Among feminist writers there are:
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber; The Passion of New Eve; Nights at the Circus;
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I. Defining a feminist text.
To be considered: the sex of the author; the sex of likely readers; the publisher; how the book is marketed; attitude of the author;
Mary Eagleton’s (32) list:
- Feminist texts are written primarily by women.
- Feminist texts have a female audience in mind.
- Feminist texts discuss sympathetically the situation of women.
- The texts published by women’s publishing companies are feminist.
- The attitude of the author determines whether or not a text is feminist.
- The response of the reader (esp.critic) determines whether or not a text is feminist.
- It would be impossible to write a feminist text before the start of the women’s movement.
Cheri Register: “To earn feminist approval, literature must perform one or more of the following functions: 1. serve as a forum for women; 2. help to achieve cultural androgyny; 3. provide role-models; 4. promote sisterhood; and 5. augment consciousness-raising.” (18-19)
II. Feminist Criticisms:
There is no single feminist criticism. It is rather a collective category that embraces a variety of critical perspectives. For instance in Maggie Humm’s book A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism some chapter headings are as follows:
- Myth criticism;
- Marxist/socialist-feminist criticism;
- French feminist criticism;
- Psychoanalytic criticism;
- Poststructuralism/ deconstruction/ postmodernism;
- Black feminism;
- Lesbian feminist criticism;
- Third World feminist criticism;
This criticisms reflect not only a variety of theoretical interests and intellectual ‘orientations’ within ‘feminist criticism’, but also emphasize differences among women (e.g. in terms of race, class, and sexual orientation).
III. Feminist Reading
Feminist critics introduced the concept of a ‘gendered reader’ (“s/he is not a neutral, impersonal interactive machine but an entity encumbered with all the baggage of daily life, likes and dislikes, prejudices, histories, other reading experiences, various knowledges and gaps of knowledge, needs, aspirations…”). As Mary Eagleton states: “gender is important both in the construction of the reader and the process of reading.” Feminist reading is related to female experience.
The implied reader: “the hypothetical figure of the reader to whom a given work is designed to address itself. The implied reader is to be distinguished from actual readers, who may be unable or unwilling to occupy the position of the implied reader” (Chris Baldick, 108)
The divided reader: “Text and reader no longer confront each other as object and subject, but instead the ‘division’ takes place within the reader himself. In thinking the thoughts of the other, [the reader’s] own individuality temporarily recedes into the background, since it is supplanted by these alien thoughts which now become the theme on which his attention is focused…[A]lthough we may be thinking the thoughts of someone else, what we are will not disappear completely – it will merely remain a more or less powerful virtual force. Thus, in reading there are these two levels- the real ‘me’ and the real, virtual ‘me’ – which are never completely cut off from each other. Indeed, we can make someone else’s thoughts into an absorbing theme for ourselves, provided the virtual background of our own personality can adapt to it.” (Iser 293)
As Judith Fetterley maintains most literary texts posit a male implied reader – a situation that creates particular problems for the female actual reader. If the sense of being divided becomes intolerable, the actual reader moves towards a position of a resisting reader.
The resisting reader: “the first act of a feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us…While women obviously cannot rewrite literary works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality, we can accurately name the reality they do reflect and so change literary criticism from a closed conversation to an active dialogue.” (Fetterley xxii-xxiii)
Images of Women School of Criticism as an example of resisting reading.
Postmodenist-feminism
PAPER 1: Jerzy Kamionowski
CYBORGS AND VAMPIRES: Donna J. Haraway’s Theory and Angela Carter’s Fiction
(Published in: „International Studies” Vol. 7, No 2 / 2004, s. 25-36.)
This paper will use the theories of Donna J. Haraway to cast light on two novels of Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve and Nights at the Circus. These novels (and some of Carter’s short stories) demand to be read in Haraway’s categories: Carter’s and Haraway’s writing belong to the same intellectual trend of thought that operates both in the postmodern AND feminist nexus. First, I am going to give a brief presentation of Haraway’s theories of female identity (namely her powerful metaphors of the cyborg and the vampire). Second, I am going to demonstrate that they provide an important context for understanding Carter’s fictions.
