What literature is within us?

I recently read the essay "No Name Woman" by the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston. It was not a traditional essay by any means, and I found it a little difficult to follow, but there was one section in it that addressed some issues I've wondered about quite a bit recently, having read several different kinds of criticism that all seem to focus on rooting texts in writers' identities. As Kingston tells stories of her childhood experiences, she questions, "Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" In our class, we've moved from Marxist to Feminist to Ethnic criticism, and it seems like all of them are so similar in some ways although they deal with different qualities that define groups of people.

In Langston Hughes' essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he talks of the way that an African American's poetry must be rooted in their African American identity. When Hughes encounters a young poet who wants "to be a poet--not a Negro poet" (1313), Hughes takes this to mean that the poet is trying to put aside his own identity so that he can better assimilate into the white culture. Hughes despises this attitude, responding, "But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why thould I want to be white? I am a Negro--and beautiful!" (1316). This is such a different idea than what we read earlier from Emerson about the way that a poet should transcend him/herself in some way in order to tap into a truth that applies to all people. Instead, Hughes seems to think that a removal of the racial identity from African American poetry is a removal of truth from the poetry. According to him, African Americans "have an honest American Negro literature already within us," and it is their duty to expose that literature that exists within (1316). This works well for the type of poetry that Hughes wants to right. In poems such as "I, Too," he embodies his racial identity with lines like "I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother." But it seems almost like a restriction in some ways on the African American writer to say that they must write in a way that is perceived as embodying their own seperate culture from the white culture.

Helene Cixous, in "The Laugh of the Medusa," seems to share some of Hughes' ideas about writing according to one's identity, but her focus centers on gender rather than race. She writes, “I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man” (2041). Reading Cixous' ideas gives me a different perspective than I can have with Hughes because--while I've never experienced the life of an African American--I am a woman. However, it wasn't until I came to college and began reading feminist writers that I even thought about gender differences in writing. I had to be educated as to what these feminist writers mean by instructing all women to “write woman." Cixous even has a difficult time articulating what feminine writing is in any concrete manner even though all of her ideas revolve around it. In the same essay where she prescribes that women should “write woman,” she claims, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, encoded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (2043). So basically, she's saying that something about women's writing makes it the same in some way even though it doesn't seem apparent that it all shares some womanly writer quality. Although I feel that it's not necessarily right or helpful to determine a type of feminine writing that is completely separate from that of males, perhaps in saying this, I'm over-generalizing to ignore a difference that is there.

I tend to wonder if classifying literature into groups like "African American literature" or "women's literature" tends to lead to the creation of more stereotypes. When Langston Hughes was writing, he was addressing a particular problem in society: the African American writer didn't seem to have a voice apart from the adopted style of white American culture. And a woman writer such as Virginia Woolf also addressed the societal issues that affected her during her life as a woman writer; women were literally not allowed to be writers. But is it still worth discussing literature within these labels today as society becomes more diverse and moves toward greater equality? While these ideas about race and literature do make points about the way things have been--and the way that some things stilll are--focusing on these issues almost perpetuates them in some way because it forces people to view literature in categories based on the author's identity.

Encountering resistance

During my first Womens' Literature class of this semester, I walked in to see three words written on the board:

Resistance, Revision, Re-imagine

I was already skeptical after receiving the booklist for the class because I had never heard of any of the authors before, but this all-too-neatly alliterated list seemed like too much for me. I wasn't sure how well I would get along with the study of all women writers. Over the course of the semester, I've realized that this course is run in quite different ways from other classes I've taken. Today I figured out why. Professor Corey was talking to us about the essay and/or final project that we have to complete for the class, and she explained that she wants to establish as few restrictions as possible for the assignment because she wants to provide us with every possible opportunity to resist the academic system of organized and strict essays. She talked about the way that an essay can be difficult form for bringing several voices into conversation and condensing ideas into such a formulaic structure. Instead, she encouraged us with examples of a past student who had choreographed a dance as her final project. She also foreshadowed the enjoyable final that we will have that will also resist and revise the traditional academic structure in some way.

Having recently read the works of feminist critics, the idea of resistance started making sense to me. My womens lit class has been rather unorthodox in the way that we read, discuss, and complete assignments, and I realize that it is created in such a way that allows us the freedom to enjoy texts in ways that we cannot in other classes. And it assigns texts to read that no other classes would. If I'm receiving such a good chance to study and engage with womens' literature, does it perpetuate the separate nature of womens' writing by placing it in its own distinct class that functions through different academic teaching styles than other more traditional classes?

