the fateful tea party when Aziz invites the English ladies to Marabar, Forster gives the reader an interesting glance into Adela’s mind, stating “in her ignorance, she regarded [Aziz] as ‘India,’ and never surmised that his outlook was limited and his method inaccurate, and that no one is ‘India’” (72). Aziz’s attempt to portray India to Mrs. Moore and Adela at the tea party falls short because he is hobbled by the reciprocal relationship between the reality of the signifier and the mutability of the signified. Mrs. Moore only glimpses this truth when it is too late, as she catches a last view of India on her journey home: “the boat sailed and thousands of coconut palms appeared all round the anchorage and climbed the hills to wave her farewell. ‘So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar caves as final?’ they laughed. ‘What have we in common with them? […] Good-bye!” (210). Having seen a part of India, she mistook it for the whole; misunderstanding that a signifier can never fully capture the reality of the signified. The struggle of the characters in their search for a “real” India is at least partially implied in Lean’s film. Soon after Adela and her chaperone Mrs. Moore have arrived in India, they are shown seated in the shade of a large tree, quietly taking their tea while tranquil, manicured lawns stretch into the background. Adela picks up a sandwich and with disgust drops it back on her plate, disparagingly remarking “cucumber.” The entire mise-en-scene is a faithful recreation of an English country garden, despite the vast changes in climate and culture. Adela’s disdainful remark of “cucumber” encapsulates her attitude throughout much of the film and novel. She is not content with a recreation of England; instead, she wants to find the “real” India. As Said remarks, “the crux of the novel is therefore the sustained encounter between the English colonials—‘welldeveloped bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts’— and India” (201). Adela, Mrs. Moore, and the British are all desperate to “make sense” of India, and in their encounters with the subcontinent’s various manifestations they seek to deconstruct and reveal its true nature as if this will make India governable.

FUNK / PARTIAL PASSAGE

The complex systems of signifiers and the signified at play in the novel do not translate well on screen, as Lean answers the characters’ search for India by presenting the viewer with a rather trite and conventional exposé of the “exotic east” that distorts the motivations and values of the characters. This distortion is best seen in the much criticized erotic temple scene, one of the few scenes (with the evident exception of the last third of the novel) that Lean chose to cut and rework. This scene replaces Forster’s depiction of Ronny and Adela’s decision to become engaged, which, in the novel, makes an important statement about the complexity of human relationships, as well as the nature of India. In Forster’s version, Ronny and Adela are driving with the Nawab Bahadur down a peaceful country road at dusk. As they drive through the countryside Adela finds that “her hand touched [Ronny’s] owing to a jolt, and one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that all their difficulties were only a lover’s quarrel” (88). Soon after, the driver hits an unidentifiable animal, and in the strange, frightened atmosphere following the accident, Ronny and Adela decide to be married. That the entire impetus for their engagement comes from a mixture of lust and uncertainty is typical of Forster’s characterization throughout the novel. True understanding, whether between two characters about to be engaged or between the British Empire and India, is never reached. The motivations and values of Ronny and Adela are just as suspect as the British presence in India. What is important is not the fact that Lean replaced the scene, but how his replacement fundamentally alters Adela’s motives. The replacement scene begins with Adela on her bike exploring the countryside outside of Chandrapore. She soon finds a small trail, through tall grasses, leading to an abandoned temple hidden under spreading trees. As Adela rides toward the mysterious temple, there is a point-of-view shot in which she and the audience see the headless statue of a voluptuous woman lying in the grass, suggesting what is to come. The temple itself is covered with the erotic statues of men and women embracing, and as Adela approaches, the non-diegetic music becomes foreign and exotic. When Adela arrives at the temple, the camera work changes from mostly objective medium shots to an

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

almost exclusive use of close ups and point-of-view shots, clearly signaling that the audience is now inside Adela’s psyche as she takes in the overt display of sexuality. The scene ends shortly thereafter, as Adela is chased away from the temple by a troop of monkeys, but by this point Lean’s view of India has already become blatantly obvious. The tall grass, trees, erotic statues, mysterious temple and the music all point to India as an exotic land full of mystery and sexuality. Arthur Lindley writes disparagingly of Lean’s decision to change this scene, commenting that “a sequence in the novel which emphasizes the alienness and indefinability of India through the mystery of what hits the car has been replaced by one which equates India with a complex of Nature, antiquity, eros, and monkeys” (62). It is not just that a part of the plot has been changed—absolute fidelity to the text is not the question. Instead, Lean has chosen to replace Forster’s suggestions of India as a disconcerting, unknowable land with the typical eastern clichés. Other alterations Lean makes are more subtle, but equally as important in creating the tone of the adaptation. One illustration is the short but important passage in the novel describing Aziz’s reaction to the British compound as he travels the streets to the Callendar’s home. Forster writes that “as [Aziz] entered their arid tidiness, depression suddenly seized him. The roads, named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India. He felt caught in their meshes” (16). The roads in the novel carry a negative connotation and seem to suggest, at least to Aziz, that the British are oppressing the very spirit of India. This small, but important, moment in the novel is entirely glossed over iin the film. The audience first sees these roads, in all their “arid tidiness,” from British eyes. An establishing shot presents three road signs, all with traditional British names such as “Trafalgar” and “Wellington,” before the camera pans down a well-kept street with pleasant bungalows, trimmed lawns, and small cast-iron lampposts. The only noises in this idyllic scene are the occasional bark of a dog and the horses’ hooves on the street. While these streets might have shown cold sterility, or the same oppressive feelings Aziz

FUNK / PARTIAL PASSAGE

has in the novel, Lean has chosen to represent almost exactly the opposite sentiments with this brief moment. Immediately preceding the shot of the British neighborhood, the audience follows Adela, Ronny and Mrs. Moore as they make their way through the streets of Chandrapore. These streets are chaotic and noisy, full of all the classic details of a bazaar—fruit, bright cones of powder, and the swirl of human bodies. Just seconds before the cut to the British street, a shot from Adela’s point of view shows a dead body being carried through the streets. In a horrified voice, she asks Ronny, “Is that a body?” The camera moves almost immediately to a close up of Ronny’s face, and he tells Adela reassuringly not to worry: “We’ll soon be out of this.” Then there comes a very quick cut, quite unlike previous ones, to the tranquil scene of the British street. This cut shows the stark difference between the crowded, dirty streets of Chandrapore and the orderly British neighborhood. Lean chooses to emphasize this contrast by cutting in the same abrupt fashion after panning down the road, this time to Aziz’s house, which is surrounded by unpaved roads, derelict houses, unruly children, and dust. In Lean’s adaptation, the English streets seem like a safe haven and a bastion of civilization—not a “net” to trap India. Critic Howard Bloom commented: “I find [A Passage to India] to be a narrative all of whose principal figures—Aziz, Fielding, Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, Godbole—lack conscious will. Doubtless, this is Forster’s deliberate art, but the consequence is curious; the characters do not sustain rereading so well as the novel does, because none is larger than the book” (2). Lean’s choice to make Adela Quested the protagonist of the film clearly distorts and romanticizes of the novel, by . Multiple critics# have noted Lean’s choice to make Adela the attractive protagonist, a position she does not enjoy in the novel, where she is characterized as a “queer, cautious girl” (Forster 24). Forster’s novel by his own admission, a poetical and philosophical statement, not about plot or character, and indeed, the third-person omniscient narration throughout gives equal focus to the cast of characters, whether Indian or British. In contrast, Lean’s film is specifically Adela’s story, which is emphasized by the opening and closing shots. The film opens with a young and innocent

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Adela, seen from a downward camera angle,moving through a veritable sea of umbrellas towards a model ship, at which she stares, wide-eyed before entering the travel office. Adela’s importance iis reiterated in the final scene, which shows her reading a letter from Aziz as she stares out a window, older and more mature. This film is, undoubtedly, Adela’s passage to India. One memorable moment occurs near the middle of the film, after Adela, in a perfectly framed close up asks, “What about love?” Adela’s confusing journey to find love is the most important theme in the film, not the more troubling themes which Forster so carefully works out in the novel. By drastically shortening the last third of the novel, Lean has placed the climax of the film on the mystery surrounding what happened in the caves, instead of events surrounding Fielding’s visit to Mau, which many critics consider to be at the heart of the novel#. Changing the climax does not merely simplify or alter of the plot line, but changes the entire story, giving the film a distinctly romantic and nostalgic bent, and distorting Forster’s novel in a way that is neither true to the text nor the ideas contained within. Another distortion is the lack of individuation, especially on religious matters, that Lean provides for the Indian characters. While religion seems to have slipped almost entirely from Lean’s version, it is one of the key factors Forster employs in order to flesh out his Indian characters, particularly Aziz. In the opening pages of the novel, Aziz considers an empty mosque and muses, “here was Islam, his own country, more than a Faith […] an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found his home” (19). Clearly, recognition of Aziz’s religiosity is important for even a rudimentary understanding of his character. Leaving out religion certainly simplifies Lean’s task, but the film and characters lose subtlety and nuance. A key scene where this simplification occurs is at the Marabar caves. As they approach the caves, Adela asks Aziz what she, in her cultural myopia considers an inoffensive question: “‘Have you one wife or more than one?’” (153). This question to Aziz, “an educated Indian Moslem,” is both “appalling” and “hideous,” and so he drops Adela’s hand and runs off to recover his composure. In the film, the simple, unfulfilling explanation given

FUNK / PARTIAL PASSAGE

for why Aziz would leave Adela alone is that he wants a cigarette. Aziz’s real motives are lost, denying him a more complex subjectivity. This lack of individuation is enhanced by the fact that, apart from Aziz and Godbole, the Indians in the film are always shot as chaotic crowds. These crowds are present in several key scenes: when Adela and Mrs. Moore land, their arrival at Chandrapore, the Marabar caves, Aziz’s arrest, and during the trial scene. Interestingly, each of these scenes is framed within the context of British authority. There are only two or three times when the British flag is shown in the film—two of these times come during crowd scenes, reminding the audience that the law and justice of the empire rises above chaos. When the flag is not shown, there are other clear symbols of British rule are present, such as the Viceroy (a personification of the law), or other British law officers. In the trial scene, when order is restored, the audience sees both the British flag and a statue of Queen Victoria calmly presiding over the chaos and ensuring a restoration of peace. Indeed, there is only one time when there is a crowd and no symbol of British authority—the Marabar caves, where Adela is overcome and disaster nearly strikes. While subtle, these moments in the film serve to create an overall tone of British superiority. Despite the more nuanced picture of British and Indian relations that Forster provides, he is not entirely immune from the same tendency that Lean demonstrates to represent Indian people as caricatures. Said writes: “it is also true that Forster’s India is so affectionately personal and so remorselessly metaphysical that his view of Indians as a nation contending for sovereignty with Britain is not politically very serious, or even respectful” (204). Just as his characters are lost in the overlapping of realities of India, so Forster himself cannot perfectly understand the country and people he attempts to portray. “No one is India,” and Forster is constrained by his position as an outsider attempting to decipher a complex system of signs. Notwithstanding this fact, of the two texts we have examined, Forster’s novel is on the whole more nuanced in its portrayal of Indian characters.

