Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women's Writings

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Embodied Shame

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Embodied Shame Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings

J. Brooks Bouson

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany ©2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Fran Keneston Cover art: "Shame," by Aimea Saul (www.imagerybyaimea.com); reproduced by permission of the artist. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bouson, J. Brooks. Embodied shame : uncovering female shame in contemporary women’s writings / J. Brooks Bouson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2727-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Canadian literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. English literature— Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women in literature. 5. Shame in literature. 6. Abused women in literature. 7. Psychic trauma in literature. 8. Body image in literature. 9. Self-perception in literature. 10. Body image in women. 11. Self-perception in women. I. Title. II. Title: Female shame in contemporary women’s writings. PS151.B68 2009 810.9'3522—dc22 2008048481

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For my mother, Elizabeth, and my sister, Margaret

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1. Introduction

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Part I: Coming of Age, Coming to Shame: The Parental and Cultural Transmission of Sexual, Racial, and Class Shame Chapter 2. The Humiliations of the Female Flesh in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women

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Chapter 3. Family Violence, Incest, and White-Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

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Chapter 4. Racial Self-Loathing and the Color Complex in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun

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Chapter 5. Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory

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Chapter 6. Coming of Age in a Culture of Shame in Naomi Wolf’s Promiscuities

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Part II: Speaking a Kind of Body Language: Shamed Bodies and Spoiled Identities in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances Chapter 7. Feeling Fat, Fearing Fat in Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size and Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story vii

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Chapter 8. The Culture of Appearances and the Socially Invisible and Unattractive Woman in Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

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Chapter 9. Gerontophobia and the Cultural Shaming of the Elderly Woman in May Sarton’s As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

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Chapter 10. Writing the Disfigured and Disabled Body-Self in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World

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Chapter 11. In Conclusion

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Notes Works Cited Index

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Acknowledgments

ecause there is shame about shame and because we tend to look away from the other’s shame, telling the story of the female bodyin-shame can be a difficult, and even risky, business. And yet, as I have worked on this project, I have been heartened by the goodwill and interest of others. I want to express here my fondest thanks to the many students I have taught in my undergraduate and graduate women writers’ classes at Loyola University Chicago and in my courses devoted to the study of shame in literature. My students’ passionate responses to women writers and their affective—even obsessive—investment in the study of shame in literature have encouraged me as I have worked on this book. I am grateful to Frank Fennell, the former Chair of Loyola’s English Department and current Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for his longstanding and collegial support of my work; to the administration of Loyola University for granting me a research leave and a summer grant while I was working on this project; and to Sarah Foust Vinson, my graduate research assistant, who aided me during the early stages of my research on this book. Special thanks are due, as always, to Joseph Adamson, for his vital support and for the inspiration of his example as a pioneer in the study of shame and literature. And I owe special thanks to James Peltz, associate director at SUNY Press, and Larin McLaughlin, acquisitions editor, for their encouragement and generous support of my work, and to Eileen Meehan and Marianna Vertullo, who saw this book through production. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to artist Aimea Saul, who has graciously granted me permission to use her photographic image “Shame” on the cover of this book. An earlier version of the chapter on Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina was published in Southern Literary Journal 34.1 (Fall 2001): 101–23, and an earlier version of the chapter that includes a discussion of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was published in my book Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). I am grateful for permission to reuse this material, which I have revised for this study.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

o be “made of flesh” is “humiliation,” remarks Alice Munro’s character, Del Jordan. Indeed, as we shall see, to be made of female flesh is to be well-schooled in the abjections and humiliations of embodiment such as those experienced by Jenefer Shute’s anorexic character Josie, who, despite her skeletal appearance, feels repulsed by her “fat face, fat gut, fat quivering thighs, fat disgusting tits”; or by Nancy Mairs, who views herself as a grotesque spectacle, a woman whose body is “crippled” and “misshapen” by multiple sclerosis; or by Margaret Laurence’s elderly character, Hagar Shipley, who, as she spends her final days trapped in her dying and abjected body, feels that other people are treating her as if she were “bad rubbish” to be disposed of; or by Toni Morrison’s character, Pecola, a poor African American girl who is made to feel like a black and ugly—and dirty—girl because of her dark skin color; or by Dorothy Allison’s narrator-character Bone, who comes to see herself as an ugly and dirty white-trash girl. My aim in Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings is to provide an analysis of representative works by contemporary women authors who deal with what I call embodied female shame: shame about the self and body that arises from the trauma of defective or abusive parenting or relationships and from various forms of sexual, racial, or social denigration of females in our culture. While shame about the body is a cultural inheritance of women and thus an issue that pervades literature, this work focuses on recent fiction and nonfiction works by North American and British women writers, specifically works published during or after the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, and therefore works potentially informed by the feminist critique of cultural representations of femininity and the feminist revisioning of the female character in literature. Part I, Coming of Age, Coming to Shame, investigates works that depict the ways in which shame about the self and body remains an important concern of women writers in coming-of-age narratives detailing the spoiled body-self identity experienced by those who are physically or sexually abused by their fathers, such as Pecola in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Bone in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, or sexually shamed by their mothers, such as Sophie in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath,

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Eyes, Memory, or those who feel sexually dirtied by the culture, an experience Naomi Wolf recounts in her personal coming-of-age story in Promiscuities. Part II, Speaking a Kind of Body Language, deals with the shamed bodies and spoiled identities of women who feel physically unattractive, flawed, or undesirable, concerns that find particular expression in works communicating the self-loathing of the anorexic woman, such as Jenefer Shute’s Josie in Life-Size, or the obese woman whose self-hatred is vividly described by Judith Moore in her memoir, Fat Girl; in works describing the debilitating sense of bodily imperfection and social inadequacy of the plain woman, such as Anita Brookner’s Frances Hinton in Look at Me, or the ugly woman, such as Fay Weldon’s Ruth Patchett in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and in works describing the troubled plight of not only the elderly woman, such as May Sarton’s Caro Spencer in As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel, but also the disfigured woman, such as Lucy Grealy, who describes living with a facial disfigurement in Autobiography of a Face, and the disabled woman, such as Nancy Mairs, who writes about her life as a “crippled” woman suffering from multiple sclerosis in Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World. Serving an important cultural function, these works point to the deeply entrenched body shame that persists in the lives of many girls and women in our postfeminist, postmodern culture even as we celebrate the supposed freeing of the female body from the social and cultural constraints and repressions that have long bound it.

Embodied Shame: The Cultural Shaming of Women “Shame is the distressed apprehension of the self as inadequate or diminished,” writes feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky, who describes shame as women’s “pervasive affective attunement to the social environment” (86, 85). A “multidimensional, multilayered experience,” as shame theorist Gershen Kaufman observes, shame is “first of all an individual phenomenon experienced in some form and to some degree by every person,” but it is “equally a family phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon” because it is “reproduced within families, and each culture has its own distinct sources as well as targets of shame” (Shame 191). Conceived of as defective or deficient from male norms and as potentially diseased, women have long been embodiments of shame in our culture, and, indeed, the female socialization process can be viewed as a prolonged immersion in shame. If recent theoretical discussions of the female body have attempted to reclaim female embodiment, this effort has been beset with problems, as Jacqueline Rose has observed. When “feminism takes up, and valorises for women, the much-denigrated image of a hysterical outpouring of the body, it has often found itself doing so, understandably, at the cost of idealising

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the body itself” (27). And when the “traditional devalorisation of women” is inverted—a “classic feminist” maneuver—“what is most discomforting about the body disappears.” Indeed, this “pure” and “uplifted” body, as Rose observes, “often seems remote from sex and substance, strangely incorporeal, suspended in pure fluidity or cosmic time” (28). Although the idealizations of the body Rose describes can be read as an attempt to value what has been devalued—that is, to turn shame into pride—the female body remains a locus of shame for women, associated as it is with out-of-control passions and appetites and with something dirty and defi ling. Susan Bordo’s analysis of the gendered story of mind/body dualism that has long pervaded Western culture points to the cultural embeddedness of embodied shame—shame about the body and self—that persists in the experiences of many women. In her discussion, Bordo shows the consequences for women of being “cast in the role of the body,” the negative term in the mind/body binary (Unbearable Weight 5). Internalizing this ideology, which views the body “as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul,” women come to feel “unease” with their femaleness, “shame” over their “degraded” bodies, and “self-loathing” (Unbearable Weight 3, 8). Contrary to the “social mythology” that claims that contemporary culture is a “body-loving, de-repressive era,” women, even though they may be “obsessed” with their bodies, are “hardly accepting of them” (Unbearable Weight 14–15). In her comments on the “new understanding” of the female body that emerged out of the “personal politics” of the second wave of feminism and its critique of the politics of the body, Bordo writes, “What, after all, is more personal than the life of the body? And for women, associated with the body and largely confi ned to a life centered on the body (both the beautification of one’s own body and the reproduction, care, and maintenance of the bodies of others), culture’s grip on the body is a constant, intimate fact of everyday life” (Unbearable Weight 17). And in a culture that continues to devalue women and in which women are “willing (often, enthusiastic) participants” in the cultural practices that objectify and sexualize them (Unbearable Weight 28), the female body remains a source of profound shame for many women. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault in her work, Bordo remarks on how female bodies are disciplined by the culture, becoming what Foucault calls “the ‘docile body,’ regulated by the norms of cultural life” (Unbearable Weight 165). Even though we live in a contemporary world in which the public arena has opened up to women, women are still subject to feelings of body shame. For the “normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress” not only focus women on the tasks of self-modification and self-improvement, but also engender in them “the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough.” Indeed, “through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity . . . female bodies become docile bodies—bodies whose forces and energies

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are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, ‘improvement’” (Unbearable Weight 166). What in part lies behind this desire for self-improvement and the drive to achieve the idealized body image is the fear of the “out-of-control” body to which the docile body serves as an antidote. Julia Kristeva vividly describes what women most fear in her account of the abject body. In her analysis, Kristeva uses the work of cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas, who, drawing a distinction between what is clean and unclean, equates dirtiness with that which is out of its proper place. For Kristeva, “there looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (1). In Kristeva’s scheme, the body, which must be “clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic,” must “bear no trace of its debt to nature” (102). The abject, which is opposed to the clean and proper body, produces visceral feelings of loathing, shame, and disgust. Associated with bodily substances and waste products—such as tears, saliva, feces, urine, vomit, and mucus—the abject is defiling and disgusting, but because it is part of the self and body, it cannot be totally expelled or rejected. Representing the horror of physical embodiment, the abject produces a visceral reaction: “Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck” (2). Culturally manifested in various ways—as food loathing and food taboos, as repulsion for bodily fluids and waste products, and as revulsion for the signs of sexual difference evident in the taboo against incest and the cultural horror of menstruation—abjection involves a fundamental rejection of the maternal body. Describing the struggle against “what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject,” Kristeva views the maternal body as the infant’s first experience of the abject, a horrific and stifl ing sensation of embodiment (13). In her account of the visceral disgust for bodily processes and embodiment and the related fear that the “clean and proper” body will be tainted, Kristeva calls attention to the shame and disgust associated with the abject maternal—and female—body in our culture. Like Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, in her account of women’s “volatile” bodies, calls attention to the continued shaming of women in our culture. “Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting . . . a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order?” writes Grosz (Volatile Bodies 203). Elaborating on Kristeva’s account, which describes excrement and menstrual blood as polluting body fluids, Grosz observes that this “coupling” suggests the association of menstrual blood with excrement; moreover, the “representation of female sexuality as

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an uncontainable flow, as seepage associated with what is unclean . . . has enabled men to associate women with infection, with disease, with the idea of festering putrefaction.” In a culture in which women’s menstrual flow is viewed “not only with shame and embarrassment but with disgust and the powers of contaminating” (Volatile Bodies 206), women are conditioned to feel deep body shame and self-hatred and to view the uncontainable, uncontrollable female body with fear and loathing.1

Shame, the Master Emotion It is suggestive that shame, which has long been associated with women and which induces secrecy and a hiding response, is an “only recently rediscovered feeling state” (S. Miller xi). Since 1971, “there has been a rapid increase in the literature on the psychology of shame, thus redressing a long-standing neglect of the subject,” writes shame theorist Helen Block Lewis. “Once clinicians’ attention is called to shame, it becomes apparent that, although it is easily ignored, shame is ubiquitous” (“Preface” xi). This neglect of shame, in part, can be attributed to “a prevailing sexist attitude in science, which pays less attention to nurturance than to aggression” and thus “depreciates the shame that inheres in ‘loss of love’” (H. Lewis, “Preface” xi). Because of the Freudian view that attachment is regressive and that women are shame-prone as a result of their need to conceal their “genital deficiency,” there is an implicit hierarchy in classical psychoanalytic discourse, which views shame as preoedipal and guilt as oedipal (H. Lewis, “Role of Shame” 31). To Freudians, guilt was the “more worthy affective experience” compared to shame, which was viewed as “the developmentally more primitive affect” (Morrison, Shame 5). Shame, then, until recently has had a “stigma” attached to it so that “there has been a shame about studying shame in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic fields” (Goldberg x). But with the movement away from the classical Freudian oedipal confl ict-guilt model of personality and the intensifying focus on the narcissistically wounded and shame-ridden self—beginning in the 1970s and with increased interest in the 1980s and 1990s through the present—shame has become the subject of psychoanalytic and psychological scrutiny, most notably in the work of affect and shame theorists such as Silvan Tomkins, Helen Block Lewis, Donald Nathanson, Andrew Morrison, Paul Gilbert, Gershen Kaufman, and Léon Wurmser. An intensely painful experience, shame “follows a moment of exposure,” an uncovering that “reveals aspects of the self of a peculiarly sensitive, intimate, and vulnerable nature” (Nathanson, “Timetable” 4). Shame sufferers feel in some profound way inferior to others—they perceive themselves as deeply flawed and defective or as bad individuals or as failures—and this

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internalized shame script grows out of repeated interactions with shaming parents or contemptuous others. At once an interpersonal and intrapsychic experience, shame derives from the shame sufferer’s “vicarious experience of the other’s scorn,” and, indeed, central to the shame experience is the “self-in-the-eyes-of-the-other” (H. Lewis, “Introduction” 15). In the classic shame scenario in which the “eye is the organ of shame par excellence,” the individual feels exposed and humiliated—looked at with contempt for being inferior, flawed, or dirty—and thus wants to hide or disappear (Wurmser, “Shame” 67). Fear of visual exposure, as Léon Wurmser explains, leads to the wish to disappear as the person one has shown oneself to be, or to be viewed as different than one is (Mask 232). Shame-imbued people may suffer shame-vulnerability—that is, “a sensitivity to, and readiness for, shame”—and shame anxiety, which is “evoked by the imminent danger of unexpected exposure, humiliation, and rejection” (Morrison, Shame 14; Wurmser, Mask 49). Experiencing a heightened sense of self-consciousness, shame sufferers may feel inhibited, inferior, incompetent, dirty, defective, scorned, and ridiculed by others. Shame, and its related feeling states—chagrin, embarrassment, mortification, lowered self-esteem, disgrace, and humiliation—can lead to withdrawal or avoidant behaviors, which reflect the desire of shamed individuals to conceal or hide themselves in an attempt to protect against feelings of exposure. Other classic defenses against shame function to help shamed individuals recover from painful feelings of vulnerability and helplessness. For example, “feeling weak may be ‘repaired’ by arrogance, self-glorification, aggressiveness,” and the “powerful, surging” feeling of anger may work to temporarily overcome the “helpless feelings of being disregarded and insignificant” that often accompany shame (Goldberg 69). Many expressions of rage can be understood as attempts “to rid the self of shame,” whereas contempt represents “an attempt to ‘relocate’ the shame experience from within the self into another person” (Morrison, Shame 14). Often described as the master emotion, “shame is important because no other affect is more disturbing to the self, none more central for the sense of identity” (Kaufman, Psychology of Shame viii). Because “almost any affect feels better than shame,” individuals develop defending scripts against shame that foster the conversion of shame “into something less punishing” or that “limit its toxicity when it cannot be prevented” (Nathanson, Shame and Pride 312). Shame also has profound consequences for individuals in their daily interactions with others. Indeed, “Shame and pride seem to be an almost continuous part of human existence not only in crises but also in the slightest of social contacts,” according to Thomas Scheff. Cross-cultural investigations of politeness behavior suggest “the universality of shame” in revealing how cultures “provide elaborate means for protecting face, that is, protecting against embarrassment and humiliation” (Bloody Revenge 51). In daily social

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interactions, states of shame and pride “almost always depend on the level of deference accorded a person: pride arises from deferential treatment by others (‘respect’), and shame from lack of deference (‘disrespect’). Gestures that imply respect or disrespect, together with the emotional response they generate, make up the deference/emotion system, which exerts a powerful influence on human behavior” (Scheff, Retzinger, Ryan 184–85). Sandra Bartky’s observation that shame is women’s “pervasive affective attunement to the social environment” (85) points to the significance of issues surrounding pride and shame and the deference-emotion system in the social formation of female identity.

Body Shame In his important work on body shame, shame theorist Paul Gilbert explains that shame of one’s body can result not only from how others treat the body (as in cases of physical or sexual abuse), but also from how others perceive the body in our appearance-driven culture, where those who feel physically unattractive, especially those who are disabled, disfigured, or aging, are vulnerable to shame. “When people experience their physical bodies as in some way unattractive, undesirable and a source of a ‘shamed self’ they are at risk of psychological distress and disorders,” as Gilbert observes (“Body Shame” 3). An “inner experience of self as an unattractive social agent,” shame is an “involuntary response to an awareness that one has lost status and is devalued” (“What Is Shame?” 22). In body shame, such an experience of social devaluation may be reflected in negative assessments of the body—“I hate, or am disgusted by, my body . . .” (“Body Shame” 10). Explaining the psychological and social contexts of body shame, Gilbert writes, “Not only is the body that part of us that is immediately observable to others, it is also connected to a complexity of self-conscious experiences.” Although “we may think of ourselves as individual minds or personalities, our existence can only take place in an embodied self. . . . And our body often operates outside our control; it grows, ages, changes in its functions, can become sick and disabled, and will eventually decay and die” (“Body Shame” 27). Moreover, our body “can be experienced as an aspect of self” that both defi nes us (for example, as male or female or as beautiful or ugly) and that we also can “work on, shape and change” (“Body Shame” 28). While the body can be a “source of pleasure”—something to be displayed to approving others—it can also be “a liability, something that can be a source of rejection, to be covered or hidden. . . . The power of culture to shape body aesthetics . . . should not be underestimated” (“Body Shame” 29–30). The power of culture to shame women should also not be underestimated. Indeed, as Gilbert remarks, “Control of female sexuality (and the

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female body) has been institutionalised in social and religious forms for hundreds of years and more . . . often involving the shaming/stigmatising of female sexuality and appearance” (“Body Shame” 35). Moreover, parents’ attitudes and behaviors toward the bodies and sexuality of their growing children can have “an enormous impact,” as children learn to distinguish what is “acceptable and unacceptable in their appearance or bodily functions (including sexuality)” (“Body Shame” 30). Commenting on the link between body shame and childhood sexual and physical abuse, Bernice Andrews remarks that although childhood abuse often does not leave physical scars, “its emotional impact” on women survivors “can be just as devastating as visual disfigurement. . . . Abuse survivors often report a deep shame and hatred of their bodies that goes far beyond the normative discontent experienced by the majority of women in Western societies” (257). Like abused children who grow up believing that they are “damaged goods,” so abused women can develop intense body shame and “come to experience their own bodies as objects of disdain and disgust,” feeling that they are “‘spoiled, damaged, ruined’” (Andrews 260; Gilbert, “Body Shame” 32). Thus, in effect, “abuse can be experienced like an (inner) disfigurement”— the feeling that “something that was good [has been] made ugly and bad” (Gilbert, “Body Shame” 32). And in our appearance-driven culture, those who are adjusting to a disfiguring or disabling condition, or to the aging process, can and often do experience body shame (Gilbert, “Body Shame” 39). Those who suffer from severe forms of body shame may experience such intense “self-dislike and self-attacking” that they want to “get rid of, remove or destroy, the hated aspect of self” (Gilbert, “Body Shame” 40). But as Gilbert points out, while some individuals may accept and become passive victims of the values imposed on them, others may resist the shaming process. Because central to the shaming process is seeing the other as having “if not the right, then the skill or power, to judge,” when individuals refuse “to accept the legitimacy of the ‘judger or rejecter,’” they are refusing to internalize the negative judgments of others and thus resisting shame (Gilbert, “Body Shame” 23).

Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings “A particular feeling condenses and expresses an unconscious fantasy about self, body, other, other’s body, or self and other,” writes Nancy Chodorow in her analysis of the psychoanalytic contribution to the study of feelings (239). “Through the power of feelings, unconscious fantasy recasts the subject—emotions and stories about different aspects of self in relation to one another and about the self and body in relation to an inner and outer object world” (239–40). Chodorow’s observation that “shame seems central to many

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women’s feelings and fantasies about mother, self, and gender, and [that] shame and disgust often color women’s sense of bodily self” (121) will be apparent in the representative works by women writers examined in Embodied Shame. Part I, Coming of Age, Coming to Shame, investigates the familial and cultural sources of shame through a detailed analysis of representative coming-of-age narratives that show the connection between body shame and the sexual abuse or cultural denigration of girls. The section begins with a discussion of Alice Munro’s comic and yet dark exploration of a young girl’s coming of age in Lives of Girls and Women. Anything but a straightforward feminist quest for identity and celebration of female sexuality, Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women is a complex shame drama in which Munro’s character, Del Jordan, becomes aware of the humiliations and abjections of female embodiment. What Munro’s Del Jordan glimpses in her “incommunicable” vision as she becomes aware of the utter “helplessness” of the flesh—that “to be made of flesh was humiliation”—becomes the lived daily reality of Dorothy Allison’s character Bone in the semiautobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina. Socially disgraced because she is the bastard daughter of a poor, white-trash woman, and physically and sexually abused by her stepfather, Bone comes to feel deep self-contempt and profound body shame. Even as Allison suggests, in the closure of the novel, that lesbianism might offer Bone an alternative to the oppressed form of femininity she has experienced in her stepfather’s brutal patriarchal household, she also insists on the debilitating effects of shame and trauma on her character as she describes the painful process by which Bone learns to view herself as a “dumb and ugly” and dirty white-trash girl “born to shame and death.” Like Allison, Toni Morrison is interested in the connection between class and shame, an issue complicated by race in Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. Intent on revealing the “devastation that even casual racial contempt can cause” in a child, Morrison depicts the damaging impact of racial shame and sexual and physical abuse on the life of the “black and ugly” Pecola Breedlove, who comes to believe that she can win her parents’ love and cure her bodily ugliness, that is, her racial shame, only if she is miraculously granted the same blue eyes that little white girls possess. While Morrison, in her characteristic way, links dark skin with the black lower class, Marita Golden describes her feeling of racial self-loathing and body shame growing up in a nurturing family in the black middle class in Don’t Play in the Sun as she, like Morrison, examines the damaging impact not only of white standards of beauty but also of intraracial color prejudice on the dark-skinned girl who is made to feel black and ugly not only by the white culture but also, and more intimately, by members of her own community. The power of shame to dirty the individual and induce feelings of bodily self-loathing is also evident in Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, which deals with the sexually dirtying effects of rape in telling the

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story of Sophie Caco’s painful coming of age. The product of her Haitian mother’s brutal rape, Sophie, who leaves her Haitian village at age twelve to live in New York with her mother, is forced as an eighteen-year-old to endure a series of virginity tests at the hands of her mother, something, as Sophie is told, that all Haitian mothers do to ensure the “purity” of their adolescent daughters because “soiled” daughters bring “shame” to their families. In describing an oppressive and sexually abusive cultural practice perpetuated in the postfeminist and sexually liberated United States, Danticat points to the potentially shameful plight of other immigrant girls who, like Sophie, come from patriarchal societies obsessed with preserving female chastity in the name of family honor. Experiencing her virginity testing as a kind of rape, Sophie becomes a direct inheritor of her mother’s shame, and, like her mother, comes to feel a deep-rooted sense of shame and disgust for her sexually dirtied body. If the presumed antidote to the kind of oppressive practices Danticat describes is the sexual freeing of girls, Naomi Wolf, in her sexual coming-of-age memoir Promiscuities, reveals the persisting power of culture—the post–sexual revolution American culture that has supposedly liberated female sexuality—to dishonor and shame female sexuality. Even as Wolf attempts to redeem what she calls the “shadow slut” in all women, she gives testimony to the abiding power of the shaming invective “slut” to control and defi ne female sexuality in the post–sexual revolution world we inhabit, a toxic culture that “dirties” adolescent girls as they begin to embrace their sexuality. Part II, Speaking a Kind of Body Language, investigates the shaming of women in our contemporary culture of appearances, focusing, through a series of representative narratives, on the shamed bodies and spoiled identities of the anorexic and obese woman; the socially excluded and unattractive woman; the elderly woman; and the severely disfigured and disabled woman. The chapter discussing the anorexic body in Jenefer Shute’s novel Life-Size and the obese body in Judith Moore’s memoir Fat Girl focuses on the self-loathing and body shame of the anorexic and overweight woman. Both works expose to public view the fears and fantasies surrounding female embodiment in our culture in which many women fear, above all else, being fat. To Shute’s anorexic character Josie, the skeletal form represents the good and perfect self while bodily flesh is disgusting. Equating female embodiment with being fat, the skeletally thin Josie, when she undergoes refeeding in a hospital, fears that her body is out of control: that her “immense mass of flesh” is swelling like dough, that her belly is “engorged like a giant tumor,” that she is being buried “in flesh.” Like Shute’s character, who envisions herself as a “ravening monster . . . huge, with a crammed, bloated maw,” Judith Moore describes herself, in her painful memoir, as a “wide-mawed flesh-flopping flabby monster.” Dealing in a frank way with the self-hatred that grows out of fat oppression, Moore conveys the intense body shame and

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feelings of self-disgust that are the cultural inheritance of overweight women in our fat-phobic culture. The plight of the socially invisible and unattractive woman who, like the overweight woman, suffers from appearance anxiety, is central to the chapter discussing Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. A lonely woman and one of life’s losers, Brookner’s character, Frances Hinton, becomes vividly aware of her own social and bodily deficiency when she is befriended by the Frasers, a married couple who are so physically “stunning” that she feels “weak and pale” in comparison. In sight of the “rare perfect example” and the “highest breed of human being” in the Frasers, Frances wants to attract their attention—to say, “Look at me!”—but when she is inevitably excluded from their charmed circle, she becomes profoundly aware of her social invisibility and the very sight of her body fills her “with shame” because she finds it “so lacking” and “so unremarkable, so humiliated.” Like Brookner’s protagonist, Doris Lessing’s character Kate Brown becomes aware of her need for the admiring gaze of others when, at age forty-five, she undergoes a crisis of identity and comes to experience intense body shame. Kate, whose “whole surface . . . had been set to receive notice,” basks in the approval of other people when she smiles in her emphatic way and sends out the signal, “I am accustomed to being noticed.” But when she appears not as the stylish Mrs. Kate Brown, but as a sagging, unattractive older woman after she becomes ill, she feels socially invisible, preparing her, during her “summer before the dark,” for the role of the aging woman in our culture. Like Brookner and Lessing, Fay Weldon, in her novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, explores the shameful plight of the socially excluded, and in the case of Weldon’s Ruth Patchett, ugly woman, in our appearance-driven culture. Measuring her image against the cultural beauty ideal embodied in her hated rival, the ultrafeminine Mary Fisher, Ruth sets out to refashion her appearance through cosmetic surgery, becoming an exact replica of Mary Fisher. Even as Weldon provides a parodic commentary on the contemporary culture of cosmetic surgery in her novel, she also reveals the power of the beauty culture to entrap women by describing the tortuous plastic surgery Ruth undergoes to transform herself bodily into the feminine ideal. The shameful plights of the elderly woman and the disfigured and disabled woman are the focus of the final two chapters. The chapter on May Sarton’s As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel examines how the elderly woman’s body becomes a locus of shame, showing how Sarton’s semi-invalid, Caro Spencer, becomes acutely aware of “all the horrors of decay” of her aging, failing body, as does Laurence’s Hagar Shipley, who expresses mortification at the sight of her aging body—her “blue-veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood.” Laurence, like Sarton, shows how her character

12

Embodied Shame

fights to retain a sense of self-worth in an ageist society in which elderly women, as Hagar comments, are made to feel like “stupid old baggage.” Like the elderly, those who are severely disfigured and disabled suffer from body shame because of their deviations from beauty and body ideals, as Lucy Grealy shows in Autobiography of a Face, which describes what it is like to live with a facial disfigurement, and as Nancy Mairs reveals in Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World, which recount Mairs’s plight as a “crippled” woman living with multiple sclerosis. Detailing her long struggle with the shame she suffered after losing half of her jaw to cancer as a girl, Grealy confesses her intense feelings of ugliness—“I was my face, I was ugliness,” as she remarks—and her obsessive attempts through multiple reconstructive surgeries to “fi x” her face and thus find her “‘real’ face,” the one she was “meant to have.” Like Grealy, Nancy Mairs understands the pressures women face in our body-obsessed contemporary culture, which idealizes bodily perfection and humiliates and rejects those who are disfigured or physically disabled. In graphic detail, Mairs describes how her symptoms have put her “well off the ideal” of femininity: “My shoulders droop and my pelvis thrusts forward as I try to balance myself upright, throwing my frame into a bony S. As a result of contractures, one shoulder is higher than the other and I carry one arm bent in front of me, the fingers curled into a claw. My left arm and leg have wasted into pipe-stems, and I try always to keep them covered.” Aware of how her body looks to others, she feels “ludicrous, even loathsome.” Insisting that there should be cultural models for women like her, Mairs calls attention to the debilitating effects of body shame on the disabled. But even as Mairs speaks the brutal truth about her “crippled female body” and “misshapen life,” she also, through her “body” writings, works to reclaim her experiences as a “crippled” woman as she offers to her readers, many of whom will confront the bodily vulnerabilities and body shame that accompany illness and old age, “companionship in a common venture.”

The Shame that Is Felt by and on the Body If the body has often been invoked in recent theoretical discussions as “a material antidote to deconstructive theory” and if some recent attempts to reclaim the body have led to a tendency to idealize the body so that “what is most discomforting about the body disappears” (Sceats 62; Rose 28), somatophobia— that is, rejection of the body—remains a troubling issue for many women. Susan Bordo, in her trenchant critique of our contemporary image-saturated culture, describes how a “pedagogy of defect” feeds women’s body shame (Twilight 37). Having become accustomed to a “visual iconography of the perfected body”—the “ageless and sagless and wrinkleless” female body— women are learning to “expect ‘perfection’ and to fi nd any ‘defect’ repellent,

Introduction

13

unacceptable” (Twilight 3). And living in a fat-phobic culture in which the “idolatry of the trim, tight body shows no signs of relinquishing its grip” on women’s conceptions of female “beauty and normality,” women’s anxieties about the body “as the source of hungers, needs, and physical vulnerabilities” not within their control have become “especially acute” (Twilight 107, 111). Like many adult women, “girls today are concerned with the shape and appearance of their bodies as a primary expression of their individual identity,” as Joan Brumberg has observed in her well-known and extensive study of contemporary girls’ preoccupation with their bodies (Body Project xxi). As the body has become a “central paradigm for the self” and the “central personal project” of girls who “organize their thinking about themselves around their bodies,” coming-of-age girls have begun to express intense dissatisfaction with their bodies (Body Project 197, 97). Internalizing the “new ideal of physical perfection,” girls have become “more anxious than ever about the size and shape of their bodies, as well as particular body parts” (Body Project 94, 98). Indeed, as Brumberg remarks, “fear of fat, anxiety about body parts, and expectations of perfection in the dressing room have all coalesced to make ‘I hate my body’ into a powerful mantra that informs the social and spiritual life of too many American girls” (Body Project 130). Sadly, as girls make the body their “central personal project,” they inevitably become subject to the body angst that drives them to “hate” their bodies, and thus they feel deeply inadequate, inferior, and defective: that is, shamed. “Just because an idea or image—of the body, say—is thrillingly ‘transgressive’ to a bunch of artists or academics does not mean we should start trumpeting the dawn of a new age,” states Susan Bordo who, as a cultural critic and philosopher of the body, insists on the “need to get down and dirty with the body” (Twilight 185, 183). Even as well-known accounts of the female body circulating in contemporary discussions of the body—such as Foucault’s “docile” body, Kristeva’s “abject” body, and Grosz’s “volatile” body—call attention to the cultural shaming of women, a collective form of denial exists among critics who, in effect, have turned what is often described as the unruly, transgressive female body into an abstraction: a cultural text that can be “fi xed” within the fi xated gaze of the critical establishment. And even as critics have come to view the body as “discursively constructed and thereby open to (voluntary) resignification and change” (Hanson 16), the social meanings assigned to female bodies as deviant and inferior—that is, as shamed—still have real consequences in the lived experiences of many women. Feminist theory has long recognized the crucial links between the culturally constructed meanings assigned to female bodies and the very real consequences of those meanings in the lives of women, and in recent years it has come to emphasize the role of the body in female identities as it has investigated not only how race, class, and ethnicity act as shaping forces in the construction of women’s multiple identities, but also how various

14

Embodied Shame

negative and shaming bodily attributions, such as fat, ugly, old, disfigured, or disabled, influence female identity and selfhood. What is missing from such discussions is an explicit account of the body politics of shame—the “most body-centered of affects” (Paster 2)—in the lives of women. Shame is “a self-feeling that is felt by and on the body,” as Sara Ahmed observes, and, indeed, “the very physicality of shame—how it works on and through bodies—means that shame also involves the de-forming and re-forming of bodily and social spaces, as bodies ‘turn away’ from the others who witness the shame” (103). Moreover, “the individuation of shame—the way it turns the self against and towards the self—can be linked precisely to the inter-corporeality and sociality of shame experiences” (105). Remarking on shame’s “sheer bodily intensity,” Elspeth Probyn similarly describes shame as a “powerful instance of embodiment” that is “called into being by, and then inflects, historical and political circumstance” (Blush 64, 79). What critical discussions of the “discursively constructed” body leave out of their accounts is the crucial knowledge that comes from the bodily world of affects, for what underlies the cultural manipulation and exploitation of women, apparent in worrisome images of female bodies as defective, or spoiled, or damaged, or dirtied, is the shame that is “felt” by and on the body. The authors investigated in Embodied Shame bring a heightened awareness to the body politics that devalues and disrespects women as they illuminate in their literary works how women can become passive victims of the values imposed on them. The way out of the shame impasse, as shame psychologists tell us, is the recognition of shame and the narration of the shame story. But because there is shame about shame and because we tend to look away from the other’s shame, attempting to avoid shame contagion, the telling of such stories is risky business. But it is also necessary business. Dealing in an open way with the fear and loathing of the female body that continues in contemporary culture, the authors discussed in Embodied Shame acknowledge the insidious ways in which shaming stereotypes can become internalized and embodied in the lives of girls and women. If scholarly discussions of the body as a discursive text are often accused of, in effect, dematerializing the body by turning it into an abstraction, literature, despite its obvious textuality, gives an odd and paradoxical kind of presence to female bodies by invoking the world of feelings and getting “down and dirty” with the body as it tells stories about the embodied self. Examining the shaping role of the body in the formation of female identity, these authors, as they read and interpret the female body, draw connections between the social meanings attributed to the body and the self-hatred women often feel. Clearly bent on discomforting us, these authors expose—uncover—the shame that persists in the lives of many women in our postmodern, appearance-driven age in which the need to constantly refashion and improve the body has added yet a new burden to women’s lives and a renewed focus on the body.

Introduction

15

But these authors also point the way toward the recognition of and resistance to the body politics that pressure women to conform: to become socialized, and thereby shamed, bodies. Through their very explicit public exposure of female shame, these authors do vital cultural work by providing a powerful critique of the cultural narratives that shame women. And in their works, they also seek a remedy to shame, the “most body-centered” of all affects, by providing gestures of healing even as they expose the shame that binds so many of us in our “extreme makeover” shame-driven culture in which the devaluation of women and their bodies remains a pervasive force in the lives of so many of us.

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PART I

Coming of Age, Coming to Shame The Parental and Cultural Transmission of Sexual, Racial, and Class Shame

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CHAPTER 2

The Humiliations of the Female Flesh in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women

ven as critics have “routinely pronounced the traditional male Bildungsroman dead,” female revisions of the traditional coming-of-age story “demonstrate the continuing vitality of the genre, as well as an ongoing cultural preoccupation with how identities emerge and evolve,” as Christy Rishoi states in her analysis of contemporary women-authored coming-of-age narratives (60). An “imprecise, romantic phrase,” coming of age evokes the “period in life during which a child is physiologically, sexually, morally, and socially transformed into an adult,” and, in the “clichéd literary terminology, it is the journey ‘from innocence to experience’” (47, 48). Because the “physiological changes of female puberty seem to work against the cultural pressure to ignore the body,” women’s coming-of-age narratives, rather than avoiding the body, “assert the embodiedness of identity” (12). Focusing on the transition from childhood to womanhood, twentieth-century coming-of-age narratives, as Rishoi observes, center on a “paradigmatic rite of passage for girls”—the “struggle to fi nd a definition of womanhood one can live with” (67). Often read as a feminist revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Alice Munro’s semiautobiographical novel Lives of Girls and Women is a coming-of-age novel in which an adult narrator, a woman writer, provides a portrait of herself as a young artist.1 Asserting the embodiedness of female identity as it chronicles Del Jordan’s comic yet dark passage from girlhood to womanhood, Lives of Girls and Women describes the shame that is felt by and on the body as it focuses on Del’s growing awareness that to be made of female flesh is to be well-schooled in the abjections and humiliations of embodiment. Yet, typically, Munro’s novel is read as a feminist celebration of Del Jordan’s sexual awakening and her discovery of her vocation as a writer as she, at the end, comes to abandon her dark Gothic imaginings in favor of her pursuit of the “real life” of ordinary people in her art. Repudiating the “body/soul dualism” espoused by her feminist mother who stands for the world of the intellect, Del, it is argued, speaks a “new language of the body, the language of the blood” (Godard 68). Deconstructing the “negative double of the feminine body,” Del, it is claimed, achieves her “‘glory’”

E

19

20

Embodied Shame

(Kamboureli 38). Freeing herself from “destructive social dicta in order to possess herself,” Del is said to be on a “feminist quest for identity and freedom” (Rasporich 45, 44). But what such feminist readings overlook, as Sue Thomas has pointed out, are the “unconscious anxieties over the confi rmation of sexual identity” that “surface disruptively” in the narrative (109). Indeed, as Ildikó de Papp Carrington comments, although Munro’s fiction can be “very funny,” it also is “often intensely uncomfortable to read” and leaves behind a “fi nal emotional residue” of “dismayed unease”—a reaction that Carrington traces, interestingly enough, to the repetition in Munro’s fiction of graphic images of shameful exposure and helplessness in which Munro’s narrators, such as Del Jordan in Lives, not only watch “the humiliation or the threatened humiliation of others,” but also observe their “own humiliation” (5, 6). Anything but a straightforward feminist quest for identity and celebration of female sexuality, Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women is a complex shame drama in which Del Jordan’s coming of age involves her initiation into the humiliations of the female flesh. Even as Del counters female sexual shame by shamelessly embracing her sexuality, she risks the loss of self by her immersion in the seductive but also potentially destructive—and indeed humiliating—world of the female body. As Del searches for a definition of embodied femininity she can live with in the lives of the various girls and women who inhabit her world, she becomes aware of the stark division of female bodies—and lives—into the clean and proper and the abject. In the rural—and lower-class, uncivilized— world of Flats Road where her father raises foxes and where she spends her childhood,2 Del has her first encounter with the grotesque, freakish underside of life captured in the tabloid headlines found in the collection of newspapers of Uncle Benny, the man who works for her father: FATHER FEEDS TWIN DAUGHTERS TO HOGS WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO HUMAN MONKEY VIRGIN RAPED ON CROSS BY CRAZED MONKS SENDS HUSBAND’S TORSO BY MAIL (7)

Unlike her father, who is comfortable in Flats Road, Del’s mother, Addie Jordan,3 shuns the abjected world of Flats Road, with its “sexual looseness, dirty language, haphazard lives, [and] contented ignorance” (11). Identifying with the middle-class, orderly, and refined world of the town, Addie eventually rents a house in the town of Jubilee while her husband continues to stay on the family’s fox farm. Described by Munro as an “old-fashioned feminist” (Hancock 103), Addie expresses her aversion toward the abject world of embodied femininity not only in her embrace of the rational world of the intellect but also in her identification with the civilized world of the town and the society of clean and proper female bodies.

The Humiliations of the Female Flesh

21

Yet while Del’s mother, in her genteel behavior and inhibited sexuality, embraces the feminine and middle-class proprieties of the townswomen, she nevertheless ends up something of a misfit in the middle-class, domestic world of the Jubilee women because of her unconventional intellectual pursuits: a liberal humanist, she is interested in art, the opera, and the “Great Books,” and she writes letters to the newspaper on topics such as birth control. Del comes to recognize the social unacceptability of her mother’s unconventional behavior when she sees her mother through the shaming gaze of her Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace, from whom Del learns that the “worst thing” in life is to “have people laughing at you” (44). Falling under the influence of her aunts when she stays with them in the summer, Del “with some slight pangs of disloyalty,” exchanges her “mother’s world of serious skeptical questions, endless but somehow disregarded housework, lumps in the mashed potatoes, and unsettling ideas” for her aunts’ world of “comfort and order” and “intricate formality” (43). At one and the same time, Del wants to “repudiate” her mother and “crawl into favor” with her aunts even while she feels the urge to “shield” her mother from her two aunts with their “tender proprieties” (72). If Del’s unmarried aunts, Elspeth and Grace, represent the clean and proper body of middle-class, conventional femininity, her Aunt Moira becomes a cautionary tale of the humiliations and abjections of female embodiment. When Del’s mother explains that Moira’s mentally challenged daughter, Mary Agnes, is different because she was deprived of oxygen in the birth canal—“Uncle Bob Oliphant held Aunt Moira’s legs together on the way to the hospital because the doctor had told them she might hemorrhage,” as Addie remarks—Del envisions her uncle holding her aunt’s “heavy, vein-riddled legs together while she heaved and tried to deliver.” To Del, “the gloom spreading out” from her aunt seems to have “a gynecological odor,” and she comes to see her aunt as the type of woman likely to suffer from female complaints: “from varicose veins, hemorrhoids, a dropped womb, cysted ovaries, inflammations, discharges, lumps and stones in various places” (46). A woman who, even in getting up or sitting down or moving in her rocking chair gives off “rumbles of complaint, involuntary and eloquent as noises of digestion or wind,” Aunt Moira is “one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life” (47, 46). “Not much could be said for marriage, really, if you were to compare her with her sisters, who could still jump up so quickly, who still smelled fresh and healthy . . .” (46). In a similar way, Aunt Moira’s grown daughter, Mary Agnes, stands outside the clean and proper body of femininity. Intent on warning Del about the dangers posed by boys, Del’s mother recounts how Mary Agnes, many years before, went off with some boys who took her to the fairgrounds where they stripped off her clothes and left her lying naked in the cold mud. In describing the sexual “degradation” of the literally dirtied Mary Agnes,

22

Embodied Shame

Addie communicates to Del her own fear and loathing of the abjected— the dirty and degraded—female body. Responding to her mother’s story, Del reacts viscerally as she reflects on the public exposure of Mary Agnes’s naked body in this humiliating scene of sexual shaming, for to Del even the thought of being naked stabs her “with shame” in the pit of her stomach (49). That shame is a highly contagious emotion is reflected in Del’s experience of vicarious shaming in this central scene of shame, and Del’s reaction to Mary Agnes’s humiliation also reveals not only that basic shame derives from an inherent sense that the self is “weak, dirty, and defective,” but that “wishing to hide, disappear, or die is the hallmark of a shamed and spoiled self” (Wurmser, Mask 93; M. Lewis, “Shame” 137). As Del thinks about Mary Agnes’s body “lying exposed,” she feels that if what happened to Mary Agnes had happened to her and she had been “seen like that,” she “could not live on afterwards” (49). Sexually degraded, Mary Agnes not only carries the taint of the sexually unclean but also becomes associated with the wasting and decaying abject body. For when Del dares Mary Agnes to touch a dead cow and Mary Agnes, responding to the dare, places the palm of her hand over the decaying eye of the cow, Del recoils from, and indeed is afraid of, the contaminating touch of Mary Agnes. Just as Del shuns the death-tainted touch of Mary Agnes, so she balks when she learns that she is expected to attend her Uncle Craig’s funeral. Forced to attend the funeral, Del tries to avoid seeing her uncle’s body, and when Mary Agnes grabs hold of Del’s hand and insists that she view the body of her dead uncle, Del bites the arm of her tormentor. Rather than being cast out of the family circle, Del is not only forgiven but her behavior is excused as the kind of “hysterical” behavior to be expected when a “highly strung” girl such as Del is made to go to a funeral (64, 63). “As long as they lived most of them would remember that I had bitten Mary Agnes Oliphant’s arm at Uncle Craig’s funeral. Remembering that, they would remember that I was highly strung, erratic, or badly brought up, or a borderline case. But they would not put me outside. No. I would be the highly strung, erratic, badly brought up member of the family . . .” (64–65). Deeply ashamed at being forgiven, Del experiences the bodily intensity of shame, feeling “hot” and “stifled” as she suffers both the burning sensation and paralysis associated with shame. A “self-feeling that is felt by and on the body,” shame involves “the intensification not only of the bodily surface, but also of the subject’s relation to itself, or its sense of itself as self,” as Sara Ahmed observes (103, 104). Encompassing the entire self, shame “fills up the self—becomes what the self is about” (105). As Del enters a state of profound shame anxiety, she becomes overwhelmed by her shame: This shame was physical, but went far beyond sexual shame, my former shame of nakedness; now it was as if not the naked body

The Humiliations of the Female Flesh

23

but all the organs inside it—stomach, heart, lungs, liver—were laid bare and helpless. . . . And shame went spreading out from me all through the house, covered everybody, even Mary Agnes, even Uncle Craig in his present disposable, vacated condition. To be made of flesh was humiliation. I was caught in a vision which was, in a way, the very opposite of the mystic’s incommunicable vision of order and light; a vision, also incommunicable, of confusion and obscenity—of helplessness, which was revealed as the most obscene thing there could be. (65) Behind Del’s sense of the everyday normality of the clean and proper social body is her horrifying awareness of the obscene humiliations and abjections of embodiment and the utter “helplessness” of the human flesh. What Del learns as a girl—that “to be made of flesh was humiliation”— is reinforced when, as she comes of age, she begins to learn about sex. Turning away from the “virginal brusqueness” and “innocence” of her prudish mother, who says that she fell in “love” with Del’s father because he was “always a gentleman” (198, 89), Del relies on her best friend and confidante, Naomi, when she becomes curious about sex. Even as Del has romantic daydreams about Frank Wales, the lead in the school operetta and the first boy she has a crush on—she envisions him surrounding her with “tender” singing or with the “unheard music of his presence” (149)—she is learning from her friend Naomi the same lesson her mother taught her in describing the sexual degradation of Mary Agnes at the hands of boys. When Del, who is happy in the library, tries to keep Naomi quiet by showing her a passage in one of her favorite books, Kristin Lavransdatter, in which Kristin squats in the straw as she gives birth, Naomi, after learning from Del that Kristin had to get married, remarks, “I thought so. Because if a girl has to get married, she either dies having it, or she nearly dies, or else there is something the matter with it. Either a harelip or clubfoot or it isn’t right in the head” (132). As Del, in her friendship with Naomi, becomes the recipient of the hidden sexual lore passed down by adolescent girls, she learns not only of the inherent dangers of female sexuality, but also of the abjections and grotesqueries of sexual life: “Naomi’s mother was a practical nurse. On her authority— or what Naomi claimed was her authority—I had heard that babies born with cauls will turn out to be criminals, that men had copulated with sheep and produced little shriveled woolly creatures with human faces and sheep’s tails, which died and were preserved in bottles somewhere, and that crazy women had injured themselves in obscene ways with coat hangers.” Both believing and not believing Naomi’s stories depending on the “buoyancy or fearfulness” of her mood, Del, nevertheless, feels the need to listen to these accounts. “Anybody who will go into birth and death, who will undertake to see and deal with whatever is there—a hemorrhage, the meaty afterbirth,

24

Embodied Shame

awful dissolution—anybody who does that will have to be listened to, no matter what news they bring” (132). When Naomi talks to Del about a girl who “disgraced” herself with a local boy in the bicycle shed, she invokes the authority of her mother and insists that the girl was at fault. “It’s the girl who is responsible because our sex organs are on the inside and theirs are on the outside and we can control our urges better than they can. A boy can’t help himself,” Naomi tells Del “in a foreboding, yet oddly permissive, tone of voice, which acknowledged the anarchy, the mysterious brutality prevalent in that adjacent world” (148). When boys say to Del and Naomi, “Hey where’s your fuckhole?” Del becomes aware of the defining and shaming power of boys with their “dangerous” hatred. “The things they said stripped away freedom to be what you wanted, reduced you to what it was they saw, and that, plainly, was enough to make them gag” (129). That Del and Naomi have, in part, internalized their culture’s contemptuous view of female sexuality is revealed in their pornographic drawings: their pen drawing of a “fat naked lady with balloon breasts and a huge, inky, sprouting nest of pubic hair” and their pictures of men and women with “startling gross genitals, the women’s fat, bristling with needly hair, like a porcupine’s back” (118, 159). Even while Naomi and Del, in their “almost daily” discussions of sex, are “ribald, scornful, fanatically curious,” Del is also aware, when she wears a nightgown that leaves her uncovered between the legs, of her own “vile bundle, which pajamas could decently shroud and contain” (162, 159). As Del and Naomi read the sex manual they find hidden in Naomi’s mother’s hope chest, they respond with an amused contempt that turns into disgust: Care should be taken during the initial connection, we read aloud, particularly if the male organ is of an unusual size. Vaseline may prove a helpful lubricant. “I prefer butter myself. Tastier.” Intercourse between the thighs is often resorted to in the final stages of pregnancy. “You mean they still do it then?” The rear-entry position is sometimes indicated in cases where the female is considerably obese. . . . “Aggh! This book makes me sick.” (162–63) In a similar way, when the two girls read about masturbation—learning that “peasants in Eastern Europe did it with carrots and ladies in Japan used weighted spheres”—they fi nd the idea of masturbation at once amusing and repulsive, something to “laugh or get sick at, or as we used to say, laugh ourselves sick” (202). Just as what proves satisfying (taking in the forbidden and “tasty” information about sexuality) becomes disgusting (the

The Humiliations of the Female Flesh

25

book makes the two girls “sick”), so Del is both attracted to and repulsed by sexuality. Even as Del is deeply curious about and wants to take in—indeed, feed on—the deliciously forbidden information found in the sex manual, she feels a reactive disgust. A basic emotion originating in the rejection of bad-tasting, offensive food, disgust has evolved into “a wide range of emotion completely unrelated to food” and can signal the desire to “spit out with violence” or reject the other (Nathanson, Shame and Pride 127, 128). Described as an emotion that has an “embodied” or visceral feel to it, disgust conveys a “strong sense of aversion to something perceived as dangerous because of its powers to contaminate, infect, or pollute by proximity, contact, or ingestion” (W. Miller 7, 2). Remarking on how “so much (male) sexuality is constructed around the desire to indulge disgust,” William Miller states, “Sex is perceived as dirty, bestial, smelly, messy, sticky, slimy, oozy, and that is precisely, for many, its attraction” (127). Illustrating how sexual desire “depends on the idea of a prohibited domain of the disgusting,” Miller remarks, “A person’s tongue in your mouth could be experienced as a pleasure or as a most repulsive and nauseating intrusion depending on the state of relations that exist or are being negotiated between you and the person. But someone else’s tongue in your mouth can be a sign of intimacy because it can also be a disgusting assault” (137). The “mutual transgression of disgust-defended boundaries,” consensual sex offers “disgust-related thrills” as both partners “do things or let things be done” to them that “would trigger disgust if unprivileged, if coerced, or even if witnessed” (137, 138). When Del, who associates sex with a disgusting assault, envisions her mother’s boarder, Fern Dogherty, in bed with Mr. Chamberlain, she entertains herself “with thoughts of their grunting indecencies, their wallowing in jingly beds. . . . Disgust did not rule out enjoyment, in my thoughts; indeed they were inseparable” (163). Schooled in the humiliations of the flesh, Del comes to associate sex not only with disgust-based pleasures, but also with the female badness of women such as Fern. In a description that evokes the cultural association of the fleshly female body with promiscuity, Fern is described as an overweight woman with a “roguish, sensual look” and an uncontained and volatile, not prim and proper, body, for she is a “big woman” with bulging thighs and a stomach that, when ungirdled, pops out “in a pregnant curve” (159, 158, 160). Del’s mother, who has befriended Fern, insists that Fern and Art Chamberlain are just friends and not involved in any “nonsense”—“Nonsense meant romance; it meant vulgarity; it meant sex”—and when Del reports the town gossip that Fern and Art are having an affair, Del’s mother dismisses the gossip as a sign of the “dirty mindedness . . . rampant” in the town. “If Fern Dogherty was not a good woman . . . do you think I would have her living in my house?” she remarks to Del (162). But, indeed, Fern is dirty-minded, as Del discovers when, prompted by Art

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Chamberlain, she searches Fern’s room and fi nds a bundle of dirty limericks hidden among Fern’s possessions: Husband, dear husband, what am I to do? I’m wanting some hard satisfaction from you. You’re never at home or you’re never awake. (A big cock in my pussy is all it would take!) (183) Set in “shameless type” and designed to engender “lust,” the limericks seem mechanical and dull to Del, but the dirty, shameless words also give off “flashes of power,” especially the word “fuck,” which has a “thrust of brutality, [and] hypnotic swagger” about it (183, 184). Living in a culture in which the good girl/bad girl dichotomy defines the sexuality of young women, the sexually curious Del comes to imagine herself as a sexually desirable “bad” girl after Art Chamberlain, reminiscing about the time he spent as a soldier in Italy during the war, recounts how an Italian man offered to sell him his daughter, who was around Del’s age. As Del thinks about the Italian girls prostituted by their own fathers, she wonders what the man says and does to the girl he has bought, unable to imagine the moment of transition between “what was possible, known and normal behavior, and the magical, bestial act” (168). Recalling the time she saw Peggy, one of Jubilee’s town prostitutes, reading the Star Weekly newspaper, Del remembers her surprise at the seemingly ordinary behavior of a woman reported to have once served a line of men in the men’s toilet at the local dance hall: I thought of her as having gone right beyond human functioning into a condition of perfect depravity, at the opposite pole from sainthood but similarly isolated, unknowable. What appeared to be ordinariness here—the Star Weekly, dotted curtains looped back, geraniums growing hopefully out of tin cans in the whorehouse window, seemed to me deliberate and tantalizing deception—the skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust. Imagining that, if she had been born in Italy, her flesh would be “used, bruised, knowing” but it would not be her “fault,” Del fi nds the thought of such faultless “whoredom” enticing (169). In her erotic fantasies about Art, Del daydreams about being alone with him on a hot summer day wearing a dressing gown that accidentally—through no fault of her own—falls to her feet, exposing her naked body. “I never pictured Mr. Chamberlain’s reaction, I never very clearly pictured him. His presence was essential but blurred; in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light” (170).

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Del, who has fantasized herself as sexually “used, bruised, and knowing,” accepts Art Chamberlain’s abusive treatment when he begins to molest her. Rather than offering her a pat on the arm or a hug, he goes “straight for the breasts, the buttocks, the upper thighs, brutal as lightning.” Discarding her romantic ideas of “love, consolation, and tenderness” and enthralled with the “secret violence of sex,” Del is receptive to Art’s assaultive touch; indeed, she encourages his behavior by making it “easy” for him to touch her. “This was what I expected sexual communication to be—a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances” (178). In yet another act of sexual communication, Art gives Del a sample of his handwriting so she can search Fern’s room for any letters from him Fern might have kept. Reading the words he has written—“Del is a bad girl”—Del wonders if Art has, in fact, discovered her “true self” (180). In accepting the male construction of her sexual identity—for unlike the good girl, who is not sexual, the bad girl is, like Del, sexually curious and desiring—Del becomes vulnerable to male aggression and violence. Caught up in a “bad girl” script, Del is deeply curious about and attracted to the hidden world of sex, but she also associates the sexual with the abjected and humiliated female body. Thus, in the sexual and emotional script that plays and replays in Del’s life, sexual curiosity and excitement inevitably lead to disappointment, disenchantment, and indeed, shame-disgust. When Del finds a bundle of material hidden in Fern’s room describing methods of birth control in which the discussion of foams and jellies and the use of the word “vagina” makes her think that sex is connected with “ointments and bandages and hospitals,” she experiences “the same feeling of disgusted, ridiculous helplessness” she once felt when undressing at the doctor’s (183). In a similar way, Del’s erotic excitement turns to disillusionment and disgust when Art Chamberlain masturbates in front of her. Inhabiting a “different layer of reality” from the one her mother lives in, Del, during her drive in the countryside with Art, perceives the natural setting as “debased, maddeningly erotic,” offering as it does a “vast arrangement of hiding places” and “shameless mattresses” for a sexual tryst (185). But when Art takes the sexually curious Del to a secluded spot near a creek and then unzips himself and displays his penis, she sees it as anything but an erotic object. “Raw and blunt, ugly-colored as a wound, it looked to me vulnerable, playful and naïve, like some strong-snouted animal whose grotesque simple looks are some sort of guarantee of good will.” The sight of Art’s penis does not “bring back” Del’s “excitement”; indeed, it does not seem “to have anything to do” with her. Placed in the role of the passive spectator to Art’s masturbatory performance, Del watches as he works “furiously” with his hand (186). “The face he thrust out at me . . . was blind and wobbling like a mask on a stick, and those sounds coming out of his mouth, involuntarily, last-ditch human noises, were at the same time theatrical, unlikely. In fact the whole performance . . .

