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City subjects: Shoplifters, bag ladies, and other figures of urban transgression in contemporary literature and film.

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City subjects: Shoplifters, bag ladies, and other figures of urban transgression in contemporary literature and film.

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CITY SUBJECTS
SHOPLIFTERS, BAG LADIES, AND OTHER FIGURES OF
URBAN TRANSGRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND FILM
by
Ketura Persellin
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1998
© Ketura Persellin
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UMI Number: 9933696
Copyright 1999 by
Persellin, Ketura
All rights reserved.
UMI Microform 9933696
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
TH E GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
under the direction of Dissertation
Committeer and approved by all its members;
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR O F PHILO SO PH Y
Date Au®usc 18» 1998
DISSERTATION' COMJMITTEE
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I I
CITY SUBJECTS
Shoplifters, bag ladies, and other figures of urban
transgression in contemporary literature and film
Introduction
Toward a new urban subjectivity
Tracing the urban unconscious in contemporary narrative
1
Chapter one
"Between flight and theft"
Female adolescence and the shoplifting narrative
33
Chapter two
"A high-heeled army of Furies"
Women, paranoia, and the subject of shoplifting
67
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. . *
111
Chapter three
Nomadism and narrative
Female transgression in Joyce Carol Oates's Foxfire
105
Chapter four
Bag ladies and umbilical cords
Mobility and confinement in Paul Auster's
In the Country of Last Things and The Invention of Solitude
150
Chapter five
City fathers and femininity in the marketplace
Incest plot and detective genre in Roman.
Polanski's Chinatown and Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss
188
Epilogue
Scribbling women and women in flight
Toward a new model of urban subjectivity
220
Works cited
231
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Introduction
1
Toward a new urban subjectivity
Representations of urbanity and female
transgression in contemporary literature and film
It often happens that male patients declare that they feel there is
something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich
placer however, is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human
beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the
beginning. There is a humorous saying: 'Love is homesickness'; and
whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, still
in the dream, 'this place is familiar to me, I have been there before',
we may interpret the place as being his mother's genitals or her body.
In this case, too, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, home-like,
familiar; the prefix 'un' is the token of repression.
— Freud, "The 'Uncanny'"
The city in literature and film
This project takes as a starting point certain tropes of
19th-century urbanity and considers the responses to them in
contemporary texts about women. These tropes, which were
linked to the rise of the modern city, include its crowds and
the anonymity they fostered; the fleeting quality of personal
relations; and technological advances that made possible new
practices and behaviors, such as wandering and browsing; and
a division between the public space of the streets and the
private, familial space of the home. The proliferation of
new, semi-public spaces like museums, exhibitions, and
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department stores suggests the range and variety of
innovation that characterized the 19th century. These and
other innovations, including trains, hot air balloons, and
photography, led to new forms of visuality that combined with
increased mobility to create important changes in
sub j ectivity.1
Along with the transformation and growth of the city
during this time, there were also new developments that
signalled changes in women's relationship to the broader
culture— or, at least, in popular perceptions of that
relationship. These developments included anxiety about
women in public (Walkowitz, City 21); the invention of the
department store and related consumerist enterprises designed
to appeal particularly to women (Wilson, Adorned 144-154); an
increased sensitivity to bourgeois female pathologies like
hysteria; and the ideology of two, gendered separate spheres.
Despite the scope of changes during the 19th century,
however, most critical work that contends with these
developments and issues generally takes for granted a certain
relationship between urbanity and femininity. Such writing,
for instance, typically suggests that the quintessential
(male) urban subject, the flaneur, found its female
counterpart in the prostitute, even while acknowledging that
the rise in consumerism in the second half of the 19th
century offered women a new range of experiences within the
public spaces of the city, experiences that differed from
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3
those of the prostitute and thus complicated her status as a
privileged urban figure. In contrast to such work, in my
study of the representational legacy of 19th-century
urbanism, I consider the points in these accounts of 19 th-
and 20th-century city life where v6rit6s about urbanity and
femininity break down.
It should be obvious by now that although the direct
concern of this project is contemporary literature and
culture, I have been greatly influenced by both Victorian and
modernist urban discourses. In fact, this dissertation grew
out of my interest in and study of 19th-century novels by
Dickens and Gaskell, especially their treatment of women in
public and the moral enigma such women typically embodied.
In addition, I was also interested in a strand of cultural
criticism that takes as its starting point the early'•20th-
century writing of Walter Benjamin, especially those that
reach back to include the 19th century. Benjamin's study of
Charles Baudelaire, for instance, is relevant to
considerations of 19th- and 20th-century urbanism and
consumerism as well as of the practices they produced,
including film spectatorship and tourism, among other
cultural forms. Because I was particularly interested in and
troubled by representations of women in numerous 19th- and
20th-century documents about the city, I found that
Benjamin's autobiographical coming-of-age account, "A Berlin
Chronicle," and a nearly contemporaneous but very different
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4
treatment of urbanity, Freud's important essay on the
uncanny, open up questions of femininity and urban space in
new and potentially useful ways while simultaneously drawing
together numerous lines of inquiry whose pursuit has become
synonymous with urban critical theory.
In turn, the concerns of "A Berlin Chronicle" and "The
'Uncanny'" have influenced the direction of this project.
To be sure, Freud's essay on the uncanny is obviously part of
a large body of psychoanalytic work, and his insights on this
matter have contributed considerably to the study of film and
literature. Anthony Vidler, for example, has extended
Freud's work to address characteristics of postmodern
architecture. Sarah Kofman has considered the feminist
implications of Freud's contention that the uncanny has its
roots in "the phantasy . . . of intra-uterine existence"
(Freud 151). A consideration of Freud's essay in the context
of a discussion of urbanism and femininity, however, sheds
new light on the network of issues it so usefully and
suggestively evokes: modernity, memory and nostalgia,
consumerism and the marketplace, femininity, maternity,
prostitution, and death. Because these concerns run
throughout this dissertation, as through the culture of
modernity as a whole, I want by way of an introduction to
consider Freud's uncanny in some detail before turning to
Benjamin's account of male adolescence and discovery in turn-
of-the-century Berlin. Each of these texts exemplifies an
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5
extremely influential master narrative of urban habitation,
though they are themselves by no means unambiguous.
Painted women; Femininity, urban space, and the uncanny
A fundamental concern of the 19th century, represented
in fiction and discussed at length in studies of the period,
is the woman on the street. "No figure," writes Judith R.
Walkowitz, "was more equivocal, yet more crucial to the
structured public landscape of the male flaneur, than the
woman in public" (21). In particular, the problem was one of
knowing if any woman on the street was a prostitute and the
psychic consequences of this uncertainty for the home
inhabited by the mother, wife, sister, or daughter. That is,
the similarity of a woman on the street to a prostitute was
enough to evoke widespread cultural anxiety, and it is this
anxiety that subtends Freud's understanding of the uncanny.
Throughout his essay on the subject, Freud struggles to offer
a definition of the term, touching on notions of the familiar
and the unfamiliar, the homely and neighborly, and the
unfriendly, strange, or foreign. As Samuel Weber and Phillip
McCaffrey point out, however, Freud fails to provide a
straightforward definition of the term. Instead, he offers
example after example of the uncanny in what Weber, in a
discussion of just this issue, calls a "Musterung," or
mustering— "a most remarkable proliferation of examples
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6
[that] . . . grows to monstrous proportions as Freud amasses
motif upon motif" (1107).
One such example involves Freud's account of a visit
abroad.
Once, as I was walking through the deserted
streets of a provincial town in Italy which
was strange to me, on a hot summer afternoon,
I found myself in a quarter the character of
which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing
but painted women were to be seen at the
windows of the small houses, and I hastened to
leave the narrow street at the next turning.
But after having wandered about for a while
without being directed, I suddenly found
myself back in the same street, where my
presence was now beginning to excite
attention. I hurried away once more, but only
to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in
the same place. Now, however, a feeling
overcame me which I can only describe as
uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my
exploratory walk and get straight back to the
piazza I had left a short while before. (143-
144)
Walking through a small, unfamiliar town, Freud unwittingly
finds himself returning repeatedly and conspicuously to the
same spot, "the character of which could not long remain in
doubt"— the town's red-light district, or prostitutes'
quarter. Freud is embarrassed by his involuntary return to
this space, but not because of his uncertainty regarding the
women who inhabit it— indeed, of that there can be "no
doubt"— but rather because his presence there invites
speculation about his status as a potential customer for the
prostitutes.
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7
Two things seem crucial here. First, Freud's discomfort
is based on a mis recognition. And second, this
misrecognition is essentially spatial in nature, involving as
it does the repeated and involuntary return to a particular
place. Likewise, the other examples Freud offers— following
a path repeatedly to the same spot, or wandering about in
search of a light switch "in a dark, strange room," banging
into the same piece of furniture again and again— are
similarly characterized by their spatial uncertainty or
doubt, an anxiety about where one is in relation to where one
ought or wants to be.
It is this misrecognition that lies at the heart of the
uncanny. In his anecdote about the prostitutes' district,
Freud's spatial uncertainty leads him in circles, in a
movement that is very similar to his methodology. Indeed, as
McCaffrey points out, Freud reproduces these tropes of
endless journey and misrecognition within the essay itself,
in which he "set[s] out to seek [the uncanny], but . . .
never clearly locates [it]" (91). Weber too suggests that
Freud's writing takes circuitous path.
At the conclusion of this essay, Freud has in
a sense been led back to his starting point,
by a strange temptation, without really
intending it, except that this time it is not
merely the Uncanny which is off-beat, off-side
and far-out . . . for Freud himself has been
led astray. (1109)
At the end of the essay, then, as in the prostitutes'
quarter, Freud finds himself in a place he does not wish to
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8
be— a reluctant flaneur, he is both writing and walking
without direction.
A similar set of concerns— about identification and
(mis)recognition, and about the connection between the spaces
of the city and certain kinds of femininity— also runs
through the E.T.A. Hoffmann short story "The Sand Man" that
Freud analyzes in what is arguably the centerpiece of this
essay. The story centers on a young man's infatuation with a
life-like doll and the cost of that infatuation, though Freud
takes pains to show that the affections of the young man,
Nathaniel, are not the central issue in the story.
But I cannot think, and I hope that most
readers of the story will agree with me— that
the theme of the doll, Olympia, who is to all
appearances a living being, is by any means
the only element to be held responsible for
the quite unparalleled atmosphere of
uncanniness which the story evokes. . . .
(133)
Freud goes on to explain what in his view is the real concern
of Hoffmann's story and its uncanniness— "the idea of being
robbed of one's eyes" and the fear of castration it
represents.
Freud's protest notwithstanding, the problems of the
story's protagonist, Nathaniel, result from an eruption of
femininity within the text: Nathaniel falls in love with
Olympia in what is yet another defining instance of
misrecognition— after all, Olympia is not a flesh-and-blood
woman but rather a life-like doll who is "beautiful, but
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9
strangely silent and motionless" (135). One day, after
learning of his error regarding Olympia, Nathaniel is walking
with his fiancde in the town marketplace, where they see
Olympia from the height of the tower they have climbed.
Falling into a "fit of madness" (135), Nathaniel throws
himself from the tower and dies. The result is, in Freud's
view, a feeling of uncanniness. Here this sensation derives
from Nathaniel's confusing a doll for a woman whom he— in yet
another misunderstanding— mistakes for his true love, and it
is in the perceived similarity of a constructed doll and a
real, flesh-and-blood woman that the story's uncanniness
lies.
As with Freud's unwitting circular journey in Italy,
when the prostitutes mistakenly think him a potential
customer, here too uncanniness is a matter of misrecognition.
In both that anecdote and in Freud's analysis of the Hoffmann
story, however— and here, of course, I am reading Freud much
as he reads others— spatial uncertainty is clearly related to
a forbidden, illicit female sexuality. For both Freud and
for Nathaniel, that is, the problem of mistaken identity
centers on concern about women who are not what they seem—
Freud's "painted women," Hoffmann's doll. Thus the potential
for misrecognition within the anonymous spaces of the city
combines with anxiety about illusory or artificial femininity
to evoke a sensation of horror or dread and thus define the
uncanny. In other words, the uncanny is not just
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10
misrecognition but rather the misrecognition of femininity in
particular— the problem of locating and identifying
femininity.
The price of this misrecognition, in Freud's version of
the Hoffmann tale, is Nathaniel's sanity and, ultimately, his
life. At the end of the story, Nathaniel is looking down at
the marketplace— yet another indicator of the relation
between the uncanny and the commodified self— from the
considerable height of the tower. His empowered gaze seems
to affirm Freud's claims regarding the uncanniness of the
recurring theft and replacement of eyes. But Nathaniel is
unable to see what is around him, including various figures
of femininity arrayed around him, specifically the fiancee at
his side and the inanimate doll far below. It is not
unimportant that Nathaniel's difficulty takes place in the
context of the marketplace— signifier of a commodification
that echoed Freud's prostitutes and that in turn is echoes in
the anxiety about female writers and the literary marketplace
that I address in the final chapter. In much the same way,
Freud is unable to locate the role of femininity within his
own theory— it is his, as it is Nathaniel's, blind spot.
Thus, Freud's argument regarding the centrality of castration
in Hoffmann's story misses an important connection, the one
that links the story's castration theme to the misrecognition
of femininity that runs throughout it and that in turn, we
know, lies at the heart of castration anxiety in general.
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11
For, like a little boy in his first encounter with
femininity, who sees his mother' s missing penis and worries
that his own might also be taken away, here Freud fails to
identify femininity correctly, eliding the importance of the
doll in favor of a return to elemental concerns about
presence and lack. In so doing, he erases from the text what
McCaffrey calls "the Uncanny Woman," who thus "becomes the
missing middle term, the 'original' embodiment of castration
. . ." (104).
Indeed, here as always with Freud, matters of
identification and misrecognition are most closely associated
with their "infantile sources" (140). As Kofman points out,
in the case of the uncanny, the most influential such source
is the womb or, more accurately, what Freud refers to as "the
female genital organs" (Freud 152). The mother's body, then,
is that "unheimlich place" par excellence, "the entrance to
the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place
where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning"
(153). The uncanny is thus a reminder of a particular home,
the "home" of the mother's body and, symbolically, the
domestic space over which she presides. The memory of this
space, a space "long known to us, once very familiar," Freud
explains, is really "nothing new or foreign, but something
familiar and old-established in the mind that has been
estranged only by process of repression" (123-124, 148). The
uncanny, in other words, is an equivocation, the articulation
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12
of deep ambivalence: "Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of
which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally
coincides with its opposite, unheimlich"— on the one hand a
feeling of comfort, of being at home, and on the other a
recognition of something strange or foreign, something
"uneasy, eerie, blood-curdling" (131, 129). McCaffrey
suggests that this is "the particular logic which [the
Uncanny Woman] implies . . .[,] the binary logic of presence
and absence" (105). Citing Jean Laplanche, McCaffrey
describes this as "phallic logic . .. an elementary logic,
admitting of only two values ... a logic of contradiction,
of opposition, of yes or no" (105). And yet it seems as
though the potency of the uncanny resides in its capacity to
transcend such logic— to contain differences and
contradictions in such a way as to collapse the oppositions
of presence and absence, yes and no. For in pointing to a
tension between the prostitute and the mother, or between the
doll and the fiancee, Freud is admitting to a great deal more
complexity than is implied by LaPlanche's formulation and
McCaffrey's endorsement of it. Taken together, those figures
embody the plenitude suggested by the conjunction "both/and":
the sensation of the uncanny is precisely that which is
evoked by a vision of both the sexualized, commodified female
and the asexual maternal female untainted by the marketplace.
It is the nature of this conjunction, and its ramifications
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13
for representations of urban space, that is the focus of this
dis sertation.
Into the Minotaur's chamber; Beniamin and border crossings
The ambivalence about domesticity that the uncanny
expresses is characteristic of modernity, which has produced
nationalism, homesickness, and nostalgia as well as ethnic
and national displacement, exile, and homelessness. For all
the global manifestations of uncanniness at work today,
however, its psychic underpinnings are perhaps still as
simple, and as complicated, as the ambivalence about the
mother Freud discusses. Literature about the modem city,
for instance, rehearses this ambivalence in the many coming-
of-age narratives that recount a young man's departure from
the maternal space of the home in search of moral,
intellectual, and sexual enlightenment. This journey of
maturation is motivated by, to borrow Baudelaire's words, a
"hate of home" (20) that is nonetheless imbued with
considerable nostalgia. Appearing frequently in personal
accounts of the city, this ambivalence has been particularly
influential within studies of urbanity that derive from the
work of Walter Benjamin. Not surprisingly, then, this
ambivalence pervades Benjamin's own writing; in "A Berlin
Chronicle," Benjamin's autobiographical coming-of-age
narrative, ambivalence influences the very structure of the
essay and— since, as Peter Demetz writes, the narrative
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14
"explicates the nature of memory by testing its powers"
(xvii)— of memory itself.
Benjamin's text is a spatial memoir, Demetz argues.
[Benjamin's] fundamental urge [is] to
rearrange everything lived by fixing it on
maps, in graphic schemes, spatial order. In
his imagination . . . space rules over time;
his topographical consciousness shapes
experience in architectonic patterns, in
neighborhoods, and in particular in urban
districts the border of which have to be
crossed in trembling and sweet fear. (Demetz
xvii)
Like Freud, however, Benjamin is chiefly concerned with the
relationship between the city spaces he describes and the
various types of femininity he locates within them. In "A
Berlin Chronicle," Benjamin describes his introduction to the
city by various female caretakers, beginning with his mother.
He characterizes the city as a maze, or labyrinth, at the
center of which lies a brothel— clearly a site of forbidden
female sexuality— that both attracts and repels him. In the
course of its telling, Benjamin's account of sexual
initiation overtakes the narrative and, in the process, comes
to be equated with the story of a boy's encounter with a
great city.
The spatial order Benjamin describes is thus one
delineated by his perceptions of and relationships with the
women who inhabit the city Benjamin remembers. Among the
women he describes are a "girl photographer" (8), his
grandmother; a friend's girlfriend (18), nursemaids, a French
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15
governess (9), a Jewish widow living with her three
daughters, an array of prostitutes, and a group of women for
whom he and his friends shop for rings. These women don't
just inhabit Benjamin's city but are in a sense coextensive
with it, despite his professed desire to read the city as a
space rather than as the site of human encounter, for, like
Freud, Benjamin equates femininity and urbanity. The sexual
dimension of his encounter with the city is apparent not
least in Benjamin's description of a "period of impotence
before the city" (4). Benjamin's language, of course,
obviously borrows a sexual metaphor. Benjamin blames this
impotence on his mother (!) but the women privileged in this
account are prostitutes. For instance, remembering a cafd,
Benjamin writes that forgetfulness obscures the faces of all
those who frequented it, except for a few prostitutes (21).
For Benjamin, then, as for Freud, prostitutes carry
immense signifying weight and power. This is especially true
in the association of prostitutes with boundary crossings.
Indeed, the trope of boundary crossings appears throughout "A
Berlin Chronicle," as in fact throughout Benjamin's life
itself, particularly in its tragic end at the border of
Spain.2 He suggests, for example, that a "crossing of
frontiers" was enacted through his visit to a brothel— "whole
networks of streets were opened up under the auspices of
prostitution" (11). Far from simply mapping the city's
spatial grid through the prostitutes, Benjamin charts a
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16
topography of desire onto this grid. In this mapping, the
prostitutes appear, however, in the guise of a monstrous
femininity. The prostitutes themselves are located at the
heart of the city and the networks of desire that traverse
it.
Nor is it to be denied that I penetrated to
[the city's] innermost place, the Minotaur's
chamber, with the only difference being that
this mythological monster had three heads:
those of the occupants of the small brothel on
rue de la Harpe, in which, summoning my last
reserves of strength (and not entirely without
an Ariadne's thread), I set my foot.
(Benjamin 9)
At the center of Benjamin's city, then, is a Minotaur's
chamber of prostitutes.
At the center of his narrative, however, is a very
different fable of sexuality. Half-way through the memoir,
Benjamin recounts his visit with some friends to an antiques
shop, where they purchase four rings. Each is intended as an
engagement or wedding ring, the signifier par excellence of a
bourgeois standard of sexuality: heterosexual, monogamous,
and respectably domestic— in short, everything the
prostitutes are not. (One ring, set with a Medusa's head
carved in garnet, contains yet another allusion to monstrous
femininity.) Thus an account of bourgeois sexual norms, a
marriage plot of sorts, is embedded within Benjamin's
narrative of desire and seduction at the hands of Berlin's
prostitutes. There is a way in which Benjamin's memoir, like
the desires it reveals, is itself structured as a series of
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17
boundary crossings, transgressions that connect the illicit
underworld of prostitution to the seemingly more respectable
world of the bourgeois family. The sexuality associated with
prostitution literally brackets Benjamin's account of his
relationship with his mother (and with the city to which she
introduces him), in the middle of which is embedded
Benjamin's retelling of the purchase of a set of wedding
rings. Ultimately, the end of the text, with its
intersecting sexual narratives, parallels the beginning in
its intersection of divergent sexual narratives. Here,
however, it is Benjamin's father who is linked to illicit
sexual desires, as Benjamin recalls his father's account of a
family member's death. He adds, finally, that only much
later did he understand the details in his father's
explanation— that the cousin had died of syphilis, signifier
par excellence of illicit sexual desire.
In Benjamin's account of heterosexual pairings and their
symbolic affirmation through the purchase of the rings, the
bourgeois family is solidified by the crossings that underlie
the very notion of marriage as an exogamous institution. Yet
in a very different way, the family is also reinforced
through prostitution, even when the border crossings involved
in the libidinal journey from the home to the brothel seem to
threaten the family in obvious and profound ways. Indeed,
for Benjamin, prostitutes are always endowed with multiple
and contradictory, cultural significations. For example, he
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18
invokes the border-crossing metaphor yet again to convey a
sense of existential crisis.
But is it really a crossing, is it not,
rather, an obstinate and voluptuous hovering
on the brink, a hesitation that has its most
cogent motive in the circumstance that beyond
this frontier lies nothingness? But the places
are countless in the great cities where one
stands on the edge of the void, and the whores
in the doorways of tenement blocks and on the
less sonorous asphalt of railway platforms are
like the household goddesses of this cult of
nothingnes s. (11)
Here the prostitutes— paradoxically called "household
goddesses"— represent not just the lack and impotence that
emerges in Benjamin's encounter with the city but also a more
general sensibility of loss.
It is clear that the spatial metaphor of transgression
is crucial to Benjamin, for whom Berlin is imagined in and
through a series of border crossings— topographical, psychic,
and social. The narrative theorist Peter Brooks similarly
imputes considerable social significance to the figure of the
prostitute. In a chapter of Reading for the Plot devoted to
the great 19th-century serial novel by Eugene Sue, Les
mysteres de Paris, Brooks affirms the prominence of the
prostitute in the modern imagination, in particular as she
personifies this notion of border crossings. The prostitute
serves, Brooks argues, as a connecting figure, a link and a
point of transition, particularly to the non-bourgeois
cultures that so fascinated the bourgeois reading public in
the 19th-century society Brooks is writing about: "The
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19
prostitute, then, stands out as the key figure and term of
access to that eminently storied subworld, realm of power,
magic, and danger. . ." (162). It is because of this
connection to something foreign and otherwise unknowable.
Brooks suggests, that the prostitute "exemplifies the modem
narratable"; "In her transformational role, in her capacity
to provoke metamorphoses [in and among men], the prostitute
is not only herself narratable, she provokes the stuff of
story in others" (162, 157).
Brooks's concern here is to demonstrate the importance
of prostitution to 19th-century narrative and the ways in
which her signifying potency derives from her symbolic link
to a foreign and distant other. Yet I would suggest that her
representational capacity results instead from what we might
call her uncanny similarity to the familiar figure of the
mother. The figure of the prostitute, in other words, is
disturbing because of how she is both like and unlike the
mother, and it is this uncanny confusion of licit and illicit
sexuality that underlies Benjamin's account of his youth and
adolescence and Brooks's notion of the modem narratable.
Indeed, the uncanny is essentially a matter of
representation: "[A]n uncanny effect," Freud writes, "is
often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between
imagination and reality, such as when something that we
have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in
reality. ..." (152). The collapse of the binary that
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20
defines "reality" as a sexualized mother and "imagination" as
the fantasy of the sexually innocent mother is what leads to
the sensation we call the uncanny. We might best consider
the uncanny a problem of realism, therefore, in that it
results from the elimination of differences in the face of a
signifying regime that relies on a recognition of difference.
"Seller and commodity in one":
The prostitute as female flaneur?
Given the representational labor performed by the figure
of the prostitute in these works, it is not surprising that
the prostitute emerges as a privileged figure in accounts of
modern urbanity. For Baudelaire, of course, the prostitute
was "the heart of the city's meaning" (Wilson, "Invisible"
55). Like the poet, the prostitute was a seller of goods.
[Poets] resembled prostitutes in another way,
for if prostitutes were women of the streets,
the poet in his guise as flaneur or dandy also
walked the streets. Indeed, Baudelaire saw
the essential condition of Parisian city life
as a kind of universal prostitution created by
consumerism. . . . (Wilson, "Invisible" 55)
Indeed, in an early version of his incomplete Arcades
project, Benjamin describes the prostitute as both "seller
and commodity in one" (Baudelaire 171). Accordingly,
Wilson's view is characteristic of a feminist response to the
primacy of the flaneur that considers the prostitute a
possible model for female urban subjectivity. In short,
Wilson concludes, "just as the flaneur was a prostitute,
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21
perhaps also the prostitute could be said to be the female
flaneur" ("Invisible" 55).
Yet such a view is by no means uncontroversial. Most
feminist theorists about modernity have tended to take the
opposite view, as in Janet Wolff's claim that "[w]omen could
not stroll alone in the city" (41) and that, therefore, there
was no female flaneur, a position Wilson suggests is
"overstated" (56).3 Yet, Wolff continues;
[In] Baudelaire's essays and poems, women
appear very often. Modernity breeds, or makes
visible, a number of categories of female
city-dwellers. Among those most prominent in
these texts are; the prostitute, the widow,
the old lady, the lesbian, the murder victim,
and the passing unknown woman. (41)
According to Wolff and others, however, none of these figures
is visually empowered and anonymous in the way the flaneur
is. By contrast, Susan Buck-Morss affirms the singular
importance of the prostitute; "Prostitution was indeed the
female version of flanerie," but she notes the sexual
inequities this implies.
Yet sexual difference makes visible the
privileged position of males within public
space. I mean this; the flaneur was simply
the name of a man who loitered; but all women
who loitered risked being seen as whores, as
the term 'street-walker,' or 'tramp' applied
to women makes clear. (119)
Indeed, as Deborah Epstein Nord notes, the prostitute did
"occupy a crucial place in virtually all urban description of
the nineteenth century" (353). But because, as Nord
suggests, "prostitution remains a symbol and a personified
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22
abstraction . . . and the individual woman or prostitute has
no existence and no significance beyond what she allows the
male observer to express about his own experience" (353), the
prostitute provides an inadequate model upon which to
theorize female urban subjectivity.
Indeed, as Buck-Morss herself suggests (though she is
not attempting necessarily to theorize contemporary urban
subjectivity), the problem associated with the prostitute as
a privileged figure of female urban subjectivity is obvious:
she is a woman with access to the city because of a
relationship to men in which she exchanges money for sex.
Therefore, it seems most useful, in attempting to theorize a
new master narrative of urban habitation, to retain the
context of commodity culture that has been integral to most
writing and thinking about femininity and urbanity but to
propose alternatives to a female subjectivity modeled
exclusively, or even primarily, on the figure of the
prostitute. It is only by recognizing the singular
importance of commodity culture that this becomes possible.
Female subjectivity and commodity culture
I have suggested that ambivalence between private and
public, home and the streets, animates a great deal of modem
narrative, as it does in the case of Freud and Benjamin.
This ambivalence is not unique to male narratives about the
city, however. It is similarly influential in narratives of
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23
female maturation and adulthood. In particular, such texts
frequently privilege the consumerist space that might seem to
resolve this ambivalence. Historically, of course, there is
ample reason for this turn to commodity culture, as numerous
critics have documented.4 In contrast to the female-
associated images of home that stand as a counterpoint to the
chaos and excitement of the city in so many accounts of
modern urbanity, the department store (and, later, the mall)
fuses elements of both private and public while maintaining a
unique association with femininity. Inviting the female
loiterer's gaze and offering a wealth of visual display, the
department store provided a space that was hospitable to
women who otherwise jeopardized their reputations by
venturing out in public.
For these reasons, commodity culture has particularly
interested feminists concerned to address a heretofore male-
centered master narrative of urban habitation. The figure of
the shopper has consequently emerged as a possible model for
female urban subjectivity. For Rachel Bowlby, however,
writing in Just Looking, the shopper is not completely unlike
the prostitute: Both rely on a certain commodified self-
display (10-11). In Window Shopping, Anne Friedberg notes
that a range of film historians and theorists, among them
Charles Eckert, Jeanne Allen, Mary Ann Doane, and Jane
Gaines, have "invoked 'window shopping' as an apt paradigm
for film spectatorship" (66).
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24
'Window shopping' implies a mode of consumer
contemplation: a speculative regard to the
mise-en-scene of the display window without
the commitment to enter the store or to make a
purchase. Cinema spectatorship relies on an
equally distanced contemplation. . . . (63)
Here Friedberg takes the cinematic spectator as the dominant
postmodern visual mode and is less concerned to develop the
notion of the shopper as distinct from the cinematic
spectator. In theorizing the subject position of the
shoplifter in chapter one I address in detail her suggestive
observations about the shopper.
Like the prostitute, the shopper is also, in the last
analysis, an inadequate model of female urban subjectivity,
as Friedberg herself acknowledges. This is at least in part
because of the relation to commodity culture through which
she is defined: the shopper as urban subject is necessarily
docile, obedient to the demands of an ever-more-regulated and
encompassing consumer culture. Even during the department
store's early years, its inoculation against moralizing scorn
and ridicule was consumerist in origin, and if a woman
escaped being seen as a prostitute— a woman for sale— by
entering the space of the department store, it was only to
find herself more forcibly sutured into commodity culture as
a result. As Friedberg puts it, "The prerogatives of the
female shopper may be endorsed in the market . . . but the
relation between looking and buying is not an unmediated
one"— first, Friedberg explains, because it requires money,
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25
and second because, "despite the illusion that shopping is
about choice, the desires that activate these choices have
been, in many cases, created . . (118).
The idea that women shoppers are passive, lacking good
sense and judgment, appears in representations of shopping
and feminist criticism alike. For example, according to
Kristin Ross, femininity in The Ladies' Paradise, Emile
Zola's novel about a Parisian department store, is
characterized as "headless and, by extension, credulous,
irrational, lacking in critical judgment and decisiveness,"
an image that "bears the characteristics of the new
generation of woman consumer as she was then [in the late
19th century] being constructed within capitalist society
(disoriented and distracted)" (Ross 17). Consequently, it
has been a concern of feminist cultural analysis, then, both
to demonstrate how commodity culture poses a unique problem
for women and to critique simplistic associations between
consumerism and femininity. For example, British youth-
culture critic Mica Nava discusses Betty Friedan's critique
of commodity culture in The Feminine Mystique, in particular
the critique that links American culture and women's status
within it to what Friedan sees as commodity culture's
tentacle-like grasp of women.
Interestingly, Friedan's critique of commodity culture
places her at odds with one of her intellectual forebears,
first-wave feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, as Bowlby
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26
notes, exhorted women to "Go out and buy," thus "invok[ing] a
relative emancipation in women's active role as consumers"
(22). And Friedan is by no means the only feminist to
critique commodity culture. In theorizing female urban
subjectivity within the context of late-20th-century urban
consumerism, however, I argue that because of women's unique
relationship to commodity culture— a relationship that
continues to be something of a mixed blessing— we can
extrapolate from an account of female urban subjectivity to
an under standing of urban subjectivity more generally. In
short, this model of female urban subjectivity is just that—
a model— for men as well as for women.
Indeed, the lure of consumerism is such that even, or
perhaps especially, within the context of late capitalism,
writers and filmmakers continue to develop it as a major
thematic concern. This is at least in part because of the
peculiarly totalizing nature of commodity culture at this
historical juncture, as Buck-Morss argues: "In commodity
society all of us are prostitutes, selling ourselves to
strangers; all of us cure collectors of things" (104)— all of
us, in a sense, are both "seller and commodity in one," all
of us are women. This connection to commodity culture
dictates that women's plots are frequently staged in the
consumerist spaces of the department store and the mall;
movies like Fast Times at Ridqemont High and Smooth Talk, to
take just two examples, make clear the ways in which
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27
adolescents in particular are seduced by the mall, whether as
a place to earn money, flirt, or loiter with friends. In the
chapters that follow, I address the unique relationship
between femininity and commodity culture as a primary element
in women's relationship to the public spaces of the city,
focusing particularly on revisions of women's historic link
to commodity culture.