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Lean’s alterations take Forster’s multi-faceted and complex novel and turn it into a rather staid story of a young girl who travels to India and narrowly escapes with her honor intact. While critics (and this paper) question whether Lean’s adaptation adequately captures the complexity of the interplay of signifiers and the signified in the novel, one must consider that there are multiple approaches to adapt any text. As Julie Sanders writes, “adaptation can also constitute a simpler attempt to make texts ‘relevant’ or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the processes of proximation and updating. This can be seen as an artistic drive in many adaptations of so-called ‘classic’ novels or drama for television or cinema” (19). Lean has certainly simplified Forster’s text, and in doing so, creates a new reading of the novel that might appeal to a new audience. However, the film version, in altering basic motivations and themes within the text, Lean does a disservice to the novel, the country, and the people he purports to represent.

Works Cited Allen, Glen O. “Structure, Symbol and Theme in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.” PMLA. 70.5 (Dec. 1995): 934-54. JSTOR. Web. Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation.” Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford UP: Oxford, 1984. 96-106. Print. Begum, Khani. “E.M. Forster’s and David Lean’s (Re)Presentations and (Re)Productions of Empire.” West Virginia University Philological Papers. 40 (1994-1995): 20-29. Print. Bell, Millicent. “What Happened in the Cave?” Partisan Review. 53.1 (1986). 103-10. Print. Bloom, Harold. Introduction. E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House, 2004. Print. Featherstone, Simon. “Passages to India.” Critical Survey. 3.3 (1991): 290-96. Print. Gane, Mike. Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory. Routledge: London, 1991. Print.

FUNK / PARTIAL PASSAGE

Hitchens, Christopher. “Busted Blue: ‘A Passage to India.’” Grand Street. 4.3 (Spring, 1985): 215-17. JSTOR. Web. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 166-84. Print. Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford UP: Stanford, 1989. Print. Roberts, Colin. “Where Angels Fear to Tread: Lean’s Confident Passage.” The Indian LiteraryReview. 3.3 (1985): 69. Print. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1993. Print. Sanders, Julie. “What is Adaptation?” Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge: London, 2006. 17-25. Print. Silver, Alain and James Ursini. David Lean and His Films. Los Angeles: Silman James, 1992. Print. Sinyard, Neil. “‘Lids tend to come off’: David Lean’s film of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.” The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen. Ed. Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 147-162.

From the Perverse Father to the ‘Miserable Monster’ Tracking the Deployment of Sexuality in M.G. Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ANNALISA ADAMS Attitudes towards sexuality were changing significantly in the short period of time between the publication of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk in 1796 and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818.4 Through a process that Michel Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, Volume 1, calls a “polymorphous incitement to discourse,” early Gothic novels like The Monk were engaged in a power/knowledge relationship with readers, simultaneously reflecting and causing changes in eighteenthcentury consciousness that are manifested in later Gothic novels like Frankenstein (34). The greatest change evidenced and elicited by The Monk and displayed in and solidified by Frankenstein is a shift in the understanding of non-normative sexuality from an aberrant behavior to an all-encompassing identity. In his 1905 “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” Freud uses the phrase “polymorphously perverse” to describe the sexual disposition of children, who “can be led into all possible kinds of sexual irregularities,” concluding that because this disposition is natural in infants, it must be “a general and fundamental human characteristic” (268). When phrase thus refers !"#$%&'()&"%&*"+,-+"*./%/'0"'1"%&*"%*2%"/3"4*5&643"%&*"7*3%"80'90:";"6<"

(3/0)"%&*"'5/)/06$"+,+,"*./%/'0"7*=6(3*"/%"7*3%"5*45*3*0%3"%&*"=&60)*3" '==(55/0)"/0"6%%/%(.*3"%'965.3"3*2(6$/%>"/0"%&*"7*)/00/0)"'1"%&*" 0/0*%**0%&"=*0%(5>?""

ADAMS / PERVERSE FATHER TO ‘MISERABLE MONSTER’

to someone whose sexuality is fluid and unlimited by any binary or social construction. So when critic George Haggerty claims that Ambrosio, the titular character of Lewis’s The Monk, is “nothing if not polymorphously perverse,” he invokes a long history of Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and indeed, Ambrosio’s wide array of constantly shifting sexual “desires resist the confines and limitations of phallic support and enchantment” (Haggerty 30). No longer a child, Ambrosio does not seem to have left this childhood state of freely floating sexuality. Yet it is not just his age that makes Abrosio’s amorphous sexuality illicit and troublesome. As a monk, Ambrosio sees himself as a father to the people and a man of God with no “single stain upon [his] conscious”; those children of God expect Ambrosio not only to be celibate, but also to be devoid of any desires at all (Lewis 65). Yet throughout the novel, Ambrosio is confronted, overthrown, and finally destroyed by one desire after another. His first illicit stirrings come from a painting of the Virgin Mary that hangs in his cell. “Were I permitted,” he sighs, “to twine round my fingers those golden ringlets, and press with my lips the treasures of that snowy bosom!” (Lewis 65). The object of his desire quickly shifts from the mother of Jesus to Rosario, a young male novice of the monastery. “From the moment in which I first beheld you,” he tells the youth, “I perceived sensations in my bosom till then unknown to me” (Lewis 69). When he discovers that Rosario is actually a woman named Matilda, rather than diminishing or dissipating, his lust increases, “his heart throbbed with desire, while his hand was pressed gently by Matilda’s ivory fingers” (Lewis 82). Ambrosio’s always already verboten desire becomes even more illicit when he loses his battle with temptation and consummates his relationship with Matilda. Although his relationship with Matilda may seem permissible but for Ambrosio’s status as a monk, it cannot be ignored that Matilda is still referred to as the “feigned Rosario” (Lewis 212). Throughout this section of the book, Lewis repeatedly gives Matilda masculine qualities, and refers to Matilda/Rosario using alternating male and

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

female pronouns,5 meaning that Ambrosio repeatedly engages in undeniably queer sexual activity with one whose gender is constantly shifting and being called into question. Still more dangerous than his desire for and sex with Matilda/Rosario is his lust after his sister Antonia. When Ambrosio first meets Antonia, he is entirely unaware of their shared blood, so we cannot condemn him for feeling “a thousand new emotions springing in his bosom” (Lewis 217). These feelings are indeed perverse to readers because of this hidden incest, but they cause still more unease because they spring, in great part, from Antonia’s innocence and purity. Ambrosio notices that her “countenance” is “so innocent,” but this just makes him “more anxious to deprive her of that quality which formed her principal charm” (Lewis 216, 228). Here we see that Ambrosio’s arousal is intimately entangled with a desire to harm the object of his desire. And eventually, these violent desires become so strong that they compel him to use dark magic in an attempt to rape his sister, strangle his mother when that attempt fails, and finally to kidnap Antonia and hide her away in the catacombs beneath the monastery. Once he has imprisoned her in the tombs, “heedless of her tears, cries, and entreaties, he gradually ma[kes] himself master of her person, and…accomplish[es] his crime and the dishonour of Antonia” (321). His attraction, based so firmly in her innocence, turns to “disgust” once he has taken that quality away from her (321). Even in addition to incest, violence, and this drive to destroy her innocence, raping Antionia in the catacombs adds a hint of necrophilia to Ambrosio’s aberrant desires in that Antonia is, after all, “buried in the vaults of St. Clare,” and dead to most of the world (317).

!"#$%&'()'"$*(+(",-.,"/.,)01."2.((*$+1"."('&,"'3"4'*&.5+".61"

$.60)6+((")6"-+&"1)(4'*&(+78".61"29&+3+&&+1",-+":)&,*+("'3"-)("(+;",'" ,-'(+"'3"-+&"'<68"=>?@AB"C-+".0,+&6.,)65"'3"9&'6'*6("'44*&(".3,+&" /.,)01.DE'(.&)'".61"#$%&'()'"4'6(*$$.,+",-+)&"&+0.,)'6(-)9F" /.,)01.DE'(.&)'"($)0+1".("2!"#"(+.0+1"-)("0)9("<),-"."G)((78"%*,".,",-+" (.$+",)$+7"6'6+"'3",-+"$'6G("2(*(9+4,+1""$!"&+.0"(+;8"=>?>AB""

ADAMS / PERVERSE FATHER TO ‘MISERABLE MONSTER’

Ambrosio, then, displays decidedly queer desire, but his desire remains polymorphously perverse and his sexuality is never specifically labeled. His desire for Matilda does not afford him a heterosexuality that precludes his desire for Rosario, and that desire for Rosario does not make him a homosexual. Similarly, his rape of his sister does not make him only and completely incestuous or necrophiliac. In other words, while a modern reader might see Ambrosio’s desire for Rosario as a mark of a homosexual identity, Lewis portrays no such identity, but instead allows Ambrosio a “mode of queer desiring that remains uncolonised by the power-saturated distributions of modernity’s sexual discourses” (Townshend 28). Lewis’s portrayal of Ambrosio’s perversity as polymorphous is representative of the greater societal attitude towards perverse sexuality during the eighteenth century. Although trials for sodomy were becoming increasingly common throughout the eighteenth century, it is important to note that “sodomy” was not a specifically homosexual crime. Laws regarding sodomy “applied to relations between men and women, men and beasts, as well as men and men” (Weeks 34). This is evidenced in many published trial reports and discussions of the day, including the 1748 “The King versus Wiseman,” in which the author defines sodomy as “carnal copulation against nature, viz. of a man or woman, in the same sex, or of either of them with beasts” (McCormick 106). So a sodomite in the eighteenth century was not yet a homosexual; his perverse sexuality was not only polymorphous, it was also removed from his identity in that “he was still defined by the nature of his act rather than the character of his personality” (Weeks 34). Although homosexuality as an identity is an idea far more modern than Ambrosio and his predilections, we start to see Ambrosio and other sexually deviant Gothic as “important cultural agent[s] in the deployment of modern sexuality,” meaning that Gothic fiction not only reflected contemporary attitudes, it was actually involved in the “discursive production and even dissemination of cultural ‘knowledge’ about sexual