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seemed imposed, fantastically and predictably exaggerated, like an Indian dance” (186–87). After Art ejaculates, he says to Del, “Quite a sight, eh?” (187). To Del, this is a sight that does not excite but disenchants, and so she feels a sense of “gloom” after witnessing Art’s humiliating and degrading sexual performance, an act in which flesh is “not overcome but has to be thumped into ecstasy” (187, 191). Del, who comes to inhabit a “different layer of reality” from the one inhabited by her mother, resists her mother’s advice when Addie, speaking in a “grave, hopeful, lecturing voice,” talks about the coming change in the “lives of girls and women,” a change that women must work to effect.4 “All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. . . . No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that,” she says to Del, encouraging her daughter to “use” her mind and not to become “distracted” by a man (193). As Del listens to her mother’s talk of “self-respect,” she views it as similar to the advice typically given to girls and women—that females are “damageable” and thus require “a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection” unlike men who can “go out and take on all kinds of experiences” and then “shuck off” what they do not want and “come back proud.” Prepared to resist anything her mother tells her “with such earnestness, such stubborn hopefulness,” Del determines to “do the same” as men (194). Despite Del’s resolve, she soon becomes aware of the limited possibilities open to her because she is a girl as she witnesses Naomi’s enactment of the feminine masquerade. “What was this masquerade she was going in for now, with her nail polish, her pastel sweater?” Del remarks of Naomi who, after leaving school, enters the conventional world of the well-groomed girls of Jubilee, who talk incessantly about their diets or their skin-care routines or about washing their clothes or their hair. “They would say, ‘I washed my cardigan!’ ‘Did you? Did you wash it cold or lukewarm?’ ‘Lukewarm but I think it’s all right.’” (197). Aware that her sweater is grubby, her hair greasy, and her brassiere discolored, Del feels that there is “a radical difference” between herself and the well-groomed girls, “as if we were made of different substances” (196). And when the deeply demoralized Del reads an article on the “basic difference” between male and female ways of thinking written by a Freudian psychiatrist—the author asserts that if a boy and girl are sitting on a park bench gazing at the full moon, the boy thinks about the “immensity and mystery” of the universe while the girl thinks about washing her hair— she is “frantically upset,” for she realizes that she does not think like a girl. Del knows that if she were to show the article to her mother, her mother would dismiss it as an example of the “maddening male nonsense” that insists that women do not have “brains,” yet she is not comforted because she does not want to be like her sexually repressed mother. “I wanted men to love

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me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice where there couldn’t be a choice” (198). Repudiating Naomi and her vision of the “normal” female life that leads inevitably to marriage—the life of “showers, linen and pots and pans and silverware” but also the life of “putting up with and warily fi ghting with men and getting hold of them”—Del turns, instead, to her studies at school as she stacks up A grades “like barricades,” intent on moving beyond what she supposes to be the real world inhabited by Naomi (213, 214). Yet when Del is paired with Jerry Storey, the other high-achieving student in her high school class, she feels that Jerry is “more freakish, less attractive” than she is, and she is “ashamed” to have people like Naomi see her in public with him (214–15, 218). “Humiliated by the disguise of high-school sweethearts” that they find it “necessary to adopt,” Del and Jerry survive their situation by mocking it (215–16). Despite the fact that the “thought of intimacies” with Jerry is “offensive”—that is, disgusting—the two are sometimes intimate. “Our bodies fell against each other not unwillingly but joylessly, like sacks of wet sand. Our mouths opened into each other, as we had read and heard they might, but stayed cold, our tongues rough, mere lumps of unlucky flesh” (222). Agreeing to satisfy Jerry’s sexual curiosity, Del, who wants to show off her naked body, strips for him, yet when he stands by the bed looking down at her, she wonders if he finds her body “as inappropriate, as unrealizable” as she finds his (223). Forced naked into the cellar by Jerry when his mother unexpectedly returns home, the humiliated and furious Del wonders afterward if she will ever get a “real lover” (226). A product of her culture with its mind/body dualism, Del comes to explore the mind-identified part of her split identity in her relationship with Jerry Storey and the body-identified part of her identity with Garnet French. During her relationship with Jerry Storey, Del’s “need for love” goes “underground” as she focuses on her academic studies in hopes of securing the “glory” of high marks on the university scholarship exams (228, 227). But she willingly foregoes the chaste world of academic pursuits when she meets Garnet French, a twenty-three-year-old man with an eighth-grade education who works in a lumberyard and whose lower-class family, the Frenches, live beyond Jericho Valley in what Del’s mother describes as the “poorest Godforsaken backwoods” in the area (240). Despite Del’s intense physical attraction to Garnet, her relationship with the uneducated, lower-class man has the potential, from the outset, to turn to disgust. In Del and Jerry’s parodic game in which they talk like sociologists and try to determine, from looking at people, what part of the country they are from, they describe Jericho Valley people as mentally inferior and physically abject: “moronic and potentially criminal,” Jericho Valley people, because of “inbreeding,” are likely to suffer from physical deformities, such as cross-eyes, cleft-palates, clubfeet,

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or hump shoulders (229). When Jerry asks Del why she is going out with a “Neanderthal” like Garnet, she replies, “What do you mean Neanderthal? He’s Cro-Magnon” (240). Accused by her mother of “softening of the brain” and of having “gone addled over a boy,” Del is aware of Garnet’s intellectual inferiority (240, 241). Not only is he unable in conversation “to theorize” or “make systems,” but he hates it when people use “big words” or talk about “things outside of their own lives” or try to “tie things together,” which are some of Del’s favorite “pastimes” (241). Even as Del feels that she possesses “unlimited” sexual power in her relationship with Garnet, sex, at the same time, seems to her “all surrender— not the woman’s to the man but the person’s to the body, an act of pure faith, freedom in humility” (238, 239). Entering the body-identified world of Garnet where words are their “enemies,” Del leaves behind the world of the intellect: “the world I saw with Garnet was something not far from what I thought animals must see, the world without names” (241, 242). That Del is risking social and psychic danger in her relationship with the lower-class, nature-identified Garnet is evident when she visits his family. If Del consciously embraces the dirty and disorderly lower-class world of the Frenches, which is like the Flats Road world of her father, she also registers middle-class unease in her description of Garnet’s mother. A representative lower-class woman, she is a shameful spectacle: a “short, round, angry-looking woman” with ankles so swollen that her legs look “perfectly round, like drainpipes” (243). Even as Del is sexually enraptured with Garnet, Garnet’s mother, who works as a nurses’ aide, talks about, and thus becomes associated with, the disgusting abjections of the flesh: “She told me about accidents, a poisoned child who had been brought into the hospital recently turned as black as shoe polish, a man with a crushed hand, a boy who got a fishhook in his eye. She told me about an arm that was hanging from the elbow by a strip of skin” (244). Attracted to “the dark side, the strange side” of Garnet (241)—a man who has been jailed for assault—Del casts him in a familiar fictional role: that of the dark and mysterious, but potentially dangerous, Gothic hero. For her, Garnet’s “dark, wary, stubborn” face contains “all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment” (234–35). Del, who had expected her first sexual “union” with Garnet to have “some sort of special pause before it, a ceremonial beginning, like a curtain going up on the last act of a play,” instead is unceremoniously and painfully crushed against the wall of her house when she loses her virginity (248). Only when she sees blood does the “glory of the whole episode” become “clear” to her (249). Yet the story she subsequently tells her mother—that there is dried blood on the ground at the spot where a cat tore apart a bird— registers what she seems unwilling to consciously admit to herself: that she has experienced her entry into the “secret violence of sex” (178), in part, as a brutal assault. Unable to feel any urgency or energy the next day when she

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writes her exams, Del, instead, daydreams about her sexual encounter with Garnet, thus giving up her hopes of academic “glory” as she succumbs to the body-identified world of sexuality. Entering an alternate reality as she and Garnet make love “in earnest,” Del begins to return home late at night “sore in unexpected places” and “frightened” of her own sexual “smell” after her sexual encounters with Garnet (251, 252–53). When her mother reads aloud the course listings from the university catalogues she has collected, Del is unable to comprehend what her mother is saying. “Astronomy, Greek, Slavonic languages, Philosophy of the Enlightenment—she bounced them at me as I stood in the doorway. Such words would not stay in my head. I had to think, instead, of the dark, not very heavy, hairs on Garnet’s forearms, . . . the knobs of his narrow wrists, . . . a particular expression, combining urgency and practicality, with which he led me into the bush or along the riverbank, looking for a place to lie down” (253). Contrary to the claim that Del, in her sexual relationship with Garnet, is given “possession” of her body, allowing her to speak a “new language of the body, the language of the blood” (Godard 66, 68), Del’s sexual initiation is fraught with perils. Despite her feeling of sexual empowerment, she loses power as she, succumbing to the libidinal pleasures and sensuous languor of the body, becomes utterly passive. While Del believes that her sexual relationship with Garnet is taking place “out of range of other people, or ordinary consequences” like pregnancy (253), readers may not, as one critic comments, be able to abandon themselves to “the pleasure of the sex in the text” because they are “afraid for Del, seeing the danger that she does not see” in a society in which pregnancy “threatens to reduce women to an animal level” (Redekop 62). “You’re lucky yet. . . . You better be careful,” Naomi warns Del when she finds out that Del is having unprotected sex with Garnet. In Naomi, Del confronts her own possible future. Pregnant, the sexually shamed Naomi tried but failed to self-abort. As she tells Del, “When I first knew I was pregnant I took quinine. I took slippery elm and damn laxative and jujubes and I sat in a mustard bath till I thought I was going to turn into a hot dog. Nothing works.” Side by side with the narrative account of Del’s ecstatic sexual relationship with Garnet is the abject image of bodily punishment of the pregnant and shamed Naomi who is getting married not for romantic fulfillment but because it is expected of her and because she has “collected” all the “stuff” in her hope chest (257). Even as Del repudiates the mind-identified feminism she associates with her mother and feels empowered in her body-identified femininity and shameless embrace of her sexuality, she, inevitably, comes to experience in her relationship with Garnet the sense of utter “helplessness” that accompanies the “humiliation” of the flesh. When the two go swimming in the river after having sex, Garnet asks Del if she wants to get married and have a baby. “Weak from making love” and “warm and lazy,” Del seems to acquiesce

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(259). But when Garnet insists that Del will have to join his church and be baptized and she resists, he accuses her of pride—“You think you’re too good for anything. Any of us,” he says to her (260). His face “broken by rage, a helpless sense of insult,” he attempts to assert his will over Del by “baptizing” her in the river and, as he holds her down under the water, she feels that she is caught up in a “possibly fatal game,” a game that requires her to be “buried alive.” Thinking that he might drown her, Del fights him underwater, feeling that she is “fighting” for her life (261). Afterward, as Del recovers from her moment of utter helplessness—and abject humiliation—she reconnects to the daily world and feels the revival of her “old devious, ironic, isolated self,” even as her body clings “cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss” (263). Del, who had wanted to keep Garnet “sewed up in his golden lover’s skin forever” (260), ends up disillusioned. “We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more” (262). Even as Del watches herself suffering and the tears flowing from her eyes as she says a line from Tennyson’s Mariana “with absolute sincerity, absolute irony”—“He cometh not, she said”—her “devious, ironic” self criticizes the Tennyson poem as “one of the silliest” she has ever read. Del, who now recognizes that she was “rigid as a sleepwalker” in her sexual relationship with Garnet, is prepared, at the end, to get started on her “real life” (264).5 In a similar way, Del, in her beginnings as a writer, succumbs to the dark allure of Gothic fantasies only to return, like a sleepwalker, to the daily reality of ordinary life in Jubilee. In her Gothic story about Caroline Halloway, who is loosely based on the Jubilee woman Marion Sherriff, Del dramatizes the abjections of female sexuality. “Some fellow got her in trouble and walked out on her. . . . Otherwise why drown herself, a girl seventeen?” as Del recalls Fern Dogherty remarking of Marion’s fate (266). A projection of Del’s fears and fantasies about her own sexuality, the fictional Caroline is a promiscuous and sexually generous woman who bestows her sexual gifts “capriciously” on men, even having sex with the “deformed and mildly deranged.” At one and the same time, she is the sexually voracious woman who burns men down and leaves “a taste of death,” and she is sexually used and dirtied by men, for she is “a sacrifice, spread for sex on moldy uncomfortable tombstones, pushed against the cruel bark of trees, her frail body squashed into the mud and hen dirt of barnyards, supporting the killing weight of men” (268). When the Photographer comes to town, Caroline falls in love with the man the townspeople are afraid of because in his photographs, young fresh girls see what “gaunt or dulled or stupid faces” they will have at fifty, brides look pregnant, and middle-aged people see in their features “the terrible, growing, inescapable likeness of their dead parents.” After giving herself to the Photographer “with straining eagerness and hope and cries” only to be

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abandoned by her lover, the pregnant Caroline drowns herself (269). But if Caroline’s eyes are white in the one photograph taken of her—her blind and unseeing eyes a sign of her self-annihilation in love—Del, who like her dark fictional counterpart has been “sabotaged by love,” nevertheless survives. And if Del is also like the blind Caroline as she, in her “black fable” (271), succumbs to her Gothic fantasy of Jubilee, she ultimately returns to reality as she comes to see and appreciate, with the artist’s eye, the unfathomable and endless mysteries of “real” and “ordinary” life. Del’s artistic muse is not the glorified lover but the shamed and rejected Bobby Sherriff, the brother of Marion Sherriff and the local madman who is home from the asylum when Del encounters him. Struck by the “ordinariness” (273) of the Sherriffs’ house when Bobby invites her to sit on the porch, Del begins to wonder not about her fictional character, Caroline, but about the real-life Marion. “Such questions persist, in spite of novels. It is a shock, when you have dealt so cunningly, powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it still there” (274). As the older writer looks back, she recognizes that during her brief encounter with Bobby Sherriff she discovered a truth that would come to animate her art: that the lives of the people in Jubilee, like the lives of people everywhere, are “dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable— deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” What the older novelist wants to capture in her writing is “every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting” (276).6 The final gesture of the publicly humiliated Bobby Sherriff, who rises on his toes “like a dancer, like a plump ballerina,” communicates a “concise meaning, a stylized meaning” (276–77) that the young Del does not understand but that the adult artist not only understands but enacts as she works, in her writings—including in the book we have just read, Lives of Girls and Women—to transform the humiliations of the flesh into stylized works of art. “To be made of flesh was humiliation” the young Del recognizes in a governing scene of shame (65). But as an artist, the adult writer is able to bring together the opposites that haunted her as a girl—the mystic’s vision of “order and light” and the obscene vision of the utter “helplessness” of the flesh—as she transforms her body shame into the body of her art. That Del’s shame-driven art is based, in part, on Munro’s own struggles is evident in Munro’s comments on her life. Growing up in rural Ontario, Munro, like her character and fictional projection, Del Jordan, was vulnerable to shame. “In Wingham, Ontario, where I grew up I very early got the idea that I was pretty freaky. As far as Wingham was concerned, anyway. And that if I didn’t hide this, I would expose myself to ridicule, which is really the main weapon of such communities” (Frum 32). Aware that her “different view of the world” would bring her into “great trouble and ridicule if it were exposed,” she learned “very early to disguise everything,” as she recalls, and

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thus “perhaps the escape into making stories was necessary” (Gibson 246). For Munro, writing not only provided an escape, but it also was a way to get “control” over “confusing and humiliating” experiences (Gibson 245). In a similar way, as we shall see in the next chapter, Dorothy Allison uses her writing, in part, to assert control over the humiliations of the past in her harrowing and violent story of Bone in her semiautobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina. What Del glimpses in her “incommunicable” vision— that helplessness is “the most obscene thing there could be”—becomes the lived daily reality of Allison’s Bone, who, suffering both physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, comes to believe that she is a worthless white-trash girl “born to shame and death.”

CHAPTER 3

Family Violence, Incest, and White-Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

n her coming-of-age, semiautobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison takes decided risks in describing the white-trash origins and body shame of her abjected and victimized protagonist, Bone. Allison, who describes herself as a “cross-eyed working-class lesbian,” remarks that “shame was the constant theme” of her childhood (“Preface” 12; “Skin” 229). “What may be the central fact of my life,” writes Allison, “is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family. . . . That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it” (“Question” 15). “Born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats,” Allison’s family, the Gibsons, had “a history of death and murder, grief and denial, rage and ugliness” (Two 32). The Gibson women—“bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt” (Two 32–33)—were bodily marked as racially and sexually inferior. Exposing the body shame of the Gibson women, Allison writes, “We were all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide-faced meant stupid. Wide hands marked workhorses with dull hair and tired eyes, thumbing through magazines full of women so different from us they could have been another species” (Two 33). Although Allison was proud of the stubborn determination of the “hard and ugly” Gibson women, she was also “horrified” by them and “did not want to grow up to be them” (Two 37, 38). What Allison found absent or caricatured in romantic depictions of poverty and the noble and heroic poor was the “reality of self-hatred and violence” among poor whites. “The poverty I knew was dreary, deadening, shameful . . .” (“Question” 17). Her people, the Gibsons, were the “bad” poor people: “men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. . . . We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. My family was ashamed of being poor, of feeling hopeless. What was there to

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work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed” (“Question” 18). Conscious of the shaping power of familial and cultural shame in both her emotional life and in the construction of her abjected white-trash identity, Allison implicitly acknowledges white middle-class anxiety about white lower-class life as she, in her desire to cast suspicion on popular romanticizations of poverty, ends up legitimating, at least in part, the popular view that white-trash culture is a central site of social pathology and abjection. “I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys,” Allison insists (“Question” 36). Describing her traumatic upbringing, Allison recounts how her stepfather, who physically and sexually abused Allison while she was growing up, instilled in her a deep and abiding sense of self-contempt and body shame. To be told daily that “you’re a dog for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” and to be knocked down “with that contempt until you believe you’re contemptible— that’s the greatest damage. That’s what has lain on my life like a layer of dirt I cannot wash off,” Allison remarks (Strong). “The man raped me. It’s the truth. It’s a fact,” she states (Two 39). “He beat us, my stepfather, that short, mean-eyed truck driver with his tight-muscled shoulders and uneasy smile” (Two 45). Acknowledging the debilitating impact of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather, Allison recalls not only her reactive rage but also her deep sense of herself as an unlovable and mutant creature: “Skin fear, pulling back, flinching before the blow lands. Anticipating the burn of shame and the shiver of despair. Conditioned to contempt and reflexive rage, I am pinned beneath a lattice, iron-hard and locked down. Believing myself inhuman, mutant, too calloused to ever love deeply or well” (“Skin” 230). In her semiautobiographical novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison conveys the pain and shame of her upbringing as she tells the story of her child narrator, Ruth Anne Boatwright, who is nicknamed Bone and who grows up in Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1950s and early 1960s. Described as a “bold and brave” work—indeed, as “one of the most courageous novels” of our current “age of testimony” (Hart 179, 170)—Bastard Out of Carolina is a trauma narrative and an incest survivor testimonial in which, as Leigh Gilmore has observed, “Allison connects the damage of incest to the shame of illegitimacy” by showing how the shaming of Bone’s mother, Anney, and of Bone around illegitimacy “prepares for the trauma and shame of incest” (69, 56). Drawing a connection between Bone’s traumatic abuse and debilitating shame, Allison also reveals, as Laurie Vickroy has observed, how the “taint of abuse” ends up debasing Bone’s self-concept (153), for, indeed, Bone comes to feel deep self-contempt and body shame as she suffers both physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, Daddy Glen. That shame derives from the shame sufferer’s “vicarious experience of the other’s scorn”

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(H. Lewis, “Introduction” 15) and that learned familial and cultural shame can lead to destructive forms of self-hatred and self-contempt become evident in Allison’s treatment of white-trash shame in Bastard Out of Carolina as she tells the story of Bone. Focusing attention on Bone’s shame vulnerability— that is, her sensitivity to the shaming and contemptuous gaze of others— Allison’s novel, like Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, shows that shame is a “self-feeling that is felt by and on the body” (Ahmed 103) as it reveals the intensity of Bone’s shame. If at times Bone defends herself against painful feelings of bodily helplessness and exposure through her defiant shamelessness, her expressions of rage, and her enactment of an attack-other script in which she actively humiliates her humiliators, she also becomes so full of self-contempt and self-loathing that she wants to disappear, that is, to die. Mired in shame, Bastard Out of Carolina deals with the affects of shame, contempt, and shame-rage as it describes the painful process by which Bone comes to see herself as a dumb and ugly white-trash girl “born to shame and death” (206). Gesturing toward healing, Allison, in the closure, uses the character of Bone’s lesbian aunt, Raylene, to suggest that lesbianism might offer Bone an alternative to the “traumatized and traumatizing form of femininity” she has experienced at the hands of Daddy Glen (Doane and Hodges 122). But even as Allison evokes the “narrative trajectory of recovery” found in the popular incest recovery story, she also, in showing that “Bone’s strength and identity have been seriously compromised by the trauma of her experience,” insists on the “long-lasting” effects of trauma (Doane 123, 113). That Bone’s life will be marred by violence and marked by shame is suggested in the drama of her birth. Bone is born after an automobile accident caused when her drunken Uncle Travis plows his jacked-up Chevy headlong into another car. Because the pregnant fifteen-year-old Anney, who is sleeping on the back seat of the Chevy, fl ies through the windshield and hits the ground, rendering her unconscious for three days, she is unable to bluff her way with the hospital staff and insist that she is married. Thus, Bone is declared a certified bastard by the state of South Carolina and the shaming word illegitimate is stamped on her birth certificate in large, red-inked block letters. In describing the social stigma once attached to unwed mothers and their children, Bastard Out of Carolina calls attention to the devastating effects of stigmatization. A social phenomenon, stigmatization, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson explains, is “an interactive social process in which particular human traits are deemed not only different, but deviant.” Reflecting the “tastes and opinions of the dominant group,” stigmatization “reinforces that group’s idealized self-description as neutral, normal, legitimate, and identifiable by denigrating the characteristics of less powerful groups or those considered alien” (31; see also L. Coleman). Thomson’s observation that “human stigmata function as social dirt” (33) points to the shame issues that underlie the process of stigmatization. Remarking that although the effects

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of stigmatization have long been known, not much discussion of the relationship between stigma and shame has occurred, shame theorist Michael Lewis describes the shame of the stigmatized individual who is publicly marked for his or her failure to meet social standards. Viewed by others as being “deviant, flawed, limited . . . or generally undesirable,” the stigmatized individual suffers from a “spoiled identity”: a feeling that the “whole self” is spoiled or no good (Shame 194, 207). Moreover, stigma, like shame, is “contagious” and thus can affect not only the stigmatized individual but also those associated with him or her (Shame 200). As a member of the disgraced and discredited Boatwright family and the mother of an illegitimate child, Anney is marked as a socially undesirable and tainted woman—as someone suffering from an abjected and spoiled body- and self-identity—and through the process of stigma contagion, her social stigma ends up affecting and infecting her daughter, Bone. Focusing attention on the shaping and shaming power of hegemonic discursive constructions of lower-class whites as the inferior, degenerate, and socially stigmatized and abjected Other, Bastard Out of Carolina describes Anney’s response to the discrediting label “white trash.”1 “Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground. The stamp on that birth certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they’d tried to put on her. No-good, lazy, shiftless” (3). That such categorical devaluations serve to objectify targeted individuals who are viewed as “nothing but” members of a discredited group and thus as “virtually indistinguishable from, and in many respects substitutable for, one another” (Schur 30–31) and that stigmatized individuals, in being treated as if they were “invisible, nonexistent, or dead,” suffer a kind of “social death” (L. Coleman 226–27) become evident in Anney’s feeling that to others she is little more than “a rock on the ground,” that is, a socially despised nonperson. In describing the social death Anney suffers as a member of a disvalued group, Bastard also inscribes a shame drama. The fact that shame results from the experience of being objectified by others so that “one’s status as a subject [is] ignored, disregarded, denied, or negated” (Broucek 8) is conveyed in this passage, and the rock image also captures the annihilating force of the other’s contempt, which can make the shamed individual feel that she is “‘a nothing,’ ‘empty,’ ‘frozen’—‘like a stone’” (Wurmser, Mask 83). Recalling accounts of how stigmatized people often try to cover or deny their stigma and thus “pass” as normal (see, for example, Gibbons 130–31; L. Coleman 222), Bastard describes how Anney tries to overcome her shameful white-trash identity as a lazy shiftless person: “She’d work her hands to claws, her back to a shovel shape, her mouth to a bent and awkward smile— anything to deny what Greenville County wanted to name her” (3–4). Rather than remedying her situation, Anney’s attempt to deny her nonperson status

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through hard work further dehumanizes her, turning her into “nothing but” a menial and socially invisible laborer. Anney also is thwarted when she attempts to undo her shame and pass as socially respectable in what, ironically enough, becomes a shaming ritual: Anney’s annual visits to the Greenville courthouse where she asks for but fails to obtain a new birth certificate without the stigmatizing word—illegitimate—stamped on it. In passages that recall Léon Wurmser’s description of the feeling of exposure that accompanies shame—the shamed individual’s sense that other people are staring at her and are “full of taunts and mockery” because they are aware of her “profound disgrace” (Mask 53)—Bastard Out of Carolina tells of Anney’s repeated humiliations at the public reexposure of her body shame and social stigma before a representative of the official white culture, the courthouse clerk, whose eyes laugh as he furnishes Anney with a duplicate of Bone’s original birth certificate. Over time, as people continually tease Anney about the birth certificate, she learns to laugh with them before they laugh at her. When the courthouse burns down—which can be read as a textual enactment not only of Anney’s burning shame-rage over the social humiliation she has endured but also of her desire for revenge—she destroys Bone’s birth certificate. “I’m glad the goddam courthouse burned down,” she says (16), while the Boatwrights defiantly laugh all over Greenville at the news of the courthouse fi re, taking pleasure, like Anney, in the destruction of this hated symbol of the official—and shaming—white culture. In illustrating the public humiliation that accompanies Anney’s private shame at having an illegitimate daughter, Allison shows how Anney inevitably transfers to Bone her own personal—and familial—sense of shame. Shame theorist Michael Lewis’s observation that children raised in a shame-filled environment by shame-prone parents “are likely to learn to experience shame through empathic shame induction” (113) is illustrated in Bone’s story. “I got no shame . . . and I don’t need no man to tell me jackshit about my child,” Anney angrily insists when the preacher tells her that her shame is between her and her God and that there is “no need to let it mark the child” (14). Despite Anney’s defiance—her angry retort to the preacher signaling her attempt to cover her deep-rooted shame—her shame does, in fact, “mark” Bone. The shaping and shaming power of internalized corrosive constructions of white-trash identity as stigmatized and abjected—as uncultured, uncivilized, and unclean—becomes evident in the family stories Bone learns about her own origins. Not only is Bone the embodiment of her mother’s shame by being designated as a certified bastard by the official culture—a label that marks her as someone with a stigmatized identity and spoiled, abjected body—but the family story about Bone’s father also represents her as an unclean white-trash child. Bone is told that her father was a “sorry excuse for a man” and that when she was an infant, she urinated all

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over him so that her “baby piss” stunk up his clothes “for all to smell” (25, 26). In this family story, Bone is constructed as a dissmelling, dirty, and angry infant who acted out the shaming invective “piss on you”2 on her abandoning, no-account father. And Bone is marked as bodily different because she, unlike the fair-haired Boatwrights, has the blue-black hair and black eyes of her great-great-grandfather, who was a Cherokee Indian according to one version of family history—Bone’s mixed racial heritage functioning as a sign of her racial impurity as a member of the abjected “dysgenic” white trash. Pointing to the power of culturally sedimented imagery, Bone comes to associate her putative Cherokee heritage not only with the “black-headed” and “man-type” part of herself, but also with her “nasty,” “rock-hard,” and quick-tempered white-trash identity (54–55): that is, with her reactive shame-rage, the angry part of herself that fends off others who might expose her shame and thus hurt her. As Bone comes to identify with her poor white relatives, the Boatwrights, she internalizes their white-trash shame. That the stubborn pride and the defiant shamelessness of poor whites such as the Boatwrights function to cover their social shame—their feelings of social powerlessness and inferiority—is evident in the narrative’s description of Bone’s family. Granny’s shaming words to one of her grandsons—she teasingly calls him “ugly”—points to the internalization of classist stereotypes and body shame in the construction of an abjected white-trash identity, and, indeed, Bone later comes to see herself as an ugly Boatwright child. “Granny was ugly herself,” Bone remarks, “she said so often enough, though she didn’t seem to care” (21). Fitting the derogatory stereotypes of white-trash culture, Bone’s uncles—Earle, Beau, and Nevil—are “dangerous” men that “half the county went in terror of,” while her aunts—Ruth, Raylene, and Alma—seem “old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men” (22, 23). When the men shoot out each other’s windows or race their pickups on the railroad tracks or punch out a local bartender, Bone’s aunts shrug it off: “What men did was just what men did.” At times, Bone identifies with her uncles’ “rambunctious” behavior, and she wishes she had been “born a boy” (23). But she also identifies with the oppositional defiance—the so-called stubbornness—of the Boatwright women. Like them, she is “stubborn,” and when she is with her aunts, she feels that she is “part of something nasty and strong and separate” from the world of “spitting, growling, overbearing males” (30, 91). Through their oppositional behavior—the dangerous, antisocial behavior of the Boatwright men and the stubborn and sometimes nasty behavior of the women—the Boatwrights enact a socially scripted and stereotypical role: that of the shamelessly defiant and angry white-trash poor. To flaunt one’s white-trash shame is not to be without shame, for as Léon

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Wurmser has observed, “if it is shame that is fought against by shamelessness, it is shame that returns in spectral form” in shameless behavior (Mask 262). A reaction formation against shame, shamelessness serves as a classic defense against the feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability that accompany shame. A deeply humiliated people, the Boatwrights try to hide their weakness and woundedness through their defiant and stubborn displays of white-trash shamelessness. Rather than being free of shame, they are caught in a shame-rage feeling trap: a self-perpetuating chain of emotions in which unacknowledged shame leads to anger, which, in turn, leads to more shame.3 That such shame-rage spirals can endure through a lifetime and be transmitted intergenerationally is dramatized in Allison’s novel. When Bone’s mother, Anney, who was briefly married and widowed and who works at a diner, is pursued by Glen Waddell, she transforms from a harried woman into a giggly and hopeful girl. “He’s a good man,” Anney says of Glen (33), who is, at first, kind to Anney and gentle with her daughters, Bone and Reese. Using a series of class-coded descriptions, Bastard presents Glen as an amalgam of middle-class refi nement and lower-class brute physicality. He is “a small man but so muscular and strong that it was hard to see the delicacy in him, though he was strangely graceful in his rough work clothes and heavy boots. . . . Glen Waddell’s feet were so fi ne that his boots had to be bought in the boys’ department of the Sears, Roebuck, while his gloves could only be found in the tall men’s specialty stores” (34). A man who “didn’t drink, didn’t mess around, didn’t even talk dirty” (35), Glen seemingly offers Anney an escape from her disgraceful and abjected white-trash family origins and an opportunity to pass as middle class and socially respectable. But, in fact, Glen is attracted to Anney because she is a Boatwright. The black sheep of the middle-class Waddell family, Glen initially determines to marry Anney because he wants to marry the “whole Boatwright legend” and thus “shame his daddy and shock his brothers” (13). A failed member of the middle class and the Waddell family scapegoat, Glen acts out a defending script against his habitual shame by identifying with the shameless and antisocial behavior of the dangerous Boatwright men. But if Glen gains a temporary sense of power through his identification with the Boatwrights, he also acts out his family’s expectations, for in defiantly marrying into the Boatwright family he, yet again, fails his family and disgraces himself. In a repetition of a father-son childhood drama, Glen’s father, the proud and successful owner of a local dairy, openly humiliates the adult Glen about his failed life. Shamed by his father, the swaggering Glen, who becomes unsure of himself and visibly slumps when he is around his father, lives in a chronic state of shame-rage. In Anney’s assessment of Glen’s behavior, Glen “got bent” because of what his father did to him. “I

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an’t never seen a boy wanted his daddy’s love so much and had so little of it. All Glen really needs is to know himself loved, to get out from under his daddy’s meanness” (132). Driven by the kind of love that “eats a man up,” Glen is someone who “could turn like whiskey in a bad barrel” (41, 45). In his needy, desperate love for Anney and his violent response to humiliation, Glen behaves like the violence-prone men described by psychologists. Like Glen, such men “show both an excessive need for supportive relationships to hold themselves together and an exquisite sensitivity to humiliation,” and they often mask their vulnerability to personality disorganization by presenting themselves as “powerful and intimidating” (Lansky 154, 149). Hypersensitive to slights, the shame-vulnerable Glen verbally and physically assaults people who insult him and thus loses job after job: The berserker rage that would come on him was just a shade off the power of the Boatwrights’ famous binges. . . . Tire irons and pastry racks, pitchforks and mop handles, things got bent or broken around Daddy Glen. His face would pink up and his hands would shake; his neck would start to work, the muscles ridging up and throbbing; then his mouth would swell and he would spit. Words came out that were not meant to be understood: “Goddam motherfucker son of a bitch shitass!” Magic words that made other men back off, put their hands up, palms out, and whisper back, “Now, Glen, now, now, Glen, now, hold on, boy. . . .” (100) In Bone’s separate but connected images of Daddy Glen, Bastard conveys the dynamic relationship between Glen’s “berserker rage” and his shame. As Bone envisions Glen screaming at her, “his neck bright red with rage,” she sees “the other, impossible vision just by it, Daddy Glen at his daddy’s house with his head hanging down and his mouth so soft spit shone on the lower lip” (100). His fragile masculine pride undermined because he fi nds it difficult to support his family, Daddy Glen uses a classic defending script against shame when he blames others for his failures. For as shame theorist Gershen Kaufman has remarked, “The transfer of blame is fundamentally a transfer of shame . . .” (Psychology 102). Seeking to relocate his own shame in others, Daddy Glen blames his failure on the “unbelief” of his family: “Our unbelief was what made him fail. Our lack of faith made him the man he was . . .” (81). “You’re mine now, an’t just Boatwrights,” Daddy Glen says of Bone and Reese, intent, initially, on adopting them (52). An autocratic, controlling man, Glen demands Bone’s complete submission to his will, and over time he begins to use corporeal punishment to enforce obedience to his rules. In an image that obsessively repeats and circulates in the narrative, Bastard Out of Carolina focuses on Glen’s enormous and punishing hands, which hang

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“like baseball mitts at the end of his short, tight-muscled arms” (35). “He’s quiet, but you make Glen mad and he’ll knock you down,” Uncle Earle says of him. “Boy uses those hands of his like pickaxes” (61). Bone is beaten for the first time when she, unaware that Daddy Glen is home, runs through the house and thus breaks one of his rules. “You bitch. You little bitch. . . . I’ve waited a long time to do this, too long,” he says to Bone. “I heard the sound of the belt swinging up, a song in the air, a high-pitched terrible sound. It hit me and I screamed. Daddy Glen swung his belt again. I screamed at its passage through the air, screamed before it hit me. I screamed for Mama” (106). Although Anney intervenes, she also, in effect, revictimizes her daughter by excusing Glen’s brutality. Just as Glen shifts the blame for his abusive behavior onto Bone—insisting that he beat her because her misbehavior made him go “crazy”—so Anney asks her daughter what she did to provoke the beating. “What had I done? I had run in the house. What was she asking? I wanted her to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be” (107). “The shamer is a person who may act inadvertently, but usually acts aggressively, to put down another,” writes Joseph Berke. “He is like a parent who disciplines a child maliciously. The issue becomes . . . the systematic demoralization of one human being by another who gains considerable sadistic pleasure by so doing” (326). The designated “bad” white-trash girl who needs correction, supposedly for her own good, Bone fi nds it increasingly difficult to keep Daddy Glen, who calls Bone’s family “that trash,” from exploding in rage. After Bone is beaten, Anney, even as she comforts Bone, also tells her daughter not to be “so stubborn” (110)—“stubborn” behavior being the defining trait of the Boatwright women. “You are hard as bone,” Glen tells Bone, “the stubbornest child on the planet! . . . Cold as death, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty” (111). In punishing Bone, Glen tries to break her will through physical pain and psychological terror, and he also acts out a complicated self-drama. As a stubborn child, Bone represents Glen’s own stubborn defiance as the black sheep of the Waddell family. By identifying with the aggressor and acting out a power script when he beats her,4 Glen not only expresses contempt for and temporarily fends off awareness of his own chronic shame, which he finds embodied in Bone, but he also induces in her his own split-off feelings of helplessness and shame as the “bad” member of the Waddell family. As Daddy Glen avenges himself on Bone for his own earlier feelings of shaming rejection and humiliation, he reinforces her inherent sense of white-trash shame. “Sometimes when I looked up into his red features and blazing eyes, I knew that it was nothing I had done that made him beat me. It was just me, the fact of my life, who I was in his eyes and mine. I was evil. Of course I was. I admitted it to myself, locked my fingers into fists, and shut

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my eyes to everything I did not understand” (110). Full of self-blame, the deeply shamed and abjected Bone capitulates to her stepfather’s psychological control as well as his sexual abuse of her during her trauma-filled coming of age. “He was always finding something I’d done, something I had to be told, something he just had to do because he loved me. And he did love me. He told me so over and over again, holding my body tight to his, his hands shaking as they moved restlessly, endlessly, over my belly, ass, and thighs” (108). The only time Glen is gentle with Bone is when he is molesting her. “I could not tell Mama. I would not have known how to explain why I stood there and let him touch me. It wasn’t sex . . . but then, it was something like sex . . .” (109). Describing the impact of child abuse on character development, trauma specialist Elizabeth Waites explains how the childhood victim can develop a scapegoat identity or incorporate self-punitive behavior into her personality structure (68). Evidence that Bone has developed a scapegoat identity is found in her masturbatory fantasies in which she imagines not only that people are watching Glen beat her while she remains defiantly proud but also that the witnesses of this shaming act admire and love her. “I was ashamed of myself for the things I thought about when I put my hands between my legs, more ashamed for masturbating to the fantasy of being beaten than for being beaten in the first place. I lived in a world of shame. I hid my bruises as if they were evidence of crimes I had committed,” Bone remarks, describing her deep body shame (112–13). If in this replay of her stepfather’s physical and sexual abuse, Bone attempts to gain active mastery over passive suffering, she also defies her stepfather through her autoerotic pleasures and thus achieves a secret sense of “pride.” Even though her masochistic fantasies are “terrible,” she still loves them. “In them, I was very special. I was triumphant, important. I was not ashamed. There was no heroism possible in the real beatings. There was just being beaten until I was covered with snot and misery” (113). As Bone’s traumatic abuse continues and she internalizes stereotypes of white-trash badness, she becomes, in part, an angry and vengeful girl as she verbally expresses and acts out her shame-rage. When Bone steals Tootsie Rolls from Woolworth’s—an act that associates her with the thieving behavior of white-trash people—Anney forces Bone to return the stolen candy to the store manager and to pay for the candy she ate. Enraged, Bone wants to kill the store manager with her stare, and afterward she retains her feelings of “desperate hunger edged with hatred and an aching lust to hurt somebody back” (98). Years later when Bone breaks into and vandalizes the Woolworth’s store, she gets revenge for the “humiliation” she suffered, a humiliation that has “itched” at her and “always” been “in the back” of her mind (222). Bastard’s description of Bone’s deep-seated rage recalls trauma investigator Judith Herman’s discussion of the behavior of abused children. “Feelings of rage and murderous revenge fantasies are normal responses to abusive treatment,” explains Herman (104). Like the abused children

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described by Herman, Bone finds it difficult to modulate her anger, and thus she becomes further convinced of her inner badness. And just as abused children sometimes try to camouflage their “malignant sense of inner badness” by attempting to be good (Herman 105), so Bone sees herself as bad—as a mean and nasty white-trash girl—and yet a part of her aspires to be the perfect little girl and to make Glen proud. Indeed, Bone hungers for what she sees as the clean and proper—and ideal—life of the middle-class Waddells. But when the shame-sensitive Bone overhears the Waddells call her family trash, relegating her to the realm of the white-trash abject, she feels exposed as “dumb and ugly” (102) and is aware of her burning shame-rage and her reactive desire for retribution. “‘Trash for sure,’ I muttered. . . . I could feel a kind of heat behind my eyes that lit up everything I glanced at. It was dangerous, that heat. It wanted to pour out and burn everything up, everything they had that we couldn’t have, everything that made them think they were better than us” (103). “I knew, I knew I was the most disgusting person on earth. I didn’t deserve to live another day,” Bone says when she attempts to cure herself of her anger and hatefulness through religion and gospel music, music that makes her feel “ashamed and glorified” at once (135–36, 136). When Bone befriends Shannon Pearl, whose father books singers for the gospel music circuit, she identifies with the “strange and ugly” (156) Shannon, and feels, alternately, disgust and a fierce and protective love for her. “I watched her face—impassive, self-sufficient, and stubborn; she reminded me of myself, or at least the way I had come to think of myself,” Bone remarks of Shannon (154). Socially undesirable because of her damaged, abjected body and spoiled identity, Shannon is cast out of the clean and proper social body. A “lurching hunched creature” (155) and an object of public ridicule, Shannon, who has the white skin and hair and the pale pink eyes of an albino, is taunted and bullied by other children because she is physically different. Depicted as a freak or physical monster, Shannon Pearl is an example of what Rosemarie Garland Thomson, in her analysis of the representation of physical disability in American culture and literature, calls “corporeal otherness” (5). Remarking on the fact that so-called ugly laws, some of them repealed as recently as 1974, were once used to restrict “visibly disabled people from public places,” Thomson explains that “the meanings attributed to extraordinary bodies” are found in social relationships in which the group that possesses valued physical characteristics “maintains its ascendancy and its self-identity by systematically imposing the role of cultural or corporeal inferiority on others.” The fact that the corporeally inferior figure “operates as the vividly embodied, stigmatized other” (7) points to the underlying body shame issues attached to Allison’s representation of Shannon Pearl, who comes to function in the text as a visible sign of Bone’s feelings of white-trash ugliness and shame-rage.

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Contrary to Bone’s expectations that the ugly Shannon will be a model Christian and act in a patient, wise, and generous way, Shannon, in fact, is filled with hatred for those who shame her. Wanting to turn the tables on those who have shamed her, Shannon becomes bound in a shame-rage feeling trap, spending most of her time “brooding on punishments either she or God would visit” on people who have hurt her (157). When Bone sees the fire of hatred and outrage burning in Shannon’s pink eyes, she tellingly wonders if she has the same hatred in her own eyes. Observing Shannon visibly wilt when a man pronounces her ugly, Bone reactively insults the man. Intoning the shaming discourse of dirt and defilement used to describe her own illegitimate status and white-trash identity, Bone calls the man a “bastard” and an “ugly sack of shit” (165). Subsequently aware of the terrible hatred in Shannon’s face, Bone, for a moment, loves the abjected, disfigured girl with all her heart. “If there was a God, then there would be justice. If there was justice, then Shannon and I would make them all burn” (166). Yet despite Bone’s identificatory bond with Shannon, the two shame-sensitive girls inevitably turn on each other. “You . . . you trash. You nothing but trash,” Shannon says to Bone. “Your mama’s trash, and your grandma, and your whole dirty family . . .” (171). Retorting in kind, Bone calls Shannon a “white-assed bitch,” an “ugly thing,” and a “monster” (170, 171). “You so ugly your own mama don’t even love you,” Bone says to Shannon (172), Bone’s angry and insulting words giving voice to her deep-rooted fear of her own ugliness and unlovability— that is, her own abjected white-trash identity and body shame. In the spectacular demise of Shannon Pearl, who becomes engulfed in flames at a family barbecue after spraying too much lighter fluid on the charcoal grill, Bastard enacts a complicated shame drama. “Shannon didn’t even scream,” Bone remarks. “Her mouth was wide open, and she just breathed the flames in. Her glasses went opaque, her eyes vanished, and all around her skull her fine hair stood up in a crown of burning glory. Her dress whooshed and billowed into orange-yellow smoky flames. . . . I saw Shannon Pearl disappear from this world” (201). The fiery death of Shannon depicts the self-consuming nature of her chronic shame-rage. It also dramatizes the social death experienced by the socially stigmatized individual and the annihilating power of the other’s contempt as it enacts the common desire of the shamed, abjected individual, who is treated as an object of contempt, to hide or disappear. As Léon Wurmser explains, “If it is appearance (exposure) that is central in shame, disappearance is the logical outcome of shame. . . .” Indeed, “Shame’s aim is disappearance” (Mask 81, 84). In dramatizing a contempt-disappear scenario, this scene illustrates the destructive force of the shamer’s contempt—a “global type of aggression” and “strong form of rejection” that “wants to eliminate the other being” (Mask 80–81). In Wurmser’s description, “Contempt says: ‘You should disappear as such a being as you have shown yourself to be—failing, weak, flawed, and dirty. Get

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out of my sight: Disappear!’” To be exposed as one who fails someone else’s or one’s own expectations causes shame, and to “disappear into nothing is the punishment for such failure” (“Shame” 67). “No, I whispered in the night. No, I will not die. No. I clamped my teeth. No,” Bone tells herself as she remains haunted by Shannon’s fiery death and convinced that she is a white-trash girl “born to shame and death” (205, 206). Helen Block Lewis, in describing the heightened self-consciousness of the shamed individual, explains that the shame experience results from the individual’s vicarious experience of the other’s contempt: her awareness of “self-in-the-eyes-of-the-other” (“Introduction” 15). In a scene that captures this core shame experience, Bastard describes Bone’s deep self-contempt and body shame when she gazes at her naked body and her stern and empty face. Viewing herself as an object of contempt—as “ugly, pasty, and numb”—Bone understands why Daddy Glen is hateful toward her and why he has made a point of telling her that she has nothing to be proud of (208). “‘You think you’re so special,’ he’d jeered. . . . ‘Your mama has spoiled you. She don’t know what a lazy, stubborn girl you are, but I do’” (209). Seeing herself through Daddy Glen’s contemptuous gaze, the demoralized, abjected Bone becomes so full of self-contempt and self-loathing that she wants to die. Explaining the link between shame and the wish to die, Carl Schneider observes how everyday expressions—“‘I was so ashamed, I could have died’; ‘I could have sunk into the ground and disappeared’; and ‘I was mortified’”—capture this connection (78). The deeply shamed Bone wants to be “already dead, cold and gone.” To her, “everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid” (209). As Bone succumbs to Daddy Glen’s withering contempt, she tries to resist his efforts to defi ne her as a worthless, white-trash Boatwright. At the bottom of the endless hole of shame, “at the darkest point, my anger would come and I would know that he had no idea who I was, that he never saw me as the girl who worked hard for Aunt Raylene, who got good grades no matter how often I changed schools, who ran errands for Mama and took good care of Reese. I was not dirty, not stupid, and if I was poor, whose fault was that?” Enraged with Daddy Glen, Bone imagines herself slashing his throat in the middle of the night and dreams of cutting out his evil heart. Yet another part of her still yearns for an ideal storybook family. “If he loved me, if he only loved me. Why didn’t he love me?” Bone wonders as she comes to recognize that she feels what the shamefaced Glen feels when he stands around his father’s house with his head hanging down (209). “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies. It was that way with Mama and Daddy Glen,” Bone remarks of the sudden public exposure of the shameful family secret of Glen’s physical abuse of her (248). When Aunt Raylene discovers bloody stripes on Bone’s thighs

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and shows them to Bone’s uncles, they assault Daddy Glen. “I’m not ashamed of beating that asshole,” Earle remarks afterward (255). Yet despite the family’s defense of Bone and her uncles’ enactment of Bone’s own deep-seated rage and wish for revenge, she does not fi nd release from her chronic shame. Instead, when Anney leaves Glen and moves into a two-room apartment, Bone feels that everything—her mother’s silence and her sister’s anger—is somehow her fault. Revealing her identification with her role as the family scapegoat, she thinks that she is blameworthy: that she is the one who did wrong and enraged Daddy Glen. And when she subsequently realizes that what happened to her was not her fault and that Daddy Glen has taken a sadistic sexual pleasure in beating her, she feels even more shame. “Had he come? Had he been beating me until he came in his trousers?” the mortified Bone wonders. “The thought made me gag. . . . It had all been the way he wanted it. It had nothing to do with me or anything I had done. It was an animal thing, just him using me. . . . I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river” (253). For Allison, the ultimate focus of Bastard Out of Carolina is not only Daddy Glen’s sadistic abuse of Bone but also the “complicated, painful story of how my mama had, and had not, saved me as a girl” (“Question” 34). Hence, in telling the story of the abusive father, Allison also pays attention to the collusive mother by describing how Anney repeatedly leaves Glen for the sake of Bone only to return to him again and again. When Bone finally gathers enough strength to defy Glen and to refuse to go back to live with him or to tell Anney that she wants the family to be reunited, she is brutally raped by an enraged Glen. Calling Bone a “little cunt” and a “goddam little bastard,” Glen tells her that he has prayed that she would die. “I’ll shut you up. I’ll teach you,” he says as he pins her down and shoves down her pants (284). “You’ll never mouth off to me again. . . . You’ll do as you’re told. You’ll tell Anney what I want you to tell her” (285). That the rapist uses sex to humiliate the victim and instill in her a terrifying sense of helplessness as her autonomy is violated (see Janoff-Bulman 78–81) is apparent in the rape scene. “He rocked in and ground down, flexing and thrusting his hips. I felt like he was tearing me apart, my ass slapping against the floor with every thrust, burning and tearing and bruising. . . . He reared up, supporting his weight on my shoulder while his hips drove his sex into me like a sword” (285). As Daddy Glen exerts total control over Bone and intentionally harms her, he acts out his annihilating contempt: his wish to degrade and dehumanize her through his act of sexual domination. Unlike an earlier version of the novel, which depicted Anney as the avenging and heroic mother by having Anney and Bone kill Glen (Strong; see also Sandell 222), Bastard presents Anney as a complicit and betraying mother who ultimately chooses her victimizing husband over her victimized child. Finding Glen still on top of Bone after he has raped her, Anney

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physically attacks Glen only to subsequently turn away from her daughter to comfort the desperately needy Glen. “Could she love me and still hold him like that?” Bone wonders. Devastated, Bone wants “everything to stop, the world to end, anything, but not to lie bleeding while she held him and cried. I looked up into white sky going gray. The first stars would come out as the sky darkened. I wanted to see that, the darkness and the stars. I heard a roar far off, a wave of night and despair waiting for me, and followed it out into the darkness” (291). Because a “secure sense of connection with caring people is the foundation of personality development,” as Judith Herman has observed, traumatic events, in calling into question “basic human relationships,” can “shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others” (52, 51). In this wrenching scene, Bastard conveys the trauma victim’s feelings of alienation, disconnection, and inner deadness. This scene also captures the shame sufferer’s feelings of unlovability. “Debilitating shame,” as Carl Goldberg aptly remarks, “is an alienating feeling. It conveys an anxiety that all is not right with one’s life, that one’s existence is not safe and harmonious. It carries the opprobrium that the sufferer is unlovable and should be cast out of human company. The shame-bound person has learned from others and now accuses himself of the ‘crime’ of being surplus, unwanted, and worthless” (8). After Anney chooses Glen over her daughter,5 Bone is taken care of by her lesbian aunt, Aunt Raylene, who acts as a mother substitute. When Anney visits Bone for the last time before disappearing from her daughter’s life, Bone feels that Anney is a stranger to her. But then when Anney tells Bone that she loves her and embraces her sobbing daughter, Bone temporarily lets go of her grief and anger and shame. As the novel ends, Bone, who is about to turn thirteen, opens the envelope her mother has left her, which contains Bone’s birth certificate with the bottom part left unmarked. At best a misguided attempt to ease her daughter’s shame, Anney’s parting gesture serves to remind readers of Allison’s novel just how deeply Bone has been marked by her mother’s shame and by Glen, who has contemptuously beaten into Bone a sense of herself as a worthless and bad individual: as a white-trash Boatwright. In its harrowing and unrelenting account of Bone’s abusive treatment by Daddy Glen, Bastard Out of Carolina evokes the ubiquitous cultural image of the white-trash family as a site of violence and social pathology, and it also provides a compelling testament to the destructive impact of intergenerationally and parentally transmitted shame. But Allison also wants to suggest the potential healing of Bone in the novel’s closure.6 “I’ve spent twenty years working with other survivors . . . [and] done a lot of study,” Allison remarks. “The most normal response is to blame yourself and hide. And to not get angry. Anger is the healthy feeling.” According to Allison, “The peak of the story is that Bone gets angry. And up to that point, she is not yet thirteen.

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She has spent essentially six years with her stepfather, never allowing herself to be angry and never holding anyone responsible—always believing that there is something wrong with her.” As Allison explains, Bone has “the possibility of healing” and of surviving her experience “whole” because she “really does get angry and begins to hold people responsible, and she has that family, that all along was giving her little pieces of how she can be strong, how she can survive the worst things in the world, because they happen” (Ng). Intent on showing the positive impact of the Boatwright family on Bone’s coming of age, Allison interweaves graphic scenes of Bone’s abuse with episodes of respite and safety in which Bone stays with members of her extended family, such as her Aunt Ruth or her Aunt Raylene. Bone, who feels consumed by shame, finds some relief in her relationship with Aunt Ruth, who tells Bone stories about her family—a potentially healing act in Allison’s novel. Similarly, Bone’s lesbian aunt, Aunt Raylene, who was “kind of wild” when she was young (179), also acts as a stabilizing force in Bone’s life. “Trash rises,” remarks Aunt Raylene, who makes money from the trash she scavenges from the river. “I like to watch things pass. . . . Time and men and trash out on the river” (180). Countering Daddy Glen’s constant denigration of Bone, Aunt Raylene tells Anney that Bone, rather than being lazy, “works like a dog,” and rather than being inferior and bad, is “the best” Anney has (188). And Aunt Raylene attempts to instill a sense of pride in Bone by telling her to “get out there and do things. . . . Make people nervous and make your old aunt glad” (182). Even as Raylene functions as a “displaced marker of Bone’s queer sexuality, if not her incipient lesbianism,” she also represents, as Ann Cvetkovich has observed, “both the network of women family members and the community of lesbians that Allison has elsewhere credited with enabling her own survival and development” (371). In Bastard Out of Carolina, as Allison “represents oppressed female sexuality formed on and from violence,” she provides a “powerful indictment of men, marriage, and heterosexuality” (Horvitz 43). Refusing, at the end, to return to Daddy Glen’s violent patriarchal household, Bone, instead, enters what Moira Baker describes as the “lesbian space of resistance” carved out by Aunt Raylene in her “safe space out by the river ‘where trash rises’ and where resistance to sexist, elitist, and heterosexist ideologies is possible” (26). In a reparative gesture, the closure suggests that Bone’s connection to her lesbian aunt makes her feel connected to her estranged mother: “[Mama’s] life had folded into mine. What would I be like when I was fifteen, twenty, thirty? Would I be as strong as she had been, as hungry for love, as desperate, determined, and ashamed?” As Bone leans her head against Aunt Raylene, “trusting her arm and her love,” she recognizes, “I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman” (309). Yet while Allison shows Bone gaining a potentially healing sense of family pride and belonging as she identifies herself as a “Boatwright woman,” the stubborn

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“pride” of Bone’s family, as the novel shows, functions to cover their chronic social shame: their abiding feelings of social powerlessness and inferiority. Because the Boatwrights are socially stigmatized as white trash, the reparative gesture in the closure’s description of Bone’s healing identification with her white-trash family roots remains problematic. And, indeed, Allison has described how in her own life she “tried desperately” for many years to run from her family, distancing herself from her sisters as she attempted to refuse the class she was “born to” (Pratt 32). Growing up “poor,” Allison was driven to act out a classic defense against shame as she learned the “habit of hiding” and by the time she realized she was “queer,” the “habit of hiding” was “so deeply” set in her that it was “not a choice but an instinct” (“Question” 13–14). After spending many years of her life trying to protect herself and hide her “despised identity,” Allison ultimately came to see that those “born poor and different” are driven to give themselves away or lose themselves or disappear as the people they “really are” (“Question” 29, 34). “For me,” Allison remarks, “the bottom line has simply become the need to resist that omnipresent fear, that urge to hide and disappear, to disguise my life, my desires, and the truth about how little any of us understand—even as we try to make the world a more just and human place. Most of all, I have tried to understand the politics of they, why human beings fear and stigmatize the different while secretly dreading that they might be one of the different themselves” (“Question” 35). If Allison spent many years of her life trying to hide her despised identity, in Bastard Out of Carolina she knowingly risks being reshamed as she describes her family origins and breaks the culturally imposed silence about incest.7 “That our true stories may be violent, distasteful, painful, stunning, and haunting, I do not doubt,” Allison writes. “But our true stories will be literature. No one will be able to forget them, and though it will not always make us happy to read of the dark and dangerous places in our lives, the impact of our reality is the best we can ask of our literature” (“Believing” 166). To Allison, literature is not only an important site for the production of the dark and dangerous places of white-trash culture, but it also is a place where she can tell and preserve stories about her people, the Gibsons, as she continues to come to terms with her origins as someone “born in a condition of poverty that this society fi nds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved” (“Question” 15). “Peasants, that’s what we are and always have been. Call us the lower orders, the great unwashed, the working class, the poor, proletariat, trash, lowlife and scum. I can make a story out of it, out of us,” writes Allison as she describes her white-trash origins (Two 1). An author who has tried to understand why poor whites are feared and stigmatized, Allison is acutely aware of the relationship between the experience of being socially shamed and the development of white-trash identity. Just as Allison exposes with amazing force in Bastard Out of Carolina what it feels like to be

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designated as the socially inferior, stigmatized white-trash girl and treated as an object of contempt, so Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye, as we shall see in the next chapter, explores the body shame of another incest victim, Pecola Breedlove, a little black girl who so despises her stigmatized, abjected black identity that she imagines she can cure her bodily ugliness and racial shame only if she is miraculously granted the same blue eyes that little white girls possess. Like Morrison, Marita Golden in Don’t Play in the Sun reveals the damaging impact not only of white standards of beauty but also of intraracial color prejudice on the little black girl who is made to feel black and ugly not only by the white culture but also, and more intimately, by members of her own community.

CHAPTER 4

Racial Self-Loathing and the Color Complex in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun

uiet as it’s kept,” which is one Toni Morrison’s favorite African American expressions, is a phrase used by someone who is about to reveal what is presumed to be a secret. Insisting that she is not bothered by the complaints of some black readers that she is “hanging out too much” of the black community’s “dirty laundry” (Minzesheimer), Morrison brings to light secrets in her novel The Bluest Eye—public and collective secrets—as she exposes to public view sensitive race matters. Like Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is an incest narrative that focuses on the familial and cultural origins of the feelings of ugliness and deep body shame of the victimized protagonist, the poor and ugly Pecola Breedlove. In deliberately setting out to confront the vexed issues surrounding color and caste in The Bluest Eye, Morrison also deals with what has been called the “dirty little secret” and “last taboo” of African American culture: the existence of intraracial color prejudice and discrimination— the so-called color complex—which continues to be an “embarrassing and controversial subject for African Americans” (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 3, 2, 1). As bell hooks remarks, “Those black folks who came of age before Black Power faced the implications of color caste either through devaluation or overvaluation.” If being born light meant beginning life “with an advantage recognized by everyone,” being born dark meant starting life “handicapped, with a serious disadvantage” (174). As Morrison investigates the loaded issues of intraracial prejudice and class divisions within the African American community in The Bluest Eye, she examines the damaging impact not only of white standards of beauty but also, more intimately, of intraracial color prejudice in telling the story of the coming of age of Pecola Breedlove. While Morrison, in her characteristic way, links dark skin with the black lower or underclass, Marita Golden describes her feeling of racial self-loathing and body shame growing up as a middle-class, dark-skinned girl in Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey through the Color Complex.1 Like Morrison, Golden is bent on telling secrets and airing dirty laundry as

“Q

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she unfl inchingly examines in her personal account how the dirty business of intraracial color prejudice shames the little black girl who is made to feel black and ugly by members of her own community.

