Feminist Review: Journal, Issue 42 (''Feminist Review'' Journal)

Feminist Review

CONTENTS

Editorial: Feminist Fictions

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Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality

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Merja Makinen

Feminist Writing: Working with Women’s Experience

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Unlearning Patriarchy: Personal development in Marge Piercy’s Fly Away Home

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Are They Reading Us? Feminist Teenage Fiction

43

Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction

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A Psychoanalytic Account for Lesbianism

67

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery

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Frigga Haug

Kornelia Hauser

Julia Bard

Joke Hermes

Stephanie Castendyk Moira Ferguson Reviews

on Women, Islam and the State Nira Yuval–Davis

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on Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico Carmen Ramos Escandon

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on The Challenge Road: Women and the Eritrean Revolution Ethel Crowley

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on Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate Janet Sayers

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on Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine Jean Grimshaw

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on The Rites of Man: Love, Sex and Death in the Making of the Male Gill Allwood

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Noticeboard

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Feminist Review is published three times a year by a collective based in London, with help from women and groups all over the UK.

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EDITORIAL: Feminist Fictions

The untimely death of Angela Carter was a poignant way to be reminded of the flourishing of feminist writing over the past two decades. In the English-speaking world, at least, feminist presses still manage to survive the economic winter and feminist writing in a myriad of genres is finding its way to other publishers and to the theatre and television as well. The articles on ‘Feminist Fictions’ in this issue arise out of a collaboration between Feminist Review and the women members of the editorial board of the German journal Das Argument. Some of us met with Frigga Haug and Kornelia Hauser over a meal in London. We talked about possibilities for joint projects and Frigga and Kornelia told us of their interest in popular writing as a vehicle for feminist ideas. In a period when the women’s movement has no clear public presence, many women are meeting feminist ideas through reading novels and watching television serials. The Argument publishing house has been issuing German translations of American popular feminist novels—by Marge Piercy, Sarah Schulman and Barbara Wilson. We decided to produce parallel issues of our two journals, with a set of articles on this theme that would appear in English and German at around the same time. The articles here have a variety of approaches to the topic. Frigga and Kornelia’s are part of a coherent theoretical project, which is spelled out at the beginning of Frigga’s article. The others are quite different—and indeed the German women would probably be quite critical of the rather pessimistic conclusion that Joke Hermes draws about the political potential of lesbian romance fiction. What they have in common, perhaps, is that they focus on the feminist content of the books that they consider, rather than being concerned with literary criticism or literary theory of the sort that Feminist Review has more often been engaged with. We hope that articles in this issue will raise questions about popular genres as a potential site for a feminist contribution. Can feminism really undermine the most conservative genres like fairy stories or romance fiction? We leave readers to draw their own conclusions—and perhaps continue the debate.

Feminist Review No 42, Autumn 1992

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ANGELA CARTER’STHE BLOODY CHAMBER AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF FEMININE SEXUALITY Merja Makinen

The last thing you’d ever need to do with an Angela Carter text is to send it on an assertiveness training course. With her death (and no one has spoken more effectively on that than her last novel, Wise Children, ‘a broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy’) the obituaries have started to evoke her as the gentle, wonderful white witch of the north. But far from being gentle, Carter’s texts were known for the excessiveness of their violence and, latterly, the almost violent exuberance of their excess. Many a reader has found the savagery with which she can attack cultural stereotypes disturbing, even alienating. Personally I found (and find) it exhilarating—you never knew what was coming next from the avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism. Margaret Atwood’s memorial in the Observer opens with Carter’s ‘Intelligence and kindness’ and goes on to construct her as a mythical fairy-tale figure: ‘The amazing thing about her, for me, was that someone who looked so much like the Fairy Godmother…should actually be so much like the Fairy Godmother. She seemed always on the verge of bestowing something—some talisman, some magic token…’ Lorna Sage’s obituary in the Guardian talked of her ‘powers of enchantment and hilarity, her generous inventiveness’ while the Late Show’s memorial on BBC2 had the presenter calling her the ‘white witch of English literature’, J.G.Ballard a ‘friendly witch’, and Salman Rushdie claimed ‘English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch queen…deprived of the fairy queen we cannot find the magic that will heal us’ and finished by describing her as ‘a very good wizard, perhaps the first wizard de-luxe’. But this concurrence of white witch/fairy godmother mythologizing needs watching; it is always the dangerously problematic that are mythologized in order to make them less dangerous. As Carter herself argued strongly in Sadeian Woman, ‘if women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men).’ The books are not by some benign magician. The strengths and the dangers of her texts lie in a much more aggressive subversiveness and a much more active eroticism than perhaps the decorum around death can allow. For me, the problematics of Carter’s writing was captured with more frankness when New Socialist dubbed her—wrongly, I think, but wittily— the ‘high-priestess of post-graduate porn’ in 1987. For Carter’s work has consistently dealt

Feminist Review No 42, Autumn 1992

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with representations of the physical abuse of women in phallocentric cultures, of women alienated from themselves within the male gaze, and conversely of women who grab their sexuality and fight back, of women troubled by and even powered by their own violence. Clearly, Angela Carter was best known for her feminist re-writing of fairy-tales; the memorials blurring stories with story-teller stand testimony to that. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, published in 1979, is also midway between the disquietingly savage analyses of patriarchy of the 1960s and 1970s, such as The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Passion of New Eve; and the exuberant novels of the 1980s and early 1990s, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. This is not to argue that the latter novels are not also feminist, but their strategy is different. The violence in the events depicted in the earlier novels (the rapes, the physical and mental abuse of women) and the aggression implicit in the representations, are no longer foregrounded. While similar events may occur in these two last texts, the focus is on mocking and exploding the constrictive cultural stereotypes and in celebrating the sheer ability of the female protagonists to survive, unscathed by the sexist ideologies. The tales in The Bloody Chamber still foreground the violence and the abuse, but the narrative itself provides an exuberant re-writing of the fairy-tales that actively engages the reader in a feminist deconstruction. I am therefore focusing my discussion on Carter’s fairy-tales to allow a specific analysis of Carter’s textual uses of violence as a feminist strategy, alongside a case study assessing the relationship of such a strategy to an assessment of her readership. Fairy-tale elements had been present in Carter’s work as early as The Magic Toyshop in 1967, but she didn’t come to consider them as a specific genre of European literature until the late seventies. In 1977 she translated for Gollancz a series of Perrault’s seventeenth-century tales, and in 1979 published The Bloody Chamber, her re-writing of the fairy-tales of Perrault and Madame Leprince de Beaumont. In 1982 she translated another edition, which included the two extra stories by Madame de Beaumont, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Sweetheart’. Three of the stories from Bloody Chamber were rewritten for Radio 3,1 and she took part in adapting one of them, ‘Company of Wolves’, into the film by Neil Jordan (1984). Finally, she edited the Virago Book of Fairy-Tales in 1990, and the Second Virago Book of Fairy-Tales for 1992. Carter saw fairy-tales as the oral literature of the poor, a literature that spanned Europe and one that encoded the dark and mysterious elements of the psyche. She argued that even though the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century aristocratic writers ‘fixed’ these tales by writing them down and added moral tags to adapt them into parables of instruction for children, they could not erase the darkness and the magic of the content.2 She argued that both literature and folklore were ‘vast repositories of outmoded lies, where you can check out what lies used to be a la mode and find the old lies on which new lies are based.’ But folktales, unlike the more dangerous myths (which she tackled in Passion of New Eve) were straightforward devices whose structures could easily be re-written with an informing, feminist tag, where the curiosity of the women protagonists is rewarded (rather than punished) and their sexuality is active (rather than passive or suppressed altogether). Carter’s Red Riding Hood in ‘Company of Wolves’ is more than a match for her werewolf:

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What big teeth you have… All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. (Carter, 1979a:118) Feminist critics who have written on Bloody Chamber argue that the old fairy-tales were a reactionary form that inscribed a misogynistic ideology, without questioning whether women readers would always and necessarily identify with the female figures (an assumption that Carter too shares in). They argue that Carter, in using the form, gets locked into the conservative sexism, despite her good intentions. Patricia Duncker uses Angela Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women to argue that Carter is ‘re-writing the tales within the strait-jacket of their original structures’ and therefore reproducing the ‘rigidly sexist psychology of the erotic.’ Avis Lewallen agrees, Carter has been unable adequately to revision the conservative form for a feminist politics, and so her attempts at constructing an active female erotic are badly compromised—if not a reproduction of male pornography. I would argue that, conversely, it is the critics who cannot see beyond the sexist binary opposition. In order to do this, two issues need to be addressed: whether a ‘reactionary’ form can be re-written; and the potential perversity of women’s sexuality. The discussion of the first issue will lead to an argument for a feminist strategy of writing and also of reading, and hence throw some light on Carter’s potential audiences. Firstly, the question of the form of the fairy-tale: is it some universal, unchangeable given or does it change according to its specific historic rendition? Narrative genres clearly do inscribe ideologies (though that can never fix the readings), but later re-writings that take the genre and adapt it will not necessarily encode the same ideological assumptions. Otherwise, one would have to argue that the African novels that have sought to decolonize the European cultural stereotypes of themselves, must always fail. One would need to argue that Ngugi’s or Achebe’s novels, for example, reinforce the colonial legacy because they use the novel format. This is clearly not true. When the form is used to critique the inscribed ideology, I would argue, then the form is subtly adapted to inscribe a new set of assumptions. Carter argued that Bloody Chamber was ‘a book of stories about fairy stories’ (my emphasis) and this ironic strategy needs to be acknowledged. Lewallen complains that Duncker is insensitive to the irony in Carter’s tales, but then agrees with her assessment of the patriarchal inscriptions, seeing the irony as merely ‘blurring the boundaries’ of binary thinking. Now I want to push the claim for irony a lot further than Lewallen, and argue that rather than a blurring, it enacts an oscillation that is itself deconstructive. Naomi Schor in an essay on Flaubert’s ironic use of Romanticism,3 states that irony allows the author to reject and at the same time re-appropriate the discourse that s/he is referring to. (i.e., Romanticism is both present and simultaneously discredited in Flaubert’s texts). Schor historicizes the continuity between nineteenth-century and modernist irony as inherently misogynistic (because linked to the fetishization of women) and calls for a feminist irony that incorporates the destabilizing effects, while rejecting the misogyny. She cites

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Donna Haraway’s opening paragraph from ‘A manifesto for cybergs’: Irony…is a rhetorical strategy and political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist feminism’. Utilizing this model of an ironic oscillation, I want to argue that Carter’s tales do not simply ‘rewrite’ the old tales by fixing roles of active sexuality for their female protagonists—they ‘re-write’ them by playing with and upon (if not preying upon) the earlier misogynistic version. Look again at the quote from ‘Company of Wolves’ given earlier. It is not read as a story read for the first time, with a positively imaged heroine. It is read, with the original story encoded within it, so that one reads of both texts, aware of how the new one refers back to and implicitly critiques the old. We read ‘The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat’ as referring to the earlier Little Red Riding Hood’s passive terror of being eaten, before she is saved by the male woodman. We recognize the author’s feminist turning of the tables and, simultaneously, the damage done by the old inscriptions of femininity as passive. ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode’ (Carter 1983:69). What should also not be overlooked, alongside this ironic deconstructive technique, is the role of the reader; the question of who is reading these tales. These are late twentieth-century adult fairy-tales conscious of their own fictive status and so questioning the very constructions of roles while asserting them. When a young girl resolutely chops off the paw of the wolf threatening her, and we read ‘the wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob…wolves are less brave than they seem’—are participating in the re-writing of a wolf’s characteristics and participating not only in the humour but also the arbitrariness. ‘Nature’ is not fixed but fluid within fiction. Carter was insistent that her texts were open-ended, written with a space for the reader’s activity in mind. She disliked novels that were closed worlds and described most realist novels as etiquette manuals. And she placed Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room in such a category, as well as the novels of Jane Austen. The fact that the former was feminist didn’t let it off the protocol hook. Books written to show the reader how she should behave, were not only an insult to the reader but also a bore to write. Carter’s own fiction seems always aware of its playful interaction with the reader’s assumptions and recognitions.4 The Bloody Chamber is clearly engaging with a reader historically situated in the early 1980s (and beyond) informed by feminism, and raising questions about the cultural constructions of femininity. Rather than carrying the heavy burden of instruction, Carter often explained that for her ‘a narrative is an argument stated in fictional terms’. And the two things needed for any argument are, something to argue against (something to be overturned) and someone to make that argument to (a reader). The question therefore arises of whether this deconstructive irony is activated if the reader is uninformed by feminism. The answer must be, on the whole, no. Bloody Chamber draws on a feminist discourse—or at least an awareness that feminism is challenging sexist constructions. Mary Kelly, the feminist artist, when challenged on the same question of the accessibility of her Post Partum Document to a wider audience, cogently argued, ‘there is no such thing as a homogenous mass-audience. You can’t make art for everyone. And if you’re enjoyed within a particular movement or organisation, then the work is going to participate in its debates.’ Lucy Lippard goes on to suggest that Kelly’s art ‘extends the level of discourse

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within the art audience for all those who see the art experience as an exchange, a collaboration between artist and audience—the active audience an active art deserves.’ (Kelly, 1984:xiii) I would argue that Carter’s tales evoke a similar active engagement with feminist discourse. At first sight, such a conclusion may sound odd, because if anyone has taken feminist fiction into the mainstream, it is Carter. But if a feminist writer is to remain a feminist writer (rather than a writer about women) then the texts must engage, on some level, with feminist thinking. There is a wide constituency of potential readers who satisfy the minimum requirement of having an awareness that feminism challenges sexist constructions. One does not need to be a feminist to read the texts, far from it, but if the reader does not appreciate the attack on the stereotypes then the payback for that level of engagement, the sheer cerebral pleasure and the enjoyment of the iconoclasm, will be missing. And without the humour or the interest in deconstructing cultural gender stereotypes, the textual anger against the abuse of women in previous decades can prove very disquieting, even uncomfortable, to read. To enjoy the humour—the payback with many of Carter’s texts—readers need to position themselves outside phallocentric culture (at least for the process of reading). The last two novels, with their lighter tone and more exuberant construction of interrelationships, probably have the widest readership of all. This mellowing of textual aggression is not the only explanation for the increasing popularity of Carter’s later texts. Helen Carr notes that the mid-eighties saw the arrival of South American magic realism on the British scene. From that moment, Carter’s readers could assign her anarchic fusion of fantasy and realism to an intelligible genre, and so feel more secure. However, a fuller explanation of Carter’s popularity needs to take account of marketing and distribution: not just accessibility of ideology, but accessibility of purchase. Is the text on the general bookshop shelves? Is it marketed under a feminist imprint, thus signalling to the potential reader, for feminist eyes only? Nicci Gerrard in her examination of how feminist fiction has impacted on mainstream publishing, argues that Carter along with Toni Morrison and Keri Hulme, have been more widely read because while still remaining explicitly feminist, they have brought feminism out of its ‘narrow self-consciousness’. Narrow is always a difficult adjective to quantify. In Britain, Angela Carter—like Morrison and Hulme—has been published by mainstream publishers from the beginning. The publishing history for her hardback fiction runs: Heinemann 1966–70, Hart Davis 1971–2, Gollancz 1977– 84, Chatto & Windus 1984–92. As far as marketing and distribution are concerned, Carter has always been presented directly to mainstream audiences. Both Passion of New Eve (1977) and Bloody Chamber (1979) initially came out under Gollancz’s ‘Fantasy’ series, placing them within a specific genre, and the former was the first into paperback—being issued by Arrow in 1978. In 1981 Penguin issued Bloody Chamber along with Heroes and Villains and The Infernal Desire Machine of Dr Hoffman. In the same year Virago published the paperback of Magic Toyshop, followed by Passion of New Eve the year after, and Fireworks in 1987. The covers of both publishing houses initially focused on the surreal, vaguely sci-fi elements, Penguin doing a nice line in suggestive plants, designed by James Marsh. (Thankfully, Virago has scrapped the original tawdry cover of the sci-fi couple embracing, on Fireworks, for the more tasteful modernist depiction of a Japanese urban

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environment.) Virago also published Carter’s non-fiction and commissioned her to edit collections of stories. Nights at the Circus reached a very large audience, in paperback. Picador published it in 1985 and it was taken up as a major lead title for Pan to promote and distribute. Gerrard cites Virago’s average fiction print-run as 5,000–7,000 in the second half of the eighties. By the early nineties, Nights at the Circus had achieved sales which exceeded this figure ten times over. But even this success needs to be placed in context. It still only reaches about 20 per cent of the sales for a number one best seller, such as Martin Amis’s London Fields or Julian Barnes’s History of the World in 10½ Chapters.5

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So Carter’s involvement with feminist publishers came relatively late in the day and seems to have stemmed from Virago’s publishing of her first piece of non-fiction, Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979). Her fiction’s reputation was made from mainstream publishing houses and was reinforced by the awards of mainstream literary prizes: the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Magic Toyshop; Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions; Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award for Bloody Chamber; and the James Tait Black Award for Nights at the Circus. The shortlisting of the 1984 Booker Prize caused a minor furore when Nights at the Circus was not included (it was won that year by Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac). Even many of the individual tales from The Bloody Chamber first saw the light of day in small but fairly prestigious literary reviews such as Bananas, Stand, Northern Arts Review, and Iowa Review (the only academic journal), none of them notably feminist in their editorial policy. And ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ was first published in the British edition of Vogue. Clearly I am arguing that texts that employ a feminist irony, that engage actively with a feminist discourse, do not automatically confine themselves to a feminist ghetto. There is a wide and growing audience for at least some kinds of feminist fiction. But I am also arguing that exuberance sells better than discomfort. The more textually savage books are published by Virago in paperback; the more magical by Penguin; and two celebratory ones by the bigmoney bidders, Picador and Vantage. But what also sells in this commodified age of ours, as everyone knows, is sex, and Carter’s texts have always engaged with eroticism. The quotes included by Penguin on the book covers invariably make reference to ‘the stylish erotic prose’, ‘erotic, exotic and bizarre romance’. And this clearly also has a lot to do with her popularity. In order to counter Lewallen and Duncker’s perception of her work as pornographic, I need to examine the feminist strategies of her representations of sexuality, particularly the debate surrounding the construction of sexuality within the Bloody Chamber stories. I believe Carter is going some way towards constructing a complex vision of female psychosexuality, through her invoking of violence as well as the erotic. But that women can be violent as well as active sexually, that women can choose to be perverse, is clearly not something allowed for in the calculations of such readers as Duncker, Palmer and Lewallen. Carter’s strength is precisely in exploding the stereotypes of women as passive, demure cyphers. That she therefore evokes the gamut of violence and perversity is certainly troubling, but to deny their existence is surely to incarcerate women back within a partial, sanitized image only slightly less constricted than the Victorian angel in the house. Carter was certainly fascinated by the incidence of ‘beast marriage’ stories, in the original fairy-tales, and she claimed they were international. In discussing how the wolves subtly changed their meaning in the film of the story, she comments that nevertheless they still signified libido. Fairy-tales are often seen as dealing with the ‘uncanny’, the distorted fictions of the unconscious revisited through homely images—and beasts can easily stand for the projected desires, the drive for pleasure of women. Particularly when such desires are discountenanced by a patriarchal culture concerned to restrict its women to being property (without a libido of their own, let alone a mind or a room).6

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In all of the tales, not only is femininity constructed as active, sensual, desiring and unruly—but successful sexual transactions are founded on an equality and the transforming powers of recognizing the reciprocal claims of the other. The ten tales divide up into the first, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, a re-writing of the Bluebeard story; three tales around cats: lion/tiger/ puss in boots; three tales of magical beings: erl-king/snow-child/vampire; and finally three tales of werewolves. Each tale takes up the theme of the earlier one and comments on a different aspect of it, to present a complex variation of female desire and sexuality. In the Finale to Sadeian Woman Carter discusses the word flesh in its various meanings: the pleasures of the flesh are vulgar and unrefined, even with an element of beastliness about them, although flesh tints have the sumptuous succulence of peaches because flesh plus skin equals sensuality. But, if flesh plus skin equals sensuality, then flesh minus skin equals meat. (Carter, 1979b:137–8) This motif of skin and flesh as signifying pleasure, and of meat as signifying economic objectification, recurs throughout the ten tales, and stand as an internal evaluation of the relationship shown. The other recurring motif is that of the gaze, but it is not always simply the objectification of the woman by male desire, as we shall discover. In each of the first three tales, Carter stresses the relationship between women’s subjective sexuality and their objective role as property: young girls get bought by wealth, one way or another. But in the feminist re-write, Bluebeard’s victimization of women is overturned and he himself is vanquished by the mother and daughter. The puppet master, open-mouthed, wide eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves. (1979a:39) In the two versions of the beauty-and-the-beast theme, the lion and the tiger signify something other than man. ‘For a lion is a lion and a man is a man’ argues the first tale. In the first, Beauty is adored by her father, in the second, gambled away by a profligate drunkard. The felines signify otherness, a savage and magnificent power, outside of humanity. In one story, women are pampered, in the other treated as property, but in both cases the protagonists chose to explore the dangerous, exhilarating change that comes from choosing the beast. Both stories are careful to show a reciprocal awe and fear in the beasts, as well as in the beauty, and the reversal theme reinforces the equality of the transactions: lion kisses Beauty’s hand, Beauty kisses lion’s; tiger strips naked and so Beauty chooses to show him ‘the fleshly nature of women’. In both cases the beasts signify a sensuality that the women have been taught might devour them, but which, when embraced, gives them power, strength and a new awareness of both self and other. The tiger’s bride has her ‘skins of a life in the world’ licked off to reveal her own magnificent fur beneath the surface. Each of the three adolescent protagonists has been progressively stronger and more aggressive, and each has embraced a sensuality both sumptuous and unrefined. With the

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fourth story, ‘Puss in Boots’, the cynical puss viewing human love and desire in a lighthearted commedia dell’ arte rendition, demythologizes sex with humour and gusto. If the wild felines have signified the sensual desires that women need to acknowledge within themselves, the three fictive figures signify the problematics of desire itself. ‘Erl-king’ is a complex rendering of a subjective collusion with objectivity and entrapment within the male gaze. The woman narrator both fears and desires entrapment within the birdcage. The erl-king, we are told, does not exist in nature, but in a void of her own making (hence his calling her ‘mother’ at the end). The disquieting shifts between the two voices of the narrator, first and third person, represent the two competing desires for freedom and engulfment, in a tale that delineates the very ambivalence of desire. ‘Snowchild’ presents the unattainability of desire, which will always melt away before possession. No real person can ever satisfy desire’s constant deferral. ‘Lady of the House of Love’, with its lady vampire, inverts the gender roles of Bluebeard, with the woman constructed as an aggressor with a man as the virgin victim. But with this construction of aggressor, comes the question of whether sadists are trapped within their nature: ‘can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’ And, through love and the reciprocal theme—he kisses her bloody finger, rather than her sucking his blood—this aggressor is able to vanquish ancestral desires, but at a cost. In this tale the overwhelming fear of the cat tales, that the protagonist might be consumed by the otherness of desire, is given a new twist. The three wolf stories also deal with women’s relationship to the unruly libido, but the werewolf signifies a stranger, more alienated otherness than the cats, despite the half-human manifestations. Old Granny is the werewolf in the first tale, and the girl’s vanquishing of her is seen as a triumph of the complaisant society (the symbolic) that hounds the uncanny. The tiger’s bride had been a rebellious child and chooses desire over conventional wealth; now we have a ‘good’ child who sacrifices the uncanny for bourgeois prosperity. In the second tale, ‘Company of Wolves’, the list of manifestations of werewolves, the amalgam of human and wolf; symbolic and imaginary, concludes with the second Red Riding Hood story. This time the wolf does consume the granny, but is outfaced by Red Riding Hood’s awareness that in freely meeting his sensuality, the libido will transform ‘meat’ into ‘flesh’. After the fulfilment of their mutual desire, he is transformed into a ‘tender’ wolf, and she sleeps safe between his paws. The final tale is of a girl raised by wolves, outside of the social training of the symbolic. Alluding to Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage, Lewis Carroll and Lacan, the young girl grows up outside the cultural inscriptions and learns a new sense of self from her encounters with the mirror and from the rhythms of her body. She learns a sense of time and routine. Finally her pity begins to transform the werewolf Duke into the world of the rational, where he too can be symbolized. Reading Carter’s fairy-tales as her female protagonists’ confrontations with desire, in all its unruly ‘animalness’, yields rich rewards. However, Patricia Duncker simplistically reads the tales as ‘all men are beasts to women’ and so sees the female protagonists as inevitably enacting the roles of victims of male violence. Red Riding Hood of the twice mentioned quotation, according to her ‘sees that rape is inevitable …and decides to strip off, lie back and enjoy it. She wants it really, they all do.’ Reading ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ Duncker claims the stripping of the girl’s skin ‘beautifully packaged and unveiled, is the ritual disrobing of the

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willing victim of pornography’. Because she reads the beasts as men in furry clothing, Duncker argues Carter has been unable to paint an ‘alternative anti-sexist language of the erotic’ because there is no conception of women as having autonomous desire. But Carter is doing that. Read the beasts as the projections of a feminine libido, and they become exactly that autonomous desire which the female characters need to recognize and reappropriate as a part of themselves (denied by the phallocentric culture). Isn’t that why at the end of ‘Tiger’s Bride’ the tiger’s licking reveals the tiger in the woman protagonist, beneath the cultural construction of the demure? Looked at again, this is not read as woman re-enacting pornography for the male gaze, but as woman reappropriating libido: And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur. (Carter 1979a:67) Lewallen does read the beasts as female desire, but argues that the female protagonists are still locked within a binary prescription of either ‘fuck or be fucked’. However, I would argue she too brings this binary division into the discussion with her, when she asserts ‘Sade’s dualism is simple: sadist or masochist, fuck or be fucked, victim or aggressor’. She uses a reading of Carter’s reading of Sade, in Sadeian Woman to inform the stories and argues, wrongly I think, that Carter is putting forward woman as sexual aggressor (Sade’s Juliette), rather than victim (Sade’s Justine). I would suggest that Carter is using de Sade to argue for a wider incorporation of female sexuality, to argue that it too contains a whole gamut of ‘perversions’ alongside ‘normal’ sex. My main problem with Lewallen’s dualism is that it incorporates no sense of the dangerous pleasures of sexuality and that is not necessarily simply a choice between being aggressor or victim. Her ‘fuck or be fucked’ interpretation ignores the notion of consent within the sado-masochistic transaction, and the question of who is fucking whom. Pat Califia’s novel of lesbian S&M illustrates how it is usually the masochist who has the real control, who has the power to call ‘enough’. While asking for a more mutual sexual transaction, Lewallen dismisses the masochism in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, as too disturbing, ‘my unease at being manipulated by the narrative to sympathise with masochism’. Now I don’t deny that it is disturbing (except, perhaps, for the reader who is a masochist). And if it was the only representation of female sexuality, I would be up in arms against its reinforcement of Freudian views. But it is only one of ten tales, ten variant representations. Moreover, the protagonist retracts her consent halfway through the narrative, when she realizes her husband, Bluebeard, is planning to involve her in real torture and a ‘snuff’ denouement. Up until then, the adolescent protagonist has not denied her own interest in the sadomasochist transaction: I caught myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away. (Carter, 1979a:11)

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Throughout the narrative, this ‘queasy craving’ for the sexual encounters (‘like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food’) is admitted by the narrator, until she discovers the torture chamber and the three dead previous wives. Then she removes her consent and, with the help of an ineffectual blind piano-tuner7 and her avenging mother, Bluebeard is defeated. Of course I would not deny that the tale, through its oscillation with the original fable, also comments on male sexual objectification and denigration of women. Clearly much of its representation draws on this—but the male violator is also portrayed as captured within the construction of masculinity (just as the female vampire was trapped within hers). The protagonist can recognize his ‘stench of absolute despair…the atrocious loneliness of that monster’. Carter’s representations of sexuality are more complex than many of her critics have allowed. Maggie Anwell, in an excellent analysis of how the film The Company of Wolves was unable to get past the binary divide of victim/aggressor, does argue for a more complex psychic reading of female sexuality represented in the tale. She suggests that the confrontation between ‘repressed desire’ (wolf) and the ‘ego’ (Red Riding Hood) ends with the ego’s ability to accept the pleasurable aspects of desire, while controlling its less pleasurable aspects. The story, with its subversion of the familiar and its structure of story-telling within a story, suggests an ambiguity and plurality of interpretations which reminds us of our own capacity to dream…Not only does the material world shift its laws; we experience our own capacity for abnormal behaviour (Anwell, 1988:82). Are we to call only for constructions of sexuality with which we feel at ease, at this point in time, still within a phallocentric society? Especially when all we have to inscribe our own sexual identities from are cultural constructions? I would argue that just as it is the debates around the marginalized and pathologized ‘perversities’ that are breaking up the phallocentric construction of sexuality, so Carter’s texts are beginning to sketch the polymorphous potentialities of female desire. These new representations may not fit into comfortable notions of sisterhood, but they may well prove liberating all the same. And Carter clearly knew what she was doing. In her foreword to her edition of the Perrault stories, she caricatures the seventeenth-century rationalistic response: The wolf consumes Red Riding Hood; what else can you expect if you talk to strange men, comments Perrault briskly. Let’s not bother our heads with the mysteries of sadomasochistic attraction. (Carter, 1977:17–8) Until we can take on board the disturbing and even violent elements of female sexuality, we will not be able to decode the full feminist agenda of these fairy-tales. We will be unable to recognize the representations of drives so far suppressed by our culture. Yet this, of course, is why it is so enormously important for women to write fiction as women—it is part of the slow process of decolonising our language and our basic habits of thought. I really do believe this…it has to do with the creation of a means of

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expression for an infinitely greater variety of experience than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language previously existed. (Carter, 1983:75) With the death of Angela Carter we have lost an important feminist writer who was able to critique phallocentrism with ironic gusto and to develop a wider and more complex representation of femininity. Neither the mystification of her gentleness, nor the assumption that representations of sexuality are locked into pornography, should blind us to Carter’s works’ attempts to decolonize our habits of thought. If we need to expand our criteria to encompass her achievements, then so much the better. Notes Merja Makinen lectures in English literature and history of ideas at Middlesex University. She is the co-author, with Lorraine Gamman, of Female Fetishism: A New Look, forthcoming from Lawrence & Wishart. 1 Later published together with another of her radio plays, as Come Unto These Yellow Sands. 2 For all that I will go on to question Patricia Duncker’s reading of Carter’s representation of female sexuality, she does give a good historical reading of fairy-tales, with much more analysis than Carter’s version. 3 The European literary movement of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, which stressed the claims of passion and emotion and a sense of mystery in life. 4 ‘I try when I write fiction, to think on my feet—to present a number of propositions in a variety of different ways, and to leave the reader to construct her own fiction for herself from the elements of my fiction’ (Carter, 1983). 5 I am indebted to Helena Blakemore’s forthcoming doctoral thesis ‘Reading strategies: problems in the study of contemporary British fiction’, Middlesex University. 6 Arguably Christina Rossetti’s poetry, especially the notorious Goblin Market, employed a similar device in the nineteenth century and Ellen Moers argued for a tradition of ‘female gothic’ tales that such strategies could belong to. 7 That Duncker argues the blind piano-tuner represents castrated male sexuality, referring to Rochester in Jane Eyre, situates her feminist strategy. She does not incorporate later psychoanalytic feminist readings, that could allow Carter’s protagonist to elect for a man with whom she will not be the object of the male gaze, as she was with her husband.

References ANWELL, Maggie (1988) ‘Lolita meets the werewolf’, The Female Gaze: Women As Viewers of Popular Culture editors Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment, London: The Women’s Press. CALIFIA, Pat (l989) Macho Sluts Boston, Mass.: Alyson. CARR, Helen (1989) editor, From My Guy to Sci-Fi London: Pandora. CARTER, Angela (1977) Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault London: Gollancz. —— (1979a) The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories London: Gollancz. —— (1979b) The Sadeian Woman, An Exercise in Cultural History London: Virago. —— (1983) ‘Notes from the frontline’ in On Gender and Writing editor Michelene Wandor, London: Pandora.