In ”A Cyborg Manifesto” Haraway (1991, 158) recognises in the cyborg a politically useful metaphor that can be successfully implemented for the purpose of deconstructing the category of ‘woman’ by emphasising multiple categories of identity. As such the cyborg represents a polemical stance on all kinds of essentialisms, those within feminist reflection on culture and society included. One negative point of reference for Haraway’s concept of the cyborg is Katherine MacKinnon’s version of radical feminism, to which I make a brief reference later in the text.
In agreement with her situated knowledges theory (FFF) which questions the innocence of any standpoint that claims the truth for itself, Haraway (1991, 181) argues for “infidel heteroglossia.” The term denotes postmodern strategies of negotiating the truth that stress the importance of multiplicity of ‘unofficial’, ‘unfaithful’, ‘local’, ‘not-sanctified’ points of view in place of “the production of universal, totalizing theory”, within feminist movement included. She postulates practising “cyborg politics” which is
the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution (Haraway 1991, 176)
The cyborg is an emancipatory figure whose practical task lies in undermining “notions of natural essence and absolute epistemologies” (Grassie 1996) and in dismantling binary oppositions: “nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other” (Haraway 1991, 151); “the cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience” (Haraway 1991, 149) (italics mine). Thus the cyborg becomes a means to promotion of heterogeneity in the identity debates.
As for the usefulness of the figure of the cyborg for representation-cum-probing of the category of ‘woman’ and showing the interplay between feminist standpoints, it must be underlined that the cyborg is a non-hierarchical, non-discriminating, all-inclusive and pluralistic being/metaphor. The cyborg reveals feminism’s present additive structure, that is co-existence of feminisms of various theoretical orientations (e.g. Black, Lesbian, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Poststructuralist etc.), whose separate discursive practices sum up to form so called ‘feminist position’, with none of its component standpoints occupying the privileged central position or being granted the right to speak for the whole. As far as the category of ‘woman’ is concerned, the cyborg insists on taking into consideration such elements as class, gender, race, sexual orientation etc. without any attempt to introduce any hierarchy here: “With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential’ unity.”(FFF) Haraway says that “the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world”, “has no origin story in the Western sense” and “would not recognize the Garden of Eden.” (Haraway 1991, 150-151) In this context it means that no absolutist metanarrative – religious (e.g. the Bible), scientific (e.g. evolutionary psychology) or feminist (e.g. gender studies) – should make a claim for a privileged epistemological (read: power) position in defining what ‘woman’ is. In Haraway’s intention, as Ingrid Bartsch, Carolyn DiPalma and Laura Sells all claim, the strength of the cyborg lies in “its potential ability to foreground multiple categories of identity and to deconstruct the universal white woman, or the universal human subject, by pointing to multiple identities, and attempting to erode the boundaries between them” (Bartsch 2001, 142). Still, the question remains to what extent these identities are affected by one another and whether they are separable or not.
In Modest_Witness Haraway presents another hybrid: the vampire – another figure that ”makes categories travel” (Haraway 1997, 80). Unlike the cyborg with its additive nature and artificial status, the vampire conveys a sense of simultaneity and is rooted in family connections. Bartsch, DiPalma and Sells, who seem to perceive the vampire as an improvement on its earlier version (i.e. the cyborg), say that “it is not simply a fusion of subject and object (...); it implicates the subject-in-the object, sex-in-race, gender-in-ethnicity, human-in-animal (...). This simultaneity eliminates the AND, the additive, link orientation of the cyborg.” (Bartsch 2001, 145) The usefulness of the vampire metaphor consists in its ability to “figure the pollution of [all] ‘natural’ categories” (Bartsch 2001, 144). Another important difference between the cyborg and the vampire is that the latter has had a much longer history in European culture, addressing its unconscious fear of impurity and infection with the blood of the other – Haraway provides a list that apparently should not be taken as exhaustive: the Jew, the diseased prostitute, the gender pervert, the alien, the traveller, the immigrant, the dislocated one etc., steering the reader towards solidarity with the outlaws. And although she is also aware of the darker aspect of her metaphor (Haraway 1997, 215), Haraway intentionally concentrates on the promises carried on by her new monstrous figure, especially in terms of problematising all sorts of bonding by blood rather than choice.
Haraway defines the vampire as “the one who pollutes lineages on the wedding night” (Haraway 1997, 214), a narrative figure with “specific category-crossing work to do. The essence of vampires (...) is the pollution of natural kinds. The existence of vampires tropes the purity of lineage, certainty of kind, boundary of community, order of sex, closure of race, inertness of objects, liveliness of subjects, and clarity of gender. Desire and fear are the appropriate reactions to vampires.” (Haraway 1997, 80) In short, “the vampire feeds off the normalized human, and the monster finds such contaminated food to be nutritious” (Haraway 1997, 214). The vampire, as an undead figure makes any sort of classifications and taxonomies problematic: it disrupts all clear-cut differentiations and schemata, and, as a result, brings into question all traditional identity formations.
Another feature that makes the cyborg radically different from the vampire is the former’s sexual sterility that becomes conspicuous when set next to the latter’s sexual allure: traditionally the vampire is a sexually powerful male character. The cyborg does not reproduce carnally but through technology, whereas the vampire thrives on blood, the liquid of the body. The vampire, through passing on the Dark Gift (that is immortality on condition of being undead) has power to make new vampires, yet this sort of generation is, ironically in the context of the above mentioned sexual encoding, nongenetic. Still, both figures seem to me inseparable and complementary in postmodern debates on the question of identity. Not only, as we have seen, do they partly overlap, but they make it possible to connect the poles of technology and biology, seemingly the two poles organising the binary oppositions in the culture of the modern era.
In the second part of this essay I would like to demonstrate that Haraway’s categories of the cyborg and the vampire address important aspects of Angela Carter’s fiction. Two of Carter’s novels work well as examples, namely The Passion of New Eve and Nights at the Circus. The former is a quasi-SF tale testing the power of the cyborg to contest and subvert the patriarchal gender-role system. The woman is presented here as a construct – but neither as a natural or biological entity of some identifiable essence, nor as a result of social manipulation and cultural grafting (mythology included); rather as a cross between the two. The latter novel exposes the reader to the difficulty of classification – the main heroine’s status as a bird-in-woman violates the taxonomies and communicates a sense of interdependence and simultaneity of identity categories, making of her a vampire figure. Fevvers’ story serves the purpose of examining what Haraway calls the ”stigmata of difference” in terms of gender, family and class. This interdependency of categories makes it possible to engage the reader in an ethical debate on essentialism.
The Passion of New Eve is not a realistic text, but a novel of ideas, belonging to the category of Carter’s speculative fictions. As such it concentrates on the question: ‘What is woman?’ and discusses the hot issue of the 1970s feminist debates – the notion of gender. Paulina Palmer says that the novel is preoccupied with the question whether “femininity reside[s] in biology, gender attributes or, as Kristeva suggests, in the marginal position assigned to the female subject in the dominant culture” and that “Carter rejects the first possibility, accepts the second, and toys, on occasion, with the third” (Palmer 1989, 19). The critic also believes that although the novel apparently advocates androgyny as a positive alternative to traditional femininity, “in the actual fact” it promotes “attributes which are predominantly ‘masculine’ and ‘instrumental’” (Palmer 1989, 16). With all due reservations about the phrase ‘in the actual fact’, I suggest interpreting The Passion of New Eve as a text arguing for understanding femininity as the cyborg construct. Unlike Palmer, I believe that Carter does not make a final choice among the biological, social and cultural options, but treats them as co-constitutive and interdependent.