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye The story of Pecola and her wish for blue eyes grew out of a conversation Morrison remembered having as a girl with one of her elementary school friends, who told Morrison that she knew that God did not exist because her prayers for blue eyes had gone unanswered (Ruas 95). Morrison recalls how she felt “astonished by the desecration” her friend proposed and how she, for the first time, experienced the “shock” of the word “beautiful.” Recognizing the implicit “racial self-loathing” in her friend’s desire, Morrison, twenty years later, found herself still wondering how her girlhood friend had learned such feelings. “Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale?” (“Afterword” 209–10). Morrison began working on The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970, first as a story in 1962 and then as a novel in 1965, a time when there was public focus on the issue of racial beauty. bell hooks, remarking on how the 1960s Black Power movement “addressed the issue of internalized racism in relation to beauty,” observes that the “black is beautiful” slogan “worked to intervene and alter those racist stereotypes that had always insisted black was ugly, monstrous, undesirable” (173, 174). Morrison, who was in part responding to the 1960s black liberation movement in The Bluest Eye, recalls that the “reclamation of racial beauty” made her question why racial beauty was not “taken for granted” within the African American community, why it needed “wide public articulation to exist.” Coming to recognize the “damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze,” Morrison, in The Bluest Eye, set out to describe “how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female” (“Afterword” 210). In dramatizing “the devastation that even casual racial contempt can cause” (“Afterword” 210), Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explores the chronic shame of being poor and black in white America and reveals the damaging impact of the race and class hierarchy on the lives of the “poor and black” Breedloves, who have come to comprehend their designated position in the social order. Having internalized the contempt and loathing directed at them from the shaming gaze of the humiliator—that is, the white culture— the Breedloves believe that they are “relentlessly and aggressively ugly” (38). “It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a

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cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, ‘You are ugly people.’ They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. ‘Yes,’ they had said. ‘You are right’” (39). The Bluest Eye, in its focus on the self-hatred of the Breedloves, points to the pernicious effects of internalized racism. Accepting as part of their self-defi nition the shaming qualities whites ascribe to their blackness,2 the Breedloves see themselves as ugly people, and in what Morrison describes as the “woundability” of Pecola Breedlove (“Afterword” 210), The Bluest Eye dramatizes an extreme form of the shame-vulnerability and shame-anxiety suffered by African Americans in white America. Morrison also depicts the damaging effects of the color complex on Pecola, who is made to feel ugly by members of the black community because of her dark skin color, coarse hair, and black features. And like Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, The Bluest Eye not only is a complicated shame drama but also is a trauma narrative, for Pecola, as Morrison has aptly described her, is “a total and complete victim,” and she is a victim not only of racial shaming but also of her “crippled and crippling family” (Stepto 17; “Afterword” 210). In a relentless way, The Bluest Eye depicts the progressive traumatization of Pecola, who is rejected and physically abused by her mother, sexually abused by her alcoholic and unpredictably violent father, and scapegoated by members of the black community. Ultimately, as the closure of The Bluest Eye indicates, the “damage done” to Pecola is “total,” and she steps “over into madness” (204, 206). Her self damaged beyond repair, Pecola retreats from real life and ends up living permanently in the dissociated world of the severely traumatized individual. From the outset of The Bluest Eye, readers are aware that part of Morrison’s agenda, as she describes the victimization and shaming of Pecola, is to dialogically contest the idealized representation of American life and the white nuclear family found in the Dick-and-Jane primer story: Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. . . . She wants to play. Who will play with Jane? . . . See Mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with Jane? Mother laughs. . . . See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. . . . Here comes a friend. The friend will play with Jane. (3) Morrison explains that she uses the Dick-and-Jane primer story, with its depiction of a happy white family, “as a frame acknowledging the outer civilization,” and then she runs together the words of the primer

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story—“Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhite” (4)—because she wants “the primer version broken up and confused” (LeClair 127). Through this broken up and confused discourse—which is found in the opening frame narrative and, as the narrative progresses, is used to head the chapters focusing on Pecola and those who traumatize her—Morrison signals the increasingly fragmented world of the trauma victim. Morrison’s stark reversals of the idealized discourse of the Dick-and-Jane primer story also communicate to readers the intense, but highly controlled, feelings of anger that drive the narrative. Thus the chapters of the novel that are headed with the primer descriptions of Jane’s idealized green-and-white house and her happy family introduce readers to the decaying storefront dwelling where the ugly Breedloves live; the chapters that begin with primer accounts of the dog and cat tell pointed stories of animal abuse; the chapters headed with primer descriptions of the very nice mother and big and strong father who smiles at his daughter report on the mother’s physical and the father’s sexual abuse of Pecola; and the chapter headed with the primer passage mentioning Jane’s playful friend relates Pecola’s conversation with her only “friend,” her dissociated alter self. If in depicting the Breedlove family as a site of violence and in presenting Pecola as a victim of her abusive parents, The Bluest Eye invokes shaming racist and class stereotypes that construct the black lower-class family as uncivilized and pathological,3 the narrative also puts a human face on the “anonymous misery” (39) of the Breedloves by telling the life stories of Pecola’s parents and revealing that they, too, are victims, people who have been severely damaged by racism. And part of the novel’s explicit agenda is to assess the “why” and the “how” of Pecola’s plight. Although Claudia, in her opening narration, insists that she takes “refuge in how” (6), the narrative is driven by the desire to elucidate the “why” of the Breedloves’ story and to indict the cultural—and familial—forces that lead to the destruction of the vulnerable and shame-sensitive Pecola. While the story of Pecola—who suffers from profound shame-anxiety and body shame, feels unlovable and ugly, and thus acts out the defensive hiding and withdrawal behavior characteristic of shame-vulnerable individuals—is at the center of the text, The Bluest Eye, through the interconnected coming-of-age experiences of Pecola and Claudia, enacts a complicated shame drama. Not only does Pecola’s characteristic body language fit Donald Nathanson’s description of the “purest presentation of the affect shame-humiliation”—in which the eyes are averted and downcast, the head droops, and the shoulders slump (see Shame and Pride 134–36)—but Pecola so internalizes white contempt for her blackness that she comes to see her dark skin and African features as markers of a stigmatized racial identity and thus wishes to be invisible or desires to have blue eyes so that others will love and accept her. Unlike Pecola, who is the passive and utterly abjected and shamed victim, Claudia actively resists the shaming process as she gives

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expression to the anger experienced by the shamed individual, the desire to flail out that signals an attempt to rid the self of shame. Questioning why people look at little white girls and say “Awwwww” but do not look at her that way, Claudia becomes angry when she observes the “eye slide” of black women as they approach white girls on the street, and the “possessive gentleness of their touch” when they handle them (22–23). Whereas Pecola dreams of having blue eyes, Claudia responds with rage when she is given a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned baby doll as a “special” gift. “I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to fi nd the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me” (20). According to the official culture— the world of adults, shops, magazines, and window signs—girls treasure such dolls, but Claudia defiantly pokes at the doll’s glass eyes, breaks off its fi ngers, and removes its head.4 “I destroyed white baby dolls,” she recalls. “But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others” (22). Claudia’s reactive rage is evident in her response not only to interracial but also to intraracial shaming. When the white Rosemary Villanucci rebuffs Claudia and her sister, Frieda, Claudia wants to “poke the arrogance” out of Rosemary’s eyes and “make red marks on her white skin” (9). Claudia feels the “familiar violence” rise in her when she witnesses the little white girl, who lives in the house where Pauline Breedlove works as a housekeeper, call Mrs. Breedlove “Polly,” even though Pecola herself calls her mother “Mrs. Breedlove” (108). And Claudia’s angry reaction to Maureen Peal reveals the force of intraracial shaming and the color complex within the African American community. A “high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back” (62), Maureen Peal enchants everyone at the school: the teachers smile at her when they call on her in class; black boys do not trip her in the hallways, and white boys do not stone her; white girls readily accept her as their work partner, and black girls move aside when she wants to use the sink in the girls’ washroom. Claudia and Frieda, in an attempt to recover their equilibrium, search for flaws in the much-admired Maureen. They secretly refer to her as “Meringue Pie”; they are pleased when they discover that she has a dog tooth; and they smile when they learn that she was born with six fi ngers on each hand and had this flaw surgically corrected. When Claudia, who is assigned a locker next to Maureen, thinks of the “unearned haughtiness” in Maureen’s eyes, she plots “accidental slammings of locker doors” on Maureen’s hand (63). Despite her jealousy, Claudia is “secretly prepared” to be Maureen’s friend, and over time is even capable of holding a “sensible conversation” with Maureen without

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visualizing Maureen falling off a cliff or without “giggling” her way into what she thinks is “a clever insult” (63–64). Ultimately, Maureen pronounces judgment on Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda by insisting that she is “cute” and that the three girls are “black and ugly.” While Claudia and Frieda are temporarily “stunned” by the “weight” of Maureen’s shaming remark, they recover themselves enough to reactively and publicly shame Maureen by shouting out the “most powerful” chant in their “arsenal of insults”—“Six-fi nger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie!” Pecola, in contrast, enacts the classic withdrawing and concealing behavior of the humiliated individual as she folds into herself “like a pleated wing” (73). Pecola’s visible pain and bodily shame at the public exposure of her inner sense of defectiveness antagonizes Claudia, who would like to see Pecola assume a defiant antishame posture. “I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes” (73–74). Yet Claudia also identifies, in part, with Pecola’s shame as she sinks under “the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance” of Maureen’s taunt. If Maureen is cute, Claudia recognizes, then she is somehow “lesser” and unworthy. Claudia can destroy white dolls, but she is unable to destroy “the honey voices of parents and aunts,” or the “obedience” found in the eyes of her contemporaries, or the “slippery light” in the eyes of teachers when they encounter “the Maureen Peals of the world.” Despite this, Claudia also recognizes that Maureen Peal is “not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred.” Instead, the “Thing to fear” is what makes Maureen beautiful while denying beauty to Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola (74). The “Thing” Claudia learns to fear is the white, racist standard of beauty that members of the African American community have internalized, a standard that favors the “high-yellow” Maureen Peal and denigrates the “black and ugly” Pecola Breedlove. Yet over time Claudia, too, partially internalizes this white standard and succumbs to the colorist attitudes of her community. The same Claudia who once dismembered white dolls and wanted to axe little white girls becomes ashamed of her own rage: her desire to hurt little white girls and hear their “fascinating cry of pain.” When she comes to view her “disinterested violence” as “repulsive”—and she fi nds it repulsive because it is disinterested—her “shame” flounders about “for refuge” and fi nds a “hiding place” in love. “Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love,” remarks Claudia (23). Although Claudia later learns to “worship” Shirley Temple—a popular figure she once responded to with “unsullied hatred”—this change is “adjustment without improvement” (23, 19, 23). Indeed, as The Bluest Eye reveals, because the standard of beauty—that is, the idealized version of the black self—is based on whiteness, the Pecolas and Claudias of the world cannot help but feel deep shame about the body and self. For shame is “a reflection of feelings

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about the whole self in failure, as inferior in competition or in comparison with others, as inadequate and defective” (A. Morrison, Shame 12). The Bluest Eye, as it highlights the politics of beauty standards and the construction of African American female identities, shows how dark skin functions as a marker of body shame, a sign of a stigmatized and abjected racial identity. If the ultimate “Enemy” that shames and traumatizes African Americans is the racist white society, more immediate and intimate enemies are found within the African American family, Morrison insists, as she investigates the familial sources of Pecola’s profound and crippling shame. When, as a young married woman, Pecola’s mother, Pauline, goes to the movies and absorbs “in full”—that is, internalizes—the white beauty standards conveyed in Hollywood films, she is “never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty” (122). Pauline identifies with white movie stars—she even affects a Jean Harlow hairstyle—but then, when she loses a front tooth, she resigns herself “to just being ugly” (123). And the fact that Pauline describes her newborn baby daughter as ugly—“Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly”—suggests that from the outset Pauline projects her own sense of bodily ugliness and unworthiness onto Pecola (126). While Pauline, in her role as a housekeeper for a white family, the Fishers, dotes on the little white Fisher girl, she neglects and physically abuses Pecola, transferring to her daughter her deep-rooted body shame and contempt for her own abjected blackness. Trying to make her daughter respectable, Pauline teaches Pecola “fear” of being a clumsy person, of being like her father, of being unloved by God—that is, “fear” of being inadequate and defective. And she beats into Pecola “a fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life” (128). Like Pauline, Cholly Breedlove transfers his own chronic shame—his own feelings of humiliation and defeat—to his daughter. Not only is Cholly “abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, [and] rejected for a crap game by his father,” but he also is subjected to racist insults, which are “part of the nuisances of life” (160, 153). As an adolescent, Cholly is deeply traumatized and shamed at the disgraceful exposure of himself as weak and contemptible when he is forced to perform sexually for two white hunters, who encounter Cholly and a young country girl having sex. As an adult even a “half-remembrance” of the episode with the white hunters, “along with myriad other humiliations, defeats, and emasculations, could stir him into flights of depravity that surprised himself—but only himself” (42–43). Cholly, who has the “meanest eyes in town,” lives in a chronic state of humiliated fury, and he vents his anger on “petty things and weak people,” including members of his own family (40, 38). Pouring out “the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires” on his wife, Cholly, by hating his wife, can “leave himself intact” (42). Trapped in an abusive relationship, Cholly and Pauline beat each other “with a darkly brutal formalism” in sight of Pecola, who

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struggles between “an overwhelming desire that one would kill the other, and a profound wish that she herself could die” (43). “Tacitly they had agreed not to kill each other. . . . There was only the muted sound of falling things, and flesh on unsurprised flesh” (43). What Pecola learns from her parents—that like them she is ugly—is confi rmed by the hostile gaze and insulting speech of others. Pecola’s ugliness makes her “ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike,” and when a girl wants to especially insult a boy, she simply accuses him of “loving” Pecola, a taunt that provokes “peals of laughter from those in earshot” (45, 46). To Geraldine, who teaches her son “the difference between colored people and niggers”—colored people like her are “neat and quiet” while niggers are “dirty and loud” (87)—Pecola is an object of disgust and contempt. In the deliberately staged encounter between Pecola and Geraldine, The Bluest Eye focuses attention on class distinctions and the connection between colorism and racial shame within the African American community. Identified by the narrator as one of the “thin brown girls” (81), the light-skinned, middle-class Geraldine has internalized white standards of beauty and behavior. To a “clean and quiet” brown girl such as Geraldine—a “colored” person of “order, precision, and constancy” (85) who adheres to the cultural norms of self-discipline and self-improvement—lower-class blacks are dirty and disorderly “niggers.” Even though “niggers” are easy to identify, “the line between colored and nigger was not always clear; subtle and telltale signs threatened to erode it, and the watch had to be constant” (87). Defensively positioning herself as racially superior to lower-class blacks, Geraldine shuns Pecola, viewing her dark skin as a sign of her stigmatized, abjected racial identity. The narrative, as it directs attention to the class and color differences among black people, describes Geraldine’s prejudice against Pecola, observing the underclass Pecola through Geraldine’s middle-class—and shaming—colorist gaze. When Geraldine looks at Pecola—who has a torn and soiled dress with a safety pin holding up the hem, muddy shoes and dirty socks, and matted hair where the plaits sticking out on her head have come undone—she feels that she has “seen this little girl all of her life” (91). Geraldine feels revulsion toward poor blacks, whom she sees as the dirty and abject Other. To Geraldine, children such as Pecola “were everywhere. They slept six in a bed, all their pee mixing together in the night as they wet their beds. . . . Tin cans and tires blossomed where they lived. They lived on cold black-eyed peas and orange pop. Like flies they hovered; like flies they settled” (92). That the “affective roots” of prejudice, as Donald Nathanson remarks, involve “dissmell and disgust” (Shame 133) is apparent in Geraldine’s response to Pecola. Linked to the “phenomenology of interpersonal rejection,” dissmell is a primitive mechanism by which individuals keep at a distance those people that they perceive as bad-smelling and dirty or that they defi ne as “too

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awful or too foul to get near” (Shame 124; see also 121–33). To be a member of a group perceived as disgusting or dissmelling is to be treated with contempt, a form of anger that declares the other person “worthy only of rejection” and that functions to “instill in the other person a sense of self-dissmell or self-disgust and therefore shame at self-unworthiness” (Shame 129). When Geraldine contemptuously pronounces Pecola a “nasty little black bitch” (92), her shaming words reinforce Pecola’s fear of exposure and rejection and intensify her body shame and abjection—her feeling that she is the ugly, dirty, and defective racial Other. Similarly, in the vacant gaze of the white store owner, Mr. Yacobowski, Pecola senses racial contempt. “He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see.” In his “total absence of human recognition—the glazed separateness”—Pecola senses his distaste (48). “The distaste must be for her, her blackness. . . . It is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes” (49). After Pecola purchases three Mary Jane candies from Mr. Yacobowski, she attempts to soothe herself. Outside his store, she feels her “inexplicable shame ebb” and takes temporary refuge in anger. “Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.” But when she recalls Mr. Yacobowski’s eyes, her shame “wells up again.” Attempting to overcome her inner feelings of defectiveness and body shame, she imagines that to eat the Mary Jane candy is to “eat the eyes” of, indeed is to “eat” and to “be,” Mary Jane: the blond-haired, blue-eyed white girl pictured on the candy wrapper (50). To incorporate and thus “be”—that is, merge with—the idealized Mary Jane is to be an object of admiration, not contempt, and to turn the shaming or ostracizing gaze of others into a look of approval and acceptance. In a pivotal episode, which purposefully and with didactic intent brings together the “ugly” black Pecola and a group of black boys, Morrison underscores the role of internalized racism and intraracial shaming in the construction of a stigmatized and abjected racial identity. When Claudia, her sister Frieda, and Maureen Peal notice some commotion in the schoolyard playground and stop to investigate, they discover that a group of black boys is circling Pecola, holding her at bay. “Thrilled by the easy power of a majority,” the boys “gaily” harass Pecola with an extemporaneous, insulting verse: “Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked.” What gives the fi rst insult “its teeth” is their “contempt for their own blackness.” Repeating what has been done to them and attempting to rid themselves of their own deeply rooted sense of racial shame and self-loathing, they humiliate Pecola. Their “exquisitely learned self-hatred” and “elaborately designed hopelessness” become expressed in their angry, insulting speech, and they dance a “macabre ballet” around Pecola, “whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit” of their scorn (65). In taunting Pecola, as the

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narrative makes clear, the boys express their deep-rooted body shame and contempt for their own abjected black identity. In the plight of Pecola Breedlove, The Bluest Eye dramatizes what Léon Wurmser describes as the “theme” of unlovability—“the triad of weakness, defectiveness, and dirtiness” that occurs in the classic shame situation (Mask 98). Feeling unloved by her parents and ugly in the gaze of others, Pecola defends herself by withdrawing. “Concealed, veiled, eclipsed,” she hides behind her “mantle” of ugliness, “peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask” (39). The “goal of hiding as part of the shame affect,” as Wurmser explains, is “to prevent further exposure and, with that, further rejection, but it also atones for the exposure that has already occurred” (Mask 54). That Pecola, who is terrified by her parents’ physical violence, wants to disappear is also suggestive. “If it is appearance (exposure) that is central in shame, disappearance is the logical outcome of shame . . . ,” writes Wurmser (Mask 81). Indeed, “Shame’s aim is disappearance. This may be, most simply, in the form of hiding; . . . most archaically in the form of freezing into complete paralysis and stupor; most frequently, in the form of forgetting parts of one’s life and one’s self; and at its most differentiated, in the form of changing one’s character” (Mask 84). Pecola’s attempt to cure her body shame by disappearing also marks the beginning of her experiences of depersonalization: that is, her “estrangement from world and self,” which Wurmser describes as symptomatic of shame anxiety (Mask 53). Pecola “squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away. . . . Her fi ngers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes, that was good. The legs all at once. It was hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull. . . . The face was hard, too. Almost done, almost. Only her tight, tight eyes were left” (45). Pecola, who is unable to make her eyes disappear, spends hours looking at herself in the mirror, attempting to discover “the secret” of her ugliness (45). And she prays for a miracle—she prays for blue eyes—because she believes that if God grants her blue eyes, she will no longer be ugly, and thus her parents might not “do bad things” in front of her “pretty” blue eyes (46). Because “love and power are vested in the gaze,” writes Wurmser, to “seek forever with the eye and not to find leads to shame.” Pecola’s wish for blue eyes recalls Wurmser’s description of the “magic eye,” the use of eye power and looking in an attempt to attract the “beckoning, admiring” gaze of the absent mother and thus undo, “by magic expression, the wound of basic unlovability” (Mask 94). Feeling utterly flawed and dirty, Pecola rejects her stigmatized, abjected African American identity and tries to overcome her body shame when she imagines that she can cure her ugliness—that is, her shame and basic unlovability—only if she is magically granted the same blue eyes that little white girls have.

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In the story of Pecola, The Bluest Eye depicts not only the wounds caused by inter- and intraracial shaming but also the horrors of father-daughter incest. When Cholly sees Pecola—who assumes the permanent posture of the shamed, traumatized individual with her “hunched” back and her head turned to one side “as though crouching from a permanent and unrelieved blow”—he wonders why she looks “so whipped” and why she is not happy. Feeling accused by the “clear statement of her misery,” he wants “to break her neck—but tenderly.” “What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter? If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him— the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? . . . What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How?” (161). Cholly initially responds to the misery of his shamed daughter with anger, and he also sees her as an object of contempt and disgust: “His hatred of her slimed in his stomach and threatened to become vomit.” But then, when Pecola scratches the back of her calf with her toe—which is what Pauline did the first time Cholly saw her many years before—the “timid, tucked-in look” of her scratching toe reminds him of the tenderness he once felt toward his wife (162). Despite the “rigidness of her shocked body, the silence of her stunned throat,” he wants “to fuck her—tenderly,” and yet the tenderness does “not hold” (162–63). “His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made—a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus balloon.” Afterward, Cholly again feels “hatred mixed with tenderness” as he looks at the unconscious body of his daughter lying on the kitchen floor (163). Raped by her father and then severely beaten by her mother, Pecola seeks help from Soaphead Church, a child molester who advertises himself as a spiritualist and psychic reader. When Pecola asks Soaphead Church for blue eyes, he finds her request “the most fantastic and the most logical petition” he has ever received, and he wants the power to help the abjected “ugly little girl asking for beauty” and desiring to “rise up out of the pit of her blackness” (174). In his letter to God, Soaphead insists that he has worked a miracle and given Pecola cobalt blue eyes. “No one else will see her blue eyes. But she will,” remarks Soaphead (182). And, indeed, Pecola ends up living permanently in the dissociated world of madness where she talks to her alter identity—her “friend”—about her magical blue eyes. The traumatically shamed Pecola believes that others are fascinated with, and envious of, her blue eyes. But she is, in fact, the object of gaze avoidance by her mother, who looks “drop-eyed” at her daughter. As Pecola remarks to her alter “friend,” “Ever since I got my blue eyes, she look away from me all of the time. Do you suppose she’s jealous too?” Similarly, members of the community look away from the shamed outcast, Pecola, socially ostracizing her with their gaze

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avoidance. “Everybody’s jealous. Every time I look at somebody, they look off” (195). Only in her mad world is Pecola someone special, a black girl with the blue eyes of a white girl. While Claudia and her sister, Frieda, are initially Pecola’s allies despite their “defensive shame”—for they feel “embarrassed for Pecola, hurt for her, and finally . . . sorry for her”—other members of the community make Pecola the target of shaming gossip and are “disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited” by Pecola’s story (190). Expressing their contempt, they remark that Pecola’s baby is “bound to be the ugliest thing walking” and that it would be “better off in the ground” (189–90). But when Claudia thinks about the baby that everyone wants dead, she feels “a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals” (190). Intent on changing the course of events—and, in effect, breaking the cycle of racial self-loathing expressed in the communal response to the pregnant Pecola—Claudia buries the bicycle money she earned from selling seeds and plants the marigold seeds, hoping that God will be impressed enough with her sacrifice so that he will produce a miracle and save Pecola’s baby. But the baby, who is born premature, dies, and the permanently damaged Pecola is socially ostracized. “She was so sad to see. Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.” And Claudia, whose marigolds never grow, ends up avoiding Pecola, who spends her days “walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear” and who, with her bent elbows and her hands on her shoulders, flails her arms “like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly” (204). The utterly abjected Pecola, who absorbs the “waste” others dump on her, ultimately becomes the community scapegoat as members of the black community project onto her their own self-contempt and body shame—their own stain of blackness. “All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. . . . And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength” (205). Morrison’s “impetus” for writing The Bluest Eye, as she recalls, “was to write a book about a kind of person that was never in literature anywhere, never taken seriously by anybody—all those peripheral little girls” (Neustadt 88). As she tells the story of the tragic coming of age of the lower-class and dark-skinned Pecola in The Bluest Eye, Morrison explores the devastation caused by black self-contempt—the sense of the body-self as racially stained and defective, as “dirty” and “nasty” and “ugly” to use descriptions that recur in the text—and she also sets out to examine the dirty business of intraracial and class prejudice. Bent, in part, on opening a conversation on the taboo topic of colorism, Morrison brings to light sensitive race matters in

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The Bluest Eye as she seeks, in her role as cultural historian, to provoke awareness of the racial wounds infl icted not only by the dominant white culture but also by the colorist attitudes deeply ingrained in the African American community, attitudes that, as Marita Golden shows, continue to do profound harm to young dark-skinned girls.

Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun Part personal confession and part polemic, Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey through the Color Complex gives testimony to the continuing power of the color complex in the lives of African American girls and women as Golden both tells her own story and incorporates into her quiltlike account the voices of other girls and women, creating, in the process, a kind of “psychological quilt” containing “coded messages hidden inside every stitch” (125). Golden, who says she has been writing Don’t Play in the Sun all her life, openly expresses her anguish in her account even as she speaks of what has long been an unspeakable and taboo topic in the African American community. “I sit before the computer screen and feel the pages of this book wrung out of my flesh, ripped from the bowels of my most secret, secret place,” she remarks at one point, admitting her extreme sensitivity to the “color thing” (116). Aware that over the years she has “warred silently, and with enormous guilt and shame, with the colorist legacy” bequeathed to her by her mother when she was a girl, Golden sets out to write herself “into being visible” to a world that has turned her, and other dark-skinned girls and women like her, into a “phantom” (188, 184). Golden, who grew up in a nurturing family in a black middle-class neighborhood in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, recalls how wounded she was when her mother told her not to play in the sun. “I was eight years old the day my mother warned me not to play in the sun and I already knew that I was invisible. I had not read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Toni Morrison had not yet written The Bluest Eye. But already I had tasted the essence of racial and colorist tragedy” (8). Both “edict and verdict,” her mother’s words, which reverberate in the text like the repetition of a trauma, are a painful and shameful legacy handed down to Golden by her colorist mother: “I’ve told you don’t play in the sun. You’re going to have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children as it is” (6, 4). Years later Golden can still recall the shame she felt when her mother said those words and communicated that “blackness . . . was a kind of disease whose progress . . . she felt she had to try to halt” in her daughter (10). Aware of “how few open arms stood ready to embrace little brown-skinned girls with nappy hair and Negroid facial features” and unable to “challenge the beliefs about beauty and self-worth that she had inherited and that had shaped her attitudes,” Golden’s mother

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attempted to warn her daughter of the “pitfalls and traps” of the color complex (10–11). If years later Golden comes to recognize that her mother meant to protect her through her warning, at the time she found her mother’s words “harsh” and “brutal” (11). Offering a series of scenes of shame from the color complex, Golden provides evidence of the deep wounds she suffered as a dark-skinned girl who came of age in a colorist world. She recalls how, when she was ten, she looked at herself in a mirror with her head draped in silk scarves, imagining herself to be Snow White or Cinderella. Using the scarves to cover her “short, has-to-be-straightened-with-a-hot-comb hair,” she imagined that she had shoulder-length and even blond hair framing her “chubby brown face,” making her “real” (4). When in the fifth grade, her square dance partner, Gregory, a white boy, expressed contempt for her dark skin, she felt a profound sense of racial—and body—shame. His lips “curled in disgust” at the sight of Golden, he erased her with his eyes. Jumping back and wiping his hand after he touched her fi ngers during the dance, as though his hand would “never be clean again,” he walked back to his desk and sat down, leaving the partnerless Golden “exposed” as what she saw herself to be in his white eyes—“a black and ugly and dirty thing” (5). If Gregory made Golden feel black and ugly, in junior high school, Russell, who had light “pretty brown” skin and “good” curly hair, made her feel “invisible” by his gaze aversion as his glance slid “quickly” over her face (5–6). Raised by parents who were “schizophrenic” in their attitudes about color, for while her mother communicated colorist attitudes, her father exuded black pride, Golden describes how, in the “war” between her parents for her “racial soul,” her mother “won the battle” during much of her childhood. “By the time I was nine or so I had internalized a kind of permanent ache, a persistent closing off and sometimes shutting down of my emotions on the issue of color. I knew by then that many people in my own community and most people in the White community did not consider me pretty, or valuable, or significant, solely because I had brown skin and coarse hair and clearly Black features” (22). In her mother’s colorist world “light was right,” whereas girls who looked like Golden were told, “If you’re black, get back” (24, 7). Often plagued by a “profound sense of smallness and unease” as a girl, Golden did “step back” because she was black (24, 25). “I stepped back in my dreams at night to make way for the light-skinned girls. I stepped back in my fantasies, imagining the amazing and the unpredictable but fearing always that maybe only half of the fantasy would come true for me” (25). Yet somewhere inside Golden, “beside the girl who stepped back, just in front of or maybe behind her shadow,” another version of her “managed to root and grow and blossom” as she determined that if she had to be “brown, and therefore unloved by the world,” then she would be “the smartest, the baddest-at-whatever-I-chose-to-do brown girl the world had ever seen” (25,

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26). Yet this, too, came with a cost to Golden’s self-esteem. “Only now, having broken the seal on the box in my mind where I stored a lifetime’s worth of colorist wounds, can I ask myself if my brown skin destined me to be a Sapphire . . . ,” Golden remarks as she recalls growing up at a time when the “brown-skinned, big-mouthed” Sapphire was the “reigning and most frequent symbol of the brown to black African American woman on TV” (77). Was there a part of her, she wonders, that felt that if she did not end up a Sapphire then she would become a Beulah, the “fat, dowdy maid who kept order, restored calm, solved problems, and cooked and cleaned each week in the home of the White family she worked for?” Brown-skinned like Sapphire and Beulah, her color seemed to “doom” her “to be either a nurturer or a nag” (78). A “living, breathing example of how a social and cultural movement could actually change a person’s life,” Golden became comfortable in her skin for the fi rst time when she was a freshman in college in the late 1960s and came under the sway of the black consciousness movement, which allowed her to free herself from the “prison” of her “mother’s judgment” that her dark color was a “crisis,” a “tragedy,” and “something to overcome” (36, 12). Gazing at her face in the mirror and loving what she saw for the fi rst time, Golden wept for the “perfect rightness” of her face and for the years she had looked at her face and decided not to “look too hard” or “too deeply” (11). Freed from her belief that her hair in its natural state “was wrong, an abomination, a transgression against natural law,” Golden felt that her Afro sat on her head “like a crown” (33). Burying the ashamed, abjected little girl inside her—the little girl who had, Pecola-like, “always stood hunched or folded in on herself”—Golden invited the other little girl inside her to “step forth and stand up straight, to stand up tall” where others could see her. “She was a badd little sister, and I reached out and held her hand and I decided I would never let it go” (39). And yet the young activists of her generation remained “hostage” to the “self-hatred rooted in colorism” (39, 38). “The Black community was a huge dysfunctional family made up of thousands of dysfunctional families, most of whom were in deep denial about the persistence of the color complex even in the age of ‘Black Is Beautiful.’ Oh, if just saying it had made it so. And so in the sixties we rattled the bars on the cage. We saw the keys to the door. But we were content to remain inside” (39). “Writing about the color complex means thinking about the color complex, and the process becomes akin to breaking through a dense, evil encryption that masks, hides, denies, and silences the truth about what we have inflicted on ourselves” (53). As Golden “surrender[s] to memory” and seeks out other people who are “brave enough to witness, question, and remember,” she reveals not only the deep wounds other brown to black girls have suffered but also the pervasiveness of the color complex, which continues to

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spread “like a stain” in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary post–Civil Rights and post–Black Power era (53, 69). If when Golden grew up in the 1950s in Washington, D.C., one of the “most color-conscious cities in America,” light-skinned parents told their sons and daughters “not to ‘bring home any dark meat’” (42, 43), years later when she was in graduate school, her dark-skinned roommate was told by a light-skinned male friend that she was too dark-skinned for him to ever take home to meet his family. When some twenty years after the graduate school incident, Golden’s sixteen-year-old son told her that his male friends used the word black as a curse to “humiliate or tease” dark-skinned girls who were disliked because they had “too much ‘attitude,’” an outraged Golden was aware that her son’s friends were “honoring a generations-old tradition of intraracial humiliation and degradation of the darkest among us” (57, 58). Unable to get the loaded word attitude out of her mind years later as she writes Don’t Play in the Sun, Golden is aware that as a middle-aged mother of an adult son, a university professor, and an author of novels and works of nonfiction, she still feels that she must “work harder to be seen, heard, valued, accepted” than she would if she were lighter-skinned (59). “I plead guilty to the charge. I do have attitude,” Golden states. “Without it I would not have survived the scorn of my Black brothers and sisters or the racism of Whites.” But behind such expressions of attitude is a “terrible secret” carried by darker-skinned black women—that their men do not value them because of their dark color (59). As Golden considers whether dark-skinned women, who are portrayed in film and television as “loud, angry, impatient, sometime nearly crazed,” end up acting out stereotypical behavior by becoming the “Sapphires” of the past and the “Sheniquas” of the present, she reveals the power of shame—and the anger that is used to defend against shame—in the lives of women with attitude (59, 61). Coming to both dread and love her own “brown-skinned-woman anger,” Golden realizes that although her anger is part of her colorist legacy, it also has fueled her writing and, indeed, driven her to write Don’t Play in the Sun (118). Aware that black girls “still look in the mirror and want to be White” and not their “brown to black, darker-skinned selves” (143), Golden, in her “Letter to a Young Black Girl I Know,” writes a letter she never imagined it would be necessary to write when she was a nineteen-year-old activist: Back then I believed that black is beautiful. I believe it now. We have traveled nearly by warp speed into the present, and yet I feel that we are standing still on nearly the same spot where we once were rooted. I am writing you this letter to tell you a very simple and yet elemental thing that you as a young dark-hued Black girl must know and always cherish. You are black. And you are beautiful. (190)5

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Giving testimony to the impact of learned cultural shame in the lives of African American girls, Golden, like Morrison, exposes the deep and abiding wounds inflicted not only by the dominant white culture but also by the ingrained colorist attitudes that pervade the African American community. As Morrison and Golden expose community secrets and examine the dirty business of intraracial prejudice, they are bent not only on provoking a conversation but also on helping to begin the process of healing the shame that binds young African American girls. In a similar way, as we shall see in the next chapter, Edwidge Danticat, in her coming-of-age novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, exposes family and community secrets even as she seeks to heal shame in her story of a Haitian American mother who, in an attempt to preserve family honor, transmits to her daughter a deep sense of body shame.

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CHAPTER 5

Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory

n her painful coming-of-age novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat depicts a troubled motherdaughter relationship in telling the story of Sophie Caco. The product of her mother’s brutal rape in Haiti, Sophie, who comes to New York from Haiti at age twelve to live with her mother, Martine, is forced as an eighteen-year-old to undergo a series of virginity tests at the hands of her mother. In a reenactment of the sexual trauma she has undergone, Martine, in effect, “rapes” her daughter by subjecting her to the tests, and thus, even as she attempts to preserve her daughter’s honor, Martine sexually abuses her daughter and transmits to Sophie her own deep-seated sexual fears and sense of shame and disgust at her sexually abjected and dirtied body. While Danticat has repeatedly explained that the virginity testing she describes in the novel in the matriarchal Caco family is not necessarily representative and should not be read as a typical Haitian family practice (Random), she is, nevertheless, exposing to public view a rural Haitian practice that Haitian Americans find shaming, and, indeed, Danticat is reported to have received hate mail from Haitian Americans after publishing the novel because she had outed the practice of virginity testing (Charters 42). Recalling the reaction of some of her fellow Haitian Americans to the novel’s depiction of Sophie’s testing, Danticat remarks that some people in her community felt that she was “betraying them” or was “ratting” on the community or was “not being a good compatriot in some way” (Wachtel 115). Dealing with extremely sensitive issues, Breath, Eyes, Memory discloses shameful family and community secrets in describing an oppressive and sexually abusive cultural practice handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter in the Caco family, as the Caco mothers, acting as the enforcers of patriarchal culture, seek to ensure that their daughters are virgins and thus are marriageable property. And in outing a repressive and abusive custom perpetuated in the postfeminist and sexually liberated world of the United States, Danticat also points to the potentially shameful plight of other immigrant girls who, like Sophie,

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come from patriarchal societies obsessed with preserving female chastity in the name of family honor.1 Danticat, who left Haiti when she was twelve and came to live with her family in New York, began to write Breath, Eyes, Memory when she was eighteen and was asked to write an essay for a teen newspaper on her experiences as an immigrant and then, when she was in college, she began to “expand and broaden” and “invent” parts of the story as she transformed her memoir into fiction (Lyons 185). Describing the book as “emotionally autobiographical”— as a “collage of fictional and real-life events and people”—Danticat states that what is “most true” in the novel are the “feelings” she describes as she focuses on her character’s “separation from” and “reunion” with her mother and her arrival in a “completely new” place (Random; Lyons 196). “I’m a weaver of tales. I tell stories,” Danticat insists, explaining that in her writing she wants “to understand and express artistically what it’s like to be a Haitian immigrant in the United States” (Random). Capturing in Breath, Eyes, Memory what she has described as the “vibrant storytelling culture” that existed in the Haitian countryside when she was growing up (Smith 195), Danticat sets out to record and celebrate the rich folkloric traditions and communal values of the rural Haiti of her childhood. But Danticat, who grew up during the brutal regime of Baby Doc Duvalier, 2 also provides brief but disturbing glimpses of the violence of Haitian life in the 1970s, most prominently in the account of Martine’s rape by a Tonton Macoute, a member of Duvalier’s personal police force. Because the “rite of passage” of Sophie’s mother, as Danticat states, is a “violent act, which was true for a lot of women who lived in the dictatorship” (Wachtel 114), Sophie is placed under a special burden. As the child resulting from the rape, Sophie becomes not only the carrier but also the visible reminder and physical embodiment of her mother’s deep-rooted and debilitating fear of sexual violence and sense of bodily shame and abjection. “Part of the reason that Breath, Eyes, Memory is told in . . . four fragments is that Sophie, the narrator, is a recent speaker of English, and in telling a story in English she would defi nitely try to be economical with her words,” Danticat remarks, recalling how she spoke French and Haitian Creole when she was growing up in Haiti and learned to speak English when she came to the United States (Random). But while Sophie’s fragmented and elliptical narrative does “mostly get to the important events” (Random), it also leaves the reader questioning the reason for her emotional detachment from what she is describing. In her economical way but often only long after the fact, Sophie reports on the painful events of her young life, so that readers are presented first with Sophie’s and Martine’s symptomatic behavior and only belatedly are told of the originating traumas that have caused their suffering. Explaining that when the migrant comes to a new country, she comes “with fragments”—as she takes from her native Haiti her own stories and

Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship 73 memories—Danticat says that Sophie’s task is to put all the “different fragments together to create a face for herself, just to imagine what her father would look like and taking what’s already there of her mother. So everything is a puzzle” (Wachtel 114). In a similar way, the reader’s task is to piece together fragments—to engage in the process of narrative reconstruction— in order to understand the puzzle of Sophie’s traumatized identity and of Martine’s traumatized identity within Sophie. Reading like a classic trauma narrative, Breath, Eyes, Memory, in the fragmented way characteristic of trauma narratives, circles around and around the central scenes of trauma that it both exposes and halfway conceals through its matter-of-fact reportorial style, which serves to partly deny the lethality of what is being described: Martine’s rape at the hands of a Tonton Macoute and her reenactment of her sexual trauma when she sexually violates her daughter by subjecting her to the traumatizing and shaming practice of virginity testing. But even as Breath, Eyes, Memory reveals how “the isolating and debilitating effects of trauma preclude change and resistance” in telling Martine’s story, it also expresses hope in telling the story of Sophie, who comes to challenge “the tyranny of the past and destructive traditions” (Vickroy 64). From the outset, readers become aware of Sophie’s—and the text’s— divided perceptions of the Caco women, who are strong and loving women but also shamed lower-class people in Haiti. Raised by her aunt, Tante Atie, for the first twelve years of her life in a rural Haitian village, Croix-des-Rosets, Sophie, as the novel begins, has been sent for by her thirty-one-year-old mother, Martine, who lives in New York. “We are a family with dirt under our fingernails,” Atie tells Sophie, describing the Caco women as “daughters of the hills, old peasant stock, pitit soyèt, ragamuffins.” As the mother-abandoned Sophie prepares to leave Haiti, Atie tells her that she must not fight her mother. “In this country, there are many good reasons for mothers to abandon their children. . . . But you were never abandoned. You were with me. Your mother and I, when we were children we had no control over anything. Not even this body,” she remarks, indirectly referring to the reason Martine left Haiti (20). In yet another oblique reference to the rape and an anticipation of what will happen to Sophie, who comes to share her mother’s experience through the process of vicarious traumatization, Atie tellingly remarks, “It would be a shame if the two of you got into battles because you share a lot more than you know” (21). While Sophie is unaware of the fact that she is the product of her mother’s rape, she does already “share” some of her mother’s fears, for like her mother, she suffers from nightmares, but while her mother is plagued by nightmares of her faceless rapist, Sophie, even before meeting her mother, has monitory nightmares in which her mother is a feared, persecutory object. Only knowing her mother from the photograph on Atie’s nightstand, Sophie dreams that her mother wants to squeeze her into the small picture frame

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so that she will be in the picture with her, a warning of what will happen to Sophie when her mother determines to control her sexuality and, in the process, “squeezes” her own fears into her daughter. In a related nightmare that anticipates Martine’s abusive, and rapelike, testing of her daughter, Sophie dreams that her mother uses her two hooklike arms to catch her by the hem of her dress and wrestle her to the floor. When Sophie’s Grandmè Ifé, like Tantie Atie, tells her granddaughter that a girl’s mother is her “first friend,” Sophie is not comforted but instead lies in bed “waiting for the nightmare” in which her mother will “finally get” to take her away (24). Because Martine and Atie once “dreamt of becoming important women” only to fi nd out they “had limits,” as Martine tells her daughter when the two are reunited in New York, Sophie becomes the inheritor of the Caco women’s dream (43). Her assigned task is to turn Caco family shame into pride: “You have a chance to become the kind of woman Atie and I have always wanted to be. If you make something of yourself in life, we will all succeed. You can raise our heads” (44). A fragile, exhausted woman who has a “scrawny body,” a “long and hollow” face, and dark circles under her eyes, Martine is a physical embodiment of the shamed and vulnerable woman (41, 42). Treating her twelve-year-old daughter like the little girl she left behind, she tries to lift Sophie to place her in the front seat of her car only to stumble under her daughter’s weight, and when she asks Sophie to sit on her lap, Sophie is afraid that Martine’s thin legs will snap under her weight. Appearing with the caramel-colored doll she has kept and mothered in her daughter’s absence, Martine asks Sophie to share her room with the doll and even tries to undress her daughter as if she were a doll—an inanimate object completely under her control. Seemingly fi xed in time, Martine infantilizes her daughter. Yet she also seems oddly detached from her daughter who, as Sophie suddenly realizes, does not resemble any of the Caco women, for, indeed, Sophie is a living reminder to Martine of her unknown rapist. When Sophie awakens her screaming, thrashing mother from a violent nightmare the first night she spends with her, Martine, when she sees Sophie’s face—that is, the face of her rapist—covers her face with her hands and turns away. As Sophie begins to carry some of her mother’s fears, in effect becoming a prisoner of her mother’s past, she becomes a mirror image of her haunted mother. The next morning, Sophie looks at herself in the mirror and sees “new eyes” and a “new face” looking back at her as if she has “aged in one day” (49). Martine, as readers slowly learn as they piece together her trauma narrative, which is told incrementally in the novel, fled Haiti and came to the United States to escape the living horror of her daily life after the rape. Just as Sophie, during her years in Haiti, knew her mother as a voice heard on a cassette tape, so when Martine begins telling Sophie about her life, she speaks “without stopping, as though she were talking on one of our cassettes”

Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship 75 (59). Upon learning that Sophie has not been told the story surrounding her birth, Martine recites the story of the rape in a factual, emotionless way. “It happened like this. A man grabbed me from the side of the road, pulled me into a cane field, and put you in my body. I was still a young girl then, just barely older than you,” she tells Sophie as she relates the spare facts of what happened. “I did not know this man. I never saw his face. He had it covered when he did this to me. But now when I look at your face I think it is true what they say. A child out of wedlock always looks like its father” (61). When Martine recounts her narrative of the rape, she does not sound “hurt or angry” but rather like someone who is “stating a fact” about something that already exists and cannot be “changed” (61). Her life permanently changed by this act of violence—an irreparable act that cannot be “changed”—Martine, despite her impersonal account of the rape, is haunted by the devastating memory of what happened to her and is unable to recover from the assault by her faceless attacker. Trauma specialist Judith Herman, who states that the act of rape is “intentionally designed to produce psychological trauma,” explains that the goal of the rapist is “to terrorize, dominate, and humiliate his victim, to render her utterly helpless” (58). Traumatic events such as rape “violate the autonomy of the person at the level of basic bodily integrity” as the victim’s body is “invaded, injured, defiled.” In rape, “the purpose of the attack is precisely to demonstrate contempt for the victim’s autonomy and dignity” (52–53). Described by Richard Ulman and Doris Brothers as the “ultimate violation” of the self, rape is a “devastating” trauma that “wreaks psychological havoc in the lives of survivors and fi nds expression in the dissociative reexperiencing and numbing symptoms” of the post–traumatic stress disorder (113, 114). Survivors, who may report “sensory flashbacks or reliving experiences during sex,” exist, as does Martine, in a “twilight zone” in which they are subject to the reexperiencing symptoms of “recurrent traumatic nightmares, intrusive recollections of the event, and reliving experiences” as well as the numbing symptoms of detachment and estrangement and constricted affect (Ulman and Brothers 119). Martine, in her detached response to her daughter, exhibits symptoms of dissociation, an altered state of consciousness in which the individual feels disconnected from experience or feels a sense of “depersonalization” or “derealization” (Herman 42–43). Because traumatic experiences become encoded in an “abnormal form of memory” that spontaneously erupts into consciousness in the form of flashbacks and nightmares and because even “insignificant reminders” can provoke these memories, what would seem otherwise a safe environment can end up feeling dangerous to survivors, as it does to Martine who, living in New York many years after the rape, remains caught in the grip of her traumatic experience (Herman 37). And like survivors of trauma who can feel “unsafe in their bodies” and be “condemned to a diminished life, tormented

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by memory and bounded by helplessness and fear” (Herman 160, 49), Martine bodily relives her horrific experience of sexual assault. Martine also feels the deep shame that survivors experience in the aftermath of trauma as a response to their “helplessness” and to the “violation” of their “bodily integrity” during the traumatic event (Herman 53). Remarking on the temporal “belatedness” of the traumatic experience, Cathy Caruth explains that because the violent event is not fully known “as it occurs” but instead is known in belated ways through compulsive repetitions, bodily symptoms, and nightmares, what haunts the victim of trauma “is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (17–18, 6). Martine, although emotionless in her dry factual account of the rape, lives a constricted life bound by fear as she relives the rape. “Shortly after she fell asleep, I would hear her screaming for someone to leave her alone. I would run over and shake her as she thrashed about. Her reaction was always the same. When she saw my face, she looked even more frightened. . . . She would cover her eyes with her hands. ‘Sophie, you’ve saved my life’” (81). When Sophie, many years later, retells her mother’s story—the story she has pieced together—she focuses on the brutality of the attack on Martine. In the Haitian culture where children are taught to respect their elders and to be obedient, the Tonton Macoute is the bogeyman of fairy tales used to frighten children.3 Frightening fairy-tale monsters come to life, the Tonton Macoutes, unlike ordinary criminals who commit their crimes in the dark, walk the streets in Haiti in broad daylight. “When they entered a house, they asked to be fed, demanded the woman of the house, and forced her into her own bedroom. Then all you heard was screams until it was her daughter’s turn. If a mother refused, they would make her sleep with her son and brother or even her own father” (139). By situating the story of Martine within the story of Haitian political violence, in particular political violence against women during the Duvalier regime, Danticat not only “demonstrates a long and continuous social history of rape in twentieth-century Haiti,” but she also “highlights the ideological sexism operative in Haitian political culture, which systematically silences . . . women’s testimonies of sexual violations” (Francis 79).4 If cane fields were traditionally viewed as “a site of labor violations” in Caribbean societies where sugar was the main economic resource, in Danticat’s novel the cane fields5 are “a principal place of sexual violation and Caribbean women’s bodies . . . the central battleground” (Francis 80). Recounting the story of her mother’s rape by a masked stranger, Sophie describes how her sixteen-year-old mother, who was on her way home from school, was brutally attacked: “My father might have been a Macoute. . . . He dragged her into the cane fields, and pinned her down on the ground. He had a black bandanna over his face so she never saw anything but his hair, which was the color of eggplants. He kept pounding her until she was too

Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship 77 stunned to make a sound.” Intent on the utter degradation and humiliation of his victim, Martine’s faceless rapist forced Martine to keep her face in the dirt after he sexually dishonored and dirtied her. Afraid for months after the assault that her attacker would “creep out of the night and kill her in her sleep” and “come and tear out the child growing inside her,” Martine tore her bedsheets and bit off “pieces of her own flesh” during her nightmares (139). Cast out of the society of clean and proper—and virginal—female bodies into the realm of the abject, the sexually degraded and unclean Martine, after the birth of her daughter, tried to kill herself in an attempt to free herself from her unbearable sense of shame and fear. Unable to escape her “too real” nightmares (139), she eventually fled to the United States where she does not escape but remains a prisoner of her horrific past. When many years later Sophie asks her mother if she will ever go back to Haiti, Martine replies, “There are ghosts there that I can’t face, things that are still very painful for me” (78). Like some trauma survivors described by trauma specialists, Martine transmits her experience intergenerationally to her daughter (see, for example, Danieli). Directly implicated in the harm done to her mother, Sophie, as the “living memory” of the rape and the rapist father, is an embodiment of her mother’s pain and shame (56). “It took me twelve years to piece together my mother’s entire story. By then, it was already too late,” as Sophie remarks (61). Determined to be the keeper of her daughter’s sexual purity, Martine insists that her daughter will not end up “running wild like those American girls,” when her lover, Marc, asks the twelve-year-old Sophie if she has a boyfriend (56). Chillingly, just before Martine tells her daughter about the rape, she asks her if she is a “good” girl, that is, if she has ever been touched by a boy or held hands with or kissed a boy. Claiming her “right” as a mother to ask Sophie this question, Martine explains that when she was a girl, her mother tested her and Atie to see if they were virgins by putting her fi nger inside their “very private parts” to see if “it would go inside” (60). Justifying this practice, Martine tells Sophie, “The way my mother was raised, a mother is supposed to do that to her daughter until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep her pure” (60–61). As an example of “internalized oppression,” the virginity testing reveals the ways in which “oppressive cultural practices become enmeshed with emotional needs and crises,” for not only is Martine anxious for her daughter’s virginity because the loss of her own virginity was “so traumatic,” but she also feels that if she reinforces her daughter’s virginity, she can “reclaim her own once-intact body and mind” (Vickroy 68). Thus, even though Martine herself comes to link her own virginity testing to the rape—“The one good thing about my being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day,” she tells Sophie (170)—she still ends up testing her daughter in a misguided attempt to preserve her daughter’s sexual “honor”

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and “purity,” making Sophie the direct inheritor of her own sense of body shame and violation. The testing begins when the eighteen-year-old Sophie falls in love and begins to meet secretly with Joseph, a musician who is the same age as her mother. “There are secrets you can’t keep. . . . Not from your mother anyway,” Martine tells Sophie. When Sophie returns home late one night, Martine, who has come to suspect that her daughter is seeing Joseph, takes Sophie by the hand and leads her to her bed where she tests her. During the test, Sophie tries to soothe herself by reliving pleasant experiences from her past. Martine, in an attempt to “distract” her daughter, tells her stories about the Marassas, who are godlike twins in vodou culture.6 Two inseparable lovers, the Marassas are “the same person, duplicated in two,” Martine tells Sophie (84). “When you love someone, you want him to be closer to you than your Marassa. Closer than your shadow. You want him to be your soul.” But Martine also insists on the primacy of the mother-daughter bond as she questions Sophie’s attraction to Joseph. “The love between a mother and daughter is deeper than the sea. You would leave me for an old man who you didn’t know the year before. You and I we could be like Marassas. You are giving up a lifetime with me. Do you understand?” After testing Sophie, Martine repeats, “There are secrets you cannot keep,” which takes on another meaning when Sophie recalls that Tante Atie had screamed while being tested by her mother: “There are secrets you cannot keep” (85). Exposing rather than keeping the family secret of virginity testing, Sophie gives testimony to the traumatizing effects of this traditional—and shaming—cultural practice. Later Grandmè Ifé explains the purpose of virginity testing, an abusive ritual that she forced her daughters, Martine and Atie, to undergo. “From the time a girl begins to menstruate to the time you turn her over to her husband, the mother is responsible for her purity. If I give a soiled daughter to her husband, he can shame my family, speak evil of me, even bring her back to me.” When Grandmè Ifé tested Martine and Atie, as she tells Sophie, she was attempting to “keep them clean until they had husbands” (156).7 Even as Martine describes the mother and daughter pair as twinlike Marassas, which suggests the existence of a loving and primal bond between mother and daughter, she is traumatizing her daughter and making Sophie into her psychic twin: into a mirror image of her own sexually traumatized and shamed self. Like Martine, Sophie “doubles”—that is, dissociates—during the reenacted “rape” of the testings. After she is married, Sophie remains haunted by the sexual trauma she endured during the weekly testings. “I closed my eyes upon the images of my mother slipping her hand under the sheets and poking her pinky at a void, hoping that it would go no further than the length of her fi ngernail. . . . I had learned to double while being tested.” When she doubled, as Sophie explains, she recalled “all the pleasant things” she had known (155). A traditional vodou practice, doubling was

Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship 79 followed by many of Sophie’s Haitian ancestors and “most of our presidents were actually one body split in two: part flesh and part shadow. That was the only way they could murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives” (156). In a similar way, Sophie’s mother can do bad things to her daughter while enacting what she sees as a protective maternal practice. In connecting the mother’s double nature to that of the political oppressor, Danticat emphasizes the internalization of politically oppressive behavior, passed down in a culturally sanctioned maternal practice in which mothers sexually violate their daughters. But doubling is also related in this scene not only to the mother-perpetrator but also to the victimized mother as well as the daughter-victim. Like Martine, who doubled—or dissociated—after being raped, so Sophie dissociates when she is “raped” by her mother. Forced to undergo weekly tests as her mother attempts to ensure that she is still a virgin, Sophie initially avoids Joseph. But when she learns that Joseph plans to leave New York, Sophie, who feels desperately alone and lost, attempts to remedy her situation by taking her mother’s pestle, used to crush spices, and ramming it into her vagina. “My flesh ripped apart. . . . I could see the blood slowly dripping onto the bed sheet. . . . It was gone, the veil that always held my mother’s fi nger back every time she tested me” (88). As Sophie inflicts bodily harm on herself through this act of self-mutilation, she is caught up in a horrific reenactment of her mother’s traumatic sexual assault in which the rapist pounded into her mother’s flesh. Sophie, even in her putative bid for freedom and sexual autonomy, remains a prisoner of her mother’s past as her mother’s sexual fears and nightmares become her own. And her act of bodily harm is also connected to her cultural heritage. For even though Sophie takes comfort in the stories she learned as a girl growing up in Haiti, her folkloric tradition encodes a long history of the patriarchal oppression of women in Haitian culture and the use of violence to control female sexuality. As Sophie injures herself, she recalls the story of the bleeding woman and Erzulie, the Haitian goddess of love who is also associated with the Virgin Mary.8 The bleeding woman, in an attempt to stop the blood spurting out of the unbroken skin of her arms, legs, face, and chest, sought help from Erzulie, who used her powers to transform the bleeding woman into a butterfly. Anticipating the bloody demise of Martine, the story of the bleeding woman relays the intergenerational transmission of trauma and also the cultural association of women’s virginity and sexuality—and their violation and victimization—with bleeding wounds. Later, as Sophie reflects on the “virginity cult” found in Haitian culture, she recalls the story of the rich man who chose to marry a poor black girl because she was “untouched” (154). When the girl did not bleed on the wedding night, the man, in defense of his “honor and reputation,” cut between her legs with a knife so he could display

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the blood-spotted sheet from the marriage bed to the townspeople. But the blood would not stop flowing out of the girl who, ultimately drained of all her blood, died (155). In a culture where a girl’s sexual honor means more than her life, women become bloody sacrifices used to defend the honor of men. And mothers, in their unthinking perpetuation of the virginity cult handed down in Haitian society, in turn, act as agents of the patriarchal culture and become oppressors of their own daughters. Disowned by her mother after she fails the virginity test—Martine tells Sophie to “go to” Joseph and “see what he can do” for her (88)—Sophie is happy to leave her mother and start a new life as Joseph’s wife. Instead, she is fated to relive her own—and her mother’s—past. Married to Joseph, Sophie remains haunted by memories of the sexual trauma she has endured at the hands of her mother. Describing the tests as “the most horrible thing that ever happened” to her, Sophie later tells Grandmè Ifé that when she has sex with her husband, she has “such nightmares” that she has to “bite” her tongue “to do it again” (156). Sophie knows the “intensity” of her mother’s nightmares because when she lived with her mother she saw Martine “curled up in a ball in the middle of the night” and had to awaken her mother before she injured herself by biting off her finger, or ripping her nightgown, or throwing herself out a window. After Sophie marries Joseph, she has suicidal thoughts and there are nights when she, waking up “in a cold sweat,” questions whether Martine’s anxiety is “hereditary” or whether she has “caught” her mother’s anxiety by living with her. “Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn’t both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl” (193). Reexperiencing her mother’s rape at the hands of a Tonton Macoute and the “rape” she endured at her mother’s hands during the virginity testing, Sophie is “somewhere else”—that is, she dissociates—when she has sex with Joseph. “He reached over and pulled my body towards his. I closed my eyes and thought of the Marassa, the doubling. I was lying there on that bed and my clothes were being peeled off my body, but really I was somewhere else.” Sophie keeps her eyes closed during intercourse “so the tears” will not “slip out” (200). Afterward, when her husband falls asleep, she gorges herself on the leftover food in the kitchen, and she then goes to the bathroom to purge herself. Bulimia, which is often associated with a history of trauma, in particular with sexual abuse, “may occur in an altered state of consciousness,” and indeed purging often seems like a “not-me” experience, as trauma specialist Elizabeth Waites explains (168). Sophie, who feels out of control when she is having sex with her husband, expresses her desperate need for bodily control by bingeing and purging. The act of purging also expresses her desire to expel her own inner sense of bodily shame and abjection—to get rid of the “bad” parts of her that are dirtied and defiled by sex. Just as Sophie’s mother

Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship 81 has a wasted look, so Sophie comes to have a “bony” look (100). Because of the testing she endured, as Sophie later tells her grandmother, she feels deep body shame. “I call it humiliation,” Sophie says of the testing. “I hate my body. I am ashamed to show it to anybody, including my husband” (123). “I need to remember,” Sophie remarks when, after her separation from her mother and her troubled marriage to Joseph, she returns to Haiti (95). After Sophie and her mother become reconciled in Haiti some two years after Sophie has left home, Sophie attempts to confront and work through her traumatic relationship with her mother, intent on not passing her own problems to her infant daughter, Brigitte. Yet when Sophie and Martine are reunited in Haiti, Sophie reactively shivers when her mother walks into her room at night and approaches her bed. In her desire to understand her past, Sophie asks her mother about the testing because she does not want to repeat her mother’s act on her own daughter. “I want to be your friend, your very very good friend, because you saved my life many times when you woke me up from those nightmares,” Martine tells her daughter (170). Martine admits that she thought Sophie would “come back” to her “humiliated” when she disowned her and sent her to be with Joseph and that she burned Sophie’s clothes after she left home, and she feels that her daughter, despite what she did to her, has become “an understanding woman” (183, 182). Indeed, Sophie does gain understanding and this is what helps her, unlike her mother, begin the process of healing. “My heart, it weeps like a river . . . for the pain we have caused you,” Grandmè Ifé says to Sophie when she learns how much Sophie has suffered as a result of the testing. “You cannot always carry the pain. You must liberate yourself,” Sophie’s grandmother tells her (157). Clutching the Erzulie statue given to her by her grandmother, Sophie cries in the night as she begins her slow, and extremely painful, process of healing. To Sophie, Erzulie is a powerful image of womanhood and maternity: “the lavish Virgin Mother,” Erzulie is “the healer of all women and the desire of all men,” and she never has to work for anything “because the rainbow and the stars did her work for her” (59). Undergoing therapy with Rena, a black female therapist who is also an initiated Santeria priestess, and joining a support group for women with sexual phobias, Sophie tries to work through her traumatic past with her mother and overcome her aversion to sex and her deep body shame. Danticat, who is intent on making evident that sexual traumas—and sexual shame— “are a collective plight shared by postcolonial women” (Francis 85), describes how Buki, the Ethiopian member of Sophie’s support group, was forced to undergo a clitoroidectomy at the hands of her grandmother when she was a girl while Davina, the middle-aged Chicana member of the group, was raped by her grandfather over a period of ten years while she was growing up. In the cleansing and healing ritual they practice, the women, attempting to overcome the deep body shame they feel, chant that they are “beautiful

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women with strong bodies” and women who, because of their own “distress,” can “understand when others are in deep pain” (202). Writing the names of their abusers on paper and then burning the paper, they seek release from the shame that binds them. As Sophie places her Erzulie statue with the other keepsakes collected by the women and then burns her mother’s name, she realizes that her hurt and her mother’s are “links in a long chain” and that her mother has hurt her “because she was hurt, too.” For the sake of her daughter, Brigitte, Sophie determines to break the cycle of maternal abuse: “It was up to me to avoid my turn in the fire. It was up to me to make sure that my daughter never slept with ghosts, never lived with nightmares, and never had her name burnt in the flames” (203). “I am very worried about her state of mind,” Sophie says to her therapist, Rena, describing Martine as “two people,” a woman who is both “trying to hold things together” and “falling apart” (218). When Martine discovers that she is pregnant by Marc—a man she has long been involved with and cared for—her nightmarish images of the rapist intensify and become unbearably painful. “Your mother never gave him a face. That’s why he’s a shadow. That’s why he can control her,” Rena tells Sophie, explaining that Martine’s pregnancy has brought to the surface feelings that she has “never completely dealt with” (209). Reexperiencing her torment at the hands of her rapist, the pregnant Martine imagines that the fetus is speaking to her in a man’s voice—the voice of her rapist. “I hear him saying things to me. You tintin, malpròp. He calls me a filthy whore. I never want to see this child’s face.” The deeply dishonored and sexually shamed and abjected Martine, who hears the voice of her rapist accusing her of being a “filthy whore,” tells Sophie to pray to the “Virgin Mother” for her (217). When Rena hears about Martine’s symptoms, she tells Sophie that Martine should have an exorcism— the kind of release ritual Sophie has undergone with her support group. “It has to become frighteningly real before it can fade,” Rena tells Sophie (219). That Sophie has a “Madonna image” of her mother, which makes her feel as if the unborn child “is a testimonial” to her mother’s “true sexuality” (220), reveals the extent to which she has internalized her Haitian culture’s belief system with its splitting of women into good and bad types: the glorified and sexually pure Madonna, who exists in the realm of clean and proper female bodies, and the sexually dirtied whore, who exists in the realm of the female abject. Martine, who cannot endure the voice of the unborn baby—a man’s voice that calls her a dirty whore—is ultimately driven to seek relief from her unbearable sense of bodily shame and abjection by stabbing her stomach with a knife, her seventeen stab wounds a fi nal, and fatal, reliving of the rape. Becoming the bleeding woman, Martine, who is found lying in her own blood, dies from her self-inflicted wounds. In telling the story of Martine and her tragic end, Danticat presents two competing visions of the Caco women, presenting them both as victims and

Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship 83 as strong women who attempt to resist their suffering. In part, Sophie draws strength from her matrilineal Haitian roots as a Caco woman. As Danticat explains in the “Afterword,” she named the family the “Cacos,” both for the Caco bird, “whose wings look like fl ames,” and for the Haitian revolutionaries who “fought and died in fl ames” (235). “Our family name, Caco,” as Tante Atie tells Sophie, “it is the name of a scarlet bird. A bird so crimson, it makes the reddest hibiscus or the brightest flame trees seem white. The Caco bird, when it dies, there is always a rush of blood that rises to its neck and the wings, they look so bright, you would think them on fire” (150). Sophie is taught to proudly associate the women in her family with the bright-flamed Caco bird,9 yet the dying bird, which becomes reddened as blood rises to its neck and wings as if it were burning with shame, can also be associated not only with the body shame of the Caco women but also with Martine’s bloody—and shamed—end as she, in effect, dies of shame. In a symbolic gesture, as Sophie attempts to embrace and also undo the hurts of the past, she chooses a bright red, two-piece suit for her mother’s burial clothes. “It was too loud a color for a burial. I knew it. She would look like a Jezebel, [a] hot-blooded Erzulie who feared no men, but rather made them her slaves, raped them, and killed them. She was the only woman with that power. . . . It was too loud a color for burial, but I chose it” (227). In dressing Martine in red, her mother’s favorite color, Sophie knows that her mother, who, above all else, wanted to preserve her daughter’s virginity, will “look like a Jezebel.” If Martine literally dies of shame, Sophie’s shameless act of defiance in dressing her mother in red signals an attempt to embrace, and thereby, overcome shame. Furthermore, by imaginatively transforming her mother, who in real life is a female victim, into the female goddess Erzulie, Sophie, in a reparative gesture, offers a kind of aesthetic redemption of her mother as she replaces the abject image of female powerlessness and victimization with the triumphant image of female empowerment and domination. In a similar way, Sophie imagines her mother’s death as the ultimate escape from her unendurable life of suffering. “She is going to Guinea”10 — the African place of origins and the place of the ancestors—Sophie says, “or she is going to be a star. She’s going to be a butterfly11 or a lark in a tree. She’s going to be free” (228). When Sophie, who returns with her mother’s body to Haiti, listens to the wake song sung in her mother’s honor, she realizes that the “mother-and-daughter motifs” found in the stories and songs her family has passed on to her are “essentially Haitian”: “Somehow, early on, our song makers and tale weavers had decided that we were all daughters of this land” (230). As Sophie throws dirt on her mother’s coffin while it is being lowered into the ground, she feels that she and her daughter, Brigitte, are “part” of the “circle of women” from whose gravestones their names “had been chosen” (233). In an act of release, Sophie, as the dirt is being shoveled over her

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mother’s coffin, runs down the hill to the cane fields—the place where her mother was raped—and begins to attack the cane, beating and pounding it just as her mother was beaten and pounded by her faceless attacker. But for Sophie, this act is a reencounter with, but also an exorcism from, the ghosts of the past. “Ou libéré? Are you free?” Grandmè Ifé and Tantie Atie shout at Sophie (233). In yet another reparative gesture, Danticat, in the closure, replaces the text’s despairing vision of female subjugation and victimization with a hopeful vision of female freedom and escape—a purely imagined escape captured in Haitian folktales that also convey the oppression of women by showing that they fi nd freedom from sexual exploitation only in death. “There is always a place where nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms. Where women like cardinal birds return to look at their own faces in stagnant bodies of water,” as Sophie intones, memorializing and poeticizing the story of her mother’s suffering and death. “I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to.” Insisting on the Erzulie-like powers of the daughter-storyteller, Sophie turns her mother’s suffering into magical escape: “My mother was as brave as stars at dawn. She too was from this place. My mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding, the one who gave in to her pain, to live as a butterfly. Yes, my mother was like me” (234). When Sophie, from the thick of the cane fields, finds that the words do not “roll off” her tongue as she tries her “best” to communicate with her dead mother, her grandmother, the master storyteller, fi nishes Sophie’s tale as Danticat, again, insists on the power of words—and the artistic imagination—to revision and rewrite, and thus artistically overcome, the hurts of the past. Words, as Grandmè Ifé tells Sophie, “can give wings to your feet.” In Haiti, “a place where women are buried in clothes the color of flames” and where the daughter “is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her,” mothers and daughters remain connected in an unbroken chain and are linked through story. “There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: ‘Ou libéré?’ Are you free, my daughter? . . . Now . . . you will know how to answer” (234). Even as Danticat emphasizes the transformative and healing power of storytelling—the words that, in “giving wings” to one’s feet, help one transcend suffering—she also calls attention to the destructive reality of Martine’s traumatic past, a past so unbearable that, after a lifetime of suffering, she finally takes a knife and attacks the growing fetus, thus ending her years of torment, her constant reliving of the rape and her resultant feelings of sexual—and body—shame. As a family storyteller, Sophie is connected to the

Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship 85 long line of Caco women who use story to “recreate the same unspeakable acts that they themselves lived through” (234). But Sophie is also intent on turning her mother’s shame—and the Caco women’s family shame—into a healing story, and fi nding a way to free herself, at least temporarily, from her own body shame, as she, like the Caco bird, is given wings through the words she uses, allowing her to escape the dreadful secrets of her own past and to transform the traumatic unspeakable past of her mother into a story with meaning that honors the suffering and shame of the Caco women. And yet if words and storytelling can help heal Sophie’s shame, Danticat also reveals in Breath, Eyes, Memory how mothers can serve as the transmitters of shaming and oppressive cultural—and patriarchal—practices as they, in their wish to preserve their daughters’ honor, dishonor and dirty their sexuality. If the presumed antidote to such oppressive practices is the sexual freeing of girls, Naomi Wolf, in her coming-of-age memoir Promiscuities, as we shall see in the next chapter, reveals the persisting power of culture—the post–sexual revolution culture that has supposedly liberated female sexuality—to dishonor and shame female sexuality.

