Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1991"

Gendered Labor, the Woman Writer and Dorothy Richardson

Abstract: In "The Case of the Modern Spinster," no old maid disappears while shopping the West London streets, and no Sherlock Holmes solves this mystery with a single clue. Instead, in this 1913 article, popular fiction writer Sarah Grand2 laments a disappearance of an entirely different sort. Namely, "home" as a haven for the modern spinster has vanished. "For the daughters who remain at home," Grand writes in this Pall Mall Magazine piece:

Pretending in "Penelope": Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom

Abstract: Feminist theorists have recently reexplored the concept of the female masquerade, formulated initially by Joan Riviere.1 Mary Ann Doane characterizes the masquerade as "a hyperbolisation of the accoutrements of femininity," as a flaunting of the cultural signifiers of womanliness.2 Carole-Anne Tyler, however, draws a distinction between flaunting those signifiers and flouting those signifiers: if the former constitutes female masquerade, the latter becomes a sort of female mimicry. The female masquerade, after all, is a potentially oppressive gender identity, but female mimicry is a potentially playful one: consider the slight but critical difference between a Marilyn Monroe and a Madonna. As Tyler points out,

Narrative, Gender, and Power in "Far from the Madding Crowd"

Abstract: In Chapter 44 of Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba Everdene, Mrs. Troy, runs away and hides in a fern brake. In a sudden act of revolt, born of humiliation at the hands of her husband, who has just confided his unsurpassed love for the dead Fanny Robin, Bathsheba seeks escape from a domain of male victimization. Running without direction in the darkness, she happens by chance on a thicket that seems familiar and drops down into a deep slumber. This seemingly protected spot, so like the tree-hung enclosure where Tess d'Urberville loses her virginity, appears far more congenial than it is in actuality. Bathsheba, stripped of a role and a right she thought was hers, wishes to slip back into a void of pre-gendered nothingness. The possibility of death, which she seriously entertains, signifies peace from gender struggle and specifically what she perceives as male domination. On a deeper level, however, Bathsheba here enacts a crisis of gender.2 Her disappearance into this wet hollow is fully emblematic of a return to the womb. Indeed, because it is extremely damp, she even loses her voice, the most authoritative, acculturated aspect of herself. Losing her power over language, the strong farmer is reduced to a lost infant. It is as if Hardy, who has revealed Bathsheba, in the early part of the text, to be a colorfully coy temptress and has later shown her as a willful woman in a male profession, forces her to start over again. On the level of story, this pivotal scene not only continues to define the heroine, but actually rebirths her. Relying on condensation as if a dream, it also operates as a triple gender scenario: it is a fantasy of gender annulment, a scene of gender mixing, and a drama of sexual choice. In this sense, Chapter 44, to which I will return, encapsulates the deepest concerns of the novel.

Do It or Dorrit

Abstract: Sometime in the early autumn of 1855, Charles Dickens apparently decided that the novel he had been tentatively calling Nobody's Fault should be renamed Little Dorrit-a change he accounted for in a letter to a friend by declaring that the new title "has a pleasanter sound in my ears," and "is equally applicable to the same story."' Despite the author's bland explanation, however, I believe we need to take seriously the famous protest of a shrewd critic-to my mind, indeed, the best critic this difficult novel is ever likely to have. I refer, of course, not to Lionel Trilling but to Flora Finching. "And of all the strangest names I ever heard," Flora says, "the strangest, like a place down in the country with a turnpike, or a favorite pony or a puppy or a bird or something from a seed-shop to be put in a garden or a flower-pot and come up speckled." Despite these apt remarks on the strangeness of the name, Flora has no sooner heard her father mention a Little Dorrit than she seems to know what one is good for: "I said at the moment," she tells Arthur Clennam, "Good gracious why not have her here then when there's anything to do instead of putting it out."2 And having employed Dorrit to make dresses for her, Flora returns to the puzzling question of the name when the seamstress's sudden acquisition of wealth puts an arbitrary stop to her labor. "The dress shall never be finished by anybody else but shall be laid by for a keepsake just as it is and called Little Dorrit," Flora announces when the seamstress is compelled to abandon her current project, "though why that strangest of denominations at any time I never did myself and now I never shall!" (1.35.404). By professing herself hopelessly baffled even as she instinctively associates Little Dorrit's name with her work, Flora as usual sells herself short, especially if we gloss these last remarks with the invaluable commentary of her fellow critic in the same scene: "Don't believe it's his doing!" Mr. F's Aunt declares of Arthur Clennam. "He needn't take no credit to himself for it!"

