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 THE UNEASY MARRIAGE OF FEMINISM AND POSTMODERNISM
IN SIX TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVELS BY WOMEN

Jill Hufnagel

Bachelor of Arts
James Madison University, 1990

Master of Arts
James Madison University, 1992

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the

Department of English

University of South Carolina

1996

Major Professor , . )
z? „

Committee Member Chainirén, Examihfng Committee

Committee Member Dean of the Graduate School

 UMI Number: 9637128

Copyright 1996 by
Hufnage1, Jill
All rights reserved.

UMI Microform 9637128

Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized

copying under Title 17, United States Code

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(C C opy right by Jill Hufnagel, 1996
All Rights Reserved.
 I would like to dedicate my dissertation to the many women who have
helped and allowed me to become my own woman.

Some of these women are in fiction.

Janie places the horizon in my open arms with her embrace of life,
in all its glory and despair.
Esperanza whispers into my ear the innocent pleasures of childhood
that I might otherwise have lost.
Louise paints across my mind the depths and passion of the female body.
Willa Prescott Nedeed reminds me that we must all climb our own staircases.
And Sula and Nel cast the silhouette
of a lifetime of love shared between women.

Other of these women are in my life.

My mother gave me her own version of feminism,
showing me that being a woman is about
speaking your mind, living freely, and loving your children.
My sister, Amy, has taught me to smile
and to breathe in the freedom of nature.
Lisa Harlan has been to me the greatest friend 1 have ever known,
full of an unparalleled energy and love for life.
In her young motherhood and her gentle compassion,
Carole Cory has shown me the incredible strength of womanhood.
Wherever 1 am, Sally Walsh brings to me
the beauties of the written word in her amazing correspondences.
And without the incredible mentoring of Judith Giblin James,
1 would never have understood what these circles of women offer me and
the ways in which we are all creative of one another.

iii
 Acknowledgements

There are some people in this world whom we will never be able to
thank enough. Judith Giblin James is one of these people in my world, and
all that I can hope is that through her model, I might offer a similar guidance,
support, and inspiration to the generation of young woman toward whom I
now turn. As my dissertation director, she always knew when to push and
just how much. More than anything, though, she has shown me a rare and
amazing kind of womanhood.

I would also like to thank Ed Madden, Diane Johnson-Feelings, and

Kevin Lewis. As members of my dissertation committee, they were always
patient, even as time dwindled and deadlines loomed. They were
challenging, understanding, and offered valuable insights into this project,
helping me along each time we came to that table on the first floor of Welsh
Humanities.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art has kindly granted me

permission to reproduce Kathe Burkhart's "Sayonara Cinderella" and Renee
Cox's "Mother and Child" from their Bad Girls exhibit catalogue.

My parents continue to have faith in me, even as I live out their job
title as professional student, and my gratitude for their belief in me cannot be
put into words.

Finally, I could not have completed this project and been so strangely
happy while doing so without Brenton. His quirky sense of humor and
preoccupation with the paranormal rescued me from myself on countless
occasions and will, I'm sure, continue to keep me sane. When I was swirling,
running around in circles, crazed, and overwhelmed, he never asked why.
Instead, he gave me the diversion of his delightful company and got me
hooked on the Chicago Bulls.

iv
 ABSTRACT

The Uneasy Marriage of Feminism and Postmodernism

in Six Twentieth-Century Novels by Women

Jill Hufnagel

Feminist postmodernists present something of a conundrum, in that

they are enough outside postmodernism's circumscribed boundaries to offer a

critique of the position even as they employ postmodern strategies to do so.

Accustomed to the fractured subjectivity of the postmodern aesthetic, women

experience not the alienation that male writers confront as a result of their

nostalgia for a modernist world view, but the solace that comes from the

recognition granted to their own lived experiences as plural selves. A

feminist postmodernism allows for the construction of a seemingly unified

self—although not the standard heroic self of the realist canonical quest plot—

that embraces multiplicitous and polyvocal identities.

Through six close readings, the study critiques the construction of a

postmodern canon as authored by the Caucasian male hegemony and moves

toward defining a feminist postmodernism. The texts examined often

threaten the legitimacy of me ta narra lives of power and oppression and

explode the polarities that fix such power. Like canonical postmodern texts,

they problematic linguistic structures, but go further to create and employ

linguistic strategies that escape the prison of patriarchal language through the

resurrection of a matrilineal, prelapsarian language. The study traces the

feminist postmodern tradition through Djuna Barnes's Nightu'twd (1936),

Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972), Joan Didion's A Book of Common

Prayer (1977), Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984), Gloria

Naylor's Mama Day (1988), and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body
(1992).

The culmination of many of the feminist and postmodern strategies

discussed in this study comes through the articulation of the mother tongue.

The text becomes an extension of the body, as the creative impulses of

motherhood and art finally merge to challenge all that is linear, all that is

classifiable. In their conclusions, these novels often move toward a telling

silence. This sixty-year tradition is marked by a passionate struggle with an

ineffectual language and a search for creative power. The feminist

postmodern novelist seeks to reposition the reader, making her

uncomfortable in this new position and complicit in both the system being

critiqued as well as in the subversive revisions offered in the novels.

Judith Giblin James

Dissertation Director

vi
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
A Marriage of Minds in Ten Parts and a Choir of Voices:
Feminism and Postmodernism in the Twentieth-Century Novel......................... 1

CHAPTER ONE
A Look in the Mirror of a Changing Genre:
Robin as a Reflection of Djuna Barnes's Nightioood............................................ 52

CHAPTER TWO
In Search of the Mother-Artist:
Redemption of Creative Powers in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing................... 82

CHAPTER THREE
A Common Bond, A Common Prayer:
Joan Didion's Grace and Charlotte of A Book of Common Prayer.................. 107

CHAPTER FOUR
Blurring Boundaries: Genre, Gender, and Culture
in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street............................................... 126

CHAPTER FIVE
The Resurrection of Lost Dialogues and Goddesses
in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day.................................................................................... 159

CHAPTER SIX
Deconstructing the Dark Continent of
Jeanette Win terson's Written on the Body............................................................185

CONCLUSION
Beyond the Image, Beyond the Word:
A Feminist Postmodern Denouement...................................................................... 202

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................ 213

vii
 INTRODUCTION

A Marriage of Minds in Ten Parts and a Choir of Voices:

Feminism and Postmodernism in the Twentieth-Century Novel

‘The honour ofyour presence

is requested
at the Marriage Ceremony of
feminism and ‘Postmodernism
000000000000000000

‘Reception Immediately follouring

Marriage is rarely an easy proposition. Divorce rates are monumental.

And studies consistently reveal that communication is a key element in both

the survival and failure of relationships. Power and identity issues follow

closely behind. Even with odds far from in the favor of even the happiest of

couples, traditions continue. They court, fall in love, explore the world
together, learn one another's patterns and routines, and often take this crazy

plunge Why? Perhaps because they have a faith that this time it will be
different, that they can make it work, that theirs is a rare and powerful union.

What, then, when they demand an open marriage, one that does not
require monogamy or ask that they sacrifice their identities as individuals to

their life together? They are both thinking people, needing mental space of

their own, and so the room to wander is not physical but rather intellectual
and philosophical. He is powerful, complex, and articulate, characterized by a
deep engagement with ontological concerns and a questioning of long-held
universals. His forefathers offer a starting place for his own area of inquiry,

and he seeks to resurrect them from their gilded caskets to critique and revise

their own imperfect unions. She, too, is powerful, complex, and articulate,
and her concerns are rooted in gender. Her foremothers offer a wealth of

knowledge, part of which is a healthy suspicion of what resides in those

gilded caskets. She questions the place of woman in the universe, and
unabashedly critiques the system that finds her repeatedly traveling a long
aisle, in a garment that makes progress rather stilted, toward an altar where

men have already convened, taken roll, and elected officers.

At the reception, they are reminded of their pasts, both alone and

together, by the many who have joined to celebrate their union. Advice­

ranging from the fairly harmless and well-meaning to the skeptical and
sometimes downright paranoid—is whispered into their ears by friends and

colleagues. After the festivities, toasts to their longevity, and the last dance -a
pas de deux on so many levels—comes a settling in for the newlyweds. The

honeymoon is divine, but soon, issues that once seemed so easily

surmountable transform them into stalemates. Who are we? they wonder,

and how did we get to this place ?

I. Getting Acquainted:
Toward Defining Postmodernism

Looking for Mr. Right-Scanning the Personals

Blind Dates-First Impressions-Small Talk-War of Words

Ah, it surfaces yet again: the identity question. Reams of pages have
been filled both with the postulations of the gods of the postmodern regime

2
and the chorus created by a contemporary mob of scribbling women. It seems,

in fact, as if almost everyone's taken hold of that snow-white plume to sign

this guest book Some of their comments overlap, while others suggest an
undercurrent of subversion that both threatens and sustains this uneasy

relationship.

000000000000000000

It is an understatement to suggest that definitions of postmodernism

vary considerably. Perhaps the term "definition" is at odds with the

complications that these efforts to pin down this movement seem to share.

Some define the movement by stringing together its apparent qualities,

offering no single term a position of authority, but instead setting each quality

alongside others. Kayann Short discusses postmodernism in terms of its

"experimentation with writing's formal elements and textual practices:

syntax, genre, closure, point of view, narrative voice, linear plot, etc.

Postmodern writing not only refers to its own discursive processes but

radically challenges language's ability to communicate experience and

perception" (699). The double gestures that abound in postmodern thought

find resonance as well in other attempts, such as Terry Eagleton's, to catalog

the movement: "Much postmodernist culture is both radical and

conservative, iconoclastic and incorporated, in the same breath" (21).

Clearly, postmodernism has wide and varied kinfolk, from surfiction

and post-structuralism, to magical realism and metafiction. Describing the

qualities of metafiction, Patricia Waugh explains that it is "a celebration of the

power of the creative imagination together with an uncertainty about the

validity of its representations; an extreme self-consciousness about language,

literary form and the act of writing fictions; a pervasive insecurity about the

3
relationship of fiction to reality; a parodic, playful, excessive or deceptively

naive style of writing" (2). Postmodernism is a meta-discourse concerned

with meta-narrative, meta-cognitive, and meta-artistic processes. Thus, as

Waugh suggests, those engaged in metafiction "explore a theory of fiction

through the practice of writing fiction" (2), the result of which is a curiously

self-conscious and self-aware fiction. This self-awareness, casting off the

garments of an artificial realism that claimed to mirror reality in the language

of fiction, creates a rare set of balances that both construct and deconstruct the

novel. Linda Hutcheon's ideas of postmodernism echo the instability that

the movement encourages: "The ex-centric, the off-center: ineluctably

identified with the center it desires but is denied. This is the paradox of the

postmodem and its images are often as deviant as this language of

decentering might suggest" (60-61).

Often postmodern theorists are challenged to create a new critical

space to accommodate the paradoxes of postmodern thought and discourse.

Like Short, Susan Rubin Suleiman uses a series of terms linked together to

sketch postmodernism: "The appropriation, misappropriation, montage,

collage, hybridization, and general mixing-up of visual and verbal texts and

discourses, from all periods of the past as well as from the multiple social and
linguistic fields of the present, is probably the most characteristic feature of

what can be called the postmodern style"' (191) Even as Suleiman

constructs a definition for postmodernism, she sets this definition in a

framework that denies its authority. She explains, "1 still believe that the

effort to define postmodernism chiefly as a formal (or even as a formal and

thematic) category and to place it as such in opposition to modernism is, even

when successful, of limited interest" (186). Suleiman's point is fundamental,

articulating the reductivist attention on "formal and thematic" issues that

4
often characterize definitions, to the exclusion of other pivotal issues, such as

the epistemological and political. Discussions of postmodernism are

necessarily amorphic, for in a theoretical discourse that calls into question

totalizing gestures, the process of defining easily becomes a

counterproductive one.
While critics have espoused varying ideas of what the postmodern

movement is and have struggled to come up with defining tenets of this

aesthetic, a single, all-encompassing definition has yet to be agreed upon.

And it never will be. A major purpose of the postmodern movement is to

defy binaries that purport equality while concealing and perpetuating

complex hierarchies, and to force the reader into the at once uncomfortable

and liberating position of being utterly without a reliable or fixed Truth. No

marking posts suit the movement because the movement is just that: fluid,

transformative, and metamorphic. The postmodern artist, initially-and by

some continuously-scolded for his/her lack of a moral center, relishes the

realm where truths co-exist and realities transcend time and space.

IL Where to Begin?
Navigating the Dating Game

Dating a Feminist- Swapping Histories-Setting a Date

Our preoccupation with dates has—no pun intended—a long history.

As we flip through photo albums, we find versions of our tinier selves

blowing out candles, hovering over a sugary blue C ookie Monster cake, and
later, as we age, we find awkward pictures of adolescent attempts at formality

at "boy-girl" parties, marked by first kisses and what seemed at the time

overwhelming crushes. Later, of course, the cutting of the cake means more
than a celebration of another year; it carries with it political, social, cultural,

professional, and sexual implications that are just short of mind-boggling.

But in the space between toddlerhood and adulthood are many years,

and our need to chart the passing of time is inscribed all around us. On the
flip side, the photos are marked with dates, corresponding to the age of those

pictured. Dates evoke in us more than simply a chronology of events; they

help us to flesh out who we were and what was happening in the world

around us. We need order, a way to remember the past, and dates give us the

semblance of such order With years, we hope, comes wisdom. And so it

follows that the older you are, the more time that you can claim as your own,

the more truth you carry with you.

000000000000000000

With dates so pivotal to our personal lives, it comes as little surprise

that scholars, too, struggle to claim years—and with those claims a

legitimating longevity—for the theories they explore and set forth. Following
the lead of the movements that precede postmodernism, critics have often

placed temporal boundaries on postmodernism, most frequently citing its

beginnings as some time in the early 1960s. But postmodernism, unlike

earlier movements which reluctantly accepted artificial chronological frames,

cannot be bound by dates. largely as a result of the way in which postmodern

literature folds and deconstructs linear notions of time, postmodernism is the

first truly anachronistic literary movement. And so, arguments can be made

that much earlier texts are in fact postmodern in certain of their elements and

techniques.
I he canonical date of the 1960s as the birth of postmodernism is under

considerable debate. In Words in Reflection: Modern language Theory and

6
Postmodern Fiction, Allen Thiher suggests that this date ought to be pushed

back several decades, "to include some works written in the 1930s" (7). Even
when postmodernism in its entirety is not under attack, certain of its qualities

can be located in much earlier texts. Robert Siegle identifies reflexivity as one

especially anachronistic quality of postmodernism, explaining: "I have little

sympathy for discussions that seem to confine reflexivity to recent avant-

garde works, as if the novel had 'evolved' into metafictional cleverness

sometime during the 1960s. . . . [RJeflexivity seems so current' mainly because

poststructuralist theory allows us to understand it fully" (14).

III. Where Have You Women Been Keeping Yourselves?

The Absence of Women in Postmodern Canonization, or,
Singles Bars and Lonely Nights

Riding the Bench-A Watched Phone Never Rings

Stranded at the Drive-in-Left Out in the Cold

Alone, she is searching. Allies are few, and even a good cup of Earl

Grey won't do. It seems, in fact, more like a mockery. To have only one

woman who knew her, really knew her, would be enough. But she is here,
the walls are bare, and the steam is fast dissolving. Was there ever a time

that well-read books, women's circling conversations, and an unexplored

passion filled this room?

000000000000000000

This spring, 1 taught a course titled "Harems, Cliques, and Convents:

Women's Communities Across Space and Time." In the class, we discussed

both the liberating and restricting forces of women's communities on the

7
individual woman. What I suspected was confirmed: we, as human beings,

long to belong. We create and join clubs and organizations throughout our

lives. I remember well a club that a group of six of us formed in the fourth

grade. We each had a sign-l think mine was a rainbow-and those signs
were, I now see, a way of claiming our space in that elementary school clique.

We were also, admittedly, about exclusion. As the forming sisters of the club,

we would determine who was in and who was out, creating a fairly benign

version of playground gatekeeping. The politics of that club continue, in

various forms, throughout all of our lives. And now, as adults, we have to

ask often complex and implicating questions about how such groups are

constructed, who holds their power, and who-by virtue of the answers to the

first two queries is excluded and why.

... the literary movements of the twentieth century that arose in opposition
to realism—most evidently modernism and postmodernism-have strong
affinities with a specifically feminist interrogation of the assumptions
encoded in realist conventions. Yet despite these affinities, there are fewer
female writers in the canons of the twentieth-century narrative experiment
than in the canon of English nineteenth-century realism. (Hite 11)

Again and again, women are scarce or nonexistent both in discussions

of postmodern discourse as well as on lists of practitioners of postmodern

fiction. Often, women seem all but oblivious of one another. In "What is

metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?" Waugh

seems almost to avoid women's literature in her overview of the

controversial, experimental fiction that she terms "metafiction." While

Bonnie Zimmerman allows that historically "women writers have turned to

experimental movements in order to freely inscribe their own words" (175),

she seems unwilling to position women similarly in contemporary trends:

8
"there are relatively few examples of truly postmodernist feminist

novels"(176). What Zimmerman means by "truly postmodernist feminist

novels" is never elaborated on, and her dismissal of women's place in the
postmodern movement seems not only hasty but largely unexamined and

reductivist. While readers might hope that Zimmerman is being somewhat

tongue-in-cheek with her comment that, "By the time postmodernism

disrupted twentieth-century realism, it was generally accepted that men were

writing the Great American Novels and women were typing them" (176), she

does little to dispel the incredible belief that she supports such a statement.

Feminist postmodernists face a profound struggle in reconciling a

desire to define a subjectivity, and thus claim an agency that would

acknowledge their authority, with the recognition that any claim for organic

subjectivity can only be artificial. Explaining that women had not made the

artistic advances that would permit the indulgences and excesses of

postmodern techniques, Zimmerman rather patly asserts: "Self-reflexive

fiction about the structure of fiction was perceived to be an apolitical luxury

not yet affordable by an 'undercapitalized' cultural group " (176). Seemingly

discounting the progress of women's fiction, Zimmerman adds: "the task of

feminist fiction has been to create an authoritative voice, not to undermine

an already existing one " (176), thus effectively robbing women writers of the

capacity to critique the systems in which they operate or the tradition that is

their inheritance.
Listing several authors, Zimmerman points to the chasm that the

feminist postmodern writer must traverse in her relinquishing of a

crystallized subjectivity. She contends that many female writers, especially

those "not directly connected with or even hostile to the feminist

movement. . . seem committed to an audience, to meaning, to everyday life"

9
(177). However, included in her list is Diane Johnson, author of The Shadow

Knows, a text firmly rooted not in the realities of the everyday but in the

paranoia that has put postmodernism in the limelight with texts such as

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Zimmerman's privileging of a

male postmodern aesthetic is blatant and often undermines its feminist

counterparts: "Feminist fiction seldom is as self-conscious and artificial as are

male metafictions, and experimentation usually serves the ultimate end of

realism" (177).
Zimmerman suggests that women writers are too involved in the

realist gestures-and the political potential therein—of their fiction to risk the

experimental strategies of postmodernism. One wonders how she reconciles

such a stance with her early comment that "Feminism is perhaps the
ultimate overthrow of authority" (175), since postmodernism clearly shares

this antagonism with narrative authority. As long as critics deem realism as

the ultimate end of women's fictions, their art will be stunted in its abilities

to participate in postmodern discourse and the linguistic and aesthetic

challenges that are layered within their fictions overlooked and therefore

discounted.
At points toward the end of the essay, Zimmerman seemingly denies

her own argument: "Despite the examples discussed throughout this chapter,

more arguments exist for a postmodern feminist aesthetic than do examples

of one" ( 186). Most disconcerting are her totalizing generalizations about the

nature of women: "Perhaps women have been raised to see relations between

things and people, perhaps we are not yet through with reality, perhaps the

anti-realism of postmodernism is passe " (186). Her final discounting is weak,

if characteristic: "feminist fiction, from the late 1960s to the present, has

maintained a tie to reality, however high it has soared above or beyond it"

io
186). What remains unexamined are the complications of the stance

Zimmerman offers, along with the appeal of postmodernism to feminist

agendas. Hers seems a cursory, largely unexamined view of women's

flirtations and courtship with experimental fiction.

Contemporary feminist fiction, furthermore, is hardly a unified

category. To the extent that Caucasian women have been erased from the

postmodern canon, women of color have been even further slighted.

Suffering a fate not unlike that of the Southern writer whom critics often

refuse to see as anything more than a charming local colorist, the ethnic

woman writer is constantly read through class and racial perspectives,

effectively shadowing her participation in the linguistic and narrative

experimentation of postmodernism. Conversely, while writers uch as Toni

Morrison, Amy Tan, and Alice Walker have finally been acknowledged as
gifted writers sketching new artistic horizons, these acknowledgments all too

often overlook the political implications of their contributions to twentieth­

century literature.
As we have seen, definitions of postmodernism are plentiful.
Numerous bibliographies and foundational articles, now often considered

pivotal, have sought to outline the tenets of postmodernism and to list its

practitioners. However, as Meaghan Morris cautions and Zimmerman's

approach so clearly illustrates, "Any bibliography [or other synthesis] frames,'

as it defines, its field of representation. But the paradox of the frame does not
prevent us from asking, in relation to any instance of framing, where and

why a line is drawn" (379) and, according to these demarcations, both

who/what is being walled in and who/what is being walled out, as Robert

Frost would sagely warn. Of one gap-riddled bibliography, Morris explains

the complications that face those trying to delineate a postmodern canon: "it

11
becomes particularly difficult to determine the difference between an act of re­

presenting a presupposed historical not-figuring of women in

postmodernism debates, and an act of re-producing the not-figuring, not

counting, of women's work, by 'simple' omission (writing it out of history, by

writing its absence into history)" (379). Morris's metatheoretical response is

well-formulated and opens another set of issues in this debate, one of which

is perhaps an impending disaster that the academic powers-that-be are

struggling to keep at bay. She wonders if postmodernism is not "the last ruse
of the patriarchal University trying for power to fix the meaning, and contain

the damage, of its own decline" (380). If Morris's suspicions are founded,

such a panic by the patriarchal University could very well signal the dawning

of a new day for countless marginalized voices. Morris further articulates the

forces facing those critics who attempt to rescue feminist postmodernists

from obscurity. She questions how feminist critics will muster the will

necessary "in trying to point out, let alone come to terms with, what seems to

be a continued, repeated, basic exclusion of women's work from a highly

invested field of intellectual and political endeavor" (380), and this is the

inquiry that is most pressing for Morris. She sees a reciprocal potential in the

intersection of these two theoretical stances: "since feminism has acted as one

of the enabling conditions of discourse about postmodernism, it is therefore

appropriate to use feminist work to frame discussions of postmodernism, and

not the other way around" (381) suggesting, then, a privileging of the

feminist frame over the postmodern.

In a similar vein, Hutcheon acknowledges both the sexism and racism

inherent in postmodern theory, but asserts, "the center used to function as

the pivot between binary opposites which always privileged one half. . . .

|However,] if the center is seen as a construct, a fiction, not a fixed and

12
unchangeable reality. . . [then] the new and-also of multiplicity and difference

opens up new possibilities" ( 62). Clarifying her position, Hutcheon explains

that, modified by feminist insights, "Postmodernism does not move the

marginal to the center. It does not invert the valuing of centers into that of

peripheries and borders, as much as use that paradoxical doubled positioning

to critique the inside from both the outside and the inside" (69).

What is ironic is that women are excluded from a field that clearly suits their

purposes of critical inquiry. If part of the postmodern agenda is the revision

of metanarratives, then women's place in this movement ought to be secure.

Perhaps their exclusion signals that they are a threat to the canon; for, as

Hutcheon asserts: "literary discussions of postmodernism often appear to

exclude the work of women . . . even though female (and black) explorations

of narrative and linguistic form have been among the most contesting and

radical" (16). On the one hand, women have already benefited from the

shifting paradigm that postmodernism offers, facilitating, as Hutcheon notes,

"the postmodern valuing of the margins and the ex-centric as a way out of

the power problematic of centers and of male/female oppositions" (16) as

well as, one might add, social hierarchies that consistently find women

lingering around the bottom rungs. On the other hand, women have been

given little credit for their role in forcing this subversion of the dominant

paradigm.

In The Other Side of the approaches much the same

question that I had in mind before beginning this study: "Why don't women

writers produce postmodernist fiction?" (1). What Hite contends is that,

while women are strikingly absent from lists of postmodern writers and

virtually ignored in studies of the movement, "a number of the most

eminent and influential women writing in the contemporary period are

13
attempting innovations in narrative form that are more radical in their

implications than the dominant modes of fictional experiment, and more

radical precisely inasmuch as the context for innovation is a critique of a

culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist" (2).

The overlooking of female participants in postmodern literature has a

notable parallel in the reception of many female modernist pioneers—"Woolf

and Stein appeared as after images, even imitators" (Friedman and Fuchs 5)—

whose work was often slighted and overshadowed by that of their male

counterparts, many of whom trailed behind them in innovation. Early

critical response has set a pattern: "women were cut out or subordinated in

the first assessments of early twentieth-century experimentalism, fixing the

response to succeeding generations" (Friedman and Fuchs 6). And this

pattern of erasure has become seemingly insurmountable, until the present,

when the postmodern stance itself should, philosophically, offer artists a

wider invitation.
In Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde, Suleiman

aligns postmodernism with "the choice of models of dissent and

heterogeneity over models of consensus and systematic totality" (184),

characteristics that can certainly be ascribed to the multicultural impulses that

have steered much of the fiction debuting during the second half of the

twentieth century in America. She describes Jean François Lyotard's

postmodern dream as one "where there would be no losers or winners, only

players in a constantly evolving process; where openness would be the rule"

(184-85). What is ironic about this observation is that while the postmodern

impulse may well gravitate toward the sort of linguistic game playing that

Suleiman describes, access to this playing field has long been denied to those

who do not fit the canonical mold

14
 While Suleiman faults early theorists for their blatant blindness to

women writers participating in postmodernism--"one can ascribe the early

critics' silence not only to ordinary sexism ('not seeing' women who are
there)"-she quickly softens the blow of such an accusation with the secondary

cause with which she concurs: "a real scarcity of women's work in those

movements" (187). Suleiman does catch herself a bit later, remarking on the

seeming absence of women's postmodern fiction: "the lack may have been in

the beholder rather than in the object" (187). This suggestion is heavy with

political nuances, many of which place the beholder in a rather precarious

position. What preconceptions and/or misconceptions would govern the

beholder's blindness to women's postmodern fiction? Are, as Hite suggests,

women's experimental strategies too often seen instead as shortcomings?

When the achievements of women writers are ignored, we are forced to

wonder about the processes by which a postmodern aesthetic has been

defined as well as the motives of participants in this framing. Perhaps

women, too, were actively responding to the tenets of a narrowly defined

modernism and using similarly deconstructive techniques in their responses,

but those gatekeepers of this new artistic horizon chose instead to define the

movement through male models. The question becomes then not why

weren't women writing postmodern novels, but who has defined what this

"postmodern novel" is and why have women's contributions to the

foundations and development of this aesthetic been categorically

overlooked? Can we, in fact, define a postmodernism that does not include

the writings of women since postmodernism, by its very nature, i .-about

creating what Suleiman terms an "open field, " about denying binaries, about

a multiplicity of overlapping and often contradictory voices? Suleiman

explains that even in the rare instances when women's contributions to the

15
postmodernist movement have been acknowledged, these acknowledgments

are often cursory in their treatment of gender issues, "ignoring the specifically

feminist-or even feminine -meanings of that work" (188).

Ihab Hassan, a formative voice in postmodern theory, provides a clue

to women's exclusion in remarking, "Nor is the most elaborate theory

innocent of autobiography" (3). One wonders at the way in which such a

statement becomes self-indicting. For if, as Hassan suggests, theory is

inclusive of and a product of the life of its writer, then the taint of the

theoretical waters becomes clear: male, Caucasian, academic. It is undeniable

that those who have authored postmodern thought are Caucasian males

speaking largely from the ivory towers of academia. Trained in modernism

and intrigued by French philosophy—most notably the works of Derrida,

Foucault, and Lacan-the backgrounds of the most influential postmodern

theorists are strikingly similar. And if their postulations are an outgrowth of

their own lived experiences, where, then, is a place for the unheard voices in

this theoretical sparring and is it surprising that the theories thus outlined

leave little room for voices that do not mirror their own? The paucity of
women writers deemed postmodern cannot be missed, and perhaps Hassan's

assertion accounts in part for this absence.

The autobiographical roots of theoretical discourse are only one

element of the power base from which postmodernism operates. The biases

that construct postmodern parameters are wide-ranging and are only now

beginning to be fully explored, by critics such as Phillip Brian Harper In

Framing the Margins: The Social l^igic of Postmodern Culture, Harper

suggests that the germ of postmodern art is the marginalization of certain

voices-based on gender, race, and sexual orientation—prior to the 1960s. His

book comes out of working with Suleiman and Alice Jardine, and the

16
feminist sympathies that resulted from that exchange are fortified by his own

marginalization as homosexual and in his area of specialization, African

American literature and culture. Writing out of a decentered

autobiographical experience, Harper contends that, "if postmodernist fiction

foregrounds subjective fragmentation, a similar decenteredness can be

identified in U.S. novels written prior to the postmodern era, in which it

derives specifically from the socially marginalized and politically

disenfranchised status of the populations treated in the works" (3). The link

that Harper suggests aligns postmodern theory and fiction with those voices

it has categorically refused to acknowledge and credits this same cacophony of

marginalized voices (rather than the usual claimants) with perhaps the most

significant philosophical trend of the second half of the twentieth century.

Harper's suggestion is itself postmodern in its disintegration of power

hierarchies that characterize this movement. Quick to clarify his position,

Harper explains: "my main objective is not to make an original claim for the

ways that fictions of social marginality prefigure postmodern

decenteredness"; rather, he wishes to explore and emphasize "socially

marginalized groups' anticipatory experience of postmodern uncertainty, "

and "to suggest that marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness is

itself a largely unacknowledged factor in the general' postmodern condition"

(4). 1 share with Harper the position "that the experiences of socially

marginalized groups implicitly inform the general' postmodern condition

without being accounted for in theorizations of it" (4). Harper examines the

sociopolitical framework for the silencing of some voices and the

concomitant amplifying of others toward filling in the blank spaces of

postmodern theory with those muted and marginalized contributions.

Claiming as postmodern Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, among other

17
works traditionally marked modernist, Harper explains that he makes such

an assertion based on popularly circulated definitions of postmodernism.

Harper seeks not to use such texts toward his own definition of

postmodernism (or expansion of the postmodern canon), "but rather to

examine more closely the effects that other observers have already identified

as postmodernist in order to interrogate their relation to the aesthetics of

marginality" (145). Finding in lists of postmodern authors an easily spotted

privileging of white males, Harper undertakes to analyze the politics beneath

canonical boundaries of postmodernism. He cites the "emphatic location of

the postmodern condition within the normative subjectivity of the white

male" and explains that this norm "sets the stage for just the sort of

correlation of postmodern subjectivity and social marginality that I want to

undertake" (146). Taken a step farther, this correlation seems antithetical,

and makes of postmodern theorists a group of frightened hypocrites offering

a last-ditch effort to save their own privileged positions as distillers of the

theory to understand the place of the marginal without actually including

their work in the canon. That these theorists offer a refreshingly open

theoretical stance—a stance particularly appropriate to the multicultural

impulse that has marked the literature of the last half of the twentieth

century—and at the same time refuse to acknowledge those works most

clearly aligned with the agenda they have set forth, suggests the work of an

insidious sleight of hand.

A secondary result of such a correlation has been the skepticism that

has been the response of many marginalized parties toward postmodern

ideology. Jane Flax suggests a bit of healthy suspicion-our own doses of

postmodern paranoia-toward the deconstruction of subjectivity, perhaps

fortuitously timed to keep in check those who are only now exploring their

18
own subjectivities. Flax notes that "at the same time as women have just

[begun] to re-member their selves and to claim an agentic subjectivity

available always before only to a few privileged white men," the integrity of

such subjectivity is coming under interrogation (Thinking Fragments 220).

IV. Whafs Your Sign?

Linguistic Game-Playing and Signifying Womyn, or,
Various Pickup Lines

Smooth Talk-Love Letters-Fairy Tales

The Prenuptial Agreement
Engraving the Invitations-Writing the Vows

We are here again. Same day, different story. . . or is it same story,

different day? We misunderstand one another. He says one thing, she hears

another. How will they ever agree on the fundamentals, when the running

of the household is still under negotiation? And when they do, when

they've signed on the dotted line—o bit naively, they're in love you know-

will they know what they've agreed upon?

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The power of naming-both within the halls of theoretical discourse

and without—cannot be underplayed, because with this power comes

authority and control. We use language every day. It's a necessity. We must

communicate. But do we actually hear each other? Have we really reached a

consensus on our meanings? Who wrote this dictionary?

Waugh claims that "If our knowledge of this world is now seen to be

mediated through language, then literary fiction (worlds constructed entirely

of language) becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of

19
'reality' itself" (3). In turn, the determinism attributed to language becomes

particularly problematic for women and for women's fictions. On one hand,

play with language—actual manipulation of letters, so as to reinscribe

difference and to create a language that reflects the experience of a sub-

culture-has its roots in feminist and African American writing. We might

find, for example, the term "herstory" as a way to avoid feminist complicity

in a system that limits the life story of women, while the alternative

"womyn" seeks to avoid containing the word "men." On the other hand,

while such techniques offer a sense of identity to marginalized groups and a

power base for their own critique of mainstream culture, these gestures

present problems. Because language is itself a fiction, merely a metonymic

system of representation, the process of renaming can only result in

ultimately empty shifts within this fictional system. Thus, attempts to

reconstruct reality through a fictional system are necessarily limited and, one

could argue, only contribute to the valuing of the original system.

In meditating on systems of representation, Siegle comes to a point

that is paramount in the discussion of the compatibility between feminism

and postmodernism: "the means by which one cluster of codes gains

dominance over another through paradigm competition is inescapably

political in every sense of the term" (11). The creation of linguistic privilege

is, then, highly arbitrary, resting not on some intrinsic truth or correlation to
reality but upon a culturally-entrenched power base which proclaims as

victorious the signifiers of the privileged. The place of the marginalized in

this hegemonic system is precarious. Language, as a cultural construct to

express knowledge, becomes then another plot open to a feminist and in turn

metafictive critique. Accordingly, as Gayle Greene contends, "issues of power

in contemporary women's fiction center on questions of language" (17). The

20
precipice upon which Greene positions the greatest challenge to

contemporary feminist critics is, by now, a tired bifurcation: "To speak and

write as men do' makes us part of a process we should oppose, but to remain

mute, to abandon language because it inscribes patriarchal ideology, is to

abandon the possibility of challenging that ideology" (20).

A fundamental link between postmodern and feminist theory is the

analysis of language as a system of representation. Optimistically, out of this

analysis is bom a potential for linguistic renewal beyond Greene's either-or

conundrum: "Freed from the governance of traditional syntax and grammar,

words shed some of the preconceptions attached to them, an act of renewal

for language that serves various ideologies, including the feminist"

(Friedman and Fuchs 17). Suggesting that the works of women writers have

been "more subversive" than those of men, Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam

Fuchs note that male writers "often display a nostalgic yearning after and

grieving for the comforting authority of linear narrative. ... In contrast,

contemporary women experimentalists, for the most part, declare themselves

on the side of ruptured and unreliable narrative" (27).

Unencumbered by the nostalgic binds that limit male narratives,

feminist writers find in the experimentalism of the postmodern "a hopeful

alternative" (Friedman and Fuchs 27) in which to inscribe their own

disruptive narratives. The double-edged repercussions of alternative fictions

are suggested in Friedman and Fuchs's introduction: "In exploding dominant

forms, women experimental writers not only assail the social structure, but

also produce an alternate fictional space, a space in which the feminine,

marginalized in traditional fiction and patriarchal culture, can be expressed"

(4). The impact of this feminist postmodernism is far-reaching and multi­

leveled: "By portraying the artificial nature of imposing a particular order on

21
a complex of events, they challenge the stance of mastery" (Friedman and

Fuchs 38). Through their erasure of artistic and authoritative privileging,

these writers effectively collapse the boundaries between high and low art,

high and low culture, and woman and women. And, as Friedman and Fuchs

explain, "By rendering problematical the notion that fiction depicts essential

truths and presents universal reality-that it tells the story of life—writers. .

perform acts of liberation. They free narrative discourse from the

authoritarian postures of conventional, patriarchal fiction" (38).

In Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in

Contemporary Women's Fiction, Sally Robinson begins by stating, "Gender

. . . can be conceived as a system of meaning" (1), and to this we might add the

idea that postmodernism is about playing with such systems and often
subverting them while working from within them. Robinson holds that

"the category of 'women' itself is, thus, a category marked by differences and

instabilities" (1), and it is this quality of gender as social construct that

feminist postmodern writers exploit and, ultimately, explode. While

Robinson identifies the trend in contemporary feminist theory toward

"demystifying a metaphysical and essentialist notion of Woman, signified by

the capital 'W,' and replacing it with a plural and differentially marked

category of women," a similar project toward toppling and fragmenting

reductivist notions of a singular Truth, for example, is the catalyst for much

postmodern theory. Ultimately, the parallel projects are marked by an

"emphasis on plural differences [that] links feminist theory with

poststructuralist theory" (Robinson 4). With this emphasis comes a set of

problems that Robinson notes: "the fear that any theorizing about gender will
inevitably lead us to new totalizations and new metanarratives" (4). Such a

fear is well-founded, for simply to circle back into totalizing theoretical

22
concepts is also to suggest that only reductivist ways of thought are possible or

can survive. Further, this sort of a result reiterates the old systems even as it

seeks to replace them and creates a false stability in linguistic and

representational systems.

V. At Last, the Event We've All Been Waiting For

The Exchanging of the Vows

"With This Ring, I Thee Wed "-A Toast to the Happy Couple­
Throw the Bouquet- Toss the Garter-lf s Raining Rice-
"I now pronounce you..."

And so we wonder, as we repeat the minister's words, about this

merging we've initiated. Will we keep to our promise "to love, to honor, to
cherish" and can we make of this relationship something different, more

than just a mimicry-or rather, a mockery-of a rather outdated tradition? At

our sides are two neat lines of color-coordinated attendants, decked out in the

appropriate garb, supporting this union with their presence. When we need
to be reminded of why we're here, they drop into our ears words of

encouragement. Before we know it, it's over. The sermons have been read,

the advice given, the songs sung. The congregation, eager and anticipatory,

follows us back down the aisle, and this time, as we leave the temple, it is

together.

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"In short, this theory would look more like a tapestry composed of
threads of many different hues than one woven in a single color."
(Fraser and Nicholson 35)

23
 Craig Owens's' 1983 essay "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and

Postmodernism" is an integral beginning of the discussion of the

compatibility of postmodernism and feminism. Suleiman remarks on its

ground-breaking theoretical decentering: "it placed the feminist issue at the

center of the debate on postmodernism" (188). And so, to trace the criticism

that fixes on the interplay between these two theoretical registers, Owens's

article marks a key starting point. Owens begins with a symptomatic response

to postmodernism, witnessing its development as evidence of "a crisis of

cultural authority " (57) and one which is set off by its admission of "only one

vision-that of the constitutive male subject" (58). Owens highlights the

linguistic revolution behind the postmodern movement—"postmodernists. . .

expose the tyranny of the signifier, the violence of its law" (59). Having been

victimized by the very tyranny that postmodernists articulate, feminists share

with their postmodern brethren a common goal. Characterizing the

postmodern agenda by its "exposjure of] that system of power that authorizes

certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidating others"

(59) and its "attempts to upset the reassuring stability of that mastering

position" (58), Owens begins to articulate a potential in the postmodern

movement toward multicultural ends that is only now beginning to be fully

explored. And the tenor of the article reiterates this potential. Owens

explains that he seeks to intersect feminism and postmodernism not "to

place them in a relation of antagonism or opposition" but instead "to

introduce the issue of sexual difference into the modernism/postmodernism

debate-a debate which has until now been scandalously in different" (59).

In fact, Owens posits a conspiratorial view of the absence of gender

considerations in discussions of postmodernism that few since have

Perhaps significant here, in terms of Ihab Hassan's comments on the autobiographical

biases that influence all that we write, is that Craig Owens is a gay critic.