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—— (1985) Come Unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays Edinburgh: Bloodaxe Books. DUNCKER, Patricia (1984) ‘Re-imagining the fairy tales: Angela Carter’s bloody chambers’ Literature and History 10(1) Spring, pp. 3–14. GERRARD, Nicci (1989) Into the Mainstream London: Pandora. GUARDIAN (1992) ‘The soaring imagination’, 17 February, p. 37. KELLY, Mary (1984) Post Partum Document London: Routledge. THE LATE SHOW (1992) BBC2, 18 February , presented by Tracy McLeod. LEWALLEN, Avis (1988) ‘Wayward girls but wicked women?’ in Perspectives on Pornography editors Gary Day and Clive Bloom, London: Macmillan. MOERS, Ellen (1978) Literary Women London: The Women’s Press. Observer, 23 February 1992, ‘Magic token through the dark forest’, p. 61. OBSERVER (1992) ‘Magic token through the dark forest,’ 23 February, p. 61. PALMER, Paulina (1987) ‘From coded mannequin to bird woman: Angela Carter’s magic flight’, in Women Reading Women Writing editor Sue Roe, London: Harvester. SCHOR, Naomi (1988) ‘Fetishism and its ironies’ 19th Century French Studies 17 (1+2) Fall-Winter 1988–9, pp. 89–97.

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FEMINIST WRITING: Working with Women’s Experience Frigga Haug

For some years black and feminist would-be revolutionaries have also been trying to influence the curricula outside their ghetto. A favourite object of attack are the lists of books, knowledge of which many American high schools require from students in their first and second semesters. (J.von Uthmann, in FAZ, 19.2.92) The author mentions ‘scandalous’ examples like the inclusion of Sappho, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf on the official curriculum. The thought that makes the author shudder, the improvement of the world through literature, gives us cause for hope. Here, my interest in recent feminist literature is concerned with the following questions. How is knowledge, as the precondition of the capacity for action, made possible, and why is it that today feminist writing takes up this task in an exemplary way? Novels from the 1980s by Marge Piercy, Barbara Wilson and Sarah Schulman form the basis of my reflections. Model analyses refer to two novels by Marge Piercy. Experience and theory The political project as problem of knowledge and mediation

The theoretical level appears appropriate to the search for knowledge. The concept, by abstracting from multicoloured diversity provides an understanding of the issue, present information about what is essential provides orientation and allows a great deal to be disregarded and certain things to be retained. Experience, interest and commitment are part of the process of abstraction. The feminist critique of traditional concept-formation aims above all at the neglect of female experiences and the consequent false universality of theory and categories, and in particular at the androcentrism of centuries of occidental theory. The wearisome problem that follows from such a critique is the necessity of expressing women’s experiences, of finding concepts, of reconstructing theories, of renewal. Contained within that there is, among other things, the problem of establishing a relationship at all between the levels of experience and theory. We have been trying for more than a decade,

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with work on memory in various women’s projects,1 to close the gap between female experience and theoretical understanding. The work is difficult and advances only very slowly. By contrast, a glance at recent feminist literature makes me feel as if I’m flying. Whole continents of women’s experience are being opened up. So I take an interest in such literature in order to gain knowledge as much as for pleasure, and ask in what way women’s experiences are worked up, brought to speak, and what new theoretical knowledge can be gained in this way.

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There is also the further attraction that, at the level of literature, insights and knowledge are much more easily conveyed than at the level of theory. Or to quote Barbara Wilson (in connexion with thrillers): One of my initial reasons for wanting to write mysteries was that I was politically involved in a lot of things. I thought it would be interesting to combine politics with an entertaining genre, so that you could have people discussing something in your novel, and the reader instead of putting the book down and saying, Oh, this is too didactic, would keep turning the pages. (McIntosh, 1991) Literature and experience 1: the family In what follows I shall proceed by first of all determining on a theoretical level the context which, in my opinion, finds expression in the novel. Irrespective of whether the authors themselves actually construct their novels in such a way as to translate theoretical knowledge into experiences, I present the individual experiences in the literature translated into theoretical theses. In a third step I test which other insights, which displacements of problems become possible with the route through literature. The two themes, the experiences dealt with in the novels, are family and abortion, two equally old and by now somewhat leathery themes of the women’s movement, but ones which have been thoroughly worked through theoretically. Marge Piercy, for example, in her novel Fly Away Home (1986), writes about the difficult process, as a woman, of achieving individuality. It is common in the women’s movement to understand the family form as fundamentally a prison for women. Theoretically we could formulate it like this, that ‘women must overthrow the bourgeois nuclear family, in order to establish their personality’ (Haug and Hauser, 1988:59). But theoretical insight into the limiting form does not connect simply to liberatory, mould-breaking practice. Even where analytical theses do, happily, intersect with personal experience, individual women do not necessarily succeed in linking their desires with their thoughts. The liberatory theses become literally unconvincing. Our theoretical assumptions refer to the construction of women as subjects, to the relation of separation between public and private, to the family as form of reproduction and the division of labour secured by it and vaguely to an overarching social structure. Let us remind ourselves how Piercy writes about the same context. First of all we meet Daria, a good-looking, happy, successful woman of the American middle class who is approaching middle age. She is on a flight home from a television broadcast in which, as usual, she skilfully presented her recipes (how as a working mother do I prepare, in only twenty minutes, a tasty and attractive meal for my family or my guests?) to her family (husband and two nearly adult daughters). Again and again she tells herself how happy she is, what a wonderful family she has, in contrast, for example, to her mother, who used herself up for her family, allowed herself to be dominated and deceived by her husband and was always unhappy; who put aside the finest things for a possible other life, who bided her time for so long, that she died waiting. Daria herself married up. Since then the movement has been inexorably upwards, for example into ever-larger houses. Social life too (represented by

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discerning guests at suppers exquisitely prepared by Daria) is satisfying. There is no resentment on her part at having to prepare all these meals, on the contrary, she loves it; it makes her important. Page after page familiarizes us with the happiness of the family. Good temper and cheerful considerateness are presented to us at such length, until the interminable nullity, boredom, dreariness and untruthfulness of this idyll overwhelms us as a kind of pain at words and reading. Then her husband’s decision comes like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky: he hands the family a whole pile of expensive Christmas presents (his wife for example, gets two dressing-gowns at once) plus the application for a separation. The pace of the novel changes. The wife’s initial despair turns into the woman’s self-doubt: what has the other woman got that I haven’t got? This feverish curiosity develops in two stages. The search for the other woman, which actually does take place as an undercover chase through streets and cafés and the discovery of whom does not lead to anything of interest, turns into an investigation of the actions of the man, who becomes more and more a stranger the closer she gets to him. She has to admit that she really has never been interested in him—so that his reproach was true—in what he, as a successful lawyer, did outside the family home. Looking for money spent on the lover, she finds huge amounts of money moved between accounts, a large proportion even using her maiden name, and for which she has no explanation. The original jealousy turns into an assiduous investigation of his deeds in the world of business and politics. The woman steps out of the private sexual relationship and begins to understand gender relationships as relationships of production in general, as a system which permeates the whole society. The man comes back one more time, proceeds entirely as a matter of course to the former common bedroom and bed, and she, just as straightforwardly, trusts his desire for a particularly extravagant dessert, which she spends considerable time preparing; because of the subsequent impossibility of shared enjoyment this proves, however, to be a foolish waste of time. Piercy works with the ambiguity of words. Daria finds allies in other people whom the man also deceived—tenants, whom he did everything in his power to turn out of their homes—and with whose help she uncovers extremely nasty property deals, going as far as the tacit acceptance of murder. Being well brought up, she asks the tenants demonstrating against her husband’s company into her home, so that she can prevent the disturbance coming to the attention of the neighbours and so avoid unpleasant gossip. Black people, the unemployed, the poor and the parents of large families behave so incongruously in her orderly living-room with its thick carpet, that after a while she herself no longer fits in. In her search for the truth not only does the husband in his business deals, which he embarked upon after he was unsuccessful as a candidate for political office, become ever more unfamiliar; she recognizes herself as someone who, in her hunger for security and safety and the harmony of her home, has helped to produce that terrible outside world full of calculation and sordidness. In the rest of the novel she changes everything: her relationship to herself and others and to the world; the shape of her life—more than thirty people a day go in and out of her new apartment, which is much smaller than her house was; her relationship to her daughters, to her new partner and the balancing of her activities—she takes her job seriously and in contrast to before also counts what she earns, because she depends on it; indeed, even

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her well-brought-up, well-tempered self is transformed into a more vulgar, impetuous and passionate person. She even learns to exercise violence, where it is necessary. Literature and theory

If we consider literature not according to the criteria of aesthetics or literary theory, but as material from which social scientific knowledge can be gained, then our theoretical presuppositions about the field in which Piercy writes will be expanded, deepened and shifted in a number of ways. There is first of all our conception that women’s feelings for or against the family are contradictory and that therefore clear decisions and actions are made impossible. Piercy writes differently about feelings. The principal character lives the individual emotions one after the other. At first there is only consent, comfort, approval and pride—contrary feelings are shifted on to the historically earlier person of the mother. That the daughter is happy in the same form in which the mother only experienced unhappiness, allows the reader to undermine in advance the possible attitude of understanding happiness and unhappiness as something for which people are themselves entirely responsible, and that the point, therefore, is to pose against the experience with the happy parental family one’s own quite different happy family. Happiness is as deceptive as the husband is a deceiver. Yet Piercy does not incite us to recognize the feelings of happiness, jealousy and of being deceived as false and to be denounced. On the contrary, she demonstrates that they can be pacified within the family form, as long as the form itself holds, and that they only turn against the individual as false hopes at the point of inevitable rupture. In another order which breaks the moorings and appropriations of the family, however, they acquire a different strength and a different significance. No element, no dimension is simply dismissed as incorrect, but all change their value for the principal character and her life. This is the second thesis. From the point of view of the wife, the husband appears as good, considerate and in order as long as she remains within the given order. But he can also ensure that she has to get out of the given order. As soon as he leaves her and gives the family notice—whereupon he also immediately wants to sell the house because it’s too big—those actions of hers which were previously valued as normal become absurd, superfluous, wrong. On her shopping day she does not know how much she should buy and why. She learns to live with a feeling of constant pain. Piercy draws the familiar into processes of transformation and so shows how lessons can be learned. In the scene in which the tenants threatened by her husband appear in a small demonstration in front of her house, the concept and feeling of neighbourhood are transformed. The five people first of all introduce themselves as the Save Our Neighbourhood group. ‘“What neighbourhood? I don’t understand.” One thing she was sure of was that they weren’t her neighbours.’ Even this brief remark shows the concept of neighbour to be a class concept and Daria knows that she is on the opposite side from those tenants who are not her neighbours. Piercy strengthens this certainty by a carefully distanced description of the individuals from Daria’s point of view and the subsequent loss of ambiguity, resulting from their attack on her neighbourhood. The ‘fat woman’ says, ‘“We’re bringing your shame home to you. You ruin our neighbourhood, so we’re going to cause a little trouble for you in yours…

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Come on guys, let’s make some noise.”’ (Piercy, 1986:106) The concepts ‘at home’ and ‘neighbourhood’ are not simply class concepts, nevertheless they are antagonistically occupied. Belonging determines what is proper to any person. So Daria immediately knows what she has to do. Piercy shows us that this knowledge is something she owes her husband. And although the latter is in the process of withdrawing himself from her life, she seems more than ever called upon to produce this intact world of ‘at home’ and ‘neighbourhood’. She did not want them parading in front of the house. Ross would be absolutely furious. Everybody on the street had doubtless seen them already and registered the information on the instantaneous gossip radar of the neighbourhood…It was her duty to defuse this scene…She must get supper started and she must deal quickly with them. Ross would be pleased by her quiet and efficient handling of a potentially nasty situation. She would disarm them by showing she had nothing whatsoever to hide. She would do the last thing they expected and thus lighten the confrontation and incidentally get them out of view of her neighbours. ‘Look, I insist there’s been a mistake, but why argue out here? Come inside and let’s sit down and talk.’ (106) Daria employs the acquired phrases of politeness and decency. In her inner dialogue she assures herself not of her own feelings, but of the necessity of her actions in terms of the anticipated feelings of her husband. It’s important not to make him angry or, rather, the other way round, to make him happy. His evening meal has to be made. Where her own will is mentioned it has already distanced itself from the domestic neighbourhood which is now defined as gossip-laden and as an instance of control. Daria does her well-brought-up best, she turns the demonstrators into guests and invites them in. Piercy, in this short scene, shows how the ‘weapons’ which this woman, who made a good marriage, still wants to employ on her husband’s behalf and for his protection, are, in a crisis, turned round against her. Inviting the not-neighbours into her own home, in order to hide them from her neighbours, becomes the beginning of her transformation into one of the others. Wherever she now develops feelings, she must interrogate herself, since, right after she allowed the strangers into the intimate sphere, it turns out that ‘Ross’ is far from ‘happy’, but on the contrary viewed this action as a further instance of estrangement, and reason for him to spend the night away from home. She needs more information which she can only find with the help of these demonstrators. She opens her eyes and sees that the longed-for return of the normality of career, growing wealth and power is a deception at the cost of the lives of other people, including herself. Her participation in only his life at home gives him the possibility of sealing the squandering of other lives into the foundation of his progress. By being blind to the world, insofar as it was not her home, she contributed to circumstances in which the lack of housing, indeed the absent right to home and life for many, was part of business calculation. By renouncing herself, renunciation becomes an attitude which he, the husband, can demand of anyone and everyone, without him even noticing it. She must escape her innocence, in which she remains guilty of not being a living person. Only at the court proceedings, as indignation rather than despair determines her feelings, does she learn that his estimation of her work as TV cook was as low as her own, a circumstance that led her to carefully plan such activity

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around his daily timetable; she cooked and froze small portions in advance, if she had to leave him ‘unprovided for’. He, on the other hand, simply used her earnings for daily expenditure, so that at the time of the divorce his own income, untouched by everyday concerns, also appeared as property saved by, and due to, him alone, as foundation of his power. She recognizes too late that he could always check what she earned and spent, but that she never knew what he did, either financially or otherwise. Even the banal accusation from everyday married life, that one party is not ‘interested’ in the other does not, for example receive literary confirmation as being quarrelsome and superfluous. Rather, Piercy shows that the accusation is not only justified, but that just such uninterest contains the possibility of everyday wrongdoing. Here, too, insight is gained by shifting the usual order in which accusations and feelings are cultivated. So we do not learn about the context of the active reproduction of oppression, that, for example, women have the wrong feelings, nor that they simply co-operate in the history of domination. Nevertheless, through the binding of life hopes and emotions to the form of the nuclear family, these so indispensable desires for happiness and the longing for life are turned into callous forerunners of unhappiness and renunciation of life. This affects not only individual women but is itself a condition for exploitation and injustice to flourish in general. The method by which Piercy allows her figures to gain knowledge is, in a way, through social disaster. Old feelings, explanations, actions and ways of behaving are inappropriate in altered constellations. Daria—as in the scene quoted above—has more and more often the feeling that she no longer knows ‘the right thing to do’, or that when she does ‘the right thing’, something wrong comes out of it. She begins to lack credibility in every way, even though earlier her credibility as wife was never at issue, was not in itself a value. Only in the community of deceived tenants can words and feelings, attitudes and actions be developed as belonging together, as being her own at all. The husband literally has to get out of the house for her not to exclusively reflect his anticipated expectations, but to develop a standard of her own. So we learn that there is a relationship between one’s own regard for oneself and the disregard of others and, therefore, that the inability to respect oneself does not cause rebelliousness against the disrespect of others. However, the inability to form an individuality of one’s own and to assert it with self-confidence is of no consequence, as long as it remains enclosed within the diverse demands of the family. In this way, Piercy seems to indicate that the relationship between the sexes stands protectively in front of, and makes us blind both to self-recognition, and to recognition of gender relations in society. So the phrase that love makes blind, enters life in this displaced way. For a while, there was a debate, particularly within the socialist women’s movement, as to which class or stratum married women really belonged: to that of their husbands or, rather, since they do not dispose of their husband’s assets at all, to the next lowest group or even to the exploited? Although such questions were posed for political and strategic reasons, they were fundamentally academic and had no consequences. But Piercy shows, both in the novel outlined above, as well as in others, that questions as to social belonging can nevertheless be very practical ones. For her marriage and the subsequent step-by-step upward climb in status, Daria, the principal character in Fly Away Home has acquired the corresponding manner. Appearance, temperament, education, way of speaking, desires and feelings, they

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are all fitted together as if fixed in the mould of the family. Since, despite professional activity in the social world, almost nothing of that really belongs to her after her husband decides he wants a divorce, all these dimensions stand around her like foreign bodies, or turn their activities against her, as with the problem of the demonstrators brought into the house. Her manner has literally lost its function, just as she has become property without an owner. So she joins together with others, who are propertyless and own nothing. The predictable male recourse to her as a possibly ownerless piece of property is first of all made impossible, since she moves in with a woman, a Puerto Rican with a child, who has been made homeless by the machinations of Daria’s former husband. Piercy shows, through frequent changes of position of ‘property’ and its varying meaning, that a woman only becomes mistress of herself if, together with other propertyless people, she tries to achieve access to the property of this world (insofar as it is needed—for housing, for example). In other circumstances, in which use is the general regulator, ownership as means of power and domination becomes property in a pathetic sense. To that extent, Piercy does not make things so simple for us, by taking up a position against property or for the propertyless. Instead, she suggests contesting property in its existing form. And strategically, she seems to suggest that, for women, alliances should not be looked for in the dominant culture and its representatives, but with all those who have dropped out of the dominant patterns or have not been admitted to them in the first place. In other novels she deals with the various groupings of the left from the 1960s to the 1980s, with hippies, draft dodgers, terrorists, socialist students. Frequently her central characters have come out of a diverse ethnic mixture, in which their beauty is ascribed to the share of groups especially discriminated against—for example, Jewish-Asian or American Indian-Irish, Black-Chinese and so on. The numerous additional and displaced theoretical dimensions of our theme of women’s oppression and family form do not themselves emerge as theses, but as a narrative about a particular woman’s life. That makes it lively and provocative. But does this not at the same time demonstrate a certain arbitrariness and limitation which therefore still means it is far removed from real knowledge? Or put another way: does this not pose once again in a quite exemplary fashion the problem of just how theoretical insight can be gained from individual experience? Piercy does not provide us with an answer to that. After all, she’s writing literature and not an academic paper on the subject. But we can derive one possible answer from the ordering of the literary material. The novel is written in such a way that it invites taking up a relationship, as woman, with the central character Daria. At the same time it is made impossible for this to take place as simple identification, because Daria constantly finds herself in new constellations, in which her old ideas, wishes and desires are radically altered and take new forms. That simultaneously distances identificatory engagement. As untypical as Daria’s actual life is, in comparison to other women’s lives, it is nevertheless typical in the various aspects of thought and feeling, which means that readers can occupy a different subject position. What links us as women to the central figure is the common fact of women’s oppression and hence the necessary and easy readiness to look for solutions. Perhaps we can describe the tension which enters the novel in this way as the fascination of solidarity. Piercy allows her principal character, Daria, to experiment with her life. Consequently, readers can constantly use sections of their own lives as a comparison and enter into productive

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discussion with the novel. Equality and inequality mean that readers gain a similar distance to themselves and their experiences, insofar as this is the process of development of the principal character of the novel. Individuality is gained as reflexive attitude. So women who have been gripped can turn into women who grasp something. For us as social scientists there further remains the methodological question of how theoretical knowledge can be acquired from experience. It is presumably correct that theoretical work with experiences is required in order to derive something generalizable from them. This difficult and wearisome work seems to be solved differently by women writers. They write down even experiences in such a way that what is worth demonstrating stands out clearly, irrespective of whether the stories as a whole are fiction or directly autobiographical. To that extent literary writings are material which virtually force themselves upon theoretical work. The new feminist literature dealing with the urgent problems and questions of the women’s movement is a stroke of luck, especially for feminism, which has to catch up on and work through the female experience of centuries. Literature and experience 2: appropriation of the body and abortion You shall make for yourself no ideal, neither an angel in heaven, nor a hero in a poem or a novel, neither one dreamed or imagined by the self; but you should love a man as he is. For nature, your mistress, is a strict godhead, which visits the raptures of maidens upon women unto the third and fourth age of the sentiments. As antiquated as many of these words of Schleiermacher may sound, they have lost none of their topicality if we really turn our attention to the question of women’s nature and women’s feelings. Let us take a second example, also by Piercy, her early novel Braided Lives. Again the theme is the formation of female identity. Piercy writes, ‘The core of falsity in the search for love: a woman gives herself to a man as if that got rid of the problem of making an identity, with a most personal god to reward, pardon or damn.’ (Piercy, 1983:349) For me it is the story of the possible and impossible appropriation of one’s own (female) body and in this way a book about abortion. Although in the novel we are taken back to the problems of girls growing up in the 1950s, while today’s generations are likely to have a greater ease and naturalness in relation to their bodies, the problem gains topicality from the recent discussion around paragraph 218 (the paragraph of the German legal code dealing with abortion). The issues of abortion have for years been bogged down in the polemics of the ruling parties: whether and at what point foetuses can be said to be living beings, whether murder or the protection of unborn life should have priority, whether the decision of the ‘mother’ against the ‘child’ is to be allowed at all. While from the other side there sounds, like an echo, the political response of feminism, that a woman’s body is her own property, and that therefore she has a right to abortion. Piercy begins, in a way, by turning the question round, and so with the problem that young women first of all have to appropriate their bodies, in order to live in them. The novel describes the apprentice years of Jill, a girl from a poor family, who goes to college with a

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grant so that she can escape the restrictions of home and become a poet. Here she can breathe, learn, think and write. She shares a room with her beloved cousin and hears about the latter’s relationships with the other sex for so long, till both are convinced that without the appropriate sexual experiences she is probably not normal. This seems all the more likely, since from an early age she already enjoyed physical, sensuous games with other girls, including her cousin. She did not understand this as sexuality. There begins the drudgery of first cinema visits with male students, who don’t interest her, and finally the intervention of the cousin, who looks for a poet for her. In between come the efforts to make the body look right without any money. The proper fitting bras with the little breast enlarging baskets have

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to be stolen. The summer draws on endlessly with, on the one hand, increasing closeness and, on the other, the impossibility of finding a room in which the sexual experiment can be carried out. Finally the holidays come and the borrowed car, which, however, requires introductions to each set of parents. After doubts as to whether she is deformed, since at first sex is impossible, changing to the conviction that premarital sex is disparaged because it was not made clear in time how boring and painful it is, to regular ‘love’ in a hiding-place in the woods, which brings with it consuming longing for love to the point of self-sacrifice, the first college year passes. Piercy describes the apprentice years as a time of constant worry about the problems of the body and the consequences of sexual love. This with reference to the position which studying occupies, to the organizing of rooms and meeting places, to the perception of other people, to self-presentation, and in between the terrible monthly question, whether one is pregnant, and the almost insoluble questions of actual pregnancy. The dominance of the body pushes into the background the question of how a love affair between two people can be given shape. It becomes altogether impossible to pose because of the exaggerated notions of morality of the parents’ generation, who link the loss of virginity with the necessity of marriage. As little as Jill wants to marry, she knows that her boy-friend’s rejection of marriage is nevertheless also proof that he does not love her. An abortion is at the centre of the novel. Here Piercy presents this theme of public parliamentary debates and simultaneous private silence as female tragedy. (Piercy, 1983:172ff) It begins with an act of control. Jill is at home during the holidays. She wakes up, her mother is standing over her dressing-table, calendar in hand. ‘“Jill, are you with child?”’ Unconvincing attempts at reassurance: “‘Only thirty-two days—it’s because of the turmoil.”’ Her mother needs only a few words, because as a woman she speaks from experience. Piercy allows her to express this placing within the female tradition both as a matter of pride and as knowing judgement. ‘“You’re regular like all my family.”’ Jill retreats into a placeless resistance. ‘“If you try to make me marry him now, I leave this house.”’ The threat is at once no threat at all, and yet to some extent there stands behind the words the possibility of disappearing altogether. ‘“I want an abortion.”’ Her mother summons up the counterarguments of morality and law. She mixes them with class experience and with subordination to patriarchal power. “‘Doctors are dirty, they charge a fortune and they blackmail you. It’s against the law, you can go to jail. Your father would kill me. They butcher you…”’ Against such overwhelming power there stands maternal authority and centuries of women’s experience. ‘“I’ll tell you what to do.”’ Her mother’s teaching speaks of survival in subordination and of its secret: the space of self-determination which remains within surrender is violence against the self. Consequently she begins her instructions with a reminder of the daughter’s weakness, which must now be overcome. ‘“You’ve always been a weakling and a coward. Sickly since you were seven. You’ll have to do this for yourself. You’ll do what I say or I’ll wash my hands of you.”’The threat draws the daughter into the chain of women, to whose violence she must surrender, if she wants to escape that other violence which issues from men and state. The mother uses the threat of male paternal authority against male medical power, about whose false cash motives she knows from female

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experience. If the daughter gives her body to those specialists, she will betray her to her father, who will allow nature to take its proper course. ‘“I’ll tell your father and he’ll make you have it.”’ Her mother knows that the situation is actually hopeless: the alliance against women consists of money, law, experts, paternal force and female nature. The most essential strength women need is for the struggle against their own nature, in comparison to which the other forces seem almost harmless. Piercy seals the entry into this women’s struggle with short sentences, which sound like the initiation to an ancient ordeal. ‘“Don’t think it’s easy. It’s hard, hard,”’ says her mother. And ‘“You’ll see that I’m strong enough,”’ replies the daughter and places herself under the authority of the mother, by repeating her words, ‘“Tell me what to do.”’ In what follows Piercy does not describe in detail what advice the mother gave, but she presents Jill’s struggles with and about her body like the struggle with the dragon in heroic legends, in which youths have to become adults and at the same time free themselves and others—usually maidens. But unlike them, Jill’s struggle was not with an external foe, but takes place in her own body, in which a fate wants to come to pass at her expense, and against which will power is not enough, simply because she is no longer a maiden. It’s easier for her to kill herself, than for her body to cease being a home for something else. Appropriately Piercy chooses the form of the inner monologue and sets the individual words in futile oppositions: Jill waits until the bath tub has filled with hot water. I sit on the toilet seat staring at my belly smooth and flat from harsh laxatives. Under the cushion of fat lurks the womb, spongy fist that will not open while in it cells divide and divide. The steam swirling hot from the tub smothers me as this body goes its animal way. Jill has to remind herself that the animal, in whose clutches she feels herself to be, is her own self as woman. With her genderization all earlier hopes of being human become ludicrous phantoms. I seldom felt feminine. I felt neuter. An angel of words. I could imagine myself a Hamlet, a Trotsky, a Donne. I thought I was projects, accomplishments, tastes: I am only an envelope of guts. This is what it is to be female, to be trapped. This sac of busy cells has its own private rhythms of creation and decay. Its viruses and cancers, its 28–day reminders of birth and death. My body can be taken over and used against my will as if I were a hall to be rented out. Hot baths with Epsom salt, hot baths with penny-royal: I am parboiled and still pregnant… Shakespeare had Hamlet walk in a graveyard and philosophize there on the transience of life and the takeover of the dead by worms. How can the hero overcome death? In the banality of the bathroom Piercy shows that for women death is in their lives, they themselves are vessels of unceasing growth and therefore of constant dying. So they enter history as species being. Jill continues talking to herself:

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Like my mother to cuddle a dark-haired girl-child and suckle it on my frustration and beat it for my hunger and bind it for my loneliness. To sacrifice myself for a girl-child whom I will try to teach to sacrifice herself, a chain of female suffering. In the ever hotter air the thoughts get muddled into ‘sick dreams’. Jill senses that the power which has taken up arms against her is, at the same time, love. Not simply that for her friend, that was merely the seduction she succumbed to, but that for the life growing in her and against her, that is, at the same time, her death. Piercy also organizes the dramaturgy in this field through the banalization of the ordinary and ‘normal’ questions. In the middle of this catastrophe of the recognition of being a woman, as body and for the rest of her life, the parents, the boyfriend turn up and continue discussing the problems of a possible marriage and particularly whether Jill’s background is middle class enough for Mike’s middle-class parental home. Jill’s mother refers indignantly to the ownership of a small house and a well-looked-after car which is only two years old. So she withdraws from Jill’s world, herself becomes a way that cannot be followed. Jill has to bring the struggle to an end. Once more her mother calls upon her: ‘“You are not trying hard enough.”’ She displays courage and jumps from ever taller pieces of furniture, until it becomes clear that she has to get to the end in another way. By now she has lost twenty pounds, but the being inside her is triumphant. She tries to take its home away and stabs herself in the chest with a knife. The injury is only a minor one and she realizes that this is only a game and that, Now I will go to work attacking my body in earnest…Thursday night I’m half dead and nausea is a constant state. My heart is beating erratically, and yet I am still pregnant. Upstairs in the hot and airless attic I prepare to follow mother’s last instructions. Through the floorboards the hoofbeats and gunshots of a Western arise. ‘Don’t cry out,’ my mother warned me. ‘Keep your mouth shut.’ Squatting in the ruins of my old sanctuary, by force I open my womb. Here Piercy brings together the ends of her story again. The small attic, which was retreat, place of her own, full of secrets and possibilities, the treasure from Jill’s childhood, had become too cramped for her purpose. She needs more air to breathe, space to think, people with whom she can argue and ‘change the world’. The way to the outside is, simultaneously, the way on which she recognizes what it means to be a woman, experiences herself as woman. The metaphors get in each other’s way. In the too-small room she knows that there is another small room inside her, in which space of hers is being seized hold of. She must enter it, in order to step out of the chain of women’s fates. The means is violence. There is no alternative. Jill almost loses her life in carrying out this action. What she did is therefore not a solution which can generally be recommended, but nevertheless necessary. Piercy fades in other female fates as impossible paths. There is the first much-loved school friend, who becomes a stranger to her when she marries at sixteen and has a child. Now she’s in prison with a life sentence, because she shot the man who threw her child downstairs. There’s the fellow student who has one child after another in order to hold on to the man who leaves in the end

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anyway. There’s the other student who is expelled from college because she has sexual relations with women. And finally there is her great love, her cousin Donna, who wants to combine marriage and profession, has to have an abortion and dies as a result. The last shock puts an end to every dream. In fast forward motion Piercy now takes the still possible solutions to their conclusion: Jill has to abandon her own wedding, which has already been announced. Distraught she disappears for a while from any purposeful and sensible life; then she organizes an emergency service for women who have to abort because otherwise they cannot survive as human beings. One means that she employs on its behalf is the blackmailing of doctors who have carried out abortions illegally. The book provides no final conclusion, but draws us into the various aspects of the possibilities women have of appropriating the female body and which must be discussed in relation to abortion. There is no simple way of growing into the body and becoming part of society with it. Questions of normality are at issue even with the first sensual stirrings which are related to another body. Cultural pressure especially from peers in heterosexual relationships soon raises questions of legality. In addition, both normality and legality are monitored by parents. The breaking of parents’ trust is not only a moral question, it draws in new, much more dramatic areas of danger. Contraceptives are not safe; if abortion is illegal, it costs so much that for a long time one’s whole life has to be dedicated to the organization of money, on top of the problem of the body and the painstakingly kept secret. The reality of pregnancies does not only put an end to the start of a possible life of one’s own, it also teaches: in patriarchal culture the woman’s body becomes a trap for her. But she can as little survive as a conscious sensual being without appropriating her own body as she can with it. What remains? After all, the long years of struggle by the women’s movement have at least made the possibilities of abortion easier, so that the measures to which Jill turned are no longer usual. Despite all the bigoted discussion of the restoration of the criminalization of any kind of abortion, the distress and practices of the generation of women described above belong to our history, and no longer to the present. And yet this novel about female apprenticeship reads like a condensation of the never changing questions about the female body and its appropriation by ourselves and by others. Solutions are still being fought for, in order to gain different dimensions of life: for love, without surrendering oneself, for the body and its sensuality, without thereby losing it or turning it, against one’s will, into the mere bearer of further life, without oneself already having life yet. Once again I ask myself the question, what knowledge this literary approach to female experiences has given me. Certainly I could now make a list of aspects whose relationship I had previously missed. The most important, however, seems to me to be the position of knowledge itself. This, as I read it from these novels, does not so much consist of the sum of new information, of results, new links and discoveries, but more of the way in which readers become involved. Knowledge, it becomes clear, can be nothing outside ourselves or won in itself, but is the process in which we are actively implicated. For example, through getting to grips with the second novel, Piercy suggests to me that with regard to the problem of the female body and its ‘humanity’ there are many open questions but not yet any real solutions. These cannot be sought in an exchange with the male sex, because in relation to this same female body it appears as a kind of executor of natural history or of morality and law, when, for

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example, whoever is involved is ready for marriage and fatherhood. Although the body belongs to each person individually, it is a problem for the whole female sex. Therefore it is necessary and also historical practice that women’s experiences are passed on and that actions take place on that foundation. But these experiences are themselves set into the history of women’s oppression and into natural history. Only slowly are women emerging from conditions of force. Again women are getting together and organizing emergency services, making use of existing knowledge and combining it with that regarded by them as useful. The legalization of abortion is still far removed from the solution of a sensual and liveable relationship of women to their bodies. Large-scale women’s organisations remain necessary. Women’s future has still to be won. The knowledge which I was looking for is therefore: the novels stimulate readers to appropriate knowledge about themselves and their relationship to their bodies, in sexual relationships and their relationship to the world and to begin this process as a great debate. They are therefore an attempt to make conscious the history of female people. Perhaps one can agree with Sarah Schulman: ‘Marginal people know how they live and how the people of the dominant culture live. But dominant culture people only know how they live. The people in power have the least information.’ Schulman, it is true, writes about subcultures, about the marginalized, those who exclude themselves, about lesbians and gays; but Marge Piercy also teaches us, that in a society in which women do not belong to the ruling culture, precisely because it is a male one, the cultural alliance with all those who equally do not belong to the ruling culture is imperative. From this perspective part of the necessary knowledge about women and their place in society, as well as about human society as a whole, could be gained from feminist literature. One will read that the themes which the new feminist literature deals with can also not simply be understood and dismissed as women’s themes. And yet today it requires women to take up these themes of life and death, of AIDs and politics, of war and fascism, of common crimes just as much as the uncommon ones, in an adequate way, that is, in terms of their real magnitude and significance for humanity. Notes Frigga Haug teaches sociology and social psychology at Hochschule für Wirtschaft and Politik in Hamburg. She also teaches women’s studies at Hamburg University and Marxism at the Free University of Berlin. She has been active as a socialist feminist for twenty years and an editor of Das Argument for almost thirty years. She has contributed to fifteen often collectively written books; of these, Female Sexualization was published in English by Verso in 1987 and Beyond Female Masochism in 1992. 1 See, for instance Haug, 1987 and Haug, 1992.