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

nonconformity” (Townshend 14, Rigby 38). Lewis’s characterization of Ambrosio’s sexuality is not simply a result of societal changes in attitude; rather it is involved in the actual deployment of sexuality’s discourse in that it “anticipate[s] sexological analysis at precisely the moment when these questions had begun to be explored” (Haggerty 64). In other words the Gothic genre, with all of its representations of perverse sexuality, was becoming popular just as questions surrounding such perverse sexuality were coming to the forefront of social consciousness. Thus Gothic novels were in the perfect position to inform and change that consciousness by way of an active production of discourse that took place “through a reciprocal relationship…between the text and the reader’s subconscious or conscious awareness” of contemporary conventions of sexual conformity and perversion (Rigby 38). A key way in which Gothic fiction was involved in the deployment of modern sexuality was the shift from the previously mentioned eighteenth-century sodomite to the nineteenth-century homosexual. While in the eighteenth century, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration,” in the nineteenth century, in part due to attitudes engendered by Gothic fiction, the homosexual became “a species” (Foucault 43). Thus while eighteenth-century Gothic fiction like Lewis’s The Monk still treats queer desire as a polymorphous aberration, it does reflect and even prompt some of the changes occurring in the understanding of queer desires. Lewis specifically does this through the production of Ambrosio as a sort of proto-figure of perverse sexuality. Although Ambrosio is, strictly speaking, far more aligned with the fluid sexuality of the sodomite than with the ‘species’ of the homosexual, Lewis does give us clues that the shift was already beginning to occur through his characterization of Ambrosio as a Catholic monk. In eighteenth century Britain, Catholicism, sexual excess, and foreignness were inextricably and symbiotically linked and ultimately queered by Gothic literature. Catholicism appeared repeatedly in Gothic fiction, and in such fiction, “the body of the Catholic was sexualized…in decidedly queer ways” (Townshend

ADAMS / PERVERSE FATHER TO ‘MISERABLE MONSTER’

26). By the time Lewis was writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, two centuries of British Protestantism’s abjection of the Catholic Other had led Catholicism into the territory of the sexually suspect (Townshend 25). In Gothic representations of Catholicism, “sexual transgression is the norm, as characters find that their lusts force them to violate religious vows, invoke Satanic powers, and destroy the bonds of family and friendship” (Haggerty 69). Thus monasteries were seen as hotbeds of perverse and subversive sexuality, and in Gothic fiction, where Catholicism is almost always linked to homoerotic or otherwise perverse sexual activity, sexual excess and religious excess became inextricably linked. Catholicism and sexual excess were also often linked to foreignness, and to a general British distrust of anything foreign. It was commonly believed that sexual perversions and subversive practices were brought into England from other European countries, especially the predominately Catholic Italy. In a 1749 moralistic text about the growth of sodomy in England, the author reflects the typical British Protestant view of Italy, calling it “the Mother and Nurse of Sodomy,” noting that there, sodomy is “withal so modish a sin, that not a cardinal or a churchman of note but has his Ganymede” (McCormick 139, 141). This attitude was so prevalent that in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen parodies the queering of foreignness; when Mr. Tilney finds out that Catherine suspects his father of killing his own wife, he tells her to “remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians,” implying that only unenlightened foreigners could possibly murder their wives (Austen 156). Such queering of foreignness shows that “attitudes about sexuality were similarly shaped by attitudes towards Catholics and Catholic countries” (Haggerty 70). Foucault also links Catholicism to sexuality through the idea of confession. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, an important aspect of the deployment of sexuality comes in Western society’s reliance on confession “for the production of truth” (58). Although the process of confession was not medicalized and made

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

scientific until the nineteenth-century, Foucault traces its roots to the churches of the Middle Ages. Thus the “transformation of sex into discourse” and the installation of sexual identities are “linked together with the help of the central element of a confession that compels individuals to articulate their sexual peculiarity—no matter how extreme” (Foucault 61). In eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, Catholic monks like Ambrosio are consequently intimately and actively involved in the production of sexuality as discourse. Therefore, even outside of his myriad queer desires, Ambrosio is set up as a queer figure just by dint of his position as a Catholic monk. Although his sexuality is fluid and his homoerotic desire is not directly linked to his identity, his Catholicism is linked to his identity, and that Catholicism is connected, for Gothic readers and writers, to perverse sexuality and specifically homoerotic desire. This tenuous, inchoate link between Ambrosio’s identity as a Catholic monk and his queer sexual desires is the very beginning of the shift from the sodomite to the homosexual, because central to that shift is the idea that sexuality is part of identity. The fact that Ambrosio’s Catholic identity becomes linked to his sexuality represents the early stages of what Foucault calls the “specification of individuals” in which homosexuality became “a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul” (43). Thus Ambrosio as a proto-figure of this sexual identity demonstrates how “the yet-uncodified history of sexuality emerges at sites like these” (Haggerty 70). By the time Mary Shelley published Frankenstein just over two decades after the publication of The Monk, the sexuality that was emerging in and being tenuously codified by the work of Lewis and other early Gothic authors had become part of the early nineteenth century consciousness. Although Foucault argues that “homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized [by] Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on ‘contrary sexual sensations,’” Frankenstein shows that the idea of the homosexual, albeit unnamed as such, existed far earlier than the late nineteenth century (Foucault 43). In Frankenstein, we can see the creature as, at the very least, a physical manifestation of

ADAMS / PERVERSE FATHER TO ‘MISERABLE MONSTER’

Victor’s own illicit homoerotic desires; therefore the monster is actually an early representation of the homosexual as his own monstrous ‘species.’ There are countless critical texts discussing the queer desire present between Victor and Clerval or Victor and Walton in Frankenstein. But in his article on homosocial bonding and homosexual panic in Frankenstein, James Holt McGavran suggests “that we read Victor’s intimate relationships with Clerval and Walton as examples of intense but ‘safe’ homosocial desire” (49). By ‘homosocial desire,’ McGavran is referring to the concept developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men, her influential book about the differences and interactions between types of male relationships. In the introduction to Between Men, Sedgwick defines ‘homosocial’ most simply as “social bonds between persons of the same sex,” and goes on to argue for the “unbrokenness of a continuum of homosocial and homosexual” (2). Far from causing acceptance of homosexual desire, however, Sedgwick contends that analysis of this continuum demonstrates that “homophobia is a necessary consequence of…patriarchal institutions” (3). In other words, Victor’s relationships with Clerval and Walton stay on the platonic, patriarchal end of the continuum between homosocial and homosexual desire, which makes them both non-threatening and inherently homophobic. Such homosocial relationships do not seem to be enough for Victor, but nor does he find sexual satisfaction in the company of women. Although “a desire to bind as closely as possible the ties of domestic love…determined [Victor’s] mother to consider Elizabeth as [his] future wife,” when he and Elizabeth were just small children, Victor always refers to Elizabeth with “affection,” as his “friend” or as his “sister” (Shelley 101, 19, 55). Indeed, at one point he even notes that “the idea of an immediate union with [his] cousin was one of horror and dismay” (104). Victor, unlike his polymorphically perverse predecessor Ambrosio, fails to find either romantic love or sexual satisfaction in his relationships with his male friends or his “sister,” a failure which ultimately causes him to create a monster who is “not only his child, but also both his

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

ideal male lover and his own recreated self” (McGavran 47). Shelley describes Victor’s creation of the creature using, as many critics have noted, the language of birth; Victor refers to the time leading up to his creation as time “spent in painful labour” towards creating “a new species” that would “bless [him] as its creator and source” (31, 32). So the creature is, at least in some respects, Victor’s child. Yet the passage also uses language that is undeniably sexual, and its progression mimics an act of sexual congress. On the fated night of creation, Victor is filled with an “unmistakabl[y]…pre-orgasmic” feeling of “anxiety that almost amounted to agony” (McGavran 61, Shelley 32). As the tension builds, Victor is “urged…forward” by a “resistless, almost frantic impulse” that echoes the passionate and uncontrollable nature of Gothic sexuality (Shelley 34. Finally, as the scene and its characters climax, Victor “infuse[s] a spark of being” into the “beautiful” creature, who responds with “a convulsive motion” (Shelley 34). But although it is reminiscent of heterosexual coitus, the language used here is not the discourse of normative and socially acceptable sex. “From the start, Victor’s obsession expresses itself with all the paranoid and furtive passion of forbidden, denied desire,” and all activities related to his “loathsome” project take place in the closet, so to speak, in a secret “workshop of filthy creation,” hidden away from the world for fear of shame and rejection (McGavran 59, Shelley 33, 32). And from this illicit homoerotic tryst is born the monster, immediately after which Victor’s climactic triumph turns to “breathless horror and disgust” (Shelley 34). Although the creature’s request for a female mate has been cited as evidence of his heterosexuality, a closer reading of the text suggests that this request shows nothing more than performative heterosexuality. The creature spends what are effectively his childhood and adolescence observing and learning from the DeLacey family, a paragon of heteronormativity. Is it any wonder, then, that when he sees how happy Felix and Safie are together, he asks his creator for a female to combat his own constant unhappiness? He can ask for nothing else because he knows

ADAMS / PERVERSE FATHER TO ‘MISERABLE MONSTER’

nothing for which to ask. Yet when he is following his own base instincts, his actions betray him as a naturally queer figure. Indeed, his very genesis is inherently queer in that he lacks a female mother. The creature also remains unnamed, linking him to the unnamable, unspeakable space of homosexual desire. Additional evidence of the monster’s own homoerotic desire lies in the fact that the female monster is not the first mate he seeks out. When he sees Victor’s little brother William in the woods, he thinks “if…I could seize him, and educate him as my companion…I should not be so desolate in this peopled earth” (96). But when he tries to take the boy, he accidentally strangles him. Thus the first object of the creature’s desire is actually male, but his attempt to fulfill this desire ends in William’s death. The creature is, then, not only a product of Victor’s homosexuality, he is himself a figure representative of that illicit desire. And at the moment the creature is created, he and his creator become locked in a violently passionate and fatally parasitic symbolic embrace in which they must hunt each other to the very edges of the earth. The creature—the embodiment of Victor’s homosexual desire—will never disappear. Try as he might, Victor cannot just make the creature a female mate and send him away because the ‘species’ he has created is male homosexual desire. The creature will always be there, even on Victor’s wedding night. Yet this strange connection also “bespeaks attraction, parodies courtship, constitutes union—no matter how weird, how negatively expressed, how destructive to both” (McGavran 46). The feelings of passionate hatred and passionate love between creator and creation are as horrifically fused and mangled as the monster himself and the creature, “in his dual identity as Victor’s homosexual self and love object…must, as often as he appears as the incarnation of gay desire, be simultaneously banished to endless, repeated acts of hate and rejection” (McGavran 62). He is, then, in a typical pattern of secret sexuality, being at once drawn closer to and pushed away from Victor, his creator, destroyer, and lover.