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CHAPTER 6

Coming of Age in a Culture of Shame in Naomi Wolf’s Promiscuities

ow do we turn girls into women?” asks Naomi Wolf in the introduction to Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, which provides an account of her sexual coming of age in the post–sexual-revolution world of San Francisco in the 1970s (xv). Describing the work as “not a polemic but a set of confessions,” Wolf tells her own story in Promiscuities side-by-side with the stories of other women from her generation in an attempt to “elucidate the emotional truths that emerge from a particular generation’s erotic memory” (xvi). Calling attention to the cultural shaming of adolescent girls in her memoir, Wolf asserts that coming of age in the post–sexual-revolution world is anything but revolutionary in an American culture that continues to bodily shame women by devaluing and stigmatizing female sexuality. Wolf’s aim in Promiscuities, which is a prolonged investigation of the sexual shaming of girls in contemporary culture, is to expose the secrets and silences surrounding female sexuality and, in the process, to rewrite the cultural-sexual script in which the “fear of being labeled promiscuous accompanies contemporary girls on each stage of their erotic exploration.” As Wolf writes, “If this story of growing up has a leitmotiv, it is the recurrent discovery of what the (very vivid) idea of the ‘slut’ means in the life of a contemporary girl or young woman, how it regulates her behavior and becomes a category that assigns a meaning she did not choose to life events that she did choose.” Wolf’s embrace of what she calls the “shadow slut” who accompanies girls as they grow into women reveals her antishaming agenda in Promiscuities as she sets out to undo and reverse the “harsh epithets” that have long “blurred and tainted” female desire (xvii). Yet Wolf’s story and the stories of her friends that she includes in Promiscuities, as she incorporates the voices of other women into her account, tell another shadow story about the “shadow slut” by giving testimony to the continuing power of the shaming invective “slut” to express fear and loathing of the abjected—that is, the degraded and dirtied—female body and thus to control and define female sexuality in the post–sexual-revolution world. Even though Wolf is resolved to provide an open discussion of female desire, she herself succumbs in places

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to the culturally imposed process of “drawing a blank,” an expression borrowed from Mary McCarthy to describe what Wolf calls the “intentional not knowing that girls are asked to yield to at moments of sexual experience” (26; see also xx, 236–37). And while Wolf records her own sexual history in Promiscuities, her account has an odd reticence as she, again and again, moves away from the personal to draw political and social lessons from her personal history and to show how she and her friends were shaped by and victims of impersonal cultural forces. By viewing the girls as largely historically situated and culturally interpellated, Wolf, in effect, cedes the sexual agency of the girls she describes who, even in their putative expressions of their sexual freedom, were simply acting out the sexual script handed to them by their culture. Indeed, the issue of who is in control—is the virginal “good” or transgressive “bad” girl in control of her sexuality or are both girls products of their sexually conservative and/or permissive culture—haunts Wolf’s account and points to the ideological and experiential complications of the slut phenomenon she is examining. Invoking the discourse of the confessional narrative—a strategy that draws in readers and provokes their active curiosity and listening—Wolf asserts at the beginning that the stories she will tell about the desire of adolescent girls are not considered “fit for public consumption”; indeed, the “honest facts” about female sexual development and desire have “sustained a long history of active censorship.” Promising to breach the “great areas of silence” surrounding female sexuality, Wolf writes about the “ordinary secrets of female adolescence” in Promiscuities (xix). To write in the “first person sexual,” she admits, is risky in contemporary society where women still fear that they will be “defined by their sexual experience, and defined negatively”; indeed, where “any sexual ‘past’ can be read as promiscuity” and where the “taint of promiscuity can lead to social or professional censure” (xxi). Yet Wolf writes in the “first person sexual, that most unladylike of voices”—the voice that “turns” one “into a slut”—as she makes her “inquiry into the nature of female passion” and examines not only the “ways our culture values and devalues” female sexuality, but also how other cultures have understood it (xxii). If Wolf’s conscious agenda is to expose what is taboo and to undo female sexual shame and abjection—“We are all bad girls,” she asserts—her narrative also confirms the persistence of body shame in our supposedly body-loving and sexually permissive, de-repressive era in which women’s desire, as Wolf describes it, is “filtered through a toxic culture” and tainted by the “cheap images and scripts of our own place and time” (xxii, xxiii). Even as she aims in her reconstruction to examine contemporary scripts and images of female sexuality to determine how they evolved into their contemporary forms and how they can be changed so that women can reclaim their sexuality and overcome their body shame, Wolf also exposes, in telling detail, how our culture continues not to honor but to dishonor and

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shame female sexuality. The fact that Wolf disguises the identities of the women whose sexual histories she recounts, who all belong to the “tribe” Wolf knows best—they are all white and “more or less middle class” (xxvii)— reveals the deep-seated shame that continues to surround female sexuality in contemporary American culture. Raised during the sexual revolution in San Francisco, Wolf and her cohorts were adolescents in a time “after the Pill but before AIDS” when female sexual desire seemed “hedged about with fewer penalties than ever before—or, as of this writing, since” (xxviii). Yet the coming of age of young girls was full of struggles for those growing up “in a society that proclaimed a sexual revolution in the absence of a coherent new sexual ethic” (xxix). Even as Wolf describes the newfound sexual freedom of the age, she invokes social constructionism as she examines the powerful—and often damaging— influence of the culture on her and her friends. “As the sixties turned into the seventies, I could feel things in our neighborhood begin to change. The postdivorce, post–sexual revolution, post–moral relativism world of today was taking shape. It created the conditions of our childhood” (5). Having grown up “inside the sexual revolution” in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco—“the loose-knit community that became a symbol of the erotic and material liberation of an entire culture”—Wolf has an insider’s perspective on how the “experiments of the revolution, great fun for adults, were sometimes played out at the expense of children” (xxviii, xxix). Thus she is “ambivalent” in her response to the “contradictory epoch” she recalls in which “delight and mourning are so closely intertwined that they seem part of one another” (xxx). While Promiscuities is personal, it also reads like a social history as Wolf continually moves from the personal to the cultural-political in her culturally embedded, historically situated account. Placing emphasis on the power of culture to form identity, Wolf insists that the group of girls she grew up with—Dodie, Michelle, Cath, Shari, Dinah, Sandy, Trina, Pattie, and Jeanne, among others—were shaped by their place and time, for the San Francisco of their youth was “a city built for sensual mysticism,” a city that “conspired” to turn Wolf and her cohorts into hedonists (7). “There were entire neighborhoods so saturated with sensuality—visual, tactile, olfactory—that the alleys from which the famous vistas dropped away seemed to run with a perpetual current of desire,” Wolf writes. “Part of the excitement, too, was the precariousness of life on a fault line” (8). Living under the threat of a cataclysmic earthquake also had an influence on the girls’ burgeoning sexual identities. “As we grew up, the idea of earthquake excited us; as we came of age, we felt subliminally that it turned everybody on. It gave girls in the Bay Area the license that young women have in wartime: If today is your last day, do you really want to die a virgin? Not us. The city made us feel that we were not alive if we were not being sexual” (9). The city, too, as Wolf recalls, provided

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girls with ubiquitous images of female sexuality. Recalling the “Sexland” neighborhood of the city, Wolf recounts how, when she was eight, she and her friend Dodie tried to look inside the street-level window of a massage parlor, attracted by the shocking-pink sign surrounded by lights that “signified the forbidden—whatever it was that everyone wanted, the secret place of satiny femininity” (10). To Wolf and her childhood friend, who studied the listings for massage parlors and go-go dancers, sex seemed to be something magical that would make them “visible”: “We wanted to be featured like that, our names in lights, our charms described on the page for all to see” (11). Yet even as Wolf seemingly celebrates the sensually and sexually free world of her girlhood, she also acknowledges the potentially debilitating impact of that hedonistic world on her generation as the ideological and experiential contradictions of her account repeatedly play out. Indeed, as Promiscuities unfolds, Wolf’s contradictory memories lead to an odd kind of splitting in the text as Wolf’s endeavor to reclaim female sexuality, again and again, is undercut by expressions of loss and sexual shame. Wolf recalls how she and her friends, who were children in the early 1960s, grew up as “perhaps the last generation of Americans” to have a childhood “oriented around children’s own needs and culture rather than around the needs and culture of adults” (13). But they also lived at a time when sexual scripts were changing, and by 1968 their mothers were “learning to be women all over again in a new way” (14). “Suddenly, our mothers were becoming sexy girls. Who, then, would be our mothers?” (18). As families began to fall apart in the general “social upheaval” of the time, girls became marked by “the absence or abdication of their fathers,” which “led directly to the girls’ often shaky sense of sexual self-esteem.” At a time when grown-ups were preoccupied with “doing their own thing,” sex often made mothers “either sad or distracted” while it made fathers “go away.” This, in turn, bred a new kind of anxiety in girls: “How could one grow up to become, through sex, the kind of woman a dad would not want to go away from?” (19). Forced to be “seductive” and never show anger in their relationships with their “distracted, weekend or summertime fathers,” girls had to “twinkle and caress and charm” to get the attention of their fathers (19–20). Thus, what girls learned was that fathers could not be relied on but could be “lured into noticing” their daughters. “The fathers’ departure created in many women my age a feeling of cynicism about the duration of the bonds of commitment and love and an almost blind religious faith in the strength of the bond of sex” (20). Wolf recalls that after the departure of her friend Michelle’s father, Michelle’s mother had a series of boyfriends and, suddenly, not only was everything permitted in Michelle’s house but Michelle’s mother also became “best friends” with her daughter. As parents “began to put their own gratification fi rst, . . . the children were left to accommodate the grown-ups’ second infancy. Often, we became our

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parents’ parents,” observes Wolf (21). Feeling as if they were “a weight, or an obstacle” to the self-realization of their parents and that a part of their parents “longed to be free” of their children, girls such as Wolf responded to that “elemental, if unspoken, rejection by acting out the wish to be free” of their parents (22). In their early adolescent years, from ages ten to thirteen, Wolf and her friends learned to alter their consciousness to prepare them for womanhood by becoming passive and relinquishing their excitement about roaming freely in the outside world. If at age ten Wolf and her friends existed in a utopic time and space of pleasure and passion, for as they played together “a general sensory excitement accompanied scenes of tension and adventure” (23), by age eleven they had learned to be passive, to wait and not to act. Active and curious girls, they learned the “culturally imposed process of ‘whiting out’”—an “intentional not knowing that girls are asked to yield to at moments of sexual experience”—and thus became involved in the “task of becoming mysterious” to themselves (26). They also learned to curtail their desire for physical space, becoming aware, as Wolf did, of the physical dangers of roaming “too far” outdoors (29). When Wolf, at age ten, had an encounter with a “bad man”—a handsome young man who tried to lure her into some bushes by claiming that he needed help fi nding his lost contact lens—she became aware of the sexual perils awaiting her in the outside world. Raised during the growth of the sex industry, Wolf and her friends were exposed daily on their walks to school and the playground to shaming sexualized images of women’s bodies in the neon signs in the sex-club district and in the sex-newspaper dispensers that appeared at girls’-eye-level on the street corners. “I would look and not look at these newsprint representations of ‘sex’—of the fate of all big girls. These naked women were young—as young as our favorite, least authoritarian substitute teachers—smiling their strained smiles” (38). Repeatedly exposed to sexualized images of female nakedness, Wolf and her friends, by age twelve, had absorbed the cultural rules governing girls’ nakedness, learning “what was just naked enough and what was too naked” (39). “We were not sluts. The way we negotiated being ‘not-sluts’ had to do with paying close attention to excruciatingly subtle rules. Midriff-baring shirts were fashionable that year. If you showed an inch of belly too much, the look was ‘slutty.’ But if too little belly showed, you risked being a ‘doggie,’ a loser in the sexual hierarchy” (39). When the twelve-year-old Wolf was taken out of her sexually charged American culture during a visit to Jerusalem, she and the Israeli girls she played with would go to the home of the girl whose mother was not there, take off their shirts, and inspect each other’s breasts; then, en masse, they would go out onto the balcony and flip up their T–shirts, “flaunting what was happening to us and proud of it” (42). Yet when Wolf returned to California, the “innocent sense of pride and pleasure” she had had on the Jerusalem

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balcony “became elusive again” (43). In an American culture where what “feels like sexual pride one moment can turn into shame the next,” Wolf and her San Francisco friends “learned to associate” their naked bodies “with shame” (45). This lesson was reinforced when Wolf returned to Israel and the uncle of one of her friends told her that she could not see her friend again because she was “dressed like a whore,” making her aware that what she had been proud of—her emerging sexuality—was “something to be ashamed of” (47). And when the thirteen-year-old Wolf went to a Zionist summer camp where she befriended Tia, who became pregnant, she learned about the risks of female sexuality. “We were not sluts . . . like Tia. . . . If we took one false step—if we did something that could expose us as ‘sluts’—there would be no way to overstate the danger of the fate that awaited us. We could die, socially; in terms of our identities as good children, we could die to our families; we could even die literally. We already understood that our own death could be the shadow side of our desire” (63). In her culturally embedded account, Wolf, even as she seeks to memorialize female passion and redeem the shadow slut in all girls, also calls attention to the powerful social stigma attached to female sexuality. To be socially identified as a slut is to be stigmatized, marked for one’s failure to meet social standards and to suffer from an unclean, abjected body and spoiled identity.1 As Wolf describes the social death experienced by the stigmatized individual, she also points to the annihilating power of the other’s contempt. Explaining the link between shame and death, shame theorist Carl Schneider observes how everyday expressions—“‘I was so ashamed, I could have died’; ‘I could have sunk into the ground and disappeared’; and ‘I was mortified’”—capture this connection (78). Describing the power of contempt, Léon Wurmser also calls attention to the social death experienced by the shamed individual. As Wurmser remarks, “Contempt says: ‘You should disappear as such a being as you have shown yourself to be—failing, weak, flawed, and dirty. Get out of my sight: Disappear!’” To be exposed as one who fails someone else’s or one’s own expectations causes shame, and to “disappear into nothing is the punishment for such failure” (“Shame” 67). What Wolf and her friends learned was the power of the culture to sexually shame girls. “If we were out of line sexually, we could become sluts; if we became sluts, we could die several deaths,” as Wolf explains. “This equation was so much a part of the air we breathed that we could scarcely examine it. The impulse to equate women’s being sexual with their suffering a swift, sure punishment is reflexive” (64). “In any group of girls, it seems, someone has to be the slut. . . . In our extended group . . . Dinah was called the slut. She found that role— or rather, it found her—and she did not deign to fight it. She put it on with dignity,” Wolf recalls, describing what happened when she was fourteen and Dinah became the designated slut at her school (64). A girl Wolf

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once used to visit almost daily after school, Dinah was poorer than most of the other white girls at the school and her body matured early compared to the other girls.2 If the body language of the “good-girl slump” recalls Donald Nathanson’s description of the “purest presentation of the affect shame-humiliation”—in which the eyes are averted and downcast, the head droops, and the shoulders slump (see Shame and Pride 134–36)—Dinah, unlike other girls, “refused the good-girl slump.” Wolf speculates that Dinah, who escaped her dreary home life by imagining herself a star as she sang along to her favorite musicals, stood erect because she was “thinking of the technique of stage movement” that she had read about in books on drama. “But there was no visual language in our world for a poor girl with big breasts walking tall, except ‘slut.’ And rather than bow her shoulders, she took that name onto them” (66). After Dinah was declared a slut, Wolf “stopped ‘knowing’ her” (71). In a world in which sex was “not just sex” but was also “class,” Dinah’s lower-class status “had declared her a slut by fourteen, while she was still technically a virgin,” and her lower-class status “kept her there” while Wolf and her other middle-class friends, who were “wilder” than Dinah, stayed “just on the right side of safe” (69, 71). From the story of Dinah and other girls like her, Wolf learned the importance of controlling her sexual desire and yet another part of her wanted to be erotically out of control. The fi rst time Wolf let a boy touch her near her breast, she felt “capable of anything”—“capable of being Dinah” (72). Evidence of the difficulty of Wolf’s task in reclaiming the “shadow slut” is found in her essaylike section “A Short History of the Slut,”3 which she inserts into her personal account. That Wolf, in her truncated history, looks back to a Babylonian practice of “sacred prostitution” as she seeks a historical “memory of female sexuality’s sacred and religious aspects” only emphasizes the deeply entrenched and culturally sedimented association of the sexualized female body and female promiscuity with “shame, destruction, and just punishment” (73, 74, 75). The shameful and punishing aspects of female promiscuity are similarly emphasized in the disturbing account of one of Wolf’s girlhood friends who, as a young adult, ended up spending time as a sex worker. Wolf’s friend, who is distressed at how contemporary society glamorizes the sex industry in Hollywood fi lms such as Indecent Proposal and Striptease, attests to the deplorable way men treat sex workers: When men think a woman is a whore, it’s open . . . season . . . on her. They can say anything to her they want, they can do anything they want, they can be absolutely as crass and vile and violent and cruel and uncaring as the darkest part of their personality wants to be. And it’s okay. They don’t have to afford the woman one ounce of respect for being a human being. She’s not a human being. She’s a thing. (81)

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Dehumanized, a socially despised nonperson, the bodily shamed sex worker suffers the kind of social death that follows sexual stigmatization. Listening to her friend, Wolf comes to a new understanding of how society treats “bad” women: I was thinking: if all women, even nice women, can do what only whores used to do, but you can no longer treat all women who do such things like whores—that is, if feminism is succeeding in breaking down some of the penalties that used to be applied to non-professional sexually licentious women—then society will all the more rigidly professionalize and demarcate the “bad girl” for sale, the girl to whom anything can be done. (81–82) Thus what exists behind the “shadow slut” that Wolf wants to reclaim is the dehumanizing and dangerous world of the “bad girl” slut, the woman to whom men can be as “crass and vile and violent and cruel and uncaring as the darkest part of their personality wants to be.” Even as Wolf prepares to return to her sexual-coming-of-age account, she recognizes why even today those girls who admit to or act on their desire “have the heart-racing sense that they are doing something obscurely, but surely, dangerous” (82). Wolf’s conscious agenda in Promiscuities is to reclaim the “shadow slut” and yet again and again her account exposes the dark underside of female sexuality in a contemporary world that continues to bodily devalue women and punish them for their sexuality. Returning to her personal erotic history, Wolf examines the link between girls’ sexual and social relationships. “Who we could be was determined by whom we were allowed to touch,” as she explains. “As we got better at investigating this erotic territory, it became a way we could try to resist, subvert, or manipulate the identities imposed on us by peers and parents” (83). If when the fourteen-year-old Wolf began to date Ben, her first boyfriend, she felt that making out with him made her “real at last” (90), she soon became involved in a deadly game when Ben, in a repeated pattern, was physically violent with her but then tender and sorry after each assault. “Caught up in a spiral of excitement,” she entered a private world of “‘love’ and sexuality and violence” (92). As Wolf recalls this abusive relationship, she admits that it is “a secret” she has long kept because of her “shame” about being abused. And she remains caught up in a form of denial. “I do not remember the pain of Ben’s violence. I still want to type the words ‘It didn’t hurt.’ But it must have. He was big, and not a few times he really slammed me around.” As Wolf tries to make sense of their “paradoxical” relationship— “He really liked and believed he respected me, and he really hit me. I really liked and mostly respected him, even after he had hit me” (95)—she, again, invokes social constructionism by determining that her toleration of Ben’s abusive behavior derived from her internalization of the cultural process that

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prepares girls and women to accept male control of their sexuality. “When I was with Ben, in spite of my upbringing—which one would think would have inoculated me against such tolerance—I thought of it as being not unnatural that he would try to control me. To the extent that I did tolerate it, I must somehow have absorbed an expectation that I should be controlled, and a fear of what might happen if I were ‘out of control’” (95–96). As Wolf seeks to redefine and reconfigure the terrain of adolescent female sexuality and desire, she harkens back again and again in Promiscuities to an earlier time and place—a utopic and sacred place in which female sexuality was marked as a rite of passage. Because of the “absence of hurdles set up . . . as rites of passage” for girls of Wolf’s generation, they pushed “against the tolerance” of their families until “something, anything” would allow them to “take the measure” of their “maturity” and their “actions.” “Could I take drugs—that is, more drugs? My dad had hung out with the Beat poets; no doubt my parents had taken drugs I didn’t even know the names of. Could I wear slutty clothes, throw my sexuality in my mother’s face? By my midteens, moms had truly completed their transformation: my mother now picked me up from summer camp looking like more of an adolescent male dream than I had ever managed to in my life . . . ” (117). In the fall of her junior year when she was still fifteen, Wolf devoted her energies in her “search for rites of passage” to losing her virginity to her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Martin. Yet everything that led up to her loss of virginity fell short of “being momentous,” and going to the clinic to get birth control “was like going to the vet: as if we were being processed not on a social but on an animal level” (119, 121). After Wolf had sex with Martin for the first time in a hotel room—an experience that was “nice but strange”— she felt angry and letdown. “That’s it? I recall thinking, not about the physical connection but about the absence of the event’s significance. . . . A phrase repeated in my head that made no sense at all in the liberated context of my surroundings: ‘That’s all my virginity is worth?’” (124). In a similar way, Wolf’s friends report on sexual initiations that were anything but “initiatory,” Tonya reporting that she felt, not fulfilled, but “empty” when she lost her virginity; Trina describing how she felt “very alone” after being coerced to have sex for the first time; and Sandy recalling how she felt “letdown” by the experience (124, 126, 128). Drawing a lesson from these accounts and her own experience, Wolf insists that a “psychic need” goes unmet in our contemporary culture because girls are not incorporated into their womanhood “through ritual and public transformation” (131). The entry into “a life cycle of sexuality . . . should be held sacred,” but, instead, for Wolf and her friends, the loss of their virginity “passed unmarked” (138, 137). And the information the girls were given about their sexuality by the culture—they were taught the cultural myth that the sex drive of boys is more intense than that of girls—was potentially damaging. “We did not know when we felt wild

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. . . and wanted to tear the world open, we were not incipient sluts, but normal girls becoming women” (143). As Wolf expresses concern about the cultural and bodily shaming of girls who grew up the post–sexual-revolution era, she exposes the staying power of the binary oppositions associated with femininity and female bodies: those of good/bad, pure/impure, clean and proper/abject, honored/ dishonored. Wolf attempts to redeem female wildness—the out-of-control sexual feelings she associates with the “shadow slut” in all girls—yet she also is an author, as one commentator has astutely observed, who has “a good deal of trouble describing the actual experience of letting loose” (Kerr). Thus even as Wolf sanctions women’s out-of-control sexuality, she exerts authorial control over her erotic memoir. Shifting from the personal and intimate to the impersonal, she interrupts her account to provide a short history of the clitoris, describing how the importance of the clitoris to female sexuality has been repeatedly discovered only to have this knowledge erased, again and again, from the cultural memory of women.4 Wolf views female sexuality as a powerful, elemental force, insisting that women are “as erotically preoccupied as men” and that “female sexuality has the potential to unfold without limits,” which earlier cultures understood (160, 158). Yet even as Wolf attempts to enshrine and celebrate women’s limitless—out-of-control—sexual desire, she is also evoking the deeply entrenched stereotype of the sexually voracious woman who has long been a taboo object and the target of social control. Thus, again and again, Wolf’s utopic desire to enshrine female sexual desire and undo women’s body shame and abjection is undermined by the experiential complications of the slut phenomenon she is describing. Wolf also expresses middle-class anxieties about a putatively sexually liberated culture that dirtied—that is, bodily shamed—the girls from her generation.5 In a culture in which girls “got the official message” that sex “necessitated information about cleaning dirt . . . and protecting against disease” (157), Wolf and her cohorts were taught to associate their sexuality with something dirty and abject: that is, with something shameful. And as the decade unfolded and the girls became “more personally ready for it, it seemed sex grew always dirtier” as the sex industry proliferated (172). Wolf recalls how she once viewed the eucalyptus forest behind her house as an “entirely sexual” place where “nothing impure could happen.” For Wolf, who grew up in a world where nature “was the final arbiter,” the forest came to “function the way that fantasies of wilderness functioned for the urbanized eighteenth-century European mind: I would find myself making a mental reference to the forest when I searched for a symbol for female lust that was not derided and caricatured by the images that populate our world” (12). Wolf’s junior year in high school was the last year in which she could “associate sex with the ‘purity’ of the natural world,” for as the “meaner 1970s erased the vestiges of the 1960s, the growing understanding that embracing

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adult female sexuality meant walking into ‘dirtiness’ as well as into pleasure intensified further” (176). Wolf recalls that when Martin went to college and joined a fraternity, she walked up Fraternity Row where groups of young men stood on balconies and, holding placards marked “1” to “10,” graded the passing women. “That world was so much dirtier, in how it saw women and their desire, than the safe place Martin and I had created. The discovery was a shock to me” (177). When Wolf learned from Martin’s fraternity brothers about a group assault on a young woman who got drunk at the fraternity house—between six to twelve men “jumped on her, groped her, dry-humped her”—she was also led to understand that what had happened had “nothing to do” with her, a “nice” girl involved in a relationship (177, 178). Although Martin was appalled at the behavior of his fraternity brothers, he was also expected to side with them to avoid being socially shamed and ostracized. As Wolf remarks, “The way those boys punished dissenters—I had seen this—was with a paranoia-inducing social withdrawal that culminated in the subtle, perpetual taunt of thirty men’s collective homophobia” (179). Afterward, Wolf came to realize that Martin’s fraternity brothers’ “view of women and their sexuality was a more accurate reflection of ‘the real world’—the adult world” than was her experience and Martin’s. “We were made to feel that we were wrong and childish and that ‘they’—with their Penthouse magazines, their Budweiser girlie posters, and their adversarial attitude toward the women they courted in the evening and derided the following noon—were sophisticated and in sync with the world.” The “certainty” of Martin’s fraternity brothers made Wolf “doubt” herself. “If ‘sex’ is Penthouse, I thought, well then, Penthouse must be the measure of my life. If I am to have love and admiration, I must pay attention to its rules” (180). As she does earlier in her essaylike “A Short History of the Slut,” Wolf, again, looks to past cultures to locate a supposedly more positive type of erotica—one that does not insult and objectify women. In her rather selective reading of ancient Chinese culture, Wolf claims that in the Han Dynasty, from 206 bce to 221 ce, female sexual desire was “not treated with fear, nor with contempt and ridicule” as it is today, but, instead, was viewed as “a powerful elemental force” (181).6 But even as Wolf strains to undo female body shame and find a positive cultural model of female sexuality, she emphasizes the dirtying of the sexuality of the young women from her generation. “Every day, one of us adolescent girls might hear in conversation in the schoolyard, or on the street, these words: ‘cunt,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘pussy,’ ‘whore,’ ‘bitch,’ and of course ‘slut.’ We shrugged them off again and again but always felt as if a small stain from them clung to us, a show . . . of dirt” (182). Rather than counteracting shame, the brief history Wolf records—in her account, while the ancient Chinese and the Zuni Indians of New Mexico viewed female sexuality in a positive way, in the Western tradition “shame

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was synonymous with feminine sexuality” (187)—only calls attention to the deeply entrenched and systematic bodily shaming and abjection of women in our culture. Growing up in a place where teenage girls were encroached on by adult men, Wolf and her friends lived in a world where adult men often seemed intent not on protecting young girls but instead on preying on them. Describing her experience with an older man, which occurred when she left San Francisco to pursue her education at Yale, Wolf recounts her encounter with a well-known professor—Harold Bloom—who, “with his histrionic teaching style, was a locus of campus worship” (196). Interestingly, in Promiscuities, Wolf disguises the identity of Bloom, giving him a fictitious name and career. Unlike the intelligent young male students in higher education, who were mentored to take the places of their professors, intelligent young women students either were overlooked or were chosen for the “heavily eroticized” role of the “intellectual handmaiden” as young girls continued to learn about “being sluts” (197). In telling detail, Wolf describes what happened when Bloom visited her at her apartment after she gave him some of her poetry to read. “You have the aura of election upon you,” he told her as he put his hand on her thigh and then, following her to the kitchen, tried to stroke her hair. Wolf, who had tried to dress attractively for their encounter, was made to feel like a slut. Burning with shame, she felt “exposed as if in a slow-moving dream of shame” (199). When she vomited in the sink, almost splattering vomit on Bloom’s hands, he released her and left, leaving her poetry manuscript on the table. When later Wolf disclosed that Harold Bloom was, indeed, the lecherous professor she was describing in Promiscuities, she opened herself up, predictably, to public censure from people such as Camille Paglia, who accused her, in effect, of behaving like a slut and inviting her own victimization.7 As this incident reveals, to write in the “first person sexual”—the voice that turns one into a slut—is, indeed, risky business. If in Manhattan in the early 1980s, “the ethic . . . was that girls could do what boys did” (203), the AIDS epidemic soon changed that. Wolf recalls engaging in risky sexual behavior and then, after donating blood to the Red Cross, waiting anxiously for two weeks to be notified if she was sexually healthy or not. At a time when sexual promiscuity became recognized as a risk factor for AIDS, there was a “renewal of punitive hostility toward active, assertive female heterosexuality. AIDS gave elements in our culture tacit license to regard every sexually active woman as a slut once more” (205–06). With the advent of AIDS, a “new variant on the defi nition of promiscuity” was conveyed in a safe-sex commercial that presented the chilling message that in every sexual encounter, a woman is being exposed not only to her male partner but to “all of his partners” and “all of their partners” and, again, “all of their partners.” Thus if a woman is “exposed” to one partner, she is “not simply fair game for possession by the many,” but she has “metaphorically,

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actually, been possessed by the many” (206). Having internalized from their culture “some suspicion that their sexuality [was] decadent and transgressive,” young women from Wolf’s generation were aware once again of the culture’s punishment of sexually active women. “Before, when mainstream culture was saying to us, ‘Go for it!,’ we had worked hard to imagine the punishments of the slut as aberrations left over from a bad old world that was, we hoped, passing away. But now it seemed that nature itself was out to confirm the inevitability of the punishment our sexuality could elicit. . . . The sluts got nailed, just as they’d always been; just as we’d always, beneath our bravado, feared” (207). A few years later, when Wolf worked as a volunteer with survivors of sexual abuse and assault, she became aware, once again, of the reality of sexual violence, becoming almost “paralyzed with the fear that came of knowing too much” (211). Influenced by the stories she heard in which the seemingly trustworthy man would become violent, Wolf began to wonder whether her boyfriend at the time, Andrew, was her potential enemy. Wolf had a four-year relationship with Andrew, a man who made her “feel split at the very center” of her “identity.” For even though she respected him and admired his political fervor, she was also “culturally conditioned” to fi nd attractive the “external symbols” of Andrew’s maleness—his blunt hair cut, his boots, and his motorcycle. “There has been a feminist ‘deconstruction’ of masculinity but very little reconstruction,” writes Wolf. “Perhaps it is time to recognize that all cultures codify maleness and femaleness within sexual symbolism and that we can create a new world in which those categories need not be fi xed or oppressive, but neither do they need to be dismissed or devalued” (214). In Andrew, “Something beautiful—a mostly benevolent manhood—was being symbolized, however reductively, by the leather, the taciturnity, the entirely unwomanly aura about him. Precious little feminist language of the last century and a half, let alone the last two decades, has done justice to this quality and what it means to so many women” (214–15). Wolf, who once wondered whether her obsession with Andrew’s masculinity undermined her feminist strength, came to validate female heterosexual desire for maleness as a sign of female power, not weakness. And the same Wolf who, as a feminist, once deconstructed the patriarchal institution of marriage, found herself studying bridal magazines as she later prepared for her 1993 marriage to David Shipley. In a culture that denigrates female sexuality, the bride, for a few moments, takes on the aura of “a lost sexual regality,” as Wolf came to see it (223). For Wolf, just as the eros of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the thanatos of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, so female sexuality in the post–AIDS era remains full of possibility but also peril. In her fi nal summing up, Wolf again reveals her deep ambivalence about her sexual coming of age even though, despite “all the wreckage,” she is “glad” that

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she grew up as part of the first generation after the sexual revolution. Wolf and her cohorts “had to learn about abuse, shame, danger, derision, and harmful myths,” yet they still had the “historical good luck” to live at a time when female desire was “freed in some critical ways” (228). As Wolf remarks, “What harmed us was not physical threats so much as psychical degradation; what we gained from our ‘liberated’ age was . . . a glimmer of a better kind of sexual consciousness.” Invoking the feminist ideal of female solidarity, Wolf urges women of her generation to shape a better “sexual culture” for their daughters by teaching them that “shame belongs to the act of abusing or devaluing female sexuality, not to that sexuality itself” (229). By presenting their own stories, women can transform and humanize the sexual environment for today’s girls, and women can also provide better guidance to girls through rituals in which they pass on their sexual knowledge to young women as they come of age. Rather than punishing the slut, Wolf calls for a social recognition of, and respect for, the power of female sexual passion and women’s “promiscuously responsive bodies.” “Maybe women really are, sexually, powerfully magical beings. What might we learn from fi nally accepting that? Not to repress female desire, as it has been repressed in the past; nor to devalue it as a joke at women’s expense, as we often do today; but to integrate it fully into our civilization” (232). In her search for positive scripts for female sexuality, Wolf attempts to heal the cultural wounds she exposes. Yet by trying to redeem the “shadow slut” in all women, Wolf opens herself up to public exposure and possible censure. Describing the subject matter of Promiscuities as “still a minefield,” one commentator avows that Wolf is “putting her neck on the line” and thus “deserves a modicum of respect” from her readers (S. Coleman). Remarking that readers might be “taken aback” by Wolf’s “brazen honesty” or that Wolf might be criticized for using the book as a “personal therapeutic cleansing opportunity,” another commentator comes to Wolf’s defense by applauding how “valiantly” she relays her stories to the reading public (Mensinger 819). And yet another commentator says she admires Wolf’s “honesty” (Phillips). But some commentators attack the book’s focus on female desire, describing the book as “tawdry” or as, in places, “embarrassing” or claim that feminists such as Wolf “call for ever greater doses of the germ with which they are already infected: more, but better, promiscuity” (Coulter; Kerr; Shalit 45). “One has the distinct feeling that Ms. Wolf simply would not be able to comprehend people for whom sex was not the centre of the universe,” states yet another commentator who fi nds an “over-heated sexual awareness” in Promiscuities (Burrows 31, 30). Remarks that Wolf’s book seems to offer a “therapeutic cleansing opportunity” for the author or that Wolf calls for “ever greater doses” of the promiscuous “germ” with which she is infected reveal that for some readers the powerful sexual taint associated with the shadow slut Wolf seeks to enshrine in her sexual narrative becomes

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associated with the author. To write in the “fi rst person sexual” is, for some, to write in the voice of the slut. In Promiscuities, Wolf insists on the importance of “forging . . . a new philosophy of desire” as she seeks to redeem the shadow slut in all women (233). Yet even as Wolf envisions a utopic space in which women’s promiscuous desires will be honored, recent accounts of the slut phenomenon in the contemporary high school culture reveal the grim realities that Wolf largely avoids in her account. Described by Leora Tanenbaum as the “insult of insults” (see 1–25), the term slut designates a girl as “low-class” and “trampy” and as a girl “without a future.” In the social hierarchy of today’s teenagers, “the school ‘slut’ is a pariah, a butt of jokes, a loser. Girls and boys both gang up on her. She endures cruel and sneering comments—slut is often interchangeable with whore and bitch—as she walks down the hallway. She is publicly humiliated in the classroom and cafeteria. Her body is considered public property: She is fair game for physical harassment. There is little the targeted girl can do to stop the behavior” (xvi). Viewed as sexually contaminated and dirtied, she is singled out and socially ostracized, as Emily White observes. Indeed, “the specter of venereal disease plays into a wider notion that the slut’s very presence represents and embodies sickness—both physical sickness and a vague soul sickness” (117). The girl deemed as the high school slut “experiences coming of age not as the dawning of self-possession and subjectivity but as a darkening loss of self and complete objectification” (White 109). And once identified as a “slut,” a girl can do little “to erase her stigma” as she comes to represent “soiled femininity” (Tanenbaum xv). The sexually stigmatized outcast, the high school slut, as the personal accounts included by Tanenbaum reveal, comes to feel a profound sense of self-disgust and shame for her sexually dirtied and abjected body. If in Promiscuities, Wolf enacts an antishaming agenda in her embrace of the “shadow slut” that resides in girls as they grow into women, her narrative also emphasizes the continuing power of the shaming invective “slut” to control and define female sexuality. Wolf opines for a world in which female sexuality is honored, indeed, viewed as sacred. Yet slut-bashing remains a powerful and controlling force in our supposedly sexually free and bodyloving culture where, as Wolf comments, “any sexual ‘past’ can be read as promiscuity” and where the “taint of promiscuity can lead to social or professional censure.” Like Wolf, the authors we will investigate in Part II, Speaking a Kind of Body Language, call into question the belief that we live in a body-loving era as they explore the contemporary body politics that devalues and disrespects the overweight, the socially invisible and unattractive, the elderly, and the disfigured and disabled woman.

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PART II

Speaking a Kind of Body Language Shamed Bodies and Spoiled Identities in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances

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CHAPTER 7

Feeling Fat, Fearing Fat in Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size and Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story

n her analysis of the mind/body dualism that informs Western culture and still remains pervasive in contemporary society, Susan Bordo calls attention to the pernicious effects of a cultural ideology that associates women with the body and men with the mind. “The cost of such projections to women is obvious,” writes Bordo. “For if, whatever the specific historical content of the duality, the body is the negative term, and if woman is the body, then women are that negativity . . .” (Unbearable Weight 5). “No mere philosophical position,” the mind/body dualism, as Bordo argues, “is a practical metaphysics that has been deployed and socially embodied in medicine, law, literary and artistic representations, the psychological construction of self, interpersonal relationships, popular culture, and advertisements . . .” (Unbearable Weight 13–14). Taught to see the body “as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul,” women feel self-loathing and shame over the “degraded female body and its disgusting hungers,” which require “containment and control” (Unbearable Weight 3, 8, 14). Like Bordo, Elizabeth Grosz is concerned with women’s embodied experience in her “corporeal feminism” and she, too, focuses on the cultural “denigration and containment of the female body” (Volatile Bodies xiv). In her analysis, Grosz draws on Julia Kristeva’s idea of the abject—“the various ‘detachable’ parts of the body, its excretions, waste products, and bodily by-products” that remain “parts of the body image, magically linked to the body” and are “objects of disgust, loathing, and repulsion as well as envy and desire” (Volatile Bodies 81). Describing the somatophobia that underlies the Western conception of the abjected “volatile” female body, Grosz observes that even in contemporary times, the female body is constructed “not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as . . . a formlessness that engulfs all form” (Volatile Bodies 203). Associated with the seepage and liquidity of bodily fluids, women become identified with “what is unclean” (Volatile Bodies 206) and so come to feel deep body shame. And the self-loathing and body shame of women described by Bordo and Grosz are intensified in the experiences of both anorexic and overweight women in our

I

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contemporary fat-phobic culture, which idealizes the trim and slender body and stigmatizes the abjected and “volatile” overweight body. “Since World War II, when the diet and fitness industries burgeoned and fostered a mass obsession with weight and body shape, fat has been a four-letter word,” as Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco observe. “People openly, disparagingly refer to themselves and others as fat” and “fear fat every day” in a postmodern United States where fat is viewed as “repulsive, funny, ugly, unclean, obscene, and above all as something to lose” (“Introduction” 2). Living as we do in a culture where, in the oft-quoted phrase of Kim Chernin, the “tyranny of slenderness” has led women to fear becoming fat, not only do overweight women learn to hate their bodies but “North American women of most cultures, and all body sizes and eating styles tend to have fat-oppressive and fat-negative attitudes towards their own bodies and, by inference, those of other women” (Brown 20).1 The model of femininity prevalent in contemporary American culture, which requires that the “ideal feminine body be small” and take up “as little space as possible,” suggests that “real women are thin, [and] nearly invisible,” as Cecilia Hartley observes (61). In a culture in which “women are expected to be beautiful, and beautiful equals thin,” women are “terrified of getting fat” and feel that they must “control themselves” and “be careful,” for any relaxation of their “vigilance might lead to the worst possible consequence: being fat” (Hartley 64). Commenting on the deep connections between shame and the overweight female body, Lisa Silberstein, Ruth Striegel-Moore, and Judith Rodin note that shame, as Helen Block Lewis has observed, involves the “implosion” of the self as shamed individuals, in the common shame defense of withdrawing or hiding, try to become “as small as possible” and sometimes say they would “like to disappear.” In a similar way, “women’s shame about their bodies stems from their feeling too big and wanting to be smaller” (91). When women, who have internalized the “societal message that equates beauty with thinness,” measure themselves against this standard and fall short, they feel ashamed because of this “comparison failure,” as Silberstein, Streigel-Moore, and Rodin explain. In a society in which women internalize the view that “what-is-fat-is-bad,” women who “feel fat” feel “bad” about themselves: that is, they feel ashamed (94). And while dieting is “one of the primary strategies to cope with the shame of fatness,” the typical failure of dieting women to attain or maintain their target weights only amplifies their sense of personal failure and shame (97). Not only does our contemporary “idolatry of the trim, tight body” show “no signs of relinquishing its grip on our conceptions of beauty and normality,” but indeed, our obsession with thinness “seems to have gathered momentum, like a spreading mass hysteria,” observes Bordo (Twilight Zones 107). Describing eating disorders as “overdetermined” in contemporary

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culture, Bordo explains that they arise from women’s “general anxieties about the body as the source of hungers, needs, and physical vulnerabilities” not within their control—anxieties that are “deep and long-standing” in Western culture but are “especially acute” in our own time. Bordo also links eating disorders to the “contradictions of consumer culture,” which encourages women to indulge their desires even as it “glamorizes self-discipline and scorns fat as a symbol of laziness and lack of willpower” (Twilight Zones 111). In the contemporary culture of slenderness, “if the thin body represents a triumph over need and want, a stripping down to some clear, distinct, essence of the self, fat represents just the opposite—the shame of being too present, too hungry, too overbearing, too needy, overflowing with unsightly desire, or simply ‘too much’” (Twilight Zones 130). Indeed, to be fat in our fat-phobic culture is to be publicly shamed and marked as someone with an undesirable identity. Viewed as “unhealthy and unattractive,” fat individuals are “widely represented in popular culture and in interpersonal interactions as revolting”—as “agents of abhorrence and disgust”—and they are viewed as having a “spoiled” identity, an identity “so powerful that even fat people roundly abhor their own bodies” (LeBesco 75, 76). In before-and-after sequences, in which the fat woman is represented “not as a person but as something encasing a person,” the fat body bears “the full horror of embodiment, situating it as that which must be cast aside for the self to truly come into being,” remarks Le’a Kent as she draws a connection between Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject as “that which must be expelled” and the fat female body (134, 135). “The abject sets up the categories of self and not-self, but it is an expulsion of something internal to the self,” as Kent explains. “The abject is that revolting physicality, that repellent fluidity, those seepages and discharges that are inevitably attached to the body and necessary for life, but just as necessarily opposed to a sense of self.” Functioning as the abject in mainstream culture, the fat body “takes up the burden of representing the horror of the body itself for the culture at large” (135). Moreoever, in before-and-after pictures, the individual “literally stands beside her abjected fat self, or drags herself out of it,” and thus it is the abjected fat body that “makes possible the consolidation” of the good and thin body, which “bears the mark of the self’s discipline” (136). That the fat body is “made to bear the horror of corporeality” (Kent 136) will be evident in the story of Josie, the anorexic character in Jenefer Shute’s novel Life-Size and in Judith Moore’s personal account of her obese childhood and womanhood in Fat Girl: A True Story, works that provide vivid accounts of the female body shame associated with the abjected and “volatile” overweight body. Like Shute’s Life-Size, which has been described as a work that plays on readers’ insecurities, making them aware of their own “‘imperfect’ bodies” (Dreyfuss), Moore’s Fat Girl exposes to public view the fears and fantasies that surround female embodiment in our fat-phobic culture in which body

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shame is the cultural inheritance of women and in which women, suffering under the “tyranny of slenderness,” fear above all else being fat.

The Anorexic Body in Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size Elspeth Probyn, in her remarks on her anorexic childhood, provides a firsthand account of the affective energies—the shame and disgust, and also the perverse pride—that drive anorexia nervosa. “Like many, I spent much of my childhood feeling disgusting,” Probyn recalls, yet she also remembers “the splinters of pride that accompanied the disgust; pride at the beautifully prominent set of ribs, the pelvic bones that stood in stark relief, causing shadows to fall on a perfectly concave stomach.” As Probyn looks back on her experiences as an anorexic, she wonders “at the forces of pride and shame doing battle in a body that knows itself to be disgusting” (Carnal Appetites 125). Aware that just as proximity to the fat body can elicit disgust, so the anorexic body can make people feel queasy, Probyn asks in what ways anorexics find themselves disgusting. Quoting from interviews with anorexics, in which one anorexic describes wanting to “fade into the background” while another recalls “trying to disappear,” Probyn remarks on the way anorexics “desperately seek not to be seen, as if sight would confi rm that they are disgusting.” Indeed, “it is hard to underestimate the anorexic’s disgust at the sight of her body, a disgust that is met with deep shame. If the two affects intermingle, shame may be one of the triggers that sets off a deep spiral of never-ending disgust: disgust at the sight of food, the sight and proximity of perceived fat bodies, her own and others” (Carnal Appetites 130). Probyn’s observations on the anorexic’s intense disgust at the sight of food and at the sight of other perceived fat bodies help illuminate the plight of Josie, the anorexic character in Jenefer Shute’s novel, Life-Size. Speaking a kind of body language, Shute’s Life-Size shows the potentially damaging effects of both the cultural identification of women with the body and the pervasive fear of the uncontained, uncontrollable female body and its disgusting hungers as it describes Josie’s extreme rejection of and disgust for her embodied selfhood. “It all seemed so simple, at sixteen,” Josie comes to think of her self-starvation. “If I could lose enough flesh, I could have any body I wanted, look like anything, anyone. . . . Perfection was easy: it equaled not being fat” (139). As Shute tells the story of Josie, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student who weighs sixty-seven pounds and has been anorexic for some eight years, she interweaves her character’s hospital experiences over a two-month period, told in the narrative present, with her associated memories of the past. But even as this narrative format prompts readers to locate the links between Josie’s past and present, there is also a strange kind of sameness to Josie’s story as her personality and memories of family and friends recede to

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the background while her obsession with her body and with food are pushed to the foreground of her consciousness and her narrative. Indeed, Josie’s personal history is bound up with her memories of her body and food: she recalls how, at the threshold of adolescence, her “lanky and lean” friend Amanda remained trim while she “mutated overnight into a pimply, potbellied, pendulous-breasted sow”; how, when she began dieting at age sixteen, her “willpower” became her “claim to fame” among her dieting school friends; how she showed restraint in her eating while watching her mother “shoveling food into her mouth”; and how, by age nineteen, she had become skeletal looking and triumphant (58, 118, 22, 51). Becoming utterly self-absorbed and increasingly isolated from others, Josie, by the time she was in college, lived “under an absolute dictatorship,” with herself “as both subject and tyrant,” and to her other people “scarcely seemed real” (154, 155). During the lost time before her hospitalization when she almost starved to death, Josie emptied herself of the past, starving the past away “until nothing remained but a vague dream populated by phantoms” (18). Entering the claustrophobic world of Josie’s consciousness, we view others through her distorted, obesophobic, and contemptuous perceptions—to Josie, other people are shamefully self-indulgent in their appetites and are repulsive, ugly, unclean, and obscene in their disgusting fatness. We also come to recognize Josie’s belief in her heroic exceptionalism in controlling her appetite and achieving a “perfect” body, as well as her excessive and obsessive self-involvement. Bound by her pursuit of having a thin and perfect body and by her boundless disgust for the abject female body—the body that eats, digests, bloats, vomits, excretes, and rots—Josie obsesses over her body and body image as she reduces life to a simple formula: to eat or not to eat. “One day I will be thin enough. Just the bones, no disfiguring flesh, just the pure, clear shape of me. Bones. That is what we are, after all, what we’re made of, and everything else is storage, deposit, waste,” Josie says at the beginning of her hospital stay (9). Like the contemporary anorexics that Joan Brumberg describes in her study of anorexia, Shute’s character makes “nonconsumption the perverse centerpiece” of her identity, as the unrelenting pursuit of thinness becomes her “secular form of perfection” (Fasting Girls 271).2 When Josie is told that her brain is “starving” because she is a “starving organism,” she says nothing but finds it difficult not to sneer. “My brain’s not working the way it should! On the contrary, it’s never been purer and less cluttered, concentrated on essentials instead of distracted by a body clamoring for attention, demanding that its endless appetites be appeased. . . . One day I will be pure consciousness, traveling unmuffled through the world . . .” (7). Taking pride in her willpower—“soon, in this body, everything will be willed,” as she puts it (5)—Josie despises other people who are governed in their lives by “the peristaltic pulse.” Unable to ignore their “gaping maw,” they are nothing more than animals that eat. “From the day’s first mouthful

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to the last at night, their lives are one long foraging. In the morning, hunched over their desks, they munch on soft dough; at noon, they herd out en masse, meat-hungry, to feed; midafternoon, in a circadian slump, they crave sugar; arriving home, they root in the refrigerator’s roaring heart and eat upright before an open door” (7). And after their hours of “shopping and chopping and mixing and cooking,” they “wolf down the result in seconds and greet it the next morning transformed into shit” (7–8). Unlike other people, who are driven by their hunger to eat, Josie claims that she has “freed” herself of the “compulsion” to eat. “For me, food’s only interest lies in how little I need, how strong I am, how well I can resist—each time achieving another small victory of the will: one carrot instead of two, half a cracker, no more peas. Each gain makes me stronger, purer, larger in my exercise of power . . .” (8). But of course, Josie is anything but free in her unrelenting and compulsive pursuit of thinness, and while she believes in her heroic willpower and exceptionalism, hers is anything but an exceptional case. Instead, Josie exhibits the classic symptoms of anorexia in her preoccupation with food; her intense fear of becoming fat, coupled with her dread that she will lose control and cram herself with food; her occasional bingeing behavior, which causes profound shame and self-disgust; her punishing and exhausting exercise rituals; and her disturbed body image, for even in her emaciated condition, she thinks she is fat.3 Totally preoccupied with her body and afraid of becoming fat, Josie feels compelled day after day to examine her skeletal body before getting out of bed. “Every morning the same ritual, the same inventory, the same naming of parts before rising, for fear of what I may have become overnight. . . . The fi rst thing I do is feel my hipbones, piercingly concave, two naked arcs of bone around an emptiness. Next I feel the wrists, . . . checking that they’re still frail and pitiful, like the legs of little birds. There’s a deep hollow on the inside of each wrist, suspending delicately striated hands, stringy with tendon and bone.” In a similar way, she examines the hollows behind her knees to confi rm that the tendons are “still clean and tight, a naked cord”; she grabs and pinches the muscles of her inner thighs; she checks to see if the bones are still sticking through her buttocks; she grabs her collarbone, which is “so prominent that it protrudes beyond the edges of the shoulders, like a wire coat hanger,” and feels the “deeply corrugated” rows of her ribs and the “row of perfect little buttons” of her vertebrae (9–10). When Josie, whose daily hospital routine includes regular feedings and weigh-ins, discovers she has gained one and a half pounds in three days, she is appalled. “My belly feels tight to bursting and suddenly looks obscenely round” (19). To Josie, even the act of eating is shameful. When she eats, she draws a curtain around her bed—for no one must “ever see” her eat or “catch” her “in the act”—and she sits “shamefully hunched” over her food tray (11, 12). Panicked when she eats some salad and wolfs down three teaspoons of melted ice

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cream, she feels like a glutton and, deeply ashamed, wants to “hide” where no one can “fi nd” her (13). In Josie’s behavior, we find a grim expression of the cultural injunction that women should not allow their appetite “free expression” but should instead constrain and control their appetite, a cultural imperative that makes eating “a shameful and disgusting act” for some women (Brumberg, Fasting Girls 266). In concretizing her disgust at the female body and its appetites, Josie’s self-starvation, then, reflects her conformity to the cultural constructions of femininity. Remarking on the “continuum between female disorder and ‘normal’ feminine practice” observable in “a close reading of those disorders to which women have been particularly vulnerable,” Susan Bordo comments that the “bodies of disordered women . . . offer themselves as an aggressively graphic text for the interpreter—a text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a statement about gender” (Unbearable Weight 168, 169). With a disorder such as anorexia, “the woman’s body” can be viewed “as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view” (Unbearable Weight 174–75). Describing the “painfully literal inscription, on the anorexic’s body, of the rules governing the construction of contemporary femininity,” Bordo posits that the “control of female appetite for food” provides a “concrete expression” of the general rule that governs the construction of femininity in our culture: “that female hunger—for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification—be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be circumscribed, limited.” Required to develop “a totally other-oriented emotional economy,” women “learn to feed others, not the self, and to construe any desires for self-nurturance and self-feeding as greedy and excessive” (Unbearable Weight 171). Through Josie’s anorexic body, Shute exposes the potential lethality of the cultural injunction that female hunger should be contained and the public space allotted to women be limited. Living in a culture of slenderness where women struggle to “become smaller,” Josie is horrified of her fatness as she undergoes the process of self-starvation: repulsed by her “fat face, fat gut, fat quivering thighs, fat disgusting tits,” she wonders how she can “justify the space” she occupies “in the world” (96, 158). For Josie, who has learned to restrain her appetite—“I had learned a rule for life: NO thyself ”—the thought of self-indulgence in eating is shameful (111). To Josie, the “mature” female body is an object of disgust and a grotesque spectacle. Glad that she has become amenorrheic as a result of her weight loss, Josie views menstruation as a “reminder that the body is nothing but a bag of blood, liable to seep or spatter at any moment” (5). Condemning her overweight mother for being a “mountain of blubber,” Josie thinks that her mother simply occupies space, “her squat frame hauling its huge belly and behind around like a life sentence,” and Josie recalls that when her mother tried to embrace her, she

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felt that she was being “enveloped” in a “mound of inflated flesh” (62, 66, 30). Unlike Josie, who tries to inhabit a perfect form, other women haul “their carcasses around as if that flesh were somewhere they just happened to live” (128). Examining the bodies of other women in the hospital through her obesophobic perceptions, Josie is struck by the “fat belly” of the art therapist, the “sausagey” calves of the dietician, and the overweight body of the nurse who has “enormous, looming breasts and a fleshy fold under her chin” and whose arm is “meaty and tight, like a sausage” (39, 161, 26, 30). Josie who wants to be “thin enough”—to be “just the bones” with “no disfiguring flesh”—equates female embodiment with being fat (9). As Josie begins to gain weight in the hospital, she feels that her “true nature is re-emerging, inscribed in fat for all to see: corrupt, slothful, insatiable” (122). Threatened with force-feeding, Josie begins, painfully and reluctantly, to eat only to fear that her body is out of control. Feeling “huge,” her “distended limbs spreading in all directions” when she wakes up after making herself eat a tomato and an orange for dinner, she is afraid to complete her morning inventory of body parts. “I can’t continue with the inspection, knowing only too well what I will feel: the heavy, sagging breasts scored with stretch marks; the swollen gut; lumpy gluteals yielding to gravity; wrists coarse; fi ngers stubby; face like a stupid moon. Dense and polluted, this immense mass of flesh swells like dough as I lie here; raising my hand to the light, I see only my mother’s fat paw” (29–30). Thinking that she should try to study the books she has brought with her to the hospital, she feels that her books will “hold” her “down,” “keep” her “in place” and “prevent” her from “expanding sloppily, yeastily, over the edges” (34). When Josie tells her doctor that she ate fifty-one cereal flakes for breakfast only to have him tell her that she has a “long way to go” in her treatment, she is afraid of becoming fat. “He wants to drag me down, bury me in flesh, obscure the clear, sharp lines of my self” (35). Josie, who begins to feel “fat, disgustingly fat” when her stomach begins to curve out (114), becomes preoccupied with her bodily functions. “There’s nothing to do but lie here and feel my body bloat and rot, rot and spread, spread and deliquesce, decompose. My ankles are enormous . . . and I’m sure my thighs are becoming thicker than my knees. I can’t bear to look down at my belly, engorged like a giant tumor, sucking substance from the rest of me. But even if I don’t look at it, it occupies my mind with its vile inner life: violent growlings and eruptions; vicious pains, as if something had perforated; terrible sewerish smells” (152). When Josie becomes constipated, she feels as if there is waste accumulating in her: “I’ve become a human trash compactor. My belly is hard and bloated; perhaps if I pressed hard enough, it would explode . . .” (173). As Josie’s hospital days become bound by the “same futile repetition: feeding the carcass, forcing it to live, keeping it going until one day it just stops,” she comes to see herself as “an

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organism that knows only how to eat and excrete, a dead creature trapped in a dying one” (192, 204). Josie’s fear that the “clear, sharp lines” of her self will be buried in the out-of-control and polluted flesh that encases her and obliterates her self recalls Le’a Kent’s discussion of the abjected fat body, which bears “the full horror of embodiment” and must be expelled to consolidate the good and perfect self (135). To Josie, the anorexic body is self-contained while the fat body is associated with what Kristeva describes as the “powers of horror” evoked by the abject. Associated with bodily processes and substances—such as tears, saliva, feces, and vomit—the abject is defiling and disgusting and yet, because it is part of the self and body, cannot be fully rejected. The abject “signals the precarious grasp the subject has over its identity and bodily boundaries, the ever-present possibility of sliding back into the corporeal abyss out of which it was formed” (Grosz, “Julia Kristeva” 198). Describing how the subject must separate itself from the abject maternal body, Kristeva writes that “the body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic” (102). For Josie, the fat female body is the unclean abjected body and it is also the uncontrollable “volatile” body described by Grosz—the body associated with the seepage and liquidity of bodily fluids and the “formlessness that engulfs all form” (Volatile Bodies 203). Conditioned by the culture, with its mind/body dualism, to associate women with the abjected body, Josie views her uncontainable, uncontrollable female body with dread and shame. Side by side with Josie’s fear that her self will be taken over and assimilated if she becomes fat is her related disgust of her own bodily processes and body-identified, shameful femininity. For Josie, to gain weight is to experience the overwhelming and stifl ing sense of embodiment associated with the abject female body. Because to Josie the anorexic body is the “clean and proper body,” she undergoes the process of self-starvation to rid herself of the body and its shameful appetites and become “pure consciousness.” Josie, who at times would rather “die than eat,” recognizes that her refusal to eat is an “exorbitant blockage of biology”—that she, rather than experiencing life by taking things in “through the mouth,” negotiates the world “by keeping it out” (168–69). Picturing her stomach as a “tiny, fisted pouch,” Josie feels that food—“chunks of alien matter”—belong “out in the world” not inside her (78). Experiencing food loathing, which Kristeva describes as “perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” (2), Josie feels a visceral disgust at the process of eating. To Josie, eating chicken is like “chewing on a carcass”; oatmeal is repulsive—“It’s mucus, it’s slime, it’s snot”; strawberries are “slightly rotting life-forms: scabrous, papillar”; an orange slice is inedible with its “scaly, reptilian rind” and its “colony of pustular sacs”; lentil soup is like “diarrhea. Lumpy”; and cheese is “evil”—“it contaminates everything you eat it with” (4, 78, 104, 146, 164, 12).