The Passion of New Eve presents the story of an English playboy Evelyn who is transformed into New Eve, and whose later fates exemplify the official women’s experience, taking him through different kinds of violation and humiliation. Evelyn’s transformation into a woman is threefold: first, the sex operation that changes him biologically; second, the experiences that inculcate in him the traditional attributes of ‘woman’; third, the prospect of motherhood, which will turn his femininity into a cultural institution.
Through this chain of ironic twists Carter confronts her reader with provoking contextual clues pertaining to the ‘woman’ debate, among whose active participants, in the role of experts, there are/have been(?) such powerful patriarchal discourses as the Bible and Freudian psychoanalysis. First of all, the creation of New Eve thanks to sex operation on Evelyn’s male body parodies not only the biblical spare rib myth, but sends us to Freud’s “placing femininity on the side of lack” (Jacobus 1995, 5). In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud tells an anecdote to illustrate how the mechanism of displacement works and to explain the phenomenon of what he calls ‘indifferent memories’. His example is the difference between the letters m and n, which corresponds with sexual difference: “The m has a whole piece more than the n”. But, as Mary Jacobus observes, “[i]n this classic representation of sexual difference (...), binary opposition leads to asymmetry; m has something that n lacks, ‘a whole piece more’, or an extra ‘member’, although to be without it is to be less than whole” (Jacobus 1995, 4). It is more important, though that it also signifies losing subjectivity – after the operation Eve(lyn) perceives his new (female) self as an object of sexual desire:
They had turned me into the Playboy center fold. I was the object of all the unfocused desires that had ever existed in my own head. I had become my own masturbatory fantasy. And – how can I put it – the cock in my head, still, twitched at the sight of myself. (Carter 1982, 75)
Thus, it turns out that it is not enough to change somebody’s biological sex to make them a woman. In the harem of the tyrant Zero Eve goes through a process of social conditioning into the role of ‘woman’; she learns “savage apprenticeship in womanhood” (Carter 1982, 107), as if parodying the anticipated definitions of ‘women’s experience’ developed later by Catherine MacKinnon (1987), who stresses the relationship of gender to sex, or more precisely, the generative power of male appropriation of women’s bodies for the constitution and sustenance of the gender category ‘woman’. In MacKinnon’s view it is the sphere of sexuality – sexual dependence, sexual violation and sexual objectification – that stands for the hard core ‘women’s experience’. As a result, one can draw the conclusion (as Haraway does) that apparently “another’s desire, not the self’s labour, is the origin of ‘woman’”(Haraway 1991: 159). Thus, not only does MacKinnon’s concept mean in practice depriving women of subjectivity, making them non-existent except as objects of male (sexual) desire, but practically preempts any possibility of changing this state of affairs – apparently one needs consciousness (category pertaining to the subject) in order to coin or modify one’s binding cultural identity. It is as if Simone de Beauvoir’s “one is not born, but becomes a woman” could be interpreted only in a negative way, whereas this diagnostic observation, clearly presenting a human subject as tabula rasa, may be read as a call to action, since everything depends on WHO is going to write on this board and WHAT messages will be inscribed on it. Of course, this might mean an instrumental attitude to one’s self, a sort of social self-engineering, but again, intentionally taking an optimistic view, we can notice that this might as well serve as a point of departure for challenging the Western system of dualistic distinctions that includes the rigid, untrespassable differentiation into subjects and objects.
In The Passion of New Eve Carter sets on to deconstruct the category of ‘woman’ by activating the mechanism of what was later called by Haraway ‘infidel heteroglossia’. It should not be overlooked that Eve’s fear of being disclosed as a female impostor makes her behave in Zero’s eyes “too much like a woman” (Carter 1982, 101). This behaviour raises Zero’s suspicions that she is a lesbian. Similarly, Zero hates Tristessa (a Hollywood film star and the embodiment of the archetypal patriarchal woman), believing that she is the Queen of Dykes who has stolen his masculine powers, whereas in fact Tristessa is a drag queen whose success in passing for a woman lies in his desire to appear feminine sustained by the expectations of the cinema male audience. In his off-screen life Tristessa remains a pathetic figure with “his cock stuck in his asshole so that he himself formed a uroborus, the perfect circle, the vicious circle, the dead end” (Carter 1982, 173). All this demonstrates how sex-role behaviour and apparel determine one’s gender, but also introduces the figures of transsexuals and transvestites – anomalous hybrids of the cyborg kind – into the ‘woman’ question. And such cross-beings are perceived by radical feminists as a threat to women’s liberation since they are “created by patriarchal culture with the aim of usurping woman’s place and power” (Palmer 1989, 19-20) – as if in the first place it was clear what ‘woman’ is.
In the third stage of her education into femininity Eve experiences a rebirth in the cave. The cave brings to mind Plato’s metaphor for his concept of human reality and the ideal order. Are we to understand that Carter uses this topos to signal Eve(lyn)’s leaving the world of shadows and entering the ‘real’ reality? Of womanhood? The novel seems to be too much infested with irony to take this at face value. What is more, it would be unforgivable in this context not to remember Freud’s maxim that “woman’s [cave-like] anatomy is her destiny”, so, as a matter of patriarchal fact, transcendence is the exclusive preserve of men. At that, Eve(lyn) is pregnant.
Through the figures of the black prostitute Leilah (who later turns out to be a feminist fighter) and the half fertility goddess/half technological monster Mother (who later appears as an old hag) Carter touches upon the ambiguous issues of race, age, power, control, play, masquerade etc. and throws them into the game. As a result ‘woman’ turns out to be an extremely complex construct in which both culture and nature have their vested interests. The open ending of the novel signals the hope invested in this, to use Haraway’s vocabulary, monstrous creature. New Eve(lyn) remains a promising figure precisely because s/he is “a cyborg”, not “a goddess” (Haraway 1991, 181). Thus, it is not, as Palmer wants, that Carter celebrates “the triumph of culture over nature, fantasy over reality” (Palmer 1989, 18), but that she celebrates implosion, which is for Haraway “a claim for heterogeneous and continual construction through historically located practice, where the actors are not all human” (Haraway 1997, 68).
Just as New Eve remains a product of sex/gender engineering whose genesis sends the reader to the myth of night births in the laboratory and Plato’s allegory of the cave, her ‘sister’ character Fevvers, from Nights at the Circus, forces us to rethink the myth of masculine parthenogenesis with its Pygmalion and Galatea story (including its modern version, i.e. the Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle story). Fevvers’ task in the story is to disentangle herself from a shroud of patriarchal (often blatantly misogynist) preconceptions, myths and representations. To make use of Haraway’s nomenclature once again, we could say that Fevvers is a result of “cybergenesis by morphing”, which makes her a prototype of SimEve (Simulated Eve), a woman whose face appeared on Time magazine’s cover in its fall 1993 issue, created from a mixture of different racial crosses by a computer (Haraway 1997, 259-265). In the case of Fevvers race is not, at least not overtly, an issue, but the similarity is still there: both, like Frankenstein’s monster who was made of bits of dead bodies, are composed out of miscellaneous pieces forced to co-exist. SimEve is a mixture of the ethnic features of the women used to create her lovely face (their faces are in the background), while Fevvers appears to be a figure sewn together from dead patriarchal myths concerning ‘woman’, predominantly of Greco-Roman, Biblical, and fairy-tale provenance.
Even the fact that Fevvers has got wings ties her to the long tradition of winged goddesses and other volatile female creatures from patriarchal mythologies. Throughout the novel Fevvers passes from one version of womanhood into another. In her teenage years she works in Ma Nelson’s brothel, but not as a prostitute: she poses as a living statue of the Winged Victory. Simultaneously, the fact that her wings are genuine is hidden from the clients, as if the possibility that some day they could enable her to soar towards freedom has to be kept in the sphere of taboo. Marina Warner observes that the Winged Victory, as one of the traditional allegories in patriarchal culture, belongs to everybody: she was a logo for Votes for Women, she was placed on the bonnet of the Rolls-Royce, and used for a cigar label (Sage 1994, 48). In the novel, though, the capitalist market mechanisms that work to fit Fevvers in this context (“Everywhere you saw her picture; the shops were crammed with ‘Fevvers’ garters, stockings, fans, cigars, shaving soap ... . She even lent it to a brand of baking powder” (Carter 1985, 8)) at the same time helped her to re-create herself as an emblem of feminine rebellion and freedom.
Early in the novel Fevvers discovers the ‘truth’ about her origin: she sees a canvas over the mantelpiece, whose subject is the mythical Leda and the swan. From this scene the reader learns that Fevvers (i.e. ‘woman’) is not ‘real’, but is a product of mythology and the fruit of rape, and the latter makes her unclean and consequently fallen. When Fevvers tries out in secret whether she can fly, she falls from the mantelpiece. This should be read as a parody of the story of the biblical Eve whose craving for knowledge and power brought about her fall, but contains other aspects of meaning too – Fevvers falls, to use her own description of the event, “like Lucifer (...). Down, down, down I tumbled, bang with a bump on the Persian rug below me, flat on my face among these blooms and beasts that never graced no natural forest, those creatures of dream and abstraction not unlike myself.” (Carter 1985, 30) What is of utmost importance, she learns to fly later under the supervision of her foster mother Lizzie. This episode reads like an illegitimate version of the Icarus myth: Lizzie the mother-engineer makes sure that her ‘daughter’ will not meet Icarus’ tragic end. Besides, Fevvers has undergone her mock-fall already (as Lucifera), which has tied her – both in a literal and metaphorical sense – to earth. Fevvers received an object lesson about the law of gravity, and learnt not to chase the chimera of her desires, but to think practically instead; the lesson Icarus also had learnt, though in a traditionally manlike, heroic way.
There are some other interesting traces pertaining to Fevvers’s entanglement in myths. She is a changeling forsaken on the threshold of Ma Nelson’s brothel, found there wrapped in straw and sleeping among broken eggshells – no doubt an allusion to Christ’s birth: her future is to become the saviour of womankind which fits in with her Christian name Sophia that hints at her wisdom. In gnostic tradition, as Maria Janion (1996, 42) reminds us, Sophia stands for the Woman-Saviour, and represents the divine wisdom capable of saving the world. At the same time Fevvers’s story re-enacts the typical fairy-tale motif of an orphan and a birdie as well, pointing to Hans Christian Andersen’s Ugly Duckling tale, which – among other things – promises victory over obstacles and celebrates survival.
And Fevvers is a survivor. Imprisoned in Mr Rosencreutz’s Gothic mansion where she is to be sacrificed in a ritual representing the victory of male principle over the female one, she manages to fly away. As part of this ritual the host calls her many names of female goddesses. He greets her with an emphatic exclamation: “Welcome, Azrael ...Azrail, Ashriel, Azriel, Gabriel; dark angel of many names.” (Carter 1985, 75) (Actually, in Madame Schreck’s house of monsters she plays the role of the Angel of Death.) During the evening he refers to her as Proserpine, Flora, Venus Pandemos, Arioriph, Venus Achamatoth, and Sophia, talks her into playing the part of Lady Godiva, and makes allusions to yoni, the core of femaleness, which he describes with obvious pleasure as the “absence, or atrocious hole, or dreadful chasm, the Abyss, Down Below, the vortex that sucks everything dreadfully down, down, down, where terror rules” (Carter 1985, 77), clearly drawing on King Lear’s outburst against women...