Dancing with mines

As I read Annette Kolodny's "Dancing Through the Minefield," it made me think about the fact that no one really created literature with the intention of privileging men over women. It wasn't that Shakespeare intentionally thought, "Hey, I'm going to focus on the male heroes and only portray women in my plays as they exist in relationship to men." And no literary theorist way back in the day wrote an essay about the way that men deserve to dominate literature. Rather, it seems that literature grew out of a reflection of life; the way that women were viewed in life became the way that they were portrayed in literature.

Kolodny addresses idea such as these by claiming that "all literary history is a fiction which we daily recreate as we reread it" (2155). She argues that without access to some kind of magical time machine to take us back to speak with Shakespeare or Milton, there really is no way to know the meaning of what they wrote in the context in which they wrote it. Despite what we believe we're doing when we study literary works and their contexts, Kolodny thinks that "we never really reconstruct the past in its own terms" (2154-5). Instead, our supposed reconstructions turn out to be only "an approximation of an already fictively imputed past made available, through our interpretive strategies, for present concerns" (2155). Although I understand that we only have the capability of viewing literature from our present context, there is something to be learned about the past in studying literature that was highly regarded in the past. Although we can't see England as George Eliot did, we can get a better idea of her England than we might through a history book. I think this is one of the most vital aspects of literature; it reflects the context of the life in which it was written--perhaps not perfectly, but in some way, it does. So we can wonder why Shakespeare didn't create plays based around strong female roles and relationships, but from this we can also see that culture at that time did not envision stories in that way. However, if most of the works in the literary cannon display a male "sense of power and significance," then I agree that it makes sense to increase the width of the cannon to include works by women that portray women in different kinds of ways.

I found Kolodny's writing much less approachable than Cixous' and Woolf's, and it could be related to the fact that they write in a more feminist fashion while Kolodny constructs her argument through a patriarchal tradition of clear-cut argumentation. However, I really appreciated her title image of "dancing through the mine field." It sums up well the types of freedom that women need to have to function in a literary field that always holds some kind of restrictive danger for women. I found these wonderful Banksy images of a woman hugging a bomb and a group of women dancing around a bomb. They seem to illustrate the quote that Kolodny ends on well:

It is a fine thing for many of us, individuals, to have traversed the minefield; but that happy circumstance will only prove of lasting importance if, together, we expose it for what it is (the male fear of sharing power and significance with women) and deactivate its components, so that others, after us, may literally dance through the minefield (2165).

Repainting our half of the world

As a reference back to an earlier blog I wrote about Virginia Woolf's and Alice Walker's question of whether thwarted creativity results in madness or self-destruction in women, Cixous has something to offer to the question. She writes about her desire for a certain woman to create a world of words out of her unique past so that all the other "unacknowledged sovereigns" of women would realize that they, too, have powerful words and songs within them. However, she describes the current state of reality as something more along the lines of women questioning themselves. Although she has felt full to the the point of bursting to "repaint my half of the world," she pushed her explosive creativity to the side in a way that she believes many women do: "And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad!" (2040). She considers herself mad for resisting the urge to write, and she feels that women need to embrace both their bodies and their power for using language in writing. She writes, "And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours; take it" (2040). For her, the act of thwarting creativity is a mad act in itself because it involves suppressing what is inherent to the individual, and it removes an act that is essential for developing the feminine identity.

"The rhythm that laughs you"

Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa" had a lot of imagery and ideas in it that reminded me of Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, the epic poem that I wrote about for my literature seminar paper. In her essay, Cixous writes,

"If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man . . . it is time for her to dislocate this 'within,' to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of." (2050)

This central idea to Cixous' essay seems similar to Notley's premise for writing The Descent of Alette. Notley wrote it as a feminist epic, and the story involves a woman hero, Alette, traveling into deeper levels of the physical world in order to reclaim her own body as a woman from the Tyrant, an abstract creature who seems to own and control everything she knows. Cixous claims that "women must write through their bodies," and this seems very much what Alice Notley attempted to do by subverting conventional ideas about the epic poem (2049). Notley created her own meter for the poem because she wanted to use language in a way that gave her a new kind of voice outside of traditional and patriarchal forms. In her essay "Epic and Women Poets," Notley writes, “I didn’t want a ‘male’ line—& that category seemed to include every line I knew about, those used by women as well. I wanted, as I always do, to try to begin as if at the beginning of the world, before things were male & female in the ways they are now." I think this idea of the way that things are male and female now has to do with the binary oppositions that have been created. Neither Cixous nor Notley seem interested in inverting the binary in such a way that privileges the female half. Instead, they question the very logic of the binary mentality and want to find some way to escape it. Cixous makes this very clear in her writing: "She will do more than modify power relations or toss the ball in the other camp; she will bring about a mutation in human relations, in thought, in all praxis" (2046).

To give an idea of how Alice Notley uses language and images to develop her feminine voice in The Descent of Alette, here's a section from it:

"I walked" "into a car where" "everything was membrane- like" "thin-membrane petal-like" "& veined" "Fetus-like" "fetus-flesh-like" "In shades of pink" "purple black &" "brown" "Thin" "reddish veins" "Fetal flower" "soaked in

subway light" "The car walls were translucent" "orchid- flesh" "The seats were & the floor--" "All was naked flesh" "We were naked" "A fetus" "delicate" "tiny-faced," "eyes closed, concentrating" "curled" "almost spiraling," "floated high" "in the

air." "We sat naked on our" " membrane-like" "tan benches" "All of us" "smooth & wrinkled" "brownish, or" "darker," "or paler," "palest" "were as if" "within a flower" "as if" "within us" "This" "This is" "simultaneous," "I understood"

"Uncontrolled by" "the tyrant" "Someone else" "in all of us" "is this lovely" "fetal flesh," "flower skin" "We are being this" "this flower" "And then" "the flower vanished" "I was clothed, there was" "no fetus" "Gray subway car

of people" "riding quietly some sleeping" "Someone's earphones" "turned up too loud" "buzzing wire" "vaguely song"

The Tyrant of the poem loosely represents patriarchal socitey, and now that I think of it in terms of man/woman binaries, it could represent the binary structure that Notley and Cixous view as dictating so much of the world's structure. Alette's epic quest is to destroy the Tyrant with the view that “from dreams,” “from dreams we” “can change, “will change” (144). At the end of the poem, Alette succeeds in killing the Tyrant, but Notley ends it by presenting the question of how to possibly create a new world out of the Tyrant's corpse. It's interesting to think about, because in destroying such a binary, what does the world look like without it when developed in new ways? I think Notley's poem presents a good picture of what issues and questions we must examine that relate to the man/woman structures of our culture.

Finding Hope in Literary Study

It was interesting to hear Tiffany Everly Kriner's discussion about her connection between literary scholarship and Christian faith. This is a prevalent issue for an English major at Messiah. I always find that my greatest questioning of the practical value of this major arises when I'm writing a paper that critiques literary works. Such a great deal of scholarly literary papers have been written that I begin to question if they hold real importance in life. Kriner's emphasis on the theological virtue of hope within literary scholarship shed some meaning for me. She described the way that texts and language are incomplete in a way that acknowledges the brokenness of the world, but they have a place in the world's redemption. I appreciated her image of texts as fragments that will become final in the whole of creation. We are participating in the knitting up of the fragments of language, but we are incapable of doing it with completion. God can and will.

Woolf and Walker

I was interested in on of the questions which Virginia Woolf's essay addresses: Does thwarted creativity result in madness and/or self-destruction in women? Woolf clearly thinks so. Her imagined outcome to her character Judith Shakespeare's life is a suicidal end. She writes: "Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at" (1023). It certainly seems true that women existed in the past who had great artistic potential which was suppressed by their retrictive gender roles.

This idea reminds me of Alice Walker's "In Search of our Mothers' Gardens," which she writes in regard to the restricted creativity that must have existed in black women who lived in the South during slavery.She describes the period of waiting that they went through--waiting for a time when the creative potential in them would be recognized and embraced:

They dreamed dreams that no one knew-not even themselves, in any coherent fashion-and saw visions no one could understand. They wandered or sat about the countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts, and drawing the mother of Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls.

They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay. And when those frail whirlwinds fell, in scattered particles, upon the ground, no one mourned. Instead, men lit candies to celebrate the emptiness that remained, as people do who enter a beautiful but vacant space to resurrect a God.

This isn't exactly the suicide of Judith Shakespeare, but it is self-destruction in the sense that the woman was forced to empty herself and become an object to be used by men. Walker further describes the mental breakdown of "our mothers and grandmothers" who were artists in their natural state but were restricted from becomming artists of society because of their gender roles. She writes that they were "driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release." Walker even references Woolf in her article as accurately capturing the essence of what a woman goes through when she must suppress her artistic tendencies. It seems that this idea of thwarted creativity resulting in some kind of self-destruction proves true in both contexts among very different groups of women. Walker argues in her essay that we should accordingly alter our view of literature; we should look "low" where we've previously looked "high." We should notice the ways that women have expressed their artistic abilities through their chores and daily work because, although suppressed, women managed to maintain a creative spark that they passed through generations.

It seems that thwarted creativity leads to negative results. At first, I wondered if someone like the Judith Shakespeare character would have only been driven to suicide because she had the example of her brother to show her the potential for what creative outlet could look like. Would the drive to suicide or insanity be a result of the comparisons to men and their freedom? Or is creativity something that needs a natural outlet regardless of the example of men?