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Thus the two are forced to take their chase out onto the unpredictable and unstable ice. Fated to hunt each other unto death, they each become the ultimate queer figure of the wanderer, the man who, like Maturin’s iconically perverse Melmoth, is inherently suspect because he cannot settle down into a heteronormative lifestyle. Frankenstein and his monstrous homosexual desire are literally outside of the known, normative world, and it is a place from which they cannot return. They will most certainly die on the ice, but they have no other options in a society that has no room for the homosexual and his dangerous desire. Their journey out onto the ice, then, is an allegorical one that “progresses towards the production of queer desires as paranoid, dangerous, sterile and socially alienating forms of intimacy and identity” (Rigby 49). As Frankenstein and his creature play out their fate on the ice, it becomes clear that while the homosexual desire between Frankenstein and his creature may be heavily coded, the results of such dangerous attraction are not. If the monster is a representation of Victor’s criminal desire, then homosexuality is presented in Frankenstein as a “cause of paranoia…a source of madness, an unnatural, diseased and abject deathly condition” (Rigby 42). The creature is a source of disease and madness in the way that he literally makes Victor ill. After he creates the monster, Victor undergoes a process of degeneration at the hands of his terrible passion, a process that leaves him in the horrifying “state of degradation” in which Walton finds him (Shelley 147). By the time Walton picks him up, Victor himself is being referred to as “a creature,” and he and his desire have become one (15). As he kills anyone who Victor loves, the monster also becomes an instrument of death, and from his “marginalised position,” he “unmasks a violence that may be done to any desire, identity or body that deviates from the normativity of the period” (Rigby 48). The creation of the monster therefore represents the convergence of forbidden knowledge and forbidden desire into an undeniably queer figure, and the creature’s death represents the necessary fate of that figure.

ADAMS / PERVERSE FATHER TO ‘MISERABLE MONSTER’

Although it may be tempting to read Gothic fiction as merely a reflection of its contemporary society, it was actually an integral catalyst to the changes that were occurring in the understanding of sexuality between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. In M.G. Lewis’s The Monk, Ambrosio represents sexual perversity before it became linked to identity, but in his depiction, there are clues showing that the codification was beginning to occur. Just twenty years later, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the next step in this process of the codification of perverse sexuality in that Victor’s monster is a representation of the homosexual as a species, of homoerotic desire as an identity. This shift in the portrayal of sexuality was then continually informing society’s perception of that sexuality, a phenomenon Austen’s Catherine Moreland displays in the way that she obtains all of her information about social systems and her outlook on sexual relationships from the Gothic novels she cannot stop reading. It was in these ways that power began to exert itself upon the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century consciousness of sexuality, molding and codifying it into what would become our rigid, binarized, and identity-based modern understanding of perverse and abnormal sexuality.

Works Cited: Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Longman Cultural ed. New York: Pierson Education, 2005. Print. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Vintage Books Edition. New York City, New York : Random House, Inc. , 1990. Print. Freud, Sigmund. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. 268. Print. Haggerty, George. Queer Gothic. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Print.

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk: A Romance. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2004. 33-363. Print. McCormick, Ian. Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing. New York: Routledge, 1997. 104-106. Print. McGavran, James Holt. ""Insurmountable barriers to our unionâ&#x20AC;?: Homosocial male bonding, homosexual panic, and death on the ice in Frankenstein." European Romantic Review 11.1 (2000): 46-67. Web. 7 Nov 2010. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509580008570098 >. Rigby, Mair. "'Do you share my madness?': Frankensteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s queer Gothic." Queering the Gothic. Ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith. New York City: Manchester University Press, 2009. 36-54. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Print. Shelley, Mar y. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. 5-156. Print. Townshend, Dale. "'Love in a Convent': or, Gothic and the perverse father of queer enjoyment." Queering the Gothic. Ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith . New York City: Manchester University Press, 2009. 11-35. Print. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality. 3rd. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.

SIC(K) CHIC(K) An Investigation of Thwarted Pedagogy and Critical Corporeality in the Anorexic/Bulimic Body and Ionesco’s La Leçon THEODORA DANYLEVICH Philology: A Power Play In Eugene Ionesco’s 1950 play La Leçon, the maid flits in and on and off stage, hauntingly warning the audience and players with increasing intensity, “la philologie mêne au pire!”.6 I propose to take this absurd warning seriously, and consider why philology might be perceived as so grave a threat. What could be so perilous about an overly passionate, or literal, love of the word? Significantly, it is the maid, an older and queerer female figure, who serves as mouthpiece for this critical warning. In Dead Subjects, Antonio Viego indicates that “Lacan understands language as radically exterior to the body,” and cites Marie Jaanus explaining that “the analytically defined ‘human’ is not the traditional knot of living flesh and eternal spirit, but a subject constituted by the force and structure of speech and language. And language as such has nothing human about it. Signifiers are dead. ‘Humans’ incorporate this deadness” (Jaanus cited in Viego 14-15). There is a stake particular to women in recognizing the disciplinary, !"#$%&'('()*"'+,-."/("/%+"0(1./23"(/%+10&.+"/1,4.',/+-",."#$%&'('()*"'+,-."/("

5,',6&/*23"

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

pathologizing, and sometimes fatal, pitfalls of abstraction and idealizing discourse. As Woolf famously observes in A Room of One’s Own, “woman is the most talked-about animal in the universe” (28). Lyn Hejinian brings this issue into material relief: Being an object of description without the authority to describe, a woman may feel herself to be bounded by her own appearance, a representation of her apparent person, not certain whether she is she or only a quotation. She may feel herself to have been defined from without while remaining indefinite in or as herself. (206-7) Hejinian’s description of a reduction of self to external surfaces: “bounded by her own appearance,” “defined from without,” and, more specifically, textual surfaces: “not certain whether she is she or only a quotation,” suggests that the female subject of language may just be a little more dead than the male. Joan Scott canonically theorized the realm of experience with regard to feminism and gender; and more recently, Sara Ahmed vectors classical phenomenology into discussions of gender and sexuality. These trends point to a disjunction between language and body akin to Lacanian disjunction between psyche and language, with a particularly deleterious effect on feminine identity as such. Anorexia nervosa is an interesting, if excessively stylish, symptom of the disappearing woman, and has been psychoanalytically diagnosed as a symptomatic resistance to one’s feminine embodiment. As opposed to the anorexic — or, more properly, anorexic/bulimic (“a/b”)7 — subject’s gender dysphoria at work, this paper hopes to take a more nuanced view of the eating disorder as a perilous but perhaps originally well-intentioned incorporation of a discourse and culture that may not adequately hold space for a feminine bodying forth. !"#"$%&%$"'("')*+",+",-."'(".%"/($%",001$,'%2",34".($$(5*36"7%*+%8"%'",89:+"1+%"(&"

')*+"+)($'),34"&($"$%&%$$*36"'("')%",3($%;*0-.18*/*0".(4<9"=)%"'5(".%8(36" '(6%')%$"*3"/<"4*+01++*(3",+"')%<",$%"08*3*0,88<"&$%>1%3'8<"*3'%$'5*3%42",34"')%" 8*3%"*+"&1??<"*3".%'5%%3"')%/+9"

DANYLEVICH / SIC(K) CHIC(K)

A reading of an intentionally generalized sample case of the a/b subject-body paired with the embodied performance of the pupil in Eugène Ionesco’s La Leçon follows a fraught interplay between body and language on the model of a thwarted affective pedagogy and citational practice as becoming a “sic(k)ness” unto death. My analysis enters into conversation with Judith Butler’s chapter on Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness, “Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection” in The Psychic Life of Power, which explores the internalization of the agonistic lordship and bondage dynamic by the bondsman, “postliberation,” into the a/b subject’s struggle with and against her body. The post-liberation status of the bondsman is especially applicable to interrogating the stakes of a feminist project in the present day. Further, the bondman’s struggle is characterized by a play of power and desire that closely parallels the dynamic I track in the a/b subjectbody and in La Leçon, with a few notable exceptions. In the case of a/b and La Leçon, the body’s ultimate survival is not a given. Also, in Butler’s reading, the question of the body as agent of critique or communication is not broached. In my texts, in spite of the body’s non-survival we are left in the end with an aesthetically intriguing remaindered structure and form of life (albeit foreshortened), and may be compelled to ask after the political valence and afterlife of these as critique. Invoking Williams’s “structures of feeling” I inquire into the sic(k) young woman’s body as both linguistic lack and excess that may critique or disrupt the narrative of becoming-subject. Pedagogic Interlude: Description of Texts The a/b body For my discussion of the a/b body I draw primarily on personal experience and on Anna Motz’s exploration of a/b in The Psychology of Female Violence. My analysis explicitly relies on the generalized stereotypical base symptomatology and demographic: “Eating disorders in general are found far more frequently in women than in men, and the average age of onset of anorexia nervosa has been found to be 18,” reports Motz (240). While I cite here from Motz the diagnostic statistical annual-IV’s criteria for classification of

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

anorexia nervosa, I am most interested in (b) and (c) which have to do with distorted perception: (a) Refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimally normal body weight for age and height (e.g. weight loss leading to maintenance of body weight less than 85% of that expected: or failure to make expected weight gain during period of growth leading to body weight less than 85% of expected). (b) Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat even though underweight. (c) Disturbance in the way in which one’s body weight or shape is experienced, undue influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of the current low body weight. (d) In post-menarcheal females, amenorrhoea, i.e. the absence of at least three consecutive menstrual cycles (a woman is considered to have amenorrhoea if her periods occur only following hormone, e.g. oestrogen, administration). Specified type: restricting type: During the current episode of anorexia nervosa, the person has not regularly engaged in binge eating or purging behaviour (i.e. self-induced vomiting or the misuse of laxatives, diuretics, or enemas). binge eating/purging type: During the current episode of anorexia nervosa the person has regularly engaged in binge eating or purging behaviour (i.e. self-induced vomiting or the misuse of laxatives, diuretics, or enemas). (APA 1994: 54-5) (emphasis added 241) Irrational fear of weight gain and body dysmorphia, among other affective aspects of the disorder are elaborated in Robert C. Lane’s “Anorexia, Masochism, Self-Mutilation and Autoerotism: The Spider Mother,” jan jagodzinski’s “Women’s Bodies of Performative Excess: Miming, Feigning, Refusing, and Rejecting the Phallus,” and Richard Maisel, David Epston and Ali Borden’s Biting the Hand that Starves You. This reading is also interested in the obsessive-compulsive dimension of the disorder as it refracts into sic(k)ening.