24
articulated in such straightforward terms: "postmodernism may be another

masculine invention engineered to exclude women" (61). Owens's treatment

of postmodern!ty as a cultural response is far-reaching and prophetic. He sees

that "the advent of postmodern!ty . . . signals a crisis in narrative's

legitimizing function, its ability to compel consensus" (64). And certainly,

since postmodernism's "official" birth in the 1960s, cultural trends have

spiraled away from consensus and other totalizing gestures—signaled for

example by the rejection of the melting pot metaphor for America-and

toward a de-centered cultural reality-wherein the melting pot has been

supplanted by the tossed salad analogy—realizing its potential only now, at

century's end, with the widespread proliferation on educational and media

fronts of the boom of multiculturalism. Seeing in the faded remnants of

master narratives a history of just that-"narratives of mastery " (65)-Owens

offers a compelling, enlightening, and appealing argument for

postmodernism as an invitation into a liberated artistry, "testifying] to a

deliberate refusal of mastery" (68), and capable perhaps of embracing a

flowering cultural multiplicity.

The use of art to political ends-what Andreas Huyssen calls "The

notion of the art work as critique" (235)—is at the heart of a feminist

postmodern literature. In concurrence with Owens, Huyssen argues "that

women's art, literature and criticism are an important part of the postmodern

culture of the 1970s and 1980s and indeed a measure of the vitality and energy

of that culture" (250-51). Part of this energy is fueled by the warring aesthetics

that mark postmodern thought, the double gestures that are the hallmark of

postmodern discourse. Waugh's characterization of meta fiction as a series of

balances - "of frame and frame-break, of technique and counter technique, of

construction and deconstruction of illusion" (14)-brings to mind the

25
incursions from the margins that are so firmly a part of feminist texts that

both acknowledge and subvert the literary establishment. In larger ways,

metafictional writers share with feminists a common dilemma: an inability,

by virtue of their doubly encoded mixed messages, to agree upon a unified

objective or aesthetic direction. Such a unified front becomes impossible

because it would undercut the very multiplicity that both parties expound

and embrace.
In Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics,

several feminist critics discuss the linguistic power plays at work in women's

fictions. As the title suggests, the collection captures a dialogue about the

ways in which language is gendered and how each gender functions within

and uses language. In the introduction, Temma F. Berg and Jeanne Larsen

position women in criticism in "a space characterized by both unity and

diversity," able then "to include contradictions without losing cohesiveness"

(xiii). This space that Berg and Larsen visualize is much like the space that

postmodernism inhabits. They note that women have avoided constructing

theory because of the forced coherence and unity that threatens a more

intrinsic feminist commitment to diversity. Like postmodernism, feminism

resists a concrete definition or a fixed aesthetic. And in their respective ways,

this amorphous quality is both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of

each.
While the absence of such a unifying force has been troublesome to

both groups, this uncrystallized quality is reflective of the unbounded artistic

statements that characterize both movements. And, as ever, out of this

absence is bom a palpable presence in the various incarnations of both

metafictive and feminist texts. Just as "The metafictional novel thus situates

its resistance within the form of the novel itself" (Waugh 11), so, too, do

26
feminists become architects of a fiction that is constantly in conflict with the

tools of creation—a language which is neither a product of nor capable of

capturing their own multiplicitous experiences. Meta fiction requires of its

readers a familiarity with traditional structures so that "initially [they can] be

comprehended through the old structures" (Waugh 13) as a comfortable way

into the new structures that they offer. This use of and deconstruction of the

privileged narrative is at the crux of both meta fictive and feminist texts.

The biases behind assumptions and oversights such as Zimmerman's,

noted earlier, are the subject of the introduction to Siegle's The Politics of

Reflexivity: Narrative and the Constitutive Poetics of Culture. He begins

with an astute observation: "Our terms and our teachings are still loaded

with preconceptions that hinder our task of seeing all that narratives

accomplish" (1). If, as Hutcheon contends, feminism and postmodernism

"Both share a concern for power-its manifestations, its appropriations, its

positioning, its consequences, its languages " (70), then Siegle's caveat cannot

be dismissed. Siegle's statement holds particular relevance for women

writers, bringing to mind the critical reception of writers such as Sandra

Cisneros, whose works are too often read and dismissed as adolescent

literature lacking the canonical (read: obvious, traditional) complexity that

would allow them to be considered postmodern.

Beneath Siegle's commentary is a strong belief in the power of

narratives to construct realities and enact cultural change. If narrative holds

this ability, then studies such as Hite's offer a starting point for analyzing

narratives of cultural authority. As her title suggests, Hite sees women's

experimental fiction as an aggressively subversive way to tell this other side

of the story. However, for women merely to be telling the other side—for a

single other side to exist—is problematic in a movement that consistently

27
denies binary, dialectic structures. I contend that women's postmodern

fiction is not a simple either-or response to a masculine agenda, but that it

complicates to the degree that it engages in a postmodern impulse that

embraces a both /and structure. While Hite claims—and rightly so—that

"experimental fictions by women seem to share the decentering and

disseminating strategies of postmodernist narratives, but they also seem to

arrive at these strategies by an entirely different route, which involves

emphasizing conventionally marginal characters and themes, in this way re­

centering the value structure of the narrative" (2), she is oversimplifying the

matter. In her equation, there is a single "center" and an intrinsic "value" to

which these artists and their fictions subscribe.

If Hite's ideas about narrative centers are at times naive, the insights

she offers into the implications of women's critical reception rescue her

argument. When women have been writing in experimental ways, they

have often been misread as having failed at conventional models. Hite

explains that women's fictions demand of their audiences that they "read

other wise, in ways that acknowledge female-created violations of

convention or tradition as deliberate experiments rather than inadvertent

shortcomings" (3). Thus, much of the way in which women's-and for that
matter all-fiction is valued is intertwined with the way in which it is

received; for, as Hite asserts, "The question of literary intention becomes

embroiled in the question of literary reception, and in the process two

meanings of otherness-otherness as a deliberate project of writing other­

wise, and otherness as an unavoidable effect of a preexisting limit called

femininity-seem almost inextricably conflated" (7-8). As long as prejudices

about women's aesthetic objectives and capabilities are perpetuated by critics

such as Zimmerman, or pitted against a male norm, women's writings will

28
be mis-received or, as Hite observes, read as failing to fulfill a canonical
imperative.

While each is a viable threat to the livelihood and longevity of the

other, both feminism and experimentalise! share an often untraveled and

uncharted common ground with an unparalleled subversive potential.

While, as Suleiman notes, "French feminist theory had from the beginning

acknowledged its link to deconstruction" (188), one can find scarce occasions

when the reverse has been true: when poststructuralists have marked the

connection between their own work and that of feminist scholars. And this

gesture, absurd as it may seem to some, would be one way out of the nihilistic

bind that has been postmodernism's legacy. The redemption that feminism

offers to postmodernism cannot be missed; "for if there existed a genuinely

feminist postmodernist practice, then postmodernism could no longer be

seen only as the expression of a fragmented, exhausted culture steeped in

nostalgia for a lost center" (188-89). Instead, postmodernism becomes a way of

decentering a social authority of white male privilege. As Suleiman depicts

it, feminism and postmodernism share a seemingly untapped reciprocal

relationship: "feminism brings to postmodernism the political guarantee

postmodernism needs to feel respectable as an avant-garde practice.

Postmodernism, in turn, brings feminism into a certain kind of high

theoretical' discourse on the frontiers of culture, traditionally an exclusively

male domain " (189). To converse with those in power, feminist critics must

acknowledge and engage in a certain dominant paradigm; however, as

Suleiman contends, "There is, I believe, an element of mutual opportunism

in the alliance of feminists and postmodernists" (189).

The silencing of women's contributions to the very same questions

that postmodern discussions pose does not go unnoticed by Flax:

29
"Postmodernist discourses, or even commentaries about them, notably lack
any serious discussion of feminist theories, even when these theories overlap

with, supplement, or support postmodernist writers' ideas ' (210-11). Perhaps

both feminists and postmodernists are a bit proprietary about their areas of

inquiry, and so they defend vehemently their own private corners of the

page, never glancing across or to the side to find that their sentences are being

finished on another line, on another page.

In Feminism/Postmodernism, Linda J. Nicholson asserts that

"postmodernism would appear to be a natural ally of feminism" (5). But she

does not offer this statement without problematizing so simple a stance,

questioning: "does not the adoption of postmodernism really entail the

destruction of feminism, since does not feminism itself depend on a

relatively unified notion of the social subject 'woman,' a notion

postmodernism would attack?" (7). A feminist postmodernism faces the

challenge of articulating the primacy of the individual woman in all of her

seamless and fragmented subjectivity—in creating the complex and often

contradictory sociopolitical quilt, women. Does postmodernism finally

provide a place to express feminisms, using shifting subjectivities of both

woman and women, without the demand for a unified front that has so long

been a theoretical stumbling block for feminist theorists? Nancy Fraser and

Nicholson offer perhaps one response to this question in "Social Criticism

without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism."

They envision a "postmodern-feminist theory (that] would be

nonuniversalist .... attuned to changes and contrasts instead of to covering

laws" (34). Their ideas are structured against codified notions of

metanarrative-based theory; thus, "In general, postmodern-feminist theory

would be pragmatic and fallibilistic. ... In short, this theory would look more

30
like a tapestry composed of threads of many different hues than one woven

in a single color" (35). Evoking the metaphor of women's lived experiences

as expressed through tapestry and quilts, Fraser and Nicholson see a feminist

postmodern theory as adopting the platform/approach of a feminist chorus:

"One might best speak of it in the plural as the practice of feminisms" (35).

A feminist postmodernism would demand an approach to the conventions

of literature that would account for both the postmodern and the feminist

implications in any given gesture.

In The Disobedient Writer, Nancy A. Walker discusses what she terms

the "disobedient" revisionary gestures—those that "expose or upset the

paradigms of authority inherent in the texts they appropriate" (7)- that have

marked fiction by women reaching back much earlier than the commonly

cited date of the 1960s. She aligns this disobedience with the postmodern

construction of metanarratives:

To the extent that a narrative is referential to a prior narrative in

its own construction, it calls attention to its own fictive and

conditional character. Put another way, it becomes a narrative

rather than the narrative, a construct to be set alongside other

constructs. Thus this revisionary kind of narrative is closely

allied to metafiction. Whereas metafiction calls attention to the

conventions of creating fiction—its mechanisms of plot,

character, and voice—the narratives 1 am addressing accomplish

a similar end by calling attention to the elements of another

version of the story. (6-7)

While one could argue that both postmodernists and feminists revise

cultural narratives, each group does so to different ends. For postmodernists,

this revision is a way of taking to heart John Barth's thoughts outlined in

31
"The Literature of Exhaustion" and "The Literature of Replenishment,"

while for feminists this gesture is intended to strike at the very core of a

cultural mythology that has historically relegated women to waiting at

windowsills for a royal rescue and wriggling their feet into ill-fitting slippers.

VI. A Trying Honeymoon:

Feminist Skepticism of Postmodern Discourse

One Last Fling-Infidelities-Paranoia- Conspiracy

Everything's cleaned up, the top tier of the cake is in the freezer, the

bouquets have dried into stiff, dusty petals, and the photo album looks
picture-perfect. So why the long face? There's no space, she feels suffocated;

the closet is overflowing and everything's wrinkled; their music is mixed and

their book shelves a disaster.

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Okay, ladies, now let's not just jump in wholesale. . .

In "Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism," Morris examines what she

terms "image and discourse piracy " (370) whereby marginalized voices

appropriate traditional forms to subversive ends. Morris carves out her

inquiry as one focused not on the interaction—or lack thereof—between

feminist and postmodern theorists, but "rather under what conditions

women's work can "figure" currently in such a debate" and the implications of

their positioning in the discussion (377). She cites as well the political

implications of a theoretical marriage: "It would be hard to deny that in spite

of its heavy (if lightly acknowledged) borrowings from feminist theory. . .

32
postmodernism as a publishing phenomenon has pulled off the peculiar feat

of reconstituting an overwhelmingly male pantheon of proper names to

function as ritual objects of academic exegesis and commentary" (378). Here,

Morris is in alignment with Somer Brodribb's suspicions of the monarchs of

a theoretical discourse boldly boasting difference, a leveling of hierarchies,

and a questioning of monolithic ideologies.

In Nothing Matltiers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism, Brodribb

offers a radical critique of what she sees as the patriarchal, often misogynistic

underpinnings of postmodern theory. Brodribb finds that "It is impossible to

understand feminist postmodernism without reference to the writing it has

nominated as central: masculine texts" (ix). She sees at the heart of the

feminist postmodernist enterprise a sycophantic worship of masculinist

theorists. Examining the roots of postmodern thought and the postulations

of its forefathers, Brodribb does more than merely call into question the

liberating potential of a male-based theory for feminist ends; rather, she

asserts that at the core of postmodernism is a terrifying mythology of fear of

and violence against women. By deconstructing the bases and implications of

a string of theorists, from Freud and Lacan to purportedly feminist

incarnations of postmodern thought such as Irigaray, Brodribb makes a case

for the blindness that is a silent companion of a derivative feminist

postmodern theory: "My argument is that these texts have not been

understood as masculine sex/sects; their misogyny is not peripheral­

misogyny is not peripheral"(x).

Her definition of terms is characterized by a loaded play with words:

"What is the Master Narrative? That we can't tell the truth, we can't tell the

difference, between our rights and their wrongs. We can't tell" (xviii). In

Brodribb's thinking, to enter into the dialogue is to confirm the damning

33
master narratives that are the impetus of this dialogue, but also, as many

would contend, to break the silence and the conspiracy that such a silence

reinforces. For what she sounds is a wake-up call that demands a deeper look

into the cultural mythology that is being perpetuated through the feminist
appropriation of postmodern theory and practice. If Brodribb's stance exudes

a bit of paranoia, a preoccupation with deeply entrenched conspiracies,

perhaps those are her own postmodern leanings coming to bear.

VII. Retaining a Post-Nuptial Identity :

A Theoretical Pas de Deux of Woman with Women, or,
Remembering Real World Feminisms

Second Thoughts-Daydreams-Identity Crises

The Broken Promise~An Affair of the Heart

I need to go back. To before. Before the countless fittings, the

invitation lists, the color coordinating, all of the well-laid plans, the

reservations and appointments. Before the cake and the champagne, before

the dancing and the toasts, before the "I do 's Before the awkward meetings

of families, the innocent flirtations, the clichéd skipping of a heart beat.

What iuas my sign? And who is in charge of the bills? What page was I on

before you walked in. . . .

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Feminism validates conspiracy theory and so, too, does postmodern

theory. For a long time, women were written out of theory, discounted as

being unable to contribute to what Annette Kolodny characterizes as a

34
 complex intellectual minefield/ Now that they've found a place within it,

perhaps academic theory is counter-productive, pulling women away from

certainly more real, and perhaps more immediate issues. Flax seeks to

ground some of the power that criticism has harbored. She articulates the

flaw of poststructuralist theory: "A problem with thinking about (or only in

terms of) texts, signs, or signification is that they tend to take on a life of their

own or become the world, as the claim that nothing exists outside of a text;

everything is a comment upon or a displacement of another text, as if the

model human activity is literary criticism (or writing)" (47). Flax's criticism is

thought-provoking, especially in light of the goals toward real-world

liberation for women that are purportedly at the center of much feminist

theory. Can a war-long viewed as a male realm-staged on literary fronts

have practical implications for women's place in society and culture, or is

recent critical theory evidence of a wayward, misdirected energy of feminist

thought?

Friedman and Fuchs make an astute observation about the divisive

nature of feminist criticism: "Theorists are interested in 'woman' as an object

of inquiry, but not necessarily in women'; feminists, on the other hand, are

interested in women,' but suspicious of the theorists' use of 'woman.' The

natural convergence of 'woman' and women' would seem to take place in

women's experimental narratives" (6). On the one hand, their logic suggests

that theorists and feminists are separate, divided. If, on the other hand, the

one facilitates and informs the other, perhaps postmodernism offers a rare

hope to the future of both woman and women.

1 See Annette Kolodny's "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the
Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," Feminist Studies 6 (1980). 1-25.

35
 VIII. Maintaining the Spark:
Where Do We Find a Place in the Discussion; or,
Searching for Role Models

Marriage Counseling-Lights in the Tunnel-Talking It Out

There were others before, and there would be others after. Theirs was a

place and space, a crossing of time, thought, fingers. They said things, made

promises, exchanged vows. They wore an outward sign of an inner union: a

circle, a link, a chain.

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The study that I propose is not without precedents Projects such as

those embarked upon by Elaine Showalter offer models for revising literary

periods to include the contributions of women, and my study follows in this

vein. Current revisionary critiques of modernism have enacted a shift in our

assumptions about modernism, and equally important to similar ends is a

gendered critique of postmodernism. In Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction

and the Tradition, Greene examines what she terms self-conscious feminist

meta fiction as manifested in select novels by Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood,

Margaret Drabble, and Margaret Laurence. She defines this fiction as that

which "explores women's efforts at liberation in relation to problems of

narrative form, fiction that destabilizes the conventions of realism in a

project of psychic and social transformation" (1). Noting that the traditional

postmodern trend of meta fictive strategies "is a powerful tool of feminist

critique," Greene is particularly interested in the impulse in contemporary

fiction by women wherein "novelists make their protagonists readers who

speculate about how literature has shaped them or writers who seek new

36
forms in their fiction." Either way, claims Greene, "they use metafiction to

challenge the cultural and literary tradition they inherit" (1-2). Joan Didion's
Grace and Sandra Cisneros's Esperanza fit well into Greene's approach.
I concur with Greene's selection process: "The writers I'm interested in

have a complex relation to this tradition, writing against it but also writing

within it, finding it both constraining and enabling " (3). All of these writers-

those in Greene's study as well as my own are engaged in both "tradition

making' and unmaking, as a process wherein fiction performs complex

negotiations with the works of the past, negotiations which are both
appropriations and subversions" (7). While Greene's interest is also tied up

with women's feminist metafictions as a response to literary realism and as

concurrent with second wave feminism, my approach is less historically

grounded, meditating instead on the artistic and linguistic implications of

what I term feminist postmodernism. However, Greene's concern with the

impulse in women's writing of the late twentieth century of revising old

narratives, of writing beyond stale and politically-loaded endings that find

women married or dead is an integral part of my literary analysis as well. As

Greene rightly notes, "metafiction is a form of literary criticism, a fictional

expression of critical positions and assessments, " and thus when women
write meta fiction using this technique to further critique gender positioning,

what emerges is both postmodern and feminist in its affinities.

My intention is to contribute to answering the call that Friedman and
Fuchs initiate: "over 80 years of women's experimental narratives need to be

recovered and recognized" (7). They contend that there exists "a steady and

strong tradition of women experimentalists. Subverting closure, logic, and

fixed, authoritarian points of view, they undermine patriarchal forms and

help fulfill the prophecy of a truly feminine discourse, one practiced by

37
women" (7). Further, they suggest that "generational grouping clarifies the

evolution and continuity of this tradition and also focuses the similarities

and differences among contemporaries" (7). Their divisions divide the

twentieth century into thirds, and term each thirty-year span a generation.

The chronology that they posit effectively blurs modem and postmodern

lines, and "the old timeline fades"—marked by male contributions and texts-

"as the dates and works of women arrive" (Friedman and Fuchs 8) and are

recognized. No longer are the dates of literature centered around male

realms such as war, but instead they are structured through women's

experience and place in society, as women, too, loosen from the hold of the

master and begin to experience their own battles and liberation.

Friedman and Fuchs further elucidate the problem of assigning dates

to women's literature. They explain that "Presence on the timeline, accorded

by publication dates, does not fully reveal the extent to which women

practiced the new fiction, since women's books habitually did not see print

until many years, sometimes decades, after composition" (8). When they did

finally make it into print, women's lukewarm reception often was the

beginning of the path toward the burial of their works and their obscurity was

compounded by a lack of any alliance among those women producing

experimental fictions, a loneliness that few of their male counterparts would

have known. To alleviate the solitary existence of these artists and demand

that the chorus of their voices be heard, Friedman and Fuchs explain that

"Viewing these writers as a separate tradition is not isolationist; rather, it is a

strategy in recovering them, in making them an object of discourse" (41). My

study picks up where Friedman and Fuchs present their outline for future

research: "Since the experimentalist and feminist aesthetics are historically

and explicitly linked in the work of Woolf and Richardson, more studies

38
substantiating the continuation of that link are in order—particularly studies

that focus on second- and third-generation experimentalists" (41).

Friedman and Fuchs position their work as an "archeological and

compensatory" part of "the recovery and foregrounding of women writers"

(xi). Their text is a response to a comment made during a session of the 1983
Modem Language Association convention. They recall the moment: "When

asked why there seem to be no women experimental writers, a panelist

replied that women writers are too busy trying to enter the mainstream to be

concerned with narrative innovation, suggesting that their interests are

political, not aesthetic" (xi). This panelist's response finds echo in

Zimmerman's article on women's experimental fictions and also in countless

classrooms across not only the country but, 1 lamentably suspect, the globe.

The impetus for my own work is a similar response made to my own

questioning during a graduate seminar in the postmodern novel. When I

asked of this well-published contemporary American literature scholar why

we were studying only two novels by women in a course covering a total of

fourteen novels, his response was: "Show me women who are writing

postmodern novels. I can't seem to find any; even the two I've included are

questionable." His response was the impetus for this study but also for

further questions about the ways in which canonical definitions of

postmodernism categorically overlook the writings of women

IX. Behind the Veil:

A Praxis for the Future, or,

A Toast to the Happy Couple

Riding Off into the Sunset

39
 And so it's over now, and just beginning. Mendelssohn fades, the rice

is finally out of my hair, and the newlywed jokes are dwindling. I pass

through rooms, studying the scattered photographs, and reread old

correspondence. Now I must find my own space and, harder still, recognize it

once I've found it. I think I'll know it by the echoes, by the whispers of the

women who've passed through it before and left the legacy of their signs. . . .

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This study seeks to revise philosophical and artistic ideas about

theories of both feminism and postmodernism and to integrate these

theoretical registers, highlighting their compatibility as reciprocal, elastic

systems to analyze a trend in twentieth-century novels written in English by

women. As Hassan says of his work, I might say of my own: "it is never a

question of presenting something that is free of ideology; it is a question of

presenting something of an ideological nature that is different, that opens

itself to other forms of discourse " (16). And like Hassan, I bring to bear my

own autobiographical reading and position in the criticism I offer. Here, I

have tried to negotiate a cacophony of critical voices and to find a place

among them, obviously choosing sides along the way Like the postmodern

and feminist theorists who inform my work, 1 refuse to enunciate a single

vision of a feminist postmodernism Nor will I offer a panacea for the

troubled union of feminism and postmodernism; rather, 1 will suggest the

potential that resides in such a theoretical union as evidenced in a group of

six novels spanning the past sixty years.

As Siegle explains, "Here we are on the brink of a Derridean sense of

the novel's self-deconstruction, the text's revelation that its organization and

presumably its thematic coherence are artificial rather than centered in some

40
 freestanding reality" (5). Ironically, this crisis of form has become a point of

entry for many long-marginalized voices and one that may prove to be the

lifeboat of the genre. Waugh explains that the novel is particularly fertile

ground for the innovation and experimentation of the metanarrative because

the genre itself "notoriously defies definition. Its instability in this respect is

part of its 'definition'" (5). Waugh contends that within the lines of the

novel a fragmentation that mirrors the schizophrenia of the genre occurs:

"Attempts at precise linguistic description continually break down" (8) as in

Djuna Barnes's ground-breaking Nightwood (1936) as well as in Cisneros's

vignette "Red Clowns" in The House on Mango Street (1984). The feminist

terminology for this fracturing of language is conveyed through "naming the

unnameable" and "speaking the unspeakable." To articulate is to, in some

ways, destroy the power of the actual, of the real. And when language cannot

convey the magnitude of reality, the inadequacy of language as emotionally

mimetic comes to light. When this occurs within women's fictions, the

political implications cannot be overlooked. The response (and failure) here

is to (of) a phailocentric language incapable of encompassing women's

experiences.

The novel form thus becomes the ideal locus for experiment. And

through avant-garde strategies, the novel finds itself molded into new images

and capable of seemingly infinite possibilities. Waugh explains, "far from

dying,' the novel has reached a mature recognition of its existence as writing,

which can only ensure its continued viability in and relevance to a

contemporary world which is similarly beginning to gain awareness of

precisely how its values and practices are constructed and legitimized"

(Waugh 19) and, 1 might add an awareness that this is done by a privileged

elite.

41
 Toril Moi explains that "At first glance, feminism and postmodernism

would seem to be strange bedfellows indeed. If postmodernism, at least in

Lyotard's sense of the term, sees all metanarratives, including feminism, as

repressive enactments of metaphysical authority, what then can it mean to

declare oneself a feminist postmodernist or, perhaps more accurately, a

postmodern feminist? Does it mean anything at all?" (35). Moi presents the

central problem to an amiable relationship between feminism and

postmodernism: the latter seeks, at least on one level, to discount the

potential of the former. However, all is far from lost. If feminism can

transcend a monolithic philosophical status that would allow its classification

as a metanarrative—and, I would argue, the wealth of feminisms is evidence

of such a transcendence—then beneath seemingly abrasive façades exists a core

that would invite an initially courteous, but ultimately amazingly

progressive, courtship. My interest is in a feminist postmodernism, rather

than in a postmodern feminism, for two primary reasons: (1) I seek to revise

our ideas of the postmodern movement, not the feminist movement, and (2)

there is within the reversal of terms a note of a defeat of intrinsic feminism

of which I do not want to be a part, for such a defeat would signal feminism's

position as a metanarrative capable of being erased by Lyotard's version of

postmodernism.

Further, this study is designed to encourage us all to constantly call

into question the countless arbitrary boundaries that determine what we read
and teach. Have women truly not written in postmodern and

poststructuralist ways or-as I believe to be the case—has a sort of retrospective

creation of artistic definitions been enacted so as to privilege the writings of

white males while overlooking and in turn excluding the wealth of

contributions by women writers? I can only concur with Robinson's

42
statement on this subject:

Because standards of literary value have always been masculine

standards, and theories of narrative have generally been rooted

only in readings of texts signed by men, then it is important to

intervene into the production of literature and criticism from

the points of view of gender (10)

Because the female assumption of the pen is in itself a subversive act, it also

becomes a means toward disruption of a male discourse and an artistic

continuum that has been gender monoiogic. Robinson's claim is both simple

and complex: "I will be claiming for contemporary women's fiction a

subversive potential real ized through its negotiation of irreconcilable

contradictions " (12). And so, women's place in fiction becomes one between

and among these contradictions, never finding a space to rest in their

positions as creators of complex, amorphic subjectivity.

Because woman's place is "both inside and outside the patriarchal

library" (Robinson 14), founded on woman's initial place as passive muse of

male creation and fantasy, rather than as active creator of fantasies of her

own, her assumption of the pen usurps and undermines this tradition of

bibliocentric power. However, what women have come to realize and exploit

is the "power in remaining on the margins, locked out of the library"

(Robinson 14) as a power that fuels artistic metamorphosis and

experimentation unavailable to those easily shelved within the dusty stacks

of tradition. At the same time, we cannot relish the margins so fervently as

to miss the implications of their meaning, tor, as Robinson warns, "the

marginal tends to exist—that is, to be constructed-only in relation to the

central and on its terms" (14-15). This problem is integral as well to Hite's

arguments for the other side of the story, for such a stance assumes a central

43
narrative that is the impetus for the creation of this "other," As Robinson

concludes, "protagonists must write in the margins of official narratives,

constructing a position from which they can speak without being recontained

within those very margins" (26).

Impatient with the conciliatory plaçations of an addled hegemony that

has consistently turned a blind eye to female contributors, feminists will have

to continue to fight for their own spaces in an expansive postmodern

territory. The marginal voices that have found power in the literary

experimentation that has marked the latter half of the twentieth century are

the building blocks of a feminist claiming of the postmodern. Perhaps the

multicultural leanings that have gradually found women writers pushing

their way into a once tightly sealed canon and brought into prominence the
voices of women of color will support a union of feminism and

postmodernism. While this theoretical marriage is a rocky one, the

alternative is a divorce that would leave in its wake both a feminism deemed

unable to compete with the big guns of academic critical theory and a

postmodernism that has been reduced to a meaningless luxury of the avant-

garde.

X.
A Last Dance

Leave your shoes by the door

and a slice of groom's cake beneath your pillow

The sunset toward which they once set out can no longer exist, in
mind or in sign. The circle is broken, but the outline where once it was

remains. Out of the absence—of the ring, of the words, of him-is bom a

certain presence. So her suspicions were true. Monogamy or bust. Is that all,

no more, nothing, the end? She traces over the yellowed cursive that fills the

44
guest book. The pen is missing, just when she had planned on passing it

down to her sister; a little bow to the whole something old, something new

rhyme. Like lines from a fairy tale—which all of it was. There are the images

left though. She finds a comfortable chair and spreads across her lap the

photo album. Other faces are familiar-guests, family—but her own seems

changed through the black and white lens that recalls the dusty photo of her

mother that gazes across her desk. Curiously, there is only one shot of the

happy couple, and it is blurred. But it is there and so she'll leave the album

open to this page. Next time, she'll know where she was.

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My own contribution to this uneasy marriage comes in the form of a

series of close readings toward an understanding of what postmodernism and

feminism can do for the status and place of six twentieth-century texts by

women writers. Feminist postmodernists present something of a

conundrum, in that they are enough outside its circumscribed boundaries to

offer a critique of postmodern thought even as they employ postmodern

strategies that recognize the textual!ty of the world and the artificiality of art.

Feminist suspicions of the postmodern agenda come from the postmodern

devaluing of narrative subjectivity, articulated almost at the same moment

that women have come into a subjectivity of their own. Accustomed to the

fractured subjectivity of the postmodern aesthetic, women experience not the

alienation that male writers confront as the result of their nostalgia for a
modernist world view, but the solace that comes from the recognition

granted to their own divided lived experiences. Because of their familiarity

with the position of marginality, women are more comfortable than their

male counterparts with this radically redefined sense of identity and are

45
anxious to explore its facets and paradoxes. Feminist postmodernism allows

for the construction of a seemingly unified self—although not the standard

heroic self of the realist canonical quest plot-that embraces multiplicitous

and polyvocal identities. Long denied the subjectivity of their male

counterparts, women have become comfortable inhabiting a fragmented

subjectivity, and so the postmodern dismantling of the unified subject is not

only familiar to women writers but also appealing.

Ultimately a feminist postmodernism is both poststructuralist in its

challenge to language and at the same time more foundational than nihilistic

canonical male postmodernism. The epistemological pessimism of canonical

postmodernism is often subverted by a feminist commitment to refuse

either/or propositions and instead to negotiate the realms between such

divisions. There is a recognition on the part of these novelists that language

ultimately writes us and therefore the postmodern concern is less with

authority and subjectivity than with a subversion of such absolutes. For a

culture deluded by its myths, language served a very different purpose than

the purpose it serves for the postmodern world, where language and all that

it seemingly constructs becomes yet another fiction, reiterating the notion

that the text is all, and that, as Frederic Jameson writes, there is no truth

beyond the bars of the prisonhouse of language. All that I offer comes with a

postmodern tag, suggesting its elasticity and potential deconstruction; for the

patterns that continue to disrupt gestures toward neat schemes of a feminist

postmodern theory are in actuality the crux of postmodern thought.

What I offer in the following chapters are images of overlap between

feminist and postmodern agendas toward defining a feminist

postmodernism—one that actively reconstructs images that find women lost

46
 in both form and message. A feminist postmodernism is political. It

challenges patriarchal power, phallocratie order, and artistic agendas. A

feminist postmodernism is fierstorical. It speaks the unspeakable, utters the

unutterable, makes centers of margins. A feminist postmodernism is

cultural. It subverts the male gaze, revises misogynistic mythologies, and

tells of the after beyond happily ever. A feminist postmodernism is artistic.

It calls into question the works of the Masters, and the materials, definition,

and position of what we term "art." A feminist postmodernism is all of this

and none of this.

The novels I have chosen to discuss are, in many ways, threatening.

Often they threaten the legitimacy of metanarratives of power and oppression

and explode the polarities that fix such power. Postmodern novels are, as

Hutcheon terms them, "doubly encoded," and their ability to move between

registers is creative of their power. Women have played an integral part in

both the formation and development of the postmodern moment, and the

transgressions that occur within postmodern novels are varied When

traditional genre divisions are eroded- as in Sandra Cisneros's The House on

Mango Street (1984)-outlaw genres are bom. And when genre remains

intact as in Gloria Naylor's Matna Day (1988)—then often what is seemingly a

traditional genre becomes the site of revisionary narrative. These writers

explore the terrain of the border using vehicles of the main road What

emerge are not maps, but detours (du Plessis). And genre crossing is gender
crossing, as the style becomes a disruption of the male hegemony,

exemplified in Jeanette Winterson's innovative response to French

feminism and poststructuralism, Written on the Body (1992).

The tradition of feminist postmodern novels runs at times parallel to

its canonical counterpart; at others, their works collide. The 1936 publication

47
of Nightwood provides an apt starting point for this tradition-a date well in

advance of the inception of the canonical postmodern tradition. In many

ways, ironically enough, Nightwood is the most conventionally postmodern

of the novels in this study. Issues of both genre and gender bending­

techniques perpetuated over fifty years later in Sandra Cisneros's The House

on Mango Street and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body—were major

stumbling blocks in the novel's publication but also key elements of its

postmodern innovation. The self-reflexivity of the internal author, Matthew

O'Connor, sounds the postmodern technique of foregrounding the author

within the text that again finds voice in Joan Did ion's A Book of Common

Prayer (1977). And in the novel's final pages, we find a silence that suggests

the collapse of patriarchal language and a concomitant search for a means of

communication beyond the limitations of conventional signification.

Chapters Two and Three examine Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and A

Book of Common Prayer. These novels of the seventies respond to a social

climate inundated with the often angry and impassioned voices of second-
wave feminism. Just as the feminist movement of the seventies sought to

give women choices, often the feminist novels of this decade find their

female protagonists confronting choices and navigating them with a

fragmented postmodern compass. Not to be confused with a modernist quest

for wholeness, these novels walk the line between modernist and

postmodernist concerns, challenging readers to see the way in which these

two movements are in dialogue.

The linguistic reversion in Nightwood to a dog's bark becomes the

quest for visual images that thirty-five years later drives Margaret Atwood's

Surfacing. Critics were intrigued by Atwood's inversion of the conventional

male quest motif in this feminist kunstleroman, with telling affinities with

48
the artistic dilemma of The House on Mango Street twelve years later. Like

Cisneros's Esperanza, the protagonist here is challenged to return home-in

ways to recreate this home—ostensibly to find her missing father. What

begins as a rather straightforward mystery becomes instead one woman's

search not for her father but for her mother (as in Gloria Naylor's Mama

Day), a search that—if successful-will mean her transcendence of the very

fairy tale images she herself creates as an illustrator for children's books. As

with Nightwood, Surfacing comes to fruition when she can move beyond

language and recuperate a lost set of symbols, thus articulating and finally

embodying a revised position as both mother and artist.

The creative power for women is both artistic and maternal, and these

dual avenues of creation are central to both Surfacing and A Book of

Common Prayer. Didion's A Book of Common Prayer is, like Surfacing,

about the way in which one woman, Grace, finds her creative power through

another woman, Charlotte. Grace is an internal author not unlike

Nightwood's O'Connor in her frustrations with the inadequacies of language

and its inherent limitations. Again a kunstleroman, the novel self-

reflexively toys with the writing process within its pages.

Just as A Book of Common Prayer is about and ends with the writing

of A Book of Common Prayer, The House on Mango Street is about and ends

with the writing of The House on Mango Street. Cisneros's work is perhaps

the inheritance of both Surfacing and A Book of Common Prayer, meditating

as it does—again through a revised kunstleroman form—on the creative

powers of the female artist. Genre bending made for a complicated reception

of this book, recalling that of Night wood nearly fifty years earlier. Both
architectural and artistic space-or rather the lack thereof-is the impetus and
structure of the book. As Nightwood and Winterson's Written on the Body

49
also suggest, absence is the structure of the presence in this collection of
prose-poems that form what Cisneros terms a sort of narrative "quilt." The

self-reflexivity throughout the text reaches a climax on the final page when,

in a Reconstructive loop of the pen, Esperanza begins to rewrite the book we

have just finished reading. Pushing the confines of autobiography and the

novel form to new limits, Cisneros also challenges the complexity of the
postmodern novel with this deceptively simple text that seeks to debunk not

only genre, but myriad boundaries that only begin with ethnicity and gender.

In Mama Day is a gothic combination of ghostly beyond the grave

narrative recalling Matthew O'Connor; magical realism in the vein of Toni

Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende; and a clever feminist

revision of Shakespearean drama and Christian mythology. The female

usurpation of power is multi-leveled, from Naylor herself to Mama Day, and

back again through the mother-line to the charmed ex-slave, Sapphira Wade.

Like Surfacing and A Book of Common Prayer, Mama Day is about

reclaiming matrilineal roots and the feminist potential within these roots. In

its interplay with Christian ritual—not unlike Nightwood's-Mama Day

revises religious master narrative to reclaim the divinity of three generations

of womanhood.

Finally, Written on the Body is the culmination of many of the

feminist and postmodern strategies evidenced in the novels discussed in this

study. It shares Nightwood's homoerotic appeal-but a homoeroticism ever

in tension with its ungendered narrator. Again like Nightwood as well as

The House on Mango Street,Written on the Body tests boundaries of both

time and space. The novel deconstructs itself in a center section that, as

Friedman and Fuchs term it, "breaks the sequence" of traditional narrative to

subversive feminist ends. Winterson's collapsing of time signals a parallel

50
collapse of language, and as the title suggests, VVinterson takes to heart the

French feminist imperative to write the female body. The text becomes an

extension of the body, as the creative impulses of body and art are finally

merged in this novel that challenges all that is linear, all that is classifiable-

only beginning with gender

The sixty-year tradition I discuss is marked by a passionate struggle

with an ineffectual language and a search for creative power. Through their

postmodern and feminist impulses, these novels move outward from the

texts toward the reader. The feminist postmodern novelist seeks to

reposition the reader, making her uncomfortable in this new position and

complicit in both the system being critiqued as well as in the subversive

revisions offered in the novels. These novels often invoke no less than an

act of resurrection--whether it be of a matrilineal, prelapsarian language or a

voice pronounced dead. And so, in tracing this buried tradition, 1 intend to

continue the excavation and resurrection that the novels themselves entreat.

51
 CHAPTER ONE

A Look in the Mirror of a Changing Genre:

Robin as a Reflection of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

Canonicity, like much else in a patriarchal society, reflects the sexism of

the system that produced it. When the literary establishment has not simply

turned a blind eye to women's writings, it has often diminished the

significance of their contributions. The history of women's publishing has

been rather troubled, and the story of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood is no

exception, its postmodern and feminist implications obfuscated by Caucasian

male gatekeepers. According to Cheryl Plumb, editor of the Dalkey Archives

edition of Nightwood,1 Barnes "had no interest in the realistic novel or in

what she labeled the 'safety' of the realistic novel" ("Revising" 151) . And

perhaps because of this lack of interest, she faced major obstacles in trying to

publish this loosely-termed "novel." In 1934, she wrote to Emily Coleman of

her frustrated publishing attempts: "I can't get the book accepted anywhere. . .
they all say it is not a novel" (in Plumb x). Barnes had difficulty getting the

novel into print because-among other reasons—it defied easy classification.

Upon examining passages from Nightwood, T.S. Eliot wrote that "he did not

believe it would do a sa novel" (Plumb xx). Although Coleman was

instrumental in getting Nightwood published, at one point she wrote to Eliot,

"the book is an artistic failure" and yet, she ends the letter, "it contains as

extraordinary writing as has been done in our time. . . makjing] it a document

which absolutely must be published" (in Plumb xx). The paradoxical

Throughout this chapter, I have used and cited from Plumb's edition of Nighiwood.

52
 response to Nightwood seems to reflect the paradoxes that the novel itself

hinges upon. As the version we now read witnesses, it is unusual,

unexpected, at times inaccessible, and largely undassifiable-qualities which

are evidence of its postmodern signaling toward a destabilizing art.

After countless drafts and ongoing editorial commentary by several

sources, most importantly Coleman and Eliot, Nightwood finally made its

way onto the shelves of book stores in 1936. The first edition was purposely

pricey and up-scale, an attempt to place this text into avant-garde hands, and

to circumvent a crushing response by comparatively pedestrian reviewers.

