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Eroticizing aggression: Power, pleasure, and modernist representation

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Eroticizing aggression: Power, pleasure, and modernist representation

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Content INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. ProQuest Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. EROTICIZING AGGRESSION: POWER, PLEASURE, & MODERNIST REPRESENTATION Copyright 2001 by Marya Erin McFadden 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) December 2001 Marya Erin McFadden Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number 3065824 UMI* UMI Microform 3065824 Copyright 2002 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17. United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA The Graduate School U niversity Park LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695 T h i s d i ssert at i o n , w ri tte n b y a/a Erin fHo-ry U n d er t h e d i rect i o n o f h — D i ssert at i o n C om m i t t ee, and appr oved b y a ll i ts m em ber s, has been pr esent ed to a n d accept ed b y Ti m G r adu at e School , i n p a rti a l fu l fi l l m e n t o f r equi r em ent s fo r t h e degr ee o f DO CTO R O F P H I LO S O P H Y D ean o f G r aduat e S t u d i es D at e December 17, 2001 D I S S E R TA T I O N C O M M I T T E E vfrn /Y t ■(/ f u 3*r> Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Marya McFadden Professor Joseph A. Boone ABSTRACT EROTICIZING AGGRESSION: POWER, PLEASURE, AND MODERNIST REPRESENTATION The linkage of eroticism and aggression comprises a crucial dynamic in the modernist representation of individual agency and social power that has not yet been recognized in its full force in criticism to date; eroticized violence serves not only as a means of limiting individual agency, but also as a means of destabilizing the categories of identity upon which social hierarchies depend. Both through innovations in narrative form that enact a dynamics of erotic aggression and through narrative representations of sexuaiized violence, the canonical and non-canonical British and American texts included in this project reveal the complex interrelationship between erotic pleasure and the threat of danger that mediates the individual subject’s relation to surrounding social forces of power. In my introduction, I analyze the various social and historical factors render modernist fiction unique in its representation of erotic aggression, as well as introduce the theories of power and subjectivity that inform my analysis. Chapter two analyzes the displacement of homoerotic repression and gender anxiety onto acts of erotic aggression in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudv Nioht. In chapter Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 three, I argue that the fantasies of erotic violence in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Virginia W oolfs The Vovaoe Out work to expose early twentieth-century constructions of gender, sexual, and national identity. Chapter four explores the mythos of sexual violence and racial identity that is confronted in two regional novels of the American South: William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eves Were Watching God. This project aims foremost to suggest new insight into the cultural politics and narrative poetics underlying the unprecedented eruption of erotic aggression in British and American modernism; it will also posit how such insights may contribute to a better understanding of the contemporary debates over representations of sexuality and violence and their impact on concepts of identity. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ii Acknowledgments This project owes a debt of gratitude to many people who inspired, encouraged, and supported me throughout its development. Foremost is my chairperson. Professor Joseph Allen Boone. His classes initially inspired me to pursue my intellectual interests in modernist literature, gender, and sexuality, which serve as the cornerstones o f this project. His own writing provides a model for the kind of theoretically informed, close textual analyses I have endeavored to provide here. The guidance, encouragement, analytical insight, and precise editorial suggestions he has patiently and freely offered throughout the years that it took to bring this project to fruition are deeply appreciated. A number of other professors I had the privilege to work with during my years as a graduate student at the University of Southern California have generously offered advice and assistance that helped shape this project. Among them are Professors Tania Modleski, Alice Gambrell, Vincent Cheng, Judith Stacey and Ronald Gottesman. I am also deeply grateful to the USC Writing Program for providing me with the opportunity to be both teacher and student during my graduate career. I am fortunate indeed to have a network of support in my personal life that has enabled me to pursue my academic career. I want to thank my Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. iii husband, Andrew Cabello; my parents, Linda and Mike Brennan, and Fred and Carolyn McFadden; and my close friend, Danyelle Rudd, for their love, patience, and support My dear friend and colleague Cindy Sarver has encouraged me since the beginning of graduate school to get to this point. My son, Spencer McFadden Cabello, deserves credit for motivating me to complete this project and for making it all seem more worthwhile. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Eroticism, Aggression, and the Construction of Identity: A Framework for Analyzing Representation Chapter 2 Danger and Homoerotic Desire in Dorothy L. Sayers' gaudY-Night and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love Chapter 3 Gender, Empire, and Fantasies of Erotic Aggression in Virginia Woolfs The Vovaae Out and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India Chapter 4 Coloring Sexuality in the American South: William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eves Were Watching God Bibliography Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Chapter 1 Eroticism, Aggression, and the Construction of Identity: A Theoretical Framework fo r Analyzing Representation Introduction The aim of this project is to analyze representations of the cultural phenomenon of “eroticized aggression” as a neglected topos of twentieth- century fiction, in order to suggest how a literary strategy may be employed to effect a political disruption of social forces of power. In pairing together a series of modem texts, I hope to create a dialogue between these pairs and among the pairings themselves that illustrate how such representations contribute to the destabilization of conventional constructions of identity categories. Such an enterprise requires first grappling with some slippery definitions and key conceptual questions: First of all, what is “eroticized aggression"? How does it relate to identity? What does it mean to say that identity is constructed? How and by whom? How can literary representations be perceived as political instruments? This chapter will attempt to provide some provisional definitions and to introduce some of the theoretical perspectives that I draw upon in tackling these foundational questions in the subsequent chapters’ argument. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 I will begin by addressing the primary term comprising the title of this project, "Eroticizing Aggression," in order to explain more precisely what that phrase means in the context of my representational analysis. Why, for example, did I choose to employ a form of the active verb "eroticizing” instead of the adjective "erotic,” which would have more succinctly modified "aggression"? Why not opt instead for the more familiar, more accessible, and nearly synonymous title phrase "Sexual Violence”? After unpacking the rationale underlying my primary title, I will endeavor to explain my choices for the subsequent words that comprise this project’s subtitle, "Power, Pleasure, and Modernist Representation.” This will involve establishing a provisional understanding of what each of these terms means within the context of my argument and in relationship to each other, which I will do through introducing several of the theorists and critics whose insights into these concepts have influenced my approach. After establishing some of these provisional definitions, I will approach the question of why representations of eroticized aggression emerged as an integral part of fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century, suggesting how specific historical conditions contributed to this literary dynamic. Finally, I will develop the broader theoretical rationale underlying this endeavor how do the representational dynamics of eroticized aggression influence the construction of human agency and identity in ways that might provide a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 useful hermeneutic tool to critics invested in the deconstruction of dominant discourses of power? Perhaps, too, it would be useful to disclose what this introductory chapter will not provide. It will not establish a monolithic theory about all representations of erotic aggression and the politics underlying their interpretations; instead, it opts to suggest the possibilities that may be opened up by the dynamics and categories of the fictional representations that emerge from the analyses in the coming chapters. It should not, in other words, be read either as a unilateral defense of or as an attack upon representations of erotic aggression; indeed, if anything, this project should invite resistance to such fixed interpretations and narrowly judgmental critical approaches. And while the specific works addressed in the subsequent chapters by no means compose an exhaustive list of the texts in which my theory about erotic aggression may be found to play an integral role in identity construction, they are intended to provide a sense of both the nuances and the breadth of the argument suggested in this introduction. Furthermore, while it is likely this chapter may not answer as many questions as it raises in the reader’s mind, I suggest these pages serve as an invitation to read on and to search for clarification in the detailed literary analyses which follow in the forthcoming chapters. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Neither ‘‘eroticism” nor "aggression” are terms that lend themselves easily to definition. In fact, it was in part their very ambiguity and inherent resistance to fixed identification that initially drew me to them as concepts worth investigating in more depth. I opted for them over their close synonyms "sexuality” and "violence” because these latter terms seem burdened with more culturally constructed and determinate meaning. In seeking to define and to distinguish such slippery concepts as “eroticism” and "sexuality,” my critical approach in this project follows Michel Foucault’s hypothesis in The History of Sexuality that sexuality is constructed in culture according to the political aims of the dominant class. Foucault argues that through a proliferation of discourses since the seventeenth century, Western culture has given rise to "the production of sexuality” (105): Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. (105-106) Thus, the notion of "sexuality” is overdetermined by a network of power relations-composed of medical, legal, psychoanalytic, educational, religious, and familial discourses-that subjects bodies to increasing Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5 social control. And while, according to Foucault, there is no way ever to be completely outside of this network of power relations, resistance to its control is possible at the site of bodies and their pleasures. He argues. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim-through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality— to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (157) Therefore, while it might be argued that the difference between “eroticism” and “sexuality” is merely semantic, I opt to emphasize the former in my project because it seems more connotative of “bodies and pleasures” and “their possibility of resistance” than the discursive construction of “sexuality.” Since it is the goal of this analysis to illustrate the strategic resistance to power often effected by modernist representations of erotic aggression, such an emphasis seems particularly important. This emphasis on resistance also suggests a key paradox underlying this project’s argument, which is that, often, the power manifested in the aggressive force of the representations analyzed subsequently is employed to challenge the sociocultural “grips of power” that seek to ensnare and control individual bodies. Similar to the relationship between the words “sexuality” and “eroticism", the term “violence" carries with it more culturally determined Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. baggage than the somewhat more wide-ranging concept of "aggression.” Particularly when associated with sexuality, "violence” becomes nearly impossible to divorce from the host of pressing contemporary social issues revolving around the concept of "sexual violence.” Especially for those feminist critics who comprise a significant element of my intended audience, that phrase is likely to remain strongly evocative of rape, sexual harassment, pornography, and battery. Indeed, those are the four issues addressed by Catharine A. MacKinnon in her widely-read essay, "Sex and Violence: A Perspective," in which she argues strongly that these issues should be regarded specifically as "sexual violence,” not merely "violence” or "violence against women,” because they violate women sexually. (Battery is included in the group because MacKinnon points out that over half of the incidents occur in the bedroom, and sexual jealousy is frequently the precipitating cause (516).) Because I believe that it is a dangerous risk for feminist theory to lose sight of the real consequences these issues of sexual violence continue to have in the lives of real women, and because the representations analyzed in this project do not necessarily depict these forms of sexual violence, I prefer instead to shift the focus of my analysis to the slightly less concrete concept of "aggression.” While some of the aggression depicted in the fiction analyzed here takes the form of rape or battery, and thus will be appropriately referred to as "sexual violence,” the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7 representations overall reflect the hostility and force that seems more accurately described as “aggression.” That aggression is frequently manifested in libidinal, psychological, and even textual forms that seem to set it apart from our cultural notion of violence as more purposive and physical. I have opted to employ the active verb “eroticizing” in my title phrase in order to emphasize the nature of the process that I believe is involved both in the authorial construction of representations of erotic aggression and in the critical deconstruction of their meanings. That is to say, the textual dynamics analyzed in this project should be perceived as a dynamic process, a fluid interchange between author, text, and critical reader. Thus, while the title in one sense refers to the authorial process of “eroticizing aggression” through the construction of textual forms and images in which eroticism and aggression intersect, it also refers to the critical process of interpreting such representations in ways that uncover the latent meanings and possibilities embedded in them. The phrase furthermore suggests the process of making aggression “sexy” or pleasurable; the forthcoming analysis will reveal this to be a double-edged sword, illustrating how, for example, the eroticization of rape in Sanctuary problematically serves to reinscribe the myth that some women deserve and desire to be sexually violated, whereas the eroticization of domestic violence in Their Eves Were Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8 Watching God invites a critique of gender domination by illustrating how the struggle to balance sexual intimacy with power imbalances may result in the physical beatings that occur within the narrative. This concept of a dynamic interchange between author, text, and reader in which representations are actively being constructed and deconstructed in order to generate new meanings functions in part as a disclaimer about the issue of authorial intent; while the following chapters offer insight into particular authors that frequently suggests that a combination of biographical experience and artistic experimentation likely influenced their fictional challenges to social stereotypes and inequities, it is ultimately of secondary consequence whether or not an author “intended” to convey all of the meanings a discerning reader is able to generate from a text, provided that the textual evidence convincingly supports them. While it is interesting-and even helpfuMo consider the politics underlying authorship and intent, critical reading is a political act in its own right which serves to imbue a text with ever new relevant consequence. The notions of “power” and “pleasure” that the subtitle suggests are integral to modernist representations of erotic aggression are again influenced by the theory of power outlined in the various writings of Michel Foucault.1 Foucault argues that power should not be perceived as a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9 hierarchical force imposed upon a subject from above; rather, power operates in a network of relations in which we are all implicated, and it is constantly being produced in our everyday social interactions. He writes that power is not “a group o f institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience o f the citizens of a given state,” nor is it “the form of rule* or “a general system of domination exerted by one group over another” (History 92). Power is instead ”a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess” (Discipline 26). However, while it should not be maintained that power is a possession of the ruling classes, it is important to note that the exercise of power frequently serves to reinforce social hegemonic structures. To illustrate how power is often employed to serve dominant interests, Foucault explains of the strategies of power that their ‘general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies” (History 93). For the purposes o f the literary analyses which follow, Foucaulfs theory of power underscores how representations of eroticized aggression that work to repress an individual subject may also embody a contradictory pleasure or resistance to domination. Indeed, according to Foucault, “pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another" (History 48). Nonetheless, the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 10 argument that power relations generally tend to subject individuals to increased social control comprises a significant premise of this project, whose purpose is to suggest the subversive potential in how particular representations further serve to destabilize those “various social hegemonies” which Foucault himself suggests are already inherently unstable. With respect to the relationship between power and human sexuality, Foucault usefully illustrates how power relations have actually worked to control and discipline the body through the proliferation of discourses about sexuality in Western culture since the seventeenth century. These discourses have constructed sexuality by determining what is “normal” and what is “perverse,” what is expected and what is acceptable. Foucault argues that over the past two hundred years, “around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable discursive explosion” (History 17). Indeed, despite the frequent claim that modem Western societies have established a regime of sexual repression, in reality they have participated in a cultural imperative to “tell the truth” about our bodies and their pleasures, and the result has been a hitherto unprecedented body of knowledge about sexuality. And, according to Foucault, knowledge and power go hand-in-hand: We should admit...that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I 11 power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. (Discipline 271 Thus, this proliferation of discourses about sexuality has resulted in greater “knowledge” of erotic pleasures and, concomitantly, in the exercise of greater power over them. This knowledge and power has taken the form of medical, legal, religious, educational, psychological, and literary discourses about sexuality. The most significant “general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex” is the model of confession (History 63). While the confessional has its roots in the Catholic practice of penance, it has evolved and spread to “whole new series of relationships: children and parents, students and educators, patients and psychiatrists, delinquents and experts” (History 63). However, the power dynamics produced by these social relations centering around this modem imperative for truth- telling with regard to sexuality do not operate in a strictly repressive capacity. Indeed, while [t]he medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, [...jthe fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: power and pleasure. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 12 spies, searches out palpates, brings to light on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it fool it, or travesty it The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. (History 45) This theoretical connection between pleasure and power is integral to my analysis of how. for instance, the image of Gudrun striking Gerald in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love can represent not only the exercise of power and domination, but also the pleasure of opposing the traditional gender dynamics of male domination and female submission. Having established the theoretical overlap between power and pleasure that underlies my analysis of eroticized aggression in the forthcoming chapters, I will turn now to the question of how these concepts relate to the final phrase in this project’s subtitle, "modernist representation.” The definition of literary "modernism” is certainly not the subject of simple consensus among scholars today, and while it is not the purpose of this project to delineate an extensive argument in favor of one definition over others, it seems incumbent to explain some of the criteria underlying my use of the term within the context of this analysis, as well as to provide a brief overview of some of the debates about modernism and gender that inform my approach here. For the most simple purposes of literary chronology, it is generally agreed that "modernism” refers to works published roughly between the years 1890-1940. The six novels Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 13 discussed in the following chapters were published between 1915 fThe Vovaoe P utt and 1937 (Their Eves Were Watching God). But modernism refers to more than simply a chronological period; it is commonly held to embody the characteristics of aesthetic self-consciousness; simultaneity, juxtaposition, and montage; paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty; and dehumanization and the demise of the individual integrated subject2 While this basic definition of modernism has the benefit of being widely accepted among modernist scholars, it is furthermore useful in that all of these characteristics will be shown to underlie the representations of erotic aggression critiqued in this project. The characteristics that define modem literature evolved as a reaction to or revolt against the traditions of realism and romanticism. The effects of rapid industrialization, the devastation of World War I, the advent of psychoanalysis, and the multiple burgeoning movements for social justice that all transpired toward the beginning of the twentieth century served significantly to inform and to influence the development of modem consciousness. Modem writers actively sought to question fundamental beliefs about human identity and human relations which had previously been held as truths, to deconstruct those norms and traditions which could no longer be unilaterally embraced. One of the great appeals of modernist literature for contemporary critics is, according to feminist scholar Janet Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 14 Wolff, "the radical potential of the deconstructive strategies o f modernist culture” (85). Indeed, I was led to embark upon this project by the ‘radical potential” to deconstruct conventional categories of gender, sexual, national, and racial identity that I have discerned operating within the strategic modernist employment of representations of eroticized aggression. The belief in modernism’s progressive potential to destabilize hierarchies of power is asserted by another feminist critic of modernism, Marianne De Koven, whose theory that modem form evolved as a way of representing the “terrifying appeal* of feminism and socialism has informed this project. Modernist writers observed a “sea-change" in twentieth-century thought about social justice, and their writing reflects a deep ambivalence toward the radical social change on the horizon. De Koven argues in Rich and Strange: Gender. History. Modernism that modem form is characterized by a paradigm of “sous-rature,” an “unresolved contradiction or unsynthesized dialectic” (4) that places old structures of power and convention “under erasure,” such that they are wiped out, yet still visible-challenged perhaps, but not abandoned. This paradigm illustrates the conflicting fear and desire on the part of modernist writers for a cultural revision that would transform class, gender, and racial conflict. That notion of modern form as potentially progressive, albeit Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15 inherently paradoxical and ambivalent is integral to my analysis of how representations of erotic aggression in modernist fiction can often simultaneously resist and reinscribe dominant culture's hierarchical dualism s. Thus, my approach to modernist representation in this project attempts to move beyond the debates over whether modernism is or is not inherently deconstructive, "feminine," or subversive, and to suggest that while it may frequently embody all of these characteristics, it never does so in an uncomplicated or unambiguous way. These debates over modernism and the question of gender in modernist studies are summarized quite effectively by Lisa Rado in her book Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. One of the central issues for feminist scholars has been whether to emphasize gender differences between male«and female modernist writers, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar do in their No Man's Land series when they read a “battle of the sexes” (Gilbert & Gubar xi) into the entire spectrum of modem literature, or to see modernist writers of both genders working to unsettle gender differences, as Bonnie Kime Scott does in Rereading Modernism when she argues that Lawrence and Joyce exemplify male modernist authors who attempted to “move into” the feminine sensibility in their work (Scott 145). Still another debate that dominated the 1980s critical Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 16 discourse on modernism centered around the differing approaches of Anglo-American and French feminists, with the former often choosing to focus on the thematics of gender depicted in modernist literature and the latter on the linguistic strategies of the texts themselves.3 Should modernism be perceived as inherently conservative, patriarchal, and repressive, or as inherently radical, feminine, and subversive? Should modernist critics adopt a psychological approach, such as that rooted in Freudian assumptions about subjectivity, or a culturalist approach, such as that based on a Foucauldian theory about the constructed nature of gender and sexuality? And finally, should modem experimentalism by authors like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein be privileged as a more progressive form than literature being produced by less elite or less recognized modem writers, many of whom were women? While all of these debates are important for contextualizing the issues of gender identity that have informed modernist scholarship, the analyses in the following chapters attempt to avoid “taking sides” on these questions as much as possible. I opt instead, for example, to examine thematics of gender and textual strategies; to read progressive gender implications into the fiction of male writers, yet to acknowledge as well the gender biases and assumptions which inform their work; to illustrate the repressive and subversive forces that often operate simultaneously within Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17 the same representation; to combine the psychological approach with the cultural; and to appreciate the progressive component of an experimentalist such as Virginia W oolf while not overlooking the progressive potential within the popular appeal of a writer such as Dorothy Sayers. It is my hope that in doing so, this project answers the challenge Rado sets forth after summarizing the central debates structuring feminist modernist criticism up until recently: ...to formulate new goals for our exploration of literature-specifically, modem literature. Instead of condemning writers for not practicing or portraying an acceptable politics of gender, we ought instead to show how their assumptions about the nature of the sexes inform their texts. (12) In addition to analyzing how representations of erotic aggression are informed by gender assumptions, this project seeks to connect assumptions about gender to assumptions about sexuality, race, class, and national identity that present an interlocking web of powerful forces. Historical Contexts The complex issues that eroticism and aggression together pose for human agency and social relations were certainly not new to the twentieth century, nor were they foreign to literature before that time. (A gloss of Shakespeare’s tragedies, for example, would quickly confirm that.) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 18 However, the veritable explosion of fictional works in both Britain and America during the modernist era in which a dynamics of eroticized aggression works on both thematic and formal levels to challenge specific binary categories of human identity may be traced to certain violent historical conditions that influenced the production of texts such as those examined in this project. Among the most significant of these historical factors were World War I, the rise of angry workers’ movements in the face of increased industrialization, colonial violence and insurgency, and the history of rape and lynching in the American South. This section will suggest how all of these conditions contributed to modernist fiction’s representations o f eroticized aggression. It is perhaps unsurprising that an aura of violence would pervade the literature generated during and after the devastation wreaked on the modem world by what was known at the time as the Great War. Approximately 8,500,000 soldiers lost their lives during the war, which lasted from July of 1914 through November of 1918, and another 8,000,000 civilian casualties have been attributed to it as well. The brutal conditions of the Great War were shockingly unlike any battles the world had ever seen before, largely because of modem technological advancements that transformed the nature of warfare. The invention of new weapons such as machine guns, tanks, airplanes, submarines, and poisonous gas greatly Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 19 increased the militaries’ mass killing capability. Such innovations in weapon technology led to the advent of trench warfare, a particularly harsh form of battle. Furthermore, the Great War was the first in Europe to be fought primarily by untrained civilians who had been drafted into battle, rather than by highly trained career military personnel.4 While the American casualties of the Great War were substantially less than those sustained by the Europeans (due to the United States’ late entry into the war in 1917 and the fact that it was fought on overseas territories), the impact of the war’s violent and seemingly senseless devastation is quite evident in literature on both sides of the Atlantic. The legacy of the Great War, most historians agree, is the way it forever shattered people’s belief in the modem world as an enlightened, progressive, and ordered place. In his landmark study, The Great War and Modem Memory. Paul Fussell argues that one of the most significant literary legacies of the Great War was that it bred the dichotomizing of “us” and “them” often found in modernist literature. Fussell argues: The physical confrontation between “us” and “them" [which occurred during the war] is an obvious figure of gross dichotomy. But less predictably, the mode of gross dichotomy came to dominate perception and expression elsewhere, encouraging finally what we call the modem versus habit: one thing opposed to another, not with some Hegelian hope of synthesis involving a dissolution of both extremes (that would suggest a “negotiated peace,” which is anathema), but with a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20 sense that one of the poles embodies so wicked a deficiency or flaw or perversion that its total submission is called for. (79) Fussell proceeds to illustrate how such an oppositional imperative operates in the works of T.S. Eliot, with his “separation of thought and feeling, intellect and reflection” (106) into two camps; in Ezra Pound’s poetic exemplification of this “adversary habit” (106); and even in E. M. Forster’s imperative to “only connect,” which according to Fussell implies a perception of the world as “regrettably disjointed if not actively opposed and polarized” (106). The claim that the Great War led to a tendency toward binary oppositions in modem thought serves usefully on the one hand to illustrate the dominant mode of perception that, as I argue, the representations of eroticized aggression in the modernist fiction explored in this project are seeking to challenge. If, as Fussell claims, “[ojne of the legacies of the war is ... this habit of simple distinction, simplification, and opposition” (79) that contributed to further entrenching polarities such as communist and capitalist, black and white, female and male, homo and heterosexual, then it becomes even more apparent why authors uncomfortable with such simplifications would seek to unsettle them, using-paradoxically-the very strategies of violence that may have engendered them in the first place. Yet while I find Fussell’s theory about the war useful in illustrating how it Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 21 shaped dominant modem perceptions into adversarial binary oppositions, I believe that in seeking to interpret modernist literature as primarily reflective of this tendency, Fussell neglects to examine just how frequently that era’s literature sought to undermine those epistemological polarities. Tellingly, he focuses primarily on canonical white male modernist authors, but even within this “canon," as this project will point out, he overlooks the challenges often posed to dominant cultural binaries by the fiction of authors such as Lawrence and Forster. In exploring the modernist representations of eroticized aggression that arose in the aftermath of the Great War's violence, this analysis will suggest that many modernist authors were far more ambivalent about dominant modes of dichotomous thinking than Fussell indicates in his study. Another way in which the Great War helped to shape modernist expression and to influence the development of the representation of eroticized aggression was by foregrounding an association between sexuality and violence that left an undoubtable mark on the cultural psyche of that era. As Fussell points out, the language of attack overlaps with that of sex: “assault, impact, thrust, and penetration” are but a few of the terms common to both the discourses of war and human sexuality. Furthermore, Fussell argues that rape is the historical promise of a successful battle, just as official brothels are a common accompaniment of war. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22 Homoeroticism, masturbation, and exhibitionism are also sexual behaviors that figure more prominently in wartime, Fussell continues. Thus, heightened cultural perception of associations between eroticism and aggression set the stage for the mode o f strategic modernist innovations in representation explored in the following chapters. While the Great War brought international violence and tumult to the modem world, national debates over the rights of workers in an increasingly industrial society were dividing citizens and sparking protests throughout Europe and the United States. Indeed, one of Vladimir Lenin’s most fervent hopes-to turn what he saw as an imperialist war to secure raw material and markets for big national powers into a civil war to secure power for the working classes-was realized in Russia in 1917. The Russian Revolution and the subsequent Bolshevik rise to power with the slogan “Peace, Bread, Land” would jolt the rest of the modem world’s intellectual and political sensibilities into recognition of the potential potency of working class movements. In the United States, socialist party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs earned nearly a million votes in the elections of 1912 and 1920, illustrating that even in a leading capitalist nation, socialist thought was not without influence. The increasing perception of the potentially violent struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was frequently manifested Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 23 in modernist literature. The aggressive currents that run through the novels of D.H. Lawrence, for example, are often framed by this struggle between the increasingly disempowered modem worker (Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, for instance) and the more powerful owner-industrialists (e.g., Gerald Crich of that same novel). While Europe and the United States were confronting domestic turmoil surrounding the rights of the working classes in an increasingly industrial society, they were at the same time facing international conflict over their colonial and neo-colonial power in India, Africa, and South America. Questions regarding whether or not it was acceptable for Western nations to exercise colonial rule over less developed countries or to exploit their labor and natural resources were being voiced with increasing volume. It was a conflict of power that was often manifested in violence, and its influence as a significant social theme may be found in such widely-read and highly-regarded works of the modernist era as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. In Heart of Darkness, protagonist Marlowe’s journey through the “dark continent” of Africa forces him to confront the dark side of his own identity as he comes face-to-face with the violence and complexity of the power struggle between Belgian interests in the Congo and the sovereignty of its indigenous people. And as I will argue at greater length in chapter Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 three, a white English woman’s accusation of an Indian man for rape— which comprises the central action of the plot of A Passage to India— is best understood within the historical context of the struggle for power between the Indians and the Anglo-Indian colonial regime, in which physical and psychological violence were rife As Jenny Sharpe effectively argues in “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency,” the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the massacre at Amritsar in 1919 contributed to the development of a discourse of rape and colonialism that provides a framework for understanding the events surrounding Adela’s accusation that Aziz sexually assaulted her in the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India. Despite a lack of supporting evidence, the British press encouraged sensationalistic accounts of the Sepoy Rebellion that suggested the widespread rape and slaughter of English women at the hand of mutinous Indian men. Sharpe argues that the eroticized bodies of English women thus became a signifier for colonialism under threat of native violation (36), and that by sexualizing the colonial insurgency of 1857, the British effectively “sanctioned the use of colonial force and violence in the name of moral influence” (37) that was used to justify the slaughter of approximately five hundred unarmed Indians attending a banned meeting at Amritsar in 1919 (39). Read within the context of these historical moments of violence, the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 25 indeterminate nature of the sexual violence alluded to in A Passage to India becomes a mode of challenging and complicating the official colonial discourse on rape. Just as it is necessary to examine the violence of rape depicted in a novel such as A Passage to India within the context of the colonial violence in India that influenced its production, it is important to approach modernist depictions of sexual violence in such novels as Sanctuary and Native Son within the context of the history of violent racial oppression in the American South. Whereas whipping and rape were instruments used to instill fear and maintain control over black bodies during the era of American slavery, lynching served to maintain a violent racial hierarchy from the Reconstruction years until World War II, when the practice became relatively rare-although sadly, to this day, not unheard of. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall makes the compelling argument in “The Mind That Bums in Each Body’” that lynching and rape bear a strong historical association in that both have been widely used as instruments for racial subordination. Arguing that in a patriarchal society, black men, as men, pose a threat to the supremacy of the established white male order, Dowd claims that the widely publicized vigilante “justice” of lynching served to create a climate of fear and intimidation intended to keep black men subservient to white men. Similarly, the sexual exploitation of black women by white men that was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 26 institutionalized under slavery further served as an instrument for maintaining patriarchal and racial power Whether seized through outright force or voluntarily granted within the master-slave relation, the sexual access of white men to black women was a cornerstone of patriarchal power in the South. It was used as a punishment or demanded in exchange for leniency. Like other forms of deference and conspicuous consumption, it buttressed planter hegemony. And it served the practical economic purpose of replenishing the slave labor supply. (Hall 332) Hall summarizes her argument about the parallel uses of lynching and rape by theorizing, “Thus rape reasserted white dominance and control in the private arena as lynching reasserted hierarchical arrangements in the public transactions of men” (333). The role of white women within this violent economy of racial subordination was two-fold: on the one hand, white Southern women signified the ultimate victims, helpless and humiliated objects of the purported sexual aggression of bestial black men; on the other hand, this role elevated their worth within the patriarchal economy, rendering them signifiers of the white social order and symbols of racial purity. As Hall astutely notes, however, both roles would cost them "a lifetime of subjugation to the men gathered in [their] behalf to seek vengeance in a lynching (335). This double-edged victim/saint role, which ultimately serves to buttress white female subordination, may be clearly discerned in the depiction of Temple Drake in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, a novel I Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 27 examine at length in chapter four. Temple is exploited as the victim of a brutal rape, elevated at her trial to a sanctified status intended to justify the vengeance of a lynch mob, and ultimately dehumanized by both roles to the extent that she is more a signifier than a character in the novel. The white cultural acceptance of the practice of lynching was predicated upon the belief in the myth of the rampant danger black male sexuality posed for white Southern womanhood. Despite the fact that less than 25 percent of lynch victims were even accused of rape or attempted rape-and of those, many may have been innocent or involved only in consensual interracial sexual relations-the mythos of rape in the American South depended upon the belief that African American men were generally unable to control their crazed lust for virginal white women. In my discussion of Sanctuary. I will argue that Faulkner both calls into question and reaffirms that mythology by effectively "coloring” Temple’s rapist, Popeye, from a white man into a black one. A much more unequivocal challenge to this racist sexual mythology comes from Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. Wright has acknowledged that, as an African American male, the specter of lynching haunted his life with the possibility not only of death by mob violence, but of the torture and sexual mutilation that commonly accompanied it. He claims that this climate of fear penetrated "the deepest layers of [his] consciousness...