Luddism, Medievalism and Women's History in "Shirley": Charlotte Bronte's Revisionist Tactics

Abstract: Charlotte Bronte's second published novel, the much-anticipated successor to Jane Eyre, must have indeed seemed like a dish of "cold lentils and vinegar without oil" to readers expecting the Sturm und Drang of the first.1 Despite Bronte's significant achievement, Shirley is not a novel calculated to keep readers on the edge of their chairs, turning pages until the small hours of the morning. As Bronte herself acknowledged:

"The labyrinth of my history": J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands

Abstract: J. M. Coetzee's first novel, Dusklands (1974), is an agonizing encounter both with colonialism's violence, and with the discursive legacy it leaves to its heirs. After the partial institutionalization of colonial discourse in the literary academy, and after many sober assessments of the political efficacy of postmodernism, it is instructive to return to this early work by Coetzee, to witness, in its passion and intellectual ferocity, a reflexive and parodic critique of colonialism and imperialism that is truly felt on the bone. The analysis that follows of Coetzee's struggle in Dusklands with colonialism's demons, falls in the shadow of Edward Said's description in The World, the Text and the Critic of the shift from filiation to affiliation : Coetzee's novel is the record of a process in which the authorial subject begins to break free of the ascribed, filiative framework of colonialism and its attendant discourses. What this break leads to, what new forms of affiliation it makes possible, is a question that will have to be deferred. The later fiction (especially Life and Times of Michael K and Foe ), where one must look for answers to the question of affiliation, engages problems of marginality and authority in such direct and complex ways, that it would falsify the corpus to offer at this point a simplistic description of the affiliations that emerge in it. (Indeed, in an industrious profession, it seems important that we should pause over the early stages of the fiction, if only to remind ourselves that epistemes cannot be switched as easily as a change of style.) Coetzee's struggle with colonialism and imperialism in Dusklands leads to questions of ontology and metaphysics; that is to say, elements of mainstream Western philosophical traditions become fictionalized as part of the "content" of the reflecting consciousness of the narrators. It is important to note, however (and I hope my analysis will bear this out), that the ontological-metaphysical dimension of Dusklands is essentially strategic. Coetzee selectively raids the traditions of Western philosophy so as to position them within the colonial situation, as a way of dramatizing the subject-constitution implied by the colonial encounter. Dusklands is not, in other words, a primarily metaphysical exercise. One might argue that what Coetzee does with Western philosophical traditions, with rationalism and existentialism, might have been done more directly with the aid of Lacan1 or more especially, Foucault (as in Said's Orientalism ), but is there any point in arguing about the paths followed in an intellectual biography? I would go still further, however, in Coetzee's defense: in a novel which wrestles with what is historically and biographically given,

Libertine Pastoral: Nadine Gordimer's 'The Conservationist'

Abstract: La question de l'engagement politique et l'utopie d'une « pastorale libertine » dans « The C. » (1974)

What We Have Instead of God: Sexuality, Textuality and Infinity in "The French Lieutenant's Woman"

Abstract: "They order," says Laurence Sterne's Parson Yorick in the beginning of A Sentimental Journey, "this matter better in France." Yorick never fully clarifies the nature of "this matter," but Richard Howard suggests that it is a question of sexuality and ways of expressing it in language (v). I think he is right. Though Sterne was writing over two hundred years ago, his comment would be even more apt today. In the last few decades, French thinkers such as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida have repeatedly reminded us of the intimate and inextricable links that exist between sexuality and language. It seems highly appropriate, then, that John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman is one of the recent literary texts that has most openly and directly explored these same links. Sexuality, textuality, and the links between the two are central issues in Fowles' novel. In particular, this novel provides some striking dramatizations of the ways in which both sexuality and textuality lead to irreducible ambiguities of interpretation, since neither concept can be circumscribed within a univocal structure of totalized meaning. Because of the resultant impossibility of finalized interpretation, both sexuality and textuality lead directly to a confrontation with infinity, hence the vertiginous force of both concepts. Infinity is the most staggering concept with which modem man has had to come to grips. Not that infinity has not always been with us-it has. However, throughout most of Western intellectual history, the idea of infinity has been circumscribed and contained within the comforting concept of an omnipotent God. Descartes, for example, considered the very fact that we can even conceive of the infinite as proof of God's existence-from where else could such a concept arise? Beginning with the secularization of the sublime that M. H. Abrams notes in relation to the romantics, though, and especially commencing with the death of God announced by that late romantic Friedrich Nietzsche, we have lost that easy way out.' Infinity is now within the purview of humanity, and now we must face it head-on. Wallace Stevens, in his poem "The American

The Rewards of Representation: Edith Wharton, Lily Bart and the Writer/Reader Interchange*