Once the initial publication struggle was won and Nightwood was out,

keeping the book in print proved almost as great a challenge. In fact, "By

1945, the book was out of print in the States" (Plumb xxiv) for the first of

many times. Thus, when we question the formation of the postmodern

canon and a certain repeated oversight of women's contributions, the

publishing climate becomes integral to this inquiry. Nightwood is only one

example of a text that fought for a voice that was quickly muffled and

silenced, and its fate accounts in due part for the buried roots of the feminist
postmodern tradition.

Donna Gerstenberger elucidates the novel's skewed and problematic

critical reception, "marked by a history of readings that focus on everything

except its radical achievement" ("Radical Narrative" 129). Tracing this

reception back to an Eliot she portrays as having perhaps been rather daunted

by this novel's achievements, Gerstenberger finds that Eliot "clearly misses

the point of Barnes's narrative form, for in his introduction he still worries

the question of a genre definition" ("Radical Narrative" 129). Sensing that

"the novel must have held a shock of recognition" for the creator of The

Waste Ijind, Gerstenberger questions the intent and spirit of Eliot's

53
introductory framing of the novel. She even goes as far as to assert that

"Eliot's constricted praise may well have risen from a recognition that

Nightwood. . . was a more radically experimental work than The Waste Land

—which it unquestionably is" (130). If Gerstenberger is correct, then the

artistic protectionism that governed Eliot's response to Nightwood may well

have sealed the fate of a work that could easily have overshadowed the

canonical texts of the era, hailing a new age of postmodernism in the voice of

a radical lesbian clearly before her time. Instead, the novel was essentially

lost, left "to wait for a period that could provide the comprehension it

deserves" (Gerstenberger 130).

Philip Brian Harper, in his examination of the politics behind

postmodern canon formation, examines Djuna Barnes's Nightwood as one

example of a text firmly rooted in canonical definitions of postmodernism,

but consistently absent from lists of postmodern works. In his analysis of the

political implications of this omission, Harper focuses on the homoerotic

dimensions of the novel that would preclude its entry into the mainstream
and in turn forecast its marginality. What Harper terms "a paradigm of

incompletion" is ironically the "structure" that he finds behind this poetic

narrative (76). This incompletion is a result of "the interrelated effects of

time and space on human subjectivity," which create a chasm between Robin

and those who surround her (79). Shattering parallel temporal and spatial
continuums, Barnes "construes time and space not as the interrelated

functions that our experience tells us they must be but rather as radically

separate phenomena, mutually opposed and essentially antagonistic" (Harper

81). Thus, the novel does not invite the reader in; rather, it repositions the

reader into a disorienting intersection of place and time, an aesthetic foreign

to readers accustomed to the Victorian and realist traditions.

54
 In 1936 most readers, with the exception of those having glimpsed an

emerging fiction illustrated by such novels as James Joyce's Ulysses and

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, expected from a novel the

traditional elements of fiction: plot, characterization, linear development,

realism. Postmodernism, with its denial of these conventions and its

emphasis on form over content, was inchoate when, in this same year,

Barnes published Nightwood, a novel that clearly reveals the elements that

later came to define the postmodern movement. At the crux of this

movement is the authorial intent to free the novel from the established

conventions dictated by realism, and in turn to free the reader from the

expectation of these conventions. While contemporary audiences are able to

read Nightwood as a postmodern mutation of the burgeoning modernism

that would have been flourishing as Barnes was writing, we cannot be quite

so ahistorical in our examination of this innovative novel. Rather, we must

look at the novel through a double lens: both as a response to the Victorian
and realist traditions that would have been most immediate in Barnes's own

time as well as for its critique of a modernism that was still inadequate in its

approach to the patriarchal boundaries that Barnes was transgressing.

Structurally, Nightwood "is engaged in an experiment to dismantle

narrative, to invent a prose which will be indefinite enough to include more

of the world than it excludes " (Pochoda 187). The postmodern novelist

begins to unhinge and subvert language, chronology, and the conception of

mimesis, ultimately creating a genre driven not by neatly manufactured

plots, but by surrealistic, fragmented images. Unlike other works of the time,

"Nightwood demands. . . a reading against the dominant text of binary

oppositions by which the Western world inscribes itself" (Gerstenberger

"Radical Narrative " 130). Nightwood's implosion of binaries reaches beyond

55
the topical and into the linguistic; "even the language of the novel works to

slip the acculturated binary assumptions of signifier and signified, and the

nature of narrative itself is destabilized as traditional categories are emptied

of meaning" (Gerstenberger, "Radical Narrative" 130). The traditional

categories to which Gerstenberger alludes are those conventions of the realist

novel-such as character, setting, background, and plot-just beginning to be

experimented with by Modernists.

As Elizabeth Meese suggests, "Barnes rages against traditional verbal

and narrative structures" (57). She knows the reader's expectations, and this

knowledge frames the structure of the novel as well as the characterization

of Robin Vote, who becomes a metonymy for the text in her subtle reflection

of the narrative. Marilee Lindemann holds that certain women writers

"empower readers by using narrative strategies that initiate readers into

female processes of knowing and telling, processes grounded in female

psychosexual identity and authority" (xxii). Furthermore, these women

construct alternative "female Worlds Within-and-Out, in which the

boundaries of the self and the form of the novel are equally fluid" (109). This

same merging of the whole the novel-with the individual-here a character

—occurs through the character of Robin Vote. As McHale explains, "a

representation may be embedded w ithin itself, transforming a recursive

structure into a structure en abyme. The consequence of all these disquieting

puzzles and paradoxes is to foreground the ontological dimensions of the

Chinese box of fiction" (114). Applying this notion to Nightwood, we might

think of the character of Robin as this "representation embedded within

itself," here the novel. By denying the very binaries upon which the text

meditates—night/day, human/animal, male/female—Robin finds freedom

sexually and, in turn, emotionally and physically. Her inability to be defined

56
is ultimately liberating; for, if we cannot understand and frame her, then we
cannot label and capture her-as woman or any other categorical identity.

Here, this "we" refers to the reader, who inevitably searches for familiar

themes and anticipates conventional approaches. This denial of

categorization is constructed by Barnes's own language and her approach to

the fiction which, as Louis Kannenstine asserts, "intends to be both in the

middle of and beyond its contemporary literary period" (109). As Barnes baits
us with traditional modes, so does Robin, only to discard these constructs of

convention once mastered and exploited. As Patricia Waugh explains,

"Metafiction lays bare the conventions of realism; it does not ignore or

abandon them. Very often realistic conventions supply the control' in

metafictional texts, the norm or background against which the experimental

strategies can foreground themselves " (18). Both Barnes's prose and Robin's

character are about motion, change, and fluidity-states which cannot be

explored in and encompassed by the rigid demands of the traditional novel

As Phillip Herring notes, "Everybody in the novel seems to be caught

midway in some metamorphosis" (207); thus, the movement of the text is

clearly aligned with the movement of the characters. Recalling the classic

beginning of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, "Bow Down" (the first

section of Nightu>ood) sees Barnes appear to "bow down" to tradition a

tendency inherited by Felix-by starting the novel in a like manner:

Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the

advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of

the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein-a

Viennese woman . . . gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an

only child, a son. (Barnes 1)

And so our hero is bom. Or so we think, and this is precisely the thought

57
 Barnes anticipates as she writes these opening lines, penning what

Gerstenberger calls "a mock-creation narrative" ("Radical Narrative" 132). By

beginning this "anti-introduction" ("Radical Narrative" 132) with the

precision suggested by a date, Barnes invokes the idea of chronology and the

reader's consequential expectation of a linear unfolding of events. Not only

does she illustrate the birth of Felix, the character whom we immediately

identify and embrace as our main character, but she also fleshes out this

illusion through the construction of a historical framework in a text that,

while initially seemingly grounded in history, "eventually turns its back on

history" (Pochoda 180).

Nighhvood turns its back on history in both gendered and

mythological ways. The book begins with the death of a woman while

birthing her heir, a son. However, as Felix soon finds, this orphan inherits a

broken legacy. While Felix repeatedly pays homage to a flawed sense of

history, Barnes, too, pays homage to the realist tradition in the initial chapters

of the novel. The heart of his father, Guido—"fashioned on his own

preoccupation, the remorseless homage to nobility"(4)—is Felix's inheritance.

But Guido dies and so, too, does the tradition toward which Barnes initially
gestures.

In many ways, postmodernism is very much about paying homage.

Guido's assemblage of a past mirrors Barnes's creation of the novel's past.

The elaborate past which he claims- "he has said that he was an Austrian of

an old, almost extinct line"-is fashioned legitimate by the accoutrements he

collects: "the most amazing and inaccurate proofs: a coat of arms that he had

no right to and a list of progenitors (including their Christian names) who

had never existed" (5). This reflection back to the author, assembling for her

characters a set of histories, and the novel, purportedly recording these

58
 histories, points to the transparency of fictional constructs on two levels: that
of the world within the novel as well as the novel itself.

In this same section, Barnes resurrects a familiar theme—a man in

search of his past, in search of his history—through the character (caricature)

of Felix, our stereotypical Wandering Jew. Felix comes to represent an

outmoded literary realism: "he (Felix) felt that the great past might mend a
little if he bowed low enough, if he succumbed and gave homage" (Barnes 9).

However, once his fabricated history crumbles, Felix is on his own. The

absurdist twist that spirals throughout the novel is pronounced when Felix is

challenged to find his own tastes. His curious love for the circus becomes one

of many examples of the mix of high and low culture that characterizes the

postmodern impulse. Felix is drawn toward the circus for such a reason: "In

some way they linked his emotions to the higher and unattainable pageantry

of Kings and Queens" (10). The circus is also juxtaposed to the church. Felix's

worship of the "The people of the theatre and the ring" is described as

"Christian" (10); however, these two institutions swap positions, and the

church is placed below the circus in Felix's esteem.

In this opening section, Barnes mimics Felix, setting up the reader to

believe that she, too, will follow conventional protocol, as she feigns homage

to classic themes. The clash between the traditional realist character, as

embodied by Felix, and the postmodern artist, as played by O'Connor,

becomes an enactment of the artistic conflict that the novel itself evokes.
When Felix first hears Dr. Matthew O'Connor speak, this man becomes an

instant challenge to Felix's hierarchy of history. Felix's response to the

doctor's countless queries that threaten to topple his historical house of cards

is fitting for the experiment that Barnes herself launches: " To pay homage to

our past is the only gesture that also includes our future " (38). Calling into

59
 question the sifting of stories that are then shuffled out to become legend and

history, O'Connor displaces the fictionalized power structure that has been

Felix's inheritance.

O'Connor's position as internal novelist is made clear with the arrival

of Nora Flood. When they meet, his first words refer to narrative time, the

time for Nora to enter the tale. Noting Nora's anxiety at not yet having been

introduced as a character, he exclaims, "Nora suspects the cold incautious

melody of time crawling, but,' he added, 'I've only just started " (16). What he

has begun is both his monologue to the crowd gathered around him at a

cocktail party and, more importantly, the inner novel that will ensue. He

asserts boldly his position as creator, reinforced by his ostensible profession as

an obstetrician, crying out: "Flood, Nora, why sweet God, my girl, I helped to

bring you into the world! " (16). The world here is both the realm of the
narrative as well as the world of fiction. O'Connor's position as God, as

creator, is subtly asserted throughout the opening chapter. When Felix

claims "I never drink spirits, " O'Connor's succinct response is telling: "'You

will'" (20). This odd exchange is an early authorial power play, one in which

O'Connor makes clear his dictatorial role and enacts the postmodern device

of foregrounding the author in the novel.

The novel is "structured" by cycles of images, rather than by more

traditional devices. From the start, we are reminded that absence is presence,

a reminder which carries strong connotations for both feminists and

postmodernists. As Gerstenberger finds, "A pattern of desire and deferral,

absence not filled by presence, is, ironically, an essential ingredient of

Nightwood's rich narrative presence" ("Radical Narrative" 133). The deaths

that have left Felix parentless are only the beginning of this trope. Of Felix,

O'Connor remarks: "There's something missing and whole about the Baron

60
 Felix'" (22). This comment leads O'Connor into a tale about a paraplegic

woman. This shifting of registers is a sort of darkly comedic stream-of-

consciousness, one which positions the reader alongside the twisted doctor

and forces the reader to be complicit in these narrative leaps. The

metamorphosis that occurs in this leap is characteristic of the novel. At the

end of "Bow Down," Frau Mann is dozing in a restaurant, where O'Connor

has left her the bill to pay as he has tiptoed out—both of the restaurant and the
chapter.

The artistic drama that Felix and O'Connor enact continues as each

jockeys for power and their status as character and author, respectively, is

played out. Felix thinks of O'Connor as "a great liar, but a valuable liar. His

fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan;

some condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer. His

manner was that of a servant of a defunct noble family, whose movements

recall, though in a degraded form, those of a late master" (31). Through the

character of Felix, Barnes seems to be exploring the authorial limitations of a

realist approach, as "the narrative constantly calls attention to itself as

narrative, validating its own existence as 'story' at the same time that it

destabilizes, in almost every case, the explanatory power of narrative based on

the notion of historical origins" (Gerstenberger, "Radical Narrative" 133).

CTConnor is a relic, changing before our eyes, and Felix is his stunted creation.

I’he "framework" upon which O'Connor relies is "imposing" and masterful,

sketching then a hierarchical construct erected to a powerful Truth now gone

"defunct." What Barnes offers us is a glimpse of this ailing artist, of his frail

creations, and finally, of the possibility of a transcendent space beyond the

confines of linearity.

While the end of chapter one finds Frau Mann lulled to sleep by

61
 O'Connor's voice, chapter two begins with a seemingly unconscious Robin

Vote. All three characters introduced thus far—Felix, Nora, and Robin—have

been set in the context of their births. While the doctor certainly christens

Robin, reviving her through a sprinkling of water across her face, her surreal
description suggests that hers is a world beyond the reach of his power, for

she is "the troubling structure of the bom somnambule, who lives in two
worlds" (34).

Felix, the embodiment of the search for tradition, history, and order, is
wary of Dr. O'Connor's unorthodox response to the supine Robin. The

doctor is described as a "man of magic; [having] the gestures of one who, in

preparing the audience for a miracle, must pretend that there is nothing to

hide . . . while in reality the most flagrant part of the hoax is being prepared"

(Barnes 35). Barnes, with striking similarity to the description of this magical

doctor, has also carefully manufactured facades of convention up to this

point—illusions she will completely transform as the novel progresses. The

parallel between Dr. O'Connor and Barnes crystallizes as the doctor emerges

as the storyteller, producing "an echo of Barnes's own locutionary

movements" (Singer 59). Again and again, Dr. O'Connor's voice parrots
Barnes's lamentation of traditional forms: "The modem child has nothing

left to hold to, or, to put it better, he has nothing to hold with" (Barnes 38).

As Elizabeth Pochoda asserts, "Barnes pursues her own methods with quite as

much courage as O'Connor does his monologues, and his monologues are, in

fact, the primary agents by which she unravels her novel" (187). Nightwood

thus becomes a response to the dilemma of a language and a genre previously

unable to accommodate the diversity Barnes embraces, and the novel that

ensues becomes a duel between modernist and postmodernist artistic

approaches.

62
 As Lawrence Schehr remarks of Robin's origin: "Robin can be born

because Matthew has become a character" (43). In essence, the narrative-

manifested in the character of Robin—exists through the voice of the

emerging novelist-figure, Dr. O'Connor. Traversing the space of postmodern

différence in which binaries are challenged and conflated, Robin identifies

neither with the natural, animal world nor with the civilized, human world.

This conflicting impulse, between human and animal, is reiterated in her

being likened to "a woman who is beast turning human " (36). Upon

studying her, Felix senses that it is "as if this girl were the converging halves

of a broken fate. . . an image and its reflection" (37). These halves may be read

as feminism and postmodernism, or, at the very least, modernism and

postmodernism. Felix struggles to pinpoint the chasm pulsing within Robin,

describing her as "newly ancient " (Barnes 40), and thus not unlike the text

that, working from the codified expectations of the reader, manipulates these
expectations to reinvent the genre.

The courtship between Robin and Felix is marked by an oddly mixed

reverence for the past. Their time together is spent largely in museums,

where they visit, study, and observe the classics. While moving through

these works, Felix seemingly imbibes the curator's choices, while Robin is
somehow out of step. Robin is literally beyond her own time, and thus

transcends linear progression. As Harper explains, "our experience of time is

such that we can only traverse it in one direction,' into the future . . hence

her (Robin's) attempts to reassociate with the past through, for example, her

choice of clothes" (84). Outfitted in garments that are a manifestation of her

refusal to acknowledge time, she wears "clothes ... of a period he could not

quite place " (40). Yet, in her long skirts "were yards enough to refashion "

(40). Does Barnes dress Robin in these anachronistic garments, leaving plenty

63
 of fabric for alterations, for what is termed "refashioning," just as Barnes

herself will do to the bolts of modernism and realism bequeathed her?

While Felix is relating to her the past of his family, Robin falls asleep.

Outraged by her irreverence for the history he has so carefully constructed, he

asserts, '"I am deceiving you!'" (42). What Felix does not completely

understand, we, as readers, do. He is deceiving the past, history, all that he
purportedly worships, in falsifying his own life story.

With Robin's acceptance of Felix's marriage proposal, we, like Felix, are

again baited both by the novel's smooth thematic progression as well as by the

seeming "normalcy" of Robin. And we are truly lured when, with continued

loyalty to convention, Robin becomes pregnant. While pregnancy classically

turns the mother-to-be toward domesticity and a fondness for the warmth of

the home, Robin's response wholly transforms such notions:

[Conceiving herself pregnant before she was; and, strangely

aware of some lost land in herself, she took to going out;

wandering the countryside; to train travel, to other cities, alone

and engrossed. (Barnes 42)

Pregnancy drives Robin out into the countryside and away, both physically

and emotionally, from her new husband to counteract the growing child she

carries within. Repeatedly, Felix's "attempts to make Robin, the beast, act out

her chosen role as Baronin Volkbein, mother, noble, and savior, are met with

indifference" (Gunn 551). Robin's response to motherhood must be read as

both feminist and postmodern. When she has a child herself, Robin in part
usurps O' Connor's power as both obstetrician and author? However,

the only solace that Robin finds is through her linking up a string of women

in her mind: "She wandered to thoughts of women, women that she had

Interestingly enough, Barnes's model for O'Connor was Dan Mahoney, an abortionist.

64
 come to connect with women" (43). While initially we might read this as her

own struggle to recall her foremothers, we later see this as her emergent

lesbianism, a shift that would offer her a way out of the tyranny that

motherhood becomes to her. The narrative, too, abandons familiar and

conventional avenues and looks outward. Like Robin - "She awoke but did

not move . . . she opened her mouth but no words came" (44)-the text is

reduced to pantomime, a foreshadowing of the silence which will end the

novel. When she delivers her son, her response is again unconventional,

and clearly unfeminine. She flails, "cursing like a sailor, . . . looking about

her in the bed as if she had lost something. Oh, for Christ's sake, for Christ's

sake!' she kept crying" (44). What she has lost by birthing a child is, in one

sense, her autonomous womanhood. At last proclaiming, "I didn't want

him!"' Robin "[takes] to wandering, to intermittent travel" (45).

The end of section two charts the alienation of our alleged "main"
character, Felix, who is left to pay homage to the past, venerating the very

beliefs-religion, patriotism, loyalty, honesty, family, history-that the text,

and Robin, subvert. Robin turns away from her husband, her home, her

newborn son, her heterosexuality-all manifestations and perpetuators of

patriarchal tradition, convention, expectation, and stability. The end of the

second section is both structurally and thematically pivotal. Ellen G.

Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, in discussing another lesbian text, offer a way of

seeing the structural shift in Nightwood: "Without desire for the male . . .,

without the search for a mate, no culturally prescribed path such as the one

that leads to marriage moves the text forward" (31 ). Barnes has led the

reader, through a rather bewildered Felix, into a narrative that, like Robin,

soon denies all that has been set in motion in the first two chapters and

ultimately resolves to wander in order to resist captivity and definition.

65
 Beginning in the opening lines of the novel, birth is a recurring

metaphor. Just as Robin has given birth within the confines of the socially

sanctioned institution of marriage, Barnes has, up to this point, given birth to

a structure and linear development that suggests the ordered progression that

marks traditional versions of the genre. Now, as Robin turns away from the
appearance of adaptation to social mores, Barnes begins to transform the

conventions she patronizes in the first two sections and gives birth to a new

narrative, a reconfigured genre It is important that both the text and Robin

are, at their inception, models of convention; this serves to create greater

chaos at the dismantling of this shell of order and design.

Section three, "Night Watch," plunges us into the night world and

begins the descent into uncharted depths—both thematically and structurally-

into a world lacking conventional order, expectation, and fulfillment. Nora

Flood, delineated by "the weather-beaten grain of her face, that wood in the

work; the tree coming forward" (46), becomes the "wood" of Robin's "night "

Unlike Robin, "Nora was an early Christian; she believed the word" (47).

While we can read this as a religious statement, we can also examine it as

artistic posturing, wherein, through Robin, Barnes questions the veracity of

the signifier. The connection between Nora and Robin transcends place and

time, as do the terms used to describe Robin: "so in the heart of the lover will

be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves. In Nora's heart lay the

fossil of Robin" (Barnes 50). Robin is about "shadows" and "fossils"; she is

the dark, the mysterious, the timeless. In a prose peppered with myth,

metaphor, folklore, and religious imagery, Robin emerges as a manifestation

thereof—a mythic figure, drawing on a continuous, collective, shadowy past.

While she connects with Nora, she remains slyly autonomous and Nora is

aware of "the other" within Robin: "when they were alone and happy, apart

66
 from the world in their appreciation of the world, there entered with Robin a

company unaware .... [Nora] knew that Robin was singing of a life that she

herself had no part in" (51). In the same way, the prose resonates with

familiarity, drawing in the reader, but it does not provide full disclosure. The

edges are blurred, as a vague mist clouds the text, continuously working to

evade classification.

Space is also inscribed as witness to Robin's liberation. As Bonnie

Kime Scott concludes, "Even the apartment furnished to attest to their

mutual love' . . . cannot hold Robin in a domestic relationship" (42). We

find that "In the years that they lived together, the departures of Robin

became a slowly increasing rhythm" (52) as her casual betrayals soon give way

to the wandering that is a fundamental element of both Robin's existence and

Barnes's subversion of traditional modes. While Robin is "disfigured and

eternalized by the hieroglyphics of sleep and pain" (Barnes 56), the novel

form has become "disfigured and eternalized by the hieroglyphics" of a tired,

confining, and ultimately inadequate model By freeing Robin, Barnes

liberates the prose. And so the section ends with Robin safely rescued from

entanglement. Her rescuers are a series of women, each of whom offers her

support and love in her opened arms. Thus, "Robin, like something

dormant, was protected, moved out of death's way by the successive arms of

women " (57) in the same way that Barnes reinvigorates the genre through

successive and progressive adaptations of rhetoric, like that advocated by

Hélène Cixous wherein the model for a poststructuralist language is the

expanse of the female body.

With the arrival of "The Squatter," Jenny Petherb ridge, comes Barnes's

opportunity to embody in a character her disdain for reheated prose. Harper

contends that Barnes's description suggests "that Jenny's primary mode of

67
 experience is the appropriation of others' effects, emotional or otherwise"

(82). Contained in Harper's "otherwise" is Jenny's linguistic parroting. Like

Felix, she is preoccupied with the past, and territorial in her preoccupation. A

poacher of sorts, Jenny is a model of "second-hand dealings with life .... The

words that fell from her mouth seemed to have been lent to her; had she

been forced to invent a vocabulary for herself, it would have been a

vocabulary of two words, 'ah' and 'oh'" (Barnes 59). Because all her thoughts,

possessions, and ideas first belonged to someone else, Jenny is left with only

remnants of voice and communicative power, thus quickly reduced to a

parrot. In one sense, Jenny's feud with language is feminist, as she struggles

to use a language which she can only borrow and never own; however, she

remains unaware of the feminist implications of her dilemma. Juxtaposed

against Robin, Jenny is the waste, the leftovers, the mastered narrative

quivering at the overwhelming dynamism and uniqueness of Robin, as the

liberated text. Barnes overtly criticizes the traditional novelist who aspires to

mere mimicry when she describes Jenny: "She had the fluency of tongue and

action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for

themselves" (60). Within these lines is a challenge not only to the modernist

imperative but also to women writers adopting the structure and strictures of

patriarchal narratives. Jenny's alienation from both language and her

surroundings results in a compensatory coherence that is the role tradition

customarily plays; "Since her emotional reactions were without distinction,

she had to fall back on the emotions of the past, great loves already lived and

related " (60). Her own impoverished soul is drawn, then, to the unique and

mysterious Robin, one whose passions elude categories, whose character

defies description. As in the previous two sections, Robin again leaves at the

end of this section, always one sentence ahead of capture. This time, "Jenny

68
 and Robin sailed for America" (67), notably the Land of the Free.

The end of the fourth section of the novel marks a change in the
novel's texture and focus.’ As Friedman and Fuchs contend, "To break the

sequence is to rupture conventional structures of meaning by which the

patriarchy reigns in order to give presence and voice to what was denied and

repressed. . . . Djuna Barnes, for instance, breaks chronology by condensing

and expanding time erratically. Time moves very rapidly in the first four

chapters of Nightwood and then comes to a sudden halt in the monologues

that follow" (15). In "Watchman, What of the Night?" Nora comes to the

doctor (the watchman) seeking knowledge of the night. Here, the all­

knowing doctor, having "evacuated custom and gone back into his dress"

(Barnes 69), is equated with the omniscient author, and both have knowledge

of the night world, of Robin, and ultimately of the text. That the doctor's

identity as a transvestite is fully revealed here is crucial. This revelation

makes more plausible his alignment with the female narrator and allows

him a glimpse into the worlds of both genders, and a rare place between

genders. Following the lead of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, "Barnes . . make|s]

use of the hermaphroditic protagonist, the superficial, cartoon-like depiction

of rapidly changing external events, and the violation of temporal and spatial

verisimilitude, accommodating difference and otherness through an

antirealistic mode" (Friedman and Fuchs 14). Able to both use and question

the power of language, O'Connor postulates: "'Yes, we who are full to the

gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done,

spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy " (Barnes

72). The doctor warns that naming is not knowledge, framing is not
1 While the original version of the novel had sections four and five reversed, Barnes was
easily amenable to Eliots suggestion that she move them to the order that the novel now
reflects. Eliots modernist leanings come to bear here, as his shift makes the novel more
conventional, and O'Connor's monologues less disruptive.

69
 comprehension, and if we accept these superficial devices, we become

effectively sheltered from the wealth offered in the dynamic world of Robin
and of ambiguity.

When O'Connor explains to Nora, "'For now the hand lies in a

shadow"' (73), we cannot help but see that O'Connor refers both to his own
sleight of hand as well as to the hand behind his own: Barnes's. Herring

describes O'Connor as one "who, in the narrative style of his real-life

counterpart, seems to represent Barnes's own world-view" (207). The

affinities between author and doctor mount as the novel continues, as do the

implications of her having assumed the voice of a male who enjoys wearing

women's clothing, especially when "O'Connor's single obsession is his wish

to become a woman" (Herring 208). Lamenting the loss of the imagination,

the doctor relies on literary metaphors and diction: "The Anglo-Saxon has

made the literal error; using water, he has washed away his page " (Barnes

77). Literature has become sterile and stoic in its practiced repetition of a form

unable to accommodate structural and spiritual diversity, and in Nightwood

Barnes seeks to "muddy the waters'" a bit, to keep the text raw and to avoid

neat piles and streamlined responses.

Gradually shifting his audience from Nora to the reader, the doctor

refers to himself in authorial terms: "must I, perchance, like careful writers,

guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?" (Barnes 80). And later

his position as author is again made overt: "I have a narrative, but you will

be put to find it" (Barnes 82). This second assertion, what Alan Singer terms

"the undisguised challenge of a prose artist" (69), exemplifies a technique that

comes to define postmodernism: the self-reflexivity of acknowledging the

nature of the art form within the lines of the text. Through the doctor, the

novelist gently mocks the bewildered reader in search of a line to follow; a

70
 beginning, middle, and end; a good, old-fashioned story. At one point, the

doctor remarks to the overly-anxious Nora, and in turn to the reader, "'I'm

coming by degrees to the narrative'" (Barnes 83) and again, " Don't get
restless-I'm coming back to the point"' (Barnes 84).

It is only at the novel's end that we can confirm O'Connor's

omniscience. His prophecy extends beyond even his own presence in the

novel: "in the end, you'll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get

their antlers mixed and are found dead that way" (84). And his final words

in this chapter see the inevitable end that he does not speak: "Nora will

leave that girl some day; but though those two are buried at opposite ends of

the earth, one dog will find them both" (89). As Herring asserts, "Finally, it is

Matthew O'Connor, Barnes's Tieresias figure, who, since he has lived as both

man and woman, is condemned to see all and explain all in the terrible world

that Nightwood evokes" (210). This curse is the burden that O'Connor will
bear, but it is also the dynamic vision that the novel offers-a vision that

transcends gender. O'Connor's enactment of this Modernist trope4 is put to

postmodern use through its androgynous implications. While in the dress of

a woman, OConnor reinvents the maternal, as both his own secret desire -

"no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and

knitting" (78)—and as a possible link between Nora and Robin. The version

of lesbianism that he envisions is not stereotypically deviant or overtly

sexual; rather, it mirrors the parent/child bond. He conveys this shift to

Nora, which is also in part his own wish-fulfillment: "You, who should

have had a thousand children and Robin, who should have been all of

them"" (85). Herring also suggests that O'Connor becomes for Barnes a way

out of traditional expectations of the novel form: "by raising to a fever pitch

* Here, Barnes pays homage to The Waste Land's blind hermaphrodite.

71
 this good doctor's eloquence, Barnes managed to evade the finer points of

plot, character, and some traditional problems of the novelist" (213). One

wonders if Herring views this as rare brilliance or an overt flaw in the novel

In "Where the Tree Falls," our opening character, Felix, still wandering

from country to country in search of something he can't quite place and still
utterly ineffectual, returns to learn from the doctor, and in turn from the

novelist. Expressing the reader's confusion with Robin, Felix explains his
own blurred vision of her:

If I should try to put into words, I mean how I did see her, it

would be incomprehensible, for the simple reason that I find

that I never did have a really clear idea of her at any time. I had
an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a

stop the mind makes between uncertainties. (Barnes 93)

This description of Robin applies to the novel—a series of images requiring

mental leaps and unwritten connections. In explanation of Felix's obsession

with the past as well as the traditional novelist's commitment to convention,

the doctor-tumed-novelist comments, "'we heap reproaches on the person

who breaks it [tradition), saying that in so doing he has broken the image—of

our safety " (94). This comment resonates as well as a response to artistic

innovation, marked by its break with tradition and a resistance of entropy.

Targeting Robin as a liberator, the doctor continues, "'She [Robin) was always
holding God's bag of tricks upside down " (94). In her irreverence, Robin,

analogous to the text, turns convention inside out, understands what is

expected, knows the ploys, and manipulates them. Felix, too, sees Robin's

ability to escape by asserting her individuality when he observes, "One's life

is peculiarly one's own when one has invented it'" (100). Liberation thus

72
 becomes the result of the ability to create, to invent—abilities manifested in

Robin and in the novel. Created within the space for play opened between

the rigid jaws of binarisms, Robin emerges as the one character who thrives

outside of convention and withers within it Further, Robin, again like the

narrative, is characterized only by an "undefinable disorder" (100), one that

hints at patterns of images, but these images never form a whole. This

disorder becomes a challenge to the constructs that those around her have so
precariously balanced.

The doctor explains, '"Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory

of that disorder. Robin did not"' (100). While historically the novel, as

Barnes knew it, had often existed within a rigidly designed frame, making

neat, linear order out of contradiction and confusion, Barnes's prose ventures
beyond the frame, dissolving the rigid boundaries into fluid images, and

clearing a space—both feminist and postmodern—for the character of Robin.

Wrapped in "a web of time, " Robin offers a sort of revitalization, through

dual avenues of creation: the text for which she becomes a metonymy and

her son, Guido We learn that "about the Baronin there was a destiny, not of

age, but of youth" (101). This hazy destiny is perpetuated in her curious off­

spring. If Guido is the future, the benefactor of Robin's mysterious ways, then

what he offers is both feminist and postmodern. As Felix reports to

O'Connor, "Guido also loves women of history " (101), suggesting that

through this young boy is a channel for herstory. But the herstory that he

will convey will not follow the linear road of his forefathers; instead, "he is

not made secure by habit-in that there is always hope" (101). And so we
leave Felix with the optimism that is Guido's inheritance. This section

comes to a close when the Cinderella-like "clock hands pointed to twelve "
(104), signifying both the impending end of the bowing down to the past that

73
 has been the curse of Felix's existence as well as the denouement of the
doctor's (and our internal novelist's) tale.

Anticipating the doctor's dismissal, "Go Down, Matthew" begins with

the doctor pleading with the traditional novelist via Nora:

'Can't you be quiet now? . . . Can't you be done now, can't you

give up? Now be still, now that you know what the world is

about, knowing it's about nothing? . . . Why not rest? Why not
put the pen away?' (105)

These comments foresee Matthew's proclamation of "the end, " while also

mourning the dishonest nature of writing, with its ability to create legends

and entrap people within these legends. While Nora is attempting to write to

Robin (a letter that can never convey her depth of feeling, a letter that cannot

be addressed, for Robin is lost to her, beyond her reach), the doctor pleads:

"C an't you rest now, lay down the pen" (107). The retiring doctor continues

by explaining the storyteller's sacrifice for the tale:

'Haven't 1 eaten a book too? . . . And wasn't it a bitter book to

eat? And didn't 1 eat a page and tear a page and stamp on others

and flay some and toss some into the toilet for relief's sake ....
Is even the end of us an account?' (107)

Having learned a single lesson that he wishes to pass on to Nora- "Life is not

to be told " (109)-he explains that story-telling is a cycle of failure. The doctor

presents the anguish of the novelist faced with the inevitable: the end.

Although he knows that life cannot be captured in dialogue, he continues to

talk as a means of survival and a way of avoiding entropy. "And me talking

away like mad. Well that, and nothing else, has made me the liar I am'"

(114), exclaims the doctor, acknowledging that the storyteller, the novelist, is

the ultimate liar; therefore, the novel cannot be mimetic or realistic. Finally,

74
 the doctor pinpoints the greatest error, at last remarking: '"There is no truth,

and you have set it between you; you have been unwise enough to make a

formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known'"

(114)—an overt parallel to the dishonesty of a neat fiction that resolves all
within its pages.

Recognizing that we have been raised on fairy tales and nursery

rhymes and have greedily imbibed the lies of honeyed romance and pristine

palaces, the doctor reminds us that our tendency to "buy" what the novel has

traditionally sold is proof of our successful indoctrination. These neat stories

are the products of the past, and, laments (7Connor:

We love them for that reason. We were impaled in our

childhood upon them as they rode through our primers, the

sweetest lie of all ... . They go far back in our lost distance where

what we never had stands waiting; it was inevitable that we

should come upon them. . . . they, the living lie of our centuries.
(114-15)

Betrayed by a golden history that became a string of broken promises, we are

drawn to the freedom Robin offers us, to this refreshing break from a past

littered with lies and appearances. Robin is freedom. As Nora remarks,

"Robin can go anywhere, do anything" precisely because, like the novel, she
has refused the leash of convention (152).

Upon exiting the stage of the page, O'Connor proclaims, "God knows,

I'm the last of my line " (116), as if hoping through his own despair to make of
his word a final truth. The ultimate despair of the novelist, echoed by the

doctor, is the inability to solve or resolve anything. To each character, the

doctor "explains the falsity of their attempts to 'apprehend' Robin" (Johnsen

37) both as a character and as a woman. While the doctor has lived through

75
 all history and knows all the outcomes—like the novelist-this knowledge in

no way empowers him to save the characters from their pain, much less from

themselves. To console Nora, all that he can offer her is a classification:

"Robin was outside the human type-a wild thing caught in a woman's skin,

monstrously alone, monstrously vain" (121). In his description of Robin is a

reflection of himself, his own complex position along boundaries of place and

time, carved in a world of his own making-the story he tells-against a world

that kept him out, that had no role for him to fill. And so the world that

O'Connor writes is one of reversals that mirror his own experience. His God

is female: "Personally I call her she' because of the way she made me; it

somehow balances the mistake " (124). At the same time, in a text that early

critics read as being about religion and homosexuality-finally connected in

O'Connor-Bames's own commentary on the gender of the divine finds

voice.

Speaking from the voice of the resurrected, perhaps the ghosts of

modernism that haunt Barnes herself, we find that all along, O'Connor was

from another realm Upon reaching this realization, Nora says to O'Connor:

"'You know what none of us know until we have died. You were dead in the

beginning " (125-26). Barnes asks that we read the novel circularly so that

O'Connor becomes a voice from beyond the grave but also, as the final

chapter suggests, a voice from beyond the narrative, who is dead once the
story begins ** It is Nora-and the reader-who resurrects him: "And I was

doing well enough," he snapped, "until you kicked my stone over, and out I
came, all moss and eyes; and here I sit. . . . Am I supposed to render up my

paradise—that splendid acclimation—for the comfort of weeping women and

‘ See Plumb's introduction to the Dalkey Archives edition of Nightwood.

* This technique is also at work in films such as Sunset Boulevard and postmodern texts
like Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Toni Morrison's Beloved.

7b
 howling boys?" (126-27). His frustration, then, is both with the characters—

particularly Nora and Felix-and with the reader, who ask that he perpetuate
a stale mythology.

Once revived, his job is to tell the tales that keep them believing, again

the same job that the novelist must undertake. Predictably, the crowd still

wants the truth, "the real story," as the priest pesters the doctor: '"I've always

wanted to know whether you were ever really married or not" (131). The

specific truth which he questions is the truth of the marriage plot, which also

suggests that the unspoken truth of this inquest is (homo)sexuality-both

O'Connor's and Robin's. The priest has missed the point because he has

anticipated and longed for "the truth" at the sacrifice of the imagination.

Dispelling the existence of such a truth, the doctor continues to blur reality
and creation, responding,

'I've said I was married and I gave the girl a name and had

children by her, then, presto! 1 killed her off as lightly as the

death of swans. And was I reproached for that story! I was.

Because even your friends regret weeping for a myth.'

(131)

Even the doctor's example is marked by traditional expectations of marriage

and children. When he finally asserts, "Oh, it's a grand bad story, and who

says I'm a betrayer? " (133), he refuses the sterility of a tidy, happy ending.

And still, the doctor is brought back to convention, to the expectation of

chronology, of dates, of linear experience, when the priest-notably a

figurehead of patriarchal authority and religious mythology- chides,

"Remember your century at least!'" (135). Invoking the final voice, here of

a woman, and perhaps of a new fiction, O'C onnor calls for a voice to

overcome his own: "Oh the new moon!" he said. "When will she come

77
 riding?"' (135). Feeling the storyteller's burden of "the end," the doctor

wonders, "'Why doesn't anyone know when everything is over, except me?'

(136). As the storyteller, he cries out now for his own freedom:

'Now that you have all heard what you wanted to hear, can't

you let me loose now, let me go? I've not only lived my life for

nothing, but I've told it for nothing ... I know, it's all over,

everything's over, and nobody knows it but me. (Barnes 136)

Overwhelmed and exhausted by his singular knowledge, the doctor/novelist

at last proclaims, " the end-mark my words—now nothing" (Barnes 136).

And in the ultimate deconstructive finale, the novel continues, sans our

loyal, exhausted storyteller, in a final section In this way, the prose-through

Robin—comes to live beyond its creator, to dwell beyond the bounds of the

hands that authored it. "The indeterminate ending of Nightwood mocks the

novel's already mocking beginning to remind the reader once again that. . .

the desire of Barnes's novel is freedom from the prison of meaning,"

(Gerstenberger, "Radical Narrative" 138), a reminder reiterated in the

permeating silence of the final pages

When we reach the puzzling last section, we are forced to question the
reach of O'Connor's authority, since he has purportedly "gone down, "

leaving a disengaged and unidentified speaker to tell the final tale. McHale
posits that "If there is a meta -author occupying a higher level than his own,

just as there is a hypodiegetic author occupying a level below his, then why

not a meta-meta-author on a meta-meta-level, and so on, to infinity " (115).