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When she is given a boiled egg, the very sight of it makes her want to take a spoon and smash it, except that she “would be afraid of the terrible smell this would release, the metallic stench, the viscous yellow blood” (17). When she is given a glass of milk, she thinks, “Would you make your way through the droppings and go right up to a cow and take the milk directly from her udder? No? But you will let someone else get it and bring it to you in a glass, right?” (37). To Josie, even to think the word “sugar” makes her “feel unclean” and “to think the word butter seems obscene, lewd and oily on the tongue” while “masticate” is yet another “obscene word” (77, 80, 81). As those who have studied food taboos have shown, not only can food become taboo because of its “offensive smell, taste, appearance or some intrinsic quality or danger associated with its consumption,” but a liked food can also provoke disgust if it is “associated with disgust items” (Robertson 8, 9). If disgust conveys “a strong sense of aversion to something perceived as dangerous because of its powers to contaminate, infect, or pollute by proximity, contact, or ingestion” (W. Miller 2), Josie’s disgust at food, which contaminates because of its association with its animal and natural origins, is a sign of her deeper self-disgust at her own contaminated and contaminating and abject female body.4 In a related way, Josie feels a visceral disgust for sex. As she recalls the “dicks” she has seen over the years—the “blunt-headed, bluish” one; the one “like a tusk” nudging her thighs; the “insistent, perpetually engorged one”; the one with a “bruised mushroom head”; the “small, serviceable one”; and the “gnarled one, with a kink”—she recalls from all of them “the same slime (9 calories per teaspoon)” (36). Believing that no lover, in his “urgent rush to ram” himself inside her, can appreciate the perfected body she has created, she comes to shun sex. “As the diet book says: ‘Make your scale your best friend and your lover.’ Its cold metal embrace and—in emergencies—my own apprenticed hand: no need, ever, for the lewd rubbing of one corpse against another” (42). Associating the obese female body with a lack of restraint in the satisfaction of bodily desires, Josie, who most of the time cannot “imagine forcing masticated matter down” her esophagus, is “fascinated and disgusted” when she sees a fat woman cramming a hamburger into her mouth, the “lewdest sight” she can imagine (223–24). “How could anyone do something so indecent in public, especially someone who had no right to eat at all?” (224). Even as Josie insists that she, in her self-starvation, eats “normally” while other people are “constantly stuffing themselves,” she also, at times, feels a compulsion to “cram” herself full of food (49, 93).5 “In the bad days, the out-of-control days,” she recalls, “I knew how to induce coma: eating, cramming, stuffi ng, ramming it in desperately until, sickened by sweetness, bloated beyond recognition, moribund with self-loathing, I could flop onto the bed and invite extinction” (122–23). For Josie, the “most shameful experience” of her life is the food binge that occurred when she was having an affair with a medical student (170). Waking up in his bed, she raided his kitchen and began eating

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compulsively, cramming food into her mouth, as some “blind drive” took over her “brain” (169), and she continued to stuff herself with food, stopping for doughnuts and pizza during her frenzied journey home.6 Although Josie does not remember the name of the medical student, she can “still see every box on his shelves, every stalk on the wallpaper, every last lettuce leaf” and can still recall all the food she ate during her binge (170). Afterward, the deeply mortified Josie intensified her efforts at self-starvation, refusing to go out in public until she could see the bones in her wrists and cheeks and fit her flat palm between her belly and waistband. “How could I appear among people as the ravening monster I truly was—huge, with a crammed, bloated maw, hands full of food, half-chewed matter drooling from a never-empty mouth, lumbering insatiably towards everything, everyone, in my path? Godzilla, King Kong, a mutant monster7 from the sewers” (175). Josie shuns forbidden foods such as cakes that force her to “keep cramming, keep chewing, in a frenzy of horrified craziness,” yet food retains its “magnetic pull” on her (168, 11). And even as she undergoes the process of self-starvation, she decorates her room with nutrition charts, Bon Appétit collages, and cookbooks, enjoying, in particular, The Cake Encyclopedia, which contains photographs “so luscious” that she sometimes touches her tongue to them as she feeds “on images,” the “only food” that she needs (183). That the “wastedness” of anorexia nervosa “parodies the beautiful female body while attempting to achieve it” (Robertson ix) is emphasized in the scene in which Josie superimposes a Vogue magazine over her wasted face. Unlike the Vogue model on the magazine cover, who has dazzling white teeth, pink skin, and shiny lips, Josie’s “fragile limbs” stick out “like a grasshopper’s,” her skin is “a dry grayish white, netted with veins,” her fi ngertips and nails are “blueberry-hued” (14). “Haggard in the harsh fluorescence, its dull, wispy hair like that of a cheap doll,” Josie’s face is the face of an old woman with “shadowy, sunken cheeks and deep grooves around the mouth” (69). And yet, when Josie is shown a photograph of an anorexic, she is struck by, and even admiring of, the woman’s skeletal appearance: “Her arms, splayed at her sides, seem abnormally long, with the elbow joints at least twice as wide as the upper arms. Her knees, likewise, are much wider than her thighs, which, to my admiration, she has reduced to pure bone. . . . The ribs score the skin so deeply they seem ready to burst through. . . . Every cord in her neck is visible, even the corrugated tube of her trachea. A discreet black slash blanks out her eyes, reducing her face to the caved-in cheeks and lipsticked scar of a crone” (71). A product of her culture, Josie has followed, and, indeed, internalized all the rules promulgated in women’s magazines and in self-help and diet books: “Keep yourself in check. Be Some Body”; “Eat Sleek”; “Experiment—strive for perfection”; “Resist temptation!”; “If you make a pig out of yourself, you will become one” (63, 64, 65, 125). Yet as an adherent to the cult of thinness, Josie,

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even as she achieves in her self-starvation what she sees as a perfect and pure body, becomes an object of physical disgust. When Josie is asked to draw a “life-size” outline of her body in crayon on a blank sheet of paper attached to the wall as part of her Body Image Awareness therapy, she insists that she does not “need a crayon to defi ne the edges” of her being: “I know what I am: a twenty-five-year-old female body, emaciated still in the clavicle and calves, with spindly shanks but a smooth coating of baby fat everywhere else . . . and a large, unsightly, tirelike deposit around the middle. My skin is dry, mottled, and erupting; my hair is limp and scant. I do not look beautiful” (216, 213). “I never planned to disappear. My goal was a modest one: to be perfect. But something went wrong, and I did without so much that I almost undid myself . . . ,” Josie admits at the end of her narrative as she prepares to leave the hospital and become an outpatient (222). Yet if Josie has gained real insight into the destructiveness of her anorexia, she retains her feelings of profound body shame. When her doctor tells her that she has gained enough weight to make “normal physiological functioning” possible, she thinks to herself, “Normal physiological functioning. Growth and bleeding and hunger and decay. A long, slow rotting; meat going bad. Thanks a lot, doc” (226). And when Josie does her fi nal inspection of her body, feeling flesh instead of bones, she is not sure she can “learn to inhabit” her body. “Can I learn to be so present? Can I learn to be so full?” she asks herself (228). “If I were a body, what would I be?” (230). Refusing to offer the happy ending of a defi nitive cure, Shute’s Life-Size leaves in doubt the ultimate fate of Josie, who, even as she is preparing to leave the hospital, still reduces life to two options: to eat (live) or not to eat (die). Taking her readers inside the consciousness of her self-starving character, Shute reveals the intense body shame and self-disgust of the anorexic in an age in which, paradoxically, anorexia serves as an exaggeration of the feminine ideal. For as Cecilia Hartley observes, even though anorexia is “in very physical and chemical ways an ‘absolute negation of the female state,’ it is the anorexic and nearly anorexic body that is glamorized on runways, on magazine covers, and in television shows and movies.” In its “rejection of excess flesh” and its “asexuality,” the thin body becomes “hypersexualized, culturally ‘feminine’ and admired.” Thus in many ways anorexia “reflects an ambivalence about femininity, a rebellion against feminization that manifests itself by means of the disease as both a rejection and an exaggeration of the feminine ideal” (68). If anorexia has been read “as an attempt to deny physiology, to make the body itself disappear,” obesity has been read as the reverse—as “reveling in the body” and giving the body “free rein.” But as Hartley observes, like the anorexic, many fat women “become fat because they are disconnected from their bodies” (69). That the fat body is “inscribed by culture” and is, like the body of the anorexic, “a reflection of oppression” (70) is revealed in Judith Moore’s Fat

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Girl, which exposes, in excruciating detail, the body shame and self-disgust of overweight women in our obesophobic culture.

The Obese Body in Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story Susan Bordo, in her comments on the seemingly paradoxical coexistence of anorexia and obesity in our culture, fi nds that both anorexia and obesity are rooted “in the same consumer-culture construction of desire as overwhelming and overtaking the self” because whereas anorexia can be seen as “an extreme development of the capacity for self-denial and repression of desire,” obesity can be viewed as “an extreme capacity to capitulate to desire” (Unbearable Weight 201). Explaining why both the anorexic and the obese are disturbing because they “embody resistance to cultural norms,” Bordo writes that while the anorexic follows, but attempts to outdo, cultural rules, the obese “are perceived as not playing by the rules at all” and thus they cannot be allowed “to get away with it” but “must be put in their place, be humiliated and defeated” (Unbearable Weight 203). In her wrenchingly painful memoir Fat Girl: A True Story, Judith Moore describes what it is like to be fat in our fat-phobic culture in which the overweight female is continually put in her place, humiliated and defeated as she becomes the target of what Laura Brown and Esther Rothblum call “fat oppression.” The “stigmatization of being fat, the terror of fat,” fat oppression is “the equation of fat with being out-of-control, with laziness, with deeply-rooted pathology, with ugliness. . . . Internalized fat oppression, which exists in almost all women raised in white North American culture, is a catalyst for energy-draining self-hatred” (1). In an American culture where fat women are “perpetually victimized by public ridicule,” where fat-phobia is “one of the few acceptable forms of prejudice left” in society, and where fat jokes “still abound,” it is “no wonder” that women internalize fat-oppressive attitudes, as Cecilia Hartley observes (65). Even as Moore gives voice to and thus exposes to her readers the degrading attitudes and public ridicule used against fat women—and she insists on using the word “fat,” despite its decided “wince-value” (Hartley 71 n.4)— she also reveals her own internalization of society’s fat-oppressive attitudes.8 Shamed by others who see her stigmatized trait—her fatness—as her defi ning characteristic, Moore comes to view herself as having a spoiled identity. Relentlessly putting on display and making a shameful, ridiculous spectacle out of her body through the “fat jokes” that permeate her account, Moore openly expresses not only her vast self-hatred but also her feelings of abhorrence and disgust for her abjected fat body. Explaining from the outset that she is not a fat activist nor does she trust real-life narratives that end with the individual heroically triumphing over adversity, Moore instead writes about

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“what it was and is like . . . being fat” in a society that views the fat person as an object of disgust and contempt: as someone who walks the earth “looking like a repulsive sow, rhinoceros, hippo, elephant, general wide-mawed flesh-flopping flabby monster” (1, 2). Raised by a mother who verbally and physically abused her “baby elephant” daughter, tormented by other children because of her weight when she was growing up, insulted as an adult by a man who told her she was “too fat to fuck,” Moore, who has internalized society’s fat-oppressive attitudes, suffers from deep and abiding body shame, and thus even when she loses weight on her many diets, she still feels like a “self-made fat girl” who is “lost inside” her fleshy body (93, 5, 30, 31). “I am fat. I am not so fat that I can’t fasten the seat belt on the plane. But, fat I am,” Moore begins her account (1). “I hate myself. I have almost always hated myself. . . . I hate myself because I am not beautiful. I hate myself because I am fat” (7). Moore, who is “almost always” on a diet as she tries to get “rid of pounds” of her “waddling self,” views herself as a grotesque and ridiculous spectacle. Speaking a kind of body language, Moore puts her shameful and abject female body on display and scrutinizes its isolated parts. A “short, squat toad of a woman” with fading curly auburn hair that forms a “clown’s ruff” about her “round face,” she has “pig eyes, with Mongoloid flaps,” a “thick lower lip” and “bad teeth”; she is wide-shouldered with upper arms “as big as those maroon-skinned bolognas that hang from butchers’ ceilings”; her belly “juts out”; the pocked skin on her thighs resembles “worn foam rubber”; and when she walks, her buttocks “grind” like turbines (7). Examining her naked body through the shaming eyes of others, Moore views herself as an object of contempt. “Between what would be my waist if I had one and my pudenda hang fat rolls. The rolls form swags, drapes of loose fat that droop between my hip bones. My freckled breasts lay flat on my chest, and from under my breasts sweat runs” (15–16). While she has subjected herself to diet after diet—the pineapple and watermelon diet, the seven-oranges-a-day diet, the rice diet, the water-packed tuna diet, the three-hot-dogs-a-day diet—she fi nds losing weight difficult. “My flesh resists loss. My fat holds on for dear life, holds on under my bratwurst arms and between my clabber thighs, along my moist back and under my fat-lined chest, where my heart thumps with the exertion of hauling twenty, thirty, even forty extra pounds” (16). To Moore, her fat body is the unclean abjected body associated with shameful bodily appetites, with body fat and sweat, and with disgusting body odors, and it is also the formless, out-of-control volatile body. Fantasizing that she is having liposuction, she imagines a glass vat filling with “tubs o’lard” as a masked doctor vacuums fat from her “belly and thighs and unspeakably huge butt” (19). When she shops for fat clothes at a fat woman’s shop, she is assailed by the “beefy stench” of her sweating body—“Sweat pops out on my forehead. Sweat forms under my breasts and blooms beneath

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my armpits. . . . I smell meaty” (22, 21). Walking with her head down as she leaves the mall with her newly purchased “ugly black fat suit,” she feels “heavy” and “ashamed” and “resigned” to her shame (23). Struggling to put on her pantyhose when she gets “really fat, as opposed to medium or mildly fat,” she gets sweaty and breathless as she pulls on the flimsy stockings, and when she is forced to start all over again when she tears the stockings or gets runs in them or discovers they do not fit in the crotch, she feels “ashamed and disgusted for being such a grotesque and grunting hog” (20). Moore, who puts on extra poundage “so effortlessly” that her weight gain “seems a form of magic” (8), calculates that she would weigh at least one thousand pounds had she not lost weight over the years during her cycles of losing and gaining weight. Associating her overweight body with the abject world of body-identified femininity—with out-of-control flesh and voracious bodily appetites—Moore imagines how she would look as a thousand-pound woman with a massive body and a tiny head. “My head would appear tiny atop my giant body. I would feed myself with a shovel. I would have ten stomach rolls and breasts big as punching bags in boxing gyms. . . . You would have to hire a winch to lift me from my bed” (34). In her fantasy of herself as a thousand-pound woman, Moore exposes her feeling of hypervisibility as her stigmatized trait—her fatness—renders her as a shameful spectacle in her daily encounters with others. If hiding is a classic defense against shame, Moore, as a fat woman, is hypervisible and cannot “hide” her fat. “No matter what a fat woman wears, a fat woman looks like a fat fat woman” (21). When a thin male friend takes her out to dinner, she feels sorry for him, aware that people observing them together must wonder why an “elegant” man like him is with “a bloated old toad” like her (25). Walking alone to a small shopping district dressed in black and wearing black sunglasses, she tries to remain invisible—“I crouch inside black and screen myself behind dark glasses. I do not want to be seen”— only to be taunted by some boys in a white convertible who call out to her, “Sooey, sooey, pig” (32). When Moore sees a photograph of her taken at the annual church blessing of the animals, she panics. For although she had lost forty pounds and thought that she fit into her black linen dress, she looks fat in the photograph with her “bulging stomach” and her “arms as big as big bolognas that hang from deli ceilings” (43). As she plays her videotape of Richard Simmons’s Sweatin’ to the Oldies and dances through the exercises, she feels an affi nity for Simmons and the sixteen exercisers lined up behind him. “These are my brothers and my sisters; they are my family. They eat too much and they get too fat. Their presence on streets is a spectacle. Their bodies provoke disgust, even from people who call themselves friends” (39). “Sometimes my whole life seems to be stories about fat,” Moore comments as she begins to reconstruct her unhappy past as a fat girl (40). In her

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memoir Moore acknowledges her profound body shame as she tells the story of her fatness, a story she has never confessed to any of her friends or to any of her therapists. As she admits, while she “blathered away” about herself during the times she was in therapy—on and off for three decades—she never uttered “one word” about her fatness or her “longings to be lovely” to any of her therapists because she was “too ashamed” and none of her therapists ever asked her about her weight (36). As Moore tells the painful story of her fatness in her memoir, seeking a kind of talking cure as she recounts the shameful “stories about fat” that make up her life history, she looks to her “fat girl” past to explain her persisting “fat girl” identity as an adult. The product—indeed, the unwanted “leftovers,” as she comes to describe it—of a bad marriage (191), Moore was an unloved girl who was abandoned by her father and rejected by her mother. A man of “enormous waddling fat,” Moore’s father was a fat boy, then lost weight and was thin during his years in college and law school when he married Moore’s mother, only to become, in the words of Moore’s mother, as “fat as a hog” (43, 60). “That my father was slender when they got married and began to fatten soon after their elopement understandably left my mother feeling deceived. She married a thin man and ended up with a fat man” (66). Moore’s mother, who told her daughter that she was “crushed” and “buried . . . alive” in her marriage, also said that she was “trapped” when she became a mother and that she was “never the same” after Moore’s “enormous butt” pushed “its way out of her” and “tore her up down there” (44, 66). When Moore’s parents separated and eventually got divorced, the four-year-old Moore was sent to live on a farm with her hated and abusive grandmother—Grammy. A short, fat woman with drooping breasts and a round stomach, Grammy was “repulsive” to her granddaughter. “I hated the way she smelled—like soured washcloths—and the way she looked— angry” (73). To the young Moore, the naked body of her vastly overweight, sixty-five-year-old grandmother was utterly disgusting: “Her long loose breasts—she called them ‘dinners’—were striped with stretch marks and tipped with long beige nipples; the breasts fell down over rolls of fat that hung between her hips. The lowest roll of fat sat along her thighs. Between her thighs, at the vee of her sex, were a small number of yellow-white hairs, and beneath the sparse outcrop of hair, drooping purple labia. Her buttocks had the same clabber look as her thighs” (75). “Starved” for her parents during her two-year stay with her grandmother and trying to “fill up the grave” her parents had “dug” for her, Moore devoured Grammy’s cooking and gained weight (77). When her grandmother told her that she had become as “big” as “Man Mountain Dean,” Moore envisioned Man Mountain Dean—a signifier of her own uncontrollable appetite—as a consuming monster who opened “his vast gutted mouth” and ate everything in his path, including the trees, the animals, and the houses, as he ran down the mountain (76–77).

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A fat six-year-old when her “dainty and petite” mother (80) took her to New York to live with her, Moore was repeatedly shamed by her mother, who told her daughter that she was disgusting, that she looked ugly, and that no one wanted to be the friend of a fat girl. Looking like a “short fat housewife” by the time that she entered second grade, Moore was taunted by a group of older boys, who yelled “Fat girl! Fat girl!” when they saw her, and she came to dread the monthly weigh-ins at her school (87, 89). Put on diet after diet by her mortified mother, Moore lost but then regained weight, weighing 112 pounds when she entered second grade, 124 pounds in the summer before fourth grade, and around 150 pounds at the start of sixth grade. “You are eating me alive,” her mother said to her; “You make me sick, just to look at you”; “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You with a face not even a mother could love” (83, 94, 97). Internalizing her mother’s contempt and disgust for her fat body and sensitive to the shaming behavior of others—to the boys who screamed “Pig Face” at her and the pretty girls who looked away from her in “sadness” or in “disgust and dismay” (125)—Moore came to feel deep contempt for her dissmelling fat girl body. “I must have looked quite a sight,” Moore remarks of her overweight fat girl appearance. “My hips were wider than the hips of many a grown woman, and there was that stomach and those breasts and huge hind end and short, tree-trunk legs. Also I did not always smell freshly bathed, although I did bathe, every night. . . . ‘Pee-yuuu,’ children said, about my odor. They said, ‘You stink’” (126–27). Told by her mother that she was the “spitting image” of her father and had his “bad” blood, Moore imagined she might have been “born bad.” “Underneath the yellow fat made from so many gravies and cherry pies and apple crisps under thick cream, so much toast buttered and jellied, so many deep sunset-yellow egg yolks, I imagined that the bad Tootsie Roll Pop fi lling of me seethed and simmered” (84). When her mother began to beat her, Moore, already convinced of her badness, believed that she deserved to be punished. Utterly derided and degraded, she came to feel that she was “not human” but was a “wild” and “dirty” animal (86). In her all-consuming hunger, she was like a predatory animal that hunts down and devours others. “Nobody much liked me, I thought, because they sensed that I wanted to bite into their bare arms and bare cheeks and rip off chunks of them and chew and chew and swallow. I wanted to eat them not because they looked particularly tasty or even because I was hungry, but because I was empty and I needed to feel full” (98). Attempting to protect her vulnerable selfhood by preventing further exposure of her shame, Moore used a classic defense against shame by withdrawing from others. “I built walls of fat, and I lived inside. When those boys said fatso, fatso at me what they said almost, but not quite, bounced off my fat walls. When my mother walked to her sewing machine and took out of its drawer the belt she kept coiled there and came at me with it, the belt

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went thud against the fat. The belt didn’t cut as hard as it might if I were skinny” (98). When Moore was in the fifth grade and her mother began to routinely beat her, the shame of being beaten compounded with the shame of being fat left her “cowering” (121). Deeply demoralized, Moore thought about throwing herself out of her bedroom window so she would “fall on the concrete and break apart into millions of tiny pieces” and thus “fi nally be small” (120). Trying to make herself “invisible to others,” she began “more and more to hide” herself from herself (122). That the deeply shamed Moore wanted to disappear is telling. For as Léon Wurmser explains, “If it is appearance (exposure) that is central in shame, disappearance is the logical outcome . . .” (Mask 81). To be exposed as one who fails someone else’s or one’s own expectations causes shame, and to “disappear into nothing is the punishment for such failure” (“Shame” 67). A fat “tub of a girl” who walked “hunched over” and looked “irremediably sad” (170, 174), Moore felt “ugly and more noticed” during the onset of puberty, for she disliked the pubic hair between her legs and the hair under her arms and her breasts and the “awful” odors of her body (180). When she began to menstruate, Moore, who did not “want to be a woman,” considered herself to be “more animal than human, more rock than animal”—“a heavy piece of dull rock that bled onto itself every month” (181). In describing herself as “more animal than human, more rock than animal,” Moore reveals the annihilating force of contempt, a type of aggression that can make the individual feel that she is “a debased, dirty thing—a derided and low animal” and that she is “‘a nothing,’ ‘empty,’ ‘frozen’—‘like a stone’” (Wurmser, Mask 81, 83). A socially despised nonperson who was abused by her mother and continually subjected to the contempt of others, Moore suffered from a kind of social, and emotional, death. “The rock feels nothing. No matter what you do to it, no matter how many times you kick it, or how loud you laugh at it, or what filthy words you write on its surface . . . the rock does not care” (181). But, of course, Moore did care, and when she, in high school, compared herself unfavorably to the popular, trim, and attractive girls—the cheerleaders and May queens—she felt envious. “Who can tell of the envy of the homely young for their more glamorous peers?” (183). “Fleshy and flabby and homely and clumsy,” Moore, though she was heavyset and not obese in high school, still felt “fat, fat, fat” (184). And when Moore, who lost twenty pounds before going to college, became involved with a young college man who ended up exploiting her sexually—after performing oral sex on him, she discovered that three of his friends had been watching—she felt that no one nice would ever ask her out. Eventually marrying and divorcing two thin men—men who came to “regret” marrying her—Moore describes herself as a “lousy lay”: “I sprawled out on the sheets and let happen what would happen,” as she puts it (192). Although Moore starved off the weight

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she gained during pregnancy after the birth of each of her two daughters, she ultimately put on weight and came to feel that her “squat burly body” embarrassed her growing daughters. “I could see their disapproval, or sorrow, or embarrassment. None of the mothers of their friends was fat,” as Moore remarks, describing how her stigmatized trait—her fatness—came to vicariously shame her daughters (194). Even as Moore reveals, in disturbing detail, her self-loathing and profound body shame as she puts her abjected fat body on display in Fat Girl, she also shamelessly exposes to readers her special relationship with food, enacting in her narrative a kind of talking—and feeding—cure. For Moore, if food is the “enemy,” it is also “the mother, the father, the warmhearted lover” (9). A major part of her life, food is a source of comfort and sensuous pleasure. Nourishing and sustaining, food can give a temporary feeling of physical—and emotional—wholeness and self-satisfaction. While some people have daydreams about heroic or sexual exploits, Moore daydreams about mouth-watering foods she has eaten. “I daydream crab legs dipped in hot butter or crab cakes dribbled with garlic aioli. I consider toasted cheese sandwiches or homemade lemonade pinkened with macerated strawberries or carrot cake with brown sugar frosting that I ate, once, twenty years ago. . . . Foods I ate once and liked I think about the way people think about old lovers” (10). Openly challenging the cultural rule that women must control and restrain their appetite and feed others, not themselves, Moore evokes a kind of visceral pleasure as she celebrates her all-consuming female hunger and palpable enjoyment of food. “My mouth is dangerous. My lips and my teeth and my tongue and the damp walls of my cheeks are always ready,” she asserts. “My mouth wants to bite down on rough bread and hot rare peppered steak and steamed broccoli sprayed with lemon juice. My mouth wants my maternal grandmother’s biscuits and sunny-side-up eggs, whose gold yolks rise high above the white circles. My mouth wants potatoes sluiced with gravy and Cobb salad and club sandwiches. . . . When I walk through the kitchen—when I walk through the world—my mouth is on the prowl” (12). If she ever has one “last fl ing,” Moore insists that she wants a “fat man,” not another thin man, for a lover (192). “Late at night, with a fat man curled in your bed, you can talk unashamedly about hot corned beef on rye and warted dill pickles. You can compare gravies and legs of lamb and mint jellies. You can reminisce about gingerbreads and peach cobblers and lemon custard ice cream.” And because a naked fat man is likely to be ashamed of his stomach, he “won’t feel disgusted” and will forgive “your fat” (193). In her rewriting of the fat abject body as a site of bodily pleasure, Moore uses what Le’a Kent calls the “strategy of counterabjection”—a strategy used to counteract shame by imagining a “powerful and unashamed” fat body (140, 142). But such subversive moments do little to counteract Moore’s self-condemning fat-oppressive portrait of herself throughout Fat Girl as a repulsive

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and grotesque spectacle—a waddling, dissmelling, grunting fat woman who walks through the earth looking like a “wide-mawed flesh-flopping flabby monster.” Fat Girl, which deals in a frank way with the self-hatred that grows out of fat oppression, has been aptly described as a “fleshy, uninhibited memoir” that makes for “painful reading” and as a work that involves readers in its shame drama, for although Moore’s tormentors do not “get their comeuppance,” there is “plenty of shame to go around” for Moore’s readers, who “inevitably divide into the contemptuous or the contemptible” (“Miss Piggy”; “Fat Girl”). Speaking a kind of body language, Moore’s Fat Girl, like Shute’s Life-Size, conveys the intense body shame that is a cultural inheritance of women in our fat-phobic culture. Calling attention to women’s embodied identities and conveying the shame that is felt by and on the body, Shute’s Life-Size and Moore’s Fat Girl show the debilitating consequences for women of the mind/body dualism that pervades our culture and continues to both denigrate and contain the female body. Evoking a common shame defense, the anorexic Josie, in her pursuit of thinness, seems intent on becoming smaller—or even disappearing—just as the overweight Moore, who feels hypervisible in her fatness, tries to make herself invisible to others. In a similar way, those who are physically unattractive or socially undesirable may react to their heightened and painful feelings of self-consciousness by trying to make themselves invisible to others just as those who desire the recognition of others—who want to say “Look at me”—but are shamed by being excluded or ostracized by others can be humiliated by their feelings of social invisibility. In the next chapter, we will examine, in Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, the plight of the socially invisible and unattractive woman who, suffering from appearance anxiety, feels a heightened and debilitating sense of her bodily imperfections and social inadequacy.

CHAPTER 8

The Culture of Appearances and the Socially Invisible and Unattractive Woman in Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

he claim that we live in a body-loving era, as we have observed in our discussion of the self-loathing of the anorexic and overweight woman, ignores women’s continuing and pervasive feelings of bodily deficiency in our culture of appearances in which women find themselves lacking as they measure themselves against the idealized images of femininity found in the mainstream culture. The “power of culture to shape body aesthetics should not be underestimated,” as shame theorist Paul Gilbert remarks. For as “social audiences construct views on what is the ideal/ acceptable body for women,” women are pressured to conform by adopting these values if they want “to be attractive to others” (“Body Shame” 30, 29). Calling attention to women’s focus on the body in contemporary culture, Sandra Bartky similarly describes how women learn to evaluate themselves as they are subjected to “the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur” and are urged to “make themselves as pleasing to the eye as possible” (28). Identifying with the body and surrounded with media images of perfect female beauty, women inevitably feel ashamed when they compare themselves to the feminine ideal of bodily acceptability. Urged by the culture of appearances to feel that their bodies are defective and deficient, women come to feel deep body shame. As Bartky writes, “Not only must we continue to produce ourselves as beautiful bodies, but the bodies we have to work with are deficient to begin with. Even within an already inferiorized identity (i.e., the identity of one who is principally and most importantly a body), I turn out once more to be inferior, for the body I am to be, never sufficient unto itself, stands forever in need of plucking or painting, of slimming down or fattening up, of fi rming or flattening” (29). Even as women are enjoined by the fashion-beauty complex to see the body as “a task, an object in need of transformation,” they are reminded of their “myriad” bodily deficiencies and thus are induced to feel “unacceptable” as they are (40). Like Bartky, psychotherapist Iris Fodor is

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concerned with the cultural shaming of women in a society in which women “live in a field of shame” and thus “build their sense of self from ongoing messages and experiences that devalue femaleness” (229). Experiencing “little environmental support and acceptance for the way they are” and feeling self-hatred and body shame in a society in which “the rewards go to those few who conform to ideals,” many women “want to hide” or they determine to try harder by going for yet another self-improvement round of “face-lifts, aerobics, [and] liquid diets” (236, 241, 234). That so many contemporary women are willing to resort to cosmetic surgery to improve their appearance reveals the pervasiveness of women’s body-self shame in our culture of appearances. Virginia Blum, in her study of the self-improvement culture of cosmetic surgery, observes that despite their “array of achievements,” women today are “always being judged” on their appearance (31). In a contemporary culture in which many women “are convinced that internal feelings and even character can be transformed by interventions on the surface,” there is a linkage between a woman’s appearance and her value (107). Indeed, plastic surgery, as Blum comments, “happens in a culture where we are impaled on the effects of first impressions” (126). And plastic surgery also happens, as Susan Bordo observes, in our contemporary “image-saturated culture” in which women have become “habituated to the glossy and gleaming, the smooth and shining, the ageless and sagless and wrinkleless” and in which women “are learning to expect ‘perfection’ and to find any ‘defect’ repellent, unacceptable” (Twilight Zones 2, 3). Subject to a “pedagogy of defect,” women come to view parts of their bodies as “faulty, unacceptable” (Twilight Zones 37). Countering the claims of those who insist that cosmetic surgery is a matter of individual choice and that women who opt for cosmetic improvement find it a source of personal empowerment, Bordo insists that as cosmetic surgery becomes “an increasingly normative cultural practice,” it encourages women to “see themselves as defective” as it ups the “ante on what counts as an acceptable face and body” (Twilight Zones 43). Evidence of the power of the “pedagogy of defect” is found in Deborah Covino’s extension of Kristeva’s account of the horror of the abject female body. Drawing a connection between the abjection of the unruly, unwanted body and aesthetic surgery, Covino argues that “abjection is always present, and foundational to cultural conceptions of beauty,” which split the body into the “good” (or clean and proper body) and the unmodified abject body, the “loathsome parts” that are “at worst hidden and at best cut away” (35, 42). Indeed, even as the aesthetic surgical industry capitalizes on women’s “desires and fears,” it also works to reinforce the idea that the body “needs to be controlled” and that abjected, unacceptable body parts “must be cut, lasered, or refined away” (1). “The disciplinary project of femininity,” remarks Bartky, “is a ‘set up’: It requires such radical and extensive measures of bodily transformation

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that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some degree to fail. Thus, a measure of shame is added to a woman’s sense that the body she inhabits is deficient . . .” (72). As victims of the culture of appearances, women become prone to what shame theorist Benjamin Kilborne aptly calls “appearance anxiety.” Reacting to the contemporary culture’s “increasing anxiety about appearances,” individuals prone to appearance anxiety attempt to “control” how they appear to others and thus how they “appear (and feel)” to themselves and, in a common shame defense, try to hide whatever is “unacceptable” (5, 6). In response to fears of shameful exposure, such individuals “may fantasize disappearing or, conversely, fantasize controlling the way” they are seen (46). But if shame about appearance can lead to the desire to disappear, it also can lead to the fear of disappearing, the feeling that one is “doomed to be invisible while longing for recognition” (Kilborne 26) as we shall see in this chapter, which explores the “appearance anxiety” of the socially invisible and unattractive woman, the woman who feels unwanted, undesirable, excluded, marginalized. Laying bare the way society devalues and dooms to invisibility the plain woman, such as Anita Brookner’s Frances Hinton in Look at Me, or the middle-aged woman, such as Doris Lessing’s Kate Brown in The Summer before the Dark, or the ugly woman, such as Fay Weldon’s Ruth Patchett in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, the works we will investigate reveal the connection between women’s appearance and their body-self shame. Aware of the “evaluating eye of the male connoisseur” and the cultural mandate that they “make themselves as pleasing to the eye as possible,” Brookner’s Frances Hinton and Lessing’s Kate Brown suffer the shame of the marginalized and excluded woman whereas Weldon’s Ruth Patchett, who is ugly and monstrous, tries to cure her shame and rid herself of her unruly and shameful abjected body by undergoing an extreme—indeed, a radical—cosmetic makeover. Making palpable the shame that is felt by and on the body, Brookner’s Look at Me, Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil expose the painful costs of appearance anxiety in our contemporary culture in which women struggle with feelings of bodily and social deficiency as they engage in what Virginia Blum calls “the social work of keeping up appearances” (59).

Anita Brookner’s Look at Me Just as psychologists investigating shame have described how they are sometimes viewed as objects of shame because they are studying shame, so writers dealing with shame can risk being shamed as we can see in a revealing story Anita Brookner recounts about her novel Look at Me. As Brookner remarks, “Look at Me is a very depressed and debilitated novel, and it’s one I regret.

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When I published it, a very old friend of my mother’s summoned me and said, ‘You are getting yourself a bad reputation as a lonely woman. Stop it at once.’ She was right: it sticks” (Haffenden 59). Brookner’s regret about writing Look at Me is telling, for it is a work that put her at risk of being shamed as a lonely woman, and, indeed, commentators have stuck Brookner with the reputation of writing about “the reticence of lonely women” (Malcolm 46). A semiautobiographical work in which the “contradictions and inconsistencies” of the character “are disconcertingly close to the contradictions and inconsistencies of the author” (Skinner 56), Look at Me chronicles the painful and shameful plight of Frances Hinton, a character who has been described, variously, as a standard Brooknerian heroine, who, no matter “how worthy” she is does not “believe—or believe in” her own worth; as a typical Brooknerian character who yearns “to belong or be accepted by others”; and as one of Brookner’s “graceless losers” (Sadler 40; Malcolm 45; Restuccia 38). These critical assessments of Brookner’s character—who feels worthless, that she does not belong, that she is a loser—point to the underlying shame drama presented in Look at Me. Doomed to be invisible while she yearns for recognition, Brookner’s Frances Hinton is a lonely, isolated woman, who has long identified with the socially invisible women in her social orbit—with Olivia, who is disabled, or Miss Morpeth or Mrs. Halloran, aging women who are socially marginalized. An archivist at the reference library of a medical research institute, Frances lives what to her is a dull and predictable life and finds herself surrounded by other people as unfortunate as herself. “I want more, and I even think that I deserve it. . . . I am no beauty but I am quite pleasant-looking. In fact people tell me that I am ‘attractive,’ which always depresses me. It is like being told that you are ‘brilliant,’ which means precisely nothing,” as she says at the beginning of her account. “Rendered invisible” by her solitude, she writes to remedy her situation because writing is her way of “piping up” and reminding other people that she is there (19). While she removes from her characters “all the sadness” that she feels in herself and writes stories designed to “make people laugh,” the “real message” hidden in her writings is a “simple” one (19–20). “If my looks and my manner were of greater assistance to me I could deliver this message in person. ‘Look at me,’ I would say. ‘Look at me’” (20). When the socially invisible and marginalized Frances is befriended by Nick and Alix Fraser, who embody the cultural ideal of beauty and success and social power, she is immediately struck by their social and physical superiority. People such as Nick and Alix, as Frances explains, are “so markedly a contrast with the general run of people that one’s instinctive reaction is one of admiration, indulgence, and . . . supplication. . . . I have noticed that extremely handsome men and extremely beautiful women exercise a power over others which they themselves have no need, or indeed no time, to analyze.” Such people “attract admirers, adherents, followers,” and they also attract people

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like Frances: “observers” (14). Because of the Frasers’ sovereignlike appeal, Frances finds herself respecting them and also wanting to please them and attract their attention. “‘Look at me,’ I want to say. ‘Look at me.’” The fact that she is “in love with their entire lives” provides a “measure of the power that they exert” (15). Aware of the social differences between herself and the Frasers, Frances uses what shame theorist Gershen Kaufman calls the “comparison-making script” in relating to them. Evolving from an “awareness of difference between self and other,” the comparison-making script “inevitably translates into an invidious comparison,” and thus the individual feels “lesser, deficient” (Shame 218). In a shame-inducing comparison-making script, Frances compares herself unfavorably to the Frasers, finding herself lacking in sight of their survival-of-the-fittest physical perfection. “So stunning was their physical presence, one might almost say their physical triumph, that I immediately felt weak and pale, not so much decadent as undernourished, unfed by life’s more potent forces, condemned to dark rooms, and tiny meals, and an obscure creeping existence which would be appropriate to my enfeebled status and which would allow me gently to decline into extinction” (37). As “a protected species, an example of the very highest breed of human being,” Nick makes Frances aware of “the unfairness of life,” and she is equally struck by Alix’s “aura of power,” which claims the “entire attention” of other people (39, 47). Brookner’s comment that in her novels there is a contrast between “damaged” and “undamaged” people (Guppy 150) sheds light on Frances’s attraction to the Frasers. Although Frances is an educated career woman and a writer, she identifies with the damaged—that is, shamed—people in her midst, like her predecessor at the library, Miss Morpeth, who has “all the unseemliness of a plain elderly woman in not very good health” and who is “humiliated” by her failing body (64), or Olivia, Frances’s coworker and disabled friend who is dismissed by Alix because she is “crippled” (161). The “supreme married couple, matched in every way,” Nick and Alix are an embodiment of the “rare perfect example,” which “demands that one lay down one’s pen and stalk it, study it, dissect it, learn it, love it” (40, 42). Unlike the deeply injured and vulnerable Frances, the Frasers seem “impervious” and undamageable: “I needed to know that not everyone carries a wound and that this wound bleeds intermittently throughout life. . . . I needed to learn, from experts, that pure egotism that had always escaped me, for the little I had managed to build up, and which had so far only gone into my writing, was quickly vanquished by the sight of that tremulousness, that lost look in the eye, that disappointment that seemed to haunt me, to get in my way, even to obtrude on my consciousness, when I was busy building up my resources of selfishness” (42, 43). Feeling that she has been “offered a glimpse of the world outside” when the Frasers befriend her, Frances is eager to “see how the others, the free ones” conduct their lives (51). Determined to “invent a new life”

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for herself and get away from her old life, she finds herself wanting to engage Alix’s attention the first day she meets her, “the day of that royal progress through life, that easy relegation of phenomena not found attractive”; indeed she feels it would be “an honour to engage” Alix’s attention (44, 47). Frances finds it hard to believe her “good fortune” when she begins to dine with the Frasers routinely, but as a “latter-day recruit,” she also realizes that she is “permanently on probation” (52, 56). Serving as Alix’s “audience” and “admirer” and sharing Alix’s “esteem for her own superiority,” Frances is aware that Alix finds her “dull, intrinsically dull” because she is “loyal and well-behaved and uncritical” (56). But she also recognizes that in some way she is necessary to the Frasers as they exhibit their marriage to her, and so Frances learns to “keep a pleasant noncommittal smile” on her face when Alix and Nick gaze into each other’s eyes or caress each other in front of her. As “the beggar at their feast,” she reassures them by her “very presence” that they are “richer” than she is or “could ever hope to be” (57). Endeavoring “to capture their attention, their good will” and cast “in the role of their apprentice,” she soon finds that the Frasers have become “an addiction” (59). Feeling “sharper, funnier, more entertaining” when she is with them, she wants to leave behind her “old sad way of life” (67, 69). When Frances begins her relationship with Dr. James Anstey—a relationship the Frasers promote—she feels for the first time in her life “strong,” “energetic,” and “young” (86). Frances, who has long identified with the invisible, unattractive women in her midst, basks under James’s interest in her: Now there was something to get up for in the mornings, other than that withering little routine that would eventually transform me into a version of Miss Morpeth. . . . Nor would I turn into Mrs. Halloran, still game, but doomed to hopelessness. No glasses of gin for me, no bottle in the wardrobe of a room in a hotel in South Kensington, no evenings lying on the bed dressed in a housecoat too young and too pink, casting superior horoscopes for those who fear the future. With what thankfulness did I register my deliverance from this dread, which had possessed me for as long as I could remember. (85–86) Suddenly and unexpectedly finding herself “written into the plot,” Frances stops writing as she comes to feel “a revulsion against the long isolation that writing imposes, the claustration, the sense of exclusion” (82, 84). Her “penance for not being lucky,” her writing is an attempt to “reach others” and “make them love” her. “I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state ‘I hurt’ or ‘I hate’ or ‘I want.’ Or, indeed, ‘Look at me’” (84). Long an observer not a participant, Frances senses that life is “opening up” not only for

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her “inspection” but also for her “participation,” and aware that she considers herself “worthy,” as she “had never done before,” she looks back on her “previous life with a sort of amazed pity” (87, 91). Unlike the married man she once had an affair with—something she never talks about—James does not make her “feel unimportant” or “humiliated” (96, 122). With James, there are “no images” in Frances’s head. “I did not write. I was happy,” as she remarks (96). But Frances’s happiness is doomed to be short-lived because she is dependent on the approval of people such as the Frasers and James. Alix, who expects Frances to provide a full and intimate account of her relationship with James, becomes annoyed when she thinks Frances is holding out on her. “I had hopes of you. I thought you might really turn into something,” Alix says to Frances (109). Asserting her proprietorial right to know, Alix asks Frances if she loves James, and when Frances says “No,” Alix uses her words against her and insists that she should “stop seeing” James and “standing in his way” (109, 118). Suspecting that James has confided in Alix and afraid that she is losing him, Frances becomes aware of the “expertise ranged against” her and feels that she is increasingly at Alix’s mercy. Filled with self-doubt, Frances views herself, once again, as uninteresting and ineffectual, for she realizes that she is neither “a powerful woman” nor “irresistibly attractive” (123). “I had become an observer when I saw that I was not to be allowed to participate. . . . I had never once said, Look at me. Now, it seemed, I must make one more effort, one more attempt to prove myself viable” (123–24). But when she tries to lure James to her bed and he refuses—“Not with you, Frances. Not with you,” he says to her (127)—she senses that she has already lost him. As Frances prepares to defensively return to her observer role, she feels a sense of dread and sorrow. “I, who found it so difficult to shed my beady isolation, must in fact never appear to be lonely. I must be the odd one at every gathering, and in order to hide my sense of shame I must pretend to be taking notes. Where I had once thought to say, ‘Look at me,’ I must now turn the attention of others away from myself” (132–33). Feeling as if her “very substance were threatened,” the deeply damaged Frances becomes aware of her profound feelings of loneliness and emptiness (145). As the socially invisible and shamed woman, she again, in a shame-inducing comparison-making script, compares herself unfavorably to James and the Frasers, who seem to act as a unit—they are “all tall, all handsome, physically linked” (158)—as they exclude her from their conversation. When Frances, during dinner at a restaurant, suddenly realizes that James is having an affair with Alix’s friend, Maria, she is aware that the Frasers are watching her and that Alix feels cheated when the “‘interesting’ situation she had foreseen or even contrived” does not materialize (160). Rejected and excluded, the deeply shamed Frances enacts a contempt-disappear scenario as she walks home alone, hiding herself in the

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night’s blackness. Describing the connection between contempt and the desire to disappear, shame theorist Léon Wurmser remarks that shame is the “affect of contempt directed against the self—by others or by one’s own conscience. Contempt says: ‘You should disappear as such a being as you have shown yourself to be—failing, weak, flawed, and dirty. Get out of my sight: Disappear!’” To be exposed as one who fails someone else’s or one’s own expectations causes shame, and to “disappear into nothing is the punishment for such failure” (“Shame” 67). Exposed to the annihilating force of the other’s contempt, Frances feels like a socially despised nonperson, as if she is a “biological nonentity, to be phased out” (163). “Shame is important because no other affect is more disturbing to the self, none more central for the sense of identity,” writes shame theorist Gershen Kaufman (Psychology viii). As “interpersonally induced shame develops into internally induced shame,” shame can spread throughout the self, and such “protracted shame” can leave the individual feeling “naked, defeated as a person and intolerably alone” (Shame 8). When Frances enters an empty London park, a place for those who, like her, desire “concealment,” she, in a contempt-disappear scenario, feels herself “growing smaller, harder, more brittle, less worthy of love than ever before” (166, 167). In describing the emotional turmoil behind Frances’s normally controlled façade, Brookner conveys the disorganizing and annihilating force of an acute shaming event in which the individual may feel “small, helpless, and childish,” her behavior and thought may seem “disorganized and disoriented,” and she may feel at a “loss for words and also at a loss for thoughts” (H. Lewis, “Introduction” 19; Scheff, “Shame-Rage Spiral” 111). Engulfed and paralyzed by shame as she makes her terrified and exhausted journey home, Frances feels utterly exposed and vulnerable, and when she fi nally arrives home in her “discredited and dirty” clothes, she feels “old, unwieldy” (174). Looking at herself in the mirror, she sees “a slight and almost childish person, with fi xed and fearful eyes,” a far different look from the “disdainful” expression she normally assumes to defend against her deep-rooted shame (175). Frances, who enters a childlike state of “total regression,” feels “small and spindly” when she periodically surfaces from the “unknowingness” of her “dense, thick, engulfi ng” sleep (177, 178). The next morning Frances feels “distaste” for her “unclothed self,” her body shame making palpable her sense of shameful insignificance and inferiority: “the sight of my body filled me with shame, so lacking did I perceive it to be in adult qualities, so flat, so unremarkable, so humiliated. I wondered if this feeling would ever leave me or whether I was condemned to see myself in this manner for the rest of my life.” Aware that she has gotten thin, Frances thinks it is appropriate that she “should dwindle” and “shed” her “biological characteristics”: “In future I would become subsumed into my head, and into my hand, my writing hand” (179). “I was not of their number, that

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was all. The moment at which I recognized this difference was the ultimate sadness,” Frances recognizes at the end as she recalls how the Frasers had delivered her “from various prospective prisons—old age, silence, solitude” (181). Yet Frances does have a defense, a way to seek revenge by humiliating her humiliators. If she continues her relationship with the Frasers but in a “humbler, more subordinate” role, she will be able to “make notes for a satirical novel,” and thus they will, unknowingly, “meet their fate” at her hands (184). But as Frances, at the end, begins to write and carefully replaces her “mask of amusement” (185) in her attempt to cover her shame and appear in control to others, her retreat to the isolated world of writing signals what, for her, is a loss of face. Utterly humiliated and defeated, Frances still longs for recognition—she wants others to “look” at her—as she resigns herself to the role of the socially invisible woman, the excluded woman who observes but does not participate in life.1

Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark Unlike Brookner’s Frances Hinton, Lessing’s Kate Brown in The Summer before the Dark is a stylish woman who has long attracted the approving gaze of others, yet she, too, comes to suffer appearance anxiety. Acutely aware of the connection between a woman’s appearance and her social value, the forty-five-year-old Kate Brown, as she undergoes a midlife crisis, experiences the social devaluation and invisibility suffered by the aging, and thereby, undesirable, woman. That women enact “the roles of both viewed object and viewing subject” as they form and judge their image against cultural ideals and exercise “a fearsome self-regulation” (Nead 10) is evident in Lessing’s novel as her character, dividing herself into experiencing and observing parts, becomes the object of her own gaze. Lessing’s novel also addresses a question Virginia Blum raises in her study of the current world of cosmetic surgery when she asks whether the individual is “internally changed” when she is received as attractive or unattractive by others (58). If Lessing’s smiling, socially adaptive Kate Brown has long been involved in what Blum calls “the social work of keeping up appearances” (59), she comes to recognize the extent to which she has been sustained by the culture of appearances as she confronts, behind her need for the confirming attention of others, her deep-seated feelings of shameful vulnerability and injury and anger. Defensively distancing herself from her feelings, Kate Brown is, as the novel opens, “uncomfortably conscious” of the discrepancy between her thoughts and feelings (2), between the conventional attitudes toward personal experiences she has consciously embraced—“Marriage is a compromise. . . . I wouldn’t like to be a child again! . . . Love is a woman’s whole existence

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. . .” (1)—and her dangerous feelings. She is aware, the narrator explains, that “a good many of the things she thought, had been taken down off a rack and put on, but that what she really felt was something else again” (2). “I’m telling myself the most dreadful lies!” she thinks to herself. “Why do I do it? There’s something here that I simply will not let myself look at. . . . Now, look at it all, try and get hold of it, don’t go on making up all these attitudes, these stories—stop taking down the same old dresses off the rack . . .” (12). Kate’s worries about growing old—initially conveyed in her fear of the “cold wind” blowing “straight towards her, from the future” (17)— are associated with the painful feelings of rejection that have been slowly emerging over the past few years: that she is “not wanted” by her family and is “unnecessary” (19). Kate admits that her view of herself as a “kingpin,” as the “warm centre of the family,” is out of date by some two or three years, as is her “carefully tended” view of her marriage (19, 52). She has hidden behind her “official memories” (90) in a desperate attempt to avoid her feelings. As a wife and mother, she has been “at everybody’s beck and call, always available, always criticised, always . . . bled to feed these—monsters,” and her husband’s numerous affairs have diminished her, making her feel “as if a wound had been opened in her from which substance and strength drained from her” (89, 64). Concealed behind Kate’s adaptable public personality are poisonous feelings of injury and anger. “She had sat often alone in her room, raging under a knowledge of intolerable unfairness. Injustice, the pain of it, had been waiting for her all these last years. But she had not allowed herself to feel it, or not for long” (52). When Kate takes a temporary summer job as a translator at Global Food, she deliberately keeps herself occupied with “minor and unimportant obsessions” (29), and she buys herself new dresses and refashions herself by having her hair done—all in an attempt to ward off her growing awareness of the “violent and uncontrollable swings in her emotions” about her husband and children (33). As Kate performs the well-rehearsed female roles of “nurse,” “nanny,” and “tribal mother” at Global Food, she feels she is “blooming, expanding, enlarging” because she is “wanted, needed” (29, 44, 51). She is the “ever-available, ever-good-natured, popular Kate Brown” (53). At times her observing self notes the “slow rise of her euphoria” and watches it “drily enough” (51). But she also begins to sense the growing “hysteria” (57) behind her smiling face. While “smiling, smiling, in the beam of other people’s appreciation,” she recognizes that her reactions are “exaggerated” and sees herself as “an efficient, high-powered, smiling woman, but spinning around and around on herself like a machine that someone should have switched off” (55, 56). Her condition mirrors that of the female fl ight attendant whose “business is to be admired,” to be “on show, the focus of hundreds of pairs of eyes, all day” and who, consequently, becomes “inflated” and “intoxicated” (54, 53). When the flight attendant gets married and thus,

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metaphorically, walks offstage, she becomes irritable and restless. “She is like a child the grownups have been admiring but now they have got bored with her, they have turned away and started talking and forgotten her, and no matter how she dances, and smiles and poses and shouts, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ they seem not to hear” (55). If Kate in her role as the tribal mother is the “provider of invisible manna, consolation, warmth, ‘sympathy’” (46), she also is the rejected child who is desperate for the attention of others. At Global Food, Kate temporarily receives the approval she requires to nourish and sustain her debilitated self. But she also recognizes that “behind a different façade”—when she assumes the shame posture of the aging woman by letting her body sag and her face droop—she is invisible. To be invisible is to feel “dislocated,” as if something has “slipped out of alignment” (43). When others ignore her, she suffers a slippage of self, this experience a rehearsal for her later retreat into the disconnected world of the aging, and socially invisible, woman. Defensively evading her deep-seated fears about growing old, Kate goes off to Spain with Jeffrey Merton, a younger man, only to fi nd herself acting the role of the sympathetic mother when her young lover becomes ill. Returning alone to a London hotel when she, in turn, becomes sick, Kate pays the hotel staff for nurturing attention “of the very highest quality” as she succumbs to her illness and retreats into herself (137). In Kate’s illness, which is presented both as a physical collapse and a psychic malady, the “cold wind” of a loveless future manifests itself as a symptom, for she feels “as if inside her she was cold, very chilled, despite her burning surfaces” (138). Nauseated, unable to eat, “the flesh . . . melting off her” (145), Kate, like Brookner’s Frances Hinton, becomes the image of the shamed individual as the inner feelings she has long been avoiding manifest themselves physically. “She stood in front of a glass. . . . She saw a woman all bones and big elbows, with large knees above lanky calves; she had small dark anxious eyes in a white sagging face around which was a rough mat of brassy hair” (141). A woman who has long worked to keep up appearances through her stylish, attractive public façade, Kate confronts what she has long avoided as she becomes painfully aware of her attenuated, shameful body-self. It is appropriate that Kate, a woman who has felt herself onstage all her life, publicly chooses to act out her crisis-of-identity at a London theater full of people “dressed up in personalities not their own” (152). No longer an attractive, stylish woman but an object of public shame, Kate openly looks at the people in the audience with “a cocky aggressive sideways cast of her eye” (156), and she mutters at the characters on the stage. An “eccentric to the point of fantasy,” she wears a “sacklike” dress, her hair is “multi-hued,” and her “gaunt” face is “yellow, and all bones and burning angry eyes” (153). To Kate, the female character in the play is the mirror image of “every woman in the audience who has been the centre of attention and now sees her power slip

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away from her.” The character, she thinks, is “Mad. Nuts. Loony. Allowed to be. More, encouraged to be. She should be locked up” (155). Looking at the room full of people through her distorted perception, Kate sees not human beings but “animals covered with cloth and bits of fur, ornamented with stones, their faces and claws painted with colour” (156). No longer sustained by the approving gaze of others, Kate, when she examines her own face in the mirror, sees that she, too, is an animal—a sick monkey. As the deeply shamed Kate retreats from the real world, she begins to live more and more in her dream world, the “country behind the daylit one” (128). Her serial dream about the seal, she believes, is “as much her business for this time in her life . . . as wrestling with her emotional self, which seemed like a traitor who had come to life inside her. What she was engaged in was the dream, which worked itself out in her” (128–29). A dramatization of Kate’s wants and anxieties, her dream-in-process conveys her sense of shameful exposure, vulnerability, injury, and helplessness. A “story” or “journey,” “an epic, simple and direct” (29), the seal dream centers on a rescue fantasy, Kate’s desire to rescue the seal dramatizing her own need for self-rescue. “How could she be sure of going in the right direction?” (47), she asks during an early dream. “Where was the seal? Was it lying abandoned among dry rocks waiting for her, looking for her with its dark eyes?” (68). When Kate looks into the eyes of the seal, which are like her own, she encounters her long-hidden and disavowed emotional self. Although she momentarily evades her responsibility when she makes “perfect” love to her idealized lover (101)—her husband? her young lover, Jeffrey Merton?—she soon continues her difficult journey in a darkening landscape, a “permanent chilly twilight,” a “dark northern country” (119, 123). The “cold wind” Kate has felt blowing from the future becomes figured in her dream. Again and again, she has the nagging feeling that her “inner tutor” wants her “to understand something,” which she is “too obtuse” (119) to comprehend. When she, in a condensed dream image, envisions that she and the seal are being attacked by wild animals, she expresses her own feelings of shameful vulnerability and injury in her relationship with her family. Another dream dramatizes her need to be special, to be singled out, and her related fear of shameful rejection. In the public gaze, she dances with the king, an older version of her perfect lover, only to be discarded by him, just as her husband repeatedly has discarded her to engage in numerous sexual affairs. Again she rescues the abandoned seal and continues her journey “north, always north, away from the sun” (146). Mutilated, alienated, homeless, the seal is an embodiment of Kate’s exposed and threatened selfhood. Confronting her emotional self when she moves to the subterranean domain of Maureen’s basement flat, the final setting of her complicated shame drama, Kate becomes acutely aware of the “monster inside which she was trapped, a monstrous baby, who had to be soothed and smiled at and

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given attention on demand” (175). Like Brookner’s Frances Hinton, Kate wants others to “look” at her, and she, too, through her starving, dwindling body, expresses her feelings of shameful insignificance and inadequacy. What Kate has never revealed to her family—that she has felt for the past few years “starved” for their attention (52)—she openly expresses during her stay with Maureen. Realizing that she should try to eat, Kate goes to a restaurant and when the waitress ignores her—as her family has done—she nearly succumbs to a childish “tantrum.” Made to feel “invisible,” she wants to shout out, “Look, I’m here, can’t you see me?” Angry, unable to eat, she feels “like a small child who has been told to sit in a corner to eat its food because it has been naughty, and then is forgotten” (170). And when she goes shopping for food, she gets so upset because she is buying second-rate goods—“bad dead food” (173)—that she feels like raging and screaming. “She was insane, there was no doubt of it—so spoke her intelligence, while her emotions were those of a small child” (174). Feeling an urgent need to eat so she can “build up energy in order to defeat the monster which had swallowed her whole” (176), she finally eats the food that Maureen gives to her—baby food—as she symbolically mothers herself in an attempt to soothe the enraged, monstrous child she harbours within. “I’m here, can’t you see? Why don’t you look at me?” Kate wants to cry out when men totally ignore her as she walks down the street, making her feel “invisible” (180, 179). Similarly, no one takes “any notice of her” when she enters a café. “She knew now, she had to know at last, that all her life she had been held upright by an invisible fluid, the notice of other people. But the fluid had been drained away.” Her smile, the “emphatic smile” of Mrs. Michael Brown, as she comes to recognize, is her way of attracting attention by sending out the signal, “I am accustomed to being noticed” (180). In a conscious experiment with female role-playing, Kate, on the mend, alternately dresses as the stylish and sexually attractive Mrs. Brown and as an invisible, sagging, old woman. “The mask, the charade, the fitting of herself to the template” of Mrs. Michael Brown revives the “old manner, the loving lovely Mrs. Kate Brown” (186–87). Her other identity, her invisible shameful self, is angry, forlorn, vulnerable. Kate, who realizes that “her whole surface . . . had been set to receive notice,” feels dislocated when she assumes her invisible identity: she is “floating, without ballast,” her head is “chaotic, her feelings numbed with confusion” (179). Aware of her divided self, Kate, in a conscious mirror encounter, studies her counterpart, a “lonely woman, her eyes forced full of vivacity, her voice urged full of charm.” Following the woman, Kate “was following herself . . . watching how she looked long into every approaching face, male or female, to see how she was being noticed” (187). When Kate performs her invisible, unattractive role, she simultaneously observes her other smiling, attractive self being “acknowledged and recognised” and thus basking and growing “subtly fat and happy because

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of all the note being taken of her” (200). To be looked at and admired by others—especially men—is to be nourished. But while Kate craves the approving gaze of men, she also comes to recognize that her customary self conforms, twitches “like a puppet to those strings” of what stimulates men’s eyes (186), and so she determines to free herself from what she comes to see as the inauthentic world of female role-playing. When Kate begins to recover her psychic balance, she thinks that perhaps her negative feelings of the last few months were nothing more than an expression of her need for attention and appreciation. “She had not been loved enough, noticed enough, licked and stroked enough? Was that all it was?” (231). “Assessing, balancing, weighing” what one thinks and feels—“it’s all nonsense” (232) she decides as she recuperates from her “sag into sickness” (201). Her “mood” when she returns home will be “irrelevant,” she concludes when she begins to experience a “reversal” of her “black” and “ugly” feelings (232, 231). At this point Kate completes her dream and rescues the seal by returning it to the sea, and then she discovers that the sun—a “brilliant, buoyant, tumultuous sun”—is “in front of her, not behind” (241). Read as an interpretive key to Kate’s inner drama, the culminating seal dream, in Betsy Draine’s view, “clearly instructs us that Kate was wrong in her assumption that this was her summer before the dark” (129), and, similarly, Barbara Waxman finds evidence in the fi nal seal dream that Kate “foresees . . . a brighter old age” after her “struggle in the dark during the summer” (From the Hearth 57). But other critics question the optimism of the closure, claiming, as Jan Verleun does, that at the end there is “little support for the belief” that Kate’s “desperate search has revealed to her the founts of the joy and happiness to which the symbolism seems to point forward” (636–37). Kate’s “statement” of defiance, her “widening grey band” of hair (244), is also the subject of critical debate. It has been contrastingly described as “trivial” (Cederstrom 145) and as a “serious statement” to make given the “association of appearance with convention” (Greene 138). But if Kate’s graying band of hair suggests her “acceptance of self and aging” (Stout 16), it also stigmatizes her by marking her as an aging woman in a culture that treats the older woman as an object of contempt. In a few short months, Kate has visibly grown older, the “light that is the desire to please” having been extinguished. “Her face had aged,” Kate thinks to herself. “They [her family] could hardly fail to notice it. . . . Her hair—well, no one could overlook that!” (243). At the beginning of her summer, Kate was aware that she had little to look forward to but a “dwindling away from full household activity into getting old.” What happens to Kate during her fateful summer before the dark, the narrator tells us, is that she experiences, in a “shortened, heightened, concentrated time,” the process of growing old (5). When Kate returns home, not as the attractive, young-looking woman she was when she left but as a visibly aging woman, she consciously expresses her desire to free herself from

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the cultural mandate that she attract the approving gaze of men by making herself “as pleasing to the eye as possible.” But she also unconsciously signals, through her new appearance, her dependency on others and her awareness of the dwindling, not the strengthening, of her self. That Kate associates getting old with “dwindling away,” which recalls Frances Hinton’s experience, makes palpable her sense of shameful insignificance. The irresolution of the closure, which suggests Lessing’s own lack of certainty about her character’s fate, underscores the central uncertainties of the text as the conscious optimism of the closure is belied by the unconscious pessimism surrounding the issue of the social invisibility and undesirability of the aging woman in a culture of appearances that so pathologizes the normal bodily processes of aging that many women have come to believe that they have a kind of “moral duty”—to themselves and to others who “behold” them—to remove the signs of aging and thus to surgically correct what cosmetic surgeons refer to as “the aging deformity” (Blum 76, 75).

Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil If “visual judgments are ubiquitous and perhaps even necessary,” as Sander Gilman remarks, they can also “trap” us as we respond to the “demand of seeing and being seen” and are “judged by how we appear” (Making 3). Like Brookner and Lessing, Weldon, in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, explores the shameful plight of the socially invisible, and, in the case of Weldon’s Ruth Patchett, ugly woman in our appearance-driven culture where women are expected to do the social work of “keeping up appearances.” Measuring her image against the cultural ideal embodied in her despised rival, the ultrafeminine Mary Fisher, Ruth feels profound appearance anxiety and body-self shame, which leads to her extreme attempt to control how she appears. Undergoing extensive and painful plastic surgery to drastically alter her appearance, the socially invisible Ruth, as she plots her revenge against her husband, determines to refashion her external appearance so that she becomes an exact replica of Mary Fisher. Aptly described as “an extravagant revenge fantasy involving cosmetic rebirth” (Dowling 86), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil not only provides a parodic statement about the contemporary culture of cosmetic surgery, but also reveals the power of cultural ideology to entrap women as it describes the tortuous plastic surgery Ruth undergoes to transform herself bodily into the feminine beauty ideal. “How . . . do ugly women survive, those whom the world pities? The dogs, as they call us,” Ruth asks at the beginning of her narrative. “I’ll tell you; they live as I do, outfacing truth, hardening the skin against perpetual humiliation, until it’s as tough and cold as a crocodile’s” (7). Rejected by her own mother who is “ashamed” of Ruth because of her ugliness—for

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“ugly and discordant things” are revolting to her mother—Ruth ends up suffering from profound body shame, feeling that she has “nerve endings not inside but outside” her skin (8). Although Bobbo willingly has sex with the six-foot-two-inch-tall, two-hundred-pound Ruth—“his vast obliging mountain” (32)—and then marries her when she gets pregnant, he rejects her “immeasurably large” (20) body. Ruth assents when Bobbo insists on having an open marriage because in their marriage both Ruth and her husband recognize that “it was Ruth’s body that was at fault. . . . He had married it perforce and in error and would do his essential duties by it, but he would never be reconciled to its enormity, and Ruth knew it” (35). When Bobbo falls in love with the petite and pretty romance novelist Mary Fisher, Ruth, who is “jealous of every little, pretty woman who ever lived and looked up since the world began” (25), compares herself unfavorably to Mary Fisher in a shame-inducing comparison-making script. “I am as dark as Mary Fisher is fair, and have one of those jutting jaws that tall, dark women often have, and eyes sunk rather far back into my face, and a hooked nose” (5). “She has four moles on her chin and from three of them hairs grow,” Ruth imagines Bobbo telling Mary Fisher after having sex, the two of them viewing her as an object of ridicule and contempt (6). “How can one love . . . what is essentially unlovable,” Bobbo says to Ruth, who is aware that she is judged by her appearance and that her massive and ugly body dooms her to a life of unlovability and social invisibility (45). If visual judgments of women’s physical appearance are ubiquitous in our appearance-driven culture, they can also be profoundly shaming for ugly women such as Weldon’s Ruth Patchett, who fails to fulfill cultural norms. In the classic shame scenario, in which “the eye is the organ of shame par excellence,” the individual feels exposed and humiliated—looked at with contempt for being inferior and flawed—and thus wants to hide or disappear (Wurmser, “Shame” 67). Fear of visual exposure, as Wurmser explains, leads to the wish to “disappear as the person” one has shown oneself to be, or “to be [seen as] different” than one is (Mask 232)—an impulse that ultimately drives Ruth’s desire not only to disappear from Bobbo’s life as she plots her revenge, but also to transform herself through cosmetic surgery. Even as Ruth, in a contempt-disappear scenario, hides herself by disappearing, she also defends against feelings of shameful exposure through her defiant shamelessness and expressions of rage. Treated contemptuously by her husband, who announces that the unlovable Ruth is a “she-devil” (47), Ruth, who has long tried to be the submissive, good wife, shamelessly embraces her husband’s defi nition of her monstrous femininity by transforming into a she-devil. “If you are a she-devil, the mind clears at once. . . . There is no shame, no guilt, no dreary striving to be good. There is only, in the end, what you want,” Ruth says as she describes how “exhilarating” it is to be a she-devil (48). Feeling empowered as a she-devil, Ruth wants “revenge” and “power”

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and “money” and “to be loved and not love in return” (49). As a she-devil, Ruth acts out not only a contempt script but also rage and power scripts—all defending scripts against shame. Just as rage protects against the feelings of vulnerability and exposure that accompany shame, so gaining power over others defends against feelings of helplessness. “When power scripts combine with rage and/or contempt scripts, the seeking of revenge is a likely outcome,” as Gershen Kaufman explains. A recasting defense, the aim is to “reverse roles with the perceived humiliator” so that “the humiliated one, at long last, will humiliate the other” (Psychology 101). Bent on revenge, Ruth sets out to systematically humiliate her humiliators, Bobbo and Mary Fisher. After setting fi re to Bobbo’s Eden Grove house, she abandons her children, leaving them with their father and Mary Fisher, financially ruins Bobbo and has him jailed on false embezzlement charges, and destroys Mary Fisher’s romantic life in the High Tower. The once wealthy and successful Mary Fisher, who sells the High Tower to pay Bobbo’s legal fees, ends up losing not only her money and Bobbo, but also her looks and her life. Left friendless and impoverished, she ultimately dies of cancer. In her revenge, Ruth takes on a representative status as she becomes an agent of revenge for society’s marginalized and socially invisible—and thus shamed—women. After Ruth disappears from Bobbo’s life, she spies on him but he does not recognize her: Ruth thought that after all that was not strange: they now inhabited different worlds. Hers was unknown to him: those on the right side of everything take care to know as little as possible about those on the wrong side. The poor, exploited, and oppressed, however, love to know about their masters, to gaze at the faces in the paper, to marvel at their love affairs, to discover their foibles. . . . So Ruth would recognize Bobbo, lover and accountant; Bobbo would not recognize Ruth, hospital ward orderly and abandoned mother. (134) Taking advantage of her invisibility, Ruth assumes a variety of identities as she enacts her revenge: using her Vesta Rose identity as the cofounder of an employment agency for women to further her embezzlement plot against Bobbo; her Polly Patch identity as live-in household help for the family of the judge trying Bobbo’s case to guarantee a long prison sentence for Bobbo; her Molly Wishant identity as a housekeeper for a priest to engineer Mary Fisher’s conversion and thus her guilt-ridden and despairing end. While Mary eventually turns into an invisible woman—she becomes “just another scurrying, aging woman, holding on to what is left of her life” as eyes “slip past her” (244)—Ruth is transformed, via cosmetic surgery, into an exact replica of the eye-pleasing Mary Fisher, the object of male desire.

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That the “aestheticized body emerges through the identification of abject body parts and their amendment” (Covino 4) is revealed in Ruth’s relentless pursuit of bodily perfection as she strives to rid herself of her natural, fleshy, and monstrous “bad” body and achieve the “clean and proper” good body of idealized feminine beauty. If women who seek aesthetic makeovers typically claim that they are acting out of personal choice (“I’m doing it for me”), Deborah Covino reads our extreme makeover culture through a Kristevan lens. In her analysis of a television show that features women undergoing elective cosmetic surgery, Covino concludes that “each story is about the desire to defeat or overcome abjection” by bringing the “body under control and within conventional beauty norms” (65). In a similar way, Weldon’s Ruth Patchett wants to overcome abjection by bringing her monstrous body under control and achieving, via aesthetic surgery, the conventional beauty norms embodied in her rival Mary Fisher. “Since I cannot change the world, I will change myself,” Ruth remarks of her desire for a new body—and thereby a new identity—in a world where a woman’s appearance designates her social viability and value (237). Unable to change the culture of appearances, Ruth, instead, changes her physical appearance. Determined to transform herself bodily into Mary Fisher, Ruth endures excruciating pain as she masochistically submits herself to a series of tortuous and mutilating medical procedures to amend her abjected body parts: she has her nose straightened and trimmed, her jaw reduced three inches in size, her eyebrows raised and hairline lowered, her ears pinned back and the lobes reduced in size, fat removed from her shoulders, back, hips and buttocks, the loose skin beneath her arms tightened, and her legs and arms shortened. Insisting that she is “remaking” herself, Ruth asserts that she-devils “are beyond nature: they create themselves out of nothing” (269, 153). While the abject bodies of monstrous females have been “adapted as countercultural sources of defiant feminist power,” such figures remain the repellent “abjects” of mass culture, as Covino observes (63).2 Tellingly, in her act of bodily transformation, Ruth is described as an abject female Frankenstein: in the fi nal stages of her surgical death and rebirth, Ruth, who is hovering “on the edge of life and death,” is seemingly stimulated into life by an electrical storm, and afterward one of Ruth’s doctors refers to her as “Frankenstein’s monster, something that needed lightning to animate it and get it moving” (270, 271). In her willful defiance, she is also a female Lucifer. When warned that her defiance has made God angry, Ruth replies, “Of course He’s angry. . . . I am remaking myself” (269). Yet despite her enormous will-to-power, the monstrous Ruth wants to become like the petite Mary Fisher, insisting that she wants to “look up to men” (204). When Ruth gives her cosmetic surgeon, Carl Ghengis, photographs of Mary Fisher and asks to be remade in Mary’s image, he tells her that she is “asking to be made pretty: trivial” (236). As the wife of one of

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the doctors remarks, “I suppose what she thought was . . . if you can’t beat them, join them” (259). In an enactment of a contempt-disappear scenario, Ruth, who has long been treated as an object of contempt and who feels deep loathing for her body—indeed, she is “glad to be rid” of her monstrous, abjected body (242)—disappears as the socially despised nonperson and is cosmetically reborn as Mary Fisher, becoming, in the process, “an impossible male fantasy made flesh” (259). And yet like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who wanted legs instead of her tail so she could be loved by her prince—“She was given legs . . . and after that every step she took was like stepping on knives”—Ruth, after her surgery, becomes an alluringly beautiful woman and yet she is condemned to a life of physical suffering because “with every step it was as if she trod on knives” (173, 275). Even as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil points to the “mutilating influence of cultural myths” in telling the story of Ruth Patchett, it also calls attention to the “cultural pressure to conform that has propelled cosmetic and reconstructive surgery into a multimillion-dollar industry” (Peterson 296). Indeed, as Elizabeth Haiken has observed, while plastic surgery is framed as the pursuit of individualism, “the project of recreating the self through surgery has led instead to conformity” (11).3 Ruth Patchett, who desires to be “like other women,” yields to the pressure to conform when she transforms bodily into the idealized Mary Fisher (253). A woman whose “features are so regular and so perfect they are hard to remember,” Mary is “all women because she is no woman” (186). As Weldon focuses on the politics of appearance in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, she engages with feminism in complicated, even contradictory, ways. In part, Weldon echoes the feminist assessment of the beauty culture voiced by Naomi Wolf in her well-known critique of the contemporary “beauty myth.” According to Wolf, the more women have broken through legal and material barriers and gained “more money and power and scope and legal recognition,” the more they have been burdened by culturally sanctioned images of female beauty, which breed “self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control” (Beauty Myth 10). When women’s identity is premised on their “beauty,” they remain “vulnerable to outside approval” (Beauty Myth 14). Moreover, in the beauty backlash against the feminist movement, the recent resurrection of the nineteenth-century caricature of the ugly feminist—a masculinized ugly woman not unlike Ruth Patchett before her cosmetic surgery4 —has “sought to punish women for their public acts by going after their private sense of self” (Beauty Myth 19). Ironically, Ruth, who believes that beauty gives women personal power over men, exerts enormous social power in the public sphere in her incarnation as the ugly feminist and she-devil, Vesta Rose, an identity she assumes to further her revenge against Bobbo. As Vesta Rose, Ruth challenges patriarchal authority and acts to benefit the invisible women who use the services of the Vesta Rose employment agency as she and her cofounder tap “the energies” of

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women who are “shut away in homes performing sometimes menial tasks”— the “grateful, patient, responsible, and hardworking” women who emerge “out of the suburbs on bus and train by the hundreds” and become known as Vesta Roses (137, 139). Despite her success at improving the lives of other women, Ruth, nevertheless, succumbs to the beauty myth and comes to use her enormous power not to benefit others or challenge the status quo but, instead, to beautify herself in her never-ending and masochistic pursuit of cosmetic self-improvement and physical perfection. In her study of cosmetic surgery, Kathy Davis argues that Weldon’s Ruth Patchett, who can be viewed as representative of the real women who become involved in cosmetic surgery, is “no cultural dope, blinded by social forces beyond her control or comprehension” but instead “uses cosmetic surgery as a source of empowerment, a way to regain control over her life” (66, 65).5 Yet even as Ruth Patchett insists that she is engaged in a godlike act of self-creation, her act of cosmetic transformation, which is seemingly freely chosen, comes to dominate her life as she succumbs to the cultural image of ideal feminine beauty embodied in Mary Fisher. At the end, Ruth lives in the High Tower with a broken and pathetic Bobbo. In her view, her long struggle is “not a matter of male or female, after all; it never was: merely of power. I have all, and he [Bobbo] has none.” As the ideal object of male desire, Ruth exacts her revenge: “I cause Bobbo as much misery as he ever caused me, and more” (277). Yet Ruth also ends up defeated, for as she admits, “In the end, she [Mary] wins” (266). If the closure of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil contains “all the broad ingredients for a happy ending” because it depicts the reunion of the husband and wife and the triumph of the virtuous wife, the novel nevertheless “delivers the bleakest and blackest of messages,” in Pamela Katz’s view (117). For Elisabeth Bronfen, Ruth, at the end, has “gained power by having resubstantiated” her image, but her “acquisition of power” has required her to “deform herself into the image of perfect feminine beauty”; thus “in order to castrate her husband, and with him the cultural formations he represents, she has to castrate herself, to die socially and then somatically” (81). For Sara Martin, who is troubled by the “inconclusiveness” of the closure and by Ruth’s “self-infl icted humiliation,” at the end, Ruth “sheds her powerlessness and her freakish body to become not a powerful woman, but a pathetic, grotesque moral monster” (198, 201). And for Susan McKinstry, who fi nds the end of the novel “terrifying,” Ruth does not offer a challenge to the “rules for female bodies” but instead “literally reduces herself into another woman in order to regain her place as the wife” (112). “I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious,” Ruth remarks in the closure (278). As the once enormous Ruth becomes physically smaller, she, in effect, becomes a petite, and thereby insignificant, woman whose power is directed toward attracting the

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approving gaze of men. The fact that the ugly Ruth, in a contempt-disappear scenario, has bodily disappeared to return as an exact replica of the pretty Mary Fisher reveals the triumph of the culture of appearances. As Weldon in her comic novel turned serious “takes the female body as symbol and turns that symbol back into flesh-and-blood” (McKinstry 105), she reveals the destructive force of the shame that is felt by and on the body in telling the story of Ruth Patchett who, succumbing to appearance anxiety, remodels the surface of her massive, ugly body in an attempt to undo what for her is more painful than the tortuous medical procedures she undergoes: her unendurable body shame. “The surgical patient’s shame is intolerable,” as Virginia Blum concludes in her study of the culture of cosmetic surgery; shame is “the thing that drives her . . . to the doctor—aging or ugliness or just not being quite beautiful enough” (287). In the next chapter, as we continue our investigation of the body shame of the socially invisible and unattractive woman, we will examine the intolerable body shame of the elderly characters in May Sarton’s As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, works that call attention to the way our culture pathologizes aging and treats elderly women as objects of contempt and disgust.

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CHAPTER 9

Gerontophobia and the Cultural Shaming of the Elderly Woman in May Sarton’s As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

imone de Beauvoir, in her well-known remarks on the cultural denigration of the older woman, observes that because, from the male perspective, “a woman’s purpose in life is to be an erotic object, when she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread” (122–23). Long viewed as a “social pathology” that “afflicts women much more than it does men,” growing old is deeply stigmatized in our youth-oriented, appearance-driven culture (Woodward, Aging 16). Indeed, “in the West our representations of old age reflect a dominant gerontophobia,” as Kathleen Woodward remarks. “We can understand our culture’s representations of aging in terms of splitting. Youth, represented by the youthful body, is good; old age, represented by the aging body, is bad . . .” (Aging 7). In Freudian psychoanalysis, which is “embedded in the fundamentally ageist ideology of western culture,” Woodward notes that “the preoccupation with the body, which in old age is figured in terms of incontinence and decline, is complicit with the general emphasis—if not obsession—in western culture on the appearance of the body as the dominant signifier of old age” (Aging 10). Also remarking on the consequences of society’s gerontophobia, Barbara Frey Waxman describes how the “youth-worshipping tendencies” of American culture reinforce “fearful associations of old age with deterioration, infi rmity, dependency, and fi xations on the past that deny the possibilities of a future” (To Live 1). Living as we do in a culture in which “being old is a stigma and reflects a spoiled self” and aging women are considered ugly, it is not surprising that women attempt to mask the aging process—that is, hide their shame—by dyeing their hair and using cosmetics and plastic surgery to try to erase the signs of aging on their faces (M. Lewis, Shame 197). What is important in shame is “the sense of personal unattractiveness—being in the social world as an undesired self, a self one does not wish to be,” as Kevin McKee and Merryn Gott explain in their discussion of shame and the aging body. “The

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transformation of individuals from people who consider themselves young and valued, to people who see themselves as frail and disabled, is surely a move from a desired state to an undesired state” (76). Particularly shaming is the failure of bodily control that may accompany old age. Carrying “penalties of stigmatisation and ultimately physical exclusion,” the loss of bodily control “can point to a more general loss of self-image; to be ascribed the status of a competent adult person depends upon the capacity to control urine and faeces” (Featherstone 376). Associated with dirtiness and dissmell, the loss of bodily control elicits disgust. In a similar way, the “ugliness of age and slow decay” can also elicit the disgust that grows out of “ideas of contamination, pollution, and defilement” (W. Miller 15, 17). Representing the Kristevan horror of abjection—fear of contamination and defilement by the wasting and decaying and, indeed, dying, body1—aging women stand outside the “clean and proper,” that is, the youthful, healthy, and beautiful female body celebrated by culture. “Rendered abject,” old women “are what we have to push away from both the social body and even the individual body in order for that body to remain clean, whole, pure” (Kaplan 188). And the aging body with its loss of control is also related to the “volatile” body described by Elizabeth Grosz: the unclean and uncontrollable female body associated with the seepage and liquidity of bodily fluids (see Volatile Bodies 206, 203). That some elderly people see their gray hair and wrinkles and other signs of aging as a deviant or pathological “mask or disguise concealing the essentially youthful self beneath” (Featherstone 379) reveals the deep rejection of the abjected, volatile, aging body in our appearance-driven culture. Despite the fact that old age is the “one difference we are all likely to live into,” as Kathleen Woodward remarks, there is a telling “invisibility of older women in everyday life” (“Introduction” x, ix). Describing how “lethal” ageism can be for women in a culture where “ageism is entrenched within feminism”—where feminists, too, have internalized the culture’s “prejudices against aging and old age” (“Introduction” xi)—Woodward recounts the words of an eighty-seven-year-old widow who lived with her son and daughter-in-law and was deeply shamed by them because she was incontinent. “‘I’m only allowed to sit on one chair. . . . Nobody talks to me all day except to yell at me. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. I just want to die’” (“Introduction” xi). Through the “pedagogy of mortification,” as Woodward interprets this account, the older woman is taught to “recede into invisibility.” Indeed, “it is as if the practice of humiliation by the younger generation produces shame and the corresponding wish to shrink in size” (“Introduction” xi–xii). Just as women have “functioned as mirrors to men that reflect them back twice their size,” so younger people function “as mirrors to older women, reflecting them back half their size,” writes Woodward as she describes how the shamed individual, who is looked at with contempt by others, can feel overlooked, insignificant, inferior. “Surely the practice

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of the disregard of older women is one of the reasons why in fact we have so many ‘little old ladies’” (“Introduction” xii). In a similar way, the “distasteful metaphor of ‘over the hill’ implies being out of sight, invisible and hence out of mind” (“Introduction” xii–xiii). Just as Woodward hopes to “bring the subject of older women into visibility” (“Introduction” xvi), so May Sarton in As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence in The Stone Angel relentlessly focus our attention on and thus make visible the plight of elderly women. Subjected to the pedagogy of mortification, Sarton’s Caro Spencer and Laurence’s Hagar Shipley are proud women who come to feel disgust for their abjected, aging bodies and shame for their spoiled identities as they are aggressively shamed by others. That both novels end in the death of the characters is telling, for Caro Spencer and Hagar Shipley die as much of humiliation as they do of old age, as we shall see.

May Sarton’s As We Are Now “I am not mad, only old,” remarks Sarton’s Caro Spencer in the opening lines of As We Are Now, which is presented to readers as a copy of the journal that the seventy-six-year-old Caro keeps in the fi nal six months of her life at Twin Elms, a residential nursing home. A former mathematician and high school teacher who is unable to care for herself after she has a heart attack, Caro fi nds herself in “a concentration camp for the old, a place where people dump their parents or relatives exactly as though it were an ash can” (9). Caro’s journal, which she entitles The Book of the Dead, chronicles her response to the aggressive shaming she endures at the hands of her keepers, Harriet Hatfield and her daughter, Rose. Intent on eliciting reader sympathy for her character, Sarton presents Caro as an educated, refined woman who comes of “gentle people” (17), keeps a copy of the Oxford Book of Poetry by her bed, and takes solace not only in the elegance of mathematical concepts but also in the spiritual qualities of music and the beauties of nature. In the class warfare that erupts between Caro and her working-class caretakers, Caro, who admits that she is a “snob” and feels “superior” to the Hatfields (42), is disliked, even hated, by the two women because she is a cultured and intelligent woman. In a place where the “inmates” are treated like “inferiors to be ordered about, controlled in every way possible,” Caro escapes control, at fi rst, simply by being herself. “However meek I am, I am still myself. This, I presume, is what has to be destroyed” (95). What, in part, Caro experiences as she undergoes the pedagogy of mortification at the hands of the Hatfields, her social inferiors,2 is the destruction of her sense of self-integrity and pride. Full of “false compassion,” Harriet Hatfield says of Caro and the men at Twin Elms, “We take them in, poor things,” referring to the people under

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her care, as Caro remarks, “always as ‘them,’ as if we were abandoned animals thrown out of a car” (16). Finding herself trapped in a dirty, dissmelling place where there is an “atmosphere of decay,” Caro tries to sustain herself even as she is forced “to swallow daily doses of sheer vulgarity and meanness of spirit” (16, 24). Harriet Hatfield, who has become corrupted by having total power over the residents at Twin Elms, subjects Caro to daily humiliations. “‘How are you feeling this morning, dear?’ Harriet may ask, but she never waits to hear my answer. With me she is subservient in a nasty way, never rude, but she has, of course, many ways to humiliate me. Thank Heavens I can wash myself and am not bedridden! My body is still my own, not to be degraded by those coarse, hard hands. For how long?” (17–18). At Twin Elms, where there is a house rule that doors must not be closed and where the Hatfields are free to enter the rooms of the patients at will, Caro feels like “an animal in a cage” (22). Treated contemptuously by Harriet, Caro, in turn, views her keeper as an object of contempt—as a woman who has the face of “a greedy and sullen pig” (17)—and she views the male patients at Twin Elms, with the exception of the dignified retired farmer, Standish Flint, as scarcely human: as “lost minds in sordidly failing bodies” (89). “Old age, they say, is a gradual giving up. But it is strange when it all happens at once. That is a real test of character, a kind of solitary confi nement. Whatever I have now is in my own mind” (14). Through her journal writing, Caro tries to make herself “whole” as she fi nds herself “sinking into madness or despair” and feels “fragmented, disoriented” by her experience of confinement in an “ash heap for the moribund” (73, 49). Intent on maintaining her sense of reality, she comes to see her notebooks as her “touchstone for sanity” in a place where it is “too easy . . . to go a little crazy as prisoners often do” (94, 101). Even as she suffers daily humiliations, Caro defends herself by recording in her journal how, many years before, she had an affair with a man who “admired” and “cherished” her (31), and even as she fi nds herself sinking into vulgarity and decay, she looks back on the “self” she once was when she was a mathematics teacher, someone who “felt the beauty of a perfect equation or, even more, a geometric figure” (37, 38). Caro writes to defend against her daily shaming at the hands of her keepers, and she also writes to give voice to her dissent. “How expression relieves the mind!” as she remarks at one point. “I feel quite lively and myself again just because I have managed to write two pages of dissent about old age! Among all the other deprivations here we are deprived of expression” (81). Her notebooks also come to serve as a written testimony to her cruel treatment at the hands of Harriet Hatfield, who strips Caro of her self-respect and her humanity. “Stowed away in an old people’s home,” and “denuded of everything that might make life livable,” Caro fi nds herself “breaking into pieces with shame and misery” and becoming “sick with fear and disgust” (40, 28, 35). When Harriet refuses to call the doctor for Standish Flint, who is dying

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painfully of cancer and begs for the doctor, Caro, “blind with rage and tears,” becomes physically violent and screams at Harriet, calling Harriet and her daughter “horrible pigs” (41). Punished for her outburst by being sedated, Caro comes to feel “unlovable, beyond the pale,” like a child who has been punished for having a tantrum (43). Caro, who poses a threat because she is “articulate” and is “still able to express” her feelings, believes at first that outside observers might be able to intervene by keeping “an outsider’s eye on our keepers,” and so she tells Reverend Thornhill about the deplorable conditions at Twin Elms and he, in turn, contacts the state inspectors who pay a visit to the home (52, 50). But afterward, Caro, who is already convinced that Harriet and Rose are trying to persuade her that she is “not quite sane” by telling her that she has said or done things she cannot recall, overhears Harriet telling a visiting relative to Twin Elms not to listen to her: “Poor Miss Spencer . . . she means well, but she is quite cuckoo. We have to warn people against anything her deluded mind makes her invent against us” (44, 70). Feeling “beaten down in a new way, as if resilience were slowly leaking away through these petty miseries like salt in the coffee,” Caro thinks that other people will not believe her if she tells them what is happening to her. Aware that Harriet and Rose are “building up” a false image of her “for the world at large,” Caro becomes afraid of “a torture far worse than petty harassments, the torture of not being believed,” and fears she is being “driven mad” (77). And when the terminally ill Standish, as a result of the state inspectors’ visit, dies alone when he is taken away in an ambulance, Caro is devastated.3 The deeply shamed Caro feels that she is “like a leper”—that is, contaminated. “What I touch is infected, so by trying to help him I deprived Standish of death on his terms, infected his death in some terrible way, so he died in an ambulance. What could be more forlorn? Carried away like a corpse in a hearse” (73). Just as Standish resisted his treatment through his angry outbursts, so Caro responds with anger to her humiliating treatment. That the once-proud Caro comes to feel, variously, childish and beaten down, cast out and thereby unlovable, dirty and also contaminated are signs of her deepening shame. For at the core of shame, as Léon Wurmser explains, is the “conviction of one’s unlovability” because of an inherent sense that the self is “weak, dirty, and defective” (Mask 92, 93). A disorganizing experience, shame can leave individuals feeling “small, helpless, and childish,” and shame can also lead to defensive anger, a “powerful, surging” feeling that may work to temporarily overcome the “helpless feelings of being disregarded and insignificant” that often accompany shame (H. Lewis, “Introduction” 19; Goldberg 69). Succumbing to the “misery of self-hatred and self-doubt,” which is like a “cancer” living within her, Caro writes to make herself whole even as she becomes caught up in a shame-rage feeling trap.4 Over time, Caro comes to feel that she is depraved—a bad person who is “black inside”— because of her growing hatred for Harriet, and she dreams of hitting Harriet

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“hard across her mean, self-indulgent, lying mouth.” Just as the keepers at Twin Elms have been “corrupted by having absolute power,” so those they keep end up corrupted: “We learn to ingratiate ourselves, to pretend we do not notice the slights and humiliations. Or we close ourselves off into that terrible place of anger, of rage and despair where Standish died. Is that my way? Is that what is now happening to me?” (74). Unable to be “gentle and loving” at Twin Elms, Caro holds herself “together with anger” but at a great cost. “What have I to do with such vulgarity, such crude horror? Must I take it in? Is that what is asked of me?” she wonders (75). Aware that anger in an old person is viewed as a “sign of madness or senility,” Caro asks, “Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a ‘symptom?’” (81). “We are slowly being turned into passive, maltreated animals. . . . And even animals respond to the environment. Pigs, I hear, are not naturally unclean, but so often kept in filthy pens that they become dirty and perhaps are more miserable than we know” (66). That contempt by others, as Wurmser remarks, is a type of aggression that degrades the individual’s value by equating her with “a debased, dirty thing—a derided and low animal” (Mask 81) is evident in Caro’s account. When her brother visits her after she has been at Twin Elms for four weeks, the once-proud Caro feels that she has become one of the “moral lepers,” the “untouchables” that relatives flee from “because they can’t bear what they have done” (27). Caro’s thoughts about what she sees when she looks in the mirror reveal the spoiling of her identity and her deep and intensifying body shame. “I look queer and gaunt since I came here— there is already a change in my face, so it startles me each morning. Can this worn-out, haunted old body be me?” (29). Old age, as Caro comes to see it, is a “disguise” (80) that only the old can penetrate. Invoking the common view of the aging process as a “mask or disguise” that conceals the “essentially youthful self beneath” (Featherstone 379), Caro compares her aging, abject appearance to her clean and proper youthful identity. “I feel exactly as I always did, as young inside as when I was twenty-one, but the outward shell conceals the real me—sometimes even from itself—and betrays that person deep down inside, under wrinkles and liver spots and all the horrors of decay” (80). Caro is afforded a brief respite from the hell of Twin Elms when Anna Close is hired as a temporary replacement for the vacationing Harriet. Unlike Harriet, whose hands have “no gentleness in them”—indeed, when Harriet washes Caro’s hair, Caro experiences her rough treatment at Harriet’s hands as “an assault” on her “person” (76–77)—the kind and gentle Anna affirms Caro’s humanity through her touch. Corroborating Caro’s perceptions, Anna finds the “dirt” at Twin Elms a “disgrace,” and when Caro says “it’s more than the dirt,” Anna understands what she means. “You shouldn’t be here. . . . It’s not the place for you or the likes of you,” Anna tells Caro (83). In the “blessed presence” of Anna, Caro thinks she must try to “stop hating

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so much,” since hatred is “corrosive,” and Anna makes her feel that she is “worthy of care” because instead of being “humiliated,” she is “treasured” by Anna, who defends Caro’s badly eroded sense of her own specialness (91, 92). Becoming absorbed in the “abstract beauty” of music, Caro finds yet another respite from her situation when she listens to Mozart, a composer who “transcends the dung of human experience” (96). And she comes to understand “things about love” that she has never understood before in her relationship with the simple and inarticulate, but gentle and empathic, Anna (98). “I hear you’ve been spoiled, Miss Spencer, but you must understand that I have no time for fol-de-rols,” Harriet says when she returns (101). Finding herself “terribly” and “irrationally” afraid of Harriet, Caro tries to placate Harriet and realizes that her “daily stint is to endure” (102). Within two days of Harriet’s return, Caro feels “somehow contaminated” and finds herself “in danger of despair and madness, in danger of appearing ridiculous” (103). In an attempt to keep intact her feelings for the gentle and loving Anna Close, Caro writes her a letter, telling her how she felt a childlike joy and trust when she was in her physical presence. But when Harriet finds the letter, she uses it against Caro. Calling Caro “a dirty old woman” and a “filthy” queer, she claims that she has saved Anna from Caro’s “dirt” and “smears” by finding the letter (106). Deeply mortified by Harriet’s contemptuous words, Caro walks out of the nursing home, determined to walk until she drops dead, only to be found and returned to Twin Elms. Explaining the link between shame and death, Carl Schneider observes how everyday expressions—“‘I was so ashamed, I could have died’; ‘I could have sunk into the ground and disappeared’; and ‘I was mortified’”—capture this connection, and Schneider also observes that the feeling of “dying in shame” is associated with the “experience of the momentary loss of the self,” since shame causes a “disruption of consciousness and loss of control that leads one to appeal, by analogy, to the experience of dying” (78, 79). Longing at times to be “put out” of her “misery,” Caro, who begins to wonder if, in fact, she is a “dirty old woman,” feels as if she has been “murdered” (107). Undergoing a rapid decline, Caro is soon transformed into a shameful, abject spectacle, for with her dirty, uncombed hair, she is “an old woman, a grotesque miserable animal” (108).5 Even though Harriet washes Caro’s hair and gives her a clean nightgown on the day that Lisa, Reverend Thornhill’s daughter, brings Caro’s friend, Eva, for a visit, Caro still feels dirty. Thrust outside the clean and proper social body, she is defiled and defiling: “How am I to hide my misery from Lisa, from Eva? How not to hurt them and hurt myself by spreading this leprosy? I do not address myself any more as Caro. Caro is dead” (109). And when Caro visits with Anna Close, she keeps her own “self-respect” and Anna’s “respect” by not telling her how the Hatfields have “killed” her love for Anna (120). Feeling unlovable and that she is “dying for lack of love,” the deeply shamed Caro determines to remain alive so she can take “violent action”

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against Twin Elms because to her “death by fire” is preferable to “death by bad smells and bedpans and lost minds in sordidly failing bodies” (116, 89). Thus, even as she appears “passive and weak,” she plans her “cleansing holocaust,” determined to use violence both to express her burning shame-rage and to stop her humiliating treatment (111, 112). As the extremely mortified Caro, who feels “dead,” prepares to end her unendurable shame and bodily abjection through fire—“the fire of anger and disgust”—she determines that the old men in the home, like her, are “better off dead” (120, 121, 124). Seemingly bent on rescuing her character from the shame-disgust that envelops her and promoting reader sympathy even as her character plans her suicidal and murderous end, Sarton describes Caro’s moments of transcendent joy as she prepares for death. “I feel free, beyond attachment, beyond the human world at last. I rejoice as if I were newborn, seeing with wide-open eyes, as only the old can . . . the marvels of the world. These late November skies are extraordinary . . . great open washed-in color, a transparent greenish-blue, a wonderful elevating pink.” Listening to Mozart, Caro feels “exalted and purified”—that she is part of the clean and proper body—as she escapes temporarily from her shame and despair and abjection (125). And even as Caro seeks “an end to misery and corruption for the body, a clean quick end,” and even as she tells Reverend Thornhill, in his final visit, that she has been “stripped down to nothing” and is “thinking of terrible things,” he affirms her identity, describing her as a “great person,” someone who has withstood “the very worst” and not been “corrupted” (126, 130, 131). “I feel at peace. Death by fire will come as an angel, or it will come as a devil, depending on our deserts,” Caro affi rms as she prepares for her fiery demise, leaving her copybook as a “testament” to her future readers (133).6 Described by critics as a “furious death of rebellion and self-expression” and as a “moral gesture of resistance” to her humiliating treatment (Blair 222; Waxman, From the Hearth 156), Caro’s final act is also a sign of both her shame-rage and her desire to end her unendurable shame and her bodily abjection through the cleansing fi re she sets. If the journal Caro leaves behind is a record of her dissent and a justification for her suicidal and murderous act, it also represents a testament to the “clean and proper” and proud part of her identity that has been systematically destroyed by the daily indignities she has suffered as she has undergone the pedagogy of mortification at the hands of the Hatfields.

Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel Like Sarton’s Caro Spencer, Laurence’s Hagar Shipley is a proud woman who feels deep shame-disgust for her abject, aging body. “I’m like an exhibition in a museum. Any may saunter past and pause to peer at me. Admission free,”

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as Hagar remarks in her characteristically sardonic voice when she ends up utterly exposed on her “slab of a bed” in a hospital ward (255). An elderly and dying woman trying to cope with the indignities of old age, Hagar, who is “rampant with memory” (5), undergoes a mental review of her life in her final days. The daughter of a proud, highly respectable, and upwardly mobile Scotsman, Jason Currie, Hagar has inherited the Currie family pride, which was put on public display in the expensive stone angel monument her father placed in the Manawaka Cemetery to mark his wife’s grave. A fiercely proud and unyielding and hard woman, the elderly Hagar has become stone angel– like in her shame-driven pride. Like the “doubly blind” stone angel monument, which is carved with “blank” eyeballs (3), Hagar has long suffered from a kind of emotional blindness, and like the stone angel statue, she has spent most of her life as “rigid as marble” (146) in her Currie family pride— her rigid pride acting as a defense against her underlying shame. Indeed, Hagar has been petrified, that is, turned to stone, not only by her class pride but also by her shame, for it becomes evident as Hagar recalls her failed marriage to the lower-class Bram Shipley that she has long suffered from a form of shame paralysis. If part of Laurence’s agenda is to reform her character by forcing the blind and contemptuous Hagar to see just how crippled she has been by her inherited family pride, Hagar also remains to the end a “holy terror” (304) as she, troubled by her increasing dependency on others, fiercely rages against her plight as an aging woman trapped in a failing, dying body. Living with her son Marvin and his wife Doris, the ninety-year-old Hagar chafes at her lack of privacy. “The door of my room has no lock. They say it is because I might get taken ill in the night, and then how could they get in to tend me (tend—as though I were a crop, a cash crop)” (6). Even as Hagar voices her contempt for her daughter-in-law, she imagines that Doris, in turn, is treating her as an object of contempt. Unlike Hagar, who is dressed in an expensive lilac silk dress, Doris resembles a “broody hen” in her “dowdy brown” dress, which is “dandruffed on either shoulder and down the back like molting feathers.” Hagar recalls how Doris, who “wouldn’t know silk from flour sacks,” was annoyed when Hagar bought her silk dress: “Unsuitable, she sighed and sniffed. Look at the style—mutton dressed as lamb” (29).7 When the proud Hagar falls and Doris tries but is unable to lift her, Hagar is ashamed. “‘Leave me, Leave me be—’ Can this torn voice be mine? A series of yelps, like an injured dog. Then, terribly, I perceive the tears, my own they must be although they have sprung so unbidden I feel they are like the incontinent wetness of the infi rm. Trickling, they taunt down my face” (31). Like the stone angel statue that Hagar once found “toppled over on her face” (178), the aged Hagar takes a humiliating fall. “She went down . . . like a ton of bricks,” Doris tells Marvin as he hoists Hagar, who rises “lugged like lead” (32). Attempting to be “haughty” when Doris subsequently warns her about falling again, Hagar walks away only to “hideously” hit herself against

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the edge of the dining-room table, and Doris ends up guiding Hagar as if she, like the stone angel statue, were “stone blind” (58). On learning that Marvin and Doris want to sell the house—the house Hagar still thinks of as her own even though she gave it to her son years before—Hagar wants to hold on to the “shreds and remnants” of her life that are contained in the house (36). “I always swore I’d never be a burden—” she says, even though she is “ashamed . . . to play that worn old tune” with her reproachful words (37). “When I look in my mirror and beyond the changing shell that houses me, I see the eyes of Hagar Currie, the same dark eyes as when I fi rst began to remember and to notice myself,” Hagar reflects at one point as she, like Sarton’s Caro Spencer, sees her aging face as a mask that conceals her essential—and youthful—identity (38). But even though she thinks that if she were to look in the mirror and take herself by surprise, she might see again her younger self, the ninety-year-old Hagar, with her dry and wrinkled skin, resembles the weather-worn stone angel statue. “As I brush my fi ngers over my own wrist, the skin seems too white after the sunburned years, and too dry, powdery as blown dust when the rains failed, flaking with dryness as an old bone will flake and chalk, left out in a sun that grinds bone and flesh and earth to dust as though in a mortar of fire with a pestle of crushing light” (54). Glancing at herself in the mirror, Hagar sees her “puffed face purpled with veins as though someone had scribbled over the skin with an indelible pencil. . . . Below the eyes the shadows bloom as though two soft black petals had been stuck there. The hair which should by rights be black is yellowed white, like damask stored too long in a damp basement. Well, Hagar Shipley, you are a sight for sore eyes, all right” (79). And when Doris helps Hagar put on her nightdress, Hagar feels deep body shame at the exposure of her aging, abject body: “How it irks me to have to take her hand, allow her to pull my dress over my head, undo my corsets and strip them off me, and have her see my blue-veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood” (77). Conditioned by the culture to associate her aging body and its repellent bodily wastes and fluids with the unclean abject and the uncontrollable volatile body, Hagar feels trapped in her out-of-control and shameful body. Hagar, who has spent most of her life trying to keep up social appearances, suffers from embarrassing digestive symptoms: “My belly growls and snarls like a separate beast. My bowels are locked today. . . . I am bloated, full, weighted down, and I fear I may pass wind” (40). When Hagar lowers herself onto the chesterfield with Doris’s assistance, the “windy prison” of her bowels “belches air, sulphurous and groaning” (58). Unable to move her bowels, Hagar finds herself “locked like a bank vault with no key,” and although she does not want to be “dominated” by the “ignominy” of her constipation, she admits that when one is “swollen with discomfort” and when one sweats and trembles “with the effort of unsuccessful straining, it’s very hard to think

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of anything else. That’s the indignity of it” (191). The proud and arrogant Hagar also suffers the indignity of incontinence—a problem compounded by her failing memory. When Marvin explains why he and Doris want to place Hagar in Silverthreads, a nursing home—Doris, as he explains, fi nds lifting Hagar difficult and cannot sleep through the night because she gets up a dozen times to tend Hagar—Doris mentions an additional difficulty caused by Hagar. “You’ve wet your sheets . . . nearly every night these past few months. It makes a lot of laundry . . .” (73). If Hagar at first accuses Doris of telling a lie, believing that Doris is looking for an excuse to put her away, she then feels deeply ashamed at her loss of bodily control. Experiencing a kind of shame paralysis as she assumes the body posture of the deeply shamed individual, Hagar bows her head in shame and wishes to conceal herself: “My head is lowered, as I flee their scrutiny, but I cannot move, and now I see that in this entire house, mine, there is no concealment. How is it that all these years I fancied violation meant an attack upon the flesh? How is it that I never knew about the sheets?” (74). When Hagar subsequently fi nds herself falling asleep, she is jerked out of her “half awakeness” by one of the “strutting shadows” of the night—“The soaking smelly sheets, the shadow insinuates, in Doris’s voice” (77). That Hagar associates being placed in a nursing home with death—“If you make me go there, you’re only signing my death warrant,” she says in a “thundering” voice to Marvin and Doris—reveals the extreme mortification she feels. Just when Hagar’s angry outburst—an expression of her shame-rage—seems to help her gain ground in her battle against Marvin and Doris, she breaks down: “My whole hulk shakes, the blubber prancing up and down upon my rib cage, and I betray myself in shameful tears” (76). “Fancy spending your life worrying what people were thinking. She must have had a rather weak character,” Hagar says to Murray Lees when he describes his mother, unaware, in her characteristic blindness, that she, too, has exposed her “weak” character—that is, her own susceptibility to social shaming—by spending her life worried about how others view her (227). That Hagar has, in fact, been petrified by her class pride and her shame becomes evident as the narrative unfolds and the dying Hagar, the proud daughter of the Scotsman Jason Currie, recalls the public disgrace she suffered not only when she married the lower-class and “common as dirt” (47, 48) Brampton Shipley, who immersed her in a twenty-four-year life of shame and squalor, but also when, after leaving her husband, she became a housekeeper for the wealthy Mr. Oatley. Although Hagar eventually regained some of her self-dignity by buying a house with the money Mr. Oatley left her in his will, the ninety-year-old Hagar spends her fi nal days once again immersed in shame. Even as Hagar tries to keep up appearances by dressing in silk, she finds herself trapped in her aging and abject—indeed, dirty and dissmelling—body. Viewing her overweight body as a disgusting spectacle,

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the deeply mortified Hagar expresses her self-loathing for her unclean and uncontainable body as she disparages herself for her “heavy larded flesh,” her “great swathed hips,” her “bulk” and “blubber” (54, 56, 55, 76). Convinced that Doris and Marvin want to “crate” her up and deliver her “like a parcel of old clothes” to the nursing home, Hagar determines to escape to a “hidden place”—her protective desire to hide yet another sign of her deep-seated shame (185, 105). In her glee at her successful escape when she arrives at Shadow Point, Hagar at first cheerfully identifies with Keats’s gypsy character Meg Merrilies, and is even heartened when she fi nds a mildewed mattress to sleep on. But when she awakens cold and in pain to the sound of falling rain, she feels frightened and abandoned. Imagining herself as one of the drowned, she envisions herself becoming liberated from her “encumbrance of flesh” and then, “free and skeletal,” journeying with “tides and fishes”—a vision that beckons then scares her. “Stupid old woman, Hagar, baggage, hulk, chambered nautilus are you? Shut up,” she thinks to herself, exposing her deep-rooted feelings of self-contempt (162). And when Hagar speaks to a boy and a girl she sees playing on the beach only to have them run off in fear, she realizes that to the children she looks like a crazy old bag-lady: “They’ve seen only a fat old woman, a crumpled sleazy dress, a black hat topped (how oddly, for this place) with blue and bobbing artificial flowers, a beckoning leer, a greasy paper bag” (189). “I hope you’ll excuse my appearance,” Hagar says when Murray Lees fi nds her at night in the darkened, abandoned cannery in her “bedraggled” cotton housedress, with her face “dirt-streaked” and her hair “slipped out of its neat bun and hanging down like strands of gray mending wool” (220). Even as Hagar says reprovingly to Lees—a man she considers to be coarse— that people should not forget their manners, she herself has become a shameful spectacle. Hagar, who earlier thought that perhaps she had come to Shadow Point “not to hide but to seek” (192), does, in fact, come to a new self-knowledge when she confesses to Lees her culpability in the death of her favorite son, John. Mistaking Lees for her son John, Hagar tells him she is sorry and Lees, pretending to be her son, consoles and forgives her, and thus, in the morning, she feels “bereaved” as though she had “recently” lost someone (249). Yet the proud Hagar, who says contemptuously of others, “Good riddance to bad rubbish” (176), remains embittered at the way she is being treated by others as if she were “bad rubbish” to be disposed of: “They can dump me in a ten-acre field, for all I care, and not waste a single cent on a box of flowers, nor a single breath on prayers to ferry my soul, for I’ll be dead as mackerel. Hard to imagine a world and I not in it. Will everything stop when I do? Stupid old baggage, who do you think you are? Hagar. There’s no one like me in this world” (250). Summoned to the Shadow Point cannery by Lees, Marvin and Doris find the utterly abjected Hagar the next

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morning. An object of shame and disgust, Hagar, “huge and immovable,” is found sitting next to her own vomit (251). If Laurence relentlessly brings Hagar to the utmost of abjection by focusing on her “as-common-as-dirt” body and the bodily processes associated with the diseased and dying body, she also sets out to redeem her dying character. Hagar, who is “repelled and stunned” when she learns that she has cancer, feels shamefully exposed when she ends up in the public ward of a hospital where she finds herself “cheek-by-jowl with heaven knows who all” (254, 255). Enraged at the cheerful behavior of one of the nurses, who tells Hagar to be a “good girl” and take her pills, she thinks, “I’d stab her to the very heart, if I had a weapon and the strength to do it. I’d good-girl her, the impudent creature” (256). But when another nurse treats her in a noncondescending way, the deeply vulnerable Hagar fi nds herself “shamefully clinging” to the nurse’s arm, unable to stop crying (258). That the dying Hagar, who fi nds herself surrounded by a “mewling nursery of old ladies” in the hospital ward (264), comes to feel attached to, and even identifies with, the other women in the hospital, is a sign of her growth as a character. And Hagar, who has long been blinded by her pride, becomes aware of how bereft of joy her own life has been. “Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine or even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some brake of proper appearances—oh, proper to whom?” Hagar’s Currie family pride and her fear of social shaming have blighted her life; indeed, she has lived her life bound in the chains of her shame-driven pride. “Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear. I was alone, never anything else, and never free, for I carried my chains within me, and they spread out from me and shackled all I touched” (292). Even as Hagar comes to new self-knowledge—an awareness that allows her to reach out to others—she remains to the end a “holy terror” as she, “unregenerate” as she is, continues to intimidate those around her by “speaking in the same way” and exhibiting the “same touchiness” at the “slightest thing” (304, 293). Believing that her family is waiting for her to die, she thinks, “How inconvenient I am proving for them. Will it be soon? That’s what they’re asking themselves” (295). When Hagar ends up sharing a room with a young patient, she is aware of the abject body shame being experienced by the young woman who has “never before been at the dubious mercy of her organs” so that “pain and humiliation have been only words to her.” In an act of kindness, Hagar gets a bedpan for the suffering girl, painfully aware, when she gets out of bed, of her stone-angel–like “flesh heavy and ponderous” (300). When the dying Hagar admits to her son Marvin that she is “frightened,” she fi nds her words “shameful” but also feels relieved that she has spoken of her fear (303). In yet another act of kindness, she reaches out to

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Marvin and gives him the son’s blessing he has always sought: “You’ve been good to me, always. A better son than John,” she tells him (304). If an “appropriate death is one with dignity (compatible with a person’s self-image), one relatively free of debilitating pain, and one that allows a person to operate on as high and effective a level as possible,” as Carl Schneider observes, most individuals “are more likely to experience dying as an embarrassment or humiliation than as a dignified and fitting final act” of life (79). The “whole panorama of the dying person is colored with shameful scenes—loss of control of bodily functions, . . . the childlike character of the sick role, the stigma of the incurable, the embarrassed family waiting at the bedside”—that make the dying person “deeply vulnerable to violation and to the degradation” of her life (79–80). If death itself is shameful—“an embarrassment and a humiliation” (Schneider 87)—the dying Hagar reacts in her characteristic way to her shame. As Hagar, in the final stage of dying, succumbs to her pain, she feels a deep sense of shame-disgust for her dying, abject body. “Pain swells and fills me. I’m distended with it, bloated and swollen like soft flesh held under by the sea. Disgusting. I hate this. I like things to be tidy” (307). And yet she remains defiant to the end, refusing to let the nurse hold a glass of water for her. “I only defeat myself by not accepting her. I know this—I know it very well. But I can’t help it—it’s my nature.” Wresting the glass from the nurse, Hagar holds the glass of water in her hands—“There. There. And then—” (308)—because it is her “nature” to defend against feelings of shameful vulnerability through her characteristic, and reactive, pride. Described as a work in which Laurence creates “a fabric of symbols and networks” to enhance the “metaphysical parable that this story of an indignant old woman becomes” and as a work that “imposes a strain” on the reader’s “attention and sensibility” (Fabre 28; Jewinski 255), The Stone Angel, even as it focuses on the shame-paralysis that subtends Hagar’s stone-angel–like pride, risks alienating those readers who take offence at Hagar’s defensive, and contemptuous, pride. Yet while some critics have described Laurence’s character as “unredeemed, though not unenlightened” at the end or have said that her achievements in her final days “may seem paltry accomplishments” for a ninety-year-old woman (Comeau 19; Buss 30), many other critic-readers have expressed open admiration for Laurence’s character despite her obvious flaws. Arguing against the claim that Hagar is “destructive,” critic-readers have lauded Hagar for being a “proud, high-spirited woman” who has lived “with vigor and determination”; for being a “feisty individual forced to endure circumstances grotesquely at odds with her self-image”; for being a woman who, “by facing the stone angel which she has become . . . gets in touch with her life-giving forces”; and for being a “strong-minded and independent” woman whose life is “more richly lived and felt in very old age than it had been over the previous nine decades” of her life (A. Bell 61, 52, 51;

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Peterman 77; Taylor 170; Waxman, From the Hearth 158, 181). Like Sarton’s Caro Spencer, Laurence’s Hagar Shipley experiences intense shame-humiliation as she associates her aging, abject body with a spoiled identity, and she, too, rages against her humiliating treatment. Rather than quietly succumbing to the pedagogy of mortification and becoming an invisible old woman, Hagar, instead, is a holy terror as she speaks, in her contemptuous voice, of the plight of the elderly woman in our ageist culture where growing old is stigmatized and the older woman is forced to suffer the indignities of old age. In a similar way, as we shall see in the next chapter in the discussion of Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World, both the severely disfigured and disabled woman are aggressively shamed by others. As Grealy and Mairs recount their struggles against the pedagogy of mortification in their writings, they describe how it feels to be subjected to the curious or contemptuous gaze of others and treated like shameful spectacles in our appearance-driven culture where those who are disfigured and disabled are viewed as bodily spoiled and as defective, damaged people.

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CHAPTER 10

Writing the Disfigured and Disabled Body-Self in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World

he pedagogy of mortification, which has long humiliated elderly women in our culture, also has been used against those who are severely disfigured and disabled such as Lucy Grealy, who acknowledges feeling “ugly” because of her facial disfigurement, and Nancy Mairs, who has become “misshapen” and “crippled” from multiple sclerosis. In their personal accounts, Grealy and Mairs describe the stigmatization of those who are physically different in our appearance-driven culture in which women associate disfigurement and disability with having a damaged, abjected body and spoiled identity. Just as May Sarton and Margaret Laurence make visible the shameful plight of elderly women in our culture, so Grealy, in her Autobiography of a Face, and Mairs in her many autobiographical writings, including Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World, make visible the plight of women who, until recently, were encouraged to hide themselves from public view and remain silent about the particulars of their condition. Providing compelling testimony to the body shame of those who are disfigured or disabled, Grealy, who as a girl lost half of her jaw to cancer, recounts how she underwent nearly thirty operations over an eighteen-year period in an attempt to surgically restore her jaw and Mairs, who was symptom-free for almost the first thirty years of her life, provides a graphic account of the chronic and progressive deterioration she has suffered as a victim of multiple sclerosis. Examples of what Arthur Frank describes as “wounded storytellers” whose “self-stories” are “embodied stories” that are told “not just about the body but through it” (xii, 2, 3), Grealy and Mairs, in their embodied stories, discomfort us as they make us deeply aware of the body politics of shame in our body-obsessed contemporary culture, which idealizes bodily perfection and humiliates and rejects those who are disfigured or disabled. Just as feminist theory has long worked to expose and subvert the mind/body binary that undergirds Western culture and that associates

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women with the body, so disability theorists such as Rosemarie Garland Thomson have called attention to the fact that femininity and disability are “inextricably entangled in patriarchal culture” (27). But if both the “female and the disabled body are cast as deviant and inferior,” as Thomson observes, some women are deemed “more” deviant than others (19, 28). “In a society in which appearance is the primary index of value for women . . . beautification practices normalize the female body and disabilities abnormalize it. Feminization prompts the gaze; disability prompts the stare. Feminization increases a woman’s cultural capital; disability reduces it” (28). In a similar way, Susan Wendell describes how cultural demands that women “control” and “attempt to perfect” their bodies “create rejection, shame, and fear in relation to both failures to control the body and deviations from body ideals” (85). Just as women internalize the all-pervasive disciplinary practices governing femininity, so they internalize what Wendell calls the “disciplines of normality,” which require “conformity to standards of normality in body size, carriage, movement, gesture, speech, emotional expression, appearance, scent, ways of eating, and especially control of bodily functions.” If for many people, their “proximity to the standards of normality” is an important aspect of their “sense of social acceptability” and “self-respect,” those with physical disabilities who are unable to conform to the standards of normality may end up feeling both “shame and self-hatred” (88). Living in a society that “idealizes the body,” the disabled or physically different “become devalued people because of their devalued bodies” and serve as reminders of “the rejected body—of what the ‘normal’ are trying to avoid, forget, and ignore” (Wendell 91). And as with the elderly, the disfigured and disabled represent the Kristevan horror of abjection and are thrust out of the good and proper social body. Despite the contemporary “resistance to the disciplines of normality” in the disability rights movement, we have seen “only a small, recent increase in the general presentation of disability culture” within the current “flood of cultural idealizations of the body,” and even among feminists, who express their “own body ideals” by insisting on women’s “strength” and “control” of their bodies, disabled women, with their “weak, suffering, and uncontrollable” bodies, may feel like “embarrassments to feminism” (Wendell 92, 93). Disabled bodies are also embarrassments to many recent academic theorists of the body. For as Lennard Davis observes, “The disabled body is a nightmare for the fashionable discourse of theory because that discourse has been limited by the very predilection of the dominant, ableist culture.” If the body often celebrated in theory is viewed as a “native ground of pleasure,” the “nightmare of that body is one that is deformed, maimed, mutilated, broken, diseased.” Instead of confronting this nightmarish image, the critic may turn to the “glossary of the body as text” rather than the “body of the differently abled” (5).

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If Grealy and Mairs risk personal embarrassment as they write about their bodies and bodily experiences, like the “wounded storytellers” described by Frank, they are compelled to tell their self-stories, seeking, in the process, to “reclaim” their own experiences of suffering and “turn that suffering into testimony” (Frank 18). Indeed, a central function of illness narratives, as G. Thomas Couser has similarly observed, is to “validate the experience of illness—to put it on record, to exemplify living with bodily dysfunction, to offer lasting testimony” (Recovering Bodies 293). “Body writing,” as Couser comments, helps us understand how our bodies “may shape and condition our identities: our bodies, our selves,” and it also reminds us of “the vulnerabilities of embodiment” (Recovering Bodies 294–95, 295). The body writing of Grealy and Mairs, even as it risks embarrassment, also becomes a source of pride as the authors create, in and through their writing, a storied body-self that gives testimony to, even as it transcends, the painful vulnerabilities of embodiment. Unlike Mairs, who uses a “strategy of direct assault” against her readers, forcing readers to examine “the ugly and the painful” (Braham 65), Grealy exhibits a kind of emotional reticence in her account, for she is intent, in the words of her friend Ann Patchett, on sparing the reader “all the sadness and pain and blame” of what really happened to her (“Afterword” 234). But even as Grealy spares the reader, she still communicates, like Mairs, the pain and shame endured by those who are subjected to the pedagogy of mortification in our appearance-driven society where the cultural idealization of female bodily perfection condemns and shames women who, like Grealy and Mairs, are stigmatized and made the subject of the contemptuous stare because they are physically different.

Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face “This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. . . . Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point” (7), writes Grealy at the beginning of Autobiography of a Face, which recounts her experiences after losing one half of her jaw to Ewing’s sarcoma, a deadly type of cancer that had a five percent survival rate when, after several misdiagnoses, she was correctly diagnosed and began her four-year treatment for cancer in 1973 when she was ten. As a “vain and proud” nine-year-old, Grealy wanted “nothing more than to be special” and “different from everyone else,” needs that are initially met when she first takes on the “role of the patient” and, after her initial surgery for what was misdiagnosed as a dental cyst, is given special treatment by her teachers while gaining the respect of her school friends (25). Ending up with a lump on her face—a bony knob on the tip of her jaw under her ear—she seems cheerful to others when she

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learns that she has a “malignancy” and will have to have a “big operation” (43). Yet when a family member later mentions the time “before” Grealy had cancer, she is “shocked”: “I had cancer?” “Of course you did, fool, what did you think you had?” “I thought I had a Ewing’s sarcoma.” “And what on earth do you think that is?” (43) Grealy’s use of language to partly deny and distance herself from her disease is telling, for to name her disease as “cancer” is not only to admit that she has survived a deadly disease but also to succumb to the body shame associated with such a stigmatizing illness. “It was as if the earth were without form until those words were uttered,” Grealy remarks of the pivotal moment when she registers the fact that she has had cancer. Grealy, who “loved” the sound of words, recalls how she would “pick a word and repeat it ceaselessly” until it lost its meaning (43). “Malignancy. I can reconstruct now that its important syllables probably charmed me, its promise of rare and dangerous implications made me feel important, but its lack of meaning provided me with just enough echo to act as background to my shock at hearing the word cancer” (44). Grealy’s question about language—she asks whether language “gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things”—is symptomatic of her characteristic use of language and abstract speculations to partially remove herself from the painful personal history she is recollecting as she “resists feeling anything other than bewilderment at the image of a child walking casually down a hall chanting agreeable, historyless words” (44, 45). Even as her disease—and her years of chemotherapy—put her in intimate contact with her body, she also self-protectively distances herself from her experiences and, indeed, it is telling that she calls her account “autobiography of a face,” not “autobiography of my face.” During her two and one-half years of follow-up treatment with radiation and chemotherapy, the young Grealy takes on the role of the good patient as she endures terrible physical suffering. If initially she is “proud” of her “new, dramatic scar and eager to show it off” to her school friends who view her as a “hero” after her surgery, she soon becomes schooled in the pedagogy of mortification (62). Although at first when people stare at her, she feels that she is special and that she has a kind of power because other people notice her, she also becomes aware that when she catches adults staring at her, they get embarrassed and quickly look away. If when she is ten and eleven, she knows that she looks different—for she is pale and thin, is going bald, and has a large scar on her face—she is able, at first, to keep herself “ignorant of the details” of her changed appearance and not “judge” herself,

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and when other children who do not know her taunt her by calling her “Baldy or Dog Girl,” she insults them back (104, 105). Donning a sailor’s hat and refusing to be seen in public without it during her two and one-half years of chemotherapy, she protectively hides behind the hat as she begins to become aware of her ugliness: “It hid me, hid my secret, though badly, and when people made fun of me or stared at me I assumed it was only because they could guess what was beneath my hat. It didn’t occur to me that the whole picture, even with the hat, was ugly; as long as I had it on, I felt safe” (106). That shame derives from the shame sufferer’s “vicarious experience of the other’s scorn”—her sense of “self-in-the-eyes-of-the-other”—is evident in the scene in which the young Grealy looks at her face in the mirror and suddenly sees herself in the shaming eyes of others (H. Lewis, “Introduction” 15). Becoming suspicious over time that she “might look much worse” than she had imagined, she “very carefully, very seriously” assesses her face in the mirror, using a hand mirror to look, for the first time, at her right profile. “I knew to expect a scar, but how had my face sunk in like that? . . . More than the ugliness I felt, I was suddenly appalled at the notion that I’d been walking around unaware of something that was apparent to everyone else. A profound sense of shame consumed me” (111–12). And while many of her schoolmates treat her “respectfully, if somewhat distantly,” when she returns to school in the sixth grade during her “periodic ‘vacations’ from chemotherapy,” she also is forced to endure the taunts of some of the boys— “Hey, girl, take off that monster mask—oops, she’s not wearing a mask!” (118). Using a classic defense against shame, she humiliates her humiliators— “You stupid dildos,” she says to the boys who torment her—and yet over time she also becomes “meek” and “self-conscious” (118, 120). And when the teasing continues in junior high school—pointing at her, the boys ridicule her by saying “What on earth is that?” and “That is the ugliest girl I have ever seen” (124)—she tries to conceal herself, looking down at the floor and walking quickly through the hallways, and she comes to identify her ugliness as the source of her unhappiness. Even more painful than the “deliberate taunts” of her peers at school are the “open, uncensored stares” of children that she endures when, hired as a fourteen-year-old to give pony parties for children, she becomes acutely aware of the open stares of the children at the sight of her “pale and misshapen face” (7, 6). Deeply shame-vulnerable, she learns through the children “the language of paranoia,” imagining that every whisper is a comment about her appearance and that every laugh is a joke at her expense. “Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life. Partly I was right: they were staring at me, laughing at me. The cruelty of children is immense, almost startling in its precision” (6–7). Wounded by the stares of the “perfectly formed children,” she feels at the same time “an exotic sense of power” when she observes how their

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parents “pretend not to notice” her (10). “What had happened to me was any parent’s nightmare, and I allowed myself to believe that I was dangerous to them.” Aware that her face makes parents “uncomfortable,” she ignores her “deep hurt” by allowing the side of her “desperate for any kind of defi nition to staunchly act out, if not exactly relish” her “macabre status.” At the same time, she is overcome by a “physical sense of dread” when the parents prepare to take photographs at the pony parties. Protectively hiding her disfigured face, she turns her head away and tilts it so that her hair falls “in a perfect sheet of camouflage” between her and the camera (11). Suffering the shame of having a facial stigma, the young Grealy uses classic defenses against shame to protect herself from future exposure, including shamelessness and anger as well as the more passive defenses of concealment and withdrawal. If Grealy ends up, at times, shamelessly flaunting her facial stigma or reacting to the taunts of her peers by angrily lashing out—returning their contempt with her countercontempt—she also becomes extremely self-conscious and wants to hide her disfigured, abjected appearance. And even as she uses concealment and withdrawal strategies to protect against her feelings of shame, she is acquiescing to and internalizing the stigmatizing judgments others make against her. A victim of self-stigmatization, she comes to see herself as odd-looking, ugly, repulsive, freakish.1 Rendered abject by her facial stigma, which becomes the central “fact” of her life—“I was my face, I was ugliness” (7)—she feels that her damaged face and spoiled identity have thrust her outside the good and proper social body. Believing that her face is what keeps her “apart” and is the “tangible element” of what is “wrong” with her life and with her, she comes to “blame” her face “for everything” (127). Over time, Grealy, who was once an outgoing person, becomes increasingly fearful and comes to dread meeting new people. While she takes a kind of “emotional comfort from surgery”—for she feels special and cared for when she is in the hospital—she finds the teasing she endures several times a day at school “incrementally more painful” (145). Schooled in the pedagogy of mortification, she accepts the judgments of others but at a great cost. “I was ugly, so people were going to make fun of me: I thought it was their right to do so simply because I was so ugly, so I’d just better get used to it. But I couldn’t. No matter how much I braced myself, the words stung every time they were thrown at me” (145–46). Even as her facial stigma becomes the defi nitive fact of her life—“My face, my ‘self,’” as she puts it (170)—the adolescent Grealy attempts to escape her undesirable, abjected bodily identity and maintain the dignity of her good and proper self by casting herself as a heroic—and morally and intellectually superior—individual. She assumes herself superior to the boys who tease her and the adults who stare at her, believing that, in her good patient role, she is able to bravely withstand pain that would “crumple” others (143). Doomed to ugliness and unlovabilty, she casts herself in the role of the “Hero

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of Love” who has access to the “real beauty” immanent in the world. “My face may have closed the door on love and beauty in their fleeting states, but didn’t my face also open me up to perceptions I might otherwise be blind to?” (150). Utterly powerless and vulnerable in social situations, she compensates by believing that she is following her “chosen” path in her pursuit of truth and beauty. “As I lay in bed at night, I considered my powers, my heightened sense of self-awareness, feeling not as if I had chosen this path, but that it had been chosen for me” (151). Trying to achieve “sainthood,” she attempts to see the boys who tease her as “misguided” and to forgive them rather than hating them, but although she sometimes has “genuine glimpses” of what it means to be charitable, she often ends up hating herself after her daily encounters with her tormenters (152). Intent on being “fiercely intelligent” at school, she uses “academic prowess” as her “armor” as she develops a “superiority complex as earnestly built as it was defensively acquired” (158). Several months before she turns fifteen, Grealy has her first consultation with a reconstructive surgeon and is appalled when he proposes to use on her, in a series of operations over a ten-year period, the “pedestal procedure,” which involves sewing skin from her stomach to her wrist for six weeks and attaching the skin of her hand to her face for another six weeks. When she finds photographs of the procedure in books on plastic surgery—which show people who have their skin and muscle “sewn to disjointed parts of their anatomy”—she is mortified, for the people in the photographs look like “freaks” to her. Feeling “utterly without hope,” she responds to her shame by wishing she were dead (155). Experiencing what Léon Wurmser describes as the core shame experience—“the pain of essential unlovability” (Mask 93)— she feels that she is “completely alone and without any chance of ever being loved” (155). But then when she learns of a new reconstructive technique involving the grafting of vascularized tissue from other areas of her body onto her jaw, she thinks that perhaps her face—and her life—can be fi xed and she can overcome her shameful abjection. Deborah Covino’s Kristevan analysis of the drive to amend the abject body in our contemporary makeover culture of aesthetic surgery sheds light on Grealy’s more extreme situation as she becomes involved in a lifelong quest to repair her facial deformity through a series of reconstructive surgeries. In her account, Covino shows how the aesthetic surgical industry reinforces a split in the psyche by dividing the body into good and bad parts—“the abject and the ‘glorified’ body”—and then seeking to “eradicate” the “bad” abject body so that only the “good” body “informs the subject’s understanding of self” (40). In the “narrative of the aesthetic surgical imaginary, cutting away or reshaping an undesirable part results in a made-over person who can interact more fully and successfully in society, and who is able to identify herself more confidently as a member of the social body” (36). Experiencing what Covino calls “abject

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body loathing” (39–42), Grealy wants to overcome her abjection by fi xing her face and achieving a good and proper—or at least something approaching a normal—facial appearance. “Maybe this wasn’t my actual face at all but the face of some interloper, some ugly intruder, and my ‘real’ face, the one I was meant to have all along, was within reach” (157). To be beautiful is to be accepted and even loved by others and thus to escape the dehumanizing effects of social stigmatization which, by objectifying people and treating them as members of a category rather than as individuals, deprives them of their “personhood” (Beuf 14–15). If other people were to fi nd Grealy beautiful, she believes, they might “love” her “as an individual, as a person” (157). Convinced of the “importance in this world of having a beautiful face,” she thinks that if she were beautiful she would live “without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like” (168, 177). Beginning a pattern that will continue for the many years of her reconstructive surgeries, the adolescent Grealy imagines that her life will fi nally begin after surgery only to be disappointed again and again when her skin—and later bone—grafts are reabsorbed by her body. When a year after her fi rst skin graft, the graft is reabsorbed by her body, she is devastated and begins to have “overwhelming attacks of shame” in which she feels that others should not look at her, that she is “too horrible to look at,” that she is not “worthy of being looked at,” and that her ugliness is “equal to a great personal failure” (185). And although she feels, for the fi rst time, that she belongs when she attends Sarah Lawrence College and takes on a new role as one of the better poets at the college, she remains obsessed with improving her appearance-impaired face. In yet another intensely shaming experience, she is devastated when she looks in the mirror after another skin graft procedure. “The graft had been applied not to just one side of my face but from one ear to the next and was obscenely swollen to the size of a football. A very large piece of pale skin from my hip had been left in. . . . This strip was a foot long and four inches wide, and on either side of it were long rows of sutures. If feeling like a freak had been more in my mind than in my face at other times in my life, the visage I saw staring back at me was undeniably repulsive” (200). Although her appearance is improved when she subsequently has a revision operation, Grealy suffers another setback when, once again, her skin graft is slowly reabsorbed by her body. But then, after she has a bone graft that gives her an “actual jaw” (204), she begins to like what she sees when she looks in the mirror, and yet she still does not feel attractive or lovable. Still a virgin when she graduates from college, Grealy, as a young adult, comes to see sex as her salvation, and so when she enters the MFA program in poetry at the University of Iowa and later lives in England, Germany, and Scotland, she has a series of short-term affairs with men as she takes on a

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new role: that of the hypersexualized woman who dresses provocatively and uses her body to attract men and to distract people from her face. And even though she undergoes a series of reconstructive procedures that improve her facial appearance, she still feels ugly. “Something was wrong: was this the face I had waited for through eighteen years and almost thirty operations? I couldn’t make what I saw in the mirror correspond to the person I thought I was. It wasn’t only that I continued to feel ugly; I simply could not conceive of the image as belonging to me” (219–20). Finding the person in the mirror “an imposter,” she stops looking at herself in the mirror (220). Told that the surgeries are for the most part fi nished, Grealy, who has long believed that she will “start living” when her face is “fi xed,” recognizes that there is “something empty” about her because of her “lifelong refusal to learn how to name the person in the mirror.” In her long obsession with achieving physical beauty, she has lost touch with the deeper core of her identity. “And now something inside me started to miss me. A part of me, one that had always been there, organically knew I was whole” (221). Grealy, who had expected to be liberated by getting a “new face to put on,” now realizes that her liberation will come from “shedding” her image. As a woman who has long suffered from a facial stigma, Grealy comes to understand the kinds of pressures all women are under in our beauty culture, which tells women that they can “most” be themselves “by acting and looking like someone else” and makes women feel inadequate because they cannot conform to the societal ideals of feminine beauty (222).2 After avoiding her reflected image for almost a year, Grealy, aware that she has “no idea” how she looks to her male companion as she sits in a café talking to him, gazes into the “night-silvered glass” of the café window to see if she can “recognize” herself (222, 223). By “unexpectedly preventing” readers from seeing her face in this scene, it is claimed, “Grealy intimates that the only gaze that matters is her own,” and the fact that her reflection in the “night-silvered” glass will be “indistinct” and will be “simply one other face in the public, communal setting of the café” suggests that she “no longer sees herself as a solitary contemptible body part” (Mintz 182). But while the closure of Grealy’s account gestures toward healing as Grealy comes to see through and beyond the culture of appearances that has long viewed her as a “contemptible body part,” the suggested “happy” ending of Autobiography of a Face is belied by the “real” and tragic ending of Grealy’s story. If as a “wounded storyteller,” Grealy sought to redeem her devalued “ugly” identity by taking on a new idealized “literary” identity—that of the highly acclaimed author—her feelings of ugliness and abjection persisted. After the publication of her book, Grealy commented, sardonically, that she was “getting famous for being ugly,” and she admitted that there was “a part” of her that still felt that “no one should be looking” at her face (Gleick). In the few years that she remained alive after the publication of Autobiography of

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a Face, Grealy underwent more surgeries to “correct” her face, still believing that her real life would start and she would find someone to love her after she completed her surgeries. After her fi nal—and failed—jaw surgeries, a desperately unhappy and lonely Grealy entered a downward spiral of suicide attempts and heroin addiction and, at age thirty-nine, was found dead from what was officially ruled as an accidental overdose of heroin.3

Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World Like Grealy, who provides vivid testimony to the shame of women who are labeled ugly and who spend their lives seeking to surgically “correct” their imperfections, Nancy Mairs understands the pressures women face in an appearance-driven American society that stigmatizes those who are disfigured or physically disabled. Unlike Grealy, who became appearance-impaired when she was a girl and who experienced some improvement in her appearance in her adult years, Mairs spent almost the fi rst thirty years of her life conforming to the cultural standard of normal or unexceptional appearance only to end up suffering from the progressive deterioration caused by multiple sclerosis. If Grealy uses the classic shame defenses of concealment and withdrawal and self-protectively distances herself, and in part her readers, from her facial stigma—evident, for example, in her refusal for almost a year to look into a mirror and in the fact that she provides readers with only passing mirror glimpses of her face in her account—Mairs, in contrast, repeatedly, even obsessively, displays her abjected, disabled body to readers. Unlike Grealy, whose emotional reticence works, in part, to conceal her excessive shame, Mairs shamelessly flaunts her shame, even at the risk of exposing herself to further shame. Described as a writer who insists on “sharing what is private” and who delivers “confrontational punches” to the readers in her “tight, relentless, and unforgiving essays” (Braham 64, 66), Mairs deliberately and self-consciously exposes to public view what is usually hidden as she chronicles the shameful bodily realities of living with a degenerative disease such as multiple sclerosis. What becomes “normal” for Mairs, as her autobiographical writings make clear, is her slow but steady loss of control of her body and bodily functions. In talking openly about her bodily symptoms and “misshapen” and “crippled” appearance, Mairs risks shaming herself in a culture in which the disabled are carriers of the “fears and rejected qualities” of the larger disability-phobic culture and represent not only bodily “imperfection” but also the “failure to control the body” and the “vulnerability” of the body to “weakness, pain, and death” (Wendell 74, 60). But Mairs, who has commented that it would be “easier” for others if she “just died,” is determined to be “open” about her condition even at the “risk of embarrassing” others

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(D. Bell). Indeed, Mairs is an author who, rather than guarding her privacy or “blocking any voyeuristic impulse in her readers . . . is inclined to flaunt herself, exploiting voyeurism for her own purposes,” as G. Thomas Couser remarks (“Autopathography” 71). Made to feel “invisibilized,” “negated,” and “disappeared” when others avert their gaze as if she were “too awful to contemplate” (Carnal Acts 153), Mairs refuses to remain silent about those things others would urge her to conceal in shame in a society in which the severely disabled woman represents the Kristevan horror of abjection and stands outside the clean and proper social body. Instead, Mairs openly—indeed, shamelessly—exposes herself to her readers as she, through her deliberate acts of self-disclosure, speaks frankly about her condition as a “crippled” woman and provides graphic accounts of the physical deterioration caused by her disease. And Mairs defiantly and shamelessly chooses the word “cripple” to describe her condition, even though she is aware that people “wince” at the word. “Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger,” she insists (Plaintext 9). Mairs, who describes herself as a “body in trouble” (see Waist-High 40–63), recounts over and over in her essays, like the repetition of a trauma, the “brutal truth” of her progressive decline as a sufferer of the chronic-progressive form of multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the body’s immune system destroys the myelin—the fatty substance that sheathes and protects the nerves—and causes scar tissue to form where the nerve sheath has been destroyed. Mairs, who has sclerotic patches throughout her brain and spinal cord, insists that without MS she would be “no body”: “I am not ‘Nancy + MS,’ and no simple subtraction can render me whole” (Waist-High 8). After spending nearly the first thirty years of her life in the “oblivion of ‘normalcy,’” Mairs began her descent “step by step (and then lurch by lurch)” into her “waist-high” view of the world from a wheelchair (Waist-High 29). Experiencing her first symptoms in 1972 and initially tested for a brain tumor because of the weakness on the left side of her body, which caused her to drop things from her left hand and to limp, Mairs, within a year of her negative brain tumor tests, began to use a cane for her limp; some five years later she added a plastic leg brace; by 1980, she used a small electric scooter for all but short walks; by 1990, after several falls, she gave up walking; and in 1992, she traded in her scooter for a power wheelchair. Like others suffering from an incurable disease, Mairs is acutely aware of herself as an embodied identity, for her disease, as she puts it, has “rammed” her “‘self’ straight back into the body” she thought she could “rise above” (Carnal Acts 84). In her reflections on the Western tradition of separating the mind from the body, Mairs comments on the prevalence of body shame in our culture, in which “open association” with the body

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“shames us” and not only does the body become “the hidden, the dark, the secret, the shameful,” but the female body “is particularly suspect, since so much of it is in fact hidden, dark, secret” (Carnal Acts 84, 85, 86). Mairs, who bears “as much shame as any woman” for the “dark, enfolded secrets” of her female sexuality, has an “additional reason to feel shame” because her body is a “crippled body” (Carnal Acts 86). If Mairs, like most women, suffers from body shame because of her failure to achieve the unattainable standard of female beauty promulgated in our culture in which the contemporary ideal woman is young, attractive, and physically fit—she is “between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five; her hair has body, her teeth flash white, her breath smells minty, her underarms are dry; . . . she is trim and deeply tanned; she jogs, swims, plays tennis, rides a bicycle, sails”—she also knows the “specific shame” of having a body “weakened and misshapen by disease” (Plaintext 16; Carnal Acts 90). Like other disabled individuals, Mairs is acutely aware of the shame that derives from the contemptuous stare of others in a society in which the disabled body, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson has observed, is perceived as “a shocking spectacle to the normate eye” and thus becomes the object of the stare, which “sculpts the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle” (26). As Mairs views her abjected, disabled body through the shaming gaze of the “normate eye,” she sees herself as an object of contempt and as someone thrust outside the good and proper social body. When, for example, she watches a videotape of a television show on the disabled in which she appeared at a time when she could still walk with a brace, she is appalled: My shoulders droop and my pelvis thrusts forward as I try to balance myself upright, throwing my frame into a bony S. As a result of contractures, one shoulder is higher than the other and I carry one arm bent in front of me, the fi ngers curled into a claw. My left arm and leg have wasted into pipe-stems, and I try always to keep them covered. When I think about how my body must look to others, . . . I feel ludicrous, even loathsome. (Plaintext 17) Mairs, who was “trained” as a woman to be “disappointed” in herself—to compare herself “unfavorably” to the feminine ideal and then take measures to correct her “glaring deficiencies”—ends up, in her fifties, dividing her time between her wheelchair and bed: “My belly and feet are swollen from forced inactivity, my shoulders slump, and one of my arms is falling out of its socket,” and even though her wheelchair has become “part” of her body, she is “shocked” at the sight of herself “hunched in its black framework of aluminum and plastic” (Waist-High 44, 45, 46). When she attends a water-exercise class sponsored by the MS Society, she is aware that to strangers the various members of the group—Joe with his “wasted arms and legs churning the

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water,” June with her urine bag, into which her catheter empties, taped to her leg, and Karen with her bag of urine floating on the surface of the water— might look “grotesque” and that once, she, too, might have seen the group as a grotesque spectacle (Waist-High 16). Even as Mairs describes herself through the “normate eye” as a grotesque spectacle, she is intent, through her own act of self-stigmatization, on revealing the devastating consequences of the social stigmatization of those with disabilities. In a culture in which illness and deformity are viewed not as “human variants” but as “deviations from the fully human condition,” the “afflicted body” is not simply a body that suffers but instead “is thought to be ‘broken,’ and thus to have lost its original usefulness; or ‘embattled,’ and thus in need of militaristic response . . . to whip it back into shape; or ‘spoiled,’ and thus a potential menace to the bodies around it” (Waist-High 47–48). And in a culture that refuses to see disability as “ordinary,” as something that can enter any individual’s life, the “effacement” of the disabled can make them feel as if there is something “ugly or foolish or shameful” about them, that they “don’t exist, in any meaningful social sense,” that they are “not there” (Carnal Acts 33–34). As Mairs provides an account of the social shunning of the disabled, she calls attention to the annihilating force of the contempt directed against the disabled in our society. Referred to as “a ‘cold’ affect,” contempt is a “global type of aggression” that wants to “eliminate the other being” (Wurmser, Mask 81, 80). In effect, “Contempt says: ‘You should disappear as such a being as you have shown yourself to be—failing, weak, flawed’. . . . To disappear into nothing is the punishment for such failure” (Wurmser, “Shame” 67). Mairs, who senses the contempt behind the averted gaze of others when she goes out in public—“the slide of an eye in any direction but mine”—understands why the disabled may resort to the classic shame defense of hiding and withdrawal to protect against further exposure to shame as they are “tempted to withdraw altogether, at least from the company of ‘normals,’ so as to avoid the indignity” of their daily treatment (Waist-High 101, 103). Using a term many people with disabilities find offensive because it is self-stigmatizing, Mairs says that she calls herself a “cripple” because it accurately describes her condition. “‘Mobility impaired,’ the euphemizers would call me, as though a surfeit of syllables could soften my reality. No such luck. I still can’t sit up in bed, can’t take an unaided step, can’t dress myself, can’t open doors (and I get damned sick of waiting in the loo until some other woman needs to pee and opens the door for me” (Waist-High 13). Living in a society that views those who require care as “an intolerable burden” on others, Mairs, at times, sees her life as “good for nothing,” and she feels “anger and disgust” at her own “uselessness” as her symptoms progress and she needs help with simple daily tasks, such as tying her shoelaces or placing a book on the shelf, making her far removed from the cultural

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ideal of “self-sufficiency” (Waist-High 76, 61; Carnal Acts 127, 128). Aware that “normals” feel “discomfort and even distaste” for the “misshapen body,” Mairs, at times, feels “revulsion” for her body and even suspects, when her children are growing up, that they are “humiliated” to have a cripple for a mother (Waist-High 51, 49; Carnal Acts 129). Inhabiting the unclean, volatile body described by Elizabeth Grosz—the body associated with uncontrollable and defiling bodily fluids and waste products—Mairs in her bodily abjection stands outside the society of clean and proper bodies. When she is on shopping trips or long drives, she is afraid she will wet her pants, an experience that “soaks” her in “shame,” and as her belly sags because of her loss of muscle tone, she ends up suffering “all kinds of intestinal disruptions, hopelessly humiliating in a society in which excretory functions remain strictly unspeakable” (Carnal Acts 139, 90). And when Mairs eventually finds herself confined to a wheelchair, she worries that she will experience a total loss of bodily control and end up in the abject world of “hospital beds, damp sheets, personal attendants, sponge baths, spoon-feeding. . . . Debility lies in that direction. And then death” (Carnal Acts 18). Focusing attention on the shaping and shaming power of the hegemonic discursive construction of the disabled as socially and physically discredited and spoiled, Mairs describes her own feeling of being a socially undesirable woman with a spoiled body-self. “Here is my troubled body, dreaming myself into life: a guttering candle in a mound of melted wax, or a bruised pear, ripe beyond palatability, ready for the compost heap. The images, though they vary, always bear the whiff of spoliation” (Waist-High 44). Aware that the “story” of her life is “spoiled” (Waist-High 189), Mairs offers testimony to her experiences of body shame in our contemporary culture in which the ever-intensifying pursuit of physical perfection and bodily control serves to further alienate and devalue those with severe disabilities. Mairs, who has discovered that “speaking out loud is an antidote to shame,” breaks the rules of polite discourse heard in the injunctions of mothers and grandmothers who say to their daughters, “Sssh! Sssh! Nice girls don’t talk like that. . . . Keep your voice down. Don’t tell. Don’t tell. Don’t tell” (Carnal Acts 91). While shame “cracks and stifles” her voice, she can “subvert its power” by acknowledging who she is, “shame and all,” and bringing what is “hidden, dark, secret” about her life “into the plain light of shared human experience” (Carnal Acts 92). Having “gone beyond shame,” Mairs announces her own shamelessness. “I’m shameless, you might say. You know, as in ‘shameless hussy’? A woman with her bare brace and her tongue hanging out.” Forced by her disease to “embrace” herself “in the flesh,” she speaks emphatically, not in whispers, as a “crippled woman,” and through her utterances she redeems “both ‘cripple’ and ‘woman’ from the shameful silences.” “No body, no voice; no voice, no body. That’s what I know in my bones,” she insists (Carnal Acts 96). As Mairs uses the classic defense of shamelessness to defend against her

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shame, she also discovers the redemptive power of speaking of her embodied shame. And in and through her “body” writings, she works to reclaim—and revalue—the disabled female body by fi nding a deep and profound meaning in her experiences of embodiment as a disabled woman. Critiquing the habit of thought that makes “disabled” the negative term in the polarizing binarism of able-bodied/disabled, Mairs begins to “reconstruct the world” with her own revisionist binary as she reverses the pride-shame oppositions undergirding the able-bodied/disabled binary by calling those who lack disabilities “the nondisabled” because, in relation to her, they are the “deficient ones” (Waist-High 13, 14). And she also insists on the ordinariness of the lives of those, like her, with incurable diseases. “I’m not . . . Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease. In most ways I’m just like every other woman of my age, nationality, and socioeconomic background. I menstruate, so I have to buy tampons. I worry about smoker’s breath, so I buy mouthwash. I smear my wrinkling skin with lotions” (Carnal Acts 32). Objecting to the phrase “physically challenged” because of its emphasis on the “body’s tasks, its difficulties, its accomplishments,” Mairs asserts that such concerns are not as important as the way we respond to physical demands and the choices that all of us, as “spiritually challenged” individuals, make in the “face of danger, and difficulty, and loss” (Carnal Acts 103). “After I learned that I had multiple sclerosis, the transitions I had to make, involving the development of a new sense of who I was and what I was good for, required mourning the loss of the ‘old me’ as I confronted a new one who seemed like a stranger,” as Mairs recalls. “The active young wife and mother faded: no longer could I run after my young children or dance with their father. When my waist-length hair grew too heavy for my weakening hands to wash and brush, I had to cut it off, and suddenly I felt no longer carefree and sexy but practical and matronly. With degenerative conditions like mine, self-definition may have to be revised in this way again and again as new limitations develop” (Waist-High 133). To Mairs, the physical act of writing is a halting and painful process because she does not have the physical endurance to sit in front of her computer screen for more than two or three hours at a time, and she often feels frustrated and angry at her failing body when her fingers “go every which way” (Carnal Acts 2–3). Yet, despite these difficulties, Mairs continues to write in her need to “make sense of” and also make “bearable” her experiences as she “scribble[s]” herself “deeper and deeper” into her life (Carnal Acts 5, 8). Speaking the unspeakable, Mairs refuses to be silent about her body-in-trouble with its ever-worsening symptoms, admitting that when she was “only slightly crippled,” she thought she could never endure being in a wheelchair only to become the woman she thought she “could never bear to be” (Carnal Acts 16). Writing about her life forces her to contemplate the issues and experiences that mark her life “as

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an undesirable, perhaps even an unlivable, life” (Waist-High 4). But Mairs, who realizes that writing has “always formed the core” of her identity and been the means through which she has “saved and shaped” her life, also realizes that she would not have become the writer she is without her disease (Waist-High 9). As Mairs writes “as a body,” she seeks to “redeem” her crippled female body “through that most figurative of human tools: language” (Waist-High 60). “A life commonly held to be insufferable can be full and funny. I’m living the life,” Mairs affirms as she works to subvert shame’s power by making her crippled life seem “less alien, less perilous, and far more amusing” to her readers (Waist-High 11, 6). Mairs, who was “as sour as a pickle” before her MS, can sometimes fi nd amusement in even the most embarrassing of situations, like the time that she was knocked onto her back by her terrier puppy. “This is called a pratfall, a burlesque device used in plays and films for a surefire laugh. In keeping with this spirit, I start to giggle at the image of this woman sprawled flat on her back, helpless under the ecstatic kisses of a spotted mongrel with a comic grin who is thrilled to have someone at last get right down to his own level” (Carnal Acts 114). And as her condition has steadily deteriorated, Mairs has become more attentive to the people and objects around her. “I notice more details. I take more delight in them. I feel much more connected to others than I used to, more aware of their troubles, more tolerant of their shortcomings. Hardship can be terrifically humanizing” (Carnal Acts 115). If Mairs is “literally diminished” by her disability, reduced in her wheelchair to a four-foot-eight-inch-high view of the world, she is also “knee-deep” in the world. “This is no piteously deprived state I’m in down here but a rich, complicated, and utterly absorbing process of immersion in whatever the world has to offer” (Waist-High 18). In her shameless writing about her body shame, Mairs wants to redeem “both ‘cripple’ and ‘woman’ from the shameful silences.” As a “shameless hussy,” she violates the rules of polite discourse and makes her readers wince. But she also sees her writing as a way of taking care of others just as she has allowed others to take care of her as her condition has deteriorated. Despite all her losses, “I can still write, which for me has always been an act of oblation and nurturance: my means of taking the reader into my arms, holding a cup to her lips, stroking her forehead, whispering jokes into her ears. . . . With such gestures, I am taking all the care I can” (Waist-High 84). Like others who write what she calls the “Literature of Personal Disaster,” Mairs writes to comfort and console her readers as she, aware that “there is nothing exceptional” about her life, offers “companionship in a common venture” (Voice Lessons 124, 127). Even as Mairs confronts the brutal truths about her abjected “crippled body” and “misshapen life,” she also, through her “body writings” and in and through the body of her writings, works to reclaim her experiences as a “crippled” woman as she offers to her readers,

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many of whom will confront the bodily vulnerabilities and body shame that accompany illness and old age, “companionship in a common venture.” Like the other authors we have examined, Mairs is aware of the shame that is felt by and on the body in our appearance-driven, body-obsessed culture. By speaking openly of her shame, she seeks to redeem her women readers from the shameful silences that have for too long surrounded and shaped the lives of women.

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CHAPTER 11

In Conclusion

n more than a decade’s work that speaks of embodiment, what have we seen beyond the repetition of ‘the body,’ ‘corporeality,’ or ‘embodiment?’” observes Elspeth Probyn as she seeks to understand the importance of the “bodily thing we call shame” in theories of embodiment (Blush 28). “Does shame disconcert us because we feel it simultaneously in our bodies, at the core of our selves, and in our social relations?” asks Probyn. “Why are we so afraid of shame?” (Blush 4). Arguing against the academic tendency to “overly privilege the body’s cultural meanings” rather than telling the “psychosomatic body’s stories,” Probyn describes shame as a “powerful instance of embodiment” that makes us “reflect on who we are— individually and collectively” (Blush 41, 79, 8). That the “body in shame tells us . . . much” (Probyn, Blush 63) is evident in the cultural phenomenon that continues to plague women in our supposedly body-loving contemporary culture—somatophobia or the rejection of the female body-in-shame. For in our contemporary culture, as Susan Bordo explains, women have been instructed in the new “pedagogy of defect” by becoming habituated to created images of physical perfection— “the ageless and sagless and wrinkleless”—and thus learning to fi nd bodily defects “repellent, unacceptable” (Twilight 37, 3). Even as postmodernists talk in “theoretical terms about ‘mutating selves’ and nomadic identities,” Bordo expresses her well-placed concern with “what happens when practices of self-deconstruction and ‘self-improvement’ have become a way of life” (Twilight 18). Behind the rhetoric of personal empowerment that undergirds cosmetic surgery, Bordo finds evidence of a “consumer culture that depends on the continual creation and proliferation of ‘defect,’” and that makes women “feel bad” about themselves while urging them to assert their own agency and “take charge” of their lives through cosmetic surgery (Twilight 21). The fact that for the individual woman getting control over one’s life is so often linked to getting one’s body in shape or taking bodily control through plastic surgery only calls attention to women’s collective sense that they are somehow “defective, lacking, inadequate” (Twilight 51). The debilitating body-self shame that infects the lives of adult women who fear being fat as they “overestimate the size of their bodies” and feel depressed about their “perceived

“I

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physical inadequacies” is also communicated to young girls who, as they try to measure up to the new ideal of physical perfection, come to express their own “fear of fat” and “anxiety about body parts” (Bordo, Twilight 120; Brumberg, Body Project 130). And in a culture that worships youth and idealizes the fit and healthy body while subjecting women to the new “pedagogy of defect,” both elderly women and the disfigured and disabled are vulnerable to the female body-self shame that pervades our culture of appearances—a culture that pathologizes aging and associates disfigurement and disability with having a damaged body and a spoiled identity. “The natural response to shame is hiding, and hiding breeds silence which further deepens shame,” as shame theorist Gershen Kaufman tells us (Shame 231). Unrecognized, shame can bind us, and it can contaminate and debilitate our daily lives. It can make us feel defective, small, inadequate, and it can hide deep within the self. The alleviation of shame first requires an awareness of shame’s ubiquitous presence in our lives. But because there is shame about shame and because we tend to look away from the other’s shame, those who write the story of the female body-in-shame are involved in a risky business. Indeed, as Probyn comments, “shame is a painful thing to write about. It gets into your body. It gets to you” (Blush 130). Yet Probyn, who is concerned with how we “might envision writing shame as part of an ethical practice” and “flesh out an ethics of response to shame,” also sees a potential for transformation in the painful act of writing shame (Blush 131, 127). For although writing shame can take a “toll on the body that writes and the bodies that read,” it also seeks to generate “new ways of thinking about how we are related to history and how we wish to live in the present” (Blush 140, 162). And just as writing shame, as Probyn remarks, can be seen as part of an ethical practice, so reading about shame demands “an ethics of response” by forcing awareness of the shame that binds so many of us in our contemporary culture of appearances. Drawing in their writings on women’s deeply embodied feelings of shame, the authors we have examined in Embodied Shame risk shaming us as they call attention to the abjections and humiliations of female embodiment in our supposedly body-loving era such as those suffered by Munro’s sexually curious Del Jordan, who learns to associate her female body and sexuality with the utter “helplessness” that accompanies the “humiliation” of the flesh; or by Allison’s white-trash narrator Bone and by Morrison’s poor African American character Pecola Breedlove who, as victims of physical and sexual abuse, come to perceive themselves as dirty, ugly, worthless girls; or by Shute’s anorexic character Josie who, driven by her fear that she will be dragged down and buried in her “fat, disgustingly fat” female flesh, undergoes the process of self-starvation in her determination to achieve the skeletally thin, but to her perfected, female body; or by Weldon’s Ruth Patchett who, finding herself an “ugly woman” pitied by the world, tries to undo her

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shame through her masochistic pursuit of cosmetic surgery as she radically refashions her appearance to conform to the feminine ideal; or by Laurence’s elderly character Hagar Shipley who, subjected to the pedagogy of mortification in our ageist culture, comes to view herself as an object of contempt, as a useless and unwanted old woman trapped in an aging—and dirty and dissmelling—body; or by Mairs who, aware that “normals” feel “discomfort and even distaste” for the disabled body, ends up feeling, at times, “revulsion” for her body, which has become “misshapen” and “crippled” by multiple sclerosis. Refusing to be silent, the authors examined in Embodied Shame demand an ethics of response as they, evoking the viscerality of shame in their works, expose the continuing cultural manipulation of women apparent in troubling images of female bodies as defective or spoiled or damaged or dirtied. “Will shame continue to be the scourge that it is in current society?” asks shame theorist Andrew Morrison. Noting that the social forces that cause shame seem “permanently embedded,” Morrison admits that he finds it “difficult to avoid the conclusion that the culture of shame will continue to create havoc for the foreseeable future” (Culture 200–01). Living as we do in a culture of shame, it is imperative, as Morrison tells us, that we confront and articulate our shame if we wish to alleviate “the burning distress that shame infl icts on so many” (Culture 193). Just as shame can beget shame, so authors can communicate through their works the emotional force of shame contagion. But in “digestible amounts,” explains Carl Goldberg, “shame spurs personal freedom by providing a means for penetrating self-discovery” (274). As the authors investigated in Embodied Shame call attention to the shame we feel “simultaneously in our bodies, at the core of our selves, and in our social relations,” they bring heightened awareness—a kind of textual self-and-body consciousness—to the body politics that continues to devalue and disrespect women in our postmodern, appearance-driven culture. By paying heed to the “bodily thing we call shame” and telling, in “digestible amounts,” the story of the female body-in-shame, these authors not only expose shame but seek a remedy to shame. If at first blush shame is a “painful thing to write about,” writing shame is, indeed, part of an ethical practice that seeks, through the articulation of shame, not only to force us to recognize the ubiquitous presence of shame in our lives but also to spur us to question and confront—and thus to resist and undo—the somatophobia that continues to bind so many of us in shame in our contemporary culture of appearances.

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Notes

Chapter 1: Introduction 1. Mary Russo, in The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, sets out to valorize the grotesque and abjected female body as she challenges what she calls the “normalization of feminism,” which has led to a “cultural and political disarticulation of feminism from the strange, the risky, the minoritarian, the excessive, the outlawed, and the alien” (vii). Linking the “grotto-esque” cavelike and visceral world of the grotesque to the “cavernous anatomical female body,” Russo admits that it is “an easy and perilous slide” from archaic tropes—like that of the “senile pregnant hag,” which connects the female body to “‘primal’ elements, especially the earth”—to the abject (1, 2, 1). “Blood, tears, vomit, excrement—all the detritus of the body that is separated out and placed with terror and revulsion (predominantly, though not exclusively) on the side of the feminine—are down there in that cave of abjection” (2). Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Russo explains that the grotesque body is “identified with the ‘lower bodily stratum’ and its associations with degradation, fi lth, death, and rebirth.” Unlike the classical body, which is “closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical, and sleek,” the grotesque body is “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing,” and indeed, the “images of the grotesque body are precisely those which are abjected from the bodily canons of classical aesthetics” (8). As Russo challenges feminism’s identification with the “normal” and places a positive value on the grotesque, she calls for an “ordinary feminism,” one that is “heterogeneous, strange, polychromatic, ragged, confl ictual, incomplete, in motion, and at risk” (vii). Remarking on Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque, which he found embodied in the Kerch terracotta figurines of senile pregnant hags—“They combine senile, decaying, and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed. . . . Moreover, the old hags are laughing,” as Bakhtin remarked—Russo admits that the image of the pregnant hag is “loaded with all of the connotations of fear and loathing around the biological processes of reproduction and of aging.” But, nonetheless, “Bakhtin’s description of these ancient crones is at least exuberant” (63). Russo, who insists on the subversive, transgressive power of the grotesque, is interested in how the category of the female body as grotesque “might be used affi rmatively to destabilize the idealizations of female beauty, or to realign the mechanism of desire” (65). But if to Russo, the hag’s “carnival laughter” has a subversive power (see 71–73), what her model overlooks is “the anguish of the grotesque heroine,” as Sarah Shieff remarks in her review of novels since the 1960s dealing with

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eating disorders (222). What such an argument also overlooks is the intensifying pressure on women in our contemporary culture to perfect their bodies. As Susan Bordo observes, we live in a consumer culture that “depends on the continual creation and proliferation of ‘defect’” and “is always making us feel bad about ourselves at the same time as it pumps us up with excitement over our own ‘agency’: take charge, ‘Just Do It!’” (Twilight 21). Living in an era in which women learn from a “pedagogy of defect . . . that various parts of their bodies are faulty, unacceptable,” many women, as Bordo comments, carry “deep wounds of shame” about their bodies (Twilight 37, 43). Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter 2: The Humiliations of the Female Flesh in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women 1. Many critics have commented on the influence of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on Munro’s novel. As Barbara Godard remarks, “Joyce’s influence on Munro has been accepted, so clearly does the form and title of her novel allude to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, yet the opposition of ‘Lives’ to ‘Portrait’ as well as the sexual difference of ‘Girls and Women’ to ‘Man’ points to a bildungsroman written against Joyce” (65). According to Godard, “Munro structures Del’s discoveries along a path already charted by Stephen Dedalus. Like him, Del explores the forces of religion and sex on the shaping of an aesthetic.” But if for Joyce’s Stephen “woman is disembodied, made one with the angels, a muse or passive receptacle for the active male principle of creation,” Munro’s Del “rebels against this by asserting the pleasures of the flesh and affi rming her own power in sex over Garnet” (66). For Sue Thomas, “The allusions to Joyce encourage a reading of Lives and Girls and Women through the generic features of the Künstlerroman. In the Künstlerroman birds are symbols of artistic and intellectual aspirations, of transcendence of family and material circumstances; in the typical female Künstlerroman birds are broken, crippled, strangled or hung, as a sign of the difficulty the woman artist has in reconciling her ambition with her sense of femininity. . . . Del does celebrate the ‘glory’ of her loss of virginity . . . but the particular image of the dismembered bird that masks the defloration signals through intertextuality the threat Garnet represents to her aspirations . . .” (117–18). See also Baum 208–09; Howells 32. 2. Munro, whose father was a fox farmer and who spent her early years in Wingham, Ontario, bases her character’s Flats Road experiences on her memories of living in rural poverty in an area where, as Munro commented, “a lot of pretty marginal type people tended to live” (Rasporich 4). 3. Munro has commented that the mother character in Lives “is quite a long way” from her own mother and “has quite a lot of several people in her” (Rasporich 23). But some aspects of Munro’s mother appear in Addie Jordan. “A forceful and charming personality,” Munro’s mother “was not inclined to accept a life of poverty easily,” as Beverly Rasporich observes of Anne Clarke Chamney. “At one period when Munro’s father was failing economically at fox farming, she took the initiative, had the fox skins made into the then fashionable fox-head scarves, and easily sold them door-to-door with a ‘high-class demeanour’ and a sales pitch that began, ‘I’ve

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heard from so and so that you are interested. . . . ’” In a similar way, Del’s mother, Addie Jordan, uses a high-class demeanor when she sells encyclopedias to the locals. Just as Del’s mother becomes a source of social embarrassment to Del, so Munro, as a teenager, became embarrassed by her mother’s slow degeneration from Parkinson’s disease, which left Munro “with the conforming desire, when she herself became a mother, to provide a normal, conventional life for her children, to be dutiful and average for them so that ‘they wouldn’t have any kind of problem from having a weird mother’” (Rasporich 7). 4. To Munro, Addie Jordan’s feminist ideals are short-sighted. As Munro commented in an interview: “You know that line ‘there’s a change coming in the lives of girls and women.’ I meant that to be ironic because the changes I think Addie sees as possible and the whole situation as she sees it is touchingly oversimplified. . . . For instance, she totally disregards sexual passion. It’s just something you forget about and it will go away. . . . She thinks the whole dark side of nature can be easily dealt with. I meant that language that people have taken so seriously to be sort of sad and funny. I didn’t mean to make fun of her. But I meant her vision to be quite inadequate” (Hancock 103). 5. Munro, who has said that Del Jordan is “very real” to her because she contains “aspects” of herself, views Lives as a “very optimistic, almost triumphant book” because Del has “power”—specifically intellectual power, for she “analyzed and saw through” and her “abdication was fairly short” (Rasporich 23, 26). Yet, interestingly, Munro notes that she wrote Lives at a time in her own life when she had “absolutely no power” (Rasporich 27). 6. In an interview, Munro commented, “I’m very, very excited by what you might call the surface of life, and it must be that this seems to me meaningful in a way I can’t analyze or describe.” What interests her are “things about people, the way they look, the way they sound, the way things smell, the way everything is that you go through everyday. It seems to me very important to do something with this” (Gibson 241). And yet, in her comments on the critical response to the Epilogue, Munro stated: “People have taken this to mean more of a siding with realistic writing than I would take it to mean. I’m not making judgments there. It’s something [the ‘black fable’] perhaps the girl no longer has the capacity to write, or has not the capacity to imagine. But it’s not a direct plumping in favour of a certain kind of writing because that dark stuff keeps coming back to me even now. You see, it hasn’t gone” (Tausky 69). Chapters 2 and 3

Chapter 3: Family Violence, Incest, and White-Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina 1. “Americans love to hate the poor” and, in particular, to hate poor white trash, observe Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz in their analysis of the white-trash phenomenon in America (1). A “classist slur” and a “racial epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves,” white trash is “the most visible and clearly marked form of whiteness” (2, 4). The fact that the term “trash” means “social waste and detritus” (4) points to the social degradation and

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shame implicit in this derogatory class designation. Referring to whites who live in poverty—classically in rural poverty—the term also invokes long-standing stereotypes of poor whites as “incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid” (2). That a “relationship [exists] between social formations and structures of feeling” (Fox 14) and that the feeling of shame and the experience of being socially shamed are crucial to the development of a white-trash identity are revealed in Dorothy Allison’s novel. Chapter 3 2. Donald Nathanson, in his discussion of the relationship between excretory epithets and shame, remarks that classic shame expressions—such as “piss on you,” “pisser,” “shit,” “you little shit”—capture the moment of embarrassment when the shamed individual feels “infantile, weak, and dirty, unable to control . . . bodily functions.” While shame is “much more than just excretion,” according to Nathanson, “excretory epithets are about shame” (“Shame/Pride Axis” 198). 3. Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger, who argue that “unacknowledged pride and shame are ubiquitous in all human encounters” (13), point to the potentially lethal consequences of the shame-shame or shame-rage feeling traps. A “feeling trap,” as they explain, “involves a series of loops of shame (being ashamed of being ashamed), which causes further shame, which can continue indefi nitely,” or it involves a self-perpetuating chain of emotions in which “unacknowledged shame” leads to anger which, in turn, results in further shame (104, 105). Moreover, when an individual has emotional reactions to his or her own emotions and to those of another person, both individuals can become mired in a feeling trap—“a triple spiral of shame and rage between and within interactants,” which, in turn, can lead to the emotional impasse of an interminable confl ict (126). “Shame-rage spirals may be brief, lasting a matter of minutes, or they can last for hours, days, or a lifetime, as bitter hatred or resentment” (127). Moreover, shame-anger chains, according to Scheff and Retzinger, “can last even longer than a lifetime, since hatred can be transmitted from generation to generation in the form of racial, religious, and national prejudice” (105). 4. By directing rage toward another, as shame theorist Michael Lewis explains, the shamed individual attempts to ward off and undo shame “through a reinterpretation of the blame from an internal to an external cause” (Shame 150–51). Gershen Kaufman, in his description of the “defending scripts” used to protect against shame, explains that rage—“whether in the form of generalized hostility, fomenting bitterness, chronic hatred, or explosive eruptions”—functions to protect the self against exposure and thus defends against shame. Like rage scripts, contempt scripts protect the self, for “to the degree that others are looked down upon, found lacking or seen as lesser or inferior beings, a once-wounded self becomes more securely insulated against further shame” (Psychology 100). Moreover, power scripts, which aim at gaining power over others, also protect the self against shame. “When power scripts combine with rage and/or contempt scripts, the seeking of revenge is a likely outcome. . . . Now the humiliated one, at long last, will humiliate the other” (Psychology 101). 5. Allison’s portrayal of Anney as “a loving mother who cannot stop her husband from beating and raping her eldest daughter poses many challenges for the reader,” as Laurie Vickroy remarks. Describing her experiences teaching Allison’s novel, Vickroy comments:

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I have never taught a novel that brought a greater response, more feelings of pity, dread, fear and outright hatred in my student readers. Although there are usually mixed opinions about Anney, depending upon the students’ backgrounds and their awareness of the workings of family abuse situations, she still comes under the most vociferous attacks of any character in fiction that I have taught. One could conclude that Allison anticipates powerful reactions by taking great pains to create sympathy for Anney’s life and to establish her as a loving, fi nancially struggling mother, so that when she abandons Bone at the end of the novel, the loss seems even greater because she does seem to love her daughter. (161) 6. Although offering a “compensatory story about a plucky heroine capable of rising above abusive circumstances,” Allison also challenges the classic “‘recovery story’ by insisting upon the long-lasting and fragmenting effects of trauma,” as Janice Doane and Devon Hodges observe (113). 7. Allison, like other women who have written incest survivor stories, risks being reshamed in a society in which the mass media exploits survivor discourse, treating it as soft-porn commodities that appeal to the public’s voyeuristic and erotic interests. In a discussion of the troublesome issues surrounding media uses of survivor speech, Minrose Gwin explains how victim-survivors “are often eroticized, and discussions of sexual violence are used to titillate and expand audiences.” Consequently, speech about a taboo subject such as incestuous abuse “becomes a titillating media commodity objectifying the survivor, stripping her of authority and agency, and thereby deflecting attention away from the perpetrator and from societal responsibility for child abuse. Numerous ‘Geraldo’ and ‘Oprah Winfrey’ shows— among others—produce such effects” (421–22). See also Cvetkovich 358–61. Discussing the eroticization of incest and violence in contemporary culture, Allison remarks on the “standard American” movie-of-the-week plot in which “the child is raped just as an excuse for daddy to go kill the rapist. . . . If it’s only a plot factor, if its only motivation is for the man to feel good about himself or to jerk off, it gets me ticked. It feels like my life has been used.” In Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison explains, she “cut a lot of stuff out” to avoid such “pseudo-porn” in her novel. As she comments, “There’s no description of genitals; there’s no description of the actual act of intercourse except from the perspective of this child who is being hurt terribly. For most of the book, you don’t even know what the man is doing, and that’s very deliberate. Because a lot of what has messed with my head when I read other books has been the enormous gratuitous detail. What always seemed to me to be missing was the enormous emotional impact. All there is in Bastard is the emotional impact” (Strong). Chapters 3 and 4

Chapter 4: Racial Self-Loathing and the Color Complex in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun 1. In The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (1992), Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall provide a detailed history of color prejudice in the United States, and they also discuss its persistence into the

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1990s. They point out that “the desire for lighter skin is nearly universal. Throughout Central and South America, Asia, and even Africa, society is prejudiced against those with dark skin, especially young dark women. Various theories for this have been advanced, but in a race-stratified society like America the consequences have long been clear. Before the Civil War, the degree of pigmentation could mean the difference between living free and enslavement, and since then variations in skin color and features have divided the educated from the ignorant, the well-off from the poor, the ‘attractive’ from the ‘plain’” (41). Chapter 4 Writing of the persistence of the color complex in her 2004 book, Don’t Play in the Sun, Marita Golden comments: “There are so many words and phrases to describe African Americans’ pernicious, persistent dirty little secret—colorism, color-conscious, color-struck, color complex. And then there are the more specific descriptive terms that separate Blacks and create castes, and cliques, and that are ultimately defi nitions not of color but of culturally defined beauty and ugliness, and that can end up distributing everything from power to wealth to love. High yellow, high yalla, saffron, octoroon, quadroon, redbone, light brown, black as tar, coal, blue-veined, café au lait, pinkie, blue-black” (7). While people like to believe that the color complex is a thing of the past, it remains “everywhere,” according to Golden (15). “The equation is simple and complex. Light skin, ‘White’ features plus straight hair equals beauty. Dark skin plus coarse hair equals ugly. But, dark skin plus long thick straight hair and ‘White’ features can equal beauty. Light skin, ‘Black’ features, and coarse hair equals ugly. There are so many caveats. So many footnotes to the clauses of the color complex. The precious treasure of light skin is like a charm; it works its full magic only in tandem with the complete arsenal of ‘White’ physical traits” (18). Golden also discusses the effects of the color complex in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America where skin bleaching and lightening “have reached epidemic proportions” (156). 2. Sander Gilman’s analysis of the process of self-stereotyping sheds light on the Breedloves’ damaging belief that they are ugly. By projecting negative images onto stigmatized groups, as Gilman explains, the dominant group is assured of its “sense of control, its own power over a group labeled as ‘different’ and thus inferior.” Because individuals incorporate into their self-representation aspects of their understanding of their group identity, those who are labeled as Other or different internalize the stigmatizing stereotypes projected by the dominant culture. This, in turn, leads to a kind of self-stereotyping, to an acceptance of the “projection of the Other” by the dominant group as “at least an aspect of self-defi nition” (Inscribing the Other 175). Self-hatred, which has formed the self-awareness of people treated as different “perhaps more than they themselves have been aware,” occurs when an outsider group, such as African Americans, accepts as a reality “the mirage of themselves generated by their reference group—that group in society which they see as defi ning them” ( Jewish Self-Hatred 1, 2). 3. This view of the black lower-class family as pathological had wide public currency in the aftermath of the 1965 Moynihan Report, which was made public around the time Morrison was writing The Bluest Eye. Described by James Berger as marking “a pivotal moment in American racial discourse” (408), Daniel Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action argued that the breakdown in the structure of the black family was a central cause of the persistence of black poverty. According to the report, “at the center of the tangle of pathology” of black culture

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was “the weakness of the family structure.” The weakened family was “the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or anti-social behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation” (Rainwater and Yancey 76). A central focus of the Moynihan Report was the damaging impact of being raised in “a disorganized home without a father” (Rainwater and Yancey 85). The fact that the black community “has been forced into a matriarchal structure . . . out of line with the rest of American society,” according to the report, “seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well” (Rainwater and Yancey 75). In the controversy that followed the publication of the Moynihan Report, as Patricia Morton explains, “critics charged that the report wrongly and damagingly presented black Americans as the cause of their own problems,” and they also characterized it as “a damaging and dangerous policy document stamped with government approval, which, in effect, ‘blamed the victim’” by faulting African American culture, particularly the pathology of the black family, for the continuation of African American inequality (3, 125). Critics of the Moynihan Report also argued that “the Negro pathology thesis was out of step with the times” because the black movement had “challenged the crippled, ‘crushed people’ portrayal associated with that timeworn thesis by testifying to the resources and strengths of black Americans.” Although the “pathology thesis was not quickly or easily dismissed,” the black family was reinterpreted in a more positive way in the 1970s (125). “In contrast to the old equation of black deviance from white middle-class norms as pathological and dysfunctional,” writes Morton, “the new black family studies increasingly emphasized Afro-American diversity—including familial and sexual departures from white norms—as a positive thing” (126). As the “strength-resiliency” emphasis came to displace the “pathology-disorganization” view of the black family, the family came to be seen not as “a problem” but as the preserver of the “health of black Americans in a racist, classist, and sick society” (Morton 128, 126). This change in perspective also led to the rejection of “the premise that African American culture was merely a shattered distortion of a homogeneous white American culture” (Berger 413). 4. When Morrison wrote this scene she was quite possibly remembering and responding to media reports on the response of African American children to white and black baby dolls. “During the early fifties,” recalls Susan Bordo, “when Brown v. the Board of Education was wending its way through the courts, as a demonstration of the destructive psychological effects of segregation black children were asked to look at two baby dolls, identical in all respects except color. The children were asked a series of questions: which is the nice doll? which is the bad doll? which doll would you like to play with? The majority of black children, Kenneth Clark reports, attributed the positive characteristics to the white doll, the negative characteristics to the black. When Clark asked one fi nal question, ‘Which doll is like you?’ they looked at him, he says, ‘as though he were the devil himself’ for putting them in that predicament, for forcing them to face the inexorable and hideous logical implications of their situation. Northern children often ran out of the room; southern children tended to answer the question in shamed embarrassment [note that both of these are shame responses]. Clark recalls one little boy who laughed, ‘Who am I like? That doll! It’s a nigger and I’m a nigger!’” (Unbearable Weight 262–63).

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5. In a contemporary culture where black women’s magazines have begun to feature dark-skinned models, the “idea that Black is beautiful remains controversial, questioned, and doubted,” Golden comments as she reflects on popular figures such as Halle Berry, who “occupies the exalted position of mulatto beauty in Hollywood that Lena Horne once held,” or Michael Jackson, who represents “a parody of Black folks’ love affair with Whiteness,” or the myriad light-skinned girls featured on the music videos aired on Black Entertainment Television (93, 97, 101). But Golden also takes heart from the ascent of the singer India.Arie and the popularity of the tennis players Venus and Serena Williams. Golden, who grew up feeling so ashamed of her hips that she wore large clothes to hide them, feels liberated by Serena’s acceptance of her “generous backside” (135) yet she is disturbed when she sees a photo of a blond Serena on the cover of Ebony magazine. Looking at the photo, Golden is a ten-year-old girl again standing in front of a mirror with scarves pinned to her head. While insisting that women like Serena “become blond within a framework of continuing and persistent self-hatred among African Americans that simply can’t be denied,” Golden is also forced to admit that she fi nds blond hair “incongruous” on Serena because of her dark skin, which provides evidence of Golden’s own color complex (141, 142). Chapters 4 and 5

Chapter 5: Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory 1. See, for example, Serap Pelin’s report on the “hymen examinations” performed by physicians in contemporary Turkey to determine if a woman is a virgin before marriage. “People want virginity testing in order to display the ‘cleanliness’ of their daughters, and to show to the society that anyone brought up by them can be assured of this so-called ‘cleanliness,’” according to Pelin (257). In an interview, Danticat recalls hearing from other non-Haitian women who had been tested after the publication of her novel. “A lot of people who read the book from different cultures, a lot of women would say their mothers had taken them to doctors, for instance” (Wachtel 115). 2. “A lot of us must remember,” Danticat says of her childhood growing up during the regime of Baby Doc Duvalier. “I remember a great deal of silence, people being afraid to say anything. You didn’t trust your neighbor because you didn’t know who might turn you in for whatever reason” (Wachtel 112). 3. During the dictatorship of François Duvalier, as Danticat remarks, Duvalier called his personal security force les Tontons Macoutes. “When you were growing up you were told that, if you were bad, the macoute would come for you, it’s like a bogeyman in the night. And he had just taken that and brought it alive, sort of a nation’s nightmare alive” (Wachtel 117). As Donette Francis remarks, “Duvalier’s willful choice of this name—which translates ‘mythological bogeyman’ and suggests ‘not real’—for his militia force enabled him to camouflage his own violations against his citizens, especially sexual violations against women. Embedded in the very word is a cultural linguistic block that already discredits the reality of women’s stories of sexual abuse by relegating abuse to the realm of the unreal, or condoning abuse as appropriate punishment for a subordinate who has misbehaved” (81).