DANYLEVICH / SIC(K) CHIC(K)

La Leçon Written in 1950 and first performed in Paris in 1951, La Leçon (The Lesson) is a short one-act by Eugène Ionesco, a RomanianFrench absurdist playwright. The plot is simple: A pupil, incidentally female and aged 18 years, arrives for a lesson at the home of a professor, the maid lets her in, and the professor comes in and they begin their lesson. The maid interrupts several times, warning the professor not to let himself get agitated, especially warning against philology. Towards the end, it is clear that the professor is agitated, and ends by killing the pupil. The maid admonishes him and makes arrangements to dispose of the body, to go with the thirty-nine other victims from that same day. The play ends with another pupil knocking at the door, and the play is sometimes thus performed continuously, in an obsessive-compulsive circularity. In my reading of the young pupil’s embodiment throughout the course of the play, her body emerges as a performative s/cite of thwarted and violent pedagogy and communication Excessive Idealism the Sic(k) Body Philosophical Precursor The drama of internalized subjection that Butler draws out in her chapter shows a devotional/desirous attitude of the subject toward her agent of subjection — in this case the abstract, “Unchangeable” purity of thought and language. Through the internalizing transposition of the lordship-bondage relation, the corporeal comes to represent “the contradictory domain […] of alternating qualities, the changeable domain of appearance” that the subject seeks to subordinate and purify in a devotional effort (Andacht) “in the service of the thought of the Unchangeable.” Rather than obliterating the body, this scenario surprisingly leads to “self-feeling” (eigensinnigkeit), an “immersion in the body that precludes access to anything else,” as a quasi-narcissism is also sadistic as it becomes clear that the transcendent measure is unattainable by the body (Butler 46-47). In Kristeva’s words, this is a jouissance that generates the abject: “a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

making it repugnant” (9). Prompted by the subject’s apprehension of death, in Hegel, the body is ultimately and “inadvertently” preserved, whereas the ideal dies, in “a transposition of figures,” and the pedagogy of idealism continues in a ritualized, religious form (Butler 48). My reading of a/b mirrors and then doubles back on this last progression, ultimately witnessing the dedicated student of “philology” as persisting in a totalizing corporeal self-feeling to the extent that the body sustains fatal injury, inadvertently. Dwelling in, rather than superseding, this moment of perilous self-feeling gives us the opportunity to explore the critical capacity of a sic(k) chic(k) body. Anorexia/Bulimia Parallel to the internalized conflict of the lordship-bondsman relation in the Unhappy Consciousness, Robert C. Lane describes a psychosomatic agonism in the a/b subject as a paranoia that stretches toward a sadomasochism: “rather than being identified with their body […] they hate it, and cruelly, unrelentingly, attack it […] They even starve it to death” (102). The a/b subject typically engages in rigid prescriptivism and despotic subjection of the body to the power of the mind. For instance, she resists and completely avoids certain types of (if not all) foods; exercises beyond the point of what is beneficial or even pleasant. In and through herself, the a/b subject presents us here with an overly cathected, hateful, and ultimately dysmorphic attention to her body striving toward the ideal. Her dysmorphic perception comes about as a response to the overwhelming and unacceptable corporeality of the body as “contradictory domain … of alternating qualities, the changeable domain of appearance” and branches in two directions that show two sides of what I call a simulacral morphology; a sic(k)ness that hyperbolizes and hypostatizes the ideal. The simulacrum here has to do with the delusionary aspect of the a/b subject’s proprioception; a bi-valent absence of “real” referent appears in the a/b subject first insofar as her perception is distorted beyond any “real” reference-point, and also insofar as, as a

DANYLEVICH / SIC(K) CHIC(K)

consequence of this distorted perception in the a/b subject, the “real” life of the “real” is imperiled. Madness by another name, the a/b subject’s simulacral morphology literalizes a bi-valent lack and excess of metaphorical thought. As jagodzinski puts it, “The anorexic is … ‘literal-minded.’ The metaphoric becomes concrete … her fanatical control over her ‘body’ becomes a synonym for the ‘self’” (30). Both directions of simulacral morphology indicate a simultaneous linguistic lack and excess of the body. With the added proprioceptive dysaesthesi, or body dysmorphia of a/b, these simulacral morphologies reflect Butler’s discussion of the psychic incursion of the body as a phenomenal screen that comes to occlude the subject’s ability to function socially, “unable to furnish knowledge of anything other than itself … an immersion in the body that precludes access to anything else.” In spite of its ultimate peril, it appears that dysmorphia is the psychic site of the body’s critical, communicative agency. The first track of the a/b simulacral morphology is a persistent and distorted fear of fat coupled with a dysmorphic perception and sensation of physical heaviness, which reflects the bondsman’s agonistic attitude toward the body as incommensurate to the ideal, at the same time as it begins to suggest uncanny, extralinguistic corporeal agency. The second is an unwitting reliance on the body (and food) as vehicles for affect, morphing into a delusionary proprioception. The a/b subject channels and concretizes onto her body or onto food feelings, anxieties, and traumatic events that the mind cannot or will not process. “Many of these patients lack the right words for their emotions (alexithymia) and will use their bodies to express the ‘ejected affects,’” writes Lane (103). In this way, “I’m fat” comes reflexively to take the place of “I hurt” or “I feel the pain of subjection.” Metaphoric excess is evidenced by the literal recursion of body and food as abject modes of communication. The a/b subject’s lack of metaphorical thought is manifested in her above inability to think beyond her body. Inside of the compulsion and obsession of the eating disorder an absolute literalness in a citational projection of thought onto body endows the subject’s psychic activity

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

with a palpably real, concrete, and thereby soothing, while in fact thoroughly simulacral, recursivity. La Lecon Ionesco’s play, as a text of the theatre of the absurd — a genre whose humor largely lies in punning and linguistic misunderstanding — lends itself exceptionally to a literary investigation and analysis of this dynamic of thwarted pedagogy and citationality of the a/b subject and her body. In La Leçon, the young pupil, notably specified as a female of 18 years, the same statistical figure that yields the highest incidence of anorexia, performs the crisis of the devoted and devotedly embodied student bumping up against the incommensurability of the experiential body and the unchangeable ideal. Her appearance on stage is immediately framed by exhaustive stage directions that detail (for the reader) a bodily transformation that she will perform for the viewers over the course of the drama, gradually becoming more and more immobile, even paralyzed, by the end of the play: She seems to be a well-brought-up girl, polite, but lively, gay, dynamic; a fresh smile is on her lips. During the course of the play she progressively loses the lively rhythm of her movement and her carriage, she becomes withdrawn. From gay and smiling she becomes progressively sad and morose; from very lively at the beginning, she becomes more and more fatigued and somnolent. Towards the end of the play her face must clearly express a nervous depression; her way of speaking shows the effects of this, her tongue becomes thick, words come to her memory with difficulty and emerge from her mouth with as much difficulty, she comes to have a manner vaguely paralyzed, the beginning of aphasia. Firm and determined at the beginning, so much so as to appear to be almost aggressive, she becomes more and more passive, until she is almost a mute and inert object, seemingly inanimate in the Professor’s hands, to such an extent that when he makes his final gesture, she no longer reacts. Insensible, her reflexes

DANYLEVICH / SIC(K) CHIC(K)

deadened, only her eyes in an expressionless face will show inexpressible [indicible]8 astonishment and fear. The transition from one manner to the other must of course be made imperceptibly. (emphasis added 45-46) Notable especially is the imposed ossification of the pupil through language, at the expense of language: “her tongue becomes thick” conveying “the beginning of aphasia” (46). Here we see an oppressive materiality of the body being performed, to the extent of overtaking even her ability to move and speak. The professor, on the other hand — who I ultimately read as conflated with the pupil in the play’s psyche as a representation of the internalized agent of oppression in Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness — undergoes an inverse transformation, from timid to “more and more sure of himself, more and more nervous, aggressive, dominating.” Notably, the professor is described with “occasionally a lewd gleam [that] comes into his eyes and is quickly repressed,” which becomes increasingly dominant towards the end of the play (46). The pupil’s slow and steady congealment into a mute lump of persistent corporeality detailed above performs and materializes the a/b subject’s dysmorphic excess of metaphorical thought, as she becomes more and more irrevocably a “knot of living flesh,” a gross incursion and “bodying forth” into the space of the play. The staged version of this dysmorphia is redolent of the concretely performative expression of the a/b subject’s anguish written in the persistent materiality of her body as it wastes away. The resistance of dead weight stands to convey something of critical, embodied communication, as towards the end of the play, the pupil’s remaindered corpse requires two additional bodies to carry it out of the room.

!"!"#!$!%&'"#$"#%"&'(")*#+#%,-"&(.&/",%0"-#&(*,--1"&*,%$-,&($"&)"23%$4(,5,6-(/7"8'#9'"

#$":)*("4*(9#$(",%0",44*)4*#,&("&)"&'("43*4)$($");"&'#$"4,4(*<"

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

How the Abjected Body Speaks: Simulacral Morphologies PROFESSOR: you have… ten fingers. PUPIL: Yes, Professor. PROFESSOR: How many would you have if you had only five of them? PUPIL: Ten, Professor. PROFESSOR: That’s not right! PUPIL: But it is, Professor. (Ionesco 56) In her book on female violence, Motz writes, “a woman uses her body as her most powerful means of communication and her greatest weapon. In a sense, she writes on her body in a gesture of protest and in order to elicit help, to communicate her sense of crisis” (1). This mute appeal of the body is not only instantiated in the metaphorical excess of the visible and ultimately grotesque persistence of the a/b body as it dwindles, and the body of Ionesco’s murdered pupil as it persists; it also presents itself via an engrossing narcissism as metaphorical lack via concrete, corporeally literal textuality as articulated by the a/b subject and Ionesco’s pupil. The absurd literality inherent in both of these modes of concretized textual performance of the body show a citational convergence between body and language that, while ultimately unviable, is emblematic of resistance, as the above example of the persisting ten-ness of the student’s fingers suggests: “But it is, professor” (56). The first symptom of La Leçon’s pupil’s corporeal literalmindedness shows itself when, near the beginning of the lesson, the professor is attempting to instill in her the (basic) principles of addition and subtraction, using her body parts as examples, and the pupil is unable to compute beyond the persistent facts of her phenomenal embodied state. In a somewhat ominous foreshadowing, the professor is gradually taking apart her body, piece by piece, with increasing violence, beginning with a suggestion of pulling off her nose:

DANYLEVICH / SIC(K) CHIC(K)

PROFESSOR: …If you had two noses, and I pulled one of them off… how many would you have left?? PUPIL: None. PROFESSOR: What do you mean, none? PUPIL: Yes, it’s because you haven’t pulled off any, that’s why I have one now. If you had pulled it off, I wouldn’t have it anymore. (55) As evidenced by this exchange, the pupil cannot for the purposes of example, which is a form of metaphorical thought, imagine that she would at any time have had more than one nose, so she answers that she would have none left were he to pull one off. The pupil’s embeddedness in her own body becomes even more obvious with the next example of her ears, as she can no longer compute the removal of any of them: PROFESSOR: …I take one away, I eat one up, then how many do you have left? PUPIL: Two. PROFESSOR: I eat one of them… one. PUPIL: Two. PROFESSOR: One. PUPIL: Two. PROFESSOR: One! (56) At this point in the play, the professor and pupil engage in a shouting match about whether she has one or two left, which is a pivotal moment in shifting the dynamic to a more violent and sinister register. The milder, playful suggestion of pulling off the nose is now superseded in violence as well as eros, as the professor proposes eating one of her ears. The pupil persists in her radically corporeal epistemology, and is ultimately deemed unable to pass the mathematical doctorate. The mathematical component of the lesson most clearly displays the body’s simultaneous devotional citation of