Smooth Talk, for example, is based on a short story by
Joyce Carol Oates, who in other stories too shows how
shopping, department stores, and malls seem to provide an
escape or refuge from the pressure and tension that typify
domestic relations. Yet the critique of commodity culture
Oates offers is merely the flip side of a vision of home and
domesticity that is at least as complex and troubled. It is
this relation between commodity culture and the home that is
really at the heart of this dissertation. How do the spaces
of consumption, once seen as a potential liberation from
domesticity, come to confine women even more forcibly within
a certain type of sexual or family relations? How do those
spaces replicate the patriarchal space of the home? How do
we understand what it means to be, as Benjamin described the
prostitute, "seller and commodity in one"? What is the
relationship between the shopper of commodities and the
commodified self? What happens when a shopper cannot go home
again, as ever-expanding numbers of bag ladies in our large
cities cannnot? When the liminal space of the store and the
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28
public space of the street combine to become a home, as they
do for so many homeless people who troll the sidewalks with
overflowing shopping carts, what is a home, and what does it
mean not to have one? Does homelessness, as Dean MacCannell
argues, become the postmodern lack par excellence?
In the first section of this dissertation, I address the
connections between femininity and urbanity implied by such
questions, specifically by arguing for the female shoplifter
as an important new urban figure, a new female flaneur. The
modem urban experience, I suggest, is being reconfigured in
contemporary representations of the urban space, and the
shoplifter— who is, I suggest, both a perversion and an
extension of the shopper— is a key icon in this new
representation. In Chapter One, "'Between Flight and Theft':
Female Adolescence and the Shoplifting Narrative," I briefly
describe the history of shoplifting, a pathology invented in
the 19th century, before turning to a discussion of two
novels by Kathryn Harrison, Thicker Than Water and Exposure,
and Susan Taylor Chehuk's Smithereens, in which shoplifting
figures prominently. I focus particular attention here on
the subjectivity of the shoplifter. Drawing on Helene
Cixous's notion of "les voleuses," I advance the idea that,
in pointing to deep anxiety about women's and girls' access
to culture, shoplifting functions as a metaphor for the more
general notion of cultural theft. Chapter Two, entitled "'A
High-Heeled Army of Furies': Women, Paranoia, and the Subject
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29
of Shoplifting," continues the discussion of the shoplifter
but expands in scope to address the space of the shoplifter,
which is characterized by the panoptic technologies of
commodity culture. This second chapter analyzes a 1984 Dutch
movie, A Question of Silence, about three shoplifters,
particularly in relation to the apparati of surveillance and
control that have been integral to the shopping experience
from its inception. In focusing on specific spaces— and
particularly the idea that the public practice of shoplifting
might work to thematize more private, domestic concerns— I
address the spaces associated with the anti-consumerism of
shoplifting while also hinting at the concern with
domesticity that I take up in the Part Two.
The second half of the dissertation, then, considers
several constitutive elements of women's relation to
consumerism and their treatment in a range of contemporary
texts. In Chapter Three, "Nomadism and Narrative: Female
Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates's Foxfire," I examine
Oates's novel in order to consider the question of female
mobility and the potential empowerment associated with
nomadism, particularly as it is articulated within the work
of post-colonial theorist Rosi Braidotti. In Foxfire:
Confessions of a Girl Gang, a group of girls lay claim to
interstitial spaces such as parking lots and alleys, which
offer an alternative to the violent or neglectful space of
the home and to the spaces of commodity culture that they are
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30
suspicious of yet willing to appropriate for their own ends
when necessary. Foxfire ultimately offers a model of female
freedom that includes an existence on the margins and a
confessional account of that existence.
Chapter Four, "Bag Ladies and Umbilical Cords: Urban
Space and Female Confinement in Paul Auster's In the Country
of Last Things and Invention of Solitude," considers a memoir
and a futurist novel, in which scavenging— yet another
response to consumer culture— is the engine of the plot and
of urban exploration alike. I theorize the subject position
of the scavenger before turning to consider an equivocation
between streets and home that runs through Auster's novel as
well as through the autobiographical work The Invention of
Solitude. This equivocation takes the form of a celebration
of the liberating potential of confinement, and I consider
this celebration as a way to ask questions about the figure
of the pregnant woman and her mobility within a post-
apocalyptic cityscape. I conclude by suggesting connections
between the maternal body, the claustrophobia implied by
confinement, the generative capacity of narrative, and the
problem of memory.
The final section of the dissertation continues the
discussion of home before returning, albeit obliquely, to the
privileged urban figure of the prostitute. In the fifth and
final chapter, "City Fathers: The Incest Plot and the
Detective Genre in Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Kathryn
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31
Harrison's The Kiss," I focus on the domestic space of the
home. As a locus classicus of anxiety about gender and the
incest narrative, Chinatown productively contends with the
familial and spatial relations I examine here. I consider
the "mystery" that is central to Chinatown, contrasting that
work with the recent memoir by Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss,
and its revision of the detective genre in particular.
Finally, I return to the figure of the prostitute to consider
the problem of the commodified self— the talk-show, besotted
self— a problem that animates the discussion of Harrison's
work and echoes longstanding anxiety about the tainting
effects of the marketplace on femininity and, it seems, on
narrative. Recent women's memoirs have generated publicity
and anger for the way in which they expose the secrets of
mostly white, middle-class women. The cheapening of
literature and the selling out and cashing in of which these
women, particularly Harrison, are accused, returns the
discussion to the problem of border crossings and anxiety
about liminality that runs through the dissertation. What is
at stake, in this chapter as in the dissertation as a whole,
is a new model of urban subjectivity informed by an analysis
of consumerism, domesticity, sexual difference, and
modernity— and by an understanding of the ways in which we
perceive, and represent, our lived environment and its
multiple pressures and effects.
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32
Notes
1 For more about visuality and mobility, see Friedberg.
2 For a fictional account of Benjamin's last years, see Parini.
3 Wilson has gone even further in a recent article called, in a
play on the title of Wolff's essay, "The Invisible Flaneur"s "It is,
then," Wilson argues convincingly, "the flaneur, not the flaneuse, who
is invisible," because the flAneur "represented not the triumph of
masculine power, but its attenuation" (Wilson, "Invisible" 75, 74).
4 See, for instance, Bowlby, Looking: Friedberg; and Wilson,
Adorned and Sphinx.
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Part One
Chapter One
"Between flight and theft"
Female adolescence and the shoplifting narrative
Qu'elle est la femme qui n'a pas vol€e?
— Hdldne Cixous, "Le rire de la Meduse"
Introduction
Women shoplift on two separate occasions in the
1994 movie Muriel's Wedding. In the first incident, an
overweight, blotchy Muriel attends a wedding dressed in
a tight animal-print skirt. Before long, another guest
at the wedding, who works as a security guard in a
department store, notices the skirt and accuses Muriel
of stealing it. Muriel leaves the wedding in disgrace,
but because of her father's status in the small town
where they live, she escapes further embarrassment.
Later in the movie, Muriel's mother, a near-catatonic,
oppressed housewife, strolls the aisles of a large
store. At one point, while the camera lingers on her
puffy, red feet, we see her slip off her pumps and
replace them with a pair of flip-flops taken from the
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34
shelf. Not only is she arrested before she even leaves
the store, thus bringing shame to her well-respected if
asinine husband, but she also soon dies.
Muriel's shoplifting is treated humorously and
indulgently, as if the security guard who catches her
were in the wrong, unfairly tormenting Muriel about
something insignificant. Her mother's theft is treated
with more ambiguity: Has she taken the thongs
absentmindedly or intentionally? Her swollen feet and
zoned-out affect suggest a woman too tired from the
labors of child-rearing and housekeeping to be aware of
her actions. Unlike Muriel— whose theft stands as a
symbol of grit and determination— the older woman and,
it could be argued, her shoplifting, is punished.
Indeed, these two episodes in Muriel's Wedding serve to
highlight an important distinction, between teenage
shoplifters and their older counterparts. Moreover,
they underscore what I will argue is the cultural
significance of shoplifting: The trope of adolescent
theft is an expression of women's and girls' uniquely
difficult relationship to the broader culture.
Muriel's Wedding begins to suggest the ways in
which people manipulate consumer practices and spaces to
satisfy needs and desires not necessarily created or
supported by the market. Like Muriel's Wedding,
numerous other contemporary works of literature and film
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35
also contain representations of shoplifting— including
such novels as Susan Taylor Chehak's Smithereens,
Kathryn Harrison's Thicker Than Water and Exposure,
Hilma Wolitzer's Tunnel of Love, and Joyce Carol Oates's
Foxfire and Marva; A Life. The recent representational
interest in shoplifting that such novels attest to is
accompanied, perhaps even prompted, by a rise in the
incidence of shoplifting. In The Sociology of
Shoplifting, Lloyd Klemke shows the practice to have
tripled between 1973 and 1989 in the US. But Klemke
also contends that most shoplifters are not female. In
fact, so-called self-reported figures show that in all
age categories, male shoplifters outnumber females,
sometimes as much as two to one. Yet in the face of
this prevalence of male shoplifters, it is nonetheless
the image of the female shoplifter that evokes
considerable cultural anxiety.
Women and shopping
It has long been argued that the commercial spaces
that developed in the 19th century, particularly the
department store, constituted a privileged space for
women, offering a power and authority that is otherwise
lacking (Bowlby 4). It is true that the buying of
objects, then and now, fill a certain purpose in
providing material evidence of one's existence. Indeed,
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36
within the logic of commodity culture, as Susan Stewart
argues in On Longing, objects displace the people who
acquire them, standing in for the desiring self.
The function of belongings within the
economy of the bourgeois subject is one
of supplementarity, a supplementarity
that in consumer culture replaces its
generating subject as the interior milieu
substitutes for, and takes the place of,
an interior self, (xi)
The shopper experiences this supplementarity as
satisfaction and completion. Moreover, as youth-culture
critic Mica Nava notes, the pleasures associated with
shopping are experienced as a sense of "identity,
purpose, and creativity" (166; Wilson, Adorned 150).
This is not to say that the rise of commodity culture in
the 19th century and women's subsequent implication in
it were cause for celebration. On the contrary, the
development of material culture was very much a mixed
blessing for female urbanites, as many historians and
critics have noted, since the new commercial space could
be seen less as the site of female liberation than as
"an instrument which secures [women's] subordination"
(Nava 166). Indeed, as critics have noted, the new
commodity forms "freed" women to enter new spaces that
only sutured them more forcibly into a complex network
of material desires (Bowlby 19; Friedberg 37).
A variant of the shopper, the figure of the
shoplifter is even more complex and ambiguous. Indeed,
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37
the shoplifter is arguably the disobedient customer par
excellence— an unruly member of consumer culture whose
illegal hoarding is fueled by a desire that is often
portrayed as insatiable and that is associated both with
femininity and perversity (Kaplan 284-287). Typically
considered an aberration and an acting out, shoplift ding
is an illicit accumulation of things that signifies the
desire to gather and collect objects in a way that
supersedes loyalty or submission to the authority of the
marketplace. Thus we typically think of consumer
manipulations like shoplifting— scavenging, looting,
hoarding, and so on— as disruptions of dominant consumer
modes of behavior.
Such anti-consumerist acts of rebellion are
arguably the expression of outrage against a system of
aesthetics and values that holds women in low esteem and
demands adherence to an array of "appropriate"
behaviors. In the novels Thicker Than Water, Exposure,
and Smithereens, among other works, shoplifting becomes
a way of managing and containing problematic
relationships; in Exposure, for example, a young woman's
effort to mount a retrospective of her late photographer
father's work is accompanied by drug and shoplifting
binges and by her increasingly vivid memories of the
compromised nature of her relationship with him,
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38
especially the photography sessions during which she
poses for him.
The notion that shoplifting may provide a way of
working through personal problems or even larger
cultural issues, as I will argue two of these novels
seem to suggest, is not new. Eccentric relationships to
commodity culture have long been considered noteworthy
insofar as they articulate repressed fears and desires,
and the shoplifter in particular has always been thought
to need real help. In her study of cinema and
postmodernism, for instance, Anne Friedberg compares
today's "compulsive shopper" to the 19th-century
hysteric, around whom circulated an array of medical and
cultural practices, behaviors, and anxieties: "Like the
hysteric," Friedberg suggests, "the shopper may be
calling into question constraining identities— sexual,
racial, class ..." (120). Friedberg is skeptical
about the capacity of the shopper to do cultural work,
since, she writes, "to act out anxieties about identity
in the realm of the market, one must believe in the
commodity's transformative power" (120). However, it
seems to me that anxieties about identity are being
worked out in the marketplace; the relative authenticity
of that identity is a different question and must be
debated elsewhere.
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39
Narratives and histories of shoplifting
There are particular historical reasons for the
emergence of the shoplifter as a privileged cultural
figure. Indeed, the shoplifter has a long history in
the Western literary tradition: one need only think of
Daniel Defoe's 18th-century character Moll Flanders, who
supports herself by stealing, picking pockets, and
shoplifting or Henry Mayhew's mid-19th-century
sociological study, entitled London Labour and the
London Poor, with its section on pickpockets and
shoplifters. Novels about shoplifters, like shoplifters
themselves, first appeared with regularity around the
mid 19th century, and what was new, aside from their
abundance, was that the characters they delineated were
middle class and female (5). That is, in the 19th
century, shoplifting began to be understood as an
expression not so much of need but of desire, and that
desire was seen as specifically female.
This new female urban type was from the first a
powerful cultural icon. In her study of shoplifters,
When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in
the Victorian Department Store, Elaine S. Abelson links
the appearance in the mid 19th century of the middle-
class, female shoplifter to the coincident emergence of
the department store, which brought objects together in
new and seductive ways. These developments, for
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40
instance, figure prominently in Emile Zola's 1882 novel,
The Ladies Paradise, which focuses on the variety of
personalities and activities found within a big
department store.
In the first place, there were the
professional thieves; these women did the
least harm of all, for the police knew
everyone of them. Then came the
kleptomaniacs, who stole from a perverse
desire, a new sort of nervous affection
which a mad doctor had classed, proving
the results of the temptation provided by
the big shops. (226)
The moment of social and cultural transformation Zola
describes has been well documented by a range of social
critics and historians. As a result of this
transformation, the department store offered a
different, privileged public space— with plate glass,
opulent displays, and a new emphasis on shopping as a
leisure activity.
Kleptomania: Shoplifting as pathology
This new space in turn fostered a variety of new
behaviors. For the first time, women were able to
travel freely about the city without being thought
prostitutes, browsing and window-shopping (Wilson,
Adorned 150). The new commercial spaces also encouraged
shoplifting, which became increasingly common among
women who were thought to have ample means for their
purchases. This new figure, the mid-19th-century
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41
middle-class shoplifter, fell under the scrutiny of the
medical profession, which, as Abelson and Wilson note,
"was to transform [shoplifting] into the more
respectable 'disease' of kleptomania" (Wilson, Adorned
150). According to Abelson, medical theories about
sexual difference, biology, and psychology played a role
in defining the shoplifter as a kleptomaniac (7). Even
today, the standard physician's desk reference defines
kleptomania as a compulsion associated with
psychological disturbances such as chronic depression,
anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and pyromania (First 402-3,
612-613). Before Freud, Abelson writes, many
"'problems' were considered the consequence of
imbalanced 'nervous energies,' and these scientific
views caused kleptomania (physical, organic-related
basis) to become the most common explanation for middle-
class shoplifting" (7). As is often the case, however,
such scientific language both obscured the more complex
cultural and ideological forces at work and prompted a
proliferation of anxiety.
This medical analysis hints at the potency of the
shoplifter's narrative while simultaneously working to
neutralize it, since prevailing 19th-century notions of
kleptomania served to suture women more forcibly into a
culture that bestowed mixed blessings. According to
Abelson, the medical label had lasting consequences:
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42
"The result of the popular medical response was the
creation of a new, representative female figure— the
middle-class shoplifter— and her inclusion in the
prevailing cultural definition of women" (7). Abelson
further points to the ways in which, by evoking a desire
to heal and cure them, female shoplifters served to
mobilize a range of Victorian anxieties about women,
gender, and identity. Thus did the shoplifter's seeming
unruliness actually serve some larger cultural need.
Abelson argues, for instance, that Victorian
attitudes toward shoplifters revealed assumptions and
stereotypes about sexual difference: The figure of the
shoplifter distilled "hidden concerns about gender and
class" (9) and thus came to embody prevailing anxieties
and legitimate existing notions of gender difference.
It is in this way that the figure of the shoplifter
provided a means by which the culture worked through the
complex relationship between women and the developing
consumer culture with which they were associated.
Moreover, as Abelson notes, the new prominence of
shoplifting threw into question the structure and logic
of commodity culture. Inhabiting an intersection
between the vexed and fluid domains of commodity culture
and sexual difference, the shoplifter became a
culturally potent figure whose threat required the
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43
containment provided by the discourses of science and
medicine.
Despite this containment of the shoplifter's
potential for unruliness and disruption, however, it can
be argued that the shoplifter is actually a rather
docile figure who overzealously follows the dictates of
consumerism. In other words, I would suggest, far from
constituting a behavior that is separate and different
from consumer behavior, shoplifting is instead very much
a part of a system of exchange that, as Abelson puts it,
"educated people to want things" (5). Women were
expected to want more than they needed and more,
perhaps, than they could afford. What they couldn't
afford, they stole. Shoplifting was, in a sense, then,
just an extreme expression of more conventional shopping
behavior: As Abelson notes, "[T]he woman who took
merchandise from the department store was responding to
the calculated arousal of desire in an environment
dedicated to sensory stimulation and unfettered
abundance" (11). By stealing, such a woman remained
part of the process through which consumer capitalism
created new needs and desires, complying with rather
than resisting dominant norms of commodity culture.
Seen in this light, shoplifting is integral to
mainstream consumerist behavior, "inseparable," as
Abelson argues, "from other forms of department store
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44
life and shopping activity" (6). An affirmation of
commodity culture, shoplifting is at the same time also
clearly an illicit practice condemned by the culture as
a whole. Both encouraged and condemned, then, the
shoplifting act exists as a limn between docility and
defiance, an act of rebellion within the constraints of
the dominant ideology of capitalism, an eccentricity
that achieves the consumer's goals while skewing the
underlying logic of the system.
The cultural work of shoplifting
Clearly, shoplifting in the 19th century was no
longer (if it ever was) about not having enough money to
purchase particular objects. Instead, I will go on to
argue, shoplifting was— and continues to be— about the
fantasy of identity formation within consumer culture.
Late-20th-century representations of female shoplifters
are particularly significant: The shoplifting narrative
attests to a persistent cultural fascination with
women's ambivalent relationship to commodity culture and
to the issue of female adolescence within such a
context. Specifically, recent novels that deal with
shoplifting center on the "problem" of growing up
female, that is, the transition from girlhood to adult
womanhood.
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45
Many studies across a range of disciplines have
documented the alienation of girls approaching
adolescence, an alienation evident in declining grades
and test scores, displays of increased uncertainty and
hesitation, and a new disinclination to participate in
sports and other physical activities.1 Many such
studies2 have further connected the "problem" of young
girls' inculturation with a range of so-called
disorders, including anorexia and bulimia, that, like
shoplifting, are associated with the rebellion of youth
and expected to dissipate with the onset of adult
maturity. Part of the problem in this regard is girls'
poor fit into the dominant culture, a culture that
historically has marginalized women in general and young
girls in particular. It is this difficulty of female
access to culture that the shoplifting narrative brings
to the fore.
"Between flight and theft": Shoplifting and la voleuse
French feminists have long argued that women's
marginal status within the dominant culture is such that
they must struggle to gain access to it. Such a view,
it seems to me, is increasingly untenable in the face of
recent gains by women politically, economically, and
culturally. Nevertheless, a range of cultural
constructions work structurally and systemically to
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46
marginalize people of color and poor people as well as
women and, perhaps most of all, girls. The question of
access thus remains an urgent one. I will argue that in
these circumstances, culture must quite literally be
stolen, other perhaps more "respectable" means of
appropriation having been tried and exhausted.
Hdlene Cixous's notion of stealing/flying provides
a way to consider the metaphor of theft. Writing about
women's state of exile vis-a-vis culture in "The Laugh
of the Medusa," Cixous theorizes the notion of
flying/theft ("voler"): "For us the point is not to take
possession in order to internalize or manipulate, but
rather to dash through and to 'fly [steal]'" (258).3 As
Nancy Kline explains in a discussion of Claudine
Hermann's Tongue Snatchers, which extends Cixous's
argument, the verb "voler" suggests both flight and
theft. As Kline notes, Cixous privileges the metaphor
of flight, suggesting the modes- of impermanence often
associated with Braidotti's notion of the "figuration of
the nomad," a richly nuanced image of female mobility to
which I will return. Indeed, considered in the context
of postmodern urban space, the connection between theft
and flight becomes particularly salient. I am
especially interested, however, in the notion of theft
as a feminist practice of appropriation and ownership.
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47
Like Hermann's "tongue snatchers," women steal
their way into culture; they steal a place for
themselves from which to articulate sexual difference
and female subjectivity.
Flying is woman's gesture— flying in
language and making it fly. We have all
learned the art of flying and its
numerous techniques? for centuries we've
been able to possess anything only by
flying; we've lived in flight, stealing
away, finding, when desired, narrow
passageways, hidden crossovers. It's no
accident that voler has a double meaning,
that it plays on each of them and thus
throws off the agents of sense. (Cixous
258)
For Cixous, the image of flight/theft provides a way to
theorize female transgression of limits and norms. Such
transgression, moreover, serves to reconfigure culture,
thus accounting for women's profound difference. This
is the way to "'seize speech," as Alicia Ostriker puts
it, "and make it say what we mean" (315). This is a
call to action.
It's no accident: women take after birds
and robbers just as robbers take after
women and birds. They (illes) go by, fly
the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the
order of space, in disorienting it, in
changing around the furniture,
dislocating things and values, breaking
them all up, emptying structures, and
turning propriety upside down.
What woman hasn't flown/stolen? Who
hasn't felt, dreamt, performed the
gesture that jams sociality? Who hasn't
crumbled, held up to ridicule, the bar of
separation? Who hasn't inscribed with her
body the differential, punctured the
system of couples and opposition? Who, by
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48
some act of transgression, hasn't
overthrown successiveness, connection,
the wall of circumfusion? (Cixous 258)
Flying/stealing, then, opposes a culture that is still
perceived as overwhelming masculine. And as theorized
by Cixous, flight/theft is noticeably inflected by
spatial metaphors. The shoplifting narrative represents
the way it is possible to "[jumble] the order of space."
By a "vigorous . . . invasion of the sanctuaries of
existing language, the treasuries where our meanings for
'male' and 'female' are themselves preserved" (Ostriker
315), girls gain access to a culture that ratifies the
lessons of sexual difference learned during childhood
and adolescence, a culture to which they must eventually
give themselves over. It is this invasion, this
transition, that the shoplifting plot sets into
narrative.
Shoplifting and cultural theft
Many recent novels and female memoirs have offered
acounts of teenage shoplifting, including Half a Life,
by Jill Ciment, Cravings, by Jyl Lynn Felman, and Cat's
Eve, by Margaret Atwood, to name just a few. The writer
Kathryn Harrison is particularly interested in
shoplifting, which figures prominently in two novels,
Thicker Than Water and Exposure, and appears in her
recent memoir, The Kiss, and at least one magazine
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article ("Thrill"). In Harrison's novel Thicker Than
Water, shoplifting works to compensate the protagonist,
Isabel, and her friend Corinne for a boring adolescence
it is a way to negotiate the constantly shifting
friendships and alliances of youth as well as
instability and insecurity in the family and the home.
Isabel and Corinne are "unrepentant vandals and
shoplifters"; every Saturday they visit a Pic 'n' Save
near their home, where they steal "closeout items that
other stores couldn't unload . . . trash, especially
cheap, vulgar clothing and clunky costume jewelry"
(115). Dressed in bulky clothing, they fill "the
linings with necklaces and earrings, bracelets, scarves
sleazy tank tops, hats even."
In the naive supposition that we would
never be caught if we left the store with
a purchase, paying for one item, we
squeezed past the checkout with our
clothes heavy, sometimes rattling with
contraband, and gave the clerk a handful
of change for some plastic ring. We were
never caught, but I was deathly afraid
each time . . . and saw stars as I handed
the ignorant or totally uncaring checker
my money. (115)
Before long the girls have acquired an enormous amount
of trash: "clothing we wouldn't normally be caught dead
wearing, gaudy costume jewelry, hideous scarves and
accessories" (113). With these clothes, the girls are
inspired to create new images of themselves, and they
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50
become different, somehow fully constituted by the goods
they've shoplifted.
Suddenly one weekend, inspired by all the
loot which had piled into great drifts,
no hangers left, every box overfilled, we
created two characters or alter egos,
creatures of our imagination but fully
formed. Corrine idly put on a red hat
and earrings, a slutty lace shirt, and
began to talk. Her voice came out
different, high and nasal, and Cornelia
Schnook was bom. In a green miniskirt,
white vinyl boots and blue glass tiara, I
found myself transformed into Edwynna
Goulasha. (113)
By providing new personae, shoplifting allows Isabel and
Corinne to negotiate the limitations of adolescence.
Through their theft and subsequent performances, the
girls navigate the difficulties of maturation, not so
much "acting out" as coming to terms with the
complexities of being female.
The same connection between theft and maturation
into adulthood is evident in the novel Smithereens, by
Susan Taylor Chehak, about a tough older girl's
relationship with an adolescent girl named May. At one
point, 16-year-old May sits waiting for a bus and
fantasizes about stealing the purse of the older woman
sitting beside her.
An elderly woman . . . came and sat down
on the bench next to me. . . . She
looked over at me and smiled, deciding
that I must be somebody who was safe.
But I could easily have reached out and
snatched that purse from her, if I'd
wanted to, and then, that quick, before
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51
the old woman had even had time to
register what I'd done, I would have
slipped off down the block and
disappeared around the corner, gone.
(64)
Chehak links May's contemplation of theft to her
curiosity about the cycles of generations. Deciding
that the theft is a bad idea, May imagines what she
would find in the old lady's purse: some "crumpled
dollar bills that she had tucked into her wallet, folded
back behind the creased and faded snapshots of her
smiling grandsons' and their new babies and their
optimistic wives" (65). In the next paragraph, May
imagines her own transformation, "from girl to young
woman to matron to crone . . . it could have been me, my
whole life condensed and blown by, in only the long,
uneventful tumble of time" (65). Facing her emergence
from adolescence into adulthood. May finds the notion
fairly disturbing and considers whether she wouldn't
rather "die young" (65).
Shoplifting and the masquerade
The notion of generational transformation is linked
here, as in Harrison's work, to a sense of masquerade.
After waiting for a bus, May finds herself in a
department store, wandering through the cosmetics and
finally trying on a shiny, tasselled pair of loafers.
She wanders through the store and, when no one notices,
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52
decides to keep the shoes. In the case of Harrison's
shoplifters, secretly acquired clothes allow young girls
to masquerade not only as the women they are not yet but
also as the "slutty" women they may never be.
Recounting her own experiences as a teenage shoplifter,
Harrison recalls her grandmother's reaction to her
"overtly sexual" costume, all of it shoplifted, one
Halloween: "'What are you supposed to be? Prostitutes at
Hollywood and Vine?'" ("Thrill" 186). The stolen
clothes and accessories allow the girls to dress across
class and age, to take on a "whole new character" (113).
In experimenting with different class positions,
the girls are using their bodies and their clothing to
play at the differences among women and thus to give
"slumming" a whole new meaning.4 In this way, they can
pass as adults, drink in bars, explore Sunset and
Hollywood boulevard shops (Thicker 114). Yet this
experimentation is risky, for the girls might
accidentally get caught up in a narrative not of their
own choosing: as Harrison notes, remembering her own
such experimentation: "[N]othing very bad ever happened
to us— though it might have quite easily: We were young,
we knew nothing of men, we had no money beyond cab fare"
("Thrill" 187). But the contrast between these middle-
class girls and the type of women they are mimicking is
clear: Isabel and Corinne are merely flirting with the
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53
dangers of city life and the structures of fear to which
they have not yet been introduced. And we will see how
the world of Isabel and Corinne contrasts significantly
with that of the Foxfire girls, who rely far more
acutely on their wits to avoid the kinds of mistaken
identity that Isabel and Corinne seem to be inviting.
Even so, the connection between the shoplifter and
the bag lady is unmistakeable. In Muriel's Wedding, for
instance, the mother walks down a discount-store aisle
pushing a grocery cart, tossing her old shoes in when
she slips on the new pair she takes from the shelf; with
her despair and ill health she resembles a bag lady.
And in Exposure, the well-to-do shoplifter, disgusted
with herself, her stolen property, and her spying
husband, throws her clothes out the window of a
Manhattan brownstone and watches the people below forage
among them like scavengers. Finally, she leaves her
apartment without wearing shoes, since she has discarded
them too— and now she resembles a bag lady herself.
We will return in chapter four to the similarities
between the shoplifter and the bag lady. For the
moment, what is important is that, if shoplifting is a
way of traversing the divide between childhood and
adulthood, it is also a way of coming to terms with
being female, that is, with moving from being women-
children to adult women, as Harrison herself makes
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54
clear: "My secret life [in her adopted persona] as Donna
helped me in that it was an initial, if skewed,
exploration of sexuality— a necessary aspect of any
adolescent's development ..." ("Thrill" 187).
The way that shoplifting provides a lesson in
sexual difference is made clear through one particular
incident in Thicker Than Water, when Isabel gets "caught
with a box of ten tampons' stuffed up my sleeve."
When the time had come to pay for them,
all the checkers had been men. I had
developed the ability to purchase tampons
from women . . . but I could not let a
man ring up my Tampax. And so I stole
them; it seemed reasonable, I wasn't
frightened walking out. After all, I'd
been shoplifting for years, nothing
expensive and not from good stores, but I
was practiced in the art. (104)
Isabel steals tampons, but only because she is
embarrassed to buy them, even to be seen with them
(104). It seems significant that what she steals is a
testament to women's biological, difference: For her,
being female is nothing if not an embarrassment. Like
the adult female shoplifters in the movie A Question of
Silence, who emphasize their alienation from the male
shopkeeper as a motivating factor in their theft, Isabel
steals because she's uncomfortable confronting the male
checkers with incontrovertible proof of- her difference
as a woman. This ambiguous relation of girls to their
own femininity just underscores the central importance
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55
about shoplifting, namely its representation of the
difficulty, even illicitness, in the connection between
femininity and culture. This relationship is always
ambiguous, particularly because what is at stake is not
just the transition from girlhood to womanhood but also
the context of a hostile dominant culture in which that
transition takes place.
Shoplifting and female identity
Shoplifting is not only a metaphor for female
induction into the dominant culture, however. As the
logical endpoint in our cultural linking of femininity
and commodity culture, the shoplifting plot also
mobilizes the issues currently at stake in the ongoing
discussion of female identity. For writers like
Harrison, the focus on commodity culture is connected to
issues of identity, especially insofar as shoplifting
is explicitly associated with the recovery of memory,
particularly memories of childhood. Harrison's novels
are structured in the form of retrospective narration,
in which earlier, formative events are revealed through
flashbacks. Shoplifting accompanies this retrospection,
as if buying or stealing mere objects provided a
material connection to the past.
Harrison's second novel, for example, centers on a
troubled young woman's shoplifting. Like the
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56
protagonist of Thicker Than Water, the young woman in
Exposure, Ann, is occupied with the project of
collecting and understanding pieces of her life,
especially the transition from girlhood to adulthood.
For this reason, the novel is at least as much about the
events leading up to her current shoplifting activity,
events that become increasingly clear to her as she
organizes a retrospective exhibit of her late father's
photographs. Ann is a photographer herself, as well as
a videographer, though her poorly managed diabetes and
her drug abuse threaten her eyesight. With its emphasis
on the spaces of the department store and the museum,
and especially the visual practices of photography and
video, Exposure seems to suggest a particularly visual
conjunction of shoplifting and memory.
The concern in Exposure with the visual is apparent
on a number of different levels, beginning of course
with the title's nod toward exhibitionism and voyeurism.
Ann is a wedding videographer with failing eyesight.
Her father was a respected art photographer. The novel
is situated not just in department stores but also in
museum and gallery spaces', where a retrospective of
Ann's father's photography— much of which portrays Ann
during adolescence, sometimes posed as if dead— is being
mounted. As she organizes the retrospective, Ann is
required to confront the photographs, some of which
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57
were "stolen"— that is, taken when she was unaware of
the camera's scrutiny, sometimes in sexually explicit
poses— and she begins to remember in greater detail and
with increasing urgency the circumstances of the
photography sessions. Her travel through the fashion
galleries of Bergdorf Goodman and Saks, where she
compulsively shoplifts, both mark and heighten her sense
of anxiety. Finally, near the end of the book, having
once again shoplifted at the opening of the
retrospective, she goes to Tiffany, where she notices
the windows, which are framed with gold curtains, parted
to reveal the merchandise as if consumption itself were
on stage (233). Ann enters the store and attempts to
steal a huge diamond ring— a final heist that leads to
her apprehension and her eventual recovery.5
There is a talismanic value in the practices of
ownership themselves in Exposure: The accumulation and
disposal of objects, for instance, have the capacity to
ward off the "fragments of [Ann's] past" (124). As Ann
attempts to find meaning in the material effects that
litter the city she inhabits, her search for something
lost— something now elusive— becomes an obsession; it
motivates her shoplifting and underlies her self-
consciousness about her stealing. She wonders whether
she'd "[m]aybe . . . already started forgetting things"
during visits home from college because, she remembers,
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58
"during those homecomings it was as if I were searching
for something, something I'd lost, I didn't know what"
(117). But in this novel, memory is constructed and
artificial, and "... whatever [Ann] remembers
threatens to recede, evaporate, when she contemplates
articulating it for someone else."
Even as she tried just now to tell Carl
about posing for her father's camera, it
was as if she were trying to recount a
dream: what she remembered seemed absurd,
and parts of what she had thought was a
coherent story were suddenly missing. . .