Abstract: Edith Wharton came of age as a novelist with the publication of The House of Mirth (1905), a book that sold 30,000 copies within the first three weeks of pub- lication and made Wharton into something of a celebrity.1 As a writer of fiction at the turn of the century, Wharton sought the typical rewards of the literary marketplace-economic benefits, professional standing and acclaim. Yet Wharton also saw her relationship with a large, invisible audience as a unique source of private satisfactions. To Wharton, the connection between writer and reader seemed a personal, even intimate bond located in some indeterminate space on the margins of the dominant culture. At the same time, however, she conceived of herself within that relationship not only as a paid professional doing a job, but also as a public performer-visible, exposed, and for sale. The House of Mirth reflects this tension. Within the novel the art of represen- tation is seen both as irrepressible inner need and as calculated, often risky, public performance. The text displays a sustained concern with the pleasures and pitfalls of reaching an audience. Moreover, many of Wharton's early sto- ries and reviews, like The House of Mirth itself, raise questions about the art of representation in general and the nature of the reader/writer relationship in particular. An author's visibility (even exposure) before the general public be- comes a recurrent motif. Wharton's fear of a relationship that could become at once too personal and too public is particularly apparent in her early stories. Many of these focus upon old (or dead) writers who are subject to posthumous rejection or notoriety. When The House of Mirth is read against the background of such stories, Wharton's sense of the rewards and dangers implicit in the writer/reader rela- tionship emerges with particular force. A short "dialogue" called "Copy" exemplifies recurrent issues. A writer's life is seen to be drained of vitality by the process of writing for an audience;

Thinking Nationally/Writing Colonially? Scott, Stevenson, and England

Abstract: Colonized peoples struggle for "permission to narrate," according to Edward Said.' That is, they battle to tell their own tale, to assert a reality distinct from that imposed by the intrusive power.2 But Said's phrase applies most usefully to those peoples colonized by violence and with a clearly defined colonial presence against which to rebel. What if a people is not conventionally colonized? Will they still struggle to narrate? And if a people stand complicit in their own colonization, or if the colonial narrative holds certain attractions for them, what tale, exactly, will they struggle to tell? Nineteenth-century Scotland provides some context-specific answers, for across that period and place, novelists from Scott to Stevenson joined literary battle with England, writing within and against a narrative determined by their neighboring power. But why did they need to? Scotland never was physically colonized by England. Although successive English armies swept over the Scottish border, the forces that conquered Scotland were often comprised of Englishmen allied with some local faction. And after the battles, it was the local faction that implemented the conquerors' shared policies, that oppressed some other Scottish group. Christopher Harvie notes, for instance, that after Charles Edward Stuart's defeat in the battle of Culloden, "the internal colonisers were Scots." He adds, "More Scots had fought for Cumberland than for Charles Edward; more Scots than English soldiers thereafter wasted the glens; it was Scots landlords and factors, not Englishmen, who forced the Highlanders on to the emigrant ships."3 Yet the Scots were colonized-if not by force, by culture. When in 1707 they willingly joined in Union with England, the Scots imagined they would become equal partners with their sister kingdom-equal because separate. Had they not carefully set aside a space for difference and thus for equality rather than subservience within the Union by retaining their own law and religion? But by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Scots began to realize that the London parliament was encroaching on their legal and religious sovereignty. As N.T. Phillipson writes: "it became increasingly clear ... that assimilation was

Male Masochism and the Colonialist Impulse: Mary Webb's Return of the Native Tess

Abstract: Although the literary canon has become not only a site of conflict but a passionately contested concept and gynocriticsI has won considerable respect for the recovery of forgotten women's texts, books by previously popular and recently rediscovered women writers continue to go rapidly out of print. If for no other reason than their usefulness in providing contextualization, such books should be of interest to theorists of culture and language and to feminist critics of all sorts. Why, then, are these books disappearing almost as soon as they reappear? A line of argument that has been pursued by many feminist critics is that the structure of the academy and the training of English professors exert an often unconscious influence on our judgments so that we apply without question heavily biased "received standards of greatness or even goodness."2 In other words, our rational processes are colonized by the dominant discourse. However, our rejection of certain books as inferior and unworthy of serious attention can as easily proceed from unexamined feminist standards. Books that have enjoyed popular success often did so because they offered sensationalism derived from a strong mixture of sex and violence, while avoiding outraging their public by at least overtly upholding the most prevalent contemporary ideology. For obvious reasons, such books are unlikely to be a source of immediate delight to feminist readers, perhaps especially when their authors are women. Yet, though feminism and institutionalized misogyny are in unlikely alliance against them, these books often deserve careful attention in context-rather than as part of the project of contextualizing "classics"-because, reilluminated in this way, they shine with a surprising power of their own. Mary Webb's Gone To Earth, the novel I will concentrate on in this essay, is a case in point. Just when the predicament of Hazel Woodus, the heroine of Gone to Earth, seems to allow for no resolution, Webb ends the novel by dropping her into a hole. By what might be considered a sort of poetic justice, Webb, as author, has been in danger of suffering the same treatment from readers for some time now. Despite the seductively beautiful paperback editions of her books published in the late 1970s and early 80s, Webb remains unfamiliar even to most professional readers. The current lack of interest in her work is understandable be-

Voice to Voice: Self-Affirmation in "The Years"

Abstract: There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs And islands of Winander!-many a time At evening, when the earliest stars began To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake, And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him; and they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled, concourse wild Of jocund din; and, when a lengthened pause Of silence came and baffled his best skill, Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind, With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, V, 364-87.