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

ideal unchangeability, and resistance to language. The professor as representative of the lordship-identified agent within the Unhappy Consciousness sees his pedagogic efforts thwarted, his efficacity thrown into question, reacts with increasing agitation and violence. As the lesson progresses to philology, which, as the maid warns, leads to “calamity” (60), the professor becomes increasingly domineering as the pupil is effectuating her retreat into her corporeality, becoming more muted. The pupil here begins to complain of a toothache, which becomes increasingly consuming and visibly uncomfortable for her, a symptom of simulcral morphology par excellence, becoming an affective placeholder as she constantly interjects and answers questions with “I’ve got a toothache.” The maid comes in and announces “The final symptom! The chief symptom!,” when she hears of the toothache (72). Where the previous lesson showed the pupil’s computational logic to be dominated by her ideal corporeal wholeness, the toothache as repeated complaint and interjection shows speech to be utterly rooted in her body, as it begins to come apart. This corporeally-rooted obstinacy naturally aggravates the professor, who becomes increasingly violent in his rhetoric: “Silence! Or I’ll bash in your skull!” (70), a threatened gesture of significant penetration, expressing frustration with the bone that supposedly contains the reasoning mind. In seeking to locate a boundary between the body and speech, teeth as the bones that frame the open mouth are significant, solid placeholders. The liminality of teeth as vital instruments for eating is also of particular significatory weight for a/b subjects: the teeth signify a mediation of the border between life and death for the a/b subject. Further, a/b subjects with a history of purging often have very painful and expensive repercussions over time manifested in their teeth. In his essay on narcissism, Freud locates an autoerotism in hypochondria and the morphology of pain in various body parts, with an originary example of the toothache. In Ionesco’s scene, the pain indeed migrates through the pupil’s body before becoming eroticized to the point of orgasmic murder. This final, fatal articulation of simulacral morphology in the play occurs as the pupil is learning to pronounce “knife” in all the

DANYLEVICH / SIC(K) CHIC(K)

different Spanish and neo-Spanish9 languages (which, incidentally, all sound the same). Once this part of the lesson begins, the pupil’s toothache expands into expressions of pain in various other body parts, and the scene ends with the knife literally being absorbed into her body; as opposed to the knowledge being absorbed by her mind (which would have been more appropriate in a scholarly setting): PUPIL: Knife… my throat…. PROFESSOR: Knife… knife… PUPIL: Knife… my shoulders… my arms, my breast, my hips… knife…knife… … PROFESSOR [changing his voice]: Pay attention… […] the knife kills… PUPIL [in a weak voice]: Yes, yes… the knife kills? PROFESSOR [striking the Pupil with a very spectacular blow of the knife]: Aaah! That’ll teach you!10 (75) The (fatal) morphology of pain in this last instance is significant in light of the orgasmic undertones to the killing scene: a seduction is enacted, leading from the pupil’s arms, to her breast, her hips, and in the end her inarticulable genital zone is concretely violated by the knife, rather than articulated in words. The scene continues, according to the stage directions, thus: Pupil also cries “Aah!”then falls, flopping into an immodest position onto a chair [...] The murderer and his victim shout !"#$%$"&'$"(%)*$++)%",-.$-&+"/"0,-12,+&,3+"/00"',+")4-5"4'$%$,-"6(/-,+'",+"&'$"

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

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

“Aaah!” at the same moment. After the first blow of the knife, the Pupil flops onto the chair, her legs spread wide and hanging over both sides of the chair. The Professor remains standing in front of her, his back to the audience. After the first blow, he strikes her dead with a second slash of the knife, from bottom to top. After that blow a noticeable convulsion shakes his whole body. (75) The erotic spell of this last moment is suddenly broken when the professor realizes what he’s done, in terrified recognition: “[…He gets up, looks at the knife in his hand, looks at the young girl, then as though he were waking up, in a panic:] What have I done! ... Oh dear, I’m in trouble! Young lady, young lady, get up!” (75). The panicked and incomprehending reaction of the professor – he urges her to get up, showing now on his end a lack of recognition of the “real” status of the student being dead. The remainder of the actual “real” referent, the young woman’s body, heretofore confounded with the realm of the ideal, emerges grotesquely out of the philologic fog. Desire, Devotion, Inadvertent Destruction The final scene of La Leçon performs an intimate and deadly intermeshment of pedagogic passion and simulacral a/b morphology through the conjunction of the toothache and the knife-pronunciation lesson. In light of the professor’s panicked recognition, which indicates a degree of naïve unwittingness in the affective momentum that leads to the murder, what are we to make of this erotic charge that leads to death? After all, he was “merely” trying to do a good job as a teacher to this (to his mind) stupidly embodied pupil... wasn’t he?... Could this deadly abuse and subjection be read as a well-intentioned but misguided communicative attempt? Or is the communicative attempt to be located in the body’s resistant critique as it moves toward its demise? This unwittingly destructive desire seems to reflect the drama of Foucaultian assujetissement, where there is a cathetcting of the subject to the agent of subjection by virtue of its power as life-giving,

DANYLEVICH / SIC(K) CHIC(K)

constitutive of subjectivity itself, all while it is disciplining and punishing the subject. As a vehement pedagogue-student duo, the professor and the pupil’s joint erotic aspiration toward the exasperatingly impossible subordination of the body to discourse is not intentionally destructive. All while I locate a critique in the sic(k) chi(k) emergent corporeal style of citation and resistance, it seems that the body’s speech is inextricable from its irrevocable turn toward death. As Kristeva puts it, “communication brings my most intimate subjectivity into being for the other; and this act of judgment and supreme freedom, if it authenticates me, also delivers me over to death … all speech perhaps, already harbors in itself something that is mortal, culpable, abject” (129-130). In clinical opinion anorexia is not in fact a desire to kill oneself: suicide is viewed as an unintended consequence of this condition (Motz 248). In a/b scholarship, critical “bodying forth” symptoms, such as the two-pronged body dysmorphia and simulacral morphologies discussed above, appear under the duress of self-harm or self-destructive behaviors. “Like other manifestations of self-harm, anorexia nervosa can be viewed as a communicative attempt, and as a solution, no matter how potentially dangerous maladaptive,” writes Motz (239). How do we come to terms with, and learn from, a fearless bondsman, who persists in struggling to the death, rather than preserving the body because of fear? La Leçon and a/b as a “Structure of Feeling-Subjected” Motz elaborates that for the young woman, “being an anorectic has its own identity and provides a clear and potent focus to life during the turbulence, insecurity and self-questioning of adolescence” (240). Adopting Raymond Williams’s figure of the “structure of feeling,” which he elaborates in Marxism and Literature, I seek, in closing, to convey a way in which a/b and La Leçon’s compulsive simulacra and corporeal remainders serve as convergent structures of feeling, as structures of “feeling-subjected,” and may in their way be modes of transient world-making and belonging by disrupting the progressive narrative of becoming-subject. Williams locates literary “style” (132) as a particular site for excavating

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

structures of feeling. Can we consider the sic(k) chic(k) corporeal textuality that manifests itself in a/b symptomatology and in La Leçon as just such a style? My reading of the absurdly corporeal style of La Leçon seeks to shed light on the more experiential aspect of a/b, as opposed to the more rationalistic scientific and diagnostic, medicalizing and pathologizing discourse, such as that which I cite at the beginning of this paper. This project seeks, in a way, to perform such a bodying forth, intending to place in more accessible relief the “structure of feeling” of what a/b can feel like. In this way, I hope to also convey a greater cultural significance and understanding of a/b as not merely a personality disorder, but as a (perilously) generative embodied ex-piriri experience at the limits of language, which might point us toward a more serious consideration of the body as a vital site of and for rethinking our pedagogic allegiances Works Cited Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 1996. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1997. ----. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. 1993. Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2000. Ionesco, Eugène. La Leçon. Paris: Gallimard. 1954. ----. Trans. Donald M. Allen. Four Plays: The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, Jack, or The Submission, The Chairs. New York: Grove Press. 1958 jagodzinski, jan. “Women’s Bodies of Performative Excess: Miming, Feigning, Refusing, and Rejecting the Phallus.” JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society. 8(1), Spring 2003. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. 1982.

DANYLEVICH / SIC(K) CHIC(K)

Lane, Robert C. “Anorexia, Masochism, Self-Mutilation and Autoerotism: The Spider Mother.” Psychoanalytic Review, 89(1), February 2002. Motz, Anna. The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes Against the Body. London: Routledge. 2008. Viego, Antonio. Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. 2007. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1981.

Representations of the Exoticized Subaltern Wide Sargasso Sea in Film CATALINA LUPU “There are always two deaths—the real one and the one people know about” (Rhys 77), declares Antoinette, the protagonist of Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, to her husband regarding the death of her mother, Annette. The mother had lived for years in fear and mental anguish due to her status as “colonizer” in 19th century Jamaica, compounded by her unstable relationship with her husband. The “real” death to which Antoinette refers is the arson of the family house by a mob of former slaves in which her infant brother, Pierre, dies in their mother’s arms, while the “one people know about” is the physical death a few years later, after Annette had been abandoned by her husband and had been driven to insanity. Antoinette’s statement resonates not only in the diegesis of Rhys’ novel, but extends intertextually from Wide Sargasso Sea to its source text, Charlotte Brontë’s 1848 Victorian gothic Jane Eyre, which assigns the death “people know about” to Rochester’s mad wife Bertha. In creating Wide Sargasso Sea and recreating Antoinette, Rhys intended to “write the story as it might really have been”; since Bertha “seemed such a poor ghost,” Rhys tried “to write her a life” (Vreeland). By writing Bertha “a life” as Antoinette, Rhys also created the “real” death to contrast with “the one people know about” as described in Jane Eyre. If Rhys’ novel provides an interiorized and psychological explanation of Antoinette’s life and death, the two film adaptations of the text—the first a 1993 feature film, the second a BBC television movie from 2006—serve to create yet another death that “people

LUPU / REPRESENTATIONS OF THE EXOTICIZED SUBALTERN

know about” by virtue of the form’s wider dissemination and of the films’ sensationalist representations of Antoinette’s family, history, home, and sensuality. As Spivak notes in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” the development of Western (and firstworld) “feminist individualism” (244) through texts such as Jane Eyre contributes to the “continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms” (243); however, I wish to suggest that the project of adapting Wide Sargasso Sea into film form is another way in which the “imperialist project” is continued, this time using new cultural technologies of representation and distribution. As a visual medium which generally receives more fanfare and a wider distribution across countries and languages, film seems to function as the ideal vehicle to bring Rhys’ novel—and with it, larger ideas of subaltern oppression—to a more public sphere. The films should function as visual and mainstream representation for Antoinette’s struggles with identity and agency without the mediation of the text and the constant constraining influence of the earlier source text, Jane Eyre. However, the potential power of the two film adaptations is subjected to the socioeconomic power of both producers and consumers of films, and as such any adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea—which is traumatizing without being gory, psychological without being melodramatic, and sensual without being racy—seems doomed to be uninteresting and unprofitable. Both the 1993 and the 2006 adaptations ignore the complex fragmented narrative structure, the dialectic of villain and victim between Antoinette and her husband, and the sense of alienation and oppression that Antoinette experiences from her family, her husband, her servants, and even from herself and her history. Many parts of the novel simply cannot translate well to the screen: the representation of Antoinette through her and her husband’s alternating perspectives, the description of Antoinette’s dreams as a liminal and limited place of agency, the interplay between action and destiny that affects Antoinette’s future, and the recurring mirror imagery which would be complicated by the presence of a camera reflecting back an already distorted and intermediary portrayal. Even in terms of what is—

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

nominally at least—“filmable” in the novel, the directors of the two adaptations make production and representation choices that significantly change Rhys’ objectives, and the agenda of feminism and anti-imperialism. The 1993 adaptation’s use of near-pornographic sex scenes between the two main characters, and particularly the sense that Antoinette bewitches her husband with her libido, uses a pseudomoralizing temptress stereotype to deny Antoinette a singular identity away from her controlling male sexual partner. Furthermore, the exotic and erotic combine visually in the many shots of black servants dancing sensually, laughing, singing, and drumming to create a connection between sexual excess and ‘primitive’ culture. Finally, the exploitation of the environment, climate, and wildlife of the Caribbean setting is also evident in the multiple scenes of sinister floating Sargassum and the beautiful but wild and dangerous scenery of the island. The filmmakers are complicit with imperialist stereotypes of the West Indies, of women, and of black people of African and Caribbean descent, and force the audience’s compliance with them through shocking and repetitive visuals. The 2006 adaptation, on the other hand, exhibits the “feminist individualism” against which Spivak rails since it causes the “native female” (in this case Antoinette) to be further excluded from the norm (Spivak 245), thus denying her “worlding” as a subject. This film adaptation achieves this through its portrayal of multiple strong female characters—to borrow Spivak’s turn of phrase—“claiming to be Caliban” (245). In the adaptation, Aunt Cora, Christophine, Amélie, and even Antoinette herself are represented as idealized strong women even in the face of insurmountable economic, legal, and sexual oppressions. This romanticized view of the women shows them all to “be Caliban” in a way that “legitimizes the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within” (245). The 1993 adaptation, perhaps unsurprisingly, was assigned an NC-17 rating for strong and explicit sexuality, and its producers did not attempt to edit the sex scenes in order to get a less damning rating that might allow for wider distribution. In creating a highly eroticized

LUPU / REPRESENTATIONS OF THE EXOTICIZED SUBALTERN

and sexually explicit spectacle, its director, John Duigan, essentially created a soft-core porn film that simultaneously anticipated the limited public interest in its subject material, and also doomed it to censorship and limited viewership. One possibility for this sexualized interpretation of the text is that the filmmakers balked at the “unfilmable,” deeply psychological topics of the book, and attempted to work around them by adding explicit sexual content to appeal to wider audiences. In choosing to include several lengthy and explicit sex scenes, the filmmakers seemed to acknowledge the need to spice up the material of the novel to make it more suitable for visual representation, and also more enticing to mainstream audiences. Conversely, however, the nature of these sex scenes—mostly completely fabricated and without any source in the text—deters mainstream audiences and subjected the film to an NC-17 rating, thus hindering the film’s wider distribution and the proliferation of the novel’s ideology. This version of the film inserts many sex scenes—among them two scenes of rape—in places where Rhys’ prose poignantly leaves off, such as the wedding night: “I poured out two glasses and told her to drink to our happiness, to our love, and the day without end which would be tomorrow” (50). Other parts of the text are perhaps more explicit, and need visual representation in order to make the scene cohere, including the husband’s realization: “I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love” (55), but this admission of not loving her does nothing to stop his selfish desire for her, as evidenced when “the sight of her dress which she’d left lying on her bedroom floor made me breathless and savage with desire” (55). The succession of these two statements—that he is acutely aware of his own lack of love for her, but that he nevertheless gives in to his desire for her—is not included in the film, and consequently the sex scene that picks up where the text leaves off is gratuitous and meaningless. Onscreen, Antoinette and her husband happily act on their desire, with no hint of any serious and self-conscious reflection from the husband about his feelings, thus reducing the husband’s culpability for acting the way he does despite knowing he does not love her. The scene is thus transformed into a cheerful romp in an exotic location

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

that ignores any of the darker elements linked to Antoinette’s sexuality and her husband’s controlling desire. This use of sex scenes indulges in the Victorian stereotype of the libidinous and licentious tropics that must be civilized, and the filmmakers apply it both to Antoinette—who in the novel is, conversely, fragile and lost, not hearty and lustful—as well as to the African and Caribbean people of the islands. There are multiple shots of the black female servants laughing seemingly uncontrollably and mysteriously, evoking both the sense that they are not intelligent enough to control their laughter and emotions, and that there is something sinister and dangerous about them and their entire race. Similarly, naked male torsos of the farm workers, glistening with sweat, are often on display for the camera, as are the female servants’ heaving bosoms, evoking both sexual and racial exploitation as their bodies and their race are displayed for the camera—by white filmmakers for white audiences—and also changing the focus of Wide Sargasso Sea from Antoinette’s ephemeral dream-state and unstable psychological identity to the Caribbean’s excessive sexuality, emotion, and physicality. Finally, the most egregious exploitative use of the Caribbean environment twisted to serve as a sinister visual motif throughout the 1993 film occurs in the shots of Sargassum fronds floating ominously in the sea, shot from underwater so that they threaten to block out the sun and thus suffocate the husband, and the audience as well. The film opens with a shot of floating seaweed, and eerie, slow-tempo music swells as the introductory credits start, setting the scene from the very beginning for a dark, dangerous, possibly supernatural and disturbing story, thus connecting the Caribbean location with the events of the story. The use of strings of Sargassum recurs the first time we see the husband, still on a ship on his way to the islands, when one of the crew drowns and is pulled out from the water smothered in seaweed. The Sargassum, indelibly connected to the environment and culture of the islands in the Sargasso Sea, acts both as a bad omen for the husband, who connects it with the dead sailor’s body, and also as a symbol of Antoinette’s future ensnarement under

LUPU / REPRESENTATIONS OF THE EXOTICIZED SUBALTERN

her husband’s power since it is the Sargasso Sea that brings his ship to her. The last shot of Sargassum further exemplifies the evil and danger associated with the environment of the Caribbean since it occurs while the husband is dreaming, and this time features him underwater with the fronds of seaweed, struggling to get to the surface and to the dappled but fading sunlight. The Sargassum acts as a barrier between the husband and his perception of freedom, and becomes the physical representation of all he hates and fears about the Caribbean, and indeed about his wife. When he wakes up from this nightmare, he proceeds to rape Antoinette, trying once more to assert his own power against her and her land, her country, and her culture. What the film misses, however, is the fundamental point that in the novel, Antoinette does not feel the strong, history-providing and identity-creating power of her homeland; therefore the recurring use of Sargassum to foreshadow her dark destiny becomes misplaced and reductive of her true struggle. Furthermore, the filmmakers’ depiction of the Caribbean serves as another oppressive force in Antoinette’s life, for it is depicted as being dangerous, suffocating, and constraining, and leads her husband to commit further wrongs against her that did not exist in the novel. Spivak argues that in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys reinscribes the themes of Victorian subject-constitution —childbearing (“cathected as companionate love” (“Three Women’s Texts” 244)) and soulmaking (“the imperialist project” (244))—between the narratives of Antoinette and her husband such that “feminism and a critique of imperialism become complicit” (251). In other words, the husband’s role as a colonial oppressive force that wrests the Caribbean of its independence and wealth goes along with his simpler role of a jealous and controlling husband who renders his wife powerless. However, the 2006 adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea arguably privileges the feminist critique over the postcolonial, and creates a slew of female characters all modified from the novel, and all complicit in their solidarity as women, regardless of their race. As Spivak notes, “Rhys suggests so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism,” elaborating that

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Antoinette, as a “white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in Jamaica, is caught between the English imperialist and the black native” (250). However, the 2006 film adaptation generally ignores “the politics of imperialism” and instead focuses on the “feminist individualism” that Brontë privileged in Jane Eyre through the visual representation of strong female characters. The 2006 film starts off in England—a strange departure from the start of the novel in Jamaica, in Antoinette’s past—where Grace Poole, Brontë’s drunken servant and guardian for Bertha, is given the opening line. Grace sports a no-nonsense look, and says in a forceful and harsh tone that Antoinette is “better off if you ask me—the world outside is a dark and cold one for a woman.” Immediately after this bold proclamation from a Grace—arguably a disenfranchised character who is poor, female, a drunk, and in the service of a man— the film shows Antoinette venturing down to the house, and finding Rochester asleep. Showing much daring than Rhys wrote for her at the end, Antoinette goes up to him and takes his liquor glass from his hand to have a drink, then also dares to lean down and kiss him. She is in a position of power as he is asleep, weak and oblivious to her actions. The story then goes back in time and geography, reverting back to the meeting and marriage of Antoinette and her husband in Jamaica. In this part of the film, Aunt Cora is represented as an indomitable force not just through Antoinette’s perspective, but also through those of Richard Mason and Rochester himself. Before introducing his friend to Cora and Antoinette, Richard Mason tells Rochester that he must make a good impression on the ladies, to which Rochester conceitedly replies, “I wasn’t aware I was required to impress anyone,” implying that he underestimates the power and authority of both ladies, and that he will humble himself in order to gain favor with them. When he finally meets the ladies, Aunt Cora is particularly sharp and opinionated, and does not allow herself to be dominated by either Richard or Rochester. She is introduced as “the redoubtable Mrs. Harper,” and assures Rochester that in Mr. Mason’s death “he leaves a space which is impossible to fill,” thus undercutting the power of Rochester, or any man at all, to fill this familial space. She pointedly remarks to Rochester, “this climate has

LUPU / REPRESENTATIONS OF THE EXOTICIZED SUBALTERN

the trick of finding the weakness in seemingly the strongest constitutions,” again subverting Rochester’s strength and the supposed authority he brings with him from England. It is also Aunt Cora who has a sustained confrontation with Antoinette about her choice of accepting Rochester’s proposal, and ultimately it is only Antoinette’s own forcefulness—the words of another woman—that silences Aunt Cora, rather than the words of Richard, Rochester, or any man. Cora says to Antoinette, You are young and pretty. You have no need to throw yourself at the first man that comes along. You have to see him as he really is; that is how he will be with you. You have to be sure, absolutely sure. You’re young, time is on your side—use it. Wait a little, until you truly know, until you’re certain. This impassioned and forceful speech is intertwined with shots of her hand gripping Antoinette’s arm protectively, acting as her guide and guardian, and as an example of a strong female living without the power and influence of a man. Her pleas with Antoinette do not work, and as she looks at her niece for the last time, trying on her wedding dress in the mirror with a look of oblivious happiness on her face, she shares a stricken look with the downcast young black maidservant, a model of female solidarity mourning the loss of another woman’s independence. Following the marriage, the film introduces Christophine, Antoinette’s nurse, and Amélie, one of the maidservants. Both representations of these women differs completely from those of the 1993 adaptation; Christophine, rather than being portrayed as fearsome, sinister, and witch-like, is instead respectful and respected, and seems to be wise rather than simply terrifying, while Amélie, rather than being consistently saucy, seductive, and destructive, is instead somber, shy, and sympathetic. Christophine is dignified in all of her interactions, with both Antoinette and Rochester, and in her exhortations for Antoinette to be strong and independent—“You got to stand on your own feet. Women must have guts to live in this world” and “Do battle for yourself now”—she shows herself to be powerful, independent of any man, and in control of her own life. While Christophine has the privileged role of an independent and

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

strong woman in the 2006 film adaptation, she becomes the idealized “individual heroic” (Spivak 253) who serves to undermine the communal and social third world feminism that Rhys inscribes. Spivak suggests that Christophine “cannot be contained by a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native” (253); however, the film attempts this containment and ultimately succeeds, while ignoring the real obstacles of class, economic status, gender, and race in Christophine’s life. Amélie similarly represents an enlightened, dignified, and aloof woman who is far more secure in her identity than Antoinette, and who works for her living and succeeds even without—and indeed despite—a man. Throughout the 2006 film adaptation, Amélie’s interactions with Rochester show her superior knowledge and understanding of his problems, and reveal the power that she has in knowing something that he does not. In their first meeting, she leaves blankets in his room, boldly explaining “it can get cold at night,” even when he does not address her first. She is also the one who first informs Rochester of Antoinette’s mother and family history—rather than Daniel Cosway in the novel—thus gaining narrative and discursive power over a crucial element of the story. During her sexual encounter with Rochester, she once again takes the first step by spoon-feeding him as he lies sick in bed, claiming, “I’m fixing you better,” but she simultaneously maintains a dignified, unashamed, and unapologetic stance the morning after, picking up the novel’s line “Yes, I am sorry for you. But I find it in my heart to be sorry for her too” (Rhys 85). In this scene, the Amélie of the 2006 production shows herself not to be an insubordinate and licentious hussy, or a groveling woman pandering to a man, but is in fact another embodiment of a strong female character who acts according to her own wishes and maintains her superiority to the pitiable, and pitiful, Rochester. The 2006 film adaptation shows Aunt Cora, Christophine, and Amélie to be examples of how unmarried women can live and thrive successfully; however, Antoinette is also represented as a more empowered and heroic version of the fragile and unstable personality

LUPU / REPRESENTATIONS OF THE EXOTICIZED SUBALTERN

that Rhys depicts. During a scene before her marriage, Antoinette refuses to talk about her past to Rochester, saying, “it was all so long ago, we mustn’t let it spoil today,” thus dictating the course of the conversation, as well as how much of her past she wants to reveal and also removing any sense of pity from trespassing in her life. She also says to Rochester, “I feel like I could fly, spread my wings and take to the skies like a bird,” showing her imaginative, liberated, and uninhibited nature even in front of the man to whom she will be bound. Later, when introducing Rochester to her mountain house, she says, “I love it, as if it were a person, more than a person!” implying she loves it more than she loves him, and undermining his power and presence in her life. She also openly refers to the past that Rochester does not control when she mentions her male friend, and possible ex-lover, Sandi. Her husband jealously remarks, “you skip stones as well as a boy,” and she unabashedly replies, “it was a boy who taught me— Sandi.” Not only does Rochester recognize her strength, but she also claims her own subjectivity before Rochester was ever part of her life, and before she was reduced to simply being his wife. And although she ultimately cannot stop her husband’s repression of her freedom and sense of identity, even he recognizes something powerful and rebellious in her; when he changes her name from “Antoinette” to “Bertha,” he explains, “I don’t like that name, it’s too complex. I’d like to think of you as something simpler.” In changing her name, and wishing to simplify her, he admits that she is intelligent and complex, and that his desire to dominate her is in fact caused by his own insecurity at her power and unknowability. Even after this transgression against her identity and independence, she gets the final word in the scene, shouting, “my name is Antoinette!” and then prolongs this powerful proclamation in four echoes as the scene fades. The 2006 film’s final suggestion of Antoinette’s increased agency as an escape from male domination, as well as from the canonical literary confinement assigned to her in Jane Eyre, occurs when the story shifts back to England as in the first scene. The last shot of Antoinette in Jamaica is her reflection in a mirror, which then morphs into a shot of Antoinette’s reflection in a mirror in Thornfield

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Hall in England. The use of mirrors suggests that the Antoinette seen on the last day of her life in Jamaica is not the real woman but a ghost, a shadow, a reflection of her former self. The fact that at the end we see her reflection, rather than her actual body, in England suggests again that she is not really imprisoned in Rochester’s attic, and consequently that her death is not her true demise. Since she is only a mirror illusion to us, her death is also only an illusion, creating the impression that the strong female heroine in fact lives on, despite her husband’s oppression, and despite the mandates of Brontë’s source text. This conclusion suggests that Antoinette is no longer the “native female,” the “other,” or the “subaltern” of Rhys’ text as Spivak conceives her to be. The 2006 film adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea is then one of the attempts to construct the “Third World Woman” that is hindered by the “hegemonic definition of literature”—or in this case, film— which “is itself caught within the history of imperialism” (Spivak 254). The feminist reinscription of the various “Third World Women” of Wide Sargasso Sea in the 2006 film adaptation “cannot easily flourish in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system masquerading as Law as such, an alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of human sciences busy establishing the “native” as self-consolidating Other” (254). While the 2006 version of Rhys’ novel attempts too much, and seems to assert feminist individualism through the strong female characters “claiming to be Caliban” (245), the 1993 version falls short of any meaningful engagement with and extension of Rhys’ objectives in explaining Bertha’s past and redeeming her future by reducing Antoinette’s struggle with male oppression to sleazy sex scenes, and exploiting the miscegenated setting of her identity struggle for an exotic and sensational appeal. Ultimately, at the end of “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Spivak enacts the universal reappropriation of which she finds “first world feminists” so guilty, which the 1993 adaptation obliviously ignores, and which the 2006 adaptation uses overzealously to create a story of female empowerment. Spivak concludes her essay,

LUPU / REPRESENTATIONS OF THE EXOTICIZED SUBALTERN

I try to extend, outside of the reach of the European novelistic tradition, the most powerful suggestion in Wide Sargasso Sea: that Jane Eyre can be read as the orchestration and staging of the self-immolation of Bertha Mason as “good wife.” The power of that suggestion remains unclear if we remain insufficiently knowledgeable about the history of the legal manipulation of widow-sacrifice in the entitlement of the British government in India. (259) Thus, Spivak clearly reappropriates Rhys’ subtle, psychological, singular and specific narrative to a situation wholly removed from Antoinette, Rhys, and even Bronte: the widow sacrifice/suicide ritual in India. Here she claims Antoinette to “be Caliban” for a country and culture that is not hers at all, thus employing the self-aggrandizing individualism that Spivak earlier criticized. Undoubtedly, both films serve as yet another form of oppression of the finely-drawn identity and delicate psychological balance of Antoinette, either by egregiously abusing Rhys’ descriptions of the couple and exploiting (eroticizing, exoticizing) the Caribbean setting, or by romanticizing the struggles of Antoinette, Aunt Cora, Christophine, and Amélie, and creating unrealistic heroines of them all. Nevertheless, to appraise the 2006 BBC adaptation in terms of Spivak’s critique of feminist individualism appears to be without merit since Spivak ultimately undermines her own argument. Both films stray from Rhys’ text, making it clear that a faithful adaptation from text to screen is not possible because of the text’s use of unfilmable—visually impossible or incomprehensible— ideas and themes. But while the 1993 adaptation changes the story to create a racist, misogynist, and imperialist view of the Caribbean environment and its people, the 2006 adaptation strives to create a positive and empowering (although occasionally generalized and idealistic) perspective on women struggling for independence regardless of their race.

PREDICATE 2 (2012)

IMPERATIVE

Works Cited Canby, Vincent. “Review/Film; Mrs. Rochester No. 1, Long Before Jane Eyre.” movies.nytimes.com. New York Times, 16 April 1993. Web. 15 November 2010. Ebert, Roger. “Wide Sargasso Sea.” rogerebert.suntimes.com. Chicago Sun-Times, 7 May 1993. Web. 15 November 2010. Harrison, Nancy R. Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988. Print. Kempley, Rita. “Wide Sargasso Sea.” washingtonpost.com. Washington Post, 8 May 1993. Web. 15 November 2010. Le Gallez, Paula. The Rhys Woman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Print. Mardorossian, Carine M. “Shutting up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.” Callaloo. 22.4 (1999): 1071–90. Moran, Caitlin. “Majestic Mirren cut off in her prime.” timesonline.co.uk. Times, October 23 2006. Web. 15 November 2010. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print. Sandler, Kevin. “The Naked Truth: Showgirls and the Fate of the X/NC-17 Rating.” Cinema Journal. 40.3 (2001): 69–93. Print. Snyder, Carey and Anders, Eric. “Wide Sargasso Sea: Imperial Travesty.” Jump Cut. 40.3 (1996): 21–23. Web. 15 November 2010. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313. Print. ---. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry. 12.1 (1985): 243–61. Print.

LUPU / REPRESENTATIONS OF THE EXOTICIZED SUBALTERN

Vreeland, Elizabeth. “Jean Rhys: The Art of Fiction No. 64.” Paris Review 76 (1979). Web. 10 December 2010. Wide Sargasso Sea. Dir. John Duigan. Perf. Nathaniel Parker, Karina Lombard. New Line Home Video, 1993. DVD. Wide Sargasso Sea. Dir. Brendan Maher. Perf. Rafe Spall, Rebecca Hall. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD.