Appropriating Women: the Violence and Potential Liberation of Textual Revolutions

APPROPRIATING WOMEN: THE VIOLENCE AND POTENTIAL LIBERATION OF TEXTUAL REVOLUTIONS A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Cristina Leslie Dahl August 2009 APPROPRIATING WOMEN: THE VIOLENCE AND POTENTIAL LIBERATION OF TEXTUAL REVOLUTIONS Cristina Leslie Dahl, Ph.D. Cornell University 2009 This dissertation relates the violence perpetuated by phallogocentric traditions of reading and writing to the violence of appropriating traditional categories of gender and asks whether or not and how texts that resist these traditions might help us change the way we think about identities, our own and others’, opening up a space for new and as yet un-thought ways of exchanging texts and the identities they make possible. Focusing on the ways in which Jacques Derrida’s Éperons , Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, and Elena Garro’s “La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas” and “El árbol” interminably reverse the roles of readers and writers, further disorienting them with the complex blend of genres in their texts and the networks of other texts that they juxtapose with their own, leads to the conclusion that the ultimate revolutionary function of these texts is to be found in the ways that they suspend the processes of appropriation and identification indefinitely, giving time, namely the time of waiting, but also time that is filled with the constant weaving of narratives, maintaining the possibility that a way out of historical cycles of violence, especially the violence of being forced to fit within current categories, might be found. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Cristina Dahl received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 1997, a Master of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2009. She currently teaches full time in the English Department at Butte Glenn Community College in Oroville, California. Her primary interests lie in comparing historical representations of gender in a variety of different genres and media in European and Mexican culture, including fiction, philosophy, painting, photography, sculpture, and film. She is also interested in the relationship between ethics, hermeneutics, and pedagogy. iii I would like to dedicate this dissertation to Michael and Groverlee Dahl. Without their constant support over the past two years, I could never have completed this project. I would also like to thank Aaron, who continues to inspire me and who patiently and unwaveringly supported me through many years of just reading, writing, and thinking, a gift and a debt that I can never fully return. I would like to thank Lisa Patti, Ana Rojas, and Angela Naimou for showing me what an ideal network of reading and writing can look like, another gift that defies response, and I will be forever grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Jonathan Culler, Ellis Hanson, and Debra Castillo for their thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback on my first draft, which I will continue to take into consideration as I proceed to other projects. I also want to thank them for exposing me to so many rich texts and asking so many provocative questions in the seminars they taught. Again, I hope I may continue to respond to these questions for many years to come. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the graduate school at Cornell University, for the Sage Fellowship that allowed me to focus exclusively on my research during my last year at Cornell and for the Provost’s Diversity Fellowship, which also allowed me to take a semester off from teaching to complete that research. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………………………...iii Dedication……………………………………………………………………………..iv Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………...v Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………………………..1 Chapter Two: The Spurred/Spurned Lover of Nietzsche: Jacques Derrida’s Appropriation of the “Feminine Operation” in Éperons ……………………………..17 Chapter Three: “Finding New Words and Creating New Methods”: Virginia Woolf’s Revolutionary Use of Image in Three Guineas………………………………………64 Chapter Four: The Gift/Poison Exchange of Texts in Elena Garro’s “La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas” and “El árbol”………………………………………………………...137 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………….194 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………197 vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The revolutionary nature of the three texts I have brought together, the way they expose the arbitrariness of gender and genre categories, creates a space for less violent discursive practices that could lead to less violent relationships more generally because they undermine epistemological traditions of appropriation and mastery. However odd it may initially appear to bring these texts together, considering the different cultural and historical contexts in addition to the differences in their genres or in the different ways in which they play with genre, in doing so, we get to see that they all ask the same question: “Why do we try to communicate about and between gendered positions?”, and they all answer the question with another question: “Why do we read and write literature?” Each of these texts locates tentative answers to the former in the its tentative answers to the latter, each with its own emphasis: because we have always done so; because we want to explore the furthest reaches of our language and logic and their ability to determine who we are and how we live; because we take pleasure in the layering of narratives and media and genre, in complexity, in allusion, in mysteries that we know we probably can never solve; because it gives us something to do; because it allows us to forget and even to overcome the inevitability of our own deaths; because it makes being and becoming richer and more rewarding; because, by appropriating and performing multiple identities and by layering these performances, we get to imagine a different world, a better world, one that offers more possibilities for thinking, communicating, and being for more people, though there is always a risk of forgetting, of failing to recognize that we are not really escaping these traditions, that we have been consumed by them and 1 are supporting and enforcing their hierarchies even when we think we are escaping them, that we commit many unintentional acts of violence because of this forgetting and can, in turn, use this knowledge to excuse the intentional acts. The way all three texts invoke the visual in or as the literary is a particularly powerful reminder of this forgetting, of this inability to recall or master illusion or allusion. Unlike Derrida, Woolf and Garro cannot “play” with the feminine position and are therefore received as particularly violent. Discursive violence, like physical violence, occurs when a reader or writer convinces herself that her appropriation of a text, her reading, is a definitive reading, when she fails to acknowledge the way either a text or body of another exceeds her reading, making it only tentative and temporary, and calls for other readings. The violence of appropriation is both mitigated and sometimes reinforced in all of these texts, especially in the ways they appropriate what they consider traditionally feminine qualities or feminine performances. Derrida and Nietzsche appropriate the “feminine operation” of style and, to some degree, a feminine subject position, in order to undermine what they consider traditionally masculine desire for truth or completeness, all the while they pay homage to this desire. Derrida implies that Nietzsche represents a break with these masculine traditions, with phallogocentrism, which he both critiques and performs as a re-valuation of what they call the feminine operation. Though much of Nietzsche’s content appears to critique the feminine, this content is, in turn, undermined by his stylistic performances, his “feminine operation,” which Derrida defines as the use of style to call any content into question. Nietzsche and Derrida’s appropriations of his texts keep both traditional notions of masculinity and femininity interminably in dialogue as they try to imagine something outside of the phallogocentric categories. Nietzsche, and Derrida attempt to remain between these traditional categories, neither believing in nor disbelieving in the possibility of 2 coherent, communicable truth or knowledge. If nothing else, their truth can be read as their ironic performances themselves, their need to keep these categories in play in order for discourse to take place. However, when Woolf, and later Garro, attempt to re-appropriate the feminine, to equally locate a break with masculine violence in the traditionally de-valued feminine, they can no longer distance themselves from this position. They are not allowed to simply play with the feminine operation, thus their performances become increasingly violent, but perhaps, increasingly revolutionary. Woolf identifies a possible alternative discourse to be found in the exchange of images under the premise that images will resist our traditional masculine pretense of mastery over the other (text or body), the audacity of defining the other and convincing oneself of the truth of that mastery. Garro’s stories, however, complicate this alternative. For Woolf, the written image, the attempt to describe the self and the other, is as close as writing can get to the heterogeneity of the image, since these attempts must always be recognized by both writer and reader as partial, as the result of arbitrarily choosing to focus on and interpret this or that feature or gesture. However, for Garro, the body of the other, the image of that body, can invite violence as much as it resists that violence. It depends on how we choose to read that image, whether we choose to appropriate it and impose our own image upon it or let it remain other and let it influence our own images of our selves. The contrast between the two stories shows that as soon as we attempt to describe the other or impose our own logic upon her, we kill any revolutionary potential she might embody.

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