References HAUG, Frigga (1992) Beyond Female Masochism: Memory-Work and Politics London: Verso. HAUG, Frigga and others (1987) Female Sexualization London: Verso.

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HAUG, Frigga and HAUSER, Kornelia (1988) ‘Zeit für mich—über das Privatisieren, in HAUG and HAUSER edition, Subjekt Frau Berlin: Argument. MCINTOSH, Sheila (1991) ‘Feminist mystery writer Barbara Wilson. An interview’ Sojourner: The Women’s Forum May . PIERCY, Marge (1983) Braided Lives London: Pan. ——(1986) Fly Away Home Harmondsworth: Penguin. SCHULMAN, Sarah (1990) ‘Helen Birch talks to Sarah Schulman’ City Limits March.

UNLEARNING PATRIARCHY: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT IN MARGE PIERCY’S FLY AWAY

HOME

Kornelia Hauser

The subject of sexuality, as critique of its repression, was central to feminism from a very early point. As long ago as 1947 Simone de Beauvoir interrogated the writings of Montherlant, Lawrence, Breton and Stendhal to discover the underlying fantasies and myths which were attached to the word ‘woman’. In 1969 Kate Millet found in the works of Mailer, Henry Miller and Lawrence dominant constructions of sexuality in which male penetration was undertaken with the purpose of subordinating the female. The feminist analysis of literature written by men is a critique of sexual culture in which liberation of the sexual senses and of sensuality was not found to be possible. The two authors wanted to show that male desire is on the one hand fused with mastery of the object and, on the other, that in the course of the development of patriarchy, sexuality had become altogether equated with male pleasure and therefore with structures of power and powerlessness, constructions of active and passive and ruler and ruled. The ideas of liberation did not simply aim at ‘better sex’, at other sexual practices or at the simple disclosure of the female organs of pleasure, but another sexuality not based purely on reproduction, at the possibility of learning with the body and—what was even more important—of unlearning acquired cultural practices. The aim was to create a literature of revolt, which above all wanted to communicate that the abandonment of the old ways of living was possible and pleasurable, that new shores can be reached even in the here and now, that not everything has to remain as it was. As, with the years, the revolt became part of everyday life and also more taken for granted, the processes of self-transformation could themselves become the subject matter of literature. Now problems focus upon the attempt to establish a space of belonging while maintaining feminist resistance. I want to take as my subject matter three of the explicit sex scenes in Marge Piercy’s Fly Away Home (1986). I want to think about the significance of emotion, of the body, of erotic feelings for individual change, but also to investigate the charged question of whether it is possible to represent changes through sex scenes at all. The representation of sex stimulates the senses, which quickly satisfy themselves by replenishment of the imagination along familiar channels. Does feminist literature interrupt traditional—male-determined—forms of arousal and reaction, even when it is heterosexual?

Feminist Review No 42, Autumn 1992

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The female body is more familiar to us from literature as hindrance to emancipation: the unwanted child, the resort to prostitution, the erotic attraction to the violent man, love in the burdensome form of marriage, the obsession with submission and so on. The other side is the potential for qualitatively different human relationships; the human emerging within stillexisting patriarchy. Piercy’s novel shows both dimensions. (For the context of the novel, see the contribution by Frigga Haug in this issue.)

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The familiar In the first scene Daria and Ross, a couple who have been married for many years are brought together. He kissed her, very gently. The shape of his long body through the layers of nylon and cotton struck her into excitement so intense she felt a vast ache, a slow painful burn. She refused to let herself remember how long it had been since they had made love, but the room had been warm and the air conditioner on, as it was tonight. The lack of easy regular habit gave an air of awkwardness to their embraces—‘Sorry, my elbow’—that she associated with their lovemaking years before, when she had still been four-fifths a virgin after marriage and his experiences had been accumulated through fumbled groping and fast copulating in the backseats of cars. They were a little tentative…(Piercy, 1986:68–9) What’s missing when sex hasn’t happened for a while? Piercy offers three possibilities: desire is surprisingly intense, there is awkwardness between the married couple, the sexual techniques seem to have gone. It is as if the previously determined situation was opening out into one still to be shaped. However, the compressed metaphor of ‘virgin’ shuts what is open into the already known. Only someone who knows nothing, can still do something different on the terrain of the body, can learn something. The dream of every man—to make a virgin his lover—is also dreamed by women: she would like to be the virgin who does not yet know anything and for whom all excitement/arousal is still to come. This self-conception of the innocent woman can also be read in a sense critical of patriarchy. Why not go back to the beginning again and again, in order to recover precisely this process of learning and experience, or—as in Daria’s case, back to it in order to enrich the illusion of ‘Before’? Their own imaginary virginity is an aphrodisiac for women. The sharp bones of his body stuck into her with an angular insistence they had lacked for a long time. Any caress tonight made her breath catch and then run ragged and fast as white water. She felt as if she could come to orgasm from kissing, sucking his mouth, his tongue, his lips. She thought, It is like eating, it is nourishment and I’ve been starving. For a moment as he came in she hurt a little, it was that long since they had, and then she felt fine. She imagined from what she had seen of her brothers that Ross was probably unusually large, but she had no other basis of comparison. She always prepared herself for him, often using jelly; but tonight she was so wet the lack did not matter. How beautiful it was to feel him on her, in her again, in the intimacy that was the core and the symbol of all the rest. Here was the heart of being a couple, coupling. At last…Close again, joined together…He paced himself, moving up against her in a new way that she liked. It took her a while to come but then she did, with a great sighing of her whole body, a gusting through her and then a vast ease, as if her body were big as a sandbar and shining from within with its own soft red glow. The aftershine was with her long after he had changed his pace, building up to his orgasm, giving that deep whistling

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moan that seemed to issue from the bottom of his belly as he too came. They were lovers again, again man and wife, united, one body renewing itself. They were we again. Through the wall came Robin’s high piercing laugh, her child, his child. For the first time in days she fell asleep at once, softly drifting. (69–70) For Daria sexual intercourse with her husband is above all a symbolic act which reseals the present (as union) and shows the future. Because of the absence of anything else in common the sexual assumes a pre-eminence, by which the whole of their common life has to prove itself. Intensification can be provided by the fruits of sexuality: children. They are a visible sign of ‘joint production’. Questions of sexual pleasure with reference to the self must be set aside in the careful observation of the act, in the classification of the actions. This particularly social act acquires its meaning for Daria through mere physiological reaction. Freud would refer to contractions and the excretion of bodily fluids. Daria’s self-determined pleasure briefly appears to her as something to be shaped by herself. The activities are hers. That words like ‘eating’ and ‘nourishment’ occur to her may be related to her profession—as a determining social form—or to the absence of formulas of ownership, ideas of property and power. In this scene Piercy shows the gentle power of the habitual. From Daria’s perspective the sexual act remains to an extent habitual, unaltered by new feelings or her separate wishes; sometimes she can omit the preparation for it, if the body shows its signs. Her function is to satisfy the immediate male sexual lust. She knows that her orgasm is part of his satisfaction. She has an instrumental relationship to her body, which serves her, by serving him. She satisfies a social need. She knows what he knows about sex and that remains habitual for as long as it simply happens to her and she experiences it as a gift. She does not live unhappily in this passivity, enjoys having the man surprise her with a new technique, sticks to the sequence in which the orgasms are distributed (even if she then has to count the number of times), she registers her climax as audible relinquishment just as she does his. After that she has all the signs which provide her with the actual information: those of belonging together, of love, of the one body, of the realized marriage. Sex is for her the proof of the functioning of the social form, which is itself again a sign for love. The social of the sexual, its symbolism which overburdens sexual lust, its human interactive dimensions pointing far beyond itself, are for Daria the core of all activities. This corresponds to a physical core, a centrepiece of the patriarchal construction of sexuality, the vagina, as symbol of everything that a woman should be for men. Piercy works even at the level of the language itself with the absence of an individually assignable vagina, as against the presence of a universal feminine, which every man is looking for (‘in the intimacy that was the core and the symbol of all the rest’). She lets Daria activate this reduction and not the man. This universal feminine originates in a culture which will not and cannot differentially apply the singular and the plural form to women. The individual woman only acquires her distinctiveness in the setting of private property—for example, of marriage. As ‘my wife’ she is evidence of a share of the cake which one will not allow to be disputed. The universal feminine is appropriated by both sexes; for her it can also become effective as the imminent threat of being replaced by another (vagina) at any time. She is not herself, cannot become it in male discourse and desire; she is representative of a place desired by men.

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‘Oh could I but love you in you, not all women’ (Volker Braun) is the wish of the man for the possibility of being able to love an individual and not a collective idea. Obstructed by himself, he will try to rule over all women in his imagination, until he has learned the distinction. The new In the following scene Daria and Tom, the new friend, make love for the first time. He was the more active and she the more acted upon, as it had been in the early years with Ross, but Tom did not otherwise remind her of her husband. His body felt different…He was more attentive to her reactions than she was used to. Over the years women must have instructed him about their bodies until he knew many different caresses and zones of arousal. He did not fall into her and flail there but felt his way by trial and response, tuning himself into her breathing, her little movements, her hands and flesh responding against him. Again she had the sense of an exhausting control in charge, a restraint that totally directed him. At last he slowly urged his penis into her, sliding himself gradually forward until she lunged to complete the coupling. He moved carefully in her for perhaps a minute and then the control blew. With a deep moan he changed and instead of carefully levering himself he writhed and bucked and heaved and seemed to spread out through her. She stopped judging him as a lover. She stopped thinking. For a period of suspension she simply moved with him and felt him in and around her, felt him like a storm or like her own flesh in strange high breaking waves. When he had come at last and lay inert and winded on her and then slid slowly out and off, she kept her arm around him. There they were landed back in reality, all covers flung off, his body runneled in sweat that had drenched her too…(244–5) Given the qualification that a marriage of many years cannot be directly compared with the ‘first time’—what has changed? First of all Daria responds differently from before to a social action: of restraint, of control. Ross’s activities were taken as actual love; with Tom they are recognizable as techniques of love. The male sex drive can also be satisfied unsociably. With Tom it becomes clear that sex has one goal and is not, for him, a sign of something else. Finally it is even a lonely business, only mitigated by the fact that the loss of control also involves the loss of this perception. The greater attentiveness to her becomes visible as a learned relationship with the female body. As yet there is no sequence to be adhered to; the exchange of experiences, of accumulated knowledge is taken for what it is. Nothing is natural between man and woman, everything is acquired. It seems to me significant that Piercy shows the man as knowledgeable through learning about the female body, whereas women know nothing or need to know nothing about men. Women’s zones of arousal are numerous and widely distributed; the achievement of orgasm for him eternally the same. The man is simple and there is nothing to be discovered, the woman, whom he does not relate directly to his needs, is unknown to him and has to be explored. For Daria the sexual act is no mere voyage of discovery with reference to another body, another personality or herself. On the

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contrary: Daria is forced to be astonished at herself, she gets into contradiction with herself. She recognizes the sexual act as a temporary togetherness, which will be followed by that separation, which once again is the condition of a sexual union. Put another way: evidently she has learned that the sexual act as a joint activity is also a production, just like any other—cultural, political, economic—production. Nothing stands for an-other, so that each in itself can be qualified. ‘You didn’t come,’ he said in a minute. ‘I haven’t done this in months. I don’t think I could ever come the first time with anyone, although I’m not generalizing from much of a sample…’ He was not done with her. He slipped his hand between her thighs and began to work on her with a finger inside and finger on her clitoris. She felt embarrassed at first. She was used to being excited before entry, but in her limited experience, if Ross was not able to make her come by intercourse, that was the end of it until next time. It felt oddly naked and selfish to lie with a man working on her and her reactions exposed and apparent and singular. ‘You don’t have to do that.’ ‘But I want to.’ She decided to believe him. She relaxed and floated on the sensations. The orgasm that finally released her was neither deep nor prolonged, but that she felt it at all surprised her. She was beset by questions she could not or did not dare formulate. She was also exhausted. Between them they pulled the covers roughly over them. As she lay in his arms trying to decide how to begin talking over what had happened, she realized from his breathing that he was asleep, and then she was. (244–6) Daria, however, makes a discovery too: whereas previously she always allowed herself to be made love to and could gain lightness in that, because she could assume that passively allowing herself to be loved was also good for the man (and sometimes things just didn’t work out for her), she now learns that when it is no longer good for him, the same situation can appear self-additive for her. The labour of the other on her body makes her become an object to herself. The dialectic of the subject-object relationship makes it possible for her, at that moment, to shape herself into a subject, in which she develops a particularly negative feeling towards herself as object. She was object, when, with Ross, she lived sex as fate. And she is now object at the moment in which she is torn out of the old seemingly immovable order and ‘afterwards’ allows herself to be satisfied. Piercy loads the significance of sexual satisfaction through orgasm and makes it questionable by presenting an ensemble of practices which also makes the process technical and banal. The qualification of the sexual in itself becomes a production which loses the subjective, emphatic significance of ‘creative manufacture’, in favour of sweat-soaked labour, the manipulation of something or someone. Tools and their use become central as well as the result of the expenditure of energy. Everything functions. Goal and ending are identical. Orgasm—indicated by Daria in the scene as being above all a matter of interpersonal skills, precisely not capable of being manufactured at any time, is shown to be a matter of stimulus and response. Piercy’s novel resists or, more strongly, opposes a reading which assumes that the singular problems which appear in the direct relationships of the sexes could bear singular answers or

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solutions. She proceeds from the external framing conditions, within which the solutions to structural problems (such as represented by relations between the sexes) would be voluntaristic and would therefore necessarily fail. However, she also proceeds from internal framing conditions, which are admittedly dependent on the external ones, which are more capable of alteration than their apparent situation would imply. The playful When she came back to her room, she was quick with energy, almost tormented by it: too much rich food in the middle of the day had made her drowsy at first. Now thoroughly digested, it made her jumpy, over-energized. Something about Tom waiting for her was exciting. Whether he finally moved in or didn’t, she wanted to keep this sense of herself as a separate active private person: not to live in a relationship as if in a house …She threw herself on top of him and made love, carried along by her energy. Between them was an ease in bed that she found excited her immensely. If she thought of something, such an impulse as she was experiencing now, she could try it out without dire punishment if her impulse did not ignite him. Firmly she held his hands above his head. Of course he was stronger than she, but the play force of the gesture seemed to excite him also. She faced over his body the massive headboard he had carved with crescent moons. Then she straddled him and kissed him from earlobe to hollow of throat, from the plump nipples with their surrounding aureoles of silky black hair down the slopes of his belly. Her fingers kneaded the great muscles of his thighs until she tantalized his standing purplish headed prick with her hair, with the caresses of her hanging breasts, the lightest brush of her lips, the faintest pressure of her teeth, before she let loose his hands and mounted him. A sense of permission between them allowed to play. She had the sense of rediscovering some pleasure lost since childhood; sometimes she felt as if they were going deep into wordless mammalian physicality, the sense of good earthy body meeting good earthy body. (386–7) The final sex scene with her lover Tom shows the now reordered elements in the social ensemble of the sexual. Prerequisite—and not result—of a different sexuality is the sovereign, independent woman, Daria. The different perception of the lover is prerequisite and presumably the result of different sexual practices. The relationship is no longer to be seen as something closed off in itself (as a house), but is itself a dimension of the outside world, to which Daria belongs just as much as Tom. Without wishing to force a relationship, it is nevertheless evident that Daria’s sexual pleasures have learned to withstand this simple inside-outside opposition. The sexual power of the male, which—as Millet analyzed—involved the equation of sexual activities (the entering of a woman, taking possession of her, the penetration of the inner space) with the subordination of women, is disrupted in Piercy’s account. The differences in the linguistic representation of the three scenes only becomes clear in the third one: Ross possessed no named sexual organs (he ‘was’ large), they disappeared in the general sign system whose result was supposed to be love and orgasm. She herself

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possessed a ‘core’, unnamed and above all unquestioned self-evident counterpart to his ‘something’. Tom was provided with a ‘penis’ on the first occasion; the distanced language of medical statements turned the organ of pleasure into a tool. Her ‘clitoris’ thereby achieved the same status as the penis: appropriate working equipment functioning within divisions of labour ‘detached’ from body and soul. If in the first scene the goal was the confirmation of love in the ideological equation of sex and love, in the second it became reduced to a banal physical consequence. In the last version, the way becomes central. And the appropriation of the particular body of the other belongs to the way, his body becomes landscape in language also. The parts of the body lose their functional determinations; every part can do everything. Daria gave up sex as fate in favour of pleasure in her own activity. The act of fusion is not one in which she surrenders/loses or forgets herself for something else, an (ideological) third party, or for him, but the common feature is abandonment in the realm of the natural. Sex has been removed from the responsibility for social processes, but has become social through the joint intensification of pleasure and can therefore become natural. Daria assembles herself in loving, she rediscovers herself. The English word ‘earthy’ refers not only to the soil but also implies the earthly. Out of the ideological conceptions of the sexual which have been praised up to the skies, Daria comes down to the earth of direct selfreferring and shared pleasure. Herbert Marcuse’s apocalyptic vision at the beginning of the 1970s, that the social equality of the sexes would produce a sexual loss of tension, is stood on its feet by Piercy. Equality— understood here as the meeting of two independent subjects—can lead to entry into the ‘gender game’, in which the power-powerlessness structure and its naturalized male-female distribution is replaced by the doing and allowing to be done game, in which there is no gender allocation. Only then are socio-sexual meanings also made available for erotic practices in an egalitarian way, without immediately becoming congealed social characters once more (sado-maso fixations, butch-femme roles, etc.). Nevertheless, the text leaves open whether Tom is aroused by Daria’s strength, by her activities, because it is a game, the arousal therefore deriving from patriarchal reality. The woman ‘riding’ on the man frequently appears in soft porn, for example. However, Piercy interrupts the pornographic stimulus: she omits everything which could put the imagination into fixed channels, that is, she omits the reactions—as voice, as changes in the body, as concrete imaginable movements. She abstracts and yet she does not negate an involvement of all the senses. My impression is that in the first scene—Daria with her husband—she attends to the attachment of feelings and idea to their ideological content. In the ideology of fusion, of melting together, all women are socialized. Before every experience we already know how ‘it’ is supposed to feel. The separation of pleasure and ‘union’ can therefore be translated into other desires, which are more strongly filled with the preconditions of the female body, as well as concerned with the patriarchal conceptions branded on the senses. We by no means want to idealize Piercy’s demonstrations as a successful process of liberation encompassing all the senses. She develops conditions of possibility, which are within the framework of the capitalist-patriarchal order of society; she shows, rather, what can still be gained within the bourgeois social order, that there are still some things women can achieve (and what they are), if the precondition of an active external relationship is

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given. What seems central to us, however, is the degree to which she links liberation with sensuality. A circumstance which, in this way, probably only applies to women who can rise from a dominated position to a position of acting in interpersonal relationships. Women’s historically experienced dependence on men—economically, socially, psychologically—can take them towards both protecting an acquired and struggled for independence, as well as remembering the need for binding relationships free of domination as unfilled hope. The undermining of the social, political and cultural determination of femaleness can bear fruit directly, which involve all the senses. Piercy shows simultaneously that this is not work carried out by men and women together. However exclusively she addresses herself in Fly Away Home to heterosexual practices, she just as radically describes the processes of transformation of her protagonist as achievements in relation to and against the lover. It becomes clear that the new-won land has to be protected and that as such it cannot be shared with men. Sexuality is presented in relationship to self-confidence and the latter in turn as the result of social forms into which certain practices are poured. Women must leave behind the sometimes seductive social forms prescribed for them, in order to establish their emotions. Note Kornelia Hauser is a sociologist who teaches women’s studies at Bielefeld University. She has been active in feminist politics for over a decade. She wrote her thesis on ‘Female socialization and the public/private split’ and is currently completing a study of gender relations in the literature of the GDR. She has worked on four collective books and has been on the women’s editorial board of Das Argument for ten years. Reference PIERCY, Marge (1986) Fly Away Home, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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ARE THEY READING US? Feminist Teenage Fiction Julia Bard

Children stop reading when they reach their teens, which upsets not only teachers but also publishers under economic pressure and with an eye to the future. Mainstream publishers routinely categorize literature as for ‘adults’ or ‘children’, and subdivide children’s books by age—‘for older children’—and by gender. Classifying books in this way raises both ideological and practical difficulties. Where does the line between childhood and adulthood fall? Is the distinction between power and powerlessness, experience and innocence, competence and incompetence, paid work and study? Are the preoccupations and literary needs of children fundamentally different from those of adults or is the distinction a way of opening up new markets? And when and why do girls’ books start to differ from boys’? I was one of those teenagers who stopped reading, or that is how I remembered it. When I came to write this article and listed some of the fiction that I read out of school between the ages of eleven and seventeen, I was surprised. It turned out to be a motley collection, ranging from The Five Chimneys—about Auschwitz—Cry the Beloved Country and The Grapes of Wrath via Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins to Agatha Christie and James Bond. A few of these books I found lying about the house but, since I was not an official ‘reader’, I am not sure anyone was aware that I read them, cried over them, judged them, learnt through them and used them as a breathing space in the most stressful and difficult period of my life. C.S.Lewis said, ‘No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty’ (Meek et al., 1977:85). The reality, as anyone who works or lives with children will know, is that many children’s books are banal and simple minded, with a lifespan of minutes rather than years. But they sell. Children’s publishing has doubled in the last ten years, and often subsidizes adult fiction lists. The recession has driven publishers to draw ever more detailed definitions of their potential readers, by age, class, gender and so on. The positive interpretation is that they are sensitively targeting their readers and fulfilling a previously unmet need. A more cynical view is that they are moulding the market to fit their economic requirements. There are probably elements of both views, but which has more influence is particularly hard to assess for children’s books which are almost invariably chosen and bought by adults. This is equally true of literature directed at teenagers or ‘young adults’. The Women’s Press ‘Livewire’ series and Virago ‘Upstarts’ are aimed at girls and young women. Both lists were

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launched along similar lines in 1987 but have since diverged, with The Women’s Press specializing in fiction, and Virago concentrating on non-fiction (though their fiction titles are still available). Carole Spedding of The Women’s Press says: ‘Adults—teachers and carers— are the main buyers, and the biggest sales of this series are in schools. We couldn’t market them directly, though the Livewire list now has a reputation among young adults themselves. This is because we have tried to promote young women as writers, and we—The Women’s Press and the authors—go into schools and talk to the readers.’ Harriet Spicer, Managing Director of Virago, says there are serious difficulties in reaching young adult readers and their parents and teachers. ‘Bitter-Sweet Dreams, which was written by Just 17 readers, has been our best-selling title in the Upstarts series by a long way, because as well as being a wonderful book, it was promoted through the magazine. Books for teenagers need a particular sort of coverage because the adult papers give them scant attention.’ A dearth of decent ‘young adult’ fiction may partially explain teenagers’ abandonment of reading, and the commitment of these two houses to redressing that balance is very welcome. But the books themselves are such an extraordinary mixture, ranging from the compelling to the almost unreadable that it is almost impossible to fathom the criteria on which acceptance for publication is based. Nicci Gerrard, reviewing several titles in the Virago series (New Statesman & Society, 7 July 1989) said: ‘Fiction for young adults is like that little girl who had a curl right in the middle of her forehead—when its’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad it’s horrid. The intense, gauche and lustful emotions of adolescence, which can be so embarrassing in retrospect, turn teenage novels into minefields of potential clichés.’ City Sax by Lorna Read is just such a minefield. The story of a seventeen-year-old who dreams of becoming a successful musician, the book was too pedestrian for any hot-blooded teenager, and too preoccupied with fancying the music teacher for any younger child. The attractive, middle-aged teacher, unbelievably, kept his hands off the talented heroine who fruitlessly threw herself at him. Fourteen-year-old Clara Barnes-Gutteridge said of this, and of Both Feet Off the Ground by Barbara Hughes: They remind me of Noel Streatfield novels, and are both very boring books.’ That put me in my place. I had enjoyed the Barbara Hughes novel about a working-class girl who painfully cuts loose from her parents to study dance then, on her own terms, rebuilds her relationship with them. The author has drawn complex characters and has not avoided the pain of moral dilemmas which change the course of people’s lives. In City Sax, in contrast, the heroine’s need to rescue herself from her parents’ low-class taste in furniture and preference for sweet sherry, seems to obviate any need to worry about their feelings. The most challenging of all the books I read was The Young Widow by M.K.Indira. The true story of a south Indian girl who was married at eight, widowed at thirteen and lived to 112, this novel is an uncompromising portrait of the heroine’s imprisoned existence. But, paradoxically, her isolation and invisibility liberate her to develop understanding and a critique of the rigid rules that govern her life. In old age she finds the courage to break out and be true to her own moral sense. This subversive strand is missing from many of these novels. Get a Life by Jenny Pausacker has gutsy girls, the pressures of adolescence, an unfolding lesbian relationship but,

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ultimately, a sense that concealed in the story are otherwise indigestible feminist messages. In there are all the required social issues: racism, sexism, homophobia, a dash of divorce and a sliver of step-parents; stir thoroughly and call it a novel. But teenagers aren’t daft. They’ll read that stuff if their teachers make them, but recognize its dishonesty at a glance. Clara Barnes-Gutteridge again: ‘Some of the books are written as if the author doesn’t believe they are being true feminists and good citizens if they don’t include racism, sexism and homosexuality in their novels. For instance in Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden (on the whole a vivid, moving and challenging description of two girls falling in love and facing the wrath of a viciously homophobic world), the heroine says: “I’ve always liked living there although it does have a tendency to be a bit dull in that nearly everyone is white…”’ (my parentheses). Maurice Sendak, the author and illustrator who has produced such marvellous books as Where the Wild Things Are and most recently I Saw Esau (edited by Iona and Peter Opie) rails against such self-conscious ‘educating’: ‘People think writing a children’s book means you have to teach children something. The possibility that you just write a yarn to amuse them seems not correct…That’s where I got into trouble, because nobody could figure out what the moral was. They were horrified.’ (The Times, 2 May 1992). Such a child-centred view has the potential to be genuinely subversive, but even a huge and prolific talent like his is vulnerable to the spurious moralizing of critics. The sort who complain that Sendak’s books will frighten the children while staying silent about a ‘culture which takes children to watch Rambo films where the audience laughs as heads are shot off. Lynette Gottlieb is Head of Year 11 (fifteen to sixteen year olds) in the English Department at Parliament Hill, a large girls’ comprehensive school in north-west London. The department has developed a feminist approach to teaching literature which includes choosing ‘adult’ fiction by women, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and authors like Kate Chopin and Doris Lessing as a basis for exploring issues like women’s isolation. They also encourage students to analyze critically the gender bias of more traditional texts. Lynette Gottlieb says of secondary-school girls: The younger ones, if they read at all, enjoy authors like Judy Blume, but they stop reading quite quickly. I think it’s because nothing caters for them. There are books which hit the market at about the age of twelve, then there’s nothing except Mills & Boon that they would choose to read.’ Parliament Hill, though, has generated an interest in a range of largely contemporary literature by women. ‘In the end, though,’ says Lynette Gottlieb, we are conscious that you have to look at everything from a feminist viewpoint, including, for example, classic poetry like Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott and Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman. This has generated some stormy but fruitful discussions in sixth-form classes where pupils from the boys’ school next door join the girls.’ But the new O-level courses will stifle such creative and ground-breaking work by replacing a 100 per cent coursework, dual language and literature certificate with two separate courses. Seventy per cent of the new English literature certificate will be assessed on exams, and 70 per cent of the texts must include Shakespeare and pre-20th-century authors. Despite attempts by the somewhat unhappy exam boards to offset the damage by asking interesting

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questions, such a sterile and proscriptive approach can only undermine all the work being done to maintain children’s interest in reading. Helen Walker, a senior librarian with responsibility for secondary schools in an inner-city schools library service is worried about how this will affect publishers. Teenage fiction has come on in leaps and bounds,’ she says, ‘and there’s a lot of really terrific stuff, though publishers don’t always get it right. It’s always a problem getting teenagers into libraries, but having good stuff there, aimed at them, makes a big difference.’ The ‘young adult’ category is, in Helen Walker’s experience, successful when it validates and reflects its readers’ lives. But much of it dates as quickly as teenagers pass into adulthood. ‘Kiesha by Millie Murray was great when it was first published’, she says. There aren’t many books about black teenagers. The way it used language was very good. That book went out consistently from the public library where I used to work, and the author came to do a session with teenagers. But Kiesha’s dated now. The clothes were very late eighties, and it was full of references to Michael Jackson. Millie Murray has written another novel since but it’s not quite as good. She’s not a very good writer; she seems to put ideas down just as they occur to her, but that doesn’t matter so much for teenage fiction.’ This encapsulates the weakness of several of these books. The lifespan of any novel depends on many factors, one of which may be the datedness of its references. Novels which aim at a readership narrowly defined by age and gender are more vulnerable to such dating, but crafting them skilfully would retain the colloquial style while making those references accessible to more than one generation of teenagers—and, indeed, to adults. Clara BarnesGutteridge may be critical of Noel Streatfield books but (when she was younger) she read, understood and enjoyed them, as will girls to come. Not every book can be a classic, but writing and marketing transient novels for a tiny slice of society starts to make them look disguised versions of the magazines which schools wouldn’t buy and, in a recession, the girls can’t afford. Fourteen-year-old Clara said: I’m not sure what age group would read these books. Most people my age either read “adult” books, “boarding school” books or nothing at all. I avoid the teenage section in bookshops because most of the books are so terrible.’ This is the kind of judgement that teenagers make when they feel they are being patronized. Her positive response to some of the books belies her general reaction to their categorization as ‘teenage fiction’. Her negative reaction to the more clichéd titles comes from the implication that teenagers themselves think in clichés. Harriet Spicer of Virago says: ‘If I’m honest, I must say that we haven’t succeeded in retaining those readers who are dropping out. We haven’t managed that magic thing that we achieved with the Virago Classics of offering women books that made them think: “That’s the thing for me.’” She believes that the attempt to classify books as for children, young adults or adults is clouded by cultural and ideological shifts in the very meaning of ‘childhood’: ‘Because of an absence of a strong sense of a childhood world any more, a lot of teenagers are going straight to books for adult readers if they can. But these lists are useful, if only in a limited way, to signal to teenagers that there are good books designed for them.’ My young adult reviewer was unprintably rude about Nell’s Quilt by Susan Terris, a book which I, as a parent, writer and teacher would have recommended as tackling fundamental

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issues of power and powerlessness, and as conveying a time, place and society unfamiliar to most readers. The story is about a girl in turn-of-the-century America under pressure to marry an unappealing man instead of going to college. There isn’t anything feminist about it at all,’ wrote Clara. I don’t agree. In my view the book explores strategies which have enabled generations of women to retain their integrity in the face of lifelong oppression. This difference of opinion gains significance in the light of our relative economic and political power. While we still have school and library budgets to pay for new books people of my age influence the market much more than people in their teens. Whether or not these young adult lists survive the curriculum changes will rest on the discrepancy between how adults and teenagers judge them. Note Julia Bard is a freelance journalist and adult-education tutor. She is on the editorial committees of Jewish Socialist magazine and Women Against Funda mentalism journal, and is writing a book on stepfamilies. References ATWOOD, Margaret (1987) The Handmaid’s Tale London: Virago. GARDEN, Nancy (1988) Annie on my Mind London: Virago Upstarts. HUGHES, Barbara (1988) Both Feet Off the Ground London: Virago Upstarts. INDIRA, M.K. (1976) The Young Widow London: The Women’s Press Livewire. JUST 17 READERS (1987) Bitter-Sweet Dreams London: Virago Upstarts. MEEK,M. , WARLOW, A and BARTON, G. ( 1977 ) editors, The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children’s Reading London: Hutchinson. MURRAY, Millie (1988) Kiesha London: The Women’s Press Livewire. OPIE, Iona and Peter editors, and SENDAK, Maurice, illustrator (1992) I Saw Esau, The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book London: Walker Books. PAUSAKER, Jenny (1987) Get a Life London: The Women’s Press Livewire. READ, Lorna (1988) City Sax London: Virago Upstarts. SENDAK, Maurice (1970) Where the Wild Things Are Harmondsworth: Puffin Books. TERRIS, Susan (1988) Nell’s Quilt London: Virago Upstarts. WALKER, Alice (1983) The Color Purple London: The Women’s Press.