This meta chain is clearly being toyed with in the final section, when the

doctor is gone and another voice takes over. "With O'Connor's silencing"

and thus the novelist's, only the living text, in the form of Robin, remains;

therefore, there is "no speech in the concluding pages" of the truly final

78
 section, "The Possessed" (Gerstenberger 39). Most compelling in the final

chapter is this silence, a silence that points to Robin's reversion to the

animalistic, a metamorphosis that she has been threatening since her

introduction as "a beast turning human," as well as to Barnes's own refusal to

be complicit in a linguistic system that is finally deeply flawed and

reductivist. The silence is disrupted only by bestial sounds, "sounds that exist

outside of ( and perhaps beyond) language" (Gerstenberger, "Radical

Narrative" 137), a move toward pre-lapsarian language.

Robin repeats a pattern we've seen since she first circled away from the

conventional domesticity she practiced while married to Felix, as "it becomes

clear, in the end, that Robin is not possessed " (Meese 61). This last section is

both a reinforcement of Robin's freedom-'thinking herself alone, she began

to haunt the terminals, taking trains into different parts of the country,

wandering without design " (137)— as well as the narrative's freedom to exist

beyond tradition, beyond convention, and beyond the male voice. She, like
the text itself, has successfully resisted capture and will continue to wander.

To the end she will be neither beast nor human; our last image shows her
"barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching" (139) as the novel

continues to embrace the unorthodox and dares to live beyond its

pronounced end. In this macabre finale, Robin is both a beast turning

human, and a human merging toward the beast within and without. As

Harper explains, "The insistence on Robin's primal quality makes clear her

identification with the past, but it is the exact nature of that identification that
constitutes her uniqueness. For she does not simply represent the past. . . she

is that time" (84). If Harper is correct, it follows that "she is fundamentally

ahistorical" (84), a claim that can be made for the postmodern impulse itself.

In a church, with candles that suggest the Catholic tradition of worship of the

79
 dead, we find a very different scene. At last, having dueled with a dog and

mocked its (the gender of the dog remains unclear) voice, they come to a stay,

"and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat

along her knees" (139). Here, the rituals move toward the surreal, while

adopting the gestures of the orthodox.

While early readers of drafts of "The Possessed" were troubled by its

place in the novel7--Eliot, in fact, wrote that he "advised strongly the

omission of the last chapter, which is not only superfluous, but really an anti­

climax" (in Plumb xxi)-it is this final section that cements Nightwood as both

feminist and postmodern. That Eliot expresses his belief that the novel "ends

superbly with his (O'Connor's] last remarks" is again telling in terms of a

feminist reading of the voice (or lack thereof) that finally puts to rest the male
authority vested in O'Connor. This voice succeeds O'Connor's and a world

succeeds the gestures toward order, the bitter nostalgia that colors much of

the preceding pages of the novel. At the novel's end both the privileged

status of the authorial voice and the male characters are absent, supplanted by

female characters in a new breed of fiction. Ultimately, Robin is the only

character to survive the modernist realm that begins the novel as well as the
postmodern one that emerges at the end

If, as Herring reads it, "Nightwood is essentially a tragic novel" (203),

then we can allay some of that tragedy in recognizing its radical implications

for the place of women's writing. Within the novel, Barnes poses a key

question: "in what form can the novel exist when it destabilizes the

traditional idea of narrative?" (Gerstenberger, "Radical Narrative" 131). She

also offers in the pages of the book an answer: "a novel that proclaims itself

by its process and by its refusal to rely on the old narrative assumptions of

' See Plumb's introduction to the Dalkey Archives version of Nightwood.

80
plot and character developed in servitude to a fixed way of reading and

inscribing reality" (Gerstenberger, "Radical Narrative" 131). We should not

overlook the feminist implications of the exchange here; for Barnes also frees

her readers from linear, "logical" ways of conveying and understanding a

chaotic and categorically non-linear world

One notable description of the feminist project to reconstruct the novel

form might serve as a gendered description of Barnes's postmodern purpose,

which "significantly subverts the form and language of the novel in order to

re claim and re-create the powers of a female selfhood lost or buried beneath

layers of patriarchal cultures" (Lindemann 120-21). Having viewed

Nightwood as the victim of "a conspiracy of critical silence" (Gerstenberger

"Radical Narrative" 131) that left its innovations untold for many decades,

the time is-as recent critical inquiry has suggested now ripe for a

resurrection of this postmodern forerunner that acknowledges not only its

ground-breaking narrative strategies but also its uniquely feminist bent. "In

Nightwood, Barnes outlines a vestigial quest to delineate the oppressiveness

of traditional form and expectations" (Friedman and Fuchs 17), and this quest

is the hallmark of both feminist and postmodern agendas.

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 CHAPTER TWO

In Search of the Mother-Artist:

Redemption of Creative Powers in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

"We can drink from. . . wells and we can drown in them, but we must learn
to see them as the portals they are. And as the portals they may be."
-Russell Brown

In many ways, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing offers the feminist

postmodern paradigm 1 have outlined. Both modern and postmodern, this

novel begins in a fairly archetypal quest, continues as this quest becomes

feminist in its conventions, and ends with a prelapsarian approach to

language and the recovery of a fragmented -but also in a renewed sense of the

term "whole"--grail. Approached alternately as an adaptation of the Grimm

fairy tales, which Atwood claims as profoundly influential in her work

(Atwood, Sander 14), a reworking of the Demeter and Persephone myth,

and a linguistic struggle that engages the feminisms practiced by Luce Irigaray,
Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, Surfacing commands attention through

both the themes on w hich it meditates and the forms Atwood invokes to

explore these meditations. Many read the novel as a reconfiguration of the

archetypal male quest, and critics identify various possible grails, "her (the

narrator's) father's know ledge of evil and death, and . . a renewed ability to

1 For two of the many accounts of Atwood's use of fairy tales, see Elizabeth R. Baer's
"Pilgrimage Inward: Quest and Fairy Tale Motifs in Surfacing” and Ronald Granofsky's
"Fairy-Tale Morphology in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing.”

• See Sherrill E. Grace's "In Search of Demeter: The Lost, Silent Mother in Surfacing."

' See Sally Robinson's discussion of Surfacing as an attempt to "shatter the laws of
phallocentric systems of signification as it questions the adequacy of language to express
female desire and experience" in “The Anti Logos Weapon': Multiplicity in Women's Texts."

82
love and trust" (Berryman 55); "the lou-garou story the narrator feels is
missing from her anthology" of Canadian folktales (Baer 25); a language

capable of encompassing female experience (Robinson), and the "'evil grail"'

of the aborted fetus (Thomas 76). Repeatedly, critics point to the subversive

nature of the novel. The central unnamed character and narrator is

Atwood's familiar woman in the wilderness, who guides her citified

companions, two of whom are male, through the threats and wonders of the

Canadian backwoods. Ironically, what becomes most important to the

narrator is not her ability to usurp a classically male role as wilderness guide

to her companions—Joe, Anna, and David—but rather her reclaiming of her

creative powers as a woman—as mother and artist—through a language that

has repressed and corrupted her realization and exercise of these powers.

Opening with the narrator's rebellious voice- "I can't believe I'm on

this road again" (3)—we find our protagonist echoing the authorial voice at
the beginning of the immediate quest, the search for her father, recently

reported missing. This search involves the narrator's return to the secluded

country home where she grew up and must now face the ghosts that have

haunted her since her departure and subsequent lapse in communication and

relations with her parents, a "dissociation" that "mirrors her separation from

her own past. . . in order to repress one moment of her life she cannot bear to

remember, " the abortion she had when involved with a married man

(Campbell 171). This unplanned pregnancy becomes both the reason for her

physical withdrawal from her family-she leaves home and severs ties with

her family, explaining, "I couldn't go there, home, I never went there again"
(169)- - and the source of the emotional distance she feels from her own body

and her ability to reproduce. While the mysterious disappearance of her

* Like Cisneros's Esperanza, the narrator here must reconstruct home, as both
architectural and artistic space.

83
father is the lure that brings the narrator back to her Canadian home for

several days, this search is only one of a series of interconnected and complex

quests that propel the narrator and the novel through the past to understand

the present. We follow the narrator's wandering mind, as various objects in

her family home trigger both early memories of her childhood with a war-

crazed brother and adult memories of a romance that repeatedly fell short of

her adolescent fantasies.

As an illustrator of fairy tales, the narrator reconciles her sense of

alienation from language with a tapestry of images. The inadequacies of

linear language are set against the semiotics of these images: her own, her

father's pictographs, David and Joe's film, and those her mother leaves for

her. The narrator expresses a growing frustration with a phallogocentric

language, and her quest to transcend this claustrophobic language is of

particular interest in a feminist postmodern reading of the novel. At the

outset, the narrator offers one solution to her linguistic frustration: "to be

deaf and dumb would be easier" (8). She has difficulty keeping time linear in

her mind, as her return to home seemingly collapses the past into the

present. Constantly questioning her own ways of knowing, she reminds

herself: "I have to be careful about my memories. I have to be sure they're

my own " (82). Almost like a sponge, she has absorbed so many histories that

her own is lost in the swirling stories. Her position as narrator is self­

conscious and self-reflexive, as she sifts through the details she will relate,

restraining herself along the way: "I have to keep myself from telling that

story " (12). "That story" is both the story of her past and the male story that

finds her wanting. Because her past is riddled with pain, she struggles to
repress it, becoming in the process a self-aware unreliable narrator. She

explains of her life, "1 needed a different version," and through her authorial

84
voice she is given the chance to revise the passages of her life that are too

much to bear, in the form of both the books she illustrates and within the text

we read: "I do posters, covers, a little advertising and magazine work and the

occasional book like this one" (56).

While the narrator is introduced as an artist, she laments her training:

"linguistics, I should have studied that instead of art" (43). On her journey

home, she is accompanied by a triad of failed and corrupt artists: her current

lover, Joe, and their married friends, David and Anna. David and Joe have

brought with them a camera to film their increasingly perverse observations

which they have named, "Random Samples," and use this trip to capture the

accompanying images, largely images of social and political waste. These

would-be cinematographers seek footage of their conquests, and wield the

camera in overtly masculine and domineering ways, even committing what

Barbara Hill Rigney terms "a form of rape" (95) when filming a nude Anna

against her wishes. Reminiscent of her childhood role of watching her

brother torture animals, the narrator confesses having been a witness to the

filming: "I saw her cut in half, one breast on either side of a thin tree" (159).

When the narrator refers to her own abortion, she describes her feelings of

division in similar terms: "I'd allowed myself to be cut in two. Woman

sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathing suit, smiling, a trick done

with mirrors. . . I was the wrong half, detached, terminal" (127).

The narrator, however, insures the demise of the artistry of these self­

proclaimed "Renaissance men" when she exposes the film and feeds it to the
lake Watching the result of her efforts, she observes, "the invisible captured

images are swimming into the lake like tadpoles" (198), recalling perhaps her

own drowned fetus. The camera is an instrument capable of cutting,

dividing, and cropping images. When, a few days into her stay, her father is

85
found having drowned in part because of a heavy camera around his neck,

the narrator senses the lesson she must take from this accident. This

instrument designed to capture images, to mirror reality, is ultimately fatal to

creative experimentation, and so the narrator liberates another of the images

captured by David and Joe's camera: an image reflective of herself, in the

heron "hanging upside down by a thin blue nylon rope tied round its feet and

looped over a tree branch, its wings fallen open" (135). This action recalls the

narrator's childhood memory of setting free the animal specimens of her

brother's makeshift laboratory—his own male art form, based on the

collection, observation, and ultimately the death of living creatures. In this

recollection, as in her dumping of David and Joe's "Random Samples, " we

find the narrator acting out a "feminine role" in striving "to free the

animals" (Rigney 99), an action vitally connected to her life-sustaining

powers, and led by a desire to preserve and fortify life. And so in destroying

the filmic gestures toward realist representation, the narrator begins to piece

together the severed images of Anna in the same way that the novel is a

record of her salvaging and acceptance of her own divided self, divorced from

her powers to create, reproduce.

Anna, too, emerges as an artist and reminds us of Joe's art. While little

mention is made of his work, Joe is a potter who has filled their (his and the

narrator's) home with his failed masterpieces; thus, these symbols of crude

artistic attempts surround her. We learn that Joe has "peasant hands'" and,

through Anna's amateur palmistry, that "Joe's hands were dependable but

not sensitive" (4). Anna's readings may be more accurate than at first they

seem. After examining the hands of the narrator, she asks, "Do you have a

twin?" and explains, "some of your lines are double. . . . You had a good
 childhood but then there's this funny break" (4). This reading’ becomes a

forecast of the narrator's attempts to reconnect with the aborted fetus that

Anna terms her "twin." In many ways, however, the narrator confronts

several twin figures in the course of the text: her mother, a parallel that

develops as the novel progresses; her war-crazed brother who nearly drowns

and pre-figures the men in the novel; and what she calls her "Siamese twin,"

from whom she is divided through the abortion.

The accuracy of Anna's prophecies may suggests that her artistry lies in

her palm reading; however, we are repeated|y reminded of Anna's

preoccupation with her appearance, as she becomes her own makeup artist,

creating illusions and transformation with cosmetics. Fearing the wrath of

her husband, Anna panics while at the lake without her cosmetics, and

remarks to the narrator, "what'm I going to do? I forgot my makeup, he'll

kill me'" (143). We are told, in fact, that Anna's artistry does more than fail;

it consumes her. She is finally entombed within "the gilt compact " (197); her

"identity has been lost in her preoccupation with the false, made-up self in

the mirror" (Rigney 94). Through the daily make-over she performs on

herself, Anna becomes appealing to the male eye, and consequently buries

her own natural image beneath layers of "cream underfilm and pink

highlights " (148). Hers is an artistry of concealment, illusion, and denial,

dictated by the male gaze.

The narrator struggles with her own inability to create and her reliance

on imprisoning images. She recalls the way in which her adolescent

obsessions resurface in her art: "when I was ten I believed in glamour, it was

a kind of religion and these were my icons. Their arms and legs are

constrained in fashion-model poses" (45). However, she finds that these

' See Josie P. Campbell's "The Woman as Hero in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing" for
further analysis of the significance of Anna's palm readings.

87
models are inadequate: "there's something wrong with the proportions. ... I

must have been imitating the paper dolls they had in the city" (45). Her

imitations of imitations are destined to fail, both in the past and in the
present. While exploring some family photo albums, the narrator finds

herself-like the fairy tale heroines she struggles to depict-similarly confined

in the snapshot images. Explaining this feeling of imprisonment, she

confides: "I was in most of the pictures, shut in behind the paper; or not me

but the missing part of me" (126). She recognizes that the camera, like her

own hand, can capture only a partial image and is thus a tool of

fragmentation, facilitating an art that divides rather than unifies. The

feminist postmodern imperative behind this recognition constitutes a

coming to terms with a fragmented subjectivity rather than trying to resolve

these various images both within and without into artificial wholes.

The roots of the empty images that fill the protagonist

s
* mind and are

realized in her work are explored during the course of her journey inward.

To her parents' cabin, she has brought with her the illustrations she is

working on for the book of Canadian fairy tales. She knows the models to

which her heroines should conform- "I outline a princess, an ordinary one,

emaciated fashion model torso and infantile face"-while also recognizing the

emptiness of such depictions: "the stories never revealed the essential things

about them, such as what they ate or whether their towers and dungeons had

bathrooms, it was as though their bodies were pure air" (58). In trying to

depict a princess, she finds her drawings inadequate and utterly false.

Surveying her attempts, she concludes, "the princess looks stupefied rather

than filled with wonder. I discard her and try again, but this time she's

crosseyed and has one breast bigger than the other" (58-59). Like Djuna

Barnes before her and Sandra Cisneros after her, Atwood calls into question

88
the misogynistic mythology that fuels fairy tales. Even her art is guided by

prohibitions. The drawings must conform to prescribed models, and the

colors she can use are limited. She complains: "they have to keep the cost

down, so I can't use red; that way 1 lose orange and purple also"; the presence

of her editor looms in the background, promising that the critical gaze cast on

women will also be cast upon her yellow princesses.

We learn that her frustration while working on the book of fairy tales

is far from new. Her artistic leanings had been curbed during her affair with a

married art professor, when he suggested that she pursue commercial art.

The narrator confesses, "I worshiped him. . . I kept the scraps of his

handwriting like saints' relics. all 1 had was the criticisms in red pencil he

paperclipped to my drawings" (175). This early relationship proves doubly

debilitating Not only does he control her art, but he also undermines her

maternal ability, remarking of the fetus that is the product of her biological

creation, "it wasn't a person, only an animal " (169), effectively denying her
dual creative power as mother and artist. The narrator's husband is more

insidious in his control of her body. He is able to coerce her to abort the fetus

when the child no longer fits his own plan, largely because he has—from the

beginning—made her feel as though the child was exclusively his own.

Recalling Felix's attempts to perpetuate his fictional family history through

Robin's womb, the narrator sounds like Barnes's Robin as she explains of her

aborted child, " I never identified it as mine. ... It was my husband's, he

imposed it on me, ail the time it was growing in me 1 felt like an incubator "

(34). Later she again depicts herself as bending to her husband's will in

bowing down to social mores from which she was alienated: "He wanted a
child, that's normal, he wanted us to be married" (50). Thus, her first

worship fails her, shows her only death and destruction, and this experience

89
 taints her love and commitment to her own art, over which her lover then

had power as evaluator and surveyor.

Not only is her art monitored by men," but so is her use of linguistic

symbols. Her husband teaches her handwriting through modeling of his

own: "He's writing his own initials on a fence, graceful scrolls to show me

how. . . . There are other initials on the fence, but he's making his bigger,

leaving his mark" (50). He will mark his territory through the sign, and she

becomes a part of that marked territory. Just as his initials are a way of laying

claim, her husband tries to claim her through the right words. She explains

her disillusionment: "He said he loved me, the magic word, it was supposed

to make everything light up, I'll never trust that word again" (50). She

transfers his betrayal to the word that she believed would enact magic, and so

her response is not to him but to the language that deceived her.

We cannot miss the narrator's own creation of a fictional world in

which to dwell beyond her husband's imaginings. Of her revised life story

she explains, "I pieced it together the best way I could, flattening it, scrapbook,

collage, pasting over the wrong parts. A faked album, the memories as

fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could

almost live in it, I'd lived in it until now" (168). Like Felix, she creates a

series of forgeries, documents that support a life that was never her own.

However, unlike Felix, she is able to construct a world through the narrative

she offers, much like Esperanza will do with The House on Mango Street.

What Surfacing finally becomes is the diary of the narrator's reunion

with her own creative, expressive powers, realized on three levels: artistic
•Men, especially, try to force the narrator to compromise her art. Her editor, Mr.Percival,
limits the colors she can use in her illustrations and therefore narrows the spectrum of her
imagination; the capitalist Bill Malmstrom offers to buy her parents' land, an offer that would
mean the end of her artwork for Quebec Folk Tales (110) and in effect the purchase of the
images that her parents bequeath her; and David says to her regarding Malmstrom's offer, "I
hope you didn't sell out " (114).

90
maternal, and linguistic. Having been divorced from her ability to create, as

artist and mother, the narrator's quest is for reunion with her own creativity

and language, the source of which exists within her own female body. She

originally left her parents' home because she did not want to compromise

their "perilous innocence. . . . They didn't teach us about evil, they didn't

understand about it, how could 1 describe it to them? " (169). While initially

she tries—through her childhood pastiche of catalog cut outs and the adult
princesses drawn of her own hand—to repeat the naive images her parents

propagated, these one-dimensional images sever and restrict her own multi­

faceted creativity.

The images around her influence and cripple her own imaginative

and creative efforts, fostering within her a disillusioning naivete. The

narrator recalls from childhood the "romance comic books, on the cover

always a pink face oozing tears like a melting popsicle" (131). Comparing her

own drawings to those of her brother, she sees her unrealistic outlook

reflected: "I didn't want there to be wars and death, I wanted them not to

exist; only rabbits with their colored egg houses, . . . summer always, I wanted

everyone to be happy" (154). These images become the basis for the scrap

book "paper house" where she finds she "could almost live" (168) and where,
for a long time, she had safely lived. In returning to the house where she was

raised, once a reflection of her "summer always" mentality, the narrator finds

that she must confront the fantasies she so ignorantly perpetuated in

childhood and that led to her present dissociation from her maternal and
artistic desires. These images from the past lead "her to recognize the split

within her, but now she must find some way to heal that wound " (Campbell

174) without reinscribing an artificial wholeness or replicating the superficial

images of her childhood.

9]
 For the narrator to begin to heal, she must renew her connection with

her parents, particularly with her mother; however, this renewal cannot be

merely a reaffixing of facades. Initially, she expects from her mother "a note,

a message, a will" (37); however, as she learns the inadequacies of language

and the betrayal that a linguistic message would constitute, she begins to

search for an image from her mother. She knows that what her mother

bequeaths her is in the scrapbooks, and her exploration of these scrapbooks

presents a uniquely female motif, one that parallels the quilt motif that

repeatedly surfaces in women's literature. Both the scrapbook and the quilt

are metaphors that characterize the way in which women learn to survive on

the scraps of a society, to create their ideas of themselves based on fragmented

images, and to piece together the stories of their lives from the notes in the

margins and on the fringes. The scrapbook is also a postmodern document,

offering only scattered images, a rough order, and no gestures toward

definitive wholeness. When she discovers her own childhood scrapbook, the

narrator explains: "1 searched through it carefully looking for something I

could recognize as myself. . . but there were no drawings at all, just

illustrations cut from magazines and pasted in" (105). These past attempts to

create were not original; rather, she accepted and appropriated the images

around her, peopling her scrapbook, her record of her self, with images

created by the hands of others. Having relied on prefabricated images rather

than on her own creative powers as an artist and a woman, she thus

submitted to the definitions and limitations expressed by these images

Looking back, she now sees the vacuity of these cutouts, the impossibility of

these images, asserting at last, "I did want to be those things" (105, emphasis

7 To examine the ways in which women writers use the quilt motif, see: "Everyday Use" by
Alice Walker, "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell, and "Hands: For Mother's Day" by Nikki
Giovanni.

92
added), referring to the "ladies" she has pasted into her book. As a child, the

narrator saw the world through the dichotomies that her brother set up and

she absorbed: "There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything" (39).
Initially, she seeks to continue in her own art the binaries prescribed by her

brother and perpetuated by her husband. However, when she repeatedly fails

to fulfill the divisive images she reveres and finds valorized in the world

around her, a postmodern disintegration of these roles becomes the only

possible response to this world of confining and reductivist dichotomies.

In an earlier scrapbook, the protagonist does at last discover the

workings of her own hand, even if the innocence of her imagination strikes

her as rather frightening. Examining her crayon renderings, the narrator

finds that "All the rabbits were smiling and some were laughing hilariously

. . . . No monsters, no wars, no explosions, no heroism" (106). The distance

she feels from the images represented in the book is apparent: "I couldn't

remember ever having drawn these pictures. I was disappointed in myself"

(106). This disparity is rectified when she later recognizes and triumphantly

reclaims her own drawing left for her by her mother. The blank pages are
those that she is now challenged to fill with reinvented images, images that

shatter those that haunt her from the past, and images that need not be

whole, encompassing an empty or artificial realism

Illustrations are also important in the legacy that the narrator believes
has been left for her by her father. As Marge Piercy explains, "ancient

pictographs provide the link between the generations, the dead father and the

'dead daughter " (63). Sensing the bridge created by his stack of drawings, the

narrator explains, "I had a talisman, my father had left me the guides, the

man-animals and the maze of numbers " (175-76). Recalling Hansel and

Gretel who found their way home by leaving behind a trail of bread crumbs,

93
the narrator traces a trail of primitive drawings, left by her father, that lead

her to reclaim her own expressive powers, at a place believed by the natives

to harbor supernatural powers. Recognizing that "You draw on the wall

what's important to you" (140), she worships these images as clues to her past

and as a sort of treasure map, leading her to the wealth of her creative

energies.

The narrator's quest resonates in the present with the illustrations that
she has brought with her to complete while on this search for her father.

These illustrations find their precursors within her parents' home, most

notably in the drawing that her mother leaves her as a means by which to

identify herself and be reborn. Craving her mother's contribution to her own

creativity, she explains: "More than ever I needed to find it, the thing she had

hidden; the power from my father's intercession wasn't enough. . . there were

more gods than his" (180). Ironically, the gift that her mother does leave is

the narrator's own childhood creation, one which she successfully "enacts" in

the final movement of the novel (Campbell 174). The narrator instinctively

recognizes her mother's contribution: "the gift itself was a loose page, the

edge tom, the figures drawn in crayon. On the left was a woman with a

round moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside her gazing out" (187).
The mother, through an image created by the narrator's girlhood hand,

returns to her daughter her maternal powers. Her gift is two-fold: the gift of

art and the gift of motherhood, both the forms of creative power from which

the narrator is alienated. The narrator recognizes this heirloom--"The

picture was mine, I had made it" (187)--and the powers depicted within it.
What this drawing offers is nothing less than the narrator's reclaiming of her
own body, the locus of a creativity that transcends binaries and embraces—

rather than reconciles-the fragmentation that she feels both from her mother

94
and her aborted child. Feeling a renewed connection with her mother, the

narrator realizes, "They were my guides, she had saved them for me,

pictographs, I had to read their new meaning" (187). To read the new

meaning of both her artistic and maternal abilities, the narrator explains,

"First I had to immerse myself in the other language" (187). This other

language is the language of the female body, the only language able to bring

her fully to her artistic and maternal powers.

Her mother disrupts the linearity of time, in effect entering the

present tense of her daughter's journey to collapse past and present. The

narrator depicts her mother as somehow transcendent: "Impossible to be like

my mother, it would need a time warp" (56). In her memory, the protagonist

envisions her mother in a resonant pose, characterized by an outstretched

hand, a pantomime indicative of feeding birds. And the narrator's mother

does come to nourish her daughter through the images she leaves for her to

discover. The mother as bird feeder becomes particularly compelling when

viewed in light of Atwood's use of birds throughout the novel. The narrator

expresses her inability to create the images to accompany The Tale of the

Golden Phoenix, a tale that she herself comes to live out, as she dies/dives

and returns reborn out of the flames/water. If initially the heron dangling

menacingly from the tree brings to mind the narrator's aborted fetus and

serves as a chilling symbol of the needless violence and destruction of

humans in the wilderness, then her mother's girlhood anecdote provides an

affirming avian image. Revealing a faith in the female ability to fly, her

mother and "her sister had made wings for themselves out of an old

umbrella; they'd jumped off the bam roof, attempting to fly, and she broke
both her ankles" (144). The narrator remembers her mother's having chased

away a bear from their campsite: "That was the picture 1 kept, my mother
 seen from the back, arms upraised as though she was flying. . . she had been
so positive, assured, as if she knew a foolproof magic formula: gesture and

word." (91). The formula her mother has is a magical ability

* to use the sign

of her own body to convey meaning, an ability for which the narrator longs.

The bread crumbs of Hansel and Gretel again find reflection in the
seeds left behind in the narrator's mother's old leather jacket for her daughter

to find/ These seeds of artistic and maternal potential form an interesting

juxtaposition to the abortion, an experience that the narrator characterizes as

having "planted death in me like a seed " (169). The mother's posture

encourages her own bird (the narrator) to venture beyond the nest, while also

asking that she circle back and find strength in the legacy she offers in her

outstretched hand. This Modernist invocation of Icarus becomes a feminist

postmodern gesture of transcendence. To become a bird, to don wings, is to

escape and to survive, a lesson we learn through the narrator's brother: "He

never caught birds, they were too quick for him" (154) Again and again, her
mother's pose is suggestive of her ability to fly, to soar, and ultimately she

does, as the narrator envisions her mother joining the birds high above. In

one of the final scenes, the narrator finds herself surrounded by jays: "I see
them in the trees and swooping between the trees, the air forming itself into

birds, they continue to call" (217). These birds suggest to her the transcendent

feminist power which she has inherited from her mother, whom she

searches for in the flock: "1 squint up at them, trying to see which one she is"

(218).

In a discussion of the mother/daughter relationship in Surfacing, Sue

* A similar sense of magic also drives Barnes's Matthew O'Connor, who seems to share the
formula for both "gesture and word."

' Ironically, in "Hansel and Gretel," the bread crumbs do become bird feed, thus
eliminating the path the children have planned to follow back home.

%
Thomas examines the "the narrator's senses of maternal inadequacy and

guilt" (73). Important to recognize is that the narrator's quest takes the form

not only of the search for her own mother, but also for the mother within

herself, the reproductive ability from which she is divorced when she leaves

her family home to abort her child. And reproduction is at the center of this

text. In the same way that the narrator cannot reproduce suitable
representations in her art, she also discards her own representation in the

aborted fetus, thus effecting a "spiritual death of self by her complicity in the

abortion of her child" (Campbell 173). She compromises her biological ability

to reproduce, and must come to terms with her own culpability in this act.

The narrator's core as a woman—her ability to bear children- is pivotal

to her quest. This death of the other (or, as Anna's palmistry suggests, her

"twin") is a death of a part of herself, a division she mourns and seeks to

reconcile in the search for the father, which finally becomes a search for the

mother—her own mother and her own maternal potential. By plunging into

the depths of the lake, she rescues this core, facing her own reflection and a

"sliced off" piece of herself in the murky depths of these sacred waters. The

search for the father that is a classic Modernist trope parodically exploited by
male postmodernists is twisted here to feminist postmodern ends In

Surfacing, the search for the patrilineal is inverted through the feminist

postmodern lens so as to reinscribe the lost mother as artist No longer muse

or object of male art, the mother becomes the subject and source of a vision

that supplants patriarchal binarisms with multiplicitous wholeness.

Leading the others into the wilderness, the narrator also finds her own

fragmented identity as she begins to both reconnect with and question her

role as mother; here, she emerges as an earth-mother, a guide to the citified

group who look to her for authority and protection. While in the Canadian

97
 wilderness, she "teaches her male companions to fish, to hunt, to split logs, to

build fires" (Du Plessix Gray 133-34). She is the literal fire-bearer, providing
food and shelter for her inept companions. Atwood goes to great lengths to

show the narrator's assumption of a domestic and maternal role while the

group stays in the cabin. The narrator prepares the meals, plans the activities,

tends to the garden, and often acts as mediator among the others. In a
classically maternal way, the narrator announces to the group, '"How would

you like/ I said, to pick some blueberries?' Offering it as a surprise; work

disguised in some other form, it had to be a game" (98). In many ways, the

narrator takes over the very roles abandoned by her dead mother-roles that

her mother enacted in the same kitchen, garden, and lake If earlier the

narrator failed to embrace her maternal powers, then in the trip back into her

parents' home, she finds a second chance, and steps into her mother's shoes

naturally, adeptly adapting to the needs of the group.

At the same time, the narrator's dive into the murky lake that almost

consumed her brother and that will consume the images of Anna becomes

her assumption of both maternal and paternal roles Continuing her father's
unfinished explorations of ancient pictographs beneath the lake leads her to

resuscitate her own unborn child. In preparing for the dive, she comments,

"Diving by myself was hazardous, there ought to be another person " (165),

and the companion for whom the narrator wishes is present in the form of

recollection. Plunging into the lake, the narrator reenacts the most distinct

memory she has of her own mother, curiously a memory from before her

own birth, while she was in her mother's womb. This prenatal memory is of

her mother's rescue of her brother, who nearly drowned in the very lake into

which the narrator now dives to rescue her own aborted child and reclaim
her right to motherhood. The protagonist remarks upon her brother's

98
 reaction to having been saved from drowning: "His drowning never seemed

to have affected him as much as I thought it should. . . . If it had happened to

me I would have felt there was something special about me, to be raised from

the dead like that; I would have returned with secrets" (83). And in her own

dive into the lake, she does uncover secrets and is "raised from the dead" of
one whose creative powers have been stunted. Beneath the water's surface,

many images of herself are revealed: "My other shape was in the water, not

my reflection but my shadow" (165), a shadow cast by both her mother and

her aborted offspring. The plunge into the water serves to unite these

generations, as parallel acts across different time periods, in which linear time

effectively dissolves. Here, "she must became her mother. . . giving birth to

herself as well as to new life" (Rigney 110), and in this first successful birth
the protagonist finds the affirmation to bear her own child She has

successfully purged herself of "that death. . . inside," that " black pearl" (170)
that hindered her creative impulses.

When the narrator resurfaces, she has seen the long repressed image

that she could not give birth to, and this vision reaffirms her own ability to

create, both as mother and as artist. The protagonist must move beyond her

initial conception of "love and death as destructive forces" (Rigney 104), ideas

with their genesis in the affair with her art professor as well as her own

disenchantment with fairy tales. When Joe makes unsolicited sexual

advances, she fights back. "I slid my arm between us, against his throat,

windpipe, and pried his head away. 'I'll get pregnant,' I said, it's the right

time " (172). Realizing that Joe fears creation and instead finds comfort in
violence and aggression, she deduces, "It was the truth, it stopped him: flesh

making more flesh, miracle that frightens all of them" (172-73). To David's

aggressive sexual overtures, she again warns, "'I'd get pregnant " (178),

99
 effectively reiterating both her maternal ability and her fluency in the mother

tongue, powers formerly beyond her reach. Her vision of the failed David is

linguistic: "he didn't know what language to use, he'd forgotten his own, he

had to copy. Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches "

(179). Having usurped David's command of the language through her refusal

of his sexual advances, he becomes a character much like Barnes's Jenny

Petherbridge, reduced to an empty parroting of a language beyond him. The

narrator's articulateness is a direct result of her control of her own body, and

her response to David echoes back to subvert a past in which her husband

assumed control of both the sign of language and her female body. She finds

that what was once her ultimate vulnerability is now her talisman against

undesired penetration, reclaimed in her reunion with the lost self she
returns to find.

Resuscitating her own previously abandoned child, the narrator

breathes real life into a new child. She summons Joe and with calculated

and willful purpose, asserts: "I guide him into me, it's the right season, I

hurry " (193). As Campbell contends, "Not only does the narrator initiate the

encounter, she directs it from start to finish to restore those 'two halves'"

(176) or, one might say, she reconnects with her creative outlets as mother

and artist. During intercourse, she finds redemption of her maternal abilities:

"1 can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the

lake where it had been imprisoned for so long " (193). In this act,

appropriately beneath the light of the moon, the narrator brings to life the

childhood picture she drew and that her mother left for her to find (Campbell

174). However, she will shelter her child from the alienation which has been

her own burden. Foreseeing her child's birth, she proclaims, "it will be

covered with shining fur, a god, I will never teach it any words' (193). In

100
 effect what she will birth will be neither fully human nor fully beast, and its

expression will be tied to the maternal, to the creative processes that cannot

be contained in a linear, phallogocentric linguistic system.

Pregnant with a child that is as much nature's as it is Joe's, the narrator

abandons her parents' home to live off of the land. Her move away from

civilization is also a move away from her own uncomplicated reflection: "I

must stop being in the mirror" (209). The reunion she feels through the

discovery of her mother's bequest is balanced against the division she senses

w hen looking into a mirror. To exist only as a reflection is to exist only

externally, and so she inverts the male gaze; "I reverse the mirror so it's

toward the wall, it no longer traps me" (210). Finally, she sees in a

purportedly mimetic art a series of empty deferrals. Anna is one

embodiment of an exhausted art: "a seamed and folded imitation of a

magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an

imitation" (197). Her own sense of self is defined against the imitations

within Anna. If, as the narrator explains, "Anna's soul [is] closed in the gold

compact" (210), then her own will roam free as she reverses the possibilities

of mimetic entrapment. The doubling throughout the novel is, like the

mirror, a gesture toward a divided postmodern subjectivity. However,

unlike the doppelganger of the canonical postmodern novel, the various

twins that are resurrected in this novel offer not alliance or a comfortable

union to the narrator but rather tangible assurance of her divided and
muitiplicitous selves.

Marked by a series of acts of shedding, rejuvenation, and liberation, the

narrator celebrates her reproductive powers, and discards the representations

of her previous creative dysfunction. Into the fire, she casts her illustrations

of "bungled princesses, the Golden Phoenix awkward and dead as a

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 mummified parrot"(210), "the ladies, dress forms with decorated china
heads" of her adolescent scrapbooks (211), and the "confining photographs"

(211) of her past. She torches not only her own "artifacts," but, as she

proclaims, "Everything from history must be eliminated" (211). From each of

the texts made sacred by her father-"Boswell and The Mystery at Sturbridge,

the Bible and the common mushrooms and Log Cabin Construction" (211)-

she rips out a single page and adds it to the pyre Destroying the power of her

father's stories, she makes each text no longer whole, no longer capable of

imparting a central truth. And in violating their posturing as wholes, as

authoritative tomes, she breaks free from these master narratives. Mentally,

she replaces these failed images with "a natural woman. . . a new kind of

centerfold" (228). These acts are of replacement, just as she replaces the role

of her own mother; however, the replacement is not merely a substitution.

Instead, the narrator inscribes a version of womanhood that, rather than

being defined against the natural-seen, for example, in Anna's obsessive

slavery to cosmetics to transform the natural that threatens to undermine her

carefully applied mask-incorporates it, through the bestial.

The narrator's desire to embrace the bestial fuels her growing suspicion
that "The language is wrong" (87)—an insight central to the final section of

the novel. Clearly, the narrator has recorded this experience after the fact, a

point made lucid as she reflects on her past: "I was seeing poorly, translating

badly, a dialect problem, 1 should have used my own" (88). The narrator's
wish is for a language of her own creation, based on her own divisive

experience with conventional, patriarchal language. Repeatedly, she

associates her inability to form personal relationships with her botched

attempts at using language: "It was the language again, I couldn't use it

because it wasn't mine" (125). Her realization is that as a woman she is a

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 foreigner trying to use the language of the male natives; therefore, what she

feels is constantly deferred by the inadequate language she must use to

convey those feelings. Behind the narrator stands an Atwood making a

strong comment about a phallogocentric language unable to encompass the

female experience. While initially her realization that "a language is

everything you do" (152) is almost debilitating to the narrator who cannot
seem to come to terms with language, this realization ultimately becomes the

impetus for her formation of a language that encompasses the polycentric

experiences of women. Invoking a poststructuralist world, she finally

explains, "Language divides us into fragments, 1 wanted to be whole" (172).

She comes to see that wholeness cannot exist without fragmentation and

multiplicity, and through Atwood she finds a meta-salvation in the larger

creation of the novel. Moving toward this revised version of wholeness, she

becomes the teller of the tale, displaying in the final analysis a cautious

reconciliation with the language toward which she feels such animosity.

Hiding from her companions as they depart, the narrator stays behind

on her parent's property, gradually merging with the nature that surrounds

her. The final chapter of the novel recalls Barnes's "The Possessed " Just as
Robin is described as a "beast turning human"—or human turning beast-the

narrator embraces the beast within once alone. Her description of herself is

posited between realms: "My body also changes, the creature in me, plant­

animal, sends out filaments in me; 1 ferry it secure between death and life, I

multiply" (200). This shift is for her a release: "I no longer have a name. 1

tried for all those years to be civilized but I'm not and I'm through

pretending" (201). At the same time, the narrator understands what she

looks like from the outside: "From any rational point of view I am absurd;

but there are no longer any rational points of view" (202). Her statement

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implies that modernist notions of universality no longer hold in the

postmodern world which she inhabits.

While merging with nature, she feels herself forbidden from traveling

paths, from entering gated spaces, from being at all bound by the barriers
erected by civilization. These boundaries in space come to be linked with

linguistic boundaries, as this return to an animal state is again connected to

language. The narrator deconstructs spoken language as she coalesces with

the silences of nature: "The animals have no need for speech, why talk when

you are a word I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning" (217). A similar play

with words again suggests the way in which equations of signification are
unstable: "From the lake a fish jumps/An idea of a fish jumps/A fish jumps"

(224).

Once the narrator has learned of the realm beyond language, beyond

différence, she can return to the civilized world She marks the transition

*he
back: "l rules are over. . . . They were here though, I trust that. 1 saw them

and they spoke to me, in the other language" (225). With this understanding

of language comes an enlightened awareness of the artificiality of all that

language purports to create. Notions of Truth recede and she senses this: "No

gods to help me now, they're questionable once more, theoretical as Jesus. . . .

1 regret them; but they give only one kind of truth, one hand" (227).

Just before emerging from her altered state, the narrator takes a final
glance at herself: "1 turn the mirror around: in it there's a creature neither

animal nor human" (227). Robin's barking laughter finds resonance in the

narrator's own subhuman utterance: "I laugh and a noise comes out like

something being killed: a mouse, a bird?" (228). The two possibilities are left
to co-exist, and the choice of animals is deliberate, suggesting the natural state

of woman as both mouse—and therefore relatively meek and diminutive—

104
and bird—therefore capable of flight and transcendence.

This hybrid utterance marks her return: "I reenter my own time" (229).
She returns speaking in the mother tongue that nurtures her maternal seed.

Dreaming of her own revolution, she thinks of her child: "It might be the

first one, the first true human; it must be bom, allowed" (230). The novel

ends on a series of brinks. The narrator is on the verge of motherhood, and

she stands at the threshold between the natural world that she has

experienced and the civilized world that beckons her. Looking toward Joe,

who awaits her return, she knows what such a return will require. "If I go

with him we will have to talk" (230). While doubtful about their finding a

linguistic peace—"For us it's necessary, the intercession of words; and we will

probably fail, sooner or later, more or less painfully" (230)-the narrator senses

in Joe an amorphic potential. Seeing him with new eyes, she finds that "he
isn't anything, he is only half formed, and for that reason 1 can trust him"

(231). While Joe calls for her, "balancing on the dock which is neither land
nor water" (231), her final posture is between the worlds, as she defies our

expectations by choosing neither. Hers is a brave position, teetering on the

precipice that threatens her survival.

When the narrator bathes in and explores the sacred waters of the

lake, she, following her mother's lead, merges with the element that will

allow her to live beyond her present numbed existence. In the "multilingual

water " (213) is an amniotic world both prior to and beyond language, a

prelapsarian realm into which she is baptized. In the images left for her by

both her mother and her father, the narrator finds a path leading inward,

toward an affirmation of her ability to reproduce. Atwood recognizes that

"experience is structured by the stories we inherit" (Greene 19); therefore, she

has her characters maneuver through the cobwebs of fairy tales toward their

105
 own linguistic grails. Ironically, the quest that begins as a search for the father

finally unites her with her creative abilities as both artist and mother, a

reunion that challenges her to destroy corrupt images and don the wings her

mother passes on. At the same time, this reunion is about a shift in her

vision, so that she sees in fragmentation a certain wholeness. For the male,

the dual avenues of creation-paternal and artistic-are divisive,'0 while for

the female, these avenues—maternal and artistic-become the ultimate source

of union, pointing to the feminist postmodern inscription of the female body

as a place of revolution. When women write the female body, they cast it as
the site of polycentric and polyvocal transformation, because it offers a

boundless fluidity. Thus, the feminist postmodem reclaims the female body

once absorbed by the male gaze, making it the source of a more fully realized,
womanist art.

“ In John Barth's Lost in the f unhouse, Ambrose and his brother embody these two means by
which to create. His brother is granted access to creation through sexual intercourse, while
Ambrose finds that his creative power comes through writing.

106
 CHAPTER THREE

A Common Bond, A Common Prayer

Joan Didion's Grace and Charlotte of A Book of Common Prayer

"for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis"
~e.e.cummings

In Surfacing, Atwood writes a novel about one woman's quest for a

sense of self that incorporates the fragments of her divided selves. The

unnamed narrator's reunion with both her mother and her own aborted

child is a part of that quest, a journey only fully realized once this narrator

can find a language in which to articulate her story. Similar patterns emerge

in Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Here, Didion writes a

novel about one woman's quest to write another woman's life, and through

this writing to find her own sense of self. The internal author, Grace, initially

attempts to define Charlotte, her ostensible subject, through the scientific

formulations that she uses professionally, as a biochemist. However, Grace

gradually finds that Charlotte resists both empirical categorization as well as

the tight narrative with which Grace tries to frame her. Ultimately, it is the

bond between these women-as mothers and writers—that links them and
surpasses the inadequacies of phallocentric language and scientific
hypotheses.

When viewed as a novel tracing the female desire for self-knowledge

and subjectivity, A Book of Common Prayer witnesses "the efforts of woman

through various private rituals to systematize and make coherent the

confusion surrounding her" (Mickelson 98). The woman, Grace, who

107
 believes that such place or moment of coherence is possible speaks the novel,

trying to control the discontinuous narrative of a wandering Charlotte who

simply will not fit Grace's mold. At the outset, this drive for coherence

alienates Grace and Charlotte, ultimately deferring the immediate possibility

of their mutual understanding in a relationship that transcends the very

systems that find them invalidated. Grace assumes the place of author­

biographer, attempting to use her modernist perspective to analyze and "bear

witness" to the postmodem Charlotte, who resists Grace's narrow biography.

This mismatch is the locus of the novel's tension. Through the narrator and

her subject, Did ion demonstrates the failure of a modernist world view, as

articulated by Grace—in which science, Truth, and "reality" prevail—to survey

the postmodern experience, as lived by Charlotte in which such absolutes

crumble and disintegrate.

Any notion of plot or suspense is dispensed with on the first page, so

that the novel becomes the chronicle of Grace's final truce with her subject,

her creation: Charlotte. Not only does their status as writers—even if their

approach to writing is yet another display of their initial polarity-align the

women, but also the fact that both women have lost a child and become

estranged mothers. And in Boca Grande, "the very cervix of the world" (199),
both women are reborn and awaken to a larger realm of experience and

perspective. With a passport listing her occupation as "MADRE" (43),

Charlotte ventures to Boca Grande in hopes of reclaiming her fugitive

daughter, Marin, sensing "that here her child would be reborn to her"

(Strandberg 234). Through her often sterile observations of Charlotte, Grace

struggles to create a linguistic, biochemical explanation for this maternal

search, a search she fails to see as operating within her own writing.

If in Surfacing the narrator merges with her mother and unborn child,

IOS
 then in her own quest toward unity, Grace, the story's narrator, and her

subject, Charlotte, emerge as two parts of a singular whole. Their fusion,

however, does not come without Grace's eventual surrender to a decentered,

unequivocally postmodern realm. Early sections of the novel reveal the

clash between these two women's voices, as Grace remarks, "Charlotte would

call her story one of passion. I believe 1 would call it one of delusion" ( 4),

thus effecting the initial distance between the women's perspectives and

establishing the authority the narrator imposes—and supposes—on the story.

Anne Mickelson explains that "From the beginning, the narrator's terse

recital of the facts of her own life are designed to project her as the champion

of realism, as opposed to idealism" (99). She has the power of language that

Charlotte lacks and—at least initially—she is therefore seemingly the more

powerful of the two women. As readers, we are given the strong voice of

Grace and we must depend on her to interpret the mysterious Charlotte. In

fact, critics' suggest that we rely on Grace to explain Charlotte in much the

same way that we rely on Nick Carraway to explain the tale and inner drive

of the glittery, heart-worn Jay Gatsby of F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Victor Strandberg explains: "Indeed, this alteration in the witness—from

distaste and incredulity to affinity and admiration—gives both The Great

Gatsby and A Book of Common Prayer their fundamental design " (227). This

"design " is structured around a self-reflexive narrative voice, one strategy of

postmodern writers. However, even after her monologue to establish her

own credibility, we note early on Grace's own biases coming to bear,

suggesting then the fictional!ty of the universe that Grace projects as

somehow more " real " than Charlotte's. While Nick Carraway constantly

1 For full discussions of the narrative implications of the novel, see both Victor Strandberg s
"Passion and Delusion in A Book of Common Prayer” and Samuel Coale's "Didion's Disorder:
An American Romancer's Art."

1()9
 reminds the reader of his inclination to reserve judgment on Gatsby, Grace is

openly judgmental from the start. Perhaps this shift is Atwood's jibe at a

narrator who, while unable to step out of his own perspective, purports to do

so. In this and other ways, comparisons to The Great Gatsby suggest an

element of conscious parody in Atwood's eventual feminist postmodern

revision of the male modernist witness novel.

As narrator, Grace's voice always receives preferential placement. We

see this linguistic dueling as Grace asserts: "She [Charlotte] characterized Boca

Grande as a land of contrasts ' Boca Grande is not a land of contrast " (5). If

Boca Grande is not full of contrast, then the early dialogue between the two

women compensates, for the reader navigates constant discrepancies between

Charlotte's and Grace's thoughts and must struggle to determine whom to

believe. In an interview with Digby Diehl, Didion acknowledged the

technical difficulty that the text's narrative authority presents: "The narrator

was not present during most of the events she's telling you about. And her

only source is a woman incapable of seeing the truth" (24). And, I might add,

the idea that there is a singular truth to see becomes increasingly slippery and

complicated, particularly as the story is screened through layers of

authoritative voices, all of whom Grace realizes in the end can only ever
offer second-hand accounts.

When juxtaposed against our outspoken narrator, Charlotte's lack of

voice is glaring. Even her thoughts are interpreted. Her second husband,

l^eonard, says to her, "I always know what you're thinking before you do" and

he proceeds to fill in her thoughts for her (86). Shortly thereafter, Leonard

again imposes on Charlotte's attempts at expression, claiming, "That's not

what you were going to say" (88). Charlotte is consistently and repeatedly cut­

off, interrupted, analyzed, and in one scene even directly translated when

no
 Gerardo looks to Grace to interpret Charlotte's words: "'What is she saying,'

Gerardo said to me" (Didion 234) . Charlotte characteristically loses track of

her ideas, illustrated when she begins, "I just thought- " and Grace follows

with, "Charlotte did not know what she had just thought " (118); she is easily

sidetracked in conversation, admitting, "I don't know what I meant " (96);

and she has a sketchy memory, which she accounts for by offering, " I am so

tired. I am so tired of remembering things'" (130).

Never guilty of empty palter, Charlotte approaches the world with a

skepticism manifested in her linguistic reticence. On countless occasions, she

reverts to silence, "choosjingj paralysis as a kind of defense " (Coale 162). Over

two telephone calls with Warren, Grace reports four times, "Charlotte said

nothing " in response to Warren's attempts to manipulate her (106-07). Later

in section two, Grace again emphasizes Charlotte's reticence: "Charlotte did

not answer .... Charlotte left the room without speaking .... Charlotte said

nothing .... Charlotte said nothing" (138-39). At the same time, "Charlotte,

as reported by Grace. . . also tends to say just enough to evoke speculation"

(Stout 173), so that both Grace and the reader are constantly searching for a

completion to Charlotte's thoughts—one which Charlotte does not provide, so

Grace ad-libs and postulates.

Charlotte, whom we come to know only through Grace's reports of her

life, becomes a reflection and creation (perhaps even the central delusion) of

Grace, her ultimate life-giver. Grace tries to apply the ordered

phaUogocentric language she has mastered so well, only to imprison and

reduce both herself and her subject in this linear frame The feminist

implications of this set-up are compelling, for in many cases Grace is as

willing to silence and second-guess Charlotte as are the chauvinistic, power-

hungry men who hover around them. The image we receive of Charlotte,

in
 then, is a product of external forces, of competing Others: the novelist/Grace,

her story, her roles, the motives assigned to her, the voice both given to and

withheld from her. And as long as Grace sees Charlotte as competition for

her voice, she will actively undercut Charlotte's voice. The beginning of the

novel resonates with the tension created by such competition. Because of her

position as writer, Grace assumes control, stepping in as yet another voice of

authority to stifle Charlotte and question her reliability and veracity.

Ironically, the forces that introduce Grace and Charlotte both to one

another and to the reader-men and the destructive power of war-are

diametrically opposed to the forces that actually bind them: their

womanhood and creation through writing and mothering. As they discover,

they are connected by the prominent emerald ring2 Charlotte wears—a gift

from Leonard, but finally a representation of the two women's inextricable

link to the war and to the men who surround them. We learn that the

emerald was given by Grace's deceased husband, Edgar, to Leonard in

exchange for weaponry. That Charlotte does not question the origin of the

ring, and the fallacy of Grace's illusions that her husband was not another of

the violent, war-hungry Strasser-Mendana clan, comes to fruition as we learn

the provenance of the ring. So not only are these women surrounded by

men, but their tangible bond—only realized at the novel's end, after

C harlotte's death— is also the product of a man's exchange in a man's world

Having abandoned her career as an anthropologist to pursue the more

sterile science of biochemistry, Grace craves the safety of concrete knowledge

with the intensity with which Charlotte dismisses such absolutes. Thus,
' If Didion is self-consciously parodying the Modernist male witness novel, then
Fitzgerald's green light takes a feminist spin, becoming the emerald that Charlotte wears.

’ Ironically, Charlotte attempts to pass down this ring to her daughter, Marin, who
constantly vocalizes her involvement in the social trend represented by the people's revolution
and by a marked repudiation of the American Dream, which, in essence, the ring signifies.

112
 Grace, clinging to the "known" qualities of science and empirical knowledge,

sees Charlotte as a riddle to solve, a reducible equation—"Give me the

molecular structure of the protein which defined Charlotte Douglas" (5)- and

futilely tries to apply reductivist laws and principles to the drifting, unaware
Charlotte. Grace voices her frustration:

The question of Charlotte Douglas has never been 'settled' for

me. Never decided ' I know how to make models of life itself,

DNA, RNA, helices double and single and squared, but I try to

make a model of Charlotte Douglas's character' and I see only a

shimmer. . . . Let me try a less holistic approach to the model.

(218)

Longing to connect Charlotte with an external reality, Grace never suspects

that their link is internal. In the same way that her training as a biochemist

fails her, Grace must slowly surrender to an understanding that words are an

inadequate approach to arresting the core of Charlotte because of their

phallogocentric origin. Finally, Grace finds that only a holistic approach will

work, and in so doing that the human form is irreducible and beyond her
scientific applications.

Only when Cirace widens her scope and sees Charlotte as a complex

amalgamation, one whose identity is deeply intertwined with her own, does

she find any answers—and a quiet resolve resounds in her tempered,

empathetic tone toward Charlotte as the tale progresses. A tangible

representation of Grace's bowing to Charlotte is the apparent role reversal of

their linguistic access at the close of the novel, wherein Charlotte is given

voice and Cirace reports of herself: "There was a silence. ... I said nothing. . . .

There was nothing to say .... 1 said nothing" (258-60). The collapse of Grace's

voice signals her surrender to Charlotte and her move away from the desire

113
 to undercut and impose authority over Charlotte's speech. While initially

Charlotte seems to be pushed around by everyone else in the story, including

-and arguably especially-Grace, the tides of control shift as the novel

concludes. In an interview with Sara Davidson, Didion commented,

"Charlotte is very much in control there in Boca Grande when everyone else

is running out" (515). Perhaps Charlotte's ultimate control is a result of her

long-held knowledge that language is a fiction, a lesson that the postmodern

Charlotte teaches the modernist Grace.

We learn from the opening line, "I will be her witness " (3), the nature

of the relationship between teller and tale, scientist and subject, and our first

notion of an alignment between the two is the revelation that both women

are writers. Grace writes of other people's lives and feels compelled to do so,

to write to understand, to make sense out of that which initially appears

illogical, and ultimately to live (we learn, for instance, that Grace is dying of

cancer as she writes this novel-and this will become her last creative effort
and one to which she is cosmically bound). Through her writings, Grace

interprets reality with the artist's keen attention to linearity and detail:

diction, grammar, verb tense—in fact, the very details that constantly elude
Charlotte.

Charlotte, who cannot distinguish among verb tenses and whose

writing, when we are first given access to it, is plagiarized from a sarcastic

comment made by Grace, occupies her time by writing letters that largely go

unacknowledged. While she writes furiously, her writing—perhaps because it

does not adhere to the very rules that Grace worships—is futile. If Grace sees

the world through an externally constructed lens, one that focuses on the

lives of others, then Charlotte sees all through an internal lens, revealing an

utterly self absorbed mentality, one pointedly oblivious to external realities.

114
 The urge that guides these seemingly diametrically opposed characters is,
however, the same: the desire to create through language.

Essentially, both Grace and Charlotte live in make-believe, self-created

worlds. Charlotte lives in a world of domestic fantasy with skewed

recollections of Marin at the core of this world Her mothering occurs

through her fictionalized accounts of her now estranged relationship with

Marin. She recalls Marin with the glowing haze of a pastel film-"She had a

straw hat one Faster. . . . And a flowered lawn dress .... We took her to lunch

at the Carlyle .... She was three. Everybody admired her hat'" (88-89)-and is

therefore incapable of seeing the present Marin: anarchist, hijacker, and

terrorist. As Lynne Hanley asserts, "Charlotte is able to deny, revise or forget

even the most recalcitrant facts about Marin's revolutionary activities

... in order to sustain her consoling fiction of their relationship" (21). And

this fiction is mirrored twice over: first by Charlotte and again by Grace in the

retelling. While Grace is quick to indict Charlotte on her fictionalizing, she

seems oblivious to the concomitant fictions that are woven within her own

writings, both through telling Charlotte's life story as well as through

revealing bits of her own.

We have the sense that Charlotte is indeed play-acting her maternal

role, when we I earn that "Charlotte would rehearse cheerful dialogues she

might need to have with Marin " (111), discussions which are utterly

ridiculous to the reader, but that provide for Charlotte a vision of herself that

reflects the type of mother she reinvents herself as having been Grace shows

us one of Charlotte's rehearsals: "Do you think I'll get braces in fourth grade,'

Marin would ask. "You're going to love fourth grade,' Charlotte would

answer" (111). Illustrating the dissonance in Charlotte's accounts, who

claims, " By the way. Marin and I are inseparable, "" Grace provides an

115
 authoritative voice-over: "Accept those as statements of how Charlotte had

wished it had been. ... Of course it had not been that way at all" (110). In

envisioning her reunion with Marin, Charlotte imagines a fairy tale that

transforms radically-minded Marin into the pretty little girl wearing an Easter
hat:

Charlotte and Marin would share a room, order hot chocolate

from room service, sit on the bed and catch up. Charlotte and

Marin would buy Marin a dress, get Marin a manicure, cure

Marin's nerves with consomme and naps. (200)

What remains unclear is whether or not Charlotte actually envisions this

scene or Grace attributes this fantasy to Charlotte, supposedly reading her

mind as Leonard purportedly was able to do.

With her growing understanding of Charlotte's inventions of

memory, Grace recognizes these fantasies as Charlotte's way of coping: "I

began to see a certain interior logic in her inability to remember" (175). At the

end, then, when Grace reflects on Charlotte's words,"I don't have to see

Marin because I have Marin in my mind " (263), we, like Grace, see that the

Marin Charlotte laments is the internally created Marin of Charlotte's

imaginative construction. When confused or anxious, Charlotte simply slips

into this internal vision, and she therefore inhabits a revised past and
imagines a fantastic future.

C harlotte reconstructs just as Grace rewrites the past. However, Grace

has yet to see the inventions she herself is guilty of summoning and the

truths she forgets. For Grace, her created world is the fiction she authors, a

fiction of reporting based on her interpretation of an external past, in that it is

both the past of another and a past based on what Grace terms the externals of

"extenuating circumstances," for which she "offerfsj in each instance the

I 16
 evaluation of others" (3). But, alas, there is no trusty voice behind Grace's/

interpreting for us the patterns inherent in her own fictional constructs.

Thus both Grace and Charlotte search out a form of mothering to

fulfill the need to create which beckons to them. Grace finds her second

chance at motherhood through retelling Charlotte's story. As novelist, Grace

does, metaphorically, give birth to the character Charlotte whom the reader

comes to know. Through Grace's Modernist linguistic constructs, she

becomes both arbiter and keeper of the image we have of Charlotte. In the

same way that Charlotte shapes her recollection of her relationship with
Marin to cast herself in a positive light, Grace shapes her history of Charlotte

based on her own convictions and motives. Suggesting that a singular reality
exists, Grace admits, "I revised my impressions to coincide with reality.

Charlotte did the reverse" (197). When the novel is seen as Grace's last

creation, we find her motive: through retelling Charlotte, through the

mothering she experiences in the process, Grace contributes to the cycle of

death and rebirth, anticipating her own death as she authors the life of
Charlotte.

The two women, while aligned based on their need to create, confront
death very differently. The very immediacy of Grace's own impending death

has forced her to accept it, to cast death as yet another part of a string of

scientific equations that effectively distances her from the experience of death.

Grace explains, "Unlike Charlotte I learned early to keep death in my line of

sight, keep it under surveillance" (120). However, her scrutiny of Charlotte,

provides her with only a false sense of security. What she can formulate as a

compound and an equation becomes feasible and comprehendible to the

Modernist Grace, which is why the enigmatic, postmodem Charlotte so

* Whereas in Ni^htwood, a narrator behind the narrator does emerge in the final section
of the novel.

117
 frustrates her—a frustration we notice in her tone toward her elusive subject
in the early sections of the book.

While Grace can both speak and write the word "death," finding in this
inscription a comfort that she cannot find in negotiating the experience of

death, Charlotte, on the other hand, is unable even to utter the word "death,"

refusing to evoke an external reality by which she attempts to remain

unaffected. We learn, in fact, that "Charlotte had trouble with the word. . . .

The word 'dying'" (165). Grace tries to reduce death to a formulaic base, while

Charlotte tries to delimit its power by refusing to acknowledge it. Charlotte's

problems with language suggest that on the one hand she sees a direct

correlation between signifier and signified, and on the other hand that her

use of language is complex and complicated, unlike the unexamined,

scientific approach to language that characterizes Grace's prose.

Art as a link—the great reconciler-between life and death is a

prominent theme in postmodern fiction The act of writing that creates the

novel becomes a force to balance out impending death, finding its

postmodern practitioners positing internal authors who write furiously to

keep death at bay. A focus on the forces of life/creativity and death/war is at

the core of this novel, and functionally defines the novel's structure. Grace's

"testimony" is framed temporally around the time period from the moment

the two women's lives intersect until their deaths. As the novel opens, Grace

is aware of her own impending death and Charlotte is already dead. Samuel

Coale points to one postmodern strategy fueling the novel: "Design hurries to

catch up with the designer; speculation pursues image " (165). The novel,

then, attests to their lives and their forms of creating within their lives. If

"Grace realizes that in trying to understand Charlotte she hopes to write

' See also: John Hawkes's Second Skin, John Irving's The World According to Garp, and John
Barth's Lost in the Funhouse.

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 herself before she dies" (Greiner 55), then her act of writing becomes

profoundly feminist, in that the vehicle through which she chooses to write

is a woman, Charlotte, who stands ever at odds with a variety of patriarchal

systems that attempt to contain her, only the first of which is language.

However, the novel ends only once Charlotte awakens to external reality and

subsequently becomes a person made whole by her recognition of her own

fragmented subjectivity. Imposing a reductivist paradigm on the

postmodern Charlotte, Grace tries to chart Charlotte's progression toward a

Modernist wholeness. Instead her charts fail her in the postmodern realm of

Boca Grande, a place of political instability and shifting loyalties where she

must, conversely, incorporate the intemal-in the character of Charlotte—to

experience a similarly fractured sense of fulfillment.

As the director of language, Grace appears powerful, but that very

ability to manipulate language also traps her into narrow definitions and

grammatically and scientifically sound constructions-constructions which

consistently resist her attempts to reduce the complex Charlotte. Upon closer

analysis, Charlotte is in many ways the more self-aware of the two women.

She creates fictions, but on some level she sees them as only that—fictions—a

stance reiterated by her use of language. She approaches language as the

building blocks of fictions and thus has difficulty using it in ways other than

to construct the fantasy world where she and Marin live in Leave It to

Beaveresque harmony. While comparatively articulate when recounting her

golden memories of Marin, Charlotte relapses into the monosyllabic when

put to use language beyond these daydreams, often falling to silence when

challenged to converse on fairly mundane levels.

In the end, Grace finds that she is at the mercy of that which she wishes

to understand, and only when she is able to confront the inadequacy of her

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 training as scientist and writer is she truly able to see Charlotte. This paradox

illustrates the now classic postmodern strategy of revealing the way in which

the tale comes to define the teller; for, by understanding Charlotte, Grace

comes to understand herself. Until Grace can move out from behind the neat

order of her scientific postulations, she is simply a reporter and analyzer of

other people's lives, one who attempts to bear witness and realizes the utter

impossibility of such a task. On the last page, Grace concludes,

. . . and all I know empirically is / am told.

1 am told, and so she said.

I heard later.

According to her passport. It was reported.

Apparently. (280)

Grace learns that her knowledge is always second-hand, distant, mired in

delusion, realizing at last her inability of defining Charlotte and her

motivations. She finds that "one cannot describe without involvement,

without commitment" (Raphael 25). In her last line, she writes, "I have not

been the witness I wanted to be" (280), acknowledging that witnessing

"involves an attempt to understand rather than dominate another" (Toher

42), a key element of feminist agendas. Thus, Grace must shift camps, from

being a part of the domineering circle of men who strive to control Charlotte

through language, sex, and violence to becoming her ally in debunking those

systems that seek to demean and devalue women.

Did ion commits one of Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs's "acts of

liberation" in A Book of Common Prayer, "By rendering problematical the

notion that fiction depicts essential truths and presents universal reality—that

it tells the story of life" (38). The novel illustrates the women's parallel and

interdependent delusions, and as Grace tries to apply her careful logic, she

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 slowly realizes that "a notebook of one's observations is really about oneself

as observer" (Taylor 147), invoking the autobiographical claim that feminists

have asserted to identify the biases of canon formation at the hands of a

Caucasian male power structure. She sees that "We all remember what we

need to remember" (266) and that this maxim applies as much to herself as it

does to Charlotte. For if Charlotte's life is based on delusion, then Grace's

writing is merely a record of this delusion and therefore tainted and

inadequate. As Lynne T. Hanley suggests, "Grace's clear eyed though

paralyzing cynicism is a tempting alternative to Charlotte's frenetic self­

delusion, but Grace herself learns late in the novel that she has harbored a

consoling fiction of her own " (22). Grace tries to assert the superiority of her

word over Charlotte's until finally she concedes, "there remain some areas in
which I, like Charlotte, prefer my own version" (199). When Grace

recognizes that Charlotte's writings are her attempt "to rid herself of her

dreams, and these dreams seemed to deal only with sexual surrender and

infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life," she finds the

universality of Charlotte's experience, confessing of women, "We all have

the same dreams" (53), effectively uniting woman to woman.

The Grace who initially characterized her subject as deluded now

embraces her, narrating their relationship in the mother tongue that signals
their bond as mother and child. As Strandberg notes, "The gradual

rekindling of maternal care in Grace is related to an increasing use of child

imagery to portray Charlotte in the book's closing chapters" (236). This

change in verbal stance signals Grace's movement from an external locus of

reality to an internal one. Grace surrenders her created text in favor of the

human being behind the text, the Charlotte she comes to mother and protect.
Once Grace concedes that Charlotte "was a woman, she was an

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unpredictable element. I suppose she was a version of me" (219), she can

begin to forge a bond with Charlotte that goes beyond the scientific sterility of

the object status she previously assigned to her. Grace equates Charlotte's

womanhood with her unpredictability, an equation that allows Charlotte's-

and in turn her own—escape from arrest by scientific formulas and linear

language. An overt change of attitude toward Charlotte is clear when, after

an evening of conversation, Grace concludes, "I liked Charlotte that night"

(234). Early in her description of Charlotte, Grace explains that "She used

words as a seven-year-old might. . . and she also mentioned names as a

seven-year old might" (29). What once frustrated Grace about Charlotte-her

inability to master language—becomes instead the appeal of a Charlotte who

will not use a language that denies her existence, her voice. At first

commenting that when talking with Charlotte, "1 felt as if I were talking to a

child" (239), Grace begins to find the child-like quality of Charlotte endearing

rather than frustrating. Charlotte's childish utterances suggest a linguistic

renewal bom at the narrative hand of Grace. At the same time, the language

they speak is undeveloped, still in its infancy, and pre-Oedipal in its gestures-

signaling the inception of a new language that can encompass their collective
experiences as women and writers.

In perhaps her strongest time of emotional connection with Charlotte,

Grace reflects: "I think I loved Charlotte in that moment as a parent loves a

child" (243); and, in fact, Grace is the mother to the text she authors, and the

lives therein. Thus, at the end, Grace tries most vehemently to keep

Charlotte alive by protecting her from the political unrest brewing in Boca

Grande, reserving two seats on the flights out of Boca Grande—"One for me.

One for Charlotte" (246). The last time Grace and Charlotte see one another
resonates with the mother-daughter roles that both women have come to

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 fulfill. Grace describes her farewell as she leaves for New Orleans: Charlotte

"pinned her gardenia on my dress. . .dabbed her Grès perfume on my wrists.

Like a child helping her mother dress for a party" (264). As Marin begins to

fade, Charlotte becomes the daughter she herself never had. This act of

replacement is reflected in the language they exchange upon separating, each

woman going to meet her own death.

The chapter directly following Grace and Charlotte's final moments

together is Grace's interview with Marin. The conversation between Grace

and Charlotte's child illustrates an interesting transference—one in which

Grace's maternal feelings for Charlotte resurface as she attempts to protect her

newly recognized child from Marin's abuse. Grace's contempt for Marin is

overt: "I remember feeling ill and trying to control my dislike of Charlotte's

child " (266). In Marin, we see the patterns in Charlotte that infuriated Grace

as she began to catalogue her tale. When Grace tests Marin with a question

about the alleged trip she took with her mother to Tivoli Gardens, Marin

reacts as Charlotte would have: she changes the subject, avoids the question,

delves inward. Grace notices the similarity, remarking of Marin's behavior,

"for the first time something other than her eyes reminded me of Charlotte "

(267). Based on the interview, what Charlotte and Marin—a revolutionary, no

less—have in common is an uneasy relationship with language?

Grace's triumph, then, is the human connection she makes with

Charlotte, the life she authors and grows to understand in the last days of her

own life. The mothering of the text becomes the mothering of a human

being: a testimony to Grace's shift in perspective from the strictly external to

incorporating and embracing the intricacies of a complex internal realm that

shatters notions of a seamless whole. Charlotte, too, finds an external voice

* According to Julia Knsteva, writing from the semiotic is a revolutionary act.

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 that is true to the internal tape. The Charlotte who once thought herself

insulated from that which she dismisses and refuses to acknowledge— " In any

case I'm not affected .... Because I'm simply not interested in any causes or
issues'" (240)—stridently asserts in one of her final lines, "I realize, ... I do

realize" (273) with Gerardo as her immediate audience, but all of us-Grace,

the others, the reader—as her ultimate audience. Her words speak of her

awakening to her surroundings, and to her own position within language.

While Charlotte's normal mode would be to leave and then mentally glorify

her departure; instead, with marked conviction, she proclaims, "I walked
away from places all my life and I'm not going to walk away from here'"

(Didion 262).

As Coale concludes,

If Charlotte's decision to remain in Boca Grande reveals some

recognition on her part about human limitations, the

boundaries of necessity beyond her romantic fantasies . . . then

Grace experiences a kind of opposite recognition, a sense of

ultimate mystery and awe in the face of human character and

motive, a decided doubt in the ability of logic, scientific

limitations, and necessary conceptual schemes to explain the

realities of another human being. (169)

The doubts that Grace harbors as she leaves Boca Grande are doubts about
modernist universal truths, and her skepticism marks her shift into a

postmodern realm, where Charlotte makes a certain fragmented sense.

Grace's final victory is her recognition of the alignment between

herself and Charlotte—"I am more like Charlotte than I thought I was" (276)-
an alignment that leads to a sense of wholeness, a fitting together of two

estranged pieces, of the internal and the external self In the end, the title of

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the book suggests the reciprocity between the women; this is a book of their

common prayer, a prayer couched in creation. While they may worship in

different ways, they worship the same thing: the creative powers of

mothering, the forces of life and death, the cycle they come to embody and

perpetuate. Finally, A Book of Common Prayer is about the writing of A

Book of Common Prayer, and in essence becomes a eulogy for both women,

who die at the novel's close.

In the end, both women are optimistic in their efforts to fill in the

blanks, the spaces. Before them rests a feminist postmodern expanse that

invites their inscriptions. Grace learns to speak the mother tongue, and in so

doing, becomes mother to both her own life story on paper, and to the child­

like Charlotte. She creates the words that cover her pages and finds the

internal self she lacks in her external relationship as mother-creator to

Charlotte. And Charlotte fills in the spaces through her imagination as well,

constantly reconfiguring her history in a rejuvenated language. Charlotte's

internal monologue is the counterpart of Grace's external novel. Like the

image of Yeats's gyre that continues to compel Didion herself (Taylor 147),

Charlotte and Grace, too, search for a place beyond the center, rooted firmly in

their multiplicitous creative powers as women.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

Blurring Boundaries: Genre, Gender, and Culture in

Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984) has suffered from

a critically-induced identity problem. Since its publication, many have read

this book as a bittersweet coming-of-age piece, and shelved it with adolescent

fiction. Missing the multi-leveled quality of the prose and its complex

innovations, few took seriously Cisneros's first full-length work. When The

House on Mango Street was taken seriously, it was often for its

autobiographical resonances or—in the case of politically correct audiences

for its class and race commentary. Suffering a fate not unlike Barnes's

Nightwood, The House on Mango Street has raised a fair amount of

discussion; however, critics have tended to cover everything except the text's

subversive potential as a feminist postmodern work that demands the

attentions of a canon that has consistently buried the works of women of

color.

This oversight is a part of the politics of marginality that Brian Harper

locates in postmodern theory. The biases that Harper points to result in a

blindness to those texts that do not—on first reading-display those elements

endemic to canonical postmodernism. The House on Mango Street has been

1 The House on Mango Street made its way onto some middle school reading lists and into a
scattering of more liberal classrooms.

■ See chapter one on Nightwood for publication history and critical reception.

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 called "a modified autobiographical novel,"’ a bildungsrotnan; a tale of the

confusions of ethnic identity, a coming-of-age novel/ a matrilineal revision

of fairy tale mythology, and an inversion of "Bachelard's nostalgic and

privileged utopia"/ however, only one critic-Maria Elena de Valdés“ --uses

the term "postmodern" in connection with Cisneros's writing. Yet, The

House on Mango Street displays many traits of the canonical postmodern

novel. The book assumes an overtly recursive structure via the self-reflexive

internal novelist, Esperanza, who actively rewrites misogynistic master

narratives of fairy tales and princesses. Esperanza's play with language

suggests its fictionality, as the novel subverts privileged tropes and

paradigms—from the genre form to the bildungsrotnan formula. And the

book closes in a deconstructive finale that finds the beginning of the novel

rewritten.

Written intermittently during the period 1977-1982, The House on

Mango Street may be read as a response to the Caucasian male postmodern

novel that dominated the literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Cisneros

herself cites the appeal of one such recognized postmodernist: "I recall I

wanted to write stories that were a cross between poetry and fiction. 1 was

’See Ellen McCracken's "Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street: Community-
Oriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal Violence."

’ See Leslie S. Gutiérrez-Jones's "Different Voices: The Re-Bildung of the Barrio in

Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street.”

' See Erlinda Gonzalez Berry and Tey Diana Rebolledo's "Growing Up Chicano: Tomâs
Rivera and Sandra Cisneros."

n See Diana Klein's "Coming of Age in Novels by Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros "

See Genaro Padilla's "Imprisoned Narrative? Or Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New
Mexico Women's Autobiography."

"See Juliàn Olivares's "Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, and the Poetics of
Space."

“Valdes explains that the text assumes "a postmodern form of fiction stitching together a
series of lyrical pieces" (68).

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greatly impressed by [Jorge Luis} Borges' Dream Tigers stories for their form

.... Except I wanted to write a collection which could be read at any random

point without having any knowledge of what came before or after Or, that

could be read in a series to tell one big story" ("Writer's Notebook," 78).

Structurally, Cisneros builds upon the blended form that she finds engaging
in Borges's work to further experimental ends. This genre-bending impulse

is part of a larger trend that Renato Rosaldo (based on a 1981 essay by Mary

Louise Pratt) offers as a sociopolitical response to a canon of privilege.

Terming this ad hoc genre "the short story cycle," Rosaldo explains, "the

formal marginality of such cycles enables them to become arenas for

experimentation, the development of alternative visions, and the

introduction of women and teenagers as protagonists. Marginal genres are

thus often the site of political innovation and cultural creativity" (88).

While Cisneros points to the influence of Gaston Bachelard's The

Poetics of Space (1964) and Borges's Dream Tigers, both of which are clearly

postmodern in their impact, critics have consistently overlooked The House

on Mango Street's place alongside those works that inform it. Instead, The

House on Mango Street is declawed, as it were, by relegating it to the less

critically hallowed realms of adolescent fiction and pseudo-autobiography,

despite the fact that Cisneros engages in the theoretical framework set forth by

Fredric Jameson in The Prison-House of Language and Tony Tanner in City

of Words' as Esperanza linguistically constructs House to compensate for the

architectural house that eludes her. That Cisneros's voice in the postmodern

conversation is silenced, twice bound by her status as Chicano female,

suggests that Harper's suspicions of sexist and racist theoretical

10 In short, Jameson and Tanner examine the way in which language acts as the building
blocks of both fictional worlds as well as our relationship to the worlds beyond those
constructed in fiction.

128
marginalization are well founded in her case.

In The House on Mango Street, Cisneros presents what seems to be a

novel. In the deceptively simple text there is a consistent narrator-Esperanza

Cordero, whose voice matures as the narrative progresses; a plot—Esperanza's

intense desire for a house of her own, one she "can point to" with pride; a

setting—the Mango Street neighborhood which Esperanza at once adores and

abhors; and a cast of characters-the memorable group of people, largely

women, who move in and out of Esperanza's life and neighborhood. While

one could argue that The House on Mango Street holds together as a novel,

an interesting and equally compelling argument may be made for reading

House as a series of short stories or prose-poems. Dianne Klein describes the

form as "a series of almost epiphanic narrations mirrored in a structure that

is neither linear nor traditional, a hybrid of fictive and poetic form, more like

an impressionistic painting where the subject isn't clear until the viewer

moves back a bit and views the whole " (22). Ellen McCracken calls The

House on Mango Street "a collection, a hybrid genre midway between the

novel and the short story" (64). Cisneros herself alternately refers to the forty-

four pieces of the book as "little cuentitos, like little squares of a patchwork

quilt " ("Solitary" 73), "a cross between poetry and fiction. . . . stories like

poems, compact and lyrical and ending with a reverberation," "lazy poems,"
and "stories, albeit hovering in that grey area between two genres" ("Writer's

Notebook," 78-79).

The House on Mango Street effectively and appropriately blurs these

forms with an irreverence that is both charming and brash, echoed in

Cisneros's own proclamation that "Poetry is the art of telling the truth, and

fiction is the art of lying " ("Solitary" 75). And genre is only the first boundary

that the book transcends. According to Nancy A. Walker, "For the woman

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writer" writing autobiographically "involves the transformation of the self

from object to subject--from player in someone else's narrative to center of

her own" (174-75) and, in accordance with Walker's language, a repositioning

of this center, toward the margins that had long held this center in place. For

women's autobiography Walker claims a new political implication. She

writes, "For a woman to do this [write autobiographically] at all is to revise

traditional concepts of who counts, who is worthy of a life story" (10). And in

the necessarily self-conscious construction of one's life is again a postmodern

germ. Ultimately, Walker extends this comment even further, explaining, "a

woman who writes is practicing a form of disobedience to the established

order" (172), a comment that again suggests the postmodern imperative in

disrupting any sort of fixed order.

Both Cisneros, a Chicano and female voice, and her narrator

necessarily challenge convention. Valdés rightly asserts that "Cisneros's text

is a fictional autobiography of Esperanza Cordero" (68). By creating a fictional

persona who is writing about writing her own autobiography, Cisneros pens a

doubly self-reflexive text firmly positioned alongside the likes of such

canonical postmodern novels as Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of

Sebastian Knight. In markedly different ways, both novels deconstruct the

autobiography as a literary form capable of representing "real" life and so both

participate in the collapse of form that has been heralded as a key component

of the postmodern experiment.

Assuming the guise of a bildungsroman, The House on Mango Street

actively subverts the very form it takes. While the conventional

bildungsroman hero finds reward in the individual victory upward and away

from his/her beginnings, in The House on Mango Street, as McCracken

explains, the text "roots the individual self in the broader sociopolitical reality

130
of the Chicano community" (63-64). The challenges that Esperanza faces

mirror those that Cisneros herself confronts. As Leslie S. Gutiérrez-Jones

asserts, "just as Esperanza must leave behind her dependence on rented

spaces. . . so Cisneros, a Chicana writer, is faced with the challenge of creating

a home in the midst of a predominantly white, predominantly male, literary

tradition: that of the bildungsroman. Writer and character both face the

conflict between desire for self-expression and fear of being co-opted by the

very forms of self-expression available" (296). While the book resonates with

the adolescent voice of a narrator who is maturing as she writes, no linear,

chronological literary structure orders her youthful memoirs. This is one of

several examples of both author and character "remak[ing] the conventions

and formulas of a patriarchal individualistic tradition, using them to

transform them, tacitly appropriating them in order to make them her

|/their] own" (Gutiérrez-Jones 296-97). And one way in which Cisneros

transforms tradition is to create through Esperanza's story a liberating

feminist revision of the kunstleroman.