. (117)
Indeed, Exposure suggests again and again that memory is
a series of images, stolen and reconstructed, collected
and displayed at will. Memory is always visual, as with
the retrospective of her father' photography, which
externalizes Ann's scrapbook, as if displaying pictures
of her childhood for everyone to see.
For example, Ann constructs, loses, and
reconstructs the past almost at will. The memory of her
childhood is partly prompted by her preparation of the
exhibit. Indeed, the status of photography as a medium
of visual and historical record are overdetermined in
the text. Ann's great-grandfather took up photography
during its earliest years, in Mexico, earning a living
with his portraits of families and then, during an
epidemic, of just-deceased infants. The photographs of
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59
dead, children, Harrison writes, are so appealing because
they pre-empt the disappointment that maturity brings.
All that might have been, all that had
never disappointed. No one had ever had
to explain how it was that Antonio grew
up embittered and beat his wife; that
Sarita was, it must be admitted, not
merely slow but a half-wit; that Maria
had slept with her sister's husband; that
Jose, disappointed in love, had drowned
his sorrows and then himself. All
confessed with a heavy sigh. (114)
Harrison continues: "[E]ach photograph was lovely, and
the passage of so many years excused affectation"— "like
the work of Julia Margaret Cameron or Lewis Carroll"
(114). Indeed, the photography of Carroll and Cameron
is known for its fascination with childhood. In a study
called Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and
Loss in Victorian Photographs, Carol Mavor writes about
the relation between photography and childhood,
suggesting that childhood and photography share a
certain static, timeless quality.
Photography was invented hand-in-hand
with our modern conception of childhood.
The child and the photograph were
commodified, fetishized, developed
alongside each other: they were laminated
and framed as one. . . . Interestingly
enough, both our image of childhood and
the photograph (mythically) keep time
still, innocent, untouched. (4)
This static quality, Mavor further argues, derives from
the sense of death inherent in the medium itself.
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Yet there is a fleeting quality to photographs that
makes them, and childhood, both like and unlike the
finality and termination of death.
Both the photograph and childhood accept
their shape and their poignancy from
death. If there were no death, why would
childhood hold its appeal? If there were
no death, why would our desire to
photograph and to preserve lost moments
be so urgent? (Mavor 5-6)
This desire is especially acute in its focus on female
children, as Mavor suggests, because they are seen as
unsexed: "Part of the appeal of understanding little
girls as without sex is that it is avoidance of death,"
Mavor writes.
For sex is always connected with death.
Little girls eventually leave their
childhood beds (just like Wendy), only to
fly to their wedding bed, which brings
them to their birthing bed, which brings
them that much closer to their deathbed.
(25)6
Like Wendy, Ann's mother follows this trajectory— she
dies when Ann is a baby. But Ann is just as frequently
on the other side of the lens. As a photographer and
videographer, she creates the texts of other people's
weddings, editing them until they present a picture of
reality that others want to see. Harrison describes
Ann's editing work in some detail— there are three
tracks, for instance, which Ann uses to construct the
perfect wedding memento. The wedding videos are Ann's
idea of what each narrative should look like, pictures
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61
she thinks the couple will want. But they are also a
fabrication of reality, because it is "up to Ann to
render what she has recorded into a happy, if inexact,
memory" (4).
What is really being "stolen" in the book's various
acts of shoplifting, however, axe the pieces of her
fragmented subjectivity, their "miniature likeness."
Indeed, Ann sees a representational, or mnemonic, value
in the objects she steals.
The ring [at Tiffany] is not pretty, one
stone of vulgar size set in a platinum
band, but Ann feels her mouth go dry with
desire for it. The largest facet on the
diamond is so big that it makes a tiny,
perfect mirror which, she is sure, would
give back a miniature likeness of her
face. (236)
The ring helps her, literally, to pull herself together.
It serves a talismanic function, especially in the way
it reminds her of her mother: When she's caught at the
jewelry store, she is clutching the ring in her hand,
"strangely exultant," much the way she remembers holding
in her hand her deceased mother's engagement ring during
photo shoots with her father— as an amulet against his
carelessness and cruelty. Both stolen rings, with their
capacity for reflection and visual representation, hold
out the illusion of plenitude.
Ann's mother dies in childbirth, and the only
images Ann has of her are a series of photographs
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depicting only parts of her body (28). It is not
surprising, then, for her to feel a sense of
disembodiedness and fragmentation herself: "[T]here were
two Anns, and that was how it started with the speed:
the only way I could study all night, the only way I
could keep two selves going, the only way I knew how to
smile and say, believing it. I'm fine" (35). In the
face of such fragmentation, Ann says she steals because
it makes life bearable: "It's the only thing that helps
me be not scared" (214). Like cocaine, shoplifting
protects her against her fears, each "offense" another
amulet.
These coping mechanisms ultimately prove
unsuccessful. The gallery space and its retrospectives
finally have an exhausting, debilitating effect. In
remembering the past, Ann attempts to move away from and
beyond it. The text draws on the trappings of
historicity— the wedding videos, the archives, the
retrospective, Ann's husband's restoration business— but
only to demonstrate the burdens of the past, not its
attractions. Indeed, the past is a dead space, filled
with photos of dead infants and Ann herself, posed as if
dead. In this sense, the objects gained during
shoplifting, though coveted for their restorative value,
are in fact nothing more than a memento mori.
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63
The logic of the shoplifter;
Planned obsolescence, history, and memory
Harrison's shoplifting narrative suggests a
specifically feminist and anti-consumerist practice of
ownership. We have seen that shoplifting is a liminal
activity, a practice both sanctioned and condemned by
dominant consumerist ideologies. Yet another threshold
is foregrounded in the shoplifting narrative, however:
the difference between old and new, which the
shoplifting narrative defines and structures. The logic
of the shoplifter is that of planned obsolescence, the
capitalist mode that sustains the shoplifter as docile
consumer. Planned obsolescence, which dictates that
everything new is almost instantly old, is about the
new, the faddish, the up-to-date and forward looking; it
is also, at the same time, about looking toward the
past, the repository of discarded, now-unusuble objects.
The tension between past and present, old and new,
is in turn the struggle for history and memory, which is
what is ultimately at stake in narratives about
shoplifting. In Twilight Memories, Andreas Huyssen
contrasts the planned obsolescence of capitalist culture
with a late-20th-century obsessive interest in the past.
The planned obsolescence of consumer
society found its counterpoint in a
relentless museummania. [In the 80s] the
museum as site of elitism (tradition,
high culture) gave way to museum as mass
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64
medium, site of spectacular mise-en-scene
and operatic exuberance. (14)
In joining the debate between old and new, and in
foregrounding the tension between planned obsolescence
and what Huyssen calls "museummania," the shoplifting
narrative articulates a concern with history and memory.
In fact, we might consider the shoplifting narrative as
expressing a feminist reinvention of the past and self-
fashioning of consciousness and identity. Grabbing what
one wants, without attention to labels, categories,
tags, prices, styles, "needs"— listening instead to the
call to selfhood issued by the market and finding that
self wherever it might be stolen— the shoplifter is a
feminist pirate, stealing and hoarding against the
deprivations of the past, real or imagined.7
This is not to idealize the shoplifter as someone
who magically stands outside consumer culture; as I have
already pointed out, the shoplifter is both radically
and integrally part of that culture. Nonetheless, in
the shoplifter's fantasy, new histories are written and
old memories reclaimed. This is how the shoplifting
narrative works through a complex array of cultural
"problems," including the lack of historical memory for
women and the desire to construct and write that
history. In representing these concerns— that is, in
tying together the dictates of the marketplace and
women's relationship to them with the historical memory
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65
that is a highly charged ground of cultural conflict—
the shoplifting narrative points to a new, aggressive
practice of ownership that might acknowledge and address
these concerns and that, in the process, constitutes a
new subjective position: the voleuse as a postmodern
flaneur. It is the space of the voleuse— the paranoid
space of the late-20th-century city— to which we now
turn.
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66
Notes
1 See, for instance, Gilligan and Pipher.
2 Such criticism is by no means always uncritical of the
relationship between these "disorders" and issues of sexual
difference. For quite some time, in fact, eating disorders have
been, among some writers and theorists, considered a desperate
appeal for attention, control, and a range of other needs and
desires that are otherwise unarticulated. The standard
physician's desk reference. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(or DSM-III-R), for instance, groups anorexia, bulimia,
kleptomania, and chronic despression.
3 "Steal" is the translator's note, not mine.
4 Thanks to Karin Quimby for noticing the class-crossing of
the two girls.
5 I use the word "recovery" quite intentionally. The
discourses of the recovery movement are important in this novel
and in Harrison's other writing, despite Harrison's obvious
awareness in her fiction and nonfiction alike that these
discourses tend to oversimplify a variety of complicated emotions,
behaviors, and interactions.
6 In our own time, it is important to consider the cultural
fascination with small girls and adolescent girls— with girlhood
in particular, in light of this interest in death. Thus, when we
talk about recovering/recovered memory, it seems that we are also
always talking about death— though whether of the girl or of the
perpetrater is unclear.
7 For a discussion of the pirate as a feminist figure, see Morris.
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Chapter two
"A high-heeled army of Furies"
Women, paranoia, and the subject of shoplifting
Introduction
A recent Los Angeles Times story describes a woman who
was disposing of her mothers' possessions after her death.
"'I had to go through every scrap of paper," the woman
recalls, "because I found checks my mother hadn't cashed, and
every magazine and newspaper where money might be hidden'"
(Ryan El). She ultimately uncovered "beautiful hand-crocheted
and embroidered linens, 10 boxes of table scarves, 50 pairs
of gloves and more than 60 pairs of high-heeled shoes" (El).
The woman in the newpaper article is not so different from an
anonymous character in Zola's novel The Ladies' Paradise,
who, according to a police report, has stolen "two hundred
and forty-eight pairs of pink gloves stolen from every shop
in Paris" (226). The sheer excess in both stories is itself
a source of considerable readerly pleasure. It will be my
concern here, however, to examine such excess within the
historical context from which it emerges, specifically the
development and advance of consumer culture in the 19th and
20th centuries and the access to urban space it secured for
women, even as women contested the terms of this equation.
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68
In the previous chapter, I discussed the "problem" of
girls who shoplift and argued that their stealing underscores
larger issues of cultural exclusion and theft. What, then,
about adults who shoplift? In this chapter, I explore
shoplifting among a different group: older, usually married,
well-to-do women. I suggest that what is emblematic of
rebellion and an ongoing process of maturation in the young
is considered far more troubling among adults. That is, what
among teenagers is understood as an expression of rebellion
and an announcement of individuality and adult subjectivity
breaking free of childhood is seen as pathology and an
absence of agency among adult women. This representation of
the well-meaning but mentally ill kleptomaniac, however,
covers over a more disturbing image: the purposeful adult
shoplifter who acts out of rage, rebelling against a system
of values that holds women in low esteem and demands
adherence to an array of "appropriate" behaviors. It is this
figure that is brought to the foreground within Marleen
Gorris's A Question of Silence.
The shoplifting narrative in Gorris's film contests
rather than affirms the idea that commercial spaces offer
some sort of simple pleasure and power to women. Instead, it
suggests that women often feel disempowered even in the
intimate spaces of mall boutiques. In so doing, it hints at
a new understanding of the relationship between women and
commodity culture, especially the social and cultural
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69
conditions that govern it. In particular, I argue, Gorris's
film provides a new master narrative of urban space, one
predicated on a paranoid gaze and an assaultive demeanor. It
is this new subjectivity— the subjectivity of the voleuse and
the urban spaces she inhabits— that I address in this
chapter.
The shopper, the walkman, and the marathon runner;
The politics of hurrying1
To fully consider the figure of the shoplifter in full,
it is first necessary to explore the issue within the context
of feminist theory and cultural studies. Although there has
been little written about the shoplifter, a great deal of
discussion has focused on shoppers and shopping more
generally. We have already seen that there are particular
social and historical reasons why the shopper is a privileged
figure in discussions of femininity and urbanity. Anne
Friedberg, for instance, theorizes the shopper's subjectivity
by way of an analysis of a range of visual practices.
Specifically, she links shopping and the "virtual mobility"
of cinema by arguing that shopping is a metaphor for cinema
spectatorship. In turn, cinema spectatorship is, in
Friedberg's view, the "paradigmatic model of postmodern
subjectivity" (125). Moreover, for Friedberg the shopper is
a postmodern flaneur, a model for the contemporary urban
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70
subject, the privileged figure of 19th-century urbanity
updated to suit the vagaries of postmodernity.
Others have offered alternative models for contemporary
urban existence. Huyssen, for instance, points to the
walkman tours frequently offered in conjunction with
blockbuster museum exhibits? with the automated and insulated
sensibility it encourages, the walkman is certainly an apt
metaphor for urban habitation. In addition to this notion of
the walkman as prototypical urban inhabitant, Huyssen also
offers the model of the marathon runner, who races through
the city at breakneck speed: "[I]n our metropolitan centers
the flaneur, an outsider already in Baudelaire's time, has
been replaced by the marathon runner . . ." (23). Continuing
the argument, Huyssen compares museums with centers of
consumption, "since the only place where the flaneur still
had a hide-out, namely the museum, is increasingly turned
into an analogue of Fifth Avenue at rush hour . . ." (23).
Huyssen's proposed model of the urbanite, then, is a marathon
runner, the museum walkman whose progress through a
commercialized museum setting increasingly likens him or her
to a Manhattanite traversing the city in haste. Yet it is
neither the shopper, the walkman, nor the marathon runner but
rather the shoplifter who provides the most appropriate model
of urban subjectivity.
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Paranoid space and the architecture of fear
71
Even a century ago the detachment and anonymity thought
to be defining characteristics of urban subjectivity were
more myth than reality. In fact, the flaneur, with whom such
detachment and anonymity are usually associated, turns out to
represent "not the triumph of masculine power, but its
attenuation" (Wilson, "Invisible" 74). Certainly, the female
urban subject, the shopper, was particularly vulnerable to
urban networks of visuality, including the modem city's
apparati of surveillance. Today, however, even the idealized
city inhabitant no longer strolls the streets casually in the
manner of the flaneur, glancing carelessly at the crowd in
which he finds himself, comfortably anonymous. No longer a
detached, curious, wandering observer, the city dweller is
instead a fearful, unwillingly involved walker. Responding
to the city with fear and paranoia, but also with inventive
practices of appropriation and ownership, the shoplifter is
the new prototype of urban subjectivity.
The subjectivity embodied by the shoplifter is one
response to the contemporary architectures of fear that make
up the postmodern city. As Mike Davis describes in his book
about Los Angeles, City of Quartz, city neighborhoods are
spread out over a tremendous geographic sprawl, separated by
neighborhood-watch signs and gated housing developments. In
the inner city, quasi-public spaces like malls are equipped
with concrete block walls, closed-circuit video surveillance,
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in-house LAPD substations, and the like (Davis 243). Such
spaces give rise to a desire to avoid the street in favor of
the home, an attitude that gave rise in the 1980s to what was
known as cocooning. No longer merely a lifestyle choice, the
desire to stay at home has spawned an entire industry of
nostalgia-driven design and furnishings books, magazines, and
other publications and industries concerned with the
preservation and celebration of the home. More them one
recent publication brings together writing by well-known
authors about houses they have known and loved; in one such
collection, both writer Kathryn Harrison and her husband,
Colin, contributed pieces about the home they share.
The politics of cocooning contrasts significantly with
the architecture of fear it is designed both to disavow and
to protest. This architecture of fear brings to the fore a
paranoia that seems common among those who inhabit the city.
One consequence of this paranoia is that "the street,"
according to Zygmunt Bauman, becomes the "'out there' from
which one hides, at home or inside the car, behind security
locks and burglar alarms" (148). Despite— or perhaps because
of— such measures, people are afraid. Looking around
themselves constantly, their darting gazes attest not so much
to a fascination with all things visual as to a concern with
the movement around them, which at any time may turn into a
threat. Within this architecture of fear, people continue to
inhabit the street, but, as Jack Womack writes in the novel
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73
Random Acts of Senseless Violence, "most [keep] looking over
their shoulders" (170). It is this backward glance, this
sensibility of paranoia, that defines the shoplifter's
subjectivity.
The scanscape of consumer culture
We saw in the last chapter how shoplifting works at
least in part to resist dominant modes of capitalism.
Clearly, however, it is not just that shoplifting simply
protests the limits of consumer culture. On the contrary,
despite the oppositional potential of shoplifting, it is
nonetheless very much the case that the spaces where it takes
place— the spaces of consumer culture— constitute a unique
nexus in the control of the body. Mike Davis has written
about the contemporary "scanscape" ("Beyond" 3), a "space of
protective visibility that increasingly defines where white-
collar office workers and middle-class tourists feel safe," a
space made possible by "comprehensive surveillance" (Davis,
"Beyond" 5). The visual empowerment fostered in and by the
shopping mall is linked, in this "comprehensive
surveillance," to the fears that infiltrate the experience of
urbanity: "Inevitably the workplace or shopping mall video
camera will become linked with home security systems,
personal 'panic buttons,' car alarms, cellular phones, and
the like, in a seamless continuity of surveillance over daily
routine" (Davis, "Beyond" 5).
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74
The surveillance system in which we now find ourselves,
in other words, is complete and unrelenting. Still, it is
certainly plausible to consider, as does Mica Nava, that
resistances to power are as persistent as the power it
addresses (167-168). Yet what is central nonetheless is the
fact that the spaces of shopping, historically considered the
site of female empowerment and liberation, are in fact the
site of women's entrapment within an apparatus of
surveillance that exploits their traditional link to consumer
capitalism. Women, that is, shop within an
enclosed, segmented space, observed at every
point, in which the individuals are inserted
in a fixed place, in which the slightest
movements are supervised, in which all events
are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work
of writing links the centre and periphery,
. . . in which each individual is constantly
located, examined and distributed among the
living beings. . . . (Foucault 197)
That is, by virtue of their status within the scanscape of
commodity culture, which solicits their gaze particular,
women are all the more objects of a panoptic consumerism.
Even as they seem to be visually empowered, in other words,
the very mechanisms that create this impression in fact work
to mobilize that network of visuality against women.
A drawing by fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo makes just
this point. (See illustration.) In the drawing, women are
surrounded by locked-up merchandise and metal cages as they
try on clothes, looking in mirrors that, it seems, just
reproduce and extend the visual surveillance of the video
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75
cameras which monitor their every move. The unique status of
women in consumer culture represented in this illustration is
similarly at stake in A Question of Silence, a 1984 Dutch
movie by Marleen Gorris in which three women who are
strangers to one another conspire tacitly to kill a man for
no apparent reason when one of them tries to steal clothes
from the store the man owns. The bleakness of the women's
crime, and of the movie as a whole, lies in the recognition
that women are uniquely situated within the boutique's power
relations but also that in a sense we are all shoplifters.
Thus the movie's radicalness consists in what it does not
explicitly reveal— that the female shoplifter is both a real
subject position and, like the flaneur, an idealized, mythic
figure, the prototypical subject of the new, panoptic
scanscape of commodity culture.
We find the deployment of the gaze within consumer space
in the earliest depictions of the department store. The Zola
novel The Ladies' Paradise, a naturalist depiction of 19th-
century consumer behaviors, brings together the new pleasures
of shopping and the new modes of visual control that
accompanied them. The Ladies' Paradise is about a department
store of the same name, one of the new Parisian department
stores where a group of women frequently browse. Among them
is a countess who steals. It is clear that the pleasure she
finds in her risky behavior derives in part from the fact
that her crime might be seen: "... the enjoyment she felt
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76
in the indulgence of this passion was all the more violent
from the fact that she was risking before the eyes of a crowd
her name, her pride, and her husband's high position" (Zola
374).
Before long, the countess is indeed caught in the act.
At first she denies stealing. She is brought into the
offices of the store; during a search for stolen merchandise,
she is found with an enormous amount of fine lace hidden on
her person and forced to sign a confession. An exasperated
store clerk wonders in amazement: "What! this one as well!
this noble-looking lady! Really it was time to have them all
searched!" (Zola 372). The countess's detainment causes her
daughter to fear the worst: "Her ignorance of what was going
on inside, the passing backwards and forwards of . . . the
two saleswomen frightened her, she had visions of the police,
the assize court, and the prison" (Zola 374). The clerk's
passing thought and the daughter's fear are significant in
underscoring the way in which the apparatus of surveillance
and control has been integral to the shopping experience from
its beginnings. Indeed, body searches and sworn confessions
are always potentially a part of the shopping experience,
even at the Ladies' Paradise. With this depiction of
shoplifting and its consequences, Zola foregrounds the
relation between consumer culture and the panoptic gaze that
surveys and controls. The consumerist network of desires
that Zola celebrates proves to be a veritable "trap" for
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77
women (374). Consumer culture is structured as a tension
between desire and fear, between the gaze of women looking at
coveted material objects and the surveying look of security
devices designed to monitor that gaze.
The subject of shoplifting: Shopping, feminism, and paranoia
In an essay entitled "Things To Do with Shopping
Centres," Meaghan Morris suggests that "like effective
shopping, feminist criticism includes moments of sharpened
focus, narrowed gaze— of sceptical, if not paranoid,
assessment" (197). This comparison is striking in the way it
brings together feminist criticism and shopping. Yet what
characterizes both, Morris is arguing, is a critical, even
paranoid stance with regard to the object under
consideration. This image of "paranoid assessment" as a
response to consumer culture— an extremely suggestive image—
raises at least two questions.
First, might the characteristics attributed by Morris to
the shopper not also be those more commonly associated with
other cultural figures, such as, for instance, women afraid
of rape or attack? The quick appraisal and the hurried
glance are in fact behaviors that also characterize women who
walk alone late at night or in deserted areas, who in so
doing risk the worst the city can offer— assault. Indeed,
paranoia seems to be a justifiable response to the city,
among men as well as women. Because of the perceived threat
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78
of the street, Bauman writes, vigilance in the city is
common: "[Being on the street] is, mostly, about passing
from here to there, as fast as one can manage, preferably
without stopping, better still without looking around ..."
(148). Those who do not consider the city with such
paranoia, Bauman suggests, cure those whose very livelihood
thrives on the paranoia of others, that is, in a culture of
exchange based on mutual fear and distrust: "[T]hose still on
the pavement are waiters and sellers at best, but more often
dangerous people pure and simple: layabouts, beggars,
homeless conscience-soilers, drug pushers, pickpockets,
muggers, child molesters and rapists waiting for the prey"
(148).
Such a vision of urban existence is also conjured up by
Friedberg in her description of the "dystopic aspects of
urban flanerie" (110), particularly homelessness.
As homelessness becomes an increasingly
visible consequence of the economies of
obsolescence, the fluid subjectivity of the
flaneur takes on a direct, if deplorable,
implication. The all-too-familiar /street
person' with shopping cart conducts a dire
parody of a consumer culture gone awry. As a
grim reminder of the excessive valuation of
the perceptual mode of shopping-flanerie, the
flaneuse as 'bag lady' can stroll the 'aisles'
of a derelict urbanity, where shopping can be
done without money, the 'shelves' stocked with
refuse and recyclable debris. (110)
Here the person who can "afford" to be a flaneur is the woman
with nothing to lose; her paranoia results in the scavenging
that keeps her alive. The bag lady— a disenfranchised woman
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79
who steals as a way to provide basic sustenance for herself—
is unquestionably a reminder of the despair and desperation
of the city and a figure to which we will return. Here,
however, I am interested in middle-class female shoplifters
who steal as a way to attest to other, less tangible forms of
impoverishment, which are no less devastating for being less
readily apparent.
The second question raised by Morris's comparison of
feminist criticism and shopping is this: What is specifically
feminist about paranoia— or, for that matter, about cxitical
evaluation? What is that "sharpened focus, narrowed gaze— of
sceptical, if not paranoid assessment"? Of what does it
consist, and what does it signify? In what way is it
uniquely connected with femininity and, moreover, feminism?
Here feminism seems to embrace not just the critical glance
but also the refusal and rejection that may well follow from
it. Morris herself begins to formulate a response to these
questions by writing that a lack of this critical stance does
not obviate the underlying dissatisfaction that it seems to
conceal: "[Ambivalence] does not eliminate the moment: of
everyday discontent— of anger, frustration, sorrow,
irritation, hatred, boredom, fatigue."
Feminism is minimally a movement of discontent
with 'the everyday' and with the wide-eyed
definitions of the everyday as 'the way things
are.' While feminism too may proceed by
'staring hard at the realities of the
contemporary world we all inhabit' . . .,
feminism also allows the possibility of
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80
rejecting what we see and refusing to take it
as 'given.' (Morris 197)
Here Morris brilliantly connects the modes of looking that
have traditionally served to disempower women— the networks
of the gaze deployed in and by the department store, for
instance— with the very critical scrutiny that is so often
the project and the practice of feminist inquiry. This
chapter will go on to suggest that there is indeed something
very feminist about the shoppers' gaze, especially when that
look mobilizes the critical regard of the shoplifter,
particularly in what Kathryn Harrison calls the "practiced
glide of trained eyes" (Thicker 77).
La voleuse/the woman in flight:
The paranoid shoplifter as paradigmatic urban subject
As we have seen, this new model of urban inhabitant, the
paranoid shoplifter, relies on a strategy that includes quick
evaluation of one's surroundings and a stealth approach to
the spaces of consumption. Like loiterers, browsers,
scavengers, and barterers, shoplifters usefully supplement
and illustrate the suggestiveness of Morris's allusion to the
paranoid shopper, with her assaultive, possessive, ultimately
selfish stance toward the hostilities of the urban space.
The instant decisiveness, hurried gait, backward glance, and
paranoid evaluation of the shoplifter replaces outmoded urban
practices. The shoplifter is thus a new model of female
flanerie, of the desire alternately to be seen and not seen
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81
within a simultaneously seductive and hostile urban realm.
Because of the shoplifter's uniquely fraught and yet
potentially empowered position within the context of the
city, she is emblematic of postmodern urban culture.
Writing about the relationship of paranoia and
postmodernism, Linda Fisher defines what she, following David
Shapiro, calls "the paranoid style."2
[It is] distinguished by an intensely
perceptive but narrowly focused attention,
directed toward the probing of the apparent
and overt, considered to be a deceptive
camouflaging of 'what is really going on,' and
which is countermanded by the rooting out of
the latent, disguised, or hidden agenda.
(107)
Citing Shapiro, Fisher clarifies the source of anxiety in the
paranoid, which is not "the fear of some danger or personal
harm, but the fear of being subjected to external control"
(107). In other words, Fisher continues, paranoid behavior
derives from "a fragile sense of self," such that the
paranoiac's "energies are concentrated . . . in protecting
this fragile autonomy by assuming control in a twofold
manner: seeking out and uncovering these perceived threats
while constantly affirming their own position" (108).
The shoplifter takes traditional consumerist behaviors
and pushes to the extreme the dichotomy she embodies. That
is, the shoplifter both submits to the consumerist imperative
to acquire and resists it with her refusal to pay and thus
fulfill the consumer transaction. The shoplifter invokes and
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82
thrives upon the seductions of commodity culture and yet
shuns the transactions that are its foundation. Because of
this, she acquires a sensibility of fear, which exceeds the
apparatus of surveillance arrayed against her, however
formidable such an apparatus might be. Taking to an extreme
the paranoia and speculation associated with shopping, the
shoplifter displays a demeanor that is a new emblem for a
not-so-new way of being: caught in a frightening web of
consumer culture, desiring the goods but fearing and
flaunting the apparatus that provides them. In some
instances, the metaphor of a web becomes literalized, as for
example in Mike Davis's characterization of a South Central
mall, which he likens to the panopticon, the edifice Foucault
theorizes as both concealing and making possible a surveying
and controlling gaze. Faced then with ubiquitous visual
powers ranged against her but invisible to her, the
shoplifter responds with wiliness, relying on extreme, clever
measures to deploy for her own ends the paranoia that ensues.
One such measure is that of flight, since the woman who
steals must continually fear and elude the forces that might
apprehend her, and so she must constantly consider the
possibilities for escape and hiding. We have seen how the
connection between flight and theft is theorized by Cixous
and Hermann. Indeed, the shoplifter is one in a succession
of fugitive women who have both inhabited and symbolized the
modem city. Indeed, the myth of the fugitive female was
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83
part of the urban landscape even at its beginnings, as
represented by Baudelaire and his contemporaries, according
to Rachel Bowlby, who has written extensively on women,
modernity, and consumer culture. In an essay about Virginia
Woolf entitled "Walking, women and writing," Bowlby comments
on the idealized "passante" in Baudelaire's famous poem "A
une passante" (32). Her "Fugitive beauty," Bowlby suggests,
poses a problem for her supposedly detached admirer.
One flash . . . then night! Fugitive beauty
Whose look made me suddenly reborn.
Will I see you no more but in eternity?
Elsewhere, very far from here! too late! never
perhaps!
For I know not where you are fleeing, you know
not where I am going. . . .(Baudelaire,
qtd in Bowlby 32)
Bowlby acknowledges that the appearance of the passante is
fleeting not so much because she passes by but rather because
the flaneur does (11). By contrast, in the late 20th
century, according to Morris and Friedberg, it is the
passante whose appearance is ephemeral. She guards her
anonymity while flirting with the possibility of being
identified and, consequently, apprehended.
This tension between the desire to be caught and the
fear of being caught are evident in Kathryn Harrison's
Exposure, which, as we have already seen, centers on a female
shoplifter. The novel's protagonist, Ann, is terrified of
being caught shoplifting. Although she has a flawless
memory, fear heightens her awareness of the stores she visits
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84
in order to steal: "She can recreate in her mind any store's
floor planr knows just where every comer and corridor and
display case lies. She can lift something and outwit the
detectives as she swiftly navigates the maze of the store"
(15). Above all, she doesn't want to get caught. The idea
of discovery is frightening and distressing.
Ann's furtive behavior contrasts with her blas6 attitude
in the face of authorities who seek to intervene and disrupt
her activities. She flirts constantly with the idea of
discovery: she notices that there are mirrors everywhere in
the stores— and it is unclear whether they serve the thief or
the store better (16?). As the book progresses, Ann takes
longer and longer to exit the store after stealing a piece of
merchandise. In one scene, she stops to sample some perfume
on her way out the store, though she's carrying a stolen
piece of clothing, and though she's aware that the longer she
takes to leave the store, the greater the risk of being
caught. For Ann, the entire point of shoplifting lies in its
furtiveness, and when she discovers that her stealth and
paranoia have been for nought— her husband and the stores
have known about her stealing for quite some time, and he has
been paying them behind her back— she completely falls apart.
It is, in a sense, the paranoiac's worst nightmare: people
really are looking strangely at her, wondering about her,
following her. With this development, the notion of paranoia
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85
is strangely evacuated of all meaning. Ann is afraid
precisely because she should be.
Shoplifting in A Question of Silence
Yet another representation of shoplifting takes this
tension between desire and fear and explores fully the
possibilities of opposition to hostile consumer spaces. In
the 1984 Dutch movie A Question of Silence, three women who
are strangers to one another tacitly conspire to kill a male
shopkeeper and in so doing disrupt the power relations
embedded in the space of the store, which is a microcosm of
patriarchal capitalism. First, a near-catatonic housewife,
Christine, removes a skirt from a hanger and begins to put it
in her bag. When confronted by the shopkeeper, she refuses
to back down. Soon two other shoppers in the store, Annie
and Andrea, also begin to remove clothes from the rack, as if
in alliance with Christine. Before long, the three women
attack the shopkeeper. They use the store's very fixtures of
display, including shattered glass shelves, a broken plastic
hanger, and the base of a mannequin to cut and beat him to
death, turning the instruments of the store against its owner
and symbolic representative. The women's crime is revealed
through a series of flashbacks as the narrative of the movie
follows the investigation of a court-appointed female
psychiatrist, Janine van der Bos, into the question of the
three women's sanity. As the investigation proceeds, it
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86
becomes clear to Janine that the women are quite sane indeed.
At the end of the movie, however, when the presiding judge
insists that Janine declare the women insane, she responds
with laughter, as do the defendants themselves and the silent
witnesses to the crime who have also shown up in court.
A Question of Silence is typically discussed within the
context of feminist legal studies, since it demonstrates the
misogyny endemic to legal-judicial systems as well as of the
oppression women encounter normally. Other critics, notably
Geetha Ramanathan in "Murder as Speech: Narrative
Subjectivity in Marleen Gorris' A Question of Silence," have
concentrated on the question of female desire. But nowhere
has the seemingly minor issue of the women's shoplifting been
addressed as essential to the development of the narrative
and to its ultimate project with respect to female
subjectivity. And in fact, on the surface, what sets the
women off does seem to be a minor incident. Writing about
the movie in her essay "Feminist or Tendentious," Mary C.
Gentile notes that "the immediate catalyst for the murder is
seemingly rather trivial: a shopkeeper catches Christine
shoplifting" (401). But the question of shoplifting— as a
practice of appropriation that is also an expression of rage-
-remains unanswered. And so these questions remain: For
instance, what does it matter that the murder is staged at
the scene of shoplifting? What do shoplifting, women's rage,
and murder have to do with one another? The crucial point
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87
here is that the women's rebellion takes place in a store, a
seemingly female-centered space. In the rest of this
chapter, I want to consider the shoplifting as a
transformative moment in this film, central to the narrative
that unfolds. Indeed, the connection between the women's
lives and the nature of the crime is arguably the movie's
primary focus. A Question of Silence, I will suggest, very
powerfully makes the case that the shoplifting and the
ensuing murder are the inevitable response to oppression.
Janine's effort to ascertain the three women's sanity
centers on her understanding of their lives, where the
women's capabilities, contributions, and intelligence go
unnoticed and unacknowledged. One woman, Annie, is a middle-
age gourmet cook who works as a diner waitress. Another,
Christine, is a much put-upon housewife and mother, not so
much abused by her husband as bullied and neglected. The
third, Andrea, is an executive secretary whose potential is
untapped and whose efforts are unrewarded. In fact, this
film suggests that the spaces of patriarchal culture outside
the store— the diner, the home, and the corporate conference
room— that the women find intolerable and that their crime
protests, are replicated in the spaces of commodity culture.
Moreover, the film shows that the women's actions within the
boutique are the result of oppression, in the home and in the
workplace, that has been suffered in silence. Indeed, as
Gentile suggests, the women's response has everything to do
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88
"with the gender-based oppression of women, the economic
servitude of women, and the silent isolation of women" (403).
A Question of Silence maps the personal register— here
represented by Christine's home life and Andrea's and Annie's
jobs, in which they, like Christine, serve as homemakers—
onto the public register. Underscoring the connection
between the store and the women's lives, Ramanathan stresses
the movie's attempts to map the language of desire onto the
social register, to show the connection between inner
subjectivity and urban, public collectivity. As Gorris
herself has suggested, A Question of Silence is one of her
"city movies," and it is not just a coincidence that the
urban space is here distilled in the boutique, a consumerist
domain that, we have seen, is uniquely associated with women
(Anderson). According to many urban theorists, this space
more than any other public space provides women greater
agency and subjectivity than do other areas of public space.
But in fact the consumerist domain represented by the
boutique has just been presented to women as their own
sphere. In reality, it is coextensive with the masculinist
world of the diner, the boardroom, and the traditional,
nuclear family. Consequently, the history of each woman in
the movie can be retold through the discourse of commerce—
the commerce of marriage, prostitution, and service. For
that reason, it is appropriate that their crime take place
within a commercial space where women's consumerist desires
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89
are encouraged, against a victim perceived to dominate that
space and indeed to control symbolically the entire consumer
apparatus it stands for. The women's radical intervention is
in fact a logical extension of the predominant modes of
exchange that encourage overconsumption and theft.
Marginalized in their own lives, therefore, the women in
A Question of Silence at least want to claim partial
ownership of a realm— consumerism— that has been represented
as theirs. Ramanathan notes that Andrea and Annie express
the "desire to own that space."
In a later courtroom sequence, the women laugh
contemptuously at the prosecuting attorney's
suggestion that the gender of the boutique
owner had been a matter of indifference. It
follows that Andrea and Annie would not have
followed suit if Christine had been a man, for
there would have been no room for them in that
particular play. In intertwining Andrea's and
Annie's desire to take over the space, born
out of their experience, and their tacit
acknowledgement that Christine is clearing the
space for them, the film gives expression to
the female imaginary as vested in the social.
(62)
This investment in the social, to paraphrase Ramanathan, is
inextricably bound to the spatial register, which here is
coextensive with commodity culture, historically women's most
significant involvement in the public sphere as well as the
site of their greatest degradation. By confronting the
commodity culture represented by the boutique, the women
confront the entire array of social and commercial forces
arrayed against them.
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90
In an essay on this movie entitled "A Jury of her
Peers," Linda Williams draws on Elaine Showalter's work to
suggest that there is no language to describe or articulate
the "wild" space these women occupy.
For only in this space could the women let out
the rage and defiance they did not even know
was in them, only in this space could
Christine channel her rage into action, and
only in this space could Annie and Andrea
identify with this rage, own it, and finally
share in its expression as well. (109)
In a way, this is a strategy for women who may have no other
choice or who have few other avenues for "acting out."
In other words, the shoplifting and the murder that both
follows it and is a logical extension of it— given that the
murder weapons are also the instruments of commerce— are a
response to and an articulation of the social and cultural
conditions of these women's everyday lives. The movie
suggests, moreover, that women generally do not have
alternatives to this type of response. Williams is mistaken,
however, in suggesting that it is the female-centeredness of
the boutique that allows the staging of the women's protest.
On the contrary, what prompts the women to protest their
oppression as women is the alienation the boutique stands for
while presenting that alienation as female empowerment.
The well-heeled, well-educated, and resourceful
investigating attorney, Janine, would seem an exception to
the trap women find themselves in, but from the start, the
movie places her in a complex relationship both to her
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91
husband and to the shoplifters. As an agent of the court she
functions as an intermediary between her husband's and the
legal system's patriarchal thinking and the social conditions
and emotional struggles that she comes to believe motivate
the women's killing and which she shares with them. Janine's
desire to "act out," though, would for the most part seem to
allow for a strategy different from that of the three
shoplifters; she seems to have the luxury of rebelling in a
seemingly more dignified manner, in the courtroom. However,
the court proves as unreceptive to her newly conceived
notions about women and their radical dissatisfaction with
their lives as have the various other male authority figures
in the movie. When she refuses to label the women insane,
Janine faces the derision of the court, which begins to
question her abilities to speak as an authority, and in the
process clarifies the exact nature of the shifting and uneasy
relationships among the various players in a legal drama.
The judge's refusal, finally, to hear her decision regarding
the defendants' sanity proves that women's voices, including
her own, are so circumscribed as to be nearly silent. The
only weapon against such silence, as the title suggests, is
the non-verbal language of laughter.
Women's traps and other panoptic devices
Like the countess in The Ladies' Paradise, the women in
A Question of Silence, Janine included, are caught in a web
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92
of desire and fear— desire for something other than the
oppression they experience and fear of the apparati that keep
that something else at a distance. For the countess in The
Ladies' Paradise, the store where she loves to shop, and
steal, is also a trap that will confront her in her "moments
of weakness" (373). Gorris too presents the store and the
judicial-legal system into which the women are inducted as
two parts in a single system. For instance, the surveillance
apparatus of the prison where the women are detained is
visually emphasized as Janine and her clients are forced to
walk past a series of guards and checkpoints. The corridors
are wide and sterile, and their bright lighting suggests that
nothing escapes the cameras which apparently monitor all
movement.
Such spaces replicate visually the space of the store
where the murder takes place, and for that matter the spaces
of every store where clothes are wired to an alarm system,
posted signs discourage shoplifters, and customers pass
through security gates as they leave. The movie not only
depicts the surveillance system of the department store as
coextensive with the more explicitly male-coded space of the
courtroom and the panopticon-like monitoring system of the
prison; it also suggests that the problems associated with
the legal-judicial system are linked to the more intimate
relations associated with domesticity. The three women come
to terms with patriarchal domesticity in different ways.
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93
Christine retreats into silence and radical negation. Andrea
uses sexual promiscuity as a weapon against men. And Annie
responds with Rabelaisian humor and bodily indulgences.
But the movie also strongly links these problems to
Janine's home life, as if to point out that despite the
powers invested in the system of law and order, there is not
much to distinguish the investigator from the criminal. The
film suggests that the shoplifting-murder is both a result
and a signifier of the oppressive home and work lives of the
three perpetrators. Janine even likens the women's crime to
the work of soldiers, and the dead shop owner, to a victim of
war— the lines are clearly drawn, and the casualties,
unfortunate losses necessarily incurred in the violent, all-
out struggle against injustice. But in investigating the
women's crime, Janine starts to think about her own
relationship to power and authority, specifically with
respect to her husband, which itself foregrounds the
continuum between the shoplifting-murder of the store owner
and the domestic relations such an action protests. In an
opening sequence, Janine seduces her husband, playfully
drawing a pen from his chin to his genitals in a slashing
motion. This gesture is repeated later in a flashback that
reveals one of the shoplifters cutting the shop owner with a
broken plastic hanger? and the connection is further
emphasized in a reference back to the scene of Janine's
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94
seduction, when the medical examiner later observes that the
man's genitals were unrecognizable.
This moment itself nicely presages a later scene, when
Janine rebuffs her husband's advances, as if to suggest that
his genitals are now unrecognizable, at least in her view.
In what is arguably the climax of the movie, Janine's husband
tries to seduce her, and the film shows her experiencing it
as a nightmare, intercutting it with her memories of the
murder in progress (which can only be imaginary, or
fantasmatic, or evidence of a shared consciousness with the
defendants) and of her husband's assertion that the defense,
for whom she is working, rarely influences a verdict. It is
her worst nightmare, one in which her bond with her husband
is inseparable from the three women's relationship to the
now-dead shop owner. The women's lives are inextricably
linked to her own, and in attesting to their sanity, their
crime becomes hers, in her eyes, in the eyes of her husband,
and in the eyes of the court. Her memories and her
nightmarish fantasy are indistinguishable, both encompassing
an event she never saw but to which, the movie suggests, she
nonetheless bears witness every day.
The detective plot revised
Ramanathan writes that A Question of Silence borrows
from the detective plot in its structure, noting also that in
significant ways it departs from the conventions of the
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95
genre. Specifically, she suggests, the movie does not really
seem to be about the murder itself, which has already been
committed at the beginning of the movie. There are two ways,
according to Ramanathan, to consider the two elements of the
movie, the murders and the histories of the women's lives.
It is possible to consider that the women's stories and the
"visual renditions of their lives [are] interruptions," that
the murder is the center of the movie, and that, therefore,
one "reads their lives only in the interest of eking out a
motive for their act" (Ramanathan 67). On the other hand, it
is also possible to see the murder as the interruption that,
as Ramanathan suggests, "keeps the narrative in present time
and allows us to question our subject positions within the
narrative trajectory" (67). Ramanathan endorses the latter
view, but it seems not unreasonable to want to know why the
women do what they do.
This emphasis on motivation and agency go to the heart
of the detective plot, which Ramanathan writes, has here been
expanded to "bear the political pressures of the social
question of gender oppression" (63). Indeed, the generic
detective plot centers on the pursuit of a criminal, or
alleged criminal, after the work of identifying that criminal
is complete. In a sense, then, it relies on the criminal's
desire to elude capture, on the desire for defense against
the forces of law and order. The playing out of this desire
is pivotal in A Question of Silence. In one of its most
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96
shocking moments, Christine places an article of clothing in
her bag and, having thus attracted the displeased attention
of the shopkeeper, simply stares back at him in response. In
so doing, she turns the tables on the forces of authority
that the boutique would otherwise conceal, confronting his
power and remaining unafraid in the face of it.
In a way, this moment— this willful courting of
apprehension— is the most radical in the film. Caught by the
authority that requires her to pay for what she wants, rather
than simply seize it, Christina stares back at him and
refuses to acknowledge that authority. She not only puts the
garment back into her bag but she takes another from the rack
as well. She does not try to avoid being noticed; in fact,
she later seems indifferent to her arrest. Similarly, with
this display of female defiance, the movie stares back into
the face of a censorious movie viewer.
The three women in A Question of Silence, and eventually
Janine as well, seek to break up and rupture the powers
arrayed against them— the court, the conventions of
psychiatric investigation, their husbands and bosses. Like
the generic detective hero, the women must enact change in
the environment around them in order to bring about the
staging of their own identity. For them, it is of paramount
importance to disrupt commodity culture and their relation to
it. Through the shoplifting and the murder that follows, the
women are, as Ramanathan suggests, "rewriting their
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97
identities as women in a public space" (61). In contrast to
the generic detective plot, there is no mystery here, except
what Gorris sets up as the false question of the women's
sanity. Christine acknowledges the shoplifting crime she
commits, and the women have nothing to say about the murder.
Indeed, the real mystery here centers on the forces that
subtend and structure patriarchal capitalism, in particular
the commodity relations that give rise to a rage women
usually conceal all too well. By removing speculation about
the crime from the narrative, Gorris offers an alternative
vision of public space, one without the generic femme fatale,
who typically constitutes the "problem" of the plot and of
the city with which she is so closely linked. A Question of
Silence represents women's relation to the space around them
without relying on generic conventions that render them the
problem to be detected and solved.
Speech and silence
In "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," Mary Russo
writes about female performance and acting out as feminist
strategies of resistance to patriarchal demands and norms.
Although the models . . . change, there is a
way in which radical negation, silence,
withdrawal, and invisibility, and the bold
affirmation of feminine performance,
imposture, and masquerade (purity and danger)
have suggested cultural politics for women.
(Russo 213)
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98
Russo remembers her childhood admiration of the "cool,
silent, and cloistered St. Clare . . . and the lewd,
exuberantly parodistic Mae West" (213). Like Russo, A
Question of Silence gives voice both to St. Clare and to Mae
West for authenticating (at least) two modes of resistance:
retreat and performance. Ultimately, the movie successfully
thematizes the differences between these two modes even as it
reveals their mutual imbrication.
Both speech and silence play an important role in the
women's lives, as the flashbacks that explain the women's
everyday lives demonstrate. When the police come to arrest
her, Christine is smoking in her bathrobe, listening to talk
radio, catatonic. Her silence and seeming passivity contrast
with the hyperbolic nature of the talk show she's listening
to. The shoplifting-murder is almost her only utterance—
before it, with her husband, and afterward, in the
psychiatric unit, she can only listen to conversation in
which she is not permitted a part. Except for voicing
concern about her children, she is completely silent, in a
legitimate, even necessary form of protest. Annie is
subjected to the bantering harrassment of the men in the
diner where she works, who tell her that "all women know
about economics is to open their hands for cash and their
legs as a reward." And Andrea, the executive secretary, is
effectively silenced from speaking authoritatively at a
meeting, later transcribing the dictation of a boss whose
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99
command of the facts concerning his business, we learn, is
inferior to Andrea's.
With its allusion to those silences, the movie's title
itself foregrounds the problem of language and access to
culture. Indeed, the dramatic events of the movie are a
staging of what happens, according to Cixous, when what is
repressed emerges into the light of day: "When the
'repressed' of their culture . . . returns, it's an
explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with a
force never yet unleashed and equal to the most forbidding of
suppressions ..." (256). Here, women's rage is fully and
non-discursively articulated: "The cinematography and music
in the murder sequence contrive to present it as a moment of
bonding among women, an unleashing of energy, a bacchic
celebration of women's community" (Ramanathan 66). This
sense of release is to be expected, however, since it is a
moment of such resistance. Both Cixous and Ramanathan seem
to imbue this moment of resistance with the pleasures of
jouissance. Ramanathan, for instance, suggests that "the
violence is the initiation of women's desire and the
beginning of women's speech" (69). According to this view,
the murder is itself a speech act. "[H]aving been
articulated in a bond forged through violence," the language
the women speak is the language of murder— a premise,
Ramanathan concludes, that is the basis for the "film's
radical edge" (61, 60).
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100
Two ideas follow from the notion of the murder as speech
act. First, I would suggest, if murder is a sort of answer,
or response, then shoplifting is the question and the real
problem. The women's theft is, in a very concrete way, an
expression of frustration, rage, and desire. Second, the
shoplifting and the murder both can be understood as staging
not the initiation but rather the fulfillment of the women's
desire in that moment. That is, it seems that the
shoplifting-murder is for the women not just a moment of
speech initiating them into culture and discourse but rather
a performance, a moment of jouissance that signals refusal
itself as a form of pleasure.
To see the entire movie in this way— as an enactment of
pleasure that opposes the surveillance of patriarchal
capitalism— is far more threatening and radical than to
consider it an enactment of rage. Whereas Christine retreats
into silence, the others are outrageous in their refusal to
conform to expectations, laughing periodically throughout the
movie. With her crude jokes and straight-talking manner,
Annie embodies the camivalesque. Following the murder, she
returns home and consumes a gourmet, celebratory meal with a
good bottle of wine. As for Andrea, she is mistaken for a
prostitute as she walks on the street eating ice cream after
the murder. She decides to act the part, finishing the
session with laughter that is another form of refusal and an
assertion of her own performative role.3 To see A Question of
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101
Silence as staging female pleasure is to recognize its
limitless passion and its complete absence of guilt.
"A high-heeled army of Furies"
A friend once told me that, when faced with heckling men
on a crowded street during daylight, her response is to turn,
point at the offender's genitals, and laugh. In so doing,
she reverses the offensive behavior, placing the harasser on
notice and signaling both her refusal of and amusement at
what she claims not to understand but really understands all
too well. Such a solution is also offered at the end of A
Question of Silence. With its final outburst of laughter,
the movie offers an appealing way out of the sobering view of
gender relations it presents at the same time that the
political effectiveness of such a strategy must be
questioned.
For these three shoplifters, the murder of the
shopkeeper and the violation of his shop are, I have
suggested, a staging of spectacle, a performance of sorts, an
"ambivalent redeployment of taboos around the female body as
grotesque . . . and unruly when set loose in the public
sphere" (Russo 214). Janine asks one of the women whether
the women's crime could have been perpetrated against a
female shop owner and is told no. Indeed, this movie is
about the fraught terms dictating women's participation in
the economic realm, as the compromised nature of their
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102
respective careers suggests. The place of their greatest
power, the boutique, is also the site of their greatest
degradation. The women's response, unleashed within this
supposedly female-centered space, is violent and angry. The
spectacle of female anger extends to the courtroom, when at
the end of the film the three women and the psychiatrist
break into laughter. Eventually joining them are the other
women witnesses, who previously remained silent in a refusal
to testify against the three women. It is no mere
coincidence that the group of silent witnesses includes a
black woman, an older woman, and two very young women;
together, writes Ramanathan, they "specifically embody a
community of diverse women" (66). It is they, according to
dominant stereotypes of shoplifters, who would more likely
use theft as an act of rebellion. Instead, they attest to
the everyday degradations that the shoplifting protests.
Together these women present something of a spectacle— the
spectacle of solidarity among a diverse group of women whose
coalition stands as an alternative to the regime symbolized
by the court, the law, and the male-owned boutique— the
linked partners of capitalism and patriarchy.
In the end, the women are "very ordinary," as Janine
describes them. They are a "high-heeled army of Furies,"
women taking the law into their own hands to mete out a
form of justice unknown in the legal-judicial system and
feared by male bystanders.4 Their crime is an explosive
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103
but simple response to the difficulty of being women caught
within a system of exchange. Labelled insane by a web of
laws and restrictions that represses female desire, the
women nonetheless move from the radical negation of silence
to the laughter that echoes throughout the courtroom in the
movie's final scenes. This is indeed the return of the
repressed, the women scorning and yet finding amusement in
the judicial system that condemns them. With its
deployment of bitter violence and its ultimate failure to
change an oppressive system, the movie is a dystopian
feminist response. Yet like Gorris's later film, the
joyous Antonia's Line, A Quesrion of Silence is a vision of
utopian feminism, suggesting that women's unity across
ethnic and social divides can disrupt an otherwise seamless
system of male control, and in so doing right the
injustices of the world. The women's laughter at the end
of the film suggests as much: Ultimately, their shared
moment of pleasure recalls the laugh of the Medusa, about
whom Cixous writes, "You only have to look at the Medusa
straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's
beautiful and she's laughing" (255).
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104
Notes
1 This heading is, of course, a reference to Susan Buck-Morss's
seminal essay. See Buck-Morss.
2 Fisher's essay is part of a debate about paranoia and
postmodernism in the journal Philosophy and Literature initiated
by a landmark work about "paranoid neurotic styles," by David
Shapiro. See Shapiro, Fisher, and Bywater.
3 Another Gorris film, Broken Mirrors, from about the same time as
A Question of Silence, also centers on the lives of three prostitutes;
it is the other film that Gorris considers a city movie. Unfortunately,
however, it was impossible to locate this movie for consideration within
this dissertation.
4 Edith Hamilton writes about the Furies: "... and Earth,
enraged at the maltreatment of her other children, appealed to
[the Cyclopes and the Titans] to help her. Only one was bold
enough, the Titan Cronus. He lay in wait for his father and
wounded him terribly. The Giants, the fourth race of monsters,
sprang up from his blood. From this same blood, too, the Erinyes
(the Furies) were bora. Their office was to pursue and punish
sinners. They were called "those who walk in darkness," and they
were terrible of aspect, with writhing snakes for hair and eyes
that wept tears of blood. The other monsters were finally driven
from the earth, but not the Erinyes. As long as there was sin in
the world they could not be banished" (65). See Hamilton.
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Chapter three
Nomadism and narrative
The transient, teen vandal
in Joyce Carol Oates's Foxfire
Introduction
Recent post-colonial theory has addressed what Rosi
Braidotti, writing in Nomadic Subjects, calls "[i]n between
zones where all ties are suspended and time stretched to a
sort of continuous present. . . . No-(wo)man's lands" (18-
19). For Braidotti, these "in between zones," which she
distinguishes from the space of the city, constitute a
"pastoral, open, nomadic space in opposition to which the
sedentary powers of the city was erected" (27). In making
this distinction, Braidotti is less concerned with mapping a
particular space than with exploring, as the title of her
book suggests, a type of subjectivity associated with "oases
of nonbelonging, spaces of detachment" (27). In
foregrounding questions of subjectivity through an opposition
of " [metropolitan space versus nomadic trajectories" (27),
Braidotti invokes the figure of the flaneur as a contrast to
the figure of the nomad. In this chapter, however, I propose
the figure of the nomad as a model for women in urban space,
particularly in relation to a Joyce Carol Oates novel
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entitled Foxfire; Confessions of a Girl Gang. At first
glance, the novel, which is set in upstate New York during
the 1950s, seems to convey little of either desert or
metropolitan sensibilities. For that matter, the girls of
the book's title— poor girls from unhappy families who come
together in a gang called Foxfire— seem to bear little
resemblance to the dandies and whores of so many urban
narratives. And yet the novel contributes considerably to a
discussion of Braidotti's spaces of transit, with its account
of the transgressions through which Foxfire attempts to
reconfigure the spaces, and networks of power, within their
small town.
In suggesting the nomad as a new model of urban
subjectivity, I continue the effort, begun in the first two
chapters, to refocus current debates about urbanism in order
to privilege women's relationship to the city. One element
of this relationship, I argue, is the home. Narratives of
flanerie have historically stressed public spaces rather than
contend with the relationship between the home and the
street; after all, such narratives typically express,
following Baudelaire, "the hate of home" as well as "the
passion for roaming" (20), shunning the domestic despite an
ambivalence regarding the complexities of the nuclear family
and the home it inhabits. By contrast, the nomad is capable,
as it were, of pitching a tent anywhere. The nomad's new
relationship to home allows us to consider more profitably
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how young girls regard the domestic space during their
negotiations of the emotional minefield that is adolescence.
What cure their alternatives to the domestic space, and how do
such alternatives in turn affect their relationship to the
city?
As these questions imply, the emphasis here on
domesticity constitutes an important element in my effort to
reconfigure the discussion concerning women and urban space,
especially as the model of the nomad privileges female agency
and mobility within the city. Thus, the inventiveness that
marks the nomad's relation to home also characterizes other
nomadic practices and behaviors in the city. Indeed, in my
analysis of Foxfire, I argue that the girls' use of their
town's marginal spaces suggest the outlines of a new urban
subjectivity. One concern in this regard is the girls'
transgressive practices of appropriation and ownership,
through which women's particular relationship to commodity
culture— historically a defining characteristic of their
involvement in urban space— is radically altered, in yet
another of the nomad's challenges to received verites about
femininity and urbanity.
Finally, as critics of both narrative and urbanism have
made clear, the aimlessness and detachment of the flaneur
gave rise not just to peculiarly urban ways of seeing and
being but also, as a result, to new forms of narrative.
Similarly, the figure of the nomad gives rise to new
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108
narrative modes linked to nomadic subjectivity. Thus, after
considering Foxfire's transgressive uses of space, including
the home, and practices of appropriation and ownership, I
turn to examine the implications of nomadic "areas of transit
and passage" for discussions of narrative, including such
important composite elements as problems of individual memory
and collective history. With its subtitle, Confessions of a
Girl Gang, the book demands to be considered in light of
ongoing debates about the constitution of the self through
confession, and I argue that, in self-reflexively insisting
on the collective self, Oates's novel is a more than adequate
text with which to consider the broad concerns I have hinted
at here.
You can't go home again
Foxfire is at once a critique of commodity culture, a
fictional memoir, and a female coming-of-age story. In it,
the narrator, Maddy, recounts the history of a 1950s girl
gang, in which a small number of friends led by "Legs"
Sadovsky grows into a larger group as it takes on a series of
increasingly ambitious protests against the mores and social
codes of the girls' families, school, and town, a small
upstate New York community. The book centers on the girls'
coming together as a female gang that slowly becomes a sort
of alternative family, and on the various guerrilla actions
they take in struggling against what they perceive to be the
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social and economic injustices of their world. The novel
focuses especially on what is for women the historically
fraught relationship between the private spaces of the home
and the comparatively public spaces of the city. Foxfire's
version of a by-now conventional feminist emphasis on the
personal makes possible a new consideration of girls'
relation to home, which for the girls of Foxfire represents a
potentially individuated though not unproblematic space
within the lesser privacy of the city.
In attempting to foster a new understanding of the
relationship between private and public, home and streets,
Oates turns to the mall, a space that is both private and
public, and that has historically both invited women's
particular interest and entangled them problematically within
a complex network of exchange. The concern in Foxfire with
the connection between commodity culture and home is by no
means unique among Oates's work. To take two examples from
Oates' short stories, "Stalking" and "Year of Wonders," like
Foxfire, contrast consumer culture with a troubled,
emotionally vacuous domesticity. In "Stalking," for
instance, Gretchen travels through a mall, shoplifting
lipstick, vandalizing a bathroom, destroying clothes in a
dressing room, ruining a pair of new shoes, and avoiding her
mother, who is also shopping in the mall. She spots a
"display of 'winter homes'" that provides a more vivid.
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populous image of home than does the house she returns to at
the end of the story.
This one comes complete for only $5330:
'Package erected on your lot— year-round home
fiber glass insulation— beautiful rough-sawn
vertical B.C. cedar siding with deep simulated
shadow lines for a rugged exterior.' (178)
Gretchen sees this display just after catching a glimpse of
her mother: "She wanders around for a while, in and out of
Carmichael's, the Mall's big famous store, where she catches
sight of her mother on an escalator going up. Her mother
doesn't notice her" (178). Here Gretchen's detachment within
the space of the mall is echoed in her alienation from her
mother. Toward the end of the story, Gretchen returns to her
family's "big white colonial house," where "nobody seems to
be home. Her mother is probably still shopping, her father
is out of town for the weekend. The house empty" (179). All
alone, she drinks a Coke in the "family room" and watches a
show she's already seen. In the end, Gretchen's "home" is a
simulacrum of the domesticity that occupies the mall's empty
spaces; the family room without the family is filled with the
sounds of a TV rerun. The story brilliantly encapsulates an
adolescent girl's negotiation of the emotional minefield her
family represents. However, the allure by comparison of the
mall's consumerist fantasies— whose seeming compensation for
an inadequate domesticity is represented here quite
literally, in the display of winter homes for sale— Oates
shows to be just that: fantasies.
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Such are the apparent dangers of domesticity and
consumer culture alike. Yet it is Foxfire's leader, Legs,
who, in navigating the consumerist spaces of her small town
and thereby creating a new type of residence for her friends,
most compellingly demonstrates the problematic status of
home. At the beginning of the novel, Legs is living "near
the Canadian border where . . . she'd been sent ... to live
with her grandmother because the Sadovsky household had been
officially designated as 'unsuitable for a minor' " (10).
Legs hardly remembers her mother; the surrogate she selects
is a young woman who is her former stepmother, pregnant with
Legs's half-sister. Like Legs, the other girls in the novel
also lack the mythic '50s family life, or even just one sane,
stable, sober parent. Mothers and fathers who are abusive or
absent evoke a vision of family life that brings less
pleasure than pain. Maddy's mother is "too ailing and dosed-
up with drugs to know what was going on, or to care." Rita's
father is "inclined to melancholic binges of drinking and
sporadic acts of violence, most of them domestic, when things
troubled him" (26). In the book's most horrifying family
scene, a man pimps his own retarded sister.
Clearly a site of trouble and conflict, the family in
this work is best ignored if not avoided— even if they could
go home again, these girls wouldn't want to. Instead, they
both expose and exploit the dangers of the nuclear family in
a series of escapades and guerrilla actions that, as
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recounted by Maddy, together make up the novel. The girls'
most lucrative financial venture relies for success on its
recognition of the power relations embedded within the
nuclear family, which customarily depend upon the girls'
powerlessness. This con game, which the girls call
"hooking," requires one member of the gang, masquerading as a
young prostitute, to invite the advances of an older,
preferably well-heeled man. After the "bait" is secured, the
girl quickly becomes teary and remorseful; faced with a
seemingly confused and obviously underage girl, the would-be
john hands over money without even being asked. The fear and
embarrassment thus evoked in these men hinges on the girls'
seeming transformation from young but street-sawy workers
into innocent, bewildered— and underage— schoolgirls.
With this maneuver, the girls simultaneously foreground
and contest longstanding assumptions about women on the
streets, in particular the belief that unaccompanied females
in public at night are sexually available if they are not in
fact actually prostitutes. To make matters still more
complicated, however, Oates foregrounds the complex sexual
relations potentially at work within any family and
particularly its connection to the girls' activities in the
streets. Here the men targeted by the girls are typically
self-described "family men," easily old enough to be their
fathers; one has a "fatherly, avuncular look to him";
another, a "fatherly-bullying smile" (233, 241). Oates
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emphasizes the misrecognition that is seemingly at the base
of the men's desire and the girls' ambivalence about their
financial scheme. One duped man has "his big fingers coiled
and firm between [Maddy's]" when she is struck by his
resemblance to her father: "the absolutely mad absolutely
unacceptable thought flies through her brain. Daddy" (243).
When his fingers are "gripping her tight and snug and
fatherly," she's close enough to smell his breath, "smelling
of whiskey and something that's a deeper riper sweet, like
decay" (244). And when she leads the man into an alleyway,
Maddy's thoughts turn to her parents, her mother "who'd
hugged her fiercely once, kissed and kissed and kissed as if
to take her breath away, years ago, a mother and her very
small daughter, and no words. She's thinking of her father
. . ." (244). For Maddy, at least, it is not the concept of
prostitution that is unacceptable; rather, what startles and
offends her is its connection to her parents, which is
conjured up in the encounter with an older man whose aims are
completely and only sexual.
Representations of the family that emphasize its
networks of desire are part of Oates's critique and revision
of the family, and they have generated considerable
criticism. In an essay on incest and social transgression in
Oates's early work, however, Marilyn C. Wesley addresses such
criticism and explains the focus in Oates's work on sexual
relationships between daughters and fathers or father
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figures. "Generally," Wesley writes, "in Oates' works of
figurative incest the daughter achieves through her
relationship with a symbolic father an induction into
cultural systems of linguistic or artistic expression" (258).
In other words, Wesley suggests, symbolic transgression
facilitates the girl's entrance into the symbolic order. Yet
this initiation brings with it a certain loss, in particular
the female's immediate relation to her own experience and
sense of self (Silverman qtd in Wesley 260). For this
reason, Wesley explains, Oates's depictions of father-
daughter incest function as cultural critique, or "social
transgression," by underscoring the psychic sacrifice made as
the price of entry into the symbolic register. In this way,
Oates's preoccupation with incest "challenge[s] the very
foundation of the patriarchal structure by repeatedly
breaking the law that makes the family" (Wesley 261). For
this reason, it is not hard to see the girls' encounters with
the father surrogates they attract as transformative.
Indeed, the girls are attempting nothing less than a
reconfiguration of the home and family. By hooking, they are
able to pay the rent for the home that Legs leases and that
they come to inhabit. In this effort to establish a home for
Foxfire— and a place of refuge for others as well— much more
than a gang den is at stake. Here Legs, the leader in this
as in other enterprises, is really trying to reinvent the
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family, her family. By renting a home for Foxfire and
attempting to establish in it a community of girls and
women— a community hospitable to runaway abused women and
other needy women and girls— Legs is attempting something
more ambitious than just a gang den: she is really trying to
reinvent the family, her family.
In this rather utopian gesture, Oates suggests that the
family is best created out of friendships and other alliances
based on need and desire, an idea echoed by Braidotti, who
celebrates the idea of "being capable of recreating your home
everywhere" (16). And this home is for the most part not
limited to the gang, which provides space for runaway abused
women and other needy women and girls, though their rejection
of a black girl Legs befriends is a troubling exception to
the group's apparent inclusiveness. Other potential costs of
transforming patriarchal norms become increasingly evident
toward the end of the novel, as the girls kidnap a rich man—
another girl's father— and then watch their prank go bad.
The price of this failed kidnapping is the unity of the gang
itself, which subsequently falls apart. Such practical
obstacles aside, Legs recognizes the conceptual challenge
involved in re-creating the home. Thus, even as she
underscores the importance of home, she voices doubts about
the project's outcome: "Y'know, a home is the birthplace of
memory but I'm wondering is it too late for us, almost?
How're we gonna dig out the old memories and replace them
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with new?" (202). Such a question extends beyond the
particular circumstances of the gang to address the matter of
social change in general. As a result, the novel places the
family within a larger social context, the transformation of
which must precede any revisions on the smaller scale of the
home. Indeed, insofar as the book is a reflection on the
potential for radical change, it is deeply concerned about
not just the restructuring of individual families but also
the revision of such cultural and historical norms as those
governing women's relationship to urban space.
Material girls: Protesting commodity culture
One element of this social context is commodity culture.
Thus, even as the girls struggle with the possibilities and
failures of home, at the same time they endeavor to engage
the urban spaces that provide its counterpoint, particularly
through the consumerism that is historically women's link to
urbanity. Although the girls feel most "at home" on the
street, they also feel ambivalent toward their families, and
thus they make use of spaces that are both public and
private, appropriating consumerist idioms and forms—
shopping, browsing, and the like— and manipulating them for
their own purposes through techniques and practices that we
might call consumer hacking, including scavenging, looting,
plundering, foraging, fetishizing, shoplifting, and hooking.
In this way the girls acknowledge the importance of
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consumer ism and its fundamental impact in their lives—
especially as it provides a way for them to get out of the
home— yet in their manipulations of commodity culture, they
demonstrate a refusal to accept it on its own terms. Perhaps
most important, it is through their guerrilla anti
consumerism that they gain access to the streets, the public
spaces of their town.
There are several levels to the girls' protest of
consumer capitalism, which becomes both increasingly
ambitious and desperate as the novel progresses. In one
sense, the girls' protest constitutes a refusal of the terms
of capitalist exchange at its most basic, though in this
regard they are also motivated by a lack of ready funds, as
an episode involving Maddy and her "uncle" Wimpy makes clear.
At one point, Maddy notices a typewriter outside Uncle
Wimpy's men's shop, ready to be picked up as trash. She
tells the reader she'll use this "treasure" for recording the
history of Foxfire and of the book. The uncle is
duplicitous, though: having told her she might just take the
typewriter— after all, it is lying abandoned on the sidewalk
— he invites her into his secluded back office, where he says
she must pay for it. But away from the watchful eyes of
passersby, Uncle Wimpy feels free to express his willingness
to give Maddy the typewriter in exchange for her sexual
compliance. Uncle Wimpy is thus supposedly teaching Maddy
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that nothing is "free," that— one way or another— she must
pay for what she wants.
But the lesson she learns is a very different one
indeed. Maddy escapes his unwanted advances, and later
returns to the store. Uncle Wimpy lets her in, shutting the
blinds and door, "which makes two doors firmly shut against
the street" (74), and emphasizing yet again the potentially
treacherous nature of private, family space. Uncle Wimpy
delivers a basic lesson in capitalism, explaining that the
price of the typewriter Maddy wants has risen over the
weekend: "'That was Saturday," he tells her. "This is
Monday. Our kind of rapid-growth economy, prices steadily
rise. There's inflation. There's interest. A genuine
Underwood office-model typewriter, ten dollars is a bargain'"
(75).
When he finally tries to get Maddy to concede that she's
returned to the store to "bargain" with him, she signals her
friends. Foxfire responds with an attack in which they
expose Uncle Wimpy, demonstrating their resistance to his
desire.
[Maddy] tugs at the blind to release it so it
flies up to the ceiling, gives a cry and as
one the girls in the alley launch their attack
as planned: they have a board they're using as
a battering ram, within seconds the window is
broken, shards of glass go flying, it's an
explosion, it's festive, the girls of FOXFIRE
piling through the window like young dogs
eager for the kill. . . . (76)
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The girls' actions put Uncle Wimpy on notice, signaling a
refusal of the systems of inequality that empower him while
disempowering them. Catching Uncle Wimpy with his pants
down, the girls quite literally expose him: With the blind
raised and the window broken, the consequences of his
attempted molestation are now made not just visible but also
audible. Displaying Uncle Wimpy's predatory inclinations to
anyone who walks by, the girls simultaneously foreground the
inequalities embedded within systems of sexual difference
and— as his familial relationship to Maddy implies— within
the family.
There is yet another level to this protest, in that the
girls' attack also exposes the false premise of capitalism—
an inequality in the distribution of power and resources,
exacerbated in this instance by the disparity between Uncle
Wimpy's size, age, and presence and the girls' youth and
relative poverty. In a final act of defiance that both
confirms and interrogates the essential connection between
sexual difference and the capitalism through which that
difference is continually being ratified, Maddy drops a
fistful of change on Uncle Wimpy's beaten body, announcing
"Cash and carry" before departing from his store. With this
remark, Maddy evokes women's historical relationship to
capitalism in general and to consumer culture in particular,
a relationship that she and her friends have disrupted, if
only fleetingly. Maddy had quite literally been "shopping"
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on the street, a "mobile spectator herself" (Bowlby 23),
looking for what she might use and manipulating both the
street and the store for her own purposes.
The complexity of her position, however, is made clear
in the reversal of power Uncle Wimpy so easily, if
temporarily, enacts, as in his eyes Maddy is reduced to mere
merchandise herself. Making this connection even more
obvious. Uncle Wimpy determines to exchange his typewriter
for Maddy's sexual complicity, and he constructs the space in
which to do so by lowering the window blind that shields him
and his mistreatment of Maddy from the view of passers-by.
When the girls raise the blind, they expose his depravity,
making a spectacle of Uncle Wimpy's abjection and literally
putting him on display. Placing Uncle Wimpy in the shop
window like a piece of merchandise, the girls reverse the
terms of commodity culture according to which they are
typically viewed as objects and in so doing appropriate for
themselves a mobile visual power. Like the shoplifters in A
Question of Silence, the girls transform the space of the
store for their own ends.
Other incidents also confirm the girls' antipathy toward
consumerism, though as critiques of commodity culture they
lack the complexity with which the girls' response to Uncle
Wimpy is portrayed. One Halloween night, for instance,
Foxfire sprays anti-capitalist slogans on the buildings of
the small-town bank, jeweler, and furrier. In another "item"
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in the narrator's "history," the gang dons animal masks and
takes up placards to picket a pet store they believe abuses
its animals, eventually succeeding in shutting down the
business. Both protests demonstrate Foxfire's understanding
that modes of production and consumption have material
consequences, especially in the lives of impoverished girls
who see themselves as radically removed from the luxury these
places connote and provide.
Taking it to the streets: Female mobility and protest
In waging their protest against a variety of consumer
spaces, the girls are struggling to stake out a place for
themselves in the public areas of their small town, an effort
that is inextricable from their redefinition of the family.
The girls' claim to the spaces in their town that would seem
to provide an alternative to home is not achieved through the
explicitly mastering authority of the flaneur's encompassing
gaze. Indeed, familiar models of domesticity and urbanity
fail to account for the girls' uses of the town: the emphasis
here is neither on the grand boulevards, museums, and
department stores that are so frequently the privileged
spaces of urban theory, nor on the sequestered, domestic
spaces traditionally associated with femininity. Indeed, the
rejection of both— public spaces and private family spaces—
is made clear in Maddy's encounter with Uncle Wimpy.
Moreover, the nature of the girls' various protests also
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emphasizes their deep suspicion of the spaces typically
associated with consumerism and thus with femininity; the
girls' protests address not only consumerism per se but also
its historic connection to problems of female mobility and
agency within urban space.
Here, though, they demonstrate an understanding of that
connection even as they underscore the ways in which it works
to trap them. Thus Oates places many of the girls' actions
within the context of the public spaces that women negotiate,
but she reconfigures the power relations of the street and
adjacent spaces, with the result that the girls locate their
protests in such underutilized, untextualized spaces as
parking lots, hotel lobbies, alleys, stolen cars, store back
rooms, and bus stops. With acts that involve secret codes
and homemade tattoos, scavenged typewriters, cross-dressing
and arson, flight over rooftops, and other violent, criminal,
or merely pleasurably perverse acts, the girls carve out
spaces they can control yet which are marginal and
interstitial. These spaces are thus, paradoxically, spaces
that will always elude them, even as they are marked by the
eccentric gestures that attest to the girls' protests in and
against a territory dominated by this novel's men, who are
red-faced, drunken, lying, raping, cheating, and stealing
boors.
The girls' heightened awareness of the politics of
mobility and visibility is illustrated in the incident with
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Rita's math teacher Mr. Buttinger, who on several occasions
keeps her after class for supposed extra tutoring, sessions
during which instead he tries to fondle and otherwise harass
her. Faced yet again with an older man's predatoriness and
seeming lack of accountability, the girls devise a caper that
will not only expose Mr. Buttinger but also reconfigure
traditional gender imbalances as they are typically taught
and reinforced at school. To this end, the girls paint his
car with descriptions of his behavior: "I am nigger lips
Buttinger I'm a dirty old man mmmmmm girls!!! I teach math &
tickle tits I'm Butinger I eat pussy. . . . Foxfire revenge!
Foxfire revenge!" (49).1 Mr. Buttinger drives home, unaware
of what's written on the passenger side of his car. At least
as significant is the content of the words in contributing to
the teacher's humiliation when he finds he's been driving
around town with things being "said" about him to strsingers
without his knowledge.
As with their strategy for dealing with Uncle Wimpy,
here too the girls successfully mobilize the public space of
the street to oppose an enclosed, private space that works to
endanger them, in this case the classroom. To succeed in
this caper, the girls must understand Mr. Buttinger's
corporeal relation to the high school, the parking lot, and
his car— for instance, he walks to his car, then gets in and
drives away without seeing it from all sides. In choosing to
vandalize Mr. Buttinger's car, the girls undermine an
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historically masculine visual register— of the street in
general and cars and high-school parking lots in particular—
that privileges the driver invisibly ensconced within the
safety of his car, the city scape displayed before him- Once
Mr. Buttinger is no longer anonymous, his privileged status
as a driver-flaneur ceases. He wants nothing so much as to
"become invisible," yet "he's aware of being a spectacle"
(31). His position as an authority in the classroom is in
turn adversely affected: Because of what the caper reveals
about Mr. Buttinger's pedagogical methods, he is quickly
fired and thrust out of the community, never again employable
as a teacher (30-31).
In their acts of revenge against Uncle Wimpy and Mr.
Buttinger, the girls mark otherwise hostile public spaces
with their own presence, in ways that are fleeting but
powerful. Here the girls get to have it both ways: make
their statement about girlhood and the community where they
live, without getting caught and paying the price— at least
until later in the novel— and it is this that constitutes
their creativity. By raising questions not just about the
girls' political agency but also about the spaces in which
that agency might be tested, the novel foregrounds the
marginality currently drawing attention within certain kinds
of theoretical work, in particular the notion of certain
marginality as the site of radical possibility, an idea
endorsed within some post-colonial and postmodern theory.
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Rosi Braidotti, for instance, writes about her "special
affection for the places of transit that go with traveling:
stations and airport lounges, trams, shuttle buses, and
check-in areas. In between zones where all ties are
suspended and time stretched to a sort of continuous present"
(19). These are semi-public spaces, the type that in Foxfire
become markers in a cartography of revenge as the girls seek
to redress the ways in which both the street and the home
have proved treacherous.
Writing in another context about creative uses of public
space, Braidotti considers the work of Barbara Kruger, whose
art is frequently installed in public spaces like busy
intersections. According to Braidotti, Kruger and other
artists whose work occupies large public sites, including
Jenny Holzer and Martha Rosier, are "perfect examples of
postmodern, insightful, and non-nostalgic appropriators of
public spaces for creative and political purposes" (20).
Braidotti continues:
Public spaces as sites of creativity therefore
highlight a paradox: they are both loaded with
signification and profoundly anonymous; they
are spaces of detached transition but also
venues of inspiration, of visionary insight,
of great release of creativity. (20)
An important quality to this type of creativity, then, is its
transitoriness, its monumental but fleeting presence in the
cityscape.
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And yet we might profitably pursue this matter of
signification: Why and how is the occupation of urban space
important, for Foxfire, or for teenage girls in general? For
them, just to form and maintain a coalition is an important
statement of their collective interest. In fact, the most
important thing they do to public space is to occupy it
collectively, provoking interest, perhaps puzzlement, as if
they were themselves a feminist art installation. Just being
together, attesting to their capacity for friendship and
coalition building, is what proves most threatening. Yet
even as they affirm their bonds to one another privately,
they do so without declaring publicly the nature or extent of
those connections. Thus their bodies function prominently in
marking them as similar to one another and different from
everyone else.
This act alone seems to be a significant social protest,
a statement about girls' loyalties to one another and their
relationship to the world around them. Their bodies further
provide the foundation for identifying yet secret emblems,
such as their brightly colored scarves, their homemade
tattoos— historically the sign of collective allegiance among
groups designated as outsiders— and as the composite elements
of the shifting coalitions they form as they walk around
their campus, down the streets, and through their town.
. . . there was the sense you could almost
feel you could almost taste that people were
beginning to be aware of us, or of something
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127
new about us. For if we were observed in the
neighborhood or at school exchanging our
special glances or laughing together talking
together then growing quiet when an outsider
approached, and if it began to be observed
that we five were suddenly in each other's
company often where previously we hadn't been
or in unlikely combinations— Goldie and me for
instance, Lana and Rita— and if we wore our
scarves, or gold-stud earrings of an identical
kind, or behaved with a certain measure of
dignity and aloofness, then people began to
know or to suspect. . . . (45)
This description of the heightened awareness of others'
beginning "to know or to suspect" is similar in tone to the
language used about lesbians and secret societies generally
as well as about criminals in the detective genre. In
keeping with that tone, here the novel points to the threat
represented by any group that is at once a source of
fascination and a problem to be silenced and disavowed. A
collective walk down the street is for these girls an act of
real creativity that is, like Kruger's art, both "loaded with
signification and profoundly anonymous": Just to occupy the
spaces of their school and their town in a social group of
their own choosing is to make a significant statement about
themselves and their place in the neighborhood and the
community.
Indeed, the significance of the girls' endeavors as a
gang derives at least in large part from that very anonymity.
Despite their use of spectacle and performance, the girls as
a gang find what is perhaps their greatest power in their
invisibility, and it is interesting to note that the girls'
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most powerful protest is the least evident visibly. As an
anonymous group, they are mostly undetectable for what they
are, a gang. Rather, they function as pure signifier, a
public work of art that is nonetheless bereft of meaning,
since that meaning remains mostly undisclosed to passersby.
For Kruger, the importance of anonymity comes from a
Foucauldian understanding of power and its effects. In an
essay about Kruger's work, Kate Linker explains the logic
behind, as Braidotti puts it, Kruger's interest "in public
spaces, in areas of passing through ... in huge
intersections at the center of the metropolises of the
Western world" (19).
To Kruger, power is not localized in specific
institutions but is dispersed through a
multiplicity of sites, operating in the range
of discursive procedures that govern
sexuality, morality, the family, education,
and so on. Conceived in this manner, power
cannot be centralized; rather, it is diffuse,
decentralized, and, in consequence, anonymous:
it exists less as a 'body' than as a network
of relations unifying social apparatuses and
institutions. (Linker 27)
Such a formulation brings a certain pragmatism to bear on the
question of women and authorship: Kruger is said here to
accede to an influential understanding of power, and to
assert herself artistically within the constraints of that
formulation.
Yet the suggestion of anonymity in Linker's assessment
might also give us pause, since at the same time it links
"geographical dislocations" with femininity, going so far as
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to call such spaces "[n]o-(wo)man's lands" (Braidotti 18,
19). Braidotti makes a connection between femininity and
dislocation, "nonbelonging," and detachment that, though
somewhat enticing in its suggestion of radical possibility,
poses significant problems concerning women and girls,
visibility, power, and authority. That is, this celebration
of dislocation or, to use Braidotti's preferred term,
nomadism, at the very least implies that girls are at their
most powerful when they are least visible. This formulation
conforms all too well to traditional representations of urban
space, in which anonymity is problematically aligned with
gender divisions, according to which the urban inhabitant
claims the "pleasures of anonymity" that are the prerequisite
to his ability to "experience the city as a whole"
(Walkowitz, City 39, 16), and the female urbanite typically
remains the object of specular attention, mostly invisible as
an active subject.
Such is the dilemma confronted by the girls of Foxfire,
who seek to stake a claim to their town while at the same
time preserving their collectivity— who, unlike Mr.
Buttinger, want to be both invisible and spectacular. They
avoid this conflict between anonymity and signification
through their collective presence itself, which produces
confusion among the inhabitants of the town of Hammond, who
sense that something significant is happening in their midst
but seem mostly unable to explain it. The girls' collective
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130
presence, for instance, is crucial to the success of the
girls' action against a pet store they believe abuses its
animals. To protest Tyne Pets and Supplies, the girls picket
outside the store, with posters and drawings of suffering
animals and masks that— since the girls don them after
speaking to the pet store owners inside— preserve just the
fiction of anonymity: "And we put on Hallowe'en masks: Legs
has a crafty fox mask, Goldie has a snarling wolf mask, Lana
has a snooty cat mask, Rita has a panda mask, and Maddy,
naturally, has a puckish monkey mask" (92). Maddy, of
course, is also called Maddy-Monkey.
With her mask, Maddy closely resembles the Guerrilla
Girls, an activist group of women artists whose purpose and
tactics, as well as the idea of "wear[ing] gorilla masks to
focus on the issues rather than our personalities"
(Guerrilla, "Mission"), Oates borrows in Foxfire. The masks
subordinate each girl's individuality to the purposes of the
group— like the Guerrilla Girls, Foxfire implies, "We could
be anyone; we are everywhere" (Guerrilla, "Mission").2 And
the girls achieve the desired effect: The store owners are
disconcerted and alarmed about negative publicity. Despite
their threats, the girls assert their right to occupy the
street, telling them "they don't own the sidewalk. ..."
[W]e don't quit picketing, we've just begun,
chanting 'Justice for animals I Mercy for
animals!' and sometimes, daringly, under our
breaths, 'FOXFIRE REVENGE!' as people on the
street stare at us, gather around to stare and
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make inquires. It's amazing to us how much
attention we draw and how quickly, and it
seems too there's sympathy on our side. (92)
Their tactics are clearly designed to attract attention,
despite the girls' apparent surprise at the outcome of their
action. And they are successful, particularly in making
possible the girls' claim to the streets of their town.
Confessions: Writing history, writing the self?
What kind of space, then, is at stake in the girls'
collective public opposition to authority? Do women in fact
ever get control of the city? When women claim the city
spaces, do the changes they make simply revise and feminize
our notion of what a city is, or might be? Or do they in
some sense by definition alter that space and feminize it,
voiding it of its citiness? For Braidotti, the marginal
spaces we have been discussing assume a new identity:
"[A]reas of transit and passage become contemporary
equivalents of the desert" (20).
According to this formulation, the girls' conquest of
the city coincides with a symbolic transformation in which
city streets become non-urban. In a sense, then, the
creativity Braidotti envisions, and that is represented in
Foxfire, has the paradoxical effect of mythologizing the
city, rendering it a pastoral space seemingly as a result of
its new relation to creativity, "transit, and passage." Once
feminized according to this formulation, the city in
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Braidotti's work disturbingly acquires the characteristics of
the desert, that non-urban wild realm so often associated
with untamed femininity.
Such a project, however, is all too familiar. After
all, it doesn't seem so different from the feminization of
the New World wilderness evidenced in Hakluyt's determination
that Virginia "hath yet her maidenhead" or the desire for its
conquest, articulated in sexual images, that Nina Baym
describes. Indeed, according to Caren Kaplan, talk of
nomadism always amounts to a revision of colonialist
discourse. In her study Questions of Travel: Postmodern
Discourses of Displacement, Kaplan criticizes the figure of
the nomad for precisely this reason, citing Braidotti, among
others: "[She] proposes a 'new nomadism' in which ideas
function as 'ruses and mobile, specific strategies, which are
resistant to systematization' in order to develop 'multiple,
transverse ways of thinking women's becoming'" (91). The
attraction to such a system of thinking can be explained,
Kaplan writes, by "the emancipatory metaphor of nomadism, its
offer of a kind of cultural guerrilla warfare and the promise
of escape from the oppressive reproductive machinery of
capitalist nation-state formations."
In this sense, poststructuralist and
postmodern critics who have been searching for
alternatives to purely nationalist or
modernist critical strategies have embraced
enthusiastically the generalized figure of the
nomad as a symbol of hybridity, mobility, and
flux. . . . (Kaplan 92)
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Kaplan continues by focusing on the ways in which nomadology
proves to be a theoretical trap, relying as it does on
romanticized figures who are "always positioned in colonial
discourse as closer to nature, purer or simpler, and near to
vanishing" (90). If we consider that the girls' city in
Foxfire is always in danger of becoming a feminized, desert
like wild space, as a result of their newly empowered,
mobilized relation to it, we might ask a similar question
about the literary project that is arguably more central to
the novel: the writing of the self.
By focusing on the matter of history, and more
specifically on secrecy and disclosure, the novel points to
larger concerns about subjectivity and narrative, which have
important implications for the set of issues being addressed
in this essay. The point of Maddy's narrative, she explains,
is to correct "distortions and misunderstandings and outright
lies" (3). The tension between keeping and telling secrets,
or between imagining and remembering the past, self
consciously underlies the entire novel: It is encapsulated in
the admonition "Never never tell, Maddy-Monkey, they warned
me" and in Maddy's response: She's "telling," as she puts it,
"for who's to stop me?" (1). The text's awareness of its
status as historical record is first elaborated in the
incident with Uncle Wimpy, on whose typewriter Maddy records
the gang's "confessions," the history of Foxfire, through
which she and her friends, it is hoped, will be inscribed
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134
into written history and narrative. From the outset, this
self-consciousness emerges as a series of philosophical
tensions in the novel, tensions that, when untangled, may
point to new models of historical understanding and
contemporary subjectivity.
Confession, secrecy, and narrative
Foxfire is filled with references to such timeless
discourses as Christianity, war, and fairy tales, which are
absolutist, foundational, originary narratives and that the
narrator hopes to replace with her own, far more relativist
version. Yet their inclusion as much as suggests that it is
possible for Maddy to revise not just her own biography or
the specific discourse and history of girlhood but also more
generally the other histories that help construct them and
that they in turn construct. From the very first, Maddy
understands and accepts her responsibility as narrator, yet
she questions her ability as well as the legitimacy of the
historical project itself. In employing the confession as a
primary mode of historical authorship— after all, the book is
subtitled "Confessions of a Girl Gang"— the novel points to
its potential for empowerment as well as for self-deception.
And in staging such a consideration of these concerns, the
book brings to bear larger, somewhat old-fashioned questions
about truth, history, and the constitution of the self.
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135
Within the novel, for instance, the historical project is
always problematic.
Nowhere is it written that history must be made up only
of facts, and for Oates, memory is a rubbish heap to be
scavenged. "I'm looking through my old battered loose-leaf
notebook from those years," Maddy writes. "Wondering how to
begin."
Like when you know the long history of time,
going back to— the beginning?— but how's there
a beginning, exactly?— how can you say Now,
now we start, now we start clocks ticking?—
it's like that, so difficult. Because there
has got to be a beginning logically yet you
always ask yourself— O.K. but what came
before? (7)
As Maddy gets closer to adulthood and gains an adult's
increased sense of "ambiguity, irony, and self-doubt," the
more unclear are her memories.
Say there's a mirror you have trusted to give
you a solid unblemished surface reflecting the
world then suddenly it breaks and shatters
revealing a thousand new surfaces, miniature
angles of seeing that must have been there all
along in the mirror's bland face but you
hadn't known (179-180).
For Maddy, writing about her past and the gang's, history and
its capacity to bestow and guarantee identity become less and
less certain. She suggests that we forget more than we
learn: "We know a lot more at young ages than we remember
knowing, later. Some kind of particular amnesia must set in.
Some kind of reinvention of ourselves" (180).
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This forgetting, though, like reinventing, is part of
the historical project. "What is memory," she writes, "but
the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must
have History."
You must labor to invent History. Being
faithful to all that happens to you of
significance, recording days, dates, events,
names, sights not relying merely upon memory
which fades like a Polaroid print where you
see the memory fading before your eyes like
time itself retreating. (44)
And yet Foxfire is not only concerned with the notion of
history as an abstract ideal, nor with the notion of
"reinvention"— feminist or otherwise— as a merely theoretical
concept. Rather, whereas history is typically the record of
groups, nations, military encounters, and the like, in
Foxfire it is also the record of personal connectedness and
even of home, the domain of the individual subject.
In Foxfire, in other words, the notion of history is
narrowed to its most essential meaning, the story of the
self. Yet the self in question is both Maddy and the group
of friends of which she is such an important part. And just
as discussion of such concepts as history, memory, and
fantasy vacillates between the individual and collective
self, so too does the powerful concept of the confession. If
Maddy is the novel's narrator, what she must write is the
story not just of her maturation into adulthood but also of
an entire group's transformation, from slumber-party
girlfriends to political activists to radical outlaws. This
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metamorphosis is complicated by, at different times, each
individual girl's isolation from and assimilation into the
group.
This process of separating from and joining with others
might well be represented by the keeping and telling of
secrets. Maddy describes herself as the "sole person trusted
to cast what we did into words, into a permanent record for
us. Typed on a typewriter. . . . A secret document and yet
as it was hoped a 'historical' document in which Truth would
reside forever" (3). Thus the project of the history told in
this novel— like the girls' gang itself— depends on its
anonymity and yet paradoxically must also be fully
articulated— a tension that echoes the gang's important and
problematic sense of anonymity. The question we must ask
here parallels a question posed earlier; Whereas previously I
advanced the notion that the marginal spaces occupied by the
girls are actually the sign of a potential trap, here I want
to consider whether secrecy is the sign of a fuller self or a
surrender to established norms that silence the self.
Numerous critics have written about the rituals of
secrecy and disclosure that make up the confession, arguably
an important constitutive element in the creation of the
self. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality,
Foucault argues that rather than think of the confession as a
form of liberation we must recognize its imbrication in a
vast network of power relations. Writing about confessions,
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he suggests that it is a mistake to suppose that
"[c]onfession frees, but power reduces one to silence; [that]
truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an
original affinity with freedom" (60).
[0]ne has to have an inverted image of power
in order to believe that all these voices
which have spoken so long in our civilization
— repeating the formidable injunction to tell
what one is and what one does, what one
recollects and what one has forgotten, what
one is thinking and what one thinks he is not
thinking— are speaking to us of freedom.
(Foucault 60)
Self-conscious about its own status as confession, Foxfire is
deeply concerned with the potential for duplicity embedded in
the confession, the very mode that thinks it speaks the
truth.
Thus the very confessional nature of Maddy's effort—
meant to shore up a sense of truth and, it is implied,
empowerment— instead threatens to reinscribe the text, and
her, within the power relations they are putatively escaping.
According to such a view, it is possible to see Maddy's
confession not as an empowered autobiographical gesture but
rather as a naive complicity in Foucault's network of power
relations— relations constantly alluded to by Legs as the
mouthpiece of Father Theriault and his simplified Marxist
socialism. In this formulation, there is nothing at all
radical about the novel, which presents itself as speaking
truth to power but is in fact only its instrument. The
correction of lies and misrepresentations that Maddy hopes to
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139
achieve is thus nothing more than "a truth which the very
form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage"
(Foucault 59).
Before turning to untangle these questions with greater
thoroughness, it makes sense to consider what exactly is
being confessed in Foxfire. It seems clear to me that the
subject of the confession is not just Maddy and her clique
but also more generally an entire generation of her peers,
whose rage against "Them," the novel implies, makes possible
and even justifies an array of violent, criminal, and fairly
nasty acts. In fact, I would suggest that the confessing
subject here is the collective feminist subject, a bigger,
different sort of gang, looking back and narrating its
history. For Foucault, of course, such a gesture is always
already coopted, succumbing at once to invisible networks of
power that only seem to offer liberation. D.A. Miller, by
contrast, though thoroughly informed by Foucault's analysis,
has a somewhat different analysis of the effects of the
confessing subject. In the final essay in The Novel and the
Police, "Secret Subjects, Open Secrets," Miller asks,
[W]e might wonder what value can be put upon
an inneraess that is never recognized in
intersubjectivity. . . . [I]f the secret
subjective content is so well concealed, how
do we know it is there? How does the
concealing subject know it is there? What
could the content of a subjectivity that is
never substantiated possibly be? (204)
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Is it possible. Miller is asking, to correct lies and create
history in secrecy? Can history be history if it is secret?
If events are not narrativized, do they really exist, even in
fiction? One might think so: "Writing the self," Miller
argues, "would be consistently ruled by the paradoxical
proposition that the self is most itself at the moment when
its defining inwardness is most secret, most withheld from
writing. . . " (200).
The truest self-disclosure, in other words, is the one
that is silent. Secrecy therefore would seem to be the
ultimate weapon of resistance.
In a world where the explicit exposure of the
subject would manifest how thoroughly he has
been inscribed within a socially given
totality, secrecy would be the spiritual
exercise by which the subject is allowed to
conceive of himself as a resistance: a
friction in the smooth functioning of the
social order, a margin to which its far-
reaching discourse does not reach. Secrecy
would thus be the subjective practice in which
the oppositions of private/public,
inside/outside, subject/object are
established, and the sanctity of the first
term kept inviolate. (207)
Miller is suggesting here that what is at stake in the
maintenance of secrecy is the fiction of the resisting
subject, a fiction that allows the subject to believe in her
marginal, outsider status. This “fiction" underlies a great
deal of postmodern, feminist, and post-colonial theory, which
promises the possibility of a radical politics outside
hegemonic discourses.
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As if such a thing were really possible. This fantasy
of outsiderness is unfortunately always compromised: The
anonymity and secrecy presupposed in this text are not only
paradoxical and confusing but also particularly problematic
for the femininity that lies at the center of the novel.
Indeed, Foxfire seems to reinscribe traditional
understandings of women's relationship to culture, cities,
and the history that records them. In her introduction to
Nomadic Subjects, Braidotti outlines the notion of the
nomadic "figuration," one of many possible "politically
informed images that portray the complex interaction of
levels of subjectivity" (4).3 Braidotti's intent is to stress
the "critical consciousness that resists settling into
socially coded modes of thought and behavior" and a "practice
of the intervals, of the interfaces, and of the interstices"
(5,6).
For her this consciousness and practice is resolutely
non-urban, and the images with which she defines nomadic
writing reveal this premise.
The nomadic, polyglot writer despises
mainstream communication; the traffic jam of
meanings waiting for admission at the city
gates creates that form of pollution that goes
by the name of 'common sense.' Nomadic
writing longs instead for the desert: areas of
silence, in between the official cacophonies,
in a flirt with radical nonbelonging and
outs idednes s. (16)
Whereas Miller holds out silence and secrecy as the fantasy
of the would-be resisting subject, Braidotti imputes a real
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142
strategic value to the spaces of silence that characterize
nomadic writing. Yet I have already pointed to a critique of
Braidotti, and for other, specific reasons, her theory of the
nomadic writer seems flawed. Most important, it seems
problematic to begin envisioning and articulating a model of
subjectivity predicated on a radical refusal of the form of
communication, however fraught with problems that form of
communication may be. Equally troubling is the dismissal of
urbanism, which comes at a historical juncture when women are
emerging as important voices in new theories, practices, and
articulations of the city. I want to propose instead an
urbanism that takes account of "nonbelonging" and
"detachment," including its potential relevance for cities
and city subjects, without abandoning those public spaces to
which women and girls are just gaining access, and which
provide the site of their negotiations with culture.
Writing, the "space-off," and outer space:
Spatial knowledge and psychic liberation?
At the end of the novel, Maddy confirms what she has
suspected all along— that her hero (and the novel' s), Legs,
has remained a fugitive from justice following the kidnapping
charges that result from the girls' final, and unsuccessful,
moneymaking scheme.
The search for [Legs and her friend v .v . ] was
publicized for months, maybe went on for
years. There were hundreds of false leads and
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sightings but they were never found and for
all I know . . . they remain fugitives to this
day. (321)
In a way. Legs's flight is an attempt to literalize the
secrecy that surrounds her and her gang. In factr Legs's
flight from the law is a logical extension of her first
appearance in the novel, when Maddy likens her to "a blind
creature with an unfailing spatial memory" (11).
. . . she's been running and who's to stop
her? even to call out her name? as she's
running now, leaping and flying effortlessly
across the rooftops of the brownstone row
houses descending the street toward the
invisible river, she's a horse, a powerful
stallion all hooves, flying mane, tail . . .
and where there's a space between one roof and
the next she doesn't break her stride doesn't
hesitate simply tenses her long muscle-hard
legs knowing she isn't going to fall, leaping
from one side to the other . . . she's free.
. . . (10-11)
Legs's flight over rooftops is important, as it points to her
connection to the notion of home, even as her link to any
real home is theoretical rather actual, superseded by her
desire to move around in and through the city of which the
houses are a part.
It is Legs's later fugitive status, however, that
tellingly brings together the novel's themes of secrecy and
mobility: hiding from the law in a way that makes possible
and is made possible by her constant movement from place to
place. This mobility reflects not just the "basic
certainties of consciousness" associated with secrecy
(Foucault 60) but also their exteriorization in space.
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Indeed, the text equates physical lack of restriction— here
implied by Legs' s fugitive status— with freedom, suggesting
that running across rooftops at night is an indication of
spatial knowledge and psychic liberation, of freedom within a
space one understands and thus is capable of dominating.
Legs's flight from the law and her earlier flight over
rooftops are excellent examples of the way in which Foxfire
works to propose a model of female freedom, a model that
includes an existence on the margins and a confessional
account of that existence. With its focus on girlhood,
particularly a group of girls, the novel seems to offer a
progressive understanding of femininity and its empowered
relation to the spaces of the city and to History in general.
The end of the novel holds out the same tension between
insidemess and outsidemess in what seems to be an
alternative vision of female power. During a visit to an old
friend many years after the demise of the gang, Maddy sees a
photograph, taken years earlier, of "a figure distinctly
American, tall, slender, blond, male? female? wearing a shirt
and trousers, swept up in the mood of the crowd of raptly
listening angry spectators: Legs Sadovsky" (324). Legs's
gender indeterminacy here parallels her continued flight,
since in passing as androgynous she is constantly outside
herself. At least as significant is that Legs, "or someone
resembling her closely as a twin," is listening to Fidel
Castro at a rally in 1961, just after the Bay of Pigs. This
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link between Legs and Castro— a guerrilla who has maintained
his underdog status long after having accrued significant
power— points to the contradictions embedded in this
discussion about marginality and power.
Two images mitigate against this seemingly compromised
ending of this novel, however. One is the position of Legs
in the photograph Maddy sees, in which Legs is "far to one
side nearly out of the frame" (324)— precisely in the kind of
marginal space delineated by Braidotti. Legs is caught
between representation and non-representation— indeed,
perhaps the non-representable, a position of abstracted but
perhaps far more hardy radicalism. Finally, though, it is
Maddy who demonstrates the possibilities of nomadism, for she
has literally gone to the desert to live a life of isolation
at the Mt. Quincy Observatory, in New Mexico, where she
studies "photographs through a microscope. Not hazy
newspaper photographs but elaborately detailed solar
photographs . . ." (326). Here Maddy, at age 50, is linked
as clearly as Legs to the powers of motion and mobility, if
here only by way of a virtual mobility. Yet its comparative
abstraction makes Maddy's mobility no less powerful. It
seems to me that Oates is suggesting that the capacity to
reflect is what confers power. And the chief signifier or
instrument of that capacity is narrative, "undertaken now,"
Maddy says, "because I have the proper telescopic instrument
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for examining look-back time, that I hadn't had before"
(327).
Here again Oates links visual power with narrative
capability. This dual talent typically marks the flaneur, as
Rachel Bowlby notes in Still Crazy After All These Years, a
study of women, writing, and psychoanalysis. Bowlby
suggests, in fact, that a central characteristic of the
flaneur is that he is a writer.
The walker is a writer; and what he notes,
with his eyes and with his pen, is the woman.
This woman cornered by pen or eye does not, at
first sight, look like someone likely to take
herself for either a flaneur or a writer. If
she tried to flaner or to write, she might be
obliged to identify herself as a man, or at
least not to look like a woman. (8)
Not only is writing associated with masculine identity,
Bowlby suggests, but "the place of the walker as writer is
marked out from the start as a masculine identity which
locates women as part of the representation" (8).
At first glance, it seems as if Oates's novel attempts
something different. From the beginning of the novel, of
course, Maddy has been associated with writing: she is the
book's narrator, the owner of Uncle Wimpy's typewriter, the
seeker of truth and History. Yet if at times it seems as
though Oates is proffering a new model of female mobility, it
is not one in which city walking is connected with city
knowledge and thus with the capacity for narrative. Rather,
there is a way in which Oates elides the connection between
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147
city walking and city knowledge, on the one hand, and
narrative, on the other. We know this because ultimately
Maddy rejects even the minimal urbanity of her small town in
favor of an isolated desert mountain retreat, where "space"
refers not to a city's expanses but to the infinitely more
vast reaches of the Milky Way.
Sometimes I grow vertiginous, flying through
space and time; my skies are white skies,
photographic negatives, against which stars
are black specks, frozen in space, yet in
motion, as I move film back and forth, back
and forth, examining black dots, blurs smears
smudges, starry clouds, with an eye for
discovering (if without the power to avert)
impending catastrophes. . . . (Foxfire 326)
Thus rather than resolve or extend the notion of the female
urban inhabitant who narrates her existence, here Maddy turns
her back on the very context that makes possible the
questions being addressed in this essay. The collective
voice, which had seemed to offer an alternative to the
tr adit ional ly privileged voice of the individual flaneur-
writer's reflections, is silent at the end of the novel, as
the solitary, wondering figure in nature is offered as an
answer to the variety of urban problems and situations
detailed in the novel.
Most troubling, perhaps, is that Maddy turns her back on
writing: Clearly, the "proper telescopic instrument for look-
back time" isn't a salvaged typewriter; rather, it is simply
a matter of perspective, a technology of seeing unrelated to
actual optical aids. Throughout the novel, the matter of who
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148
is seen— and seen doing what— is related to power and
control, as with Uncle Wimpy and Mr. Buttinger. In the end,
power and control are associated with Maddy, who has the
ultimate visual authority, an authority that— like Bowlby's
flaneur— can discern, interpret, and convey meaning. We are
given to understand that the lyricism of the end of the novel
is connected with Maddy's newly acquired "look-back" skills,
which enable her to write these confessions. Yet for all her
telescopic knowledge, or indeed, perhaps because of it, Maddy
turns her focus away from the matters of her girlhood—
youthful indiscretions, it seems— and toward the truly
weighty matters of science, the real Truth before which
matters of the imagination— secrets, fantasy, memory, and
even narrative itself— must seem quite insignificant indeed.
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149
Notes
1 Professor Alice Gambrell noted the racial slur included in the
girls' graffitto; especially when considered with the girls' subsequent
rejection of Legs's black friend Marigold, it raises serious questions
about the price of the girls' solidarity.
2 Other parallels between i r<* and the Guerrilla Girls are
interesting, in particular the similarity between the title of the
Guerrilla Girls' first book— Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls— and
Foxfire's subtitle, particularly given the proximity of their dates of
publication. See Guerrilla Girls Staff, Confessions.
3 The image of "nomadic subjects" comes from the actual experience
of nomadic people, Braidotti acknowledges, an instrumentalization of
marginalized people's lives other critics have commented on.
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Part Two
Chapter four
Bag ladies and umbilical cords
Urban space and female confinement in Paul Auster' s In the
Country of Last Things and The Invention of Solitude
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Introduction
In contrast to the women discussed in section one, who
steal from stores what they don't really "need," female
scavengers, or "bag ladies," rummage through junk and trash,
appropriating for themselves the objects that others no
longer consider useful. As an urban type who, like the
shoplifter, also has a historic relationship to the city's
consumerist spaces, the bag lady usefully supplements the
model of urban subjectivity we have been developing. Living
on the street as a scavenger, constructing a life and a home
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151
by appropriating others' castoffs and discards, the figure of
the bag lady is particularly important in foregrounding the
relationship between domesticity and urbanity that runs
throughout literature of the city. In this chapter, I
theorize the figure of the bag lady as a new urban
subjectivity by examining the issue of homelessness and the
bag lady's response to it in two Paul Auster works, the novel
In the Country of Last Things and the memoir The Invention of
Solitude. I will argue that in his novel, Auster begins to
develop a new urban subjectivity but, when read against his
memoir, it becomes clear that he relies on conventional
understandings of the relationship of femininity to the
domestic-urban binarism.
The issue of home is important not just in Auster's work
but also in postmodern culture more generally. Many critics,
for instance, have written about the notion of home, and the
lack of home, as a peculiar problem in modernity. Issues of
nostalgia, exile, and displacement, too, have been linked to
modernity. And we have seen how the uncanny— literally, the
"unheimlich," the unhomely— uses a specifically domestic
vocabulary to articulate the tension in modernity between
familiarity and estrangement. Indeed, the ambivalence about
domesticity that is expressed in and by the uncanny has its
roots in the literature of modernity, in which a love for the
public spaces of the city combines with a deep anxiety about
home, an ambivalence embodied in the flaneur, who is blessed,
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152
Baudelaire wrote, "with a hatred of home and a passion for
roaming" (20). John Lechte summarizes the flaneur's
antipathy toward domesticity:
Walking in the city signified being away from
home— read: being away from the familiar and
being exposed to difference and the
unfamiliar. . . . Walter Benjamin, too, saw
in Baudelaire's flaneur the archetype of the
one who is not at home: 'The flaneur is still
on the threshold, of the city as of the
bourgeois class. Neither has yet engulfed
him; in neither is he at home.' (102)
The flaneur expresses this equivocation by expressing his
"hate of home" (Baudelaire 20) through his interiorization of
the street.
This ambivalence toward domesticity has developed into
the postmodern concern with homelessness. In fact, as Dean
MacCannell argues in Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist
Papers, homelessness can be considered a "materially and
symbolically essential" aspect of postmodernity (106).
Indeed, MacCannell suggests, the homeless are the repressed
other of the "postmodern community."
Wherever there is a fixation on surface
appearance, a rigorous thematization of
surface, there is also a deep repression, a
denial of feeling. The homeless are the soul
of postmodernity if it can be said to have a
true soul. (MacCannell 110)
Moreover, according to MacCannell, the question of
homelessness is really not so far removed from broader
cultural concern with the notion of home. In a sense, then,
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153
our concern with homelessness is merely the displacement of
our anxieties about home.
Before the emergence of the postmodern as a
social type, . . . the homeless were called
'drifters,' bums,' tramps,' and 'winos,' never
'homeless.' Now that these kinds of people
are beginning to have a certain symbolic
significance as 'homeless,' when one utters
the word, the point is that one is supposed to
be able to congratulate oneself for having a
home. (109)
That is, by focusing attention too avidly on homelessness, we
repress more fundamental, and more disturbing, anxieties
about what it means not to have a home, evidence of which can
be found in the writing about home that has proliferated of
late.1 For MacCannell, "in the postmodern community 'as a
whole,' the homeless represent lack. It is precisely this
crucial lack, this particular lack of a 'home, ' which is
generic to postmodernity" (111).
Have shopping cart, will travel: The bag lady as flaneuse
What MacCannell himself seems to repress in his brief
history of the word "homeless" is the term "bag lady,"
perhaps the signifier par excellence of homelessness today.
The bag lady is the homeless woman who patrols the streets,
scavenging for abandoned objects and appropriating for
herself what seems useful or desirable. With her bags and
cart, she relies on practices of ownership that are both like
and unlike the shopper's. As critics such as Anne Friedberg
have suggested, with their aimless observation of the spaces
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154
they traverse, bag ladies and shoppers both share some of the
flaneur's attributes (110).2 But the bag lady's mode of
inhabiting urban space as a home, as Friedberg suggests,
points to a cultural overinvestment in flanerie and thus
serves as a "grim reminder of the excessive valuation of the
perceptual mode of shopping-flanerie" (110). Indeed, the bag
lady is the impoverished, "dystopic" version of both the
shopper and the flaneur (Friedberg 110). Whereas the
shopper-flaneur at the mall browses through an idealized city
space, her homeless counterpart "stroll[s] the aisles of a
derelict urbanity, where," as Friedberg writes, "shopping can
be done without money, the shelves stocked with refuse and
recyclable debris." Thus, "[a]s homelessness becomes an
increasingly visible consequence of the economies of
obsolescence, the fluid subjectivity of the flaneur takes on
a direct, if deplorable, implication" (110). Clearly, the
economic and social disparities between homeless people and
their shopping counterparts are troubling. Among these
differences, however, the most important is that at the end
of the day, stores close and shoppers head home, whereas the
homeless both live and "shop" in the public spaces of the
street. For them, distinctions between home and the streets
have little meaning: they conflate the private spaces of home
and the public spaces of leisure, giving new meaning to the
notion of living above the store.
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These differences between the shopper and the bag lady
have been interpreted as a critique of consumer culture, a
counterpoint to the overinvestment in consumer culture that
typifies contemporary representations of the city, and "a
dire parody of a consumer culture gone awry" (Friedberg 110).
Because Friedberg's focus lies elsewhere, she devotes little
attention to exploring the subjective implications of this
parody; as a result, one is left to assume that the "fluid
subjectivity of the flaneur" characterizes the bag lady, too.
In her essay on flanerie, Susan Buck-Morss similarly links
the bag lady to a critique of commodity culture, arguing that
female scavengers have been "consumed by that capitalist
society which makes of Woman the prototypical consumer" and
that their "appearance, in rags and carrying their worldly
possessions in worn bags (from Bloomingdale's, perhaps), is
the grotesquely ironic gesture that they have just returned
from a shopping spree" (118).3 Like Friedberg, Buck-Morss
imputes a certain element of performance to the figure of the
bag lady. But if, as we have seen, the shoplifter and
especially the teen vandal share a love of theater, the bag
lady most certainly does not. Instead, her creativity lies
in simply finding the next meal and staying out of the rain.
At the same time, by combining the shoplifter's anti-
consumerist practices of appropriation and ownership with the
nomad's mobility, the bag lady forges a model of subjectivity
that resembles urban piracy.4
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156
A bus depot, a cardboard box— a home?
In Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things r almost
no one lives in a recognizable home, but the novel
deconstructs the notion of home to the extent that even
seemingly homeless people might be said to have a home— a
place to return to at the end of the day— even though that
place may be no more than an abandoned bus depot or a
cardboard box. Indeed, most of the inhabitants of Auster's
fictional city lack a home in any conventional sense of the
word. Set in a port city, probably New York, the novel
portrays complete social collapse,5 an urban space where
people "pour in from the country . . . dragging carts piled
high with their belongings, sputtering in with broken-down
cars, all of them hungry, all of the homeless" (7). The
protagonist, Anna Blume, comes to this city to look for her
brother, a journalist who has disappeared in the course of
investigating the city's decline. Although Anna never finds
him, she is unable to stop looking and unable to leave. The
novel is written in the form of an extended letter home, in
which Anna recounts her attempts to navigate an increasingly
chaotic, unstable, and dangerous urban environment, a city
critic Elisabeth Wesseling describes as an "anonymous
metropolis where continuously exacerbating scarcity,
impoverishment and homelessness create an almost
uninhabitable world and reduce daily life to a raw struggle
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157
for survival" (497). Indeed, the matter of finding shelter
is an especially urgent challenge for Anna, and she succeeds
by combining the perceptual strategies of the tourist and the
detective.
The bag lady as bricoleur
When Anna first arrives, she shares a small apartment
with a woman she meets, Isabel, and with Isabel's husband,
Ferdinand, only to lose it to a gang of thugs the day Isabel
dies. After that, she lives in a study carrel in a library;
and finally she finds a home in a splendid old mansion whose
very existence is an anachronism. But even when Anna seems
homeless, she always finds a place to stay temporarily. The
engine of the plot and of urban exploration alike, scavenging
provides Anna with a reason to leave the apartment she shares
with Isabel, her scavenging partner. Indeed, scavenging is
perhaps the only reason to leave the considerably safer space
of the home and venture into the streets.
A difficult and potentially dangerous activity,
scavenging involves scouring the streets for useful trash,
and Anna describes it as a "free-for-all, with constant
attacks and counter-attacks, a sense that anything can happen
to you at any time" (37). In the cityscape Auster portrays,
most people live by working either as garbage collectors or
as object hunters, each of which requires licensing and
specialized equipment, and neither of which brings in much
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158
money: "The garbage collector looks for waste; the object
hunter looks for salvage. He is in search of specific goods
and materials that can be used again" . . . (33). The
scavenger, or bag lady, "can never expect to find something
whole" or "totally used up" (36), Anna explains.
You hover somewhere in between, on the lookout
for things that still retain a semblance of
their original shape— even if their usefulness
is gone. . . . A piece of string, a bottle-
cap, an undamaged board from a bashed-in
crate— none of these things should be
neglected. (36)
The bag lady survives by collecting "odds and ends" as well
as unexpected things— "a collapsible telescope with one
cracked lens; a rubber Frankenstein mask; a bicycle wheel; a
Cyrillic typewriter missing only five keys and the space bar;
the passport of a man named Quinn" (36) .6
Through her scavenging, Anna comes to understand and
indeed construct the urban landscape, in a process critic Tim
Woods calls "making sense of the postmodern urban
environment," or, to borrow Jameson's term, "cognitive
mapping" (120). According to Woods, Anna is always
"negotiating various locales in the city, continuously
working to make sense of and articulate both place and event.
People are shown to be never simply fixed within a locale but
are active, space-producing bricoleurs" (Woods 110).
And scavenging is the practice of ownership associated
with the bag lady and the new urban subjectivity she
embodies. Scavenging involves new ways of experiencing urban
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159
space, darting around, light-footed, necessarily sensing and
fleeing from danger.
I scampered around in breathless surges,
dodging the dangerous byways and toll mounds,
careening fitfully from one street to another,
never failing to hope for some extraordinary
find around the next corner. It is an odd
thing . . . to be constantly looking down at
the ground, always searching for broken and
discarded things. (35)
Scavenging leads to a heightened awareness of the surrounding
city space and the difficulties associated with moving
through it.
In the novel, as in real life, urban mobility is
governed by an entire set of rules, which are here revised to
suit a new cityscape. Scavengers' ability to achieve
anonymity on the streets— a pose achieved almost nonchalantly
by the flaneur— is crucial; studied cautiousness is the mark
of the scavenger's urban savoir-faire. Mobility is thus
achieved through long practice and careful deliberation as
well as a total awareness of one's surroundings. Because of
the demands placed upon the scavenger's gaze, she or he must
move slowly and carefully, so as not to miss anything,
remembering, Auster writes, to "take only one step at a time.
Otherwise, falling is inevitable. . . . To collide with
someone can be fatal" (5). Thus, part of the scavenger's
attentiveness is ocular vigilance, among both men and women,
whose "eyes must be constantly open, looking up, looking
down, looking ahead, looking behind . . ." (5).
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This mode of traversing the city reverses the
traditional terms according to which women first achieved
access to the public thoroughfares of the street; whereas
once women were typically the object of the gaze, here Auster
suggests that they must now turn that gaze back onto the
spaces and people that surround them. Accordingly, Anna's
survival and Isabel's depends upon their empowered gaze and
acuteness of vision, in a formula that departs from the more
usual association of female visuality with a shopping gaze
typically depicted as frivolous. Instead, daily survival
depends upon on a willingness and ability to observe and
assimilate one's surroundings.
But even as scavengers focus complete attention on the
search for objects to sell, they must also appear emotionally
insulated from the urban spaces through which they travel.
We didn't do much talking in the streets.
. . . That was a danger Isabel warned me
against many times. Never think about
anything, she said. Just melt into the street
and pretend your body doesn't exist. No
musings; no sadness or happiness; no anything
but the street, all empty inside,
concentrating only on the next step you are
about to take. (57)
Men too are subject to these rules, since they are vulnerable
to much of the same danger in the street faced by women. In
fact, scavenging in many ways would seem to equalize or
neutralize gender differences usually so important to urban
space.
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161
Indeed, within this dreadfully fraught urban landscape,
men are often threatened by the city in ways usually
associated with women. For instance, Boris— the man who
helps support Anna and her friends at Woburn House by selling
off its antiques— navigates the streets very carefully.
. . . [H]e would improvise routes as we walked
along, always making certain to avoid the
crowds. He would take me through back alleys
and deserted paths, stepping neatly over the
gutted pavement, navigating the numerous
hazards and pitfalls, swerving now to his
left, now to his right, not once breaking the
rhythm of his step. (148)
Thus, whereas for many critics the concern to understand
urban danger and opportunity is particularly connected to an
analysis of sexual difference,7 for Auster danger and
opportunity appear to be less a matter of gender than of
street savvy most appropriate to a city experiencing drastic
social and economic decline. That is, equivocations about
women's safety in the street appear to be resolved in the way
men and women equally face danger as they negotiate the city
streets.
But if the city appears to be in some ways equally
threatening to men and women, as Boris's response seems to
suggest, it nonetheless also presents particular dangers to
female inhabitants. Thus, for a woman to be momentarily
unaware is to be potentially caught in a web of especially
troublesome circumstances. Such is the danger presented by
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162
the human "tollists," or toll takers, men who are often
rapists (2).
Men build these barricades whenever the
materials are at hand, and then they mount
them, with clubs, or rifles, or bricks, and
wait on their perches for people to pass by.
They are in control of the street. If you
want to get through, you must give the guards
whatever they demand. Sometimes it is money;
sometimes it is food; sometimes it is sex.
(6)
The price of women's mobility in the novel's city, then, is
often their sexual victimization at the hands of those who
control passage through the streets. Mobility is thus
related to the threat of the violation of the female body, a
literalization of the familiar connection between female
mobility and promiscuity. The tollists underscore the
traditional danger to women of their presence on the streets,
a danger often unseen and unacknowledged; the threat the
tollists represent emphasizes the gendered nature of urban
space— here a futurist space that is not more but less
hospitable to women's mobility. That Anna must downplay her
femininity— cutting her hair, wearing men's clothes— in order
to succeed as an object hunter merely emphasizes the dangers
faced by women in the streets.
Contained and confined— the space of the female body
With its portrayal of visually if not always physically
empowered women, Auster's novel seems to provide a new
response to a sexual-spheres tradition that places women at
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163
home and men in the streets. Critic Pascal Bruckner even
suggests in this regard that the novel reverses conventional
understandings of subjectivity and space. Yet Anna's
experience with Isabel's husband— which shows home to be at
least as fraught as the streets— complicates Bruckner's
facile judgment. We will return in chapter five to the
problem of the home as an explicit source of danger, but here
it is important to note that Anna's first home in the city
proves just as unsafe as the streets from which by definition
it should protect her: It is in this particular space that
Ferdinand tries to rape her. By underscoring the complex
nature of both subjectivity and urban space, Auster's novel—
which seemed to reverse conventional under standings of
subjectivity and space— actually thematizes an equivocation
between the home and the streets.
This ambivalence is most apparent in Auster's focus on
enclosed spaces like the one where Anna is almost raped. In
In the Country of Last Things, and particularly in his two-
part memoir The Invention of Solitude, Auster portrays
enclosed, even claustrophobic, spaces as potentially the most
liberating. Hence the notion of the life of the mind, which
in The Invention of Solitude is equated with "the infinite
possibilities of a limited space" (Solitude 89), signals the
ways in which a physically, spatially limited existence might
expand outward through the nomadic wanderings of a creative,
fertile mind. This insight of Auster's is developed through
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164
a "series of staggering paradoxes," which Bruckner describes
in an essay on The Invention of Solitude: "nomadism as a
means of cloistering oneself; introspection as a means of
escape" (28, 30). Indeed, as Woods notes, much of Auster's
work deals with "the actions of individuals within locked
rooms, isolated garrets, enclosed spaces, circumscribed
areas, and the effects of closure and openness on human
consciousness" (108). The second part of Auster's memoir,
"The Book of Memory," for example, is in a way an extended
meditation on the "life of the mind," in which Auster writes
about "Memory as a place, as a building, as a sequence of
columns, cornices, porticoes. The body inside the mind, as
if we were moving around in there, going from one place to
the next, and the sound of our footsteps as we walk, moving
from one place to the next" (82). Auster's interior space is
one that magically defies the limits of enclosure.
In an interview with Auster, Mark Irwin suggests that
his "characters vacillate from boxed-in extremes to
expansive, often vagrant wanderings" (111). Auster
acknowledges that his work "does shuttle between these two
extremes: confinement and vagabondage— open space and
hermetic space" (Irwin 111), but curiously, for Auster
"confinement" does not signal a cloistered, isolated,
enclosed state. Rather, he suggests, "there's a curious
paradox embedded in all this: when the characters in my books
axe most confined, they seem to be most free. And when they
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165
are free to wander, they are most lost and confused" (Irwin
111). Discussing contradictions like these, Bruckner
concludes that Auster "is able to reverse the language of
mobility and immobility, of the wanderer and the sedentary.
Through escape, we experience intimacy; through
confrontation, estrangement" (30). Similarly, Woods suggests
that the novel presents "the intersection of private and
public spaces, as [Anna's] urban experiences allow public
space to become the stage for private experiences, and
private spaces to be unfolded onto public spaces" (108-109).
What becomes apparent here, however, is that in this way
Auster undermines the vision of female mobility suggested by
the figure of the bag lady in In the Country of Last Things.
A is for Anne, Anna, Auster?
Flanerie, enclosure, and the uncanny
Despite his fascination with enclosed spaces and their
supposed potential for liberation, Auster simultaneously
celebrates those spaces in their association with femininity.
Referring to the character Nashe in his novel The Music of
Chance, Auster describes the pleasures of traversing
uncharted territory:
I think what excites me . . . is not the idea
of traveling to a destination that one has
picked out in advance— but thrashing out into
the unknown. In the way that Cabaza de Vaca
did, for example, the first white man to set
foot on this continent. (Irwin 112)
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166
In Auster's world, if both men and women enjoy the
paradoxical freedoms of confinement, it is only men who are
also free to wander— and in the process, to explore and
discover. Auster observes that both De Vaca and Nashe have
stories of "being lost, of immense wanderings, of never
knowing what's going to happen next" (Irwin 112). Like
Freud, whose wandering in Italy becomes part of his essay on
the uncanny, Auster also revels in the experience of losing
himself.
The plan of (Amsterdam] is circular (a series
of concentric circles, bisected by canals, a
cross-hatch of hundreds of tiny bridges, each
one connecting to another, and then another,
as though endlessly), and you cannot simply
' follow' a street as you can in other cities.
To get somewhere you have to know in advance
where you are going. A. did not, since he was
a stranger, and moreover found himself
curiously reluctant to consult a map. For
three days it rained, and for three days he
walked around in circles. (Solitude 85-86)
Like Freud, Auster gets lost in an unfamiliar town and
celebrates the freedom of movement he enjoys, a freedom that
far exceeds norms of female mobility. Indeed, the seemingly
ungendered experience of wandering aimlessly through a city
is not one enjoyed by Anna Blume, or by any other woman, for
that matter. Indeed, women mostly do not have access to the
pleasures of wandering described by A., the narrator of
Auster's memoir.
We walk down the street, turn at random down
another street, stop to admire the cornice of
a building, bend down to inspect a splotch of
tar on the pavement that reminds us of certain
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167
paintings we have admired, look at the faces
of the people who pass us on the street . . .
go into a cheap restaurant for lunch, walk
back outside and continue on our way. . . .
Sometimes it seems as though we are not going
anywhere as we walk through the city, that we
are only looking for a way to pass the time,
and that it is only our fatigue that tells us
where and when we should stop. (Solitude 121-
122)
Here Auster records the experience of flanerie, the casual
observation of urban randomness and variety, a pleasure
achieved only for the urban wanderer inoculated against the
dangers that accompany such observation.
Confinement in/as the female body
Urban writing and wandering are similar activities that,
we will see, are pleasures mostly associated with
masculinity. For Auster, urban wandering is "[j]ust like
writing, I suppose. . . . Every day, I set off on a journey
into the unknown and yet the whole time I'm just sitting
there in my room . . ." (112). The importance of this
contradictory understanding of space lies in its relation to
the art of writing, when a paradox like "the infinite
possibilities of a limited space" is most real for Auster.
In his memoir, Auster recounts his visit in Amsterdam to Anne
Frank's "secret annex . . . the room in which the diary was
written" (82). Anne Frank has much in common with Auster's
protagonist, besides the shared name "Anna"8: both write into
the void, from within deteriorating social conditions that
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168
force them into confinement as a way to preserve their
safety.
The memoir's narrator, A., also remembers other real,
historical, and fictional figures too in his paean to the
life of the mind, but the connection between confinement and
femininity is particularly strong. In fact, throughout "The
Book of Memory," Auster connects small, confined spaces to
women both real and imaginary, including Emily Dickinson,
Billie Holiday in "Solitude," Vermeer's women, a desperate
woman writing "into empty space" in 1938 Europe, and, of
course, Anne Frank.
To be sure, Auster also associates "cloistering" and
"introspection" as "a form of exile" (Bruckner 28) with
masculinity, through images that include Jonah in the belly
of the whale, Van Gogh in his room, and of course A. in his
small Varick Street apartment. But despite Auster's fantasy
of space undifferentiated by gender, and despite the ways in
which his memoir does show solitude to be equally accessible
to men and women, it nonetheless persists in linking
confinement and femininity, a connection that proves
especially important in In the Country of Last Things.
Throughout the novel, the advantages of keeping indoors are
considerable, and Anna writes at the end about how she hardly
ever leaves Woburn House: Having "lost the habit of the
streets now," she writes, "excursions have become a great
strain on me."
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169
It's a question of balance. . . . [W]henever
I have to walk more than fifty or a hundred
yards, I feel myself beginning to wobble.
Each time I take a step, I think I'm going to
fall down. (184-185)
Perhaps the most significant connection between confinement
and femininity in Auster's novel is in Anna's pregnancy, a
condition also known as her "confinement"— "[i]n French,
enceinte, 'walled in,' the enclosure by which maternity is
both valorized and made marginal" (Stewart x).
Pregnant women in general seem to fascinate Auster: on
the trip to the Amsterdam museum recounted in "The Book of
Memory," he pays particular attention to a painting by
Vermeer, a painting that illustrates the both the cultural
and physical connotations of the term "confinement."
He thinks, for example, of Vermeer's women,
alone in their rooms with the bright light of
the real world pouring through a window,
either open or closed, and the utter stillness
of those solitudes. . . . He thinks, in
particular, of a painting he saw on his trip
to Amsterdam, Woman in Blue. . . . As one
commentator has written: 'The letter, the map,
the woman's pregnancy, the empty chair, the
open box, the unseen window. . . .' (Solitude
140)
Like the woman in Vermeer's painting, Anna also becomes
pregnant. But Auster, unlike Vermeer, does not celebrate the
potential mobility and agency that accrue as a result of
being pregnant. Complications during the early part of
Anna's pregnancy— complications arising from the problem of
worn-out shoes during the onset of winter— threaten to
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170
curtail her mobility completely and make hers a very literal
confinement.
The ties that bind: Confinement and mobility
As befits a novel in which the city is fraught with
dangers that discourage all types of mobility, much is made
of the problem of Anna's shoes when, as winter approaches,
she learns she is pregnant. She succumbs to sickness
quickly, and the stakes in making her well again are
considerably higher, since, as she puts it, "If staying on
your feet is the single most important task, then imagine the
consequences of having less than adequate shoes" (24).
Desperate for adequate footwear, Anna is lured to a distant
building in order to procure the second in a pair of well-
made, almost-new shoes. Once there, she discovers that she
has been duped and led unwittingly into a human
slaughterhouse. To escape almost certain death, she throws
herself out a window, and when she finally regains
consciousness, it is clear that she has lost both the shoes
and her pregnancy and almost died.
The linking of pregnancy and death in this brief account
is neatly summed up during Anna's first encounter with Sam,
to whom she introduces herself by explaining her last name,
Blume, "as in womb and tomb" (101). Thus Auster firmly
resolves the tension between confinement and mobility through
the figure of a pregnant bag lady— or, perhaps, the mobilized
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171
female in confinement. This equivocation— between mobile
femininity and confined, pregnant femininity— is most vividly
conveyed by Auster's vision of the scavenger's apparatus:
Since the shopping carts used for transporting refuse are so
valuable, "[m]ost scavengers . . . invest in some kind of
tether device known as an 'umbilical cord'— meaning a rope,
or a dog leash, or a chain, which you literally tie around
your waist and then attach to the cart" (Country 33).
But just as a fetus at least in some sense has a
parasitical relationship to the pregnant woman, the cart too
impinges on the scavenger, because it "makes walking a
cumbersome business" (33). Like a shackled prisoner, the
scavenger cum pregnant woman rattles her chains as she walks,
making such a noise "as the cart goes bumping along the
street, that scavengers are often referred to as 'musicians'"
(33). One might thus consider Anna's survival in a
devastated cityscape a testimony to female mobility. Or,
alternatively, one might see the perils she faces as the
punishment that necessarily accompanies such mobility, in
which case it is no longer clear whether the greatest torment
a person might face is confinement in a single room or
"mobility" in an urban space so overwhelmingly chaotic and
frightening that one might long to return to a secluded
isolation. Such a dilemma becomes even more dramatic in its
similarity to Anne Frank's predicament. In her case, the
small space where she hides is finally replaced by the
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172
ultimate confinement— a confinement particularly linked to
femininity in its resemblance to what Freud describes as "the
place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the
beginning" (153)— the confinement that is death.
The space of the female body
The ideological effects of Anna's pregnancy extend
beyond the twin moments of conception and miscarriage,
perhaps because, in Auster's novel, "[c]hildren appear twice:
one a corpse and the other an unborn fetus. . . . Zero
Population Growth is at its zenith" (Washburn 64). Pregnancy
in any context carries the weight of signification.
According to Deborah D. Rogers, "[P]regnancy is a vehicle for
our profoundly ambivalent attitude towards female sexuality"
(83), an argument Lauren Berlant extends and complicates by
suggesting how pregnancy becomes a field on which competing
and contradictory assumptions about space, gender, and
identity are played out. In Auster's case, pregnancy becomes
a metaphor for the fertile mind of the artist.
Discussing his work, for example, Auster compares
writing and reproduction. Asked whether "fiction summons [a
certain] freedom through polyvocalness," Auster says, "Novel-
writing seems to be more generative for me. One book seems
to give birth to another" (Irwin 113). Bruckner emphasizes
this linking of writerly creation with the female capacity
for reproduction. He suggests that Auster's "penchant for
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173
narrow spaces . . . makes the room a kind of mental uterus,
site of a second birth. In this enclosure the subject gives
birth, in essence, to himself" (28). As Bruckner suggests,
Auster seems to imagine that he contains within himself the
generative capacities of a female. In a way, that is, Auster
sees himself as a pregnant woman.
The idea of a man masquerading as a pregnant woman
presents a range of problems. Here, though, I want to focus
on the site and space of the pregnant female body itself.
For Berlant, pregnancy itself contains within it a
specifically spatial equivocation: "To gain a space, or to be
one?" (Berlant 157). What seems very clear is that a
pregnant woman is not just a body; she also constitutes a
space, one that functions as a rich signifying field
concerning matters of cultural and national identity. The
private, reproducing body becomes a matter, a space, of
larger, more public, significance. Thus, this body contains
within it not just the potential for life but also the
capacity to generate signification— to generate narrative.
We have seen how for Auster pregnancy is associated with
narrative. Pregnancy, renewal, and rebirth are moreover
linked in his work with the expression of differences within
himself— as with the "two sides of a single thought," such as
freedom and confinement (Irwin 113)— differences of the type
narrative both relies on and articulates. These are in turn
a matter of spatial politics, not just because of the way in
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174
which any equivocation is somewhat spatial, in that it covers
the territory between two competing ideas, but also because
of the way Auster articulates such tension through the spaces
of the city and the women and men who inhabit it. Narrative,
like the city, must be capable of containing great contrasts.
In both urban space and in narrative, "[t]here can never be
any fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is
necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to
change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse" (Country 6).
Narrative must expose and then resolve apparent
contradictions, because the challenge of writing, like the
challenge of a hostile cityscape, demands such paradoxical
thinking.
Urban transformation and sexual difference in narrative
Auster's novel foregrounds just this problem of
narrative reliability. As Woods suggests, narrative is
"frequently described as something about which to be
suspicious, since truth and history are quickly muddled"
(118). This problem of narrative is in turn linked directly
to the instability of urban space. The way the city itself
is constantly shifting and changing causes a profound crisis
of knowledge as it "robs you of certainty": "A house is there
one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked
down yesterday is no longer there" (6, 1). Armed with her
missing brother's address, for example, Anna sets off to find
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175
him, sure of her ability to locate him, unaware that "the
street would be gone. It wasn't that the office was empty or
that the building had been abandoned. There was no building,
no street, no anything at alls nothing but stones and rubbish
for acres around" (18).
The effect of such urban chaos is cognitive dissonance.
As Bruckner suggests, there is a psychic upheaval in "what
the city does to you. It turns your thoughts inside out. It
makes you want to live, and at the same time it tries to take
your life away from you" (Country 2-3). The streets you
thought you were on yesterday are altered, so the entire day
is thrown into question:
It's not just that things vanish— but once
they vanish, the memory of them vanishes as
well. Dark areas form in the brain, and
unless you make a constant effort to summon up
the things that are gone, they will quickly be
lost to you forever. (87)
Loosed from its geographical moorings, memory itself is
thrown into question.
[I]t is easy to get confused, to be unsure
that you are really seeing the thing you think
you are looking at. It could be that you are
imagining it, or mixing it up with something
else, or remembering something you have seen
before— or perhaps even imagined before.
. . . (19)
In Auster's novel, not only is memory fleeting, it is also
incomplete: "I can't help it if there are gaps in my memory,"
writes Anna. "Certain events refuse to reappear, and no
matter how hard I struggle, I am powerless to unearth them"
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176
(125). For Auster, the problem of memory— the "great trap"
(38)— is in turn connected to the problem of truth.
It's not that people make a point of lying to
you, it's just that where the past is
concerned, the truth tends to get obscured
rather quickly. Legends crop up within a
matter of hours, tall tales circulate, and the
facts are soon buried under a mountain of
outlandish theories. (18)
In fact, the novel is deeply concerned with telling stories,
recording history, and defining and communicating the truth.
But in a novel where words themselves often cease to
have meaning, the very notion of narrative— here seen in
Anna's letter, Sam's transcribed interviews, the library, and
the ubiquitous newspapers— is infused with contradictions.9
Questions about urban narrative are underscored by the
ambiguous status of literacy and systems of knowledge in the
novel. For example, public institutions typically associated
with the Enlightenment and the rise of democracy, such as
newspapers and libraries, are useful here only insofar as
they help provide basic, subsistence needs such as food or
shelter. The library, for instance, is no longer available
for research.
It was debatable . . . whether the library was
actually a library anymore. The system of
classification had been thoroughly disrupted,
and with so many books out of order, it was
virtually impossible to find any volume you
might have wanted. When you consider that
there were seven floors of stacks, to say that
a book was in the wrong place was a much to
say that it had ceased to exist. (115)
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177
"Research" here is much like scavenging: both involve
gathering discarded objects in a random process with no
predictable outcome. Anna writes, for instance, "[M]ost of
my excursions into that place were simply to collect books at
random [to burn]. . . . The books were how we kept warm
during the winter" (115-116). And until the library burns
down, it provides shelter during the winter for Anna and her
lover, Sam. Matters of the intellect thus provide with life-
sustaining warmth and shelter: Life is narrative, and vice
versa, an equation that gives new meaning to the term "the
life of the mind."
Magic and masquerade
In the end, if narrative is a matter of differences, the
most profound such difference is the one that distinguishes
"real" from "unreal"— illusion, masquerade, and fantasy, and
other forms of artifice. When Sam turns up at Woburn House,
after being separated from Anna following her disastrous shoe
shopping trip, he is asked to take on the role of doctor. As
a journalist without training in science or medicine, Sam
relies on his caring and intelligence to become a "doctor"
whose specialty is the talking cure. The novel makes clear
that a lack of traditional learning poses no obstacle: Sam
"had a way of listening to them that made them want to talk,
and words came flooding from their mouths the moment he sat
down to be with them. . . ." (167) In this way, Sam becomes
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178
the therapist of desperate people who "unburden themselves"
through "the salutary effect of speaking words, of releasing
words that tell the story of what happened to them" (167-
168). Anna protests this new job, however, calling it "a
lie," but Woburn House's proprietor tells her it's simply "a
masquerade" (165).
Such distinctions are ultimately unimportant, however:
the unreal becomes real when the survivors of Woburn House
\
stake their lives on a set of chance encounters, stories, and
illusions. Woods suggests that "the disappearance of the
material realm destroys the realm of representations, and
this in turn destroys collective understanding and
comprehension" (121), but in fact it is only through
collective understanding in the most fundamental sense that
Anna and her friends are able to leave the city. Toward the
end of the novel, the Woburn House community plots to leave
the city, which has become uninhabitable. In order to
escape, the group will create a magic show: "We can tour the
countryside in our car, . . . giving performances in exchange
for food and lodging" (187). Boris "will be the magician,
of course. . . . Sam will be the barker, and Victoria will
be the business manager. I will be the assistant— the
luscious young woman prancing around in a skimpy, sequined
outfit. . . .
[F]or the grande finale I will climb into a
wooden box and get sawed in half. A long,
delirious pause will follow, and then, at the
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179
precise moment, when all hope has been lost, I
will emerge from the box with my limbs intact,
gesturing triumphantly, blowing kisses to the
crowd with a bright, artificial smile on my
face. (187)
From Anna's "artificial" smile to her description of how
pleasant it is to "dream of these absurdities" ; from the
"masquerade" of Sam's psychotherapy to the magic act they
plan to take on the road, at the end of the novel all is
illusion and artifice, with magic and masquerade defying the
realities of a chaotic urban space. No longer is Anna
threatened by an all-too-real human slaughterhouse; now she
plays at being cut up. And whereas once her survival
depended upon appearing masculine, now she must rely on a
reinscription of conventional femininity.
The end of the novel would seem to be a return of
visuality to the status quo ante, with Anna planning to
participate in the magic show through an enactment of looking
relations often associated with an empowered masculine gaze
and a feminized object of that gaze. Yet this apparent
return to a regressive femininity masks a parodic stance,
particularly in the way all the inhabitants of Woburn House
redefine reality, and in the process, defy it. Anna's
survival has depended upon the divestiture of the outward
manifestations of her femininity; but as she plans to leave
the authoritarian regime of the city, she adopts a femininity
that, as part of a magic show, is excessive, even ironic.
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180
Beyond the slaughterhouse
In their fabrication of reality, the magic show and
Anna's masquerade resemble Anna's scavenging: Both are a way
of looking for "specific goods and materials that can be used
again ..." (Country 33). In Auster's city, useful things
masquerade as trash filling the streets, and vice versa.
That is, things are no longer what they seem— everything
evolves from its original purpose and "nothing is really
itself anymore" (35). Even "shit and dead bodies" have a
certain market value: "Because there is so little left,
almost nothing gets thrown out anymore, and uses have been
found for materials that were once scorned as rubbish" to the
extent that people take "enormous risks for even the smallest
crumb" (33,4).
The process of scavenging involves retrieving objects
from their status as garbage: "What another has seen fit to
throw away, you must examine, dissect, and bring back to
life" (35). At the same time, however, the illusion is what
appears most real, as things get distilled into their very
essence, which in turn becomes something altogether new.
There are pieces of this and pieces of that,
but none of it fits together. And yet, very
strangely, at the limit of all this chaos,
everything begins to fuse again. . . . You
can't tell the difference between a good dress
and a bad dress if they're both torn to
shreds, can you? At a certain point, things
disintegrate into muck, or dust, or scraps,
and what you have is something new, some
particle or agglomeration of matter that
cannot be identified. (Country 35-36)
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181
Although. Auster, like Yeats, suggests that "things fall
apart," the novel contests the pessimism of Yeats's famous
poem "The Second Coming," suggesting instead that things
ultimately come together again too. In the course of the
novel, Auster rewrites Yeats's poem. But here, even when
everything falls apart, so much remains: "What strikes me as
odd is not that everything is falling apart, but that so much
continues to be there" (Country 28). In Auster's version, it
comes as no surprise to find that, as Yeats writes, "anarchy
is loosed upon the world"; on the contrary, upheaval is to be
expected and any evidence of order or reason comes as a
surprise. Anna observes that objects are discarded, found,
and sold in endless circulation: "You would think that sooner
or later it would all come to an end. Things fall apart and
vanish, and nothing new is made" (7).
But objects that cease to become recognizable are
transformed into something new. Peel everything back, Auster
writes, and see what remains: "Let everything fall away, and
then let' s see what there is. Perhaps that is the most
interesting question of all: to see what happens when there
is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too"
(29). In the end, even such destitution becomes manageable,
because "[i]t takes a long time for a world to vanish, much
longer than you would think" (28).
Everything falls apart, but not every part of
every thing, at least not at the same time.
The job is to zero in on these little islands
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182
of intactness, to imagine them joined to other
such islands, and those islands to still
others, and thus to create new archipelagoes
of matter. (36)
Scavenging is thus urban bricolage in its most literal
sense— it is creating wholeness and completeness out of
unrelated things: "a clump, a mote, a fragment of the world
that has no place: a cipher of it-ness" (35-36).
What is left, finally, in Auster's city is the
impossibility of laying down rules; there are always
exceptions, nothing is absolute. In the face of the kind of
impoverishment and homelessness that makes scavenging
necessary, other new behaviors also become possible. Thus,
if scavenging characterizes a new mode of urban existence, it
also leads to "new ways of thinking," since "[a]fter a while,
[scavenging] must surely affect the brain" (35): "Scarcity
bends your mind toward novel solutions, and you discover
yourself willing to entertain ideas that never would have
occurred to you before" (29). These "novel solutions" are
not just new ideas; they are also narrative solutions, new
ways of piecing together reality out of salvaged material—
scavenging as a practice of not of appropriation but of
sub j ect ivity.
Discussing scavenging as bricolage in her analysis of
Auster's novel, Wesseling refers to a poem called "For Anna
Blume," by the Swiss Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Wesseling
describes Schwitters's method— he collected "newspaper
cuttings, graffiti, scraps of conversations, verbal cliches
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183
and the like," which he then reorganized into poems— and
compares it to Anna's scavenging.10
There is a striking resemblance between
Schwitters' composition method and one of the
few remaining ways of making a living in the
world of Auster's novel: scavenging. . . .
Significantly, Anna describes scavenging as an
imaginative endeavour. Although official art
has disappeared from the country of last
things, this creative reorganization of waste
could be regarded as an alternative art form,
which closely resembles the practices of the
avantgarde. (499)
Adhering to the principles of Schwitters' "art form," Anna
and her friends develop a strategy for escaping a city that
is no longer tenable. To that end, Sam goes out every day to
"the perimeters of the city, investigating the situation
along the ramparts, watching carefully to see if troops are
massing or not" (185). These trips are vitally important,
since "such knowledge could make all the difference when the
time comes" (185).
Indeed, it is arguably just this understanding of the
deteriorating city that is the novel's primary concern. Yet
neither Sam nor Anna ever fully succeeds in making sense of
the city, nor does Sam ever find pleasure in his solitary
journeys through it. In fact, the ability of the lone
individual to wander aimlessly in the city— and to take
pleasure in that encounter— is lost to the inhabitants of
this new, frightening urban space. Instead, the city subject
is now the ultimate bricoleur, piecing together not just the
objects that make up a life but rather subjectivity itself.
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184
To "zero in on . . . little islands of intactness," as Auster
puts it, "to imagine them joined to other such islands" is to
imagine a new subjectivity that is not always already
dispersed and fragmented but is, rather, composed of
constantly shifting and contingent "ciphers of it-ness,"
which together add up to a whole. The self of the declining,
threatening city scape is thus made possible only in the
context of the gang, the roving band. It is this model of
subjectivity, the composite self, that with illusion and
artifice negotiates hostile urban territory.
Postscript
Writing about the relationship of narrative to social
interaction and insurrection, Woods considers that narratives
axe "perceived to act as political levers that can pry open
alternative spaces, gaps, niches in dominant ideologies"
(121). For instance, he writes, Anna "constantly confronts
mechanisms that seek to replace private spaces with public
spaces, private narratives and representations with public
versions" (121). This slippage between the private and the
public, which Woods suggests works in both directions, is
helpful in returning the present discussion to the questions
about home, homelessness, the city, and identity with which
it began.
In her famous essay, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman, and
the Whore," Susan Buck-Morss quotes from a 1934 book entitled
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185
Images de Paris, which includes a "portrayal of suffering,
presumably under the Seine bridges, where a bohemian woman
sleeps, her head bent forward, her empty purse between her
legs" (118). This image, of the homeless woman using a
public space as her private domain, contrasts with that of
the flaneur, the privileged figure in so many discussions of
urbanism. Injecting new life into such discussions,
particularly those concerning the possibilities of female
flanerie, Elizabeth Wilson writes in her essay "The
Invisible Flaneur" that "the flaneur himself never really
existed, being but an embodiment of the special blend of
excitement, tedium and horror aroused by many in the new
metropolis, and the disintegrative effect of this on the
masculine identity. . . . The flaneur represented not the
triumph of masculine power, but its attenuation" (74). She
cites, as have other writers on this subject, instances of
writer-artists, including Baudelaire, who existed one step
ahead of the rent collector, surviving on a low income.
But if the flaneur is a marginal figure of anxious,
abject masculinity, as Wilson argues, his female counterpart
suffers considerably worse financial straits. Moreover, the
figure of the homeless woman evoked by Buck-Morss extends the
notion of the flaneur to its logical extreme— the homeless
woman, or bag lady.11 Representing the total impoverishment
and final abjection of the flaneur, the bag lady is a
marginal figure who, long associated with impotence, is now
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186
quite literally feminized. Shunning domesticity, the
flaneur, according to Buck-Morss, treats the streets like an
interior; the flaneur flirts with homelessness, as though the
streets were his own private dwelling. By contrast, for the
homeless person, who has no home, the streets are home.
Her blouse is covered with pins which glitter
from the sun, and all her household and
personal possessions: two brushes, an
open knife, a closed bowl, are neatly arranged
. . . creating almost an intimacy, the shade
of an interior around her. (118)
Being on the streets is no game for the bag lady, no
pleasurable pastime: she must "inhabit the streets as one's
living room," which is a very "different thing from needing
them as a bedroom, bathroom, or kitchen, where the most
intimate aspects of one's life are not protected from the
view of strangers and ultimately, the police" (118). Buck-
Morss seems to understand that home— which can be death and
confinement in some contexts— is also sometimes simply a
matter of where you put your body.
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187
Notes
1 See, for instance, recent collections of essays about the home,
such as Fiffer and Fiffer, as well as the recent rise in attention to
what used to be called "home economics," including for instance Martha
Stewart's success as a magazine editor and publisher, author, and TV
personality.
2 Just think, for instance, of the homeless people who panhandle
very near the Beverly Center; they stand right at the exits, in fact,
until they were replaced with signs reading, "Don't give to panhandlers;
give to recognized charities." Then too there are the recent immigrants
selling oranges at major intersections throughout the city, including
very close to the Beverly Center; they often using shopping carts to
hold their oranges.
3 It is unclear whether Friedberg refers specifically to
Bloomingdale's Big Brown Bag, which was supposedly the first supposed
downscale shopping bag, and which gained its cachet from its very
unpretentiousness, even mock anonymity.
And a recent DKNY tote bag ($60) consisted of a plastic-encased
brown-paper grocery bag with two small handles attached.
4 For a feminist, postmodern treatment of the figure of the
pirate, see Morse.
5 In several respects, the novel resembles Doris Lessing's Memoirs
of a Survivor, including the departure at the novels' end from the urban
space toward parts unknown where survival is more likely.
6 All of these have symbolic relevance to the themes of the novel
as a whole, and Quinn is a character in another Auster novel, City of
Glass.
7 See also Wilson, Sphinx, and Walkowitz.
8 Katharine Washburn writes that "the book does not suffer through
the numerous comparisons to be made with the tone and the urgency of
Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl." See Washburn 65.
9 Dennis Barone notes the importance of "the disintegration of
language" (7).
10 Peter Kirkegaard compares Anna as scavenger with Benjamin's
ragpicker, who "wanders the streets of the city, collecting forgotten
valuables, with luck or intuition, like the poet 'stumbling over a
rhyme.'" See Kirkegaard 165.
11 Anne Friedberg writes about "the flaneuse as 'bag lady'"; Buck-
Morss is very clear that "The homeless bohemian is a woman." See
Friedberg 110.
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Chapter five
From syphilitic
prostitute to incest survivor
Narratives of female desire in urban space
. . . the entire story is reduced to a riddle, and incest is the answer.
— Katie Roiphe
Introduction
In Roman Polanski's 1974 neo-noir film Chinatown,
protagonist Jake Gittes asks Lieutenant Escobar, his former
colleague on the police force, "Are you still putting
Chinamen in jail for spitting in the laundry?", a question
that goes directly to the heart of the movie. As another
policeman's response makes clear— he describes Jake's
business as "going through other people's dirty linen"—
Chinatown is about dirty laundry in at least two senses of
the term. It concerns the business of the stereotypical
Chinese laundry, just one of many allusions in the film to
Chinese and Chinese-American culture. And it concerns the
dirty laundry whose airing in public is often synonymous with
disclosures of the most private nature— secrets, usually
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involving family relationships, whose revelation is
potentially embarrassing, even scandalous.
Indeed, the movie brings together a particular myth of
the city with a vision of the family and the home as explicit
sources of danger. Thus, although the movie focuses for the
most part on its protagonist, a male detective, it
simultaneously foregrounds the relationship between the city
and the family that has been at stake in this discussion of
female urban subjectivity. This chapter continues the
consideration of the family-city binary begun in Chapter
Three. Here I focus specifically on what I will argue is the
recent convergence of the detective genre and the incest
narrative. I first consider the movie Chinatown, in which
the female urban subject is represented as a silent incest
survivor. With a plot that, as one critic puts it, "deftly
intertwines public scandal and private perversion to suggest
the scope and depth of the iniquity which has permeated the
city" (Babener 245), Chinatown shows the essential
interpenetration of urbanity and domesticity that both
underlies and constitutes urban subjectivity.
I then turn to the figure of the female detective as yet
another type of urban inhabitant, a figure whose
investigation centers on the mysteries of the home, the
family, and the self. I will focus on the detective as a
trope within the work of Kathryn Harrison and argue that this
familiar generic figure provides a powerful lens through
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190
which to consider the issues of urbanity we have been
examining throughout this dissertation, particularly their
urgency for any feminist analysis of the networks of power
and desire that run through and therefore constitute the
family. Much like Chinatown's detective, the protagonist in
each of Kathryn Harrison's novels goes out into the city to
solve a crime, a search that leads her back into the home,
where she uncovers family secrets, often involving incest,
that help further her self-understanding.1 And because the
exposure of these secrets is constitutive of narrative
itself, their disclosure— their unfolding in a plot—
coincides with their discovery.
Ultimately, Harrison's fiction both draws on and revises
the detective genre's conventions concerning the city and the
narrative of investigation and discovery, but her most recent
work, a memoir, turns away from the spaces of the city in
favor of an abstracted rural milieu. I will argue that the
detective genre has incorporated the female private eye and
historically "female" concerns— like family and
relationships— and that at the same time, the issue of
incest, which is historically a feminist concern, has been
incorporated as a standard theme within the detective genre.
In other words, I will suggest, the incest narrative in
general appears to resemble the detective plot, and vice
versa. Hence the incest survivor as female dick— the
appropriation by the incest narrative of detective-genre
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conventions, particularly the flanerie that has traditionally
been one of the detective's defining characteristics, by the
incest narrative.
The detective genre
The detective narrative is usually associated with the
rise of the modem city, which made possible both the
anonymity that fosters certain criminal behaviors and the
detached gaze that permits the detective to trace those
behaviors. Thus the detective's investigation, according to
generic convention, is a search for criminal behavior that
requires him to explore the city. In this respect, as critic
Ralph Willett explains, the detective resembles the flaneur,
who "listens, searches and above all, like the private 'eye,'
sees and deciphers the signifiers of that labyrinth of
populated spaces and buildings which forms the modern
metropolis" (3). Like the flaneur, the detective
historically relies on his knowledge of the city and his
ability to traverse it freely and without threat of harm. In
Edgar Allan Poe's famous short story "The Man of the Crowd,"
for example, both the criminal and the detective travel
through anonymous urban crowds, one man impulsively following
the other in a seemingly random journey through the city's
thoroughfares. It is this narrative that renders the man of
the crowd the "perfect criminal" and— though this point is
unstated in Poe's story— the narrator, the perfect detective.
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Indeed, like most detectives who succeed him, Poe's narrator
struggles to make sense of an increasingly chaotic and
fragmentary urban life. It is just this struggle that
constitutes both the typical detective's investigation and
the source of his income.
Only by omission, however, can the detective's struggle
be said to define his subjectivity, for it is by now a truism
in the study of the genre that the classic hard-boiled
detective is, on the surface at least, a bit of a cipher, a
seemingly objective observer detached from the infinite
variety of the city. As feminist film critics have long
argued, however, this pose of apparent detachment masks the
sexual politics that are in fact inherent to the genre. The
way in which the detective's masculinity is constituted by
his relation to the city is important for understanding both
the genre and the model of female urban subjectivity that, we
will see, stems from it. In an article critiquing the urban
theorist who likens himself to the hero of film noir, for
example, critic Rosalyn Deutsche argues that Chinatown
demonstrates the detective's own involvement in the
fragmentation and chaos of the city. According to Deutsche,
the movie exposes the detective's internal struggle: Fraught
with conflict and equivocations, his own interior landscape
symbolically reproduces the conditions of the city, and his
ambivalence about his investigation parallels the dual course
it ultimately travels. The equivocations embedded in
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Chinatown, for example, are for Jake symbolically compressed
into the psychic wound associated with Chinatown, the site of
a "traumatic loss" (Deutsche 33) involving a woman, which he
alludes to more them, once but never fully explains.2 The
painful memory of this loss, and the fact that it remains
unrepresented, contrast with the investigation Jake finds he
cannot abandon. One critic, John Fawell, suggests that for
Jake this ambivalence is associated with Chinatown itself;
thus, Fawell writes, Jake moves "in two opposing directions
at once, trying to escape the reality of Chinatown while at
the same time undertaking an investigation that leads right
back to Chinatown" (183).
The detective's ambivalence results at least in part
from the fact that the spaces of the city that often appear
so seductive to him and to the viewer are at the same time
the setting of a memory that must be repressed. The chaos
and fragmentation that typify the modem city thus
characterize the detective's psyche as well. Deutsche puts
it this way:
Nor are the violent spaces Jake investigates
strictly outside himself. Rather, as in
countless noir scenarios, the qualities that
make the city 'realistic'— its meanness,
decadence, violence— . . . also entangle the
city with the protagonist's psychic geography,
with the spatial processes that form his
identity. (33)
The detective's investment in the cityscape he is
investigating— and the disavowal of his involvement— cure
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"what Jake forgets about Downtown" and the point of
Deutsche's article. The need to ignore or repress his own
stake in what happens around him is thus crucial both to the
detective's relationship to the city and to those he
investigates— and his compulsion to return to the scene of
his earlier trauma echoes the uncanniness thatr we have seen,
runs throughout texts of urbanity.
Domestic space and urban space
In "The Invisible Flaneur," Elizabeth Wilson writes that
the flaneur, the prototypical city dweller who is a point of
departure for most subsequent writing about urban
subjectivity, experienced a feeling of impotence in the face
of what Raymond Williams has described as the city's
"miscellaneity, its crowded variety, its randomness of
movement" (151). Like the flaneur, whose inheritance of
modem urban sensibilities he shares, the detective also
struggles to keep at bay a sense of loss and disempowerment.
To do so, however, he must repress the relationship between
his interior landscape and the city he observes and
deciphers, even as that relationship threatens constantly to
resurface, succeeding in Chinatown during the final sequence,
which re-enacts the scene of Jake's earlier loss.
But although generic convention dictates that the
investigation of a crime lead the detective out into the
city, what frequently seems far more deserving of such
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scrutiny is the private space of the home and the family that
occupies it. In Chinatown, for instance, the recognition of
domestic conflict forms the basis of Jake's business; from
the beginning of the movie, we know that his income derives
primarily from "reporting assorted indiscretions and
fornications for a fee" (Babener 246). The relationship
between the detective business and the problem of the home or
the family, however, does not generally seem to be a primary
concern in criticism of the genre that focuses on the city.
To the contrary, a disregard for the importance of the family
is quite characteristic of much urban theory.
By contrast, critics like Deutsche and David Sibley,
among others, recognize the relation between domestic sexual
politics and the urban context. In her essay about
Chinatown, for instance, Deutsche recognizes the importance
of incest to the urban narrative; she contends that, in
depicting themselves as film noir detectives, contemporary
urban theorists "forget" about the very crime they have
supposedly set out to find: "What Jake discovers about
Downtown is not only speculation and the murderous power of
money. An investigator of illicit love affairs, he
also finds domestic violence, ambiguous family identities and
. . . a tale of incest and a father's sexual power" (Deutsche
33). Far from being a relatively routine matter of domestic
dispute, in other words, "sexual misconduct" is instead a
thing of real violence.
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But despite the centrality of domestic violence to the
plot of Chinatown, the movie seems to suggest that the
twisted sexual politics that characterizes Noah Cross and his
family is unique in its monstrosity— that, in other words, it
is only by virtue of his unparalleled civic and economic
power that Cross is able to wield similar influence within
his family. At the same time, however, such tremendously
fraught relationships as those involving Cross and the
Mulwrays are not visibly marked by physical violence; the
fact that actual violence does not seem to be a part of
Cross's liaison with Evelyn— at least, of course, until the
end of the movie— complicates what might otherwise appear to
be simply a matter of one man's unbridled lust, ambition, and
greed. Indeed, Evelyn's complicity in her relationship with
her father— or, at least, the potential for her actions to be
read, by her and others, as complicity— provides ample cause
for the anguish and shame she demonstrates, although despite
the ambiguity of Evelyn's relationship to her father in this
regard, it is important to note that his culpability is in no
way lessened as a result.3
Incest
Much has been written about the way in which the
mysterious otherness of the city is subsumed in Chinatown
under a particular ethnic difference. Numerous critics have
observed, for example, how "Polanski's Chinatown is the
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unknowable and unfathomable city within a city, the ultimate
metaphor for enigma, corruption, and doom" (Babener 250).
Moreover, as these critics have noted, Chinatown links the
mystery of the urban space to the enigma of femininity:
Evelyn is repeatedly identified with Chinatown "and with the
racial, cultural, and presumably sexual indecipherability
with which it is associated" (Belton 945).4 In particular, as
John Belton points out, in this metaphoric relationship
Evelyn stands in for the sense of mysteriousness evoked by
Chinatown: "Evelyn's presence in the film," Belton writes,
"and her secret 'fill in,' as it were, for the absent place
of Chinatown, which [for most of the movie] remains unseen"
(945).
This pairing of the woman and the city is not so
unusual, of course. Indeed, as Teresa de Lauretis has
written, the woman and the city serve as guarantors of one
another's signifying potential: "The city is a representation
of woman; woman, the ground of that representation. In
endless circularity . . ., the woman is at once the dream's
object of desire and the reason for its objectification: the
construction of the city" (13). The end of the movie— in
which, as Belton notes, there is "no longer the relative play
of difference but only the absolute otherness of 'Chinatown'"
(949)— makes sense in this light: Evelyn's otherness and
Chinatown's have become identical, both equally foreign and
unrepresentable. Indeed, Chinatown itself is visible only in
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the final scene, when it is identified by the cliche of a
restaurant sign in neon, which symbolically marks the
entrance of the narrative into a space that is different and
foreign as well as strangely familiar. The neon sign also
serves as a reminder of the film's specific historical
location: Despite the nostalgia evoked on the one hand by the
almost pastoral backdrop of much of the film, including the
primordial struggles over land and water, and on the other by
period designs such as costumes and cars, the action is set
in a time not so distant from our own. Nonetheless,
Chinatown does seem particularly distant both geographically
and historically, as if the final exposure and recuperation
of incest were by association also to be read as culturally
and temporally remote.
Even as it functions ideologically to distance the
incest, Chinatown at first seems really to be quite unrelated
to the matter of incest— almost incidental, it would appear,
to the final scene of the movie, when it provides the setting
for Evelyn's death, Cross's subsequent move to "rescue" his
daughter-granddaughter, and the suggestion of her eventual
victimization at his hands. However, by the end of the
movie, references to Chinese ethnicity have accrued in such a
way that the "city within a city" is equated with a
different, perverse sexuality— one both more and less
natural, more fundamental and earthy but at the same time
less normal and Western. Taken together, the references to
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Chinese ethnicity serve to distance the incest from a white
bourgeoisie, for, as Elizabeth Wilson suggests, "Chinatown,
Chinese servants and extras, references to laundries and
jokes about 'making love like a Chinaman' have no function in
the film but to 'other' the incest, making it seem to belong
to an alien racial group, while simultaneously placing it at
the heart of the white upper-middle class experience"
("House" 39).
The country and the city: The limits of representation
The notion of incest as simultaneously natural and
unnatural is not new to Chinatown, of course. Ldvi-Strauss' s
discussion relies on just this paradox: As Rosaria Champagne
suggests in The Politics of Survivorship, in Ldvi-Strauss's
study, the incest taboo itself "provides the crucial link
between nature and culture"— the prohibition "is at once on
the threshold of culture, in culture, and in one sense . . .
culture itself."5 The ambivalence that clearly underlies
Ldvi-Strauss's formulation similarly animates Chinatown, with
its tension between civilized and natural, public and
private, urban and rural, Western and "Oriental"—
equivocations whose resolution is the movie's central
concern. Indeed, the work of the movie is to maintain the
irreducible difference of Chinatown even as all that it is
meant to signify— scheming, duplicity, perversity— is
completely normalized, shown to be absolutely not other, by
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the end. As Wilson concludes, "Even though the film explodes
the dominant ideology of 'not in this house' by representing
an incestuous upper-middle class relationship, it cannot do
so without distancing incest and attaching it to those long
suspected of unnatural practices, of whatever is not
transparently intelligible" (39). Like all such
relationships, then, the incestuous relationship disclosed in
Chinatown is portrayed in the context of "the realm of the
unnatural" (Belton 941). Paradoxically, such incestuous
relations are also considered somewhat more earthy and close
to nature, that is, more distanced from the affairs and
concerns of the city, as with Fawell's suggestion that
"[iIncest is a natural choice for the central, crime"
(emphasis added). The ambiguity of these relationships echoes
Jake's equivocation regarding the past he is compelled to
return to even while trying to escape.
Longing for the garden
One point of ideological pressure in urban
representation, then, is the return of the pastoral, as in
the project in Chinatown of transforming the rural into the
urban. This transformation takes concrete form throughout
the movie, as when naive senior citizens deed their land over
to Cross in his effort to "bring LA to the water." In any
event, the pastoral is shown to be empty and nearly
irrelevant. The boy riding in the dry riverbed, for example.
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like Evelyn's morning ride, is vaguely anachronistic, and at
one point, intent upon finding an escape route, Gittes drives
through an orange grove, literally turning it into a street.
And the transformation of Los Angeles is represented both
literally and ironically when an angry farmer brings his herd
of sheep into a contentious water-rights meeting.
It could be argued, therefore, that as the
quintessential myth of Los Angeles, Chinatown recounts the
death of the pastoral in favor of a new urbanity. But even
so, the urban in this movie, as in others of the genre,
always contains within it an underlying tendency toward the
pastoral. In The Country and The City, Raymond Williams
writes about the pastoral impulse of urbanity. In
particular, Williams suggests that the pastoral is a creation
of industrialization and urbanization— that the country, in
other words, is the invention of the city (47-48); we will
return to the viability of "the postmodern pastoral" in a
moment.6 The urban detective genre is infused with this
tendency toward the pastoral, as a final scene in the Clint
Eastwood film Dirty Harry, to take just one example, makes
clear. In that movie, the detective's pursuit of a serial
killer culminates in Marin County, outside San Francisco.
There is a sort of logic to the staging of this scene in the
countryside, because at this point in the film, the spaces of
the city have been thoroughly demystified. Traces of the
city left behind are clearly present, however, in the
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building materials that form the setting for the movie's
final confrontation between the detective and the criminal.
As the two men chase one another, they traverse a cement
factory where the materials of urban production are literally
laid bare, as is the artificiality of the constructed spaces
of the city.
In Chinatown, we see a variety of homes and
neighborhoods; the one most closely identified with patriarch
Noah Cross, a ranch staffed largely by Latinos, lies in a
rural, orchard-filled, as-yet-unincorporated part of the San
Fernando Valley. Evelyn's home is a Bel Air—type estate, and
Katherine's is located in an area that resembles the West
Adams district or Pasadena; both seem fairly suburban. By
the end of the film, the narrative has moved from the tension
between urban and rural evoked by the water-and-power
disputes that form one of the film's main story lines and
into the heart of Chinatown— which, like incest,
simultaneously represents both nature and an intense,
distilled urbanity.
The urban setting at the end of the film provides a
fitting context for the sexual politics at the heart of this
movie. At that point, the concerns of the narrative are
distilled into their essence— the pure grit of a foreign,
exotic city space and the horrified scream of a young woman
grieving for her dead mother— or perhaps more accurately, the
horror we experience in witnessing the rapaciousness of the
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film's patriarch. In the end, the inhabitants of Chinatown
mill around the area, as the lieutenant's directions are
given in a voiceoverr "All right, clear the area," he says,
"on the sidewalk . . . off the streets." This scene
rehearses two competing tendences: the narrative desire for a
sanitized urban space, where the illicit desires that have
crowded the space of both the city and the screen are
eliminated, and the urban response to this impulse to purify,
a tendency to embrace and absorb what is strange and
unfamiliar, even in the face of apparent threat— a tendency
that, as Brooks has shown, is constitutive of narrative
itself. The vision of Noah Cross' claim on his daughter-
granddaughter— the vision, that is, of the family secrets at
the heart of the city— is supplanted by the exoticism of
Chinatown, as if to suggest that corruption resides in what
is foreign, not in what is familiar. But such a distinction,
with its disavowal of the similarities between the familiar
and the strange, leads us right back to the uncanny, with
which this dissertation began.
Female urban subjectivity in Chinatown
For ail its brilliance as a narrative that conjoins the
family and the city in narrative, Chinatown devotes little
attention to the issue of female urban subjectivity.
The movie's final scene, however, provides a very small
insight into this matter. Following Jake's unsuccessful
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attempt to save Evelyn and Katherine, their car continues to
travel a straight line down the street until the passengers
themselves are no longer visible. After a gunshot sounds,
Evelyn's head falls onto the wheel, causing the horn to
blare. Katherine screams as she realizes her mother has been
killed. What seems interesting here, particularly within
this discussion of female urban subjectivity under way, are
the delays that draw out this scene, before Evelyn's head
hits the wheel, causing the horn to sound, and then, even
more noticeably, before Katherine's scream. With their sheer
excess, these delays defy the logic of realism, and I would
argue that this in fact is their purpose: Realism is not
capable of representing incest, as several moments
considerably earlier in the film make clear. The delays in
this scene are the film's only representation of the horror
of incest. Yet even in this moment, it is impossible finally
to represent it at all: That is, Katherine's horror at the
knowledge of her family's secrets is converted into horror at
her mother's death and represented as such.
A similar reluctance to represent incestuous desire runs
throughout the film. In one scene, after consummating his
relationship with Evelyn, Gittes attempts to elicit "the
truth" from her and in his frustration resorts to violence.
This brilliant climactic scene, in which Gittes's slaps
punctuate Evelyn's failed effort to vocalize her experience
of incest, ultimately attests to the impossibility of
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representation where the conjoining of sexuality and violence
is concerned. Evelyn repeats, "My sister . . . my daughter,"
several times, finally inserting the word "and" that
translates her words into a comprehensible sentence. In the
last analysis, the ambivalence, difference, and equivocation
of Chinatown— symbolically represented in this scene in
Evelyn's tortured repetition of "My sister . . . my
daughter"— can, paradoxically, only be resolved through the
recognition of incest, a recognition summed up in the
conjunction she uses to construct a meaningful sentence—
"She's my sister and my daughter"— and so finally speak the
truth.
In the next moment, Evelyn attempts to explain: "My
father and I . . . understand?", she says to Gittes, yet
again eliding the words necessary to articulate her
experience completely. When Jake, searching for further
clarification, asks whether her father raped her, she merely
shakes her head "No," but her movement is odd and jerky, as
if even this small gesture is too difficult, or says too
much. The film thus reduces Evelyn's articulation of desire
to the most abbreviated and elliptical narrative.
The detective genre and the incest plot
In her novels and her recent memoir, Kathryn Harrison
contends with a number of the issues present in Chinatown,
particularly incest and more generally family sexual politics
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within the urban context, though in so doing she revises many
of the conventions the movie both challenges and relies on.
Of course, Harrison is by no means the first to publish a
work dealing with incest. In Nature's Ban; Women's Incest
Literature, Karen Jacobsen McLennan has compiled an anthology
of writing about the subject that reaches back to the twelfth
century. But incest narratives have appeared with fair
greater frequency in recent years. One article alone, by
Katie Roiphe, cites such works as The Secret History, by
Donna Tartt? A. Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley; The Robber
Bride, by Margaret Atwood? Bastard Out of Carolina, by
Dorothy Allison; Two Girls, Fat and Thin, by Mary Gaitskill;
Our Father, by Marilyn French? The Sweet Hereafter, by
Russell Banks; and Push, by Sapphire. Even the most cursory
glance at recent film and book titles reveals many others
that represent incest either implicitly or explicitly,
including Angels and Insects, by A.S. Byatt, and The Cement
Garden, by Ian McEwan, both of which were made into films;
Love Invents Us. by Amy Bloom; Memoir of a Survivor, by Doris
Lessing? and Random Acts of Senseless Violence, by Jack
Womack, among others.
The feminization of the detective
Incest appears to be of particular interest within the
detective genre, however. Generic mysteries routinely center
on the crime of incest. More them one novel by Anne Perry,
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for instance, as well as Sara Paretsky's Blood Shot, contend
with the issue. As Leo S. Braudy points out, the prolific
post-war writer Ross MacDonald was one of the first detective
writers to focus on crimes of relationships rather than of
property: The "money secret" is less important than the
"family secret," Braudy suggests,7 although the repetition of
the blackmail plot, in the work Hammett and Chandler, can
arguably be seen as an attempt to conjoin the two. And if
there is an increasing concern about the family as a locus of
perversion and criminality, incest is the deviancy par
excellence— a crime that exceeds the requirements of generic
convention per se and grows instead out of a long tradition
of definitive cultural taboos. The crime of incest is
particularly at home in the city, where, Benjamin wrote, "the
masses appear as the asylum that shields an asocial person
from his persecutors" (Benjamin 40). The city is the place
that gave birth to the detective genre because of its
capacity for shielding the criminal's perversity.
Fetishism and forensics; Incest as mystery
Kathryn Harrison's novels about incest, like other
female coming-of-age novels, resemble the detective novel in
several respects. Like detectives, Harrison's protagonists
inhabit a complex urban environment that is confusing and
often overwhelmingly chaotic; Harrison emphasizes the
anonymity and crowding of the city to depict the random and
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fleeting quality of personal encounters. We saw in Chapter
One how the protagonist of Exposure, a diabetic videographer
named Ann, assumes the guise of a criminal in order to
remember and recount her life story. Ann views the lives of
her fellow city dwellers as mysteries to be investigated and
solved. A compulsive shoplifter, she frequently changes into
newly acquired clothes after a spree and discards the old,
now superfluous garments. She thinks about these abandoned
clothes— left behind in the back seat of a taxi, for
instance— as clues, objects that might convey meaning to
others. She wonders what the cab's next occupant must think,
finding these items left together in heap. And as she
imagines the lives of others who live in the city, she
considers whether they do the same.
Shoes, clothes— they tell a lot about who wore
them. In the cab, sometimes, I wonder what
people think about the clothes I leave behind.
In my haste, are buttonholes torn? . . . Does
anyone hold up a skirt that bears the very
shape of my flesh, do they look at it
carefully, do they smell it? (118)
Here Ann's discarded clothes function not just as fetishes
but also as forensic evidence— in relation to her own
criminal behavior, shoplifting, as well as the larger, still
mysterious events of her past and her life, which it is the
work of the protagonist and the narrative to uncover.
If Ann is fascinated by the encounters that result from
the randomness of urban existence, she is equally fascinated
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209
by her own life.8 Mystified by her own existence, she looks
for clues that might explain it to her.
Does anyone go through life the way I do?
Stopping to pick up a scrap of paper on the
street, to read a note dropped by a stranger
as if it might have a message to me? Does
anyone else look so hard, everywhere, for
clues? (118)
The search for something lost, or for clues that might lead
to the recovery of that lost object, is characteristic of
Harrison's work, in which women are detectives in their own
and others' lives. These investigators, though, are often
stymied or confused, like Ann, who doesn't even know what
she's looking for: "[I]t was as if I were searching for
something, something I'd lost, I didn't know what" (117) .
Indeed, whatever she "remembers threatens to recede,
evaporate, when she contemplates articulating it for someone
else."
Even as she tried just now to tell Carl about
posing for her father's camera, it was as if
she were trying to recount a dream: what she
remembered seemed absurd, and part of what she
had thought was a coherent story were suddenly
missing. . . . (47)
For Ann, as for Isabel in Thicker Than Water, remembering and
then recounting one's life is never easy. Thus the desire to
make something whole, to make meaningful and rational what is
essentially chaotic, underlies Harrison's two novels as it
does the detective genre in general: All are similarly
characterized by the notion of a central mystery to be solved
in the course of the narrative.
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210
Indeed, the desire to tell a story— to write or to
narrate, to give voice to the self— is a major concern in
Harrison's work. In Harrison's writing, this concern is
figured as a matter of memory. Her third novel, Poison, set
during the Spanish Inquisition, takes on the issue of
historical memory; the first two, Thicker Than Water and
Exposure, concern young women struggling to reconstruct
memories of their childhood and adolescence. These novels,
and the more recent memoir, The Kiss, ask what is worthwhile,
or necessary, to remember. What is the relationship between
reality and imagination, between fiction and memoir?
With its particular focus on the difficulty of
retrieving and recounting the past. Exposure perhaps best
engages these questions. Much of the novel contends with the
artificial way in which we piece together a falsely
reassuring sense of identity, often through our mystification
of family relations. For instance, the protagonist, Ann,
remembers her father's grandfather, working as a photographer
of small children dead from an epidemic; a passage describes
how the photos served to preserve images and memories of
perfect, idealized people. As a professional videographer,
Ann creates memories for other people, splicing fragments of
wedding footage to create the perfect memento of a romantic
moment, leaving unseemly tears or angry outbursts on the
cutting-room floor and so retroactively creating a myth that
is far more pleasant than the reality ever was.
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211
The detective plot; Writing the self
Treated in some ways as a mystery, incest in Harrison's
work, as in Chinatown, is a problem to be uncovered. And
whereas even so self-conscious a detective story as Chinatown
is ambivalent about the nature of the family and its relation
to the mystery that ensures the forward movement of the
narrative, in Exposure and Thicker Than Water it is clear
that the real crime lies unambiguously within the family. As
with Chinatown, in which the differences that characterize
the city are both continuously disavowed and reasserted— as
they must, serving as they do in a compensatory relation to
the incest plot that underlies the movie— Harrison's work too
foregrounds the urban setting and its array of differences.
As we will see in a moment, however, in Harrison's recent
memoir the urban differences that characterize the detective
novel are replaced by the more absolute, less culturally
scripted differences within the family and within the self,
differences that appear, variously, as fragmentation,
perversion, and pathology.
Indeed, Harrison elevates the notion of difference in
her narratives, and fragmentation within the self and within
the family are shown explicitly to be resolved, if not
embraced, rather than disavowed, by the end of the narrative.
The detective's ambivalence, and especially his complicity in
the mystery he is trying to solve— the generic dirty little
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212
secrets about what Deutsche calls "the protagonist's psychic
geography" (33)— are revealed in Harrison's work to be the
heart of the detective plot. For Harrisonr that is, the
detective and the mystery are one and the same: the self is
both object and subject of investigation. Fragmentation is
not just a characteristic that lies outside the detective—
for instance, as in so much of the genre, within the city—
but is at least as much a quality of the detective itself.
Indeed, this is the primary objection writer Katie Roiphe
lodges against such novels: she argues that current incest
literature portrays its subject as a "dark secret" to be
uncovered and disclosed.
It often happens that I am in a bookstore
leafing through one of the attractive new
hardcovers, with its soft colors and its matte
sheen, when my eye catches a phrase on the
inside jacket: '. . . until she is forced to
come to terms with the dark secret of her
harrowing past.' (65)
Her complaint is the relentlessness with which incest
literature takes the form of a narrative that sets out to
uncover, or disclose, a secret.
Thus in Harrison's work, we find that the labyrinth of
family sexual politics has supplanted the labyrinth of the
city. Indeed, the Minotaur at the center of the urban maze
is no longer the syphilitic prostitute of the 19th and early
20th century but rather the incest survivor with her own
narrative of family and individual identity. What is
interesting is that Kathryn Harrison's memoir, The Kiss,
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213
which recounts her incestuous relationship during adulthood,
is a narrative of the upper middle class that contends
somewhat differently with the problem of representing incest.
The Kiss replaces the realist depiction of the city typical
of Harrison's first two novels with the abstracted space that
intentionally fails to portray anything specific; it lacks
the novels' identifying details, revealing instead only the
family story at the core of all Harrison's writing: a young
woman's struggle to come to terms with an absent,
narcissistic mother and a sexually predatory father.
The book begins by describing the narrator's meetings,
as an adult, with her father: "We meet at airports. We meet
in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one
will recognize us" (3). Their meeting places are precisely
the kind of "in-between spaces" Braidotti celebrates as the
spaces of transition inhabited by the nomad. Indeed, like a
nomad in her wandering, Harrison moves with her father among
what she describes as the "nowheres and no-times [that] are
the only home we have" (4). No concrete details emerge from
the memoir— we never learn her father's name (Harrison
herself uses her husband's name) or the names of the cities
where she grew up, attended college, or lived briefly with
her father and his second wife. Indeed, as one reviewer,
Michael Shnayerson, writes, "No geographical location is
given . . . the characters move against a virtually blank
backdrop" (56). The effect of such abstraction is that the
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214
memoir, with its lack of specific details, resembles a
parable— a fragment of Truth existing outside both time and
place, as if Harrison were suggesting: This happens all the
time, everywhere— and that is the real crime. The Kiss is,
in short, a theory of incest.
The return to nature
The specific details in Harrison's memoir involve
national parks— the non-places fleetingly inhabited by
tourists in an anonymity that resembles that of the city.
Indeed, Harrison's desire in meeting her father is to remain
anonymous, and she achieves this the in "unreal places: the
Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon" (3)
where they meet. The memoir is not structured linearly, but
it does follow a series of rendezvous with her father around
the country: They go to "a white desert in the state of New
Mexico" (124) and to Lake Havasu, where "the original London
Bridge has been reassembled over a man-made stream in the
desert" (144-145), in a postmodern juxtaposition of rural and
urban. They stop at motels and eat at "a picnic table at a
roadside stop, the kind that truckers pull into for a few
hours of sleep" (186). In a sense, Harrison's memoir is a
road narrative; but if the point of the road story is to
leave home and go far, far away, hers is a nightmare version,
one in which leaving home means making a U-turn and driving
deep into a familiar, frightening domesticity, where one
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215
meets one's predatory father. She travels alone, "Copenhagen
to Milan: twenty-nine hours. Milan to Monaco to Paris to
Munich: fifty-three hours" (129). Her train rides lull her
into a sense of security: "Transit is narcotic, fleeing
irresistible" (129). Here the country, not the city, is the
place to escape notice by fading into the scenery.
Other recent novels about incest— including Our Father,
by Marilyn French; The Sweet Hereafter, by Russell Banks; The
Age of Consent, by Gregory Wolff; A Thousand Acres, by Jane
Smiley; and Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison,
among others— similarly take place in a rural or semi-rural
setting. The movie The Cement Garden, based on the novella
by Ian McEwan, takes up the contrast between nature and
culture— a part of any discussion of incest since Ldvi-
Strauss— in a particularly interesting way. As a backdrop to
the adolescent sexual exploration of a newly orphaned brother
and sister that figures centrally, the film is set in a home
surrounded by suburban ruins, behind which lies a garden of
cement. The movie Angels and Insects, based on the A.S.
Byatt novella, dramatizes the relation between nature and
culture somewhat differently, contrasting its protagonist, a
naturalist who studies Darwin and zoology, with an adult
brother-sister relationship portrayed as at best deceitful
and adulterous and at worst pathological.
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216
The return to the marketplace and the cornmorii fied self
Harrison's memoir was published amid considerable
controversy. In the eyes of her harshest critics, Harrison's
crime, like Jake Gittes's, is one of airing dirty laundry.
Critic James Wolcott, for instance, correctly places the work
within the contexts of early psychoanalysis and the detective
genre, though he does so only to make an unfavorable
comparison. Wolcott contrasts The Kiss and other recently
published memoirs by young women9 with Freud's case studies of
Dora and the Wolf Man, which, he writes, "survive as
detective literature, owing to the ingenious brainwork that
he [Freud] lavished against his patients' resistance" (32).
Jonathan Yardley, who has written three vicious attacks on
Harrison, similarly offers the context of Freudian analysis
for Harrison's latest work, which he calls the "logical if
thoroughly distasteful culmination of a process" that began
with Joyce and Freud and continued with Philip Roth and "that
has made exhibitionistic narcissism the coin of the realm"
(D2). Wolcott similarly laments the "deluge of pop-psych
bestsellers, celebrity confessionals and tabloid talk shows"
that has caused "our deepest, darkest secrets" to be shallow:
"[Our] psyches are no longer labyrinths or flooded basements,
but well-lit TV studios where we swivel in the guest chair,
awaiting our cue" (Wolcott 32).
The disclosure of family secrets seems controversial
indeed. The reviewers' hostility toward the memoir, and
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217
toward Harrison herself, merely serve to underscore
Champagne's contention that to talking about incest is the
real taboo. Long silent about her complex relationship with
her parents, Harrison tells Mary Gordon in an interview that
in writing her memoir, she's "given the silent girl words'"
(144). And reviewers are angry, in the words of yet another
writer, Lisa Schwartzbaum, that Harrison is "speaking the
unspeakable." It is precisely this act of articulating what
should remain unsaid that, as Champagne argues, is the real
taboo involving incest: It "is a taboo against writing and
reading, not against the act of sexual abuse" (87)— a taboo
not so much against soiling one's clothes as against exposing
one's dirty laundry. Harrison says as much to Gordon:
"'There's only one real incest taboo: talking about,'
[Harrison] begins. 'The people who judge me about this book
don't judge me for what I did, just for talking about it'"
(144).
Ultimately, these questions about the seemliness of such
disclosures— about, in Linfield's words, "how much women
should tell about their emotional and sexual experiences"
(8)— shed further light on the relationship of the detective
novel to female narrative. I would suggest that the recent
incest-related memoirs and novels, taken together, themselves
function as the resolution of a sort of detective story. The
mystery in this case concerns what it means to grow up
female, an experience Susan Cheever calls "a trauma that
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218
numbs" (11). In fact, what is most numbing in Harrison's
memoir— and what few critics are honest enough to recognize—
is not its account of father-daughter sex but rather its hint
of the larger-scale betrayal of daughters by and in a culture
that remains patriarchal to its core.
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219
Notes
1 This dissertation examines Harrison's first two novels. Thicker
Than Water and Exposure, but not her third, a novel called Poison, set
during the Spanish Inquisition.
2 In a class presentation on this film, the presenter argued that
"the movie can't stand to see Gittes being abject" and so "displaces
this anxiety onto foreignness and otherness. This is also the
frustration evident during her confession." Class discussion, September
12, 1996.
3 The legal difficulties involving charges of statutory rape faced
by director Roman Polanski since the early '70s, and their thematic
congruence with the issues central to Chinatown, lie well outside the
scope of this project. Yet it is worth at least raising the question of
whether on some level the film, by foreclosing the possibility of
physical coercion, does in some way excuse Cross's violation of his
daughter.
4 See especially John Belton. "Language, Oedipus, and Chinatown."
MLN 106:5 (December 1991). 945-6. Also William Galperin. "'Bad for the
Glass': Representation and Filmic Deconstruction in Chinatown and Chan
Is Missing." MLN 102:5 (December 1987). 1163.
5 Claude L6vi-Strauss quoted in Rosaria Champagne. The Politics
of Survivorship: Incest. Women's Literature, and Feminist Theory. (New
York: New York U P, 1996) 34, 35.
6 Hilary Schor used this phrase in an extended question about
urbanity, nostalgia, and the pastoral.
7 Braudy touched on many of these issues in a lecture on
Chinatown. Blood Shot, and The Chill, in a course during 1998 on the
monster and the detective. In particular, I am grateful to him for the
insight about the shift in the genre, which begins with MacDonald toward
an increasing focus on the family.
8 The first Anne Perry novel in the Inspector Morse series
concerns— through a series of accidents and amnesiac episodes—the
detective's unwitting revelation of himself as criminal. There are no
doubt numerous other detective works that deal with the detective as
knowing or unknowing criminal.
9 Michael Shnayerson's list of these memoirs includes Susanna
Kaysen, Girl, interrupted (New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1993); Kay
Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind (New York: Knopf, 1995); Lucy Grealey,
Autobiography of a Face (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994); Marion Winik,
First Comes Love (New York: Pantheon, 1996); Suzannah Lessard, The
Architect of Desire (New York: Dial, 1996); Mary Karr, The Liar's Club
(New York: Viking, 1995); Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story (New
York: Dial, 1995); and Jill Ciment, Half a Life (New York: Crown, 1996).
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Epilogue
Scribbling women and women in flight
Toward a new model of urban subjectivity
The hostile reception to Harrison'’ s memoir we discussed
in the last chapter echoes the kind of ideological work we
have been discussing throughout this dissertation: a
revulsion toward combined femininity and commodification,
which reaches back at least to 19th-century writing about
prostitution. Hence the antipathy toward Harrison among her
reviewers is articulated in terms of a debased marketplace
and the taint suffered as a result of inhabiting it. The
Washington Post book critic, Jonathan Yardley, is
particularly hostile, describing Harrison in one article as a
"market-driven [exhibitionist]" ("Death"). Yet what is
noteworthy about such animosity is not so much the outrage
expressed toward Harrison as the particular form it takes.
That is, as Yardley himself suggests, his particular concern
centers on the literary and cultural decline that, in his
view, Harrison represents; accordingly, he writes that we
"have gone from a literature of the self that embraced larger
worlds to one in which the self is not merely all but is a
marketable commodity, the more outrageous, the more
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221
marketable" ("Death"). Here Harrison seems somehow to
represent an entire array of social and cultural changes.
Clearly, the problem here is the successful female
writer, a figure who clearly conjures up by-now familiar
anxieties about female urban subjectivity. Criticized for
wanting to "cash in" on her story and for exploiting the
"current infatuation with confessional memoirs," Harrison is
guilty, according to Yardley, of writing for "personal gain";
her book, he writes, is "a confession [that] isn't from the
heart, it's from the pocketbook" ("Daddy's Girl"). In this
view of Harrison's work— which sees a blurring of differences
between high-minded literature and "romance-novel clichds,"
that is, between the self of "larger worlds" and the
marketable, marketed self— we can detect the echo of
longstanding anxieties about the spectacle of femininity in
the city. Indeed, these are the very concerns that, for
instance, lie behind Hawthorne's famous comment about hordes
of "scribbling women," the female writers whose financial
accomplishments far exceeded his own. These are the
anxieties too of theorists like Freud and Benjamin, writing
during the emergence of the West into its present
configuration of sovereignties, for whom the idea of border
crossings carries significant metaphoric weight, evoking as
we have seen the troubling image of the nomadic, wandering
female. And in the current debates about incest, this same
nomadic, wandering female literally comes home, for in the
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222
texts we have been discussing, incest is a matter of women
who are out of place— a daughter who is also a lover, for
instance, or a sister who is also a daughter.
Incest, that is, can be seen as a basically spatial
issue. It is a matter of borders and the failure to
recognize the limitations they indicate, and the injunction
against incest is an inducement to cross over or outside of
familial boundaries. It makes sense, then, to consider
incest within the context of a discussion of urbanity.
Indeed, the specter of the sexually perverse family
associated with the rise of the city reaches back at least to
Engels, who notes the close quarters shared by large families
in the slums of the new industrial urban centers, where it is
not uncommon to find that "[i]n every room five or seven beds
are made up on the floor and human beings of both sexes are
packed into them indiscriminately" (77). Engels cites a
particular study that describes "half a dozen cases in
Manchester in which a man sleeps not only with his wife but
also with his adult sister-in-law" (77). The implications of
such arrangements are, in Engels' view, unambiguous: "There
is no need for me to discuss the physical and moral state of
these dens of vice. Every one . . . is a breeding-ground of
crime and also the scene of much conduct of an unnatural and
revolting character." (77-78)
Thus, in Chinatown, family matters and civic politics
"cross" over into one another even as patriarch Noah Cross
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223
himself fails to obey the taboo that requires kinship ties to
form across family lines. In short, various "crossings"
evoke tremendous cultural concern, since, as David Sibley
argues in Geographies of Exclusion, they constitute a
"liminal zone" that challenges boundaries and separations by
effacing differences and that in so doing produces
considerable anxiety (33), particularly about families and
about the women in them. It is for this reason, Sibley
argues, that we must recognize the home as "one context for
the exercise of power" and for myriad forms of violence (91-
94).
In an essay entitled "Democracy's Turn: On Homeless
Noir," Dean MacCannell connects the violence within the home
to the concerns of film noir. Specifically, he compares the
hero of film noir and the homeless person, suggesting that
each offers damning insights about the home and the figure of
paternity that dominates it. What the homeless attest to—
the peculiar importance of home, whose lack they represent—
the noir hero only implies: "[T]he truth film noir tried to
anticipate," MacCannell argues, in an odd turn of phrase, "is
that the moral formulations of the paternal order are a sham"
(294).
All that is important . . . is the
preservation of an image of ideal bourgeois
freedom and respectability. This image is
held up as an ultimate ideal, but it is not.
It is only the outer wrapping or mask for the
freeplay of the capitalist father who pretends
to assume the responsibilities of a patriarch
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224
but does not and, in fact, enjoys the
privileges of the totemic pere iouissant
(292).
This malevolent, voracious father figure might well remind us
not only of Noah Cross but also of the molesting uncle in
Oates's Foxfire; the rapist Ferdinand in Auster's In the
Country of Last Things; the peeping-tom photographer-father
in Harrison's Exposure; and all the men in the Gorris film A
Question of Silence. Like the noir hero and the homeless in
MacCannell's article, these men have "no internally imposed
limits or boundaries around their space that correspond to
the territorial markings of private ownership" (295). Here
once more we see the significance of liminality, in relation
to the family and the urban spaces it inhabits— if only in
the way that the pere iouissant ignores them.
Such disregard, according to MacCannell, is the source
of the tendency of the pere iouissant to flaunt the power he
appropriates; "[The film noir hero and the homeless] know
that they can never ultimately hide their feelings in the
interior of a personal or private subjectivity. They must
hide out in the open, fully exposed" (295). But the exposure
of the pere iouissant in some sense contradicts what we know
about the considerable anxiety that this figure tends to
mobilize. It is perhaps in recognition of this notion that
Harrison continues to write, in essays and stories, about the
fraught subjects of family, parenting, and home. They are no
longer the mark of a "personal or private subjectivity";
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225
perhaps they are merely compensation for the price she pays
for airing her dirty laundry. Despite the Park Slope
residence critics often mention, Harrison is like the
homeless person MacCannell refers to: She too lacks what can
be described as a "proper place, a shelter under the dominion
of the paternal metaphor" (287). Like Evelyn, who as her
father's daughter and lover also lacks a "proper place,"
Harrison attests to both the pleasures of transgression and
the tragic disruption such spatial and relational instability
entails. This is what is implied by the story Harrison
recounts in her memoir and in the reception it has received.
It is odd to note, though, that in the last analysis, the
radical implications of Harrison's work seem to escape her.
Indeed, as a final image in Exposure— which finds Ann in her
old volunteer job at a hospital, cuddling needy babies—
attests, Harrison's literary outpouring continues assiduously
to uphold the paternal order found in the family and in the
home.
* * *
Writing about Chinatown. Rosalyn Deutsche proposes, in a
summary of relevant feminist theory, that "the image of the
city, like the image of the woman . . . is tied up with the
mysteries of sexuality" (33). In this dissertation, I have
tried simultaneously to investigate these images and to offer
what I see as alternatives to them— alternatives, that is, to
the tropes of urbanity that rely on masculine models of
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226
subjectivity. These alternatives include women who are
literally out of place, transgressing norms of female urban
subjectivity and, in the process, providing new models. I
have proposed the shoplifter, the teenage nomadic vandal, the
bag lady, and the female detective as some of the urban
figures who emerge from a long literary and cultural
tradition concerning women and the city but who also
challenge this tradition. These figures further our
understanding of the city itself, which I have argued is
increasingly regulated both visually and technologically.
What appears certain to me, in the last analysis, is the
continued visibility of the very notion of urban characters,
whom Benjamin describes as the "types that might be
encountered by a person taking a look at the marketplace"
(35). These "physiologies" were an early genre of
journalism, which described the various types the city gave
rise to, "[f]rom the itinerant street vendor of the
boulevards to the dandy in the foyer of the opera-house,
there was not a figure of Paris life that was not sketched by
a physiologue" (35). In his exhaustive study London Labour
and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew similarly catalogued the
varieties of the city. Without in any way implying any
similarity between this work and these 19th-century
documents, I do consider my dissertation as continuing in the
same intellectual tradition. Indeed, there are urban types I
have not addressed that could be more fully understood
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227
through the kind of analysis I have undertaken here. For
instance, the so-called welfare queen— the female recipient
of federal assistance, usually a mother— has proved a
lightening rod for a range of cultural anxieties. This is
particularly evident in the way that even more balanced and
general discussions of welfare reveal assumptions about the
connections among femininity, consumer culture, and urbanity.
The range of concerns here seems to distill persistent
uncertainties about the future of our cities and the status
of women in American culture. Similarly, the female looter—
captured on videotape, for instance, during the 1992 LA
riots— follows in a long tradition, which reaches back to
revolutionary France, of women rioting for basic sustenance.
In this instance too female urban subjects served to mobilize
the anxieties— concerning femininity, the family, the
marketplace, and the city— we have been discussing.1 An
analysis that cast an eye toward historical moments other
than the present one— for instance, a study of female anti
war demonstrators during the late 1960s and 1970s, or of the
women who participated in the zoot suit riots— could likewise
investigate the other forms this particular group of issues
takes and shed further light on the issues concerning female
urban subjectivity that I have addressed here.
What seems clear in any event, however, is the ongoing
relevance of the visual register. Benjamin makes clear in
his discussion of the physiologies, which he calls "a
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228
panorama literature" (35), that this early analysis of the
developing city was a source of scopic pleasure. The
continued appeal of the detective genre attests both to the
persistence of visual mobility as a model of agency within
the city and to the desire to register this mobility
cinematically. The movie Smoke, which Auster wrote, stages
this fascination through a cigar shop owner's daily habit of
photographing a street scene near his store— the same scene
at the same time, over a period of years. The movie Muriel's
Wedding is similarly invested visually, though here the
protagonist more obviously exploits the various desires and
powers associated with consumer culture. At one point in the
film, she sits behind the counter of the video store where
she works, watching (repeatedly, we are told) the royal
wedding of Diana and Charles, when interrupted by a young man
she finds attractive. She picks up the phone and calls her
friend, who we learn is working at another store just across
the street, and together they discuss the relative merits of
the male customer, as her friend appraises him across the
distance of the two store windows and the street. The young
man, like Maddy's uncle in Foxfire, is thus on display, an
object of fantasy for both Muriel and her friend.
The women's visual pleasure is reiterated twice— in the
shop windows and in the videos themselves. A similar
engagement with the tropes we have been discussing takes
place later in the film, when Muriel visits a series of
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229
bridal stores, all in the guise of a young bride trying on
wedding gowns, which she then photographs so that, as she
lies to the saleswomen, her dying mother can see them. She
eventually makes an albums of all the photos. It is just
this inventive use of consumer spaces as the site of female
self-discovery that seems to hold continuous appeal— and
seems, in fact, to require a narrative. But in the final
analysis, this story always tends toward older, more familiar
tales of women on the loose and out of place— scribbling
women and women in flight— in dangerously close proximity to
the men in the story, who may or may not be her family. This
is to say that this narrative, like the stories of the city
we have been discussing, still constantly returns to the
figure of the father, the pere iouissant. Thus, the fallen
woman, the woman passing by on the street— who may or may not
be a prostitute— may also be our sister. In the end, our
story about inventive femininity contains the seed of doubt:
Is that our sister? Our daughter? Is it us? Paradoxically,
it is only by continually acknowledging, and attempting to
understand, this tendency, that we will succeed finally in
telling our own stories differently.
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230
1
France,
Notes
For an interesting discussion of femininity and revolutionary
see Sennett.
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Anderson, John. "Antonia's Director Has One Dream Come
True." Los Anaeles Times. February 27, 1996. F-l.
Atwood, Margaret. Cat's Eye. New York: Bantam, 1989.
Auster, Paul. In the Country of Last Things. New York:
Penguin, 1988.
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Creator Persellin, Ketura (author)

Core Title City subjects: Shoplifters, bag ladies, and other figures of urban transgression in contemporary literature and film.

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema,Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest,women's studies

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor [illegible] (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), James, David (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-431259

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