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SEXUALITY IN LESBIAN ROMANCE FICTION Joke Hermes

Romance research has mainly concentrated on heterosexual romances. Lesbian romantic novels have, as far as I know, been extensively discussed only in ‘Some pulp Sappho’ by Fran Koski and Maida Tilchen (1979). Lesbian trash does not figure much in the few other texts on lesbians or lesbianism in literature (see Zimmerman, 1985, 1990, Jay and Glasgow, 1990). In this paper, I propose to discuss lesbian romances as a reader, concentrating on a 1950s lesbian pulp novel Stranger on Lesbos, and a modern romance, An Emergence of Green. The lesbian texts have a quite different background regarding how they were and are published and how they are bought and read. For one thing there are not nearly as many lesbian romances available as there are Mills & Boon or other mass-marketed heterosexual romances. According to Jane Rule, author of lesbian novels, a lot of romances are still sold by mail order (Opzij, 1985). Apparently, another difference between straight and lesbian romances, is that NorthAmerican readers of the latter genre still do not like to be seen buying one. Many confess they hide their copies of lesbian pulps in more neutral covers. Koski and Tilchen quote Kate Millett who even burnt hers in case a sublet would find them (1979:262). The mass phenomenom researched by Tania Modleski (1982), Janice Radway (1984) and others, such as Ros Coward (1984), Cora Kaplan (1986), Ann-Rosalind Jones (1986), is something quite other than the subcultural phenomenon of lesbian romance reading. I will, however, rely on some of the insights provided by their impressive studies. Radway’s description of the ‘institutional matrix’ within which heterosexual romances are produced has served as an example to sketch the history of the lesbian romantic story. Modleski’s perceptive treatment of the different layers underlying romantic fiction (and other popular women’s genres) has convinced me of the interrelatedness of history, politics and narratives. I will write from a feminist perspective, which in my view denotes the integration of the perspectives of the observer and of the participant (see McRobbie, 1982; Walkerdine, 1986). It seems vital to me, particularly when researching lowly valued genres, that we question our own position. In which ways do we relate to the texts we talk about? Which of our own identities are bound up with our research topics? My commitment to romance novels is very personal, I happen to enjoy both lesbian and heterosexual romances. A good romance will keep the world at a distance and it restores, even if only temporarily, one’s faith in the future

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of things. Mingling my observations as a reader with academically inspired reflection, I hope to make my reading of and comments on the genre of the lesbian romance relevant to others. What I loosely call the genre of the lesbian romance consists in fact of different genres. Novels written in the 1950s and 1960s are generally called ‘pulps’, although some of them are considered literary works. Ann Bannon, for example, (author of the series that was reissued in 1975 under the title Beebo Brinker) is considered a pulp writer but Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart, written in the same period, is considered literature’. The lay reader may become aware of this last fact by the numerous poetry citations. Naiad Press has published lesbian classics as well as originals since the mid-1970s. Naiad’s main authors Sarah Aldridge and Katherine V. Forrest will probably not claim literary status. Yet, their work has more status than that of the Harlequin writers, who are, for instance, provided with numerous publisher’s orders on sex scenes (degree of explicitness in descriptions, number of erotic scenes). Publishing lesbian pulp The circumstances under which lesbian pulp has been written, published and marketed, has had far-reaching consequences for the narratives. As opposed to heterosexual romances, lesbian love stories were often pornographic in character in the fifties. The now giant publisher of heterosexual romance, Harlequin Enterprises published its first romance in 1958. Before that the big paperback publishers, such as Dell and Fawcett, started releasing cheap semipornographic novels, some of which had lesbian protagonists. They were hardly interested in lesbian emancipation; they made money by publishing the books the public appeared to want. Lesbians writing for the big companies undoubtedly felt justified in doing so because they had to make a living. Moreover, there weren’t any other ways to publish lesbian fiction. Fran Koski and Maida Tilchen write in “Some pulp Sappho” that during the 1950s and 1960s hundreds of lesbian novels were published—many as paperback originals—by FawcettCrest, Midwood Tower, Beacon-Signal, and Macfadden-Bartell (1979:262). They like the novels and feel they need to defend this ‘strange reading habit’ since ‘today’s lesbian feminist’ might object to them. Objections against these novels, indeed, were very strong in the late 1970s and early 1980s and many feminists still feel uncomfortable about them. Koski and Tilchen bravely argue that those who dismiss the genre overlook the circumstances under which they were published, i.e., the enormous influence of publishers on the text. Lesbian writers found themselves in a Catch 22 situation. Not going along with publishers’ demands would have meant loosing the only existing public outlet for lesbian fiction. Many of the pulps, as a result, have ambiguous story lines. A publisher’s machismo Ms Taylor [author of Stranger on Lesbos and Whisper their Love, both published by Fawcett-Crest] says, was often satisfied by ‘happy’ (i.e., heterosexual) endings; hence the proliferation of the-dilettante-dyke-returns-to-herhusband plot’ (1979:263).

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Koski and Tilchen continue: It also seems to us that some of the novels, intended by the author to end in fulfillment for the lesbian protagonist have been changed by the (male) editor to ‘punish’ lesbians and teach that perversity doesn’t pay. And we suspect that some basically fine novels of lesbian love have been routinely injected with voyeuristic sex scenes for saleability; e.g., Chris seems to have sex scenes written in two different styles (Randy Salem, Chris, New York: Universal Publishing and Distributing, 1959)—though Gene Damon (Barbara Grier), an expert on this subject, maintains that it’s usually poor writers, and not the editors, that make a trashy lesbian novel trashy. (263) The most objectionable characteristic of 1950s pulp novels is that the lesbians in many of these novels hate themselves, or think they should. Protagonists have recourse to alcoholism, suicide and violence. They often end up dead, drunk or in psychiatric wards. According to Koski and Tilchen, this is caused by lack of political perspective (1979:264). I would suggests that lesbians in the 1950s did not so much lack political perspective but political possibilities. One can hardly expect lesbian authors to change society single-handedly. Of course, social norms, and society itself has changed since then. Koski and Tilchen, in the politicized jargon of the late 1970s, hope that the modern lesbian novel will ‘orient us towards structuralist critiques of the society that keeps us down, and show us what we can be.’ (265) In a way, such a position is still warranted by social hostility against lesbianism and homosexuality. Partly this is exactly what the romances first published by Naiad, and later also by other women’s publishers, such as Pandora Press, the Women’s Press and most recently by Silver Moon Books, do. However, I want to take issue with this point of view inasmuch that I feel that lesbian subculture has managed to create space for itself and does not require its fiction always to educate. Secondly, fiction isn’t necessarily the best means for political education. As a reader, I feel that political education spoils a good romance. The North-American Naiad press started in the mid-70’s, specializes in lesbian fiction. Naiad was founded, so I have been informed, by Anyta Marchant, a wealthy lawyer seeking an outlet for her literary activities. She provided Barbara Grier with funds to start Naiad Press on the condition that Grier would publish her books unedited. It is rumoured that she, in fact, is Sarah Aldridge. Whether or not this is true, since 1974 Naiad Press published eight Sarah Aldridge novels. Currently, Naiad’s main author is Katherine V.Forrest who writes detective novels as well as science fiction and romances. Recently Naiad titles have been sold to European publishers, such as Silver Moon Books. The Naiad romances mark a new era in the publishing of lesbian fiction. Social and political change has made it possible for this specialized publisher to exist and operate within the confines of public law and morality. However, Naiad books can still be mail-ordered and, no doubt, are sent in discreet brown bags. Explicit legitimation of a lesbian lifestyle plays an important part in the Naiad texts; this isn’t surprising, given that the Naiad authors are undoubtedly aware they are the first in this century to openly identify with women and write about lesbian love without fear of criminal retribution. Moral retribution, however, may still

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be their part: in non-lesbian circles for writing about lesbian love, in the lesbian subculture for imitating the most heterosexual of literary genres. The 1950s and 1960s lesbian romances were situated in the realm of pornography: forbidden, unnatural and illegitimate love were all the more titillating to their predominantly male readers. Cover blurbs on Beacon Books and Fawcett-Crest novels read: ‘The shocking portrait of a pretty wife who fell victim to the soft and corrupt passions of another woman’; ‘The searching novel of a lonely young wife faced with the temptations of unnatural love’; ‘About three lovely girls who shared forbidden ecstasies’; ‘The girls taught each other love! An intimate glimpse of the vice that lurks behind the facade of many a private school’.

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Romances written from the mid 1970s on are an openly lesbian genre that continues to develop. While Sarah Aldridge often refers to ‘nature’ and ‘innocence’, the 1980s novels introduce irony. For instance: the front page of Michelle Martin’s Pembroke Park (1986) boasts of being ‘a bit of a departure: the first lesbian regency novel’.

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Writerly politics In this section I will discuss the differences between the fifties/sixties and seventies/eighties novels more specifically, concentrating on two texts: Valerie Taylor’s Stranger on Lesbos (1960) and Katherine V. Forrest’s An Emergence of Green (1986). Stranger on Lesbos and An Emergence of Green have a lot in common. Both books are about the developing relationship between a married woman and a lesbian. They are also exemplary for their time, respectively 1960s and 1980s lesbian novels and therefore crucially different. Valerie Taylor’s Stranger on Lesbos tells the story of Frances (Frankie) a lonely, neglected wife, who—when her son Bob is in high school—starts going to college again. She is estranged from her husband Bill, who in contrast to the earlier years of their marriage is wholly taken up with his job as an executive. In her English class Frankie meets Mary Baker (called Bake, note the androgynous name!) who works in television promotion and who in her spare time takes college classes too. After class Frances and Bake go to a little place where Bake orders Martinis. Frances protests, she doesn’t drink, but gives in and likes it. Bake—of course a skilful driver—takes her home afterwards. They fall into a kind of routine. Having drinks after class, Bake driving Frances home. After a day spent in the country Frances tries to tell Bake how much she likes her. They sat side by side, drinking slowly, not talking. She felt rather than saw the warm solidity of Bake’s thigh next to hers on the cushion, and the even rise and fall of her chest. ‘You’re the nicest person I know’, she said sleepily, hearing her voice wobbly and small. ‘I like you very much. ‘I wish you could be my roommate in college, or something.’ ‘Do you?’ Bake got up and walked slowly across the room, glass in hand, leaving emptiness where she had been. […] ‘Frances, didn’t you ever hear of women loving each other?’ Frances jumped up and went to stand beside her. ‘Look, Bake, that’s not what I was thinking about.’ I mean, you don’t have to worry about anything like that. I’m not like that. She seized Bake’s hand in both of hers, almost crying. ‘Honestly, I don’t even know what they—look, Bake, please don’t give it another thought.’ Bake pulled her hand away. ‘People do feel that way sometimes, you know. It happens quite often.’ ‘I know, but don’t worry about it. Even if I felt that way about you, I wouldn’t say anything about it. Or make any trouble for you. I mean, I’d get over it. So that’s all right.’ Bake stood looking away from her, pondering, like a grown-up trying to put an abstract idea into terms a child can understand. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’ ‘Do you mean—’ […]

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‘I love you,’ Bake said quietly. ‘I think I’ve loved you for quite a while. Come on, I’ll take you home now.’ (Taylor, 1960:28–9) Of course Frances does not want to go home, she stays the night. Frankie’s first time is not a big success. The sex is not described, just the awkward conversation the morning after. But the situation is not devoid of romantic overtones. Frankie, looking at herself in a mirror, says she wishes she were beautiful. ‘You are,’ answers Bake seriously. ‘You have a beautiful sensitive mouth and winged eyebrows.’ ‘I look like everybody else’. Which is countered by Bake with a ‘You look like my Frankie’. After which Frankie steps into the shower, reluctantly, feeling that the warm water must wash off Bake’s touch and leave her again ‘the sterile, neutral creature she had been before last night’ (30–31). Frankie feels very shy when she goes to college and will see Bake again. These moments, Frances in the bus, hugging her books, beaming at the common houses she passes, or Frances telling Bake she would like to sleep with her (which happens only once) are the romantic heights in Stranger on Lesbos. The story moves on to Frankie’s double life and the pressure she is under to choose either for Bake and a lesbian lifestyle or for her husband and dull married life. In the end it is married life she chooses. Even marital rape cannot push her into a choice for lesbianism. Which is not very surprising since Lesbos is no Garden of Eden in this novel. Frankie’s affair with Bake lasts for three years. Years spent in dark, eerie bars. Alcohol and violence play a prominent part. Frankie even spends a night in gaol after Bake has pushed a woman to the floor who made a pass at Frances. Bake disappears in the tumult that follows, the woman seems to be badly hurt and the police pick up all bystanders. While Frances is in prison, Bake starts sleeping with an ex-lover, Jane, again, leaving cigarette butts for Frankie to find once she gets back to Bake’s place. Not Bake but her husband comes to bail her out. Frankie feels abandoned. Things come to a head when Frankie’s son Bob wants to marry a girl from a very straightthinking family. He asks his mother to give up her lesbian double life to give him a chance with Mari. Frankie has never discussed her affair with either her husband or her son, but both seem to be aware of the situation. For Bob’s sake Frankie ‘behaves’. She stops seeing Bake although even after Bake’s infidelity and her bad drinking, she still longs for her. The evening before the marriage, Frankie runs into Kay, a very attractive friend of Bake. They have a drink. Kay has lost her girlfriend (with whom she had her first affair after her marriage) to Bake. They run into Bake, and Frances drinks far too much. She ends up with a girl from a baseball team, who takes her home, beats her up and rapes her. Next morning Frankie turns up late and bruised for the wedding. All goes relatively well. To her great surprise her husband is not mad at her. He sees her again as poor skinny little Frankie, the girl he once married. Frankie sees Kay at the marriage reception. Like a slap in the face came the realization that while she wanted Kay as a friend— nothing more, nothing else—Kay’s thoughts of her, now visibly budding into plans, involved a great deal more than friendship. (142)

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Frankie finds the face of her husband reassuring. Beneath all the fatigue and stiffness, the aches, the nausea and bewilderment, a familiar need was beginning to clamor in her. After all, she thought, shaking hands absently with a stern-looking man, it’s been a long time. The corners of her mouth twitched into a smile. (143) She decides in favour of her husband. With only a minimal qualm, she renounced Kay’s friendship and whatever possibilities it might hold of emotional involvement. I’ll leave the receiver off the hook, she decided firmly. Bill smiled down at her. ‘Want to go somewhere and sit down?’ She slipped her hand into his. ‘All I want,’ she said softly, ‘is to go home—with you.’ (144)

Stranger on Lesbos could just as easily have ended with Frankie and Kay together instead of Frankie and Bill. Both have been married and have had one (not too happy) lesbian affair. Frankie is raped by her husband in a fit of rage, not an argument in favour of staying with him. But in the narrative the rape does not count as an argument to choose for lesbianism. As Valerie Taylor has already endowed Frances with a horrible youth (poverty; hardly a chance of any education; a hard-handed father who has attempted to rape her, mistaking her for her mother) and as she is also raped by the girl from the baseball team, it shouldn’t surprise the reader that she teams up with her husband again. This ‘diletante-dyke’ returns to her husband. Katherine V.Forrest’s An Emergence of Green contains some of the same elements. Carolyn Blake, although much younger than Frances Ollenfield Kirby, is also married and work takes up much of her husband’s time. Carolyn does not take classes but finds a job, defying her husband’s wish that she stay home and look after him. One day, coming home early from her new job, Carolyn finds an Amazon in her pool: Val Hunter, a big woman and beautiful swimmer. There is a son, but he is Val’s, not Carolyn’s. Val is a widow, which she doesn’t regret, In contrast to Stranger on Lesbos, in An Emergence of Green the protagonists are likelier and more equal partners. Although Val has lived with a woman before, she has never slept with one. Both are coming out. Very slowly the tension between Carolyn and Val mounts. Val is a painter. She lives in the neighbour’s garden house with her son. Every afternoon while Paul, Carolyn’s husband, is at work, Val comes over for a dip in the pool. Paul takes immediate offence to Val when he finally meets her and she to him. Carolyn has bought one of Val’s paintings and, much against her own wish, has to introduce them. Meanwhile Val tries to teach Carolyn not to be afraid of water and her pool anymore. Carolyn had a terrible experience in the pool before she met Val. Her husband tried to make love to her in the water and badly hurt her, misinterpreting her reaction for excitement. The experience was traumatic enough for Carolyn not to go into the water again. Val guesses that simply lying on a raft, not in the water but on top of it, may

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help. She brings over two old rafts. Endlessly the two women drift on the rafts in the pool, simply holding hands. Paul, anxious and afraid to lose Carolyn, persuades his neighbour to end Val’s lease of the garden house. Not knowing where Val lives and if and where she sees his wife only increases his anxiety. Although it is more difficult, Carolyn and Val still see a lot of one another. Paul and Carolyn become more and more estranged. Carolyn starts to sleep in the guest room where she has put up another of Val’s paintings. She discovers it was Paul’s doing that Val was thrown out of the garden house, which doesn’t exactly endear him to her. When Carolyn and Val are at a beach house in Malibu, loaned to Val by a friend (Val has just sold some pictures and is in an exuberant mood), Carolyn, or Carrie as she is called by Val, finally finds the courage to talk about the difficult subject of their relationship. Follows a beautiful love scene, a whole chapter long. Some excerpts: ‘Val, we…’With an abruptness that was pure instinct she ordered, ‘Val. Look at me.’ The eyes that were raised to her were those of a child expecting a blow. Blindly Carolyn reached to her, took Val’s other hand, rubbed both hands in hers, warming them. ‘Val,’ she said huskily, ‘we’ve been touching for months’. Val did not answer. I don’t know what she needs from me. ‘Val, can you tell me how you feel?’ God, I’m groping through a minefield. ‘Can you tell me what you…’ ‘I…’Val cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know.’ Her low voice was off-tone. ‘I actually don’t know’. (149) [Talking is difficult, slowly they approach one another.] Soft hands cupped Carolyn’s face. Val’s hands. The knowledge surged through her: Val’s hands. Carolyn looked into dark eyes, compelled by their depth and intensity, unaware that her own hand had moved into Val’s hair until the crisp curliness wound around her fingers. Val’s eyes were heavy-lidded; she was looking at Carolyn’s mouth. As if by hypnotic command Carolyn lowered her own eyes to Val’s mouth, focusing on the full sensual shape of it. […] Under the slow questing pressure of her own, Val’s lips became velvety yielding. She held Val’s shoulders to brace herself and stared at her mouth. ‘Do my lips feel like yours?’ Seeing Val’s perplexed look, the beginning of a grin, she realized the absurdity of the question and laughed. Val joined her in tension-breaking laughter. (150–1) […] Val shifted, propped herself on her elbows, her body curved over Carolyn. Carolyn’s arms circled her; she caressed Val’s shoulders down her back, she slid her hands up under Val’s blouse, the bra a barrier over the smooth warm flesh. Carolyn unhooked it, her arms drawing Val onto her; the released breasts another spreading softness on her body. She slid her palms over the smooth planes of Val’s back, sinking her fingers into the soft flesh.

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Val lifted her body; Carolyn filled her hands with creamy heaviness, curving and pliant, overflowing and incredible. As if wanting only the sensation of Carolyn’s hands on her breasts, Val lifted her body fully from her. Tautness had quickly formed under Carolyn’s palms; she released the rich full breasts to gently take the nipples between her fingertips. (151–2) […] Val pulled her up into her arms. Her kiss was agressive, her tongue swift thrusts. Without gentleness a hand moved down over Carolyn’s throat and inside her shirt. The nipple tingled and hardened before Val’s fingertips touched it. The hands on the buttons of Carolyn’s shirt were impatient The big soft hands cupped and caressed Carolyn’s breasts; Val kissed her, her tongue stroking as slowly in Carolyn as it had slowly and sweetly stroked her breasts. Still kissing her, Val gripped Carolyn’s hips, pressing them up into her. Her hands came to the belt of Carolyn’s pants. (152) And so it goes on and on, Val in the end making her come, Carolyn experiencing easy orgasm. Val does not let Carolyn touch her until later in the narrative, on which occasion Forrest indulges again in several pages of love-making. Although the sex scenes are described very explicitly, the use of language is typical for modern romantic fiction. For instance: ‘Carolyn felt she was extremely wet, when Val’s fingers came to her.’ Although every part of the body can be and is named, in the description of sex scenes something has to remain covered up, hidden in the mutual understanding of reader and writer. Excitement and pleasure in reading these parts of the book stems from the colourful language Forrest uses to describe, at length, the coupling of the protagonists. One knows who is doing what to whom and Forrest has a nice choice of adjectives. Val’s lips became velvety yielding; creamy heaviness, curving and pliant, and so on. The heroines aren’t in bed before we expect it, we are kept in suspense for a respectable and agreeable amount of time and the sex scenes themselves last long enough. Forrest provides her readers with a maximum in romantic tension, which is made up in part of the one protagonist feeling insecure whether the other loves her and in part of feeling insecure about how it will be in bed. Forrest uses the romantic cliché of the interior monologue to underscore this. Carolyn and Val are both very uneasy about their affair. Val is afraid she will lose Carolyn. Carolyn knows she has to tell Paul but does not know how. By chance one day Paul comes home earlier than expected. Val is making love to Carolyn. Horrified Paul watches her satisfy his wife. He understands he has never gratified her sexual needs. Shattered he goes away unobserved, to the neighbours and out again, until Val’s battered Volkswagen leaves the driveway. When Paul comes into the house, Carolyn is there in her usual corner of the sofa. She has decided she cannot postpone any longer asking Paul for a separation. She tries to ask him but Paul cannot think of anything but what he has just witnessed in the guest room. He asks her out of the blue if she has ever had an orgasm during their marriage. Carolyn does not understand his train of thought. He lashes out to her that she only wants to be with ‘that Amazon’ when her asking for a divorce finally registers with him. His reproach misses the

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point. Carolyn sincerely wants a separation, to live by herself for a while and find out what it is she really wants. Paul doesn’t hear her anymore, living his private hell, his fear of women, resulting from (or so Forrest suggests) his mother’s suicide. ‘All I ever did was love you’, he said, and walked toward her the knowledge of what he would do growing him, cold and implacable. (230)] A detailed description of Paul Blake raping his wife follows. Her face was a hideous mask of horror. He slammed her head down, screaming with the flaming pain that engulfed him, pushing the face and its horror with all his force into the pillow. (232) [The neighbours hear Carolyn screaming and come to check out what is happening. While Paul has to attend to them, Carolyn manages to hide and later escape from the house to Val. From a detailed medical description later on in the book, one is given to understand that Paul sodomized Carolyn, which, without any lubricant, must have been painful for the man, hence the flaming pain that engulfed him. Somehow, I don’t think his conscience is described.] Taking a circuitous route, she drove to Val’s flat, circled the block, parked two blocks away. Glancing fearfully around her for any sign of Paul or his car, she walked the two blocks. Val answered her knock. Carolyn stepped over the threshold and collapsed. (236/7) The first 150 pages of the book are predominantly romantic. The two women drifting in the pool, holding hands, Carolyn admiring Val’s hands, falling in love without knowing it, Val’s jealousy of Paul. This part culminates in the description of the first time they make love. The text’s use of language follows the conventions of romantic fiction. The attraction the women feel for one another is located in their bodies and their instincts, not in rational arguments. It is bodies, not minds that know what must be done. The love scene opens with Carolyn ordering Val to look at her, ‘with an abruptness that was pure instinct’. Straight romances, Harlequins or Mills & Boon, recognize two kinds of knowledge: intellectual and emotional knowledge. Plot lines are always a variation on one theme. The heroine thinks she hates the overbearing Male who has come into her life, until the first kiss teaches her that her body is thinking along different lines. Suspense in a Harlequin novel originates in the problem the protagonist has in recognizing her ‘true’ wishes and needs and in coming to a more favourable evaluation of the hero, who will turn out to be a warm and caring person and not overbearing at all. Bodily knowledge precedes and defeats rational arguments. Coming out as a process of self-discovery could have the same narrative function in lesbian romances. Of course, in Harlequins the romantic knowledge that originates in the body and in emotion, can easily be depicted as natural and good, since it leads to heterosexual coupling. Lesbian romances don’t and authors try to find ways to defend portraying lesbian love. However, such textual politics usually rely on the rational intellectualist logic that romantic fiction has a habit of declaring invalid.

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In the last fifty pages of An Emergence of Green we are forced to witness an atrocious scene of marital rape. We have to understand that there are good reasons for a woman to choose for women and not for men. We have to be enlightened, the ultimate goal of rationalist logic. Somehow, this is just as bad as the tragic fates of lesbian protaganists in 1950s and 1960s pulp novels. Again an author feels that sexuality in modern lesbian romance cannot be the ‘natural’ thing it is in straight romance. Although the sex scenes might still have pedagogical merit, they do not serve the romantic goal of confirming ‘emotional knowledge’, Sexuality plays a confusing double role in this lesbian romance: on the one hand, a negative one—rape politically rationalizes lesbian love, on the other hand it plays a positive, though ultimately not very convincing role in the romantic part of the narrative. Indeed, An Emergence of Green ends with Carolyn and Val deciding ‘to stay together for the time being’. What kind of romance is that? Readerly politics Married life as boring, sex with men a task, at times definitely unpleasant: ‘at best it was messy and undignified’ (Taylor, 1960:33); Carolyn on a holiday pleading illness when she feels sore and painful because Paul wants to fuck her day and night (he thinks he can win her back that way and put her mind off Val); the men wielding power over their wives by way of marital rape. Stranger on Lesbos and An Emergence of Green have a lot in common. It is no coincidence that Stranger on Lesbos ends with husband and wife together again. Political circumstances forbade other endings. Whether Taylor censured her own text or whether a publisher demanded it, we do not know. The narrative contains enough ingredients to make it a convincing and believable end, even though a case could equally be made for a happy lesbian ending. When I read An Emergence of Green, I had the strong impression that Katherine Forrest was rewriting Stranger on Lesbos, this time giving the book the right ending. Forrest’s heroine Carolyn is slightly better off than Frances. Though she has no living relatives either, nor had a terrific youth, she did finish college and has a job she likes. But both are married young to older husbands who feel they hold legitimate power over their wives’ bodies. In Taylor’s case Bill raping Frances is unpleasant reading but it is not the worst thing that has ever happened to her and it does not make her decide in favour of lesbianism. She is also raped by a woman, at the end of the book, and this description is far more vivid and horrifying. Forrest’s book has clear political goals besides literary ones. The rape incident in An Emergence of Green definitely settles the question. Carolyn will choose for women. Forrest also has Carolyn nearly raped earlier in the novel (in the pool), which serves to strengthen her argument and makes what Paul Blake does to his wife more conceivable. Forrest argues that this is what men can do to women, physically and emotionally, even if they say they love them. That you may not find sexual pleasure with men, the same way you find it with women, that relationships with women feel better, more equal or simply feel different, all of this doesn’t seem to count as a legitimate argument in favour of writing about lesbian love. Where Taylor stops because she doesn’t have or doesn’t want to express a political view, Forrest goes on to state her social criticism as clearly as she can. Because of the way it ends

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and the political argument contained there, An Emergence of Green is not a satisfying romance. The strange thing is that it has all the material to make one. The book simply is too long. An Emergence of Green would do nicely in Harlequin format. The story could end with Carolyn finding out that it is her husband’s doing that Val had to leave the garden house, which shocks her into realizing what she really feels for her. She then finds the strength to defy her husband and tell him she is leaving. End of story in Val Hunter’s bed. But Forrest wants more. Until the early 1980s violence was not an unusual trait in heterosexual romantic fiction. Protagonists had to be shocked into learning their innermost wishes and thoughts. Low sales figures for this particular kind of romance made Harlequin drop this kind of story line. Heroines don’t have to be literally forced into recognizing their inner wishes anymore. I was amazed to come upon the same sort of scene again in lesbian romance fiction. Before reading An Emergence of Green, I read Forrest’s first novel Curious Wine (1983). Like An Emergence of Green, Curious Wine contains a scene of male sexual violence against the heroine. The heroine, Diana, is in doubt whether she is in love with Lane, a woman she has met in a Lake Tahoe mountain cabin where she is staying with some female friends for a short holiday. She goes to a casino, meets a man, has a drink with him and is unable to stop him from having sex with her, He hurts her but not as bad as Carolyn is hurt by her husband. It does make Diana realize she really wants Lane. The same thing exactly. Rape, for Katherine V.Forrest is the ultimate political argument in favour of lesbianism. Forrest invests her characters with a political meaning that, in my opinion, stretches far beyond the narrative. I agree with Janice Radway who argues in Reading the Romance that romances convey a sense of well-being. Romances revolve around their own specific structure of feeling, located at plot-level. Empathy or identification occurs not only with heroines or heroes, but also, and maybe foremost, with the story and its development. As in melodrama narrative pace is more important than individual characterization (see Ang, 1985:64 and Elsaesser, 1987). Politics in Forrest’s novels diminishes the narrative pleasure they could offer. My pleasure in reading romances is escapist. I do not read them for a philosophical or psychological questioning of who we are, what we can turn into, or why we are here. I prefer to share a nice and at times funny dream with an author I like; because of the way she writes, because of her protagonists. I feel it is part of the discourse of romantic fiction not only to identify with the narrative but also with its writer, romanticizing her in the process. I do know that I value in my authors what Georgette Heyer, a famous author of so-called Regency romances, likes to invest her heroines with: humour, wit and good sense (Robinson, 1978:210 and Aiken Hodge, 1985). Writerly readers One of my favourites in lesbian romance fiction is Michelle Martin’s Pembroke Park (1986). Pembroke Park shows a way in which lesbian romance fiction can be what I call truly ‘emancipated’, i.e., provide truly gratifying lesbian and escapist reading. Pembroke Park, allegedly the first lesbian Regency novel, is situated in 1817. According to the foreword this is a period in which women enjoyed personal and sexual freedom. Needless to say, if it is true, it

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can only have been so for upper-class women. Of course, neither an American writer nor a Dutch reader are much concerned with class politics, since for neither of them has the issue had the societal consequences it has for British readers. Martin’s protagonists are Lady Joanna Sinclair and Lady Diana March. Joanna, a widow, lives with her daughter at Pembroke Park. Also living there are her overbearing and tyrannical brother Hugo Garfield, who is only interested in money, and an old aunt who thinks good manners is all that matters. Lady Diana March has just bought the house in which Joanna was brought up. She has had an outrageous past, spent abroad. Most of her family and her lover Gwen have died of the plague in Constantinople. Diana is a most unconventional young woman. Bold and daring, she does as she likes. One day riding her horse, wearing trousers, not using a sidesaddle, she meets Lady Joanna Sinclair. The women fall in love. Joanna is not aware of this until midway through the novel—she has never had an affair with a woman and does not understand her troubled feelings. Diana refuses to be aware of hers. Joanna thinks of herself as a plain woman. But once part of Diana’s family circle—who, male and female, are almost all homosexuals, she is praised for her beauty, wit and courage. Joanna and Molly are set free by Diana from the tyrannical brother, who pursues Diana for some time because of her money. Joanna enjoys her newly found freedom and goes to Kent where she owns a small house and starts to paint. Diana has tried to put Joanna out of her mind by travelling but of course her travels, in the end, take her to Kent and to Joanna’s bed. Delicious sex scene, and all is well. Joanna paints, Diana is cured from the nightmares she suffered from. The book ends with a conversation in Vienna between Joanna and Diana and two male friends, who are lovers too. The four decide it would be best to get married for form, in order to avoid legal persecution. I like Pembroke Park in spite of, or maybe because of its outrageous and unlikely plot and because of its ironic and humorous quality which Martin has managed extremely well. It does not lessen the novel’s romantic impact. For example, Joanna finds out that one of the men staying with Diana, loves men and not women: ‘She stared at him a little dazedly and then cleared her throat and said: “Does no one at Waverly Manor love members of the opposite sex?”’ (1986:179). Both protagonists are likable and spirited, talented in their own special ways and more or less equal partners. Both think of themselves as plain, which, of course, they are not. Pembroke Park follows the logic of romance throughout the novel. The protagonists are beautiful because they are in love. They feel they love the other but dare not declare themselves for fear of the other not being in love with her. The end of the book is a truly happy ending, they’ll live happily ever after. There is another reason for liking Pembroke Park. In several ways the novel invites its readers to identify not only with the text but with the position of the author. An important key to the pleasure in romance reading seems to be whether readers are seduced into thinking they share a secret with the author. Namely, that she, the reader, could have written the novel herself, given a little time. The author has done the reader no more than a favour by writing it for her. This would explain the fact that romance plots are always quite simple. Another argument in favour of this reconstruction of readerly pleasure, is the emphasis put on the fact that many writers started out as readers. Janice Radway mentions in Reading the

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Romance that many Harlequin writers are readers who sent in a manuscript. The Naiad romances often contain biographical information about the author. In several cases (including Martin’s) it is mentioned that the author read heterosexual Gothics or Regency novels but now writes them herself because there was no lesbian variant. An American fanzine such as the Romantic Times thrives on readers-become-writers success stories. No matter how small a number of readers actually become writers, it clearly is a popular fantasy. Conclusion Some modern lesbian romances are true-to-form romances. An example is Pembroke Park. Others do not follow the logic of romance throughout the novel. One of the most important aspects of lesbian romance fiction is the way in which a balance is struck between the narrative role of sexuality and the political stance of the author. I discussed Katherine V. Forrest’s An Emergence of Green to illustrate that romances cannot be political treatises. Even if one is sympathetic to the fact that the texts try to politically justify their own subject, I still do not feel that terrible childhoods (incestuous rape) or brutal husbands make a good case for lesbianism. An Emergence of Green also illustrates that there have been important changes in the genre since the 1950s and 1960s. Valerie Taylor’s Stranger on Lesbos shows us lesbianism as something weird and lesbians as rather frightening persons. She has Frances raped; the bars Bake takes her to are eerie places. In other novels by Taylor similar scenes occur. Forrest’s depiction of the lesbian community is quite something else though not necessarily much more palatable. After Carolyn has been raped, Val phones a friend who knows a nurse. The nurse comes in the middle of the night to examine Carolyn, and advise Val how to take care of her. She is a lesbian too, surprised at Val’s naivité concerning marital rape, which apparently is part of the nurse’s daily routine. The scene suggests that the lesbian community consists solely of super-caring, warm and realistic women, which seems overdone. Even more so because it strengthens a reading that suggests that Forrest’s romance is only an instrument in a political project, which appears to have as its goal a deterministic defence of lesbianism. A related reading could be that Forrest is not defending lesbianism as such but tries to write a romance without writing one. The romance is, understandably, not a highly valued genre in lesbian subculture because of the pulps and because of the heterosexual connotation of the genre. The realistic description of the rape scene can also be interpreted as a move to another set of narrative codes, those of the realistic novel, a genre with a much higher standing and direct relation with feminist consciousness-raising. Since I happen to enjoy the codes of romance and do not mind either the history or the connotations of the genre, I like a romance to adhere to the rules of the genre and give me my, admittedly conservative, reader pleasure. I hate open endings in romances, such as the ending of An Emergence of Green. Forrest clearly estimates that it is very important to be your own person, to be self-supporting and strong. Romantic logic however likes to picture the union of two persons as creating more than their sum. Romances try to prove that people are better, more beautiful, more talented than they appear to be at first sight and that they are better off together with someone who loves them. Likewise, sexuality in Forrest’s novels is

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confusing, erotic description alternates with rape scenes, while the sex ought to prove that our heroine has found Ms Right. Conservative though it may be, in the case of the narrative politics in lesbian romance fiction, I would like to move that outright social criticism be spared for other books. For there is no way, whether in lesbian or in heterosexual romances that rape and moralizing will give me any amount of reading pleasure. Notes Joke Hermes has a degree in political science. She teaches cultural media studies at the University of Amsterdam and is one of the editors of the Dutch Journal of Women’s Studies, Tijdschrift voor Vrouwenstudies. Her publications are on the subject of feminist theory and romantic fiction and on reading feminist magazines. She is preparing a book about women’s magazines based on interviews with readers. I would like to thank Mieke Aerts, Ien Ang, Mariette van Staveren and Liesbet van Zoonen for discussing romances with me as well as earlier versions of this paper. References AIKEN HODGE, Jane (1985) The Private World of Georgette Heyer New York: Pan Books. ANG, Ien (1985) Watching Dallas. Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination London: Methuen. BANNON, Ann (1986) Beebo Brinker Tallahassee Fla.: Naiad Press (originally published in 1962). BURGIN, Victor , DONALD, James and KAPLAN, Cora (1986) editors Formations of Fantasy London: Methuen. COWARD, Rosalind (1984) Female Desire. Women’s Sexuality Today London: Paladin. ELSAESSER, Thomas (1987) ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ in GLEDHILL ( 1987 ). FORREST, Katherine V. (1983) Curious Wine Tallahassee Fla.: Naiad Press. ——(1986) An Emergence of Green Tallahassee Fla.: Naiad Press. GLEDHILL, Christine (1987) Home is Where the Heart is. Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film London: BFI. GREEN, Gayle and KAHN, Coppélia (1985), editors Making a Difference. Feminist Literary Criticism London/New York: Methuen. JAY, Karla and GLASGOW, Joanne (1990) Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. London: Only Women Press. JAY, Karla and YOUNG, Allen (1979) editors Lavender Culture New York: Jove/HBJ. JONES, Ann-Rosalind (1986) ‘Mills and Boon meet feminism’ in RADFORD ( 1986 ). KAPLAN, Cora (1986) Sea Changes. Culture and Feminism London: Verso. KOSKI, Fran and TILCHEN, Maida (1979) ‘Some pulp Sappho’ in JAY and YOUNG ( 1979 ) pp. 262– 74. MARTIN, Michelle (1986) Pembroke Park Tallahassee Fla.: Naiad Press. McROBBIE, Angela (1982) ‘The politics of feminist research. Between talk, text and action’ Feminist Review 12, 1982, pp. 46–57. MODLESKI, Tania (1982) Loving With a Vengeance. Mass-produced Fantasies for Women London: Methuen. OPZIJ (1985) ‘Interview with Jane Rule’, November 1987, p. 44. RADFORD, Jean (1986) editor The Progress of Romance. The Politics of Popular Fiction London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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RADWAY, Janice (1984) Reading the Romance, Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. ROBINSON, Lillian S. (1978) ‘On reading trash’, in IDEM, Sex, Class and Culture London and New York: Methuen. RULE, Jane (1986) Desert of the Heart London: Pandora Press (originally published in 1964). TAYLOR, Valerie (1960) Stranger on Lesbos Greenwich Conn.: Fawcett. WALKERDINE, Valerie (1986) ‘Video replay. Families, films and fantasy’, in BURGIN , DONALD and KAPLAN ( 1986 ). ZIMMERMAN, Bonnie (1985) ‘What has never been: an overview of lesbian feminist criticism’, in GREEN and KAHN ( 1985 ). ——(1990) The Safe Sea of Women Only Women Press.

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A PSYCHOANALYTIC ACCOUNT FOR LESBIANISM Stephanie Castendyk

Diane Hamer’s impressive article ‘Significant others’ (1990) is one of the rare attempts I have come across to assess lesbianism in analytical theory without pathologizing it. Her assumption that analysis does not necessarily have to categorize lesbianism in terms of illness seems to me a valid way to rethink lesbianism in psychoanalytical terms. Such an approach could do the same for lesbian relations as for heterosexual ones; it could allow a better understanding of psychic relations and lift the restrictions that have hampered our thought. Unfortunately, analysis has often been misused in a different way, namely to pathologize, destroy and marginalize lesbian love. Diane Hamer managed to use analytical theory for a positive understanding of lesbian life. However, I still cannot quite agree with the assessment of lesbianism she prescribes. So I will try to elaborate my own thoughts on the subject. As I believe that the point from which somebody writes should be disclosed as far as possible, here is my account: I am a German woman and bisexual, however vague this term may be. My love with a woman has predominated in my life far more than any heterosexual relation but I have only limited experience with the social role of a lesbian, be it inside or outside lesbian circles. I have been in analysis and although it changed my attitude within the lesbian relationship it didn’t turn me into a rigid straight. However, I do not use the word ‘we’ in this article but I hope that this does not deter the lesbian reader who would identify in this way. Introduction To my knowledge, the Zürich-institute which founded what is called ‘ethnopsychoanalysis’ is the only school that acknowledges homosexuality as a valid sexual orientation. The original reason might have been their professional glance over the fence of our own culture, realizing that different communities have different ways of organizing their sexuality. But particularly one of its leading members, Fritz Morgenthaler, wrote the fundamental book Homosexuality/ Heterosexuality/Perversion (1987), in which he argues eloquently in favour of the distinction between neurotic and ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ homosexuality. The tendency of many analysts to interpret homosexuality as a syndrome and pursue attempts to cure this illness,

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Morgenthaler sees both as a personal defence against their own homosexual sides and as a sign that analysis has taken up a control function within society, trying to force through its taboos. Morgenthaler’s book is fascinating and knowledgeable, but although a longer publication about the subject of homosexuality would certainly have to deal with his interesting theory, I will not be able to refer to it without inflating this essay to a proportion no longer acceptable for Feminist Review. Therefore my only aim is to outline two possible ways of acquiring a lesbian object choice. The main presuppositions of my theory are: 1 that homosexuality is the result not of pre-Oedipal, but of the Oedipal conflict, as this is the phase in which sexual identity and orientation is formed. (In this point I agree with Morgenthaler); 2 that the ‘Oedipal conflict’ is the name for essentially two separate developments, which have not always been distinguished enough in analytical theory: the acquisition of a sexual identity and the making of an object choice. To start from these principles I will argue that homosexuality is a possible and productive way of preserving the capacity for sexual lust against various threats that the child experiences during the Oedipal phase. These threats against her erotic capacity can either occur when the girl tries to establish her own sexual identity or afterwards, when she faces the task of making an adequate object choice. In each case lesbianism will be the result of the development, but depending on which of the two have posed the threat, lesbianism might have a different face: the woman may either take up the ‘male’ or the ‘female’ position. Omnipotence and positive castration According to Jacques Lacan’s most famous article The mirror stage and its creation of the egofunction’, the mirror stage ends the phase of partial perception where lust and unlust are just perceived in their actuality and without a reference to the identity of oneself as an entity. Here—not later in the Oedipal complex—consciousness is introduced as well as the unconscious. However, the child still has a polymorphous sexuality which is not connected to an object. Significant for the phase after the mirror stage is the feeling of omnipotence in the child that derives from the fact that it established itself as an entity against and in separation of the mother during the mirror stage, thus transgressing the phase of partial perception. Stating it’s existence as a separate entity, this self-identity equalizes the child to the seemingly omnipotent mother as an omnipotent self. This omnipotence then gets confronted with the difference of gender. The child is forced to realize that it isn’t ‘both’, it isn’t self-sufficient and omnipotent. This step, like some before and after, is called ‘positive’ or ‘symbolic’ castration by Françoise Dolto in her book L’image inconsciente du corps (1984). The term is strictly structural and therefore does not mean castration in the physical sense. Instead it refers to a situation where somebody is confronted by a restriction. The evaluation of the castration as positive implies that the acceptance of this restriction allows a wider range of possibilities thereafter. For example, in the mirror stage the child has to accept that it is no longer a unity with the mother, thus giving up

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symbiosis to gain its own identity and the ability to separate without complete and utter desperation. During the mirror stage the child establishes its own time and space, which is also a crucial basis for acquiring language. Quite similar to this is the symbolic castration in terms of gender: the child gives up omnipotence. By accepting to be only the one and not also the other gender it gains the possibility for an object choice. In fact, accepting to be either male or female is the main supposition needed to enter the rivalry of the Oedipal conflict, because only when a child identifies with one sex is it ready to desire the other and look for an appropriate object. In contrast to love, desire is impossible while imagining oneself as omnipotent. Aristophanes made this point when he expands on the nature of eros in Plato’s Symposium. Jacques Lacan illustrates this contrast between love and desire by explaining that love is a function of presence, whereas desire is a function of absence. In our context it is only necessary to remark that the acquisition of a sexual identity has to be achieved in order to develop desire for a libidinous object choice. Lesbianism via male identification Already while realizing that it is only one sex and not also the other, the child is confronted with the connotations of either: it perceives not only a neutral difference but the patriarchal hierarchy that gives more freedom, power and status to the male sex. The child sees this hierarchy symbolized in the most obvious difference between the sexual organs. Under these circumstances and given also the modern social primacy of the visual sense, it is not astonishing that the little girl sees herself as deficient, as lacking the materialized symbol of power—the penis. What is traditionally called penis-envy turns out to have a social dimension. The girl is envious of all the penis represents, she is envious of the phallus, not of the organ. During this phase the whole purpose of the child is to aquire a sexual identity. Therefore everything to do with the sexual difference is of crucial interest. For a girl to realize that the female sex seems not as socially accepted as the male one is a very bad experience. But even worse is another realization she is likely to make: the frigidity of the mother. This sounds rather crude and I must confess that it is as crude as it sounds. But still we can’t deny the fact that frigidity is a widespread syndrome. Only a few decades ago some analysts even thought frigidity to be a conditio humana of the female sex. The sexuality of women has been suppressed on a private as well as on a public level as far as ignoring it completely. Usually motherhood was offered as a replacement for lust and quite often still is: the kid as a cork. And even though women have fought for their freedom and sexuality for a long time now, the symptom of frigidity remains rather persistent. Being due in part to unconscious identification it is very difficult to fight by the means of enlightenment. (This of course doesn’t account for the frequent cases when frigidity is just the result of incompetent and ignorant love-making. Though this might not make a great difference for the observing child, at least the grown-up woman—mother or not—can alter the situation.) One might argue that the child is not able to perceive its mother’s frigidity. Usually the girl doesn’t even know the word. But being able to name a thing and recognizing it’s presence are

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two different processes. Not only can one generally presuppose that a child gets to know virtually everything within its range of interest—and this particular item is of crucial interest during this phase—one also has to realize that frigidity and exclusive motherhood is signalled in numerous ways to any perceptive individual: signs of frustration, the lack of erotic self-confidence, a pure identification with the mother role and her lack of a positive and promising attitude towards the gender of her daughter are only a few indicators. Since the disregard for women is mainly and only a social one, initial identification with the mother is painful but not unbearable. The fight for social equality might or might not take place on a political level in future: the first and foremost interest of the girl in having a sex capable of lust is fulfilled. This is quite different when identifying with the mother means to actually take on a castrated sex, a gender identity without the promise of sexual lust. This offer is not at all acceptable. In spite of the visible evidence and against all uttered opinions stating the girl is a girl she is forced to identify with the only sex around that promises the capacity for lust. If the mother is frigid and there is no other strong female figure around who proves the female sex to be a valuable one in terms of lust capacity, the girl is quite likely to identify with the male sex usually represented by the father. Here I want to emphasize that this whole drama of sexual identification is still not linked to an object choice. It is also necessary to remark that the identification of the girl with the father isn’t usually a complete one. Instead she produces what could be called an unconscious cognitive dissonance: she asserts herself as a girl with boyish qualities and especially with the male capacity for lust. That is she doesn’t think of herself as actually being a boy to the extent of taking up a transsexual identity. She identifies only with the male sexual position, not with the male gender role. However, the girl’s identification with male sexuality is one possible way to acquire a lesbian orientation although it is necessary to emphasize that the object choice doesn’t yet play a role—it states a drama in itself, at least theoretically, meaning that the two procedures can take place simultaneously but don’t have to, since they are structurally disconnected. So, how does the girl in the phase of sexual identification acquire her object of desire? Given a positive and promising identification with the mother it is very likely that she will choose her father as a first object because it is not only the expected choice but also the one of the mother. But what forces the girl to choose a male object when she identifies with the father? Nothing. It is far more likely that in this case the father-choice doesn’t take place at all. When the girl has taken up the male sexual position she will look for a female object of desire which apparently the father isn’t. Nevertheless the mother doesn’t seem an endearing object either when frigidity and inferiority are her main qualities. This fact points to a quite different way of accepting the incest prohibition: it is no longer needed. Instead the girl is not tempted at all and takes the blank promise of future satisfaction with other women for granted as also the father tends to get his satisfaction elsewhere, even if he doesn’t actually seek it: his aura of potency and fulfilment suggests it implicitly. However, the future lesbian has taken a somewhat unusual step to sexual identity but has accepted the two prohibitions (of being only one gender and the incest prohibition) thus being ready for an object choice and not being restricted to the parental object. A potentially fulfilled and happy life with only the usual minor

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neuroses and a few more social problems lies ahead. (Just to complicate matters it is necessary to point out that the girl who identifies with the sexual position of her father doesn’t need to become a lesbian in consequence. She might find a man one day who has undergone a similar process, himself identifying with the sexual position of his mother. Thus both would follow the heterosexual concept only with inverted positions. But it is more likely that the girl looks for another woman once she is grown up as women have also been the objects of the father she identifies with.) Lesbianism through object choice As I remarked before, traditional theory presumes that the girl initially takes up her father as her object. (At least this is the case when one realizes that what Freud called the mother object in the phase of polymorphous sexuality is a love-object and not a libidinous one. The child that still hallucinates its omnipotence has sources for lust production but not objects. It is autoerotic.) The choice of the father is, even under so-called ‘normal’ circumstances, a highly dangerous business for two reasons: first of all the claim for the father comes into conflict with the mother, because he is primarily her husband and object of desire. This fact is a potential death threat for the child because the fierce feelings of jealousy the little girl nurtures towards her mother must indicate for her that the mother has equal aggressions against her small rival. The second threat deriving from her object choice is directly physical. By this age the girl has quite an acute perception of size and can easily imagine the damage her father would cause in case she reaches her desired goal. This direct danger in connexion with the incest wish produces what is called the organ-anxiety. Ideally, that is in theory, this conglomeration of fear and desire is solved by the next positive castration—the Oedipal prohibition. The mother claims quite distinctly her husband as her desired object and comforts the girl by promising her that she will find her own fulfilment with an acceptable replacement once she has grown up. The girl accepts this prohibition, thus gaining the future possibility of potentially unlimited objects. She is no longer restricted to her first choice, her father. Quite ironically this outcome is obstructed when the father likes to be the object of her desire. If he fails to acknowledge the incest barrier himself by responding to the flirtatious attempts of his daughter, both the fear of physical injury and the fear of rival aggression from the mother inflates enormously: for the girl her capacity for lust is then in danger of being destroyed. In this respect the child is dependent on its parents setting the limit. This of course doesn’t mean that every tenderness towards a child is dangerous, it just refers to a parental behaviour that consciously or unconsciously sexualizes their relation to the child, which can take place without ever actually abusing the child or even thinking of doing so. It is the right of the girl to play out her newly found sexuality by trying to seduce the object most desirable to her during this phase. But it is also her right to be prevented from actually reaching her goal. She is in need of an atmosphere that guarantees her status as a child and therefore excludes even the hint of possible incest. This is the equivalent situation to the boy’s castration threat which also splits in the fear of being castrated by the father or consumed by the mother’s genitalia. In the days of Freud one

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can assume that the incest barrier was far more respected than in our days of antiauthoritarian education, at least as long as one realizes that overstepping the incest barrier is not exclusively restricted to sexual abuse which probably took place as much as today. Overstepping the fine line of incest prohibition can be done far less drastically but is still threatening enough for the child to give up his or her initial choice. Other constellations can have the same effect as long as they produce the same essential threat, for example a mother that doesn’t claim the father as her love-object, thus failing to set the incest prohibition. In this situation the threat of rivalry diminishes but the physical threat of internal injury becomes overwhelming. A third reason might be that the father isn’t a possible object. If the girl has to realize that the father in particular and therefore men in general are cruel and brutal to a life-threatening extent, she might well give up this offered choice. There are numerous situations which force the girl to retreat from her first object of desire. The only thing they all have in common seems to be a drastic threat against her capacity for lust or against her life in general, because no child will deviate from the heterosexual path without having a need to do so, as long as heterosexuality is the development her parents and all surrounding her are expecting. Identification with the mother and general social pressure are even stronger forces in this age than later in adolescence. However, what option is there for a girl who identifies with the female position but can’t take the father as her first object of desire without having to be afraid that her lust capacity will either be destroyed by the revenge of her mother or by the possible penetration of her father’s penis? She can’t acquire her mother as a first object of desire instead, first because she already identifies with her and secondly because the mother represents her own sexual position: she is not the desired other. If the promise to experience sexuality in her acquired position is strong enough, she will simply give up the idea of a first parental object, like all the other girls do who are brought up by a mother only. Thus it is easy for her to accept the incest prohibition, because she has anyway given up the parental object in question. Curiosity and phantasy might concentrate on a man outside the family triangle. But if the threat by the father has been too dangerous, she will give up the idea of a male object at all. Her desire is then directed towards women because the female object representation doesn’t pose a threat against her own lust capacity. Having discussed a small number of possible developments—bearing in mind that they are all models not to be mistaken for a complex individual history—the first and foremost result is that lesbianism is a solution of the Oedipal conflict which rescues the capacity for lust against a perceived danger and is therefore a positive outcome. In the first stage of sexual identity the identification with the father is the only promise for sexual lust at all. When the option is a female identity at the price of the capacity for lust, one can’t really say this is a proper option. Though numerous ‘solutions’ on this level still prefer to accept a castrated sexual identity for the sake of being congruent with the expectations of all people around the girl. The result is a complete or partial frigidity within a heterosexual framework. In the second stage of object choice the girl takes up the female object when the prescribed line of heterosexual choice again threatens her sexual capacity or even her physical integrity. It is as

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equally courageous a step as forging identification with the father, since it is also taken against the usual pressure to conform with the norm. Both ways of acquiring homosexuality have one thing in common: they avoid a regression to earlier stages of narcissistic autoeroticism. Only if this regression has taken place is the analyst allowed to talk of a neurotic development, be it within a homosexual or a heterosexual concept. Also Fritz Morgenthaler argues that a fully developed sexuality is not bound to the object choice but to the ability of leading a sexual life and establishing lasting partnerships with a desired sexual object. It is regression to former stages of personal development that will prevent such a sexuality, not the choice of a partner with the same sex. Any ‘normal’ homosexual has the same opportunity to build up a fulfilling love relation as any ‘normal’ heterosexual who doesn’t suffer from neurotic fixations and regressions. Lesbianism as a result of socially prescribed inferiority To sum up my exposition of sexual development with a lesbian orientation I very much doubt the theory Diane Hamer stated, that social devaluation of the female sex in combination with a tomboy existence and strong support for boyish attitudes can result in lesbianism. Especially as such a conditioning might end up in a boyish self-image, but hardly in favouring the disgraced woman as an object of desire. Neither do I believe that a later born brother induces such an attitude to a now neglected girl. Both situations may very well support the girl’s decision to identify with the male sex but I don’t think they can originate this decision. My reason for stating this is that an identification (and this source of lesbianism is meant here) which requires such an enormous cognitive dissonance, an identification that goes against all surrounding opinion and also against the girl’s perception of her own body has to be based on an absolutely crucial threat. The only threat in question during the phase of finding one’s own sexuality is the loss of lust capacity, because lust is precisely what the child searches for by establishing its gender. Identifying with a sex that everybody says one isn’t and a glance down one’s own body further disproves, is an act one only undertakes when any possibility of lust seems utterly nonexistent in one’s own biological sex. Only the unconscious and universal opinion (and the universe of a little girl is rather limited) that female lust (not power, not superiority) doesn’t exist, forces a child to a step like this. To think ‘being a woman means to be nothing, to have nothing, to create nothing’ (Diane Hamer, 1990:142) seems to me in this context the metonymy for: a woman is impotent. And as any grown-up woman knows that this isn’t the case, and as this insult to the mother is devastating, and as the very recognition of female impotence is anyway unconscious, this metonymy for something quite specific is still in currency. As an argument against the view that former tomboys who reject the social role of women tend to end up as lesbians, we need to take a closer look at tomboys and their sexual orientation. First of all it is quite possible that the male sexual identification doesn’t coincide with tomboyish behaviour. Mainly when behaving like a boy is not accepted within the family but also when the girl’s unconscious intention is to conceal what she has perceived and what she decided in consequence, the girl will stay quite girlish while at the same time triumphing over frigidity by means of male identification.

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Being a tomboy is also not necessarily connected with a male sexual identification. It may very well be an objection to a perceived inferiority of the female role, as it might also be the result of having five brothers or a father who likes boyish women. Equally it may be the product of identification with a boyish mother, a jealous reaction to a small and unjustly pampered brother or simply a generally accepted pursuit of pleasures regarded as specifically boyish by a society beyond a tolerant family circle. Statistically the occurrence of tomboys is far more widespread than lesbianism, and furthermore many lesbians have never been tomboys. The interesting fact is that the social behaviour and the sexual identification are not necessarily bound together. And even the object choice might occur independent of the two others. One can observe feminine behaviour in a lesbian woman as well as butch behaviour in a heterosexual one, and, as explained before, one might even find a male identification in a heterosexual woman. All this shows that becoming a lesbian is far from being a matter of pathology. It seems to me a very valid solution in a very difficult Oedipal constellation. The presuppositions of analytical theory that everything is a syndrome when it differs from the so called ‘norm’ is sexist and ridiculous. If everything different from the norm were already rendered as pathology, analysts would be everyone’s most wanted companion. Instead the only legitimacy for analysis is that somebody wants to undergo it. Any assessment of activity that is not asked for is a violation, especially when it is an evaluation, as analysts for good reasons are not allowed to indulge in evaluation of whatever sort. This of course doesn’t prevent an analyst from interpreting things differently to his or her patient (in fact, he has to) or disclose problems in a way the patient couldn’t anticipate and therefore couldn’t ask for either. The basis of trust in order to practise analysis is crucial, even though this trust is dangerous because it can be misused by the analyst. The behaviour of an analyst can only be called a violation when he starts an analysis with the judgement that homosexuality is in itself invalid, immoral and an orientation the patient has to get rid of. Fritz Morgenthaler gives a very interesting and specific account of this problem by diiferentiating the sexual from sexuality. ‘The sexual’ is a general potential whereas ‘sexuality’ is always already a restricted form, a corset of the potential. According to Morgenthaler, every analyst has to accept this corset as a valuable version of integrating the sexual potential into the ego functions. In his view the task of the analyst would therefore be to work on regressions and fixations the patient suffers from, not to alter the patient’s chosen sexuality. Accordingly lesbianism only becomes a problem for analysis when the analysand doesn’t want to be a lesbian. Being able to like one’s homosexual orientation is in this case an equally positive outcome from analysis than turning into a heterosexual. Lesbianism might have been a restriction of female identity in earlier times at least if the woman was eager to get children but since this is possible while generally leading a lesbian life any attempt to pathologize lesbianism is absurd. Furthermore it seems to me a far better solution of the Oedipal complex than quite a few heterosexual ones though it would take too long to embark on these for comparison. The main and fragile capacity for lust is rescued: the girl has neither submitted to frigidity nor has she reduced her lust capacity to a noncommunicative and isolated autoeroticism, which is a frequent outcome just superficially covered by narcissistic heterosexual practices.

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But all this history of sexual development doesn’t answer at all the repercussions of the object choice on adult lesbian life. Does the different way to become a lesbian have anything to do with butch or femme? What about the sexual positions within a lesbian couple? How does sadomasochism come into all this? And most of all: isn’t there a point of view from which lesbianism is not only the best possible solution of a difficult situation? Is there not also a gain in taking up this position, a gain not to be acquired through a heterosexual orientation? Difference and desire Taking up the eighth chapter heading of Diane Hamer’s article I also want to quote some of her lines recalling the Lacanian definition of desire: Desire is brought into being with this realization (of the difference between the sexes and the inequities of phallic possession) and is always retrospective and recuperative; that is, it is the desire to get back that which one thought one possessed but which one now realizes is the possession of another. (Hamer, 1990:146) Besides rendering lesbian desire an impossibility this definition also eliminates any male heterosexual desire. Because which man would or even could desire a woman when she is so obviously not the one who carries the symbol of the phallus? Indeed the penis is only one symbolization of the phallus. The term ‘phallus’ in its radicalized French meaning defines ‘what fills the lack of being’. This is a rather abstract description that refers to the early stages of symbiosis or omnipotence. During the symbiosis, perception is partialized and therefore the child’s world is perfect when all its needs are met. In the latter phase after the mirror stage the newly perceived self is complete and seems to be omnipotent. Only after the gender division does the child realize itself not to be a whole unity but dependent on ‘another half’, as Aristophanes states it in Plato’s Symposium. The ‘phallus’ in this context represents and signifies what potentially fills the own lack of being (or better: of unity). Understanding it this way of course nobody actually possesses the phallus, but it can be assumed to be in the possession of the other. Thus, for instance, a child assumes the parents to carry the phallus. When saying that desire is always the desire for the phallus this definition doesn’t refer to the penis at all any longer. Instead Lacan translates this sentence into another: desire is always the desire for/of the other. In terms of sexual desire this means that desire is always the desire for the other sexual identity (not gender identity). Giving up the states of symbiosis or omnipotence meant to accept one’s deficiency, not only for the girl but also for the boy in so far as neither of them could hold on to the idea of being both. This acquisition of one sexual identity is necessary to have a sexual object at all. Desire is therefore based on sexual difference. This more useful definition of desire leaves open the question of lesbian desire. How can two women who both seem to lack the same thing desire each other at all? Difference and furthermore sexual difference, not racial, class or individual difference, seems to be necessary

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for desire and it is precisely the sexual difference that seems difficult to state in a lesbian constellation. Going back once more to the history of sexual development I pointed out that some lesbians get there by identification with the male sexual identity and others become a lesbian by inverting their object choice. Assuming that these two ‘types’ always find and desire each other, the sexual difference is assured, because, as I remarked before, sexual identity is not bound to the physical sex. Sexual identity, at least within analytical theory, is defined as a psychic reality generally formed during the Oedipal complex. It doesn’t have to coincide with a butch or femme appearance either, as Susan Ardill and Sue O’Sullivan have pointed out (1990). But it has to coincide with a male and a female position in the context of sexual desire and love-making. This seems to be a rather rigid statement and I feel the need to elaborate on the words ‘male’ and ‘female’. These terms don’t carry any general content. In every culture they are defined differently and are more or less open to a change of connotations. The only secure definition is that they are defined by their difference. In a gender context everything that is female isn’t male and vice versa. These two poles are obviously only the extreme ends of a polarized paradigm. Nobody and nothing is ‘only female’ or ‘only male’ and some people represent more androgynous positions than others. But what needs emphasizing is that sexual desire keeps being dependent on this difference, be it in a very polarized or in some less extreme phenomenological expression. I insist on the fact that the difference of male and female is a merely structural one in order to make sure that I am not talking of normative gender roles. The presupposition that one needs a masculine and a feminine position in desire doesn’t prescribe the actual behaviour of the participants. It only states that sexual desire is based on this structural difference in psychic positions and can’t take place without it. The need of sexual difference for desire seems to enter into a real calamity when the two women who love each other both prefer the same sexual position, this is when there is a distinct and similar preference on both sides. What shall they do? Diane Hamer stresses the lesbian ability to be fluid in one’s desire, to be ‘mobile because lesbians can be both masculine and feminine—simultaneously or at different moments—in relation to the desire of another.’ (Hamer, 1990:149) This statement I admit to finding difficult to understand, theoretically as much as from my own experience. ‘Swapping’ positions is easy to imagine but being masculine and feminine simultaneously is a different kettle of fish. How? Either one moves oneself in a position of being both which is a state of omnipotence where no object is required and it seems to me even difficult to assess such a position, not to speak of desiring somebody. Or one is constrained to one position at a time, even if it is only to allow the other to be ‘another’. Swapping positions is already difficult enough, at least when a couple with the same preference has to do it turn by turn. A situation quite different from doing it occasionally which seems to me if less frequent still equally possible in heterosexual relations. As already mentioned one can even observe heterosexual couples where the sexual positions do not entirely coincide with the biological sex: a combination where the woman always takes the masculine and the man always the feminine position.

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Butch and femme femme The example of a lesbian couple with the same preference of position poses several questions. The first is the one of confusion connected with the constant swapping. If, let’s say, the greater sexual fulfilment is experienced by both women in the preferred female position, each time one has enjoyed it one is in debt to the other. One’s own lust becomes a lust at cost of the lust of the other. And this might quite possibly be an even worse problem than it seems. If sexual difference is necessary for desire—and I do believe this—is it then confined only to the actual love-making? Is it not that to create an erotic communication aside from the sexual practice, one has to carry exactly this difference also into all the other daily activities? If so, swapping becomes a highly exhausting business! The other observation is even more irritating. It seems to me that there exist two basic modes of relation. The first takes place between the parent and the child, respectively relations of a similar modus. In order not to end up in a fatal symbiosis (because the exchange mechanism doesn’t work here) this relation needs and is ruled by the incest prohibition. Only the incest prohibition can prevent a love that is unconditioned and based on an absolute presence from becoming symbiotic, because the rule of exchange doesn’t work in such a relation. All other relations, be it friends, colleagues, even enemies but certainly love relations depend on this ‘law of exchange’. This doesn’t mean the absolute rule of exchange like in a money transfer—cash for cash only—it just means that there has to be a fundamental balance of giving and receiving, be it love, injury, acknowledgement or, for instance, lust. If this is not the case it seems to me that, in terms of lust, the only way of avoiding symbiosis is through sado-masochism, whereby sadism can be defined as the need for distance at any cost and masochism as the need for closeness at any cost. (These definitions do obviously not coincide with what judges in England presumptuously feel the right to condemn.) In this account where there is an inbalance of lust, three possibilities exist: the first is symbiosis itself, which inevitably leads to mutual destruction. The second option is sado-masochism, which, if nothing else, is hardly to everybody’s taste. These two options don’t only occur as alternatives but may also punctuate each other. A third tendency serves the desexualization of the relationship, anxiously watching over a kept balance. (I know that one argument against this scenario is that not everybody has the same need for lust, but though I admit that this might lead to an ‘inbalanced balance’ I’ve never really believed in a significant difference of need in this respect.) All three versions can be frequently observed when a homosexual couple tries to solve the problem of having undergone the same sexual identification, hence preferring the same sexual position. And all three of these options have a very detrimental effect on the relationship, not to speak of the individuals involved. So the question of ‘butch’ or ‘femme’ seems to me not the crucial one. The real difficulty occurs when two lovers prefer the same sexual position. A butch or femme appearance and behaviour might coincide with a male or female identification, but they don’t have to, as the gender role is structurally and genetically dissociated equally from the biological sex and from the sexual identification. One can in a sense regret this fact, as it would be much easier to find an appropriate partner if the sexual identification was obvious by behaviour and looks, but on the other hand a diversification like this opens all opportunities to an utmost variety in sexual organization.

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The merits of lesbian object choice So as not to end my essay with the problem of an appropriate lesbian partnership I want to come back to the possible merits of lesbianism. Generally I do agree with Diane Hamer that lesbianism has got the bonus of more fluidity though this is a bonus not always taken up by all lesbian couples. The fluidity seems to me to be a possible result of a situation where traditions and therefore limiting habits and practices are not as valid and unquestioned as in heterosexual relations. Though I don’t think that heterosexuals can’t achieve the same fluidity as homosexuals, I believe that the initial first step out of traditional concepts— besides proving some valuable courage—also makes any other step out of conventions easier. And the more steps one takes the more differentiated perception and reaction can become. This applies essentially to all areas, be it in social or in private life. A second bonus seems to me the basis of communication. Between women a communicative attitude is unquestioned and the grounds of all erotic life. A fact that doesn’t belong to general knowledge, namely men lack it quite often. And communication seems to function in a more differentiated way between women, maybe because we really do know more about a partner of the same sex, maybe only because we think we do. These merits aren’t structural and may even be transitory, either by a less restricted heterosexual convention or by a growing restriction in lesbian circles. But is it worthwhile at all to look for such structural merits of lesbianism, as Diane Hamer does? Isn’t it something more of a goal to work towards an individual sexuality, be it homo—hetero—or whatever sexual as long as it is most differentiated and communicative? Any attribution of worth seems to me an evaluating hierarchy that can only obstruct equality. And besides, all these hierarchies copy the structure of oppression that make up the system of power in our society. Nobody can fight this system by erecting an inverted but structurally similar system in a social peer-group or minority. Doing this always means to unintentionally agree and therefore support the oppression one has set out to fight against. For lesbians and gays to render transsexuals, heterosexuals or fetishists less worthy means establishing the same pecking order as vice versa. We could do no greater service to small-minded government and society. Note Stephanie Castendyk is a Ph.D. student of literary criticism in Berlin. She has also worked with an independent film company in London making socially critical documentaries, especially a film about transsexuality for Channel 4.

References ARDILL, Susan and O’SULLIVAN, Sue (1990) ‘Butch/femme obsessions’. Feminist Review No. 34. DOLTO, Françoise (1984) L’image inconsciente du corps Paris: Editions du Seuil.

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HAMER, Diane (1990) ‘Significant others: lesbianism and psychoanalytic theory.’ Feminist Review No. 34. LACAN, Jacques (1966) Ecrits: Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je Paris: Editions du Seuil. —— (1978) Le Seminaire 1954–1955 Livre II Le moi dans la theorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychoanalyse Paris: Editions du Seuil. MORGENTHALER, Fritz (1987) Homosexualitaet/Heterosexualitaet/Perver sion Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. PLATO (1951) Symposium London/New York: Penguin.

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MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND THE PROBLEMATIC OF SLAVERY Moira Ferguson

A traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion…[an] inhuman custom.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

I love most people best when they are in adversity, for pity is one of my prevailing passions.

Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft

History and texts before A Vindication of the Rights of Woman In 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft became a major participant in contemporary political debate for the first time, due to her evolving political analysis and social milieu. In contrast to A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790 which drew primarily on the language of natural rights for its political argument, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) favoured a discourse on slavery that highlighted female subjugation. Whereas the Rights of Men refers to slavery in a variety of contexts only four or five times, the Rights of Woman contains over eighty references; the constituency Wollstonecraft champions—white, middle-class women— is constantly characterized as slaves. For her major polemic, that is, Mary Wollstonecraft decided to adopt and adapt the terms of contemporary political debate. Over a two-year period that debate had gradually reformulated its terms as the French Revolution in 1789 that highlighted aristocratic hegemony and bourgeois rights was followed by the San Domingan Revolution that primarily focused on colonial relations. Wollstonecraft’s evolving commentaries on the status of European women in relation to slavery were made in response to four interlocking events: first, the intensifying agitation over the question of slavery in England that included the case of the slave James Somerset in 1772 and Phillis Wheatley’s visit in 1773; second, the French Revolution in 1789; third, Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790) that forthrightly argued against sexual difference; and fourth, the successful revolution by slaves in the French colony of San Domingo in 1791.

Feminist Review No 42, Autumn 1992

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This discourse on slavery employed by Wollstonecraft was nothing new for women writers, although it was now distinctly recontextualized in terms of colonial slavery. Formerly, in all forms of discourse throughout the eighteenth century, conservative and radical women alike railed against marriage, love, and education as forms of slavery perpetrated upon women by men and by the conventions of society at large. Wollstonecraft’s earlier works, received discourse, and the advent of the abolitionist debate

Prior to the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft had utilized the language of slavery in texts from various genres. In Thoughts (1786), an educational treatise, Wollstonecraft talked conventionally of women subjugated by their husbands who in turn tyrannize servants, ‘for slavish fear and tyranny go together’ (Wollstonecraft, 1787:63). Two years later, in Mary, A Fiction (1788), her first novel written in Ireland during trying circumstances as a governess, the heroine decides she will not live with her husband and exclaims to her family: ‘I will work…, do anything rather than be a slave’ (Wollstonecraft, 1788:49).1 Here as a case in point, Wollstonecraft inflects slavery with the orthodox conception of slavery that had populated women’s texts for over a century—marriage was a form of slavery; wives were slaves to husbands. Wollstonecraft’s early conventional usage, however, in which the word slave stands for a subjugated daughter or wife was soon to complicate its meaning. From the early 1770s onward, a number of events from James Somerset’s court case to Quaker petitions to Parliament and reports of abuses had injected the discourse of slavery into popular public debate. The Abolition Committee, for example, was formed on 22 May 1787, with a view to mounting a national campaign against the slave trade and securing the passage of an Abolition Bill through Parliament (Coupland, 1933:68). Following the establishment of the committee, abolitionist Thomas Clarkson wrote and distributed two thousand copies of a pamphlet entitled ‘A Summary View of the Slave-Trade, and of the Probable Consequences of Its Abolition’ (Clarkson, 1808:276–85 and passim). Wollstonecraft’s friend, William Roscoe, offered the profits of his poem The Wrongs of Africa’ to the committee. The political campaign was launched on the public in full force (Craton, 1974: chapter 5). Less than a year after the Abolition Committee was formed, Wollstonecraft’s radical publisher, Joseph Johnson, co-founded a radical periodical entitled the Analytical Review. Invited to become a reviewer, Wollstonecraft’s reviews soon reflected the new influence of the abolition debate (Sunstein, 1975:171). One of the earliest books she critiqued in April 1789 was written by Britain’s most renowned African and a former slave; Wollstonecraft was analyzing a text based on specific experiences of colonial slavery for the first time. Its title was

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African Written by Himself, in which Equiano graphically chronicles being kidnapped from Africa,

launched on the notorious Middle Passage, and living out as a slave the consequences of these events. While the Analytical Review acquainted the public with old and new texts on the current debate, Wollstonecraft was composing an anthology for educating young women that also reflected her growing concerns. Published by Joseph Johnson and entitled The Female

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Reader: or Miscellaneous Pieces for the Improvement of Young Women, the textbook cum anthology included substantial extracts promoting abolition. It included Sir Richard Steele’s rendition from The Spectator of the legend of Inkle and Yarico, Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s hymn-in-prose, ‘Negro-woman’, about a grieving mother forcibly separated from her child, and a poignant passage from William Cowper’s poem, ‘The Task’, popular with the contemporary reading public: I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep, And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought and sold have ever earn’d. No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s Just estimation priz’d above all price, I had much rather be myself the slave, And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him (Wollstonecraft, 1789:29–31, 171, 321–2). A series of events then followed one another in rapid succession that continued to have a bearing on the reconstitution of the discourse on slavery. In July 1789, the French Revolution erupted as the Bastille gaol was symbolically stormed and opened. Coinciding with the French Revolution came Richard Price’s polemic, Edmund Burke’s response, and then Wollstonecraft’s response to Burke and her review of Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education. Meanwhile, in September and the following months, Wollstonecraft reviewed in sections the antislavery novel Zeluco: Various Views of Human Nature, Taken from Life and Manners, Foreign and Domestic, by John Moore. Let me back up and briefly elaborate how all this attentiveness to colonial slavery affected public debate and Mary Wollstonecraft’s usage of the term. The French Revolution

On 4 November 1789, Wollstonecraft’s friend, the Reverend Richard Price, Dissenting minister and leading liberal philosopher, delivered the annual sermon commemorating the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 to the Revolution Society in London. The society cherished the ideals of the seventeenth-century revolution and advocated Dissenters’ rights. This particular year there was much for Dissenters to celebrate. Basically, Price applauded the French Revolution as the start of a liberal epoch: ‘after sharing in the benefits of one revolution,’ declared Price [meaning the British seventeenth-century constitutional revolution], ‘I have been spared to be a witness to two other Revolutions, both glorious’ (Price, 1790:55). The written text of Price’s sermon, Discourse on the Love of Our Country, was reviewed by Wollstonecraft in the Analytical’s December issue. A year later, on 1 November 1790, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France that attacked both Price and his sermon was timed to be published on the anniversary of Price’s address. It soon became a topic of public debate. Several responses quickly followed. As the first writer to challenge Burke’s reactionary polemic, Wollstonecraft foregrounded the cultural issue of human rights in her title: A Vindication of the Rights of Men. It

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immediately sold out. Not by political coincidence, she composed this reply while evidence about the slave trade was being presented to the Privy Council during the year following the first extensive parliamentary debate on abolition in May 1789. The Rights of Men applauded human rights and justice, excoriated abusive social, church and state practices, and attacked Burke for hypocrisy and prejudice. She argued vehemently for a more equitable distribution of wealth and parliamentary representation. By 4 December the same year, Wollstonecraft had revised the first edition and Johnson rapidly turned out a second one in January 1791 (Tomalin, 1974). In The Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft also frontally condemns institutionalized slavery: On what principle Mr. Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive; for the whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation. Allowing his servile reverence for antiquity, and prudent attention to selfinterest, to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished; and, because our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom, and term an atrocious insult to humanity the love of our country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured (Wollstonecraft, 1790:23–4). In The Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft explicitly argues for the first time that no slavery is natural and all forms of slavery, regardless of context, are human constructions. Her scorching words to Burke about his situating slavery ‘on an everlasting foundation’ (in the past and the future) sharply distinguishes her discourse from her more orthodox invocations of slavery in Thoughts and Mary. Contemporary events have begun to mark the discourse on slavery in a particular and concrete way. In particular, Wollstonecraft challenges the legal situation. In The Rights of Men, she graphically represents slavery as ‘authorized by law to fasten her fangs on human flesh and… eat into the very soul’ (Wollstonecraft, 1790:76). None the less, although she supports abolition unequivocally, she considers ‘reason’ an even more important attribute to possess than physical freedom. ‘Virtuous men,’ she comments, can endure ‘poverty, shame, and even slavery’ but not the ‘loss of reason’ (Wollstonecraft, 1790:45, 59). The same month that Wollstonecraft replied to Burke, she favourably reviewed Catherine Macaulay Graham’s Letters on Education. Macaulay’s argument against the accepted notion that males and females had distinct sexual characteristics was part of the evolving discourse on human rights that connected class relations to women’s rights. Macaulay also expropriated the language of physical bondage and wove it into her political argument. Denouncing discrimination against women throughout society, Letters also rails against ‘the savage barbarism which is now displayed on the sultry shores of Africa’ (Ferguson, 1985:399). Macaulay takes pains to censure the condition of women ‘in the east’—in harems, for example—and scorns the fact that men used differences in ‘corporal strength…in the barbarous ages to reduce [women] to a state of abject slavery’ (Ferguson, 1985:403–4). Macaulay’s historical timing separates her from earlier writers who used this language; by

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1790 slavery had assumed multiple meanings that included the recognition, implied or explicit, of connexions between colonial slavery and constant sexual abuse. In The Rights of Men, however, Wollstonecraft had not exhibited any substantial attention to the question of gender. But, after she read Macaulay, her discourse on gender and rights shifted. Notably, too, as one edition after another of A Vindication of the Rights of Men hit the presses, Johnson was concurrently publishing Wollstonecraft’s translation of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Elements of Morality for the Use of Children. In the preface to this educational treatise, Wollstonecraft pointedly inserted a passage of her own, enjoining the fair treatment of Native Americans. In terms of democratic colonial relations as they were then perceived, Wollstonecraft rendered Salzmann more up to date. There was, however, still more to come before Wollstonecraft settled into writing her second Vindication in 1792. First of all, information about slavery continued to flow unabated in the press. According to Michael Craton, ‘William Wilberforce was able to initiate the series of pioneer inquiries before the Privy Council and select committees of Commons and Lords, which brought something like the truth of slave trade and plantation slavery out into the open between 1789 and 1791’ (Craton, 1974:261). None the less, in April 1791, the Abolition Bill was defeated in the House of Commons by a vote of 163 to 88, a massive blow to the antislavery campaign. Just as much, if not perhaps more to the point, in August of that year, slaves in the French colony of San Domingo (now Haiti) revolted, another crucial historical turning point. The French Caribbean had been ‘an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation’ (James, 1963:ix). The conjunction of these events deeply polarized British society. George III switched to the proslavery side, enabling faint-hearted abolitionists to change sides. Meanwhile, radicals celebrated. This triumphant uprising of the San Domingan slaves forced another angle of vision on the French Revolution and compounded the anxiety that affairs across the Channel had generated. Horrified at the threat to their investments and fearful of copycat insurrections by the domestic working class as well as by African Caribbeans, many panicstricken whites denounced the San Domingan Revolution (Klingberg, 1926:88–95). Although no one spoke their pessimism outright, abolition was temporarily doomed. When campaigners remobilized in 1792, they were confident of winning the vote and refused to face the implications of dual revolutions in France and San Domingo. Proslaveryites, now quite sanguine, capitalized on the intense conflicts and instigated a successful policy of delay. A motion for gradual abolition—effectively a plantocratic victory—carried in the Commons by a vote of 238 to 85.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman The composition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman started in the midst of these tumultuous events, its political ingredients indicating Wollstonecraft’s involvement in all these issues. Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft seems to have been the first writer to raise issues of colonial and gender relations so tellingly in tandem.

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More than any previous text, the Rights of Woman invokes the language of colonial slavery to impugn female subjugation and call for the restoration of inherent rights. Wollstonecraft’s eighty-plus references to slavery divide into several categories and subsets. The language of slavery—unspecified—is attached to sensation, pleasure, fashion, marriage and patriarchal subjugation. It is also occasionally attached to the specific condition of colonized slaves. Wollstonecraft starts from the premise that all men enslave all women and that sexual desire is a primary motivation: ‘I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex…. For I will venture to assert, that all the causes of female weakness, as well as depravity, which I have already enlarged on, branch out of one grand cause—want of chastity in men’ (1792:37, 138). Men dominate women as plantocrats dominate slaves: ‘As blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves and the latter a play-thing…. All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience; or, the most sacred rights belong only to man’ (44, 83). In permeating the text with the idea that women are oppressed by all men, Wollstonecraft accords all women, including herself, a group identity, a political position from which they can start organizing and agitating. However, when Wollstonecraft begins to argue at a concrete level, when she confronts, say, the ‘foibles’ of women, that sense of group solidarity dissolves. Notable examples are women’s too ready acceptance of inferior educations, female vanity and an excessive display of feeling, exemplified in the following passages on: First, education: Led by their dependent situation and domestic employments more into society, what they learn is rather by snatches; and as learning is with them, in general, only a secondary thing, they do not pursue any one branch with that persevering ardour necessary to give vigour to the faculties, and clearness to the judgment. (23) Second, self-involvement: It is acknowledged that [females] spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves,—the only way women can rise in the world,—by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act:—they dress; they paint, and nickname God’s creatures. Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio!—Can they be expected to govern a family with judgment, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into the world? (10). With such attention to vain practices and little intellectual encouragement, women can scarcely be expected to lead (nor do they lead) sensible lives: Nor can it be expected that a woman will resolutely endeavour to strengthen her constitution and abstain from enervating indulgencies, if artifical notions of beauty, and

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false descriptions of sensibility, have been early entangled with her motives of action. (43). In censuring how white middle-class women act, Wollstonecraft views them as a homogenized group—‘I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex…. It is time to effect a revolution in female manners’ (37, 45). She separates herself off from them as a mentor-censor. Wollstonecraft’s self-distancing arises from an understandably positive view she holds of her own ability to transcend situations that she generally deplores in the female population. Since she had broken through prescribed barriers in a rather independent fashion from an early age, she deplores the same lack of resourcefulness in other women; she sees no valid reason why other women cannot act the same way, her sense of female conditioning somewhat precarious. Or perhaps she understands her own social construction and her past inability to remove herself from certain scenarios—when she worked as the irascible Mrs Dawson’s companion, for example. She could be projecting anger at her own passivity in earlier situations. This sense of herself as set apart comes out even more clearly, though somewhat indirectly, in a footnote to the second Vindication. In the text proper, Wollstonecraft is referring to the length of time it will take for slaves—like white women presumably—to gather themselves up from the condition of slavery: Man, taking her body, the mind is left to rust; so that while physical love enervates man, as being his favourite recreation, he will endeavour to enslave woman:—and, who can tell, how many generations may be necessary to give vigour to the virtue and talents of the freed posterity of abject slaves. (76–7). In the footnote Wollstonecraft quotes herself, stating that slavery always constitutes an untenable human condition: ‘Supposing that women are voluntary slaves—slavery of any kind is unfavourable to human happiness and improvement’. (77). Then she purportedly quotes from an essay by a contemporary, Vicesimus Knox, as follows: The subjects of these self-erected tyrants [i.e., those who establish what norm of human affairs will be, either ‘some rich, gross, unphilosophical man, or some titled frivolous lady, distinguished for boldness, but not for excellence’] are most truly slaves, though voluntary slaves; but as slavery of any kind is unfavourable to human happiness and improvement, I will venture to offer a few suggestions, which may induce the subjugated tribes to revolt, and claim their invaluable birthright, their natural liberty. (77) However, as it turns out, Wollstonecraft has altered Knox’s quotation to underscore her own political orientation. In his essay, Knox was not talking of women, let alone calling them slaves. Wollstonecraft’s fiery response to female domination echoed in Knox’s essay—that women should act independently and ignore strictures—is probably why the essay appeals so much

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to her. Entitled ‘On the fear of appearing singular’, one of the essay’s most telling passages encourages such (singular) thought, no matter the consequences or the social ridicule: It may not be improper to premise, that to one individual his own natural rights and possessions, of whatever kind, are as valuable as those of another are to that other. It is his own happiness which is concerned in his choice of principles and conduct. By these he is to stand, or by these to fall. In making this important choice, then, let the sense of its importance lead him to assert the rights of man. These rights will justify him in acting and thinking, as far as the laws of that community, whose protection he seeks, can allow, according to the suggestions of his own judgment. He will do right to avoid adopting any system of principles, or following any pattern of conduct, which his judgment has not pronounced conducive to his happiness, and consistent with his duties; consistent with those duties which he owes to his God, to his neighbour, to himself, and to his society. Though the small circle with whom he is personally connected may think and act differently, and may even despise and ridicule his singularity, yet let him persevere. His duty to freedom, his conscience, and his happiness, must appear to every man, who is not hoodwinked, superior to all considerations (Knox, 1782:21–2). This sense of importance that Wollstonecraft attached to independent or singular thought—a cornerstone of bourgeois individualist ideology—helps to explain her apparent lack of emotional solidarity with the white women she roundly castigates throughout the second Vindication. Although her intentions are unreservedly positive—to restore natural rights to all women—her approach is not entirely compassionate. She sees all around her that women ‘buy into’ societal norms. Because she has resisted these norms and short-circuited her own social construction, she deplores women who have not followed suit. This separation that Wollstonecraft maintains from other women prevents her from seeing the implications of women’s response, especially in the common frivolous practices she condemns. She cannot see that flirting and vanity could have a positive dimension, could sometimes be deployed by these very women as strategies of resistance, as devious ways of assuming a measure of power. Wollstonecraft, instead, sees the trope of the coquette, for example, as exclusive evidence that women accept their inferiority. The following passage on Rousseau’s ideas about women as sexual objects illustrates Wollstonecraft’s dislike of teasing behaviour. ‘Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquetish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire’ (1792:25). Wollstonecraft sees women as slaves to men not just because of male sexual lust, but because women enslave themselves through an obsession with fashion and an eager acceptance of inadequate education. She cannot see female foibles in any other context than female self-trivialization. Furthermore, the blame that Wollstonecraft attaches to white women for their vanity is complicated by her assessment of the relationship between African women and dress:

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The attention to dress, therefore, which has been thought a sexual propensity, I think natural to mankind. But I ought to express myself with more precision. When the mind is not sufficiently opened to take pleasure in reflection, the body will be adorned with sedulous care; and ambition will appear in tattooing or painting it. So far is this first inclination carried, that even the hellish yoke of slavery cannot stifle the savage desire of admiration which the black heroes inherit from both their parents, for all the hardly earned savings of a slave are expended in a little tawdy finery. And I have seldom known a good male or female servant that was not particularly fond of dress. Their clothes were their riches; and, I argue from analogy, that the fondness for dress, so extravagant in females, arises from the same cause—want of cultivation of mind (1792:186–7).2 Wollstonecraft equates self-conscious dressing with lack of intellectuality. In doing so, she reveals her own acceptance (and construction) as a contemporary woman, bombarded by and receptive to such ideas about Africans as David Hume’s: There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences…. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men (Hume, 1898:III, 252).3 Wollstonecraft does not take into account either white women’s resentment about powerlessness, their displacement of anger, their projection of personal power and pleasure, or, in the case of Africans and African Caribbeans, some customary cultural practices.4 Given, too, her protestations to Sophie Fuseli about her scrupulous conduct toward the Swiss painter, Henry Fuseli (and his toward Mary Wollstonecraft), her attack on coquetry might also betray a rather personal subtext.5 Wollstonecraft’s views, then, of white women’s behaviour in particular, and of sexual difference in general are complex and politically self-contradictory.6 Justifiably, she thinks of herself positively breaking through social constraints while the vast majority of women conforms to a restrictive mandate. She sees this process continuing as a result of practices that reach back to antiquity: Man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she ought to have her neck bent under its yoke; she, as well as the brute creation, was created to do his pleasure (49). These contentions parallel ideas expressed in Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education where she argues that women are historically oppressed because of situation and circumstances; the only item distinctly separating men and women is physical strength which men have used to exercise freely their physical desires. The fine differences between them seem to be as follows: Catherine Macaulay wants women to stop being giddy but recognizes

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their social construction. At one level, Wollstonecraft concurs with this and even uses the language of ‘circumstances’ to explain vain and flirtatious female behaviour. But she seems much less patient—more desperate even—with women’s situation. Catherine Macaulay is calmer, less rhetorically intense in her analysis, perhaps because with a certain amount of middle-class privilege in her life, the situation has affected her less. Wollstonecraft’s argument from antiquity has further implications, too. She contends that this age-old subjugation for unspecified reasons enables men’s desire to transform women into tools for sexual lust. These beaten-down women with bent necks resemble the brute creation, brute a synonym in contemporary vocabulary for slaves. Thus, white women, slaves and oxen become part of a metonymic chain of the tyrannized; this association of colonial slavery with female subjugation opens up new political possibilities. The bent yoke, for example, suggesting excessive maltreatment also suggests insecurity on the part of the oppressor, a combination that precipitates insurrection. The question that permeates the image is: who will eternally bear a brutelike status? Remember, too, that the San Domingan Revolution is less than a year old so Wollstonecraft’s words inscribe a threat of resistance in them: ‘History brings forward a fearful catalogue of the crimes which their cunning has produced, when the weak slaves have had sufficient address to over-reach their masters’ (167). Moreover, Wollstonecraft deliberately uses the language of slavery to define women’s status: ‘When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense; for, indirectly they obtain too much power, and are debased by their exertions to obtain illicit sway’ (167). This imposed status, this condition of subjugation provokes women into the flirtatious behaviour she dislikes, but also provokes duplicitous strategies of gaining power. In histories of slave insurrections, the ear of the master—necessary for finding things out and for facilitating the timing of rebellions—was frequently obtained through such ‘illicit sway’. While decrying the domestic sabotage of conquetry, she affirms a time-honoured slave strategy and the need for resistance. Perhaps more importantly, Wollstonecraft is suggesting collective opposition, but can only do so through positing the resistance of slaves and the London mob. Put bluntly, to suggest that women politically resist—although she herself does—only seems possible for Wollstonecraft at an oblique level, given her social conditioning. Wollstonecraft also re-emphasizes that the historical subjugation of women is linked to male desire for sexual as well as political and social power. In doing so, she fuses the oppression of white women and black female slaves as well as slaves in general. A striking passage from The Rights of Woman based on the trope of sexual abuse exemplifies the point. It includes one of the few specific references to contemporary African slaves in The Rights of Woman, or in any of Wollstonecraft’s texts for that matter. Why subject [woman] to propriety—blind propriety, if she be capable of acting from a nobler spring, if she be an heir of immortality? Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a sure guard, only to sweeten the cup of man? (Wollstonecraft, 1792:82–3).

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The passage announces that slaves and white women are subjected to tyrannical practices that have no purpose beyond the paltry one of ‘sweeten[ing] the cup of man’. On the one hand, slaves should not be expected to give Vital blood’ to produce sugar and cater to white British colonial-patriarchal whim and profiteering. On the other hand, the ‘cup of man’ symbolically intimates that a female (opponent) is doing the filling. This sexual innuendo is consistent with Wollstonecraft’s complex socio-sexual discourse throughout The Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s awareness of the generic use of man further problematizes her provocative phraseology and the relationship she hints at between sweetening men’s cup and ‘poor African slaves’. If only as faint shadows, black female slaves and the specific kind of sexual persecution they endure are ushered into view, interjecting themselves as sexual victims. Aware of political and personal levels, Wollstonecraft subtly denotes sexuality as one of the ‘prejudices’ that brutalize white and black women alike. As Cora Kaplan suggests, ‘We must remember to read A Vindication [of the Rights of Woman] as its author has instructed us, as a discourse addressed mainly to women of the middle class. Most deeply class-bound is its emphasis on sexuality in its ideological expression, as a mental formation, as the source of woman’s oppression’ (Kaplan, 1986:48). Sex and resistance interact. A coquette’s cunning that can overpower (manipulate) men, links to subterfuges and plots by slaves, especially by black female slaves who double as objects of desire. Or at least Wollstonecraft might unconsciously recognize that undue attentiveness to one’s person means that desire is suppressed and life is lived on almost self-destructive, self-contradictory planes; excess vanity is not as foolish as she superficially thinks. Thus sexuality becomes the site of black female and by implication white female resistance. Women use the very object of desire—themselves, their bodies—to thwart those who desire. Wollstonecraft knows, too, that external forces cause sexual and racial difference. She articulates this understanding in a positive review of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). She agrees with Smith that climate and social conditions are the principal causes of difference among men and women throughout the world, but that, above and beyond these differences, human beings constitute a unity (Johnson, 1788:Vol. 2,431–9).7 She again pinpoints superior male physical strength as the reason for this ongoing situation. Thus she denies the conservative argument of innate difference and necessary cultural separations—that God created essentially distinct beings.8 Such subjected people as AfricanCaribbean slaves and white Anglo-Saxon women are prevented from developing and exercising their reason; certain environments have precipitated their alleged propensity for passion. Once again, Wollstonecraft is arguing opposing sides of a question. Whereas attention to dress proves that Africans, conceived in a totalized way, are an unmeditative people, in this reading they became people historically cut off from intellectual pursuit. With a change in circumstances, she argues, reason can replace alleged naiveté and infantilism.9 Wollstonecraft’s intervention regarding sexually abused female slaves is not surprising. Through reviews and personal reading, Wollstonecraft was well attuned to this phenomenon. In 1789, a review of Equiano’s Travels centrestages her horror at ‘the treatment of male and female slaves, on the voyage, and in the West Indies, which make the blood turn its course’ (Johnson, 1789:28). Equiano categorically indicts ‘our clerks and many others at the same time

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[who] have committed acts of violence on the poor, wretched, and helpless females’ (Equiano, 1789:69). In chronicling his feelings on finally leaving Montserrat, Equiano harrows readers by undergirding his despondency, disgust, and (silently) his sense of impotence: ‘I bade adieu to the sound of the cruel whip and all other dreadful instruments of torture; adieu to the offensive sight of the violated chastity of the sable females, which has too often accosted my eyes’ (Equiano, 1789:121). Besides her intimacy with Equiano’s first-hand experiences, Wollstonecraft has presented a paradigm of slavery in an extract on Inkle and Yarico in The Female Reader. Shipwrecked British merchant Inkle is rescued and nursed back to health by islander Yarico. After they fall in love, Inkle promises to take Yarico to London and treat her royally, but when a rescue ship appears, Inkle cavalierly sells her to slave traders when their ship docks in Barbados. To top off his inhumanity, after Yarico pleads for mercy on account of her pregnancy, Inkle ‘only made use of that information to rise in his demands upon the purchaser’ (Wollstonecraft, 1789:31).10 Hence, Wollstonecraft’s subtle approach to the sexual abuse of black women in the Vital blood’ passage, in reviewing Equiano, in spotlighting that last look at a pregnant Yarico in an anthology for adolescent girls. Since her discourse as a white woman is already shockingly untraditional, to speak sex, and of all things to speak openly of black women’s sexuality and hint at abuse suffered at the hands of white planters, would be an untenable flouting of social propriety. She has to maintain a semblance of conventional gender expectations. On the site of the body and sex, then, Wollstonecraft foregrounds the relationship between black and white women and their common point of rebellion. At one point even, referring to women as ‘brown and fair’, meaning dark and fair-haired white women most likely, slippage and connexion between black and white women reopen a fissure of sorts for comparing overlapping oppressions. Slave auctions and the marriage market, for example, are represented as variations on activities that are life-threatening to African-Caribbean and Anglo-Saxon women (Wollstonecraft, 1792:144). None the less, Wollstonecraft acknowledges by her loaded silences that the representation of others’ sexuality as well as sexual selfrepresentation is a tricky business (Jordan, 1968:150–4). Thus, in one sense, equal rights and a self-denying sexuality go hand in hand, because sexuality for Wollstonecraft (dictated at large by men) imperils any chances of female autonomy. Not only that, Wollstonecraft recognizes dissimilar codings for white female and bondwomen’s bodies, differences in complicity and coercion. In keeping with her sense of singularity, she is much harder on middle-class white women, in part because she is closer to them. She does not feel affected by or implicated in female social conditioning. Unlike Catherine Macaulay who argues that women will only waken up if they understand their oppression, Wollstonecraft implicitly recommends imitation of her own bold behaviour as the ‘wakening up’ device. To recap briefly: all women have the same choices available as she did and should forego vanity and selfindulgence; they should break their ‘silken fetters’. If she can short-circuit subjugation, her brief goes, so can anyone. Thus beyond a rhetorical appeal to effect a revolution in female manners, Wollstonecraft tends to eschew a group response to the absence of female rights. This aloofness,

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furthermore, permeates—even undercuts—her sense of vindication. A buried sense of identification and solidarity expresses itself, instead, in a displaced way. Specifically, Wollstonecraft talks about resistance only by talking about slaves. The successful revolution by slaves in San Domingo taught the British public that slaves and freed blacks could collectively overthrow systematic tyranny. In the following passage, by equating slaves with labouring class ‘mobs’ and using highly inflated diction for rebels, Wollstonecraft censures slaves’ reaction. ‘For the same reason’, states Wollstonecraft, quoting from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘women have, or ought to have but little liberty; they are apt to indulge themselves excessively in what is allowed them. Addicted in every thing to extremes, they are even more transported at their diversions than boys.’ She continues this response to Rousseau: ‘The answer to this is very simple. Slaves and mobs have always indulged themselves in the same excesses, when once they broke loose from authority.—The bent bow recoils with violence, when the hand is suddenly relaxed that forcibly held it’ (Wollstonecraft, 1792:144–5). Yet since Wollstonecraft disdains passivity and servitude, she may be embedding an unconscious desire about female resistance that corresponds to her own. She could be hinting that women should emulate the San Domingan insurgents and fight back. The nuance is further stressed pictorially by the sexual overtones of female compliance in ‘bent bow’. Just as importantly, the image resonates with the previous textual image of women from earliest times when necks bent under a yoke. Put succinctly, what slaves can do, white women can do; or, as she asserts in The Rights of Woman, authority and the reaction to it push the ‘crowd of subalterns forward’ (Wollstonecraft, 1792:17). Sooner or later, tyranny incites retaliation. San Domingo instructs women about the importance of connecting physical and moral agency. Struggle creates a potential bridge from ignorance to consciousness and self-determination. In the most hardhitting sense, the San Domingan revolutionaries loudly voice by their bold example—to anyone ready to listen—that challenge to oppression is not an option but a responsibility. The social and political status quo is anything but fixed. Wollstonecraft’s metaphor of the bent bow also decrees a stern warning to men. It reminds readers that male tyrants and predators incite their own opposition; at some point those who are ‘bowed’ may uncoil themselves and assault the ‘bender’. This image of the bent bow further recalls Wollstonecraft’s own situation in the last decade. Undeterred by an emotionally unnerving home life, she tried her hand at most of the humdrum occupations open to women, refusing to be moulded or deterred by social prescription. Befriending and being befriended by Dissenters like Richard Price only fortified Wollstonecraft’s already firm opposition to women’s lot. Moreover, her sutble, analogous and multiply voiced threats address at least two major audiences. She overtly advises women to educate themselves and warns men that vengeance can strike from several directions. The fierce, conservative reaction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a response to the covert as well as the overt text. In that sense, the wheel comes almost full circle. Wollstonecraft recognizes that all women are opposed by all men in a general group identity. However, because she privileges personal and political singularity and takes pride in independent thought and action, she identifies

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her own resistance to gendered tyranny as the means by which women should subvert domination. She projects outwards from her personal response to female domination, oblivious to more devious practices on the part of other females to assert themselves and gain at least some personal if not political power. In one sense, her bourgeois individualism prevents that insight since she sees herself outside customary female assimilation. Faced with oppression, women have simply made wrong choices. Consequently, Wollstonecraft can posit collective rebellion by white women to prescribed subordination only by analogy. With this displaced reaction in mind, certain re-views of Wollstonecraft’s diatribe against female reactions to males—their flirtatious behaviour—can be more sympathetically read. Just as Wollstonecraft can indict Africans for being neither intellectual nor reflexive while portraying a carefully executed and successful revolution, so, too, does she exhibit a conflictual stance toward women. Since slaves resist masters and since all men oppress all women, women will, by implication, resist their male masters. Thus indirectly, Wollstonecraft registers that through coquettish manipulation, however feebly or distortedly, a women’s resistance could be enacted.11 This argument about slaves and mobs, that is, creates a fissure in the text. If we doubled back, say, on salient passages where Wollstonecraft condemns Rousseau—‘Women should be governed by fear’, he says, ‘to exercise her natural cunning and made a coquettish slave’ (47)—Wollstonecraft’s view of slaves’ and mobs’ resistances becomes open to reinterpretation: even though she assaults these self-trivializing behaviours and deplores their forms, at some level she may recognize them as tropes of insurrection; she uses female reaction to male domination in a plural way. Deploring how women try to finesse and please men through sexual manoeuvring, she rhetorically conflates coquettish with cunning and makes sexual manipulation double as a form of resistance to tyranny. Women ‘play at’ blind obedience not only to get some of what they want, but unconsciously to ridicule their ‘masters’, to cancel out tyranny with emotional excess, with a mirror-image perversion of power. Frivolous giggling is also a signal act of mimicry whereby women seem to conform to expectations. Ironically, the artificiality of forced laughing marks male desire and orthodox prescriptions for female behaviour. If Wollstonecraft is (unconsciously or not) subtly mocking the idea that fear works as a governing principle to produce obedience, she foregrounds the idea that forced obedience linked to sex is a practice that can turn into its opposite: women will mimic the master’s desire with design, they will use conformist ideas about womanhood to gain power. At times, Wollstonecraft recognizes these strategies more openly. The state of warfare which subsists between the sexes (races), makes them (the tyrannized group) employ those ruses or ‘illicit sway’ that often frustrate more open strategies of force. The aim of The Rights of Women, then, is to vindicate women’s rights. Starting from the premise that all women are oppressed by all men, Wollstonecraft subscribes to a concept of overall group identity. This is undercut, however, when she probes particulars because her sense of a personally wrought self-determination causes her to find women culpable for their vanity, their acceptance of an inferior education, their emphasis on feeling. She locates herself outside what she deems self-demeaning behaviour.

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So in the end, she posits a group response indirectly, only by looking at oppressed communities who have actively resisted—slaves in particular—and sometimes ‘mobs’. Her suppressed sense of solidarity and identification with women express themselves through the rebellion of slaves whose bow (back) has been bent too far. This analogy also constitutes a threat against masters; contradiction is there from the beginning since all men are oppositional—within Wollstonecraft’s political framework—to all women. Put another way, Mary Wollstonecraft’s construction within specific social and cultural boundaries that she resists produces a covert text. Her sense of personal singularity occludes her vision so she cannot always imagine or conceptualize flirtation as a tool of resistance. Despite a radical outlook, moreover, she still subscribes to a sense of class hierarchy that contradicts her demands for greater distribution of wealth and legal representation and for female independence and colonial emancipation. In that sense, her text brilliantly illuminates the bourgeois project of liberation. She embodies the liberal ideal of progress in demanding freedom in certain individuals but the shortcomings inherent in that ideal undercut it. The conditions that produced the text, then, end up questioning the text itself and highlighting its gaps and incompletions, its long series of tensions between bourgeois values and issues of class, race, gender and desire. So deeply estranged from its internal conflicts is The Rights of Woman that it cannot ideologically fulfil itself; an authentic, workable solution to female subjugation is impossible. The text trips over itself, its variant vindications ideologically incompatible. As a result, contradiction emerges as a major textual coherence, problem-solving beyond reach. Additionally, because the text invokes the French and San Domingan revolutions, the complexity of sexual difference, inequities perpetrated against Dissenters, and the abolition movement, textual implosions inevitably occur. Even while the text appears to dampen inflammatory ideas and underwrite the current system, liberating ideas erupt to refute the self-contradictory discourse of bourgeois feminism. Thus the issues that Wollstonecraft avoids or bypasses end up hollowing and shaping the text into a new determination. She talks about disaffection, yet often blames women’s alienation on their own behaviour; she poses the problem as one for which women bear responsibility. Her socio-cultural myopia leads her to misread resistance. Concurrently, she undermines her own argument through parallels between white women and black slaves. Moreover, the condition of women that she illumines pinpoints an important area of sexual difference and pushes the frontiers of this debate forward. Put baldly, the text ironically subverts the very bourgeois ideology it asserts (that creates alienation) and demands liberation despite the restrictive system it promotes. Furthermore, Wollstonecraft’s usage of colonial slavery as a reference point for female subjugation launches a new element into the discourse on women’s liberation. No coincidence, then, that Charlotte Smith in Desmond (1792) and Mary Hays in Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) criticize colonial slavery along with discussions of women’s rights; exploring popular controversies, they simultaneously allude to Wollstonecraft’s innovative investigations and connexions. First of all, their inscription of colonial slavery presupposes the presence of women of colour and assumes a white, patriarchal class system as its common enemy. Second, it suggests unity among the colonized and their allies. Third, it centrestages

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the question of sexuality in gender relations and stresses the ubiquity of sexual abuse in qualitatively different environments. By theorizing about women’s rights using old attributions of harem-based slavery in conjunction with denotations of colonial slavery, Wollstonecraft was a political pioneer, fundamentally altering the definition of rights and paving the way for a much wider cultural dialogue. Notes Moira Ferguson is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1679–1834 (Routledge, 1992) and of East Caribbean: Gender and Colonial Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). 1 Writers as diverse as Katherine Philips, the Duchess of Newcastle, Aphra Behn, Mrs Taylor, Lady Chudleigh, Sarah Fyge Field Egerton, Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchelsea, Elizabeth Rowe, Elizabeth Tollett, and many more frequently employed the metaphor of slavery to express the subjugation of women; marriage was far and away the front-runner situation in which women described themselves or other women as ‘enslaved’. Note also that Wollstonecraft refers to the Spartan’s perpetual subjugation in Lacedaemonian society of the Helots, state serfs bound to the soil, with no political rights. See Shimron (1972:96), Mitchell (1952:75–84), and MacDowell (1986: 23–5, 31–42). 2 Wollstonecraft does not hold exclusively to those attitudes, however. In the Analytical Review somewhat later, for example, she argues that Hottentot people act in harmony with their situation (Analytical Review Vol. 25, May 1797, p. 466). 3 The essay was first published in 1742, but the passage quoted was added as a footnote in the edition of 1753–4. See Cook (1936) and Curtin (1964:42). 4 Mary Prince, for example, as a slave in Bermuda and then in Antigua is described by a vitriolic writer in a pro-slavery newspaper article. The trunk of her only worldly possessions (containing unspecified items) that she took from her owner when she left is exaggerated by this writer to ‘several trunks of clothes’ to suggest excess vanity and even prostitution. ‘She at length left his house, taking with her several trunks of clothes and about 40 guineas in money, which she had saved in Mr. Wood’s service’ (Zuill, 1937:37). 5 Attentiveness to appearance, across cultures and stemming from different origins, infuriates Wollstonecraft. The fact that her own appearance is negatively commented upon at this time suggests itself as a factor that enters in. Apparently she spruced herself up when she became infatuated with Henry Fuseli, the Swiss painter. See Flexner (1972:138–9). 6 For Wollstonecraft’s views on Eros and her anger at women as sexual objects for men, see Blake (1983:103–4). 7 See also Smith (1787). 8 Hannah More’s renowned opinions on women constitute one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s significant textual silences, but most notably in the second Vindication. When Wollstonecraft vociferously applauds women’s assuming more prominent socio-cultural roles, she implicitly intertextualizes More’s opposition to this advice. See also Myers (1990:260–2). 9 However, despite Wollstonecraft’s argument that ethnic differences are due to climate and social conditions a la Stanhope Smith and her unilateral commitment to abolition, she remains ambivalent about black equality. Her acceptance of a system that operates on the differential

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between owners and workers and on the basis of certain assumptions about European superiority can never square with an absolute human liberation. Everything is measured against the model of a European society that regards African society as the other. Wollstonecraft may Eurocentrically contend that people in other cultures would be smart and civilized if they were raised as she was, but her review of Olaudah Equiano’s narratives gives the lie even to that belief: We shall observe, that if these volumes do not exhibit extraordinary intellectual powers, sufficient to wipe off the stigma, yet the activity and ingenuity, which conspicuously appear in the character of Gustavus, [i.e., Equiano] place him on a par with the general mass of men, who fill the subordinate factions in a more civilized society than that which he was thrown into at his birth. (Analytical Review Vol. 4, May 1789, p. 28) 10 Aside from her commentary on Equiano’s and Yarico’s experiences, among others, Wollstonecraft also recognizes other ways that sexuality oppresses white women. She had dealt on a personal level with her sister Eliza’s post-partum depression by effecting Eliza’s separation from her husband, Hugh Skeys. She felt, it seems, as if Skeys were responsible for her sister’s condition; she treated him, more or less, as a male predator, a villain of sorts. At the same time, the Rights of Woman appeared at a time in her life when she was immersed in a difficult personal situation; the choices open to a woman who wants to work and to love—she was discovering—were very limited. 11 Remember too that, psychologically, Wollstonecraft’s attack on male sexuality could mark a displaced attack on Fuseli whose male sexuality has engendered inner turmoil. Mary Poovey’s argument that ‘men’s [and not women’s] unsatiable appetites’ are Wollstoncraft’s target is worth considering in the light of her passion for the Swiss painter (Poovey, 1984:71–6 and passim). See also discussions of displacement in Freud (1966:155–6 and passim).

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FREUD, Anna (1966) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence New York: International Universities Press. GRAHAM, Catherine Macaulay (1974) Letters of Education. With Observations on Religions and Metaphysical Subjects intro. Gina Luria, New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc. GREEN, T.H. and GROSE, T.M. (eds) Essays Moral, Political and Literary : Longmans, Green & Co. HUME, David (1889) ‘Of national character’ in GREEN and GROSE . JAMES, C.L. R. (1963) The Black Jacobins. Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution New York: Vintage. JOHNSON, Joseph (1788, 1789) editor The Analytical Review, or History of Literature, Domestic and

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Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. KAPLAN, Cora (1986) Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism London: Verso. KLINGBERG, Frank J. (1926) The Anti-Slavery Movement in England. A Study in English Humanitarianism New Haven: Yale University Press. KNOX, Vicesimus (1782) ‘On the fear of appearing singular’ Essays Moral and Literary. A New Edition of Two Volumes Vol. 1, No. 5, London: Charles Dilly. MACDOWELL, Douglas M. (1986) Spartan Law Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. MITCHELL, H. (1952) Sparta London: Cambridge University Press. MYERS, Sylvia Harcstark (1990) The Bluestocking Circle. Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England Oxford: Clarendon Press. POOVEY, Mary (1984) The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Ideology as Style in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen Chicago: University of Chicago Press. PRICE, Richard (1790) A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the

Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain with an Appendix containing the Report of the Committee of the Society: an Account of the Population of France; and the Declaration by the National Assembly of France. Third Edition, with Additions to the Appendix, Containing Communications from France Occasioned by the Congratulatory Address of the Revolution Society to the National Assembly of France with the Answers to them Dublin: T.Cadell. SALZMANN, Christian Gotthilf (1790) Elements of Morality for the Use of Children London: Joseph Johnson. SHIMRON, Benjamin (1972) Late Sparta. The Spartan Revolution 243– 146 B.C . Arethusa Monographs III , Buffalo: State University of New York, Department of Classics. SMITH, Samuel Stanhope (1787) An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in

the Human Species. To which are added, Animadversions on certain Remarks made on the first edition of this Essay, by Mr. Charles White, in a series of Discourses delivered before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester in England. Also, Strictures on Lord Kaims’ Discourse on the Original Diversity of Mankind, New York; second ed. New Brunswick: J.Simpson and Co.; New

York: Williams & Whiting, 1810 . SUNSTEIN, Emily (1975) A Different Face. The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft New York: Harper & Row. TOMALIN, Claire (1974) The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. WOLLSTONECRAFT, Mary (1787) Thoughts on the Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the more Important Duties of Life London: Joseph Johnson.

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——(1788) Mary, A Fiction London: Joseph Johnson; reprinted as Mary and the Wrongs of Women ( 1976 ), editor Gary Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——(1789) The Female Reader; Or Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best

Writers, and Disposed Under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women. By Mr. Cresswick, Teacher of Elocution to Which is Prefixed a Preface, Containing Some Hints of Female Education London: printed for Joseph Johnson. ——(1790) A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France 2nd. ed., London: printed for Joseph Johnson. ——(1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Women London: Joseph Johnson. ZUILL, William (1937) Bermuda Samples 1815–1850: Being a Collection of Newspaper Items, Extracts

from Books and Private Papers, together with many Explanatory Notes and A Variety of Illustrations, Bermuda: Bermuda Book Stores; rpt. Bungay, Suffolk: Richard Clay & Son.

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Women, Islam and the State Edited by Deniz Kandiyoti

Macmillan: London 1991, ISBN 0 333 52695 3, £35 Hbk ISBN 0 333 52696 1, £14.99 Pbk Many of us have waited for the publication of this book since the initial conference Deniz Kandiyoti organized in 1987 at which the first drafts of some of the papers in the book were presented. In the post-Rushdie-affair, post-Gulf-War atmosphere, the appearance of this book is doubly welcome. As the introduction makes clear, the treatment of Islam—as well as of women— has for a long time been dominated by ahistorical accounts of the main tenets of Muslim religion and their implications for women. Racists, Orientalists, Fundamentalists and Muslim feminists all base their analyses on essentialist notions of what the ‘real’ Islam is all about. In contrast, this collection includes some of the best feminist scholars in the area, who all point out that the specific political projects of the various states which they analyze construct the specific historical ways in which Islam

Feminist Review No 42, Autumn 1992

acts upon and influences the lives of women in these societies. The ‘woman question’ has symbolic importance in the ways in which various Muslim states, in their different trajectories, have constructed their notions of citizenship and social order. Women are not just the biological reproducers of the next generation of citizens, or even just their cultural reproducers: they often symbolize the ‘spirit’ of the people, and in Muslim societies, their collective ‘honour’. As Kandiyoti points out, the ‘woman question’ has been the terrain of hot ideological contests. The ‘liberation’ of women was used as a symbol of progressive secular élites, while women’s adherence to a strict Muslim code of behaviour has been seen as an expression of cultural ‘antiimperialist’ authenticity. The different papers in the book look at some of the processes of change and ideological debates which have taken place around the ‘woman question’ in the different countries. They also look at the relationships between the state and civil society, family and society and the relationships between Islam and ‘national cultures’. It is difficult to briefly sum up the sophisticated analyses of the different papers in the book, but doing so will at least give some more concrete ideas about the range of issues covered by the book. Deniz Kandiyoti’s paper concentrates on the period over which Turkey was transformed from a Muslim empire into a secular nation-state, during which women played a central symbolic role in the ‘modernization’ of the nation. In Afsaneh Najmabadi’s paper on Iran, two periods of political and social transformation are compared: that of the rise of the Shah, in

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which women played a similar modernizing role as that of Turkey, and the Khomeini revolution, in which women were put behind the veil. Ayesha Jalal’s article on Pakistan highlights some of the paradoxes of women’s position and women’s politics in an Islamic state in which, for the first time, a woman has become a prime minister, while 75 per cent of its women live in rural areas in which the state has hardly penetrated, and their lives are shaped by custom, rather than by law. The relationship of Islam and the state in Bangladesh, the other Muslim state in the Indian subcontinent, is more ambivalent. Naila Kabeer points out that given the specific history of Bangladesh and its war of independence from another Muslim state— Pakistan, fundamentalism in Bangladesh has until now made less headway than in Iran and Pakistan. Bangladesh has remained a People’s Republic rather than an Islamic one and women’s position has been correspondingly less attacked. Amrita Chhachhi’s article on India deals with a Muslim community which is part of a secular state, in a period of growing communal strife and religious fundamentalism. Chhachhi looks at the complex relationship between state, capital and patriarchy and the roles of fundamentalist movements sponsored by the state in this. She also looks at the particular effects ‘forced identities’ in a situation of national and communal conflict can have on the position of women, when they are being constructed as representatives of their collectivities. Suad Joseph’s paper compares the different élite strategies for state building in Iraq and Lebanon: a strong centralist state in Iraq and a minimalist state in Lebanon.

While in Iraq there was an attempt to draw women away from their kinship groupings and into the state, in Lebanon the tendency was to keep them under their groupings’ control. Margot Badran’s paper on Egypt examines competing discourses and agendas over the ‘woman question’ in nineteenth—and twentieth-century Egypt. Her analysis is especially poignant in light of the recent news on the abolition by the Egyptian state of the only autonomous women’s organization in Egypt. The last paper in the book was written by Maxine Molyneux on the (by now defunct) People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. As a self-defined socialist state, it carried out interventionist policies aimed at the political, economic and social transformation of its inhabitants. The radical character of the state’s reforms raises the question of the effectiveness, as well as the limits of legal reforms in ‘women’s emancipation’. This issue needs to be completely reevaluated given the recent developments in the Soviet ‘Socialist’ bloc, as well as the developments in Yemen itself. The weakest point of the book is in discussing the Arab world—the ‘heart’ and origin of Islam. I missed an analysis of the Nasserite and Ba’athist constructions of ‘Arab Socialism’ (to differentiate from Yemen’s ‘Socialism’) which has attempted to incorporate Islam and Pan-Arabism into socialism. And even more I missed an analysis of those oil countries, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which have sought economic modernization while resisting any changes in the political and social domain, especially in all that pertains to women. Analyzing these Muslim states might have given us further insights into some of the processes Amrita Chhachhi pointed to about

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the relationship of capitalism and fundamentalism, and the discussion of citizenship in rentier economies developed by Afsaneh Najmabadi. I also regretted the absence of an article on Palestinian women. One might argue that Israel, the state which rules most of them, is not Muslim but Jewish. However, because of the adoption by Israel of the Millet system of the Ottoman Empire, all Muslims under Israeli rule are governed by Muslim law in those areas of personal law in which Israeli Jews are governed by Orthodox Jewish law. It would have made an interesting comparative case to that of India, in which Muslims also constitute a minority in a nonMuslim state next to a hostile Muslim state, but without the specific history of the Zionist project. However, these missing links should be understood more as an agenda for a second volume. It would have been an impossible task to include everything in one book of 275 pages. I only wish the book could be more readily available to a large constituency of readers. The division between trade and academic books, the difference in price and supposedly targeted audience is detrimental to the project of this book, and to what many of us are trying to accomplish in our writings. Nira Yuval-Davis Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico Jean Franco

Verso: London 1989, ISBN 0 86091 248 5 Hbk £24. 95 Jean Franco’s Plotting Women is an initial attempt to outline the ways in which women have been represented in literature throughout different stages of Mexican

history. Franco’s aim is to take a perspective that departs from the dominant hegemonic discourse of the metropolis. In her case, as an academic of British origin working in the USA, this would be the perspective of British and North American Marxist-feminism. Instead she starts out from a Latin-American feminist perspective and argues that it is through this decentred non-metropolitan perspective that it is possible to explore the relations between gender, class and identity. This is so because it is precisely Third World women who have pointed out how the liberation of individual women is tied to the liberation of their communities. Franco’s attempt is important because it assumes that the specificity of LatinAmerican feminism lies in its relation to the social context. However, her attempt to analyze the representation of women throughout history from a feminist point of view is less successful, mostly because of the very subjective texts on which she bases her analysis. Franco takes as her point of departure Foucault’s idea that an alternative discourse is confronted by dominant discourse. Her main thesis is that women struggle for the power of interpretation; since women have traditionally been excluded from interpretative power, they have had to express themselves within the marginal spaces allowed them by the ‘master narrative’. This dominant discourse, in Franco’s view, has three important sites in Mexican culture: religion, nationalism and modernization, which Franco locates in colonial times, particularly the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Religion as a dominant discourse is the framework in which she analyzes New Spain women’s discourse from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, when the struggle for

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interpretative power centred around rationality. The author identifies sermons and confession as two kinds of discourse through which single men (priests) excluded women from the dominant discourse —on the grounds that females were not rational—and kept to themselves the power to advise, exhort, counsel and scold women. Franco argues that by placing women in the sphere of emotion, not of reason, men in fact created a space for a feminine discourse; for a non-integrated culture, not accepted as such by ideology and dominant discourse. It is in this ‘herspace’ that women plot and conspire to be heard, even if only in the marginal and mystical discourse of colonial beatas or ilusas 1 they were forced by their confessors to write. Using Luce Irigaray’s idea that mystical discourse subverts the symbolic order by existing outside the linguistic system, Franco reads the mysticism of Mexican nuns as a language of body and soul from which women could talk. This is an attractive interpretation because it implies an attempt to recognize and to rescue women’s discourse for analysis. At times, mystical experience challenges the master discourse. However at others, through the very process of being transcribed, it is integrated into established discourse. The impossibility of recuperating mystical women’s discourse without the mediation of the established clergy is clear in the texts that have survived their authors. These are mostly the inquisitorial records Franco uses as her main sources, which were written by nuns under the direction of priests or by the priests themselves who had used the beatas’ conversions as examples to others. By using deconstructive techniques on some of the beata texts, Franco attempts to restore their value and meaning and to

present them as examples of a feminine voice which seeks the expression of its sexuality. Hysterical mysticism (‘the mysterical’) thus acquires a completely different significance. In the case of Sor Juana, a Jeroniman nun, the analysis centres on her effort to express herself through alternative male voices that she herself creates. She is forced to do this because in her society women have practically no chance of devoting themselves to intellectual inquiry as a main independent activity. Sor Juana chooses the path of knowledge, and by doing so, she becomes a challenger of the established order. Yet, despite her rebelliousness, she is incapable of subverting the master discourse of the religion that ultimately controls her. Finally, Franco analyzes the case of Ana Rodriguez de Castro, an ilusa also of the colonial period, who exemplifies how, towards the end of the eighteenth century, religion is no longer a main source of power and control. It is necessary however, to ask about the role of mysticism in a society in which, as Franco stresses, religious discourse has a predominant role. Was mysticism an exalted modality or religious feeling that in effect integrated women into the dominant religious discourse? The fact that the established church and its instruments (theology, inquisition, confession) retained the power to validate mystical discourse, does not modify the fact that mysticism was a form of religiosity and, as such, part of the master narrative that Franco is dealing with. On the other hand, if mystical experience was a challenge to the master narrative, to describe it was in some way to incorporate it into the rational schema of the dominant discourse. The answer to these problems is not easy, especially because Franco seems to give as much importance to the marginal discourse of an unknown beata as to the well-known

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figure of Sor Juana. Both are the discourses of women, but it is important to stress that— there are more differences than there are similarities between the two. While Sor Juana’s discourse was validated and recognized in her time, and has been since, the discourse of the mystical beatas was much less visible. Worse still, the documents that have survived about these cases are tainted by the perspective of the men who abridged them or who forced the women to write. Not assessing the representativity of the texts also affects the second part of Franco’s argument: that mysticism was a way of breaking away from the constraints which convent life imposed upon women. Franco uses a seventeenth-century ilusa, Ana Aramburu, to explain why ilusas, by escaping their confessors’ control and creating their own myths, constituted a risk for society. Since the ilusas were not under the control of either a father or a husband, and indeed lived alone most of the time—itself a challenge to society—they further infuriated the authoritarian colonial regime. The second moment of a master discourse that Franco analyzes is that of nationalism, especially of the nineteenth century, when women played a role in the construction of Mexican nationality. This is the period when the Virgin of Guadalupe becomes a symbol of nationalism, while at the same time, Malinche, Cortes’s concubine, becomes important in nationalist discourse as a scapegoat. This dualism, holy-woman/traitor woman, not exclusive to Hispanic culture, although Franco seems to assume so and explains how, in the construction of nineteenthcentury nationalism, woman had an important role to play. This is the weakest part of the book, since nineteenth-century

historical sources are still very fragmented, unlike those of the colonial period, from which Franco has been able to use good historical studies of women and documents. Franco assumes the existence in Mexico, of a sharp division between public and private realms, but this European perspective has already been shown to be not pertinent for Mexico or Latin America.2 Franco fails in this chapter to provide a Latin-Americanist perspective, since she tries to impose on Mexico a concept that was originally elaborated for nineteenth-century Europe. Here again, more historical research will illuminate the question of similarities and differences between the old and the new continents. The scarcity of memoirs by nineteenthcentury Mexican women makes Franco’s evaluation of the period difficult to assess, particularly since she relies more on men’s writing than on texts by women.3 The book is more successful in its interpretation of women in the twentieth century. In this section Franco analyzes Antonieta Rivas Mercado and Frida Kahlo as ‘advanced women’ who tried to forge for themselves an identity outside the nation and outside of history. In Frida’s case, Franco interprets her conception of the world as one in which nature belongs to women and culture to men. Antonieta Rivas Mercado, on the other hand, appears in Franco’s analysis as a fragmented human being, torn between the public figure engaged in Vasconcelos’ political campaign and the private one that is revealed in her personal letters to Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, the painter whom she was in love with. Her suicide, according to Franco, was a consequence of the masculine logic of attempting to distance herself from the men in her life: her husband, her lover, her son, her father.

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Franco’s interpretation of Antonieta Rivas Mercado is interesting because it rescues a little-known figure and gives suicide a different meaning. However, both Frida and Antonieta shared the desire to live vicariously through a man. In both cases the attempt failed. In Frida’s case though, it generated a productive artistic life, one which was motivated by her desire to understand herself—to understand female nature. In the case of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, on the other hand, the only possible option was destruction. In the last section of her book Franco analyzes the images of women in the discourses of modernity, in cinema and radio. She detects in the cinema of the fifties, especially in the film Enamorada, a return to domesticity for women and a submissiveness that the revolution had temporarily allowed women to overcome. In contemporary feminism Franco identifies a legitimate attempt by Latin-American women to overcome domesticity. Franco’s book is important because it gives us the first feminist reading of women’s representation at different stages of Mexican culture. It is not a definitive book, however. On the contrary, it poses questions about the images of women, the voices of women, the lives of women that cannot be answered until we have more and better research about women: what it has meant to be a woman, to live as a woman, to write as a woman. Carmen Ramos Escandon Notes 1 Beata: pious woman, one who lives in pious retirement and wears religious dress. Ilusa: deluded, deceived, ridiculed. Both terms had specific implications according to canonical law in colonial Mexico.

2 For a revision of the European case see: Boxer and Quartart (1987) and Rosenberg (1982). Regarding the Mexican case: recent studies show how import-ant it is for women to be able to tend to their family chores and their work at the same time whenever possible (Oliveira, 1989). For Latin America see Feijoo and Jelin (1985). 3 The only text of this kind published so far is Lombardo de Miramon (1980).

References BOXER, Marlyn and QUARTART, Jean ( 1987 ) editors Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World 1500 to the Present New York: Oxford University Press. FEIJOO, Mary Carmen and JELIN, Elizabeth (1985) El deber, ser y el hacer de las mujeres Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico. LOMBARDO DE MIRAMON, Concepcion ( 1980 ) Memorias Mexico: Porrua. OLIVEIRA, Orlandina (1989) Trabajo, poder y sexualidad Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico. ROSENBERG, Roseleid (1982) Beyond Sep arate Spheres New Haven: Yale University Press.

The Challenge Road: Women and the Eritrean Revolution Amrit Wilson

London: Earthscan 1991, ISBN 1 85383 059 3, £7.95 Pbk

The struggle for women’s emancipation in the West has taken many and varied forms, from public demonstrations to private battles. In the countries of the developing world, however, women’s struggles have usually been initiated within the context of struggles for national autonomy. During the heat of neocolonial battles, nationalist movements usually realize that women’s potential also needs to be unleashed in order to progress. However, contradictions begin to emerge when the battle is over (Mernessi, 1985:11).

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As occurred in Nicaragua and Algeria, and recently Palestine, a call for the return to traditional social structures means for women the return to the kitchen and the bedroom. Amrit Wilson describes, among many things, how the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) are trying to avoid this occurrence. This is a very challenging and important book in which Wilson charts the turbulent voyage of the EPLF which for thirty years has valiantly fought the oppression inflicted upon the Eritrean people by the Ethiopian army, led by Mengistu. This army is a neocolonial one, backed at different times by both the US and the USSR. The Ethiopians have followed the example of their previous colonial masters, Italy and Britain, in the way they have brutally massacred the ethnic minorities in the region. Right from the beginning, women have played a central role in the Eritrean struggle for self-determination: Wilson has interviewed women who have dedicated their whole lives to it. The employment of lengthy quotes from the women themselves lends a very individual and sympathetic approach to the book. The author is thus exonerated from the common academic sin of over-theorizing and thus removing the human dimension. She does quite the opposite; she aims to and succeeds in allowing us an at once painful and awe-inspiring glimpse into the hearts and minds of the women fighters, thus exposing the harshness and complexity of their lives. Wilson also analyzes the manner in which colonialism exacerbated existing patriarchal oppression. Feudal relations between men and women were modified to suit the colonizers; many women ‘graduated’ (sic) from being chattels for their men to being prostitutes to service the needs of whichever

army was there at the time, be it Italian, British or American. The strong link between colonialism and prostitution demonstrates the importance of the context of each woman’s struggle. Traditional means of earning a living were no longer possible because of war. Under colonialism, they were doubly oppressed, both as women and as Eritreans. Permanent war, which has of course devastated the lives of many Eritrean people, has led to the development of a strong feminist consciousness among the women who have fought on the frontline of that war. It has fostered among them a collective identity as Eritreans and as women and has unleashed from them previously unrealized strengths. Both of these factors have contributed to their dissatisfaction with the patriarchal status quo. The sexual dimension of Eritrean women’s lives has traditionally, and continues to be, subject to rigid societal control. These controls have been implemented in the name of Islam. Girls were often engaged before they left their mothers’ wombs and both forms of female circumcision, infibulation and clitoridectomy, were widely practised, as in some other countries of the Muslim world. Many modern Muslim intellectuals and feminists argue that these practices certainly do not originate in Quranic text but in the imaginations of the mullahs and the ulemas throughout the centuries. The EPLF, in the ‘liberated zone’, are working to change these practices completely. Both arranged marriages and infibulation have been banned; clitoridectomy has not yet been banned, so as not to completely alienate their less liberal followers. These reforms have also been endorsed by the National Union of Eritrean Women (NUEW).

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While vitally important, those reforms which pertain to women’s personal lives constitute only a small part of the EPLF socialist manifesto. Other areas where they show real clarity of vision are agriculture, trade, culture, education and health. The National Democratic Programme of the EPLF (March 1987) shows real political maturity and respect for all members of the community. This book shows how varied are the manifestations of patriarchy throughout the world and how these were partly created and partly exacerbated by colonialism, both past and present. It shows how sterile and inaccurate economistic and culturalist analyses are when applied to politically volatile societies. Many Western feminists fear that facing the differences in women’s experience throughout the world would challenge the ‘sameness’ of women’s oppression, i.e., deconstruct the whole edifice upon which feminist politics is based (Moore, 1988:11). On the contrary, I believe that it is through learning about how other women cope in the face of adversity that the women’s movement everywhere can gain strength and true solidarity can be established. Ethel Crowley References (1985) Beyond the Veil: MaleFemale Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society

MERNESSI. F.

London: Al Saqi. MOORE, H. (1988) Feminism and Anthropology London: Polity Press.

Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate Edited by Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh

Virago: London 1992, ISBN 1 85381 385 0, £8.99 Pbk

Sex is central to fantasy and desire. Little surprise therefore that it is such a source of discontent: of pleasure and pain, gratification and disappointment, happiness and grief. No solution, however, simply to shut the door on its pornographic representation as urged by the feminist antiporn lobby led by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. This is the message of Sex Ex posed. Its contributors tell an important tale, beginning with Lynne Segal’s demonstration that, contrary to Dworkin and MacKinnon’s claims, porn is seldom violent and hardly a cause of rape. It would be a disaster, writes Mandy Merck, for illiberal England to legislate yet further against pornography. Elizabeth Wilson castigates the Labour Party’s espousal of the Dworkin-MacKinnon cause as cheapskate opportunism; while Carole Vance draws attention to the 1985 US Meese Commission’s scandalously exploitative reduction of fantasy to reality in spuriously allying itself with antiporn feminism. Not that porn is innocent. In allaying men’s fears of women’s sexual rejection, impotence and homosexuality, writes Segal, it valorizes the phallus. It thereby both hides and sustains anxieties associated with the penis. Kobena Mercer like wise describes the unease evoked by the racist equation of Blacks with the penis depicted in the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, given that he too was subject to discrimination—as a white male homosexual and AIDS victim. Similarly dislocating, in this case to women, is the phallocentrism of films like Deep

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Throat. No wonder the surprise, says Anne McClintock, greeting her attendance at strip joints, so much are they designed for men. Or it would be surprising, Elizabeth Cowie writes, were it not for the multiple identifications open to spectators—female and male—say as victim or assailant in sadomasochistic (S-M) porn. All too often, comments Mary McIntosh, antiporn feminism overlooks women’s (and men’s) agency in sex. Likewise Jane Mills and Robin Gorna draw attention to the way sexual pleasure and eroticism are overlooked, indeed resisted and refused, in school sex education and in the development of safe sex AIDS/ HIV information. This is matched by antiporn feminism’s rendering of sex, at least pornography, as only fit for discussion, says Carol Smart, provided it is presented in moral terms—as coercive. So much so, wryly observes Harriett Gilbert, that Dworkin’s novel Mercy is barely distinguishable from de Sade’s Justine. Such reductions of sex to violence lose sight of the diversity of pornography—and its play with phallocentrism. This is described by Linda Williams in interrelating heterosexual, gay, S-M, lesbian, and bisexual porn. Feminist sexual reductionism likewise rides roughshod over women’s mixed feelings, reported by Loretta Loach and Gillian Rodgerson, about S-M and lesbian erotica and porn. Nor does it do justice to variation and change in the social and historical determinants of attitudes to sex: to the anti-liberation backlash in 1970s England, for instance, that prompted Kenneth Clark’s differentiation of art from porn, here documented by Lynda Nead; or to 1920s outrage at Mae West’s Broadway nofrills rendering of working-class sex, with which Marybeth Hamilton ends Sex Exposed.

She and the book’s other contributors rescue for feminism the historically and individually variable pleasures of sex and porn. But in doing so they arguably fail adequately to address the obverse of erotic pleasure and desire—its miseries and discontents. Certainly these cannot be resolved through doing away with porn. Nor is it any help, however, to reject antiporn feminism out of hand without engaging further with the complexities of women’s sexual unease that it both crudely oversimplifies yet also importantly expresses. Janet Sayers Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine Margaret Whitford

Routledge: London 1991 ISBN 0 415 05968 1, £35.00 hb ISBN 0 415 05969 0, £9.99 Pbk

Given that some of the major writings of Luce Irigaray engage closely with, and are steeped in knowledge of Western philosophical traditions, it is perhaps surprising, as Margaret Whitford points out, that her English-speaking readership in particular has not recognized her primarily as a philosopher. Her work is studied (and classified) as psychoanalysis, literary theory or feminist theory, but rarely as philosophy. In this book, Whitford offers a reading of Irigaray that sees her first and foremost as a feminist philosopher; but a philosopher for whom the boundaries between philosophy and other domains are not clearly demarcated. Irigaray is engaged, Whitford argues, in ‘that most philosophical of enterprises: philosophy examining its own foundations and presuppositions’ (p. 2). While

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not claiming to be offering a fully comprehensive study of Irigaray’s work, Whitford nevertheless offers readings of a large range of her writings that are not only detailed and careful, but combine philosophical acumen with a keen eye for the ways in which Irigaray’s work connects with contemporary tensions and debates that have become central to feminist theory and philosophy. Whitford argues that a number of Englishspeaking writers have misinterpreted Irigaray’s work, sometimes in contradictory ways. In a great deal of recent feminist theory, the term ‘essentialist’ is one of the most pejorative that can be used of any feminist writer, and the charge of ‘essentialism’ one that legitimates a fairly quick dismissal. Irigaray has been accused of varying forms of ‘essentialism’: of a ‘biological essentialism’ that derives a view of female nature from the supposition of an unmediated morphology of the female body, or of a ‘psychic essentialism’ that misreads Lacanianism and takes the feminine to be a pre-given libido, prior to language. Irigaray has also been accused of a sort of regressive Utopianism which offers an almost romantic picture of a pre-Oedipal imaginary closeness between women; and of offering a picture of ‘the feminine’ that amounts to a reactionary celebration of traditional gender ideologies. Somewhat in tension with this reading is that which sees Irigaray’s critique of ‘language’ and of male rationality as consigning women forever either to irrationality and incoherence, or to the alienation of themselves in the male Symbolic. Whitford takes issue very convincingly with all these interpretations of Irigaray. Irigaray herself, Whitford shows, has refused to offer a ‘theory of woman’; (that, she has

said, is a task that can be left to men). She has also warned of the danger of ‘blueprints’ that suppose it possible to articulate any fully clear vision of a different future for women. No form of thought can transcend the limitations and parameters of its own origins. The problem for Irigaray is not that of what sort of ‘Utopia of stasis’ we might devise, but of what strategies of subversion we can adopt, how it might be possible to ‘deconstruct’ or expose that which is ‘hidden’ in Western philosophy, how we might imagine new possibilities, while at the same time (necessarily) making use of that of which we are proposing a critique. This is a task which, far from being unique to Irigaray, is one which no attempt to think through the relation of women to philosophy can avoid. The strategy of ‘mimesis’, which Irigaray sometimes uses in Speculum of the Other Woman, needs to be read in this light. Irigaray (who was herself trained in psychoanalysis and is a practising analyst) uses the methods of psychoanalysis to try to dismantle what she sees as the structures of the Western unconscious, and the ways in which these have resonated in philosophy. In particular, she attempts to trace the fantasies which she sees as having haunted male discourse; the destructive male imaginary which is based on a buried act of matricide, and the fear of women and of the body which follow from this. Irigaray ‘reads’ the history of philosophy in a way which resembles that in which a psychoanalyst might ‘read’ the utterances of the analysand. The analysand may ‘speak’ that which is repressed in ways of which s/he is not aware, cannot articulate. So may the history of philosophy ‘speak’ the repressed feminine; and just as the aim of psychoanalysis is not primarily to establish a new ‘truth’ but to change the analysand, so, Whitford suggests,

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Irigaray is trying to make an intervention in philosophy. Many feminist critics of philosophy, as well as Irigaray, have noted the ways in which it has been difficult for women to locate themselves within philosophy as speaking subjects, without at the same time undergoing a profound self-alienation. The ‘subject’ of philosophy has been a male subject. It has also usually been, supposedly, a fully conscious and rational subject. But the idea of the conscious, rational subject has of course itself been the subject of critique, notably within French philosophy, and perhaps most importantly in the work of Derrida, much of whose work has been devoted to undermining the ‘phallogocentrism’ of the Western philosophical tradition. Yet what is the position of women within the Derridean deconstructive enterprise? Derrida himself has mobilized ‘the feminine’ as a response to the crisis of the subject; to undermine ‘phallogocentrism’ it is necessary to ‘speak like a woman’. But to ‘speak like a woman’ is not the same as ‘speaking as a woman’; and some feminist critics of Derrida have suggested that his mobilization of the feminine may in fact be simply a colonization; one which, moreover, has quite a long history. Derrida has been notoriously unsympathetic to feminism, and his critique of ‘phallogocentrism’ has appeared to leave women in a double bind. If they continue to ‘speak like women’, they appear to be consigned to a position of mere ‘enunciation’, where a position as a woman cannot be spoken. If they attempt to appear as speaking subjects themselves, they are accused of ‘speaking like men’. Much of Irigaray’s work, Whitford suggests, can be seen as addressing this dilemma. Subtending the ‘rational subject’ of

philosophy, but unrecognized, is a sexuate subject, governed by unconscious desires. And subtending philosophy itself is the ‘male imaginary’ in which women are merely lack or ‘other’. In philosophy, we need a critique of the idea of ‘reason’ that recognizes the passional foundations of reason, and refuses to divorce reason from the motivations and desires which lie at its foundation. And Irigaray asks what are the conditions for a ‘female imaginary’ that is not simply incorporated back into the male imaginary as its ‘other’? The morphology of the female body to which she appeals in an attempt to construct the idea of a ‘Zfemale imaginar’’ should not be seen as a mere description of the female body. Rather, it is an attempt to offer a new symbolic mediation of what a ‘female imaginary’ might be like, and to counterpose this to the symbolic mediations of the male body and of male sexuality which have often been a subtext of philosophical theories. The problem for women is how to assume the ‘I’ in their own right, how to enter philosophy as speaking subjects, but in a way that does not require that the female subject appears as a replica of the male subject which has been the target both of feminist and of deconstructive critique. And the problem for men is how they can venture out of the closed world of ‘I’ and recognize both the passional foundations of the male subject and of male rationality, and come to see women as interlocutors in philosophy. This enterprise, for Irigaray, requires that one retain the idea of ‘speaking as a woman’; but always in a provisional and questioning manner. We do not yet really know what it might be to ‘speak as a woman’, or on what terms women might enter philosophy; but we cannot eliminate the question without eliminating at the same

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time the task of establishing new forms of cosubjectivity with men. Irigaray’s work, Whitford suggests, is offered in order to create the space for a dialogue between herself and her readers, and between the readers themselves. ‘Her work is offered as an object, a discourse, for women to exchange among them selves, a sort of commodity, so that women themselves do not have to function as the commodity, or as the sacrifice on which sociality is built. Instructions for use of Irigaray would include the message: Do not consume or devour. For symbolic exchange only.’ (p. 52) Much the same might, I think, be said about Whitford’s own book. There is a great deal in the book that I have not discussed in this review, and much of Whitford’s discussion of Irigaray is textually detailed and, at times, quite dense. But what I think it achieves overall, quite excellently, is a new ‘map’ of much of Irigaray’s work that readers will be able to use both to enter for themselves the ‘map’ of Western philosophy that Irigaray provides, and to connect her work with some of the most fundamental contemporary debates about women in philosophy. These debates concern not simply the ‘truth’ of philosophical theories or the ‘correctness’ of interpretations, but some quite fundamental questions about the nature of interpretation itself and about the status of philosophical theories and claims; such questions are absolutely central to the feminist critique of philosophy. Do not consume or devour Margaret Whitford’s book. Use it, rather, as a means of symbolic exchange, to enter, reenter or re-evaluate the terrain of questions about the relation between feminism and philosophy. in ways which you may find, in turn, exciting, difficult, or extremely contentious, but always interesting and thought-provoking. The book provides

not only a much needed re-evaluation of Irigaray’s work, but an interrogation of the question of the place of women in philosophy which deserves wide reading and discussion. Jean Grimshaw The Rites of Man: Love, Sex and Death in the Making of the Male Rosalind Miles

Grafton: London 1991 ISBN 0 246 13474 7, £14.99 Hbk ISBN 0 586 09220 x, £6.99 Pbk

The Rites of Man opens with a prologue containing gruesome tales of male violence in which Miles expresses the urgency to discover its cause. This, she claims, lies in the social construct of masculinity. The rest of the book, then, examines the ways in which men acquire masculinity, and the effects it has on them, on other men, and (to a lesser extent) on women. The central thesis is that murderers and rapists are not psychopaths, but just ordinary men whose violence is the result of the pressures inherent in socially acquired masculinity. Violence is, in one way or another, essential to being a ‘real man’, and will not disappear until an end is brought to the ‘rites of man’, which instil masculinity in males. Just a few of the institutions held responsible for the reproduction of these rites are the family, public schools, gangs, sport and war. These are examined in the course of the argument, which is divided (somewhat unclearly) into sections on childhood, growing up, manhood and old age. However, already in the first two chapters, it is mothers and mother-substitutes who receive the blame for men’s behaviour,

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particularly, it seems, those who are loving and caring. Once again the problem of men becomes the fault of women: ‘Quite unavoidably then [my emphasis], adult male heterosexuality will contain strong elements of terror and anger, fantasies of rôle reversal and revenge against women, a blanket urge to punish someone, anyone, for what mother has done.’ (p. 30) In fact, this appears to be a book on masculinity which pays very little attention not only to feminism, but to women. It is a valid point that men, too, suffer from the ever more demanding masculine ideal, which today insists that a man not only ‘succeed’, and ‘be a man’ but a new man. However, Miles’s desire to see an end to violence seems to be based on a wish to save men from the constraints and hardships (physical and mental) of the ‘rites of man’: if they did not have to participate in these rituals, they would not have to be hurt/killed/upset and the world would be a happier place. ‘Because the majority of young men make a safe, successful transition to adulthood, are we to care nothing for those who do not?’, she writes (p. 117). Relying heavily on anecdotal evidence (from actors, politicians, novelists, Cosmopolitan…), this study lacks a strong theoretical framework. The analysis also suffers from the occasional descent into tabloid sensationalism as well as emotionally charged inaccuracies such as this: ‘And why has no government, no figure of authority, no campaigner, no parent, ever tried to stop the senseless slaughter on the roads?’ (p. 115) Despite a critique of nuclear families, marriage, the ideology of ‘new fathers’, Miles fails to go far beyond the exposure of masculine rituals and the institutions which support them—something which was already done in the late 1980s. This seems to be

mainly because she ignores the feminist critique of masculinity which has burgeoned in the past few years. When Miles mentions feminism, it is to name it as a cause of the increased pressure on men to assert their masculinity (in response to more independent women), not to analyze the vast amounts of work that feminists have recently produced on this subject. Race and class are dismissed as valid subjects for analysis on the question of masculinity and male violence on the grounds that some wives of white, middleclass men are also battered. Perhaps, as Miles claims, ‘neither race nor deprivation holds the key’ (p. 220) to male violence, but they are central issues which cannot simply be ignored, not least because the different masculinities which exist in society are then condensed into one. Gay men are also incorporated into the model: ‘Homosexual men are and remain men first, last and foremost and as such, like all men […], they pursue dominance and seek transcendence through the penis.’ (p. 152). The struggles by many gay men to challenge the structures of gender and subvert traditional masculinity are not mentioned. Despite the pessimism she inadvertently evokes through the repetition of words such as ‘inevitable’, ‘inescapable’ and ‘inexplicable’, Miles does offer some suggestions for future change in her ‘twentyfirst-century blueprint for boys’ survival’, which includes close, involved fathering; positive rôle-modelling; eliminating violence from school life; and offering positive images of women. As for the violent few, Miles suggests various legal reforms and more research into the causes of male violence. However, she makes no mention of the social, economic and cultural variations in the lives of different men, and the effects which these

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have on their propensity to violence. Neither does she suggest that improving the socioeconomic conditions of many men (and women) would change the power relations which lead to violence. It would be unfair to be entirely negative about this book. It is written in an engaging style, covers a huge range of subjects and uses detailed descriptions of masculine behaviour from many different cultural and historical contexts. However, for those wanting a more solid, theoretically sound analysis on this subject, it would be better to turn to Lynne Segal’s Slow Motion (London: Virago 1990). Gill Allwood WOMEN: their lives and literature. Catalogue of second-hand & rare books now available from Jane Bell, Fortune Green Bookshop, 74 Fortune Green Rd, London NW6 1DS. 071–435–7545.

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Journal of Gender Studies: Call for papers and for subscriptions The Journal of Gender Studies, first issue May 1991, is a twice-yearly interdisciplinary journal which publishes articles relating to gender from a feminist perspective within a wide range of subject areas covering the Social and Natural Sciences, Popular Culture and the Arts. The Journal of Gender Studies also seeks articles from international sources and aims to take account of a diversity of cultural backgrounds and differences in sexual orientation. It encourages contributions from previously unpublished writers as well as from established authors. The journal includes reviews of books, films and other forms of entertainment. The Journal of Gender Studies is published by the Hull Centre for Gender Studies, a group of academics, students and townspeople which organizes seminars and day schools in Hull and is jointly sponsored by the University of Hull and Humberside Polytechnic. Contributions (typed, two copies) are invited; articles which should be betweeen 3,000 and 5,000 words, and short pieces, letters and news items. Contributors are advised to use the Harvard (author/ date) reference system and to write in a jargon-free, accessible style. Contributions should be sent to: Marion Shaw, Journal of Gender Studies, Department of English, The University, Hull, HU6 7RX. Annual subscription: Institutions—£10.00; Individuals—£6.00. Subscriptions should be sent to: Lucy Vulliamy, 51 Park Avenue, Hull HU5 3EW. Calls for or Papers Out of the Margin. Feminist Perspectives on Economic Theory

From 2–5 June 1993 the international conference ‘Out of the Margin. Feminist Perspectives on Economic Theory’ will take place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. During the past few decades economists have become increasingly aware of the fact that gender has a deep impact on the economy. Thus far, however, little attention has been paid to the impact gender might have (had) on economic theory and methodology itself.

Feminist Review No 42, Autumn 1992

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The aim of this conference is to highlight the interrelation between gender and economic theory. Central issues are the influence of hierarchical conceptions of gender on economics and the impact of economics on relations between the sexes. The focus will be on mainstream (neo-classical) economics. By bringing together both economists engaged in empirical work and theoretical economists the conference aims at contributing to the exploration of a genderbias free economics and the search for alternatives. Papers are invited within the following fields: • • • • •

Philosophy and Methodology of Economics Economic Theory: Assumptions, Contents and Concepts Empirical Research and Construction of Data History of Economic Thought Economics and the Empowerment of Women

Papers will be selected on the basis of one page abstracts. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1 October 1992. Full papers should be received before 1 April 1993. Both abstracts and papers can only be accepted in English. A detailed call for papers is available on request. Please contact: Jolande Sap, c/o University of Amsterdam, Dept. of Economics, Roetersstraat 11, NL-1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Second Lancaster Women’s Studies Annual Conference This will take place on Saturday 20 March 1993 at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL. Papers and workshops have been invited on the subject of: ROMANCE REVISITED. This will be an interdisciplinary conference and welcomes proposals on topics such as: theories of romance/romantic love; visual/ literary representations of romance; romance, marriage and ‘the family’; lesbian and gay romance; romance and gender identity; heterosexuality and romance; possession, jealousy and revenge; romance and ethnic/national identity; desire and sexuality; romance and legal discourses; romantic love and sexual violence; psychoanalytic perspectives on romance; romance and class differences; youth cultures and romance; ‘happy endings’. Contacts: Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey, Centre for Women’s Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL Tel: 0524 65201 ext. 2235 or 4171. XIII International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences This will be in Mexico City, 28 July-5 August 1993. Call for papers for the session: Negotiating Lesbian/Homosocial Identity in Cross Cultural Perspective. Papers welcome from students, academics and community activists. Information and abstracts (by November 1992) to: Saskia Wieringa, Institute of Social Studies, PO Box 90733, 2509 LS The Hague, The Netherlands or Evelyn Blackwood, Institute of Culture and Communication, 1777 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96848, USA.

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The Judy Kimble Memorial Fund The Fund has been set up in memory of Judy Kimble, who was born in Ghana in 1952 and devoted her life and work to Africa. She died of cancer at the early age of 34, when she had launched out on a very promising academic career as a Lecturer in Politics at Leeds University. After her Cambridge degree, she had returned to Africa, and had spent several years (1974–9) teaching and researching in Lesotho; her ashes are buried there, in the continent she loved. She took her MA at the University of Lesotho, and her Ph.D at Essex University, both based on her research into the migrant labour system and its exploitation of Basotho workers in the South African mines. In 1984–5 she worked in Botswana on the Leeds University Election Study Project. She was totally committed to the struggle against apartheid, racism and oppression, especially the oppression of women. The Fund’s aims are to assist the education of Southern African women, in particular by offering a small grant annually to a woman who wishes to travel to another African country for study and/or contacts with women’s organizations, co-operatives, trade unions, etc. The Fund is open for contributions, which may be sent to the following address: Hon. Treasurer, Judy Kimble Memorial Fund, 4 Stowford Court, Bayswater Road, Headington, Oxford 0X3 9SL. Doctoral Programme in Feminist Theory Essex University has launched a new doctoral programme designed to stimulate and offer support to research projects, through interdisciplinary encounters and the articulation of feminist theory. The teachers involved each have a strong disciplinary base as well as established theoretical concerns. It is directed by Elaine Jordan (literature) and others involved are Margaret Iverson (psychoanalysis, visual representation), Ludmilla Jordanova (history, woman/nature) Miriam Glucksmann (concept of labour, sociology), Mary McIntosh (gender, sexuality, sociology) Aletta J. Norval (postmodernity, politics) Clair Wills (psychoanalysis, literature, nationalism). The programme lasts three years: in the first, students take graduate courses from the various departments and develop their own research proposal; in the second they take part in a common seminar in feminist theory and in the third they complete their own Ph.D research. Enquiries and applications: Director of Feminist Theory Programme, Centre for Theoretical Studies, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, England. Tel: 0206 872178. Plea for or Written Material I have returned to South Africa after twenty-eight years away, joining the thousands of returning exiles, reclaiming our birth right and hoping to build a new and democratic South Africa. It is early days yet to give any accurate prediction of what the outcome will be but it is clear that the situation of women in this country is dire. Women certainly do not constitute a homogeneous group. Women are divided not only on class lines but also by ethnic differences with Black women being the most exploited of all. In spite of their privileged position, white

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women are surprisingly uneducated, even though large numbers of them do work outside the home. Organizations like the African National Congress and COSATU have included demands for women’s rights in their negotiating programmes. This is a major step forward in ideological terms, but women’s status remains unchanged. The women’s movement, like the broader mass democratic struggle, has also suffered from the academic and cultural boycotts. The intellectual isolation is one factor. But, in addition, there is a dearth of feminist literature. It is extremely difficult to get books and most are prohibitively costly. The library at the University of Western Cape, where I am currently working, has practically no feminist literature. For such an institution to build up its library holdings is extraordinarily difficult, if not almost impossible. It is not only the cost of such an exercise, but also the fact that so many basic texts are now out of print. And this university, which has been operating an open door admissions policy, is experiencing grave financial difficulties as a result of the savage cuts in its subsidy. There is an urgent need for support from feminists world-wide to aid the struggle that women are beginning to conduct in this country. Your readers could make a significant contribution to the development of women’s studies here in the Cape. I appeal to them to help us concretely to build up a feminist library at the University. What I have in mind is the donation of any book or a copy of any article that your readers have written, however long ago, or have in their possession and are willing to part with. Please send them direct to me and thank you, in advance! AnnMarie Wolpe, University of Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville, 7535, South Africa. Conferences Second Women’s Forum in Russia

After the success of the first forum in Dubna in March 1991 (see report in Feminist Review 39) a second forum has been arranged for 11–13 December 1992. The Second Forum has the motto ‘From Problems to Strategy’ and aims to: set up a permanent alternative women’s organisation; prepare a report on the situation of women in Russia and organise workshops and training to work out strategies for change. The organisers are looking for support, both financial and practical participation, from women’s organizations and individuals in Europe and North America. Information from: Organization Committee for Second Forum and Women’s Network, Centre for Gender Studies, ISESP, Krasikova 27, Moscow 117218. Phone: 095 124 6185. Feminist Theory in Practice: Studies on Literature in English

A day conference on Saturday 28 November 1992 at Oxford Polytechnic from 9.30 to 5.00pm. Details from: Vicki Bertram, School of Humanities, Oxford Polytechnic, Gipsy Lane, Headington, Oxford OX3 0BP.