As if following the lead of Cisneros, Esperanza, too, experiments with

form. As Gayle Greene explains, "To make a protagonist as author' is to give

her control over conventions that have traditionally controlled her. It is also

to grant her the powers of imagination, intelligence, inventiveness that

women writers have traditionally withheld from their protagonists" (17).

Displaying a stereotypically adolescent boredom and frustration with the

attention span that a traditional narrative demands of the reader, Esperanza

indulges in her own artistic whims, offering instead a winding narrative

loosely held together by her own voice, that "moves, as if along links in a

chain of free associations" (Rosaldo 85). In this adaptation of the coming-of-

age novel, Esperanza holds us at each crossroads in her storytelling before

131
continuing to link up with another character, thus reminding us of her

narrative control and exercising a power she lacks outside the world of her
own fiction. Esperanza allows co-existing realities and perpetuates the

fictional lives of her characters beyond the brief vignettes in which they

appear. For example, although we know only one story about Cathy Queen of

Cats, she continues to have a life even after Esperanza leaves her to tell

someone else's story, and so her individual tale—left open-ended—lives

beyond the written page in the mind of the reader who may choose her

outcome.
Perhaps Esperanza's dwelling at crossroads is a reflection of Cisneros's

own heritage. As Cisneros explains, "We're always straddling two countries,

and we're always living in that kind of schizophrenia that 1 call, being a

Mexican woman living in an American society " ("Solitary" 66). Esperanza

inherits her creator's "schizophrenia, " constantly confronting the boundary

between her roots and her visions of the future while also navigating the

transition between the childhood she must leave and the adulthood that

beckons her as she struggles through the ambiguities and insecurities of

adolescence. Through the collection of snapshot-like vignettes, Cisneros

decenters the authority of the novel form and chooses instead a fragmented

narration that reflects the discontinuous way in which we live our lives. Of

her own intent with the book, Cisneros explains, "I had no idea how these

pieces were going to fit together " ("Solitary" 73). She challenges us to break

through both convention and stereotypes and instead to read beyond the

boundaries and into what Gloria Anzaldüa terms the "borderlands" of genre,

gender, and culture. Ultimately, Cisneros writes in the margins; Esperanza

builds her house on borders; and so, as readers, we must reposition ourselves

on a series of lines sketched by Cisneros and lived by Esperanza, to perform

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 along with both external and internal author what Cisneros terms a

"balancing act" ("Solitary" 66).

In reminiscing, Cisneros cites what could be read as The House on

Mango Street’s intertext, Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House, as "one of

the most important books of my childhood." This "picture book" vision

became for Cisneros "the house I dreamed of, a house where one family lived

and grew old and didn't move away? One house, one spot" ("Writer's

Notebook" 70-71). The text's set piece, titled "The House on Mango Street," is

Esperanza's own response to the American dream as mythologized in such

books as The Little House, and a first glimpse of the double-consciousness"

that she exhibits throughout the work. McCracken's statement that "the

image of the house is a central unifying motif" (64) must be viewed as ironic

because it is actually the lack of this center that becomes the overwhelming

presence of the narrative. While The House on Mango Street is structured

around the house that Esperanza longs for but never attains, this longing is

balanced against the engaging voice of the omnipresent Esperanza.

Frustrated by her rootlessness—a problem that resurfaces throughout the

narrative-Esperanza remarks, "They always told us that one day we would

move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we

wouldn't have to move each year" (4). Ironically, the roaming that

characterized her childhood and which she desperately seeks to end is instead

reinscribed in the wandering, nomadic structure that her own writings

assume.

The house on Loomis Street—the Corderos's residence before the one

on Mango-stands in blatant contrast to the dream house in Esperanza's

mind: "Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and
11 This is W E B DuBois's term, originally used to refer to the dual identity that African
Americans struggle to navigate as part of a Caucasian dominated society

133
grass growing without a fence" (4). It is not until she is forced to see her

house through the eyes of another that she feels the depth of inadequacy.

When a nun from her school walks by and asks, '"Where do you live? " (5)

Esperanza points to the house. The nun responds, '"You live th ere?'” ( 5) and

Esperanza readjusts her vision: ‘‘There. I had to look to where she pointed-

the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed on the

windows so we wouldn't fall out. You live there? The way she said it made

me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I nodded. I knew then I had to

have a house. A real house. One I could point to" (5). As Juliân Olivares

suggests, "By pointing to this dilapidated house, she points to herself. House

and narrator become identified as one" (162-63). The Mango Street house that

is supposed to be the fulfillment of a series of postponed promises is instead

yet another dubious victory. She clings to this house because for once her

family owns something and she has internalized the value of property;

however, she quickly confesses that "it's not the house we thought we'd get"

(3). In reaction to her countless identifications with the clearly inadequate

house, she begins building the dream house in her mind via the text of The

House on Mango Street. This linguistic construction becomes then the

merging of her dream and reality, erected precariously on boundaries tangible

and intangible, literary and cultural.

Esperanza and the text both frustrate our expectations as readers with

this beginning, wherein she sketches the setting but leaves the voice of the

narrator for the fourth vignette. In the piece titled "My Name," the narrator

introduces herself through a literal discussion of her name. We know by her

comments that she uses and thinks of language in specific and concrete ways.

Offering up the cultural boundary that is problematic in her own sense of

identity, she begins, "In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means

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 too many letters" (10). She free associates and comes up with what her name

means in her own mind: "It means sadness, it means waiting. . . like the

number nine. . . A muddy color. . . the Mexican records my father plays" (10).

She allows these meanings to co-exist and linger before explaining that she

was named after her great-grandmother, of whom she says, "She looked out

the window her whole life" (11). This image brings to mind the home of the

first vignette and living on the boundary between the inside—the domestic—

and the world beyond—the realm of possibilities. Esperanza articulates clearly

the despair of being perched on this boundary: "I have inherited her name,

but I don't want to inherit her place by the window" (11). She is linked to her

foremother through blood and in name, but at the same time she struggles to

break this chain of longing that is her inheritance.

Returning to the letters of her name and the sound of the syllables, she

explains, "At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made

out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made

out of a softer something, like silver" (11). Imitating in the lines of the text

the smoothness of her name when uttered by her native tongue, Esperanza

literally articulates her own fractured sense of identity, as both Mexican and

American. The division between her public self, whose name is stumbled

over in class, and her inner vision of herself, as smooth and silvery, we sense

as she writes, "I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name

more like the real me, the one nobody sees" (11).

I^ater, this self-consciousness recurs when Esperanza meets two sisters

new to the neighborhood: "And I wish my name was Cassandra or Alexis or

Maritza—anything but Esperanza" (15). And in this same section, she shows

her growing awareness of the intricacies of language, becoming the resident

grammarian. When one of the sisters, Lucy, misuses a pronoun-"Her was

1.35
bom here, but me I'm Texas"-Esperanza corrects her, "You mean a he" (15).

Although Lucy misses her point, Esperanza's comment is one of many that

marks her emerging artistic development. And as the narrative progresses,

Esperanza's sense of self matures and becomes increasingly complex.

Esperanza's narrative, while full of her own charming and distinct

voice, is in no way self-centered. Rather, as Valdés notes, "The first person

moves effortlessly from observer to lyrical introspection about her place in

the world" (60), thus mirroring in her shift in point of view the myriad other

boundaries that she daily crosses. She shares her narrative authority with

many of her neighbors, including Cathy Queen of Cats, to whom she totally

surrenders her own voice, even to the point of leaving out quotation marks

that would show that the voice is not her own. Recalling the scene with the
nun, Cathy forces Esperanza into the uncomfortable position of

acknowledging her place in the world as a part of Mango Street. Esperanza

explains, "Then, as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is

getting bad" (13). References to her own house are woven throughout the

narrative and her preoccupation with the failure of this part of her dream is

pervasive. While riding a bike with two friends, she cannot help but

mention that they ride "Past my house, sad and red and crumbly in places"

(16), and so we sense that this single failure in her eyes—and through the eyes

of the others with whom she has come to associate—is a large part of almost

every facet of her young life and, as is increasingly evident, the catalyst for her
artistic endeavors.

While Esperanza often seems isolated in her life full of boundaries-

cultural, adolescent, gendered, artistic—she finds some connection with

Nenny, her sister and at times foil in the narrative. They share boundaries

and a familial history that is comforting to the often estranged Esperanza.

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 When Esperanza sees a house that for no specific reason reminds her of

Mexico, she voices this sense. "Rachel and Lucy look at me like I'm crazy, but

before they can let out a laugh, Nenny says: Yes, that's Mexico all right.

That's what I was thinking exactly" (18). And so Esperanza finds in her sister

a like soul, traversing and navigating similar boundaries and seeing the
Mexico in Mango Street.

In Meme Oritz, a neighborhood boy, Esperanza seems—if

subconsciously—to depict a mirror of her own divided self. In French,

"meme" means "same" and "even," and in English we cannot help but

notice the repeated me of his nickname. We find out that he has done what

Esperanza envisioned for herself—assigned himself a new name: "His name

isn't really Meme. His name is Juan. But when we asked him what his name

was he said Meme" (21). And this same double naming is again reflected in

his dog, "a sheepdog with two names, one in English and one in Spanish"

(21).
Esperanza is continually intrigued by the powers of naming, and

illustrates this power at work through the sketch of Darius, a young boy on

the playground who displays what Esperanza thinks of as unusual wisdom

when he points to a cloud in the sky and says to an eager childhood audience,
"See that. That's God. . . God, he said, and made it simple" (34). This same

interest in the way in which naming creates meaning and the namer gains

authority is again the subject of the vignette that follows and begins with

Esperanza's espousal of her wisdom: "The Eskimos got thirty different names

for snow" (35)." As holder and distiller of knowledge, Esperanza then

continues to explain to her sister and friends, "And clouds got at least ten

In this, she echoes the narrator of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing , contemplating the
inadequacies of language: "the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important
to them" (125).

137
different names" (36). By passing on what she has read, by having the power

to name, Esperanza gains respect among her peers and finds a place for

herself and power through her knowledge.

Out of her memory of her great-grandmother ever at the window,

Esperanza sketches another female toeing domestic lines in her depiction of

Marin, one of several images of young womanhood that both intrigues and

frightens the adolescent Esperanza. Of Marin, she writes, "she stands in the

doorway a lot" (23-24). Her searching outward, beyond domestic confines, is

manifested in her Cinderella-like dream of wanting a job downtown: "you

always get to look beautiful and get to wear nice clothes and can meet

someone in the subway who might marry you and take you to live in a big

house far away" (26). But in this section, Esperanza allows us a glimpse into

the future-a foresight—as she steps beyond the ever present that marks the

narrative up to this point. She writes, "But next year Louie's parents are

going to send her back to her mother with a letter saying she's too much

trouble, and that is too bad because 1 like Marin" (26-27). In the end of this
section, she leaves the reader with a dream-like image of Marin that

demonstrates Esperanza's increasing ability to see into Marin and her

complexities, a clear advance over even the vignette prior to this one, as she

remarks: "Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the

same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall,

someone to change her life" (27). We know, too, that Esperanza will not

linger by doorways and w indows, will not wait for something or someone
Instead, she will enact change and fulfill her own dreams in the lines she

authors.

With Cisneros behind the pen, Esperanza rewrites the fairy tales that

are echoed throughout the text, writing, as Rosaldo explains, "against earlier,

138
but still vital, narratives of cultural authenticity" (85). In a piece titled "There

Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn't Know What to

Do," Esperanza revises a simple fairy tale to fill in the very harsh reality

behind it. She begins by expressing her empathy toward this overworked

mother: "It's not her fault you know, except she is their mother and only one

against many. . . only one mother who is tired all the time from buttoning
and bottling and babying, and who cries every day for the man who left

without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come"

(29). The Esperanza here, who sees the single mother as a victim of social

circumstance, is a very different and clearly matured Esperanza from the one

who, in an early section of the book, envisions her problems vanished with a

more glamorous name than the one given her. She is beginning to see that a

simple exchange of letters, or arranging words on a page, while significant as

her own avenue toward understanding, cannot unravel the string of despair

that she gradually knits together for us. She must see that her great­

grandmother's life flows naturally into her own. Just as "Anais Nin's

feminine narrative coalesces as genre lines are decomposed and revised"

(Friedman and Fuchs 18), House's "autobiographical elements become a sign

of the fact that one's own experience and perception are at odds with accepted

narratives" (Walker, N. 174). In recognizing the broken promises that have

scarred Marin, leaving her to star gaze and worship more deeply debilitating
fantasies, and the loneliness and loss that has left Rosa Vargas in a puddle of

her own tears, she sees that she must break the mold through her own art

In one of the earliest vignettes, "The Family of Little Feet," Esperanza

revises "Cinderella" and in her new version, she and her friends become the

shimmering heroines of their fantasies when a neighbor gives them some

old shoes to use for dress-up. Esperanza proclaims this victory with delight:

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 "Hurray! Today we are Cinderella because our feet fit exactly" (40). When

the giddy young girls try on the shoes, they are initially delighted by the

transformation. But this early childhood glee is complicated by the border

that stepping into these grown-up shoes marks. "Then Lucy screams to take

our socks off and yes, it's true. We have legs. . . legs, all our own, good to look

at, and long" (40). Later, as they take to walking the streets, what began as

girlish play is slowly twisted into a sort of trial run at prostitution: it's "Lucy,
Rachel, me tee-tottering like so. Down to the comer where the men can't

take their eyes off us. We must be Christmas" (40). As the girls continue

their procession through town, tickled by their new found jewels, they

become the object of much male attention. The neighborhood grocer calls

out to them, "Them shoes are dangerous, he says. You girls too young to be

wearing shoes like that" (41). And a boy cries out, "Ladies, lead me to

heaven" (41). As their walk continues, the stakes escalate. Coaxing Lucy

toward him, begging, "come closer. I can't see very well. Come closer " (41), a
"bum man" "echoes"-as critics note11 —the wolf of "Little Red Riding Hood,"

one of many fairy tales that are subsumed within the text. In this version,

our urban Chicana little red riding hood is tempted to become a true street

walker when the man then propositions her: "If I give you a dollar will you

kiss me?" (41). It is as if the girls don their grown-up shoes and walk across

an invisible line, a border into womanhood. From this point in the

narrative forward, we sense that this dip into womanhood has forever and

irreversibly altered the childhood perspective that marks the earlier

vignettes. And we cannot miss Cisneros's analysis of the original C inderella,

wherein if your foot fits, then you become object of the male gaze. . . and you

begin your walk into a realm that is not the girlhood fantasy that we were

'See Gonzalez-Berry and Rebolledo, page 116, and Rosaldo, page 92.

140
promised and greedily bought into.

Esperanza becomes progressively sure of herself, as her voice grows

louder, clearer, stronger and, as Olivares suggests, "she comes to inhabit the

house of story-telling" (167). She sees herself as the bearer of wisdom, self-

reflexively professing, "it's obvious I'm the only one who can speak with any

authority" as she plunges into a lecture on "what to do with hips when you

get them" (50). While Nenny can only recite tired old jump rope verses,

Esperanza emerges as the artist of the family, able to spin lyrical tunes about

the kinds of hips she envisions to the beat of a jump rope, another boundary

between worlds. They skip rope—playing still the games of girlhood-but now

to the tune of songs about their emerging, beckoning womanhood and

sexuality. Framed by the swinging rope, Esperanza lingers on this boundary.

As the narrative progresses, Esperanza faces increasingly difficult and

emotionally complex issues, including the sexual advances of a co-worker

while on her first job and the death of her grandmother. Her empathy again

marks her growing understanding of the complexities of the boundaries she

must navigate when she first sees her father as fragile when he sits on her

bed and sobs over the death of his mother. Assuming a maternal stance, she

ponders, "And I think if my own Papa died what would I do. I hold my Papa

in my arms. I hold and hold and hold him" (57). And so, as she approaches

and crosses thresholds, she is able to see into her characters more deeply and

allow them to cross along with her.

Even before Esperanza is able to see the subversive power of her own

writing, two women strive to convey this power to her. Her blind, sickly

Aunt Lupe tells her, "You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and 1 said

yes, but at that time I didn't know what she meant" (61). In the piece that

follows, Esperanza visits Eleni ta, "witch woman," to exchange her five

141
dollars for fortune-telling. She longs to know about the house of the

patriarchal American dream that she has so anxiously bought into and that

seemingly consumes her every thought. Thus, when Elenita tells her, "Ah,

yes, a home in the heart. I see a home in the heart," Esperanza—blind to the

feminist implications of a house made by her own hand—disappointedly

responds, " Is that it?" Elenita repeats her premonition, adding, "A new

house, a house made of heart" (64). Although Esperanza cannot see that she

is already in the process of creating this feminist postmodern "house made of

heart," we as readers see and know w hat she does not. Cisneros explains of

Esperanza, "the only way that I could make her escape the trap of the barrio

was to make her an artist" ("Solitary" 69), thus offering her own belief in the

equation between art and freedom. Gutiérrez-Jones makes lucid this

connection;

she yearns to stake out an architectural space—one which she

implicitly assumes will provide her with the space' to develop a

sense of identity and an artistic voice. But when architecture

will not cooperate, she must look instead to her imagination in

order to create a sense of place. . . . Shifting from a literal to a

metaphoric register, her house' becomes not a structure she can

point to, but a spiritual sanctuary she carries within. (296)

Gradually Esperanza supplants the architectural house that is a product of

patriarchal American society with the artistic house she builds in her own

feminist postmodern image.

As Esperanza matures, her writing follows suit. She begins to explore

the ambiguities and complexities of the very act of story-telling. While

telling the tale of a young boy, Geraldo, who is killed in a hit-and-run, she

balances different versions of the story. She notes, "That's right. That's the

142
story. That's what she said again and again" (65). And in the process she

deconstructs the idea of a singular Truth, while self-reflexively reminding the

reader that what is before us is only one version of a story. She further

reminds us that we can only ever know part of a story and that the narrator

both gives and withholds information from the reader and thus has a

monopoly over artistic power in the exchange of the words on the page.

Esperanza has an insight into Geraldo's life that the others never know:

"They never saw the kitchenettes. They never knew about the two-room

flats. . . . How could they?" (66). And so she repeats, this time emphasizing

the emptiness, what little they did know: "His name was Geraldo" (66).

In the section titled "Edna's Ruthie," Esperanza explores the life of the

"touched" Ruthie, "the only grown-up we know who likes to play" (67), as yet

another who is ever on the brink of boundaries, physically an adult and

mentally a child. Ruthie constantly says one thing and does another, and

while Esperanza knows on one level that Ruthie lives in a dream world,

where "she got married instead and moved to a pretty house outside the city"

(69), Esperanza as artist (herself on borders) will blur the division between

what Ruthie says and what is "reality," because she will not perpetuate the

binary world view that has been so troubling to her. One can read her writing
as a response to these binaries, as a forcing away of boundaries and divisions

out of reacting to the many divides within her own existence. However,

rather than following the conventional bildungsroman theme, Esperanza

bonds with the community. She does not reign from above but instead, as
Gutiérrez-Jones asserts, she "undercuts this alienating authority, evading its

threatened division from the community by expressing herself and her

subjects in prose which eschews the conventions of formal literary language"

in favor of "simple childlike poetry" (308). Her regressive use of language is

143
indicative of her refusal to conform to the demands for linearity, control, and

mastery of the formal conventions of language that characterize phallocentric

systems.

Through this childlike language, Esperanza subverts the tropes of a

conventional literary establishment. As if in response to her creator's

proclamation-"! am not the muse" ("Solitary" 68)—Esperanza's turn to

Nature as muse and as outgrowth of her own projected position is a classic

artistic gesture. Reminiscent of Walt Whitman's empathic connection to a

single oak outside his window that "stood all alone without friend or lover

near,"" Esperanza looks to the trees outside her own window: "Four skinny

trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not

belong here but are here " (74). As Vaidés notes, "the trees are personified in

the image of the narrator" (63). They offer to her a wisdom: "Keep, keep,

keep, trees say when I sleep. They teach" (75). As she learns from the poetic

rhythms of the "secret" "strength" of nature, she finds renewed inspiration,

ending the vignette with a quiet understanding that marks a mellowing and

changed artistic temperament. The trees described in the opening vignette as

"only four little elms the city planted by the curb" (4)— a reminder of the

failed dream of the house with a yard without fences—are now re visioned

and re-created under her transformative pen to become "Four who grew

despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose
only reason is to be and be" (75).

Esperanza is attentive to the subtle nuances of language, and often

bases her interpretations of the characters' lives on their relationship to or

use of language. In a piece titled "No Speak English," Esperanza talks of a

neighborhood woman who never leaves her home and speculates about why

"From Walt Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing."

144
 this is so. After offering those explanations that others have suggested,

Esperanza sets forth her own: "I believe she doesn't come out because she is

afraid to speak English, and maybe this is so because she only knows eight

words" (77). Not only does Esperanza project her own sense of linguistic

alienation onto Mamaci ta, but she also is empathic toward this woman's

despair at leaving her homeland. Like many of the women in the book,

Mamacita "Sits all day by the window " (77) and this recurring image of the

angel in the home discontented with her domestic boundaries and looking
outward toward the possibilities of unknown horizons is both a commentary

on women's place in the Mango Street community as well as an expression of

Esperanza's frustration with the models that surround and taunt her, leading

her toward writing her way out of these same entrapments. The incantation
that Esperanza ostensibly attributes to Mamacita is at the same time a record

of her own inner voice: "Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a

pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the

walls of the apartment pink, but it's not the same you know. She still sighs

for her pink house, and then 1 think she cries. I would" (77). Her artistic

empathy is a result of her own growing recognition of home as a complex

and largely emotional construct, not so much connected to a structure as to

the emotions that this structure evokes. This realization is absolutely central

to the text and facilitates Esperanza's ability to create, as is prophesied, "a

home in the heart" in the form of the text she authors.

Rafaela is yet another image of female imprisonment, "still young but

getting old from leaning out the window so much, [she gets] locked indoors

because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful

to look at" (79). While "Rafaela leans out the window and leans on her

elbow and dreams her hair is like Rapunzel's" (79), Esperanza forces us to

145
critique the phallocentric mythology that would move Rafaela to assume

such a pose and in turn participate in such a fantasy. This connection with

the princess fairy tale is overt and subversive, forcing us to see the other side

of the story, as Molly Hite terms it, wherein the subtext of the sugary tale of

long, golden-haired woman saved by magically-appearing knight in shining

armour is made clear: she is entrapped by one man only to be reimprisoned

by another. This fairy tale requires our belief in women's passivity, of

women sitting always at window sills, waiting, waiting, waiting. . . .

In the course of the text, beauty becomes not so much a prize as an

avenue through which men can and will overpower, control, and imprison

women. Of the "raven" haired Sally, we learn, "Her father says to be this

beautiful is trouble. . . . He remembers his sisters and is sad. Then she can't

go out. Sally I mean" (81). Sally's father connects these women in his mind

and thus seeks to shelter his daughter from the leering gaze of other men and

male desire. At the same time, we cannot miss Esperanza's envy of the

beautiful, glamorous Sally: "I like your coat and those shoes you wear, where

did you get them? My mother says to wear black so young is dangerous, but I

want to buy shoes just like yours" (82). The urge to imitate Sally is rooted in

Esperanza's socialized subconscious, wherein she learns her own value

through the degree to which she is capable of gaining male attention. But, as

she soon sees, male attention comes at a price that her childhood body is not

ready to pay. And this duality-between the childhood that both she and Sally

are gradually leaving behind and the allure of adulthood that beckons—is

manifested in the double life that Sally lives. At the end of the school day,

Esperanza reports on the change in Sally: "You become a different Sally. You

pull your skirt straight, you rub the blue paint off your eyelids. You don't

laugh, Sally. You look at your feet and walk fast to the house you can't come

146
 out from" (82).

Sally's transformation and her double life is also a projection of

Esperanza's own duality; she is at once an undeniable part and product of

Mango Street and ashamed of this fact of her existence. This projection is

made concrete as Esperanza tries to read Sally's mind: "Sally, do you

sometimes wish you didn't have to go home? Do you wish your feet would

one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and
maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and

big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a

room is waiting for you" (82). Finally, Esperanza as artist gives to Sally a new

version of her life story. She will not allow us to see Sally merely as a victim

of a world controlled by male desire; rather, Esperanza recasts Sally's actions

as honorable and emotional, all in the name of love. Esperanza writes, "all

you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to
love, and no one could call that crazy " (83).

In "What Sally Said," Esperanza continues the story of Sally's life that
she began five vignettes earlier. The structure of the piece is such that

Esperanza undercuts and responds to Sally's words and weaves her own

commentary and insights into Sally's dialogue, without using quotation

marks to indicate a change in speakers. As Gutiérrez Jones notes, "the

competing voices eventually blend to produce a sort of harmony. in a way

that a monologic narrative would not allow" (309). The effect of this

technique is that the two voices are interspersed and interwoven and

through the combined force of the voices of the two girls, Esperanza relates a

very different story than the one which the solo Sally begins, "He never hits

me hard" (92), a version that privileges a phallocentric world view and

absolves Sally's father of his guilt. Esperanza adds, "But Sally doesn't tell

147
 about that time he hit her with his hands just like a dog, she said like if I was

an animal" (92). With this linguistic structure, Esperanza begins by saying

that Sally "doesn't tell" about this incident of which Esperanza somehow has

knowledge; yet, the sentence ends, "she said," thus confusing us regarding the

source of this information. Esperanza seems to be meditating on the unsaid

of Sally's story, the unsaid that comes to fruition at the story's end when we

learn, "the way Sally tells it, he just went crazy, he just forgot he was her

father between the buckle and the belt" (93). In the vignettes about Sally,

"The text enacts a conflict between the female protagonist's story and the story

that a male reporter attempts to tell about her" (Robinson 23). Through a

gap-filled narrative, Cisneros encourages a targeted reader-response approach

to The House on Mango Street, toward a reaction to the masculine voice of

justification. We know what Sally has not said by first being taught by

Esperanza how to fill in the empty spaces, how to say the unsaid. And now,

having been schooled in the business of reading, we can interpret the

situation that until now Esperanza has made clear to us.

Other women become for Esperanza not only talismans against

following the path of traditional womanhood but also very powerful

mentors who encourage her artistic pursuits. In "Minerva Writes Poems,"

Esperanza tells of Minerva, whose poems become like tiny wishes in a life of

despair: "she writes poems on little pieces of paper that she folds over and

over and holds in her hands a long time" (84). In Minerva, Esperanza finds
her first artistic relationship: "She lets me read her poems. I let her read

mine" (84). Esperanza clearly values this artistic reciprocity, but is

disconcerted by the cycles of Minerva's life, cycles that threaten to halt the

perpetuation of art through empty repetition. Her husband "left and keeps

leaving. . . . Then he is sorry and she opens the door again. Same story " (85).

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 She knows that repetition makes for boring story-telling, and her own

frustrated attempts at new versions of Minerva's story reflect her inability to

effect change: "There is nothing I can do" (85). This comment seems to refer

to Esperanza's own momentary understanding of her position as artist. She-

and we—wonder: what ca n Esperanza's writing do? Only at the book's end is

this question answered. Gradually, Esperanza finds that in coloring the lives

she depicts, unveiling the other side, expressing empathy for those whom she

sketches, her art can be both her own source of freedom—her own house of

words to conquer the shame she feels at facing a reality that threatens to
undermine her dreams-as well as the beginnings of freedom for those she

liberates in the lines she authors.

This artistic paradox presents a constant challenge to Esperanza

While, as she says, "I want a house on a hill like the ones with the gardens

where Papa works" (86), she cannot face the unattainability of that which she

worships and the obvious divide between what she desires and what she

actually has. When the family takes Sunday rides to look at the houses of

which Esperanza dreams, she finds that she can no longer go with them. "I

don't tell them I am ashamed-all of us staring out the window like the

hungry. 1 am tired of looking at what we can't have" (86). And so again

Esperanza must reconcile her shame with her desire. While earlier in the

text she wants to change her name and erase Mango Street from her memory,

we note a change of heart in Esperanza, when she proclaims, "One day I'll

own my own house, but I won't forget who 1 am or where I came from " (87).

And she holds to her promise, titling this book of her memoirs "The House

on Mango Street" and so inscribing into her work the place that initially she
is so desperate to abandon.

In "Beautiful and Cruel," Esperanza envisions her own place in the

149
 fairy tale world and enacts a rebellion based on the place she sees herself

inhabiting: "I am an ugly daughter. I am the one nobody comes for" (88).

Here, instead of plunging into fantasy and aligning herself with the fair

princess or the undiscovered Cinderella, Esperanza creates for herself a new

space, that reflects the inner self that she has developed throughout the text.

Sally Robinson's comments on Doris Lessing's Martha Quest are applicable as

well to Esperanza: "She insists on reading as fragmentary, inauthentic, and

false the many subject positions she occupies throughout her history,

particularly those encoded by the texts as feminine" (20). She asserts, "I have

decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the

threshold waiting for the ball and chain" (88). And so, in this retelling and

subversion of phallocentric mythology, Esperanza also attributes to herself

the power associated with masculine action: "I have begun my own private

war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without

putting back the chair or picking up the plate" (89). Not only does she

envision herself in a physical combat that is the place of men, but she also

will create a disorder that she has no intention of cleaning up after or

resettling. In terms of the fiction she authors, Cisneros becomes Esperanza's

double in the war that is waged with the narrative form In her writing,

Cisneros's "own quiet war" resonates in the text that refuses to conform to

genre, that constantly overturns fairy tale and that demands a place for a new

voice: the voice of the adolescent Chicana Esperanza.

In "The Monkey Garden, " Esperanza paints the picture of what we

quickly identify as a fallen Eden. And to further suggest this parallel, she

begins the piece with the observation, "The monkey doesn't live there

anymore" (94). The wildness, the lack of order, the growing chaos of the

garden is clear: "after the monkey left, the garden began to take over itself.

150
 Flowers stopped obeying the little bricks that kept them from growing beyond

their paths" (95). One wonders here if Cisneros is also making a comment on
the garden of fiction and the chaos that would lie in the wake of her own

transgression of linguistic and literary boundaries. Like the flowers, a symbol

long associated with womanhood, that no longer "(obey] the little bricks,"

Cisneros disobeys the linear constructs of patriarchal language, transgressing

into the wilds of a narrative that defies genre definitions, crosses cultural

boundaries, and speaks in the voices of many long gone unheard.

It is in this postlapsarian world that Esperanza learns that she cannot

save her friend Sally, the fallen Eve. When Sally is whisked off by the

neighborhood boys and sentenced to kiss each of them, Esperanza's impulse

is to stage a rescue. "Sally needed to be saved. I took three big sticks and a

brick and figured this was enough. But when I got there Sally said go home.

Those boys said leave us alone. I felt stupid with my brick" (97). And so

Esperanza must face the fact that she cannot assume the stance of knight in

shining armour, cannot save the reputation and preserve the innocence of

Sally, regardless of how nobly her acts were intended. This recognition of her

own powerlessness is part of a larger move that Esperanza must make, a

move out of childhood and into adulthood. She comments, "I looked at my

feet in their white socks and ugly round shoes. They seemed far away. They

didn't seem to be my feet anymore. And the garden that had been such a

good place to play didn't seem mine either" (98). And so Esperanza is forced
to leave her Edenic, childhood world and face the harsh, fallen world that is
her inheritance.

The fairy tale against which Esperanza most vehemently cries out is

that of physical sexuality. In the most disturbing piece of the collection, "Red
Clowns," Esperanza begins, "Sally, you lied. It wasn't what you said at all.

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 What he did. Where he touched me. I didn't want it, Sally. The way they

said it, the way it's supposed to be, all the story books and movies, why did

you lie to me?" (99). In what Marfa Herrera-Sobek calls this "diatribe, "

Esperanza decries "a conspiracy of two forms of silence: silence in not

denouncing the 'real' facts of life about sex. . . and complicity in embroidering

a fairy-tale-like mist around sex" (178). Esperanza's is a rebellion against the

romantic mythology that she had greedily imbibed throughout her

upbringing; it is a violent reaction against a world which she sees as having

deceived her with its princesses and promises.

While on the one hand the adolescent Esperanza does not have the

language to convey the violation that she has experienced, on the other hand

she does not want to voice the pain. Her powerlessness resonates in her

halting language: "I don't remember. It was dark. I don't remember. I don't

remember. Please don't make me tell it all" (100). Esperanza, as writer,

understands the value of articulation and sees that to attempt to replicate in

language the crime against her is both futile and counter-productive. As Kurt

Vonnegut recognizes that to try to convey the bombing of Dresden in the

novel Slaughterhouse-Five is to give an order and a shape to an event

horrific beyond comprehension and, if shaped in language, ultimately able to

be repeated, Esperanza on some level senses a similar danger as she struggles

through this horrifying experience. While she never articulates the specifics

of the violation against her, Esperanza has taught us as readers to hear the

unsaid, and so out of the absence of this description comes a haunting

presence: Esperanza's silence.

In "Linoleum Roses, " Esperanza presents a completion to Sally's story.

Playing against the formulaic fictive ending, with a happily ever after

marriage and the couple riding off into the sunset that fairy tales are made of,

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 Esperanza writes her character into a place that she herself will, by example,

choose not to inhabit. From the piece's title alone, we sense the false

construct against which Esperanza rails: linoleum roses. While on the one

hand Sally has that which Esperanza has long dreamed of--"she has her

husband and her house now, her pillowcases and her plates" (101)—on the

other hand, Esperanza questions at what expense Sally has these material

belongings: "She says she is in love, but I think she did it to escape" (101).

This woman is even further isolated than the others Esperanza sketches
throughout her story. Of Sally's husband, we learn, "he doesn't let her look

out the window. . . . She sits at home because she is afraid to go outside

without his permission. She looks at all the things they own" (102). In this

section, Esperanza meditates on the repercussions of a choice- marriage

wherein Sally trades her freedom for a house and the literal imprisonment of

this structure versus the liberation of Esperanza's artistically constructed

house.

For Esperanza to surrender fully the architectural house that haunts

her, several women must first articulate for her the compensatory liberation

that her writing offers her to fill the architectural void. While at the wake for

a neighborhood child, Esperanza is chosen by the mysterious three aunts,

three women who "had the power and could sense what was what" (104), and

who are perhaps a female replacement of the Christian triumvirate or whom

Valdés sees as recalling the "lunar goddesses" or the "three fates " (65). They

begin by asking Esperanza her name While in the beginning of the book

Esperanza wants desperately to change her name and all of the associations

carried with it, the three aunts bestow upon her a revised vision of her name,

calling hers "a good good name" and claiming, "She's special. Yes, she'll go

very far " (104). When, like genies escaped from some magical bottle, they

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grant her a wish and then explain, "It'll come true" (105), Esperanza is

confused. But we, along with Esperanza, must sense their power when one

of the aunts says to her, "When you leave you must remember to come back

for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will

always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget

who you are" (105). Esperanza is amazed: "It was as if she could read my

mind, as if she knew what I had wished for, and I felt ashamed for having

made such a selfish wish" (105). Ultimately, we have not so much a revision

of a classic fairy tale as what Klein calls "a kind of subversive fairy tale" (24)

with Esperanza as its benefactress rewarded not for her beauty but for her

artistry.

This same statement of Esperanza's impenetrable bond with Mango

Street is reiterated by another friend, Alicia, as the book comes to a close.

When Esperanza is complaining, "I don't have a house," Alicia reminds her:

"You live right here, 4006 Mango, Alicia says and points to the house I am

ashamed of" (106). This pointing traces the circle that the aunt asked that

Esperanza maintain as the book comes full circle, to the nun who made a
younger Esperanza feel so insignificant by associating her with her house.

Alicia challenges Esperanza to make peace with her house and to claim it as

her own. But Esperanza is still unwilling, and denies her connection: "No

this isn't my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year

I've lived here. I don't belong. I don't ever want to come from here" (106).

Further indulging her own pity, Esperanza continues, "me I never had a
house, not even a photograph . . . only one I dream of" (107). But Alicia will

not allow Esperanza's dissociation and reiterates the wisdom of the aunts:

"Like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you'll come back too" (107).

When Alicia challenges the stubborn Esperanza, who vows not to return

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 "until somebody makes it better" (107), Esperanza must confess her own

responsibility and see herself as that somebody who can begin to make it

better, if only through the lines she writes. Ultimately, Cisneros projects onto

Esperanza what she herself learned: "it is exactly what I found out, years after

I'd written the book, that the house in essence becomes you. You are the

house" ("Solitary" 73). Out of the absence of her dream house is bom the
presence of her linguistic House.

At the close of the book, "The house is now a metaphor for the subject

and, therefore, the personal space of her identity" (Valdés 66). Invoking

Virginia Woolf's call for a room of one's own, Esperanza envisions for

herself "A House of My Own" and defines this space by what it is not: "Not a

flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house

all my own" (108). For Esperanza, absence does in more ways than one

become the presence that she has longed for throughout her writings.

Recalling Tanner's postmodern tract, City of Words, hers is a house of

language: "Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper
before the poem" (108).

Esperanza's is not a domestic or marital wish but a liberated and artistic

wish. While the traditional "female bildungsroman has tended to culminate

in images of imprisoned women" (Gonzalez-Berry and Rebolledo 110),

Cisneros in effect overturns this trope, envisioning through Esperanza a

house no longer equated with women's toil, one that will not imprison

women into labels and roles. Instead her house is a space of liberation and

freedom, an emotional rather than a physical construct that is set to the

natural rhythms of what Valdés terms "a narrative of self-invention" (61).

While Cisneros acknowledges Bachelard's The Poetics of Space as the

theoretical catalyst for her construction of The House on Mango Street

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 ("Solitary" 65 and "Writer's Notebook" 72-73), she uses this model, as she

does the bildungsroman and kunstleroman forms, only to subvert and

reconstruct them in her own artistic vision. Olivares examines the way in

which Cisneros twists and "inverts" Bachelard's "male-centered ideology "as

expressed through his "nostalgic and privileged utopia" into "a different

reality" that is an outgrowth of her own Chicana experience (160). As Vaidés

explains, "the house she seeks is, in reality, her own person" (58), and so

Cisneros's sense of artistic identity comes with her postmodern play with

forms just as Esperanza's sense of identity comes with the creation of the
house both in her heart and on the page. Valdés asserts,

The symbolic space she creates should not be abstracted from the

writing, because the writing itself is the creation of her own

space. The structure of this text, therefore, begins as a frame for

self-invention and as the writing progresses so does the subject.

She is, in the most direct sense of the word, making herself and
in a space of her own. (62)

Having found the "house in the heart" that was her destiny—a feminist

postmodern "house of bricks that no big bad wolf can blow down" ("Solitary"

74)- Esperanza finishes her writings by demonstrating to us the way in which

her experience is transformed into the lines that we read: "I like to tell

stories. I tell them inside my head. I tell them after the mailman says, Here's

your mail. Here's your mail he said" (109). Having shown us the inner

workings of her art, she now allows the story to fold in upon itself, and recites

in this deconstruction what comes to sound like her mantra: "1 like to tell

stories. I am going to tell you a story about a girl who didn't want to belong"

(109). She then proceeds to repeat the opening lines of the first vignette. But

this time, she revises her text, explaining: "what I remember most is Mango

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 Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to" (109-110). The

House on Mango Street is what Greene terms a "self-begetting novel," "that

endfs] with the protagonist ready to begin writing the novel we have just

finished reading" (16). Esperanza will end resting on the boundary of

belonging, finding that she can neither wholly claim nor fully deny her own
place on Mango Street, but can use this boundary to artistic ends: "Esperanza

has made her tension a tension creative of her subject" (Valdés 67).

Esperanza intimates that she will rewrite the novel we have just read,

applying what she has learned along the way, and further, confirming her
dedication to her continued writing.