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4. Donette Francis provides a brief historical overview of the sexual violations committed against women under the Duvalier regime. If women were considered to be “political innocents” prior to the Duvalier regime and thus were “exempted from state violence,” during the Duvalier regime they came to be viewed as “enemies of the state.” When they “voiced their political opinions in support of women’s rights or the opposition party, they were defi ned as ‘subversive, unpatriotic, and unnatural’” and thus were viewed as “deserving of punishment, which often took the form of sexual torture. In 1959, for example, Duvalier instated tonton macoutes, a rural militia group, to gain control of the rural countryside. Within a two-year time span, Duvalier’s rural militia wielded more power than the Haitian Army and their own brand of politically motivated rape was a notorious method of maintaining their power” (78). Chapter 5 5. When asked about her use of cane as “a powerful image of Haitian suffering,” Danticat remarked: “Part of my use of cane probably comes from the fact that my family is from Léogâne, which has a lot of cane. As a child, cane seemed very menacing. You could get lost in there, and often you must set fi re to a cane field to harvest it, because it is so dense. Many Haitians survive by working in the sugarcane, and it’s very grueling work. I saw people go off to the cane fields in the Dominican Republic and return ghosts of themselves” (Lyons 194). 6. “In vodou culture, the marassas are endowed with the power of the gods. Twins are mystères (mysteries), who, since they can never be deciphered, must be held in high esteem and revered” (Chancy 124). As Danticat remarked in an interview: Marassa is actually part of the African tradition where there are twin deities. In the tradition of the Ibegi in Africa, twins are considered very special, in some cases to be very powerful. If one of the twins dies, the other will carry an effigy. Marassa in common language means twins. Often politicians, if they want to identify with someone, will say, “He and I are twins.” In Haiti, after Aristide came back, people were saying that he and Clinton were twins. Recently, they were saying that Aristide and Preval are twins. This is the same as saying that they are really close. I wanted to use all the connotations of twins in the story. Going back to the mother-daughter relationship, the idea is that two people are one, but not quite; they might look alike and talk alike but are, in essence, different people. (Shea, “Dangerous Job” 385) In the same interview, Danticat also explained the meaning of “doubling” in the novel: “Doubling is a similar idea. I started thinking about this because I had often heard the story of our heroes, like Jean-Jacques Dessaline, who is considered the father of our independence. In the folkloric explanation, he was such a strong individual because he was really two people: one part of him could be at home and the other on the battlefield, or two of him could be on the battlefield at once. The idea is that someone is doubly a person but really one person—as opposed to the twins who are really two people” (Shea, “Dangerous Job” 385). 7. Discussing the virginity testing, Danticat remarks, “You fi nd often in stratified societies that poor women are encouraged to be marriageable. And especially in this rural setting, this family, not having a father, the mother would have to be all

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the more forceful, all the more strict, with her daughters so that people could respect them. So, the grandmother checks this and that, she wants them to remain virgins so that they can be respected and marry well, and I don’t think that’s a tradition that’s unique to Haitian culture. . . . There’s this sense of honour, and as the mother says, ‘If you die, you die alone, but if you dishonour yourself, you dishonour all of us’” (Wachtel 115). Danticat also states that she sees “sexuality as one of several spaces where women struggle for control over their lives. Most societies monitor women’s sexuality in a way that they don’t try to monitor men’s sexuality. In Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995), the scholar Joan Dayan talks about how some rural women refer to the space between their legs as their own plot of land, something that can be traded for goods. I’m defi nitely interested in the way that women—poor women, especially—try to reclaim their sexuality as a means of survival, as their own personal fl ight” (Alexandre 114). 8. The “mother” of all Haitians, Erzulie “is all-powerful and all-controlling” and her “power over men is legendary, as is her power over other vodou loas [gods]. . . . She is often shown wearing a crown or a halo, ‘a symbol of her transcendent power and of her radiating beauty’” (Chancy 123). Danticat has remarked that she is “very much drawn to” the Erzulie figure. “There’s the red-eyed Erzulie, who you don’t mess with. There’s the Erzulie who’s young and beautiful. There’s the Erzulie who’s a crone figure. Erzulie has all the manifestations of all the different stages of a woman’s life. She can be cruel and demanding and jealous but can also be the goddess of fertility and of love. She is enigmatic, sensual, powerful. You can see how Erzulie would be embraced by Sophie’s family, especially the grandmother, because there are several aspects of them in her, but she is also many things that they are never going to be allowed to be” (Lyons 194). 9. As Danticat recalls, “I grew up hearing stories about these women who fly and, if you were a child, you were supposed to avoid them. . . . And they have these wings of flames, and I remember hearing that when I was young and I just thought, ‘God, I’d just love to see one,’ but if you see one, you don’t live” (Wachtel 117). 10. Ginen, as Danticat has remarked, is “the ancestral paradise” (Alexandre 119). “Our ancestors . . . were forced onto slave ships and brought to the Americas to enrich others. . . . So they dreamed of another kind of escape: going back to Africa, what we Haitians refer to as Ginen, the home of the ancestors. They dreamed of ‘stealing away home,’ as the African American spirituals tell us” (Alexandre 113). When she was growing up, Danticat recalls, many of the older people she knew “had no fear of death. Many of them would buy the cloths for their dress and talk about their funeral. They were comfortable doing that.” While she was raised in the Baptist Church “with the idea that you have to earn your way in this life to the afterlife,” she also heard other beliefs about death “where we would all be reunited in Africa. But always it was engraved in my mind that—whether you believe in Christian principles or something else—death is not the end” (Shea, “Dangerous Job” 388–89). 11. “There aren’t that many legends in Haiti about butterfl ies, but I’m fascinated by the idea of transformation,” Danticat remarks. “I think in some ways we all think we could go from a caterpillar to a butterfly—that whole metamorphosis is a metaphor for life, especially a life of poverty or struggle because you hope that this is temporary and that one way or another, you’ll get wings. It’s the Christian ideal we grew up with that people are willing to suffer very much if that means one day they’ll

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get their wings and fly. Haiti has such beautiful butterfl ies in all different colors” (Shea, “Edwidge Danticat” 15). Danticat also states that her “favorite kind of butterfly is the monarch butterfly. It fl ies 3,000 miles each winter, from colder climates to warmer ones. The butterfly that leaves the cold climate is not the same one that returns the following spring. Along the way it gives life to offspring that somehow know how to go back to the same place their mothers and fathers came from. The original butterfl ies die, but their offspring continue the journey and then return to their original homestead in the spring. I think that’s extraordinary. I often equate that with the immigrant experience: leaving a place you know for some place you don’t know, traveling on faith, and still dreaming that your children will be drawn back to the place you came from. Even if it’s only to visit” (Alexandre 114).

Chapter 6: Coming of Age in a Culture of Shame in Naomi Wolf’s Promiscuities 1. Viewed by others as being “deviant, flawed, limited . . . or generally undesirable,” stigmatized individuals, as shame theorist Michael Lewis comments, suffer from a “spoiled identity”: a feeling that the “whole self” is “spoiled” or “no good” (Shame 194, 207). Contemporary authors such as Emily White, in her book Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut, and Leora Tanenbaum in her book Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, provide disturbing accounts of the stigma attached to the slut phenomenon in contemporary American society. 2. As Leora Tanenbaum explains, often the girl who sexually matures early is singled out as the school slut. “Some girls who aren’t sexually active at all are presumed to be so because of their physique. When everyone else in the class is wearing training bras, the girl with breasts becomes an object of sexual scrutiny. . . . A girl with visible breasts becomes sexualized because she possesses a constant physical reminder of her sexual potential. . . . In other words, a girl can become known as possessing a sexual persona simply because of the way she looks, not the way she behaves” (8). Emily White similarly observes that the girl who ends up with a bad reputation “tend[s] to be under the spell of what physicians call precocious puberty, a state of development when the body is moving ahead of time, hasty and accelerated” (42). The girl who matures ahead of time can feel like “a true alien.” “The big-breasted girl looks like a girl in a pornographic movie, ‘eye candy’ in a school of boys who are just discovering their dad’s basement stash of magazines” (43–44). Thus, those girls “whose bodies look like the bodies of mothers, of grown women, are assumed to be doing the things women do” (44). Chapters 5 and 6 3. Wolf’s point in her “A Short History of the Slut” (72–82) is to demonstrate that it is not “inevitable” that women should be “punished” for their sexuality by showing that other cultures have viewed female promiscuity differently even though the idea of the slut is “deeply embedded” in our own culture. As Wolf states, “some early recorded civilizations saw women’s sexuality very differently from the way it looks today. In Sumer and Babylon, looseness in women was part of the religion. Temples were once staffed by sacred prostitutes—young women from the most aristocratic households—whose earnings helped support the temples. This practice of sacred prostitution may have derived from more ancient fertility rituals”

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(73). The “direct Western lineage of sexual valuation,” which was derived from the Hebrews, viewed “sex without procreation” as “illicit” and the Hebrews “equated female promiscuity—meaning any female sexuality outside marriage—with shame, destruction, and just punishment, as we consciously or unconsciously still do” (74, 75). The belief that “women were more lustful than men” among Christians in the Middle Ages in Western Europe led to the view that women were “more culpable” (78). During the early Middle Ages, “extramarital sex on the part of women carried even more severe penalties than did single women’s sexual expression—deadly ones. Adultery included lovemaking outside the institution of marriage. According to the law of the Burgundians, the ‘stench of adultery’ was so loathsome that women found to have had sex outside marriage . . . were banished from their homes and condemned to die from strangulation, their bodies to be discarded in a marsh. Among Gallo-Romans, in what is now France, a husband was entitled by law to kill ‘with a single blow’ his wife and her lover caught in the act” (80). While Wolf’s aim is to suggest a different way of viewing female sexuality, her brief history serves to reinforce the idea that punitive attitudes toward female promiscuity are deeply entrenched in our culture. Chapter 6 4. In “Lost and Found: The Story of the Clitoris” (143–56), Wolf begins her historical account in 1559 when Venetian scientist Renaldus Columbus fi rst described the clitoris as “preeminently the seat of woman’s delight” (143). In 1671, Jane Sharp, a London midwife, said that the clitoris “makes women lustful and take delight in copulation” (144). In the 1750s, similarly, Albrecht von Haller, a Swiss biologist, said that the purpose of the clitoris was to “raise the [woman’s] pleasure to the highest pitch” (145). But by the end of the eighteenth century, women’s sexuality was viewed as “less intense than men’s,” and in the nineteenth century “the sex drive became ascribed to the masculine realm, and theories began to deny that it even existed biologically in women” (145, 146). In the twentieth century the clitoris was periodically promoted: by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell in 1902; by Margaret Sanger in 1910; by Dr. Marie Carmichael Stopes in 1918; by Theodore Hendrick van de Velde in 1926; by Dr. Helena Wright in 1930 and 1947. Yet, this information was somehow forgotten. The 1976 Our Bodies, Ourselves included a section called “The Role of the Clitoris,” which stated the following: “Until the mid-1960s, most women didn’t know how crucial the clitoris was. . . . Even if we knew it for ourselves, nobody talked about it . . .” (155). 5. Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s observation that “human stigmata function as social dirt” (33) points to the shame issues surrounding the stigmatization of female sexuality in a putative era of sexual freedom. 6. As Wolf writes, “At least two thousand years ago, philosopher-sexologists in China were studying human sexual response as part of their larger philosophical vision, the Tao, or ‘Way.’ They saw the sexual union of men and women as fundamental to the health of both sexes. The earliest sex manuals we know of were produced in this environment in China. These guides instructed practitioners in the art of making love so as to attain the ideal of harmony in what the Tao masters called ‘the yin-yang relation.’ In their view, the passive force of life—the feminine—is yin, and the active, or masculine force, is yang” (181–82). Used to the “dirtying of women’s sexuality” in contemporary culture, Wolf was struck by the poetic descriptions of female genitalia in Chinese sex manuals—“‘the Open Peony Blossom,’ ‘the Golden

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Lotus,’ ‘the Receptive Vase,’ ‘the Cinnabar (or Vermilion) Gate,’ and ‘the Golden Cleft’” (183). While some commentators find Wolf’s “forays into cultural anthropology” of interest (S. Coleman), others question Wolf’s “half-digested erudition” in passages that aim to show that other cultures have placed a higher value on female sexuality (Gewen). Remarking on Wolf’s account of the ancient Chinese reverence for female sexuality, one commentator notes that “amid all this appreciation of women, the Chinese practiced the custom of foot-binding, crippling girls for life in the pursuit of a misguided ideal of beauty. Nowhere does Wolf mention this. Of course, she could respond that foot-binding arose about a thousand years after the period she is discussing . . . but surely she owes it to her readers to explain how the Chinese went from adoration to disfigurement. . . .” In addition, Wolf does not tell the “whole story” about China, for women of that society were “devalued, peony blossoms and all. As young girls they were separated from boys, secluded, and taught to be timid and submissive, never to raise their voices. They had almost no property rights, or any right to divorce, though a husband could divorce his wife if she failed to produce a male heir. Fathers sold daughters into slavery or prostitution, and the poor were known to engage in female infanticide. . . .” And although Wolf repeats approvingly that “many cultures outside the West have viewed women as far more carnal than men,” she does not reflect “on the fact that those same cultures have often kept their very carnal women hidden away under lock and key” (Gewen). 7. In a 2004 New York magazine article, Wolf elaborated on this incident and identified Harold Bloom as the professor who had sexually harassed her in 1983. After many months of calling and e-mailing Yale to no avail, Wolf went public. As she recalls, when she mentioned the incident in speeches she gave at colleges, young women in the audience would ask her what she had done and if she had named the professor. When she admitted that she had done nothing despite having the “obligation” to protect other young women, she was met with a “long, sad silence.” Unable to “bear” any longer her own “collusive silence,” Wolf fi nally went public with her accusation (“Silent”). Reacting to Wolf’s exposé, Camille Paglia publicly attacked Wolf. “It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men, and made a profession out of courting male attention by fl irting and offering her sexual allure,” Paglia remarked, accusing Wolf, in effect, of behaving in a sluttish way (Grove). Chapters 6 and 7

Chapter 7: Feeling Fat, Fearing Fat in Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size and Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story 1. “Clearly we can no longer regard serious problems with food and body image as solely the province of pampered, narcissistic, heterosexual white girls,” remarks Susan Bordo. “To do so is to view black, Asian, Latin, lesbian, and working-class women as outside the loop of the dominant culture and its messages about what is beautiful—a mistake that has left many women feeling stranded and alone with a disorder that they weren’t ‘supposed’ to have and that clinicians dismissed. Indeed . . . there are reasons why racial and sexual ‘Others’ might fi nd themselves to be more, not less, susceptible to the power of cultural imagery” (Twilight Zones 134–35). Bordo

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also notes that “when black, Jewish, and other racially marked groups talk about their eating problems, ethnic ‘shame’ is a prominent theme, with slenderness and fat coming to stand for successful assimilation versus the taint of ‘difference’” (Twilight Zones 136). 2. “Sadly, the cult of diet and exercise is the closest thing our secular society offers women in terms of a coherent philosophy of the self,” observes Joan Brumberg in her exhaustive investigation of anorexia, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Many young women, who hear the message that they can be “beautiful and good” by being thin and believe that their body weight is “entirely subject to their conscious control,” become “preoccupied with their bodies and control of appetite” (269). In our “obesophobic” culture in which women “struggle with food because, among other things, food represents fat and loss of control,” some women “come to fear and hate their own appetite”; for them, “eating becomes a shameful and disgusting act, and denial of hunger becomes a central facet of identity and personality” (265–66). And for contemporary anorexics, who make “nonconsumption the perverse centerpiece” of their identity, the unrelenting pursuit of thinness becomes their “secular form of perfection” (271). 3. In her acknowledgments, Shute indicates that she draws on both theoretical studies (by authors Hilde Bruch, Kim Chernin, David Garner, Susie Orbach, and L. M. Vincent) as well as fi rst-person accounts of anorexia in telling Josie’s story. Josie has many of the physical symptoms of anorexia: “In addition to the emaciated appearance, the anorexic usually has a dry cracking skin and may have lost some hair from her scalp. . . . The nails become brittle. Lanugo hair, a fi ne downy growth, over the cheeks, neck, forearms and thighs is common. The patient’s hands and feet are usually cold and blue. Cyanosis may extend to the nose and ears” (Garfi nkel and Garner 14). Chapter 7 4. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s description of the disgust occasioned by touching animals—for Benjamin, at the heart of this experience is the fear that “in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized”—Elspeth Probyn remarks that the “idea of being engulfed by the animal, of fi nding ourselves on the same level, pervades much discussion of disgust and shame. In order to calm this terror, to make sense once again of the distinctiveness of human versus animal, we eat the beast. But this is, says Benjamin, ‘a drastic gesture that overleaps its mark’. Even as we reorder the barriers between human and animal through eating, the touch, ‘the zone of the fi nest epidermal contact remains taboo’” (Carnal Appetites 137). 5. “The drive for thinness is related to the anorexic’s intense fears of obesity and of being out of control,” as Paul Garfinkel and David Garner comment: While our culture as a whole is preoccupied with a desire for thinness, the anorexic lets this dominate her life. She become terrified of any real or imagined manifestations of fat on her body, even in places where fat is stored normally. Any slight weight increase is perceived as a threat which must be halted promptly. This fear of obesity and weight gain is coupled with an intense food preoccupation common to all starving people. The result is the opposite of what the anorexic wishes: While avoiding foods and eating to reduce her size, she becomes increasingly preoccupied with

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thoughts of foods and food-related activities. The starvation-induced food preoccupation magnifies the anorexic’s fears of not being able to control her appetite and forces her to increase her dieting behavior. (7) 6. As Sandra Heater remarks, “Binges are part and parcel of anorexia. . . . An anorexic’s binge does not just mean overeating until one feels too full. Rather it is a secret, frantic compulsion to devour everything edible in sight. A binge means eating a half cake, a quart of ice cream, four or five sandwiches, entire packages of crackers, anything else available. The binger prowls the kitchen opening the fridge, cabinets, and drawers, all the while stuffi ng in the food. She is barely conscious of any food she is eating and no normal warning bell signals satiety. Unleashed flood waters of obsessive eating engulf the marauding anorexic” (52). Chapters 7 and 8 7. In a discussion of recent literary works dealing with eating disorders, Greta Olson comments that in the texts she has studied, “food, the desire to eat, and the body are repeatedly portrayed as fiendish demons out to destroy the self.” Just as food can seem demonic, so “the desire to eat or binge becomes synonymous with monstrosity” (119). Commenting on the passage from Life-Size in which Josie sees herself as a “ravening monster . . . lumbering insatiably towards everything,” Olson notes that instead of describing sexuality, the “adjective ‘insatiable’ is . . . used to describe the appetite for food” in this passage (121). 8. Social historian Peter Stearns, in his book Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West, discusses the beginnings of the contemporary American obsession with weight. As Stearns writes, “Between 1890 and 1910, middle-class America began its ongoing battle against body fat. Never previously an item of systematic public concern, dieting or guilt about not dieting became an increasing staple of private life, along with a surprisingly strong current of disgust directed against people labeled obese” (3). The “public reproof” of fat and the growing belief that fat was bad, as Stearns observes, “involved a level of revulsion and disgust that went well beyond stylistic considerations—the birth signs of the new stigma. . . . In the decades of stylish plumpness, calling someone ‘gaunt’ for her thinness, while admittedly unpleasant, hardly carried the emotional load of the turn-of-the-century attacks on fat” (24).

Chapter 8: The Culture of Appearances and the Socially Invisible and Unattractive Woman in Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil 1. When asked in an interview with John Haffenden if she shared Frances Hinton’s view of writing as a “penitential activity,” Brookner tellingly remarked, “The reason why I’ve written novels is penitential and possibly useful. I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness: I felt I was drifting and obscure, and I rebelled against that. I didn’t see what I could do to change my condition. I wanted to control rather than be controlled, to ordain rather than be ordained, and to relegate rather than be relegated” (59). In the same interview Brookner also described her feeling of invisibility: “I’m absolutely passive, like blotting paper. I really feel

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invisible” (61). Similarly, in an interview with Olga Kenyon, Brookner stated, “I write out of a sense of powerlessness and injustice, because I felt invisible and passive. Life is so badly plotted” (12). When Haffenden asked Brookner if she had decided to put all her “eggs in the basket of professional worthiness and attainment,” she replied, “No. I thought I was not particularly viable outside a protected environment, and I liked reading and looking. Writing novels was a kind of fi rst-aid when I found myself in a disagreeable state of will, paralysed: it worked momentarily. I felt alone, abandoned, excluded, and it was no good moping. It was a gamble” (74). She also described her intense loneliness in her interview with Haffenden. “I feel I’m walking about with the mark of Cain on my forehead. I feel I could get into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s loneliest, most miserable woman!” (75). 2. As Covino remarks, in a contemporary culture where “in some way the body is the self” (60), the aesthetic surgical industry, although it “does not speak explicitly of unimproved bodies as the housing of corrupt inner selves . . . nonetheless reminds us of the well-rehearsed coincidence of monstrous looks with deranged mental states. This association, one that perhaps most famously occupies Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, continues as a staple of the modern horror genres” (61). Just as beauty is associated with virtue and wisdom, so the abject body is associated with the monster: While monsters such as Frankenstein’s Creature and Baron Sardonicus frame a tradition of corrupt, ravaging males, it is the female body that remains most susceptible to corruption, most distant from achieving the transcendent intellect that the Western philosophical tradition aligns with the eternal soul. . . . The Medusa, the Witch, and their materializations in the “loathly lady” literary tradition most prominently figured by Chaucer and Spenser comprise a typology of horrific female bodies who are figures of eternal evil and staples of popular culture. At the same time that such figures have been adapted as countercultural sources of defiant feminist power, as deities of the “monstrous feminine,” they remain the abjects of a mass culture subtended by the aesthetic surgical imaginary, as we see in, for instance, the Alien series of horror movies that continued through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. (62–63) Chapter 8 3. Elizabeth Haiken, in her study of the culture of cosmetic surgery, also describes how, despite the feminist movement, women have been seeking out, in ever increasing numbers, plastic surgery in their desire for self-improvement and their pursuit of physical perfection. “Despite the personal and professional gains women have made in recent years, appearance remains key to women’s sense of self-worth” and, indeed, ironically, “as a direct result of the economic gains women made in the post–World War II years, by the 1970s and 1980s more women than ever before could afford to buy the things they wanted, and among the goods they bought were smoother faces, bigger breasts, and thinner thighs” (9, 10). 4. As Shirley Peterson observes, Weldon, in describing Ruth’s ugly monstrosity, challenges patriarchal authority as she “enlist[s] freakishness for a feminist agenda,” and she also invokes the “long, albeit uneasy, association of feminism

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with freakishness,” the sexist stereotype of feminists as “physically and psychically deformed viragoes” (Peterson 291, 292). 5. Davis’s aim is to counter the idea that women who seek out cosmetic surgery are “cultural dopes.” Instead, she argues that such women are not passive victims but are active agents intent on taking control of their lives in the current culture of beauty. Ruth Patchett, Davis argues, “is no cultural dope, blinded by social forces beyond her control or comprehension. She does not see cosmetic surgery as the perfect solution and she is well aware of the enormous price for women who undertake it. Under the circumstances, however, it is the best she can do. . . . Within the context in which she lives, Ruth makes her choices—perhaps not freely, but at least knowledgeably” (66). But for Virginia Blum, it is “impossible to discuss individual choice . . . around the issue of cosmetic surgery when the phenomenon seems to be so much more radically embedded in cultural strategies than a simple call to political resistance would address.” Responding to the differing views of Susan Bordo and Kathy Davis, Blum remarks: Susan Bordo asks women to resist the cultural forces while Kathy Davis argues for women’s agency within oppressive cultural circumstances. . . . In response to Bordo’s injunction to interrogate cultural images instead of mindlessly submitting to them, Davis wonders how “any practices, feminist or otherwise, might escape the hegemony of cultural discourses in which the female body is enmeshed.” I would say there is a big difference between doing the work of analyzing the seductive cultural images, unraveling their combination of lures, and making one’s own life/body a tribute to one’s expressed politics. Is it even possible to resist if the drive to have surgery is already in place? (61–62) See also Bordo, Twilight Zones 35–44. Sara Martin, in her analysis of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, comments on a real-life case that “eerily recalls . . . Weldon’s bizarre heroine” and that Susan Faludi reported on in her 1991 book Backlash. After Newsweek’s publication in 1986 of a study that concluded that after age thirty-five a woman’s possibilities of getting married were reduced to five percent, journalist Diana Doe, who was single and in her late thirties, bet that she could beat the odds and get married before she turned forty. Deciding that “her body needed a radical revamping,” she began her publicized cosmetic surgery “Project,” signing agreements with doctors who worked on her body in exchange for publicity about their skills. After having surgery on her breasts, Doe decided to meet with a man she had talked to on the phone, and because the man disliked her physically, she decided to continue with her “Project.” “To my surprise,” writes Martin, “Faludi does not condemn Doe’s plain foolishness, using her case instead to denounce the immense pressures put on women by men’s preference for attractive sexual partners. Faludi never stops to consider for a moment whether Doe’s extremely low self-esteem is representative of most women’s view of themselves, nor does she consider to what extent American men’s views of women as sexy dolls are backed by the pathetic, self-infl icted horrors endured by pliant, stultified women like Doe” (200).

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Chapter 9: Gerontophobia and the Cultural Shaming of the Elderly Woman in May Sarton’s As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel 1. Indeed, the elderly, dying woman is associated with what for Kristeva is the “utmost of abjection”—the corpse. “The corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled. . . . The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject” (3–4). 2. In an interview with Kay Bonetti, Sarton describes the origins of As We Are Now, remarking that the “two fat women” in the novel—Harriet and her daughter— were “real.” When Sarton visited a nursing home in New Hampshire, it was “disgraceful” and “terrible,” as she recalls. “And then Caro herself . . . was also there and this was a woman I only saw once. But she haunted me because she was wandering around crying, and she was obviously a different class from the other people there who were mostly farmers, old farmers. She was obviously, if you like, a lady. I thought of her as a school teacher perhaps. And the next time I went—which was quite a long time later, because it was such a long way from where I lived that I didn’t go very often—I went with flowers from the garden and asked about her. They said—let’s call her Miss Spencer—‘Miss Spencer had to be put in a room with no windows because she became violent.’ And you see, that’s what started the novel. I thought that could have been me, you see, that woman. And what would it have been like? That’s how I wrote it” (85). 3. Standish Flint, as Sarton comments, is based on a friend of hers, Perley Cole, who ended up in a New Hampshire nursing home. As Sarton recalls, “somebody as ill as he was should never have been there and he was sent there by the hospital without their ever having gone there or known where they were sending him. . . . I got Perley Cole out of there, but he died two days later, so it was too late, you see, just as it is with my character, Standish, although he dies in the ambulance. . . . Whenever I saw Perley Cole he would say, ‘Get me out of here.’ But these fat women were always listening, and I had to shout. So I would say, ‘I’m trying, Perley’” (Bonetti 85–86). 4. Describing the “natural, inevitable sequence from shame into humiliated fury and retaliation and thence into guilt for ‘unjust’ or ‘irrational’ rage,” Helen Block Lewis has called shame a “feeling trap” (“Introduction” 2). Drawing on Lewis’s work, Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger point to the potentially lethal consequences of the shame-shame or shame-rage feelings traps. A feeling trap, as they explain, “involves a series of loops of shame (being ashamed of being ashamed), which causes further shame, which can continue indefinitely,” or it involves a self-perpetuating chain of emotions in which unacknowledged shame leads to anger which, in turn, results in further shame (104–05). Moreover, when an individual has emotional reactions to his or her own emotions and to those of another person, both individuals can become mired in a feeling trap—“a triple spiral of shame and rage between and within interactants,” which, in turn, can lead to the emotional impasse of an interminable conflict (126). 5. In an interview with Karen Saum, Sarton remarks, “I look at As We Are Now as a descent into hell in which there are different steps down. The first is the person being captured, so to speak, and put in jail. The fi nal step is when genuine love is

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made dirty. Caro had come alive again because a gentle nurse came into this terrible place and she sort of fell in love with her. Then that love is made dirty by the people who own the home. She tries to run away at that point. That’s the fi nal step; after that she begins to go mad and suffers despair. That’s when she decides to burn the place down” (113). 6. For Sarton, the end is inevitable even though Caro ends up killing innocent people in the fi re. “I felt it had to end that way,” as she remarks in an interview. “The innocent people were just vegetables, and so ill-treated that one felt death was better, really.” For Sarton, the end becomes “inevitable” when Caro’s “genuine love is defiled. That’s when everything goes. There is nothing left. Then she is in hell” (Saum 113). In another interview, Sarton similarly comments, “The book is a descent into hell, and the last rung on the ladder was when true love was made dirty, when Caro’s feelings for Anna, which were not homosexual, but simply love, were made dirty by the awful women there” (Finley 148). 7. “Clothes . . . transmit age-related messages, and when men or women do not dress to their age society may be offended. The source of offence or deviation here is not the fact of being old but the refusal to accept the state (‘mutton dressed as lamb’).” The fact that “extreme disparity of age and costume . . . is seen as disgusting or even frightening” suggests just how shaming Doris’s words are to Hagar in this scene (Featherstone 380).

Chapter 10: Writing the Disfigured and Disabled Body-Self in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World 1. Medical sociologist Ann Hill Beuf, in her investigation of appearance-impaired children in contemporary American society, describes the routine shaming of children like Grealy. “The person whose appearance is impaired, who stands out because of obvious flaws or disfigurements, is perceived as a deviant . . . ,” as Beuf states (7). Considered deviant because of a failure to conform to cultural standards of beauty and of “‘normal’ or unexceptional appearance,” the appearance-impaired individual is often stigmatized by others, who view the stigmatized trait as the person’s “major characteristic” (7, 13). “Severe impairment, especially if it is visible, is more likely to be noted and responded to” and visible impairment of the face is of “the greatest significance.” Indeed, “even a small disfiguring mark on the face carries with it considerable social significance and may be reacted to by others” (15). If the appearance-impaired individual internalizes the stigmatizing views of herself held by others—a process called “self-stigmatization”—she will come to see herself as having a “spoiled identity,” which is the “cruelest price exacted by the process of deviance labeling,” in Beuf’s view (19). Many appearance-impaired children are subjected to the “fi xed stares or glares” of strangers, including not only other children but also adults, who project through their stares their curiosity or disgust or even repulsion (49). Such children are also subjected to fi nger-pointing, which is particularly upsetting, for “to ‘point the fi nger’ is to accuse” and in this case the child is being accused of “ugliness” (50). In an American society that puts “a

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high value on appearance,” the child who “fears the social consequences of impaired appearance is not paranoid, but is responding to a very real situation in our society,” Beuf comments (112). Such children are “extremely aware of and sensitive to stigmatizing incidents. Staring, laughing, the conspiratorial exchange of glances between two strangers, questions both innocent and rude, taunting, name calling and insults, even physical abuse occur” (50). While some appearance-impaired children are only subjected to stares, others must “struggle to answer queries such as ‘How did your face get like that, anyhow?’ Still others have had their lives made truly horrendous by taunting, jeering classmates whose cruelty seems limitless” (50–51). “‘Saving face,’ a phrase commonly used to indicate the retention of one’s dignity, takes on an ironic aspect when applied to the efforts of appearance-impaired children to maintain their dignity” because their faces are often what threaten their “dignity and self respect” (65). And those children for whom no treatment exists “must set upon the painful path of acceptance, of facing life as a freak and trying to salvage from it what dignity, acceptance, and joy they can” (102). 2. Indeed, as Kathryn Morgan observes, we live in a culture where cosmetic surgery now promises to correct what were once considered to be “normal variations of female bodily shapes” or were described as “problem areas” but are now increasingly referred to as “‘deformities,’ ‘ugly protrusions,’ ‘inadequate breasts,’ and ‘unsightly concentrations of fat cells’—a litany of descriptions designed to intensify feelings of disgust, shame, and relief at the possibility of recourse for these ‘deformities.’” One possible consequence of living in a culture of cosmetic surgery is that “more and more women will be labeled ‘ugly’” and indeed, “the ‘ordinary’ will come to be perceived and evaluated as the ‘ugly’” (41). In a similar way, Susan Bordo describes how women learn, from a “pedagogy of defect,” to fi nd various parts of their bodies “faulty, unacceptable” (Twilight Zones 37). For Bordo, as cosmetic surgery becomes “an increasingly normative cultural practice,” it ups the ante “on what counts as an acceptable face and body” and encourages individuals to see themselves as “defective” (Twilight Zones 43). “In a culture that proliferates defect and in which the surgically perfected body . . . has become the model of the ‘normal,’ even the ordinary body becomes the defective body. This continual upping of the ante of physical acceptability is cloaked by ads and features that represent the cosmetic surgeon as a blessed savior, offering miraculous technology to end long-standing pain” (Twilight Zones 55). 3. In Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, Ann Patchett, in describing her friendship with Grealy, provides valuable insight into—and also supplements—Grealy’s rather brief account of her adult years in Autobiography of a Face, and Patchett also offers a more detailed account of Grealy’s physical appearance. When Patchett became a close friend of Grealy during the time they were both students in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, she thought that Grealy’s face had improved from the time they both spent as undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence College where Patchett knew who Grealy was because she was a kind of campus celebrity. “Even though I didn’t know her then, I had seen her face change significantly over the years,” recalls Patchett: I thought it had improved. Her lower jaw had been a ledge falling off just below her cheekbone when we started college, making her face a sharp

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triangle, but now the lines were softer. She couldn’t close her mouth all the way and her front teeth showed. Her jaw was irregular, as if one side had been collapsed by a brutal punch, and her neck was scarred and slightly twisted. She had a patch of paler skin running from ear to ear that had been grafted from her back and there were other bits of irregular patching and scars. But she also had lovely light eyes with damp dark lashes and a nose whose straightness implied aristocracy. Lucy had white Irish skin and dark blond hair and in the end that’s what you saw, the things that didn’t change: her eyes, the sweetness of her little ears. (11–12) Patchett also describes the difficulty Grealy had eating because she had lost all of her lower teeth and all but six of her upper teeth during the radiation treatments she endured as a child. Grealy could only eat soft foods that did not have to be chewed—what the two of them called “Lucy-Food”—and because her saliva glands had been damaged, she had to sip water to get the food down: Her throat was scarred from years of surgical intubation, and that, coupled with her inability to put her lips together, meant she was forever choking on the smallest spoonful of pudding. On top of everything else, she had no feeling in her lower lip and chin and was mortified at the idea of having food all over her face and not knowing it, which was often the case. When Lucy went out to dinner with other people, she would usually sit and sip a beer, waiting until she came home to eat. (24) While people thought that Grealy’s story was her face, it was, in fact, her “entire body,” according to Patchett: It had been systematically carved apart for its resources over the years: the skin and muscle taken from her back had left wide swaths of scar tissue; delicate, snaky scars wrapped around her legs because some surgeon had needed an extra vein; one hip had been mined for bone grafts and had left a spiky stalagmite peak that pushed threateningly against the ropy pink skin. In the future they would take her lower ribs and a bone from her leg and the soft tissue from her stomach and pour them all into her jaw, where they would gradually melt away into nothing. (26) Although Grealy was “tortured by her relationship with her face and talked about it being ugly,” she was fond of her body and viewed each scar as “a badge of honor” (26). After the publication of Autobiography of a Face made her a sudden celebrity, Grealy, who was an extremely needy person, remained tormented by her feelings of ugliness and her belief that she would be alone for the rest of her life. Patchett recalls the “interchangeable” questions Grealy constantly asked her: “Will I ever have sex again?” and “‘Do you love me?’ ‘You think I’m pretty, don’t you?’ ‘Do you think I’m a good writer?’” To Patchett, the questions all meant the same thing: “Everything is going to be okay, right?” (137–38). Grealy, whose “loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity,” felt that she was “alone, alone, alone” despite “the legions of friends who

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adored her” or “the fact that she had more sex than all of her close friends combined” (171, 169). During her fi nal, but failed, surgeries to graft bone to her jaw so she could have teeth implanted, helping her to eat, Grealy continued to believe that her real life would begin when she completed her surgeries. After she published a collection of essays, As Seen on T.V., she was disappointed by the public reception of her work. Over time, Grealy, deeply demoralized by both her writing and her failed surgeries, entered a downward spiral of drug abuse and suicide attempts. Patchett recalls, for example, the time that Grealy “brought all of her bad habits together for the weekend: Percocet, drinking, cocaine, and heroin” and then called Patchett on Monday night to tell her that she “hadn’t killed herself, but not for want of trying” (209). Grealy, who claimed that she was not addicted to heroin, continued to use it. As Patchett comments, “Lucy was having the great love affair she had always dreamed of. It was dangerous and rocky, violently depleting, but in the few minutes that it was sweet it made her feel the all encompassing heat of love” (235). After cutting her wrists and taking an overdose of heroin, Grealy ended up on suicide watch and after several other suicide attempts, she was found dead. “You think I’m talented, don’t you?” Grealy asked Patchett in their fi nal phone conversation (251). “When the Coroner’s report came back weeks later we were told that while she had heroin in her system, it was not a lethal dose. There was food on the table, and she was in bed. She had not asphyxiated, as everyone had thought at first. All I knew for sure was that she was dead. What combination of things brought that about would be impossible to say. Still, I took a little comfort thinking maybe she was not so terribly unhappy in that moment. Maybe she was sleepy and full and pleasantly high and had just crawled beneath her blanket to sleep. Her death was ruled an accidental overdose” (253).

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Index

Ahmed, Sara, 14, 22, 37 Alexandre, Sandy, 194n7, 194n10, 195n11 Allison, Dorothy: Bastard Out of Carolina, 1, 9, 35–52, 182; Allison on, 35–36, 48, 49–50, 51, 189n7; autobiographical sources of, 35–36, 49, 51; class and shame in, 35–37, 38–41, 50–51; closure of, 49–51; coming of age in, 44, 50–51; critics on, 36, 37, 50, 188–89n5, 189n6; illegitimacy in, 37–39; incest in, 36, 37, 189n6, 189n7; as incest survivor testimonial, 36, 37, 189n6; lesbianism in, 37, 50, 51; mother-daughter relationship in, 36–37, 38, 39–40, 43, 47, 48–49; shame drama in, 37, 39–40, 43–45, 47; trauma in, 37, 44–45, 48–49; as trauma narrative, 37, 189n6; white trash culture in, 35–36, 38–41, 50–51; white trash shame in, 35–41, 50–51 —Bone: abuse of, 36, 42–45, 47–49; Anney, relationship with, 36–37, 38, 39–40, 43, 47, 48–49; Aunt Raylene, relationship with, 37, 49–50; birth of, 37; Boatwright family, relationship with, 40–41, 47–48, 50–51; Boatwright family, and white trash culture, 38–41, 50–51; Daddy Glen, relationship with, 36, 42–45, 48–49; family stories about, 39–40; illegitimacy of, 37–39; masturbatory fantasies of, 44; rape of, 48–49; scapegoat identity of, 44, 48; Shannon Pearl, relationship with, 45–47;

shame of, 37, 39–40, 43–45, 47–49; shame-defenses of, 37, 44–45, 46, 47; shame-rage of, 37, 44–45, 46, 47; revenge, wish for, 44–45, 47; whitetrash identity of, 37, 39–40, 43–45, 47, 49, 50–51 Andrews, Bernice, 8 Baker, Moira, 50 Bartky, Sandra, 2, 7, 125, 126–27 Baum, Rosalie, 186n1 Beauvoir, Simone de, 147 Bell, Alice, 160 Bell, Dale, 172–73 Berger, James, 190–91n3 Berke, Joseph, 43 Beuf, Ann Hill, 170, 203–04n1 Blair, Barbara, 154 Blum, Virginia, 126, 127, 133, 139, 145, 201n5 Bonetti, Kay, 202nn2–3 Bordo, Susan, 3, 12, 13, 105, 106–07, 111, 117, 126, 181–82, 186, 191n4, 197–98n1, 201n5, 204n2 Braham, Jeanne, 165, 172 Braziel, Jana Evans, 106 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 144 Brookner, Anita: Look at Me, 2, 11, 124, 127–33, 135; artist figure in, 128, 133; body shame in, 129, 131–32; Brookner on, 127–28, 199–200n1; contempt-disappear scenario in, 131–32; critics on, 128; closure of, 133; as semiautobiographical work, 128; shame drama in, 128–33; standard Brooknerian heroine in, 128

219

220

Index

—Frances Hinton: appearance anxiety of, 127, 128–29, 131–33, 135; approving attention, need for, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 137; body shame of, 128–29, 131–132; comparisonmaking script of, 129, 131; contemptdisappear drama of, 131–32; the Frasers, idealization of, 128–30; the Frasers, relationship with, 128–30; James Anstey, relationship with, 130–31; shame drama of, 131–33; shame vulnerability of, 129, 130, 131–32; shame defenses of, 132–33; shameful insignificance, feeling of, 128–29, 131–33, 139; socially invisible women, identification with, 128; writing as revenge, use of, 133 Brothers, Doris, 75 Broucek, Francis, 38 Brown, Laura, 106, 117 Brumberg, Joan, 13, 109, 111, 182, 198n2 Burrows, Lynette, 100 Buss, Helen, 160 Carrington, Ildikó de Papp, 20 Caruth, Cathy, 76 Cederstrom, Lorelei, 138 Chancy, Myriam, 193n6, 194n8 Charters, Mallay, 71 Chernin, Kim, 106, 198n3 Chodorow, Nancy, 8–9 Coleman, Lerita, 37, 38 Coleman, Sarah, 100, 197n6 Comeau, Paul, 160 Coulter, Ann, 100 Couser, G. Thomas, 165, 173 Covino, Deborah, 126, 142, 169, 200n2 Cvetkovich, Ann, 50, 189n7 Danieli, Yael, 77 Danticat, Edwidge: Breath, Eyes, Memory, 1–2, 9–10, 71–85; autobiographical sources of, 72, 192nn2–3, 193n5, 194nn 8–10; closure of, 84–85; critics on, 73, 77; Danticat on, 71, 72–73,192nn2–3, 193nn5–6,

193–94n7, 194nn8–10, 194–95n11; Haitian American response to, 71; Haitian folklore in, 72, 78–79, 79–80, 81, 83, 84; Haitian political violence in, 72, 73, 74–75, 76, 79, 80, 192nn2–3, 193n4; immigrant experience in, 72–73; matriarchal family in, 71, 73, 74, 79, 80, 83, 84; mother-daughter relationship in, 71, 72, 73–75, 77–80, 81, 82–85; patriarchal oppression of women in, 71, 72, 74–78, 79, 80, 81–82, 83, 84, 85; rape in, 71, 72, 74–78, 79, 82, 84 ; shame drama in, 74–85; storytelling in, 72, 73, 78, 79, 83–85; trauma in, 71, 72, 73–74, 74–78, 79–82, 83, 84; virginity testing in, 71, 73, 74, 77–79, 80–81 —Martine Caco: aesthetic redemption of, 83–85; as the bleeding woman, 82, 84; body shame of, 71, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84–85; double nature of, 78–79; death of, 82–83; family honor, desire to preserve, 74, 77–78; rape of, 71, 72, 74–78; rape, reliving of, 74, 75–77, 82, 84; trauma, transmission of, 71, 73, 74, 77–81; trauma narrative of, 74–78 ; trauma symptoms of, 74, 75–78, 80, 82, 84; virginity testing, justification of, 77–78 —Sophie Caco: body shame of, 71, 77–78, 80–81, 81–82, 83, 84–85; bulimia of, 80–81; as daughter-storyteller, 83–85; dissociation, experiences of, 78–79; Erzulie, attraction to, 81; Erzulie-like powers of, 84; Haitian childhood of, 73–74; mother psychic twin of, 78–79; mother, relationship with, 71, 72, 73–75, 77–80, 81–82, 83–85; mother’s rape, product of, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75–77; selfmutilation, act of, 79; sexual phobia of, 80–81, 81–82; virginity testing, grandmother’s explanation of, 78; virginity testing, mother’s explanation of, 77–78; virginity testing, response to, 78–81; virginity testing

Index as rape-like, experience of, 71, 73, 78–80, 81 Davis, Kathy, 144, 201n5 Davis, Lennard, 164 Doane, Janice, 37, 189n6 Dowling, Finuala, 139 Draine, Betsy, 138 Dreyfuss, Lisa, 107 Fabre, Michel, 160 Featherstone, Mike, 148, 152, 203n7 Finley, Michael, 203n6 Fodor, Iris, 125–26 Foucault, Michel, 3, 13 Fox, Pamela, 188n1 Francis, Donette, 192n3 Frank, Arthur, 163, 165 Frum, Barbara, 33 Garfi nkel, Paul, 198n3, 198–99n5 Garner, David M., 198n3, 198–99n5 Gewen, Barry, 197n6 Gibbons, Frederick, 38 Gibson, Graeme, 34, 187n6 Gilbert, Paul, 5, 7–8, 125 Gilman, Sander, 139, 190n2 Gilmore, Leigh, 36 Gleick, Elizabth, 171 Godard, Barbara, 19, 31, 186n1 Goldberg, Carl, 5, 6, 49, 151, 183 Golden, Marita: Don’t Play in the Sun, 9, 53–54, 65–69; beauty and race in, 65–69; Black Power movement and, 67–68; black pride in, 67–68; color complex in, 65–69; color complex, description of, 190n1; and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, 65, 67; mother-daughter relationship in, 65–66; racial politics in, 65–69, 192n5; shame drama in, 65–69 —Golden, Marita: anger of, 68; Black Power movement, reaction to, 67, 68; colorist wounds of, 65–67; interand intraracial shaming, experiences of, 65–67; learned cultural shame of, 65–69; mother, relationship with, 65–66; mother’s shaming

221

words, reaction to, 65–66; writing, importance of, 67–68 Gott, Merryn, 147–48 Grealy, Lucy: Autobiography of a Face, 2, 12, 161, 163, 165–72; beauty culture in, 163, 165, 171; body shame in, 163, 165–71; closure of, 171; critics on, 171; facial disfigurement in, 163, 165–72; shame drama in, 166–72; wounded storyteller in, 163, 165, 171 —Lucy Grealy: abject body loathing, feelings of, 165, 169–70; Ann Patchett, friendship with, 165, 204–06n3; body shame of, 165, 167–72; cancer, treatment for, 165–66; death of, 172, 206n3; facial disfigurement, responses to, 167–71; reconstructive surgeries of, 163, 169–70, 171, 204–06n3; shame defenses of, 168–69, 170–71; shame-vulnerability of, 167–72; spoiled and stigmatized identity of, 168, 169–70, 171, 203–04n1; ugliness, feelings of, 163, 165, 167–72; unlovability, feelings of, 169, 170, 205n3 Greene, Gayle, 138 Grosz, Elizabeth, 4–5, 13, 105, 113, 148, 176 Grove, Lloyd, 197n7 Guppy, Shusha, 129 Gwin, Minrose, 189n7 Haffenden, John, 128, 199–200n1 Haiken, Elizabeth, 143, 200n3 Hall, Ronald, 53, 189–90n1 Hancock, Geoff, 20, 187n4 Hanson, Clare, 13 Hart, Lynda, 36 Hartley, Cecilia, 106, 116, 117 Heater, Sandra, 199n6 Hepworth, Mike, 148, 152, 203n7 Herman, Judith, 44–45, 49, 75–76 Hodges, Devon, 37, 189n6 hooks, bell, 53, 54 Horvitz, Deborah, 50 Howard, Ravi, 194n7, 194n10, 195n11 Howells, Coral Ann, 186n1

222

Index

Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie, 48 Jewinski, Ed, 160 Kamboureli, Smaro, 19–20 Kaplan, E. Ann, 148 Katz, Pamela, 144 Kaufman, Gershen, 2, 5, 6, 42, 129, 132, 141, 182, 188n4 Kent, Le’a, 107, 113, 123 Kenyon, Olga, 200n1 Kerr, Sarah, 96, 100 Kilborne, Benjamin, 127 Kristeva, Julia, 4–5, 13, 105, 107, 113, 126, 142, 148, 164, 169, 173, 202n1 Lansky, Melvin, 42 Laurence, Margaret: The Stone Angel, 1, 2, 11–12, 145, 149, 154–61, 183; body shame in, 154–60; closure of, 159–60; critics on, 160–61; death in, 159–60; old age in, 155–61; shame drama in, 155–60 —Hagar Shipley: abject body, responses to, 154–55, 156–57, 157–58, 159, 160; aging, abject body of, 154, 156, 157–58, 158–60; body shame of, 154, 155–60, 183; contemptuous voice of, 155, 157, 159, 161; Currie family pride of, 155, 159; death of, 160; incontinence of, 157; marriage of, 157; Marvin and Doris, relationship with, 155–57, 158, 159–60; Murray Lees, relationship with, 157, 158–59; self-contempt, feelings of, 155, 156– 58; shame defenses of, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160; shame drama of, 155–60; shame-paralysis, experience of, 155, 159; shameful spectacle, reduction to, 156, 157–58, 159; shame vulnerability of, 160; spoiled identity of, 149, 156–59; stone-angel statue, compared to, 155, 156, 159 LeBesco, Kathleen, 106, 107 LeClair, Thomas, 56 Lessing, Doris: The Summer Before the Dark, 11, 124, 127, 133–39; aging

woman in, 133, 134, 135, 138–39; appearance anxiety in, 11, 124, 133; body shame in, 135–36, 137–38; closure of, 138, 139; critics on, 138; culture of appearances and, 11, 133, 139; shame drama in 134–38 —Kate Brown: appearance anxiety of, 11, 124, 133, 135–36, 137–38; body shame of, 135–36, 137–38; confirming attention, need for, 11, 133–35, 136– 38; feminine masquerade, enactment of, 137, 138; Global Food job of, 134, 135; growing old, fears of, 134, 135, 138–39; invisible shameful identity of, 11, 124, 127, 134, 135, 137; marriage of, 134, 136; midlife crisis of, 133–39; observing and experiencing selves of, 133–34, 137–38; seal dream of, 136, 138; self-starvation of, 135, 137; shame drama of, 134–39; shame-rage of, 134, 137; shame vulnerability of, 133–34, 135, 136, 137 Lewis, Helen Block, 5, 6, 36–37, 47, 106, 132, 151, 167, 202n4 Lewis, Michael, 22, 38, 39, 147, 188n4, 195n1, Lyons, Bonnie, 72, 193n5, 194n8 Mairs, Nancy: Carnal Acts, 12, 161, 163, 173–74, 175, 176–78; Plaintext, 12, 161, 163, 173, 174; Voice Lessons, 178; Waist-High in the World, 12, 161, 163, 173, 174–78; beauty culture in, 163, 165, 172, 174; body shame in, 172–79; “body” writings, purpose of, 165, 176–78; critics on, 165, 172, 173; disabled body in, 161, 163, 165, 172–79; reader, interactions with, 165, 172, 178; writing as redemption in, 165, 177–79; writing as self-disclosure in, 165, 172–73, 175–77, 177–79 —Nancy Mairs: act of writing, physical difficulty of, 177; and the beauty culture, 163, 165, 172, 174, 176; bodily abjection of, 172–73, 174, 176; as a

Index “body in trouble,” descriptions of, 173, 176, 177; body shame of, 172–79; contemptuous stare, the object of, 161, 165, 174–75; “crippled” body of, 163, 173, 175–76, 177, 178; feminine ideal, deviations from, 174, 176; as a grotesque spectacle, 175; multiple sclerosis, symptoms of, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178; self-loathing, feelings of, 176; self-stigmatization, act of, 175; shame defenses of, 172, 175, 176, 178; shamelessness of, 172–73, 176–77, 178; as socially undesirable, 175, 176; as a wounded storyteller, 163, 165, 177–79 Malcolm, Cheryl, 128 Martin, Sara, 144, 201n5 McKee, Kevin, 147–48 McKinstry, Susan, 144, 145 Mensinger, Janell, 100 Miller, Susan, 5 Miller, William Ian, 25, 114, 148 Mintz, Susannah, 171 Minzesheimer, Bob, 53 Moore, Judith: Fat Girl: A True Story, 2, 10, 117–24; abjected fat body in, 107, 117–24; body shame in, 10–11, 107, 117–24; commentators on, 124; dieting in, 118; fat, fear of, in, 121–22; fat oppression and, 10–11, 117; food in, 121, 123; mother-daughter relationship in, 120–22; shame drama in, 117–24; trauma in, 121–22 —Judith Moore: adolescence of, 122; body shame of, 10–11, 107, 117–24; fat girl identity of, 118, 119–20; fatoppressive attitudes, internalization of, 10–11, 107–08, 117; food, relationship with, 121, 123; girlhood of, 120–22; grandmother, relationship with, 120; hypervisibility, feelings of, 119; marriages of, 122–23; maternal abuse, target of, 121–22; maternal contempt, target of, 120–22; mother, relationship with, 120–22; selfdisgust of, 117, 118–19, 122, 123–24;

223

self-hatred of, 117, 118, 119, 123–24; self-ridicule of, 117, 118–19, 123–24; shame defenses of, 118, 121, 124; shame drama of, 117–24; as a shameful spectacle, 118, 119, 123–24; as a socially despised nonperson, 122 Morgan, Kathryn, 204n2 Morrison, Andrew, 5, 6, 59, 183 Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye, 1, 9, 53–65, 182; beauty standards and African-American identity in, 54–55, 57–59, 60–61; color complex in, 53–54, 57–59, 60–61; coming of age in, 53–54, 56–57, 63–64; Dick-andJane primer story, function of, 55–56; Morrison on, 54, 55, 55–56; and the Moynihan Report, 190–91n3; shame drama in, 54–64; trauma in, 55–56, 63–64 —Pecola Breedlove: blue eyes, wish for, 54, 56, 62, 63–64; body language of, 56, 58, 62, 63; body shame of, 56, 58, 59, 60–61, 62, 63, 64; and Claudia, 56–59; and the black community, 55, 60, 61–62, 63–64; disappearance, wish for, 62; as dissmelling and dirty person, 60–61; and father, 59–60, 63; and Geraldine, 60–61; hiding behavior of, 58, 62, 63; and Maureen Peal, 58; and mother, 59; and Mr. Yacobowski, 61; rape of, 63; scapegoating of, 61–62, 64; shame drama of, 54–56, 60–64; as trauma victim, 55, 63–64; ugliness of, 54–55, 58, 59, 60–61, 62; unlovability, feelings of, 56, 62 Morton, Patricia, 191n3 Munro, Alice: Lives of Girls and Women, 1, 9, 19–34, 182; artist figure in, 19, 32–33; bodily abjection in, 19, 20, 21–25, 27–28, 29–30, 31–32; body shame in, 20, 21–23, 24–26, 27–28, 31–32; coming of age in, 19–20, 23–33; critics on, 19–20, 31, 186n1; feminist politics of, 19–20, 28, 187n4; and Joyce’s Portrait of the

224

Index

Artist as a Young Man, 19, 186n1; mind/body dualism in, 19, 29–30, 31–32; mother-daughter relationship in, 21–23, 28–29; Munro on, 20, 33–34, 186n2, 186–87n3, 187nn4–6, sexual shaming in, 19–20, 21–22, 23–25, 27, 31; shame, bodily intensity of, described in, 22–23; shame drama in, 19–20, 21–23, 24–26, 27–28, 29, 31–32 —Del Jordan: Art Chamberlain, relationship with, 25–28; body-identified femininity, and, 29–32; body shame of, 19, 20, 21–25, 27–28, 31–32; coming of age of, 23–33; feminine masquerade, reaction to, 28–29; feminist advice of mother, response to, 28; good girl/bad girl dichotomy and, 26–27; Garnet French, relationship with, 30–32; Gothic imaginings of, 30, 32–33; Jerry Storey, relationship with, 29–30 ; mind-identified feminism and, 29–30, 31; mother, relationship with, 21–23, 28–29; Naomi, friendship with, 23–25, 28–29; sexual curiosity of, 23–28; sexual initiation of, 30–31; sexual shaming of, 23–25, 27–28, 29, 31–32; sexuality and shame-disgust, association of, 24–26, 27–28, 29, 31–32 Nathanson, Donald, 5, 6, 25, 56, 60–61, 93, 188n2 Nead, Lynda, 133 Neustadt, Kathy, 64 Newitz, Annalee, 187–88n1 Ng, Lily, 50 Olson, Greta, 199n7 Paster, Gail, 14 Patchett, Ann, 165, 204–06n3 Pelin, Serap, 192n1 Peterman, Michael, 160–61 Peterson, Shirley, 143, 200–01n4 Phillips, Julie, 100 Pratt, Minnie Bruce, 51

Probyn, Elspeth, 14, 108, 181, 182, 198n4 Rainwater, Lee, 191n3 Rasporich, Beverly, 20, 186n2, 186– 87n3, 187n5 Redekop, Magdalene, 31 Restuccia, Frances, 128 Retzinger, Suzanne, 7, 188n3, 202n4 Rishoi, Christy, 19 Robertson, Matra, 114, 115 Rodin, Judith, 106 Rose, Jacqueline, 2–3, 12 Rothblum, Esther, 117 Ruas, Charles, 54 Russell, Kathy, 53, 189–90n1 Russo, Mary, 185n1 Ryan, Michael, 7 Sadler, Lynn, 128 Sandell, Jillian, 48 Sarton, May: As We Are Now, 2, 11, 145, 149–54, 161; aging body and abjection in, 150, 152, 153, 202n1; body shame in, 11, 149, 150, 152, 153; closure of, 154, 203n6; critics on, 154; old age in, 149, 150, 152, 153; Sarton on, 202nn2–3, 202–03n5, 203n6 —Caro Spencer: Anna Close, response to, 152–53; body shame of, 150, 152, 153; death of, 154; Hatfields, response to, 149–52, 153; journal of, 149, 150, 154; old age, response to, 149, 150, 152, 153; pride of, 149, 151; revenge of, 153–54; shame defenses of, 150, 151–52, 154; shame drama of, 149–54; as a shameful, abject spectacle, 149, 152, 153; shamerage of, 151–52; spoiling of identity, experience of, 151, 152, 153; Twin Elms, experience of, 149–52, 153–54; Twin Elms, fiery destruction of, 154, 203n6 Saum, Karen, 202–03n5, 203n6 Sceats, Sarah, 12 Scheff, Thomas, 6–7, 132, 188n3, 202n4 Schneider, Carl, 47, 92, 153, 160

Index Schur, Edwin, 38 Shalit, Wendy, 100 Shea, Renée, 193n6, 194n10, 194–95n11 Shieff, Sarah, 185–86n1 Shute, Jenefer: Life-Size, 1, 2, 10, 107, 108–17, 182; abjected fat body in, 107, 108, 109, 111–12, 113; anorexia in, 108–16; anorexic body as cultural text in, 111; body shame in, 107–08, 109–16, 124; closure of, 116; critics on, 107, 199n7; female sexuality in, 114; food loathing in, 113–14; shame drama in, 108–16 —Josie: abject female body, disgust for, 1, 107, 109, 111–13; abjected fat body, horror of, 107–08, 109, 111–12, 113, 115; anorexic symptoms of, 109–11, 112, 113–14, 115–16, 198n3; bodily functions, preoccupation with, 112–13; body, perception of, 110, 111, 112–13, 115, 116; body shame of, 2, 10, 108–16; cult of thinness, adherent of, 109, 111–12, 115–16; eating, visceral disgust for, 109–10, 113–14; food, obsession with, 113–14, 115; food binges, experiences of, 110, 114–15; obeseophobic perceptions of, 109–10, 111–12; physical appearance of, 110–11, 115, 116; pride of, 109, 110; sex, visceral disgust for, 114; skeletal body, inventory of, 110, 112; thin body, compulsive pursuit of, 109–10, 111, 115–16 Silberstein, Lisa, 106 Skinner, John, 128 Smith, Katharine, 72 Stearns, Peter, 199n8 Stepto, Robert, 55 Stout, Janis, 138 Striegel-Moore, Ruth, 106 Strong, Marilee, 36, 48, 189n7 Tanenbaum, Leora, 101, 195n1, 195n2 Tausky, Thomas, 187n6 Taylor, Cynthia, 161 Thomas, Sue, 20, 186n1

225

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 37, 45, 164, 174, 196n5 Ulman, Richard, 75 Verleun, Jan, 138 Vickroy, Laurie, 36, 73, 77, 188–89n5 Wachtel, Eleanor, 71, 72, 73, 192nn1–3, 193–94n7, 194n9 Waites, Elizabeth, 44, 80 Waxman, Barbara Frey, 138, 147, 154, 161 Weldon, Fay: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, 2, 11, 124, 127, 139–45, 182–83; appearance anxiety in, 127, 139–40, 142–45; beauty myth in, 127, 143–45; body shame in, 139–45; closure of, 144–45; contemptdisappear scenario in, 140, 143, 145; cosmetic surgery in, 127, 139, 141–43, 144, 145; critics on, 144, 200–201n4, 201n5; female ugliness in, 127, 139–40, 143, 145; feminist politics of, 143–44, 201n5; politics of appearance in, 139, 142, 143–44; the socially invisible woman in, 11, 124, 127, 139, 141 —Ruth Patchett: abject body of, 139–40, 142–43, 145; appearance anxiety of, 139–40, 142–43, 144, 145; Bobbo, marriage to, 140–41, 144; body shame of, 139–45; cosmetic transformation of, 127, 139, 140, 141, 142–43, 144, 145; as female Frankenstein, 142; as female monster, 142, 200–201n4; Mary Fisher, rivalry with, 139–40, 141, 142, 143, 144; revenge of, 139, 140–41, 143, 144; shame defenses of, 140–41, 142, 144; shame drama of, 139–45; shame-rage of, 140–41, 144; she-devil identity of, 140–41, 142; social invisibility of, 11, 124, 127, 139, 141; ugliness of, 2, 139–40, 142, 143, 145; as ugly feminist, 143; will-to-power of, 142, 144 Wendell, Susan, 164, 172

226

Index

White, Emily, 101, 195nn1–2 Wilson, Midge, 53, 189–90n1 Wolf, Naomi, 143 Wolf, Naomi: Promiscuities, 2, 10, 87–101; body shame in, 87, 88–89, 90, 91–92, 93–94, 96–97, 98–99; coming of age in, 87, 89–99; commentators on, 96, 98, 100, 197nn6–7; as confessional narrative, 88; female sexuality, dirtying of, 88–89, 91–94, 96–97, 97–99, 196–97n6; female sexuality and good girl/bad girl dichotomy in, 88, 91–92, 93, 96, 98–99; female sexuality, search for positive cultural model of, 88, 93, 95, 97–98, 100, 195–96n3; promiscuity as elemental force, celebration of, 100; sexual revolution in, 87–88, 89–91, 99–100; sexual shaming of girls in, 87, 88–89, 90, 91–93, 94, 95–97, 98; sexually active women, punishment of, 98–99; “shadow slut,”

attempt to reclaim in, 87, 88–89, 94, 100, 101; slut, and contemporary high school culture, accounts of, 101, 195n2; slut, social death of, 92; slut, stigmatized identity of, 92, 195n1; writing in the “first person sexual,” risks of, 88, 98, 100–01 —Naomi Wolf: adolescence of, 91–93, 94–97; childhood of, 89–91; loss of virginity of, 95; marriage of, 99; personal erotic history of, 89–99; San Francisco, memories of, 87, 89–91, 99–100; sexual initiation of, 95; sexual revolution, ambivalence toward, 87–88, 89–91, 99–100 Woodward, Kathleen, 147, 148–49 Wray, Matt, 187–88n1 Wurmser, Léon, 5, 6, 22, 38, 39, 41, 46, 62, 92, 122, 132, 140, 151, 152, 169, 175 Yancey, William, 190–91n3