Culture and Imperialism

Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. By Ann Laura Stoler. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xi+335. $54.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Moments of being

Between the Acts.

Barbara Johnson. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1998. viii + 215 pp. $22.00 cloth. Barbara Johnson's The Feminist Difference is heralded by a striking cover: a glossy reproduction of an androgynous-looking creature wearing a softly-- constructed blue-black jacket and hair as short as a typical man's, with no bust evident or any stereotypic female jewelry; thus, Johnson initially confronts us with a visual representation of both difference and similarity even before she engages us in the shifting verbal text of "difference" as experienced in the feminist sphere. Is the representation consciously meant to suggest androgyny? Are women able to analyze in just which ways they are unlike men, apart from obvious anatomical differences? What effects do cultural representations of race and gender have upon women's perceptions of their differences among themselves, as well as differences from men? Barbara Johnson suggests in The Feminist Difference that it is literature above all else that may offer the vast capacity for mystery essential in confronting the uncertainties and contradictions of feminism. Johnson embraces literature as a type of cultural work which makes accessible those ideas which are necessary and yet impossible to articulate fully except through the ambiguous territories possible in story and poetry. Johnson launches her feminist critique with an examination of literary differences with respect to psychoanalysis, race, and gender. Juxtaposing works such as Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," Gilman's `"The Yellow Wallpaper," and Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," she frames her analysis in these terms: "Is Female to Male as Ground is to Figure?" In this trio of narratives, the initiative toward therapy is generated by what Johnson identifies as a discommoded man rather than by the woman herself. Aylmer, in Hawthorne's story, wants to erase the birthmark and obliterate sexual difference by erasing woman to ground or blankness. The figure in "The Yellow Wallpaper" becomes recursive in a startling way; in the end readers do not know which side of the paper she is on and thus also do not know where to locate themselves. Johnson believes that both stories are narratives of a woman's complicity in her own destruction, a destruction related to the repression of ambivalence and to the repression of writing. Mixed feelings are not permitted; what the woman ultimately rejects, then, is herself as complex woman. In "The Quicksands of the Self," Johnson complicates the questions of race raised in the narratives by Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut. In Larsen's novel, Quicksand, the mulatto named Helga learns to act out the logic of self-erasure in merging with a man as the omnipotent other. Race is shown to be a kind of selfobject from which a self is able to derive both positive and negative mirroring. Racial pride and prejudice, however can be seen as institutional structures, not merely interpersonal phenomena. Larson is lauded for recognizing that the mother, who bears the burden of creating a positive mirror for her child, may herself suffer from the impossible ways in which her "difference" is inscribed in the social order. Johnson next focuses upon Bigger in Richard Wright's Native Son. Bigger not only kills; he writes. Bigger's letter hides the unmistakable traces of its black authorship, but the detectives are blind to such clues. Johnson believes that it is because the rape plot is so overdetermined that Bigger becomes a murderer and that most readers do not recognize the almost invisible plot about black women in Wright's fiction. The difference is not recognized. Johnson caps her discussion of racial "difference" with an astute analysis of Toni Morrison's Sula as a recontextualization of Freudian concepts of envy, castration, and the penis in the framework of American sexual and racial arrangements. …

The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender

OF DISSERTATION KATHERINE MANSFIELD AMONG THE MODERNS: HER IMPACT ON VIRGINIA WOOLF, D.H. LAWRENCE AND ALDOUS HUXLEY Katherine Mansfield among the Moderns examines Katherine Mansfield’s relationship with three fellow writers: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley, and appraises her impact on their writing. Drawing on the literary and the personal relationships between the aforementioned, and on letters, diaries, and journals, this project traces Mansfield’s interactions with her contemporaries, providing a richer and more dynamic portrait of Mansfield’s place within modernism than usually recognized. Hitherto, critical work has not scrutinized Mansfield in the manner I suggest: attending to representations of her as a character in other’s work, while analyzing the degree to which her influence on the aforementioned authors affected their writing and success. Albeit, her influence extends in vastly different ways, and is affected by gender and nationality. While Woolf’s early foray into Modernism is accelerated by Mansfield’s criticism of her work, several of Woolf’s texts – “Kew Gardens,” Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway – are similar in certain respects to Mansfield’s work – “Bliss” and “The Garden Party.” A repudiation of Mansfield, personally, and a retelling of her work are seen in Lawrence’s The Lost Girl and Women in Love. Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point, contain characterizations of Mansfield that undermine her writing, and her person: both are affected by the mythical misrepresentation of Mansfield, created by Murry after her death, known as the “Cult of Mansfield.” Using Life Writing, this study asserts that Mansfield had impact on the writing of Woolf, Lawrence, and Huxley. Taking into account the many issues that surround the recognition of this, among them: gender politics, colonialism, marginality by genre, and personal relations – these all, to varying degrees, prevented critics from acknowledging that a minor modernist author played a role in the undisputed success of three major authors of the twentieth century.

/pdf/katherine-mansfield-among-the-moderns-her-impact-on-virginia-52laotzyo0.pdf

Nicola Anne Tarrant-Hoskins

Papers

Katherine mansfield among the moderns: her impact on virginia woolf, d. h. lawrence, and aldous huxley