In this final vignette, her writing becomes her release: "I put it down

on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and

Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She

sets me free" (110). Using a feminine pronoun to refer to the house of her

own construction, Esperanza's artistic freedom is in contrast to the

imprisonment suffered by the other women in the book, women who are

often entrapped by the very masculine houses that an earlier Esperanza

dreams of and imagines as her own. "Displacing] men's stories about

women" is central to the feminist freedom at the heart of the text, and as

Valdés further suggests, "Her freedom is the fundamental freedom to be

herself and she cannot be herself if she is entrapped in patriarchal

narrativity" (69). Finally she, too, mirrors the wisdom of the women who

have helped her find her way: "I have gone away to come back. For the ones

1 left behind. For the ones who cannot out" (110). And so Esperanza, who

can write her way out, who has the power to mold her own universe, can

also create in language a home that crosses boundaries of the mind, of place,

of emotion. At the same time, Cisneros, too, "renovatefs] and remodel]s] the

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 rented cultural space of this patriarchal genre, in order to make it her own"

(Gutiérrez-Jones 310). The House on Mango Street does not end in a

modernist fulfillment of Esperanza's quest for a house; instead, the house

Esperanza ultimately creates is linguistic, suggesting that one system­

language—can create another: architecture

Like the artist-figure, Ambrose, in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse,

Esperanza reaches an artistic maturity at the book's end that allows her to see

that h o w the teller tells the tale is what matters. We have been for Esperanza

a sounding-board as she has progressed with her writing, watching her, as we

do Ambrose, try on various approaches to writing to find a fit in the end. As

readers, we are changed through our own participation in the text, the

intersection of Esperanza's world with our own. Finally, as Vaidés puts it,

"The subject that emerges from our reading is neither the author's nor ours;

she is a unique construct of intersecting designs and paradigms, those of the

author's structure of the text, and those of the larger cultural context we

share, in part, with the author" and, I might add, Esperanza (63). Faced with

multiple boundaries and paradoxes herself, Esperanza ultimately straddles

those fences that once legitimated only a patriarchal, ethnocentric house

through the linguistic creation that is an extension of her own complex

subjectivity, The House on Mango Street. While Cisneros equates the writing

of the book with "making a quilt by the light of a flashlight" ("Writer's

Notebook" 79), she illuminates for her heroine a line of well-lit gender,

genre, and cultural boundaries that Esperanza can surmount. In the end,

both author and character move beyond the dialectic, binary structures that

are imprisoning in the surrounding world and into a liberating dynamism in

an art that celebrates and indulges in co-existing possibilities.

IS8
 CHAPTER FIVE

The Resurrection of Lost Dialogues and Goddesses in

Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

"Women's stories have not been told . . . without stories she cannot
understand herself. . . . She is closed in silence." -Carol P. Christ

In 1992, with the publication of Bailey 's Cafe, Gloria Naylor

triumphantly asserted, "I have done the quartet that I dreamed about" and

proclaimed it the "foundation" of her literary career ("Backtalk" 218). The

Women of Brewster Place (1982) began the series, followed by Linden Hills

in 1985 and Mama Day in 1988. In each of these novels, Naylor reconfigures

patriarchal images propagated through mythology, Christianity, and

canonical literature. Out of this decade of literary fervor, Naylor reveals the

interconnected lives of several generations and family lines, each circling

back to the other novels in the quartet. Criticism on Naylor's work has, up to

this point, concentrated on The Women of Brewster Place, the earliest and

most well-known of her writings. Mama Day has received very little critical

attention, which is unusual given its presence on the market for the past

eight years and assuming the prominence Naylor gained with the television
series based on The Women of Brewster Place.

Like The House on Mango Street, the critical attention that Mama Day

has received has been largely racially and culturally centered; moreover, as in
the case of Nightwood, rarely have critics examined this novel as

experimental, much less postmodern. Of the articles on Mama Day, few'

Peter Erickson's '"Shakespeare's Black?': The Role of Shakespeare in Naylor's
Novels"is a notable exception, offering keen insight into the implications of Naylor's
invocations of Shakespeare.

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make a substantial comment on Naylor's intentions with this book and the

ways in which this novel subverts phallocentric ideology and history with

the creation of the island of Willow Springs and its powerful female
inhabitants. After mentioning Mama Day's affinities with Shakespeare's

works, Gayle Greene asserts, "I have found no feminist meta fiction by black

women writers that relates the rewriting of old plots specifically to women's

search for freedom as Drabble, Laurence, and Atwood do. I suspect that this is

because the white male tradition' is a matter of less urgency to them than it is

to white women " (24). Greene's comment is-specifically in Naylor's case--a

superficial one, suggesting that Naylor's allusions to Shakespeare are cursory,

rather than revolutionary, honorary rather than subversive.

While Naylor clearly invokes Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet,

and The Tempest, she calls attention to these invocations and in the doing

subverts them. The novel's young lovers-Ophelia and George—recall Romeo

and Juliet, and George, like his predecessor, Bascombe Wade, will come to

enact his own night on the heath. After the ferocious summer storm that

links Mama Day to The Tempest and takes out the bridge connecting the

island to the mainland, the narrator addresses the reader's conventional post­

storm expectations of sunny skies and a horizon of promises: "Wasn't that

the way in those Victorian novels? A wild tempest, flaming passions, and

then the calm of a gorgeous sunrise. Well, we were hardly going according to

the script" (256). The narrator forthrightly asserts that Mama Day will

overturn its belletristic forerunners. Through George, Naylor acknowledges

both the nods toward and the diversions from a conventional story line.

Peter Erickson's analysis of Naylor's use of Shakespeare suggests the

subversive potential in the "delicate tension in Naylor's double perspective

on Shakespeare: she appreciates Shakespeare while at the same time she is

160
 determined critically to rewrite him" (232). With this statement, Erickson

aligns Naylor with the feminist postmodern, as it engages in intertextual

revisions of master narratives, effectively working both within and outside of

the literary establishment. The complex machinations of Naylor's family

saga suggest a both/and structure as mirrored in the double naming of

characters, in for example, "the central character's double name: both

Miranda and Mama Day. If the former suggests the tie to Shakespeare, the

latter breaks it by indicating the possibility of escape from Shakespearean

entrapment in the subservient daughter role" (Erickson 243). A similar

duality marks Ophelia/Cocoa, who "recalls the destiny of Shakespeare's

Ophelia in the male-dominated world of Hamlet" while her "alternate name

aids the process of exorcising the burden both of her great grandmother's

demise and of the potential Shakespearean connotations" (Erickson 244). If

her great grandmother obeyed the Shakespearean stage directions and died a

suicide, then this generation has found a way to both honor and undermine
the author of those directions. Ultimately, "the effect of Mama Day's

exploration of Shakespearean heritage is critically to revise and decenter it"

(Erickson 241). Naylor will not be co-opted by a canon of privilege, and so her

borrowings are subversive, suspicious of a literary establishment anxious to

embrace the carbon copies of master narratives.

One way in which Naylor subverts the artistic hierarchies that have

often excluded writers of color is through her creation of a story based on

spoken, rather than written, language. The oral tradition is central to the

novel, which is as much about the resurrection of lost dialogues as it is about

learning to hear these dialogues and being sensitive to their existence and

importance. Before the text even begins, Naylor sketches out for us a diagram

of the family tree, which locates the principal Day characters, descendants of

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 the seventh son of the seventh son. Based on the lineage presented, the Day

women are also direct descendants of the legendary former slave, Sapphira

Wade, first described in the phoenix image of "laughing in a burst of flames"

(4). What, then, are we to make of the documents' that begin Mama Day. the
family tree and the bill of sale for Sapphira, both of which record a shift in

power from white males to African American females? This shift in power

resonates in the novel, wherein women-from Sapphira and Miranda, to

Ruby and Cocoa-exercise power over generations of men. If women are

undervalued in New York, which serves as a foil for Willow Springs and the

setting for roughly half of the novel, then they find their worth and identity

as women in Willow Springs, Naylor's envisioned matriarchy based on the

mysteries of Shamanism and a reverence for Mother Earth. On this Edenic

island, myths are revised and re-presented. In the family tree, we see the

long-silenced heritage that will unfold before those able to hear it; thus, the

novel becomes a record of communication across the generations, and the

urgency of this communication.

Like I he House on Mango Street, Mama Day asks that we become

liberated readers in a work that answers "an old-fashioned calling (to bear

witness, to affirm public virtues) in a post-modernist world" (Mukherjee 19).

In the opening pages, we are told that we must learn to listen, a lesson first

failed by "Reema's boy," who good-naturedly enough, if rather blindly,

attempts to decipher the ways of Willow Springs. Based on his academic

sociological training, he produces a sterile document full of euphemistic

conclusions and theories incapable of embracing the mysterious dynamism of

Ironically, the first document that Naylor provides us is a map, yet another relic of
linear order, only to later reiterate that Willow Springs is absent from any map.

1 This same mix both fuels and informs A Book of Common Prayer, which opens with the
Modernist voice of Grace proclaiming of a postmodern character whom she cannot possibly
apprehend through her traditional training, "I will be her witness."

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 this unique island community-the result of his failure to observe, to listen.

While this well-meaning would-be sociologist determines that 18 & 23 is

actually 81 & 32, "the lines of longitude and latitude marking off where

Willow Springs sits on the map," we are good-naturedly cautioned not to

make a similar mistake, and challenged to see that 18 & 23 becomes a

communal, polyvalent code to express what a Caucasian, phallogocentric

language cannot. Instead, we are introduced to a world in which

conventional currency no longer has value: "Sapphira Wade don't live in the

part of our memory we can use to form words" (4). We are reminded that

"someone who didn't know how to ask wouldn't know how to listen " (10)

and the plea, one which addresses an audience for the tale about to unfold, is

clear. The narrator self-reflexively urges, "Really listen this time: the only

voice is your own. . . . you done heard it without a single living soul really

saying a word" (10). Here, the narrator's advice is riddled with linguistic
implications that threaten the power of linear language to speak the

unspeakable in a tale in which language is supplanted by living: "sitting on

our porches and shelling June peas, quieting the midnight cough of a baby,

taking apart the engine of a car" (10). This opening frames for us the novel's

insistence on our learning to hear the long-silenced voices and their stories,

"en;oin( ing] us to hear the maternal language of Mama Day and Sapphira

Wade" (Levy 278), while also suggesting the immanent quality of the

conversation that will surface, a conversation deeply rooted in the island's

communal past.

In many ways, Mama Day becomes a diary of resurrections, only fully

realized in the final pages. Invoking the unspoken, the novel finds company

in both Maxine Hong Kingston's No Name Woman and Amy Tan's The

Kitchen-God's Wife. Structurally, the novel takes the form of a synchronous

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 trialogue. Told through alternating voices-a narrator whom Naylor refers to

only as the voice of the island, interspersed with monologues by Ophelia and

George -the novel collapses time and place, shuttling from two generations

in the past to an envisioned future, and between New York City and Willow

Springs. It provides a rare honesty and sensitivity-gained through a

retrospective eye—in the conversations between the novel's protagonist,

Ophelia, and the beyond-the-grave voice of her former husband, George,

fourteen years dead when the novel opens. To allow the tale to unfold,

George must, in a Christ-like resurrection, return from the grave and express

the many thoughts and feelings that did not find voice in real time. More

important than this structural trialogue, however, is the resurrection and

reconstruction of a long-silenced matriarchal language, handed down

through the oral tradition of African American culture. This passing down

of language and stories enacts a subversion of androcentric myth and a

subsequent replacement of this patriarchal tradition by a richly affirmative

Earth-Mother power with its roots in pre-Hellenic mythology In Mama

Day, Naylor "imaginées] the restoration and réévaluation of lost women's

experiences" (Homans 371); thus, the trialogue-like the myth-reclaims the

mother land out of which it is born, while collapsing a temporal spectrum so

as to resonate through all time.

The past becomes the present—in its insistent presence—in Willow

Springs. The myth of the rebellious slave woman, Sapphira Wade, whose

owner bequeathed the island to his slaves for love of her looms larger than

life behind all that occurs on the island. This literal (ironically enough) no-

man's-land provides the essential backdrop for this trans-temporal, trans-

historical resuscitation of long-entombed conversations. In this mystical

place that promises renewal and undermines a history of mastery, Naylor

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 uses what Kayann Short terms "speculative fiction-science fiction, fantasy,

mystery, gothic, or magical realism-to envision new worlds of possibility for

women" (700). Willow Springs is a place where "years melted down into the

fraction of a second . . within a whole new set of horizons" (158). While the

novel begins with a family tree that suggests the exacting of dates, no such

linear chronology follows, and so modernist expectations are thwarted, much

as they are in Nightwood.

Before his first trip back to Ophelia's home, George tries to apply the

logic of the mainland. He wonders, "where was Willow Springs? Nowhere.

At least not on any map I had found" (174). Situated on an island that is

owned by neither South Carolina nor Georgia and resting just east of the

coastal border between the two, Willow Springs—with a split identity and the

liberty of being owned by neither-becomes a reconfigured Eden. And at one

point, George fuels this assertion, playfully propositioning Ophelia: "'Let's

play Adam and Eve " (222), two of the many roles they come to enact while

on the island. Time seems to stop when they cross over to it via the

primitively-constructed bridge that provides the sole link to the mainland,

and, as George explains, "it all smelled like forever" (175).

The people of Willow Springs recognize the artificiality of time: "The

clocks and calendars we had designed were incredibly crude attempts to order

our reality" (158). Able to find comfort beyond linear order—"All of those

numbers were reassuring, but they were hardly real "-they dreamt of a way to

"chart the mental passage of time " (158). Even before venturing to Willow
Springs, George identifies an exchange of time and language in his

relationship with Ophelia: "We needed words less and less as time went on.

Why, if we had eternity. . . we'd find ourselves in a place where we'd need no

words at all" (159). And in his travel to the mythic island, he is challenged to

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 surrender his attachment to the equations that linguistic and temporal

constructs offer and instead to see these equations as empty promises.

Once George and Ophelia plunge into the sacred depths of Willow

Springs, the hustle and bustle of New York City is quickly left behind,

becoming an impossible dream of some crazed future. In the final lines of

Part One of the novel, Ophelia communicates in retrospect the significance of

their first trip together to the island: the "summer we crossed over that bridge
would be the summer we crossed over" (165). This crossing over is not

confined to the physical; rather, Willow Springs invokes a series of

intellectual, linguistic, and psychological transgressions.

************************

While in New York, George is Mr. All-American, he reveres football,

believes in the American Dream, and lives firmly planted in the present,

without reliance on the help and support of others. In Mama Day, George is

troubled by his lack of familial lineage. His mother was a prostitute, and his

unknown "father was one of her customers" (thus effectively erasing his

patrilineal roots). He grew up in a Boys' Home, under the strict tutelage of

Mrs. Jackson, whose mantra-"Only the present has potential, sir" (23)-all of

the boys quickly learned to repeat. We also recognize him as the son of

Miriam, who steadfastly claims herself to be a virgin in Bailey's Cafe, a

connection Naylor establishes as George gestures to the brownstone where he

was bom and the "deserted, crumbling restaurant"4 nearby (131). Ophelia
looks in the direction George points and remarks, "The side windows had

been broken, but across the front in peeling letters I could read, Bailey's Cafe"

(131). Thus, not only is he a miracle child in Miriam's insistence on his

' Like Willow Springs, Bailey's Cafe is also a place that does not exist in time or on
maps. Balanced at the edge of the abyss, it is both the threat of destruction and a potential
site of renewal.

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 immaculate conception, but he also quickly becomes a Christ figure, a role he
will be challenged to fulfill.

George assumes several archetypal roles in the novel, all of which are

finally subsumed by the powerful matriarchy reigning in Willow Springs. In

his alienation from traditional parental figures, George becomes a Wandering

Jew in black face, and in his initial feelings of affinity with the natural-if

deceptive-calm of Willow Springs, he happily plays Adam in this magical

Eden. In venturing to Willow Springs with Cocoa, George sees what it is like

to have a family and a tangible heritage and feels a temporary sense of

homecoming. He communicates his feelings of belonging to the resistant

Ophelia: '"I don't want to go anywhere either. I could see myself staying here

forever"' (220). However, George's vision is soon cut short and his patience

tried in this place and among these people "Who had redefined time. No,
totally disregarded it" (218).

The storm that hits Willow Springs during George and Ophelia's first

visit together to the island effectively hinders their return when it destroys

the bridge. Literally stranded on the island, George is challenged to adapt to

the ways of island life, requiring a patience uncharacteristic of a New Yorker

and a faith in the past and in realms beyond those with which he is familiar.

As husband and protector of the ailing Ophelia, victim of one of the island
women's jealous hoodoo, George seeks access to the quickest mode of

healing. He pragmatically looks to the coast, which suddenly becomes—much

to his frustration—miles away, yet offering the only solutions he can

envision.

The parallel dreams of George and Cocoa while on the island suggest

that they share a collective unconscious, as each delves into a past beyond

their memories and recalls a scene akin to the grand unspoken myth of

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 Willow Springs. Their dreams also prove hauntingly prophetic, and suggest

the postures they will come to assume. In George's dream, he "walked on

water" trying to save Ophelia and "straddle[d] both worlds" (184-85). Here, he

envisions himself in a blatantly Christ-like stance, fulfilling the position of

savior to an Ophelia who takes the form of Sapphira in his reverie. At the

same time, Ophelia's dream finds George unsuccessful, "drowning in the

cypress swamp" and "swimming in the other direction" (189), rather than

parting the waters or walking on water/ and again in another dream "nearly

drowning in The Sound " (252) as she struggles not to distract him with her

screams of distress. What neither of them realizes is that in their dreams,

George has become the Bascombe Wade of this generation, destined to die for
the woman he loves.

When Mama Day hears Bascombe Wade's attempts to speak to

George—"them heart shaped ginger leaves. . . were pulling him in closer to

listen "-she fears what he may be told, thinking, "Ain't nothing he needs to

hear around here" (207). Competing with these voices from other times and

places, Mama Day-herself on the threshold of crossing three centuries-

triumphs, this time, as "the ginger vines on that tombstone whisper in vain

under all her chatter" (207). Later Cocoa, too, hears the voices to which

George is deaf: "I wanted to scream at all those silent whispers—how would I

break his heart?" (223). Because George, steeped in the tangible, in logic and

reason, cannot learn to listen to the inner voices, to the unreal voices, we see

his fate. Repeatedly, we are reminded that "it was what you believed that

counted" (217), and George's ability to believe in these foreign worlds is

stringently tested.

* Later, Ophelia says of her own confrontation with the hallucinations brought on by
Ruby's spell, "it would have been easier to think of walking on water" (259).

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 Abigail's” concern about George's ability to rescue Cocoa is largely

linguistic. She recognizes the improbability of Willow Springs language

falling on "beyond the bridge" ears, explaining to Mama Day, "We ain't even

got his kind of words to tell him what's going on" (267). Bonnie

Zimmerman's comments about Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who

Owned the Shadows apply as well to Naylor, who "draws on their [the

characters'] circular, nonlinear, complicated language and myth" (182).

George recognizes the multi-dimensional shift in time, place, and language

in Willow Springs: "words spoken here operated on a different plane

through a whole morass of history and circumstances that I was not privy to"

(256). Mama Day, too, sees the gap, cautioning, "we ain't talking about this

world at all" (268), as George is challenged to reconcile these divergent

realms.

Up to this point, George has assumed the traditional role of the dutiful

male quest-hero. He leaves his home in search of a grail with which to

return, and in this adventure, he is asked to face his greatest fear. At the

climactic point of the novel, Mama Day sends George to save his beloved in

the waking world by retrieving for her a treasure hidden in the hen house,

beneath no less than the meanest hen in the coop. Mama Day offers him

the traditional talismans of Christian doctrine: "as he mounts the steps she

takes up the ledger and the walking cane She puts them in his hands and

folds hers over his " (295). He departs on his journey bearing the Book,

actually the ledger recording the bill of sale for the legendary Sapphira Wade,
and the staff, which once belonged to Mama Day's father, John-Paul.

Curiously, the Book and the staff also tie him to the men who have come

before him, and insure that he will follow them to the grave, again for the

" Abigail is Mama Day's sister and Cocoa's grandmother.

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 same reason: an intense love for a woman. Upon his departure, the core of
his quest, Mama Day "turned her face to the sky," remarking, "Whatever

Your name is, help him" (299). The name that repeatedly eludes Mama Day

is not that of the Christian deity, but rather of the mysterious Sapphira, to

whom she seems to offer this meditation which "ain't a prayer. And it ain't a

plea" (299). Even when Mama Day consciously looks to the Christian deity

for help, "pray[ingj to the Father and Son as she'd been taught," her thoughts

shift naturally, as instead "she falls asleep, murmuring the names of women"
(280).

Synchronous thematic spirals lead several of the characters in the

novel to confront their darkest fears. Mama Day uncovers the well where

her sister Peace drowned and, overwrought with misery and madness, her

mother followed after her. Hearing the screams stifled for years, Mama Day is

tested in this scene; for, "She wants to run from ail that screaming. Echoing

shrill and high, piercing her ears. But with her eyes clamped shut, she looks

at the sounds .... Circles and circles of screaming " (284). in the same way,

Cocoa must confront the hallucinations of her own figure grossly distorted in
the mirror. Like Mama Day and Ophelia, George, too, must journey to the
center in his own night-sea journey.

When George finally makes his way into the coop, he eyes the devil he

must conquer: "The huge red hen seemed to be in a trance. . . . Her eyes never

left me, and when I came within another foot, she struck" (300). After

plowing through the nest, George emerges bewildered, and in his empty

palms, he faces the abyss: "Nothing. There was nothing there—except for my

gouged and bleeding hands. . . there was nothing to bring her" (300). Blind to

the wealth within his own palms, and thus unable to become the "bridge"

between the two worlds, George deems his quest a "wasted effort" (301), not

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 having learned the language and ways of Mama Day and Willow Springs.

In this scene, George becomes the bearer of a line of men and of

patriarchal religion, both of which fall with him, when he suffers a heart

attack and is unable to move beyond his own pragmatism, unable to offer

Mama Day the bond suggested by a joining of hands. To save Cocoa,

She (Mama Day] needs his hands in hers-his very hand-so she

can connect it up with all the believing that had gone before. A

single moment was all she asked, even a fingertip to touch hers

here at the other place. So together they could be the bridge for

Baby Girl to walk over. Yes, in his very hands he already held
the missing piece she'd come looking for. (285)

Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs's observation about contemporary

women writers is telling here: "They interweave hallucination, memory,

fantasy, and present action as though they were the same; the novel's 'events'

become a complex and shifting constellation of elements that resist

coalescence, making what happens' elusive " ( 27). Applying their

observation to Mama Day, we understand that George's failure comes from

his own inability to surrender his need for linear progression, and for a here

and now that takes precedence over other temporal realms.

George becomes the victim of the fallacy—and his erroneous belief in

this fallacy—of the archetypal male quest. In the classic model, the hero leaves

his home in order to quest after a given object or answer, and then returns

home all the richer or wiser. However, even while George notes that time

has been folded and spun in Willow Springs, he holds the fallacious belief

that he and Ophelia "could defy history" (226), a history built upon the death

of Bascombe Wade, whose shoes he will come to fill. In Mama Day, George

willingly plays a role similar to that of St. George and other classic heroes, in

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 search of the dragon he must slay in order to win his manhood and save his

damsel. Naylor changes the stakes, however, when the dragon becomes one

of Mama Day's rather ferocious hens and the only treasure with which he

must return is that held within his own hands. What he must find is the
force that fuels Candle Walk, during which the people of Willow Springs

embark on their own journeys, "Holding some kind of light in their hands"

(110). Unfortunately, George is unable to see the power within his empty

palms as his own dragon, for this motif is too far removed from the archetype
so adeptly inscribed within George's rational male sensibilities. This failure

of the archetypal hero—here with the dubious and clearly female hen—allows

for the rise of the Trinity of Goddesses, "a mirror image" of "the Christian

trinity" (Daly 51). With the death of this Christ-figure, a space is carved out
for the ascension of the Triple Goddesses of the Moon.7 Based on Greek

mythology, three goddesses—also known as the Moon Mothers (Rich 107)-

shared special power, and these three goddesses are found echoed in Naylor's

Mama Day through the matrilineal triad of Cocoa, Mama Day, and Sapphira.

As we learn from the lesson of Hecate, "Without death there is no life "
(Spretnak 83); thus, George must die so that Cocoa may live, a sacrifice

steeped in the Christian doctrine wherein Christ dies on the cross as a

sacrifice for all humanity.

As the inheritor of mystic powers, and with the death of the Christ-

figure, George, Ophelia becomes one of the Trinity of Goddesses to emerge in

the novel. Ophelia, the sole surviving daughter of two generations marked

by a trinity of women, literally has the fate of the family line resting upon

her A family tree that records a beginning full of men, with two consecutive
In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich discusses the Triple Goddesses and offers as a model
"the woman who belongs to herself" (107).

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 generations of seven sons, finally sees a reversal: "Three generations of

nothing but girls, and only one left alive in this generation to keep the Days

going—the child of Grace" (39). While her name initially signals a correlation

with the young heroine of Hamlet who, according to Linda Schierse Leonard,

is one of many classic madwomen in literature (12), Naylor's Ophelia will not

suffer a similar fate. While Ophelia does not find death by walking into the

Earth's waters, Sapphira, her great, great grandmother and the source of

power that courses through the matriarchal line, does reenact Ophelia's now-

famous death-by-water scene. But when Sapphira walks into the water to
her death, her power does not die with her; rather, through Mama Day, this

power is passed down to Ophelia, who both rewrites the story of Hamlet's

Ophelia and the story of her own drowned foremother, Peace.

Of the Triple Goddesses, Cocoa most closely resembles Hecate, poised at

the crossroads between life and death, a pose that Cocoa assumes in her

posthumous conversations with her deceased husband, George In the same

way that she is a link between generations, she is a link between the worlds of

life and death. In reverence of Hecate, "those mortals who purified

themselves in Her name . . offered Her ritual suppers at lonely crossroads"

(Spretnak 82), and we witness the extensive preparation of food in honor of

Cocoa's annual return to Willow Springs. In the early sections of the novel,

Abigail and Mama Day discuss what they will prepare for their

granddaughter. Abigail rattles off to Miranda a list of the ingredients she will
need before Cocoa's arrival:

Listen, bring me over a batch of that dried rosemary you got out

at the other place to season this pork shoulder—Baby Girl loves

herself some roast pork. And a good half-dozen eggs I'll do up

one jelly and one coconut cake. (37)

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 Every time Cocoa visits the island, she is greeted with elaborate meals,

perhaps the most significant being the long postponed wedding meal that is

finally held once Cocoa returns to Willow Springs with the husband who, up

until their visit, has been a stranger to Cocoa's land and people. We learn:
"The wedding dinner is a big thing. . . folks and neighbors will cook up one

something of a feast" (133), thus further aligning Cocoa with the goddess
Hecate.

While under the spell of Ruby's nightshade, Cocoa undergoes the

transformation that will seal her assumption of the powers handed down

through her foremothers. In her own night-sea journey, she must confront

and conquer the madwoman she faces in the mirror, resembling the figure of

Medusa. According to Charlene Spretnak's description of Hecate in Lost

Goddesses of Early Greece, "A nest of snakes writhed in Her hair, sometimes

shedding, sometimes renewing" (83). What initially reads as a classic scene of

female bonding, with the older woman lovingly and meticulously plaiting
the hair of the younger woman, who meditates, "Twenty years melted away

under her fingers as she sectioned and braided my hair. ... A gentle nudge
and I knew to bend my head, turn it to the left or right. ... All unspoken and

by rote" (246), quickly becomes the workings of spiteful "hoodoo." Ruby rubs

her demonic potions into Cocoa's hair, which is described as snake-like and

which then transforms into the worms infesting her entire body.

Attempting to reverse Ruby's debilitating curse on Cocoa, Mama Day must

erase the work of Ruby's hands upon Cocoa's head:

Taking the shears out of her pocket, she begins cutting off each

braid. They fall, curled up like worms on the pillow around

Cocoa's face. . . . with that done she takes the shears and snips

carefully through the plaits woven next to the scalp. The white

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 strings pop out, looking even more like worms. (264)

In this scene, Cocoa acquires the guise common to Hecate and reminiscent of
Medusa, both mythically powerful and mysterious women.

Mama Day is the character closest to nature and most attuned to the

messages it bears. She senses the storm and impending doom on the

horizon: "Death. Miranda feels death all around her. . . . But something else

was telling her something and if it just got a little louder, she was willing to

listen. . . . the pictures move backward and it all falls into place" (226-27).

Mama Day recognizes the continuity from the past to the present and into the

future, a sort of timelessness that is foreign to George. Mama Day exhibits

many of the characteristics commonly attributed to Artemis, "the Goddess of

untamed nature," who "dwelt apart in wild, untouched forests" (Spretnak 75)

in much the same way that Mama Day ventures to the other place, while the

rest of the community fears this portion of the island. Mama Day wonders at

people's fears: "Where do folks get things in their head? It's an old house

with a big garden, that's all" (117). We also look on as Mama Day animates

the garden with her own version of Artemis's "sacred bough" (Spretnak 75):

the brow n woman's walking cane becomes a thing of wonder.

Remember this-A wave over a patch of zinnias and the scarlet

petals take flight. . . . Winged marigolds follow them into the air

. . . . A thump of the stick: morning glories start to sing. The

other place. Butterflies and hummingbirds. And the wisdom to

draw them. (152)

And of Artemis we are told: "Every particle of the forest quivered with Her

energy" (Spretnak 80-81). Mama Day's unique relationship with nature is not
the result of her years; even as a child, "folks started believing John-Paul's

little girl become a spirit in the woods" (79).

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 According to Leonard, "The Greek goddess Artemis was the guardian

of young maidens, and she taught them to be independent and true to

themselves" (10). In Mama Day, we find reflected this spirit of Artemis,

particularly in her relationship to both Cocoa and Bernice. To each of these

women, she offers advice and passes on her mother-wisdom As the island
midwife, lauded as "Everybody's mama" (89), Mama Day shares a clear

affinity with "Artemis [who] assists females of all species in childbirth"

(Spretnak 75). Mama Day's name alone suggests her status as mother to the
children of the community-a veritable "Mother Goddess" (Levy 278)-the

majority of whom she saw into the world, having been "there to catch so

many babies that dropped into her hands" (88). With the many children she

midwives, Mama Day continues the legacy that began with Sapphira's seven
sons.

Artemis is heralded as having "loved new life" (77), and the same is

said of Mama Day, who "thinks of the things she can make grow. The joy she
got from any kind of life," as she wonders, "Who made her God?" (262). The

miracle child, Ophelia, was delivered by Mama Day, as was Bernice, and the

child Bernice hopes for is conceived through Mama Day's special magical

powers and Bernice's faith in these powers, because "the only magic is...

what she believes" (96). Through a ritual involving a hen, Mama Day plants

the egg that will become Bernice's son, Little Caesar. When Bernice is ill and

believes herself to be pregnant, Mama Day feels "Bernice's womb, she pushes
up against it and cups her left hand " (75). Artemis is said to have shown a

similar bedside manner. When helping a pregnant woman, "the Goddess

appeared instantly at her side bringing artemisia for a potent tea. . . and

massaged her womb" (Spretnak 78). Again, like Artemis the "provider of

medicinal herbs" (Leonard 10), Mama Day protects those children she

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 delivers, and offers natural remedies. When Carmen Rae's baby has the

croup, she simmers a natural concoction "of senna pods, coltsfoot,

horehound, white cherry bark, and black cohosh .... She weighs them out by

touch" (193). Nursing him back to health, "the baby cradled in her arms, she

gets him to sip a tablespoon of the mixture from the kitchen stove as she
watches his fretful sleep" (193).

Perhaps the most compelling affinity between Mama Day and Artemis

concerns the mythic merging with the sacred tree. According to Spretnak,

"Artemis moved toward the tree. . . and touched the earth. From the roots,

up the trunk, along the branches to the leaves She drew her hands" (79).

Mama Day enacts a similar scene in the west woods near the other place,
while reminiscing about her father.

Miranda runs her fingers in the ridges of the tree trunk. . . . (Hjer

skin seems to dissolve into the fallen tree, her palm spreading

out wide as the trunk, her fingers twisting out in a dozen

directions, branching off into green and rippling fingernails.

(255)

In this case, Mama Day becomes the victim of nature, having merged so fully
with the tree that her fingers become wedged beneath it, causing her to fear
momentarily the harsh potential of her surroundings.

The true reign of these empowered women is felt by all of Willow

Springs when Mama Day avenges Ruby's corrupting hoodoo, and displays the

"fierce and vengeful" (Hamilton 31) side of her own magic, a side she shares
with Artemis. In pure ferocity, Mama Day visits Ruby's home. With her
mighty cane, she raps against the house.

The wood on wood sounds like thunder. The silvery powder is

thrown into the bushes. She strikes the house in the back.

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 Powder. She strikes it on the left. Powder. She brings the cane

over her head and strikes it so hard against the front door, the

window panes rattle. (270)

In response to Mama Day's calling, lightning follows, and "It hits Ruby's

twice, and the second time the house explodes" (273). Here, Mama Day is

empowered by the forces of Artemis, of whom it was said that "when women

died a swift and painless death, they were held to have been slain by her

silver arrows" (Hamilton 31).

We also witness the strength of Hecate, who, when angered,

"unleashed the power of Her wrath and swept over the earth, bringing

storms and destruction" (Spretnak 83). With the storm brewing, Mama Day

appears to dismiss traditional, patriarchal religion and usher in the powers of

another deity when she "goes over to her sister, and gently she closes

Abigail's Bible" (250). In response to the darkening skies, we are told that

"prayers go up in Willow Springs to be spared from what could only be the

workings of a Woman And She has no name" (251). This passage

reverberates when, upon locating the bill of sale for a rebellious slave

woman, Mama Day struggles to recall the identity of the woman whose name

has long gone unsaid, and whose story has gone unspoken. Mama Day runs

through a list trying to jog her memory: "Samantha, Sarena, Salinda. . ."

(280), and one name of particular importance left out of her list is Selene, the

Goddess to whom she bears a striking resemblance. We learn the name

Mama Day searches for when "in her dreams she finally meets Sapphira "

(280).

The line that opens the next section, "It wasn't quite a full moon, but it

was extremely bright" (280), signals the presence of Selene, who carries the

"swelling moon" (Spretnak 81) across the heavens. The moon's presence is

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 persistent in this entire section, as is Sapphira's-and hence Selene's. From

the beginning, this amazing woman looms larger than life, and George

notices this quality in Ophelia's description of her He explains, "it was odd

the way you said it—she was the great, great, grand, Mother—as if you were

listing the attributes of a goddess" (218), which she essentially is. Much

earlier in the novel, we learn the tie between Sapphira and Cocoa: "the Baby

Girl brings back the great, grand Mother" (48). Cocoa increasingly hears the

calling from her foremother. While sitting on her grandmother's back porch,

she finds that "if she breathes real soft, there's just a whisper of the ocean

washing up on the far bluff" (240), and this voice seems to coax her, asking
for her attention.

According to myth, Selene dwells "in the sky" (Hamilton 31) and is

located in heaven (Hamilton 114), like Sapphira, whose body "They never

found . . . although John-Paul and three of his brothers dragged the bottom of

The Sound for a week" (117). Worshipers watched while "Selene pulled the

full moon across the sky. She rose from the ocean and climbed steadily with

the enormous disc to Her Zenith, where it gradually shrank in size and She

easily glided downward to the ocean once again . . . When Selene crossed the

heavens, her light flooded the earth" (Spretnak 82). Worshipers "marked

her passage, (and) joined in small groups to celebrate," a ritual like Willow

Springs' Candle Walk in honor of Sapphira, "a slave woman who took her

freedom in 1823" for whom the townspeople each present a "candle held

high to light her way to the east bluff over the ocean " (111). Following the

celebration of Selene's passage, "the nights grew darker" (Spretnak 82),

suggestive of another correlation with Candle Walk, held on December 22nd,

the evening following the Winter solstice and marking the beginning of

winter. While "old Reverend Hooper couldn't stop Candle Walk night"

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 (112), it becomes clear that he—as well as others before him-is threatened by

this reverence. We understand Reverend Hooper's concern since with the

fall of the Christ-figure comes the replacement of Christmas/ "that ain't

never caught on too much here " (108), with the celebration of Candle Walk.

In the same way that Artemis led the reunion of worshipers beneath the

moon (Spretnak 79), Mama Day, too, is central to the festivities of Candle
Walk. "For years Miranda ain't had to greet, Come my way, Candle Walk '

Folks use that night to thank her" (108). In Willow Springs, the people pay

homage to the woman who acts as nurse to those who need her natural

remedies, and on this night she is met with the reward of all that they make

with their hands and pass on to her.

A bold assertion of the Trinity of Goddesses—"a sort of women's trinity

with mother, daughter, and spirit" (Levy 283)- emerges during Candle Walk,

as Cocoa, Mama Day, and Abigail walk together through the night, despite the
threat of rain.

It's the three of them under two umbrellas with Cocoa in the

middle as they take the stretch toward the bridge junction.

Bunched together, so it's hard to say who's holding who up

when one stumbles in the fog. But it's Cocoa who keeps the

matches dry in her coat pocket to relight the candle that the cold
wind keeps blowing out. (307)

All of these women assume all of these "goddess" roles, thus making one to

one relationships a bit limiting, as we witness in the compelling scene which

sees Abigail's significant role in the resurrection of this myth. She walks

arm-in-arm with her sister and her granddaughter, a powerful triumvirate

that will bring light to darkened paths and silenced tales, all to the fitting
‘The replacement of Christmas is prefigured in the Christmas conflagration that ends
Linden Hills.

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 mantra, "'Lead on with light, Great Mother. Lead on with light'" (111) that

passes from ear to ear, lips to lips, flame to flame. In this ceremony, the torch

of matriarchal power is passed on to Cocoa through the successive hands of

her foremothers, with the responsibility for maintaining the flame now

falling to the youngest generation. When the others go in for the night,

Mama Day, like Artemis, ventures into the untrodden woods, and "she keeps

her candle with her" (307) to bring light to the stories long darkened in the

depths of the island. As a savior, "George done made it possible for all her

Candle Walks to end right here from now on, the other place holds no more

secrets that's left for her to find" (307).

As readers, we bear witness to the successful passing down of powers to

Ophelia. Mama Day appeals to George: "One day she'll (Ophelia] hear you,

like you're hearing me" (308), and the dialogue we read records the veracity of

Mama Day's claim. When George waits for Ophelia, with marked

impatience, "to wake up in a burst of flaming passion " (256), we recall the

similarly phoenix-like image of Sapphira, "laughing in a burst of flames" (3).

Like Hecate, the mother who renewed the cycle of life (Leonard 9), the more

fully-realized Ophelia bears two sons to her second husband, one of whom

she names after her deceased husband. When George, Jr., asks about the man

whose name he bears, Ophelia explains, "I put him on my lap and told him

that he was named after a man who looked just like love" (310).

Finally, Mama Day speaks herstory, recognizing its many dimensions,

layers, and versions. We learn in the novel's opening that Sapphira is

pivotal to the linguistic renewal: "It ain't about right or wrong, truth or lies;

it's about a slave woman who brought a whole new meaning to both them

words" (3). In Ophelia's final words to George as the novel closes, she asserts

the boundless fluidity of their story. She finds peace, allowing, "when I see

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you again, our versions will be different still. . . . Because what really

happened to us, George? You see, that's what I mean—there are just too many

sides to the whole story" (311). Ophelia's insight recalls a wisdom voiced

earlier in the novel, when Ophelia and George are arguing: "Just like that

chicken coop, everything got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an

inside. All of it is the truth" (230). This dialogue is a part of the postmodern

disintegration of notions of a singular Truth, a disintegration reiterated in the

shifting voices that narrate the story and its embrace of multiple mythologies.

Throughout the novel, Mama Day and Abigail are presented as two

halves of a dynamic whole creating and complementing one another like

Grace and Charlotte of A Book of Common Prayer. As Ophelia remarks,

"together they were the perfect mother" (58). Naylor clearly lauds the

strength between the two sisters who "didn't breathe without telling the

other what it felt like" (57), and they become an expression of Naylor's

personal belief that "women have always been close to women" (Naylor, A

Conversation 578). The narrative describing the intricate wedding ring quilt

that Abigail and Mama Day piece together for Cocoa from scraps belonging to

their family is a particularly apt description of the way in which all of these

women's stories finally coalesce: "When it's done right you can't tell where

one ring ends and the other begins" (138). Applied to Naylor's fiction and the

dialogues that are resurrected in the novel, this statement speaks to the

circular, spiraling nature of much women's art and writing. And within the

novel, we watch the collaborative writing of Abigail and Mama Day as they

respond to Cocoa's monthly letters, bickering as they go, but "although it's the

same fight every letter they answer, it never occurs to either of them to write

back to Cocoa separately " (66).

We might ask of Naylor a question that Craig Owens asks of

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 postmodern artist Barbara Kruger's work: "is she simply parodying our

reverence for works of art, or is this not a commentary on artistic production

as a contract between fathers and sons?" (77). If the former is Naylor's

objective, then she answers this patriarchal pact with a matriarchal exchange

that transcends the linearity of contracts. As Helen Fiddyment Levy asserts,

"The language Miranda summons is literature in its truest sense; ... it breaks

out of the library's walls; it defies explanation and explication" (283). What
Miranda brings to voice is nothing less than the screams at the bottom of the

well that took Peace, screams that end a silence of complicity. Naylor's

women become a community of artists, passing on the power of "the stories

of their mothers
. . . the women who came before them " (Christian 239). Within this gesture

is a feminist postmodern will to break through the silences of patriarchal

history, using the power of an African American oral tradition.

With Mama Day, "Naylor moves into the realm of matriarchal

mythmaking" (Andrews 14) as she resurrects the women who reign in

Willow Springs and the goddesses they resemble. The subjectivity and

agency of these women of color is the legacy of myriad selves, which Naylor

identifies as "your personal self, your historical self, your familial self," all of

which coalesce, so that "Identity comes through connecting yourself to

nurturing of some sort, to your body, and . . . when you write, the writing

flow(s] through that identity" ("A Voice of One's Own " 28). The way in

which Naylor speaks of her writing ties her to the ideology of l'écriture

feminine, wherein the female experience is inscribed through the depth,

complexity, abyss, and expanse that is the female body. Levy's comments on

Zora Neale Hurston's writings apply as well to Naylor: "Hurston's language

itself reflects the attempt to bring the mother tongue into literature, to bridge

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the gap between reader and author and fictional community" (279). In

Naylor, Hurston finds a literary sister, one who shares her desire to write in a

language that encompasses the African American female experience.

Ultimately, as Levy contends, "Naylor attempts to transcend the limits of

modern language and summon the connecting strength of myth" (278), a feat

that is accomplished in the epilogue, wherein "at last there ain't no need for

words" (312). This move toward silence is the culmination of Naylor's

revisionary mythmaking, and its subversive potential cannot be overlooked.

In this silence, Naylor overthrows the authority of patriarchy and Caucasian

tradition—as manifested in Shakespeare and Christianity—to speak no longer

through linear language but instead through the polyvalent female

experience of living.

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 CHAPTER SIX

Deconstructing the Dark Continent of

Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body

"The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single,

and that our one existence is really countless existences holding hands
like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end."
-Jeanette VVinterson, Sexing the Cherry

Jeanette Winterson's 1992 novel Written on the Body is an innovative

response to French feminist Hélène Cixous's urging: "Write your self. Your

body must be heard" (338). If Luce Irigaray imagines a language "that upsets

the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of desire, diffuses the

polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single

discourse" (354), then Written on the Body seeks to engage and employ

Irigaray s linguistic vision. Told from the point of view of a narrator of

unspecified gender. Written on the Body is an exploration of the nature of

love and desire, as related through an account of the narrator's obsession

with a married woman, Louise. Like A Book of Common Prayer; this novel

makes of cancer a trope through which to explore the collapse of language

and form. If the body is like a book, then the malignancy of the body causes a

mutated form and the vehicle of this form: language. And so, in what is

again a revised witness novel, Winterson toys with both the cliches of the

romance novel and, like Cisneros, the kunstleroman. The ways in which

Winterson builds upon and advances a feminist postmodern tradition make

Interestingly enough, the narrator refers to the Book of Common Prayer while searching
for a way in which to deal with the loss of Louise (151). Perhaps this inclusion is Winterson's
nod toward Didion's novel.

IKS
 it the ultimate exemplar of feminist postmodernism among the constellation

of novels in this study. The refusal to create a fixed center, initially through

the ungendered narrator, is fundamental to the technical play with which

Winterson effectively deconstructs genre expectations, notions of reality,

constructs of time, linguistic representation, and the stance of both narrator

and reader

Referring to the earlier novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Paulina

Palmer points to Winterson s "interest in narrativity and in exploring

connections between narrative and point of view" (100). Because of its radical
experimentation with narrative voice through its ungendered narrator,

Written on the Body holds a compelling position in the debate regarding

gendered-particularly womanist or feminist-writing/ Palmer notes the

political implications of Winterson s technique: "fit] is no mere gimmick but

serves an important ideological function. It enables Winterson to avoid

focusing on a specific sexual identification and ... to challenge the

conventional division between homosexuality and heterosexuality" (112).

The androgynous "I" that emerges is an all-embracing "I," not unlike the

narrator of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, who is described as having a

similar multiplicity of voice: "Jeanette, instead of uncovering a single, static

identity , constructs for herself a series of shifting, fluid selves by means of the

acts of storytelling and fabulation in which she engages" (Palmer 101).

Androgyny and bisexuality-in their embrace of a both/and notion of gender

and sexuality-are a part of the postmodern condition. The effect of this

genderlessness is to set aside the reductivist entrapments of gender.

Another experimental challenge to gendered reading is June Arnold's The Cook and the
Carpenter (1973). Of this novel, Bonnie Zimmerman writes, "Arnold delved more deeply into
the artificiality of gender construction by constructing a uniquely artificial text, its language
being completely gender free ... Unmarked pronouns, ambiguous personal names, and
occupational appelations (as in the title) disguise the sex of the characters. Only at the end
are they revealed to be exclusively women" (184).

186
Winterson exploits the duality encompassed in the ungendered narrator to

force a postmodern reading of the text and, consequently, to force the reader

to inhabit—along with the narrator—the undefined narrative space that

transcends gender. This destabilization of the reader's expectations is

profoundly feminist, creating a space for the usurpation of a power

historically contained in the masculine voice and pronoun.

In seeking to understand the relationship with Louise, the narrator

attempts to chronicle their affair through the consistently self-conscious

novel that the reader receives. However, because a reductivist linear

narrative cannot encompass the complexities of desire, the narrator's attempt

at applying order quickly fails. In turn both the narrator and the audience

remain unfixed. The "you" of the novel vacillates between the implied

reader, with whom the narrator self-reflexively engages in active dialogue at

points in the novel-"I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can

be trusted as a narrator" (24)—and the ever-present "you" of Louise, upon

whom all of the narrator's energies are spent. Because of the narrator's

obsession with Louise, a dialogue that does not include her is nearly

impossible. Repeatedly, the narrator forgets the "you" of the reader in favor
of the "you" to whom all thoughts return. Thus, not only is any fixed notion

of narrative voice erased via the lack of gender identity, but also any fixed

notion of audience is similarly blurred. As readers of the novel, Palmer

asserts, "our gender differences are subverted and our desires, anxieties and

fears acted out by a myriad different figures, both male and female" (102).

This subversion imposes on the reader a fragmented subjectivity,' forcing

him or her into the initially schizophrenic position of mixed loyalties, that

are only resolved once the reader willingly surrenders the need for a fixed
This "fragmented subjectivity," as demonstrated in my discussion of Surfucttt^ is a
fundamental element of the feminist postmodern

187
perspective.

Ultimately, the novel encourages a reader-response approach, and

those critics who seek to unveil the hidden identity of the narrator are
missing the invention the novel invites on the part of the reader Aurelie

Jane Sheehan labels and refers to the narrator as female after a terse dismissal:

"For the first few pages I considered the possibility that the narrator might be

male or female. I did not ricochet between genders for long" (209). Clearly

there is little value in proclaiming the gender of the narrator when, in fact,

the novel allows a reading that reflects the reader's own sexual inclination.

Winterson does not intend to create of the narrator's identity a solvable

mystery; rather, she intends to debunk a gendered reading of the text, thus
deconstructing the novel as she writes. Winterson's voice seems to break

through the narrator's at points, addressing the reader: "No longer would

you be watching a film from a fixed perspective; this is a film-set you can

explore, even alter if you don't like it" (97). Her vision of a virtual reality

reading experience is firmly in line with the postmodern approach to

language and literature. In short, the novel "works " with the narrator as

male or female; delineating one gender or the other is not Winterson's

intention. Meditating on the possibility and range between the two is, so that,

as Richard Eder contends, "we are cut off from our assumptions and

groomed to enter Winterson's unsettling polymorphous world " (3). In

debunking gender, Winterson also debunks genre—both of w hich are based

on patriarchal strictures of expectation and behavior.

Written on the Body is a metanarrative response both to the romance

novel as well as to the phrase that is its formula: "I love you." From the

opening words of the novel, Winterson suggests that absence is presence in

18K
 the first question the narrator poses: "Why is the measure of love loss?" (9).

This question is the catalyst for the novel that follows, as the narrator

struggles to understand love, loss, Louise and the connection among these
entities. The response to this question begins with the narrator's assertion

that "Love demands expression," and thus the novel is bom. Foreshadowing

of the supplanting of language by the body occurs on the first page of the

novel, when the narrator recalls, "I did worship them [the words I love you'j

but now I am alone on a rock hewn of my own body" (9). Within this

language of Caliban, and of the Shakespeare who created him—that the

narrator revered is encoded a curse, highlighting our inadequacies and

showcasing our colonization under a system of another's making. When

Caliban fails, the narrator peers through Alice's looking glass, only to reply

with frustration, "flow can you stick at a game when the rules keep

changing? " (10).

This language of which the narrator is suspicious furnishes an entire

world. When Louise says, " There's nobody here but us,"' the narrator finds

that her words had become manifest: "I looked up and the banks were empty "

(11). This same language- "I love you"- becomes what the narrator calls "our

private altar" (11), capable even of constructing the narrator: "1 had said them
[these words) many times before, dropping them like coins into a wishing

well, hoping they would make me come true " (11). This tension, between the
narrator's wariness toward language and the power that this language

exercises, fuels the narrative.

In a mock play-within-the-play, the narrator rehearses "the same |old[

story" (13) of infidelity in which the narrator repeatedly stars as a bored and

lonely married woman's lover. The lover in this play is again ungendered,

providing a parodic mise en abyme. One such tryst, with the "happily

189
married" Bathsheba (16), is perhaps the precursor of the narrator's affair with

Louise. The narrator explains, "When we were over, I wanted my letters

back. My copyright she said but her property. She had said the same about

my body" (17). As a way of reclaiming the corporal, the narrator seeks to

reclaim the linguistic.

The narrator is self-conscious of the activity of writing one's life,

proclaiming, "This is the wrong script" (18/ -signaling a deliberate rewriting

of the romance plot-and repeatedly referring to the problematic process of

putting a life on paper. Winterson contests the romance novel, even as her

narrator longs to become the shining armour-clad hero of one. And so

Louise is cast as "more of a Victorian heroine than a modern woman. A

heroine from a Gothic novel" (49), while in another scene the narrator is

likened to "a character from Anna Karenina" even while in the same breath

explaining, "I don't believe in living out literature" (75). This clash—between

authorial intention and protagonist's longing-is often conveyed through the

self-reflexivity voiced in the novel. At one point, a friend remarks: "The

trouble with you,' she said. . . "is that you want to live in a novel " (160). If in

postmodern thought, language is everything, the novel becomes a world

within which the narrator does live. The narrator questions this world
created by language, as well as the script in this world. "Who do I think I am?

Sir Launcelot? Louise is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty but that doesn't make me a

medieval knight" (159). The narrator and ostensible novelist both mock the

romance formula while at the same time fighting the urge to replay the

romantic script.
As in Surfacing, the narrator reflects, "Now here 1 am making up my

own memories of good times" (161), thus casting doubt on the truth of the
' A similar passage in Mumu Duy suggests a parallel interest in the revising of master
narratives: "Well, we were hardly going according to the script” (256).

190
 narrative up to this point and questioning the reach of authorial privilege.

As Palmer contends, "by drawing attention to the fictionality of the text and

the acts of representation which its construction involves, the question [of
the real or imaginary quality of the characters] is ultimately meaningless since

all the characters portrayed in it are fictions" (104); thus, the novel actively

undercuts the reader's emotional response to these paper doll characters. The

impact of the novel, finally, is in the learning to write the body; speculation

on the reality of the text only sheds light on the artificiality of the genre,

enacting the subversion and deconstruction of a language that purports to

record reality.
Not only does the novel meditate on the looseness of language, but it

also self-reflexively contemplates the veracity of the narrative. Recalling an

earlier relationship with the Dutch feminist Inge, who questions the truth in

a comment made by the narrator, countering, '"You're making it up, " the

narrator wonders, "Am I? " (22). This same exchange is repeated between

Louise and the narrator, and the question of the "truth " of the story is

broached repeatedly. The narrator's comments on the power that voyeurism

affords resonate throughout the novel: "1 am the scriptwriter and I can put

words in their mouths" (59). At one point, the characters seemingly stage a

revolt in the narrator's dreams: "They accused me of lies and betrayal. I

opened my mouth to speak but I had no tongue only a gutted space" (69). In
a struggle for voice and identity, the narrator exclaims, "I shall have to haggle

over my own reality" (98), and in the language of the text, the narrator finds a

place to hide, a world beyond the black and white margins suggested by lines

of true and false. Of Louise the narrator mysteriously explains to a friend,

Gail, " She came out of the air and now she's returned to it. . . . It's as if Louise

never existed, like a character in a book. Did I invent her?" "No, but you tried

191
 to/ said Gail. 'She wasn't yours for the making " (189). Out of longing for the

body of Louise, the narrator creates the body of text. While in The House on

Mango Street the linguistic compensates for an architectural absence, in

Written on the Body the linguistic compensates for a biological malignancy

and, ultimately, absence.

Written on the Body challenges the very form it assumes; thus, the

novel itself is stylistically experimental. When Louise's body grows

malignant with cancer, the novel's form follows suit, metamorphosizing into

vignettes structured by anatomical divisions when the center cannot hold.

Not unlike the character of Robin Vote in Nightwood, Louise—specifically

her body—becomes a metonymy for the novel. The novel progresses as

expected until about two-thirds of the way through, when the prose is

interrupted while the narrator dismantles and examines Louise, body part by

body part. This shift is marked by a dramatic change of tone. The narrator's

witty parley revolving around a quirky-if sordid-sexual history that

constantly intersects the relationship between the narrator and Louise gives

way to a scientific exploration of the workings of the human body. 1’he

chapter headings in this section are divided anatomically, illuminating the

transformation wherein the page becomes the body.

While the narrator dissects Louise, Winterson dissects the genre as she

quite literally writes the body in the pages of Written on the Body, recalling

Esperanza's construction of the linguistic House on Mango Street that fills the

lack of an architectural house on Mango Street. When an anthropological

approach fails to explain Louise's diseased body, the narrator resorts to the

more pragmatic promise of science, mirroring the changed perspective from

anthropology to biochemistry that Grace assumes in A Book of Common

Prayer. As Susan Bordo explains, however, "Beneath the imagery of a

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 moving (but still unified) body is the deeper postmodern imagery of a body

whose own unity has been shattered by the choreography of multiplicity"

(144). The narrator deconstructs Louise in an attempt to reconstruct her,

finding, however, that "the L that tattoos me on the inside is not visible to

the naked eye" (118) and learning that observation of surfaces and exteriors

will not reveal the inner workings and depths of Louise.

The entire novel questions the possibility of language to construct

reality and reflect genuine emotion. Elizabeth Meese expresses a frustration

with language that parallels the narrator's as she queries, "Whether or not it

is really you and I and love that I mean when I write I love you ?"

(ISemjErotics 18). The narrator purports to understand the relationship with

Louise and the nature of desire; however, the very practice of comprehension

repeatedly falls short of the narrator's search for an outward "truth," because

such a search—as Grace comes to realize in A Book of Common Prayer—is

futile. The metonymic quality of language proves frustrating to the narrator,

who needs an order by which to comprehend both the love and the loss of

Louise. Louise appeals to the narrator, " I want you to come to me without a

past. Those lines you've heard, forget them. . . . Come to me new " (54). Like

Charlotte, Louise holds a knowledge that the narrator (and internal novelist)

does not, and therefore both women become lessons and challenges to the

authorial power that reigns on the page. Raging against the emptiness of

language, Louise says to the narrator, "you try and regain control by telling

me you love me. That"s a territory you know, isn't it? That's romance and

courtship and whirlwind " (53). Overturning the stereotypical script, Louise

forces the narrator to examine the vehicles of expression. She knows the

failure of language and therefore challenges the narrator's proclamation of "I

love you " Once confronted, the narrator struggles to address and break down

193
complex emotion and its components and is relentless in searching for a

precise language that truly encompasses depth of feeling. The narrator

laments,

Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one

another is still the thing we long to hear? 1 love you' is always a

quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when

you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have

found three words and worship them. (9)

The lesson here is not to revere a phallogocentric language; thus, the narrator

yearns for a new language, a language not created by another's tongue, and

the text of the novel becomes both a struggle to create this new language and

Winterson's contribution to parler femme. Throughout the novel rings the

refrain, "It's the cliches that cause the trouble" (10). Realizing the energy that

reinvention of language requires, the narrator jokingly complains, "1 want

the sloppy language, the insignificant gestures. The saggy armchair of

cliches" (10).

While struggling with signifiers, the narrator also struggles with the

dimensions of the signified and recognizes the tenuous link between the two

realms. "A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not

precise then should I call it love?" (10). As Palmer asserts, "Conventional

standards of normality are . . . deconstructed and shown to be relative and

artificial" (94) in the narrator's recognition that the L of love is the same L of

Louise and, finally, the L of loss This set of connections is troublesome to the

narrator, who wants to understand Louise as a whole and thereby gain

control of both language and life. However, the narrator must come to see

that Louise is not a seamless whole, the sum of her deconstructed parts, or a

linguistic formula yet to be discovered. Thus, the narrator cannot have some

194
 sort of authorial control, because to assume such control would be to wield an

empty, monolithic power over the complexity of womanhood that is Louise.

The narrator questions, "Why do I collude in this mis use of language?" and

finally responds, "The only word I can think of is Louise" (57). Gradually, the

narrator comes to allow "Bigger questions, questions with more than one

answer, questions without an answer" (13), and in this surrender of control is

the beginning of a linguistic revolution. Of Louise's body, the narrator

expectantly hopes, "I will find a map as likely as any treasure hunt. I will

explore you and mine' you" (20), which the narrator comes to do, finding a

place of linguistic renewal through the treasures hidden in the secrets of the

female body. With Winterson clearly behind the page, the narrator

appropriates the Christian gospel-"And so the word was made flesh" (SSI-

through the gradual shift to the body as a space creative of language.

Ultimately the narrator must invent a language that, as Adriana

Mendez Rodenas suggests, "does not preclude the opposite term in the

deathly combination of signifier/signified, but, instead, invites exchange and

fusion, verbal chant, and the writing of the body" (42). By learning to live
without absolutes, the narrator rediscovers language in the form of Louise's

body, asserting, "What other places are there in the world than those

discovered on a lover's body?" (82). Reinforcing "the analogy between text

and body, script and voice" (Rodenas 42), the narrator practices this new

vocabulary: "Articulacy of fingers, the language of the deaf and dumb,

signing on the body body longing" (89). This "signing" marks a return to the
Edenic, to a semiotic realm that both precedes and surpasses phallogocentrie

language. Addressing Louise, the narrator continues:

* The double entendre cannot be overlooked here; for, in the process of seeing the female
body as the source of language, the narrator will also come to feel a sense of ownership "mine"
of this new body of language "you."

195
 You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me

with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing

blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my

body. . . . Written on the body is a secret code only visible in

certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. (89)

As Sheehan explains, "the body makes quite a love letter" (209), and the

"secret code" between the narrator and Louise translates to the parler

that Winterson explores. Louise's voice echoes in the words of the narrator,

who writes: "I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has

translated me into her own book" (89), and in turn this translation becomes

the novel,Written on the Body."

Later, the narrator contemplates life without Louise in terms of

reading the body: "Your hand prints are all over my body. Your flesh is my

flesh. You deciphered me and now I am plain to read" (106). In a passage that

seems a particularly overt reference to Winterson's own desire to write a new

language, the narrator proclaims: "I don't want a model, I want the full-scale

original. I don't want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new"

(108), and so she does, in a language that takes as its signs the complexion of

the Caucasian body. When the narrator remarks, "There is endless white

space where you won't be" (111), this is a clear reference both to the absence of

Louise and to the accompanying lack of language on the printed page—what

Meese terms "the white body of the page" QSetnIErotics 19), articulating that

the blank page is the unwritten body. Women's bodies as the muse for a

male art are reclaimed here; no longer the objectified muse, the curvaceous
torso and outstretched limbs of Louise become the text itself.

” A similar gesture is made with Esperanza's creation of both a house on Mango Street
and the novel. The House on Man$o Street.

196
 “Time slips sideways in a place like this" ~Enchanted April

Time must be called into question and problematized for language to

undergo a parallel scrutiny; both are linear systems that forge artificial

connections to "reality." In "Women's Time," Julia Kristeva discusses the

causative relationship between linear language and progressive time- "linear

time is that of language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun +

verb; topic-comment; beginning-ending)"—as two systems that limit the

female realm. Kristeva contends that, "when evoking the name and destiny

of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human

species than of time, becoming, or history" (33). Rather than walking a

diachronous time line, women occupy what Kristeva terms "monumental

time" (32).'

Reinforcing the novel's suspicions of language, then, is the suspicion

of progressive time and its eventual erasure through a time that is "All­

encompassing and infinite like imaginary space" (Kristeva 34). The narrative

repeatedly and aggressively denies linear constructs of time; instead, as Jim

Shepard notes, it is "presented in the retrospective form of a lament, an

elegy " (10), thus again recalling A Book of Common Prayer. This shifting

chronology is a calculated part of a larger gesture by Winterson to dismantle

artificial, patriarchal, linear constructs that impose a reductivist order. Tales

from the narrator's past mingle with the present relationship with Louise

and thus, as is the case in Mama Day, the past becomes an overlay to a present

that refuses to fall into a neat order Beginning at a point after the
According to Kristeva, "we confront two temporal dimensions: the time of linear history,
or cursive time (as Nietzsche called it), and the time of another history, thus another time,
monumental tune (again according to Nietzsche), which englobes these supranational,
sociocultural ensembles within even larger entities" (32).

N7
 relationship with Louise, the narrator first situates time through a flashback:

"I am thinking of a certain September" (9). The next mention of time does

not suggest progress; rather "It was a hot August Sunday" is a move

backward, reinforced by the use of the past tense. The reader, then, is situated

in a sort of timelessness, unable to calculate the span since the affair with

Louise, much less the present time of the narrative being revealed or the

order of revelation. From this "hot August Sunday," the narrator again

jettisons backward in time to "June. The wettest June on record" (20),

questioning along the way, "Have 1 got it wrong, this hesitant chronology?"

(17). Anticipating the end of the story and a consequential stopping of the

watch, the narrator explains, "My experience has been that time always ends.
In theory you are right .... Time without end. In practice we both wear a

watch" (18). Thus, they both hold onto what they know are inadequate tools

of time and are complicit in this artificial system.

From June, the narrator moves to "Tuesday the twelfth of May 1 pm"

(36). And of Louise, the narrator wonders, "Who are you for whom time has

no meaning?" (51). The move backward soon reverses, shuttling forward to a

certain "August" that precipitates the narrator and Louise's "living together

in great happiness for nearly five months"-a five months that are quickly

panned over until the Christmas revelation that brings their bliss to a halt

and accelerates the narration into the present. When Elgin reveals to the

narrator that Louise has cancer, the story is interrupted by the sudden jolt of

the tragedy. Floating out of space and time, the narrator reflects, "The laws of
motion are suspended .... There is no connection. . . . the centre cannot hold.

Where am I? There is nothing here I recognise. This isn't the world 1 know "

(100-01). What follows is a monosyllabic dialogue between the narrator and

Elgin, in w hich the narrator tries to reduce this devastating revelation to a

198
simple linguistic exchange. Instead, Elgin's words plunge the narrator into

the anatomy of Louise and effectively freeze time while the narrator

examines the body that has allowed malignancy.

In the center section of the novel, the narrator steps out of any sort of

sequenced narration and into a world of science, of fixed formulas and the

illusion of safety of physicalities. If, as the narrator suggests, "Cancer is an

unpredictable condition. It is the body turning in upon itself" (105), then we

watch as the time of the novel—like the form—becomes unpredictable,

"turning in upon itself." Here, the narrator attempts to arrest time: "Now

that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph

not a poem" (119). During this section, three months pass while time stands

still, and the narrative resumes marked by a reference to the calendar:

"March. Elgin had promised to write me in March" (141).

While separated from Louise, the narrator records the mundane

lifestyle of waiting tables at a wine bar while mentally occupied in

understanding Louise through continued study of the behavior of cancer.

The months pass without comment, mechanistically and ordered: "April.

May." And later, a marked change from the "wet June" of Louise, comes

"June. The driest June on record" (150). The seasons-and seemingly the
entire universe-mirror the narrator's experience as images of death and

decay replace those images of fertility and life that filled the time while

Louise was present. The arid description of June recalls the novel's opening:

"It hasn't rained for three months. . . . The grapes have withered on the vine "

(9) and moves the reader into the present time of the narrative being
recorded.

Next comes "August. Nothing to report" (160). Skipping a month, the

narrator records "October. Why stay? There's nothing worse than being in a

199
 crowded place when you are alone" (180). The final mention of time—"Time

is a great deadener" (189)—leads into the last scene, which witnesses the

narrator's departure into a realm beyond chronology. The narrator suggests a

premature end to the story: "1 sat down in the saggy armchair." Recalling the

"saggy armchair of cliches" that threatens the expression of genuine emotion,

the narrator wonders, "Is this the proper ending? If not the proper then the

inevitable?" (188). However, this ending, in which the narrator surrenders to

an easy, empty formula, does not hold for long, soon deconstructing into

uncharted territory

If, as French feminists contend, "female sexuality is the figure for

differance that disrupts a phallocentric discourse by celebrating multiplicity

and diffusion" (Walker, Lisa 242), then such a celebration finds voice in the

final dream-like sequence of the novel. All vestiges of linear time are

effectively destroyed when in the final paragraph the narrator proclaims,

"This is where the story starts" (190). Recalling the recursive finale of The

House on Mango Street, Written on the Body is what Gayle Greene terms a

"self-begetting novel," "that end|s] with the protagonist ready to begin writing

the novel we have just finished reading" (16). We wonder: if the narrator

can begin again, can the story find a different outcome? And yet, the entire

text is subsumed in the end of this single paragraph: "I don't know if this is a

happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields " (190). These "open

fields" suggest the narrator's transcendence to a world beyond boundaries, to

a realm of limitless horizons no longer held by time or place, and to a

spiraling outward. Here the narrator finds "the freedom to take whatever

form one wishes, and to cast off all prescriptions: social, moral, existential,

sexual and—in the writing—aesthetic and literary" (Eder 3). And the reader

enjoys a similar liberation, as "the body, the memory, the language of the

200
 writer compel us in a synergistic field of circulating energies, but without the

closure such a systematic metaphor suggests" (Meese (Sem)Erotics 19-20). In

the end, the narrator sardonically wonders for a second time, "Is this the

proper ending?"a statement overtly pitted against the expectation of "happily

ever after."

In Written on the Body, Winterson allows a variety of possibilities to

co-exist. With the absence of a narrative center comes a series of

deconstructions of this innovatively amorphous text. If, as Laura Doan

claims, "For the lesbian writer, the task, the political agenda if you will, is to

displace and explode the binary" (147), then Winterson fulfills this task in

Written on the Body with the ungendered narrator, an embodiment of the

both/and of postmodernism. Restrictive conceptions of both gender and

genre are freed and deconstructed as both "author and character engage in the

double gesture, destroying as they create" (Meese Crossing 122). If in Mama

Day language is subsumed by living, in Written on the Body, language is

subsumed by loving, and by the body upon which this love is written. And if

the novel does pose a central question, it is the question repeated in the text

of whether or not an artist creates with the genitals and, by extension,

whether or not a reader reads with the genitals. In Written on the Body,

Winterson extends beyond writing the body to the gendered implications of

reading the body, wherein meaning is overtly posited in the reader's filling in

the most pivotal of narrative gaps. Meese's comments on Monique Wittig's

artistic intentions clearly apply to Written on the Body wherein, "the

revolution staged ... is the revolution to free the . . . body. The body (of)

writing and the writing (of) body are identical" (Crossing 129). Moving one

step farther, Winterson also frees the body of reading.

201
 CONCLUSION

Beyond the Image, Beyond the Word:

A Feminist Postmodern Denouement

As Linda Goode Bryant explains, "Through appropriation the

appropriator seizes control of another's culture" (Bad Girls 100). And much

of a feminist postmodernism is about appropriation. Literature invents

linguistic models to convey the re-imagined versions of those images, stories,

and plots appropriated in the visual arts, the site of a concurrent feminist
postmodernism. In her 1993 Mother and Child (figure 1), Renee Cox

appropriates to her photograph a title that evokes classic images of a serene,

docile, nurturing, and above all lily white Virgin Mary cradling to her breast a

cherubic, similarly ivory baby Jesus. Cox overturns the original image of the

seated mother with head gently bent to look into her son's eyes with this

standing mother looking instead into the lens, confronting the camera's gaze

with steely determination, confidence, and conviction. She is both object and

subject here in her confrontation with the lens that seeks to define her. Her

nude body is neither fleshy nor ripe; instead, she is the image of ebony

strength, defined and toned in body, and androgynous in her stance. The

child is not held to her breast; rather, she carries him lengthwise across her

midriff. In an era of assault on African American maternity, Cox provides us

with a revised image of mother and child- one with no apparent ties to an

Almighty Father or a Virgin Mother.

Ka the Burkhart's 1980 Sayonara Cinderella (figure 2) throws off and

202
 Kl Ilic ( <n

Mother and Child I K>'> ‘

Figure 1
Reproduced with the permission of The New Museum of Contemporary Art.
' ’*< ' i 1 I !' S- t \ : * ■ *

203
 3»

K a! hi Ht) t k [i.if !

Sayonara Cinderella ' 1

Figure 2
Reproduced with the permission of The New Museum of C ontemporary Art.

204
Here, the rebellion is far from subtle. In lynching Cinderella, Burkhart

murders the romantic tale of the passive, long overlooked but hard-working

and golden-hearted maiden awaiting the day when her prince will come,

when her foot will fit the slipper that becomes the emblem of her oppression

and the source of the Cinderella mythology. The promise of such a pipe

dream is quickly undercut by the noose about her neck, even as she dons the

ball gown that was the key to her having been noticed by the earnest-if rather

dim—prince. Here, our Cinderella's happily-ever-after has taken a macabre

twist: she's been hanged and what has fallen to the floor as she dangles from

the sturdy rope? Of course, that glass slipper and the promises which

accompanied it are now far beyond her reach. This Cinderella's glittering

slipper has perhaps crashed to the floor because it did not fit, nor did the

claustrophobic narrative of which it was so central a part. Or, is this a

moment beyond the happily-ever-after when Cinderella has enacted a

rebellion of her own and cast off that loaded? incriminating? slipper. This

reimagining of pervasive cultural mythologies about women that both Cox

and Burkhart engage in is the crux of a feminist postmodernism that women

writers have been consciously developing over the last sixty years.

Accepted definitions of postmodernism attempt to place it in a cycle of

revisionary literary movements. Ironically, this movement that is repeatedly

linked to male writers and seen as an outgrowth of masculine

disillusionment after two world wars, has a logical appeal for women

novelists. Postmodernism-even as defined by a Caucasian male standard—is

the ideal venue for feminist concerns and women's writing. The woman

novelist's struggle with patriarchal language becomes analogous to the male

novelist's recognition of the deconstruction of language. At the core of this

205
 movement is the utter failure of language—a major issue of a feminist

scholarship focused on the inability to express through a patriarchally-created

language a woman-centered world and feminist ideology. That white men

have claimed this territory as their own is not surprising. However, to truly

understand the complexities of the movement and the drive behind its
aesthetic impulse-to both "exhaust" and "replenish" (Barth) language—we

must widen the definition to include and extend to novels written by

women.

Together, the novels in this study provide a tapestry of images that,

once woven together, form a feminist postmodernism that actively subverts

and revises cultural, mythic, and literary legacies that find women
historically and linguistically lost. The political implications of an

acknowledged feminist postmodern tradition are a fundamental reason for

arguing for its recognition. While a feminist postmodernism challenges

patriarchal power, phallocratie order, and artistic agendas, it brings feminism

into power as a high academic discourse, while offering a legitimacy to a

postmodern movement that many have discounted as mere artistic excess.

Feminist postmodernists counter the amnesia of a patriarchal canon with a

recursive, cyclical approach to time that arrests the linearity of Father Time
"(Exploded, plural, fluid," women's time "rejoins, on the one hand, the

archaic (mythical) memory and, on the other, the cyclical or monumental

temporality of marginal movements" (Kristeva 38).

A feminist postmodernism is artistic, making the novel a venue in

which to critique an androcentric literary tradition. Often the feminist

postmodern text, filled with narrative gaps, encourages a read er-res ponse

approach. This narrowing of aesthetic distance between writer and reader is

endemic to a postmodern art that seeks to integrate high and low culture and

206
 to topple a social definition of art as ever shadowing its viewers from above

on its fragilely constructed, precariously balanced pedestal. Instead, through

narrative gaps, the reader is invited to actively participate in the revisions the

novel invokes. This act of collective creation usurps the privileged position

claimed by the canonical artist, while making readers complicit in the

revolution that such a usurpation signals.

In speaking the unspeakable and uttering the unutterable, a feminist

postmodernism articulates the mother tongue in two profound ways:

through the resurrection of her st ory and through the female body. As

lesbian text, Nightwood becomes a search for an alternate language, realized

through the character of Robin Vote, who merges with the bestial to return to
the point at which the masculine voice erases the language of natural

womanhood. The narrator of Surfacing continues the search set into

motion by Robin, as she, too, embraces the wilds of an unbound nature to

articulate an unspoken past. Making the margins a place of radical

revisioning, Surfacing enunciates an image-driven /irrstory long silenced by

history. Finally, in the most overt example of I'ecriture feminine, Written on

the Body, the female body becomes the blank page on which to write the

mother tongue reclaimed by the women of Nightwood and Surfacing.

Adaptations of the kunstleroman allow feminist postmodernists to

grant their internal authors a power withheld in more conventional

reincarnations of the form. Careful to avoid reinscribing master narratives,

these novelists give to their characters a freedom to roam and wander beyond

both their authorial power and the confines of the page. Linear language is

subsumed when the novel transcends the page to become the book, house, or

body that it invokes. The House on Mango Street, as written by Esperanza,

becomes the architectural house on Mango Street for which she longs. A

207
 Book of Common Prayer becomes the vital link between the writer, Grace,

and her subject, Charlotte. This book supplants the Christian document of

the same name to forge a new religion in the language between and among

women. And through the linguistic Written on the Body, the ungendered

narrator is able to reconstruct the absent and ailing body of Louise, and to

reclaim the female body as artistic subject. As these vastly different novels

demonstrate, the feminist postmodern recognition of language as construct is

used to productive ends that move beyond the lines on the page.

Dwelling in the borderlands between gender and ethnic boundaries, a

feminist postmodernism is at once cultural. In The House on Mango Street,

Esperanza subverts the male gaze, revises misogynistic mythologies, and tells

of the after beyond happily ever. Beginning with her reverence for the

American Dream, that plants in her a passionate, all-encompassing desire for

a house, Esperanza uses the book as a place to locate her position in this
dream as a Chicano female. Only when she writes herself between American

and Mexican, male and female, child and adult, can she create a dream that

mirrors the balancing act that is her life. And so, her writing- between prose

and poetry-becomes this convergence of dream and object. Both in the story

it speaks and in its revisions of Shakespeare and Christianity, Mama Day

reveals a similar critique of Caucasian male power. Naylor calls into question

the works of the Masters, and the hierarchy that informs what is termed

"art," by resurrecting what Julia Kristeva terms "a symbolic determinator,

defined as the cultural and religious memory forged by the interweaving of

history and geography" (31). Exploiting marginality to libera tory ends, Naylor

creates through Willow Springs an island of African American female power

that overturns the Caucasian hegemony. Here, Sapphira Wade freed slave

woman who gave the island to her people-supplants a Christian deity, and

208
 Shakespeare's Ophelia becomes the African American Cocoa who does not

drown, but rather lives to tell the story of her foremothers and perpetuate the

powers of the mythic Sapphira. While Naylor's refusal to speak the language

of a Caucasian male literary establishment is intoned through a trialogue of

African American voices, Cisneros's refusal is manifested in the young,

Chicana voice of Esperanza.

The whole toward which the feminist postmodern reaches is a

synthesized whole. No longer lauding wholeness as an organic place of

literary nirvana, these writers create a mosaic-like whole, that makes no

gestures toward seamlessness and instead illuminates the stitching that holds
together its disparate fragments. What has historically been locked in

opposition-to create the artificial wholeness toward which the traditional

character quests--is resolved in the character of Robin. Offering perhaps the

strongest example of a feminist postmodern subjectivity, Robin is a creature

who is not divided but rather terrifyingly integrated.

Disintegrated notions of wholeness are reiterated through the feminist

postmodern critique of language Within a feminist postmodernism is a

gesture of writing beyond the ending1 that seeks to radically revise the

contract written by a male-dominated literary establishment. Gayle Greene

analyzes the contemporary critical response to formulaic endings: these

narrowly defined denouements "relate closure to the conservative tendencies

of realism. . . which tends toward the revelation of a single, univocal truth -a

tendency that neutralizes potentials for change " (12). These reductivist

narrative strategies are similarly binding both to the novel form and to its
potential as a vehicle for feminist possibilities. When the novel's end reads

like a pat solution, its artistic development is stunted- "For if the novel is a

This is Rachel Blau Du Plessis's term, explored fully in her book of the same name.

209
 form that resists change, it is also a form that is always changing" (Greene 19)
—as is its ability to revise oppressive plots.

Written against the formulaic paradigm, the novels in this study often

end with a disintegration of language—articulated in a variety of ways. In the

final scene of Nightwood, Robin is in a church, where she does not chant

Hail Marys or open a psalm book. Instead, mocking the dog who is with her

and crawling after him, she ends "barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and

touching" (139). Curiously,Surfacing ends only once the narrator has emitted

a similar sound: "I laugh, and a noise comes out like something being killed:

a mouse, a bird?" (228). Both Nightwood and Surfacing turn back on

language, pointing toward an expression grounded in the natural and

animalistic.

The final line of A Book of Common Prayer articulates the narrator's

recognition of the artificiality and inadequacy of a scientific language-"! have

not been the witness I wanted to be" (280)—and signals a decided silence.

Often these endings are a gesture of refusal. Grace refuses to arrest Charlotte

through an inadequate phallogocentric language. And The House on Mango

Street closes with Esperanza's revelation of the creative process, and the

collapse of all that she has written, as she self-reflexively begins again her

story: "I like to tell stories. 1 am going to tell you a story about a girl who

didn't want to belong. We didn't always live on Mango Street" (109). An

Esperanza who has been lost in her Chicana duality, as manifested in her

uneasy relationship with language, will effect a folding in of language. In

Mama Day, the narrator rests finally in the the last paragraph of the novel,

almost breathing a sigh of relief, proclaiming, "at last there ain't no need for

words " (312), and surrendering to the force that has subsumed language: life.

As in The House on Mango Street, Written on the Body suggests a new

210
 beginning in the final paragraph: "This is where my story starts" (190).

However, in this final paragraph, Winterson signals a spiraling outward—

"The walls are exploding, the windows have turned into telescopes" (190)—

and beyond the written word into "open fields" that cannot be apprehended
by codified language.

For these feminist postmodern novelists, writing beyond the end

becomes the writing of silence. Their silence is a subversive appropriation

and overturning of their having been canonically muted. In their endings,

these feminist postmodern novels forge an intriguing alliance with the

visual art of Cox and Burkhart. No longer reliant on language, their silence

rings through the lasting images they draw across the mind. As readers and

viewers, we are changed. Our cooperative mythologies, scrutinized and

revised, are no longer intact as we are given new eyes with which to see the

collage spread—both on the page and on the canvas-before us.

Deemed "casualties," "left out of the sociosymbolic contract, of

language as the fundamental bond" (Kristeva 42), these marginalized writers

reinscribe their presence through a silence that refuses to be complicit in an

exclusionary system. Turning inward, the feminist postmodern writer

abandons the phallogocentric linguistic system to explore "the fluid and

infinitesimal significations of their relationships with the nature of their

own bodies" (Kristeva 42). A feminist postmodernism addresses Kristeva's

query: "how can we reveal our place, first as it is bequeathed to us by

tradition, and then as we want to transform it?" (42). Stepping outside of

patriarchal literary codes, these novels meditate on what is left beyond the

male version. The answer comes in a resonant silence that contains

everything simultaneously. Cradled by the erratic rhythms of the

"multilingual waters" that birthed them, these texts are buoyant, as are their

2! I
creators, surfacing and surviving in uncharted waters.

212
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