[as] something Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 28 whose horror and blood might descend upon [him] at any m om ent..” (Chafe 60). Wright captures the tragic results o f this fear and hatred quite powerfully in the character of Bigger Thomas, a young black man who accidentally kills a young white woman by smothering her with a pillow in a panic to keep her quiet and to keep himself from being discovered in her bedroom by her mother. Although Bigger was only trying to assist the drunken Mary in getting to her room safely, he knows only too well the cultural mythology that would refuse to accept such an innocuous explanation for his presence there. His panic leads him to commit a far more severe crime than he could have even imagined, one he compounds by mutilating and burning the body in a desperate hope to avoid detection, since he realizes that nobody would believe the true story behind why he was in the room and how he unintentionally killed Mary . Native Son. published at the late end of the modernist era, thus enacts a thematic representation of eroticized aggression that serves to indict the racist myth of the black male as dangerous sexual predator by illustrating how such a stereotype bears the responsibility itself for the production of sexualized violence. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Subjectivity and Erotic Aggression 29 I suggested in an earlier section of this chapter that the advent of psychoanalysis was a significant influence in the development of literary modernism. As the most influential founder of modem psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud revolutionized thought about the development of human identity in his early twentieth-century writings; his creation of certain psychoanalytic principles regarding the development of human sexuality as it relates to human subjectivity reverberates in modernist representations of erotic aggression and extends into the realm o f identity politics. Despite my belief that critics have been correct to challenge Freudian theory for maintaining a problematic “normalVdeviant" dichotomy with regard to sexuality and for relying too often upon a troublesome and unacknowledged gender bias, the Freudian premise that individual identity is rooted in the sexual development that occurs within the context of familial attachments remains a convincing and integral principle for understanding human subjectivity as constructed in modem Western cultures. Whereas Foucault’s cultural theory assists us in conceptualizing individual subjects as always inside of a network of power relations that act through various discourses about sexuality to construct our experience of our bodies and their pleasures, Foucault’s own admission that we are also Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 30 always acting in resistance to those forces of power suggests, in turn, that our experience of ourselves as individual subjects cannot be fully accounted for by discursive social practices, that indeed the T that we attach to our bodies possesses an autonomous agency shaped by individually specific desires capable of resistance. Herein, I would argue, lies the possibility for a useful intersection of cultural and psychological criticism, for a Freudian-based theory of subjectivity provides a way to account for the development of that individual desire and agency. Our identity, according to Freud, is shaped largely by the development of our sexuality; our adult neuroses, desires, fears, sense of well-being, and ability to form successful relationships are all connected to the formative experiences we had in the early developmental stages (infantile auto- eroticism; oral eroticism; anal eroticism; the genital phase; and for women, a final stage of repression in which object-choice is re-directed) and the attachments we form to our parental figures. The erotic and aggressive instincts are inherently connected to one another, according to Freud’s theory of sexuality. He writes in Three Essavs on the Theory of Sexuality that “every pain contains in itself the possibility of a feeling of pleasure” (159). This is because the tension of sexual excitement necessarily involves simultaneous pleasure and displeasure; the displeasure in the lack of immediate satisfaction Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 31 demands an increase of pleasure, hence the repetition of something unpleasurable becomes an inherent component of sexuality. The inherent connection between pleasure and unpleasure leads one prominent Freudian theorist Leo Bersani, to question whether if, "in sexuality, pleasure is somehow distinct from satisfaction, perhaps even identical to a kind of pain?” (34). Indeed, in Freud’s concept of the human unconscious, we all possess two instincts: Eros, the life instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct. These two instincts are inextricably connected. Whereas Eros often takes the form of erotic impulses, Thanatos is primarily manifested in human aggressive instincts. Both aggression and eroticism are experienced by the unconscious as an intense oceanic feeling. Bersani describes the oceanic as “an ecstatic sense of oneness with the universe, a breaking down of the boundaries between the ego and the world traceable to the 'limitless narcissism’ of infancy” (19). This oceanic feeling occurs because of the collapse of boundaries between subject and object that is produced through both erotic and aggressive experiences. Infants enjoy an inherently narcissistic pleasure because they see all the world as an extension of themselves; the developmental process involves developing and recognizing an ego that is detached from the primary love object, the mother. Both erotic and aggressive acts-for instance, having Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 32 intercourse or striking someone— represent the subject’s refusal to recognize an object as distinct from him/herself, and thus represent that dissolution of ego boundaries that can re-create the oceanic pleasure * associated with infancy. Psychoanalytic accounts of the role that both eroticism and aggression play in the development of human subjectivity have significant implications for our cultural concept of gender identity. According to Freud, sadism is an exaggeration of normative masculinity. In a theory of sexuality which remains hotly contested to this day, Freud argues that men are inherently more sexually aggressive than women, and thus more likely to try to obliterate the subject/object boundary and extend the ego dominion through the sexually aggressive acts characterized as sadism. Masochism is defined by Freud as “an extension of sadism turned round on the subject’s own self, which takes the place o f the sexual object” (158). Thus, sadism and masochism are driven by essentially the same desire, but manifested in different sexual objects. Psychoanalytic theorists with a foundation in Freudian theory have often elaborated upon his theories of sexuality, modifying them in ways that nonetheless continue to suggest that erotic aggression is inextricably bound to notions of gender identity. For instance, Gilles Deleuze disagrees with Freud that masochism is essentially sadism turned around against Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 33 the self. And while he concurs with the Freudian claim that in sadism, the subject wants to take the place of the potent father, he disagrees that in masochism, the subject’s Oedipal guilt causes him to take the place of the mother. Rather, Deleuze views masochism as an alliance between mother and son in which the mother figure (not the father as Freud would have it) takes the role of torturer, and it is the father who is beaten. Another psychoanalytic theorist, Jessica Benjamin, argues from a more explicitly feminist perspective that while masochism can often be associated with femininity (as Freud argued), this is less the result of inherent sexual differences between men and women than because of a social structure of gender inequality. Benjamin argues that “what Freud called penis envy, the little girl’s masculine orientation, really reflects the wish of the toddler-of either sex-to identify with the father, who is perceived as representing the outside world” (100). Thus, it is not a biological imperative to associate power and potency with the father, but rather a social condition. Domination occurs and often takes the form of male domination and female submission because of this gender inequity. For men, “[ejrotic domination represents an intensification of male anxiety and defense in relation to the mother,” according to Benjamin (77). Afraid of his dependency on a woman for recognition of himself as a separate individual, a man’s aggressive instinct may lead him to attempt to crush Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 34 her. Women may align themselves with masochism in an attempt to, in effect, obliterate their own identities as relatively disempowered objects and identify instead with more powerful masculine subjects. Benjamin writes that while in some cases a woman’s search for her own desire may take form of extreme self-abnegation, “even in the more common form of masochism-adult ideal love— woman loses herself in the identification with the powerful other who embodies the missing desire and agency” (116). Thus, we see how a psychoanalytic perspective, offering insight into gender and sexuality’s early impact on subject-formation, may complement an understanding of external expressions of aggression, particularly in instances in which aggression is eroticized along axes of gender. Representation and Identity Politics Perhaps one of the most significant contributions Freud made to modem thought was his development of the concept of the unconscious. His theory that all subjects possess an unconscious realm wherein lie our deepest desires and fears, and that this unconscious manifests itself in representations-primarily dreams and language— that are subject to interpretation, has proved to be particularly influential to the way modem readers and critics tend to approach literature and other arts. This notion of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 35 the unconscious opened up virtually limitless possibilities for artists and writers to use their representations to suggest unconscious motivations, as well as for their audience to interpret them. The widespread cultural attention increasingly paid to seeking unconscious meanings underlying representations in the wake of Freud's “discovery” of the unconscious comprises a significant influence on the modernist fiction discussed in this project. Modernist literature is rich in connoting unconscious anxieties and desires that frequently manifest themselves in representations of eroticism and aggression. Of course, the artistic construction of representations and the critical deconstruction of them are necessarily influenced by subjective cultural biases and perspectives. Freud is often criticized, for instance, for neglecting to consider how his own patriarchal assumptions may have influenced his interpretations of a young girl's fantasies in his famous study Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Because both the creation and interpretation of representations are culturally influenced, one of the primary goals of this project is to examine the specific political implications of modernist representations of erotic aggression. As I illustrate in the following close textual analyses, erotic aggression is often strategically employed to challenge dominant cultural beliefs about gender, sexuality, race, class, and national identity. I argue that representations of erotic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 36 aggression provided modernist authors with a strategy for exploring and critiquing the construction of individual subjectivity, interpersonal relationships, and social categories of identity, at times as distinct concerns and at other times as overlapping issues. While the challenges posed by these representations are frequently fraught with ambiguity, paradox, or contradiction, they should nonetheless be viewed as political instruments contributing to the construction of greater cultural norms and beliefs about human identity. The dynamics of erotic aggression identified in this project help to shape contemporary cultural understandings of what it means to be a member of a socially constructed category such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or national identity and often to illuminate the power struggles operating within such constructions. As such, I suggest that such permutations of eroticized aggression have shaped transformations in how identity has been conceptualized and institutionalized throughout the twentieth century. In order to understand how representations of the unconscious may be seen to effect identity politics, it is necessary to consider the relationship between what we often think of as the dual realms of “fantasy” and “reality.” I maintain that the two should not actually be thought of as a dualism at all. As feminist critic Lynda Hart argues in her study of sadomasochistic literary representations, fantasy does not provide an “escape” from reality, or else Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 37 we as a culture would not be so concerned with it Instead, Hart posits that fantasies are actually constitutive of reality, that they have the power to change real social circumstances. One literary example Hart uses for illustration is Dorothy Allison’s novel, Bastard Out Of Carolina, in which a sexually abused young girl engages in erotically pleasurable fantasies of being hurt Hart argues that the girl’s sexual identity and sexual fantasies have necessarily been shaped by her experience of abuse. Her fantasies allow her to watch her own abuse-to serve as a witness to it-and thus to defy her abuser; they therefore serve as an empowering way of altering her history of victimization. Hart’s theory that fantasy and reality are not the same, not entirely separate, but rather interrelated and mutually constitutive, is quite compelling. It serves as a model underlying the premise for my argument about how literary representations of eroticized aggression may alter our understandings of the social construction of human identity. Of particular interest to me is the construction of gender identity, a concern which serves as a common thread linking all of the literary analyses in the following chapters. While my consideration of gender identity often overlaps with issues of sexual, racial, class, and national identity, it nonetheless constitutes the primary underlying concern. While this focus is undoubtedly to be attributed at least in part to my own Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 38 subjective authorial interests, I believe, too, that in a larger cultural sense, gender can often be seen as the primary structural difference around which other differences are frequently constructed. Another feminist theorist who shares this view and, furthermore, also articulates the violence of discursive constructions of identity differences, is Teresa De Lauretis, who argues in T h e Violence of Rhetoric,” T h e discourse of the sciences of man constructs the object as female and the female as object. This, I suggest, is its rhetoric of violence, even when the discourse presents itself as humanistic, benevolent, or well-intentioned” (253). De Lauretis argues that while Foucault’s theory of power is useful for understanding “the mechanics of power in social relations, its critical value is limited by his unconcern for...the techniques and discursive strategies by which gender is constructed and hence...violence is en-gendered" (245). In other words, De Lauretis perceives that the discursive construction of gender objectifies women and thus is inherently violent. While I am not entirely convinced that the discourse of human sciences always constructs The female as object”-a far too totalizing characterization of a wide-ranging body of discourse-1 do concur that female objectification is frequently the case in dominant cultural discourse, and also that an inherent element of violence underlies the construction of identity differences according to this century’s rigid binarization of male/female and subject/object. Indeed, the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39 notion of the violence generated by, and residing in, culturally-enforced binary categories o f identity (black/White, hetero-Zhomosexual, etc.) comprises a significant premise of this project5 The belief that the violence that adheres to the construction of human identity according to rigid and hierarchical binary structures can be resisted-and that this resistance can be influenced by literary representations-is, quite clearly, integral to my critical enterprise here. Without meaning to suggest that the modernist representations of eroticized aggression analyzed in the forthcoming pages should be perceived as unilaterally subversive in that respect, I do maintain that these endeavors present a significant enough example of how discourse may disrupt our culture’s gender and sexual norms to make them worthy of the attention of literary critics concerned with identity construction. In the pages that follow, modernist experimentations in form and innovations in content will be shown to employ a dynamic interplay between pleasure and pain that suggests that erotic aggression comprises a crucial component of human subjectivity as well as social relations. While some o f the novels analyzed here are frequently considered by critics of modernism and others are less so, I believe that all benefit from a unique consideration of their dynamics of erotic aggression in light o f contemporary theories of power and identity. This project aims to forge new connections across familiar Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 40 texts and to construct a new lens through which to view and to interpret the permutations of pleasure and pain that I argue comprise an integral part not only of modernist fiction, but of our individual identities and social fabric as well. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41 1. See particularly The History of Sexuality, v. 1, Discipline and Punish, and The Archeology of Knowledge. 2. This definition of modernist literary characteristics comes from Eugene Linn, and has been widely adopted by such critics of modernism as Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences (Berkeley & Los Angeles: UC Press, 1990) and Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Stranoe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991). 3. However, in recent years, Anglo-American feminism has developed a more sophisticated approach that blends an analysis of linguistic and thematic textual elements. Carla Kaplan’s The Erotics of Talk stands out as one successful example of feminist modernist scholarship that combines the (traditionally French feminist) emphasis on linguistic techniques with the (traditionally Anglo-American) interest in thematic representations of women in order to develop a persuasive argument about modernism and gender. 4. Most of the facts about the Great War have been culminated from information provided by the Great War Society Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (www.woridwar1.com/tgws/index.htm) and Trenches on the Web (www.woridwarf .com/sfnum.htm). 5. For a detailed illumination of how twentieth-century thought and knowledge has been structured (often violently) by such binarisms, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s argument in The Epistemoloav of the Closet that a struggle with the homo/heterosexual definition has shaped all of Western culture since the end of the nineteenth century. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 43 Chapter 2 Danger and Homoerotic Desire in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudv Night and D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love “ The fact is, though you will never admit it, that everybody in this place has an inferiority complex about married women and children. For all your talk about careers and independence, you all believe in your hearts that we ought to abase ourselves before any woman who has fulfilled her animal functions.m - Miss Hillyard, Gaudv Night “ Oh, if I were tempted Id marry like a shot I’m only tempted not to. ’ The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement 'Isn’ t it an amazing thing,’ cried Gudnm, ‘ how strong the temptation is, not to!’ They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.’’ - Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, Women in Love The conversations excerpted above are among many staged in both Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1936 novel, Gaudv Nioht. and D.H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel, Women in Love, that reveal anxiety over the monumental changes in gender roles taking shape in the early part of the twentieth century. In both conversations, professional women-Oxford scholars in the case of Gaudv Night, and a school teacher and an artist in Women in Love-are debating the relative merits and drawbacks o f traditional marriage and motherhood, and in both the rejection of those roles is shadowed with doubt and anxiety. with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 44 This anxiety is not unique to women in the novels: “I don’t believe a woman, and nothing but a woman, will ever make my r i f e , ' ' Gerald Crich says to Rupert Birkin in Women in Love (74). Rupert, however, clings to the hope of the "ultimate marriage,” (75) one in which his wife will give him "the surrender of her spirit” (288)-a marriage, in other words, based on the dominance of man over woman against which his female contemporaries were struggling. And while Lord Peter Wimsey’s repeated proposals of marriage to Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night reveal no indication that he harbors any doubts about matrimony, he struggles overtly in several scenes to overcome his desire to be overly protective or solicitous towards Harriet, fearing that a display of such traditional gender role behavior would completely alienate her feminist sensibilities. The continual intellectual ruminations on the state of relations between men and women, and the possibility of finding agency and fulfillment within those relations in an era when, as Rupert puts it, "the old ideals are as dead as nails” (75), composes an intriguing common theme between two novels dissimilar in many obvious respects— the one, often considered a weak link in a popular mystery series, the other, held to be a modem masterpiece in the literary canon. In staging these overtly intellectual debates on the changing state of gender relations, both narratives self-consciously reveal an anxiety which, I Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 45 will argue, manifests itself in representations of erotic aggression that serve to unsettle not only conventional categories o f gender identity, but of sexuality as well. Problematizing what it means to be constructed “as a man” or “as a woman” in our society implicitly problematizes what it means to be constructed ”as a heterosexual” as well, for as Judith Butler points out in Gender Trouble. The institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire. (23) In both Gaudv Nioht and Women in Love, anxieties about gender roles give rise to anxieties about sexuality, and in both works, violence provides a narrative pretense for exploring the fantasies and fears evoked by eroticism not contained within conventional binary constructions. The changes taking place in modem gender relations in early twentieth-century Britain were no less than revolutionary. It was only at the tail end of the nineteenth-century that women were allowed any property rights in England, and when an 1891 legal decision determined that men could no longer imprison their wives in the house so as to enforce their conjugal rights, the London Times declared that “‘one fine morning last month marriage in England was suddenly abolished’"(Gilbert & Gubar 49). Twenty years was to make a big difference. During World War I, women Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 46 entered the work force in unprecedented numbers in both farms and factories (Gilbert & Gubar 271). Women's fashions became much less restrictive and more similar to men’s: trousers, overalls, and even military uniforms became commonplace (Gilbert & Gubar 330). Women found freedom on the roadways in motorcars and on motorbikes (293). They began to receive more of the benefits of formal education: Sayers, for example, completed the same curriculum and examinations as her male counterparts at Oxford in 1914, but it would not be until 1920 that the university would consent to award degrees to its women graduates (Hitchman 17). Not only did these changes pose obvious challenges to the social structure of gender hierarchy, but they presented a significant threat to the hegemonic sexual order as well. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write in No Man's Land. T o be sure, specifically erotic release was frequently associated with the unprecedented freedoms women were achieving” (299). The anxieties provoked by this cultural “erotic release” are explored in Gaudv Night and Women in Love via their representations of erotic violence. Gender domination depends not only upon the sexual subjugation of women, but as Butler points out, upon the enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality as well. Women who have the agency to choose with whom to have sex (or not), as well as under what conditions, subvert the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 47 social as well as sexual control that men have historically exercised over them. Yet sexual relations between women threaten the relevance of men altogether, while those between men threaten to “feminize” them such that the gender distinctions upon which domination is founded become blurred. Thus it is that the anxieties that surface in Gaudv Night and Women in Love in intellectual conversations about the institution of marriage speak directly to instabilities in the social structures of both gender and sexuality. The violence in these works, while assuming differing and multiple valences, serves strategically to help hammer away at those structures of inequality. In Gaudv Nioht. Sayers performs a modernist experiment with the detective fiction genre by using violence to deconstruct gender and sexual norms. Violence, of course, is an inherently integral element of the detective fiction genre, with murder being the most popular plot premise. Yet Sayers uses violence in Gaudv Night as a pretense for exploring the homoerotic desires and fears that surface at the women’s college when an anonymous aggressor is presumed to be a woman driven mad with sexual repression. The text becomes effectively “queer” (in the contemporary theoretical sense of the word), a work in which gender and sexuality are deconstructed to unleash a play of polymorphously perverse possibilities. In addition to exploring Sayers’ thematic use of violence, my analysis of the novel will explore how her generic experimentation may be read as an act Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 48 of aggression that strategically parallels the text’s subversive content on the level of form. Ultimately, both the thematic and the formal violence of the text work together to challenge yet a different type of cultural violence: systematic gender and sexual domination. Therein lies an intriguing kinship between two strikingly dissimilar novels, for my analysis of Women in Love attempts to reveal how it, too, ultimately employs violence-both in its thematic explorations o f its characters’ erotic lives and in its experimentation with the pastoral romance genre— in order to destabilize the binary structures o f gender and sexuality that impose a systematic violence upon those who are marginalized by them. The pastoral romance is not a genre traditionally characterized by violence; by inserting sadomasochistic elements into the love relationships it describes, Lawrence successfully illuminates the power and domination inherent in heterosexual romance conventions. Furthermore, by linking the violence in the text to homosexual repression, Lawrence exposes the violence underlying compulsory heterosexuality. Nonetheless, the textual dynamics of erotic aggression are somewhat more problematic in Women in Love than in Gaudv Night, which I argue is the result of a greater ambivalence on Lawrence’s part about challenging the patriarchal privilege which he himself enjoys. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 49 Although Gaudv Night was written in 1936,20 years later than Women in Love (the first draft of which was written in 1916, although Lawrence could not find a publisher for it until 1920), I have chosen to position my textual analysis of the later novel first in this chapter. Part of my rationale for reversing the chronology of the texts resides in the aforementioned claim that Gaudy Night is somewhat less ambiguous in its use of erotic aggression to destabilize categories of gender and sexual domination. Although Sayers’ novel is by no means uncomplicated, I argue that Lawrence’s work evinces a dynamic of erotic aggression that, while ultimately similar to Gaudv Niohfs. is nonetheless more problematically paradoxical in its deconstruction of gender and sexuality. Thus, my analysis of Sayers’ text in a sense sets the stage for the particular hermeneutic challenges posed by Women in Love. Furthermore, the poststructuralist discourse on gender and sexuality by such critics as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lynda Hart, and Terry Castle that I employ in connection to Gaudv Nioht establish an argumentative framework about how representations of erotic aggression challenge broader social constructs that is a necessary foundation for my analysis of Women in Love as well. Lawrence’s text raises more explicit psychoanalytic concerns than does Sayers’, and thus much of the critical material I employ in connection with the latter section of the chapter includes such Freudian-influenced Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50 theorists as Leo Bersani, Gilles Deleuze, and Jessica Benjamin, who help to illuminate the psychic and social connections of erotic aggression. Queemess at Shrewsbury The following analysis of Gaudv Night will reveal the ways in which the aggression implicit in the generic conventions o f detective fiction functions to “queer” the format in such a way that lesbian desire is both encoded and erased in the narrative. When an outbreak of vandalism, threatening missives, and physical attacks occurs at an Oxford women’s college, the perpetrator is determined to be one its women residents. Lynda Hart, drawing on discourses of criminology, sexology, and psychoanalysis, as well as texts extending from the nineteenth-century novel to contemporary film and performance art, argues in Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression that the figure of the lesbian is the “silent escort” of violent women (x). This figure operates in a dialectic of “appearance/disappearance” in representations of aggressive women (x). While her erasure, according to Hart, serves to maintain what Butler terms “the institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality,” her appearance nonetheless works to de-naturalize that institution; furthermore, the queer resistance of this dialectical representation to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 51 remain unambiguously located in either the heterosexual or homosexual camp functions narratively to destabilize that division. The plot of Gaudv Nioht is set in motion when protagonist Harriet Vane, herself a successful mystery novelist, is motivated to return to her alma mater, Shrewsbury Women's College at Oxford, to attend its annual celebratory Gaudy Dinner. What lures her back to the campus for the first time since her graduation ten years ago is the "urgent entreaty” (2) of a former "intimate friend” (9) and classmate, Mary Stokes, who has fallen ill and desires to see Harriet one more time before undergoing a dangerous operation. Harriet’s recollections of her relationship with Mary suggest a physical attraction that colors their collegiate history with the erotic overtones of a mutual schoolgirl crush. While considering the Gaudy invitation, Harriet recalls: Mary Stokes, so pretty and dainty as Miss Patty in the Second-Year play; so charming and finished in manner; so much the social center of her year. It had seemed strange that she should take such a fancy to Harriet Vane, rough and gawky and anything but generally popular. (3) Hence, from the novel's earliest pages, Sayers reveals Harriet’s self- conscious awareness of the alluring feminine charms embodied by Mary and lacking in herself. Also foregrounded is the "strange” nature of the “fancy” that the “pretty," “dainty" Mary takes to the androgynous figure of Harriet. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 52 Harriet Vane, like Dorothy Sayers, is an Oxford graduate, a successful mystery novelist and reportedly “unfeminine" in appearance. In addition to the novel’s opening allusions to the attraction Harriet shared with Mary Stokes as an undergraduate, the story suggests that Harriet has spent the intervening years endeavoring to establish a heteronormative identity that is jeopardized by her return to Oxford and the ensuing reminders of the love of women she may have willfully repressed. Readers leam that Harriet was the subject of a scandal in one of Sayers’ earlier novels for her suspected role in the poisoning death of her male lover, a man with whom she had lived, but refused to marry, despite the substantial social disapprobation for such an arrangement at that time. Harriet had been cleared of the charges by Sayers’ best-known detective creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, who later proposed to her himself. Gaudv Nioht finds Peter repeating his matrimonial proposals at regular intervals, always to be denied. Harriet’s rationale for refusing to marry both her first lover and Peter is reported by the narrator to be her fear of losing her independence, a fear which was most certainly not unfounded given the marital constraints commonly imposed upon women of her time; the repeated articulation of this fear furthermore testifies to the novel’s feminist politics, for Sayers is clearly concerned about the loss of women’s autonomy that frequently accompanies marriage. Nonetheless, when considered in conjunction Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 53 with the lesbian subtext that underlies the entire narrative, Harriets reluctance to marry assumes additional significance as an indicator of her ambivalence regarding her sexuality. This ambivalence proves to be the source of much anxiety for Harriet upon her return to Shrewsbury, which for her represents a return of the repressed. Having distanced herself from Oxford by both years and miles in an attempt to deny what may be her own homoerotic desires, Harriet grows threatened by their re-emergence at the Gaudy. Sayers displaces the psychological threat of lesbianism onto the physical threat of violence manifested in the poison pen vandal, whose harassment of the college community coincides with Harriet's return. The first evidence that Harriet's sexual repression may be linked to the poison pen’s potential for violence surfaces when she discovers an obscene drawing of a sadomasochistic and sexual act in the college quad following the Gaudy dinner It was ugly and sadistic. It depicted a naked figure of exaggeratedly feminine outlines, inflicting savage and humiliating outrage upon some person of indeterminate gender clad in a cap and gown. (38) Harriet’s response to the drawing is noteworthy for the degree to which it unsettles her Harriet stared at it for a little time in disgust, while a number of questions formed themselves in her mind. Then she took it upstairs with her into the nearest lavatory, dropped it in and pulled the plug on it. That Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54 was the proper fate for such things, and there was an end of it' but for all th a t she wished she had not seen it (38) As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that Harriet has not been able to “pull the plug” so easily on the psychic anxieties— whether of desire or fear-the image has evoked in her, and that it is responsible for “a number of questions” that now haunt her mind. While the details of the "savage and humiliating outrage* depicted are left otherwise unspecified, the drawing clearly represents an act of sexualized brutality. The threatening figure is a naked woman, one of “exaggeratedly feminine outlines,” suggesting that the danger is associated with exaggerated or unleashed female sexuality. That the victim is clad in cap and gown indicates that this danger is heightened in the academic environment at Shrewsbury, an exclusively female environment in which women live and work together in close quarters. The fact that the victim is of “indeterminate gender” also suggests a number of interesting possibilities that Sayers chooses to keep in play, both for Harriet and for the reader: if the victim is a woman-as might be expected of a member of a female college-the drawing might signify the threatening nature of the homosexual possibilities at the women’s college; if the victim is androgynous, as Harriet is, it<pould serve as a warning about the sexual dangers of repudiating her traditional feminine role; if the victim is a man, it Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 55 might represent either a lesbian fantasy of violently ridding the Oxford environment of men in order to have full sexual access to its women, or the heterosexual male sadomasochistic fantasy of being dominated by a phallic woman. Ultimately, Sayers will resolve through Peter Wimsey that the drawing represents none of these possibilities, but rather one woman’s antifeminist view of the unjust brutality inflicted upon male academics by educated women who refuse their “natural" gender assignments. As such, it is the work of Annie, a college scout seeking revenge on women academics for the suicide of her husband following one Miss de Vine’s exposure of his falsified thesis- and its subsequent rejection. Yet despite the narrative mechanisms propelling the surface plot of the poison pen mystery, if one takes seriously Sayers’ own acknowledgment that the novel is “almost entirely psychological” with only a “mild detective interest” (Reynolds 254), the psychic possibilities at play both in Harriet’s mind and in the reader’s become much more relevant than the final “whodunnit” rationale. It then follows that if Harriet Vane, the Oxford educated, feminist, successful author of murder mysteries, who has defied social convention by cohabitating with her lover, “wishe[s] she had not seen” the obscene drawing in question, her discomfort is less likely the result of the shock to her delicate sensibilities than its unsettling evocation of repressed desires Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 56 and anxieties— desires and anxieties which, as I will show, center around the specter of female homoeroticism. Following Harriet's discovery of the drawing, Sayers points out that “the episode had troubled and unsettled her” (52). Then, in a scene noteworthy in that its sole function seems to be to provide a suggestive glimpse into Harriet's psyche, she gazes at a portrait of the founder of the college and fantasizes about this rather “queer” woman, whose legacy perhaps has awakened Harriet’s own queer sensibility: she stopped to stare at the portrait of that Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, in whose honor the college had been founded. The painting was a well-executed modem copy of the one in St. John’s College, Cambridge, and the queer, strong-featured face, with its ill-tempered mouth and sidelong, secretive glance, had always exercised a curious fascination over her. (53) The Countess’s “strong-featured” face recalls the description of Harriet’s own androgynous features, and Sayers’ association of its M queer”-ness with its “secretive glance” hints enigmatically at the source of Harriet's “fascination” with its possible secret. While I suggest that Sayers constructs the possibility that Harriet suspects the Countess of being a lesbian, and that this is a source of fascination, I find the significance of this “queer” passage to lie more in that notion of possibility than in a determinate lesbian identity fo r both the Countess and Harriet. The use in literature of the term “queer” to connote Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 57 same-sex object choice has been well-documented, and certainly Sayers, a well-educated author living in London, acquainted with the Bloomsbury Group, in the post-Oscar Wilde, post-Radclyffe Hall cultural era, knew well the implications of her word choice. Still, Eve K. Sedgwick’s analysis in “Queer and Now” of the broader significance of term proves informative here. Sedgwick does not deny the importance of retaining the simple associations of “queer” with same-sex sexual expression, arguing that “for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queemess itself”(8). However, she explains how recent theoretical discourse has brought greater resonance to the term, so that now one of the things that “queer” can refer to [is] the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithicaily. (8) Thus, it would be irrelevant, and in fact counterproductive, to argue that the portrait passage should be read as marking either Harriet or the countess “as a lesbian”; in accordance with Sedgwick, they are “queer” precisely because their gender and sexuality resist such monolithic interpretation. And to the degree that Sayers has succeeded in “queering” both characters, rather than simply “coding” them as lesbians, she also, by implication, queers all of the women academics at Shrewsbury who have Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 58 been influenced by the legacy of the countess (whose name, Mary, suggests an interesting parallel with Harriet’s ‘ intimate friend” Mary Stokes). Harriet recalls that the Countess was something of a holy terror; uncontrollable by her menfolk, undaunted by the Tower, contemptuously silent before the Privy Council, an obstinate recusant, a staunch friend but an implacable enemy and a lady with a turn for invective remarkable even in an age when few mouths suffered from mealiness. (53) After painting this glowing psychological portrait of a woman who certainly defied gender expectations, Harriet concludes that the Countess ‘ seemed, in fact, to be the epitome of every alarming quality which a learned woman is popularly credited with developing*(53). Undoubtedly, Harriet regards the Countess’s queemess as among these alarming qualities with which learned women are credited. Sayers thus connects the potential for queer sexuality which defies easy categorization with the defiance of gender role categorization that characterizes all of the women at Shrewsbury, and with the “menfolk[‘s]” sense of a psychic violation of their turf. In this context, ‘Shrewsbury” is hardly a name to pass unremarked. Although it refers to an actual English town, Sayers’ choice of the word to denote her fictitious Oxford women's college contains, like much of the rest of her narrative, layers of connotation. The Random House College Dictionary defines a shrew as ‘ a woman of violent temper and speech; Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 59 virago;” the same source provides the archaic definition of virago as ”a woman of masculine strength or spirit" On the most obvious level, Sayers is having some feminist fun with a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of the stereotypical view of academic women that Harriet finds embodied in Countess Mary. The narrative’s explicit rationale for why the poison pen’s letters and vandalism are so dangerous to the college is because they threaten to reinforce this stereotype to the outside world. On a more subtle level, however, the word’s association between women, violence, and masculinity becomes more provocative if one sees Sayers to be employing violence rhetorically in the narrative to deconstruct normative categories of gender and sexuality. With the outbreak o f the poison pen campaign, Shrewsbury becomes a queer environment where both Harriet and the reader must suspect each woman as a potential aggressor and, hence, as a potential lesbian. Harriet imagines the scandal that would ensue if the lurid details of the poison pen’s letters and drawings were to become public knowledge and feed suspicions about “what lived in academic towers" (80): The warped and repressed mind is apt enough to turn and wound itself. “Soured virginity”- “unnatural life "- “semi-demented spinsters”- ”starved appetites and suppressed impulses”-"unwholesome atmosphere”~she could think o f whole sets of epithets, ready-minted for Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 60 circulation. Was this what lived in the tower set on the hill? (78) This last question lingers in the mind of Harriet, the reader, and ultimately all of the women at the college throughout the five hundred page narrative. The actual letter writer, the rabidly antifeminist Annie, reiterates it when she observes, “It isn't naturaL.all these unmarried ladies living together,” (127) and continues, "Some of these clever ladies are a bit queer, don’t you think...?’ (128). The detective fiction genre serves quite aptly and ingeniously to seduce both those within and outside the narrative with the thrilling proximity to danger that comes from wondering not only, “Who is scribbling these obscene drawings and writing these threatening letters?” but more importantly, “Why is (s)he doing it? Is (s)he a lesbian driven mad with repressed desire?" When Harriet agrees to return to the college to investigate the scandal, she deliberately puts herself in the position to become a “victim” of what she suspects is just that: a repressed lesbian. It is a possibility which both frightens and empowers her. She might be physically harmed-and indeed she is eventually attacked-by the aggressor; on the other hand, she can justifiably indulge in otherwise forbidden fantasies about the sexuality of all the women at Shrewsbury. Readers of crime fiction generally derive a rather voyeuristic pleasure in the suspense of danger, fantasizing (from a safe distance) who might have Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61 “done it” and why; this pleasure takes on homoerotic valences within the queer possibilities constructed in Gaudv Nioht. In the essay "Detecting a Novel Use for Spinsters,” Catherine Kenney suggests, "Perhaps the murder mystery itself, with its titillating and faintly erotic insinuations of forbidden action and information, is just a stylized sublimation of the sex drive” (131). Yet Gaudv Nioht cannot properly be called a murder mystery, since no murder ever occurs; we suspect that it will, for that is the genre Sayers became famous for writing, and to which all of the other "Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries” (which the book jacket clearly labels itself to be) conform. Lord Peter himself does not even appear until three hundred pages into the narrative; Harriet Vane is the primary detective and interest in this story. Sayers thus seduces the reader with the conventions of the Lord Peter murder mystery, and then proceeds to violate that genre by refusing to produce either a murder or Lord Peter. This dynamic of genre seduction and violation suggests a self- consciousness on Sayers’ part regarding the erotic component that Kenney finds to be constitutive of the murder mystery, and an experimentation with it that amounts to an act of formalist violence. In doing away with the murder aspect of the mystery, Sayers substitutes a different brand of "forbidden action” with "titillating and [more than] faintly erotic insinuations”: the uncontained possibilities of lesbian sexuality. In Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 62 substituting Harriet for Peter as the detective who must ferret out the o mysterious secret at Shrewsbury, Sayers raises the stakes involved in both the potential danger and the potential pleasure of pursuing this particular suspect. To argue that Sayers “plays” with polymorphously perverse narrative possibilities in Gaudv Nioht recalls Jacques Derrida’s influential essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in which he articulates the post-structuralist notion of a de-centered text with no originary “truth” of interpretation; the result is a field of “fireeplay” of “infinite substitutions,” or “supplemental” meanings for any given sign (160). Miriam Brody explains in her essay, “The Haunting o f Gaudv Night: Misreadings in a Work of Detective Fiction,” how Sayers’ novel is explicitly concerned with possibilities at play in the reading of signs: Detective fiction is prototypically semiotic. The sign- reading detective deciphers a text of signs, foremost among which is the crime itself, signs no one claims to have written, signs which are apparently, then, unauthored. Indeed the cast of characters to whom one may wish to impute the work of such sign-reading loudly denies authorship. The real writer, the malefactor, is an absent presence through most of a work of detective fiction. (94) As such, it matters little that Annie is ultimately revealed to have authored the poison pen signs, or that her rather conventional motivation is the desire to avenge her husband’s death. Throughout the bulk of the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 63 narrative, everyone can be read as the possible author/culprit and any number of possible motives ascribed to them. The psychological element that Sayers saw as the primary concern of her novel thus resides in Harriet’s role as the text’s sign-reader, whose readings are necessarily structured by her own desires. Brody acknowledges the influence of Harriefs libido on her role as detective: Tormented, and deeply suspicious o f sexual life, Harriet searches for the Poltergeist and sees in the signs only the reflection of her own profound confusion” (98). Brody labels Harrief s readings as “misreadings” because they do not lead her to deduce that Annie is the poison pen, and “(f)inally, she calls in Peter Wimsey for help” (98) in solving the mystery. However, while Harriets suspicions may be “misreadings” on the most obvious level of the mystery plot, I would argue that they compose precisely the subversive substance of the narrative, which by Sayers’ own admission was only marginally an interest in detection. In effect, I want to argue that Harriet displaces her own desires onto the poison pen culprit, and consequently presumes her to be motivated by repressed homoeroticism. One of her chief suspects is the history tutor, Miss Hillyard, who is the most candid of the senior scholars in her dislike of men, and thus a likely candidate to be harboring lesbian tendencies. Following a bitter disparagement of marriage by Miss Hillyard, Harriet Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 64 observes to her, “ You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of men— o f the male character, I mean, as such,” to which Miss Hillyard concurs (55). The history tutor goes on to criticize the institutional sexism found not only in marriage, but in academia as well. Perhaps Miss Hillyard’s vocal disdain for the male gender disconcerts Harriet so much because she recognizes in it her own doubts about heterosexuality, marriage, and the division of gender roles: Something funny there, thought Harriet. A personal history, probably. How difficult it was not to be embittered by personal experience. She went down to the J.C.R. and examined herself in the mirror. There had been a look in the History Tutor's eyes that she did not wish to discover in her own. (55) A look of identification, perhaps? One that Harriet was afraid to find mirrored in her own unconscious? Much later in the novel, Harriet deduces that Peter’s presence at the college and his relationship with her evokes a bitter jealousy in Miss Hillyard because the History Tutor is attracted to him; I would suggest, however, that perhaps the object of her attraction is Harriet, not Peter, and on some unconscious level, Harriet is afraid of finding similar homoerotic desire mirrored in herself. Harriet’s projects her fantasies onto all of the women at Shrewsbury. At dinner after discovering the initial drawing, Harriet kept on asking herself, Which? Which of all these normal and cheerful-looking women had dropped that unpleasant paper in the quad the night before? Because you Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 65 never knew; and the trouble of not knowing was that you dimly suspected everybody. (50) Harriet's ruminations bring to mind D A Miller’s analysis of how connotation functions narratively to raise homosexual meaning that is always capable of being “elided even as it is also being elaborated” (124); following Miller’s logic, the homosexual possibilities underlying Harriets suspicions, while not explicitly articulated, serve to “raise the ghost [of homosexuality] all over the place” (125). Sayers may thus be seen to be opening up a textual field of freeplay in which every woman at the college may be substituted as the possible author of the signs. The Dean reinforces what Derrida would call the supplemental nature of the narrative, as well as the sexual nature of the possible interpretations at play, when she comments to Harriet that the culprit “might even be one of ourselves. That’s what’s so horrible. Yes, I know-elderly virgins, and all that” (79). The narrative play invites both Harriet and the reader to fantasize about the identity and the motivations of the party responsible for the queer doings at Shrewsbury. Not only does Miss Hillyard become “a little twisted" (57) in Harriet’s imagination, but the entire college environment becomes shadowed with eroticism and ambiguity. When the poison pen strikes again by vandalizing the new library, Harriet checks her first instinct to look for paint-stained clothing by imagining the culprit to have earned out her mischief in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 66 nude, a speculation which reinforces the erotic nature of the aggression, at least in Harriet's (and the reader’s) fantasy (123). The English tutor, Miss Lydgate, remarks on the startling habit of the present undergraduates to sunbathe scantily clad in undergarments, and one wonders if this is a “clue’ to the English tutor’s repressed sexual fixation. The new Research Fellow, Miss de Vine, reveals a desire to be alone with Harriet and professes an admiration for the protagonist’s detachment She remarks, Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable ... If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it— still more, because of it— that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself. (37) One wonders if this is a “clue” to Miss de Vine’s attraction to Harriet, a suspicion that is only augmented when Harriet replies, “I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feer (37). The remark recalls Brody's observation about Harrief s “profound confusion” regarding sexual life. Has she been so “disconcerted” because she senses the possibility of a mutual attraction between herself and Miss de Vine? Miss de Vine responds to Harriet’s confusion by arguing, “I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings” (37). In the context of an atmosphere of unleashed homoerotic desire, Miss de Vine’s remark might be read as an invitation to Harriet to join her in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 67 resisting the social imperative to adopt an “appropriate” heteronormative identity. The link between the poison pen vandal's aggression and the potential for queer sexuality is clearly constructed in the content of the threats made on campus. Sayers often chooses not to reveal the explicit nature of the poison pen letters, preferring instead to keep the possibilities at play in the narrative, but she does hint on a couple of occasions that they contain a consistent anti-male theme, and that the writer has knowledge of some perverse secret about the recipient In describing the letters, Sayers only vaguely explains, There were a number of messages, addressed to various members of the S.C.R., and informing them, with various disagreeable epithets, that their sins would find them out that they were not fit for decent society and that unless they left men alone, various unpleasing things would occur to them. (85) The precise nature of these “sins” which would render the offenders unfit for decent society, like so much of the narrative, may only be speculated upon, but like the obscene drawings, the inference is clearly sexual. Sayers seems to desire both Harriet and the reader to interpret these messages as signs that the writer either has projected her homoerotic fantasies onto the objects of the letters, or has actual firsthand knowledge of some sexual experience of theirs and desires to eliminate any possible heterosexual claims to their affection. Such an interpretation is further Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 68 invited when Lord Peter’s nephew. Saint-George, reveals to Harriet that he has been accosted in the college garden by the “ghost” haunting Shrewsbury, and after demanding, “‘Which of ‘em do you want?’”, she warns him to “‘go away. We murder beautiful boys like you and eat their hearts out1 ” (223). Saint-George’s reference to the poison pen author who seeks to drive men away from the college as a “ghost” is only one of many such references throughout the narrative. In Saint-George’s description, this apparition “popped out from behind a bush” in the garden and grabbed him; dressed all in black, she had “beastly” eyes and a “horrid voice, like glue,” and she was “uncommonly strong” (222-223). At various other points in the story, the phantom-like vandal who mysteriously appears and disappears is referred to as “ghost” or “poltergeist” People catch a glimpse of her in a lighted window, and then she is gone before anyone can enter the room. She seems to glide like a specter in and out of college buildings, turning off all the lights and managing to evade the throngs of inhabitants who pursue her. “‘It’s the Poltergeist,’ said somebody. ‘Let’s catch her this time,’ said somebody else” (205), goes the refrain of the haunted inhabitants of Shrewsbury, yet the apparition always proves ultimately elusive. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 69 The ghost metaphors used to designate the campus culprit suggest further evidence that the danger she embodies is the threat of lesbian sexuality, for according to Terry Castle, Western literature since the Enlightenment has invoked the figure of the ghost to represent the simultaneous absence and presence of lesbianism. In her persuasive critical study, The Aoparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modem Culture. Castle argues that “in nearly all of the art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lesbianism, or its possibility, can only be represented to the degree that it is simultaneously ‘derealized’ through a blanching authorial infusion of spectral metaphors* (34). Sayers' representation of the poison pen writer Annie as a “poltergeist” figure, then, follows in a literary tradition, well-documented by Castle, of authors who can only suggest the possibility of lesbianism by disembodying it in the ethereal guise of the ghost. However, Castle argues that despite the “insubstantiality” and “‘not-thereness’” of the apparitional lesbian, she is a figure who functions strategically as a reminder of precisely that possibility (46). By “haunting” our literary heritage with her persistent apparitional appearance and disappearance, she embodies a lesbian existence that is always present, lurking perhaps in the shadows or ju st around the next comer. Castle explains: Why, since the eighteenth century, this phantasmagorical association between ghosts and lesbians? And why the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 70 seductive permutation of the metaphor in the twentieth century? The answer, it seems to me, is not far to seek. The spectral figure is a perfect vehicle for conveying what must be called-though without a doubt paradoxically-that ‘recognition through negation’ which has taken place with regard to female homosexuality in Western culture since the Enlightenment Over the past three hundred years, I would like to suggest the metaphor has functioned as the necessary psychological and rhetorical means for objectifying-and ultimately embracing-that which could not otherwise be acknowledged. (60) Presenting the suspected troublemaker of Gaudv Nioht metaphorically as a ghost may be read as yet another narrative strategy that Sayers employs to acknowledge the possibility of lesbian desire that emerges simultaneously with the danger on campus. The aggressive actions initiated by the poison pen culprit- threatening letters, obscene drawings, vandalized classrooms and books, mutilated dummies hanging in the chapel, people accosted frighteningly in the garden, an undergraduate tormented to the brink of suicide, and finally, life-threatening attacks on Harriet and Miss de Vine-serve as the narrative occasions for the possibility of lesbianism to surface at Shrewsbury. That which has been repressed cannot be admitted or acknowledged outright, but it can be implied through the spectral appearances, innuendos, and inferences occasioned by the threatening presence of the poison pen. Indeed, Lynda Hart, employing the same spectral metaphor as Castle, argues that lesbianism is a “haunting secret” that has accompanied Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 71 Western cultural representations of aggressive women since the Victorian era. In the preface to Fatal Women. Hart explains that "one ghost in the machine of heterosexual patriarchy is the lesbian who shadows the entrance into representation of women's aggression” (ix). In constructing the poison pen “poltergeist” of Shrewsbury as a possible lesbian throughout the majority of her narrative, Sayers is thus, in one respect, conforming to the prevalent discursive models of her time which displaced women’s aggression onto sexual deviancy. In another respect, however, Sayers seems to challenge what Hart calls the “banal” and “pervasive” history in which “(l)esbians in mainstream representations have almost always been depicted as predatory, dangerous, and pathological” (x), because ultimately the Shrewsbury ghost is revealed to be motivated not by lesbian desire, but by anti-feminist, heterosexual vengeance. Annie believes that it is ‘ unnatural” for women to usurp a “man’s role” in the academic, professional arena; she blames all women academics for her husband’s suicide, and thus she instigates the vandalism at Shrewsbury in an attempt to bring public scandal and ruin upon the college. If anyone is demented, Sayers implies, it is sexist ideologues such as Annie who would restore rigid, traditional gender boundaries in an era when women were just beginning to cross them in places like Shrewsbury. Annie’s aggression, then, may be seen to signify Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 72 the violence of a patriarchal order that has not hesitated to use physical, psychological, legal, and economic force to maintain its dominance. Furthermore, while Annie ideologically professes to be motivated by the desire to return women to their "proper place” in the home, ironically she herself is appropriating the masculine prerogative of aggression in her tactics. Thus, while she is not revealed to be a lesbian, in a sense Sayers does succeed in "queering” her, for, as Hart explains, what is particularly pertinent for lesbian historians and theorists to remember is that the female invert’s aggressiveness was what marked her as deviant and therefore dangerous, not her object choice. As [George] Chauncey has argued, it was the invert’s usurpation of masculine privilege that defined her sexuality... (9) Even though Annie is purported to lack same-sex sexual desire, her aggression "masculinizes” her, thus positioning her in the same "ambivalent position in the symbolic order” as the lesbian (x). This irony is not lost on Virginia B. Morris, who argues in “Arsenic and Blue Lace: Sayers’ Criminal Women” that "Annie never recognizes that she has become exactly what she despises: a woman who is doing a man’s job” (493). Much like Phyllis Schlafly, who in the 1970s built a successful career out of telling American women they shouldn’t have careers, Annie is a hypocrite whom Sayers surely delights in using to deconstruct those same gender and sexual taxonomies that the character’s own narrow mind endeavors to enforce. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 73 Whereas Castle argues that the ghost of the lesbian operates paradoxically to ensure the “recognition through negation” of lesbian existence, Hart voices a different claim: I am not developing this negativity [about the lesbian ghost in the shadows of representations of aggressive women] in the interest of making lesbians visible. Rather, I demonstrate some discursive maneuvers in which the production of violent women in representation depends on a dis-articulated threat of desire between women. It is not a matter, then, of looking for the lesbian behind representations of violent women, but rather of understanding how the lesbian functions in a structural dialectic of appearance/disappearance where the aggressive woman is visible. The lesbian (dis)appears in the masculine imaginary so that the violent woman can ascend to her place in the phallocratic symbolic, (x) In other words, while Castle finds the ghost-like presence of the lesbian to be a strategic trope for maintaining lesbian visibility, Hart finds the apparitional nature of the lesbian who disappears behind the image of the violent woman to function more to “defuse the full force” o f the threat of lesbian desire to the dominant social order. She argues that the recurrence of lesbian sexuality as the ghost behind aggressive women reflects “a profoundly paranoid heterosexist/patriarchal culture that persistently and ostentatiously exhibits and produces its necessary other in order to keep it under erasure” (ix). On one level, it is possible to read the apparitional lesbian who haunts the image of the Shrewsbury suspect throughout most of Gaudy Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 74 Niaht as a narrative device that is ultimately used to reinscribe that heterosexist/patriarchal culture. On the surface, the plot’s resolution does indeed function to erase the threatening possibility of lesbianism from the text Because Annie is revealed as the perpetrator, motivated by an anti feminist rage at the death of her husband, the specter of lesbian desire that originally surfaces with her threats is effectively erased from the college environment. There is no ‘semi-demented spinster” driven mad with repressed lesbian desire, after all; the women of Shrewsbury who had eyed each other with excited suspicion are reassured that none of their own had been harboring such dangerous homoerotic impulses. Sayers rather disingenuously suggests in the final pages, They were all normal again. They had never been anything else” (493). As further evidence that the potential for sexual deviance is obliterated and the dominant order restored, the novel’s conclusion finds Harriet accepting Peter’s marriage proposal. Despite her feminist doubts about the institution o f marriage, despite her confusion about her sexuality, Harriet Vane will become Mrs. Peter Wimsey: could a more overt narrative capitulation to the heterosexist patriarchy be possible? By hastening to affirm that Harriet and the good women of Shrewsbury are most assuredly heterosexual, and by silencing lesbian desire— the unacknowledged, unspoken “secret" driving the mystery narrative-must not Sayers be seen Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to endorse what Hart calls “the discursive/material violence of this system’s effort to secrete (set apart, sift, distinguish) the hetero from the homo’ (ix)? And yet... On the one hand, the resolution of Gaudv Night reveals how Sayers’ text is circumscribed within the dominant social conventions that its plot ultimately imposes, which can undoubtedly be attributed to a certain conservatism both within the author and the popular audience for which she was writing; on the other, however, the queer possibilities that Sayers keeps in play throughout the bulk of the novel function precisely to destabilize that hetero/homo binary. The disembodied, free-floating desire that is unleashed throughout the mystery resists the fixity of a determinate subject or object. By seducing both the women of Shrewsbury and the reader with the possibility that lesbianism is the spectral “secret” behind the aggression of the poison pen, and that the culprit could be or “get” anyone, Sayers effectively uses the premise of that aggression to challenge, rather than to uphold, what Hart calls the discursive “violence” of heterosexist dualisms. Furthermore, many contemporary readers would find it completely feasible to read a queer subtext into the heterosexual romance/marriage plot involving Harriet and Lord Peter as well. Harriet is a rather masculinized figure; Sayers describes her in various places as a tall, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 76 somewhat rough, gawky, short-haired, strong-featured woman. Saint- George exclaims to her when she refuses to respond sympathetically to his attempts to charm her, “You are the most unwomanly woman I ever met” (223). Correspondingly, Peter is a notably feminized figure. Harriet notices that Saint-George shares his Uncle Peter's face, "ominously weak about the curved lips;” his hair, "the pale yellow of ripe barley”; his "light, drawling voice”; and his “beautiful, sensitive hands” (181). Other characters remark Peter’s lack of masculinity as well. As the monocled, impeccably groomed detective cuts a dandyish figure playing the piano and singing an Elizabethan love song in an antique shop, another man loudly goads, "Who is this effeminate bounder?” (423). Even Annie accuses him of lacking sufficient virility to entice the women of Shrewsbury to regard him as a sexual object: “It’s men like you that make women like this. You don't know how to do anything but talk” (488). There is a curious lack of sexual chemistry, moreover, between Harriet and Peter. Harriet remarks to herself at one point that in all the years of knowing him, “she had never considered Peter primarily as a male anim ar-that is, sexually. His proposals to her are noticeably lacking with respect to passion or romance. And in one of the most interesting and bizarre scenes of the novel, the pair enacts a stylized, mock sadomasochistic ritual that culminates in the purchase of a studded Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 77 leather dog collar for Harriet The highly aestheticized “degree of artifice” in the scene is characteristic of camp, according to Susan Sontag’s influential analysis of the subject in Against Interpretation (275). The premise for the scene is a self-defense lesson intended to protect Harriet from an attack by the poison pen. The tongue-in-cheek, aestheticized nature of the ritual is evinced by Peter’s observation that Harriet would make a good strangling victim: "You have a nice throat for it,” pursued his lordship, thoughtfully. “It has a kind of arum-lily quality that is in itself a temptation to violence. I do not want to be run in by the local bobby for assault; but if you will kindly step aside with me into this convenient field, it will give me great pleasure to strangle you scientifically in several positions.” (413) They spend the next few minutes engaged in various modes of strangulation attack-and-response movements, after which Harriet compliments him: “No gentleman could throttle a lady more impersonally.” Peter responds, “Thank you for the testimonial. Cigarette?” (414). As they indulge in a mockingly post-coital smoke, it is quite clear to the reader that Sayers is playfully appropriating the conventions of an S/M sex ritual to evoke a scene that is decidedly unerotic or sexual. In contrast to the parodic quality of this scene, “in actual S/M rituals...playfulness and parody seem to be entirely lacking, perhaps because...parody is an erotic turn-off,” Tania Modleski argues in Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Aae. Neither Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 78 Harriet nor Peter possesses the true fetishist’s "I know, but all the same,” suspension of disbelief that would render the scene erotically stimulating; the artifice is obvious to both them and the reader. I suggest, then, that the erotic artifice of this scene is indicative of the entire romance plot involving the two. Sue-Ellen case argues in Towards A Butch-Femme Aesthetic” that gay and lesbian subcultures have used camp as a mode of ‘ liberation from the rule of naturalism or realism,” as a way of breaking down the rules between what’s real and what’s not. Camp, she explains, ‘eradicates the ruling power of heterosexist realist modes” (298). In this campy S/M scene, the pretense of violence once again serves as a narrative pretense for destabilizing hegemonic constructions of sexuality. Sayers may perhaps be bowing to heteronormative conventionality by marrying off her two protagonists, but she does so with a wink that suggests there’s something queer about those two. Dorothy Sayers was no stranger to erotic attractions between women, and the gender and sexual ambiguity that overshadowed her own life undoubtedly contributed to her interest in exploring these issues in Gaudv Nioht. She was well-aware, for instance, of the propensity for homoerotic attractions to develop in single-sex institutional environments. Barbara Reynolds’ biography, Dorothy L. Savers: Her Life and Soul, reveals its subject to have been quite candid about the high school crush she Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 79 shared with other classmates on a certain instructor, Miss White. Reynolds calls the attraction “a clear case of schwamerei," (30) which translated means "romantic zeal.” Nancy M. Tischler, too, acknowledges in Dorothy L. Savers: A Pilgrim Soul that in the "‘woman-ridden* existence...Sayers shared for the first twenty-five years of her life, she had seen many levels of woman-love,” ranging from "deep friendship” to those "fragile outcropping(s) of the romantic drive" which are fraught with "more dangers” (62-63). Those "dangers,” perhaps, served as the inspiration behind Gaudv Night’s linkage of same-sex eroticism and aggression. As most of the biographical literature on Sayers is quite reverential in tone and reluctant to probe immodestly into issues of her sexuality, I have not unearthed any conclusive evidence that Sayers ever acted upon any of her attractions to other women, either during her schoolgirl years or during her later membership in the all-female Mutual Admiration Society she founded at Oxford in 1912. Certainly, she never identified herself as a lesbian. What does clearly emerge from scrutiny of Sayers’ early life is the portrait o f a young girl markedly confused about her gender and sexual identity. As a young teen, she indulged both in the predictable adolescent crushes on neighboring young men and male matinee idols, and in the male-identified fantasy of being one of the Three Musketeers, "hopelessly enamoured of the fair duchesse de Chevreuse,” a role assumed by her Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 80 cousin Ivy Shrimpton, eight years her senior (Reynolds 25). Sayers apparently fostered this fantasy in “flowery love letters” to Ivy, to whom she also sent romantic French poems (Reynolds 25). A fascinating photograph in Reynolds’ book captures a teenage Sayers in her masculine guise, dressed to the hilt as Athos, the gallant lover from Alexandre Dumas’ novel (20). This image of Sayers strikingly foreshadows the later androgynous persona she was to adopt and the ways her future biographer was to describe her. Reynolds’ description of the novelist when she motorcycled through the English countryside in 1926 to visit her parents in the village where her father was the local Anglican priest conjures up irreverent subtitles that might be imagined by a modem reader, particularly one familiar with the lesbian themes in the author’s work: “Dorothy Sayers, Motorcycle Mama,” or perhaps, “Biker Butch.” She writes: ...Dorothy dressed in motorcoat, leggings and boots. She wore gauntlets and goggles and her cropped hair was hidden beneath a leather helmet. Her appearance was startlingiy unfeminine. What her parents thought of it we can only guess but someone who saw her arrive attired in such fashion at her father’s house outside Oxford described her in very unflattering terms. There is a tough masculinity about her at this time. She must have been quite robust to handle the heavy motor-cycle of the period and she obviously enjoyed the aggressive noise of the engine and the defiant danger of speed. (202-203) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 81 Carolyn Heilbrun points out that by the 1930s, about the time Sayers was approaching middle age and writing Gaudv Nioht. the author found herself more free than ever “to disdain those efforts of dress, cosmetics, and hairdressing that had always caused her undue effort and dissatisfaction" (557). The stout short-haired Sayers partook o f what was considered at the time to be the "unbecoming habit” of wearing trousers (Heilbrun 558). Of Sayers' weight, Heilbrun speculates that it was a physical manifestation of a psychic denunciation of a burdensome femininity: "But can it be doubted that for a woman to grow fat in middle age is to disassociate her personhood from her feminine appeal?” (558). Despite Sayers’ marriage in 1926 to a journalist who, according to Reynolds, "bitterly resented" her success-a marriage which endured, apparently unhappily, until his death in 1950— ft is evident that her sexual orientation nonetheless has persisted to be the object of speculation. As Heilbrun points out, while authorized biographer James Brabazon’s denies that the author’s "intense” friendships with other women were sexual, he "does not deal with Sayers’ great defensiveness on this subject” (560). Heilbrun thus succeeds both in illustrating that Sayers' sexual orientation was subject to question during her lifetime and in slyly implying that perhaps the lady protested a bit too much. The question of whether or not Sayers ever engaged in homosexual activity is likely to remain with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. unanswerable, and indeed is irrelevant to the queer sensibility of her narrative. What the autobiographical information on Sayers does serve to illuminate is an author self-consciously aware of the violence of gender and sexual marginalization, one whose ingenious use of aggression to indulge in otherwise prohibited homoerotic fantasies serves to challenge that marginalization. U A Strange, Perilous Intimacy” Whereas in Gaudv Night. Shrewsbury College serves as a locus for modem anxieties about changing gender roles, in Women in Love, the sharp contrast between the traditional rural landscape of the English countryside and the encroaching industrial changes represented by the Beldover colliery provides the setting for similar anxieties to surface. Yet while the conversations among the women academics in Sayers’ novel indicate an explicit feminist interest in gender equality, those among the protagonists in Lawrence’s novel more often suggest the fears evoked by the prospect of unsettling the gender distinctions that maintain male dominance. Nevertheless, both novels reveal an anxiety about sexuality that accompanies the modem changes occurring in gender roles, an anxiety which is manifested in both texts in representations of erotic permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 83 aggression with a decidedly homoerotic bent The eroticization of aggression in both works ultimately functions to expose the violence inherent in the systematic maintenance of restrictive gender and sexual hierarchies. Even while Lawrence’s novel on one level struggles desperately to uphold those hierarchies, it simultaneously deconstructs them, revealing their destructive impact on all the individual subjects in the narrative. As I will demonstrate shortly, Women in Love violently subverts the pastoral romance genre suggested by its title, its setting, and its plot conventions, resulting in another rather queer text that seems finally more concerned with “men in love” with each other-and the destructive effects of repressing that love-than its title would lead one to believe. Indeed, the title itself signifies a willful repression of the love between men that serves as a central element o f the novel, and it also represents a conscious effort to position women as erotic objects in the text. And while the English country village setting and the heterosexual romance plots involving Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen and Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen evoke a tradition of pastoral romance, Lawrence quite clearly breaks with that tradition through his use of violence to shatter conventional assumptions of gender and sexuality. Interestingly, however, the link between the pastoral form and male homoeroticism suggests a symbolic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. return to the pastoral love plaints of the ancient Greeks, which were originally directed from the male shepherd figure to another male; the Anglo-Saxon appropriation of the form, of course, obliterated most traces of this original homoeroticism and established the pastoral as a model of heterosexual romance conventions. Perhaps on some level, then, Lawrence’s recuperation of the originary homosexual implications of the genre serves strategically to expose the violence of compulsory heterosexuality represented in that literary erasure of “the love that dare not speak its name.” In an amusingly telling insight into the violence of the novel, as well as into the unsettling constructions of gender and sexuality within it, Richard Aldington once wrote that Women in Love had been misnamed: it should have been titled Everybody in Hate (De Salvo xii). Aldington thus indicates the oddity of the exclusion of men from the title-an oddity which, as I will show, may be attributed to the novel’s deliberate problematization of gender categories. His comment also suggests the inadequacy of the love/hate binary in any attempt to interpret the novel’s dynamics of erotic aggression, dynamics which serve to unsettle the very oppositionality of such constructs. That erotic aggression operates on several different yet related levels in the text. In one respect, as the psychoanalytic criticism that follows helps to point out, the novel explores the unconscious link between Eros Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 85 and Thanatos that suggests that the instincts for love and hate are inextricably connected, and that the psychic tension between the selfs desire to assert its separation from another that it is paradoxically dependent on for its own recognition serves to blur the boundaries between eroticism and aggression. This unconscious connection between the two instincts is not unrelated to the social forms of erotic aggression that get played out in the interactions between the novel’s main characters, whose shifting positions o f domination and submission reveal how these psychodynamics are manifested in social relations. In yet another respect, the novel reveals a kind of systemic violence that imposes patriarchal, heterosexual norms on individual subjects. Under this system, women and homosexuals are marginalized by the categories that identify them as “other” in order to limit their access to social agency and power. Finally, I argue that Lawrence’s text critiques that systemic violence not only by employing erotic aggression thematically to deconstruct gender and sexual binaries, but also by experimenting with a generic form that violates generic conventions in order to expose their complicity in the maintenance of an oppressive system. One useful explication of the psychic links between eroticism and aggression is offered by Leo Bersani in The Freudian Body, a work in which Bersani analyzes certain moments of theoretical collapse in Freud’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 86 writings. In Civilization and its Discontent Freud writes that the human aggressive instinct “is the derivative and main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world dominion with it” (Bersani 19). According to Bersani’s reading of Freud’s text, aggressiveness is beginning to sound bizarrely like— o f all things-the oceanic feeling, which, as we have seen, was an ecstatic sense of oneness with the universe, a breaking down of the boundaries between the ego and the world traceable to the ‘ limitless narcissism” of infancy. Like the oceanic feeling, aggressiveness includes an intense erotic pleasure. (19) That same narcissistic sense of oneness and erotic pleasure that is derived from the sexual breakdown of the boundaries between subject and object is derived from the use of aggression to produce a similar experience of ego omnipotence. In other words, the pleasure instinct that drives an individual subject to seek out an erotic union with another recalls the infant’s pleasurable sense of being one with its mother, before it develops subject/object boundaries; likewise, the aggressive instinct that drives the subject to seek the submission of another produces a related pleasure in the obliteration of those boundaries. According to Bersani, Freud evaded the conclusion which is the logical result of his own theory: “destructiveness...is identical with love...[and] constitutive of sexuality”(20). While Bersani’s use of the term “identical” seems clearly to overlook some significant differences between our expressions of “love” and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 87 “destructiveness," as well as to collapse any difference between infantile narcissism and adult ego omnipotence, his argument about the similar psychodynamics of eroticism and aggression, and of their perhaps inextricable relationship, nonetheless proves compelling. The psychic blurring of the distinctions between subject and object and between pleasure and pain, described by Bersani is enacted throughout Lawrence’s text in various moments of eroticized aggression. Furthermore, the psychic concept of the oceanic feeling that Bersani links to both erotic pleasure and aggression-unto-death suggests an interesting connection between such moments and the social dynamics of power embedded within them. The Freudian notion of the oceanic, the fluidly unconscious state of pleasure found in transgressing the boundaries separating the ego from the rest of the world, resonates suggestively with Marianne DeKoven’s discussion of water imagery in Rich and Strange; Gender. History. Modernism. DeKoven argues that the early twentieth century was characterized by a “sea-change,” or a process of radical social transformation brought about by burgeoning feminist and socialist movements. Much of the literature of that period employs water imagery to reflect an ambivalence towards the breakdown of social boundaries that had previously maintained strict gender, class, racial, and sexual hierarchies, according to DeKoven. As noted in my introductory chapter, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. she claims that the formal paradigm of modernism is one of “sous-rature,” or an unresolved contradiction or unsynthesized dialectic that enacts in the realm of form an alternative to hegemonic culture’s hierarchical dualisms, roots of those structures of inequity that socialism and feminism proposed to eradicate. (4) Modernist writing constitutes itself as self-contradictory, DeKoven explains, through this device of sous-rature, “a verbal sign that has been discredited but has no adequate replacement”; the sign is under erasure, “visible but crossed out.” The ambivalence towards the social changes looming on the horizon of the new century was differently inflected for male and female modernists, and for male writers such as Lawrence, it was characteristically bound up with a fear of the loss of authorial status and male privilege. Drawing on both Bersani and DeKoven, I suggest in the following pages that Lawrence’s representations of erotic aggression in Women in Love sen/e strategically to unsettle both the psychic and social barriers that divide subjects into dichotomous categories-such as self/other, masculine/feminine, or hetero/homosexual-even as these representations paradoxically work to maintain the visibility of such binaries. The following analysis suggests how Gerald and Rupert’s attempts to subjugate physically and/or emotionally their female lovers, Gudrun and Ursula, may permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 89 be read as the result of their own homoerotic anxieties, as well as of the threat that both homosexual desire and feminism pose to their privileged status in a patriarchal world that privileges men. Just as Sayers employs the aggressive actions of the poison pen as a narrative pretense for exploring the homoerotic anxieties evoked at a women’s college that represents a threat to the patriarchal status quo, so too does Lawrence employ aggression to reveal the anxieties evoked in his male characters by the dual threats of feminism and their own homosexual desire. Yet while Sayers’ text challenges patriarchal norms with bold determination as its protagonist, Harriet Vane, wears her feminism as a badge of honor and eventually manages a decisive victory over the anti feminist aggressor, Annie, Women in Love suggests a marked ambivalence on Lawrence’s part, a recognition of the inadequacy of the old social order combined with a fear of its loss. A telling distinction between the two texts in this regard may be found in the feet that the threat posed by Annie comes from outside the circle of Gaudv Night’s protagonists, whereas in Women in Love, it is two of the principal characters, Gerald and Rupert, who, at times, use aggression in an effort to assert male dominance. As the following analysis of Women in Love suggests, the shifting positions of domination and submission occupied by the four main characters at various points throughout the novel suggest a tension Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between, on the one hand, the desire to assert male privilege over women and to repress homosexual desire, and on the other, the desire to expose the violent injustice inherent in a society that demands both. In struggling with this tension, Lawrence’s text perhaps reveals a somewhat greater degree of sympathy for the fears evoked by the modem social changes in gender and sexual relations than does Sayers’, despite the fact that both works ultimately may be seen to subvert patriarchal norms. In light of DeKoven’s analysis of the use of water as a modernist trope to represent the blurring of borders demarcating traditional structures of hierarchy, it is perhaps noteworthy that it is on a small island in a lake where two of Lawrence’s characters, Gerald and Gudrun, enter into the sadomasochistic contract that will function to problematize their gender and sexual identities. Sisters Gudrun and Ursula have just finished indulging in an idyllic swim that reinforces the novel’s pastoral quality: naked, they swim “blissfully,* then run ashore “like nymphs,” still “quite naked," “hair blowing loose" among the trees, to “dance themselves dry...in a little wild world of their own” (193). One rather expects Sir Philip Sidney to enter with a herd of sheep and an Elizabethan love sonnet, when instead Lawrence abruptly changes tone, interjecting an aura of bestial perversion and sensual danger into the scene. Not sheep, but a herd of cattle suddenly appear to the singing and dancing sisters, frightening Ursula, but permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 91 captivating Gudrun and provoking her to break into a mesmerizing, frenzied dance that suggests a sadistic will-to-power. it was evident she had a strange passion to dance before the sturdy, handsome cattle...[Gudrun] went into a strange palpitating dance towards the cattle, lifting her body towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if in some little frenzy of unconscious sensation, her arms, her wrists, her hands stretching and heaving and reaching and falling, her breasts lifted and shaken towards the cattle, her throat exposed as in some voluptuous ecstasy towards them...Soon she would touch them, actually touch them. A terrible shiver of fear and pleasure went through her. (196) The cattle (while likely somewhat confused) are described as “hypnotized” by the dance, and Gudrun clearly relishes the erotic power she believes she wields over them. Gerald and Birkin interrupt her trance, and in the ensuing scene it becomes evident that Gudrun's sadistic streak has succeeded in enthralling Gerald, who recognizes in her a kindred spirit, a dominatrix capable of fulfilling his fantasies, and, I will argue, a challenge to his masculinity. After Gerald warns her of the dangers of her proximity to the cattle, Gudrun slaps him, feeling “in her soul an unconquerable desire for deep violence against him” (199). Gerald is overcome with “ungovernable,” “black emotion” (199)-not anger, but passion. “I’m not angry with you. I’m in love with you," he professes (200). “That’s one way of putting it,” she laughs, recognizing his masochistic arousal (200). “It’s all right then, is it?” (20°0) he demands. Gudrun concurs, but not before “her blood ran cold” at Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 92 the prospect of a relationship with Gerald (200-201). This observation about Gudrun’s own fear of Gerald suggests that he is not fixed as the masochistic subject in this relationship, and, as I will argue shortly, that the two of them engage in a dance of domination and submission in which the leading role of torturer fluctuates throughout the te xt Yet in this scene, Gudrun seems to wield the upper hand with her exhibition of sensual power that captivates Gerald. Masochism depends on a contract of mutual consent, according to Gilles Deleuze in Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. and in that moment on the lake shore, the contract between Gerald and Gudrun is sealed. In Deleuze’s theory, “the function of the masochistic contract is to invest the mother-image with the symbolic power of the law” (67). Although Deleuze admits that “the question remains why a contract is necessary,” he adds that “there is no doubt that masochism cannot do without [it]” (67). Gerald's demand that Gudrun consent to his brand of “love” thus assumes symbolic contractual significance. After the initial slap, he announces, “You have struck the first blow,” (199) suggesting that she has initiated their contract “And I shall strike the last,” (199) Gudrun replies, suggesting her willingness to assume the role of the mother- image torturer in Gerald’s fantasy. Deleuze observes that theatricality is yet another integral feature of masochism, and the theatrical quality of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 93 Gudrun’s dance performance on the lake sets the stage for the ultimately deadly performance of the contract that has now been sealed between her and Gerald. According to Deleuze’s theory, the male masochist as constructed in the texts of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch experiences "the father's likeness in him...as a sin which must be atoned for” (87) because o f his Oedipal desire for the mother. Unlike Freudian theory where the torturer represents the father, in Deleuze’s analysis, the father is expelled from the symbolic order altogether, and the masochist invests the oral mother with the paternal law. The pleasure is derived through the pain of her punishment because the masochistic contract transfers the paternal law to the mother, resulting in the most radical transformation of the law. The law now ordains what it was once intended to forbid; guilt absolves instead of leading to atonement, and punishment makes permissible what it was intended to chastise (Deleuze 88). In other words, “the purpose of masochism [is] to resolve guilt and the corresponding anxiety and make sexual gratification possible”; it is “the resexualization o f aggression turned upon the s e lf (91). Deleuze further points out the significance of the figure of Cain in Masoch’s work. Beyond symbolizing “the immensity of man’s sufferings,” Cain was The favourite of the mother” (83). By slaying his father’s likeness in his brother and making Eve into The goddess-mother," Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 94 (83) Deleuze argues that Cain’s crime "falls squarely within the world of masochism, with its attendant features of loyalty to the maternal rule, dedication to the oral mother [and] expulsion of the father” (84). It is particularly significant then, that immediately after Gudrun gives her consent for Gerald to love her and thus enters into a masochistic contract with him, the next sentences of the novel read: “He walked on beside her, a striding mindless body. But he recovered a little as he went. He suffered badly. He had killed his brother when a boy, and was set apart, like Cain” (201). This analogy to Cain, which seems to come from out of nowhere in the scene, assumes striking significance in light of Deleuze’s analysis of Cain as an archetypal male masochist. Gerald’s accidental childhood shooting of his brother assumes additional significance as an act which functions, at least in part, to subvert the law of the father. In constructing Gerald as a masochist who symbolically invests Gudrun with the paternal law, Lawrence is in one respect challenging the psychic dominance of the patriarchal order. However, the affair between Gerald and Gudrun is not destined to fit the classic masochistic paradigm constructed in Masoch’s Venus in Furs and used as the model for Deleuze’s theory, for Gudrun is not fixed as the torturer and Gerald her masochistic subject in this relationship. As I suggested earlier, the fact that Gudrun’s “blood ran cold” with fear at the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 95 prospect of a relationship with Gerald’s indicates that whereas Gerald is drawn to the violent side of Gudrun, she too is initially drawn to Gerald because of his own “sinister side” and “the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper” (27). Early in the novel, when Gerald relentlessly compels his frightened horse to stand at the railroad tracks while a locomotive races by, cruelly terrorizing the animal until blood runs from its mouth, Gudrun nearly “faint[s] with poignant dizziness” (135). Lawrence writes that at this instance an unspoken “bond was established between them” because “they were of the same kind, he and she” (145). They share the same “passion for cruelty”” (278), which results in a deadly game of shifting positions, in which first one and then the other assumes the role of torturer. Indeed, while Gudrun has won Gerald’s heart with the promise of fulfilling his masochistic desires, these same desires also jeopardize his masculine identity and compel him to attempt to subjugate her. Kaja Silverman has pointed out that The male subject..cannot avow his masochism without calling into question his identification with the masculine position and aligning himself with femininity” (36). Since, according to Deleuze, masochism is rooted in the subject’s pre-Oedipal alliance with the mother, his fear that he will lose the “nurturing all-powerful figure of his initial oral gratifications” leads him to disavow the phallic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 96 power o f the father. Silverman thus finds male masochism to represent a subversion of male dominance. However, if on one level, Gerald’s position as a masochistic subject who finds pleasure in Gudrun’s domination does represent a challenge to the phallic power of the patriarchal order, on another level, the anxiety evoked by the prospect of losing his masculine privilege drives him to attempt to dominate her in an effort to restore his status in the gender hierarchy. Hence, Gerald’s psychic desire for a pre-Oedipal alliance with a mother figure is manifested is masochistic pleasure that conflicts with his social desire for the privilege attendant upon him as the eldest son of a well-to-do mining family whom society has granted the power to dominate women and workers alike. This conflict underlies the recurrence of what Judith Ruderman calls “the devouring mother” figure in Lawrence’s work. According to her book, P H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother. Lawrence’s psychic anxieties about what he called the “incestuous” nature of the mother-son bond and the threat of merging with women were exacerbated by modem social changes granting increasing power to women. Modem democratic and socialist movements that challenged patriarchal domination led to what Ruderman calls Lawrence’s “protofascist leanings” (17) and his desire for strong male leadership. She explains, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 97 Lawrence’s need for nurturance, his hatred o f the dependency on others that this need dictated, his desire to assert his adulthood and to revenge himself on the ‘devouring mothers” in his life -a ll these personal concerns became linked in Lawrence’s mind and art to society’s problems in the chaotic years during and after World War I. As the men went off to war, leaving the women at home to take on traditionally male occupations and responsibilities, profound changes occurred in the male-female relationship. These changes were deeply threatening to Lawrence, with his need to assert male dominance over (strong) females. (17) Although Rupert Birkin more clearly represents Lawrence’s own desires and beliefs in the novel, in this respect it is Gerald who more directly symbolizes Lawrence's fear of ‘the devouring mother.” Gerald’s own mother is depicted as eccentric to the point of questionable mental faculties, a woman who seems to exist in a wholly narcissistic world, yet who nonetheless appears to wield considerable power within the family, particularly over the somewhat emasculated (and ultimately annihilated) figure of Gerald’s father. Yet while Lawrence avoids much direct representation of Gerald’s mother or his feelings for her, Ruderman’s analysis of the psychoanalytic discourse on the fears accompanying the devouring mother suggests that the mother figure is often represented as a dangerous animal. She writes, ‘The pre-oedipal tension between the desires for merger and for separation, and the fear of the mother as an ego destroyer, may lead to the child’s perceiving the mother as a wild animal who will eat him up” (10). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 98 This is an insight that suggests provocative possibilities in light of the recurrent appearance of wild animals in Women in Love. The exhibitions of domination that drive both Gerald and Gudrun into a sexual frenzy of excitement for one another consistently revolve around animals: the sight of Gerald torturing his horse by the railroad tracks makes Gudrun dizzy with passion; the sight of Gudrun dancing to subdue the cattle makes Gerald declare his love for her; and the sight of Gudrun engaged in violent struggle with a huge wild rabbit further inflames Gerald’s passion for her. Thus, Gerald’s drive to dominate animals, and to dominate a woman who is strong enough to do so herself, may be read as symbolic of his quest to subjugate the femininity that, in his psychic desire for fusion with it, threatens to collapse the social boundaries that maintain his patriarchal status. Early in the novel, a sequence involving Gerald’s sexual encounter with a woman named Minette establishes his sadistic compulsion to dominate women: She appealed to Gerald strongly. He felt an awful, enjoying power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt that she was in his power...He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge. (82) Later, in bed, he wonders if she is suffering; the thought of her as “a violated slave, whose fulfillment lies in her further and further violation, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 99 made his nerves quiver with acutely desirable sensation” (98). The references to master/slave and attacker/victim relations illustrate the social imperatives propelling Gerald’s psychic desire for domination. Minette fails to retain Gerald’s interest however, inspiring in him instead hostility and disgust, perhaps because she is in a sense, tea erased; she becomes completely invisible , and not just ‘crossed o u t” by his power. Gudrun, on the other hand, provides an irresistible challenge precisely because she is not so easily erased. As Jessica Benjamin points out in The Bonds of Love, the paradigm of domination involves a tension between the independent assertion of the autonomous self and the dependency on the recognition of the other to recognize that self (54). Thus, even while Gerald strives to ‘destroy” Minette out of a fear of his dependency on her (and all women ‘devouring mother” figures from whom he cannot fully separate), the successful destruction of her paradoxically jeopardizes his own self, whose image is dependent upon her recognition. As an other who cannot be so easily destroyed, Gudrun provides the recognition of Gerald’s power and independent agency that someone as passive as Minette is unable to supply. Gudrun represents the social changes occurring in gender relations during the World War I era in Britain that threatened its long-standing tradition of male dominance, as women increasingly chose independence Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 100 and a career over marriage and domesticity. Not only does she display a will-to-power uncommon to women in the scene with the cattle and in another where she attempts to "master” a wildly violent, terrified rabbit belonging to Gerald’s sister, but her occupation as a bohemian artist who has lived in London further associates her with realms once assumed to be those of masculine privilege. If Gerald can subjugate her and restore her to her "proper” place as a submissive woman, he can reassure himself of his masculine, heterosexual place in the symbolic social and psychic order. Lawrence reveals Gerald’s violent compulsion to dominate her in his description of their first sexual union: Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again...And she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. She had no power at this crisis to resist The terrible frictional violence of death filled her and she received it in an ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute, violent sensation. (393) However, Gudrun is not willing to remain fixed in her position as Gerald’s "vessel” and "subject,” and eventually, the realization that she will never completely submit to him, that she may in fact leave him for another man, leads Gerald to attempt to strangle her. Unable to follow through with the act, he wanders off to his death on a snowy mountaintop. The frozen landscape suggests that the only possible return to the oceanic pleasure of unbounded relations has become sheeted over with ice; Gerald’s violent attempts to repress those desires he associates with femininity or Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 101 “weakness” have brought him out of the modernist sea of possibilities and into a land of frozen sterility. Gerald’s attempts to dominate Gudrun through physical and sexual force are paralleled by Rupert’s demands for the emotional and sexual submission of his lover, Ursula. He endeavors to persuade her that it is “perhaps the highest love-impulse [to] resign your will to the higher being” (166)-the higher being, in Rupert’s mind, being himself, the intellectual, modem male. He later argues, “I want you to drop your assertive will, your frightened apprehensive self-insistence...l want you not to care about yourself, just to be there and not to care about yourself, not to insist-be glad and sure and indifferent” (289-290). Initially resistant to Ruperts demands, Ursula protests, “You want me to be your thing, never to criticize you or to have anything to say for myself. You want me to be a mere thing for you! No, thank you!” (289). Eventually, however, she acquiesces, giving up her body, her job, her family, and her home for him. After they make love, “she knew there was no leaving him, the darkness that held them both and contained them...Besides, she had a full mystic knowledge of his suave loins of darkness” (363). Rupert’s “suave loins of darkness” have presumably been sufficiently powerful to win Ursula’s subjection, and at the climax of the novel, Lawrence will again link Rupert’s domination of her to his phallic sexuality. At the mountain resort to which they have travelled Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 102 with Gerald and Gudrun, Ursula yields to what is for her symbolic of the ultimate degradation by submitting to anal intercourse with Rupert “She was bestial,” she feels afterwards, and y e t “she wanted to submit” to him and ”she exulted in i f (466). Ursula’s submission to Rupert in one sense reinforces the traditional sexual politics underlying Freud’s classic theory of female masochism: In Three Essavs on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud argues that masochism is an inherently feminine condition, that women are naturally more passive and men more aggressive. Certainly, Rupert’s attempts to subjugate Ursula may be read as endeavors to assert this ”natural" psychic order that would reassure him of his superiority. In another respect, however, Ursula’s submission recalls Jessica Benjamin’s theory of erotic domination in The Bonds of Love in which she argues that women often assume a masochistic role in a relationship not because they are essentially masochistic, but because patriarchal social conditions have privileged men with power that women may unconsciously hope to access through surrender to an idealized male figure. She argues, Let us acknowledge the partial truth of Freud’s gloomy view. The equation of masculinity with desire, femininity with object of desire does reflect the existing situation; it is not simply a biased view. Woman’s sexual agency is often inhibited and her desire is often expressed by choosing submission. But this situation is not inevitable; it has come into being through forces that we intend to understand and counteract. We do not need to deny the contribution of “nature” or anatomy in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 103 shaping the conditions of femininity; we have only to argue that the psychological integration of biological reality is largely the work of culture— o f social arrangements that we can change or direct (90) Those “social arrangements” are based on a patriarchal system in which the father “is perceived as representing the outside world” (100), according to Benjamin, and that a woman’s submission to an aggressive male father figure may stem from “identificatory love,” or her desire to identify with the male’s social agency and power through complete abjection to him. Particularly since Ursula’s abjection ultimately satisfies neither herself nor Rupert, Benjamin’s theory usefully suggests that Lawrence’s text may in one respect be a critique of those “social arrangements” of gender inequity that beget this paradigm of erotic domination. Both Gerald and Rupert’s compulsions to dominate their female lovers surface simultaneously with their attraction to each other in the narrative, suggesting that homoerotic anxiety and repression may compose yet another side of their aggressive efforts to maintain gender superiority through sexual domination over women. It is not merely coincidental, for instance, that Gerald’s insistence on viewing his sexual conquest of Minette as a violent assertion of his phallic power occurs after an unsettling encounter with Rupert on the train to London where the homoerotic tension between them surfaces in an uncomfortably enclosed Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 104 space that seems to trap the men amidst their mutual desire. Rupert attempts to persuade Gerald (and perhaps himself) that he believes the “aim and object” of life is “the finality of love” with a woman (73-74). Lawrence undercuts Rupert’s belief, however, by suggesting, “But to Gerald it sounded as if he were insistent rather than confident” (74). Likewise, doubts are raised about Gerald’s ability to maintain a fixed heterosexual identity when he claims, “‘I don’t believe a woman, and nothing but a woman, will ever make my life’” (74), and then “Gerald’s eyes narrowed with a queer dangerous smile as he watched the other man” (74). The queemess of the scene is augmented by continual references to Rupert’s distracted awareness of Gerald’s physicality and attractiveness: “Birkin could not help seeing how beautiful and soldierly his face was, with a certain courage to be indifferent” (75). Gerald is repeatedly described in the scene as “manly” and “soldierly,” constructing him as the object of Rupert’s desiring gaze-and, as Rupert is widely acknowledged to be Lawrence’s spokesperson, the likely object of the author’s desiring gaze as well. Gerald’s attraction to Rupert is more unconscious: “Gerald was held unconsciously by the other man. He wanted to be near him, he wanted to be within his sphere of influence...But yet, beyond this, he did not take much notice” (75). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 105 In an article entitled “Homoerotic Feeling in Women in Love." Charles Ross convincingly argues that the revisions Lawrence made on progressive drafts of the novel reveal the author’s decision to make the evasion or repression o f Gerald and Rupert’s erotic feelings for each other an explicit and important theme in the work (171). Whereas earlier critics had argued that Lawrence made homosexual references in the text more obscure in later drafts out of a desire to please those critics who had chastised him for the explicit sexuality in his earlier works, and/or out of a fear of revealing his own "covert” homosexual desires, Ross asserts that Lawrence's artistic intentions were paramount. Lawrence deleted allusions to the classic homosexual friendships of Achilles and Patroclus and David and Jonathan, as well as a prologue in which Rupert explicitly admits his desire for the bodies of men, because he preferred to explore the unconscious nature of Gerald and Rupert's attraction for each other and the effects of its evasion, according to Ross: The final version makes their attraction "powerful but suppressed," a pressing but not fully conscious need that the two friends will discover in the course of the novel...In other words, the revised language is evasive because they are unconsciously evading the truth of their feelings. Lawrence decided to make their unconscious desire— its initial suppression and eventual revelation— an explicit theme. (171) Ross’ argument is bolstered by an early scene in the novel at Gerald’s sister’s wedding reception, a scene in which Lawrence clearly intends to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 106 suggest that the men are engaged in active denial of their attraction for each other. Ironically, in the midst of a scene celebrating the institution of heterosexual coupling, the men struggle to suppress their non-normative love for each other There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either hate or love, or both...Yet the heart of each burned for the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual and free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them. (48) As Ross points out, “the disavowal of ‘unmanly and unnatural’ emotion” in this passage points to Lawrence’s intentional “ironic comment on the characters’ defensiveness” (171). To carry Ross’ argument about the theme o f homoerotic denial a step further, I would suggest that the language evoking the “deadly,” “perilous” nature of the men’s desire reveals the violence inherent in their psychic denial. What Ross terms Gerald and Rupert’s “defensiveness,” however, I would more accurately describe as their repression of homoerotic impulses; Lawrence’s “ironic” tone implies a critique of the men’s unwillingness to acknowledge their attraction. The point in the narrative at which the two men come the closest to indulging their desire for each other is the famously erotic wrestling match in the “Gladiatorial” chapter. Ross Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 107 notes that, interestingly, it is the one chapter in the novel where Lawrence made the sexual aspect of the men's relationship more explicit in the final draft, which, I want to suggest illustrates the author's strategic use of aggression as an occasion for challenging heterosexist norms. Whereas in Gaudv Night, the violence of the poison pen vandal provides a pretense for queer desires to rise to the narrative surface in the course of the investigation, in the "Gladiatorial” chapter, athletic aggression provides a socially sanctioned opportunity for the men to transgress the taboo against their homoerotic desire without articulating it as such. Yet unlike the aggression between the two men and their female lovers, which is depicted as a destructive byproduct of their homoerotic repression, the aggression between Rupert and Gerald is depicted as a means of liberating that desire. The text seems to suggest that "straight” aggression, like that manifested in Gerald and Rupert’s attempts to dominate Gudrun and Ursula, harmfully reinscribes conventional gender and sexual hierarchies, while "queer” aggression, such as that unleashed in the “Gladiatorial” sequence, can perhaps force a subversive wedge into that oppressive system of hierarchies. After Rupert suggests the wrestling match, "a queer, smiling look” crosses Gerald’s face as he agrees (308). After warning the butler not to return and closing the door, the men strip off all their clothes. Lawrence’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 108 language eroticizes their wrestling, metaphorically evoking sexual intercourse in his description of their sensual aggression. Initially, Rupert “impinged invisibly upon the other man, scarcely seeming to touch him,” like a tentative, first-time lover, “then suddenly piercing in a tense fine grip that seemed to penetrate into the very quick of Gerald’s being” (310). After this initial “penetration,” the men became accustomed to each other’s rhythm, they got a kind of mutual physical understanding. And then again they had a real struggle. They seemed to drive their white flesh deeper and deeper against each other, as if they would break into a oneness...[Rupert] seemed to penetrate into Gerald’s more solid, diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection. (310) Eventually, the two men collapse, sweaty, panting, “almost unconscious," with Rupert lying on top of Gerald, and remain that way, hand in hand for quite some time. Lawrence then suggests, “The wrestling had some deep meaning to them— an unfinished meaning” (313). Rupert is more willing to acknowledge the implications of their intercourse than is Gerald. He explains, “We are mentally, spiritually intimate, therefore we should be physically intimate too -it is more whole” (314). He tells Gerald that he finds him beautiful, “and that is enjoyable too. One should enjoy what is given...We should enjoy everything” (313). In Rupert’s mind, physical intimacy between men should be part of that “everything,” part of the totality of human experience and relations. He has Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 109 proposed forming a “Blutbrudershaft,” or blood-brother bond, with Gerald earlier in the novel, saying, “We ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and perfectly, finally, without any possibility of going back on it” (240). Rupert’s verbal pattern of imperatives as he tries to persuade Gerald to accept a physically intimate relationship with him serves as yet another reminder of the central role that conversational discourse about gender and sexuality plays in both Women in Love and Gaudv Night’s problematization of these categories. Nonetheless, Gerald refuses Rupert, “attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction, that he was mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction” (240). Gerald’s sense of “bondage” with Rupert parallels his bondage with Gudrun in the text, and his resentment at being “feminized” both by homoerotic attraction and by masochistic desire leads to his paradoxical love/hate relationships with both of them. Thus, despite Rupert’s attempts at persuasion, Gerald “would never openly admit what he felt..his gentle love for the other man” (238). This characterization of homosexual love as “gentle” further reinforces the distinction between the destructive erotic aggression in the heterosexual relationships and the more benign, liberating aggression that permits the men to express their erotic desire during the wrestling. Yet Gerald’s refusal to admit his feelings for Rupert determines that the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 110 meaning of the wrestling match is to remain forever “unfinished," sexually unconsummated and unacknowledged. The relationship between Rupert and Gerald is widely acknowledged to be based on that of Lawrence and John Middleton Murry (Meyers 207). As Louise DeSalvo explains it, Lawrence hoped that he could achieve an intimate mystical union with Murry that would satisfy his need for a relationship with a man. Murry, never sure what Lawrence required from him, could not comply...Lawrence learned, too, that blood- brotherhood-the relationship he proposed to Murry, his way of loving men asexuall?- could not satisfy his powerful homosexual feelings, (x) Just as Rupert’s pursuit of an intimate union with Gerald was to have been, ideally, “a necessary, sustaining complement to heterosexual marriage” (Ross 181), so too did Lawrence believe that he and Murry could share a bond that would augment, without replacing, their marriages to Frieda Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, respectively. In this respect, Rupert’s bisexual ideal seems to speak directly for Lawrence’s. Yet Lawrence’s own anxiety over his homosexual desires manifests itself in the erotic aggression of Women in Love. Lawrence once wrote that “every man comprises male and female in his being, the male always struggling for predominance” (Meyers 207), a comment that suggests both the subversion of gender and sexual binaries enacted in Women in Love and the text’s paradoxical struggle to assert a domination based on those Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 111 binaries. For while Lawrence is often commended for his work’s interest in women and female sexuality, he nonetheless believed that “the possibility of hope and salvation” in the modem world lay in the ‘ absolute surrender, unconditional” (DeSalvo xii) of women to men— sentiments echoing those uttered by Rupert to Ursula in the novel. And while he believed that homosexuality between men was a ‘ higher” love than that between men and women, one that ‘allows rather than inhibits individual freedom” (Meyers 209), he nonetheless was also deeply repelled by the idea of actual sexual relations between men, even writing in one letter that ‘ men lovers of men...give me such a sense of corruption, almost putrescence, that I dream of beetles. It is abominable” (Meyers 211). In Women in Love. the unresolved contradiction of these approaches to gender and sexuality culminate in representations of erotic aggression that seek to maintain a hierarchical order that they simultaneously cross out. Thus, while Gerald and Rupert repress, to varying degrees, their homoerotic desires, the text nonetheless makes that repression-and its destructive consequences— a visible theme; likewise, while Gerald and Rupert endeavor to subjugate their female lovers, the text explicitly reveals the destructive consequences of gender domination. By the novel’s resolution, the heterosexist, patriarchal order that the text, on one hand, struggles to assert is exposed as a violent, destructive Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 112 system that endeavors to contain subjectivity within limited taxonomies. The aggression of the wrestling match provides the occasion for the men’s homoerotic desire to surface, but Gerald’s unwillingness to admit of his "gentle love” for Rupert and Rupert’s unwillingness to adm it of the sexual aspect of his love for Gerald, suppress that desire in a desperate effort to maintain their heterosexual privilege. However, the hetero/homo binary that they endeavor to uphold is revealed to be a systematically violent one, as Lynda Hart asserts in Fatal Women. For the text’s resistance to the queer possibilities of their desire manifests itself in the men’s attempts to enslave their female partners, and the violent results of their endeavor prove to be their own undoing. By the novel's end, Gerald lies dead, and Rupert, while still insisting on his need for "two kinds of love,” that of a man and a woman, lies no closer to achieving that vision. Any pastoral qualities evoked by the narrative are obliterated in the icy landscape of death and dissatisfaction that envelops the characters. Thus, those analyses of the sexual violence in Women in Love that focus only on the reactionary, misogynist implications of its gender dynamics overlook the ways in which that sexual violence also functions to disrupt gender and sexual hierarchies. Among such analyses, which I find to be of limited use in illuminating the erotic aggression in the novel, is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s argument in No Man’s Land that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 113 Women in Love provides male artillery to the modernist 'battle o f the sexes” being waged over the changes taking place in gender relations during the inter-war period as women increasingly moved out of Victorian domesticity and into the public sphere of cultural and economic life. In their view, Gudrun represents the ”New Woman” of the modem era whose power ultimately destroys Gerald. And, indeed, Lawrence twice claims that Gerald was ”murdered,” which seems to blame Gudrun for his death. Bonnie Kime Scott claims in Refiguring Modernism that Lawrence had become ”a reactionary in regard to women and the feminine” by the time he wrote Women in Love, a book in which "the cultural necessity becomes the male assertion of power; all else, disaster” (164). Yet while I have shown that the text does, in fact, depict women and homosexuality as threatening to hegemonic “masculine" identity, at the same time the representations of these anxieties also expose the constructed and unstable nature of the categories on which they are based. While Scott interprets the “disaster” that culminates the novel as the result of its failure to restore male power, I would argue instead that it is the result of the very impetus to uphold a social order based on domination. By the end of the novel, the ideal of a society rooted in gender and sexual hierarchies is not only shrouded in ambivalence, but revealed to be a recipe for destruction. Ultimately, Women in Love, like Gaudv Night, reveals Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 114 the violent costs to individuals in the maintenance of such a society, and perhaps in doing so, sets the stage for a vision of subjectivity not bound by adherence to the rigid social constructs that, on some level, modernists such as Lawrence and Sayers had begun to question. Their novels, while in many respects radically different from one another, both respond to an era rocked by the violent carnage o f World War I and the tumultuous social upheaval it brought with it by staging intellectual conversations that speak directly to the anxieties elicited by a culture in which what it meant to be a man or to be a woman was no longer clearly defined. Their formal experimentation arose out of a need to find new ways to construct identities and relations that had become ambiguous. While both texts to a certain extent may be read as attacks on the patriarchal armor, with its concomitant heterosexual imperative, they nonetheless are marked by moments of hesitancy or ambivalence regarding what might take its place. The products of authors marginalized by gender, in Sayers’ case, and sexuality, in Lawrence’s, these novels reveal a remarkable awareness of both the interrelatedness and the constructed nature of the two categories; furthermore, their demonstrated awareness of the complex interrelationship between psychic and social forms of erotic aggression contribute to a postmodem-looking critique of the violent oppression wrought by traditional hierarchies of gender and sexual identity. o Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 115 Chapter 3 Gender, Empire, and Fantasies of Erotic Aggression in Virginia W oolfs The Vovaoe Out and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India “ What is it to be in love?' she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by die wings of die butterfly, and awed by die discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly dew away, she rose, and with her two books beneath her arm returned home again, much as a soldier prepared for battle." - Rachel Vinrace, The Vovaae Out "The discovery had come so suddenly that she felt like a mountaineer whose rope had broken. Not to love the man one's going to marry! Not to tind it out till this moment! Not even to have asked oneself the question until now! Something else to think out" -Adela Quested, A Passage to India Both of the preceding passages depict revelatory moments in the lives of two young English women as they are struck with a sudden, dawning awareness of their own sexuality and recognize, with horror, the limitations imposed upon women by the institution of marriage. Just as the intellectual conversations staged in Gaudv Niaht and Women in Love reveal a thematic anxiety about marriage and gender roles that served as the focus of the previous chapter, the excerpts of these interior monologues Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 116 of Rachel Vinrace in Virginia W oolfs The Vovaae Out (1915) and Adela Quested in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) suggest a similar anxiety. The implications of what it means to be "in love”-th a t is, to become a wife in pre-World War I English sodety-strike Rachel as a Terrible possibility” which she approaches as a violent threat to her being, “much as a soldier prepared for battle” (188). Likewise, Adela, too, is shocked to realize that because of the inconsequence her culture has assigned her own erotic agency that she has failed to question whether or O not she is in love with her fianc6. She feels immediately imperiled by the realization, as "a mountaineer whose rope had broken” and whose fate spins wildly beyond her control. While The Vovaqe Out and A Passage to India share with Gaudv Nioht and Women in Love a concern about the oppression of women that frequently characterized marriage in the twentieth century, they differ from the latter two novels in that they explore that concern in settings far removed from the England depicted by Sayers and Lawrence. Distant locales that are under either the imperialist economic influence or the direct political rule of the British Empire serve as the sites where W oolfs and Forster’s young female protagonists experience sexual awakenings that weave together fantasies of violence with an interrelated critique of gender oppression and colonial exploitation. The “voyage” in W oolfs novel Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 117 transports its British characters to the South American resort of Santa Marina, whereas the "passage” in Forster’s text is, of course, indicative of a similar journey to India. While the previous chapter argued that Sayers and Lawrence employ violence both thematically and formally to deconstruct reductive binary categories of gender and sexual identity, this chapter expands that analysis to reveal a similar strategic use o f violence that considers Empire among those modem social systems that marginalize and subjugate those who are "othered” by such systemic hierarchical taxonomies. Both Woolf and Forster, along with such Bloomsbury peers as Lytton Strachey, were critical of the injustices fostered by British imperialism in the early twentieth-century. Kathy J. Phillips argues in Virginia W oolf Against Empire that the Bloomsbury group’s condemnation of imperialism was strongly influenced by nineteenth-century liberalism’s ideals of social justice and individual liberty. The influence of such liberal ideals is quite apparent in W oolfs condemnation of gender and colonial oppression in The Vovage Out. Furthermore, Phillips points out that Woolf was undoubtedly influenced by the anti-imperialist views of her husband, Leonard Woolf, as well. After serving as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, Leonard Woolf became actively anti-Empire, arguing "against the Empire on Labour Party committees, in political journals, and in two books, Empire Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 118 and Commerce in Africa (1920) and Imperialism and Civilization (1928)" (Phillips xxxii). Selma Meyerowitz, Leonard Woolfs biographer, argues that Empire and Commerce shows that “imperialism was morally wrong, culturally destructive, and economically impracticar-a radical position in 1919 (Phillips xxxii). In The Vovaae Out and A Passage to India, the destructive effects of imperialism combine with the destructive effects of patriarchy to erupt in representations of violent erotic fantasies that suggest the dangerously oppressive nature of both social systems. In both novels, the gender inequities experienced by Rachel and Adela parallel the colonial inequities they observe, and their psychic response to that injustice is to repress their own desires in an effort to conform to social expectation. Their repression manifests itself in fantasies of violence that I will argue, ultimately work to connect and to critique interlocking forms of social oppression. As the following close readings of the texts suggest, the complexity of these fantasies serves to problematize the conventional victimizer/victimized relationship by implying that, while their violent nature may be read as a consequence of Rachel and Adela's social oppression and resulting psychological repression, the violence nonetheless provides a sometimes liberatory, if ambiguous, means for them either to escape or to challenge the systemic injustice surrounding them. In their representation of erotic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 119 aggression, then, these two novels function strategically in a similar way to Gaudv Night and Women in Love. Like the two novels of the previous chapter, The Vovaae Out and A Passage to India problematize conventional constructions of gender and sexual identity, while additionally considering the complicity of nationalist identity in the maintenance of a violenly patriarchal English social structure. In yet another similarity with Gaudv Night and Women in Love, the two novels discussed in this chapter also represent modernist experimentations in form whose aggressive violation of generic expectations and conventions suggest interesting parallels with the violent content of the texts. Joanne S. Frye echoes a common perception of W oolfs first novel when she notes, in The Vovaae O ut Thematic Tensions and Narrative Techniques,” that the work "is, superficially, a traditional novel, in part a novel of manners and in part a Bildungsroman. Its narrative surface is straightforward..." (403). However, as I will show, Woolf aggressively breaks with these traditional narrative conventions by staging violent fantasies that continuously interrupt the expected psychosocial development of this Bitdungsroman’s young protagonist, and also by ultimately killing off any possibility for Rachel and her fianc& to achieve the marital union that provided the happy ending in the classic novel of manners. In A Passage to India. Forster seems to follow a traditionally Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. realistic narrative mode, yet he, too, undermines convention through denying the reader the expected satisfaction of narrative closure, for he refuses to provide a definitive explanation for the central action of the novel: a sexual assault that is purported to transpire in the Marabar Caves. In both works, then, the formal breaks with genre and narrative convention will be shown to intersect with the aggressive thematic disruption of conventional constructions of gender and national identity. A Vovage of Violence For twenty-four-year-old Rachel Vinrace, the voyage of Woolfs title is a voyage not only out of England, but out of youth and security as well. Rachel must leave behind the sheltered estate of her two elderly aunts in Richmond as she embarks on the journey that will take her to South America and into womanhood. It is a journey fraught with psychic and social perils, for Rachel’s dawning awareness of her own marginalized position and lack of power in modem society results in fantasies of violence that often signify her victimization at the same time as they paradoxically suggest a means of liberation from her sense of constraint and feelings of repression. From the beginning of the novel, Rachel is depicted as an unusually timid young woman who is surprisingly naive permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 121 about matters of romance and sexuality. As she becomes more educated in this arena, her sense of jeopardy grows increasingly strong. Once in Santa Marina, Rachel’s increased awareness of her gender oppression becomes interconnected with the British imperialist oppression of the native inhabitants of the region. Through a series of representations conflating eroticism and aggression, Woolf reveals and critiques the interlocking structures of social power that impose a systemic violence of marginalization. The following analysis will reveal, for instance, that Woolf raises the specter of incest in Rachel’s upbringing at the beginning of the novel. Subsequently, Rachel is haunted by recurring dreams with violent sexual content. Her courtship with and engagement to Terence are also disrupted by jarringly surreal fantasies of eroticized aggression. When she eventually encounters the indigenous residents of Santa Marina, it is in a scene in which the intersection of colonialist aggression and the imperial erotic paradigm are nakedly revealed and disrupted. And even in the representation of Rachel’s death, the violence of death itself and the violence that the event wreaks on genre expectations are infused with a sense of lyrical bliss. The novel begins with Helen and Ridley Ambrose embarking on the Euphrosyne, the merchant ship operated by Rachel's father Willoughby Vinrace, whose late wife had been Ridley's sister and Helen’s dear friend. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 122 Helen is disappointed in the rather mousy person of her niece, Rachel, who seems lacking in the spirit, vitality, and intellect of her late mother, Theresa. Helen puts some of the blame for what she perceives as Rachel’s shortcomings of personality on the girl’s father, Willoughby, whom Helen suspects of “nameless atrocities with regard to his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected him of bullying his wife” (18). While the nature of these “nameless atrocities” is never spelled out, the language is at the least evocative of the possibility of incest: as the silent secret underlying many familial relationships-including W oolfs own-sexual abuse comes to mind as one of the few truly “nameless” acts of shocking brutality that a father could commit against a daughter that would not suggest hyperbole in Woolfs choice of phrase. Thus, the novel suggests early on the possibility that Rachel may be the victim of her father's sexual abuse. This theme of incest comprises the focus of Louise De Salvo's "Introduction" to The Vovaoe Out. De Salvo connects the "incestuous overtones" (ix) in Willoughby's relationship with his daughter to the sexual abuse Woolf suffered at the hands of her half-brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth, from the time she was six until she was in her twenties (v). Likewise, in her essay "'My Boldness Terrifies Me': Sexual Abuse and Female Subjectivity in The Vovaae Out. Diana Swanson argues that with Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ! 123 regard to the "nameless atrocities” Helen suspects Willoughby of committing, m (n)ameless' has typically functioned as a code word for 'sexual'” (290). Furthermore, Swanson finds evidence that Willoughby "does not respect (Rachel's) physical boundaries," for the narrative notes that he often "enforces) his words...when he spoke to his daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder" (22). Like De Salvo, Swanson finds parallels between W oolfs and her protagonists relationships with their fathers: Willoughby wants Rachel to play a wifely role toward him, to take her mother's place as housekeeper, hostess, and companion, just as (Woolfs father) Leslie Steven expected his daughter to take (his wife) Julia's place. These glimpses of Willoughby's behavior toward Rachel suggest that she suffers from incestuous abuse. (290) By implying that her protagonist is an incest victim, Woolf situates sexual violence at the foreground of the novel's psychic and social trajectories. For not only is Rachel's personal psychic development necessarily influenced by her childhood trauma, sexual abuse is revealed to function as part of the female socialization process.1 In other words, the incest alluded to in The Vovaoe Out carries greater social implications beyond those personal consequences it bears for Rachel because it serves to illuminate the role that sexual abuse plays as an obstacle in the social development of female subjectivity in a society where women are the objects of a myriad of interrelated forms of "cultural abuse," such as Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 124 "repression, oppression, denigration, (and) marginalization” (Swanson 285). As Rachel takes the voyage from girlhood to womanhood, the hinted- at violence that has marked her relationship with her father continues to mediate the development of her social subjectivity, as her encounters on board ship quickly illustrate. A watershed moment in Rachel's growth occurs when she experiences her first kiss with the much older, very married Richard Dalloway, another passenger on the Euphrosyne. His age and marital status suggest that Dalloway symbolizes a father figure for Rachel. Furthermore, he functions as a representative of the British Empire, having formerly served as a Member of Parliament During the season following a lost election, Dalloway occupies himself by travelling to foreign countries, studying their manufacturing centers and political systems, in the hope of applying his knowledge for the benefit of Britain during a future term in office (35). Dalloway’s advocacy of British political imperialism is linked with Willoughby's representation of its economic imperialism, for the latter is in the business of providing dry goods to “the Amazons" and exploiting the natural resources of South America by bringing rubber home to feed the British industrial machine (36). Thus, these two father figures may be seen to embody the link between the systems of patriarchy and imperialism. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 125 Dalloway further functions to connect imperialism with the conventions of heterosexuality. In a conversation with Rachel shortly before their kiss occurs, he tries to tell Rachel of the things that he has learned are important in life. He speaks to her of sex, calling it “love,” but he says, “I don’t use the word in a conventional sense. I use it as young men use it” (68). Ignorant in the ways of the world, Rachel foils to comprehend his reference. Their voices become whispers as they are drawn together by an unspoken erotic force until they are interrupted by Clarissa Dalloway’s cry, "Warships, Dick! Over there! Look!” (68). Helen Wussow, who also cites this line’s significance, argues persuasively in "War and Conflict in The Vovaae Out” that the novel depicts a series of power struggles in a world comprised of "chaos and overt aggression” (101). The intrusion of this image of imperialist aggression into a conversation in which a patriarchal figure attempts to explain sexual norms to a young woman not yet folly aw are-or accepting-of her role in the heteronormative order thus serves to connect the power struggles between nations with those between men and women. The kiss that Rachel shares with Richard Dalloway precipitates the first explicit representation of those violent fantasies that are to accompany Rachel's sexual awakening throughout the novel. For immediately after Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 126 Richard imposes her first kiss upon her, Rachel has a terrifying nightmare of being pursued by beast-like men: She dreamt that she was walking down a long tunnel which grew so narrow by degrees that she could touch the damp bricks on either side. At length the tunnel opened and became a vault; she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her wherever she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and like the face of an animal. The wall behind him oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down. (78) The "tunnel" in which Rachel finds herself seems quite clearly to symbolize her own vaginal passage, with the "damp bricks" representing her own newly awakened sexual desire. The tunnel opens into a "vault” which traps her, perhaps within the confines of a uterus which circumscribes her role as a woman whose expected social function is to marry and bear children. The "little deformed man" in the dream suggests not only the threat of masculinity embodied in Willoughby Vinrace and Richard Dalloway, but also may evoke the threat of mothering "little deformed" sons who will become heirs to the patriarchal empire, thus perpetuating the female’s own imprisonment. When Rachel awakens, the horror did not go at once. She felt herself pursued, so that she actually got up and locked her door. A voice moaned for her; eyes desired her. All night long barbarian men harassed the ship; they came scuffling down the passages, and stopped to snuffle at her door. She could not sleep again. (78) with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 127 Rachel's desire for Dalloway has been overshadowed by her fear of the physical violation and social subordination embodied in his sexuality, and this fear overwhelms both her conscious and unconscious thoughts. A t this point in the novel, Rachel is positioned as a sexual victim of both her father and Richard Dalloway, as these fantasies of violent pursuit reveal. However, as the novel progresses and Rachel continues to discover herself as a sexual woman through her relationship with Terence Hewet, the role that aggression plays in her erotic imagination becomes even more complicated. In Santa Marina, the violent fantasies that mediate Rachel's developing sexual agency reveal a paradoxical empowerment that suggests that they function in a liberatory role in her psyche as well as a threatening one. After Rachel and Terence become engaged, for example, she begins to indulge in violent fantasies that provide a psychic refuge from the marital constraints she senses are closing in around her. Shortly after their wedding plans are announced, the couple passes an afternoon reading and responding to the congratulatory notes from their friends. As Rachel writes thank-you notes, Terence reads aloud from a novel a passage about a marriage in which romance soon gives way to dissatisfaction. The wife finds that motherhood “as that function is understood...by the upper middle classes" is not enough to fulfill her (329). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 128 The husband begins to resent her feminine belongings invading his turf and her numerous expenditures, yet he is ultimately persuaded to remain in the marriage out of a combination of sexual attraction and a sense of obligation. The novel’s author is hopeful that in the future the wife might become “what she now made a pretence of being-the friend and companion-not the enemy and parasite of man” (330). Terence then asks, “'Lord Rachel,...will it be like that when we’re married?” (330). Although Rachel does not answer that question, the two embark upon a discussion about what married life might hold in store for them. Both have clearly been affected by the gloomy depiction of married life that Woolf takes pains to detail at length via the quoted passage. Their conversation is marked by eruptions of violent fantasies— detailed in the following paragraph-that suggest a curious friction between the betrothed couple, one that sparks a mutual sense of danger and seemingly reveals their unconscious desire to harm both each other and themselves. After Rachel echoes Terence's anxious query about what life will be like once they are wed, Terence delivers an assessment laced with startling animosity. He begins with a physical critique of Rachel that reduces her to a dehumanized object for consumption: '"You're not beautiful,' he began, 'but I like your face. I like the way your hair grows down in a point and your eyes too-they never see anything. Your mouth's too big, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 129 and your cheeks would be better if they had more colour in thernm (330). Rachel's eyes see nothing, according to Terence's telling observation, because she is merely the object of the gaze-both his literal gaze and the larger cultural gaze of a patriarchal economy which commodifies women. Terence goes on to reveal what he does find attractive in Rachel: "But what I like about your face is that it makes one wonder what the devil you're thinking about-it makes me want to do that-" He clenched his fist and shook it so near her that she started back, "because now you look as if you'd blow my brains o u t There are moments," he continued, "when, if we stood on a rock together, you'd throw me into the sea." (331) The inscructability of Rachel's face, the fact that Terence's gaze cannot penetrate the corridors of her mind to possess all that is there, poses a source of both attraction and anger for him. Much as Women in Love's Gerald Crich was driven to violence against Gudrun Brangwen by his frustration with his own desire for all that he could not completely control in her, Terence expresses, through his clenched fist, the unnerving desire to strike Rachel precisely when he ponders the possibility of her own agency and power. While Terence's violent gesture represents the very real threat of male physical violence against women and a clear tactic of intimidation, Woolf complicates any construction of Rachel as a potential victim by positioning her also as a potential aggressor. In a dynamic similar to that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 130 in Gudrun's slap following the cattle scene arouses Gerald in Women in Love. Terence seems to find a perverse pleasure in entertaining the fantasy is attracted to the possibility that his intimidation of Rachel might drive her to "blow [his] brains out" (331) or "throw him into the sea” (331). In turn. Rachel becomes captivated by the fantasy of her own potential as an agent of violence. For immediately after Terence imagines her taking his life, Rachel~"(h)ypnotized by the force of his eyes in hers"-embarks on a similar fantasy of drowning: 'To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven about the roots of the world-the idea was incoherently delightful" (331). The delight that Rachel feels at the idea of being flung into the sea is incoherent in the sense that it represents an oceanic pleasure in both the literal and psychoanalytic senses of the term. As discussed in the previous chapter, water is a frequent modernist trope for representing the blurring of traditional boundaries. Rachel revels in the fantasy of acting as an agent in an act of violence that would destroy the symbolic boundaries that demarcate her own construction as victim and object. The ocean furthermore obliterates the boundaries between Terence and Rachel as two separate egos, as man and woman, as subject and object. For one blissful moment in fantasy, both find a pleasurable refuge from the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 131 personal and cultural obstacles that in reality will prove insurmountable to them: [Rachel] sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through the waters. [Terence] watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which would hinder their passage through life. "It does seem possible!" he exclaimed, "though I've always thought it the most unlikely thing in the w orld- I shall be in love with you all my life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing thafs ever been done! We'll never have a moment's peace-" He caught her arms as she passed him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the floor, where she lay gasping, and crying for mercy. "I'm a mermaid! I can swim," she cried, "so the game's up." (331) This playful power struggle bears little resemblance to the real-life conflicts they would face as husband and wife, for in this fantasy version, Rachel can imagine herself a mermaid, a mythic embodiment of identity transgression who cannot be restrained. Hence, the violence at the heart of this fantasy sequence— Terence's feigned blow to Rachel, his sense that she would like to shoot him or fling him from a rock, and Rachel's desire that both fling themselves off a rocky seaside cliff-actually functions as a means of psychological liberation. Both are momentarily free in fantasy from the social roles and expectations that in reality circumscribe them as individuals and separate them from one another. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 132 The intrusion of violent fantasies onto the scene of the newly betrothed Terence and Rachel's afternoon of writing thank-you notes for their engagement cards and pondering the institution of marriage is consistent with the critique of matrimony that underlies the entire narrative. The marriages which are depicted in The Voyage Out are a far cry from ideal or fulfilling to the women so conjoined. At the foreground of the novel, for instance, lie Helen and Ridley Ambrose, the latter of whom is completely oblivious to his wife's misery at having to leave her children in London to accompany him on a prolonged journey to South America. Ridley is a rarely seen peripheral character who is perpetually shutting himself up in his room to pursue his antiquities scholarship with a single- minded zeal that utterly ignores any needs his wife might have. After the introduction of the Ambroses, the Dalloways board the Euphrosyne, and while Clarissa Dalloway puts on the reasonably convincing facade of a happily married woman, her husband is meanwhile engaged in stealing kisses from a teenage girl on the other side of the deck. And, of course, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf will return to the character of Clarissa and explore just how many unexpressed thoughts and unfulfilled desires lie beneath the surface of her bourgeois veneer. Rachel and Terence are both quite conscious of the drawbacks of the marriages that surround them. As Rachel grows more aware of herself Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 133 as a woman and her position in society during her stay in Santa Marina, she passes much of her time reading books that Helen Ambrose and others lend to her; Ibsen is one of the selections that has a profound influence on her. At the outset of chapter ten, Rachel finishes reading A Doll's House, Ibsen’s famous drama of a middle-class woman so discontent with marriage and motherhood that she makes the radical decision to leave her husband, and she wonders, N < What I want to know,' she said aloud, 'is this: What is the truth? Whafs the truth of it all?' She was speaking partly as herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read" (129). A bit later, Woolf indicates the play's lingering influence on Rachel: "Her mind wandered away from Nora, but she went on thinking of things that the book suggested to her, of women and life” (130). Terence, too, is surprisingly aware of the limitations that marriage places on people, particularly on women, evincing a rather progressive sensibility for his era and gender. He is depicted as being more self-conscious than Rachel of constraints marriage imposes upon women: ...he knew many different married couples; but he saw them always, walled up in a warm firelit room. When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world; above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters; indeed he was surprised to find that the women he most admired and knew best were unmarried women. Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it was for men ... Even the Ambroses, whom he admired and respected Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 134 profoundly-in spite of all the love between them, was not their marriage too a compromise? She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she arranged things for him; she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband. (268-269) Given both Rachel and Terence’s growing consciousness of the limitations imposed particularly upon women by the institution of marriage, it is unsurprising that their own decision to marry is shrouded with psychological and symbolic ambivalence. Rachel and Terence’s engagement commences on an expedition they take up the Amazon river that penetrates the South American wilderness surrounding Santa Marina. It is the second ’Voyage” in the novel, one which transports Rachel, Terence, St. John Hirst, Helen Ambrose, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing out of the sheltered enclave of the British denizens of their resort hotel and into the indigenous territory of the region. Hence the expedition is predicated upon a certain cultural imperialism that effectively links Rachel and Terence’s betrothal with their nationalist identity. The British tourists have decided to voyage upriver to see “the natives” in their natural environment, positioning themselves as the subjects of an imperialistic scopophilic gaze. Terence and Rachel’s decision on this expedition to join the ranks of the marital establishment thus serves as yet another linkage between the institutions of marriage and empire in the novel. Both institutions offer privileges to those in positions of power at the expense of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 135 those whose freedom and individual agency is concomitantly restricted. The aura of ambivalence and danger which hangs heavily over the journey, and which I will analyze more closely in the following pages, signals W oolfs subtle critique of these interlocking systems of oppression. In order to explicate how gender power relations intersect with imperialist power relations in the Amazon section of the novel, I would first put into use a definition of imperialism that appears in Anne McClintock’s extensive study, Imperial Leather Race. Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. In McClintock's insightful analysis, imperialism is not a question of British power impelled from the center to subjugate other peripheral territories; rather, “imperial power emerged from a constellation of processes taking haphazard shape from myriad encounters with alternative forms of knowledge, authority, and power” (16). Clearly, McClintock’s concept of imperialism owes a debt to Foucault’s groundbreaking theory of power as a complex network of relationships rather than a unilateral force imposed from the top down. The implications of this concept of imperialism for The Vovaoe Out suggest that the imperialist dynamics of power that emerge during the British expedition up the Amazon, particularly during their wordless exchange with the native inhabitants which is highly charged with both sensuality and danger, must Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 136 be viewed as shifting and unfixed, rather than as a force imposed by the dom inant culture upon the subaltern. From its outset the expedition is marked by a general sense o f apprehension and unease among its participants. As W oolf describes the first morning of their journey, the British find themselves hot, nervous, and uncom fortable: The morning was hot and still. A fter breakfast they drew chairs together and sat in an irregular semicircle in the bow ... Mrs. Flushing was already dotting and striping her canvas, her hand jerking this way and that with the action of a bird nervously picking up grain; the others had books or pieces o f paper or embroidery on their knees, at which they looked fitfully and again looked at the river ahead. (297) Their discom fort seems to grow more ominous with W oolfs description of the landscape they encounter as they journey farther into the wilderness. As parrots fly shrieking overhead, The country grew wilder and wilder. The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle...” (297). W oolfs language makes it quite evident that the tourists’ perception o f nature grows increasingly violent. Even farther upriver, as they approach the native village that is their destination, their apprehension grows even stronger. Helen Ambrose, particularly, is sensitive to the discontent, although the other group members sense it as w ell: Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly she was prey to an uneasy mood not readily Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 137 ascribed to any one cause. Looking onshore as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought the country very beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel herself the victim o f unclassified emotions, and certainly as the launch slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun, she fe lt herself unreasonably moved. W hether the unfamiliarity o f the forest was the cause of it, or something less definite, she could not determine. Her mind left the scene and occupied itse lf w ith anxieties fo r Ridley, fo r her children, for far-off things, such as old age and poverty and death. (309) The anxiety felt by Helen and the rest of the group is indicative of the shift in power relations that necessarily acccrues as they travel deeper into the jungle, its “unknown” context rendering all the more unstable their preconceived values and sense o f priority. When at last they reach the village, the British tourists’ participation in a disturbing encounter with “the natives” forces them into an awkward realization both of their own position as im perialist oppressors and o f the instability of that position. As they approach the village, they see women squatting on the ground, working with straw or preparing something in bowls. The British are in itia lly unseen voyeurs, but when they are discovered, they learn how disconcerting and disempowering it is to become the object of the gaze themselves, for the women stare back at them in what may be interpreted as a defiant expression of their own agency: The women took no notice o f the strangers, except that their hands paused fo r a moment and their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon them with the motionless inexpensive Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 138 gaze of those removed from each other fa r far beyond the plunge of speech. Their hands moved again, but the stare continued. It followed them as they walked, as they peered into the huts where they could distinguish guns leaning in the comer, and bowls upon the floor, and stacks o f rushes; in the dusk the solemn eyes o f babies regarded them, and old women stared out too. (316) It is noteworthy here that the stare pursues the British even as they attempt to regain the ir position as the subjects of the gaze, im periously prying into the villagers’ homes. The fact that they discover guns in those homes further undermines the British sense o f dominance and also adds more of a sense of danger to the encounter, fo r here is evidence that the villagers possess the ir own tangible instruments of power. W oolfs wording, furthermore, makes it clear tha t the villagers’ stare, and the power it represents, becomes a palpable— and hostile-force acting upon the British: “As they sauntered about, the stare followed them, passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously not without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly” (316). Then, in an interesting passage, a woman breastfeeding her child manages to force their eyes away from the ir intrusive gawking at her body and its maternal function: As she drew apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby, the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand there looking at her any longer. (316) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 139 These British, who would never dream o f gazing en masse a t the breast o f an Englishwoman— who, in fact, are so concerned with protecting the modesty o f their own bodies that they erect a rather ridiculous curtain on board their boat to separate the sleeping women from the men— do not for a moment accord this native woman the same human dignity and respect Nonetheless, her own unwavering stare forces their acknowledgm ent o f her autonomous agency, and they turn away, disconcerted by the realization. McClintock w rites in Imperial Leather that “the mass m arketing o f Empire as a global system was intim ately wedded to the W estern reinvention of dom esticity” (17), a concept which usefully helps to illustrate the connections suggested between, on the one hand, the im perialist dynamics of power that emerge through the expedition upriver, and on the other, the gender power dynamics embedded in Rachel and Terence’s engagement W hen McClintock speaks o f “the Western reinvention o f dom esticity,” she refers to the dominant Victorian-era view o f women as the keeper of hearth and home. Prior to industrialization, when women and men more commonly worked together to provide fo r fam ilial subsistence, there was less distinction between the commercial and the dom estic spheres-and less need to construct a fem inized culture o f dom esticity. When industrial commerce developed as an almost exclusively masculine Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 140 province, however, it became culturally necessary to "reinvent” a dom estic role fo r women as keepers of the home, responsible for childrearing and hostessing. The "mass marketing o f Em pire,” in McClintock’s words, depended upon selling the notion that w hile British men were busy colonizing the globe, their wives would be tending to the homefiront, both benefiting from and enabling their husbands’ im perialist enterprises. For Rachel and Terence to enter into a m arital engagement during the Amazon expedition, then, represents W oolfs strategic linkage of two oppressive system s-m arriage and imperialism. As a British woman, Rachel is situated in a dual position w ithin these interlocking systems, as June Cummins notes in "Death and the Maiden Voyage: Mapping the Junction o f Feminism and Postcolonial Theory in The Vovaae Out." Her status as a woman in a male-dominated society renders her a member of an oppressed group of people, w hile her status as a British citizen in a colonial system renders her one o f the oppressors. This position on the border between the two system s causes a "psychological crisis” that eventually leads to Rachel’s death, according to Cummins. Cummins interprets Rachel’s death as her "passive resistance” to participating in the structures o f patriarchy and im perialism , as a refusal of these binary systems of oppression (209). That Rachel never finds the words to articulate a fem inist critique of the institution of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 141 m arriage-her death thus represents a symbolic rejection o f it— and th a t W oolf neglects to develop an overt critique o f Empire, provide evidence o f the voicelessness shared by women and the colonized. Cummins argues that it is the understanding o f the subject’s "lack o f access to language [that] aligns feminism and postcolonial theory” (207). Yet while W oolf and her protagonist may both refrain from articulating an explicit objection to this system atic injustice, I want to suggest that Cummins misses a crucial point: namely, that the alm ost surrealistic images of violence which disrupt the narrative realism o f the voyage upriver and the marriage plot enact a critique of the very binary categories of identity upon which such injustice is predicated. One of the most significant moments o f violent disruption occurs when Helen surprises the newly betrothed Rachel and Terence as they are walking through the forest, pouncing on them in an ambiguous narrative sequence that is charged with both eroticism and aggression. The previous afternoon, Rachel and Terence had pronounced their love fo r each other and decided to marry; as they walk through the forest, alone together for the first tim e since deciding to wed, their contemplation o f the prospects of married life leave them feeling awkward and distanced. Despite their expressions o f love, W oolf writes, [T]hey remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close together, as [Rachel] spoke, that there seemed no Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 142 division between them, and the next moment separate and ter away again. Feeling this painfully, she exclaimed, “It w ill be a fig h t” (313) The division and conflict suggested by this passage centers explicitly around gender, for immediately afterward, in discussing th e ir differences, Terence postulates, " I’m only older, lazier; a man, not a woman’" (313). “‘A man,’” Rachel then repeats, as if contemplating the binary that divides them (313). They are overcome w ith an "overpowering sense of unreality” at the prospect of marriage (314). Into this ambiguous scene o f intimate distance, W oolf interjects the surreal "assault" on the tw o lovers by Helen, with her physical presence driving a literal and ontological wedge into their heterosexual union. The aggression of the assault is more psychological than physical. Despite the awkwardness of their intimacy, Rachel and Terence have recognized the dawning of "happiness” (314) between them; immediately thereafter, A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel’s shoulder; it might have been a bolt from heaven. She fe ll beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure , large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. (315) The violence of the moment is suggested by W oolfs strong imagery: the force of “iron,” the “bolt from heaven" that connotes supernatural wrath, the “whipp[ing]n of the grass on Rachel’s face. These images evoke not so with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 143 m uch physical harm to Rachel as a powerful psychological jo lt to her newly found happiness. Much has been written about the lesbian resonances between Rachel and Helen that W oolf made explicit in Melvmbrosia. an earlier draft o f The Vovaae O u t and this particular scene is often read as one of the rem aining traces o f homoeroticism that W oolf retained in her final draft of the novel.2 Certainly, the scene is decidedly erotic as well as aggressive. A fte r Woolf makes the simple but highly suggestive observation, “Helen w as upon her,” Rachel is rolled around in a passionate frenzy until a seem ingly orgasmic stillness comes over her Rolled this way and that, now seeing only forests o f green, and now the high blue heaven; she was speechless and alm ost without sense. A t last she lay still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. (315) I w ant to suggest that Helen’s erotic intrusion into the scene enacts such a psychological blow to Rachel because it belies the tranquility o f the gender and sexual order imposed by her engagement to Terence. A fter Helen’s assault on Rachel, “Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of Terence and Helen” (315). Their importance in this passage is as archetypal “man and woman,” superceding th e ir individual identities, for they represent to Rachel two “great,” “loom [ing]n possibilities in term s of her own gender and sexual identity. She can marry Terence and assume her Status as a wife whose domesticity supports the British Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 144 Empire, or she can acknowledge that an attraction to -o r even an allegiance w ith-other women would invite a refusal and a threatening disruption o f that social order. W oolf further confuses the trajectory o f Rachel’s psychological and social development when she suggests the possibility of an erotic interchange between Helen and Terence as they both straddle Rachel, subtly suggesting a polymorphous explosion o f erotic possibilities that would sim ilarly challenge the patriarchal status quo: Both [Helen and Terence] were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving; they came together and kissed in the air above her. Broken fragments o f speech came down to her on the ground. She thought she heard them speak of love and then of marriage. Raising herself and sitting up, she too realised Helen’s soft body, the strong and hospitable arms, and happiness swelling and breaking in one vast wave. (315) The erotic confusion of the moment is quite clearly pleasurable fo r all involved, with W oolfs imagery evoking the heat of passion, laughter, kissing, bodies touching, and yet another metaphoric orgasm as happiness crests t t in one vast wave” o f oceanic bliss. The com plexity and the am biguity of the erotic dynamics suggested in this passage, moving from violence to pleasure, provide further evidence for my conviction that W oolfs use of aggressive eroticism ultim ately works to challenge conventional gender and sexual identities more than to assert an alternative, as some have argued. For example, in “The Vovaqe Out: with permission of the copyright owner Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 145 Virginia W oolfs First Lesbian Novel,” Jessica Tvordi claim s that ”ln The Vovaae O ut W oolf constructs a lesbian subtext which, through the use of lesbian images and codes, disrupts and undermines the heterosexual te x t..” (236). W hile I would concur with Tvordi that "lesbian images and codes” are among the textual erotics that serve to disrupt the heterosexual marriage plot, I believe that it is too simplistic to assert that the end result is a "lesbian novel.” Just as I argued in the previous chapter that Lawrence quite possibly obscured the homosexual references in later drafts o f Women in Love because he was interested in exploring something even more complex, I find it probable that W oolf deliberately employs ambiguous erotic images in order to suggest more than merely the possibility o f lesbianism: the possibility o f human erotic identity that resists fixed categorization. Patricia Juliana Smith’s argument in "The Things People Don’t Say: Lesbian Panic in The Vovaoe Out" comes closer to mirroring my own view, for she argues that the passage that finds the three characters rolling around in the grass together "frustrates most conventional attempts to draw any distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality” (135). Sm ith’s analysis o f the novel further supports my conviction about the polymorphous perverse possibilities evoked by W oolfs use of aggressive eroticism , for she finds that W oolf "evokes the more sinister possibilities o f alternatives to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 146 heterosexuality, especially those o f sado-masochism, amazonism, and a general breakdown of social and gender hierarchy..." (137-138). Although Smith believes that "lesbian panic” is at the root of this exploration of altem atives-a view I would again argue is too narrow -she nonetheless performs an astute reading of the disruptions caused by the erotic dynamics in the te x t The violent imagery that accompanies Rachel’s voyage o f erotic discovery ultim ately culminates in the novel’s most violent act o f rupture of all: Rachel’s death from a fever contracted, not coincidentally, on the very expedition that launches her engagem ent It is this tragic ending that has critically distinguished the novel from the traditional fem ale bildungsroman plot with its marriage ending; unlike her nineteenth-century literary predecessors, W oolf does not retire her protagonist to a life o f bourgeois wedded bliss in the English countryside. Rachel Blau Du Plessis has been among the notable feminist critics to characterize the ending of The Voyage Out as an example of a modem feminist literary strategy of resistance to the lim itations imposed upon women by heterosexual romance conventions. In W riting Bevond the Ending. Blau Du Plessis argues that Rachel’s death should be interpreted as "the aggressive act of the author against the hegemonic power of narrative conventions (of love and quest)” (51). Her critical commentary thus acknowledges the violence Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 147 inherent in W oolfs narrative choice to “break" the sequence o f a romance plot by killing o ff her youthful female protagonist W hile Blau Du Plessis offers useful insight into both the fem inist sensibility and the importance of aggression underlying W o o lfs treatment of heterosexual romance, her analysis proves less convincing when she asserts that "W oolf meted out death as Rachel’s punishment fo r being insufficiently critical and vocal” in response to Terence’s attem pt to discuss feminism with her (51). Although Terence does exhibit an unusually admirable sensitivity to gender inequality, I differ with Blau Du Plessis’s reading that, in effect, condemns Rachel fo r her silence on the subject of gender. In the passage to which Blau Du Plessis refers, Terence attempts to engage Rachel in a conversation about the notes he has w ritten under the heading "Women” for the book he is working on (323), but he does so while she is attempting to play the piano. He repeatedly interrupts her with his queries, which she ignores, until finally she explodes: "‘No, Terence it’s no good; here am I, the best musician in South America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can’t play a note because of you in the room interrupting me every other second’” (324). Despite her mask o f self- deprecating humor, Rachel voices a legitim ate complaint: his voice is silencing hers. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 148 Terence’s response, moreover, belies the fem inist concerns he purports to consider "You don’t seem to realise that that’s what I’ve been aiming at for the last half-hour [...] I’ve no objection to nice sim ple tunes-indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain.” (324) In other words, her m usic is only deemed worthy if it aids his literary endeavors. In light o f this obvious injustice, I disagree with those critics who suggest W oolf "kills off” Rachel as a punishment for her silence in response to Terence’s queries; indeed, that silence speaks volumes about the unfairness of a woman’s attempt to pursue her own creativity being prevented from doing so by a man’s purported interest in the unfair treatm ent of women! The irony of the scene suggests that W oolfs aim in this interchange is to illustrate that even a man as basically decent, liberated, and sensitive to gender issues as Terence seems to be is, when it comes down to it, nonetheless a man who takes fo r granted the privileges and power his male status affords him. Death is the only avenue o f escape and resistance afforded to Rachel. Indeed, Rachel’s silence in the aforem entioned scene with Terence parallels the silence o f the native inhabitants of the village they encounter on their expedition. Both lack a voice with which to protest their m arginalization, and thus from a fem inist postcoionial perspective June Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 149 Cummins argues tha t Rachel's death may be read as a form of “passive resistance” to participating in the systems of patriarchy and im perialism, as a refusal o f the binaries these systems impose (209). Carrying the fem inist and postcolonial implications of Rachel’s death to an even deeper level, Suzette Henke argues in “De/Colonizing the Subject in Virginia W oolfs The Vovaoe O u t Rachel Vinrace as La Mysterique” that her illness and demise is rooted in a psychoanalytic desire to return to a preoedipal, proto-fem inist state. Henke draws on Luce Irigaray’s theory of female hysteria as a woman’s rebellion against the requirem ents of fem ininity, a way to defy heterosexuality and patriarchy. She argues that Rachel’s tropical disease symptoms seem to follow those o f the female hysteric. The concept of “la mysterique" is a blend of “m ystery," “mystic" and “me- hysteria”: la mysterique “loses all sense of her corporeal boundary” and “revels in the splendid isolation of hysterical dissolution beyond the world o f pleasure and pain” (106). Once again, it is a refusal of binaries, a rejection of incorporation into the imperial body politic that this critic finds to characterize Rachel’s death as subversive. The hysterical symptoms to which Henke refers come in the form of Rachel’s feverish delusions. One recurring image she has is of an old woman with a knife. This image of the old woman w ith the knife is a recurring dream of Rachel's during her fever, and it echoes the nightmare Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 150 that plagued her on board the Euphrosyne earlier in the novel. The initial catalyst fo r this feverish delusion is the nurse whom Helen hires to care for Rachel: when Rachel firs t glim ples "an elderly woman with her head bent down” playing cards by candlelight across the room from her bed, she perceives that ”[t]he sight had something inexplicably sinister about it and she was terrified and cried out” (367). Shortly after the nurse com forts her, Rachel is again tormented by a delusional image o f her female caregiver The woman was s till playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and the light stood in a little archway in the w all above her. She cried Terence!’ and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the woman w ith an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood s till above her. (368) The nurse again attempts to calm Rachel, but the nightmare persists: In order to get rid o f this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing cards, while the bricks o f which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old women became Helen and Nurse M clnnis after a tim e, standing in the window together whispering, whispering incessantly. (368) The “little deformed man” in the damp tunnel of Rachel’s nightmare on the Euphrosyne at the beginning o f the novel has thus been transformed into the “little deformed women” in the same tunnel of these dreams. This menacing feminized figure o f Rachel’s imagination soon grows violent. A delusional Rachel tells Terence, “‘You see, there they go, rolling o ff the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 151 edge o f the h ill'”; to his confused, “ Rolling, Rachel? W hat do you see rolling? There’s nothing rolling,” she responds only, "T he old woman w ith the knife’" (370). Later, when Terence attempts to kiss her, "she saw only an old woman slicing a man’s head o ff with a knife” (376). Rachel subsequently murmurs, in obvious reference to the man’s head, "There it falls!’” (376). This image of a head falling echoes the rolling of the previous delusion, suggesting that perhaps it was heads which were "rolling o ff the edge o f the h ill” in that scene as w ell. That the "little deformed man” o f Rachel’s earlier dream has become fem inized in these later hallucinations suggests a series of interesting interpretive possibilities. Since Rachel perceives the "little deform ed women” to represent both the nurse and Helen at various tim es when they are trying to care for her, perhaps it is the ir representation of matemalism that Rachel finds so frightening. If the fever serves in one sense as a means of rescuing Rachel from her impending marriage to Terence and the burdens of motherhood that would likely follow, the women o f her nightmare could represent an embodiment of that threat. Since the only specified target o f the old woman w ith the knife is a man, furtherm ore, the image also connotes the Freudian discourse of phallic castration by a maternal figure. Rather than depicting matemalism solely as a potential threat to Rachel’s autonomy, this latter interpretation would Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 152 sim ultaneously invoke the inherent power the mother figure manifests in Freudian typology. This notion o f the all-powerful, castrating mother suggests that while Rachel’s fever serves as a device fo r liberating her from the restrictions that a life o f marriage and motherhood would impose, it also represents a retumal to a preoedipal, maternal state o f oceanic bliss. In the psychological sym bolic order outlined by Irigaray and elaborated by Henke in her theory o f “la mysterique”, the mother symbolizes a dissolution of corporeal boundaries that would represent for Rachel yet another form o f escape from the lim itations imposed upon women by “the law of the father” that reigns supreme in the Freudian sym bolic. This oceanic atmosphere is intensified by the obvious surrealism of the imagery surrounding Rachel’s feverish demise. As Rachel lies in bed overcome w ith fever, the movement o f the window blinds swaying slightly with the breeze and drawing the cord across the floor “seemed to her terrifying, as if were the movement of an animal in the room” (364). The threat of violence underlies th is delusion as well, which ”pierc[es] her forehead w ith a little stab o f pain (364). Later, the oceanic pleasure that sim ultaneously accompanies the pain of Rachel’s fever becomes apparent when she imagines, T he glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the end of the bed, and as it was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 153 refreshingly cool she tried to keep her mind fixed upon it” (366). After nearly a week o f fever, Rachel succombs to her illness in a manner which W oolf describes m etaphorically as drowning: The heat was suffocating. At last the faces w ent further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. W hile all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea. (379) Rachel never again leaves the sea o f fever which engulfs her. She drifts in and out of consciousness, and W oolf renders her thoughts with the same oceanic metaphor. She had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to bear her up and down w ith it; she had ceased to have any w ill of her own; she lay atop the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly of weakness. (385) W oolfs surreal imagery conveys ju st how removed from the real world Rachel has become. That wave upon which Rachel rides in the preceding passage soon becomes “the side o f a mountain,” and her body “a drift of melting snow” (385). Subsequently, Rachel perceives that ”[t]he room also had an odd power of expanding” and her voice sometimes “became a bird and flew away” (385). The surrealistic style that overtakes the narrative at this point marks W oolfs complete break with the conventions of the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 154 bildungsroman genre, as well as "realistic” narration. There w ill be no pretense o f a "happily ever after” marriage for this heroine. In an interesting narrative aside which serves to link Rachel’s illness to both gender and im perialist oppression, one o f the native servants is badly injured at the same tim e tha t Rachel takes a turn for the worse, and callous indifference of the British inhabitants of the household is striking. In fact, her injury is only noted in order to blame the poor woman for adding an extra burden o f work onto Mrs. Chailey, the Ambroses' British servant, who explains that Maria, in opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she had bound it up; it was unfortunate in when there was so much work to be done. Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet, but appeared to her mere waste of tim e to take any notice of the unruly flesh of servants. (390) Despite the fact that she herself is hired help, Mrs. Chailey clearly does not see herself as a “servant” in the same class as the native woman. While it would be easy to overlook such a brief passage, I believe that W oolf clearly had a purpose fo r integrating it into her narrative at such a crucial point in the story: the utter lack of concem -the scorn, even-for Maria’s pain stands in striking contrast to the household’s fixation on Rachel’s. The difference between the two women, of course, is class and race. Thus, W oolf deliberately frames Rachel’s impending demise in the context o f the unjust Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 155 imperial enterprise that brought her to Santa Marina and led her on the Amazonian expedition during which she contracted her deadly fever. Yet while death is on one hand the ultimate punishment, Rachel’s movement away from reality and into the oceanic depths o f her own consciousness is accompanied by a paradoxical pleasure in the dissolution of the corporeal and social boundaries which had presented such conflict in her relationship with Terence. Before she closes her eyes for the last tim e, Rachel smiles at Terence. Subsequently, “[a]n immense feeling of peace came over Terence" (392). He feels-only for a m oment- the peacefulness o f complete union between the two of them that comes with her death: Once he held his breath and listened acutely; she was still breathing; he went on thinking for some tim e; they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as w ell as himself; and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to breathe. So much the better-this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to breathe. It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They now had what they had always wanted to have, the union which had been im possible while they lived. (392-393) Even though Terence soon after breaks down in misery over his loss, W oolf wants to convey the brief moment o f bliss and union death brings to the lovers, an oceanic bliss which briefly manages to transcend the socially imposed gender barriers which separated them in life. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 156 However, w hile Rachel’s death clearly does effect a symbolic refusal of the patriarchal im perialist system surrounding her, death has its obvious drawbacks as a strategy of political resistance. Although her demise signifies an act of aggressive resistance o f gender conventions, it simultaneously renders her the ultim ate victim of a society based on both gender and national oppression. W oolf seems painfully aware o f that fact in so much as she returns to the hotel fo r the final two chapters o f the novel only to depict, anticlim actically, life returning to its normal tedium. Rachel’s death ultimately has little effect on the British community in Santa Marina, who resume their usual roles and pastimes. Yet rather than view this as a strategic failure, the careful reader w ill perhaps instead acknowledge W oolfs success in illustrating both the pitfa lls and the possibilities intertwined in the narrative dynamics of erotic aggression that she, like the other modernists examined in this project, chose to employ with such stylistic nuance as to invite continuing critical speculation nearly a century later. Another Perilous Passage Sexual violence lies at the heart o f E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. yet as in The Vovaae Out, it is shrouded in ambiguity, fantasy, and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 157 mysterious indeterminacy. While W oolfs and Forster’s novels present vast stylistic and them atic differences, their intriguing sim ilarities in invoking erotic aggression to disrupt the development o f the ir female protagonist’s journeys into m arriage and in placing these ‘‘ journeys” within the context of British colonialism indicate a mutual interest in the effects of sexual violence on the construction o f identity and social agency. Whereas Rachel Vinrace and her interior thoughts comprise the central subject of W oolfs narrative, Adela Quested may be seen as merely a supporting player in a novel in which the central subject is often considered to be India itself, or the relationship between British and Indians as manifested in the friendship between Mr. Fielding and Dr. Aziz. However, as almost all critics concur, the alleged sexual assault on Adela in the Marabar Caves serves as the primary plot premise propelling the narrative action in A Passage to India, and thus erotic aggression casts a shadow over this entire te x t Although Forster’s novel is stylistically grounded in the realist tradition, it is also distinctly modem in form as w ell, interjecting the linguistic rhythms and philosophical principles o f Eastern religions into what seems at firs t to be a traditionally realistic narrative. It furthermore exhibits a modem sensibility in its refusal to provide a definitive explanation for the most important action in the story: the events which transpire in the Marabar Caves. It is Adela's accusation of having been "insulted” in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 158 caves on her expedition w ith A ziz and Mrs. Moore that brings the tensions between the Indians and the Anglo-Indians to a crisis point; she subsequently recants upon the witness stand. But throughout the entire narrative, Forster withholds an explanation o f "what really happened” from the reader, a decision w hich has proven to be the source of continuing speculation and debate am ong readers and scholars. Forster’s refusal to provide an unambiguous explanation for the Marabar Caves incident im poses an authorial act o f aggression onto the traditional narrative dynam ics o f desire in a way that suggests a form al parallel to the novel’s representation of erotic aggression. As Peter Brooks has suggested, traditional narrative plots enact an erotic tension that parallels the Freudian notion o f erotic desire. Literary plots enact a postponement of the "pleasurable discharge” that accompanies the narrative’s climax and closure, according to Brooks. Following Brooks, then, all readers of narrative follow a trajectory of desire that is inherently erotic, deriving pleasure in the tension that postpones the satisfaction o f closure. Yet as Joseph Boone points out, the theoretical equations of erotic pleasure with narrative suspense that have been posited by Brooks and Terry Eagleton, among others, betray an underlying gender bias, for the metaphors invoked— those o f “tumescenceVdetumescence” and "pleasurable discharge”— "w ould seem to encode at the most elementary Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 159 level o f narrative a highly specific, male-oriented norm o f sexuality fostering the illusion that all pleasure (of reading or of sex) is ejaculatory” (Boone 72). Thus, Forster’s act of denying the reader the satisfaction of closure that would result from a definitive explanation for the events that transpired in the cave may be read as an aggressive authorial attem pt to subvert a specifically masculine trajectory o f narrative desire. In a novel whose content, I w ill argue, may be read as a challenge to conventional constructions o f gender and sexual identity, Forster’s innovative use o f form to disrupt a sexually biased plot trajectory reinforces the subversive effect o f the strategic interplay between aggression and erotic desire in the narrative. Like Rachel Vinrace in The Vovaae Out. Adela Quested is a young British woman who enters into a m arital engagement in a colonial setting, a condition which affords the author the opportunity to enact an interlocking critique of gender and national oppression. For Adela makes the passage to India in order to determine whether or not to marry Ronny Heaslop, the city m agistrate o f Chandrapore, where the British have established a civil station. From the outset of her arrival, Adela expresses a naive desire to see The real India,” a desire which illustrates both her narrow, essentialist perspective on the country and her more admirable goal o f distancing herself from the sheltered environment that most Anglo-Indians are content Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 160 to inhabit That is to say, only a member of the im perialist power structure would construct a myth of a (marginalized) monolithic “real India” without concern for the myriad of differences across religion, caste, geographical region, etc., that the country embodies. On the other hand, though, Adela’s interest in experiencing more of the Indian culture than is present in the British civil station bespeaks a liberal sympathy toward the native culture that is utterly lacking in the Anglo-Indian residents o f Chandrapore who do not attempt to disguise their disdain fo r all things (and people) Indian. Adela quickly realizes that as the w ife o f a British civil servant, she would be expected to join in the other Anglo-Indian women’s denouncements of India and its people in order to help maintain the status o f superiority and power assumed by the British outsiders. W hile Forster’s primary concern may be the im perialist injustice wrought by the British regime in India, gender and sexual identity are clearly integral narrative issues as well, given that it is the accusation of a sexual assault on a British woman by an Indian man that serves as the central narrative action. The overdetermined nature of this highly charged narrative premise is thoroughly explicated by Nancy Paxton in W riting Under the Rai. in which she explores the complex and differing ways in which rape as served as “the master trope of colonial discourse” about India from 1830- 1947 (3). Beginning with how rape was Orientalized in Romantic poetry by Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 161 Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, Paxton goes on to analyze representations o f rape that began in m id-nineteenth-century mutiny novels influenced by the Indian Uprising of 1857 and which depicted Englishwomen threatened with rape by Indian men. Despite the lack of verification that such incidents occurred w ith any prevalence during or after the uprising, the genre of colonial rape narratives served "to ju stify the extremely violent British m ilitary campaign of retaliation follow ing the 1857 uprising and to legitim ize more authoritarian, forceful, and racist policies as British colonial strategies of control after these events” (Paxton 6). Late- nineteenth-century novels reveal the conflicts posed when the emphasis on the masculine force associated with the “ New Im perialism ’ o f the 1890s collided w ith the ‘New Women’” o f the period who supported women’s voting and property rights, improved access to education, and various other legal reforms on behalf o f women (Paxton 34, 17). Eventually, Paxton moves to an analysis of Passage to India and how ”literary modernism re-O rientalizes rape, even as it opens up more radical sexual and political possibilities" (35). In order to understand how Passage to India may indeed help to pave the way fo r more radical sexual and political possibilities through its dramatization o f violence in a colonial setting, I will begin this section with an analysis of the incident in the Marabar Caves before turning to the larger Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 162 contexts of novel’s the power dynamics. For years critics have debated “what really happened” in the caves: Was Adela assaulted by Aziz, the guide, or some other unknown male? By some supernatural force? Or did she hallucinate and imagine the whole thing? In an earlier draft o f the manuscript, Forster makes it clear that there is a real, physical assault on Adela. He brings the reader into the cave with her in order to show that she is forced up against the wall, her breasts are grabbed, and that she strikes the assailant w ith her field glasses before running away (Forster, Manuscripts 242). In the final version, the reader is denied all access into the cave with Adela, and though we do encounter the broken field glasses on the ground, they hardly serve as proof o f an assault. Indeed, these revisions make it quite clear that Forster intended for the incident to remain ambiguous, as does his statement in a later letter that “in the cave it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion’ (Silver 172). W hile I acknowledge that the indeterminacy of the assault is one of the defining-and m odem ist-characteristics of the novel, I also believe that the weight of the evidence suggests that Adela fantasizes her attack. The description o f A dela’s thoughts ju st prior to her entrance into the cave suggest a sudden awareness of both her sexuality and her relative powerlessness as a woman in a patriarchal society that renders her psychologically vulnerable to fantasies of victimization. As Adela and Aziz Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 163 make their way toward a group of caves, her mind is "m ainly w ith her marriage,’ Forster notes (151). After considering the details o f the travel plans involved, she turned to the more serious business o f her life at Chandrapore. There were real difficulties here— Ronny’s limitations and her ow n-but she enjoyed facing difficulties and decided that if she could control her peevishness (always her weak point), and neither rail against Anglo-lndia nor succumb to it, their married life ought to be happy and profitable. (151) This passage reveals much about Adela’s fears of her incom patibility with Ronny and of carving out a place for herself in an Anglo-Indian community that she knows to be contaminated with racial prejudice and injustice. That she speculates that their marriage may nonetheless be a "happy” one suggests an extrem ely compromised definition o f a "happy m arriage,” one that is undoubtedly the result of Adela’s gender socialization and her observation of the marital conventions and roles typical o f her society. That she furtherm ore characterizes her impending union as "profitable” suggests that both she and Forster are aware o f the economic basis for marriage in im perialist Britain: Ronny’s role would be to make a living for them by protecting the British interests in India, and Adela’s would be not only to produce heirs and maintain the dom estic stability required to support his endeavors, but to provide, in a profound sense, the moral justification for that economic exploitation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 164 Immediately after these thoughts about the socioeconomic basis for her upcoming marriage and the duties and attitude that would be required o f her as Ronny's w ife, Adela thinks, as she clim bs over a rock, “What about love?" The rock was nicked by a double row of footholds, and somehow the question was suggested by them. W here had she seen footholds before? Oh yes, they were the pattern traced in the dust by the wheels o f the Nawab Bahadur's car. She and R onny-no, they did not love each other. (152) I w ill return to the association between the footholds and the question of love, but first it is im portant to understand her reference to the incident involving the Nawab Bahadur. For significantly, it is immediately after an automobile accident that occurs when they are passengers in the Nawab Bahadur’s car that Adela agreed to marry Ronny. Prior to that drive, Adela had informed Ronny o f her decision not to marry him. In an odd turn of events, the couple then accepts a ride in the Nawab’s car, get into a collision with a hyena, after which Adela declares, “ Ronny, I should like to take back what I said on the Maidan [about not getting married].’ He assented, and they became engaged to be married in consequence" (94). Adela’s sudden reversal is made without any explanation whatsoever, opening up the possibility that the violence o f the collision somehow jo lts her into an acceptance o f the engagement Indeed, the accident is associated with the firs t (and really the only) erotic spark ever depicted between Ronny and Adela. Their hands touch, generating “one o f the thrills Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 165 so frequent in the animal kingdom” to pass between them, and then ”...bump, jump, a swerve, two wheels lifted in the air, brakes on, bump with tree at edge of embankment standstill. An accident” (88). Thus, Adela’s acceptance of Ronny’s proposal is inextricably linked to a momentary association between eroticism and aggression that seems to foreshadow the incident in the cave. As far as the novel indicates, Adela’s only experience herself as an erotic subject capable of desiring and being desired occurs in the context of a violent force that simultaneously upends the narrative course of action. As Adela gazes at the footholds in the rock that remind her of those she viewed during that pivotal drive in the Nawab’s car, she is struck with the realization that she does not love Ronny. She suddenly recognizes that her own erotic desires are so insignificant in this “business” of marriage that she herself has not considered them until this moment This revelation, too, is experienced as a violent force by Adela, as indicated by the simile Forster creates in the passage I cited as an epigraph to this chapter The discovery had come so suddenly that she felt like a mountaineer whose rope had broken . Not to love the man one’s going to marry! Not to find it out till this moment! Not even to have asked oneself the question until now! Something else to think out. (152) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Adela feels that she is spiraling dangerously out of control toward a perilous demise. She realizes that she has passively accepted the predominant social expectations o f a wife as someone who provides the companionship and support necessary to assist her husband in carrying out his enterprises, without ever pausing to consider her own subjective needs and desires. In other words, she has unconsciously accepted her own objectification as a woman, and the realization of that gender injustice is experienced as a violent force o f oppression. The brilliant complexity of this passage foreshadows the events that follow soon after in the cave, for the image of the broken rope suggests that Adela’s knowledge of her captivity to gender and sexual norms is expressed both in terms of breaking away (quite literally) from those norms and in terms of falling toward her doom. Thus, the paradoxical sense of both liberation and oppression that I have shown to be associated with the modernist representations of erotic aggression throughout this project is quite vividly rendered in this passage. However, despite her sudden insight into her predicament, Adela has neither the will nor the means to object to the limitations imposed upon her by the patriarchal institution of marriage, for she quickly disregards her lack of love for Ronny being an adequate reason for breaking off her engagement. “[Ijt would cause so much trouble to others,” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 167 she thinks, repressing her own subjective desires yet again (152). I believe that the incidents which immediately follow are a direct result of this psychological repression of Adela’s own erotic subjectivity— a repression that is the result not of some individual shortcoming, but of the social constraints that have been so strongly imposed upon her psyche throughout her entire life that a conscious or active resistance to them is unthinkable. Thus, in effect, she immediately projects her own erotic agency onto Aziz, allowing herself to contemplate his sexual desires since she must repress her own if she is to fulfill her social obligations. She ventures to inquire, “‘Are you married, Dr. Aziz?’" (152). What follows is an interchange in which Aziz responds affirmatively and invites Adela to visit her, despite the fact that his wife is deceased, “for he felt it more artistic to have his wife alive for a moment" (152). Adela then inquires as to whether he has children, to which he again responds affirmatively. After allowing herself to view Aziz as an individual capable of both possessing and exercising his own sexual desire, she suddenly notices “(w)hat a handsome little Oriental he was" (152). However, Forster describes how quickly Adela’s mind moves to repress the possibility of her attraction to Aziz at the very instant she takes notice of him sexually: “She did not admire him with any personal warmth, for there was nothing of the vagrant in her blood, but she guessed he might attract women of his own Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 168 race and rank, and she regretted that neither she nor Ronny had any physical charm” (153). In other words, Adela would have to be a social “vagrant” to acknowledge any attraction to an Indian, yet she cannot help but be struck by the lack of sexual chemistry between herself and Ronny. Furthermore, to see herself as someone without “physical charm” suggests a latent wish on Adela’s part that Aziz might find her attractive as she finds him. Adela’s newfound interest in Aziz as a sexual being crosses the line into cultural insensitivity when she naively asks him whether he has one wife or more: The question shocked the young man very much. It challenged a new conviction of his community, and new convictions are more sensitive than old ones ... But to ask an educated Indian Moslem how many wives he has-appalling, hideous! He was in trouble how to conceal his confusion. (153) Aziz is dreadfully embarassed by Adela’s question because it implies that polygamy is normative in his community, when in fact the influence of Western ideology had led it to be viewed by the educated classes as an unacceptably backward and perverse practice. Aziz ducks into a nearby cave “to recover his balance,” while Adela follows behind more slowly, ignorant of her faux pas, and unknowingly enters a different cave. When she enters the cave, Forster indicates that she is “thinking with half her mind [that] ‘sight-seeing bores me,’ and wondering with the other half Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 169 about marriage” (153). This is the last piece of information the reader receives about Adela’s experiences in the cave; moments later, Aziz emerges from his own cave to find the guide has lost sight of Adela. Aziz soon discovers her field glasses lying on the ground, their leather strap broken. Adela has run down the hill and encountered the newly-arrived Miss Derek in her car. The women drive off without explanation, and it is not until Aziz returns to Chandrapore that he learns that Adela claims to have been “insulted” by himself in the cave— "insulted,” of course, being an acknowledged euphemism for sexually assaulted (163). Since the reader knows that Aziz did not enter the same cave as Adela, her allegation seems either a mistake or a falsehood. And while it is theoretically possible that the guide or some other assailant could have pursued Adela into the cave and perpetrated the assault, the novel provides no evidence to support this interpretation. Abundant textual foundation exists, however, to support the argument that Adela’s frame of mind causes her to hallucinate a sexual attack. She has been so thrown off balance by the realization that she does not love Ronny-and that her desires are insignificant to her impending role as the wife of a British civil servant in India-that she is already positioned as a victim of her gender when she enters the cave. She has repressed her own erotic desire, and instead projected it onto Aziz, who comes to her mind to represent the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 170 erotic subjectivity that she must repress in order to function properly as Ronn/s wife. And despite Forster’s disavowal of any feelings of attraction on the part of Adela for Aziz, her own professed recognition of his physical attractiveness seems to belie such simple disinterestedness. Thus it is with this volatile psychic combination of gender victimization, sexual repression, and projection that Adela enters the cave. Furthermore, she has just been reminded by the pattern in the rocks of the one moment that she did feel herself in possession of sexual desire: at the moment of impact in the car accident with Ronny. That moment here serves as a foreshadowing in whose light we can read the intersection of erotic experience and violent assault that erupts again inside Adela’s mind in the cave. The archetypal significance of the cave as a metaphor for the womb suggests further evidence that Adela is, in a sense, assaulted by her own womanhood. Let me be clear that I do not refer here to the antiquated psychoanalytic notion of hysteria as a product of the female reproductive organs. Adela is not a hysterical victim of her own biology; rather, she is assaulted by the social injustice that her womb represents, by the recent revelation that she is not permitted to experience her own erotic subjectivity. The position of the object is that of the victim, and since her womb is what makes Adela an object and not a subject in the marital paradigm of gender relations, it is appropriately within the womb-like enclosure of the cave that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 171 she feels most victimized by this injustice. As with Rachel’s nightmares of being trapped in a womb-like enclosure in The Vovaoe Out, both women unconsciously perceive themselves as prisoners of the social role circumscribed by their reproductive anatomy. It is a mark of the novel’s interest in the complexity of human identity and social relations that in the cave incident Aziz is constructed in Adela’s mind (and thereafter in the minds of the Anglo-Indians who pursue her allegations of assault) as the sexual subject or aggressor, whereas throughout much of the work he is positioned as a marginalized racial and sexual figure. By virtue of being Indian, he is, of course, politically and socially disempowered by the Anglo-Indian regime that rules his homeland. The novel takes great pains to depict how, despite being an educated physician, Aziz is snubbed and mistreated by the Anglo-Indian community in Chandrapore. For instance, at the beginning of the novel, he is called away from a social gathering by a note summoning him to the home of the civil surgeon, his boss, Major Callendar. After leaving his friends abruptly and suffering significant transportation woes, Aziz arrives at the major’s house only to find that he is gone and has left no word regarding why Aziz was summoned in the first place. To make matters worse, the carriage Aziz has taken pains to procure is taken by the major’s wife and her companion without even so much as an aknowledgment to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 172 Aziz for his gracious gesture. The scene is meant to set the tone o f racial inequity and injustice that Forster explores throughout the novel through the figure of Aziz. Most significantly, no one in the Anglo-Indian community except for Cyril Fielding thinks twice about presuming his guilt in the sexual assault Adela reports. The relationship between Fielding and Aziz becomes another nodal point in the text where axes of sexuality, colonialism, and violence collide. For the friendship not only illuminates the racial inequities that burden their friendship, but also introduces a homoerotic dynamic that serves further to destabilize dominant gender and sexual paradigm in the narrative. Contemporary critics have widely concurred that Fielding and Aziz’s friendship is characterized by homoerotic valences. From their first meeting, in fact, a homoerotic subtext may be gleaned from their verbal intercourse. When Aziz arrives at Fielding’s home for a small party, Fielding has just gotten out of his bath. Although he is concealed from Aziz’s view, Fielding’s nakedness, along with his entreaty that this man he has never met, “Please make yourself at home,” establish an immediate sense of intimacy between the two men. Then, in what Sara Suleri Goodyear calls “perhaps the most notoriously oblique homoerotic exchange in the literature of English India,” Aziz removes his own collar stud and helps Fielding to insert it into his own shirt (157). Goodyear argues that the erotic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 173 implications o f the scene seem almost too obvious to read, but that by transferring the stud from Aziz’s own body to Fielding’s, the men engage in the only form of exchange through which men are allowed to touch men (158). These references occur in Goodyear’s essay, “Forster’s Imperial Erotic,” which argues that A Passage to India represents Forster’s attempt to revise an imperial erotic paradigm in which the colonizing presence is always male and the colonized territory is female; rather, “A Passage to India presents an alternative colonial model: the most urgent cross-cultural invitations occur between male and male, with racial difference serving as a substitute for gender” (Goodyear 152). The novel’s homoeroticizing of race is predicated upon a deferral of desire that invites an interesting parallel between Aziz and Adela. For just as I argue Adela’s fantasy of a sexual assault should be read as the result of her own erotic repression and displacement, Aziz and Fielding refrain from any overt expression of their sexual desire for each other out of their own combination of repression and conformity to social convention. In the scene just described, for instance, Aziz “preferred to be alone with his new friend” and “was disappointed that other guests were coming” to Fielding’s (66). The repression may be noted in the way the men’s relationship is always referred to as a friendship, despite numerous homoerotic valences that with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permissioh. 174 suggest otherwise; the conformity to social convention is evident upon the entrance of the other guests. In terms of drawing a parallel between Aziz and Adela, it is noteworthy, too, that the violent incident in the Marabar Caves which is set in motion by Adela’s erotic repression is what ultimately prevents any progression of the homoerotic relationship between Fielding and Aziz. For upon Aziz’s acquittal, he wants most of all to be with Fielding, but is rejected when his friend opts instead to escort Adela Quested safely through the riot that is beginning to swell: '“Cyril, Cyril, don’t leave me,' called the shattered voice of Aziz,’’ and yet Fielding does exactly that (232). We are told that ”[v]ictory gave him no pleasure,” as Aziz can only cry, “’Cyril, Cyril... Why isn’t Cyril following? Let us turn back... Cyril, again you desert,” almost obsessively (234-235). When at last the two men do meet following the aborted trial, Aziz makes his most overt attempt at intimacy with Fielding. As the two men lie on the roof looking up at the stars, Aziz says, ”'[L]et us dream plans for the future’” (250). When Fielding demurs, u ’l am useless at dreaming,'” Aziz soon adds, “In any case we spend our holidays together, and visit Kashmir, possibly Persia, for I shall have plenty of money ... While with me you shall never spend a single pie’” (250-251). Clearly, Aziz envisions a future with Fielding, yet his dreams are soon shattered when Fielding begins a defense of Adela Quested and a plea to Aziz to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 175 show her some compassion. Aziz is so embittered by what he sees as his friend’s betrayal that later in the novel he believes Fielding has married Adela. Even though he discovers that Fielding’s bride is in fact Stella, daughter of Aziz’s beloved Mrs. Moore, the divide between the men has grown impenetrable. Thus, while the incident in the Marabar caves on the one hand casts Adela as the feminine victim/object of a sexual attack, Aziz’s position as the racially and sexually objectified “other” of the revised imperial erotic theorized by Goodyear furthermore positions him as a mirror object to Adela. That Forster aims to illustrate the network of power relations that entangle both Adela and Aziz as unfixed objects and subjects within its gendered and racially marked system is cogently argued by Brenda Silver in one of the most insightful expositions of the sexual violence at the center of the novel, “Periphrasis and Rape in A Passage to India." Silver argues that “both Adela’s original utterance and her subsequent withdrawal of Aziz’s name during the trial can be read as a form of resistance, a resistance that resides in speaking her objectification” (187). By speaking “rape” in making her original accusation, Adela is voicing her resistance to what she discovers in the caves: that to be a woman is to be rapable. Yet by recanting and speaking Aziz’s name as she clears him, she restores to him the subjectivity and individuality he had been denied by the Anglo- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 176 Indian community putting him on trial. As Silver so astutely points out, though, Adela's refusal to withdraw her allegation of rape, even as she clears Aziz, is yet a further subversion of the Anglo-Indian masculine discourse of knowledge and power [l]n refusing either to specify or deny what happened in the cave...she creates another gap, one that disrupts rather than enabling the discourse of power and knowledge. Her refusal to specify, like the Indian women’s refusal to be seen, generates a counter discourse, one that opens up gaps that those in power cannot control or afford, in part by undermining their claim to knowledge and truth. (189) Thus, while Adela is in one sense victimized by the psychic violence in the cave, she is in another sense ultimately empowered by it, for in the end her allegation serves to weaken the Anglo-Indian regime’s authority, for they are forced to acknowledge their wrong assumptions. Thus, similarly to Rachel Vinrace’s fantasies of erotic aggression in The Vovage Out. Adela’s fantasized assault in the Marabar Caves functions not only to illustrate the vulnerability of women to sexual violence, but more significantly to disrupt the very notions of gender and racial identity upon which that violence is predicated. In terms of the power dynamics constructed through the text, the incident at the center of A Passage to India suggests the same paradoxical complexity as the acts of erotic aggression analyzed both earlier in this chapter and in the one preceding it. For while it is true that Adela and Aziz are both victims of the “insult" in the cave-she of e » with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 177 an act of aggression that she truly believes occurred, and he o f the social and legal ramifications that her accusation imposes upon him— they are also empowered by the (albeit temporary) destabilization of the authority and institutional control exercised over them by the Anglo-Indian regime. Although she is scorned and humiliated as a result of her recantation, Adela nevertheless escapes the fate of a loveless marriage to Ronny and a wifely role of serving the imperial British subjugation of India. And while Aziz is embittered and traumatized by being arrested and tried for a crime he did not commit, he nonetheless strikes a humiliating blow to the Anglo- Indian authorities who are forced to release him and acknowledge that they were wrong in their prejudicial certainty of his guilt. By disrupting the structures of knowledge and power that compose the foundation of the British colonial rule in India, then, the representation of erotic aggression in the novel may be seen to serve what Benita Parry calls “the counter-discourse generated by the text" (136). In her essay, T he Politics of Representation in A Passage to India." Parry argues that the novel constructs an oppositional discourse that “interrogates the premises, purposes and goals of a civilisation dedicated to world hegemony” (136). Although Parry does not specifically address the dynamics of erotic aggression that I argue are central to the text, her convincing argument about the oppositional discourse operating in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 178 novel suggests further evidence that the novel, like the other modernist texts explored in this study, works to shatter many dominant cultural beliefs, especially those pertaining to human identity’s transparency or fixity. Parry argues that Forster replaces the epistemology of traditional fiction with "the ontological puzzlement of a modernist text” that ultimately produces "a set of radical alternatives to the meanings valorised by an imperialist civilisation” (135). She links the oppositional discourse constructed in A Passage to India to Forster's own position as an outsider in society, one who “shared the ideology of the middle-class milieu to which he was bom, [but]...at crucial points disengaged from i f (137). Although Parry does not mention his homosexuality as one of the aspects of Forster’s “disengagemenf with established British society, this fact of his identity would quite likely have heightened his sensitivity to the ways in which erotic desire may constitute an “oppositional discourse” such as that which I argue is constructed in the Marabar caves incident. For all of the obvious differences between A Passage to India and The Vovaae Out, they are united in their similar employment of a strategic interplay between eroticism and aggression to deconstruct conventional constructions of gender and sexual identity within a colonial context. As noted earlier in the chapter, Woolf and Forster were known to have shared an anti-imperialist sensibility that undoubtedly played a role in their Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 179 decision to explore the ways in which cultural identity and national oppression intersect, often violently, with individual agency and interpersonal relationships. While Forster clearly seems to have been less overtly concerned with gender oppression than Woolf, his own “outsider” status as a homosexual likely contributed to his novel’s implicit awareness of the inextricable link between sexuality and human identity. As both Rachel and Adela both discover the limitations they face as women and as potential wives, along with their sexual vulnerability and status as objects instead of erotic subjects, their authors grant them at least the possibility of effecting disruption or destabilization through the fantasies of erotic aggression that permeate both novels. Perhaps it was the violent nature of imperialism itself that suggested to Woolf and Forster the possibility of appropriating aggression as a strategy for resisting the oppressive domination of the institutions and discourses of power that ultimately preclude the possibility of agency and self-determination for both novels’ protagonists. While neither novel offers a substantial vision of resistance to institutions such as imperialism or marriage, both invite readers to challenge the conventional understandings of identity that underlie such power structures in ways that suggest that novels themselves may be potent weapons in their dismantling. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 180 1. Diana Swanson argues convincingly that “W oolf makes clear that sexual abuse functions as part of a larger process of female socialization* in Diana Swanson, “‘My Boldness Terrifies Me’: Sexual Abuse and Female Subjectivity in The Voyage O ut” Twentieth Century Literature 41.1 (1995): 285. 2. See, for instance, Jessica Tvordi, “The Vovage Out: Virginia Woolfs First Lesbian Novel,” Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations, ed. Vara Nevarow-Turk and Mark Hussey (New York: Pace UP,1993) 226-237, for such an interpretation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 181 Chapter 4 Coloring Sexuality in the American South: William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eves Were Watching God He came toward her. She did not move. Her eyes began to grow darker and darker, lifting into her skull above a half moon of white, without focus, with the blank rigidity of a statue’s eyes. She began to say Ah-ah-ah-ah in an expiring voice, her body arching slowly backward as though faced by an exquisite torture. When he touched her she sprang like a bow, hurling herself upon him, her mouth gaped and ugly like that o f a dying fish as she writhed her loins against him. He dragged his face free by main strength. -Sanctuary She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. -Their Eves Were Watching God The images of female erotic desire depicted in the passages above could scarcely be more different. In Faulkner’s nightclub scene, Temple Drake, the Southern belle virgin-tumed-whore following her brutal rape and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 182 imprisonment in a Memphis brothel, presents a garish caricature of female sexuality: desperate, dangerously overpowering, and evocative of the ugly animalism of a dying fish. Her gaping mouth, clearly a vagina dentata threatens to devour her prey. In Hurston’s description of Janie Crawford’s sexual awakening, female desire is in harmony with the natural world: it is beautiful, satisfying, fruitful. In an unusual similarity between the two passages, however, female sexuality is described using language that builds a strong connection between erotic pleasure and pain. Temple’s body arches in "exquisite torture” as her desire for Red consumes her, and Janie’s first orgasm is “a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.” Another suggestive parallel between the two passages is the significance of color in the imagery of desire: Janie’s sexuality is drenched in golden sunlight, whereas Temple’s eyes grow darker and darker as her desire mounts. The sunlight that warms Janie’s fantasy under the pear tree corresponds with the generative power associated with female sexuality in Hurston’s passage. Female desire is potentially life- generating, as indicated by the fertile marriage of the bee and the bloom. The darkness that overshadows Temple’s desire in Faulkner's passage only serves to dehumanize her, giving her “a statue’s eyes” and ultimately bringing death to Red by inciting Popeye’s sexual jealousy. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 183 This chapter will argue that both William Faulkner's 1931 version of Sanctuary and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eves Were Watching God examine the "coloring of sexuality” in the American South of the 1930s, and that they do so by exploring how sexuality and violence collide in the volatile intersection of racial, gender, and sexual identity. Specifically, eroticized aggression takes the form of rape in Sanctuary and of spousal abuse in Their Eves Were Watching God. Although the forms of violence differ, both narratives filter their representations of sexualized violence through African American characters-a population for whom submission has a long and violent history, beginning with slavery and continuing through the lynchings that still occurred with regularity during the 1930s. The historical violation of both the material bodies and the human identities of African Americans enacted by white cultural domination resonates strongly throughout both texts and is echoed in the physical and psychological violations of Temple and Janie. The previous chapters have considered how representations of eroticized aggression intersect with constructions of gender, sexual orientation, and national identity in several works of modem British fiction. This final chapter moves across the Atlantic to examine how both thematic and formal uses of erotic aggression in two significant works of modem American fiction produce differing effects on cultural constructions of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 184 gender, sexuality, and racial identity. Faulkner and Hurston represent two very different strands of American modernism: Faulkner, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style in the vein of James Joyce, was a critically acclaimed success who won the Nobel Prize for literature; Hurston, on the other hand, died impoverished in a Florida welfare home, her body buried in an unmarked grave and her novels long out of print It would be far too reductive to attribute Faulkner's relative success to his race and gender, although undeniably racism and sexism played a role in Hurston’s fate. Rather, it is more informative from a critical standpoint to consider how Faulkner’s “high1 1 art of experimental stream-of-consciousness and his interest in “big” thematic issues such as redemption was for many decades valorized in marked contrast to Hurston's “low” art of African- American folk narrative and her interest in “small” thematic issues such as a rural Black woman’s search for selfhood. It was not until Black feminist criticism gained popularity in the 1970s that Hurston's work was re discovered, and Their Eves Were Watching God eventually joined the canon of American literature. However, despite these apparent differences between the two authors’ styles and experiences, it is intriguing to note that they share a similar desire to create mythologically totalizing communities within the region of the American South, communities in which their narratives unfold Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 185 in artificial isolation from the rest o f the modem world. In Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and in Hurston’s all-black town of Eatonville, Florida (which was based on a real community), individual desires are pursued, social relationships are constructed, and justice is meted out by author/creators who give no indication that a larger frame of reference exists outside the carefully-crafted confines of these little worlds. As the following pages will suggest, the mythological nature of these two regional constructions provides fertile ground for their authors’ modernist explorations of the gender, racial, and sexual identity politics that germinate there. Their Eves Were Watchino God is undoubtedly Hurston’s most popular and critically acclaimed work. A glance at the MLA Bibliography reveals the prolific body of scholarship devoted to the novel, which has also become a staple on high school and college reading lists across the country. Sanctuary, on the other hand, is among the most universally scorned of Faulkner’s novels by his critics. For years, Faulkner scholars have argued that the author’s own admission in the introduction to the 1932 Modern Library edition of the novel that it was a a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money,” indicates that it was little more than a sensationalistic commercial enterprise. However, unlike other Faulkner novels, Sanctuary has remained in print since its publication and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 186 is among the most widely read of his works. Since it is my belief that arguments over the “literary merit” of a work mainly sen/e to reinforce a tradition-bound academic agenda, I have little interest in pursuing that debate over the novel. Indeed, it would be a risky enterprise even to take Faulkner’s statments about the novel at face value, as he was rather famously disingenuous about his work. However, while Faulkner’s admission that the text was “deliberately conceived to make money” should not be trusted as evidence either of his intentions or of the novel’s relative literary merit, it does serve usefully to highlight the novel’s popular appeal. In its rather sensationalized depictions of sex and violence, the novel represents perhaps the most popular commercial endeavor of this “high brow” author-a fact which makes it all the more interesting to revisit in light of contemporary cultural studies investigations into what popular cultural artifacts reveal about the desires and anxieties of the public to whom they appeal. The thematic representations of erotic aggression that I argue are crucial to understanding the identity politics of both Sanctuary and Their Eves Were Watchino God are presented in distinctly different ways. In my subsequent discussions of both texts, it will become apparent that while sexual violence is foregrounded and highlighted in Sanctuary as the key narrative premise, erotic aggression is presented more subtly-albeit Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 187 perhaps even more insidiously-in Their Eves. Furthermore, although the novels differ strikingly in style and narrative form, I will illustrate that a formal dynamics of erotic aggression is enacted by both narratives, marking them as emblematic of modernist formal experimentation similar to the other works explored in this project Sanctuary enacts its narrative erotic aggression by positioning Temple Drake as the object of the reader’s voyeuristic gaze, by heightening our own anticipation of the rape, and eventually, by actually positioning the reader, and not Popeye, as the rapist. A dynamic of erotic aggression will also be revealed in Hurston’s narrative structure in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Indeed while critic Carla Kaplan has pointed out the erotic nature of Janie’s narration of her story to her friend Phoeby, and numerous other critics have discerned strategic aggression in Hurston’s refusal to give Janie a voice at her own trial and by breaking with romance conventions by “killing o ff Tea Cake, Janie’s final lover, my analysis will reveal a strategic link between the erotic aggression of the narrative’s form and that of its thematic representations. “She Asked For It” and “That Black Man’ Did It”: Delivering the Dominant Mythology on Rape in Sanctuary Sex and violence have always had audience appeal. One need only think of Oedipus or Hamlet to see that it was hardly a novel concept of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 188 William Faulkner in 1931 to rely on the ages-old combination of blood and lust in a (perhaps) deliberate attempt to make money with his novel, Sanctuary. The primary plot developed in Sanctuary is the story of Temple Drake, an Alabama debutante and university student who flirts with danger by sneaking out with boys she is not supposed to date and teasing them sexually with no intention of delivering on their desires. She thus represents the stereotypical “cocktease," a cultural symptom of male anxiety about sexual inadequacy. Temple gets more than she bargained for when she goes out with Gowan Stevens, a college-educated "Virginia gentleman” with a taste for liquor whose quest for more moonshine takes the couple to the isolated, rural Mississippi home of bootlegger Lee Goodwin. Stranded there by a car accident as the result of Gowan’s intoxication, the "gentleman" proceeds to drink himself into unconsciousness, while his date becomes the prey of Goodwin’s household of misfits and miscreants: quick-with-his-fists Van, feeble minded Tommy, and sinister gangster Popeye. After a long night of being ogled, manhandled, secretly observed, and pursued by various inhabitants of Goodwin’s home, Temple is eventually cornered in the corn crib by Popeye and sexually assaulted with a com cob. Gowan has fled the premises and abandoned her after awaking from his stupor, and so after raping Temple, Popeye kidnaps her Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 189 and takes her to a Memphis brothel. Temple is kept virtually imprisoned there-locked in her room, although perhaps not inescapably so— while the impotent Popeye stops in periodically to rape her with foreign objects and, eventually, to watch her have sex with another man, Red. In the meantime, a variety of related subplots occupy most of the narrative content Lee Goodwin is accused of murdering Tommy, when in fact it was Popeye who did so in order to get to Temple in the com crib. Goodwin’s common-law wife, Ruby, seeks the defense help of Horace Benbow, an attorney whom Popeye encountered near the Goodwin’s still at the beginning of the novel. Benbow is experiencing a moral crisis of his own: having recently left his wife (because he was tired of picking up shrimp for her every week), he finds himself still grappling with a lustful obsession for his youthful stepdaughter, Little Belle. Benbow’s marital abandonment is met with scorn by his sister, Narcissa, who is determined that he not further sully her reputation by getting mixed up in the Goodwin case. Add to the mix the comic interference of sleazy politician Clarence Snopes and the ignorant shenanigans of his foolish brother, Virgil, and his hapless sidekick, Fonzo, in the whorehouse, and the picture of a dark, ironic, and convoluted narrative becomes evident. While the brutal manner in which Temple is sexually assaulted was intended to shock audiences, what emerges from Sanctuary as perhaps Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 190 most disturbing from a critical standpoint eighty years later is the way in which the narrative reinforces dangerous social stereotypes through the depiction of the brutality. Specifically, Faulkner suggests through his depiction of Temple early in the novel that she is asking to be raped, that on some level, she deserves what happens to her. This notion is reinforced by her actions later in the story, when she is transformed in the whorehouse into a drunkard consumed with lust for the stud, Red, whom Popeye has procured for her-the message being, of course, that she really enjoyed her attack, that it brought out her true licentious nature. Her amorality is cemented when she lies on the witness stand and implicates Goodwin in her assault, effectively signing the sentence for his public torture and execution. For Temple, there is no last-minute "redemption” in the revelation of a truth that would exonerate an innocent man, as there is for Adela Quested in A Passage to India. The novel serves to reinforce yet another historically harmful stereotype of black men as dangerous sexual predators who victimize white women. It does so by effectively raciaiizing Popeye, who is actually white, by coloring him black. And finally, the novel enacts a disturbing dynamic on the level of the narrative interaction between reader and text, effectively implicating the reader in the attack on Temple: it forces our voyeuristic imaginations to seek gratification through Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 191 filling in the narrative gaps that Faulkner leaves open at pivotal moments throughout the text Temple Drake is sexually objectified in the narrative from the moment she is introduced: Townspeople taking after-supper drives through the college grounds or an oblivious and bemused faculty member or a candidate for a master’s degree on his way to the library would see Temple, a snatched coat under her arm and her long legs blonde with running, in speeding silhouette against the lighted windows of the Coop, as the women’s dormitory was known, vanishing into the shadow beside the library wall, and perhaps a final squatting swirl of knickers or whatnot as she sprang into the car waiting there with the engine running on that particular night The cars belonged to town boys. (28) Faulkner positions her from the beginning as the object of several gazes- the townspeople’s, the (male) faculty and graduate students’, and the reader’s. His imagery reduces her to a series of eroticized body parts: she consists of “long legs blonde,” a “speeding silhouette,” and a “squatting swirl of knickers.” And, of course, her primary narrative function is laid out clearly in this passage where she is first introduced: she is the embodiment of a certain male fantasy of female sexuality, a femme fatale whose modus operandi is to elicit men’s sexual desire without reciprocating it. Many men’s. For Faulkner is careful to point out Temple’s attentions are divided among many town boys, as well as her fellow collegians. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 192 Faulkner’s erotic objectification of Temple does not end with his introductory image of her; indeed, it continues to gather steam throughout the novel, as she is repeatedly referred to as a series of fetishized body parts. Throughout the text’s introduction of Temple, she remains the object of a male gaze. The narration details how the town boys that she dates on week nights watch her on the weekends when she is allowed to date the college boys. On these occasions, Temple ignores them, coolly drawing their stares. They see her as "her high delicate head and her bold painted mouth and soft chin, her eyes blankly right and left looking, cool, predatory and discreet” (29). They watch her through the windows as she dances, “her waist shaped slender and urgent in the interval, her feet filling the rhythmic gap with music” (29). As she emerges from the dance with her date, who unfortunately for Temple is Gowan Stevens on this particular night, the town boys continue to observe her, seeing her through Faulkner’s lens as more body parts: “Her face was quite pale, dusted all over with recent powder, her hair in spent red curls. Her eyes, all pupil now, rested upon them for a blank moment. Then she lifted her hand in a wan gesture, whether at them or not, none could have said” (29). Their voyeurism of Temple reaches its peak when they are teased with "the fleet revelation of flank and thigh as she got into his car” (29-30). I will leave for another critic to explain how a woman’s waist can be “urgenf-in urgent need of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 193 groping?-or her curls can be "spent” as if perhaps they had just achieved some erotic climax o f their own, but I trust that the imagery of the preceding passages provides adequate illustration of the narrative’s deliberate fetishization of Temple Drake's body. Temple continues to be depicted as the erotic object of the male gaze after Gowan has drunkenly crashed his car and stranded them at Lee Goodwin’s house, and it is here that the danger of her objectification comes dramatically to the fore. Immediately following the accident, which Tommy and Popeye both witness, the simple-minded Tommy takes note of Temple’s tiny feet in high heels and the fact that she is "‘a right tall gal...[w]ith them skinny legs of hem” (40). As he studies "her belly and loins,” he observes, “‘He aint laid no crop by yit, has he?” (40). Temple then catches Tommy looking up her skirt as she removes her shoes for the hike up to Goodwin’s house. Once at the house, the observation of Temple takes on more sinister overtones. Indeed, Tommy becomes something of a protector to Temple, obsessively worrying about the harm the other men’s gazes might precipitate. "‘Dum them fellers’ and ‘Why dont them fellers quit pesterin that gal?’"(63, 65) become Tommy’s constant refrains throughout the night Temple stays at Goodwin’s. As it turns out, of course, Tommy’s foreboding is well-warranted, as the men progress from simply looking at Temple, to making obscene Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 194 comments, to manhandling her, and eventually to raping her. Van, one of Lee’s henchmen, tries to cajole her into taking “a little walk” with him; subsequently, he rips the raincoat off her body when he realizes she has removed her dress. Popeye refers to Temple as a whore when she implores him to drive her away from Goodwin’s. Later, he gropes at her breasts beneath her raincoat Ultimately, it is Popeye who rapes her with a com cob. And even though Lee never actually harms Temple, he may have plans to sexually assault her as well, according to Tommy, who tells Temple repeatedly, “ Lee says hit wont hurt you none. All you got to do is lay down...’” (96-97). Temple is warned by Lee’s common-law wife, Ruby, to get away from the house before dark. Temple’s presence poses a threat to Ruby, who realizes that the girl may prove too much of a sexual temptation for Lee to pass up. And Temple herself realizes the danger surrounding her at the house, saying to Ruby, “There are so many of them [...] But maybe, with so many of them...” (52), leaving unfinished the false hope that perhaps there is safety in numbers. Yet despite the feet that Temple is the victim of the brutal assault at Goodwin’s house, Faulkner’s depiction of her actions prior to and following the rape disturbingly suggest that perhaps she deserves what happens to her. The dangerous and pervasive cultural myth that a rape victim must have “asked for i f is given credence through Faulkner’s depiction of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 195 Temple Drake.1 The fact that Faulkner depicts her as always running throughout her stay at Goodwin’s— she never walks from place to place, but is continually running-suggests that Temple is perhaps deliberately attempting to attract attention to herself.2 Indeed, in one passage she clearly poses herself as an object of desire for her future rapist Popeye: Temple met Popeye halfway to the house. Without ceasing to run she appeared to pause. Even her flapping coat did not overtake her, yet for an appreciable instant she faced Popeye with a grimace of taut, toothed coquetry” (47). Such an image suggests that Temple does not run out of fear, but because of some sort of frantic energy that is tied to her desire to play the coquette, even when to do so is clearly to invite danger. The disturbing suggestion that Temple may have invited her assault by positioning herself as eroticized object to the men around her is reinforced and even compounded later in the novel with Faulkner’s implication that on some level, she even enjoyed the attack. Following the rape, Popeye drives away from Goodwin’s house with Temple in his car and takes her to Memphis, where he has her locked up in a room at Miss Reba’s brothel. While she is initially a prisoner, it soon becomes apparent that although opportunities to escape exist, Temple neglects to avail herself of them. She is resourceful enough to bribe Miss Reba’s maid, Minnie, to let her out of the house when she wants to use the telephone to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 196 set up a rendezvous with Red, for example, yet she returns to the brothel after doing so. Surely she could have telephoned her father or brothers, or merely just run away, if she had wanted to do so. Instead, Faulkner suggests that Temple has become a woman who enjoys getting drunk and having kinky sex. When Horace Benbow arrives to interview her for information that might assist him with Lee Goodwin’s defense, Temple comes across as a stereotypical “fallen woman." Her face is colored with "two spots of rouge” and her mouth is “painted into a savage cupid’s bow” (207). Her only interest is in procuring alcohol and cigarettes: “I want a drink” (207) are the first words she utters, and she repeats the request four times on the same page, demanding a cigarette from Benbow as well. When Temple finally does get around to telling Benbow about her assault, Faulkner describes her as “recounting the experience with actual pride, a sort of naive and impersonal vanity, as though she were making it up, looking from him to Miss Reba with quick, darting glances like a dog driving two cattle along a lane” (209). Temple is depicted not as a victim deserving o f sympathy, nor as a strong survivor deserving of respect, but as a vain “dog,” objectified and dehumanized through the author’s description of her. The description in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter shows Temple lusting after Red, the man with whom Popeye Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 197 arranges for her to have sex while he, impotent observes them. Clearly, despite the fact that Temple has been raped with a com cob, kidnapped and locked up in a brothel, and subjected to the pain and humiliation of repeated sexual assaults, Faulkner does not wish to elicit sympathy for her character. For the image of Temple’s wanton lust for Red does nothing to suggest she is the victim; indeed, she is constructed as a rather ugly and dangerous sexual predator herself, for Popeye has warned her that if she makes a play for Red, he will kill him. Nonetheless, Temple reveals no concern for Red’s safety, only an obsession with her sexual desire for him. In the darkly comic nightclub scene quoted previously, which finds Temple "arching” and "writhpngj” with desire like "a dying fish,” she comes across as an exaggerated caricature of female sexuality (232). In this scene, a grotesquely exaggerated and degraded portrait of Temple’s "erotic longing" emerges, an image of degradation which is enhanced by the copious amounts of alcohol she consumes. She is "overcome...by physical desire” (230); "she felt long shuddering waves of physical desire going over her, draining the color from her mouth, drawing her eyeballs back into her skull in a shuddering swoon” (231). When she finally comers Red alone in a room, with "her hips grinding against him” and "making a whimpering moan,” she is repeatedly described as "dragging his head down” and "dragging at his head” as he struggles to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 198 get free of her grasp (232). She pathetically implores him to have sex with her, begging, “‘Let’s hurry. Anywhere’ (232), and “‘Please. Please. Please. Please. Dont make me wait I’m burning up...l’m on fire. I’m dying, I tell you” (233). If the language brings to mind a second-rate romance novel, that is likely because Faulkner seems deliberately to invoke and to exaggerate the popular cultural stereotype of the woman gone mad with desire, overcome with lust, and so on. In this way, Temple is constructed as the embodiment of a limited (and male-defined) vision of female sexuality; even if Faulkner seeks on some level to critique the male vision that creates such fictions of female sexuality, nonetheless, Temple herself remains nothing more than a stereotypical “slut.” The fact that Temple is purported to be so consumed with desire for Red after having been initially forced by Popeye into having sex with him only reinscribes the dangerous and all-too-pervasive cultural myth about rape that, often, “no means yes,” or “she really wanted it.” Faulkner thus suggests that Popeye’s sexual assault on Temple has brought out her true licentious nature, and that she in fact enjoyed it. In this way, the author seems deliberately to forestall any possible sympathy for Temple as a rape victim, a move which has done little to endear him to feminist critics. Faulkner adds additional fuel to his “blame the victim” tone with respect to Temple through his harsh depiction of her actions and attitude at Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 199 the end of the novel. When Temple takes the stand at Lee Goodwin’s trial, she falsely accuses Goodwin of shooting Tommy and raping her. She never once mentions Popeye, whether out of fear or out of some misguided desire to protect him is never made clear. Temple’s accusation is as good as a signature on Lee Goodwin's death warrant for her sensationalists story rouses the outrage of the townsmen, whose misguided sense of moral duty to defend the virtue of Southern white womanhood transforms them into an ugly lynch mob determined to make Goodwin suffer. They attack Goodwin, committing an unspecified act of sexual brutality-a , We made him wish we had used a cob’” (289)-and then burning him alive. Ironically, the male fear of the castrating woman Temple represents with her gaping mouth and her vice-like grip on Red becomes the power of men themselves, who carry out the literal castration of Goodwin. Instead of demonstrating any remorse that her testimony has thus doomed an innocent man to such a hideous death, Temple appears merely bored in Faulkner’s final image of her, a vacuous and vain child of privilege who has been whisked away to Paris to bide her time and wait for the scandal to die down. As she sits in the Luxembourg Gardens with her father, listening to the army band play Tchaikovsky, “Temple yawned behind her hand, then she took out a compact and opened it upon a face in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 200 miniature sullen and discontented and sad” (309). As always, her primary concern seems to be with her appearance. Yet although Temple clearly embodies a moral void which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the sacred sanctuary that Faulkner ironically suggests through her own name and the novel’s title, one could make the case that her amorality is the result of sexual violence she has endured. Such an argument would challenge my claim that Faulkner is ‘blaming the victim”-a t least in part-for the brutality in the novel, and suggest that the author is instead illustrating how the fear, pain, and humiliation Temple has endured have been the death of her very soul. This argument is bolstered by the fact that the face staring back at Temple from the compact mirror is “sad,” and furthermore by Faulkner’s last sentence in the novel: [Temple] closed the compact and from beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves of music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the opposite semicircle of trees where at sombre intervals the dead tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and death. (309) The images of death all around her are clearly metaphors for Temple herself, who like the sky had recently been “lying prone and vanquished in the embrace” of Popeye. His violation of her has not only resulted in the deaths of Popeye, Red, and Lee Goodwin, but incurred the spiritual death of Temple herself. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 201 However, while Faulkner may certainly be implying that Temple’s horrific experience has contributed to the cipher she has become by the novel’s end, his portrayal of her from the start has suggested that she is far from a blameless, sympathetic character. Some critics have suggested that Temple lies on the stand out of fear of Popeye, that perhaps she keeps looking to the back of the courtroom because she is intimidated by some of Popeye’s henchmen. This interpretation would go a certain distance toward absolving Temple of responsibility for her actions. Far more likely, however, is that she is looking at her brothers, and that these are the four men with whom she and her father leave the courtroom following her testimony. After all, Temple's primary concern throughout the novel is appearances and what people think of her. From the start, Faulkner has depicted her as a vain, foolish, self-absorbed young woman, and so it would seem inconsistent for him to begin eliciting sympathy for her at this point in the story. Whereas Faulkner’s negative depiction of Temple Drake serves to reinforce the range of negative stereotypes about women’s sexuality and rape described above, his narrative also evokes disturbing racial connotations through its depiction of eroticized aggression. While many of Faulkner’s novels, such as Lioht in August and Absalom. Absalom!, deal with the complexities of racial identity in provocative depth, Sanctuary is far Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 202 less explicitly concerned with race, yet still manages quite subtly to reinscribe negative cultural stereotypes about African Americans, sexuality, and violence. In contrast to the other works examined in this project that frequently employ erotic aggression to challenge social stereotypes and reductive assumptions about gender and racial identity, Sanctuary's representations of sexual violence more often seem to achieve the opposite result. Although none of the main characters in Sanctuary is of African American descent, Faulkner's use of blackness in the novel’s imagery produces a blend of gothicism and racial ambiguity that invites a reading of its racial overtones. The gothic elements of Sanctuary mav be found in the structure of Lee Goodwin's house, otherwise known as the Old Frenchman Place, a rambling, isolated, nineteenth-century abode that seems to have a hidden danger around every comer. The illicit distillery, the band of criminals and ex-cons who inhabit the place, the intimations of sexual transgression: these are but a few of the noir qualities that contribute to the novel’s gothic sensibility. Critic Eric Sundquist argues that “for the white writer, the identification of the gothic with darkness had fixed the image of the black deep in his subconscious mind, a disruptive or rebellious force to be studied and held at bay” (19). And indeed, underlying the gothic elements that emerge throughout Sanctuary seems to be an identification of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 203 darkness, danger, and disruption with blacks. Sundquist goes on to explain that Faulkner's work reflects a consciousness of racial issues in America through its combination of gothic and naturalistic strategies. He explains, T h e essence of the gothic is the eruption from below of rebellious or unconscious forces and the consequent violation of boundaries, whether racial, sexual, or abstractly moral” (18). Furthermore, the naturalism of Faulkner’s novel suggests a desire to explore the "darker,” repressed realm of human identity. As Sundquist explains, Naturalism works by strategies of submersion and the exploration of levels of consciousness or society purportedly below the normal: the economically oppressed; the biologically inferior, the theologically depraved or damned; and the psychologically subconscious, that "darker” part of the self or the community that must be repressed. The issue of race...both motivated and reflected the strategies of naturalist thought.. (Sundquist 18) Both gothicism and naturalism are thus reflective of American literature’s often unconscious beliefs about race. The gothic suggestion of racial and sexual "boundary violation” and the naturalistic consideration of how forces beyond an individual’s control can "darken” their destiny come together in Faulkner’s depiction of sexual brutality in Sanctuary. The naturalism comes into play most clearly with Popeye at the end of the story, where Faulkner provides the background on his early years: he is bom with an unnamed disease that his father has passed along to his mother before abandoning her, leaving Popeye stunted, sickly, and destined for Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 204 impotence. Left often in the care o f a pyromaniac grandmother, he soon takes to torturing small animals. The manner in which Popeye meets his end is also fraught with ironic naturalism: although he escapes blame for Tommy’s murder and Temple’s rape, he is ultimately convicted and hanged for "killing a man in one town at an hour when he was in another town killing somebody else” (Faulkner 301). The racial component that Sundquist claims to underlie the text’s naturalistic and gothic elements surfaces most clearly in the way in which Faulkner succeeds in coloring Popeye black, to the degree that Popeye’s race may seem quite ambiguous to an untrained reader. Indeed, the first two times I read the novel, first as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student in English, I believed that Popeye was a black man. It was not until my third reading of the novel that I realized that all of the characters who are black in the novel are referred to as "Negro,” and that given the rigid degree of social segregation the text implies (Virgil Snopes and Fonzo are shocked at the prospect of visiting a Negro brothel, for instance), it was not reasonable to infer that a black man would have been welcomed at Lee Goodwin’s place or at Miss Reba’s establishment. Yet in retrospect, I believe that my early confusion regarding Popeye’s race was not only understandable, but also indicative of a deliberate strategy of ambiguity on Faulkner’s part. For Popeye is repeatedly referred to as a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 205 “black man,” and so despite the fiact that he is not in actuality, an African American, he is clearly darkened enough to connote such a possibility. Popeye is, in effect, black by association. The first time the reader encounters Popeye on the opening page of the novel, he is engaged in a standoff with Horace Benbow across a spring. Benbow has inadvertently stumbled upon the location of Goodwin’s distillery, and Popeye is clearly menacing him. Popeye is dressed in a black suit and his face “had a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light" (4). The notion of a “queer, bloodless color” reveals Faulkner’s initial attempt to de-racialize Popeye, to render him effectively a racial cipher who can subsequently be “colored in” strategically by his author to connote blackness. And in feet, by the next page, Faulkner does just that, describing Popeye’s skin this time as having “a dead, dark pallor” (5). Two pages beyond that, Faulkner provides Benbow’s impression of Popeye: “He smells black, Benbow thought; he smells like that black stuff that ran out of Bovary’s mouth and down upon her bridal veil when they raised her head” (7). Thus, from the outset, Faulkner constructs Popeye as someone who looks and smells “black”; moreover, the association is quite clearly intended to be a negative one, with blackness itself being associated with death, horror, a dark stain upon the white purity of Madame Bovary’s bridal veil. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 206 The prior allusion to Flaubert is an interesting foreshadowing of the gender and racial stereotypes that Faulkner will reinscribe throughout the novel’s representation of erotic aggression involving Popeye and Temple. The image foreshadows the highly charged cultural myth of Popeye as a dangerous, odious "black man" whose sexual violation of Temple represents a horrific stain upon the construct of pure, white Southern womanhood-a construct that the lust-filled Temple, echoing the adulterous Emma Bovary, hardly embodies. The myth receives further articulation when Temple and Popeye first meet, and her repeated references to him as "that black man” (40,47) cement the racial implications of the rape which is to take place. By deliberately blackening Popeye and suggesting a racial dimension to his sexual violence, Faulkner reinscribes yet another socially destructive myth about rape: not only does he suggest that the victim may deserve it and/or actually enjoy it, but also that a black man is a particularly dangerous sexual threat Given that a signficant number of Faulkner’s other novels, such as Light in August and Absalom. Absalom!, reveal a strong thematic interest in exploring the complexities and ambiguities of race relations in the American South, it seems likely that the author intended the character of Popeye to play on the unconscious racist assumption that all rapists are black. The fact that Popeye is only strategically “blackened" by his author, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 207 and is not in fact an African American character, suggests that perhaps Faulkner wished to challenge such racist sexual ideology. Indeed, the fact that this particular white rapist is impotent and must therefore carry out his violation with a com cob, could be read as a deliberate attempt to capitalize on-and perhaps to stoke-the racist sexual anxieties of white Southern men. However, in doing so, regardless of his intentions, Faulkner creates a text which ultimately serves to perpetuate those anxieties and to contribute to a sexual mythology in which black men threaten white supremacy. The pervasive cultural mythology that constructs black men as a sexual danger to white women has a long social and literary history, of course. Between 1882 and 1930, the historical period immediately prior to Faulkner’s publication of Sanctuary, approximately 2500 African-Americans were lynched in the South (ACLA). While it was commonly maintained that rape and murder were the most frequent reasons for lynching, in reality the documented reasons often included being “improper with a white woman,” “insulting a white woman,” “eloping with a white woman,” “entering a white woman’s room," and “frightening a white woman” (ACLA). Clearly, African American men suffered greatly as a result of a pervasive white cultural fear that perceived their sexuality as a threat and responded with violence. Literature has often played a role in the construction of that mythology. One Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 208 of the most commonly cited examples is Thomas Dixon’s1905 novel The Clansman, in which the image of bestial black rapist remains reflected in the retina of the dead white woman he victimized (Sundquist 4). For a white Southern writer such as Faulkner to “blacken" his rapist character and therefore to invoke this racialized mythology about rape suggests an attempt to exploit and perhaps even to reinforce such harmful stereotypes. While the representations of Popeye and Temple suggest that erotic aggression is employed as a premise in Sanctuary for exploiting cultural anxieties about the potential power of both women and black males by reinforcing reductive and negative stereotypes about both, the novel also weaves a dynamic of erotic aggression into its very narrative form similar to the other works explored in this project In a manner consistent with how its representations of sexual violence seem ultimately to reinscribe dominant social hierarchies, the novel’s narrative dynamic of erotic aggression appeals to the reader’s unconscious desire to seduce and dominate, soliciting our complicity in its representation of Temple’s violation and in its exploitation of racial stereotypes regarding Popeye. It does so by literally teasing us with the possibility of Temple’s rape from the beginning of the novel, whetting our expectations of sexual danger. When the rape finally is delivered-both its narrative occurrence and its later rendering in testimony from Temple to Benbow and at Lee Goodwin’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 209 trial— the details are deliberately withheld by Faulkner such that the reader is forced to provide them himself or herself. Temple is not raped until nearly 100 pages into the novel, and the details of the assault-the fact of the com cob, for example-are only alluded to during the trial that occurs nearly 300 pages into the tact In these ways, then, the reader is actually made complicit in the narrative’s sexual violence. In “Reading Rape: Sanctuary and The Women of Brewster Place." Laura E. Tanner concurs that *[b]y withholding any direct representation of the rape upon which it focuses, Sanctuary shifts the burden of creation away from Faulkner and toward the reader” (561). Tanner’s analysis of Temple’s rape supports my argument that the narrative’s deliberate omission of the rape strategically positions the reader as the aggressor. As Tanner astutely points out, “It is the reader who first articulates the possibility of rape in Sanctuary. The narrative’s continual allusions to the danger that threatens Temple’s sense of well-being are ambiguous and incomplete" (562). We see Temple worrying that she should get out of Goodwin’s house before dark, hoping that there is safety in numbers, trying to convince herself that “Things like that don’t happen. Do they? They’re just like other people” (Faulkner 54). Yet what exactly “that" might be is left unarticulated. Faulkner thus forces the reader to fill in the narrative gaps in which sexual violence is only alluded to. Tanner argues, “The reader’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 210 active role in the construction of meaning blurs the conventional line between a novel and its audience, encouraging the reader’s entrance into the fictional text” (563). While all narrative desire may read as a function of such blurring of the boundary between audience and text, the way in which Sanctuary constructs a prolonged solicitation of the reader’s desire for rape seems particularly disturbing. For, according to Tanner, the novel strategically forces the reader into the position of looking forward to the rape: Denied an explicit account of the novel’s violence, the reader is tempted and frustrated, tempted and frustrated, until the process of reading begins to assume the rhythm of desire itself. The reader's absorption of warnings about the imminence of Temple’s rape translates into an eagerness to peruse the spectacle that has been promised; his or her sensitivity to the subtle conventions of fiction is exploited by a narrative trap that invites the reader— if only momentarily— to envision and even create the promised violence. (Tanner 564) When the rape finally does occur, the reader’s anticipation is not “rewarded” with a concrete representation, but again provided with only narrative symbolism and allusion: Popeye approaches Temple in the comcrib as he “waggle[s]” his phallic pistol at her (Faulkner 99). Temple begins to say, “Something is going to happen to me,” which soon changes to the scream, “‘Something is happening to me!’” as she lies “tossing and thrashing on the rough, sunny boards” (Faulkner 99). Tanner’s otherwise astute analysis incorrectly suggests that the old blind, mute man to whom Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 211 Temple addresses her screams is actually in the room with her during the rape; in fact, he is up on the porch of the house, while she is in the crib in the bam. The fact that Temple imagines a blind “witness” to her assault parallels the way in which Faulkner “blinds” his readers as well, forcing us to imagine ourselves as witnesses. Even during the trial scene when the reader is finally provided with certain details about the rape, Faulkner neglects to represent any direct testimony. Instead, we see the district attorney hold up a corn-cob that “appeared to have been dipped in dark brownish paint” (Faulkner 276). While the prosecutor alludes to the testimony of a gynecologist and chemist, these are withheld from the reader, as is Temple’s direct testimony about the rape itself. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s theory of the gaze articulated in her well- known essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Tanner argues that the reader of Sanctuary is distanced from the text by Faulkner’s exaggeration of literary devices, such as the symbolism and allusion referred to in the previous passage; however, she maintains that the reader transgresses the boundary between reader and participant in the narrative violence because of the textual gaps that invite the reader actively to construct the rape (572-573). Thus, Tanner claims that “the reader...conspires in an act of imaginative assault that implicates the reader in the novel’s violence not merely as a voyeur but as a violator” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 212 (572). The reader thus becomes psychically complicit in Temple’s violation, a process which suggests the powerful potential of a rt-fo r better or for worse— to politicize human relations. By implicating his reader in Temple’s rape, Faulkner may be seen to employ erotic aggression on the level of narrative form in an experimental fashion that recalls the modernist authors previously discussed in this project. However, whereas I argued that a critical reader might discern in the narrative dynamics o f erotic aggression enacted in the previous novels an attempted destabilization of power hierarchies and conventional categories of identity, in Sanctuary the formal violence of the text seems primarily to invite active participation in the brutalization of women. Thus, the gender and racial dynamics underlying Faulkner’s representations of the sexual violence involving Temple and Popeye in the novel reflect a similar modernist anxiety about the changing social status of women and blacks that characterizes the other works of fiction explored in this project With D. H. Lawrence and Dorothy Sayers, I argued that representations of erotic aggression served primarily as an expression of anxiety about changing gender and sexual norms; with E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, I explored how such representations reflected a similar paradoxical attitude with respect to the politics of gender and imperialism. Yet whereas I have concluded that the four novels discussed in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 213 previous chapters ultimately employ erotic aggression to assert a challenge, albeit occasionally an ambiguous or hesitant one, to the politics of social domination, Sanctuary ultimately reveals a less ambiguous and less progressive modernist approach to representing changing social dynamics through representations of erotic aggression. While Faulkner perhaps intended to invoke and to unsettle racist and sexual norms through his depictions of Temple and Popeye, his representations of them serve strongly to reinforce negative and limiting stereotypes of women, black men, and rape. In Defense of Herself: Eroticism, Violence, and the Construction o f Identity in Their Eyes Were Watching God While the representations of sexual violence in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary tend to construct both female sexuality and blackness as destructive social forces in the Depression era American South, the depictions of eroticized aggression in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eves Were Watching God present a more ambiguous and complex approach to gender and racial identity at the same time and place in American culture. Hurston’s novel chronicles the self-development of a young African- American woman, Janie Crawford, in rural Florida at the beginning of the twentieth century. Janie’s identity evolves as she moves through three Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 214 marriages and ultimately finds herself alone, narrating the story of her life to her best friend, Phoeby. The novel has often been described as Janie’s quest for a voice, with that voice being constitutive of her subjectivity.3 A novel based on a black female protagonist was a rarity in American literature prior to the publication of Their Eves, and the feet that Janie is such a strong, mufti-dimensional character has contributed to the novel’s enduring appeal. In constructing Janie’s story, Hurston dismantles some of the same myths and stereotypes about blackness and femininity that Sanctuary seems to reinforce: blackness is not associated with ugliness and danger; black men are not sexual predators; women are not merely sexual objects-teases and tramps-void of significant moral compass or subjective desires. However, while Hurston's novel does serve to challenge some of the myths that in Sanctuary serve to marginalize women and people of color, its representations of eroticism and aggression also raise some troublesome questions about the role of violence in Janie’s quest for subjectivity. The idealized romance between Janie and her third husband, Vergible T ea Cake” Woods, is marked at least twice by significant episodes of domestic violence that revolve around issues of sexual jealousy and desire; the relationship meets a murderous end-the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 215 ultimate violence-when Janie fatally shoots Tea Cake in self-defense after he threatens her with a rifle in a fit of jealous rage brought on by rabies. Hurston’s representation of domestic violence seems on one level to reinscribe some of the disturbing cultural mythology surrounding domestic violence: that women ask to be beaten, that deep down they enjoy it, that sometimes it’s necessary to show them who’s boss. By raising these disturbing possibilities, the novel poses a unique challenge to feminist criticism. And while some readings of the novel have interpreted the fetal shooting that ends Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship as a symbol of feminist revenge or resistance to male domination, such an argument denies that Hurston presents his death as a tragedy, not a triumph. The following analysis argues that the representations of eroticized aggression depicted in Their Eves Were Watching God reveal a profound ambivalence on Hurston’s part regarding the dynamics o f heterosexual romance and the possibility for a black woman to achieve autonomy and agency within the context of such relationships. Ultimately, though, I will argue that these representations challenge contemporary assumptions about marriage, race, and gender in the 1930s by presenting an African American heroine for whom violence is not an instrument of subjugation or a weapon for revenge, but a necessary tool within the context of specific circumstances for the construction and preservation of her own identity. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Like the other modernist authors included in this study, Hurston engages in an innovative narrative formal structure that blends a dynamic of erotic aggression into the very composition, reception, and unfolding of the te xt Her decision to write Their Eves Were Watching God in a black southern folk dialect was met with much derision by many of her contemporary African American writers and critics. Hurston’s choice to write about life and love in the small town of Eatonville, Florida, and "on the muck” also did not coincide with the expectations of influential Harlem Renaissance figures for whom the serious concerns of social protest fiction and the desire to depict an emerging middle-class black elite were predominant fictional concerns. For instance, Alain Locke, one of Hurston's former professors at Howard University and an early supporter of her work, wrote that he was disappointed with the novel’s failure to “come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction,” while author Richard Wright argued that Hurston “exploits that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint’” (Awkward 3). Nevertheless, the powerful imagery constructed through the novel’s dialect seduces the reader with a use of language that recent critics often describe in erotic terms. Furthermore, the text’s repudiation of romance conventions as manifested in its “killing o ff of its ostensible romantic hero, Tea Cake, represents an aggressive modernist break with generic conventions similar to W oolfs in The Vovaqe Out, in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 217 which the heroine dies rather than marries. Thus, Their Eves w < g n » Watching God enacts a narrative of seduction and violation that invites comparison to the other modernist novels explored in this project with its complex thematic representations of erotic aggression. Janie is introduced to the reader in a scene which both interestingly parallels and strikingly contrasts with our initial view of Temple in Sanctuary. Both women are presented as objects of the male erotic gaze. Temple is described as a compilation of fetishized body parts subjected to the lustful, and decidedly menacing, observation o f the “townie” boys who watch her on her dates. Janie, on the other hand, is presented as the object of the stares and speculative gossip of the townspeople on their evening porches who watch her walk back into town after a prolonged absence with Tea Cake. Their gaze, too, is eroticized: they wonder why she is wearing overalls instead of a dress, why she lets her long hair swing down her back, “her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets," and "her pugancious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt” (2). Yet while both women are presented as erotic objects of a male gaze, the tone in the two novels’ introductory representations of them differs strikingly. Whereas Temple is quite clearly endangered by her objectification, as evidenced by how the men’s stares progress to rape at Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 218 the Old Frenchman Place, Janie is undisturbed and certainly unthreatened by the townspeople’s stares. This distinction between the two novels’ presentation of their female protagonists highlights a profound cultural difference in the ways in which erotic desire is perceived and expressed in the black and white communities depicted in Their Eves Were Watchino God and Sanctuary.. In Temple’s white Mississippi world, male desire is something that must be repressed; lustful gazes must be cast furtively, and they must be both coyly solicited and coolly unacknowledged by the icons of virginity who receive them. In Janie’s all-black community, sexuality and desire are spoken of more freely as part of the everyday intercourse of human life; desiring gazes are discussed among both men and women on the porches, and Janie can freely acknowledge them to her friend Phoeby. The greater openness about sexual desire depicted in Hurston's African American community suggests that the menacing nature of the erotic desire directed toward Temple may be at least partly attributed to a more repressive sexual environment in the white Southern community. The introductory views presented of Temple and Janie also highlight a significant difference between how Faulkner and Hurston contextualize female sexuality in these two novels. It is significant that Temple is presented from the first moment of the text until the last in the company of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 219 men. She is depicted on dates with town boys and college boys when we first see hen she is then escorted by Gowan to the Old Frenchman Place, where she is surrounded by predatory men; after her rape, she is accompanied by Popeye or Red at all times; during her trial, she is questioned by male attorneys in front of a male audience; following her testimony, she is escorted away by her father and four men. Temple is an erotic object who is continually filtered through a male gaze and whose subjectivity and sexuality are considered only in relation io men. Janie, on the other hand, is walking alone when the reader first spies her in the street. And while Their Eves Were Watchino God is primarily a chronicle of her attempt to achieve erotic subjectivity within the context of a series of heterosexual relationships, it significantly concludes with her alone once again. Hurston’s novel is explicitly concerned with exploring the possibility for women to achieve autonomous erotic agency, whereas Faulkner's seems incapable of even conceiving of female sexuality independently of men. After being introduced as the object of much speculation, Janie begins her story to Phoeby with language that is heavily imbued with erotic overtones. After Phoeby implores Janie to explain to the townspeople what has come to pass between her and Tea Cake that occasions her return to town alone and in overalls, Janie replies that she won’t be bothered Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 220 explaining herself to them, but that Phoeby can speak for hen "You can tell ‘em what Ah say if you wants to. Dafs just de same as me ‘cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouT (Hurston 6). A few moments later, Janie reiterates the erotic nature of her narration itself when she rhetorically asks Phoeby regarding the townspeople’s interest, “If they wants to see and know, why they don’t come kiss and be kissed?" (6). "Knowledge” here is linked with erotic "communication.” Likewise, Hurston’s imagery emphasizes the physical intimacy between the two women as they sit on the porch and Janie begins her tale: "They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Phoeby eager to feel and do through Janie [...and] Janie full of that oldest human longing-self-revelation” (6). After emphasizing the women’s closeness in the darkness, Phoeby’s eagerness to hear, and Janie’s longing to tell, Hurston resumes the kissing imagery in a way that suggests the physical sensuality imbuing this particular narrative: “Phoeby, we been kissin’-friends for twenty years, so Ah depend on you for a good thought. And Ah’m talking to you from dat standpoint.” Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked. (7) However, throughout the remaining narrative until the final chapter, Phoeby is physically absent from the story. Her presence as a listener thus serves as a narrative device that enables Janie to speak her tale and also to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 221 emphasize the intimate nature of her storytelling, but of course Hurston’s real audience is the novel’s reader. When listener Phoeby disappears from the narrative view and is replaced as Janie’s audience by the novel’s reader, the reader becomes the object of Janie’s oral seduction, her “kissin’-friend." The erotic nature of Janie’s narration is also argued convincingly by Carla Kaplan in The Erotics of Talk. Suggesting that “[rjeduced to its basic narrative components, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eves Were Watchino God is the story of a young woman in search of an orgasm” (99), Kaplan claims that the “revelation” Janie experiences under the pear tree in the famous passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter is not about “marriage or a husband or sex, but talk itself, the experience of conversation, the act of storytelling and narration” (101). Whereas Janie’s three marriages prove ultimately unable to provide her with sustained satisfaction, Kaplan argues, It is only in telling her story to Phoeby that Janie is finally able to satisfy “that oldest human longing-self-revelation” ... Only in telling her story to Phoeby does she fulfill her quest for the satisfaction she beheld under the pear tree. Telling her story to Phoeby is the erotic fulfillment Janie misunderstands as “marriage” (the plot of romance) and in this sense Phoeby, whose “hungry listening helps Janie to tell her story,” is the “bee" to Janie’s “blossom." (101) Not only does Kaplan’s exposition convincingly articulate the eroticism inherent in the novel’s narrative structure, but it also provides Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 222 insight into the aggression embodied in Janie’s storytelling. For although Kaplan does not explicitly identify Janie’s narration as "aggressive,” she acknowledges that Hurston’s decision to focus on Janie’s private voice and search for erotic agency ran counter to the dominant Harlem Renaissance ideology that emphasized social protest and discouraged sexual expression-particularly for black women writers-that might contribute to racist stereotypes of African Americans as primitive or licentious (108). I would argue that Hurston’s oppositional approach to constructing black female agency through a private rather than a collective voice, and through reclaiming rather than silencing the pleasure of erotic expression that gives voice to that agency, must be seen as an aggressive attempt to distance herself from the prevailing artistic ideology of the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, Kaplan perceives the aggression inherent in Hurston’s narrative when she quotes Marcuse in arguing that for Hurston, "‘the fight for Eros is the political fight” (113). While Kaplan’s emphasis here is on the political nature of Hurston’s narrative erotics, the aggressive component of this “fight” for black female erotic agency should not be overlooked. Indeed, another way in which the narrative structure of Their Eves Were Watchino God may be seen to present an aggressive challenge to the politics of marginalization is by violently undermining the conventions of the marriage/romance plot. In the previous chapter, I discussed how Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 223 Rachel Blau du Plessis’ theory of modernist women writers “breaking the sequence” of the conventional marriage plot glosses the use Virginia Woolf makes of erotic aggression in Th? Yflvaoe Out in her attempt to challenge the gender inequities manifested in the institution of marriage at that time. In Their Eves Were Watchino God. Hurston also “breaks’ the sequence of the marriage plot to effect a critique of male domination, and in doing so illustrates the interrelatedness of patriarchal and racist ideologies. For as Ann duCille points out in Th» rv.,.piinf Convention: Sex. Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction black women writers appropriated the marriage plot for their own emancipatory purposes during the 19th and early-20th centuries. Whereas in the 19th century “the coupling convention’ in African American women’s writing tended to represent marriage as a sexless institution offering social respectability and protection to black women, by the 1930s, writers such as Hurston began to reveal that patriarchy is a pervasive problem in the black community as well as the white, and to challenge the “emotional confinement* economic commodification, and male domination” that marriage frequently represented for black women (112). The fact that Janie abandons her first husband, that she may be seen as indirectly responsible for the death of her second, and that she is directly responsible for the death of her third, clearly suggests an Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 224 aggressive critique of marriage that will be more fully explored in the pages that follow. While I have argued that a critical eye may perceive the combination of eroticism and aggression within the narrative structure of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the thematic representations of sexuality and violence are patently apparent from the beginning of Janie’s story. It is significant, however, that even before Hurston introduces the thematics of sexual violence, she paints a backdrop of racial division and oppression that is foundational in the development of Janie’s identity. Janie begins her tale to Phoeby by reminiscing about her childhood in West Florida. Janie recalls that she was raised by her grandmother, and that they initially lived in a house in the backyard of the white family for whom “Nanny” worked, the Washburns. Janie’s memories of her earliest years with the Washburns are recalled idyllically, but life begins to change for her when she becomes aware of the racial difference that sets her apart. Janie recalls the superficially comic scene when, six years old, she failed to recognize her own image amidst the group of Washburn children in a photograph because she was “colored” (9). She recounts the family’s response to her ignorance and how it effected her "Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest” (9). Hurston makes it evident that it is the social construction of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 225 Janie’s blackness that begins to change her sense of the world. After being made aware of her racially marked body. Janie soon realizes that it places her in a marginalized position on the social hierarchy, for she recalls how the other black children belittled her fo r living in “de white folks’ back-yard" and wearing the second-hand clothes of the Washburn children, which were much better than the other black children wore. The children’s resentment of Janie’s association with whites is. o f course, one of the insidious effects of racism. To ease the torment of Janie by her peers. Nanny moves off of the Washburn property into her own small house, a move which Janie clearly attributes to a racist cultural divide. It is after recounting the story of their move that Janie introduces the dynamic of erotic aggression into her narrative; hence, in terms of narrative structure, racial division incites erotic division. In the frequently-quoted pear tree passage that appears at the beginning of this chapter, the sixteen-year-old Janie experiences a “revelation" in the form of an erotic awakening. Under the pear tree, the mysteries of sexual intercourse are revealed to her metaphorically through the bee and the bloom union. The notion that pain is perhaps an inherent component of erotic pleasure is introduced in this passage, as I noted previously, with the description of Janie’s orgasmic revelation as K a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid” (11). Hurston continues Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 226 to expand on that association shortly thereafter when Nanny catches Janie kissing Johnny Taylor over the gatepost, for Nanny's perception of what seems to be a fairly sweet benign moment transforms it into something dangerous and hostile. Hurston writes that Nanny woke from her afternoon nap to peer out the window and find “Johnny Taylor lacerating her Janie with a kiss” (11). In order to prevent Janie from proceeding any further with her erotic exploration and possibly finding herself unmarried and pregnant- -the unhappy fate of Janie’s mother and Nanny herself-she insists that Janie be married off immediately to Logan Killicks, a man many years Janie’s senior. When Janie balks at the prospect, Nanny “slapped the girl’s face violently” (13). That Nanny should perceive a young girl’s first kiss as such a violation that it seems literally to “lacerate” her-and drives Nanny herself to violence-is perhaps unsurprising in light of the history of violence that accompanied her own experience with female sexuality up to that point. Bom into slavery, Nanny gives birth to Janie’s mother after being raped by her owner. When the mistress of the plantation sees that Nanny’s newborn baby looks white, her suspicions of her husband’s sexual involvement with their slave are confirmed, and she beats Nanny violently. When she threatens Nanny with a worse beating from the overseer and promises to sell her daughter off, Nanny runs away with the child and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 227 braves the treacherous swamp. After surviving such extreme hardship, Nanny refuses to marry, apparently despite numerous opportunities, because "Ah didn’t want nobody mistreating mah baby” (18). Her hopes for her daughter’s future as a school teacher are annihilated one night when the seventeen-year-old girl is raped in the woods by her own school teacher. Janie is the result o f that rape. Her mother never recovers from the assault; she becomes an alcoholic and disappears from Janie and Nanny’s life. With a background so devastated by sexual violence, it is little wonder that Nanny perceives Johnny’s kiss as such a threat to Janie. Yet whereas Nanny seems, understandably under the circumstances, to conceive o f women only as potential victims of sexual aggression, Janie’s evolving attitude toward love and violence is more complex. Throughout the novel, Janie actively pursues a sense of erotic agency that will permit her to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh that to Nanny seemed only exploitative and dangerous. However, her pursuit of that agency is repeatedly problematized by the element of aggression that continues to accompany Janie’s erotic experiences. That aggression is first seen in the passive-aggressive dynamic that characterize Janie's relationship with Logan Killicks, then amplified in her conflicts with Joe Starks, and finally manifested in more overt domestic violence in her romance with Tea Cake. Hurston depicts Janie not as the victim of sexual Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 228 violence, as her mother and grandmother had been, but paints a more complicated, even contradictory picture of Janie’s relationship to erotic aggression. The fact that Hurston’s representation of the violence intersects with Janie’s pursuit of erotic agency suggests that aggression is a force that paradoxically facilitates and inhibits her acquisition of an autonomous identity. Janie’s first marriage to Logan Killicks is marked by a passive- aggressive dynamic that constructs a power struggle between husband and wife rooted in sexual desire that sets the stage for the relationships that follow in the novel. Janie is never attracted to her first husband, Logan Killicks, and laments to Nanny that she feels no passion for him. Nanny, of course, thinks she is absurd to expect or to value such a thing in the first place. Feeling emasculated by his pretty young wife’s lack of desire for him, Killicks attempts to reassert his manhood by demanding that Janie plow the field. Janie’s lack of erotic fulfillment, her sexual withholding, and her resentment at being made to serve Killicks result in her ultimate act of “emasculation’’: she leaves him one morning for Joe Starks, and she never once looks back. Her second marriage, to Joe Starks, also fails to provide Janie with the passion or erotic pleasure she had been longing for since her moment under the pear tree. Despite her hope that she has found “a bee for her bloom” (31), she soon learns that Joe is primarily concerned Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 229 with satisfying his own ego. He devotes all his energy toward becoming Eatonville’s leading citizen. He starts the only general store in town, builds the nicest house, and gets himself elected mayor. It soon becomes apparent that Janie’s value to him is primarily as an armpiece; she is supposed to dress well, look attractive, and be ever ready at his side— silently seen and not heard. The Starks’ marriage soon becomes a sexless one. Hurston writes, T he spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again” (67). Janie’s awareness of her decrease in passion for Joe is explicitly tied to the first instance in which he is violent with her. Perhaps sensing that he has become sexually undesirable to his wife, Joe is overcome with the desperate desire to try to assert some control over her She wasn’t petal-open anymore with him. She was twenty- four and seven years married when she knew. She found that out one day when he slapped her face in the kitchen. It happened over one of those dinners that chasten all women sometimes. They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a scorchy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans. Janie was a good cook, and Joe had looked forward to his dinner as refuge from other things. So when the bread didn’t rise, and the fish wasn't quite done at the bone, and the rice was scorched, he slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears and told her about her brains before he stalked on back to the store. (67) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 230 Hurston’s use o f the metaphor "petal-open” to describe the erotic potential that Janie lacks with Joe indicates an obvious connection between her emotional and erotic feelings. Janie’s response to this incident is silence. Disillusioned with Joe, she determines to keep her "inside" and her "outside” from mixing (68). His beating thus teaches Janie to become emotionally repressed. Despite Janie’s formation of a "split se lf in reaction to her husband’s abuse, she does not remain in the role of a repressed victim of male dominance forever. For years, Janie lives as "a rut in the road ... beaten down by the wheels” of life (72), until the day she strikes back at Joe. Interestingly, her retaliation occurs in response to his efforts to project his own fear of aging and his growing unattractiveness onto Janie. Because Janie’s identity is so strongly linked in the novel with her sense of erotic physicality, she chooses to fight back when Joe publicly insults her sexual attractiveness. Angry at Janie's inability to cut tobacco to his liking, Joe yells at her in the store, "‘I god amighty! A woman stay round uh store till she get old as Methusalem and still can’t cut a little thing like a plug of tobacco! Don’t stand dere rollin’ yo’ pop eyes at me wid yo’ rump hangin’ nearly to yo’ knees!’” (74). The customers feel the sexual degradation of his remarks, for Hurston notes, A big laugh started off in the store but people got to thinking and stopped. It was funny if you looked at it right quick, but it Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 231 got pitiful if you thought about it awhile. It was like somebody snatched off part of a woman’s clothes while she wasn’t looking and the streets were crowded. (74) The verbal aggression and sexual humiliation o f Joe’s remark is enough of a catalyst to spur Janie to respond in kind. After essentially warning him to back off from his insults, she strikes a blow to his masculinity by saying, “Talkin’ bout mg lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life’” (75). It is a remark which “robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible” (75). Janie never lifts a hand against Joe, as he had to her, but she knows that her singular verbal assault does more damage to him than any beating ever could. And indeed, after Janie annihilates his facade of self-important machismo, Joe’s health begins to deteriorate almost immediately, and he holds her responsible. Ultimately, Joe dies of kidney failure, a condition which can hardly be attributed to Janie’s remark. Yet the fact remains that on the level of narrative structure, the verbal aggression between Joe and Janie-hostility manifested in sexual hum iliation- ultimately results in his death, her acquisition of a voice, and her liberation from a marriage that once seemed full of promise but has become oppressive and stifling. While Janie is positioned as the victim of unsatisfying and oppressive marriages who ultimately strikes the last blow against her first Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. two husbands, the victim/oppressor paradigm proves inadequate in conveying the complexities of Janie’s next relationship. In depicting the violence that accompanies Janie and Tea Cake’s love and marriage, Hurston suggests that violence is perhaps a necessary evil in Janie’s endeavor to construct her own identity within a culturally specific set o f circumstances. I will argue in the following paragraphs that the incidents of domestic violence between Tea Cake and Janie and the shooting that results in Tea Cake’s death defy any explanations cast in terms of fixed binary constructs such as aggressor/victim, male/female, sadist/masochist. The representations of Janie and Tea Cake resist being fixed in positions of hierarchical dualisms because both of them may be seen in shifting and differing ways to benefit and to suffer from the erotic aggression that occurs between them. Thus, the novel enacts a destabilization of conventional constructions of gender identity similar to the modernist works explored in previous chapters. With Tea Cake, Janie finds the erotic pleasure and fulfillment fo r which she has long been searching. When they are together, their passionate intensity seems to blur the boundaries between them as individuals in a way that is simultaneously frightening and blissful. Hurston explains that when Janie is with Tea Cake, “such another hugging and kissing and carrying on you never saw. It made her so glad she was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 233 scared of herself (111-112). In addition, she has found her dearest companion: Janie and Tea Cake play checkers, go fishing, even work side by side on “de muck,” picking beans together in the Everglades. The text thus idealizes them, as do their friends from whose opinions we measure their relationship, as the best of friends and the most passionate of lovers. Yet in addition to all of this pleasure and play, there is violence. In one scene, Janie instigates an attack on Tea Cake out of jealousy, having caught him playing flirtatiously with another woman in the fields, going off into the bushes with her in an encounter that likely would have led to infidelity had it continued: She cut him short with a blow and they fought from one room to the other, Janie trying to beat him, and Tea Cake kept holding her wrists and wherever he could to keep her from going too far [...] They fought on [...] They wrestled on until they were doped with their own fumes and emanations; till their clothes had been tom away; till he hurled her to the floor and held her there melting her resistance with the heat of his body, doing things with their bodies to express the inexpressible; kissed her until she arched her body to meet him and they fell asleep in sweet exhaustion. (131-132) Not only is Janie the instigator of the violence, but she also finds the fight erotically stimulating. Is Hurston actually lending credence to the dangerous cultural mythology that holds that women are often to blame for domestic violence, and that they frequently enjoy being beaten? The next violent encounter between Janie and Tea Cake seems on the surface to add even more fuel to that speculative fire. Tea Cake’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 234 beating of Janie in this instance represents a desperate attem pt to reassure himself o f his mastery over her. Jealous that a woman at the camp has designs on a match between Janie and the woman’s brother-a match in which Janie has evinced absolutely no interest— Tea Cake nonetheless assaults his wife: Tea Cake had a brainstorm. Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him of his possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss. (140) The concept of “possession” invokes the historical ownership o f women by their husbands and fathers and of slaves by their masters, and thus directly links Tea Cake’s attack to the interrelated legacy of patriarchy and slavery. Yet even in this instance, Janie defies classification as a victim, for Hurston remarks that the next day in the fields, the beating aroused a sort of envy in both men and women. The way he petted and pampered her as if those two or three face slaps had nearly killed her made the women see visions and the helpless way she hung on him made the men dream dreams. (140) Hurston seems problematically to suggest that the beating brings Janie and Tea Cake closer together, that the stereotypical fight-and-make-up cycle of domestic violence is a positive thing, and that it brings them admiration and respect within the community. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 235 However, I believe it would be reductive to interpret Hurston’s depiction of the violence between Tea Cake and Janie as merely benign or even beneficial to their relationship. On the contrary, the complexity of the dynamic of erotic aggression between Janie and Tea Cake suggests profound insight on Hurston's part about the difficulty women face in attempting to construct their own autonomous identities within the context of a heterosexual relationship in a society plagued with gender inequality, a difficulty which is only magnified for black women who confront the additional obstacle of racism. In The Bonds of Love. Jessica Benjamin develops a theory about why women may submit to domination in their erotic relationships that helps to illuminate the erotic aggression between Janie and Tea Cake. Benjamin argues that women who have not been able to develop a strong sense of their own agency may seek to find their identity in surrender to a partner who embodies their missing desire and agency (116). The pleasure of the dominated partner comes from trying to affirm her sense of self in the connection of surrender to her idealized partner (Benjamin 60). Janie, who had been so oppressed in her marriage to Joe Starks that she was never allowed to speak her own thoughts or even let down her own hair, is clearly a woman trying to find the agency and power she had been missing in that relationship when she meets Tea Cake. And the fact Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 236 that he is so idealized throughout Janie’s narration— despite stealing Janie’s money on their honeymoon to gamble and throw a party for strangers, despite the episodes of violence previously described, and despite trying to kill her in a rabid fit of jealousy-furthermore suggests that she has put him on a pedestal in the way Benjamin describes to be characteristic of women who can find pleasure in submission. According to Benjamin’s theory, women may submit to or even desire domination by their male partners because they have been socialized to perceive men as the more independent, powerful members of society. While women may wish to have that power and agency themselves, they have also been acculturated to perceive themselves as sexual objects. Thus, submission to erotic aggression permits them to retain the sexuality for which they feel culturally valued, yet to enjoy the pleasurable power that comes from identifying with a male partner whose violence psychically obliterates the ego boundaries that separate them. Hurston stresses repeatedly how attractive Janie is, and that it is Joe’s insult to her sexual attractiveness that prompts her rebellion against him; thus, the erotic aspects of the domestic violence between her and Tea Cake reaffirm the sense of sexuality that Janie believes to be so integral to her identity and power, while the violence affirms her connection to the strength and independence that she Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 237 perceives Tea Cake to possess and that she has been searching for throughout the narrative. However, while Hurston may be attempting to illustrate why a woman such as Janie allows herself to find pleasure in a relationship that can be violent, she also suggests the paradoxical problem inherent with a woman endeavoring to achieve her own sense of identity in the context of a marriage in which she idealizes and submits to her partner. For eventually, of course, Janie will opt to defend herself against Tea Cake when he attempts to shoot her. The shooting is precipitated by the onset of rabies, which Tea Cake has contracted from a dog bite in the course of saving Janie during a hurricane. A jealous delusion that Janie might be leaving the house to cheat on him sparks Tea Cake to try to kill her. When she instead shoots him first as the only way to save her own life, Janie makes a choice that places her own self-preservation first. Her sense of “surrender,'’ then, has limits, for her object all along has been to fulfill her own sense of agency and power. Yet those feminist critics who read this final shooting as a sort of feminist triumph seem to overlook the tragic paradox of the act. Susan Willis, for example, believes that the shooting demonstrates that “as long relationships between men and women are embraced by a larger system in which men dominate, no woman can expect to attain selfhood in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 238 marriage” (127). Diane Sadoff believes that killing off Tea Cake is a way for Hurston to ”act out her rage against male aggression and to free Janie, a figure for herself, from all men” (22). And Donald Marks believes that Janie’s widowed status at the end of the novel is Hurston’s way of finding “a vision of community not predicated upon violence and male domination” (157). Hurston clearly intends in Their Eves Were Watching God to challenge male domination and to assert female agency; at the end of each of her three marriages, Janie makes choices which place her own self-preservation first, and she is a heroine (both to Phoeby and the reader) for doing so. Yet Janie does not perceive, nor does Hurston represent, shooting Tea Cake as a triumphant act of self-assertion, but as a tragedy. Janie is devastated by her loss of him, and even at the end o f the novel, she continues to define herself through her erotic connection to him. As she sits in the bedroom where they first made love, Janie senses Tea Cake in the room with her Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. (183-184) Hurston thus seems to suggest that the self needs to be defined in relation to another-even if it is only the fantasy of another-and also to illustrate the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 239 fragile tension between the self s paradoxical desire for independence and its inherent dependence. While she shows that violence can be one way of negotiating that tension, she neither endorses nor condemns it If Hurston seems to suggest in accordance with Benjamin’s theory, that erotic aggression is one possible consequence of social gender inequality, she also illustrates how racism complicates the issue for Janie. In the courtroom sequence where Janie goes on trial for Tea Cake’s murder, Hurston points out Janie’s discomfort with having “twelve strange men who didn't know a thing about people like Tea Cake and her” come to pass judgment on her. She also senses the hostility of the other blacks in the courtroom, who she perceives to be "all against her," "pelting her with dirty thoughts, "their tongues cocked and loaded” (176). After she is acquitted, Janie overhears some of the black men opining that she was exonerated because she was good-looking and because the life of a black man wasn’t worth anything to the white jury. Hurston thus illustrates the double bind that Janie finds herself in as a result of combined racism and sexism. She is alienated from the white power structure that sits in judgment on her, yet as a woman who has challenged a man in her own defense and with a gun-a phallic symbol evoking his own gender’s power-she poses a threat to the men of her own community. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 240 In the end, Hurston’s depiction of erotic aggression in Their Eves Were Watchino God may be seen to be the most complicated of all the works of fiction included in this study. It represents erotic aggression as an indisputable fact of Janie’s life and her construction of her own identity: conceived in violence, of a mother conceived in violence, she goes on to try to develop her own sense of agency in the context of a marital institution in which power imbalances frequently result in violence. In the end, she must resort to violence against the one she loves most in order to save herself. While Hurston’s narrative engages in explicit critiques of both the white and male power structures that limit Janie’s access to power and autonomy, it offers little insight into how best to challenge those power structures, for violence proves to be an ultimately unproductive, if sometimes necessary, instrument for change. The Janie at the end of the novel is alive and independent, but still identifying herself through a male ghost. She achieves a type of autoerotic pleasure in his memory, but only filtered through the pain of her loss. Hurston’s novel thus proves emblematic of the “sous-rature" paradigm Marianne De Koven finds to be characteristic of modernist thought. Its dynamics of erotic aggression attempt to cross out or place under erasure the forces of racism and sexism that oppress Janie, yet it leaves them still visible beneath the surface and seems to know not what to offer in their place. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 241 1. For a thorough and provocative analysis of the dominant cultural mythology that constructs women as “rapable,” as biological triggers who “invite" rape even through the very odor of their sex, see Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) 184. 2. For example, see the following passages: “She began to run” (46); “Without ceasing to run she appeared to pause” (47); “Temple ran on up the broken steps" (48); "She broke free, running” (49); “She ran into the kitchen" (49); “She whirled and ran out the door...” (49). 3. Henry Louis Gates, for example, says that “in [the novel’s] concern with the project of finding a voice, with language as an instrument of injury and salvation, of selfhood and empowerment, it suggests many of the themes that inspirit Hurston’s oeuvre as a whole," in “Afterword: Zora Neale Hurston: ‘A Negro Way of Saying,’” Their Eves Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Harper & Row, 1937) 187. Carla Kaplan chronicles numerous other critics who have argued that the novel is about Janie’s acquisition of a voice, including Barbara Johnson, Karla Holloway, Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Susan Lanser, in Carla Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk (Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 102-103. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 242 Bibliography Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume Penguin, 1992. Armstrong, Paul B. "Reading India: E.M. Forster and the Politics of Interpretation." Twentieth Century Literature 38:4 (1992): 365-385. Barratt, Robert "Marabar The Caves o f Deconstruction.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 23:2 (1993): 127-135. Batker, Carol. "‘Love me like I like to be’: The Sexual Politics of Hurston’s Their Eves Were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women’s Club Movement” African American Review 32.2 (1998): 199-212. 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Asset Metadata

Creator McFadden, Marya Erin (author)

Core Title Eroticizing aggression: Power, pleasure, and modernist representation

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

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

Tag comparative literature,literature, American,literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Advisor Boone, Joseph A. (committee chair), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Stacey, Judith (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-199278

Unique identifier UC11334725

Identifier 3065824.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-199278 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3065824.pdf

Dmrecord 199278

Document Type Dissertation

Rights McFadden, Marya Erin

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA